The devil's servants: satire in colonial America and the visual language of conflict

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Seven Year's War, numerous bloody confrontations occurred on the Pennsylvania frontier between Indians and European-American settlers. In December of 1763, a group of men from the frontier town of Paxton massacred Indians from the nearby settlement of Conestoga in protest of what they perceived to be a willful neglect of their defense on the part of the colonial leadership. Days later, several hundred armed Paxtonians marched toward Philadelphia threatening to attack the city. As the Quaker Party dominated colonial politics and promoted peaceful relationships with the Indian tribes, they bore the brunt of the settlers' anger. The "Paxton Boys," as they came to be called, and the contentious Assembly election of 1765 provided the subject matter for the first series of political satires produced in colonial America. ☐ With close scrutiny to the political prints, as well as other satirical texts, the following thesis will show that the prints in question offer far more than mere illustrations of political battles. Instead, the prints evince a process whereby the Quaker elite and their enemies struggled to define themselves amidst an increasingly volatile political scene. Moreover, these prints illuminate the ways in which the character of American visual satire was affected by the wider world of British print culture and the colonial print market.