There was no great change in political conditions in Pennsylvania until about the year 1755. The French in Canada had been gradually developing their plans of spreading down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys behind the English colonies. They were at the same time securing alliances with the Indians and inciting them to hostilities against the English. But so rapidly were the settlers advancing that often the land could not be purchased fast enough to prevent irritation and ill feeling. The Scotch-Irish and Germans, it has already been noted, settled on lands without the formality of purchase from the Indians. The Government, when the Indians complained, sometimes ejected the settlers but more often hastened to purchase from the Indians the land which had been occupied. "The Importance of the British Plantations in America," published in 1731, describes the Indians as peaceful and contented in Pennsylvania but irritated and unsettled in those other colonies where they had usually been ill-treated and defrauded. This, with other evidence, goes to show that up to that time Penn's policy of fairness and good treatment still prevailed. But those conditions soon changed, as the famous Walking Purchase of 1737 clearly indicated.
The Walking Purchase had provided for the sale of some lands along the Delaware below the Lehigh on a line starting at Wrightstown, a few miles back from the Delaware not far above Trenton, and running northwest, parallel with the river, as far as a man could walk in a day and a half. The Indians understood that this tract would extend northward only to the Lehigh, which was the ordinary journey of a day and a half. The proprietors, however, surveyed the line beforehand, marked the trees, engaged the fastest walkers and, with horses to carry provisions, started their men at sunrise. By running a large part of the way, at the end of a day and a half these men had reached a point thirty miles beyond the Lehigh.
The Delaware Indians regarded this measurement as a pure fraud and refused to abandon the Minisink region north of the Lehigh. The proprietors then called in the assistance of the Six Nations of New York, who ordered the Delawares off the Minisink lands. Though they obeyed, the Delawares became the relentless enemies of the white man and in the coming years revenged themselves by massacres and murder. They also broke the control which the Six Nations had over them, became an independent nation, and in the French Wars revenged themselves on the Six Nations as well as on the white men. The congress which convened at Albany in 1754 was an attempt on the part of the British Government to settle all Indian affairs in a general agreement and to prevent separate treaties by the different colonies; but the Pennsylvania delegates, by various devices of compass courses which the Indians did not understand and by failing to notify and secure the consent of certain tribes, obtained a grant of pretty much the whole of Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna. The Indians considered this procedure to be another gross fraud. It is to be noticed that in their dealings with Penn they had always been satisfied, and that he had always been careful that they should be duly consulted and if necessary be paid twice over for the land. But his sons were more economical, and as a result of the shrewd practices of the Albany purchase the Pennsylvania Indians almost immediately went over in a body to the French and were soon scalping men, women, and children among the Pennsylvania colonists. It is a striking fact, however, that in all the after years of war and rapine and for generations afterwards the Indians retained the most distinct and positive tradition of Penn's good faith and of the honesty of all Quakers. So persistent, indeed, was this tradition among the tribes of the West that more than a century later President Grant proposed to put the whole charge of the nation's Indian affairs in the hands of the Quakers. The first efforts to avert the catastrophe threatened by the alliance of the red man with the French were made by the provincial assemblies, which voted presents of money or goods to the Indians to offset similar presents from the French. The result was, of course, the utter demoralization of the savages. Bribed by both sides, the Indians used all their native cunning to encourage the bribers to bid against each other. So far as Pennsylvania was concerned, feeling themselves cheated in the first instance and now bribed with gifts, they developed a contempt for the people who could stoop to such practices. As a result this contempt manifested itself in deeds hitherto unknown in the province. One tribe on a visit to Philadelphia killed cattle and robbed orchards as they passed. The delegates of another tribe, having visited Philadelphia and received 500 pounds as a present, returned to the frontier and on their way back for another present destroyed the property of the interpreter and Indian agent, Conrad Weiser. They felt that they could do as they pleased. To make matters worse, the Assembly paid for all the damage done; and having started on this foolish business, they found that the list of tribes demanding presents rapidly increased. The Shawanoes and the Six Nations, as well as the Delawares, were now swarming to this new and convenient source of wealth.
Whether the proprietors or the Assembly should meet this increasing expense or divide it between them, became a subject of increasing controversy. It was in these discussions that Thomas Penn, in trying to keep his family's share of the expense as small as possible, first got the reputation for closeness which followed him for the rest of his life and which started a party in the province desirous of having Parliament abolish the proprietorship and put the province under a governor appointed by the Crown.
