Frontier Country. Patrick Spero

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to return to his master and instead stayed in Philadelphia.⁶

      Hawkins’s recalcitrance, however justifiable, nonetheless made things worse. Burt decided that Hawkins was too much trouble to bear and sold him to a local plantation. Hawkins now found himself a farmhand, laboring away in fields and learning little that would help him in the future. That job did not work out either, and he soon found himself again in the hands of Davenport, who then sold him to “an Indian.” The Indian, named Chickoekenoke, took Hawkins “back into the woods several hundred miles.”⁷

      Hawkins’s stay there was short too. Chickoekenoke grew frustrated with his servant, just as all his other masters had, and brought Hawkins back to Davenport seeking a refund. At Davenport’s place in Donegal, Hawkins saw an opportunity to escape and ran to seek a justice of the peace, hoping the law could provide some protection. An angry Davenport intercepted him, bound his hands, tied him to the tail of a horse, and “ha[u]ld [Hawkins] on the ground a considerable way through a thick muddy swamp.” The brutality of the public beating—which shocked a group of women onlookers—drew the attention of the law. Davenport, facing charges of abusing his servant, turned Hawkins over to the authorities, “sorely beat and bruised on the body and one eye almost beat out and like to have broken both arms.” Sitting in the jail, “destitute of friends,” Hawkins told John Mitchell his tale of woe and hoped the court could intercede in his case, to give him the freedom he so desperately wished he had never given up.⁸

      Hawkins proved a poor commodity because he possessed a strong spirit, and because of that, we have his story today. However unusual Hawkins’s tale may be, his travels are emblematic. Hawkins witnessed the Indian trade, once the economic foundation for those who lived in the western areas of Pennsylvania; worked on a farm, a new and bountiful industry that had recently begun to lay a new economic foundation for these western areas; traveled through the woods and saw Indian society, a culture whose history predated William Penn’s arrival; stayed in a small trading enclave with Burt; and spent time in Donegal, a burgeoning and bustling Scots-Irish community formed in 1720 of recent immigrants like himself. It was a rough-and-tumble world where the only certainty was imminent danger. It was also a fluid society in which Indians and colonists interacted easily and regularly; Hawkins, for instance, was sold as an indentured servant to an Indian, a transaction that would be considered unusual in a few decades. And, as Hawkins’s story ends with him racing to find the protection of a justice of peace, it was a world in which the law was a presence but hard to reach, a figment of what it should be. Government officials, from high proprietary officials stationed in Philadelphia like James Logan who expressed dismay and surprise at Davenport’s actions, to the local justice of the peace John Mitchell, who indicted Davenport for his abuse of Hawkins, knew that this world on the fringes of Pennsylvania existed. They hoped to put an end to it, for the disorder, violence, and uncertainty it bred threatened their hopes for peace.⁹

      Hawkins, meanwhile, was encountering a western Pennsylvania that was fast changing. Once composed 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 СКАЧАТЬ