Obviously, Franklin felt be owed Deborah a great deal for her acceptance of his five-year absence in England, and he was ready to live out the rest of his life with her, with all the fortitude and tact he could muster. When Deborah confessed that, in a moment of jealousy, she had opened all of her husband’s English mail while he was touring New England with Sally, Franklin smoothly replied: “I approve of your opening all my English letters, as it must give you pleasure to see that people who knew me there so long and so intimately, retain so sincere a regard for me.”
But the violent world beyond peaceful Philadelphia was about to destroy this reasonable dream. During the autumn of 1763, the western counties of Pennsylvania had become a chaos of desolation and fear. A missionary sent out by Philadelphia’s Christ Church reported 750 abandoned farms and 200 women and children cowering as destitute refugees in the shelter of Fort Pitt. Frantic pleas for help poured into the capital. As usual, the Proprietary government reacted with paralysis. A new governor was in the state house. The Penns - no doubt alarmed in part by the Franklin power play that had captured New Jersey - sent over one of their own, John Penn, a grandson of founder William Penn. He asked that the Assembly pay for a thousand-man force to march into the Ohio territory to crush the marauding Indians. But little or nothing was done to counter the immediate problem - the looting and scalping that was terrorizing the western counties.
As usual, when the government fails to act, men take the law into their own hands, with often disastrous results. Several towns in predominantly German Lancaster County were Irish. Many colonies had made it a policy to encourage the Irish to settle on their frontiers as a kind of border guard or buffer against Indian assaults. Men from two of these Irish towns, Paxton and Donegal, embittered by the brutal losses they had already taken, struck in blind fury at the only Indians they could find - the peaceful remnants of a tribe that had signed a treaty with William Penn and the first settlers and lived in harmony with the white people ever since. Called the Conestogas, they were only twenty in number, and they made their living from weaving baskets, brooms, and bowls that they sold to their white neighbors. The Paxton Boys, as they called themselves, descended on this little community in the dawn, slaughtered the six Conestogas they found at home and burned their village to the ground.
Officials in Lancaster hustled the fourteen bewildered survivors into the town’s jail, the strongest available building, and assured them that they would be defended by all the power the government could muster. John Penn backed them with a proclamation denouncing the murders and forbidding “all persons whatsoever” to harass or harm any peaceful Indians. But Paxton and Donegal Townships were unimpressed and undaunted by this declaration. On December 27, the Paxton Boys oiled their muskets, sharpened their hatchets and scalping knives, and mounted their horses once more. Into Lancaster they rode, and not one person rose up to oppose them. No one had the courage to take on the Irishmen. The Paxtons clattered to the door of the jail and battered it down. Then they charged in and slaughtered the fourteen surviving Conestogas. It was frontier revenge at its worst. Only seven Conestogas could even remotely be called warriors. The rest were women and children.
Pennsylvania seethed with an ominous mixture of horror and alarm. Governor Penn issued another decree offering 200 pounds reward for the capture of the Paxton ringleaders. He was like a man shouting into a whirlwind. Nobody listened. On the contrary, more than a few people in the colony rose to defend the murderers. The Paxton Boys were Presbyterians, and the members of that faith found labored arguments in the Bible to support the notion that the Indians were a cursed race, and it was an act of piety to kill them. They also got in a few licks against the traditional Pennsylvania policy toward the Indians, which was dominated by the Quaker doctrine of forbearance. To the frontiersmen exposed to the savagery of Indians on the warpath, kindness was synonymous with weakness, and the slaughter of the Conestogas - in the minds of these confused, embattled people - required a new approach based on eye-for-eye vengeance. Benjamin Franklin was appalled to learn that more than a few Pennsylvanians - even his Philadelphia neighbors - agreed with this justification of the murderers. He decided to give them an answer.
A few days after the first of the year, the printing press of The Pennsylvania Gazette churned out copies of a pamphlet entitled, “A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County.” It was a masterpiece of verbal destruction. Franklin told how the Conestogas had made a treaty with William Penn that was to last “as long as the sun should shine or the waters run in the rivers.” He then went down the list of the victims, giving a brief sketch of the most important.
