On the evening of December 27, 1763, the quiet streets of Lititz suddenly filled with men on horses. “God damn you, Moravians,” the riders shouted from one end of the small village to another. They fired off a “volley of shots” from their weapons before they left town. In 1763, twenty-three single sisters and twenty-nine single brethren lived in the Lititz choir houses, while many families lived on farms or in private homes. These families had been part of the Warwick country congregation, which the Lititz congregation incorporated soon after its founding in 1756. The congregation, which had consecrated its new Gemeinhaus a few months earlier, had 277 members in all. The shouts and shots must have frightened the men and women who had gathered for an evening Singstunde, a service in which the community sings hymns together. The residents of Lititz heard the riders’ curses and their gunfire, but they could not have known what had prompted these threats. They would have been terrified had they known that evening what they learned the next day: these riders had just slaughtered fourteen Conestoga Indians who had been placed in Lancaster’s workhouse for protection and had injured Lancaster’s sheriff, John Hay, in the process. Two weeks earlier, they had murdered six Conestoga Indians who lived on Conestoga Manor near the Susquehanna River. These were the frontiersmen known to historians as the Paxton Boys.
In the past decade or so, the Paxton riots have become a familiar topic for historians studying the changing relations between Indians and whites in colonial America. These riots, Daniel Richter wrote in 2002, “crystallized long-simmering hatred into explicit new doctrines of racial unity and racial antagonism”: the Paxton Boys “preached the novel idea that all Native people were ‘Indians,’ that all Euro-Americans were ‘Whites,’ and that all on one side must unite to destroy the other.” Dozens of articles and several books, including Peaceable Kingdom Lost (2009) by Kevin Kenny and Massacre of the Conestogas (2010) by Lancaster columnist Jack Brubaker, have been written on these events. But no historian has bothered to consult the materials left by Lancaster County’s Moravian ministers —Matthäus Hehl in Lititz and Albrecht Ludolph Russmeyer in Lancaster—who wrote about the massacres as they occurred.
Hehl’s and Russmeyer’s letters and congregational diary entries offer a strikingly new account of the Paxton riots. They record the Paxton Boys’ own words, as well as events that no other source describes (including the burial of the murdered Indians the next day: “like dogs all 14 of them were thrown into a hole on top of one another without a blanket or covering”). They reveal that many of Lancaster’s residents sympathized with the Paxton Boys: the Indian killings “didn’t seem to faze the residents,” Hehl wrote, “who say that they had it coming to them.” They reveal that the rioters directed their anger not at provincial authorities in Philadelphia (as many historians have assumed) but at Edward Shippen in Lancaster. And, most important to us here, they reveal the Moravians’ fear that they would be the Paxton Boys’ next victims. They thought this because the Paxton Boys said it to them directly.
Moravian records show that the Paxton Boys boasted freely about what they had done and what they still planned to do. In Lititz, as we have seen, men on horseback interrupted a gathering with curses (“God damn you, Moravians”) and gunshots immediately after the murders at the Lancaster workhouse. On December 28, the next morning, “a prestigious man…came to Brother [Johannes] Ebermann”—a Lancaster blacksmith—“and paid a debt he owed and said: ‘We have done a fine piece of work.’” The following day, December 29, Andreas Horn, a Lititz innkeeper, reported to Hehl that an Irishman who had been at his home said that “after the Irish protesters (he indicated about 400 men) have carried out their plans in Philadelphia, they want to go to Bethlehem, and destroy the Indian town.” The “plans in Philadelphia” involved exterminating nearly 140 Indians, most of them Moravian Indians from the mission towns of Nain and Wechquetank, and a large mass of frontiersmen in arms marched on Philadelphia in late January 1764. They were stopped at Germantown, however, when Philadelphia’s citizens took up arms to oppose them, and the frontiersmen returned home. But this reversal did not compel them to abandon their plans. In late February Russmeyer heard that “the Paxtoners are arming themselves again in order to go to Philadelphia. They don’t hesitate to let it be known. One of them said to Brother [John] Hopson: ‘When we go there, we’ll be sure to bring back Quaker scalps,’ etc. They also said they wanted to go to Bethlehem since Indians are said to still be found there.”
