Smith Rebellion 1765 Gives Rise to Modern Politics

by Karen Ramsburg

Overview

Eight years before the Boston Tea Party and ten years before Lexington and Concord, the first shots in the American Revolution were fired in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1765. Known as the Smith Rebellion, this crucial turning point in American history set the stage for modern American politics.

In this history, author Karen Ramsburg tells the enlightening story of this uprising on the Pennsylvania frontier and definitively shows how it laid the groundwork for the political maneuverings of today. Ramsburg dips back into history and reveals how a simple act of self-defense became the spark that created our nation and developed the first battle in a long, continuous class war still ongoing today.

Fearful that illegal trade goods, such as tomahawks, scalping knives, and gun powder, were being transported to Fort Pitt to rearm the Indians and renew Pontiac’s War against the frontiersmen, Justice William Smith and his cousin James Smith, a.k.a. Black Boy Jimmy, believed they had a right to stop it. The ensuing rebellion led to a definition of government as a contract between all men to reject some of their natural rights in favor of a framework that would secure each man’s rights to life, liberty, and property.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781462057795
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/07/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	164
File size:	218 KB

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SMITH REBELLION 1765

Gives Rise to Modern Politics

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By Karen Ramsburg

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Karen Ramsburg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-5781-8

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Chapter One

History of Smith's Rebellion

Eight years before the Boston Tea Party, a group of Pennsylvania frontiersmen known as the Black Boys (so called because they painted their faces black to avoid identification) (Spero, 2009) lit the spark that became the American Revolution (Swanson, 1937). Scots-Irish immigrant Justice William Smith was considered the mastermind behind Smith's Rebellion (Hazard, ed., 1856), which changed the course of American history and gave rise to ideas that would later impact the Second Amendment right to bear arms in the US Constitution (Bouton, 2007).

Smith's use of legal precepts to defend the rebellion gave the Black Boys a legitimacy and legal standing that other rebellions lacked (Spero, 2009). Patrick Griffin (2007), in his book American Leviathan, believed that March 6, 1765, the day of the Sideling Hill affair, was the beginning of the end for British colonial rule. On this day, James Smith, brother-in-law to William Smith, and ten other men stopped a pack train carrying trade goods belonging to George Croghan, deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs. The goods were bound for Fort Pitt. This eighty-one-horse pack train was believed to be carrying trade goods that were still illegal because no treaty ending Pontiac's War had been signed. The Proclamation and Indian Trade Act of 1763 had specified that any goods that could effectively rearm the Indians to continue warfare were considered illegal. George Croghan was well aware of this law, and chose to evade it because he believed the opportunity to create vast wealth for himself far outweighed the potential consequences if he was caught (Spero, 2009).

What James Smith and his men considered an act of self-defense had an impact on events on both an international and national level which caused a ripple effect all the way to the English Parliament. The Sideling Hill affair prevented the consummation of huge land speculation deals between wealthy Philadelphia merchants and important investors such as George Washington and Ben Franklin (Spero, 2009). It hampered Franklin's efforts to offer a national currency scheme in lieu of the Stamp Act that Prime Minister Grenville of Great Britain was contemplating as a means to reduce Britain's national debt from the French and Indian War (Grubb, 2006). In addition, it enabled Franklin to reopen attempts to replace the Penn's proprietary government with a royal government after Parliament had already decided against this idea. These events set the stage for revolution (Griffin, 2007).

In 1765, Croghan's pack train carrying tomahawks, scalping knives, powder, lead, and rum was ultimately bound for Illinois. His desire for wealth was shared by the wealthy Philadelphia merchants Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan as they loaded wagons carrying trade goods ordered by Fort Pitt's commander, Henry Bouquet, to aid in treaty negotiations (Waddell, ed., 1994) with the Indians. Croghan had plans to amass vast riches from trading with the Indians. He also had hopes of participating in land speculation by gaining access to Indian territory as a result of his trading (Spero, 2009).

The 1765 frontier in Pennsylvania was close to anarchy because of a brutal war for survival between Scots-Irish immigrants and Indians over land. Croghan's trade goods in the wrong hands would only make life for the settlers even more unbearable. Penn's incompetent, pacifist government was incapable of mounting a response to the threat of Indians attacking white settlers. The British military was overwhelmed by the new lands added to the thirteen colonies as a result of the Treaty of Paris that ended the French and Indian War (Griffin, 2007).

The inhabitants of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, described their suffering and need for assistance in their March 1765 Remonstrance but soon discovered that their pleas would be ignored and concluded they must fend for themselves (Hazard, ed., 1853). The frontier demonstrated John Locke's premise that self-defense and ultimately rebellion and revolution were justified if government failed in its duty to protect the citizens' rights to life, liberty, and property. Ideas such as the right of rebellion in defense of oneself explain why Locke's theories would become the basis of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In March 1765, Locke's theories formed the legal basis for the creation of the Black Boys (Hutchens, ed., 1952).

