Szopka Part 3: The Paxton Boys

The Conestoga massacre perpetrated by the Paxton Boys 

Calendar Gearwheels

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole,
And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.

Isaiah 11:6-8 (NKJV)

                                                               

Edward Hicks painted dozens of different versions of The Peaceable Kingdom. Hick’s has trapped the moment. Not only once, but in each painting he violates the fatalism of the clock. A profundity I can’t let go of. Death can be postponed, but the arrangement of past, present and future on time’s progressive slide-rule, the immutable law governs everything and offers no loopholes or compromise. But as Hicks reminds us, we have ways of subverting even this. Art, narrative in particular, offers a glimmer of hope. 

Edward Muybridge

A model trapped in time, never advancing or receding. A snapshot, like Muybridge’s racehorse, four hooves off the ground. Suspension. Each rendition starts and stops with an eternal moment, the treaty signing. Neither a history, nor a foreseeable future. Such an understanding of time underscores the child-like, or childish dysfunction of the work. Childhood, as Gaston Bachelard described, “liberated from the gearwheels of the calendar.”

   One imagines Hicks in his studio, painting a fleur-de-lis on a rocking chairs by the candle light. Boredom keeps him company. But there’s also guilt. Ornamental painting is, though not outwardly prohibited, frowned on by the tenants of “simple” Quaker living. But finances are problematic. A debt that will follow him for the rest of his life forces him to paint. Or so he tells his friends. He confesses guilt over attending to such a “superfluous” profession. To live the quiet Quaker life, free from distracting things (like painting) was to make space for this “inner light.” He quits painting and tries farming and fails, eventually returning to art. Over time, his patient friends accept, or tolerate, his work. He advertises in local papers, receives clients, hangs sign-boards and hires apprentices. Perhaps there’s a hint of rebellion when he picks up a shingle and draws an outline of an ox and then a lion. Over years he paints his Kingdoms in secret, trying again and again to “get it right” or to refresh a vision that comforts him. As an action, revisiting this narrative moment, Hick’s demonstrates some agency himself.

Time is conditional in art. Hick’s deference to his “inner light” won’t allow him to shake reason in favor of imagination, history in favor of memory. In the attack and completion of multiple Kingdoms, Hicks lived the memory of the history. The paintings aren’t to be confused with events real (as in historical), or anticipated (as in prophesied). Penn’s treaty and Isaiah’s prophecy are re-lived by the act of painting rather than the existence of the paintings themselves. The Kingdoms are indexes, foot prints, of the artist as inhabiting an idea. In this act of playfulness, Hicks “speaks” events to life.  

Distinctions between the spoken and the written, the act of listening in respect to the act of reading, are profound. As Walter Ong explains in his seminal, Orality and Literacy, “Sound exists only when it going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. When I pronounce the word ‘permanence’, by the time I get to the ‘-nence’, the ‘perma-’ is gone, and has to be gone.” (Ong 32)

Walter Ong

The brush stroke as breath, as a word spoken. And so Hicks made manifest a kingdom peaceable; not by finishing a painting and showing it off, but by the act. Process over product. The artist Hicks, becomes Sendak’s Max (Where The Wild Things Are), imaging and inhabiting his inner world. The final painting, doesn’t illustrate faith, but replies as an index, a footprint, of the artist at “play.”

Mnemonic Device

Direct written documentation of Penn’s treaty with the Lenni Lanape at Shackamaxon hasn’t survived, though the tribe recalled and retold the event for decades using techniques that hadn't changed in thousands of years: physical, tactile gestures corroborating memory. Hick's repetitions with his brush echo such gestures.

The oral traditions of the original inhabitants of the continent were complex and varied. For the Lanape and their neighbors these technologies were particularly elegant. These soft technologies of memorization are far more portable than writing and reading, and, unfortunately, are lost in our world of print and screen. In this particular oral culture, recitation was practiced under ceremonial protocols and coached by other members of the tribe (usually clan-mothers) who acted as correctives (ie. bullshit detectors), insuring a level of remarkable constancy over generations. These were not casual or primitive means of keeping record.