Hebron’s Moravians, too, expected violence to escalate. The minister there, Andrew Langaard, heard that “the general sentiments of the Irish [were] against the people of Bethlehem” and that, in particular, “an old man, one of the rebel leaders, whose grandson had been with the last expedition, strongly asserted that not one stone should remain upon another in Bethlehem.” Even in late March 1764, a worried Nathanael Seidel wrote to Germany that he was hearing that “evil attacks against Bethlehem were in the works, and [the rumors] say the nest that so long had the Indians by it must be totally destroyed.”
The fact that the Paxton Boys did not carry out these threats should not minimize their reality for the individuals who heard them—and who did not know how events would turn out. Matthäus Hehl was concerned enough to send an express to Bethlehem, worried that “if such a mad mob should get the idea of coming to Bethlehem to pay some sort of unpleasant visit, gathering likeminded friends along the way, you wouldn’t be able to respond to such an unexpected attack any faster than a rumor can fly. So at all times be prepared and armed in prayer as our dear Savior will direct, or otherwise assure your safe-keeping. Lest the Savior not keep them in check, know that the Paxtown group is evilly disposed towards Bethlehem.”
The Paxton Boys had murdered twenty Conestoga Indians in two separate killings: they had announced their intentions in advance of these executions—to Edward Shippen in Lancaster—and then carried out what they promised. Moravians had no reason to suspect that the Paxton Boys’ threats against them were any less sincere or dangerous. Indeed, at one point some of the Paxton Boys, having returned from their expedition to Philadelphia, told Moravians in Hebron that “they had killed all the Indians, five Quakers, and two Moravians in Philadelphia, and as proof, showed them the blood on their clothing.” The Paxton Boys seemed eager to convince the communities at Hebron and Lititz that they had no compunction about shedding Moravian blood.
Historians have—rightly—depicted the Paxton Boys as Indian killers. They have overlooked, however, that the frontiersmen’s vision of a secure Pennsylvania required the elimination, too, of German-speaking immigrants at places such as Hebron, Bethlehem, and Lititz. One can only imagine what the citizens of Lititz felt, on December 27, when the men on horseback rode through their small town, menacing them with curses and gunfire—or what they felt when they learned, soon after, that the intruders had recently murdered twenty men, women, and children. Authorities at Bethlehem, they knew, had recently, in October, rebuilt stockades around the settlement to protect them from renewed violence from Indians and others. Did authorities in Lititz consider surrounding their village with stockades? Did they discuss abandoning the town, as so many other communities, especially those to the west, had done when they found themselves threatened by frontier violence? Did the twenty-three single sisters, most of whom had been living, working, and worshiping together for less than a year in Lititz, believe that their experiment in semi-communal living would soon end? The astonishing records that the Moravian ministers of Lancaster County left can tell much more about the Paxton riots than historians have heretofore recognized: but these materials cannot tell us everything. We can only imagine.
~ Scott Paul Gordon, Lehigh University; published in The Church Square Journal, Fall 2014
Sources:
[Albrecht Ludolph Russmeyer,] Lancaster Congregational Diary, 27-28 December 1763, 29 February 1764, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem.
Matthäus Hehl to Bethlehem, 29 December 1763, Records of the Indian Missions, 1742-1898, Box 127, Folder 5, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem.
Albrecht Ludolph Russmeyer to Nathanael Seidel, 2 January 1764, Box: Letters from Lancaster to Provincial Helpers Conference, 1754-1790, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem.
[Andrew Langaard,] Hebron Congregational Diary, 4 March 1764, in John W. Heisey, ed., “Extracts from the Diary of the Moravian Pastors of the Hebron Church, Lebanon, 1755–1814,” Pennsylvania History 34, no. 1 (1967): 44-63.
Nathanael Seidel to Enge Conference, 31 March 1764, R14.A45.2, Unity Archives, Herrnhut.
Report by August Gottlieb Spangenberg and Andrew Anthony Lawatsch (1763), in Albert F. Jordan, ed., “The Moravians and the Indians during the French and Indian War,” Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society 22, no. 1 (1969): 1-14.
Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian County: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2002).
Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Jack Brubaker, Massacre of the Conestogas: On the Trail of the Paxton Boys in Lancaster County (History Press, 2010).
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