Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  Franklin’s expression remained calm, but inwardly he must have experienced a sinking sensation. He knew as well as anyone else that farmers in Pennsylvania were no more inclined to part with their wagons than farmers in Maryland and Virginia. But he gamely agreed to do the job for the distraught general, if he would agree to paying some extra expenses. Most likely, Pennsylvanians would want to drive their teams in person or send one of their servants as a wagoner. That would make the cost of the wagon, four horses, and a driver fifteen shillings a day. Perhaps Franklin hoped Braddock would find this prohibitive. Instead, the British general took two pounds from his money box, and he told Franklin to get to work.

  Immediately Franklin conferred with Sir John St. Clair, who had just returned from a foray into western Pennsylvania to discuss the failure to build the roadway that was essential to keep the army supplied from Philadelphia. St. Clair gave Franklin a detailed description of what he had said to the lackadaisical westerners. If they did not get moving on the road, he warned them that he would send troops into Cumberland County, force every able-bodied man into road gangs at the point of a gun, slaughter their cattle as he wished in order to feed his men, and, if necessary, seize their horses, burn their houses - and, in general, treat them as a “parcel of traitors.”

  Most of the inhabitants of Cumberland County were German immigrants. Studying St. Clair, Franklin noticed that his uniform resembled that of a Hussar, the fearsome light cavalry of the Austrian and German armies, famous for their disregard of all civilized niceties and their love of plunder and rapine.

  Quickly Franklin dashed off a handbill and had several thousand copies printed for distribution throughout Lancaster, York, and Cumberland Counties. He came down hard on the price, fifteen shillings a day. It was a good price for a wagon, four horses, and a driver. But at the heart of Franklin’s message was a warning - if the immigrants did not accept “such good pay and reasonable terms” their loyalty would be “strongly suspected.” This would put the King’s “brave troops” in a seriously foul mood and their progress through the counties would almost certainly be “attended with many and great inconveniences,” a remark that needed no amplification for anyone who understood the plundering inclinations of European armies. If he did not get the required wagons in fourteen days, he would be forced to inform General Braddock of his failure. “And I suppose Sir John St. Clair, the Hussar, with a body of soldiers, will immediately enter the province for the purpose aforesaid, of which I shall be sorry to hear, because I am very sincerely and truthfully your friend and well-wisher.”

  Well within the deadline, over 150 four-horsed wagons, plus 259 pack horses streamed into Braddock’s camp.

  Everyone in the British Army was vastly amused by Franklin’s Hussar ploy. “I cannot but honor Franklin,” wrote William Shirley, Jr., son of the Massachusetts governor, “for the last clause of his advertisement.” General Braddock was ecstatic, and he wrote to his superiors in London, declaring that Franklin’s achievement was “the only evidence of ability and honesty I have known in these provinces.”

  William Franklin played a key role in this operation, securing dozens of horses and wagons in Cumberland County while his father was at work in York and Lancaster Counties. Helpful, too, was a singularly patriotic gesture on Benjamin’s part. When he saw some farmers were still skittish in spite of the appeal of hard money and the threat of Hussar St. Clair, he guaranteed the value of all the wagons by posting his personal bond for 20,000 pounds.

  Back in camp, meanwhile, Franklin became General Braddock’s favorite dinner companion. Before the fire in the tavern where they boarded, Braddock spread out his maps and traced his line of march over the Alleghenies for Franklin. The plan called for the speedy capture of Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Monongahela, and then a move north to reduce the French fort at Niagara. Franklin listened politely. He was no soldier, but his omnivorous mind could grasp the basic essentials of Braddock’s strategy. He also had a keen awareness that America was not Europe. Braddock was talking as if the rugged mountains, the impassable forests, and the rushing streams of western Pennsylvania did not exist. He was also assuming that the Indians were no threat whatsoever. In his mind’s eye, Franklin saw the army strung out in a long, narrow line along the road that they would have to cut for their advance. Something shuddered inside him, imagining what might happen if the Indians launched a surprise attack. Although he knew he was in the ludicrous position of an amateur advising a professional, he felt compelled to warn Braddock: “The only danger to your march is an Indian ambush,” he said. “Your army will be near four miles long. Could not an attack on its flanks cut it like a thread into several pieces?”

