Frontier Country

In this detailed study of the politics of Pennsylvania’s frontiers, Patrick Spero reclaims the term frontier from its role as an analytical concept. Noting that colonists used the term widely in the eighteenth century to denote “a zone that people considered vulnerable to invasion,” he contends that colonists’ understandings of frontiers shaped their relations with various levels of colonial government (6). Despite a shared conception of frontiers, competing attitudes about the presence of Indians within the polity meant that Pennsylvania’s western settlers frequently disagreed with colonial and imperial officials about whether a given locale constituted a frontier. Spero argues that these diverging views eroded the bond between frontier people and their colonial governments, before the Revolution institutionalized frontier peoples’ views of Indians as permanent enemies in “a new governing contract on the terms frontier people demanded” (9).William Penn’s vision of peaceful expansion failed to stop a growing population from founding western settlements and eschewing trade controls, thus subverting the protocols that initially prevented frontiers from forming. Those pressures sparked intercultural violence in the late 1720s that first prompted westerners to describe themselves as “frontier inhabitants” in letters and petitions to their government. That a 1730s border war with Maryland did not elicit similar descriptions suggested that frontiers existed only when a clear external enemy, particularly Native Americans, threatened.The proprietary’s role in resolving these episodes contrasted with an assembly that appeared to neglect western concerns. The Frame of 1701 empowered the assembly in legislative matters, but assigned the proprietor to regulate expansion and commerce, conduct Indian diplomacy and defense, and appoint legal and county officials. Western settlers expecting defensive support thus found the proprietary branch more responsive during the Seven Years’ War, when what struck many locals as “an invasive Indian war” threatened Pennsylvania’s western settlements and “created frontiers throughout the colony” (113). Spero’s assertion that by establishing a series of forts, the Pennsylvania and British governments “transformed the physical landscape as they remade the mental one” raises intriguing questions about the physical characteristics of frontiers, but those directions remain unexplored here (116).By the 1760s, colonists who were convinced that Indians constituted a perpetual threat believed they inhabited a permanent frontier. Frontier people asserted local civil authority to institute their vision of a colonial society devoid of Indians, attacking Native neighbors and halting trade to Native communities. When the Treaty of Fort Stanwix opened new areas for settlement, frontier people frustrated with Pennsylvania allied with Virginia and Connecticut to provide security against the perceived Indian menace by establishing a martial culture and local governance, and adopting anti-Indian measures. Defensive concerns prompted a final shift as the American Revolution fostered a new east-west alliance that accorded westerners greater influence in Pennsylvania’s revolutionary government. Finally incorporated into larger political bodies, frontier residents injected the principle that Indians would exist outside the new Pennsylvania government, creating the frontier government they had long demanded.One of the book’s compelling aspects is unfortunately visible mostly in the coda, which treats data reflecting uses of the word frontier in colonial sources. Though some of this data does appear in a table and set of maps plotting the use of the term during the Seven Years’ War, more of this analysis could have been productively integrated throughout. (Interested readers can visit Spero’s mappingfrontiers.com for more.)While readers familiar with recent scholarship on colonial Pennsylvania will find much of this story familiar, Spero’s attention to colonists’ own understandings of frontiers bridges recent work on racial attitudes and political developments in the colony, and draws several less prominent episodes into a larger narrative, to explain how Pennsylvania became a Frontier Country

Colonialism · Economics · Frontier · Government (linguistics) · Legislature · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Settlement (finance) · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Demography · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History