Tag: White Victimhood

June 2022

In 1988, the last year of the Reagan presidency, Shelby Steele, a black conservative writer in Northern California, published an influential and widely read essay in Harper’s Magazine in which he warned of the demoralizing effects the politics of victimhood can have on African Americans. In the U.S., he wrote, racial politics is fundamentally about power, and one of the primary tactics in the ongoing struggle between whites and blacks is to wrap one’s group in a cloak of innocence.

Innocence, that “feeling of essential goodness in relation to others” can lead to a sense of entitlement, Steele wrote.1 It gives people license to abuse or exploit or punish any group they convince themselves is less deserving than their own. Thus, innocence is a form of power.

White racists have always clung to the idea of their own innocence. The primary source of this innocence has been the moral inferiority—or guilt—of the targets of their racism.

It was during the civil rights movement that black activists were able to flip the script and also claim innocence, the source of which was the victimization they had endured for centuries at the hands of whites. It was that feeling of innocence—and the concomitant recognition of white guilt—that gave blacks their first real power in American life. In short, victimization became innocence, which was transformed into power.

Steele’s concern with this dynamic was that it provided African Americans with a perverse incentive to celebrate rather than overcome historic wounds, which could, ironically, lock people into a form of passivity. In other words, if victimhood is someone’s source of power—and pointing fingers can reap benefits—one might become incapable of developing the strength and skills to overcome life’s inevitable challenges.

While Steele’s insights were undoubtedly cogent, he was likely unaware of the central role victimhood played in the emergence of white racial identity before the founding of the United States. Indeed, white racial victimhood was a primary source of power and self-justification for settlers who served as shock troops for a nation George Washington called “an infant empire.”2

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The first people in mainland North America to refer to themselves as “white” arrived in South Carolina from Barbados in the late seventeenth century. They were part of a general exodus from the overpopulated island that had the distinction of being the first British colony to employ mass numbers of enslaved Africans. The first English settlers to Barbados brought with them ten slaves in 1627. As planters moved toward a labor-intensive sugar monoculture and as English servants proved incapable of working well in the tropics, more Africans were imported. Within three decades, they outnumbered whites on the island.

In 1661, Barbados adopted the first comprehensive slave code in the British empire. The goal of this new regime was to manage and police the African majority. Having no precedent in English law, the colonists created a legal code that divided the islanders between white masters and black slaves. The problem, however, was that not all whites were masters. Outnumbered and fearful of uprisings, the planter class began encouraging white servants—often vagrants, criminals, and religious exiles from Scotland and Ireland, as well as England—to identify themselves by the pale skin color they shared with planters rather than the propertyless, low class status they shared with Africans. In this context, the idea of whiteness emerged from the landed class’s efforts to ensure that poor servants would never take the slaves’ side in an uprising. It was this emerging white identity— along with the racial scheme undergirding the Barbados slave code—that Barbadians took with them to South Carolina. The slave code they brought inspired similar statutes in other mainland colonies.

It took another sixty years after the arrival of Barbadians in South Carolina before the term “white people” began to appear in the Northern colonies.

However, by the 1750s, in the middle colonies, references to people being white were made almost exclusively to distinguish Europeans not from Africans, but from Native Americans. In Pennsylvania, Britain’s most diverse colony that would later become an important gateway into the interior, “white” was not a term employed by coastal elites to maintain power. Instead, it emerged on the frontier as common settlers of varying religions and national origins began to seek common cause with one another in their violent struggle with Native Americans over Indian land.

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On March 9, 1782, roughly five months after the end of the siege of Yorktown—which is often called the last decisive battle of the Revolutionary War—about 160 Pennsylvania militiamen massacred 96 pacifist Christian Indians in Gnadenhutten, Ohio. The Revolution in the trans-Appalachian West was as much about land as it was about liberty. While competition over territory was an old story, the Revolution in the West gave settlers a patriotic justification for killing Indians. Soldiers in western Pennsylvania looked for and claimed land where they could settle after the war. Officers tried in vain to restrain men who scratched their names or initials on trees in the woods. Because conflict on the frontier was fought mostly among neighbors, the stakes—land—were high. And so was the ferocity. The American Revolution in the backwoods was total war, where prisoners were as likely to be mutilated as they were to be taken prisoner. In the end, the American victory was a disaster for Indian peoples on the frontier.

After nearly two centuries of deep ties with Euro-Americans, most Native Americans in the east were dependent on the transatlantic marketplace and its consumer goods. When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, both Britons and Americans lobbied major tribes for their support. If Indians wanted continued access to anything from guns to European cloth, alcohol, metal kettles and pans, or glass mirrors, they were essentially obliged to take sides in a war that wasn’t of their making. Each Indian group assessed the potential material benefits of siding with either the British or the Americans, while others sought desperately to remain neutral. By war’s end, however, in part because of how badly the Americans treated even their Native allies, most Indians wound up backing the British.

The Delaware Indians at Gnadenhutten, about ninety miles west of Pittsburgh, had begun to move to the Ohio Country in 1772 as hostile European settlers pushed them westward from Pennsylvania. Converted to Christianity by Moravian missionaries, a German-speaking utopian sect that had a comparatively compassionate approach to Native Americans, the Moravian Delawares were pacificist neutrals. At the same time, their missionary sponsors, however, were secretly passing intelligence to the Americans at Fort Pitt. So, in effect, the village was unofficially supportive of the American war effort. But that wasn’t enough to save them.

Every year, the Pennsylvania militia sent a punitive expedition to the Ohio Country to subdue Indians with whom they were in conflict. Rarely did they find them. But that didn’t matter. In the previous two decades, Euro-American settlers stopped making distinctions be- tween friendly and hostile Indians, between those who were responsible for attacks on their frontier settlements and those who were simply guilty of being Native.

