“Ye Most Barbarous Creatures in Ye Universe”: The Paxton Boys and the Racializing Solidarities of Colonial Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT In December 1763, a group of Pennsylvania frontiersmen known as the Paxton Boys systematically massacred twenty Christianized Conestoga natives before marching on the colony’s remaining Indigenous converts in Philadelphia. The Paxton Boys’ actions have often been linked to preexisting ideological differences between colonial Pennsylvania’s frontiersmen, Indigenous populations, and provincial government that were exacerbated by the French and Indian War. These issues prompted the rise of broader ethnic solidarities that shaped the Paxton Boys’ ideology but alone fail to capture the local stressors behind the group’s particularly radical ideology. Paxton Township’s geographic location on the northern edge of Lancaster County played a significant role in informing their extreme beliefs and actions. While their ideology did not reflect that of the entire colony, their march on Philadelphia did prompt divisive political discourse that put their ideology into the limelight, framing natives as antithetical to landownership and marginalizing their place in the British Empire.