Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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The Conojocular War: The Politics of Colonial Competition, 1732-1737
Get PDFIN JANUARY 1765, CHARLES MASON took a break from his work drawing a boundary line between Maryland and Pennsylvania to visit Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the site of the 1763 Paxton Boys\u27 massacre of the Conestoga Indians. He did so, he wrote, out of "curiosity to see the place where was perpetrated last winter; the horrid and inhumane murder of 26 Indians: men, women, and children, leaving none alive to tell." What he found was hardly what he expected. Lancaster was not a lawless frontier outpost but a bustling and vibrant port on its way to becoming the largest inland city in British North America.Disappointed in his efforts to learn about the massacre, Mason soon "fell in company with Mr. Samuel Smith," who told him a story of a different, earlier conflict. In 1736, Smith recounted, Pennsylvania was "in open war" with Maryland "on the river Susquehannah.
A Voice in the Wilderness: Alexander Addison\u27s Case for Peace during the Whiskey Rebellion
Get PDFOn the first day of September 1794, while tension seized western Pennsylvania over whiskey excises, Alexander Addison, president of the Court of Common Pleas for the Fifth Circuit, delivered a charge to the Grand Jury of Allegheny County on behalf of peace and order. Addison\u27s presentation came at an important moment, as new whiskey excise laws had threatened to sever relations between the young United States government in Philadelphia and the western counties of Pennsylvania. At the time of Addison\u27s presentation, the citizens of western Pennsylvania, gathered together in township halls, were asked to choose whether or not to consent to legal terms of submission to the United States in an effort to avoid a violent confrontation between the government and western "insurgents."1 In his presentation, Addison made a plea for submission to the laws of the United States and to peace
The Mason-Dixon and Proclamation Lines: Surveying and Native Americans in Pennsylvania\u27s Borderlands
Get PDFIn January 1765, Charles Mason visited Lancaster, Pennsylvania,during winter holiday from his work on the Maryland-Pennsylvaniaboundary line. "What brought me here," wrote Mason, "was mycuriosity to see the place where was perpetuated last Winter the Horridand inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children, leavingnone alive to tell." The dead were Conestoga Indians who had "fled to theGaol" in Lancaster in a vain effort to escape the Indian-hating vigilantesknown as the Paxton Boys. The Paxton Boys broke into the jail and brutallyexecuted and dismembered the Conestogas, peaceful dependents onthe Pennsylvanian government and erstwhile neighbors of the Paxtons."Strange it was that the Town though as large as most Market Towns inEngland, never offered to oppose them, . . . no honor to them!" ThePaxtons, it seems, were not alone in their anti-Indian sentiments
"The Good Education of Youth": Worlds of Learning in the Age of Franklin. Edited by John Pollack
Get PDFFranklin\u27s Turn: Imperial Politics and the Coming of the American Revolution
Get PDFON JANUARY 29, 1774, Benjamin Franklin stood silently in thePrivy Council chamber (popularly known as the Cockpit), representinga Massachusetts petition to oust its current governorand lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver.Spectators quickly filled all available seats in the chamber, leaving minimalstanding room. As Franklin noted, "there never was such an appearance of privy counsellors on any occasion, not less than thirty-five, besides an immense crowd of other auditors." They came, Franklin stated, to see some "entertainment." Alexander Wedderburn, solicitor general and counsel for Hutchinson and Oliver, gave the crowd their show by verbally attacking Franklin for over an hour. Amid a cheering, laughing, and clapping multitude, Wedderburn slammed his fist into a pillow situated on the table in front of him as he called Franklin a thief, an "incendiary," and a man who "moves in a very inferior orbit.
William Penn and the Origins of Judicial Tenure during Good Behavior
Get PDFWILLIAM PENN IS, of course, best known for founding Pennsylvania as a safe haven for Quakers and for his commit-ment to religious tolerance in general. Unexplored in the vast amount of secondary literature on this iconic figure is his role in the origins of judicial tenure during good behavior, the institutional safeguard by which a judge can be removed for serious cause only that, together with adequate and secure judicial compensation, helped make the judiciary an independent and coordinate branch of government. In fact, two influen-tial articles on judicial tenure in New Jersey, Donald L. Kemmerer\u27s "Judges\u27 Good Behavior Tenure in Colonial New Jersey" and Jerome J. Nadelhaft\u27s "Politics and the Judicial Tenure Fight in Colonial New Jersey," do not say a word about Penn, even though he was one of the early proprietors of that colony. J. Paul Selsam likewise overlooks Penn\u27s con-tributions to judicial independence in his important article about the his-tory of judicial tenure in Pennsylvania, and Joseph H. Smith\u27s oft-cited 1976 article "An Independent Judiciary: The Colonial Background" is similarly silent about Penn\u27s role
Spies in the Continental Capital: Espionage across Pennsylvania during the American Revolution. By JOHN A. NAGY
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