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Peaceable Kingdom Lost book cover
Peaceable Kingdom Lost
The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment
2009
First Published
3.70
Average Rating
304
Number of Pages

William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in which Europeans and Indians could live together in harmony. In this book, historian Kevin Kenny explains how this Peaceable Kingdom—benevolent, Quaker, pacifist—gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans. Kenny recounts how rapacious frontier settlers, most of them of Ulster extraction, began to encroach on Indian land as squatters, while William Penn's sons cast off their father's Quaker heritage and turned instead to fraud, intimidation, and eventually violence during the French and Indian War. In 1763, a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys exterminated the last twenty Conestogas, descendants of Indians who had lived peacefully since the 1690s on land donated by William Penn near Lancaster. Invoking the principle of "right of conquest," the Paxton Boys claimed after the massacres that the Conestogas' land was rightfully theirs. They set out for Philadelphia, threatening to sack the city unless their grievances were met. A delegation led by Benjamin Franklin met them and what followed was a war of words, with Quakers doing battle against Anglican and Presbyterian champions of the Paxton Boys. The killers were never prosecuted and the Pennsylvania frontier descended into anarchy in the late 1760s, with Indians the principal victims. The new order heralded by the Conestoga massacres was consummated during the American Revolution with the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States confiscated the lands of Britain's Indian allies, basing its claim on the principle of "right of conquest." Based on extensive research in eighteenth-century primary sources, this engaging history offers an eye-opening look at how colonists—at first, the backwoods Paxton Boys but later the U.S. government—expropriated Native American lands, ending forever the dream of colonists and Indians living together in peace.

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Author

Kevin Kenny
Author · 5 books
Kevin Kenny is Professor of History and Glucksman Professor in Irish Studies at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in American History from Columbia University in 1994, where his dissertation won the Bancroft Award. He taught at the University of Texas from 1994 to 1999 and at Boston College from 1999 to 2018. His first book, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford University Press, 1998) examines how traditions of Irish rural protest were transplanted into industrial America. His second book, The American Irish: A History (Longman, 2000), offers a general survey of the field. A third book, Peaceable Kingdom Lost (Oxford University Press, 2009) analyzes the unraveling of William Penn’s utopian vision of harmonious co-existence between Native Americans and European colonists. Professor Kenny’s latest book, Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2013), examines the origins, meaning, and utility of a central concept in the study of migration, with particular reference to Jewish, African, Irish, and Asian history. He is also editor of Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2004) and he has published articles on immigration in the Journal of American History and the Journal of American Ethnic History among other venues. His latest book, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2023), explains how slavery shaped immigration policy as it moved from the local to the national level in the period from the American Revolution through the end of Reconstruction.
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