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The Paxton Boys

How the decisive collaboration in which Quaker men of wealth felt driven by circumstance to seek protection from the Established Church of England happened in the months after Braddock’s army was cut to pieces on October 16, 1755, is a fascinating story. The western frontier of colonial America promptly exploded, after the British defeat. Delawares and Shawnees attacked across western Pennsylvania, burning all forts except Pitt. By November they were across the mountains and the Susquehanna, and in January the whole frontier collapsed. Settlers fled, many running on until they reached Philadelphia, "almost crazy with anxiety." Scots-Irish Presbyterians on the Monongahela blamed their trouble on rich Philadelphia Quakers controlling the legislature who had prevented levies for frontier defense.

An unauthorized Presbyterian militia hastily assembled, the notorious Paxton Boys, whose columns proceeded to march on Philadelphia! I can hardly do justice here to that lively time, except to remind you that Pennsylvania to this day is divided East/West. The net upshot of Braddock’s fatal hauteur was to send Scots-Irish Presbyterians on the warpath against Quakers and to drive important Quaker interests into Tory arms for protection from their fellow Pennsylvanians.

Thus at the very moment British authority and rigid class attitudes came into question for many Americans, conservative Quakers, conspicuously wealthy and in control of the mainstream press, became its quiet proponents. "I could wish," said Thomas Wharton (for whose Quaker family the business school is named at Penn), "to see that Religion [Anglicanism] bear the Reins of Government throughout the Continent." In the exact decade when Americans were growing most fearful of the rise of an American civil episcopate, these Friends "cheered the news of the growth of Anglicanism," according to Jack Marietta, the Quaker historian. So the dormant seeds for a delayed Anglican revival were buried in Pennsylvania/New Jersey/Delaware soil right from our national beginnings. And Philadelphia

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