The massacre at Gnadenhutten was not an unprecedented event. By the late eighteenth century, Euro-American settlers repeatedly retaliated for Indian attacks by killing neutral or even friendly Native Americans. What made the Gnadenhutten Massacre infamous—Benjamin Franklin called the murders “abominable”—was the number of victims, their religion, and the fact that thirty-nine of them were children.3 The stark contrast between the cold-blooded killing and the Indians’ dignified religious devotion was also particularly heartbreaking.

On March 6, 1782, Joseph Shabosh, the son of a Christian Indian woman and a European missionary, encountered the militia on a road about a mile from the village of Gnadenhutten. He hit the ground and broke his arm after they fired several shots at him. Assuming that they’d mistaken him for someone else, he identified himself as a Christian Indian. He soon realized that his identity made no difference to the militiamen, and he begged them to spare his life. A few of the men then seized him and chopped his body into pieces.

The militia then approached the Indians working in a cornfield and told them they had come to protect them from other Native groups who were allied with the British. They sent them to their homes to pack their belongings for a trip to Fort Pitt, where they’d be safe. The Indians in the nearby Moravian village of Salem were given the same instructions. The residents of both towns were told to meet in Gnadenhutten, where they were asked to hand over all their weapons to the American militia, for their protection. At some point, the militiamen debated what to do with the Indians, and despite some internal dissent, they ultimately decided to execute them for being enemy warriors and raiders. Their proof was that the Moravian Indians used such items as teakettles, pewter basins, and spoons. Instead of signs of being Europeanized, it was clear in the minds of the militiamen that the items, which the soldiers later plundered, had to have been stolen.

The Indians started preparing their souls for death by singing hymns and praying aloud in unison. The militia dragged them into their huts by twos and threes and bludgeoned them to death with a cooper’s mallet they had taken from one of the Indians. Some were scalped alive. Others had their corpses cut up. The houses were then set on fire.

Not only did no one face any form of punishment for their actions, but the expedition’s commander, David Williamson, would later be elected sheriff of Washington County, Pennsylvania. When General George Washington got news of the massacre, he knew British-allied Indians, particularly non-Moravian Delawares, would be out for revenge. He ordered that no American soldiers should allow themselves to be taken alive. This was the state of Indian/Euro-American relations in which the Revolutionary War would come to an end and a new nation would be born.

Today, anyone can visit the site of the massacre at Gnadenhutten. It’s a somber place where a humble burial mound rises next to the parking lot. The skeletal remains of the bodies were placed in a pit years after the murders. In 1872, ninety years after the massacre, a thirty-five-foot-tall obelisk was erected in honor of the victims. Some log cabin replicas were placed around the nine-acre memorial site. Outside the cabin nearest the obelisk stands a sign that can easily startle you if you’ve been walking through the memorial thinking of those in whose honor it was created. It reads: “Birthplace of First White Child Born in Ohio.”

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From the start, Pennsylvania was unique among British colonies. Its Quaker founder, William Penn, had an enli- ghtened vision for the territory he had been granted by the King of England. He wanted it to be a place governed by the spirit of cooperation and toleration rather than coercion. The Delawares, the first Native Americans Penn and thousands of English and Welsh Quakers encountered, were also predisposed to get along with the settlers. They already had had good relationships with previous European newcomers, including the Dutch and Swedes. So when Penn arrived expressing his desire to pay for Indian land and to treat Natives fairly, his overtures were welcomed.

New Englanders had fought bloody Indian wars short- ly after their arrival. So did Virginians in the Chesapeake Bay. But Pennsylvania enjoyed nearly seventy-five years of peace. It’s not that there had not been conflict in those early years between Europeans and Native Americans. The Europeans wanted what the Indians had: land. Conflict was inevitable. It helped, at first, however, that the territory west of Philadelphia was nearly empty and the Delawares could move there after Penn had purchased their ancestral lands to the east.

Early English and Welsh Quaker settlers set the tone for the colony. The Quakers were pacifists and didn’t establish a colonial militia. Pennsylvania then became the only colony where the Native Americans were better armed than the colonists. That fact alone encouraged the Europeans to cooperate. Unlike Massachusetts, whose Puritan founders were interested in finding safe haven only for their own religious beliefs, the Quakers welcomed other religious dissenters. The first German-speaking migrants to arrive in the colony were Mennonites invited by Penn himself. They were soon joined by German Quakers. In the early years of German-speaking migration to Pennsylvania, most settlers were members of small, persecuted religious sects, such as the Schwenkfelders, Dunkers, and Moravians. It didn’t take long for the colony to develop a reputation as an asylum for Europe’s oppressed religious minorities. That and the plentiful available farmland turned Pennsylvania into what some called “the best poor man’s country in the world.”4

By the early eighteenth century, German speakers made up the largest segment of the population. (The first large group of Amish arrived in Lancaster County in the 1720s.) Again, unlike New England, whose colonists tended to live in tightly knit villages, the settlers in Pennsylvania who spread out from Philadelphia sought the best plots of land and established dispersed family farms.

Rising European immigration fueled a demographic explosion. German-speakers from the Rhineland and Scots from the Lowlands and Ulster began pouring into the colony. Chronically short of laborers, entrepreneurs recruited workers who came for economic rather than religious reasons. The sheer number of new arrivals— plus the fact that the population doubled every eighteen years—pushed settlers westward.