A Lenape man dedicated to preservation of the “Treaty of Amity and Friendship” would have relied on a belt of wampum beads. Wampum is neither currency nor text, but, like the knots on prayer shawls worn by Orthodox Jews (or the beaded bracelet, the japa mala that encircle the wrists of Buddhists and Hindus; or the pearls on a Catholic rosary; or the misbaha preferred by the followers of Islam), the beads are pinched to provoke the memory of a prayer, history, or in this case all of the above. In practice, each grain of narrative, each beat or phrase or formula, inhabits a bead caressed.

Like Faulkner’s claim to art (literature), in which he attests to “arresting motion,” in order for it to “move again, for it is life,” the wampum speaker would “breath” life into the event itself, for the breath and the word are coordinate, as is breath and life. “Law” therefore, becomes a living and breathing spirit, while written law an object, a thing, a contractual arrangement and to molder. Like any living thing, the oral agreement requires repeated husbandry. Life must be breathed into the agreement time and time again in order for the treaty to remain “alive.”

We think of breath as transient and paper and ink as fixed. But the paradox here is that written laws, which seem so intractable, are easily ignored or forgotten. And this forgetfulness anticipates one of the darkest periods of Pennsylvania’s history. Perma-nence here, was the idea, not the law as written

In the nineteenth century, the nadir of Penn’s Holy Experiment, a militia calling themselves The Paxton Boys would massacre the last remaining peaceful coalitions between the Indians and white settlers, a belt of wampum, strewn among the ashes, would surface as a sad reminder of all that was lost.

The New Orthodoxy and The Schism

Quaker ministers, Hicks in particular, favored allegory as a rhetorical strategy in their sermons. Yet the beasts inhabiting his Kingdom—lion, wolf, ox, and lamb—go beyond simply illustrating Isaiah’s prophecy.

   Allegory, any figurative comparison between un-like things, requires intellect and imagination rather than submission to literal interpretations. For Friends the Bible was a product of man’s imagination, not God. The Gospels were a source of inspiration, not law. Arriving at a such modern credo was symptomatic of The Enlightenment. Quakers were a product of the Enlightenment. The Quaker principle of “inner light,” was at the seat of Reason itself. The inner light as the universal germ of the divine: the ability to reason the gift of that divinity. Reason as virtue.

A painful schism among his fellows would disappoint Hicks, a revolution that would become the subject of later iterations of his Kingdom. His disillusion was a product of a new generation of Quakers, the up and comers in England, failing to adhere to the virtues of “inner light,” and the trust in Reason that so characterized his fellow believers. To Hick’s, the heresy of deluding the centrality of the “inner light” and the subsequent abandoning of Reason allowed for one’s animal nature to take over. 

The Four Humors

Descriptions of human behavior in that century still relied on pseudoscience. That relative balances of four bodily fluids (humors) produced distinct variations in temperament had yet to be challenged by hard science. In Hick’s Kingdom, each animal represents a particular temperament and its connection to one of the four humors. Note that each humor manifests itself in a virtue and its negative counterpoint.

 the wolf  > black bile/melancholic = thoughtful yet clever, deceitful

 the leopard > blood/sanguine = cheerful yet savage, wanton, cruel

 the bear > phlegm/phlegmatic = rational yet apathetic, calculating, voracious

 the lion > yellow bile/choleric = brave yet lustful, dominating, merciless

The schism began, Hicks believed, when the Orthodox lost their faith in “the inner light,” that flame of Reason over nature, the divine over the alchemical, thus falling prey to lust, greed, and ambition. The Later Kingdoms chronicle events. A historical record of the Quaker faith in the 19^th century.

Understand that the idea of an “inner light” was considered a radical heresy for which European Quakers had been persecuted. William Penn himself spent time in jail for his beliefs. Freedom of religion was a novel idea, a meme adrift in salons. Quakers of Hick's generation were more than products of the Enlightenment, they were radicals. American Quakers read Voltaire and Thomas Paine. Reason and the ability of the intellect to discern God and worship him were required. But their practiced “quietism,” the philosophy of serenity through passivity, also kept them quiet. To live the quiet Quaker life, free from distracting things (like painting) was to make space for this “inner light.”

