Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania by Patrick Spero

Abstract

Reviewed by: Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania by Patrick Spero Keri Holt (bio) Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania patrick spero Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 343 pp. Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania takes a fraught term and redefines and contextualizes it in ways that illuminate its importance as the British American colonies transformed into an independent nation. The frontier, Patrick Spero writes, "was a politically potent word in the eighteenth century," and, using the colony of Pennsylvania as [End Page 262] a case study, Frontier Country examines how the complexities of "governing frontiers was … essential to the success or failure of colonial projects" (7, 8). By carefully reexamining this term and the role it played in American political discourse, print and popular culture, and day-to-day lived experience during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spero offers significant arguments about the causes of the American Revolution and the influence of the frontier on early US nationalism, as well as the need to carefully historicize the terms we use to study the political and cultural dynamics of early America. For Spero, recognizing the importance of the frontier in colonial American and early national politics requires fundamentally reorienting and reinterpreting the term frontier itself. Conventionally, frontier has been understood as a spatial term marking the border or limit of a sovereign space. Although the location of a frontier can change, particularly in the context of national expansion, we typically assume frontiers to be sparsely populated spaces defined by activities of settlement and development located at the (relatively distant) boundaries of a state or nation. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the term frontier marked a much more situational and transitory space defined not so much by set borders but by feelings of fear and uncertainty. During this period, writes Spero, "[f]rontiers formed—people and places became a frontier—when people felt a specific type of fear: invasion" (115). Although colonial borders were more susceptible to invasion than other spaces, the term frontier did not necessarily mark a clear boundary line but, instead, operated as a plural term that could mark multiple locations anywhere within a colony, depending on perceived threats. As a result, during the colonial period, frontiers were understood not so much as a location but as a particular kind of experience. "For those colonists who lived in fear of invasion, a frontier was more than a geopolitical abstraction that drove policy decisions. It was a personal experience that shaped their actions and beliefs," writes Spero (114). By examining this "traumatic process of becoming a frontier," this book offers a new lens for examining the causes of the Revolution and the changing expectations that the colonists had for their government over the course of the eighteenth century. In the end, argues Spero, "[t]he failure of the British Empire to provide for frontiers—indeed, its apparent turn against such zones and their inhabitants—became a central argument for independence" (222). [End Page 263] To make this argument, Spero offers an extensive analysis of the plural and shifting dimensions of frontiers in colonial Pennsylvania, focusing specifically on the experiences of people living on these frontiers and the growing distance between their experiences and the expectations and actions of the British Empire and the Pennsylvania colonial government. Pennsylvania experienced a much greater variety of frontier experiences than other colonies, particularly regarding its efforts to manage and defend these varied locales, and these diverse frontier experiences and policies were well documented in letters, newspaper articles, court cases, government proceedings, Quaker records, pamphlets, broadsides, and formal histories written throughout the colonial period. Spero provides a thorough and impressive assessment of these texts and contexts, assembling them into an engaging narrative history that traces Pennsylvania's transformation from a pacifist colony that was antithetical to the concept of frontiers to one whose government was increasingly preoccupied with frontier management. The politics of Pennsylvania's frontier management were exceedingly complicated and contradictory, and Spero does a masterful job explaining the varied and changing perceptions of invasion in colonial Pennsylvania, as well as the competing responses from the colonial governor, the Assembly...