By the 1720s, English, German, and Scotch-Irish mi- grants had started settling farther inland near the Susquehanna River. When the population was sparse and the colonial government could control the pace of expansion with purchases of Indian land, Euro-Americans and Natives were able to forge some sort of understanding and cooperation. Even when competing over land and resources, European settlers and Indians often created alliances and some level of mutual accommodation. Historian Jane T. Merritt points to the Moravian Christians as a symbol of the cultural hybridity of the early-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania frontier. Just as some Delaware were attracted to European religion, plenty of Europeans adopted aspects of Native culture that helped them better negotiate their new environment. As long as the frontier remained relatively open, Europeans and Indians could find ways to live and trade together.

The Europeans, however, tended to live in their separate ethnic and religious enclaves. The dispersed nature of the population, the colony’s live-and-let-live ethos, and the absence of any type of conscripted militia service ensured that the population would rarely mix and cultural—and linguistic—barriers between them would remain high. German speakers, who were dividing themselves among a variety of groups and dialects, tended to adhere to their native tongue and maintained their own local newspapers.

Ethnic tensions among Europeans would only grow as immigration continued apace. Benjamin Franklin famously complained about the “Palatine Boors,” referring to newcomers from the German Palatinate region.5 Colonial authorities openly worried about the large numbers of rough-natured Presbyterian Scotch-Irish, who themselves were not so fond of the English. Between 1700 and 1750, Pennsylvania’s diverse Euro-American population grew from 18,000 to 120,000.

Beginning in the 1730s, German and particularly Scotch-Irish settlers—who were often at odds with one another—were moving west of the Susquehanna River. Local Indians understandably resented the new settlements, many of which were on land that had not been ceded by Native Americans, sparking violent clashes. At the same time, significant numbers of Delawares, Shawnees, and others continued to move farther west. By the late 1740s, Shawnees and Delawares were well ensconced in new communities of the Ohio Country, west of the Alleghenies. They came to view the other side of the mountain’s endless ridges and valleys as their safe haven from European incursions.

Native Americans weren’t the only ones frustrated with unauthorized settlement on Indian land. Pennsylvania authorities knew squatters generally undermined the rule of law and only heightened tensions with Native Americans. Provincial Secretary James Logan, who had first considered the tough Scotch-Irish the perfect people to live on the border of Indian Country, given their history as border-taming Protestant colonists in the northernmost province of Catholic Ireland, later confessed that the “audacious and disorderly”6 habits of the migrants from Ulster made them “troublesome settlers to the government and hard neighbors to the Indians.”7

While Indians moved west to distance themselves from expanding European settlement, they had no intention of isolating themselves from the world of transatlantic trade. It didn’t take long for Euro-American traders to follow the Pennsylvania Indians who settled on the Allegheny Plateau. In exchange for consumer goods, they bought pelts, which they exported to Europe. In the course of time, Euro-American blacksmiths and gunsmiths from the east were welcome among the Ohio Indians.

And Pennsylvania’s colonial authorities didn’t want to lose touch with fleeing tribes, either. By the 1740s and 1750s, Pennsylvania was competing with the French for access to Indian trade in Ohio. La Belle Rivière, as the French called the Ohio River, was critical to connecting and securing the future of their colonies in Canada and Louisiana. The Ohio Indians were quick to learn the value of playing the two European nations against each other in order to get the best prices for their trade. Both Pennsylvania and France vied for their loyalty.

Pennsylvania wasn’t the only colony with its eyes on the Ohio Country. In the late 1740s, Virginia staked a claim to the territory and began sending expeditions there that directly challenged French ambitions. What had begun as a refuge for migrating tribes now became a site of imperial conflict. Out of this collision of competing interests emerged the French and Indian War, in which Britain and France fought over control of North America. Knowing the difference between the British and French imperial strategies—the French emphasized alliances and strategically placed forts, while the British conquered via settlers—Ohio Indians chose to align with the French and make war on Pennsylvania, whose settlers had pushed them off their lands.

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On October 16, 1755, Delaware and Shawnee warriors swooped down from their home base in Kittanning on the Allegheny Plateau to attack Europeans who had settled a few miles west of the Susquehanna River. They killed at least thirteen settlers and captured another twenty-eight. Several were scalped. For the next three years, Pennsylvania’s frontier was targeted by stealthy, precision attacks that left settlers in terror and disarray. In addition to the element of surprise, the attacks were far from indiscriminate. Indeed, they were personal, which made them all the more terrifying. The warriors knew who they were attacking, and the settlers knew the names of their attackers. They had once been neighbors.

In November 1755, when a small group of seven or eight Indian warriors attacked the family of Henry Kobel in Bethany Township, Pennsylvania, they spoke to the children in High German. “Be still, we won’t hurt you,” they said before killing their parents.8 Not long after, another settler was captured by Indian warriors who he said spoke English as well as he did. The objective of the Indian attacks was to drive the settlers off the land. In the first two years of the war, Indians had killed at least 326 European settlers and captured 125 more. But perhaps even more horrifying for the settlers was the way warriors sometimes mutilated the bodies of their victims, men and women found with their breasts hacked off or with a tomahawk sticking out of a man’s groin. The mutilated bodies were sometimes left at crossroads, where they were most likely to be seen. The violence was clearly designed to strike terror in the larger settler community.

And it worked. Settlers became refugees and began to rewind the process of colonization. They abandoned their farms and fled chaotically toward the east and south to find refuge in the larger, better-protected towns that they had passed through on their way to the back- country. Contemporary accounts describe men in their bare feet and women with young children on their backs, roads packed with wagons crammed full of families’ belongings. As the attacks continued, historian Peter Silver has written, “more Europeans of more miscellaneous backgrounds came into closer contact with each other than had ever been the case in the province before.”9

This diverse group of refugees met along the roads and in emergency meetings where they discussed how they would respond to the attacks. As new ties between strangers formed, a defensive community emerged. The settlers, writes Silver in his 2000 Yale dissertation, “rapidly grew less choosy about who its members were.”10 What they shared was the feeling of terror and a growing hatred for Native Americans. War is always horrible, but the particularly intimate character of the attacks—the fact that they knew the men who conducted them—left the settlers with an even deeper sense of anger and betrayal. In making sense of their predicament, refugee settlers also cast blame not just on the Indians who attacked them, but even on friendly or neutral groups who they now felt must have been complicit in the aggression. Before the attacks, settlers were more capable of making distinctions between friendly Indians and those who threatened them. But the raids made the settlers’ views of Indians both more harsh and more uniform. By 1758, when Native groups had agreed to drop their support for the French in their war effort, European settlers were beyond making distinctions between friends and foes. In fact, for many settlers it was simply easier to direct their anger at nearby allied Indians than at the perpetrators who rode in from far away.

