11
Braddock’s defeat on the Ohio sent Pennsylvania into shock. Philadelphia got the bad news from the fleeing British troops. Colonel Thomas Dunbar, who inherited Braddock’s command, panicked at the thought of an enemy he could neither see nor number; convinced that his whole force risked destruction, he burned his baggage train and led his men in a rush to Philadelphia, where he proposed to go into winter quarters, although it was not yet August.
Dunbar’s disappearance left the frontier defenseless. The French commander, Captain Jean Dumas, had, like Dunbar, inherited command from a superior killed in the recent battle, but unlike Dunbar he knew what to do with his unanticipated authority. He immediately launched a campaign of terror from the Ohio south and east into the hinterlands of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. His intent was to intimidate England’s Indian allies into turning coat, and to drive the settlers of the English colonies back upon the Atlantic seaboard.
From Dumas’s perspective at Fort Duquesne, the campaign went very well. Several months after its start he informed the French government, “I have succeeded in setting against the English all the tribes of this region who had been their most faithful allies.” The policy was calculated and cruel. Referring to the tribes lately loyal to the English, Dumas boasted, “I have succeeded in making almost all of them attack the English, and if any of them resisted I have always managed to destroy them, so that I have put the Iroquois in fear of the Delawares and Shawnees unless they follow their example; and since the war-parties I have intercepted here have taken scalps and prisoners back to their towns, they find themselves engaged in the war, so to speak, in spite of themselves.” With some exaggeration, Dumas continued, “I have succeeded in ruining the three adjacent provinces, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, driving off the inhabitants, and totally destroying the settlements over a tract of country thirty leagues wide, reckoning from the line of Fort Cumberland.” Six or seven war parties were in the field at once, each headed by a Frenchman. “Thus far, we have lost only two officers and a few soldiers; but the Indian villages are full of prisoners of every age and sex. The enemy has lost far more since the battle than on the day of his defeat.”
From Franklin’s perspective in Philadelphia, the French campaign seemed hardly less effective. The autumn of 1755 brought regular reports of the terror on the frontier. From Penn’s Creek came a lurid tale of massacre and kidnapping: fourteen dead and scalped, eleven spirited away to God-knew-what fiendish fate. From Cumberland (later Fulton) County came reports that the Delaware chief Shingas—Shingas the Terrible, as he was now called—was leading his people against their former allies. “All burned to ashes,” wrote a person who escaped the destruction of the community of Great Cove by Shingas and his warriors. “It is really very shocking to see an husband looking on while these Indians are chopping the head off the wife of his bosom, and the children’s blood drank by these bloody and cruel savages.”
That the terror was inflicted by recent allies made it all the more terrible. Franklin’s friend John Bartram recounted his backcountry informants’ assertion that “most of the Indians which are so cruel are such as was almost daily familiar at their houses: ate, drank & swore together, was even intimate play mates. And now without any provocation destroyeth all before them with fire, ball & tomahawk.” Bartram described how even apparently secure houses were ravaged:
If they attack a house that is pretty well manned, they creep up behind some fence or hedge or tree & shoot red hot iron slugs or punk into the roof & fires the house over their heads & if they run out they are sure to be shot at and most or all of them killed. If they come to a house where the most of the family is women & children they break into it, kills them all, plunders the house & burns it with the dead in it or if any escaped out they pursueth them & kills them.
The raiders crossed the Allegheny Mountains, then the Susquehanna River. A frontier offensive no longer, the French-inspired campaign endangered the oldest, most heavily settled parts of the province. Attacks near Reading prompted the German inhabitants of that town to threaten to occupy Philadelphia unless they received immediate support. “We must not be sacrificed,” their ultimatum declared, “and are therefore determined to go down to Philadelphia with all that will follow us, and quarter ourselves on its inhabitants and await our fate with them.” Getting no satisfaction, the Germans marched on the provincial capital, a thousand strong.
By this point the enemy was within a day’s ride of Philadelphia. The greatest portion of the province had been lost to the French and their Indian allies, and more continued to be lost. “Almost all the women & children over Sasquehannah [the Susquehanna River] have left their habitations,” wrote provincial secretary Richard Peters in November 1755, “and the roads are full of starved, naked, indigent multitudes.”
With the populace on the run, Pennsylvania’s government was paralyzed. During the last crisis of provincial security, in 1747, the failure of the government to fund defense had resulted largely from the pacifist scruples and residual influence of the Quaker party. Since then the Quakers had undergone something of a conversion experience, the result of two scares: one at the polls, where their opponents had mounted a vigorous campaign to oust them on grounds that they who would not defend the province should not govern the province, and the other in the west, from the French and the Indians. As this latter persisted and intensified, the Quakers conducted themselves as model citizens in regard to defense. “The Quakers have now shown that they can give and dispose of money for that purpose as freely as any people,” Franklin remarked approvingly.
