Frontier Country. Patrick Spero

      With Baltimore in England and Cresap operating with a commission on the western side of the Susquehanna opposite Lancaster County, Thomas Penn began to orchestrate Pennsylvania’s counterstrategy through Samuel Blunston. Penn once again aimed his institutional powers at Cresap, the representative of Maryland’s claim to absolute legal authority over the area. By the winter of 1733, Thomas Penn approved an arrest warrant for Cresap, and rumors that were probably true circulated that there was a £50 reward for his capture. Around that time, Andrew Hamilton, the Penns’ main legal adviser, met with Blunston and gave him specific orders for arresting Cresap. Although no record exists of his instructions, correspondence between Penn and Blunston suggests that Hamilton advised the latter to arrest Cresap at any point when he was not at his house. This was likely done for technical reasons. Cresap possessed a grant for his home, which meant Pennsylvania would violate Maryland’s sovereignty by raiding it. The area outside of Cresap’s home, however, was, in Pennsylvania’s view, under its jurisdiction.²⁸

      During the winter of 1734, Blunston plotted with his aides to snatch Cresap. As a pacifist Quaker, Blunston delegated the violence to the Scots-Irish settlers from Donegal and the Scots-Irish sheriff of Lancaster County, a pattern that would come to define this war and the ones that would follow. The situation escalated on January 29, when Lancaster County sheriff Robert Buchanan received intelligence that Cresap planned to leave his yard to help his workmen cut logs for a new home and a ferry. It was the exact legal opening they had sought. Buchanan rounded up a crew and headed across the river. Cresap, having received advance word of the Pennsylvanians’ plan, stayed back and sent his wife to the field to watch for the impending attack. The Pennsylvanians, meanwhile, seized eight of Cresap’s men for various complaints, carted them off to Blunston’s house (which served as Lancaster’s jail), and left the rest. Cresap’s wife, meanwhile, escaped and raced back to their home to warn Thomas of the assault.²⁹

      Some of the disappointed Pennsylvanians decided to head to Cresap’s home to capture their prize, contravening the instructions of Hamilton. This smaller group arrived at Cresap’s at about seven o’clock in the evening. At first, they asked for nighttime lodging, a ploy to get into the house, but Cresap refused and bolted the door. A standoff ensued with both sides shouting threats through cracks in the logs. Eventually, Cresap opened the door to fire a warning shot. The Pennsylvanians seized the opportunity and began to push in the front door. Cresap and his tenants, frightened by the action, released the door and ran into the back room. The Pennsylvanians tumbled into the house. Two Pennsylvanians rushed after Cresap, but Cresap’s assistants beat them back while Cresap nailed the inside door shut.³⁰

      Outside, the Pennsylvanians realized that Cresap’s warning shot had hit Knowles Daunt, one of Emerson’s servants. Daunt’s leg was crushed above the left knee with fragments of bone protruding. The Pennsylvanians, upon realizing the severity of the injury, retreated from the house and asked Cresap’s wife for a candle to aid Daunt. She refused, shouting through the walls that “she wold gladly wash her hands in said Daunt’s heart’s blood.” The Pennsylvanians, shocked and confused at the deadly turn, headed back across the river, abandoning the immobilized Daunt. A fellow servant, Michael Dooling, eventually rescued him. Daunt lasted a few days in Lancaster but ultimately succumbed to his injuries. Cresap remained secure on the western side, but Daunt’s murder would eventually catch up to him.³¹

      Such deadly violence surprised Penn. The thing that concerned him most was that his colonists had operated outside of the law, which he worried could upset his standing if imperial administrators tried to intervene. Up until this point, most of the conflict had occurred through legal channels. This violence, however, resembled war, and he worried that to an impartial judge Pennsylvania could appear the instigator. Because of the bloodshed, Penn, after consulting with Andrew Hamilton, instructed Blunston, who as a justice of the peace presided over the county court, to “calmly” deal with the eight prisoners grabbed in the initial action. Penn, however, did “not mean that they should not be told how much we shal resent any such incroachments and that all persons must expect to be punished who will be guilt[y] of such irregular practices.” Blunston appears to have released them on bail. Necessity likely also drove the leniency, since, as he reported at the time, there were “more prisoners then guards.”³²

