The policies meant to integrate Indians into the British Empire, however, only added to colonists’ growing frustrations. The Paxton Boys epitomized this viewpoint. After living through the Seven Years’ War (1754 to 1763) and Pontiac’s War (1763 to 1765), colonists who had experienced this decade of strife saw Indians—all Indians, even their Conestoga neighbors—as enemies rather than friends with whom they wished to trade. They viewed imperial policies, traders, and a colonial governing elite as disconnected from—even hostile to—their needs. Where imperial officials stationed in London or the eastern seaports aimed to incorporate Indians into Britain’s mercantile system and increasingly global trade, many colonists on the frontiers of the British Empire wanted to exclude Indians from the rights and privileges of the imperial system and shift political power away from the east and to the west.
The Paxton Boys’ massacre of the Conestogas and subsequent march on Philadelphia was the first in a series of frontier rebellions that aimed to challenge these imperial regulations in the decades before the American Revolution. A few months after Mason’s venture to Lancaster, another group of colonists calling themselves the Black Boys launched a raid on a British fort near Fort Pitt, one of the most audacious attacks on imperial authority in colonial America. Three years later, another mobilization occurred to defend Frederick Stump, a man arrested for murdering a group of Indians in an attack eerily reminiscent of the Paxton Boys.
These colonial protests against their government in the 1760s were just as important to the coming of the American Revolution as such better-known urban revolts as the Stamp Act protests and Boston Tea Party. But the cause of the western discontent was far different from that of easterners. More than a decade of living on the frontlines of war transformed the worldview of colonists on the edges of Great Britain’s North American Empire. During the Seven Years’ War, the countryside they inhabited, once renowned for its peace and prosperity, turned into what was increasingly called a “frontier country,” an important description they had not used previously. During and after the war, people in western regions that had been called the “back parts” or “back counties” before the fighting began to refer to themselves as a “frontier people” who lived in “frontier counties.” Many wrote about the traumatic process of “becoming a frontier,” an event marked by profound fear, utter desperation, and an abiding hatred for those that caused these feelings. These self-described “frontier people” were civilians who had turned into unwilling combatants, and they looked to their government for the military protection they believed they deserved. When the government failed them, they looked to themselves and their neighbors for security. The perception of being a people ignored by their governments lingered after peace in 1763 and animated their actions in the years before independence.
When Mason fell into the company of Samuel Smith after investigating the Paxton Boys, he stumbled upon the second problem of imperial governance: establishing political borders in the empire. Mason’s lack of awareness of the border war that led to his current appointment suggests that few people outside of these contested areas were familiar with this type of intercolonial strife. For those living in the British Empire’s North American holdings, however, border conflicts between colonies were a common occurrence. From New Hampshire to the Carolinas, boundary controversies were a regular part of governing. Indeed, Smith and other combatants regaled visitors with stories of colonial conflicts decades after they occurred because they still mattered to colonists at the time, many of whom lived in similarly unstable areas.
Located at the center of Great Britain’s North American holdings, Pennsylvania experienced more border conflicts than any other colony. After its clash with Maryland in the 1730s, Pennsylvania waged two separate fights in the 1760s and 1770s, one against Virginia and another against Connecticut. Unlike the Maryland War, Pennsylvania lost these later battles. By 1775, the colony—once the literal and figurative heart of North America, the home of the largest city in the colonies, and the seat of the Continental Congress that was then preparing to declare thirteen colonies independent of the empire—had collapsed. Although the colonial government claimed sovereignty over the region that we today associate with Pennsylvania, its governing authority had largely vanished. Connecticut controlled the northern third of the state, while Virginia controlled the western region. In the interior portions, groups like the Paxton Boys and Black Boys ignored their government, and many renounced their allegiance to Pennsylvania so they could help other colonies establish toeholds in areas that Pennsylvania’s government claimed. The failure of the British Empire and its colonies to establish clear political borders without resorting to intercolonial warfare reveals another fundamental failure of imperial administration.4
Indeed, in 1776, those in Philadelphia who were rejecting the British Empire thought a great deal about the frontiers and borders of the nation they were creating. As patriots explained their reasons for declaring independence, they looked west. Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence that one of King George III’s crimes against his colonists was encouraging Indians to launch raids “on the inhabitants of our frontiers,” a reference to events that were then occurring around Fort Pitt. And when revolutionaries thought about the powers of the government they were creating, they again looked west. John Dickinson, a Pennsylvanian well versed in the colony’s travails, made sure that the Articles of Confederation contained a clear means for states to mediate their border disputes.
Figure 1. Pennsylvania and its contested borders. Pennsylvania fought a war against Maryland over its southern and western boundaries from 1732 to 1738. In the 1770s, Pennsylvania clashed with Connecticut and Virginia over their competing claims and lost.
But these attempts to solve the problems of the British Empire during the American Revolution beg the question: what caused the disintegration of government power in the years preceding American independence? The answer has less to do with the structure of the British Empire and its officials and more to do with, in Jefferson’s words, “the inhabitants of our frontiers,” people such as Samuel Smith and the Paxton Boys. Like the border wars that we should take seriously because people of the time did, we should take Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence seriously and try to understand what he meant by them. In fact, one of his well-chosen words connects these two problems of governing North America and helps explain the collapse of colonial and imperial rule in the west: frontier.
Frontier: the border … which the enemies find in the front when they are about to enter.
—N. Bailey, The New Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1776)
Words, like people, shape history. Words can command action, convey feelings, or encapsulate beliefs. People deploy certain words to drive events. Words are often the best—and sometimes the only—things historians have to access the past. And words, like people, possess a history. The meaning and import of a specific word may change, sometimes dramatically so. To a historian, knowing what a word meant and how its definition shifted over time can help reconstruct the way people experienced their past, show the way they used words to explain their present, and explain the course of the history these people made.
Frontier is such a word. Colonists used frontier to describe the world as they understood it. Specifically, a frontier in early America was a zone that people considered vulnerable to invasion, one that was created when colonists feared an onslaught from imperial rivals and other enemies. As such, it was a word that colonists used to explain their geopolitical landscape. For our purposes, an English dictionary published in 1776, the year Jefferson cited attacks on “our frontiers” as a reason to declare independence, distills the way that people thought of a frontier at the time of the American Revolution: “the border, confine, or boundary of a kingdom or province, which the enemies find in the front when they are about to enter the same.”5
According to this definition, a version of which appeared in print at least as early as 1730, frontier zones were the opposite of how they appear in today’s popular imagination. Frontiers