Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment | Date: 28 April 2011, 02:55
|
Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment
By Kevin Kenny
* Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages: 304
* Publication Date: 2009-07-21
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0195331508
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780195331509
Product Description:
William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in which Europeans and Indians could live together in harmony. In this book, historian Kevin Kenny explains how this Peaceable Kingdom--benevolent, Quaker, pacifist--gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans.
Kenny recounts how rapacious frontier settlers, most of them of Ulster extraction, began to encroach on Indian land as squatters, while William Penn's sons cast off their father's Quaker heritage and turned instead to fraud, intimidation, and eventually violence during the French and Indian War. In 1763, a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys exterminated the last twenty Conestogas, descendants of Indians who had lived peacefully since the 1690s on land donated by William Penn near Lancaster. Invoking the principle of "right of conquest," the Paxton Boys claimed after the massacres that the Conestogas' land was rightfully theirs. They set out for Philadelphia, threatening to sack the city unless their grievances were met. A delegation led by Benjamin Franklin met them and what followed was a war of words, with Quakers doing battle against Anglican and Presbyterian champions of the Paxton Boys. The killers were never prosecuted and the Pennsylvania frontier descended into anarchy in the late 1760s, with Indians the principal victims. The new order heralded by the Conestoga massacres was consummated during the American Revolution with the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States confiscated the lands of Britain's Indian allies, basing its claim on the principle of "right of conquest."
Based on extensive research in eighteenth-century primary sources, this engaging history offers an eye-opening look at how colonists--at first, the backwoods Paxton Boys but later the U.S. government--expropriated Native American lands, ending forever the dream of colonists and Indians living together in peace.
Summary: peaceable kingdom
Rating: 5
The information provided before purchasing was complete and accurate. The book was very readable, entertaining and believeable. It is a remarkable addition to American history for someone with an Ulster Scot background as I have
Summary: Peaceable Kingdom Lost
Rating: 5
The book arrived in new condition, on time and I am almost finished reading this excellent book. Since I have been a lifelong Pennsylvanian, a Presbyterian and a history major this was an excellent slection.
Summary: Fine Book, Gives Both Sides on how Good Intentions Run Afoul of Reality
Rating: 4
This is a fine scholarly book with an interesting thesis that would have been rated with five stars except for problems in repetition, source identification and for a little unevenness in presenting settler versus Indian atrocities. The author clearly identifies with the modern, politically correct approach by mentioning that the Paxton Boys were defended strongly in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. The clear meaning is that they can no longer be defended. Well, maybe not today since we no longer find our neighbors murdered, tortured and mutilated beyond belief by Indians and expect to be next at any time. The point is that the events in 1763 have to be viewed in the context of the intermittant warring situation and the fears and aspirations of people on the frontier in 1763, not in a peaceful and comfortable New York penthouse in 2009.
The thrust of the work is that William Penn originally meant to establish a peaceable place on earth, perhaps even a utopia where everyone could realize their dreams, but conflict between the warlike Indians and the equally warlike Scotch-Irish Presbyterians forced the colony to face the political reality of competing peoples for the same land. This reality aided by the bumbling administration of the Penn heirs and Quaker party brought about the destruction of the Penn colony's peaceable kingdom. This thesis is accurate, and the story is compelling. The reader should remember that today we have diverse peoples competing for ever-scarcer resources, and politics have to be realistic above all to work out the problems. I need not remind other readers that this attitude is in very short supply at the present. There is much to learn from the example of the Penn colony.
The Paxton Boys were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians living in the Susquehanna River valley and lived on the sharp edge of the divide between the secure Quaker towns in Pennsylvania and the Indians, mostly Delawares and the Iroquois confederacy of six nations. The Scotch-Irish were hated by the pacifist Quakers, Germans and English Anglicans, although later where they made up the bulk of the Continental Army and supplied the majority of Continental governors and most of the Continental general officers (also four of the first five Commander-in-chiefs of the United States Army), their efforts were seen in a somewhat different light. They had been persecuted greatly by the English, forced out of Scotland, and then Ulster, Ireland, in the 18th century by the English landlords and government policies. After centuries of conflict when they generally got the worst of the bargains, they were ready to fight anyone for land and a right to determine their own political and economic fates. First it was the Indians, then the Quakers who seemed to support the Indians against the Scotch-Irish, and in 1775 it was the British in general. When given the chance to point their rifles at Redcoats, they did so with relish. It is no exaggeration to say that had the British not persecuted the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians so strongly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the United States might still be in the British Commonwealth.
Many if not most of the Scotch-Irish in Pennsylvania were squatters on the frontier without clear titles to the land they developed and made productive. Because they turned "wasteland" (forest) into productive farmland, they expected to be rewarded with its ownership. Secondarily, if they squatted on land supposedly reserved for Indians, then when they successfully fought off the Indians, such land should become theirs by right of conquest. The reader may note that these principles were generally held throughout the American colonies, whether the land was purchased (essentially always fraudulently in modern legal terms) from the Indians or not. The same principles were at work in the 20th century in Israel and espoused unabashedly by Zionists.
The snakes in the grass to the Scotch-Irish way of thinking were the pacifist Quakers who seemed to take the side of the Indians in every instance. The Quakers essentially made excuses for the Indians, even for their most horrible tortures, murders, kidnappings, slavery, and murders, always blaming the Scotch-Irish for every Indian outbreak (sounds like the far-left today.) The Pennsylvania political regime, however, was unable to protect the settlers or even to fund a militia in a timely and effective manner to repel Indian attacks. The Scotch-Irish were required to fall back on their own resources and defend themselves.
Author Kenny does a fine job in wading through the political bickering and presenting the problems and viewpoints of all concerned. The reader can see the peaceable kingdom start to unravel, but then in 1763 the Scotch-Irish lashed out literally in all directions out of sheer frustration. Differentiating in no way between Indians or tribes, a group of Scotch-Irish from the Paxton Presbyterian Church (thereafter "Paxto
|
DISCLAIMER:
This site does not store Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment on its server. We only index and link to Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
|
 |
|
Comments (0)
All