At Pawling's Tavern, located near present-day Greencastle, Pennsylvania, the wagon and horse drivers transferred Croghan's goods from wagons to eighty-one pack horses. This shipment was worth three thousand sterling (Bouton, 2007). Some accounts state the goods weighed up to thirty thousand pounds. As the loading progressed, a cask of scalping knives accidentally broke open. Knives spilled out over the ground, which alerted the Black Boys of the danger that was coming (Bouton, 2007).

William Duffield, a local citizen, met the pack train near Justice William Smith's house. He asked the drivers to store the goods until it could be determined by William Smith if they were, in fact, illegal. However, the pack train drivers refused to stop and continued west to McConnell's Tavern, in present-day McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, where Duffield asked one last time for them to stop peacefully (Smith, 1870).

The following day, March 6, at 1:00 p.m., James Smith and ten Black Boys attacked the train during a snowstorm. After the Boys shot four horses, the pack train stopped. The drivers were told to get their personal property and leave for Fort Loudoun. Smith and his men burned sixty-three loads of contraband. After the attack, Captain Robert Callender alerted Lieutenant Charles Grant at Fort Loudoun. Grant detached Sergeant Leonard McGlashen and a platoon of men to retrieve the undestroyed goods. In searching for anyone connected with this event, McGlashen captured and detained eight suspects for questioning. At this point, McGlashen returned to Fort Loudoun (Hazard, ed., 1853).

The detention of the eight men led to the first of two sieges of Fort Loudoun. This first siege did not end until after the Black Boys had captured several members of the Black Watch, the Forty-Second Regiment of the British army, who were used to demand a prisoner exchange. In addition, McGlashen had captured a number of rifles owned by the Black Boys. Lieutenant Grant, commanding officer at Fort Loudoun, refused to return the guns, which led to increasing hostilities that would ultimately lead to a second siege of Fort Loudoun on November 10, 1765 (Hazard, ed., 1853).

After two days of the Black Boys shooting up the fort, Grant asked for a truce, under which the siege was settled. Grant turned over the Black Boys' captured guns to local magistrate William McDowell, and the Black Watch was then given a free pass to withdraw to Fort Bedford (Hazard, ed., 1853).

One of the important aspects of this rebellion that is often overlooked is William Smith's and the Black Boys' use of civil law as a weapon of rebellion. (Bouton, 2007) This tradition goes back to the English civil war, during which Protestant rebels used English civil law against the Royalists, often charging whole armies with crimes like trespass (Hazard, ed., 1853).

In Smith's Rebellion, the rebels created their own system of passes and inspections of traders heading west to Fort Pitt (Hazard, ed., 1853). William Smith asserted to Lieutenant Grant that neither the Pennsylvania proprietary government nor the British military authority had any validity in this case because Smith declared himself to be the common law (Hazard, ed., 1853).

On June 27, Governor John Penn charged William Smith with having encouraged and protected the rioters. His hearing was scheduled for July 30 before Governor Penn. Smith defended himself by noting that Grant at Fort Loudoun was interfering with the civil law and that Grant's actions were illegal. The result was that a warrant was sworn out for Grant (Hazard, ed., 1853).

Over the course of the nine-month rebellion, the Black Boys asserted their right of self-defense. They were the first armed resistance against British military authority. They forced the capitulation of a unit of the best military in the world.

On January 10, 1766, William Smith was removed as a justice of the peace, and a warrant was issued for his brother-in-law, James Smith (Swanson, 1936). For the moment, that ended Smith's Rebellion.

Ten years later, James Smith, also known as "Black Boy Jimmy," became a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. He helped draft the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution which contained the first gun-possession law in America. This law became the Second Amendment to the US Constitution—the right to bear arms (Bouton, 2007).

Chapter Two

Saving the Birthplace of the American Revolution

The following letter from William Pencak, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University appeared in the Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Public Opinion newspaper.

January 5, 2010,

Dear Sir or Madam:

I recently learned that some citizens of Mercersburg are trying to save the house of Justice William Smith. It is not only the most important historical site in Mercersburg, but probably the most important historical site related to the American Revolution in Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna River.

Why do I say this? Here, the Black Boys met in 1765 to prevent the British from supplying the Indians with trading goods, which included weapons that could be used to attack the frontier. They eventually drove the British out of Fort Loudoun and later Fort Bedford in the first military resistance against the Mother Country prior to the American Revolution.

We don't remember the Black Boys because unlike Lexington and Concord, their actions did not lead to widespread support from all the colonies. But we should. In 1775, the Pennsylvania riflemen who comprised the Black Boys would be among the first men recruited by Congress to aid the New Englanders as they camped outside Boston following the Battle of Bunker Hill. General William Thompson, commander of the Pennsylvania Rifles in the Revolution, was a leader of the Black Boys as well. Not only were the frontiersmen who met at Mercersburg the first to rise up against the British, they were among the first, and the best, who participated in and won the Revolution. Their experiences at the Smith House explain why they were so prominent in the cause of America.