“ . . . Shehaes was a very old man, having assisted at the second treaty held with them, by Mr. Penn in 1701, and ever since continued a faithful and affectionate friend to the English; he is said to have been an exceeding good man, considering his education, being naturally of the most kind, benevolent temper.
“Peggy was Shehaes’s daughter; she worked for her aged father, continuing to live with him, though married, and attended him with filial duty and tenderness.
“John was another good old man; his son Harry helped to support him.
“John Smith, a valuable young man, of the Cayuga Nation, who became acquainted with Peggy, Shehaes’s daughter, some few years since, married her, and settled in that family. They had one child about three years old.
“The reader will observe that many of their names are English. It is common with the Indians that have an affection for the English, to give themselves, and their children, the names of such English persons as they particularly esteem.”
Franklin told how Shehaes, when he was warned that he was in danger of being murdered, replied, “It is impossible, there are Indians, indeed, in the woods who would kill me and mine if they could get at us, for my friendship to the English; but the English will wrap me in their match-coat and secure me from all danger.”
“How unfortunately was he mistaken,” Franklin added, and described how the old Indian was “cut to pieces in his bed” in the first massacre at Conestoga. Then Franklin described in graphic terms the final scene in the jail. “When the poor wretches saw they had no protection nigh, nor could possibly escape, and being without the least weapon for defense, they divided into their little families, the children clinging to the parents; they fell on their knees, protested their innocence, declared their love to the English, and that, in their whole lives, they had never done them injury; and in this posture they all received the hatchet! Men, women, and little children were everyone inhumanly murdered! In cold blood!”
Franklin then went on to tell a series of compelling short stories that described how the ancient Greeks, the Saracens, the Spaniards, the Negroes of Africa, and the Indians of America consistently practiced mercy toward strangers who by chance or accident happened to wander into their country or to visit them as peaceful guests. “In short it appears,” Franklin wrote, “that they [the Indians] would have been safe in any part of the known world, except in the neighborhood of the Christian white savages of Paxton and Donegal.”
Sheer castigation was not Franklin’s goal. In the final pages of his demolition, he revealed his true purpose. There were 140 other peaceful Indians, most of them converts to Christianity, who had fled to Philadelphia for safety. Already, some Philadelphians were complaining about the cost of maintaining them, and suggesting that they be sent back into the countryside, where they would meet certain death. Franklin asked his neighbors if they could leave these poor people “exposed to the armed madmen of your country? Let us rouze ourselves for shame and redeem the honor of our province from the contempt of its neighbors. . . Cowards can handle arms, can strike where they are sure to meet with no return, can wound, mangle, and murder; but it belongs to brave men to spare and to protect; for, as the poet says, Mercy still sways the brave.”
This was strong language, but Franklin knew exactly what he was doing. He was no friend of lawless revolution, and the Paxton Boys showed every sign
of turning their vendetta against the Indians into just that. Early in February, word reached Philadelphia that a mob of 800 heavily armed frontiersmen, led by the infuriated Paxton Boys, was on the march. It was 1755 all over again with the province defenseless against armed invasion. Once more the governor and his Council, quarreling with the Assembly and with each other, were creating a stew of frantic indecision. According to a merchant just back from the frontier, the rioters’ avowed goal was to kill the 140 peaceful Indians who were now living on Province Island in the Delaware. But they also made it clear that they were willing to shoot anyone else who got in their way. The only organized fighting force in the vicinity of the capital was three companies of the Royal American Regiment - about 180 men. In desperation, John Penn turned to the one person with enough clout to convince Philadelphians to do battle with this oncoming army of potential revolutionaries: Benjamin Franklin. He offered Franklin command of any troops he could organize and begged him to recruit them as soon as possible.