  General Braddock took a swig of his apple toddy, pulled on his long clay pipe and smiled benevolently at Franklin. “The savages may indeed be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia,” said the commander-in-chief, “but upon the King’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible that they should make any impression.”

  Franklin went home to Philadelphia, still troubled by doubts. A few days later, his old friends Doctors Phineas and Thomas Bond came to Franklin asking him for a donation to help purchase several hundred pounds of fireworks to celebrate the capture of Fort Duquesne. Letting his glasses slide down his nose, Franklin said: “I think it will be time enough to prepare the rejoicing when we know we have a reason to rejoice.”

  The doctors looked amazed. Like General. Braddock, they assumed that British regulars were invincible. “Why the devil,” said one of them. “You surely don’t suppose that the fort will not be taken?”

  “I don’t know that it will not be taken,” Franklin said, “but I know that war is a very uncertain business.”

  The Doctors Bond abandoned their fund raising.

  A few days later, a messenger rushed into Philadelphia carrying the unbelievable story that Braddock had been ambushed only a few miles from Fort Duquesne, and two-thirds of his soldiers killed or wounded. Braddock himself, and young William Shirley Jr., were among the dead. The survivors, under the command of Colonel Thomas Dunbar, were in panicky retreat. What must have struck Franklin like a blow in the solar plexus was the news that the wagoner’s - the moment they saw the first frantic refugees from the front streaming past them - let loose the fastest horse in their teams and abandoned the other animals and their wagons to the enemy. He had pledged 20,000 pounds of his own money for those horses and wagons. If British leaders decided not to pay those stingy Germans, they would descend on Benjamin Franklin like a swarm of locusts and devour him down to his shoe buckles.

  Meanwhile, in a council of war held at Fort Cumberland on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border on August 1, Colonel Dunbar decided to withdraw all the way to Philadelphia, taking with him every fighting man he had. When Franklin, as head of the Pennsylvania Assembly’s Committee of Defense, asked him for an opportunity to explore this foolish move, Dunbar suggested Trenton, New Jersey, as a likely place to meet. Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie called Dunbar’s headlong flight “monstrous.” Franklin made no comment on it, but it was evident to him that Pennsylvania would have to protect its own frontiers. The net effect of Braddock’s expedition had been to provide a handsome road down which the French and Indians could travel, unrestrained, to slaughter hapless farmers and their families in their lonely cabins.

  Not even desperate need, however, could reconcile Governor Morris and the Assembly. It had, in Franklin’s words, “no more effect upon [him] than the miracles of Moses had on the heart of Pharaoh.” The argument boiled down to a single word. Each time the Assembly sent a money bill to the governor, there was a clause calling for a tax on all estates real and personal “those of the Proprietaries not excepted.” The governor consistently tried to get the word “not” changed into “only.”

  Although Franklin followed his usual strategy of keeping his head down, the governor was an astute politician, and he had no trouble discerning who was the leading spirit of the opposition
. In his wrath, he wrote to his master, Thomas Penn, meanly pointing out that Franklin held “an office of profit as Deputy Postmaster General.” The Proprietor promptly paid a visit to the Secretary of State for the Colonies and tried to get Franklin fired. The minister showed Penn General Braddock’s letter praising Franklin’s services, and that was the end of that bit of backstabbing.

  Throughout the summer and into the fall, the debate raged in the Pennsylvania Assembly while frontier Indians picked off isolated farms and travelers in small probing raids. When no resistance appeared, the savages grew bolder and struck with more brutal force. Full-scale raiding parties poured into Berks and Northampton counties. Less than eighty miles from Philadelphia, people died under the tomahawk and scalping knife.