But angry settlers also blamed the colonial government, particularly the Quakers who controlled the Assembly, for not protecting them from Indian attacks. Settlers had begged for military assistance, but Pennsylvania’s government had initially been unresponsive. Both the governor and many members of the Assembly thought the settlers had provoked the violence in the first place by encroaching on unceded Indian land. In blaming the Quakers for their plight, writes historian Kevin Kenny, the settlers “reduced the Assembly to Quakerism and Quakerism to pacificism.”11 Significantly, according to historian Matthew C. Ward, it may have been the Indian raids during the French and Indian War that led Pennsylvania’s backcountry settlers to fully arm themselves.

It was during this time that the term “white people” emerged as the most common description of the settlers who had suffered attacks by French-allied Indians. Previously, reports of Indian attacks sometimes referenced Presbyterian Irish victims or German Mennonites or Lutherans, but they more often would use the term “English” as a synonym for non-Indians. Silver suggests that at a time when backcountry settlers were drawing an ever-stronger distinction between Indians and non-Indians, the “conspicuously poor fit that ‘English’ made, even as a convenient blanket term, gave rise to a new generic term.”12

When public figures or the press wanted to refer to the group of Europeans who suffered under the weight of Indian attacks, they’d increasingly use “white people.” Initially, it was not a racial term—because Quakers were not included—but a political one that defined a community of interest who shared a growing disdain for Native Americans and the desire to kick pacifist Quakers out of Pennsylvania politics.

At the same time, in part to persuade the colonial government to act on their behalf, Pennsylvania’s settlers began to refer to the frontier as the “bleeding country,” a term that only fed their sense of themselves as an ag- grieved people.13 The emerging community of white people was thrown together by their shared suffering at the hands of Indians. Their shared grievance—and disdain for both Indians and Quakers—was greater than their distrust of one another.

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The political articulation of the settlers’ victim mentality was fully formed by 1764 after the French and Indian War had come to an end and another, larger Indian front pushed back against the British garrisons that had taken over the territory now ceded by the French. As early as 1758, well before the war ended and after the French- allied Native groups had buried the hatchet with the British, traders, hunters, and settlers took to the two military roads the British had forged westward during their war with the French. Some former refugees simply sought to reoccupy the farms they had abandoned, while others were eager to stake out new claims farther west in the Ohio Country. With the French defeated, and with easier routes built through the Appalachians, moving farther west no longer seemed as daunting to Euro-Americans looking for game, Native trading partners, and land.

In the summer of 1763, a loose confederation of Native American groups took up arms to push back the British encroachment. While many historians have called this event Pontiac’s War or Rebellion—after the Ottawa chief—historian Michael N. McConnell has aptly referred to it as “the Defensive War of 1763.”14 For the second time in a decade, settlements in western Pennsylvania came under siege. But this time, the settlers were more hardened than they had been when the first raids began in 1755. The fear and anger they’d experienced had forged in them an aggressive intransigence toward Native Americans.

Making matters worse, in early December 1763, news arrived that King George III had issued a proclamation prohibiting all European settlement west of the crest of the Appalachians. The idea was to discourage westward expansion and keep Europeans and Native Americans on opposite sides of the mountains. While many would come to ignore the invisible line—the British didn’t have the wherewithal to enforce it—news of the policy nonetheless enhanced the frontier settlers’ sense that neither the colonial nor the British governments had their interests in mind.

In the same year, a group of Scotch-Irish volunteers formed an armed group called the Paxton Boys, dedicated to patrolling the countryside to protect against Indian attacks. Still furious over the colony’s unwillingness to defend them and frustrated by their inability to punish enemy warriors, they eventually turned their suspicions—and anger—on Christian Indians such as the Moravians and the Conestogas. While the latter weren’t Christian, they too had adopted European-style dress, housing, and farming techniques. The Paxton Boys accused all these “friendly” Indians of aiding the Native groups who were attacking European settlements. As a preemptive measure, the colonial government evacuated all the willing Moravian Indians to barracks in Philadelphia, where the Paxton Boys could not reach them. The Conestogas, however, stayed put, perhaps feeling that they had long benefited from the protection of Pennsylvania. Indeed, the Conestoga Indians had signed a treaty in 1701 with none other than William Penn himself. The treaty stated that the signatories shall forever live “as one head & one Heart, & live in true Friendship & Amity as one People.”15 A copy of the treaty was one of the items found in the ashes of their village, Conestoga Manor, after more than fifty Paxton Boys came through on the morning of December 14, 1763, and killed and scalped six sleeping Indians—two men, three women, and a child—and burned their houses.

