Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

14
The Paxton Boys
Hardly had the war ended when internal trouble as well as trouble with the
Indians erupted in Pennsylvania. (It must be pointed out that the Quakers
reaped the reward of their past policy: even the frontier Quakers were left
untouched by the rampaging Indians.) In the midst of border fighting with
Indians, a group of over fifty Scotch-Irish frontiersmen from Paxton in Lancaster
County suddenly decided to take a leaf from the book of seventeenthcentury
Massachusetts and Virginia, and to massacre peaceful and friendly
Indians. A tiny group of some twenty peaceful Conestoga Indians (seven men
and the rest women and children) had long been settled in the county. It was
easier for the brave lads to butcher these few Indians than to battle their enemies
on the frontier. And so on December 14, 1763, the "Paxton Boys," led
by Matthew Smith and Lazarus Stewart, slaughtered and scalped eight of the
defenseless Conestogas. Their only excuse was a vague suspicion that they
might have been aiding the enemy. Governor John Penn asked for their
arrest. In reply, the Paxton Boys murdered the remaining Indians, who had
vainly been placed in jail to guard their safety.
Not content with this outrage, the Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia in
pursuit of some peaceful, neutral, and Christian Moravian Indians who had
gone there. The poor Moravians had been set upon several months before by
a band of Scotsmen, and several men and women had been murdered. When
the murderers were in their turn ambushed and killed, the entire Moravian
Indian community was blamed and the Ulster Scots decided to annihilate
these Indians. The terrified Indians fled to the Moravian town of Nazareth,
but the Assembly decided to disarm them and move them finally and forcibly
to Philadelphia. The one hundred and forty-odd Indians were, for their
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