For two consecutive days and nights, Franklin sat up with the governor and his Council, planning the defense of the city. Once more the key problem was persuading people to risk their lives to protect the government. When the Quakers again declined to bear arms, Franklin shrewdly suggested recruiting Quakers to dig ditches around the building in which the Indians were being housed. The Royal American regulars were to staff these fortifications. Franklin, meanwhile, called on his fellow Philadelphians to establish a military association, and he put down his name as the first volunteer. Within hours, nearly a thousand citizens had followed his lead, including a surprising number of Quakers, who were probably alarmed at rumors that after the Paxton Boys and their friends finished off the Indians. They were going to settle a few old scores with the Quakers. As Franklin later told an English friend, “The governor offered me the command of them, but I chose to carry a musket, and strengthen his authority by setting an example of obedience to his orders.”
About midnight on Monday, February 6, 1764, horsemen came racing into the city to tell Governor Penn that at least 250 Paxtons, hefting their murderous frontier rifles and tomahawks, and swearing Gaelic oaths, were in Germantown, only seven miles away. Once more the governor panicked, and at two o’clock in the morning, Penn and his counselors were pounding on Benjamin Franklin’s door. Church bells clanged throughout the city, summoning the Associaters and regular soldiers to arms. Throughout a long cold night, they waited for an attack. None came. Toward morning they learned that some clergymen had warned the Paxtons that the city was ready for them, and the frontiersmen had decided to wait at Germantown for reinforcements.
No doubt at Franklin’s suggestion, the governor decided to send an official delegation to talk with them. Inevitably, Franklin was asked to head the delegation. He assented without a murmur. A less courageous person might have chosen to stay behind the city’s fortifications. To meet eyeball to eyeball with these quick-triggered Irishmen, after he had publicly called them cowards and murderers, was no small matter. But Franklin rode out to the confrontation with his fellow assemblyman, Joseph Galloway, William Logan of the Governor’s Council, and Attorney General Benjamin Chew. By the time they arrived, almost 500 Paxtons were swarming through the quiet streets of Germantown, and many more were expected. They were talking of 1,500, perhaps even 5,000 men if they needed them.
Four Paxton leaders met the delegation. At first they were prepared to bluster their way into Philadelphia, but Franklin and his companions bluntly told them to come ahead and try. There were over 1,000 men - regulars and volunteers, entrenched and armed with cannon - waiting for them. The reception would be a lot warmer than Lancaster. This “fighting face,” as Franklin called it, unnerved the Paxtons. They began claiming they never intended to hurt anybody. All they wanted was an opportunity to express their grievances, to awaken the governor and the Assembly to the deplorable conditions on the frontier. From there, it was easy enough to accept that if their impromptu army dispersed, the governor, his Council, and the Assembly were willing to give a full and fair hearing to the frontiersmen’s complaints.
Franklin and the rest of the governor’s delegation rode back to Philadelphia that evening, and the militia volunteers were disbanded. Summing up his hectic week, Franklin wrote wryly to a London correspondent, “Within four and twenty hours, your old friend was a common soldier, a counselor, a kind of dictator, an ambassador to the country mob, and on their returning home, nobody, again.”
In his official residence, a mortified Governor John Penn could not quite agree that Franklin was nobody. He writhed at the thought of how he would have to tell his uncle Thomas Penn that he had been forced to beg Benjamin Franklin for help. His counselors - all members of the Proprietary Party - were equally mortified. Almost as soon as the Philadelphia Associaters had disbanded, they began plotting to twist the whole ugly incident into a political weapon that would destroy Franklin for good. With an elaborate display of conciliation, the governor saw the Paxton leaders in private. Some of their followers were permitted to enter Philadelphia with their guns and examine the peaceful Indians in their sanctuary to see if they could identify any red man who was guilty of a crime. No doubt some of these interrogators were the same people who had slaughtered the peaceful Conestogas. But Governor Penn said not a word about prosecuting these murderers. His denunciatory proclamation, his reward for those who brought the killers to justice, both were forgotten. When Franklin and his followers in the Pennsylvania Assembly asked the governor for an opportunity to question the Paxton leaders, Penn curtly rebuffed them. The Paxton Boys swaggered back to their frontier townships making triumphal noises, and a few weeks later the governor issued a proclamation, tailored to their specific demands. Henceforth Pennsylvania would pay $150 for every captive male Indian of a hostile tribe and $138 for every female captive; for the scalp of a male Indian, $134; for the scalp of a female Indian, $50. Not a word was said about the need to provide witnesses that the scalps were taken from hostiles.