Most of the Conestogas survived that day because they were out selling brooms and baskets. When they returned, authorities from nearby Lancaster placed them in the county workhouse under protective custody. Two weeks later, however, another gang of about fifty Paxton Boys rode into the center of Lancaster with muskets and scalping knives, brushed aside minimal security, and hacked the remaining fourteen Conestogas—eight of them children—to pieces. The slaughter took all of eleven or twelve minutes. One of the Paxton Boys reportedly ran off bragging about having killed “a whole Tribe! a Nation at once.”16

Despite some effort by colonial authorities, no one was arrested for the murders. Nor could any witnesses be found to testify against men who openly bragged about their roles in the slaughter. Eastern Pennsylvanians, however, were appalled by the massacres, and colonial authorities were shaken by what they considered an insurrection in the west. Indeed, the hatred the Paxton Boys felt for Native Americans only slightly over- shadowed their disdain for what they saw as a callous, uncaring colonial government. During the rebellion, and months thereafter, the presses of Philadelphia published scores of pamphlets arguing in favor and against the actions and intentions of the Paxton Boys. The combination of the Paxton rebellion and the ensuing pamphlet war only further divided eastern and western Pennsylvania. More significantly, it further unified westerners.

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While the white people were an amalgam of European groups, the Scotch-Irish were the ones who most profoundly influenced the cultural contours of this emerging community. Some scholars have argued that the Scotch-Irish disappeared in the course of Americanization. But what’s more likely is that other European-origin groups became more like the Scotch-Irish. Thus, as historian Warren R. Hofstra has suggested, as a distinct people, the Scotch-Irish “vanished in plain sight.”17

Benjamin Franklin didn’t much like Pennsylvania’s Germans, but his antipathy for the Scotch-Irish was even greater. Because of their shared Calvinist origins, Franklin tended to lump New England Congregationalists and Pennsylvania’s Scotch-Irish Presbyterians together. He considered them both bigoted and intolerant of anyone who dared to disagree with them. In Pennsylvania politics, Franklin was aligned with the Quakers, many of whom condescended to the more rough-hewn Scotch-Irish settlers.

On some level, the pamphlet wars over the Paxton Boys were as much about European interethnic rivalry and emerging notions of racial difference as they were about the horrible fate of the Conestogas. Franklin published an incendiary narrative of the massacres in which he called the Scotch-Irish vigilantes “CHRISTIAN WHITE SAVAGES.”18 He mocked the notion that all Indians were alike and therefore equally deserving of the Paxton Boys’ acts of revenge. “If an Indian injures me, does it follow that I may revenge that Injury on all Indians? It is well known that Indians are of different Tribes, Nations, and Languages, as well as the White People. In Europe, if the French, who are White People, should injure the Dutch, are they to revenge it on the English, because they too are White People? The only Crime of these poor Wretches seems to have been, that they had a reddish brown Skin, and black Hair; and some People of that Sort, it seems, had murdered some of our Relations.”19

For their part, the pro-Paxton pamphleteers—not all of whom were Scotch-Irish—derided what they perceived as the self-righteousness of the Quakers, their perceived “partiality”20 for the Indians, and their treatment of the “insignificant Scotch-Irish” as if they were “unworthy of protection.”21 They highlighted the savagery of the Indians, belittled the notion that there was a distinction between friendly and enemy Natives, and described the suffering of the frontier settlers in the most melodramatic terms. One pro-Paxton pamphleteer referred to the settlers as “ruined, despairing People,” “abused,” “unhappy,” “insulted,” “injured and oppressed,” “neglected,” “left naked and defenceless—abandon’d to Misery and Want—to beg their Bread from the cold Hand of Charity.”22

The massacres of the Conestogas didn’t quench the Paxton Boys’ thirst for blood. Furious that colonial officials were still protecting the Moravian Indians, in early February 1764 they gathered 250 men to march to Philadelphia, where they intended to kill the Native Americans, while thumbing their noses at authorities. Benjamin Franklin—along with a group of well-armed citizen volunteers and British troops—intercepted the Paxton Boys at Germantown, where Franklin convinced them to disband and put their grievances down on paper.

In the end, their primary complaints—the lack of frontier defenses, Quaker favoritism toward Indians, and their relative underrepresentation in in the colonial Assembly—continued to be ignored by the colony. But their insurrection of 1763–64, a mere twelve years before the Declaration of Independence, would nonetheless have far-reaching cultural and political ramifications. After the rebellion, Benjamin Franklin remarked that the “Spirit of killing all Indians, Friends and Foes” had spread throughout the colony.23 The victimized white people on the frontier had redefined the murder of Indians from being an offensive act to a defensive act. Regardless of what the law said, they had a new justification for killing Indians—and taking their land. It was neither criminal nor immoral, because it was revenge for what had been done to them.

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After the Paxton rebellion, after which not one person was arrested, the Pennsylvania frontier became ungovernable. The colonial government had lost whatever control it had over Scotch-Irish settlers. In March 1765, a group that came to be known as the “Black Boys” because the members blackened their faces, attacked a wagon train carrying goods from Philadelphia to Fort Pitt at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers. The vigilantes targeted the shipment because it carried goods destined for trade with Ohio Indians. In June of that year, Thomas Gage, the commander of British forces in North America, described the residents of western Pennsylvania as being “in an actual State of Rebellion.”24

The following March, in a letter to the governor of colonial Pennsylvania, Gage wrote that he was “sorry to find that the lawless Banditti on your Frontiers continue giving you fresh troubles. The Robberies and disturban- ce they have been guilty of with Impunity, emboldens them to every Act of Violence, whilst they flatter themselves that they are secure from Punishment.”25

By 1768, the British were fully aware of the level of lawlessness on Pennsylvania’s western frontier. Because they could not control the settlers, the British had lost credibility with the Indian tribes with whom they negotiated trade and treaties. In January, two German settlers, John Stump and his servant John Ironcutter (Eisenhower), were selling rum to six Indians—four men and two women—in Stump’s house near Middleburg when the two murdered them because they said they had become unruly. The next day Stump and Ironcutter rode fourteen miles to an Indian camp, where they killed another woman, two young girls, and a child. Stump then scalped the victims, threw their bodies in a heap, and burned them.