The war with the French of Canada and their Indian allies is of interest here only in so far as it affected the government of Pennsylvania. From this point of view it involved a series of contests between the proprietors and the Crown on the one side and the Assembly on the other. The proprietors and the Crown took advantage of every military necessity to force the Assembly into a surrender of popular rights. But the Assembly resisted, maintaining that they had the same right as the British Commons of having their money bills received or rejected by the Governor without amendment. Whatever they should give must be given on their own terms or not at all; and they would not yield this point to any necessities of the war.
When Governor Morris asked the Assembly for a war contribution in 1754, they promptly voted 20,000 pounds. This was the same amount that Virginia, the most active of the colonies in the war, was giving. Other colonies gave much less; New York, only 5000 pounds, and Maryland 6000 pounds. Morris, however, would not assent to the Assembly's bill unless it contained a clause suspending its effect until the King's pleasure was known. This was an attempt to establish a precedent for giving up the Assembly's charter right of passing laws which need not be submitted to the King for five years and which in the meantime were valid. The members of the Assembly very naturally refused to be forced by the necessities of the war into surrendering one of the most important privileges the province possessed. It was, they said, as much their duty to resist this invasion of their rights as to resist the French.
Governor Morris, besides demanding that the supply of 20,000 pounds should not go into force until the King's pleasure was known, insisted that the paper money representing it should be redeemable in five years. This period the Assembly considered too short; the usual time was ten years. Five years would ruin too many people by foreclosures. Moreover, the Governor was attempting to dictate the way in which the people should raise a money supply. He and the King had a right to ask for aid in war; but it was the right of the colony to use its own methods of furnishing this assistance. The Governor also refused to let the Assembly see the instructions from the proprietors under which he was acting. This was another attack upon their liberties and involved nothing less than an attempt to change their charter rights by secret instructions to a deputy governor which he must obey at his peril. Several bills had recently been introduced in the English Parliament for the purpose of making royal instructions to governors binding on all the colonial assemblies without regard to their charters. This innovation, the colonists felt, would wreck all their liberties and turn colonial government into a mere despotism.
The assemblies of all the colonies have been a good deal abused for delay in supporting the war and meanness in withholding money. But in many instances the delay and lack of money were occasioned by the grasping schemes of governors who saw a chance to gain new privileges for the Crown or a proprietor or to weaken popular government by crippling the powers of the legislatures. The usual statement that the Pennsylvania Assembly was slow in assisting the war because it was composed of Quakers is not supported by the facts. The Pennsylvania Assembly was not behind the rest. On this particular occasion, when their large money supply bill could not be passed without sacrificing their constitutional rights, they raised money for the war by appointing a committee which was authorized to borrow 5000 pounds on the credit of the Assembly.
Other contests arose over the claim of the proprietors that their estates in the province were exempt from taxation for the war or any purpose. One bill taxing the proprietary estates along with others was met by Thomas Penn offering to subscribe 5000 pounds, as a free gift to the colony's war measures. The Assembly accepted this, and passed the bill without taxing the proprietary estates. It turned out, however, to be a shrewd business move on the part of Thomas Penn; for the 5000 pounds was to be collected out of the quitrents that were in arrears, and the payment of it was in consequence long delayed. The thrifty Thomas had thus saddled his bad debts on the province and gained a reputation for generosity at the same time.
Pennsylvania, though governed by Quakers assisted by noncombatant Germans, had a better protected frontier than Maryland or Virginia; no colony, indeed, was at that time better protected. The Quaker Assembly did more than take care of the frontier during the war; it preserved at the same time constitutional rights in defense of which twenty-five years afterwards the whole continent fought the Revolution. The Quaker Assembly even passed two militia bills, one of which became law, and sent rather more than the province's full share of troops to protect the frontiers of New York and New England and to carry the invasion into Canada.