To Franklin and his followers this proclamation was an invitation to murder, made doubly disgusting because it was signed by the grandson of William Penn. Simultaneously, the governor abandoned all pretense of working harmoniously with the Franklinite Assembly. He asked it for a militia bill in order to protect the colony from subsequent riots and invasions. The Assembly gave it to him with a provision that was sacred to American militia at the time - the men had the right to elect their officers, and officers, in turn, had a voice in choosing the higher ranks. Governor Penn threw the bill back in their faces, asserting that only he had the right to choose officers. When the Assembly passed a 55,000 pound money bill, the governor insisted that the best of the Proprietary lands in Pennsylvania could not be assessed higher than the lowest price for property owned by ordinary taxpayers.
The governor and the Assembly batted the argument back and forth for the better part of a month. Finally, the exasperated Assembly asked Franklin to compose a message to the governor expressing their sense of outrage. He did so, icily informing Penn that he would get neither his militia nor his money. Referring to the governor’s offensive wooing of the Paxtons and their supporters, Franklin condemned “the steps taken to enflame the minds of unthinking people and excite tumults against the Assembly . . . to awe us into Proprietary measures.” They declined to be awed and replied instead with a threat of their own. “We must for the present depend on ourselves and our friends, and on such protection as the King’s troops can afford us, which we hope, by the blessing of God, will be sufficient to defend us, till his Majesty shall graciously think fit to take this distracted province under his immediate care and protection.”
To a friend in England, Franklin wrote, “All hopes of happiness under a Proprietary government are at an end; it has now scarce authority enough left to keep the common peace; and was another mob to come against him, I question whether, tho’ a dozen men were sufficient, one could find so many in Philadelphia, willing to rescue him or his attorney
general, I won’t say from hanging, but from any common insult.”
To prove he meant what he said, Franklin wrote and the Assembly passed twenty-six resolutions condemning the governor and his policies and declaring that they were adjourning to consult their constituents on preparing “a humble address” to the King to oust the Proprietors forever.” The distracted Penn was soon writing violent denunciations of Franklin to his Uncle Thomas. “There never will be any prospect of ease and happiness while that villain has the liberty of spreading about the poison of that inveterate malice and ill-nature which is so deeply implanted in his own black heart.”
Franklin did nothing to assuage the governor’s agitation with another pamphlet, “Cool thoughts on the Present Situation of Our Public Affairs.” It was a smoothly reasoned argument that the province had nothing to lose and perhaps something to gain by changing to a royal government. An extensive account of the history of New Jersey, which had switched from Proprietary to royal government long ago, was one of the more significant points. But the issue was not actually a change of government, Franklin argued. “It is rather . . . only a change of governor that is instead of self-interested Proprietaries, a gracious King!”
Not everyone agreed with Franklin’s argument. Governor Penn and his followers, of course, were in all-out opposition. But when the Assembly began to consider the petition to the King, the Franklinites found almost as much resistance in the ranks of the Presbyterians, the representatives of the German settlers, and a number of thoughtful men who simply feared that the change might be for the worse. Among these, the most talented was an eloquent young lawyer named John Dickinson. He soon emerged as the leader of the opposition, a role that did no harm to his already enormous ego.
The debate over the petition was bitter and fierce. Dickinson and others attacked it with all the skill and energy they could muster. But the Franklinite majority was immovable. They were finally and utterly disgusted with the Penns and were convinced that they had to go. Caught in the middle was an old Franklin friend, Isaac Norris, the speaker of the Assembly for fourteen years. His daughter was married to John Dickinson, and he was so distressed by the battle that he resigned. The Assembly immediately elected Franklin to replace him, and the petition was rammed through with a solid majority. As Speaker, Franklin was the man who signed the petition, which he had also written.
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