The Paxton Boys' callous murdering of twenty Conestoga Indians in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in December 1763 has long been cited as one of the chief examples of Euro-American-perpetrated “ethnic cleansing” in early America. This violence gained such notoriety because it generated a large amount of print publicity, because Benjamin Franklin's participation in the subsequent controversy has brought much retrospective attention, and because it symbolized, and was an integral part of the demise of, Pennsylvania's Quaker-led preference for maintaining peaceful relations between colonizing Euro-Americans and the various bands of Native Americans who resided within provincial boundaries.

Kevin Kenny's contribution to our understanding of the Paxton killings is his thorough exploration of the French and Indian War background to the Paxton episode and of the polemical and political literature that the killings triggered. There are other good accounts of this, but none so up to date. Kenny's will be a useful and handy account to pull off the shelf. In addition, the last section of the book ties together some of the apparently fragmentary episodes of frontier violence in the late 1760s and early 1770s shaping them into a narrative of a continuing, Paxton-heritage influence and activities. Finally, the book is a succinct distillation of many of the essential features of Pennsylvania history necessary for an understanding of the Paxton episodes and, as such, constitutes a useful introduction to colonial Pennsylvania history.

Overall, however, the book is a disappointment. Much of this has to do with the way in which Kenny has framed the Paxton episode. He clearly wants to see the Paxton massacre and its aftermath as a real and symbolic crucial step in escalating the level of settler barbarity toward Native Americans that “by the time of the American Revolution … had become commonplace,” but “the Paxton Boys' brutality was anomalous as late as 1763, in Pennsylvania at least” (5). First, yes that is largely true. Pennsylvania had been free of large-scale white-native violence until 1755. And the absence of such did have something to do with William Penn's peaceable principles and politics and the Quaker unwillingness to allow effective militia organization. But far more important were the relatively small native populations within the putative boundaries of Pennsylvania (hardly surprising given the late date of Pennsylvania's founding). To foreground the “Peaceable Kingdom” heritage, which Kenny admits was somewhat of a pipe-dream even in William Penn's brief hour and which James Logan, Penn's Quaker chief-factotum, belied when he facilitated Scotch-Irish settlement in Lancaster County, sets up a model of declension more misleading than helpful. The hard truth is that in the British colonies of North America, the barbarity that Kenny sees as a new development in the Paxton murders existed long before in the very fiber of white-native relations wherever settler/native numbers and respective organizational abilities created “hard,” jarring, and competing proximities. The Paxton killings are, therefore, most profitable viewed through a transcolonial lense. The main issue is not the appearance of a new level of barbarity emanating from a fatal, belated failure in a lost Quaker cause and spreading into the Revolutionary world, but the fact of replication of this type of violence in Pennsylvania, which confirmed murderous habits of mind and behavior elsewhere in the colonies.

Another issue—one which only seems to drift through the book—is Scotch-Irish agency and identity. At the time of the killings, the Paxton Boys and were largely seen as synonymous with the Scotch-Irish residents of Paxton and Derry townships. Kenny pretty much reaffirms this, but we learn nothing new about these people. Paucity of sources is certainly part of the problem. But on a larger question of the Scotch-Irish presence on, and context for, our understanding of the early American frontier again we learn little: “On both sides of the Atlantic … [they] served as a military and cultural buffer between … civility and barbarity” and like most, or perhaps all colonists, they wanted “personal security and land to call their own” (3). The author seems to want to make something of the Paxton Boys' claim of “right of conquest,” a theme that would interest those concerned about early American law, but the conquest rationale for colonizing activities of various types had been floating around the Atlantic world for a long time. There appears to be nothing distinctive, revelatory, or of sustained coherence that the Paxton Boys brought into the open that would further our understanding of that notion.

In short, this is a book with some usefulness but one that is also disappointing in its inability to frame the Paxton Boys murderous actions in a fresh and revealing light.