Our Savage Neighbors: Pontiac vs. the Paxton Boys [1763-1766]

Prior to the American Revolution, the Ohio River Valley was a cauldron of competing
interests: Indian, colonial, and imperial. erupted out of this volatile atmosphere

In a famous council on April 28, 1763, Pontiac urged listeners to rise up against the British.

(19th-century engraving by Alfred Bobbet).

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Resistance and Rebellions

Pontiac's Rebellion was a war launched in 1763 by North American Indians who were dissatisfied with British rule in the Great Lakes region after the British victory in the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War (1754–1763).

Warriors from numerous tribes joined the uprising in an effort to drive British soldiers and settlers out of the region.

Warfare on the North American frontier was brutal, and the killing of prisoners, the targeting of civilians, and other atrocities were widespread. In what is now perhaps the war's best-known incident, British officers at Fort Pitt attempted to infect the besieging Indians with blankets that had been exposed to smallpox.

The ruthlessness of the conflict was a reflection of a growing racial divide between British colonists and American Indians. The British government sought to prevent further racial violence by issuing the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which created a boundary between colonists and Indians.

Result: Pontiac's War has traditionally been portrayed as a defeat for the Indians, but scholars now usually view it as a military stalemate -  while the Indians had failed to drive away the British, the British were unable to conquer the Indians

The Paxton Boys (1763 to 1764)

The terror generated on the frontier by the Indian attacks fostered much bitterness. A number of racial incidents occurred, including the brief appearance of the Paxton Boys in Pennsylvania.  The village of Paxton a few miles east of Harrisburg in eastern Pennsylvania, became a hotbed of racial and political unrest during Pontiac's Rebellion.

Still part of the frontier in the 1760s, the area was populated by many rough-and-tumble Scots-Irish immigrants who had grown weary of the colonial assembly’s inattention to their vulnerability to attack. Requests for soldiers — or guns, powder and lead at the very least — were ignored by the legislators, many of whom were Quakers with strong pacifist convictions.

Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment

William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in which Europeans and Indians could live together in harmony. In this book, historian Kevin Kenny explains how this Peaceable Kingdom--benevolent, Quaker, pacifist--gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans. 

Kenny recounts how rapacious frontier settlers, most of them of Ulster extraction, began to encroach on Indian land as squatters, while William Penn's sons cast off their father's Quaker heritage and turned instead to fraud, intimidation, and eventually violence during the French and Indian War. In 1763, a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys exterminated the last twenty Conestogas, descendants of Indians who had lived peacefully since the 1690s on land donated by William Penn near Lancaster. Invoking the principle of "right of conquest," the Paxton Boys claimed after the massacres that the Conestogas' land was rightfully theirs. They set out for Philadelphia, threatening to sack the city unless their grievances were met. A delegation led by Benjamin Franklin met them and what followed was a war of words, with Quakers doing battle against Anglican and Presbyterian champions of the Paxton Boys. The killers were never prosecuted and the Pennsylvania frontier descended into anarchy in the late 1760s, with Indians the principal victims. The new order heralded by the Conestoga massacres was consummated during the American Revolution with the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States confiscated the lands of Britain's Indian allies, basing its claim on the principle of "right of conquest." 

Based on extensive research in eighteenth-century primary sources, this engaging history offers an eye-opening look at how colonists--at first, the backwoods Paxton Boys but later the U.S. government--expropriated Native American lands, ending forever the dream of colonists and Indians living together in peace.