   English Quakers, evolving in a more fractious spiritual climate than their American counterparts, began to chafe under these ironically coined “primitive” beliefs in Reason and the Inner Light. Amidst the nineteenth century’s evangelical awakening, younger Quakers felt pressured to compete. To insure survival, the horizontal, egalitarian structure of the sect gave way to a deterministic, centralized authority. Adherence to scriptural dogma neutralized dissent. The idea of the “inner light,” so endemic to Quaker theology, diminished in value along with other trapping including a mistrust of worldliness and vanity. Yet they proved excellent in business, due in part to the rigor of their work ethic. English Quakers, and many of their cosmopolitan compatriots in Philadelphia, went about like dandies in expensive coats and buckled shoes. They shamelessly entered into commercial enterprises, banking and money-lending, professions frowned on by the Primitives. And they were successful (think Cadbury Chocolate and Lloyd’s of London). This new Orthodoxy was producing an entirely different animal.

   While tensions always existed between rural and cosmopolitan Friends, the arrival of this “new orthodoxy” instigated the schism. Characterization of the schism is difficult. The splinter, at first, was diametric between the new “Orthodox” and the old “Primitives.”     

   The “Orthodox” strove to incorporate the members of the Society under fundamentalist and authoritarian dogma. Ironically, it was these Orthodox Quakers that would ignite the eventual abolition of slavery on a global scale, an end to what was previously understood, throughout human history, as an intrinsic organ of civilization without which it would cease to exist. The “Primitives,” on the other hand, while they agreed that slavery was a gross injustice, were appalled by these broad sweeps of moral authority, and asserted the “inner light” as the only truly “Quaker” mechanism for achieving justice on this earth and resisted involvement in the noisy, worldly public sphere, even when such mechanisms support justice. And it must be noted that, while Quakers by Hicks’ time reviled slavery, their predecessors (even the founders of the sect) owned and traded African slaves.

     This perforation, while never violent, was so demoralizing that Hick’s couldn’t help expressing his disappointment through his art. His perceived role as the feud unfolded can be read in the faces of his beast. One imagines him laughing, for example, when he painted the miserable countenance on his poor lion. He’d made room for his anger on his easel.

Our painter Edward Hick’s, emphatic about the virtues of Primitive Quaker values, was a staunch follower of Elias Hicks, his cousin, whose followers became known as “Hicksites.” Though the schism remained bloodless, Elias found himself excised from Friend’s meetings, his followers ostracized.

Gladtiding

In later Kingdoms a new theme overshadows Penn’s Treaty Vignette: a gathering of primitive Quakers. A banner proclaims: “Mind the LiGHt Within…IT IS GLADTIDING of Grate JOY…PEACE ON EARTH…GOOD WILL to ALL MEN Every where.” By this time the schism has become history, and though the sect has split, Edward has rekindled hope. The homage includes the recently deceased Elias Hicks, as well as founding fathers George Fox, Richard Barklay, and Edward’s hero, returned for the sake of continuity, William Penn.

     William Penn represented for Hicks the paragon of Quaker quietism, piety and virtue. He didn’t set out to deceive, but his “inner light,” his reason, like the Orthodox generation that would follow, was eclipsed by an animal nature. The “Holy Experiment” ran at cross-purposes with Penn’s obligation to King Charles II. Penn was merely a real estate agent. His true nature, his humor, might have been the cartoonish bear: a chubby, slow moving, coldly calculating appetite. Though Penn deserves some credit for at least imagining tolerance at all (particularly novel at the time), divergent from reality as it was.

After he died, utilitarian materialism would outlive any fairy-tale of oxen and black bear, kid and leopard, poisoning the story that would unfold there after.