General Braddock warmly praised the assistance which Pennsylvania gave him because, he said, she had done more for him than any of the other colonies. Virginia and Maryland promised everything and performed nothing, while Pennsylvania promised nothing and performed everything. Commodore Spy thanked the Assembly for the large number of sailors sent his fleet at the expense of the province. General Shirley, in charge of the New England and New York campaigns, thanked the Assembly for the numerous recruits; and it was the common opinion at the time that Pennsylvania had sent more troops to the war than any other colony. In the first four years of the war the province spent for military purposes 210,567 pounds sterling, which was a very considerable sum at that time for a community of less than 200,000 people. Quakers, though they hate war, will accept it when there is no escape. The old story of the Quaker who tossed a pirate overboard, saying, "Friend, thee has no business here," gives their point of view better than pages of explanation. Quaker opinion has not always been entirely uniform. In Revolutionary times in Philadelphia there was a division of the Quakers known as the Fighting Quakers, and their meeting house is still pointed out at the corner of Fourth Street and Arch. They even produced able military leaders: Colonel John Dickinson, General Greene, and General Mifflin in the Continental Army, and, in the War of 1812, General Jacob Brown, who reorganized the army and restored its failing fortunes after many officers had been tried and found wanting.
There was always among the Quakers a rationalistic party and a party of mysticism. The rationalistic party prevailed in Pennsylvania all through the colonial period. In the midst of the worst horrors of the French and Indian wars, however, the conscientious objectors roused themselves and began preaching and exhorting what has been called the mystical side of the faith. Many extreme Quaker members of the Assembly resigned their seats in consequence. After the Revolution the spiritual party began gaining ground, partly perhaps because then the responsibilities of government and care of the great political and religious experiment in Pennsylvania were removed. The spiritual party increased so rapidly in power that in 1827 a split occurred which involved not a little bitterness, ill feeling, and litigation over property. This division into two opposing camps, known as the Hicksites and the Orthodox, continues and is likely to remain.
Quaker government in Pennsylvania was put to still severer tests by the difficulties and disasters that followed Braddock's defeat. That unfortunate general had something over two thousand men and was hampered with a train of artillery and a splendid equipment of arms, tools, and supplies, as if he were to march over the smooth highways of Europe. When he came to drag all these munitions through the depths of the Pennsylvania forests and up and down the mountains, he found that he made only about three miles a day and that his horses had nothing to eat but the leaves of the trees. Washington, who was of the party, finally persuaded him to abandon his artillery and press forward with about fifteen hundred picked men. These troops, when a few miles from Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), met about six hundred Indians and three hundred French coming from the fort. The English maintained a close formation where they were, but the French and Indians immediately spread out on their flanks, lying behind trees and logs which provided rests for their rifles and security for their bodies. This strategy decided the day. The English were shot down like cattle in a pen, and out of about fifteen hundred only four hundred and fifty escaped. The French and Indian loss was not much over fifty.
This defeat of Braddock's force has become one of the most famous reverses in history; and it was made worse by the conduct of Dunbar who had been left in command of the artillery, baggage, and men in the rear. He could have remained where he was as some sort of protection to the frontier. But he took fright, burned his wagons, emptied his barrels of powder into the streams, destroyed his provisions, and fled back to Fort Cumberland in Maryland. Here the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia as well as the Pennsylvania Assembly urged him to stay. But, determined to make the British rout complete, he soon retreated to the peace and quiet of Philadelphia, and nothing would induce him to enter again the terrible forests of Pennsylvania.
The natural result of the blunder soon followed. The French, finding the whole frontier of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia abandoned, organized the Indians under French officers and swept the whole region with a devastation of massacre, scalping, and burning that has never been equaled. Hurons, Potawatomies, Ojibways, Ottawas, Mingoes, renegades from the Six Nations, together with the old treaty friends of Penn, the Delawares and Shawanoes, began swarming eastward and soon had killed more people than had been lost at Braddock's defeat. The onslaught reached its height in September and October. By that time all the outlying frontier settlers and their families had been killed or sent flying eastward to seek refuge in the settlements. The Indians even followed them to the settlements, reached the Susquehanna, and crossed it. They massacred the people of the village of Gnadenhutten, near Bethlehem on the Lehigh, and established near by a headquarters for prisoners and plunder. Families were scalped within fifty miles of Philadelphia, and in one instance the bodies of a murdered family were brought into the town and exhibited in the streets to show the inhabitants how near the danger was approaching. Nothing could be done to stem the savage tide. Virginia was suffering in the same way: the settlers on her border were slaughtered or were driven back in herds upon the more settled districts, and Washington, with a nominal strength of fifteen hundred who would not obey orders, was forced to stand a helpless spectator of the general flight and misery. There was no adequate force or army anywhere within reach. The British had been put to flight and had gone to the defense of New England and New York. Neither Pennsylvania nor Virginia had a militia that could withstand the French and their red allies. They could only wait till the panic had subsided and then see what could be done.