The present paralysis arose not from the Quakers but from the proprietors. The Penns adamantly refused to countenance any tax upon their lands in Pennsylvania, even for provincial defense; the Assembly refused to exempt them, especially for defense. During the summer and autumn of 1755, while the frontier burned and the settlers fled for their lives, the proprietors and the Assembly locked in legislative stalemate.
The agent of the proprietors was the current governor, Robert Morris, in office since the previous autumn. Franklin had known Morris as a public official in New Jersey; he encountered him again in New York, on Morris’s route from England to Pennsylvania. As charming in his own way as Franklin, Morris asked Franklin whether he might expect a difficult time with the Assembly. Franklin responded, doubtless with the slight smile that accompanied those comments of his intended to be half jesting but half serious, that he need not expect any difficulty whatsoever as long as he avoided disputes with the Assembly.
“My dear friend,” Morris answered, perhaps with a smile of his own, “how can you advise my avoiding disputes? You know I love disputing; it is one of my greatest pleasures. However, to show the regard I have for your counsel, I promise you I will if possible avoid them.”
The problem was not Morris’s disputatious temperament, although that hardly helped matters. The problem was the Penns’ insistence that any candidate for governor promise, on pain of financial penalty, to veto any measure taxing the proprietary estates. Morris was particularly ill placed to refuse such a promise, or to break it once given; an impecunious sort, he needed every shilling of his salary (to pay, among other obligations, child support to his recent London landlady, a fetching widow who bore a son with a noticeable resemblance to the Pennsylvania governor).
While Morris defended the proprietors’ interests, Franklin spoke for the people of Pennsylvania. As before, he sat on all the most important committees of the Assembly; even more than before, he drafted the most important documents to emerge from the Assembly. During the second half of 1755 the contest between the proprietors and the Assembly became a duel between Morris and Franklin.
In late July the Assembly received the stunning news of Braddock’s defeat. The body quickly authorized the expenditure of £50,000 for provincial defense. To raise the money, the Assembly approved a property tax, applicable to all real and personal property within the province.
The governor received the tax bill in early August; he shortly returned it, unapproved, with suggestions for amendment that would exempt the proprietary estates.
Franklin drafted the Assembly’s response, the gist of which was that taxing the proprietary estates, along with all the other estates in the province, was “perfectly equitable and just.” Tactically trying to corner the governor, Franklin and his colleagues requested to know whether the governor’s veto reflected his reasoned judgment or a previous commitment to the proprietors. If the former were the case, the Assembly would be pleased for the governor to elaborate his thinking; if the latter, it would only waste everyone’s time to pursue this bill.
Morris defended his veto on its merits—thereby initiating a series of exchanges that were never particularly enlightening and grew less edifying with each round. Franklin singled out the governor for personal attack, branding him the enemy not only of provincial safety but of the cherished rights of Englishmen.
How odious it must be to a sensible manly people, to find him who ought to be their father and protector, taking advantage of public calamity and distress, and their tenderness for their bleeding country, to force down their throats laws of imposition, abhorrent to common justice and common reason! Why will the Governor make himself the hateful instrument of reducing a free people to the abject state of vassalage; of depriving us of those liberties which have given reputation to our country throughout the world, and drawn inhabitants from the remotest parts of Europe to enjoy them?
Eventually the governor admitted that the terms of his commission prohibited his accepting any measure that taxed the proprietary estates. This prompted Franklin to take on the proprietors themselves. Morris had objected to Franklin’s use of the word “vassalage” to describe the situation of the Pennsylvanians; Franklin answered that in fact their condition was worse than that of vassals. “Vassals must follow their lords to the wars in defence of their lands; our Lord Proprietary, though a subject like ourselves, would send us out to fight for him, while he keeps himself a thousand leagues remote from danger! Vassals fight at their lord’s expence, but our lord would have us defend his estate at our own expence! This is not merely vassalage, it is worse than any vassalage we have heard of; it is something we have no adequate name for; it is even more slavish than slavery itself.”
Within a short generation this language of slavery would characterize colonial complaints against the government of Britain itself. Franklin and the Pennsylvanians anticipated affairs by applying it to their proprietor.
Yet if Franklin was precocious, he was not foolish. Morris charged that the logical terminus of the Assembly’s line of argument was democracy—a concept that in the mid-eighteenth century was commonly equated with anarchy. Franklin would grow more democratic with age, but at this point he refused Morris’s bait. “We are not so absurd as to ‘design a Democracy,’ of which the Governor is pleased to accuse us,” he wrote. If anyone, it was Morris who was bringing democracy closer, by his adamancy in defense of the proprietors. “Such a conduct in a Governor appears to us the most likely thing in the world to make people incline to a Democracy, who would otherwise never think of it.”
Looking back on the fight with Morris, Franklin later conceded its intemperate nature. “Our answers as well as his messages were often tart, and sometimes indecently abusive. And as he knew I wrote for the Assembly, one might have imagined that when we met we could hardly avoid cutting throats.”
