The Paxton Boys struck Conestoga Indiantown at dawn on December 14, 1763. Only twenty people were living there by 1763—seven men, five women, and eight children. The raiding party killed the six Conestoga Indians present that morning and burned their settlement to the ground. Two weeks later, on December 27, the Paxton Boys killed the remaining fourteen in Lancaster jail, where they had been placed in protective custody. At the end of January 1764, reports reached Philadelphia that the Paxton Boys were marching on the city. On February 5, several hundred rebels reached Germantown, just six miles northwest of the city, where a delegation led by Benjamin Franklin persuaded them to write down their grievances. The Paxton Boys went unpunished, resulting in wave after wave of violence on the Pennsylvania frontier. They joined the patriot side in the Revolution, but not for lofty ideological reasons. The American Revolution did more than destroy oligarchy and privilege in colonial Pennsylvania. It doomed the region’s Native American population.

About the Speaker: Kevin Kenny is Glucksman Professor of History at New York University. His books include Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford University Press, 1998), The American Irish: A History (Longman, 2000), Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment (Oxford University Press, 2009), Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2013), and The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2023). Professor Kenny currently serves as Director of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University and as President of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

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