One thing was accomplished, however, when the Pennsylvania Assembly passed a Quaker militia law which is one of the most curious legal documents of its kind in history. It was most aptly worded, drafted by the master hand of Franklin. It recited the fact that the province had always been ruled by Quakers who were opposed to war, but that now it had become necessary to allow men to become soldiers and to give them every facility for the profession of arms, because the Assembly though containing a Quaker majority nevertheless represented all the people of the province. To prevent those who believed in war from taking part in it would be as much a violation of liberty of conscience as to force enlistments among those who had conscientious scruples against it. Nor would the Quaker majority have any right to compel others to bear arms and at the same time exempt themselves. Therefore a voluntary militia system was established under which a fighting Quaker, a Presbyterian, an Episcopalian, or anybody, could enlist and have all the military glory he could win.
It was altogether a volunteer system. Two years afterwards, as the necessities of war increased, the Quaker Assembly passed a rather stringent compulsory militia bill; but the governor vetoed it, and the first law with its volunteer system remained in force. Franklin busied himself to encourage enlistments under it and was very successful. Though a philosopher and a man of science, almost as much opposed to war as the Quakers and not even owning a shotgun, he was elected commander and led a force of about five hundred men to protect the Lehigh Valley. His common sense seems to have supplied his lack of military training. He did no worse than some professional soldiers who might be named. The valley was supposed to be in great danger since its village of Gnadenhutten had been burned and its people massacred. The Moravians, like the Quakers, had suddenly found that they were not as much opposed to war as they had supposed. They had obtained arms and ammunition from New York and had built stockades, and Franklin was glad to find them so well prepared when he arrived. He built small forts in different parts of the valley, acted entirely on the defensive, and no doubt checked the raids of the Indians at that point. They seem to have been watching him from the hilltops all the time, and any rashness on his part would probably have brought disaster upon him. After his force had been withdrawn, the Indians again attacked and burned Gnadenhutten.
The chain of forts, at first seventeen, afterwards increased to fifty, built by the Assembly on the Pennsylvania frontier was a good plan so far as it went, but it was merely defensive and by no means completely defensive, since Indian raiding parties could pass between the forts. They served chiefly as refuges for neighboring settlers. The colonial troops or militia, after manning the fifty forts and sending their quota to the operations against Canada by way of New England and New York, were not numerous enough to attack the Indians. They could only act on the defensive as Franklin's command had done. As for the rangers, as the small bands of frontiersmen acting without any authority of either governor or legislature were called, they were very efficient as individuals but they accomplished very little because they acted at widely isolated spots. What was needed was a well organized force which could pursue the Indians on their own ground so far westward that the settlers on the frontier would be safe. The only troops which could do this were the British regulars with the assistance of the colonial militia.
Two energetic efforts to end the war without aid from abroad were made, however, one by the pacific Quakers and the other by the combatant portion of the people. Both of these were successful so far as they went, but had little effect on the general situation. In the summer of 1756, the Quakers made a very earnest effort to persuade the two principal Pennsylvania tribes, the Delawares and Shawanoes, to withdraw from the French alliance and return to their old friends. These two tribes possessed a knowledge of the country which enabled them greatly to assist the French designs on Pennsylvania. Chiefs of these tribes were brought under safe conducts to Philadelphia, where they were entertained as equals in the Quaker homes. Such progress, indeed, was made that by the end of July a treaty of peace was concluded at Easton eliminating those two tribes from the war. This has sometimes been sneered at as mere Quaker pacifism; but it was certainly successful in lessening the numbers and effectiveness of the enemy.
