But angry settlers also blamed the colonial government, particularly the Quakers who controlled the Assembly, for not protecting them from Indian attacks. Settlers had begged for military assistance, but Pennsylvania’s government had initially been unresponsive. Both the governor and many members of the Assembly thought the settlers had provoked the violence in the first place by encroaching on unceded Indian land. In blaming the Quakers for their plight, writes historian Kevin Kenny, the settlers “reduced the Assembly to Quakerism and Quakerism to pacificism.” Significantly, according to historian Matthew C. Ward, it may have been the Indian raids during the French-Indian War that lead Pennsylvania’s backcountry settlers to fully arm themselves.
It was during this time that the term “white people” emerged as the most common description of the settlers who had suffered attacks by French-allied Indians. Previously, reports of Indian attacks sometimes referenced Presbyterian Irish victims or German Mennonites or Lutherans, but they more often would use the term “English” as a synonym for non-Indians. Peter Silver suggests that at a time when backcountry settlers were drawing an ever-stronger distinction between Indians and non-Indians, the “conspicuously poor fit that the word ‘English’ made with so many of the people” gave rise to a new generic term.
When public figures or the press wanted to refer to the group of Europeans who suffered under the weight of Indian attacks, they’d increasingly use “white people.” Initially, it was not a racial term–because Quakers were not included–but a political one that defined a community of interest who shared a growing disdain for Native Americans and the desire to kick pacifist Quakers out of Pennsylvania politics.
At the same time, in part to persuade the colonial government to act on their behalf, Pennsylvania’s settlers began to refer to the frontier as the “bleeding country,” a term that only fed their sense of themselves as an aggrieved people. The emerging community of white people was thrown together by their shared suffering at the hands of Indians. Their shared grievance–and disdain for both Indians and Quakers–was greater than their distrust of each other.