When the rain slackened, the small army moved out again and now as they neared Gnadenhutten William Franklin took over and organized the march with “great order and regularity,” in the words of one eyewitness. William rode at the head of the column, with scouts probing the trees on each side of the trail. The troops on horseback followed him. Behind them were the edgy remnants of the companies that had survived the Indians’ surprise attack on January 3. In the center of the column, William placed his father with the five wagons of baggage, tools, and stores. Two companies of foot soldiers composed the rear guard. More scouts swept the trees on the flanks and the rear of the column, reducing the likelihood of a surprise attack to a minimum.
They were grimly aware that the enemy was all around them. Shortly before leaving Bethlehem, thirteen farmers came to Franklin, asking for guns and ammunition so they could go back to their homesteads and recover their cattle. Straggling along in the rain, they neglected to keep their priming pans of their muskets dry and an Indian war party killed eleven of them. One of the weeping survivors staggered into the Franklin camp with the harrowing story. Grimly Franklin issued orders to his men that made it clear he was ready to wage war with equal ferocity. He told them $40 “will be allow’d and paid by the government for each scalp of an Indian enemy so killed, the same being produced with proper attestations.”
Through the narrow Lehigh Gap with steep-sided “hills like Alps,” the small army trudged. Every man struggled to obey Franklin’s orders to keep his musket dry. It did not require a military genius to see that this narrow pass was their only line of retreat, and a handful of Indians could block it. A few hours later they emerged at the western end of the pass, to stand on the plateau before the ruins of Gnadenhutten. A young ensign with the expedition described the grisly scene. “All silent and desolate, the houses burnt, the inhabitants butchered in most shocking manner, their mangled bodies for want of funerals exposed to birds and beasts of prey. . . .” The soldiers needed no urging from the two Franklins to go to work. They knew that a stockade was far more reliable protection than any hope of retreat through the narrow pass at their backs. Quickly they buried the dead, threw up crude huts for living quarters, and began hacking at the plentiful timber around the ruined village. In only seven days, they had completed a fort, 455 feet in circumference, in spite of the fact that every other day it rained so hard they had to take refuge in their huts.
Ever the experimental observer, Franklin noticed that on the days that the men worked hard they were “good natured and cheerful.” On the idle days, they were mutinous and quarrelsome, “finding fault with their pork, the bread and &c, and in continual ill-humor.” Franklin did his best to boost their morale. As usual, his approach was original. The little army had a chaplain, a devout Presbyterian named Charles Beatty. He came to Franklin complaining that the men “did not generally attend his prayers and exhortations.” As a stern soldier of the Lord, he was probably hoping that Franklin would issue an order forcing the men to worship under threat of punishment. Franklin mused for a moment, stared out at the bleak Pennsylvania hills, and then with a small, shrewd smile noted that, along with pay and provisions, the men were guaranteed a gill of rum a day, half in the morning and half in the evening. He hoped the chaplain would not think it beneath the dignity of his profession, Franklin said, but if he would “act as steward of the rum . . . if you were to deal it out, only just after prayers. . .”
This struck Mr. Beatty as a good idea. He recruited a few chaplain’s assistants to measure out the rum.
“Never were prayers more generally and more punctually attended,” said Franklin.
Deborah Franklin, worried about her husband, sent him a steady stream of food and wine, including roast beef, roast veal, minced pies and apples. Although he was actually sleeping on a pine-board floor, Franklin cheerfully told her that he was spending his nights in “feather beds, in warm blankets.” With more truth, he assured her that all the members of his staff drank to her health at every meal because there was “always something on the table to put them in mind of you.”
Once the fort was completed, William Franklin ordered their sole cannon to be mounted in one of the angles and fired as an act of defiance to the Indians whom they knew were watching them from the surrounding forest. With the fort as a ready refuge, patrols were ordered out to “scour the adjacent country.” On the neighboring hills, they found evidence that the Indians were watching them closely. Franklin trudged up the slopes and inspected the savages’ hiding place. He made careful notes on how they kept themselves warm, almost within sight and sound of the white men’s fort. “A common fire on the surface of the ground would by its light have discover’d their position. . . . They had therefore dug holes in the ground about three feet in diameter, and somewhat deeper. We saw where they had with their hatchets cut off the charcoal from the sides of burnt logs lying in the woods. With these coals, they had made small fires in the bottom of the holes, and we observed among the weeds and grass the prints of their bodies made by their laying all round with their legs hanging down in the holes to keep their feet warm.”
Franklin always maintained a lively interest in Indians and Indian affairs. He had seen too much of their cruelty and unpredictability to keep any romantic notions about the noble Redman. But he was always in favor of treating them fairly and honestly. Later, he was to prove himself ready to defend them at the risk of his life against the cruel reprisals of aroused whites.
Franklin named the stockade at Gnadenhutten Fort Allen, after the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, and sent out working parties to build two smaller stockades, fifteen miles to the east and west. With these primitive bastions completed and manned, there was a series of forts along the mountain wall strong enough to resist the usual Indian war party of perhaps a dozen or two dozen warriors. On February 1 came a letter from Governor Morris urging Franklin to return to Philadelphia for an early meeting of the Assembly, which he had just called. Coincidentally, into Fort Allen strolled Colonel William Clapham, a professional Indian-fighter from New England. Franklin promptly appointed him commander, paraded the troops, and turned over the fort to him. In a few days, he was back in Philadelphia, General no more.”
