Edward Shippen was at least a passive conspirator in the destruction of the Susquehannock. He had, by his own account, at least two days’ notice of the raiders’ plans to attack Lancaster, where the Indians were being secured. He took no additional defensive actions. The Paxton Boys rode into town in the middle of the day, went directly to the workhouse, and, in a matter of minutes, entered the building and executed the remaining Susquehannock families. The sheriff and coroner tried to reason with the raiders but offered no physical resistance. Shippen did not even reach the scene until after the Paxtons were back on their horses and parading out of town.3
The fate of the American college had been intertwined from its beginning with the social project of dispossessing Indian people. For nearly fifty years Shippen sat on the board of the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania); in fact, several officers and trustees had personal or professional interests in the back-country. The Penn family held sizable backcountry estates, and John Penn joined the board just months after the massacres. Provost William Smith and trustee Richard Peters both owned property in Paxton. The most experienced land agent in the colony and the provincial secretary, Peters helped perpetrate the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737, in which William Penn’s sons, John and Thomas, took more than a thousand square miles of Lenape land. James Logan, also a trustee, completed the swindle by forcing the arrangement on the Lenape and securing the support of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, who also helped remove the Lenape from eastern Pennsylvania. William Allen, chief justice of the colony and a charter trustee of the Philadelphia college, got ten thousand acres of disputed lands in a single grant and eventually established Allentown in the Walking Purchase territory. Peters also helped execute the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), which resulted in the removal of the Lenape, Shawnee, and Ohio Iroquoian peoples in the rich Ohio Valley and the advance of white settlements across the Alleghenies.4
William Penn’s colony was an enterprise. Individual colonists could purchase land directly from Penn, who also collected taxes. Colonists received incentives for importing servants. Penn sold tens of thousands of acres to land companies in Germany, Wales, London, and Ireland. Throughout the Mid-Atlantic, colonial authorities and land speculators recruited non-English Protestants to take up farms by purchase or tenancy. Scots-Irish immigrants poured into the Pennsylvania backcountry in the decades before the massacres. Tens of thousands of Germans—Palatines, Amish, Moravians, and Lutherans—went there too, carried to America on hundreds of vessels dedicated to that trade. In the 1740s the governor estimated that more than sixty thousand Pennsylvanians, three-fifths of the inhabitants, were German, a population that grew to more than a hundred thousand in the next decade. Swiss Mennonites settled as did Swedish Lutherans. Jews found acceptance as merchants and traders in Philadelphia and in the back-country. Nathan Levy and David Franks, for example, held land claims in Upper Paxton a decade before the massacres.5
Men in the immigrant trade were overrepresented on the board of the Philadelphia college. Founding trustees John Inglis, Robert Strettel, Edward Shippen, and George McCall brought German and British immigrants and indentures into Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia glassmaker Caspar Wistar, an early benefactor of the college, built an Atlantic trading network and an impressive fortune on this German migration. Charles Willing, Philadelphia’s mayor and a trustee, owned a firm that used twenty-two ships to transport more than four thousand Germans to the colony before the American Revolution. His son, Thomas, later partnered with the financier and land speculator Robert Morris—who made his money trading tobacco grown by slaves in Maryland—in a firm that aggressively looked to exploit the war economy during the American Revolution.6
Philadelphia rose on the interdependent trades in enslaved Africans, European immigrants, and lands from Indian clearances, and men engaged in all three enterprises dominated the college. They drew settlers into the backcountry by maintaining a thriving slave market, which also provided bound labor for an expanding manufacturing sector. Slaves augmented the workforce at the Berkshire Furnace iron works and at Charming Forge. In 1743 the evangelist George Whitefield invited the United Brethren—a denomination that rose from the Mennonite and German Reformed churches—to settle upon lands north of Philadelphia that he had purchased from the Lenape with the intent of opening a school for black children. Whitefield abandoned that project, and the Brethren established one of their many North American missions.7
