The colony had pursued this course of action before. Although Wright’s murder was the first in which Indians had slain an Englishman (or at least the first the council knew of), the colony had a history of mediating crosscultural violence. They had learned that English-style retribution—arrests, trials, and hangings—was an ineffective way to punish violence that occurred between colonists and Indians. Most recently, in 1722, a powerful trader, Edmund Cartlidge, had brutally murdered an Indian in a deal gone bad. The Cartlidge case happened west of the Susquehanna, an area that Pennsylvania had not officially settled and therefore exercised no legal control over. Traders and others often called such areas of legal and political ambiguity “the woods.” Dealing with problems of violence in the woods meant that the colonial government could pursue nontraditional justice. In this earlier case, the colony provided reparations for the crime through Indian means: a formal treaty at which the colony offered gifts of condolence and sincere apologies. Faced with the Wright murder in 1727, the council again decided that official diplomacy was the best way “to make the Indians in general sensible of the outrageousness of the action and to oblige them to make such satisfaction as the nature of the case will admit of,” even as they publicly called for more traditional punishment to assuage colonists’ desires for justice.30
But admonishing Indians was not the primary focus of discussion at the Provincial Council’s emergency meeting. After settling on the proper course of action, the council shifted topics and used the murder as an opportunity to examine the state of Indian relations in the colony. They offered a dour assessment. From the time of Penn’s founding until about 1722, the colony had what the council called “a good understanding and an uninterrupted friendship” with Indian groups in the colony. The problem, all agreed, was that the previous governor was too inattentive to Indian affairs, leaving Indians feeling “slighted.”31
The council went even further. Citing Burt, the Indian trader, as the root cause of this trouble, the council began to examine their regulations concerning trade and internal policing. Since the colony’s founding, government officials had viewed trade as a beneficent means of tying Indians and colonists together and ushering in an era of prosperity, but they realized the promise of trade also carried with it potential pitfalls. William Penn had realized the perils and opportunities of trade when he called for government-regulated trading towns, heavy fines for duplicitous traders, and juries composed of equal numbers of Indians and colonists to mediate disputes.32
While the government never put this last policy into practice, it had followed Penn’s other proposals by regularly passing regulations meant to ensure trading happened on equal and just terms. By 1727, laws limited all trade for profit to specific market towns and Indian villages, under the assumption that those locations would allow the government to enforce its policies. Indians complained that colonists had often used alcohol to swindle them, so the Assembly banned its use during exchanges. The government also required all traders to receive a license from the governor. In order to qualify for a license, they needed to have a letter of recommendation from their local justice of the peace. Fines for breaking fair trading practices had grown only heavier over time. The point of these regulations was not to limit trade but to ensure that the market was as free from coercion and deception as possible. It was part and parcel of Penn’s founding belief that the government needed to play an active role in maintaining peaceful relations with Indians in order to prevent frontiers from forming.33
Before the Wright murder, government officials and most civically minded Pennsylvanians took pride in their successful track record. When the Assembly renewed a law entitled “For the Continuing Friendly Correspondence with the Indians” in 1715, it sent a letter to the Board of Trade stating its rationale for doing so. “The whole intent of this act,” they wrote, “is to prevent the Indians being imposed upon or abused in trade or otherwise by ill-minded persons, which experience hath shown is impossible to prevent if all manner of persons, without some restrictions and regulations, should be suffered to live among the Indians.” Like William Penn, assemblymen saw such laws as setting Pennsylvania apart from other colonies. They observed that their “English neighbouring Collonies, have felt, in the late warrs, with those savages … the loss of great numbers of Christians killed, and their houses, plantations, goods, and cattle burnt, destroyed, or carried away, by those heathen.” Pennsylvania had not, they pointed out, “lost the life of any one Englishman, by their means, from the settlement of the Collony, to this day, that we know, or have heard of.” They told the board that they had accomplished this “peace and tranquility” by “treating and dealing with the Indians honestly,” and implied that the empire should advise other colonies to follow their model.34
The council expressed similar sentiments in 1727 as it reflected upon the Wright murder, noting “that this government had been formerly happy above most of our neighbours, in preserving a good understanding and an uninterrupted friendship with all our Indians.” Gordon shared a common vision for the colony, noting in his inaugural address that his goals were: “to discountenance parties, divisions, and factions in government, to maintain right and justice, to promote vertue, to suppress vice, immorality and prophaness, to assist and protect the magistrates in discharge of their duty herein, to encourage legal trade, and to use the Indians well.” The Wright murder threatened the Pennsylvania model of harmony through justice.35
During its investigation, the council found that the government’s recent performance had failed to live up to the promise of its laws. The situation leading to Wright’s murder illustrated all the ways they had failed. The council observed that “it was scarce possible to find a man in the whole government more unfit” for trading than Burt, and yet Burt had received a license to trade on recommendation from the Chester County Court. Burt’s license, the council went on, “clearly shews the necessity of having that trade, and qualifications of the persons admitted to it more narrowly inspected, than is at present provided.” They also pointed out that laws had long barred the use of alcohol during trading, and yet it flowed freely that night in the woods. The very promise of security that the colonial state was supposed to offer to its members seemed at stake. “Unless some more effectual provision is made,” they concluded, then “the publick tranquility,” the hallmark of early Pennsylvania life, “will ever be in danger.”36
Gordon agreed with his council that the government needed to change its ways and become more proactive in regulating trade and managing its alliances with Indian groups. Gordon ordered the chief justice of the colony to issue warrants for Burt’s arrest. He also agreed that he needed to craft a treaty with Indians to repair any damage inflicted by these events and renew bonds of friendship. The only problem was that the calendar and custom of the Indians made such a treaty unlikely in the short term. Most of the Indian diplomats “were abroad on hunting” until the spring. The council thus resolved to begin planning for a major treaty after the spring thaw. In the meantime, they hoped that the precarious peace would hold.37
CHAPTER 3
The First Frontier Crisis
The spring thaw did not come quickly enough. Soon after Thomas Wright’s murder, rumors of Indian war began circulating. Animosity between Indians and colonists turned deadly in the spring of 1728 when a confluence of events made war appear imminent. As officials tried to avoid the colony’s first conflict, they had to either confront the issue of expansion that the founders of the government had ignored—or face the potentially deadly consequences.
The most dangerous threat to stability during the crisis was the belief held by some colonists that Pennsylvania had “frontiers,” a new development on the geopolitical landscape of the colony. These “frontier inhabitants,” as they called themselves, petitioned their government for the support they believed they deserved. At the height of this uncertainty, groups of colonists who feared an imminent invasion formed unofficial militias to provide protection and launch raids on Indian groups. The ad hoc mobilizations eventually resulted in several clashes between Indians and colonists and