The other undertaking was a military one, the famous attack upon Kittanning conducted by Colonel John Armstrong, an Ulsterman from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the first really aggressive officer the province had produced. The Indians had two headquarters for their raids into the province, one at Logstown on the Ohio a few miles below Fort Duquesne, and the other at Kittanning or, as the French called it, Attique, about forty miles northeast. At these two points they assembled their forces, received ammunition and supplies from the French, and organized their expeditions. As Kittanning was the nearer, Armstrong in a masterly maneuver took three hundred men through the mountains without being discovered and, by falling upon the village early in the morning, he effected a complete surprise. The town was set on fire, the Indians were put to flight, and large quantities of their ammunition were destroyed. But Armstrong could not follow up his success. Threatened by overwhelming numbers, he hastened to withdraw. The effect which the fighting and the Quaker treaty had on the frontier was good. Incursions of the savages were, at least for the present, checked. But the root of the evil had not yet been reached, and the Indians remained massed along the Ohio, ready to break in upon the people again at the first opportunity.
The following year, 1757, was the most depressing period of the war. The proprietors of Pennsylvania took the opportunity to exempt their own estate from taxation and throw the burden of furnishing money for the war upon the colonists. Under pressure of the increasing success of the French and Indians and because the dreadful massacres were coming nearer and nearer to Philadelphia, the Quaker Assembly yielded, voted the largest sum they had ever voted to the war, and exempted the proprietary estates. The colony was soon boiling with excitement. The Churchmen, as friends of the proprietors, were delighted to have the estates exempted, thought it a good opportunity to have the Quaker Assembly abolished, and sent petitions and letters and proofs of alleged Quaker incompetence to the British Government. The Quakers and a large majority of the colonists, on the other hand, instead of consenting to their own destruction, struck at the root of the Churchmen's power by proposing to abolish the proprietors. And in a letter to Isaac Norris, Benjamin Franklin, who had been sent to England to present the grievances of the colonists, even suggested that "tumults and insurrections that might prove the proprietary government unable to preserve order, or show the people to be ungovernable, would do the business immediately."
Turmoil and party strife rose to the most exciting heights, and the details of it might, under certain circumstances, be interesting to describe. But the next year, 1758, the British Government, by sending a powerful force of regulars to Pennsylvania, at last adopted the only method for ending the war. Confidence was at once restored. The Pennsylvania Assembly now voted the sufficient and, indeed, immense sum of one hundred thousand pounds, and offered a bounty of five pounds to every recruit. It was no longer a war of defense but now a war of aggression and conquest. Fort Duquesne on the Ohio was taken; and the next autumn Fort Pitt was built on its ruins. Then Canada fell, and the French empire in America came to an end. Canada and the Great West passed into the possession of the Anglo-Saxon race.
When the treaty of peace was signed in 1763, extinguishing France's title to Canada and turning over Canada and the Mississippi Valley to the English, the colonists were prepared to enjoy all the blessings of peace. But the treaty of peace had been made with France, not with the red man. A remarkable genius, Pontiac, appeared among the Indians, one of the few characters, like Tecumseh and Osceola, who are often cited as proof of latent powers almost equal to the strongest qualities of the white race. Within a few months he had united all the tribes of the West in a discipline and control which, if it had been brought to the assistance of the French six years earlier, might have conquered the colonies to the Atlantic seaboard before the British regulars could have come to their assistance. The tribes swept westward into Pennsylvania, burning, murdering, and leveling every habitation to the ground with a thoroughness beyond anything attempted under the French alliance. The settlers and farmers fled eastward to the towns to live in cellars, camps, and sheds as best they could. * Fortunately the colonies retained a large part of the military organization, both men and officers, of the French War, and were soon able to handle the situation. Detroit and Niagara were relieved by water; and an expedition commanded by Colonel Bouquet, who had distinguished himself under General Forties, saved Fort Pitt.
At this time the Scotch-Irish frontiersmen suddenly became prominent. They had been organizing for their own protection and were meeting with not a little success. They refused to join the expedition of regular troops marching westward against Pontiac's warriors, because they wanted to protect their own homes and because they believed the regulars to be marching to sure destruction. Many of the regular troops were invalided from the West Indies, and the Scotch-Irish never expected to see any of them again. They believed that the salvation of Pennsylvania, or at least of their part of the province, depended entirely upon themselves. Their increasing numbers and rugged independence were forming them also into an organized political party with decided tendencies, as it afterwards appeared, towards forming a separate state.
