" Equipped for Murder": The Paxton Boys and" the Spirit of Killing all Indians" in Pennsylvania, 1763-1764 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Murder on the Margins: The Paxton Massacre and the Remaking of Sovereignty in Colonial Pennsylvania
Journal of Early Modern History, 2015
On December 14 and 27, 1763, rioters in western Pennsylvania attacked and killed nearly two dozen Conestoga Indians living near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Five weeks later, two hundred and fifty men, calling themselves the Paxton Boys, marched on Pennsylvania to kill Indians housed there for their protection. These events sparked outrage, as pro- and anti-Paxtonite authors debated the attacks. Defenders of the massacre claimed that they had not only the right but the duty as good British subjects to kill “alien” Indians within the colony’s borders. This article argues that these efforts to articulate the civic rights and duties in the aftermath of the massacre represented a subtle attempt to redefine imperial authority on the frontier. The Paxton rioters, in their actions and their post-hoc justifications, seized sovereign power of life and death and the ability to delimit the meanings of allegiance, casting themselves as sovereign subjects on the frontier.
A Case Study in Frontier Warfare: Racial Violence, Revenge, and the Ambush at Fort Laurens, Ohio
2011
In February of 1779, a combined British and Native American raiding party ambushed a small group of American soldiers at an isolated fort on the Ohio frontier. The attack resulted in the deaths of at least 13 soldiers, many of who died from massive head injuries that, to modern researchers, do not appear to have been tactically necessary. However, rather than being an isolated instance of savagery or wartime atrocity this paper considers the ideological and cultural bases of violence behind the trauma, and will argue that the Fort Laurens ambush was just one example of violence in a long standing, and exceedingly brutal, conflict between Native Americans and white settlers on the American frontier during the 18th century.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
The lynching of Native Americans (American Indians) is one of the few areas in lynching studies that has seen relatively little development amid the flowering of scholarship on mob violence inspired at least in part by W. Fitzhugh Brundage's highly influential 1993 monograph Lynching in the New South. 1 Brundage's book helped to inspire expanded study of the lynching of African Americans in particular as well as broadened consideration of American lynching violence more generally, yet it cannot be said that the latter direction of post-Brundage scholarship has meaningfully incorporated the history of lynchings that targeted Natives. The relative dearth of scholarship on the lynching of Native Americans flows from several factors. First, given the nineteenth-century histories of Native removal, white settlement, and the regional distribution of the lynching impulse, most of the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Natives that were mobbed were collectively murdered by whites in the Midwest and West, not in the South. 2 Significantly, the southern border territory and state of Oklahoma, which would incorporate Indian Territory, and which saw a significant number of lynchings of Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was left out of the important inventory of lynchings compiled by sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck. 3 Yet with key exceptions, the post-Brundage efflorescence of scholarship on mob violence has largely fixated on the South, which is not where most lynchings of Native Americans occurred. Meanwhile western historians still have yet to fully absorb the significance of lynching, racially motivated and otherwise, in the trans-Mississippi West, despite the crucial efforts scholars such as Ken Gonzales-Day, William Carrigan and Clive Webb, and Nicholas Villanueva, Jr., have made in recent years to recover the history of the lynching of hundreds of Mexican Americans across the American West. 4 Moreover, an understandable emphasis on the lynching of African Americans, the primary victims of collective murder in the American South, has clouded comprehension of the lynching of other victims of racially motivated violence, such as Hispanics and Native Americans, who were underrepresented and sometimes misrepresented or erased in the data collected by late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century anti-lynching activists focused on the lynching of Blacks in the South, not the mob violence directed against other racially marginalized groups elsewhere in the country. Finally, a significant number of lynchings of Native Americans occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as white settlers
Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment
Ethnohistory, 2011
The massacres of Indians in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by the Paxton Boys in December 1763, have long been a notorious event in that part of the globe. A glance at Kevin Kenny's bibliography provides a sense of the continuous interest in the killings since the 19th century. Part of this, captured in this book, is the involvement, in the aftermath at least, of the state's most famous citizen, Benjamin Franklin. Indeed his fame contrasts sharply with the impossibility of establishing much about even the leaders of the Paxton Boys.