Predator and Prey

Pax Zoologica is a fantasy, but who wouldn’t like to imagine an alternative universe in which the Conestoga, the Lane Lanape, and the Seneca live side-by-side with German Anabaptists and Hickite Quakers without threat of violence? The end of the international slave trade began in the late eighteenth century, and, though it would take decades of work to put an end to the peculiar institution, freed slaves as well would be part of Penn’s happy enterprise. Given insurmountable odds against such a peace, is it worth envisioning the hybrid style of civilization that might have evolved if things hadn’t gone to shit?

If I could imagine a fantasy for Pennsylvania: What would such a peace yield?

Even holding to the best of intentions, tragedy, unfortunately, appears illimitable. Syphilis and small pox would have taken their toll no matter how righteous William Penn might have been. Even without violence, jostling between vastly different cultures creates insurmountable deficits. Imagine the growing pains of an ancient culture fully adapted to oral discourse suddenly switching to chirographic technologies, to writing and reading. Every mode of discourse no longer has meaning: standards of truth and falsehood rendered in-concrete. memories and histories lost forever. And that’s just the start.

Tolerance

Even the word “peace” is difficult to translate, particularly when “peace” for the Seneca doesn’t mean cessation of inter-tribal warfare but simply the maintenance of a balance of power. Peace is a state of perpetual nature. For the nineteenth century Quaker “peace” meant the antithesis of violence unless necessity, such as a revolution, required a call to arms. And for the new “Orthodox” Quakers “peace” meant the complete absence of aggression.

    The outlook for my fantasy of Pennsylvania, even with a generous dose of luck, remains grim. But to imagine a peace that encourages the mutual cooperation between vastly different societies into perpetuity, is a worthy vision. Is it worth considering intentions, even when sewn with hypocrisy?

Pennsylvania’s “Great Law” hosted incongruous religious stripes that otherwise lived in the expectation of violent persecution. Along with the Quakers, Anabaptists and Amish, Moravians, Unitarians, Mennonites, Coptic Christians, even Jews braved the Atlantic to get here. Tolerance, a fringe virtue in Europe, delivered them. William Penn himself, jailed for his beliefs, had first hand experience. Following an unheard of model set forth by Rhode Island, Pennsylvania boasted no official religion. It would become, in eighteenth century, one of the most diverse communities in the entire world. The epitome of enlightened tolerance, and a cautionary tale.

     Having come out of Europe’s bloody religious wars, the notion of tolerance seemed like a pipe-dream. Intolerance didn’t undo the Peaceable Kingdom, private property, the idea that land existed to be mastered, cut apart, bought and sold was the misplaced gene that caused the malignancy of intolerance. The distinction determines everything, if you’re a Marxist. Private property is like a corrupted gene from one generation to the next. Though more like a virus with its likelihood to spread. Land as currency is an awkward analogy to make unless you’re a capitalist. To the Lane Lanape and Conestoga the forest was eternal, endless, as was their preeminence. The Indian believed in the permanence of the land and her people, with the colonists as novel irregularities.

     Had Penn’s vision, his idealism, displaced his official mandate, and had it survived past his lifetime Pennsylvania, predicated on coexistence and tolerance, a living and breathing hybrid of folk styles, would be the most advanced society in the world today. Now its lost history serves as only a vague reminder of a genre of democracy that seems further and further out of reach. But this is the convenience of rear-view mirror thinking. A utopia, perhaps?

The End of History

Lotto and Capoferri's marquetry, Bergamo, Italy.

On the rocky hills outside of Bergamo, in the north west of Italy, behind ancient stone walls is a small church. Displayed here are several inlaid wood panels depicting biblical stories, products of a collaboration between Renaissance artist, Lorenzo Lotto, and master craftsman Giovanni Francesco Capoferri. The subtle art of marquetry illustrates David’s victory over Goliath, the trial of Lot, and Judith’s beheading of Holofernes. The characters’ gestures, the ingeniously rendered through the deft pairing of swatches of olive, oak and walnut. As astonishing as the craftsmanship may be, what struck me most was that each frame contained a single landscape in which all events of a particular story were contained simultaneously. Certainly this contamination of a narrative present by its past and future isn’t unique to Lotto’s work, but his particular arrangement, his  elevated liberties elevates the work above crafty novelty. Time acquiesces to the artist. Stories unfold clockwise or not. The end suggests a beginning, etc. This is painting akin to memory, not history. Art, not politics. 