The extreme narrowness of the Scotch-Irish, however, misled them. The only real safety for the province lay in regularly constituted and strong expeditions, like that of Bouquet, which would drive the main body of the savages far westward. But the Scotch-Irish could not see this; and with that intensity of passion which marked all their actions they turned their energy and vengeance upon the Quakers and semicivilized Indians in the eastern end of the colony. Their preachers, who were their principal leaders and organizers, encouraged them in denouncing Quaker doctrine as a wicked heresy from which only evil could result. The Quakers had offended God from the beginning by making treaties of kindness with the heathen savages instead of exterminating them as the Scripture commanded: "And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them." The Scripture had not been obeyed; the heathen had not been destroyed; on the contrary, a systematic policy of covenants, treaties, and kindness had been persisted in for two generations, and as a consequence, the Ulstermen said, the frontiers were now deluged in blood. They were particularly resentful against the small settlement of Indians near Bethlehem, who had been converted to Christianity by the Moravians, and another little village of half civilized basketmaking Indians at Conestoga near Lancaster. The Scotch-Irish had worked themselves up into a strange belief that these small remnants were sending information, arms, and ammunition to the western tribes; and they seemed to think that it was more important to exterminate these little communities than to go with such expeditions as Bouquet's to the West. They asked the Governor to remove these civilized Indians and assured him that their removal would secure the safety of the frontier. When the Governor, not being able to find anything against the Indians, declined to remove them, the Scotch-Irish determined to attend to the matter in their own fashion.
Bouquet's victory at Bushy Run, much to the surprise of the Scotch-Irish, stopped Indian raids of any seriousness until the following spring. But in the autumn there were a few depredations, which led the frontiersmen to believe that the whole invasion would begin again. A party of them, therefore, started to attack the Moravian Indians near Bethlehem; but before they could accomplish their object, the Governor brought most of the Indians down to Philadelphia for protection. Even there they were narrowly saved from the mob, for the hostility against them was spreading throughout the province.
Soon afterwards another party of Scotch-Irish, ever since known as the "Paxton Boys," went at break of day to the village of the Conestoga Indians and found only six of them at home—three men, two women, and a boy. These they instantly shot down, mutilated their bodies, and burned their cabins. As the murderers returned, they related to a man on the road what they had done, and when he protested against the cruelty of the deed, they asked, "Don't you believe in God and the Bible?" The remaining fourteen inhabitants of the village, who were away selling brooms, were collected by the sheriff and put in the jail at Lancaster for protection. The Paxtons heard of it and in a few days stormed the jail, broke down the doors, and either shot the poor Indians or cut them to pieces with hatchets.
This was probably the first instance of lynch law in America. It raised a storm of indignation and controversy; and a pamphlet war persisted for several years. The whole province was immediately divided into two parties. On one side were the Quakers, most of the Germans, and conservatives of every sort, and on the other, inclined to sympathize with the Scotch-Irish, were the eastern Presbyterians, some of the Churchmen, and various miscellaneous people whose vindictiveness towards all Indians had been aroused by the war. The Quakers and conservatives, who seem to have been the more numerous, assailed the Scotch-Irish in no measured language as a gang of ruffians without respect for law or order who, though always crying for protection, had refused to march with Bouquet to save Fort Pitt or to furnish him the slightest assistance. Instead of going westward where the danger was and something might be accomplished, they had turned eastward among the settlements and murdered a few poor defenseless people, mostly women and children.
Franklin, who had now returned from England, wrote one of his best pamphlets against the Paxtons, the valorous, heroic Paxtons, as he called them, prating of God and the Bible, fifty-seven of whom, armed with rifles, knives, and hatchets, had actually succeeded in killing three old men, two women, and a boy. This pamphlet became known as the "Narrative" from the first word of its title, and it had an immense circulation. Like everything Franklin wrote, it is interesting reading to this day.
One of the first effects of this controversy was to drive the excitable Scotch-Irish into a flame of insurrection not unlike the Whisky Rebellion, which started among them some years after the Revolution. They held tumultuous meetings denouncing the Quakers and the whole proprietary government in Philadelphia, and they organized an expedition which included some delegates to suggest reforms. For the most part, however, it was a well equipped little army variously estimated at from five hundred to fifteen hundred on foot and on horseback, which marched towards Philadelphia with no uncertain purpose. They openly declared that they intended to capture the town, seize the Moravian Indians protected there, and put them to death. They fully expected to be supported by most of the people and to have everything their own way. As they passed along the roads, they amused themselves in their rough fashion by shooting chickens and pigs, frightening people by thrusting their rifles into windows, and occasionally throwing some one down and pretending to scalp him.
