Quakers, "war-like Indians", and the "Scotts-Irish" - war by proxy, or "Let's you and him fight."

Honza Prchal
attorney at Heninger, Garrison & Davis
Published Apr 4, 2016

A few years ago I was in a discussion in this group that got a bit heated about the most modern-seeming of our founding groups here in the USA, the Quakers, and the most broadly despised group, the "Scotts-Irish" (actually mostly Enlgish borderers, Scottish borderers, and their descendants/adherents from Irish territory that generally lines up with modern Ulster. I found supporting evidence in David Hackett Fischer's excellent book, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed 

Quakers were remarkably decent to their aboriginal neighbors, who made that possible by being remarkably decent to the newcomers, but the Indians (unlike the similarly inaccurate but generally accepted term, "Scotts-Irish", "Indians" needs no explanation, but has analogs in various trendy new terms that have yet to find broad popular acceptance even among Indians, like "AmerIndian", "First Nations", "aboriginal America", "native peoples" and "Native American") further West were less peaceable and tractable. Quakers were so semi-pacifist as to have no militia in Pennsylvania. This presented a rather thorny problem.

Quakers reacted by shifting the quarrelsome borderers lately plaguing them in Philadelphia Westward to "deal with" these people, as they had until recently been dealing with each other and Catholics in situ in the British Isles, and as they did with the fierce and similarly unfortunate "5 Civilized Tribes" further South http://www.tartansauthority.com/global-scots/us-scots-history/the-native-indians/the-cherokee/ shorty thereafter. Their home territories included manorial houses that resemble ancient Yemeni towers designed to shelter the locals and their valuables from slave-raiders, or the similar towers in Slavic Europe designed to avoid the depradations of Tatars and Turkic Muslim Slavers, or those of Castille designed for similar purposes against the Moors. Needless to say, these newcomers eventually won.

On page 634, Fischer writes "the Quakers decided to deal with the problem [of the troublesome "Scotts-Irish"] in a different way, by encouraging the borderers to settle in the "back parts" of the colony. In 1731, James Logan informed the Penns in England that he was deliberately planting the North Britons in the west 'as a frontier in case of any disturbance.' Logan argued that these people might usefully become a buffer population between the Indians and the Quakers. At the same time, he frankly hoped to rid the east of them." citing The Penn Papers collected by the Historical society of Pennsylvania.

Fischer goes on to note that the borderers moved westward "with much encouragement from Quaker leaders". He fails to mention Indian troubles again. The seemingly modernist, pacifist, Quakers now number fewer people than Native Americans even on recognized reservations. In addition to pacifism, they got into the idea of birth control early (Fischer notes the phenomenon and their decline in numbers, but delicately doesn't draw the obvious conclusion), and controlled themselves right out of historical significance.