      Cresap, for his part, left for Maryland to report on what happened. When his superiors heard of the skirmish, they decided to launch a counterattack that was meant to assert Maryland’s sole control of the western territory. Cresap returned with twenty militiamen in tow, the undersheriff of Baltimore County, and a resupply of “guns … swords, cutlasses and clubs.” Their aim was to capture the strongest symbols of Pennsylvania’s authority on the western side. They hoped that by doing so, they could show the strength of Maryland’s government and better establish their legitimacy.³³

      As the band approached the contested region, the group split into two. One group surrounded Pennsylvania loyalist John Hendricks’s house while the other blocked the river to stop an escape. After seizing Hendricks, the group then moved on to Joshua Minshall’s house, a Quaker loyal to Penn, and took him. They carted the two men to a jail in Annapolis. The arrest warrants for both Minshall and Hendricks rested on depositions that accused them of aiding the assault on Cresap’s house and, in the case of Hendricks, stirring up the Indians to attack Marylanders and giving “menacing speeches” to Marylanders that “they should not hold such lands … unless they would become tenants to the [proprietor] of Pennsylvania or acknowledge him as their land lord.” Hendricks’s words, the deposition stated, had created a “great terror” in Marylanders’ minds. As the protector of Baltimore’s tenants, Ogle arrested them in order to secure his tenants from their “great terror.”³⁴

      The seizure of Penn’s tenants escalated the cycle of violence in which both sides were competing to accomplish the same thing: securing absolute legal control of new ground. A key part of what drove the violence was each government’s desire to show that they could provide protection for their residents and that the other government lacked the ability to provide the security colonists expected. The wives of the imprisoned Pennsylvania men knew of the proprietor’s responsibility to them and they pleaded with Penn directly that “proper care … be taken for their husbands defence.” Penn understood his responsibility and sent money to the prisoners and their families, as well as securing a strong legal defense for them in court. It was a smart choice. Hendricks and Minshall, stuck in a “stinking louses hole” and surrounded by those they called their “enemys,” promised Penn “to stand and maintain” his rights. They refused to sign anything that Maryland could use to strengthen their legal case because they knew Penn upheld his side of the bargain.³⁵

      Sparks flew throughout 1734 and 1735 as both sides continued to try to bully their rival into submission. The leaders of both sides added regular colonists who were vocal partisans to their list of targets, hoping that intimidation could sway their allegiance and those still caught in the middle. Marylanders seized one of John Emerson’s servants stationed in the contested zone, leaving the man’s nursing wife “to fend for herself.” Emerson tried to retaliate by seizing Cresap, but he failed to find him. Instead, he arrested William Cannon, Cresap’s brother-in-law. Ogle responded to Cannon’s imprisonment with a proclamation calling for the arrest of Robert Buchanan, the sheriff of Lancaster, and John Emerson. In the winter of 1735, Buchanan and “thirty men several of whom were armed with hangers and pistols” seized seven Germans working on Cresap’s plantation; their crime, a captive would later testify, was “for working for the said Cressop on his land.”³⁶

      Cresap, understandably, grew more paranoid. He worried that Pennsylvanians plotted to “kill and destroy” him and “burn” his house. In such a state of constant fear, Cresap was often seen standing in his doorway “armed with pistols in his belt, a Gun in his hand, and Long Sword by his side Like Robinson Crusoe.” Other Marylanders lived in fear of arrest, complaining that Samuel Blunston and the Pennsylvanians used trumped-up warrants to arrest “a great many people over the river for some debt and some quarreling.” As these patterns of legal intimidation grew stronger, nearly everyone in the region became affected by the conflict; one historian has estimated that over two hundred households took up active arms for one side or the other. As