Yet in the governor Franklin found a kindred temperament, if not a kindred intellect. Politics aside, Morris was as reasonable as Franklin. “He was so good-natured a man that no personal difference between him and me was occasioned by the contest, and we often dined together.” At one of these dinners Morris remarked jokingly that he much admired the idea of Sancho Panza, the companion and foil of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, who, when offered a government, requested that it be a government of Africans, as then, if he could not agree with his black subjects, he might sell them for slaves. A friend of Morris, seated next to Franklin, picked up the governor’s theme (perhaps by previous arrangement). “Franklin,” he queried, “why do you continue to side with these damned Quakers? Had you not better sell them? The Proprietor would give you a good price.” Franklin responded, “The Governor has not yet blacked them enough.” In his recollection Franklin went on to say of Morris (and of himself), “He had indeed laboured hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wiped off his colouring as fast as he laid it on, and placed it in return thick upon his own face.”
At the time, and privately, Franklin reckoned Morris “the rashest and most indiscreet Governor that I have known.” This made him difficult to deal with, but might yet work to the advantage of the Assembly and the people. “He has 1000 little arts to provoke and irritate the people, but none to gain their good-will, esteem or confidence, without which public business must go on heavily, or not at all.” Such being the case, Franklin thought, Morris would “do more mischief to the Proprietaries’ interest than good, and make them more enemies than friends.”
The only question was whether the province could hold out till then. “We are all in flames,” Franklin told Peter Collinson.
Amid the flames of war the spark of something Franklin had not felt for years—or at least not acted on—flickered anew.
Catharine Ray was the daughter of Simon and Deborah Greene Ray of Block Island, in the colony of Rhode Island. Twenty-three years old at the time of Franklin’s visit to Boston at the end of 1754, Katy Ray was staying with her sister Judith, who happened to be married to the stepson of Franklin’s brother John. Franklin met Katy through that familial connection, and was immediately entranced by her beauty and charm. He may have been smitten equally by the mere fact of her youth, and the fact that she appeared quite taken by him.
There was nothing in Franklin’s home life to push him toward a liaison with a woman the same age as his son. By all evidence Debbie suited him as well as ever; indeed he quoted to Katy the song he had composed about Debbie and his acceptance of her faults. Yet on certain days this acceptance must have seemed like resignation, and as his fame and horizons expanded, he must have wondered whether life held more for him. He was not the first traveler to feel the constraints of domesticity lessen with distance from home.
The circumstances of Franklin’s introduction to Katy Ray are uncertain, but at some point it became apparent that he would be heading south for New York and Philadelphia about the same time she would depart in the same direction for her parents’ Block Island home. Likely Franklin suggested they travel together; Judith, feeling responsible for her younger sister, must have been happy to accept this offer of a chaperone. He would accompany Katy as far as Westerly, Rhode Island, where another sister lived. From there he would take the road west to New York, while she would backtrack to where she could catch a boat to Block Island.
Precisely what transpired on that journey through the frozen New England countryside is impossible to re-create with confidence. The only record is found in a handful of letters exchanged between the two in the succeeding several months—and in the relationship that persisted between them for the next thirty years. Katy wrote first, shortly after her safe arrival at her parents’ home. Her letter is lost—doubtless partly because Franklin did not desire it to fall into the hands of Debbie.
He answered with an alacrity commanded by no other correspondent during this busy time of his life. “Your kind letter of January 20 is but just come to hand, and I take this first opportunity of acknowledging the favour,” he wrote. Evidently the two had stretched their journey beyond what was strictly necessary; only with real reluctance had Franklin—who extended his own journey even farther, to accompany her right to the Rhode Island shore—let her go. “I thought too much was hazarded when I saw you put off to sea in that very little skiff, tossed by every wave. But the call was strong and just, a sick parent. I stood on the shore and looked after you, till I could no longer distinguish you, even with my glass.”
Franklin explained how he had tarried in New England, lingering on the road, soaking up memories of his childhood—“my earliest and most pleasant days”—and basking in the recognition that accompanied his recent accomplishments. “I almost forgot I had a home.” New England revivified him; by contrast, when he reached New York he felt “like an old man who, having buried all he loved in this world, begins to think of heaven.”
It was not New England alone that made Franklin feel young; it was Katy Ray. Apparently at some point on their journey he attempted to trade the role of chaperone for one more passionate; she rebuffed him—but with such gentleness and tact as to enamor him of her even more. “I write this during a N. East storm of snow, the greatest we have had this winter. Your favours [those expressed in her letter] come mixed with the snowy fleeces which are as pure as your virgin innocence—and as cold.”
Katy’s rebuff reminded Franklin that he was, by her standards, an old man. His hopes of something more than a kiss on the cheek would remain unrequited; her further favors would be bestowed on one much younger—and unattached. Referring again to that “cold” virgin innocence, he declared, “Let it warm towards some worthy young man, and may Heaven bless you with every kind of happiness.”