Ohio History, 2021
In 1813, the United States was at war with Great Britain and her native allies. While military battles were vicious and violence was expected by both sides, uncivilized warfare—also known as irregular warfare, guerrilla warfare, and unconventional warfare—angered and was spurned by both Europeans and Americans. To be sure, uncivilized warfare was practiced by both Euro-Americans and Native Americans in the Great Lakes region of North America beginning as far back as the early seventeenth century. One case was that of an Odawa (Ottawa) war party from Fort Malden in Canada, which raided, killed, and captured American settlers at Cold Creek (Ohio) in June of 1813. The raid and ambush committed deplorable acts of butchery in the killing of women and children, and the tactic was used to instill fear and panic in American settlers in hopes of forcing them to vacate Indian lands. This article examines the details of uncivilized warfare at Cold Creek, which caused moral outrage and indignation in eastern newspapers, the American military, and the US Congress. The author argues that this type of warfare was more complex in native cultural traditions and sociopolitical relations between Native Americans and whites than simple revenge. The debate by historians on this issue remains unsettled today for lack of direct and circumstantial evidence.
Native Americans, the Colonial Encounter, and the Law of Harm, 1600-1787
Justice without the State within the State, 2016
Das Erstellen und Weitergeben von Kopien dieses PDFs ist nicht zulässig. 2 The Iroquois, arguably, had a constitution discernible from their oral traditions that rested on five characteristics: minimization of internal conflict; primacy of the Mohawk but with an inclusion of all voices; customary but never rigid rules for the removal of political chiefs; aggression as the desirable quality among additional members of leadership; and »defensive imperialism« that allowed for justifiable wars of annihilation.
Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist by Gary B. Nash
Journal of Southern History, 2018
Flaying in the Pre-Modern World: Practice and Representation. Edited by Larissa Tracy. Boydell. 2017. xviii + 406pp. £60.00. Flaying as a punishment-for treason or otherwise-was a rare occurrence in the pre-modern world. Indeed, as some of the essays in Larissa Tracy's collection establish, even allusions to human flaying in some pre-modern cultures are hard to find. Mary Rambaran-Olm notes only 'scattered references to flaying in Old English literature' (p. 101); William Sayers finds likewise that 'the flaying of the human body features only marginally in the traditions of early medieval Ireland' (p. 261). In cultures where flaying is allowed as a punishment in the law it is an exceptional one and the known instances of it being meted out are few and far between. It is, nonetheless, a persistent image in some medieval genres (hagiography, romance and literature of the life of Christ, in particular), as well as in the post-medieval imagination, as this collection demonstrates across its fourteen essays and epilogue, which span from the eleventh to the early seventeenth centuries, and range across Irish, English, French, Italian and Scandinavian examples. While its main subject thus sometimes proves elusive, this book's usefulness partly derives from the explanations it finds for the literary prevalence of human flaying in cultures where its practice is unusual if not nonexistent. For this reason too it is necessarily a book that is about many other things-flagellation, cannibalism, painting techniques, surgical instruments and Mediterranean conflicts, among others-but, perhaps most prominently, also about skin: its relation to the body and to the self, and to what constitutes the individual human as well as the social body. Rambaran-Olm's inquiry into the emergence and persistence of the so-called 'Dane-skin' myth in the seventeenth century and beyond is illustrative. The fantasy of pre-modern flaying (that eleventh-century hostile Danes, living in England, are massacred, flayed and their skins displayed on church doors) is used, Rambaran-Olm argues, to construct and uphold a post-medieval sense of national identity. Thus she notes: 'For seventeenth-century viewers', the skin-bound doors 'were material evidence of Anglo-Saxon fortitude and moral justice in punishing invaders for crimes against their community and Church' (p. 105). It is another near myth of human flaying that forms the focus of Perry Neil Harrison's epilogue on early modern anthropodermic bibliopegy (or, the binding of books in human skin). Harrison notes that 'scientifically verified examples of the practice during the Middle Ages are exceedingly rare, and perhaps even non-existent' (p. 368). However, Harrison argues that one verified