As any undergraduate will tell you, utopia means ou topos, no place, and eu topos, a place where All-Is-Well. An oxymoron of sorts. All is well, as in “all,” that is, “everything.” Taken literally, theoretical dangers begin to mount, probable hazards confirmed by history. As Steven Pinker points out in his seminal, The Better Angels of Our Nature, utopian dogma begins with “pernicious utilitarian calculus.” Thomas Merton calls this state of state-being "the proximate Utopia" a provisional, penultimate state "where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out." If one believes in a forthcoming infinite happiness, a true utopia, the systematic removal of obstacles to this perfected state of being is rational. Of course, these “obstacles” are the would-be critics of this perfect happiness: i.e. people who bleed. But of course their numbers are limited in respect to the future. Finite individuals, even in gross hoards (tens, hundreds, millions?) remain finite, and their elimination, absolute and complete, is validated in the happiness, absolute and complete of the lucky generations inhabiting this infinite state of happiness, infinitely. A utopia must be born out of purges…

     Christianity, even in this century, continues to believe in such a perfected life, the afterlife, and proves the best example of this grim logic: this imperfect world matters not when perfection exists elsewhere. Those who believe go to heaven. The utopian vision imagines holding on, pinching the clock, stopping time as imagined in the pages of their lexicons. Mao attempted to end history by the implementation of continuous beginnings (perpetual destruction), an unquenched revolution. And all this orbited his megalomaniacal narcissism. Some thirty million dead, mostly by neglect.

     The classical Marxist notion of historical inevitability features as a target the end of change itself. Christianity serves the beginning of history (as Christians like to think) and the Marxist revolution as its end. The proletariat will cleanse the world of inequity and paradise will follow. Free will and agency only buttons fitting buttonholes, links in a causal and final chain. The Third Riche was supposed to be around for at least a thousand years. The narcissism of childishness. Idealists of the worst kind make play with time on a grand scheme.

     Perhaps then, Penn’s vision, or any democracy, is not utopian in the strictest sense of the world, for such a society was predicated not on a purified ideal, but on an awkward cohabitation between distinctly different ways of life. This cohabitation takes every day for its own history. Every day one must relive the notion of tolerance, breath life into it word by word.

The inmates of Hick’s zoological allegory stand waxen, static: an ideal to ruminate on, an infinity to ponder. His beasts animate his inner turmoil, personal as it was, but freeze themselves in symbiotic harmony. The arrangement of Penn and his treaty’s cosigners stop in their tracks. This is the best it will ever be. Perhaps. A singular moment of tranquility. A beautiful notion, but imperfect.Verbs acquire the taint of time.

     The clock stops. Not a megalomaniac messing with the gear works, just an artist, an obsessive in his workshop. This is passive agency, this peculiar Kingdom. A suggestion of how we could be. The verbs that describe the behavior of the actors may be passive. The grass is being eaten by the lion, the treaty is being exchanged, etc.

The image of these beasts coexisting becomes a fetish, the fetish becomes is reclaimed as parody, the end result may be satire. What happens after the ox and lion run out of straw, or when the child that leads them looks away? While Hick’s fantasy achieves a state of perfection, Pennsylvania’s Peaceable Kingdom fell short of Utopian absolutism. Its flaws were in its DNA. When Penn died his sons inherited the mandate, and, perhaps chaffing against their father’s piety, detoured the colony away from peace, particularly in respect to the “heathen” natives.

The Paxton Boys

Outliving its moment as a flagship of tolerance and peace, Pennsylvania succumbed to capitalism’s predatory nature and thimblerigged one of the most outrageous shell games of all time. The American art of larceny went pro along the banks of the Susquehanna River in the nineteenth century. The most infamous, the so-called “Walking Purchase,” in which the Penn family defrauded the Lane Lenape (Delaware) out of a million acres, cut so deep that, to this day, the unhealed wound continues to sting Diaspora. As recently as 2004, the Delaware Nation sued for justice, and even though the US Supreme Court acknowledges The Walking Purchase as fraudulent, it still dismissed the case.