Perhaps his hopes revived, perhaps he merely experienced confusion, when she responded with some of that warmth he thought was reserved for another. “Absence rather increases than lessens my affections,” she said. Franklin’s quartermastering work for Braddock kept him away from home during the spring of 1755; consequently he was slow receiving her letters and responding to them. “My not getting one line from you in answer to 3 of my last letters …” she wrote in June, “gives me a vast deal of uneasiness and occasioned many tears.” Franklin did not save these letters either; this, and Katy’s own remarks in the surviving correspondence, suggest they contained comments inappropriate from a single woman to a married man. “Surely I have wrote too much and you are affronted with me,” she said, “or have not received my letters in which I have said a thousand things that nothing should have tempted me to say to any body else, for I knew they would be safe with you.” She must hear from him. “Tell me you are well and forgive me and love me one-thousandth part so well as I do you.”
Their letters crossed in the mail. “You may write freely everything you think fit, without the least apprehension of any person’s seeing your letters but myself,” he said. “You have complimented me so much in those I have already received that I could not show them without being justly thought a vain coxcomb for doing so.” He teased her for what she denied him. She had asked whether everybody loved him yet; he replied, “I must confess (but don’t you be jealous) that many more people love me now than ever did before. For since I saw you, I have been enabled to do some services to the country and to the army, for which both have thanked and praised me, and say they love me. They say so, as you used to do, and if I were to ask any favours of them, would, perhaps, as readily refuse me. So that I find little real advantage in being beloved, but it pleases my humour.”
Real advantage or no from Katy’s love, he urged her to keep sending him letters. “The pleasure I receive from one of yours is more than you can have from two of mine. The small news, the domestic occurrences among our friends, the natural pictures you draw of persons, the sensible observations and reflections you make, and the easy chatty manner in which you express every thing, all contribute to heighten the pleasure; and the more, as they remind me of those hours and miles that we talked away so agreeably, even in a winter journey, a wrong road, and a soaking shower.”
She had spoken of a long thread she spun. He answered, “I wish I had hold of one end of it, to pull you to me.” Yet his wish was merely that, he knew. “You would break it rather than come.”
In the contest between the Assembly and the proprietors, the proprietors yielded first, but in a manner initially unacceptable to the Assembly. In November, Governor Morris received word from London that the Penns were pleased to make a “free gift from us to the public” of £5,000, to be used for colonial defense but not to be construed in any way whatsoever as a tax payment or other concession to the unwarranted and irresponsible demands of the Assembly.
This news reached Philadelphia about the same time the Germans from Reading did; almost simultaneous with both came a report of a massacre at Tulpehoccon, which included the ghastly tale of Indians scalping children alive. A bitterly ironic plea accompanied the report: “The Assembly can see by this work how good and fine friends the Indians are to us. We hope their eyes will go open & their hearts tender to us, and the Governor’s the same, if they are true subjects to our King George the Second, of Great Britain, or are willing to deliver us in the hands of these miserable creatures.”
Under the circumstances Franklin and his allies in the Assembly decided that to allow the impasse with the proprietors to continue would be unconscionable. Without yielding the principle that the Assembly should determine which properties were taxed and at what level, they accepted the Penns’ gift and approved a defense appropriations bill that exempted the proprietary estates.
Meanwhile the Assembly weighed a militia bill that would put the appropriated money to use. Almost without exception, substantive bills laid before the Assembly originated in committees; the militia bill was one of the exceptions, being directly proposed by Franklin. That such was the case indicated both the extreme danger to the province and the increasingly obvious ascendancy of Franklin within the Assembly. The militia envisioned by the bill was similar to that of Franklin’s 1747 Association. Service would be voluntary, and the militiamen would elect their own officers. There was, however, one important difference between the militia of 1755 and the Association: The new version was organized under the auspices of the provincial government, rather than outside the government.
This last aspect might well have made the new plan more acceptable to the proprietors than the Association had been. Thomas Penn’s complaint at that time, that the Association was extralegal and therefore potentially insurrectionary, no longer applied. But in fact this was thin comfort, for Franklin’s success in gaining Assembly approval of a militia simply indicated that he had taken over the government—at any rate the popular part of it. Where once the Quakers had stood against a provincial armed force, now they stepped aside. Not even the governor—handpicked by Thomas Penn himself—could prevent Franklin’s coup, for with the colony in flames, refugees on the roads, and the backcountry folk clamoring for protection, Morris was obliged to swallow his reservations and accept the militia bill.
He nearly gagged, as he related to Penn. Morris made clear that Franklin was the evil genius behind the recent developments. The governor described a meeting with representatives of the “back People” at the capital; he had explained that they long since would have had their protection if not for the recalcitrance of the legislature. They had been satisfied with his explanation, he told Penn, and proceeded to visit the Assembly.
Upon this Franklin harangued them, telling them the Assembly had done every thing that was consistent with the liberties and privileges of the people, for which they, the House, were contending. Some of the people answered that they did not know that their liberties were invaded, but they were sure their lives and estates were, and while they [the Assembly] were contending, the country was bleeding, and therefore hoped they would dispute no longer but send the Governor such a bill as he could pass.
