The Paxton Boys and the Moravians: Terror and Faith in the Pennsylvania Backcountry

Abstract

The diaries and letters written by Moravian ministers as the Paxton Boys bloodied Lancaster County in late 1763 challenge recent accounts of these events that have become an obligatory stop for historians studying the changing relations between Indians and whites in colonial America. These sources complicate the standard chronology in which physical violence turns to political pressure (on which, many historians suggest, the Paxton Boys were focused all along); they reveal that the killings were meant as a challenge to Edward Shippen and Lancaster’s elite, not provincial elites in Philadelphia; and they reveal that, while racial prejudice influenced the groups that the Paxton Boys considered enemies, their category of enemy itself was not limited by race. The Paxton Boys targeted whites, English Quakers and German Moravians, when they believed that these groups jeopardized the security of the backcountry. As riders cursing “God damn you, Moravians” passed through the village of Lititz, many feared that the German Moravians might be the next group to disappear from Pennsylvania’s landscape.