  Shackamaxon Wampum (Penn Treaty Museum, Pennsylvania)

Like present day Israel, squatters fueled by a mythic sense of entitlement pushed westward, laying claim to prohibited territories and, unsurprisingly, provoking violence from inhabitants brushed aside.

     Paramilitary bands of Scotch-Irish settlers marshaled tit for tat raids of revenge. One of these militia, The Paxton Boys, marched on the city of brotherly love, lobbying for assistance. But Philadelphia’s pacifist, Quaker lawmakers, scoffed at such requests. At least officially: It was mighty convenient to leave the dirty work of conquest to these Ulster Presbyterians.

     Issues of class complicate the narrative. The Quakers running the show from Philadelphia were the same breed that so irked Edward Hicks and his cousin Elias, while the settlers, as cantankerous and violent as they were, lived hand-to-mouth. The Scotch-Irish had had it up to here with landed, ruling classes and would stop at nothing to cast off the yoke of servitude of serfdom endured for millennia. Liberation for these immigrants started and stopped with property. Land was their divine entitlement. The Indians were heathens. Do the math. 

     The tipping point occurred in 1763, after the peace settlement between the French and British, when the Paxton Boys, a militia made up of these Scotch-Irish, massacred a settlement that included a half dozen Conestoga Indians, including men women, and children, who’d been living peaceful with Moravian residents for over a decade. The event would prove the tipping point in Pennsylvania’s relationship with Native Americans. The long downward slope from Shackamaxon to finally coming to its flat-line at a place called Conestoga. The Paxton Boys, blood soaked murderers, marched on Philadelphia a month later to galvanize state officials, including Benjamin Franklin, into supporting their campaign, and were met, while not with immediate support, without punitive disaffection for their lawlessness. In other words, the overt breaking of treaties and bloodletting was no longer criminal.

     A further irony is that, according to historian James H. Merrell, the site of the massacre was itself a historic treaty ground, and, from under the smoldering ruins of the house in which the murders took place, wampum belts and paper treaties were recovered. One document, signed by the hand of William Penn, pledged:

“…that they (the colonists, and the Conestoga) shall forever hereafter be as one Head & One Heart, & live in true Friendship & Amity as one People.” Penn’s own note to self and surviving offspring stated, “for himself, his heirs and Successors, yt he and they will at all times shew themselves true Friends & Brothers to all & Every one of ye Said Indians.” (Merrel 288)

Now the Indian population in Pennsylvania, while present, is officially invisible. Those who remain have little political clout. During the Kennedy administration Pennsylvania Indians were forced off tribal land so engineers could minimize the risk of flooding by the upper Allegheny river. The resulting Kinzua dam condemned forest belonging, by law, to the Seneca, displacing 600 people whose claim went back as far to a treaty with George Washington. The tense shifts to past participle: were living, were breathing.

Evanescent

Ignoring all this inglorious history, Edward Hick’s vision, his William Penn and Tamanend, and his wild-things all frozen in amber, might be read disdainfully as romantic. A willful impediment to that narrative quality called profluence, the river’s condition of constant forward movement. A gesture of sad longing for a past that really never was. A fantasy. Even if there was a historical moment in which enlightened tolerance produced any modicum of peace, that moment was like a word spoken, impermanent. Or as Walter Ong might insist, evanescent.

 

As Edward’s brush settled on a liberated landscape, he holds his breath. In that instant he succeeds in perfection. His work is play, perhaps, but serious play. Serious play in which he controls time, a magic that remains, and will always remain, solely in the hand of the artist and the poet. Breath expired, the moment is gone again, only to be re-imagined on another plank. And as we spectators stare back at the lion and the lamb, excusing their tentative uncertainty, we too relish the possibility of peace.