Surveying the situation on the eve of Pennsylvania’s 1726 General Assembly elections, Quaker James Logan realized he’d come to despise the colony’s democratic process. To him, its participants were seemingly “vile people who may truly be called a Mob.” In fact, many had come to loathe and fear the colony’s elections. Each contest seemed more contentious and heated than the last, and the two competing factions had become progressively more hyperbolic and even violent in public depictions of their opponents. In such a tense and partisan environment, elections were almost always marked by public disorder, but they increasingly also devolved into violence and vandalism. What concerned Logan most, however, was his belief that the increasing vitriol was not due exclusively to the serious political and economic considerations of competing interest groups within the colony. He believed a good deal of what animated the supporters of both factions was irrational. He felt followers of both factions genuinely believed the colony was perpetually “absorbed in a contest between papists and levelers.” “Papists” was a kind of political dog whistle connoting various types of abusive power molded off of anti-Catholic tropes, and “levelers” connoted radical social and economic egalitarianism. Fear of either overlapped with prominent conspiracy theories of the time. Logan thought either accusation a hysterical exaggeration. He dismissed what he saw as irrational suspicion felt by ideologues on both sides, stating simply “they chase specters.”[1]
The historiography of the conspiratorial style in American politics is well-known but tends to start at the American Revolution and move forward. A growing amount of evidence provided by the study of emotions and symbolic public language suggests its roots can and should be traced far earlier within American thought and speech.[2] The problems that defined Pennsylvanian politics throughout the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, requires considering the influence of paranoid and conspiratorial rhetoric as more than merely symbolic hyperbole. Quakers like Logan had rational reasons to fear elections. The ruling Quaker elite presided over economic and political power despite becoming a minority of the colony’s population in the 1730s, and each contest brought more non-Quakers into the Assembly. Their relative demographic decline accelerated as the population expanded and diversified in the 1740s and 1750s through several waves of immigration into the colony. German religious exiles and Scot-Irish economic immigrants settled in the countryside and frontier areas, demanding more influence and opportunity within the Quaker-dominated society. Yet, Friends tenaciously clung to their minority rule through increasingly aggressive measures to preserve their dominance in the colonial assembly and city councils. They saw themselves as battling not just for political control but also to maintain the proprietary ownership of the colony by the Quaker Penn family. A succession of British governments had eyed political tension and sectarian antagonisms as a potential justification for ending the proprietary status of Pennsylvania in favor of direct royal rule for the lucrative and large colony. All of Pennsylvania’s Protestant dissenters, including Quakers, feared that royal rule meant the reimposition of the English state church. The stakes of electoral defeat for the Society of Friends and their allies were very high.[3]