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.
