Historical discussions of the Penn family's hereditary rule in Pennsylvania and of the authority exerted by its appointees conveniently stress that in 1764 the Proprietary faction tacitly entered into a successful coalition with Dissenting elements (predominantly Scots-Irish Presbyterians) and poorly represented city dwellers and frontiersmen. In thus setting aside its long-standing disdain for these earlier critics, the Proprietary successfully, if temporarily, checked the anti-Proprietary factions led by Benjamin Franklin and prominent Philadelphia Quakers.1 In addition, at least one study has shown that during the years preceding 1764 the Penn appointees struggled to achieve their ends through an opportunistic uniting of the Penns' cause with their own (prosperity for the Penns meant prosperity for the latter) and through erecting a power base secured by friendships and intermarriage among themselves.2
Harmonious, fraternal pursuit of the higher Proprietary cause did not always come easily, however, for the faction itself was drawn from a volatile mix of peoples united by a long, convoluted history of discord with one another: English Protestants (usually Episcopalians), Anglo-Irish Episcopalians, Scots-Irish Dissenters (usually Presbyterians), and a sprinkling both of Germans and of former Irish-Catholics who, like George Croghan, had converted. The Pennsylvania colonial papers from this time reveal that conflict among Proprietary placemen was not unheard of; most notably, the long, controversial careers of George Croghan and Conrad Weiser often inspired hostility, jealousy, and envy among colleagues as well as those outside their faction. One of the more intriguing, although not so well-known, rivalries developed in Cumberland county shortly after its organization in 1750 and involved two forceful individuals who represented the Penns' interest in very different ways-the Reverend Thomas Barton, Anglican missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (usually abbreviated as "S.P.G. "), and Colonel John Armstrong, of Carlisle, military leader and the Penns' official surveyor and land-agent.
What makes the Barton-Armstrong conflict so noteworthy is the way it dramatizes not only how cultural and religious differences, apparently transferred from colonial Ulster, could threaten the fragile coalition of disparate elements within the Proprietary party but also how the antagonists rather successfully managed to contain the more publicly disruptive and unseemly evidences of their rivalry, although it must be admitted, they probably did so more with an eye to the main chance than from a self-effacing dedication to the Proprietary. Of equal interest is the light it sheds upon those who had to endure daily the risk of walking the straight and narrow path of fidelity to their patrons: for, if nothing, else, the extant record implies profound insecurities lurking not far beneath the surface of the authoritative roles enacted by the two men.
The reasons for Barton's conflict with John Armstrong are no longer fully clear. Doubtless, as William Hunter and Robert G. Crist have suggested, their enmity had roots in the prevailing and more general hostility between New Light Presbyterians and Anglicans.3 Armstrong's construction in Carlisle of a new stone Presbyterian meeting house opposite the Episcopal St. John's, at that time a humble log church, cannot, as Crist speculates further, have but exacerbated the tension between two representatives of Proprietary interests west of the Susquehanna. Not to be dismissed either is the importance of essential ethnic differences between the two: Presbyterian Armstrong, most probably a Scots-Irish immigrant from county Fermanagh,4 would have shared with the Episcopal scion of a fallen Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, county Monaghan family the long legacy of competitiveness, frustration, intolerance, and bitterness that had accumulated in Ulster during the previous hundred years. Presbyterian, Scots-Irish and small landholder; Church of Ireland, Anglo-Irish, and landlord class-these inheritances would almost have guaranteed a collision between the two Ulstermen trying to secure prestige and fortune within the same narrow foothold on Pennsylvania's unstable frontier. In addition, it is likely that Armstrong still nourished a grudging memory of the honors that befell Barton following the publication in 1755 of the newcomer's5 impassioned exhortation to the frontiermen to unite against their common foe during the grim months after Braddock's defeat. As a prominent Dissenter, he probably knew those honors to be largely undeserving, for Barton's plagiarism of an earlier sermon had been exposed and discussed in Philadelphia's coffee houses and the gossip immediately suppressed by Proprietary vested interest.6
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