In the city there was great excitement and alarm. Even the classes who sympathized with the Scotch-Irish did not altogether relish having their property burned or destroyed. Great preparations were made to meet the expedition. British regulars were summoned. Eight companies of militia and a battery of artillery were hastily formed. Franklin became a military man once more and superintended the preparations. On all sides the Quakers were enlisting; they had become accustomed to war; and this legitimate chance to shoot a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian was too much for the strongest scruples of their religion. It was a long time, however, before they heard the end of this zeal; and in the pamphlet war which followed they were accused of clamorously rushing to arms and demanding to be led against the enemy.
It is amusing now to read about it in the old records. But it was serious enough at the time. When the Scotch-Irish army reached the Schuylkill River and found the fords leading to the city guarded, they were not quite so enthusiastic about killing Quakers and Indians. They went up the river some fifteen miles, crossed by an unopposed ford, and halted in Germantown ten miles north of Philadelphia. That was as far as they thought it safe to venture. Several days passed, during which the city people continued their preparations and expected every night to be attacked. There were, indeed, several false alarms. Whenever the alarm was sounded at night, every one placed candles in his windows to light up the streets. One night when it rained the soldiers were allowed to shelter themselves in a Quaker meeting house, which for some hours bristled with bayonets and swords, an incident of which the Presbyterian pamphleteers afterwards made much use for satire. On another day all the cannon were fired to let the enemy know what was in store for him.
Finally commissioners with the clever, genial Franklin at their head, went out to Germantown to negotiate, and soon had the whole mighty difference composed. The Scotch-Irish stated their grievances. The Moravian Indians ought not to be protected by the government, and all such Indians should be removed from the colony; the men who killed the Conestoga Indians should be tried where the supposed offense was committed and not in Philadelphia; the five frontier counties had only ten representatives in the Assembly while the three others had twenty-six—this should be remedied; men wounded in border war should be cared for at public expense; no trade should be carried on with hostile Indians until they restored prisoners; and there should be a bounty on scalps.
While these negotiations were proceeding, some of the Scotch-Irish amused themselves by practicing with their rifles at the weather vane, a figure of a cock, on the steeple of the old Lutheran church in Germantown—an unimportant incident, it is true, but one revealing the conditions and character of the time as much as graver matters do. The old weather vane with the bullet marks upon it is still preserved. About thirty of these same riflemen were invited to Philadelphia and were allowed to wander about and see the sights of the town. The rest returned to the frontier. As for their list of grievances, not one of them was granted except, strange and sad to relate, the one which asked for a scalp bounty. The Governor, after the manner of other colonies, it must be admitted, issued the long desired scalp proclamation, which after offering rewards for prisoners and scalps, closed by saying, "and for the scalp of a female Indian fifty pieces of eight." William Penn's Indian policy had been admired for its justice and humanity by all the philosophers and statesmen of the world, and now his grandson, Governor of the province, in the last days of the family's control, was offering bounties for women's scalps.
Franklin while in England had succeeded in having the proprietary lands taxed equally with the lands of the colonists. But the proprietors attempted to construe this provision so that their best lands were taxed at the rate paid by the people on their worst. This obvious quibble of course raised such a storm of opposition that the Quakers, joined by classes which had never before supported them, and now forming a large majority, determined to appeal to the Government in England to abolish the proprietorship and put the colony under the rule of the King. In the proposal to make Pennsylvania a Crown colony there was no intention of confiscating the possessions of the proprietors. It was merely the proprietary political power, their right to appoint the Governor, that was to be abolished. This right was to be absorbed by the Crown with payment for its value to the proprietors; but in all other respects the charter and the rights and liberties of the people were to remain unimpaired. Just there lay the danger. An act of Parliament would be required to make the change and, having once started on such a change, Parliament, or the party in power therein, might decide to make other changes, and in the end there might remain very little of the original rights and liberties of the colonists under their charter. It was by no means a wise move. But intense feeling on the subject was aroused. Passionate feeling seemed to have been running very high among the steady Quakers. In this new outburst the Quakers had the Scotch-Irish on their side, and a part of the Churchmen. The Germans were divided, but the majority enthusiastic for the change was very large.