Few could deny the heinousness of these unprovoked attacks. But when a British officer handed the two men over to the sheriff in Carlisle, the county seat of heavily Scotch-Irish Cumberland County, a mob of vigilantes sprung them free. According to historian Richard White, the group “feared the precedent of back country settlers being sent to Philadelphia for trial.”26

Meanwhile, during the following decade, tens of thousands of white settlers moved across the Proclamation Line with impunity and began grabbing land west of the Appalachians. Just as it’s impossible to understand the emergence of white people as a multiethnic community of interest without taking into account the shared hostility toward Native Americans, it’s impossible to understand that hostility without considering the fact that it was fundamentally born of competition over land.

Unlike the 1782 massacre at Gnadenhutten, there is no equivalent memorial to the Conestoga Indians who were murdered nearly twenty years prior. But if you’re willing to search, you can find a bronze roadside marker set on a large stone about twenty-five minutes by car west of Lancaster, not far from the Susquehanna River. The plaque marks the general location of Conestoga Manor, and only in what seems like an afterthought mentions that “the tribe was exterminated by the Paxton Boys in 1763” in the last sentence. In Lancaster proper, there is a small plaque mounted well above eye level on the back wall of the nineteenth-century Fulton Theatre. It reads simply “Site of Conestoga Massacre, December 27, 1763.” But while the atrocities in Lancaster County are not as memorialized as those in Gnadenhutten, most historians of colonial and revolutionary-era Pennsylvania and Ohio tie a direct line between the two events. If the Paxton Boys represented the violent early expression of a still-coalescing community of interest, then, in the words of historian Gregory T. Knouff, Gnadenhutten “marked the apotheosis of White racialist identity.”27 While in 1763, the acts of the Paxton Boys still inspired disgust among some European-origin colonists, by 1783, such atrocities were no longer so shocking.

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In 1779, Benjamin Franklin, then the U.S. ambassador to France, met with the Marquis de Lafayette in Paris to be- gin planning a children’s book that they hoped would be used “to impress the minds of Children and Posterity with a deep sense of [Britain’s] bloody and insatiable Malice and Wickedness.”28 The Continental Congress had asked Franklin to put together a list of British atrocities that would become the basis of a primer for rebels/patriots.

One of the challenges of the Revolutionary War effort was how to engender a fury against Britain that would first instill in the colonial public a strong enough will to fight and then sustain a brand-new country’s identity in the wake of a Revolution. Leading Boston patriot Sam Adams was particularly concerned that the Revolution would fail if generations of Americans did not learn to despise the mother country.

The American Revolution was decidedly not the articulation of a clearly separate self-conscious colonial identity eager to distinguish itself from the empire. On the one hand, the British were convinced that intercolonial tensions—those between north and south, as well as east and west—would make political and military coordination impossible. On the other, even after the Declaration of Independence was signed, it was difficult to tell exactly who was fighting against whom.

What the Revolution needed was a way not only to clearly draw a line between colonial and imperial identities, but to unify a diverse and fractious colonial population. The answer would be found in a type of war propaganda that would destroy whatever affection the public had for Britain. To do this, the rebels had to demonstrate that the British—cultural cousins to so many colonists— were really dangerous foreigners. “To accomplish this vital, difficult task,” writes historian Robert G. Parkinson, “they embraced the most powerful weapons in the colonial cultural arsenal: stereotypes, prejudices, expectations, and fears about violent Indians and Africans.”29

The children’s book that Franklin and Lafayette were planning was never published. But the list of twenty-six proposed illustrations still survives. They could be broken down in roughly three topics, the British mistreatment of prisoners, the bombardment of colonial towns, and images of British-allied Native American and African slaves menacing European-origin colonists. Indeed, more than a quarter—seven of twenty-six—of the images were supposed to feature Indian and black British proxies—five of Native Americans and two of Africans wreaking havoc. Number fourteen was to be an illustration of a grateful King George III receiving a list from his secretary of war of colonists who had been scalped.

Tying the British to their Indian and black allies was so crucial to war propaganda that it was the reason for the twenty-seventh and final grievance against King George III in the Declaration of Independence: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”30 Insurrections referred to the proclamation issued by Virginia’s colonial governor offering freedom to slaves who left their patriot owners and joined the British army. The hypocrisy of referencing slavery in an argument for liberty led the drafting committee to strike the word “slave” altogether. But the signers of the Declaration of Independence evidently had no problem calling all Native Americans savages, despite the fact that some tribes were fighting for the revolutionary cause. Rebels were consciously leveraging colonists’ fear of Native Americans to further their fight against the British. The Indian hating that began on the colonial frontier was now being spread via colonial printing presses to forge unity for the patriot cause.

***

The most extensive and successful rebel propaganda campaign was the story of the murder of Jane McCrea by British-allied Indians in Fort Edward, New York. It sought to point out that the British were not worthy of colonists’ loyalty because they had allied themselves with Native Americans. So many versions of the sad tale were printed so often that McCrea became, in the estimation of one cultural historian, “the new nation’s first folk heroine.”31 On orders from military and political leaders, rebel printers published McCrea’s tale in scores of publications throughout the colonies.

The essence of the story was that in late July of 1777, an orphaned daughter of a Presbyterian minister was captured and killed by Indians while she was on her way to meet her fiancé, a loyalist officer in the British Army.