In the wake of George Whitefield’s 1740 American tour, a new evangelical furor had awakened the colonies, where plans for new schools began taking shape in the synods of New York and Philadelphia. In 1740 Whitefield opened an ephemeral charity school in Philadelphia. When David Brainerd fell under the evangelical sway, Yale president Thomas Clap expelled him. Protests from the Reverend Jonathan Edwards and other leading New Lights, those who embraced evangelicalism, failed to soften Yale’s governors. The alignment of Harvard and Yale against evangelicalism, which culminated in the Harvard faculty’s 1744 public condemnation of Whitefield for appealing to what they saw as the emotional stupidity of the people, further radicalized the evangelicals. In 1746, as has been previously discussed, the revivalists organized the College of New Jersey (Princeton). Among its founders were men who studied under the evangelical preacher William Tennent in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania. Brainerd headed to Elizabethtown, New Jersey, where he became a student of Jonathan Dickinson, the founding president of the new college. In 1749 leading Philadelphians drew up a constitution for an academy, chose Benjamin Franklin as the president, purchased the “New Building” that had housed Whitefield’s school, and reserved free meeting space for Whitefield and the evangelist Gilbert Tennent.8
Evangelicalism generated social experiences that recast the denominational boundaries of the British colonies as immigrants changed the landscape of American religion.9 There were other ideological, economic, and military pressures transforming the colonies. The Atlantic market—particularly the trades in enslaved Africans and European immigrants—drew merchants and farmers into continuous intercolonial exchanges and created new dependencies. A revolution in the arts and sciences spread a secular language for describing the connections between Euro-Americans, for understanding and legitimating their social privileges, and for crafting a shared history. European wars of succession and empire, culminating with the French and Indian War from 1754 to 1763, raised common threats and rationalized military and administrative bureaucracies throughout British America.
The General Assembly of Massachusetts sent Colonel Ephraim Williams and a few other English families to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the Reverend John Sergeant, a Yale alumnus, maintained a mission to the Housatonic and Mahican. Rev. Sergeant married Abigail Williams, the colonel’s daughter, and they created a training ground for a generation of Connecticut missionaries. Before taking the presidency of the College of New Jersey, Jonathan Edwards preached at the Indian mission in Stockbridge, where he also gathered intelligence on Native nations. In 1743 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel dispatched David Brainerd to preach to the Mahican east of Albany and west of Stockbridge. Brainerd regularly traveled to Stockbridge to study the Indian languages. Gideon Hawley, a Yale graduate, and Timothy Woodbridge, also a Yale alumnus, began their careers in Stockbridge. Brainerd, Hawley, and Woodbridge later organized missions in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Colonel Williams used the Stockbridge settlement to acquire tracts of Indian land in western Massachusetts, much of it taken through theft, rigged town votes, and manipulations of law. At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Williams redrew his will to provide for his mother and siblings. His peace of mind was purchased by his land and slaveholdings. He gave £100 to each of his three sisters, and he instructed his brothers to provide their mother an annual stipend from their inheritance: “my homestead at Stockbridge, with all the Buildings and Appertenances thereunto belonging, with all the Stocks of Cattle and Negro Servants now upon the place.” The slaves included Moni,
an adult woman, a boy named London, and a girl called Cloe.10