Yes, the Smith House has undergone significant changes. So has Mount Vernon, which is much larger than the house inhabited by George Washington. A few buildings are all that remain of the real colonial Williamsburg: most of the town was built with Rockefeller money in the 1930s and later. And while we are not 100 percent sure this is the Smith House, the initials WS in the cornerstone and the presence of a large house dating from this era are pretty good evidence. Much better, for instance, than for the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia, which no one paid attention to until her descendants opened it as a tavern to make money during the Centennial Exposition of 1876. Once the house is preserved, it can be restored, as occurred with Independence Hall.

What surprises me the most is that the Mercersburg Fire Company is the group that wants to demolish the building. If anyone in modern America can be compared to the Minute Men of 1776, it is the volunteer firemen who come to aid their communities in times of distress. They are the successors of the Black Boys, and ought to be at the front of the effort to preserve, not to obliterate, their memory.

I first learned about the Smith House in August 2009, over coffee with a friend—that the house was located next door to the fire department, which had purchased the property to raze for a parking lot. A week later, a group of concerned citizens met, and we were introduced to historian Patrick Spero's (2009) dissertation, Creating Pennsylvania, from which we learned about the important role the house and Smith's Rebellion played in our nation's history.

Initially it was assumed by those who supported the fire company that if you supported saving the Smith House, you could not be in favor of helping the fire company. I said, "But I'm a nurse, so that's impossible!" What really attracted me to Justice William Smith and the Black Boys was the fact that these ordinary citizens exercised their right of self-defense during a brutal war with the Indians, when government was so incompetent that people were left to fend for themselves. These hardy Scots-Irish immigrants came to America in search of opportunity. To knock down the house that symbolized their American Dream, where the ideas of true American patriots gave rise to the very fabric of our nation, seemed wrong.

The battle to save the Smith House took eighteen months and consisted of many twists and turns. In September 2009, about ten or so Mercersburg residents formed the Committee to Save the Justice William Smith House, Inc. and began trying to get the house on the historic register. Representative Bill Shuster stated that he would help us get funding if we could secure its placement on the national register. But when the folks from the Pennsylvania Historic Museum Commission (PHMC) came to look at the house, we were told that because of renovations, such as an 1820 stone kitchen and a second story added in the early 1900s, Justice William Smith would not recognize his house.

The compromised architectural integrity cost us the nomination; however, we believed that the history behind the house was so important that it warranted doing whatever was necessary to save it. In the end, a letter from Keith Heinrich at PHMC stated that the history was not in question.

Because the fire department wanted the space for expansion, things became contentious between the fire board and the preservation committee for the next year and a half.

In November 2009, I attended a fire board meeting during which a member said that he had a friend who worked for Frederick County Landmarks Association in Maryland. The friend's name was Doug Claytor, and he said he could move the house to the Conococheague Institute located near Welsh Run in rural Franklin County, Pennsylvania. "It would get lost there. Why not move the house across the street, where it could remain on Smith's property?" I suggested. Suddenly all of the tension left the small, crowded room, and fire board members unanimously agreed that this was the best idea. However, some of the committee members in our preservation group were not completely in favor of moving it; some thought the fire department could use the house for additional space if it was renovated.

Doug appeared at our committee meeting the following week, and I wondered if he had already agreed to work with the fire company to move the house. After getting to know him, I soon realized that he was an expert in colonial architecture with many years of experience in historical restoration and preservation. Doug offered to dismantle the renovations one layer at a time and talked about how much information we could learn about the house and its history by peeling it back to its original form.

In December 2009, local historian Calvin Bricker gave a talk on the history of the Black Boys at the Starr Theater in Mercersburg. Dressed in pre-revolutionary farmer's attire, Calvin gave a living-history narrative before we viewed Allegheny Uprising, the 1939 movie starring John Wayne as James Smith. Our hope was to educate the people of Mercersburg about the value of the property.

The fire department granted us permission to conduct an initial archaeological survey in a small area of the basement, representing a total of 255 square feet, on January 16, 18, and 19, 2010. The survey was conducted by the Cumberland Valley Chapter 27 of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology, Inc. In a 2010 unpublished report written by Doug Stine titled, "Justice William Smith House Basement Excavation" was compiled by Doug Stine, President, and included a field notes summary by Ron Powell, the chapter's field supervisor, as well as an analysis of ceramic assemblage provided by archaeologist and ceramicist Scott Parker, director of research, Little Antietam Creek, Inc. The goals of the excavation were (a) to see if there was any archaeological evidence to establish a date for the building; (b) to see if there was archaeological evidence that could directly associate the house with Justice William Smith; and (c) to establish any evidence as to previous usages of the building.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from SMITH REBELLION 1765 by Karen Ramsburg Copyright © 2011 by Karen Ramsburg. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................xv
Chapter One History of Smith's Rebellion....................1
Chapter Two Saving the Birthplace of the American Revolution....................7
Chapter Three The American Dream....................33
Chapter Four Class Warfare....................41
Chapter Five Self-Defense....................57
Chapter Six The Right to Bear Arms....................71
Chapter Seven Profits before People....................77
Chapter Eight Religion, Politics, and Economics....................93
Chapter Nine Restoring the American Dream....................103
Conclusion....................119
Appendix....................125
References....................133