The facts were to be debated for decades to come, but the emotional resonance of the basic story was enough for the rebels to seize on. “Seeing an enormous opportunity to denigrate their enemies and bolster American spirits at a critical moment in a critical campaign,” writes Parkinson, “patriot publicists moved quickly to broadcast the story as widely as possible.”32 A letter written on the day McCrae was killed was reprinted throughout the colonies. It stated that a group of Indians “took a young woman . . . out of a house at Fort Edward, carried her about half a mile into the bushes, and there killed and scalped her in cold blood.”33 Another account echoed the words in the Declaration of Independence. “The barbarous savages, having received full liberty from the more barbarous Britain, to murder and scalp all before them, without regard to age or sex.”34

American general Horatio Gates used McCrae’s story to drum up support for the coming battle with the British at Saratoga. When the Americans won, which became a turning point in the Revolution, McCrae became a martyr for the cause. While it’s unclear whether the story really mobilized citizen soldiers, what is clear is that the rebels thought it was a winning message. Long after the war had ended, McCrae’s story was immortalized in novels, histories, and paintings.

Indian captivity stories were wildly popular in America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and women were often at the center of them. Historian June Namias has identified three female types in these stories: the survivor, the amazon, and the frail flower. McCrae clearly fits into the last category. In written form, according to Namias, frail flower narratives tended to include “brutality, sadomasochistic and titillating elements, strong racist language,” and “pleas for sympathy and commiseration.”35 All those apply to the most famous painting of McCrea, John Vanderlyn’s 1804 The Death of Jane McCrea, which still hangs in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. According to historian Richard Drinnon, Vanderlyn’s painting “helped set the pattern for an endless series of pictorial indictments of Jefferson’s ‘merciless Indian Savages.’ Always the epic contrast was between the dusky evil and fair innocence, between maddened red cruelty and helpless white virtue.”36

But Vanderlyn’s painting, which would be included in children’s textbooks up until the early twentieth century, also carries with it another powerful cultural theme, that of justifiable revenge against Native Americans. Historians Jeremy Engels and Greg Goodale suggest that the image of a white man in the back of the painting was that of McCrea’s fiancé, David Jones, who arrived too late to save her life but would later seek to avenge her death. The power of the image, they argue, was its ability to capture “the helpless girl, with ripped red, white, and blue dress, [who] will soon be murdered and scalped by hypermasculine, monstrous Indians. Her breast is exposed, implying that she has been, or will soon be, raped—a common claim in the eighteenth century.”37 The hatred and demonization of Indians was no longer a fact of life among whites on the frontier. It was now also part of the ideology of a new nation looking to justify its expansion west.

***

In 1782–83, when negotiating the Treaty of Paris, lawyers and diplomats representing Great Britain ceded the territory between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, south of the Great Lakes and north of Florida, to the United States. Their rationale was that Britain had won that land from the French in 1763 at the end of the French and Indian War and that now the Americans had won it from them. The treaty made no mention of the Native Americans who had fought or died on either side of the Revolution, nor those who inhabited so much of the territory the new country now believed it rightfully owned.

The idea that the United States would expand to fit its new borders was a foregone conclusion. Indeed, well before the Revolution was won, men dreamed of a nation that covered the entire continent. In his valedictory address to the graduating class at Yale on July 25, 1776, the college’s future president, Congregational minister Timothy Dwight, imagined “a vast continent, containing near three thousand millions of acres of valuable land” inhabited by a homogeneous people. He acknowledged that for this glorious “Empire of North-America” to be born, the inferior race of “vicious, luxurious, mean-spirited and contemptible a race of beings” in the south and western parts of the continent would have to “either be entirely exterminated, or revive to the native human dignity, by the generous and beneficent influence of just laws, and rational freedom.”38 In short, two weeks after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Dwight was already predicting the conquest of the Spanish Southwest.

The Treaty of Paris quickly brought normalcy to the coastal cities of the United States. But it didn’t change much in the backcountry, where Indians and American frontiersmen continued to settle an ever-growing list of scores. While the British had at least made efforts, however unsuccessful, to keep white settlers from heading over the Appalachians onto Indian land, under the new government, acquisition of those lands in the West was now a national goal. Land-hungry settlers streamed westward unimpeded. Between 1783 and 1790, the white population of Pennsylvania’s three western counties grew by almost 90 percent. By 1800, the population of western Pennsylvania grew from about 33,000 to 95,000 souls. And the new government back east was no more in the position to control these settlers as the British had been before them. By 1790, George Washington’s second year in office, the “independent-minded inhabitants” of the western frontier had, in the words of historian Gregory H. Nobles, “repeatedly shown themselves resistant to external direction, defiant of government authority, and susceptible to foreign intrigue.”39

While the Treaty of Paris presumed to grant the Trans-Appalachian West to the United States, the British refused to give up control of a number of forts around the Great Lakes from which they continued to covertly support Indian raids on American settlements. Meanwhile, Spain controlled the Mississippi River, which meant that poverty-stricken western farmers not only couldn’t get their goods over the Appalachians to the east, but also couldn’t get their goods to any markets downstream. In the early years of the republic, many Americans believed that a break between east and west was inevitable. Not only were their interests different, but so were the cultures of their inhabitants. In 1785, Timothy Pickering, who served as secretary of state under presidents Washington and Adams, wrote that the settlers on the frontier were “the least worthy subjects in the United States. They are little less savage than the Indians.”40

But for America to push westward, the government had to come to some sort of an agreement with these “savage” whites in the West, particularly those in anarchic western Pennsylvania. The longer seaboard politicians resisted frontier demands, the more they risked losing the settlers to possible reunion with Britain or joining Spain. More than anything, the settlers in western Pennsylvania wanted what they’d been demanding since 1755: governmental protection from Indians. Their sense of entitlement came from their image of themselves as martyrs. In 1786, an open letter to the state government from residents of a backcountry Pennsylvania county argued that in the “scenes of horror” during the Revolution, “we were your frontier. Our blood answered for yours. Our hazard and unparalleled distress purchased your safety.”41 In even more intimate language, they went on to insist that they “had stood between you and the tomahawk and scalping knife, and diverted the inhuman strokes from you.”42

With government protection would implicitly come an acceptance of western views of Native Americans. And those views justified the kind of violence that was committed at Gnadenhutten in 1782. The emerging understanding between east and west would entail an acceptance of racially motivated violence. As historian Patrick Griffin has written, racist violence would “provide the social template for the West, one that speculators, military commanders, and officials in the West would either come to accept or have to tolerate.”43 It was the price of keeping a young, fragile nation together.

