Frontier Country. Patrick Spero

of a small, interwoven society of traders and roughnecks, the west was bustling with new arrivals who carried different dreams. The Scots-Irish, of which Henry Hawkins was likely one, were the first to arrive in substantial numbers. This group’s cultural lineage came from Scotland, but they passed through Ulster in Northern Ireland, where they provided a toehold for Protestantism, before coming to Pennsylvania, a path that has earned them their name Scots-Irish. Predominantly Presbyterians, they came not to escape religious persecution but economic stagnation. Irish landlords had raised rents on their Scots-Irish tenants in the early eighteenth century, making the Pennsylvania countryside an attractive alternative. Little did these immigrants know that this region would prove to be more than just adequate. The lands in the Susquehanna Valley turned out to be among the most fertile in all of colonial America. The Scots-Irish came to Pennsylvania in large numbers first in 1717. James Logan placed their settlements, such as Donegal and Paxton, near the banks of the Susquehanna, far beyond the Quaker-dominated cultural and political center. By 1729, there were at least six Scots-Irish settlements along the river.¹⁰

      The “Pennsylvania Dutch,” a nickname likely rooted in the pronunciation of Deutsch, meaning German, arrived in fits and starts, and their composition changed over time. Religious refugees seeking asylum were the first group to come to Pennsylvania. These early German colonists often migrated in large, organized groups and sought isolation. Government officials placed them beyond Philadelphia, either west, near the Susquehanna River, or to the northeast, along the Delaware River. According to demographers of colonial Pennsylvania, 1727 marked the first of three massive immigrations from the Rhineland to Pennsylvania. That year alone saw over a thousand Germans arrive at the port of Philadelphia, surpassing the entirety of German immigration in the first thirty-five years of colonial settlement. Most new arrivals traveled in family groups and came to Pennsylvania because of connections to those already settled in the colony. Unlike the previous immigrants, however, these Germans were not small sects that sought seclusion but more mainstream Protestant groups, like Lutherans, who expected to participate in society.¹¹

      The immigration of Scots-Irish and Germans did more than increase population numbers and expand the geographic reach of the colony. These new arrivals changed the face and faith of the colony, turning a once Quaker-dominated society into perhaps the most diverse in North America. While William Penn had once dreamed of such change, the Quaker elite who ran the colony in the 1720s was unsure about it. As one historian aptly summarized, the original Quaker colonists and their heirs “assumed that Pennsylvania would remain predominantly a Quaker colony in which ‘weighty Quakers’ would always shape public policy.” Quakers had, so far at least, created an ordered and peaceful colony, one that had begun to prosper without encountering many of the problems with Native Americans that other colonies had experienced when they began to flourish. The Scots-Irish and German populations, pushing the bounds of the colony and changing its cultural makeup, posed no small threat to this carefully established harmony.¹²

      Government officials adopted a number of policies to ease their fears of and solidify their authority over this new population. In 1727, the first year of sustained immigration from the German Palatinate, Pennsylvania instituted a new policy that required all captains carrying German immigrants to register those over sixteen years of age. Also in 1727, Governor Patrick Gordon decided to enforce a long dormant naturalization law that required all arrivals to make a statement at a local courthouse affirming their allegiance to the proprietor, their loyalty to the British Crown, and their support for the legitimacy of George II’s ascension. A public declaration of allegiance was an important political act that carried great legal weight in the eighteenth century. The significance of such a declaration was all the more powerful for German settlers, many of whom had lived under seigniorial law in which their liberty was owned by their lords. In effect, the Pennsylvania statement was a renunciation of their previous feudal allegiances and an affirmation of their new ones to a British king and proprietor.¹³

      The Scots-Irish, meanwhile, carried a reputation for bad behavior that worried officials as much, if not more, than the Germans’ loyalty. Many of the original settlers in Pennsylvania depicted the Scots-Irish as poor, violent, and backward, a marked contrast to the educated, sensible, and prospering culture the Quakers had sought to cultivate in the colony. To deal with this threat, officials created settlements and manors in western areas to house the Scots-Irish, far away from the Quaker core around Philadelphia.¹⁴

      The author of this plan was James Logan, who was William Penn’s protégé and closest adviser. Logan came from meager means in Ulster, but, when Penn noticed the young Quaker’s brilliance, he enticed him to come to Pennsylvania in 1699. Logan served in a variety of high offices and had his own interests tied up in land speculation and the Indian trade. From the vantage point of his multiple positions, Logan understood the colony’s internal politics and its geopolitics better than anyone. He thus knew how to ensure I had Scots-Irish migration and settlement patterns maintained Quaker power in the east, while also helping fill proprietary coffers. By 1726, extant tax lists from Chester County, then the county that stretched to the Susquehanna, suggest that 2,300 settlers took up residence in the far western areas of that county. In addition to the official settlements near the Susquehanna River, Logan estimated that in 1726 new settlers cleared and occupied over a hundred thousand acres of previously undeveloped land without license. The changes in the cultural landscape of the colony thus had real physical effects on its countryside.¹⁵

      There was more to Logan’s thinking than maintaining stability among and preserving the power of the “weighty Quakers,” however. Logan had an intimate understanding of the Scots-Irish, for he, an Ulsterman, was one of them. Instead of sharing the Quakers’ dour assessment of the Scots-Irish, he viewed these immigrants and their new western settlements as a benefit. The Scots-Irish at Donegal, a new settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna, were a “good, sober people,” Logan wrote to William Steel, a friend and fellow official. Best of all, they were of the stock that “had so bravely defended Londonderry and Inniskillen,” a reference to a 105-day-long siege of Ulster in 1689 in which Catholics loyal to James II tried to oust Protestants supportive of William and Mary’s ascension. “Those people,” he continued, “if kindly used, will I believe, be orderly, as they have hitherto been, and easily dealt with.”¹⁶

      Logan realized that these Scots-Irish settlers could help solve one problem frontiers posed to a colony that rejected militarization: they could serve as the first defenders against invasion, just as they had in Ireland. Logan made this rationale explicit in 1729 when he wrote that he decided “to plant” the Scots-Irish settlements near the Susquehanna so they could serve “as a frontier, in case of disturbance” with “Northern Indians,” a reference to unallied Indian groups in neighboring French Canada and the Ohio Valley. In that way, colonial officials created an ad hoc means to facilitate expansion that also served the geopolitical interests of the colony. Logan’s actions represented an unspoken part of the political settlement forged in 1701. Proprietary officials had the dual tasks of developing western land and providing colonists with legal and defensive protection in these new areas of settlement. The Quaker-dominated Assembly, focused as it was on the concerns of the eastern counties, was happy to outsource such responsibilities in 1701.¹⁷

      But as these new settlers populated areas near Indian settlements, their interactions with their Native neighbors began to affect Indian relations with the colony, often pushing them in directions colonial officials did not want. We cannot know exactly what these settlers thought of Native Americans when they left Europe, but it is more than likely they carried across the Atlantic fear and trepidation about their soon-to-be neighbors, baggage that weighed heavily on their actions with Indians once they arrived. Reports of vicious Indian wars in other colonies and ideas of Native savagery circulated widely in Europe, affecting settlers’ perceptions and playing heavily on their imaginations before they set out. The idea of Indians as peaceful allies, although cultivated by Penn and others, was counterintuitive to settlers who heard little of such things. The insecurity and violence that people like Henry Hawkins experienced only added to their worries. Indeed, while Logan hoped they might become “a frontier in case of a disturbance” with Indians, John Burt, Henry Hawkins’s former master, proved that colonists could be the cause of a disturbance.¹⁸

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