Smith Rebellion 1765 Gives Rise to Modern Politics

By Karen Ramsburg

Eight years before the Boston Tea Party and ten years before Lexington and Concord, the first shots in the American Revolution were fired in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1765. Known as the Smith Rebellion, this crucial turning point in American history set the stage for modern American politics.

In this history, author Karen Ramsburg tells the enlightening story of this uprising on the Pennsylvania frontier and definitively shows how it laid the groundwork for the political maneuverings of today. Ramsburg dips back into history and reveals how a simple act of self-defense became the spark that created our nation and developed the first battle in a long, continuous class war still ongoing today.

Fearful that illegal trade goods, such as tomahawks, scalping knives, and gun powder, were being transported to Fort Pitt to rearm the Indians and renew Pontiacs War against the frontiersmen, Justice William Smith and his cousin James Smith, a.k.a. Black Boy Jimmy, believed they had a right to stop it. The ensuing rebellion led to a definition of government as a contract between all men to reject some of their natural rights in favor of a framework that would secure each mans rights to life, liberty, and property.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462057795

Karen Ramsburg

As a nurse, activist, and mother, Karen Ramsburg became interested in history while trying to save the Justice William Smith house in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. She is running as an Independent candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania’s Ninth Congressional District in the 2012 election. Ramsburg was born in Frederick, Maryland, and resides in Mercersburg.

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Copyright © 2011 KAREN RAMSBURG

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-5781-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5780-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5779-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011917637

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 11/29/2011

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

History of Smith’s Rebellion

CHAPTER TWO

Saving the Birthplace of the American Revolution

CHAPTER THREE

The American Dream

CHAPTER FOUR

Class Warfare

CHAPTER FIVE

Self-Defense

CHAPTER SIX

The Right to Bear Arms

CHAPTER SEVENc

Profits before People

CHAPTER EIGHT

Religion, Politics, and Economics

CHAPTER NINE

Restoring the American Dream

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX

REFERENCES

About the Author

This book is dedicated to my mother, who taught me the value of working hard and playing by the rules.

You mistake yourself, Sir; I am the Common Law.

— Justice William Smith

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. William Pencak, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University, for his strong advocacy and support for saving the Smith house, for coming to Mercersburg and speaking to us, and for his ideas about keeping history alive in the classroom. Schools and universities all over the United States and abroad are accessing the Smith Rebellion 1765 website. As an advisor to the site, Bill offered a wonderful bibliography for further reading that can be found under the library tab.

I would like to thank Dr. Patrick Spero, Professor of History at Williams College, for his willingness to answer questions about the history and for providing support both for the website and for saving the Smith house.

I would like to thank Dr. Kevin Kenny, Professor of History at Boston College; Dr. Patrick Griffin, Professor of History at Notre Dame University; and Dr. Nathan Kozuskanich, Professor of History at Nipissing University, for their letters of support for saving the house. Their letters have been included in the appendix. A special thanks to Nathan for permission to use his map on the website home page and for his assistance in helping me understand the Second Amendment.

I would like to thank Dr. Richard Pencek, Professor of Art and Architecture at Penn State University; Douglas Claytor, director of Frederick County Landmarks Association; and Chris Witmer, vernacular architecture advisor, for their expertise in colonial architecture and their help in establishing the authenticity of the house.

Touring the house would not have been possible without the help of Calvin Bricker, local historian, who set up floodlights that enabled us to see the construction features of the house.

I would like to thank the great team of archaeologists, Doug Stine and Ron Powell, who headed the excavation in the basement and who wrote a description of the artifacts in an unpublished report titled Justice William Smith House Basement Excavation.

A special thanks to Scott Parker, Archaeologist and Director of Research, Little Antietam Creek, Inc., for his commentary that is documented in Doug Stine’s report, which is titled Analysis of Ceramic Assemblage from Smith House Excavation and his educational PowerPoint presentation for the International Retired Persons (IRP) at Wilson College.

A special thanks to the members of Chapter 27 of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology, Inc., and to the volunteers—Douglas Claytor; Michele Smith; Ed Heinbaugh; Dave Hornbaker; Leon Spickler; Mark Ebberly; Owen Freas; Barbara Baker; and Cy Deitz—who participated in the basement excavation.

A special thanks to soil scientist Dr. John Wah; archaeologists Dr. Jonathan Burns and David Crane with AXIS Research, Inc.; and volunteers John McCorriston and Jeff Nitterhouse of the Shippensburg Historical Society for making the thirty-two test hole excavation possible. Thanks also to archaeologist Scott Padamonsky for his work in analyzing and cataloging the artifacts.

A special thanks to Roscoe Barnes, former reporter for Chambersburg Public Opinion, for all of the articles he wrote about the Smith house.

I would like to thank Jeff Marks for the painting of the 1765 Smith House that is on the cover of this book. The original hangs in my dining room. I will always be grateful for all of the work Chris Witmer and Jeff Marks put in to portraying the house with historical accuracy.

I would like to thank Linda Reis, Pennsylvania State archivist, for her encouragement and support since I first met her, and for making possible our upcoming program about the Smith house and its history. This program was presented in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Historical Association (PHA) on October 14, 2011. Drs. Spero and Pencak will participate.

I would like to thank Dr. Paul Orange, general practitioner, for saving the house. I would like to thank Dr. Richard MacMaster, codirector of the Center for Scots-Irish Studies and coeditor of The Journal of Scots-Irish Studies, for helping piece together this history and for his support in helping to preserve the house. A special thanks to Dr. Paula Reed, architectural historian, for helping to write the application to the historic register.