Frenzied land speculation set the context for these missions and reshaped white-Indian relations in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South. The College of New Jersey supported Brainerd’s Lenape ministry. Hawley raised a church on disputed land across the Pennsylvania border. Woodbridge took a share in the Susquehannah Land Company—a private stock company that purchased western tracts to relocate Connecticut residents—in exchange for representing its interests with the Six Nations, the Lenape, and the Ohio Indians. A broad segment of Connecticut residents became, almost overnight, committed to defending and asserting ancient charter rights to territory in Pennsylvania. Certainly some of this obsession was driven by land speculation in Connecticut that created a false scarcity, but it was also part of a greater colonial phenomenon.11
In 1746 Peter Jefferson, a surveyor and minor planter from Virginia, had been part of a party that mapped one portion of Thomas Lord Fairfax’s five-million-acre Virginia holding. Jefferson later invested in the Loyal Land Company, a private partnership active in the territory that became Kentucky. He taught his eldest son, Thomas, to survey, which Thomas then taught to his friend Meriwether Lewis. Upon his father’s death, Thomas Jefferson inherited stock in the land company, and he received the plantation where he later built his Monticello estate. White settlers gained that territory in the Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in a 1722 negotiation with the Iroquois at Albany, New York, in which the colonial government conveniently accepted the Iroquois’s authority over the Indians of Virginia. In 1769, after he left William and Mary to finish his training in a law office, Thomas Jefferson began purchasing western lands with Virginia colleagues including Patrick Henry, an active speculator.12
In 1748 George Washington, only sixteen years old, had left Virginia to help survey Lord Fairfax’s lands on the Pennsylvania border. That same year his brothers joined Thomas Lee in the Ohio Company, a partnership that sought to break the French hold on the frontier by colonizing a half-million-acre tract along the Ohio River. Virginia’s elite dominated the new corporation. In 1753 Governor Robert Dinwiddie sent George Washington, now a Virginia militia colonel, and his troops to western Pennsylvania to send back intelligence on the French operations and movements. Colonel Washington strung forts along Virginia’s northernmost boundaries to protect the Fairfax lands and the new British settlements. His aggressive defense of the Ohio Company outposts helped to spark the French and Indian War. Throughout his career Washington casually pursued his interests in western lands during his military assignments and engagements, and for good reason: Virginia governor Lord Dunmore compensated soldiers during the French and Indian War, in part, with promises of land. Washington received twenty thousand acres on the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers and purchased other claims. By the time of his death, his largest real estate holdings lay beyond Virginia. The activities of land-speculating Virginians, Anthony F. C. Wallace argues, caused a series of colonial and international conflicts that began with the French and Indian War and ended with the War of 1812.13
“PURELY WHITE PEOPLE”
Awakened Christianity provided a spiritual complement to an emerging economic and political entitlement. Midcentury white colonists claimed a divine right to North America. “We are become a great and growing people,” declared Provost William Smith of this manifesting destiny, “extending, and likely to extend, our empire far over this continent.” He pointed to “seminaries of Learning and the advancement of useful Science” as the instruments of this enlargement. The growth of the colonies was now a greater moral good than the conversion of Indians, since the advance of white civilization would best advertise the triumph of Protestantism. He offered a peculiar proof: Britain sat west of continental Europe because God wanted its people to claim America. The vicar of Newcastle, Delaware, John Brown, confirmed that it was in the strategic interests of the colonies to continue the culture wars upon Indians, and he even fantasized about a future in which Native Americans and Africans would thank white Christians for their efforts.14
Colleges, although church-based, intensified this vision. No longer instruments for civilizing “savages” and “heathens,” eighteenth-century colleges became mechanisms for unifying the colonies. The first Jewish students on the American campus matriculated about 1750, a century after the first Native American scholars; and, paradoxically, Jews gained access at the very moment when Christians were doubting the value of educating Native people.