  Most of the victims were Germans, who had settled the wealthy area that stretched from York to the Quaker enclave around Philadelphia. Deeply religious to the point of pacifism, they had no enthusiasm for taking on Shawnee and Delaware warriors. Frantically, they begged Governor Morris for help. When that harried official failed to give them a satisfactory answer, more than a thousand of them marched on Philadelphia, carrying a wagon full of scalped corpses, which they parked before the governor’s mansion. Fortunately, Thomas Penn had only a few days earlier offered to donate 60,000 pounds to the defense of the colony if the Assembly would agree to a money bill that did not impose a tax on his estates. The governor was able to mollify these furious provincials with this proof of the Proprietors’ concern, and the desperate Germans dragged their wagonload of corpses over to the Assembly, where Benjamin Franklin assured them that action was forthcoming.

  Under Franklin’s leadership, the Assembly quickly voted 60,000 pounds to recruit and equip troops in accordance with a militia bill that the ubiquitous Mr. Franklin had drawn up. But this did not prove to be a quick solution to the Pennsylvania’s woes. Volunteers slowly formed military companies because Franklin’s bill specifically exempted Quakers from serving. This caused strong resentment among those who were being asked to risk their lives to defend the apostles of nonviolence.

  Franklin attacked the problem in the Pennsylvania Gazette by publishing a dialogue between Citizens X, Y, and Z.

  “For my part,” says Z, “I am no coward, but hang me if I fight to save the Quakers.”

  X replies, “That is to say, you will not pump ship because it will save the rats as well as yourself.”

  Then late in November came the worst news yet from the still defenseless frontier. The Moravian village of Gnadenhutten had been surprised by a Shawnee war party, and every living soul slaughtered except a handful who escaped to the woods. The village had been burned to the ground. Mass terror swept Pennsylvania. Farmers and their families abandoned their homesteads and crowded into the towns. Governor Morris, shuddering at the possibility of another and larger German assault on Philadelphia, succumbed to the widespread fright and fled to the aid of the man whom he had been denouncing in his letters to Thomas Penn for the better part of a year. Morris begged Franklin to recruit and organize a force of 300 rangers and lead them to the frontier, where he would have full authority to organize the region for defense. Franklin accepted, thus adding one more title to his resume: general.

  On December 18, 1755, Franklin, former Governor James Hamilton, and Joseph Fox, who had been designated “Commissioners of Defense” by the governor, rode up Philadelphia’s High Street and then north on Front Street to the Bethlehem Road with fifty troopers and three canvas-topped Conestoga wagons behind them. Beside Franklin rode his son, William, gorgeous in the uniform of a British grenadier, which he was entitled to wear thanks to a half-years’ service a decade earlier as an ensign during the conflict known as King George’s War. Although he technically served as his father’s aide-decamp, William soon took control of the military details of the expedition while Benjamin handled the political diplomacy.

  Down the road to Bethlehem - really little more than a cow path - the little army proceeded, the officers stopping at primitive inns along the way. In a letter to Deborah, Franklin told how the chambermaid almost froze him to death on the first night of the journey. He noticed the sheets she was putting on the bed were damp and asked her to air them first. An hour later, she announced the bed was ready, and Franklin slipped under the covers. A moment later he was on his feet again, shaking like a man who had just plunged into an icy pond. The chambermaid had aired the sheets on a hedge outside the inn, and they were literally frozen. Franklin was forced to wrap himself in his greatcoat and woolen trousers to endure them.”

  At Bethlehem, the Defense Commissioners found a frightened population, entertaining as many as a thousand refugees. But they were in good spirits, thanks to the well-organized Moravian Brotherhood, who controlled the town. Under their strong leadership, the settlers had erected a stockade, were well-armed with guns they had purchased in New York, and had an efficient system of sentries posted. They even had gathered paving stones near the upper story windows of their houses for women to drop on the heads of any Indians who attempted to break in. Franklin - a man repeatedly forced to deal with Quaker pacifists in the Pennsylvania Assembly - was wryly amused when the Moravians had abandoned their professed pacifism when they heard of the tragedy that had befallen Gnadenhutten. He could not resist needling the Moravian bishop, Augustus G. Spangenberg, about his “suprize.” Hadn’t they obtained an act of Parliament exempting them from military duties in the colonies, he asked the bishop. Didn’t this mean “they were conscientiously scrupulous of bearing arms?” The bishop replied that pacifism was not one of the “established principles” of the sect. But at the time that they obtained the act of Parliament, “it was thought to be a principle with many of their people.” However, in the current crisis they found that few adhered to it. Commenting later, Franklin said dryly, “It seems they were either deceiv’d in themselves, or deceiv’d the Parliament. But common sense aided by present danger, will sometimes be too strong for whimsical) opinions.”