His harangue had not, therefore, the effect he desired, and I suppose expected, for great pains had been taken by some of the members and all their numerous emissaries to sow sedition in the minds of these country people, who were, however, proof against all their lies.
Morris almost certainly exaggerated Franklin’s “harangue.” Franklin rarely addressed large groups, and then, by most evidence, without conspicuous success. But Franklin did lead the opposition to the proprietors on this issue as on others, and thereby singled himself out for criticism. In another letter Morris told Thomas Penn, “Since Mr. Franklin has put himself at the head of the Assembly they have gone to greater lengths than ever, and have not only discovered the warmth of their resentment against your family but are using every means in their power, even while their country is invaded, to wrest the Government out of your hands.”
If Morris was happy to charge the current disarray to Franklin, Franklin preferred to split the blame between the governor and the proprietors. In a letter to Richard Partridge, the Assembly’s agent to the British government, Franklin asserted, “If we cannot have a Governor of some discretion (for this gentleman is half a madman) fully empowered to do what may be necessary for the good of the province and the King’s service, as emergencies may arise, this Government will be the worst on the continent.” As for the Penns, Franklin declared that by their “senseless refusal” of the initial defense bill and by their “mean selfish claim” to exemption from taxes, they had brought upon themselves “infinite disgrace and the curses of all the continent.”
The distrust and alarm the governor and proprietors felt toward Franklin escalated dramatically when the de facto leader of the Assembly donned the uniform of the soldier. In view of his experience organizing the Association and his central role in winning approval of the militia bill, Franklin naturally took charge of raising the troops the bill authorized. “We meet every day, Sundays not excepted,” he informed an old friend, regarding the committee supervising provincial defense. When the governor and other allies of the Penns began circulating rumors that the militia was designed simply to glorify Franklin and perhaps allow him to seize the government, he published an imagined dialogue among some ordinary Pennsylvanians, explaining the bill, justifying its objectives, and countering its critics—all in plain, straightforward language. “I am no coward,” says one, in a typical passage, “but hang me if I’ll fight to save the Quakers.” Answers his companion, “That is to say, you won’t pump ship, because ‘twill save the rats, as well as yourself.”
In late November an enemy raiding party attacked the Moravian mission of Gnadenhutten on the Lehigh River northwest of Bethlehem, a village some fifty miles north of Philadelphia. The viciousness of the attack and the continuing lack of provisions for defense had terrorized the inhabitants and threatened to depopulate the region. The governor and the Assembly, finally—and temporarily—working in harness, dispatched Franklin, former governor James Hamilton, and Joseph Fox, a Quaker assemblyman who would be disowned by his coreligionists for his activities on behalf of their defense, to the northwest frontier. Fifty mounted militiamen and a small baggage train accompanied the commissioners. William Franklin, having reenlisted in the military and wearing the scarlet uniform of the king’s grenadiers, rode beside his father, who at this point remained in mufti.
The purpose of the expedition was to organize frontier defense. The first step was simply to show up, thereby giving flesh-and-blood substance to the recent legislative promise to secure the border. With luck the commissioners’ appearance would rally the locals to their own and the colony’s defense. Initial evidence indicated just such luck. Franklin had feared that the pacifist Moravians, who had a special Parliamentary exemption from military service, would refuse to take up arms; his first view of Bethlehem revealed an opposite intent. “I was surprised to find it in so good a posture of defence,” he wrote. “The principal buildings were defended by a stockade. They had purchased a quantity of arms and ammunition from New York, and had even placed quantities of small paving stones between the windows of their high stone houses, for their women to throw down upon the heads of any Indians that should attempt to force into them.” When Franklin expressed his surprise to the local bishop, the prelate explained that pacifism was not a principle of their faith but had been thought, at the time of the Parliamentary exemption, to be a tenet embraced by the members individually. The bishop said the members had amazed themselves by their alacrity to arms. Franklin remarked wryly, “It seems they were either deceived in themselves, or deceived the Parliament. But common sense aided by present danger will sometimes be too strong for whimsical opinions.”
The situation elsewhere was less promising. The commissioners traveled from Bethlehem to Easton, at the eastern terminus of the Pennsylvania frontier (next door was the Delaware River, across which lay New Jersey). On Christmas Day, James Hamilton wrote to Governor Morris, “The people here are not very numerous and are besides very backward in entry into the service, though the encouragement is great, and one would think they would gladly embrace the opportunity of avenging themselves on the authors of their ruin.” But they lacked the nerve to do so. “The terror that has seized them is so great, or their spirits so small, unless men come from other parts of the province I despair of getting such a number here as will be sufficient to garrison the block houses we proposed to build.”