There was a new alignment of parties. The eastern Presbyterians, usually more or less in sympathy with the Scotch-Irish, broke away from them on this occasion. These Presbyterians opposed the change to a royal governor because they believed that it would be followed by the establishment by law of the Church of England, with bishops and all the other ancient evils. Although some of the Churchmen joined the Quaker side, most of them and the most influential of them were opposed to the change and did good work in opposing it. They were well content with their position under the proprietors and saw nothing to be gained under a royal governor. There were also not a few people who, in the increase of the wealth of the province, had acquired aristocratic tastes and were attached to the pleasant social conditions that had grown up round the proprietary governors and their followers; and there were also those whose salaries, incomes, or opportunities for wealth were more or less dependent on the proprietors retaining the executive offices and the appointments and patronage.
One of the most striking instances of a change of sides was the case of a Philadelphia Quaker, John Dickinson, a lawyer of large practice, a man of wealth and position, and of not a little colonial magnificence when he drove in his coach and four. It was he who later wrote the famous "Farmer's Letters" during the Revolution. He was a member of the Assembly and had been in politics for some years. But on this question of a change to royal government, he left the Quaker majority and opposed the change with all his influence and ability. He and his father-in-law, Isaac Norris, Speaker of the Assembly, became the leaders against the change, and Franklin and Joseph Galloway, the latter afterwards a prominent loyalist in the Revolution, were the leading advocates of the change.
The whole subject was thoroughly thrashed out in debates in the Assembly and in pamphlets of very great ability and of much interest to students of colonial history and the growth of American ideas of liberty. It must be remembered that this was the year 1764, on the eve of the Revolution. British statesmen were planning a system of more rigorous control of the colonies; and the advisability of a stamp tax was under consideration. Information of all these possible changes had reached the colonies. Dickinson foresaw the end and warned the people. Franklin and the Quaker party thought there was no danger and that the mother country could be implicitly trusted.
Dickinson warned the people that the British Ministry were starting special regulations for new colonies and "designing the strictest reformations in the old." It would be a great relief, he admitted, to be rid of the pettiness of the proprietors, and it might be accomplished some time in the future; but not now. The proprietary system might be bad, but a royal government might be worse and might wreck all the liberties of the province, religious freedom, the Assembly's control of its own adjournments, and its power of raising and disposing of the public money. The ministry of the day in England were well known not to be favorably inclined towards Pennsylvania because of the frequently reported willfulness of the Assembly, on which the recent disturbances had also been blamed. If the King, Ministry, and Parliament started upon a change, they might decide to reconstitute the Assembly entirely, abolish its ancient privileges, and disfranchise both Quakers and Presbyterians.
The arguments of Franklin and Galloway consisted principally of assertions of the good intentions of the mother country and the absurdity of any fear on the part of the colonists for their privileges. But the King in whom they had so much confidence was George III, and the Parliament which they thought would do no harm was the same one which a few months afterwards passed the Stamp Act which brought on the Revolution. Franklin and Galloway also asserted that the colonies like Massachusetts, the Jerseys, and the Carolinas, which had been changed to royal governments, had profited by the change. But that was hardly the prevailing opinion in those colonies themselves. Royal governors could be as petty and annoying as the Penns and far more tyrannical. Pennsylvania had always defeated any attempts at despotism on the part of the Penn family and had built up a splendid body of liberal laws and legislative privileges. But governors with the authority and power of the British Crown behind them could not be so easily resisted as the deputy governors of the Penns.
The Assembly, however, voted—twenty-seven to three—with Franklin and Galloway. In the general election of the autumn, the question was debated anew among the people and, though Franklin and Galloway were defeated for seats in the Assembly, yet the popular verdict was strongly in favor of a change, and the majority in the Assembly was for practical purposes unaltered. They voted to appeal to England for the change, and appointed Franklin to be their agent before the Crown and Ministry. He sailed again for England and soon was involved in the opening scenes of the Revolution. He was made agent for all the colonies and he spent many delightful years there pursuing his studies in science, dining with distinguished men, staying at country seats, and learning all the arts of diplomacy for which he afterwards became so distinguished.
As for the Assembly's petition for a change to royal government, Franklin presented it, but never pressed it. He, too, was finally convinced that the time was inopportune. In fact, the Assembly itself before long began to have doubts and fears and sent him word to let the subject drop; and amid much greater events it was soon entirely forgotten.