The frontier settler experience became the basis for a new understanding of the meaning of the Revolution. This vision didn’t involve men in wigs as much as it did those who donned Indian garb. It emphasized, according to Griffin, “the role common people played in epic events while acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that vic- tim could be victimizer.”44 Before long, the people that coastal elites once referred to as savages would become symbols of true democracy and national expansion. They would push forward into Indian territory and expect the government to send the military to defend them. Just a few years after the massacre at Gnadenhutten, U.S. for- ces were sent to protect settlers from Indians, rather than the other way around.

***

Over the past few decades, commentators have been wringing their hands over the growing politics of victimhood in America. More often than not, they conclude that the civil rights movement is the primary culprit. And there’s little doubt that the movement developed and helped institutionalize new state-sponsored mechanisms and even incentives—financial and political—to identify oneself or one’s group as a victim. But the first group in America to wrap itself in victimhood was the people we now call whites. They leveraged their self-anointed victim status to get what they wanted from the new government—protection and land. Their reputations were wiped clean. Their victimhood became heroism. In return, the government used them as a vanguard to take over an entire continent.

As such, the emergence of contemporary white grie- vance politics shouldn’t be understood simply as a reaction to the civil rights movement or to changing demo- graphics. The phenomenon dates back to even before the birth of the nation.

All groups of people define themselves in contradistinction to other peoples. It was fear of victimization at the hands of Indians that kept the original thirteen colonies together during the Revolution. European Americans continually reinforced their white identity as they fought Native Americans at each successive stage in the expanding West. The definition of white—and who made up its constituent groups—evolved over time. While it would eventually be adopted by elites as well, a certain sector of society always maintained its more populist coonskin-cap connotations. Some whites were on the front lines, while others helped deliver government largesse and intellectual justification from the safer confines of eastern cities and their institutions. The two sides don’t always get along, but their alliance persists to this day, thanks to an understanding first forged on the Pennsylvania frontier around the politics of victimhood.

***

1. Shelby Steele, “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent? Race and Power in an Era of Blame,” Harper’s Magazine, (June 1988): 45–53.

2. From George Washington to the Marquis de Lafayette, August 15, 1786, The Writings of George Washington; Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private, ed. Jared Sparks, vol. 9 (Boston: Russell, Ordione, and Metcalf, 1835), 193.

3. From Benjamin Franklin to James Hutton, July 7, 1782, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives. gov/documents/Franklin/01-37-02-0377.

4. James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geogra- phical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), xiii.

5. Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc.,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 13, no. 4 (Summer 1970): 475.

6. Maldwyn A. Jones, “The Scotch-Irish in British America,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 297.

7. Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 39.

8. Peter Rhoads Silver, “Indian-Hating and the Rise of Whiteness in Provincial Pennsylvania” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2000), 293.

9. Ibid., 176.
10. Ibid., 180.
11. Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 80.

12. Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Trans- formed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 304.

13. John R. Dunbar, Introduction to The Paxton Papers, ed. John R. Dunbar (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), 10.

14. Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebras- ka Press, 1992), 208.

15. Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 125.

16. Jeremy Engels, “‘Equipped for Murder’: The Paxton Boys and ‘the Spirit of Killing All Indians’ in Pennsylvania, 1763–1764,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 356.

17. Warren R. Hofstra, “Introduction: From the North of Ireland to North America: The Scots-Irish and the Migration Experience,” in Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Expe- rience, 1680–1830, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), xiii.

18. Benjamin Franklin, “A Narrative of the Late Massacres, in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province, by Persons Unknown. With Some Observations on the Same,” in The Paxton Papers, ed. John R. Dunbar (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), 72.

19. Ibid., 63.

20. Anonymous, “The Apology of the Paxton Volunteers Addressed to the Candid & Impartial World,” in ibid., 191.

21. Thomas Barton, “The Conduct of the Paxton-Men, Impartially Represented: With Some Remarks on the Narrative,” in ibid., 272.

22. Ibid., 272, 274, 280, 281, 293–94.
23. Jeremy Engels, “‘Equipped for Murder,’”: 357.
24. Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost, 207.
25. Alden T. Vaughan, “Frontier Banditti and the Indians: The Paxton Boys’ Legacy, 1763–1775,” Pennsylvania History: A Jour- nal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 51, no. 1 (January 1984): 6-7.

26. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 350.

27. Gregory T. Knouff, “Whiteness and Warfare on a Revolutionary Frontier,” in Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania, ed. William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 252.

28. Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 400–401.

29. Ibid., 21.

30. Jack N. Rakove, The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 95.

31. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 137.

32. Parkinson, Common Cause, 340.
33. Ibid., 341.
34. Ibid.
35. June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 37.

36. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 101.

37. Jeremy Engels and Greg Goodale, “‘Our Battle Cry Will Be: Remember Jenny McCrea!’: A Précis on the Rhetoric of Revenge,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (March 2009): 102.

38. Timothy Dwight, “A Valedictory Address to the Young Gentlemen, Who Commenced Bachelors of Arts, at Yale College, July 25th, 1776” (New Haven, CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1776), 1-22, Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 14747 (filmed).

39. Gregory H. Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997), 131.

40. Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 30.

41. Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 222.

42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 154. 44. Ibid., 14.