Founder of the College of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin began his published condemnation of the Conestoga bloodshed by casually accepting that Indian populations “diminish continually” whenever “settled in the Neighbourhood of White people.” While Franklin rejected the vulgar theology of the backcountry presbyters who claimed divine authority to shed the blood of anyone with “a reddish brown Skin, and black Hair,” he shared the basic tenets of their beliefs. A dozen years before the massacres, Franklin had expressed his concern that “the number of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small.” His antislavery sentiments were conceived from a fear that Africans would darken the complexion of America. “Excluding all blacks and tawnys” could reverse this fate. Franklin praised the “lovely” red complexion of the Indians, a compliment made easier by his belief that they were doomed. President Ezra Stiles of Yale also anticipated the continued passive reduction of Native Americans. He had even invested in it: in the decade before the Conestoga massacres, Stiles, who graduated from Yale and was working there as a tutor, had become a stockholder and active supporter of the Susquehannah Company.15
Despite his rejection of homicidal violence, Benjamin Franklin was taken with the possibility of purifying North America. His “tawnys” were the German and Scottish immigrants crowding into the Pennsylvania backcountry. A longtime slaveholder, businessman, and land speculator, Franklin worried over the demographic consequences of his own economic actions. He made significant investments in legal and illegal schemes to grab western lands, combining with prominent Pennsylvanians including Samuel Wharton to outmaneuver their southern and northeastern rivals for control of the fertile regions across the Appalachian Mountain range. In 1766 he partnered in the Vandalia Company, later the Walpole Company, with the British banker Thomas Walpole to lobby for millions of acres in Ohio. George Washington’s firm, the Mississippi Company, which included aristocratic Virginians such as Francis Lightfoot, Richard Henry Lee, and Arthur Lee, was also speculating in this region. Later, Franklin and his son united with Sir William Johnson, the Indian commissioner in New York, in a failed attempt to gain sixty million acres for the ephemeral Illinois Company.16
The American college eased the tensions between Franklin’s financial and social concerns. Large settlements of foreign people in the backcountry threatened to “Germanize” the colony, and Franklin feared that they could no more be assimilated than they could “acquire our Complexion.” But Provost Smith and several of his trustees were urging the colony to open backcountry schools to protect the immigrants from the corruptions of their “savage neighbors” and “Jesuitical enemies.” The Anglican priest also sought to drive a wedge between the backcountry Germans and the seaboard Quakers.17 American colonists no longer trusted that colleges could civilize Indians, but they were confident that they could civilize Germans.
It is a fair measure of the velocity of racial thought in colonial North America that Franklin’s “tawnys” did whiten, and rapidly. They even whitened in Franklin’s mind. The belief in the biological supremacy of white nations allowed him to flatten the cultural barriers between European peoples and bridge the religious or denominational divisions that had been the organizing bases of the colonies. In 1787 Franklin became the largest single donor—giving an initial £200—and the namesake of Franklin College (Franklin and Marshall) in the backcountry. Benjamin Rush, the scientist and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a charter trustee of the new “German College.” Rush predicted
that “our children will be bound together by the ties of marriage, as we shall be by the ties of friendship, and in the course of a few years by means of this College the names of German—Irishman & Englishman will be lost in the general name of Pennsylvanian.” Four years earlier, Dr. Rush had organized Dickinson College in nearby Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Leading Virginians were speculating west of the Appalachian boundary, in Kentucky, where they raised Transylvania College, a Presbyterian frontier school.18
The whitening of colonial society and the secularism of the Enlightenment created some space for Jews. In 1762 the Manhattan merchant and King’s College (Columbia) trustee John Watts wrote to Moses Franks—the son of the New York slave traders Jacob Franks and Abigail Levy—recommending Dr. James Jay, who “has undertaken to serve our College & I hope may succeed.” Franks was a foreign agent for King’s at the time of Jay’s British fund-raising trip. Watts’s business partner Oliver DeLancey, a trustee, was married to Phila Franks, Moses’s sister. Franks had joined the Watts and DeLancey firm in numerous West Indies investments, and he had served as Watts’s London representative. The contributions of Jewish merchants as privateers in the Atlantic colonial wars encouraged greater religious tolerance. Judah Hays, a prominent West Indies trader, was among the New York merchants whose ships attacked French interests. Moses Michael Hays, his son, was a founder of the Massachusetts Bank and a benefactor of Harvard College. Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas later served three decades as a trustee of King’s College. Jacob Rodriguez de Rivera and Aaron Lopez of Newport gave generously to the College of Rhode Island (Brown), where such gifts, large and small, moved the trustees to open the college to Jews. Rodriguez de Rivera also donated to Yale.19
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