  At Easton, the next village on their route, Franklin and his companions found a far different situation. The town was equally jammed with refugees from outlying farms, including not a few friendly Indians converted to Christianity. Although many of the refugees were Moravian, the Brotherhood did not rule Easton, and the situation was chaotic. Food was disappearing at an alarming rate and the disheartened refugees consoled themselves with whiskey. Neither of his fellow commissioners seemed inclined to do anything about the situation but write despairing letters back to Governor Morris. “The terror that has seized them is so great, or their spirits so small,” lamented ex-Governor Hamilton, “unless men come from other parts of the province I despair of getting such a number here as will be sufficient to garrison the blockhouses we propose to build.”

  The two Franklins had a private conversation, and they decided the situation called for a drastic, military solution. With Benjamin signing the orders, William swiftly organized a town guard of twenty-four men. Sentries were placed at the ends of the four main streets and rangers were ordered out to scour the area for Indian tracks. Communications were established with distant farmhouses, and the area around the town was cleared of bushes and trees for 200 yards, the range of an ordinary musket.”

  Until Franklin went into action, James Hamilton had been telling Governor Morris that the Militia Bill, which he had already denounced as “the quintessence of absurdity,” was proving itself to be a failure. The general alarm created by the Indians’ hit-and-run tactics made many people reluctant to come forward. But once these same frightened men saw genuine leadership, a story as old as human history was repeated. They volunteered by the dozen. In just ten days, Franklin had 200 men under arms. The Germans began to call him “General” and sometimes “Lieutenant General.”

  Pondering the difficulty of a guerrilla war against an adversary who lived and fought in the wilderness, Franklin came up with an idea that was some 200 years ahead of his time. He suggested ranger companies with dogs - “large, st
rong, and fierce.” Whenever the enemy came near “thick woods and suspicious places,” they could “turn out a dog or two to search them.”

  With Easton secured, the Franklins jogged through rain and mud to Reading to consult with Governor Morris and friendly Indians. They found the governor in a swivet. Franklin’s Militia Bill had provided that the enlisted men could choose their officers, with the approval of the governor and his council. The Philadelphia regiment - one of the first formed - had not too surprisingly elected Benjamin Franklin as its colonel, putting the governor in an excruciating bind. He knew that his employer Thomas Penn would foam at the mouth if he saw Franklin’s name on the regimental list. Other members of the Proprietary Party were already warning Penn that Franklin was plotting a coup d’etat, and his Militia Bill, as well as his march to the frontier, was part of this fiendish plan. With Franklin the only person who could hold the frontier together, Morris could not challenge him. In fact, just as he arrived at Reading, the governor got additional news that made the situation all the bleaker. A small body of troops sent to protect the Lehigh Gap near the ruins of Gnadenhutten had been surprised and driven to chaotic retreat. This reduced the governor to near collapse. He signed a “dedimus” which made Franklin, in effect, the military dictator of Northampton County and rode off with the other two commissioners to sign a treaty with friendly Indians.

  On January 15, in wretched weather, the two Franklins led 330 men out of Bethlehem for the twenty-mile march to Gnadenhutten. Rain came down in icy sheets, but the little expedition plodded grimly forward. Not till nightfall did they seek refuge in a German farmer’s barn where, Franklin wrote, “We were huddled together as wet as water could make us.” They stayed the next day, trying to dry out their soaked clothes. In this damp and depressing atmosphere with the freezing rain still pouring down outside, Franklin celebrated his fiftieth birthday. The fact that he survived these wilderness experiences is evidence of his physical vitality.