Franklin adopted the attitude that the building of a block house would go far toward bolstering those quavering souls. Hamilton at first had charge of the commission, although his inclusion at all seems to have represented as much an effort by Morris to keep watch on Franklin as a measure to strengthen the frontier. Hamilton had no sympathy whatever with Franklin’s militia bill, describing it to Thomas Penn as “the quintessence of absurdity.” In the field he got in the way, and before long Franklin elbowed him aside. By the end of December, Franklin was drafting orders like a career soldier. “You are immediately to raise and take into pay for one month a company of foot consisting of 24 men, to be employed as a garrison, guard and watch for the town of Easton,” he wrote Major William Parsons. “You are to keep a constant regular watch with your company every night, 4 sentinels being placed at the outer ends of the four principal streets, and one near the guard room…. You are likewise once at least in every day to send out a scout to range some miles round the town, to examine all thickets and places capable of concealing parties of the enemy.” A week later, following a dismaying new report from Gnadenhutten that enemy Indians had routed not merely isolated settlers, as in the recent past, but a well-armed company of militia, Governor Morris acknowledged the obvious and formally appointed Franklin military commander for that sector of the frontier, with complete authority over all aspects of the emergency.
On January 15 Franklin led a march across the Blue Mountains to Gnadenhutten. The winter weather was miserable, with the temperature just above freezing and a heavy rain that soaked the men and, more worryingly, their firearms. The Indians of that region were used to winter warfare and knew how to keep their powder and gunlocks dry; had Franklin’s column been attacked on the march, the men would have had difficulty returning fire. Indeed, the one survivor of an earlier raid said his ten companions had been killed because the wetness had incapacitated their weapons.
The route of the march intensified the danger. One of Franklin’s men, Thomas Lloyd, left a description of a particularly perilous stretch: “Hills like Alps on each side and a long narrow defile where the road scarcely admitted a single wagon at the bottom of it; a rapid creek with steep banks and bridge made of a single log situated so the Indians might with safety to themselves from the caverns in the rocks have cut us all off notwithstanding all human precaution.”
The column arrived intact, only to witness what the unseen enemy was capable of. “All round appears nothing but one continued scene of horror and destruction,” wrote Lloyd. “Where lately flourished a happy and peaceful village is now all silent and desolate, the houses burnt, the inhabitants butchered in the most shocking manner, their mangled bodies for want of funerals exposed to birds and beasts of prey and all kinds of mischief perpetrated that wanton cruelty can invent.”
The first order of business was burying the dead; the second, commencing construction of a fort. Of necessity the men of that part of the country were adept at hewing wood; as important as the firearms Franklin’s men brought were the seventy axes. Amid the danger and destruction Franklin indulged his scientific curiosity to time two men felling a tree (six minutes for a tree fourteen inches in diameter). Once the branches were removed, each pine trunk was cut into three pieces eighteen feet long. One end was pointed with the axes; the other was tipped into a trench three feet deep that served as the foundation of the stockade. Raised and secured, some 450 timbers made a fortress 150 yards in circumference. Carpenters constructed a platform several feet above the ground on the inside of the walls, from which the men might fire through loopholes at attackers. At one of the corners was mounted a small swivel gun. Franklin ordered a round fired to apprise any enemies within hearing that the English now had a cannon to defend themselves. From start to finish the construction required less than a week, despite downpours that recurrently halted the work.
Franklin’s approach to military command was typical of his approach to social affairs generally. The furthest thing from a martinet, he preferred to appeal to his men’s reason and self-interest. The chaplain of the company complained that the men were insufficiently attendant to prayers and his sermons; Franklin suggested a change in the rationing system. Each man, as part of the enlistment agreement, had been promised a gill (roughly four ounces) of rum a day. “It is perhaps below the dignity of your profession to act as steward of the rum,” Franklin told the chaplain. “But if you were to deal it out, and only just after prayers, you would have them all about you.” Attendance at prayers improved at once.
Upon completion of the stockade Franklin sent a scouting party into the forest about the fort; the rangers found that there had indeed been an audience for the warning shot—and apparently an audience for the entire construction process. On a wooded hill overlooking the fort Franklin’s men discovered several holes dug in the dirt. At the bottom of these holes were the ashes of charcoal fires; in the grass at the edges of the holes were the imprints where the Indians had sat, their feet hanging down in the holes next to the smoldering (but nonsmoking) fires. Thus warm and invisible, the Indians had watched the fort go up. Presumably they had decamped to give notice of the construction to their comrades.
The fort at Gnadenhutten, named Fort Allen for William Allen, the chief justice of Pennsylvania and a longtime friend of Franklin, was one of three built under Franklin’s command. The others—subsequently called Fort Norris for the speaker of the Assembly, and Fort Franklin—were fifteen miles to either side of Fort Allen along a southwest-to-northeast line that paralleled the mountains.
By themselves the forts did little to secure the frontier from Indian attack. Although they did provide a refuge for settlers in the event of further attacks, their primary purpose was psychological. The Indians of Pennsylvania and the neighboring provinces must have known long before this time that they would never be able to resume the ways of life that had sustained their ancestors prior to the arrival of the Europeans; in light of the conveniences consequent to European contact—guns, metal tools, and the like—it was doubtful that many of the present generation wanted to recapture their ancestors’ less sophisticated lifestyle. In any case, the Europeans were here to stay. The only question was which Europeans the Indians would have to deal with. If the French drove out the English, the Indians would have to make peace with the French. During the last two years the French had indeed seemed about to drive the English into the sea. But if the English were determined to stay, then the Indians would have to accommodate themselves to the English. More than outposts for defense, Franklin’s forts were a statement of imperial purpose.