I would like to thank Jackie Nelling for opening her house and sharing Perry’s collection of artifacts with us. I would like to thank Ed Beecher for creating the Save Smith House website where the articles about saving the house can be read. I would like to thank Tim McCown, local historian, for teaching me to see history as a process and not as a series of events, and for his help editing this book.

A special thanks to Kate DeGroot, for all of her help and suggestions. I would like to thank Ken Wapnick for being a source of inspiration over the last twenty years. I would like to thank my daughter, Alexandra, for her suggestions and support in writing this book.

INTRODUCTION

If you drive past the Mercersburg, Montgomery, Peters, and Warren townships’ volunteer fire department located in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, the place where the Justice William Smith House once stood has today become a parking lot and a grassy yard. Across the street can be found the remnants of what people in Mercersburg have come to believe is the birthplace of the American Revolution, the birthplace of our Second Amendment right to bear arms, and a symbol of the goal or aspiration known to many of us as the American Dream. The history of the Smith House, the rebellion that began there, the battle to save the house for future generations, and today’s political events unfolding across America are all tied in to the pile of stones and dirt that lies across the street from where it stood for almost two hundred and fifty years.

I have come to appreciate that history is a process, not just a series of unconnected events. We need to make our history relevant to today, and our failure to do so explains why we repeat the mistakes of the past. We claim to revere our history, but while some use it to prove a partisan political point and others misuse it to prove that their opponents are unpatriotic, as a nation we just keep failing to understand and learn from it.

Everything we are and everything we claim we stand for began on the Pennsylvania frontier in places like Mercersburg, not in places like Boston. It began over land and the identification of who had a just expectation of possessing the rights of citizenship, as Englishmen at first, and later as Americans. It began as a debate over the relationship of men to each other. In England, this debate was between master and servant, but in America, even servants could become landowners, and this fundamentally changed the values of this country and maybe the world. In America a group of former servants took their Calvinist doctrine and came to believe they had the same rights as any man.

John Calvin, the founder of the Presbyterian faith, believed that men had a right to communicate with God themselves and didn’t need popes or priests to interpret God’s will for them. Calvin attacked religious aristocracy and asserted that men’s souls were equal because the soul was God’s divine creation. Human class and status didn’t matter.

It was the Calvinist John Locke, whom Thomas Jefferson called one of the greatest men in history, who began to define men’s political relationships to each other in the same way that Calvin had described the relationship between men’s souls and God. God had given all men immortal souls; he had not placed any man above any other man on earth. As Algernon Sydney, a nobleman and political philosopher, would note, God caused some to be born with crowns upon their heads, and all others with saddles upon their backs (Sydney, 1698, p. XIX). In England after the Protestant Reformation had begun, if there was no clergy to sanctify law and justice, who then gave law its legitimacy? In England, the king became that source of divine leadership until Locke and Sydney began to argue, as Calvin had, that men were naturally free and lived as equals in nature. They were equal because all had the same rights (Sydney, 1698).

In 1690, John Locke published the Second Treatise on Government. In this work, he posited the idea that government is a contract among all men to give up some of each man’s natural rights in exchange for the security that forming government could give them. The correct role of government according to this idea is to promote each man’s rights to life, liberty, and property. These ideas formed the basis of Smith’s Rebellion in 1765 and eleven years later were the foundational ideas in the Declaration of Independence.

If government was a contract, contracts could be broken or breached. If the contract was broken, all men had the right of rebellion to replace the government and put a new one in place that would meet the terms of the contract. This idea of government as a contract among equals and the debate about what each man’s role in our society would be may have begun with James and William Smith, but it is also at the heart of political unrest in places like Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio today as some leaders assert a different principle. This different conception of rights is one in which only a chosen few have the rights and privileges of political power, while they put the costs and duties onto those they disenfranchise.

What makes Smith’s Rebellion in 1765 so vitally important is that the settlers, who were considered the worst of society by wealthy Philadelphia merchants, demanded equality—and the right to be part of decisions that affected all their lives. Today we might call the same issue profits before people as we confront unemployment and free trade.

My thesis for this book is that Smith’s Rebellion was predicated on Locke’s ideas about government being a contract among all men to surrender some of their natural rights in favor of a framework that secured each man’s rights to life, liberty, and property. Our national debate today is over the same issues that motivated James and William Smith to conclude that they must destroy the illegal trade goods bound for Fort Pitt on March 6, 1765.

I begin with the history of the Justice William Smith house and the modern-day story about saving it to highlight why we need to preserve historic places as part of our national, cultural, and social education. I also explore the early precepts of America’s formation that define who we are as a people and help us understand why, in a time of anarchy in the colonies, it was so radical to propose a rebellion based on law and the rights of all Englishmen—a rebellion whose leaders purposely chose to kill no one.

The third element connects our history to modern-day politics and deals with national and international socioeconomic events. As we approach the 2012 elections, we find ourselves facing many of the same issues in modern form that the Smiths were confronted with in 1765. Things change, such as technology, and time seems to march relentlessly on, but there are some themes in our history that are timeless and continue to be part of the national tapestry in every era.

Today, as we confront high unemployment, deficit reduction, and a shortage of currency in the hands of those who drive the economy, we might do well to remember that these were the same issues that drove the colonists—including James Smith, by then a colonel in the Continental army—to pick up arms in April 1775. While armed rebellion should no longer be seen as a reasonable, viable, and just option, our