Violent Crime, Victims, and Society in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800

This paper is an inquiry into violent crime in one of the most honored places in modern history and the first liberal society in the Western world: Pennsylvania.1 From its inception to the present, early Pennsylvania has en joyed an unmistakably good reputation, especially because the liberal present honors its liberal ancestor. While Pennsylvania was still novel, Voltaire called it "the golden age of which we have all heard so much, and which has appar ently never existed except in Pennsylvania." It was the "Utopie de Penn," declared the Abbe Raynal. "This republic," he continued, "without wars, without conquests, without effort. . . became a spectacle for the whole uni verse." "Behold and see peace and happiness reigning with justice and liberty among this people of brothers." "Happy Pennsylvania, thou Queen of Prov inces," exclaimed J. Hector St. Jean Crevecoeur. As he traveled among Penn sylvanians, evangelist George Whitefield recorded that "Their oxen are strong to labour and there seems to be no complaining in their streets. . . . The Constitution is far from being arbitrary; the soil is good, the land exceedingly fruitful, and there is a greater equality between the poor and rich than perhaps can be found in any other place of the known world." It was the "best poor man's country on earth."2 The philosophes of the French Enlightenment?Voltaire, Montesquieu, Abbe Raynal, Chevalier de Jaucourt, the Encyclopedists?especially made Pennsylvania a byword. In the Encyclopedic and Raynal's History of the Indies they broadcast the success of Pennsylvania until it became general knowledge among literate, hopeful men and women. Pennsylvania proved the wisdom of their liberal critique of the ancien regime and of their prescriptions to change or replace it: "people could be happy without masters and without priests."3 While some of these enthusiasts, like Voltaire, had never been to Pennsyl vania and others, like Crevecoeur, had, neither were grossly mistaken about it. In varying degrees, Pennsylvania's laws and government, religious freedoms, social structure, and economy were what they asserted. Historians now so berly affirm what the Enlightenment savants wrote: Pennsylvania was "a worldly success," "an ideal colony," "a hopeful torch in a world of semidarkness."4 After independence in 1776, attention to America swelled along with hope for change in Europe and revolution in France. While an independent United States inspired European liberals as Pennsylvania earlier had, it was still the