In time of danger, capable military leaders capture the hearts of their countrymen. Franklin’s part in rallying the Assembly and then leading the militia made him the hero of the hour in Pennsylvania. At the beginning of February 1756 he learned that Governor Morris was convening the Assembly; hoping to ensure that what he had accomplished in the backwoods of Northampton County not be lost in the back rooms of Philadelphia, Franklin relinquished operational command to Colonel William Clapham, a veteran of the Indian wars on the frontier, and, riding hard, covered the seventy-five miles from Fort Allen to the capital in two long days and a short night.
Yet only part of Franklin’s hurry reflected his anxiety about the governor’s aims. The rest revealed a desire to avoid what he considered excessive praise. As he prepared to return to Philadelphia, he heard that a large body of citizens intended to ride out and greet him and to escort him back to the capital. “To prevent this,” Franklin explained to Peter Collinson, “I made a forced march, and got to town in the night, by which they were disappointed, and some a little chagrinned.”
The chagrin and disapproval did not, however, prevent Franklin’s being elected colonel of the Philadelphia regiment. Now it was Governor Morris who was chagrined. Although he had been forced to turn to Franklin in the hour of maximum danger, he did not wish to make Franklin’s command official—both because he knew that the proprietors despised Franklin and because he himself distrusted him. Yet in light of the clear requirements of the militia bill, which he had signed, he had no alternative to accepting whom the militiamen chose. After two weeks of hoping for providential deliverance in one form or another, Morris grudgingly gave his approval.
Franklin shortly treated the city to a review of the troops. The ghost of William Penn must have groaned to hear the tramp of a thousand soldiers’ boots across his city of brotherly love. The first company reached the reviewing stand, drew up, waited until the second company neared, then fired into the air and retreated in close order. The second company did the same, and so on. Four freshly painted cannon were hauled along the street by teams of powerfully built horses. Oboes (“haut-boys”) and fifes filled the air with their martial melodies; just after them rode Franklin alone, master of all he surveyed. “So grand an appearance was never before seen in Pennsylvania,” asserted the Gazette.
Franklin’s triumph was not without minor amusements. As the troops marched past his house, they honored their colonel with thunderous volleys—“which shook down and broke several glasses of my electrical apparatus,” Franklin noted wryly.
Governor Morris, and Thomas Penn at a distance, could only shudder at the swelling enthusiasm for their chief adversary. For a decade Penn had suspected Franklin of designs against the established government of the province. During most of that period Franklin had challenged the status quo by political means, but briefly in the days of the Association, and now again as colonel of the Philadelphia regiment, he appeared capable of leading a military revolt.
The appearance only intensified a few days later when Franklin set off for Virginia. This time he was wearing his postmaster’s cap rather than his colonel’s hat, but his men provided a send-off suited to a victorious general. “Twenty officers of my regiment with about 30 grenadiers presented themselves on horseback at my door just as I was going to mount, to accompany me to the ferry about 3 miles from town,” Franklin told Collinson. “Till we got to the end of the street, which is about 200 yards, the grenadiers took it in their heads to ride with their swords drawn.”
The show was hardly Franklin’s idea; inwardly he groaned, knowing that it could “serve only to excite envy or malice.” In fact it excited both. Provincial secretary Richard Peters wrote Penn describing Franklin’s behavior as an “abomination” and declaring, “The city is in infinite distraction all owing to the officers of the militia puffed up and now solely directed by Colonel Franklin…. Matters are ten times worse in the city than ever and the Antiproprietary party will gain more ground than ever by means of the Colonel who continues to evidence a most implacable enmity against the Proprietors.”
Thomas Penn was less alarmed than Peters, living much farther from the scene, but he was no less concerned. “I much wonder the Governor would appoint Mr. Franklin colonel,” Penn told Peters. “He should never have any commission given to him till it is certain he has changed his sentiments.” Penn decried Franklin’s “republican principles” and asserted, “I have scarcely seen such an instance of baseness as in this of Franklin’s.”
Penn’s criticism of Franklin must have reflected at least a little annoyance at himself for misjudging the man. Franklin almost certainly could not have received his appointment as deputy postmaster without Penn’s approval, at least tacit. Doubtless the proprietor hoped that the appointment would purchase Franklin’s cooperation on matters touching proprietary prerogatives. It was not an unreasonable hope. It had been borne out in Penn’s gubernatorial appointments; applied generally, the principle was what held the empire together.
But it underestimated Franklin badly. Financially, Franklin did not need the job; this alone set him apart from most placemen. Indeed, he had yet to make a pound from the post. Penn had no real experience with civic-mindedness; that a person might assume a task for the good of his country and people was beyond him.
Before long, Penn would get to know Franklin personally and would come to appreciate the extent of his misjudgment of Franklin’s motives. Meanwhile he sought to neutralize Franklin’s influence. One method set fire against fire, figuratively. Franklin’s current influence derived from his control of the provincial militia; Penn encouraged Governor Morris to create anti-Franklin military units. Either from want of imagination or from conscious irony, the governor’s companies modeled their organization on Franklin’s 1747 Association; they even appropriated the Association’s name. Needless to say, the supporters of this new group cited public spirit and a desire to defend the province as their reasons for taking arms; almost as needless to say, their taking arms was interpreted—just as it was intended—as a riposte to Franklin’s growing fame and influence.
It was not inconceivable that at some point the contest between Franklin’s soldiers and the governor’s would take direct, armed form; for now the clashes consisted of rival reviews in the streets of Philadelphia and nasty clashes in the newspapers of the city. Franklin scored the governor for dividing the province when he should have been uniting it. The governor’s friends responded that Franklin’s fame had gone to his head. From experimenting with electricity, he now experimented with the welfare of the people. “To be convinced whether a shock of the electric fluid will kill rats or turkeys, must the experiment be made general on all the rats and turkeys on the face of the earth?”
As the controversy raged, Franklin went about his business—which only incensed the proprietary party the more. When King George dispatched Lord Loudoun to America as commander in chief, following the belated formal declaration of war, Franklin traveled to New York to meet him. Loudoun apparently found Franklin’s counsel useful, for he conferred with him repeatedly during the summer of 1756 on the state of frontier defense and the politics of provincial security. Franklin in turn developed a high regard for the new commander. “I have had the honour of several conferences with him on our American affairs,” Franklin told William Strahan, “and am extremely pleased with him. I think there cannot be a fitter person for the service he is engaged in.”
Meanwhile the proprietary campaign against Franklin continued. Thomas Penn tried to have Franklin stripped of his postmastership. When this failed—after Franklin defended himself to his postal superiors—Penn tried another approach. Franklin’s Militia Act had challenged not merely proprietary control of Pennsylvania politics but some of the basic principles of imperial rule, among these the selection of officers. As Penn explained to Morris, “The militia is taken out of the hands of the Crown, and the appointment of officers given to the people, which can never be allowed.”
Penn revealed Franklin’s offense to the appropriate officers of the Crown, who, agreeing, canceled the Militia Act. This neat trick not only solved Penn’s problem with the turbulent colonel but placed the proprietor in the comfortable and relatively unusual position of defending His Majesty’s authority in North America.
Franklin viewed this latest development with equanimity. After half a century on earth he knew—better than most great men do—what he was good at and what not. He knew he was no soldier. He might organize frontier defense and command construction battalions, but he had no experience of combat and little inclination to acquire it. Franklin had met Colonel Washington of Virginia on the road; he could tell at once that Washington possessed far more of the martial spirit than he would ever have. At one point of maximum alarm, Governor Morris offered to make Franklin a general if he would lead a campaign to capture Fort Duquesne. Franklin rejected the offer. “I had not so good an opinion of my military abilities as he professed to have,” he said later. Consequently he could not be too disappointed at Parliament’s decision to terminate his military career.
Besides, he had something better than a military command. “The people happen to love me,” he told Peter Collinson in November 1756. Franklin could put aside military authority, but his ego was not immune to popular acclaim. A warrior like Washington might find charm in the sound of bullets whistling overhead; Franklin was more beguiled by the sense of embodying the virtuous desires of ordinary people. This feeling of being virtue’s agent was not new in Franklin’s life. His earlier civic initiatives had afforded a taste of it. But only upon entering politics—upon placing himself before voters—had he felt it so directly. And it was this that allowed him to shrug off the attacks by the proprietors and their agents. Referring to a recent barrage, he told Collinson, “I am not much concerned at that, because if I have offended them by acting right, I can, whenever I please, remove their displeasure by acting wrong.”
Franklin appreciated the possibility of self-delusion in such matters. He regularly examined his motives. For the present at least, regarding the struggle with the proprietors, he was satisfied. “I am persuaded that I do not oppose their views from pique, disappointment, or personal resentment, but, as I think, from a regard to the public good. I may be mistaken in what is that public good; but at least I mean well.” The proprietors quite clearly did not. “I am sometimes ashamed for them, when I see them differing with their people for trifles, and instead of being adored, as they might be, like demi-gods, become the object of universal hatred and contempt.”
Franklin never lost the conviction that virtue conferred right and ought to confer power. Yet neither did he lose the ability to question whether his view of virtue was the only accurate one. “Forgive your friend a little vanity,” he asked Collinson, “as it’s only between ourselves.” The people loved him today, and concurred in his view of virtue, but they might change their minds tomorrow. “You are ready now to tell me that popular favour is a most uncertain thing. You are right. I blush at having valued myself so much upon it.”