Franklin’s military career was not yet over. The governor had finally signed his colonel’s commission, and the Philadelphia regiment was proudly drilling on High Street each evening, under their officers’, and sometimes their colonel’s, approving eyes. Franklin’s political opponents decided to create a rival military organization and solicited recruits for something called “the Regiment of Philadelphia County,” headed by one Jacob Duche. A lively competition ensued, which soon led to sniping in the newspapers. A Duche partisan sneeringly demanded whether “six and seven hundred men and boys, a greater part of whom had never appeared at a formal muster, can be called a ‘well-trained regiment of a thousand men.’”
William Franklin, intensely proud of his military reputation, undoubtedly spurred his father to retaliate. There were also strong political reasons for a show of strength. Thus, on March 11, The Pennsylvania Gazette carried a statement in the largest, blackest type available in the print shop of Franklin and Hall.
The Regiment of Philadelphia is to be reviewed on Tuesday next, the 16th inst., at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on Society Hill, By order of the Colonel.
Swallowing hard, the Proprietary Party, including Governor Morris, former Governor Hamilton, and Franklin’s other dedicated enemies took their place on a reviewing stand at the present intersection of Front and Pine Streets in Philadelphia. Around them thronged a “vast concourse of people,” according to the reporter in The Pennsylvania Gazette, who may well have been Franklin himself.
Companies wheeled by the right flank and the left flank on Society Hill and fired by platoons while the spectators oohed and aahed with delight. The artillerymen then demonstrated their skill with their brass cannon, firing a thunderous twelve-round salute in a single minute. The soldiers were so please
d with themselves that they escorted their colonel back to his house and fired a farewell salute that shattered several glasses in his electrical laboratory and terrified Deborah and Sarah Franklin.
The sight of Franklin at the center of this martial column inspired vast alarm in the Proprietary Party. They rushed home to their desks and fired off warnings to Thomas Penn. They found yet more ammunition, a few weeks later, when Franklin departed on another post office tour, this one south to Virginia. William Franklin was determined to miss no opportunity to elevate the colonel’s reputation, and he persuaded some thirty grenadiers and twenty young officers to accompany Franklin to the ferry, about three miles from town. To complete the dramatic effect, someone barked an order and out of their scabbards slid the grenadiers’ long, gleaming swords. This show made Franklin look like Genghis Khan en route to a massacre, and when Thomas Penn heard about it, he exploded. No one had ever paid him such an honor, when he visited Pennsylvania. It was, he fulminated, reserved for princes of the blood royal. Now he was sure that Franklin was plotting to make himself the Cromwell or the King of Pennsylvania.
Once more Penn renewed his intrigues against Franklin in London, this time going straight to Sir Everard Fawkener, the Postmaster General, asking him to write a letter all but ordering Franklin to become a Proprietary yes-man or lose his job. Fawkener, more impressed by Franklin’s reputation than by Penn’s whining, wrote what his American deputy called “a gentle admonition” and no more. Not a word did Penn write to Franklin, thanking him for the fifty days he had spent on the frontier in the worst of winter. Penn’s petty meanness caused Franklin to hold him in contempt. When his London friend Peter Collinson warned Franklin that Penn and his relatives were incensed at Franklin’s military flourishes, Franklin tartly replied: “I am not much concerned at that because if I have offended them by acting right, I can whenever I please reverse their displeasure by acting wrong.”
Meanwhile, Franklin luxuriated in Virginia’s early spring, “gay as a bird,” as he wrote Deborah. Again he met George Washington, en route home from a fruitless trip to Boston, where he had attempted to convince the new British commander-in-chief, William Shirley, to back him in his claim that his provincial commission as a colonel of the Virginia militia was superior to the commission of a captain in the regular British Army. He was upset that he failed to get a clear statement of support from Shirley, who ruled instead that the Maryland officer with whom Washington was contending was not acting in the capacity of a regular and, therefore, had to take orders from the Virginia colonel. Washington wanted himself and his men to be incorporated into the regular military establishment. But Shirley could only shrug his shoulders and say that would depend on orders from London. Although Franklin hardly needed the lesson, it was one more example of how disunited the colonies were and how inchoate was the British approach of trying to govern them down to the most minute details from Whitehall Palace.
From Virginia, Franklin sailed to New York, where, to his relief, he learned that the British treasury would make good on the farmers’ wagons and horses, lost in Braddock’s disaster. He met and was unimpressed by Braddock’s arrogant slow-thinking replacement, Lord Loudon, who was planning an attack on the French fortress of Louisburg, on Cape Breton Island. He was far more taken with one of Loudon’s subordinates, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swiss-born officer, who had organized the Royal Americans, one of the first regiments recruited to gain official recognition from London as equal in power and prestige to British regular outfits. Bouquet was a thoughtful soldier, who made a point of seeking out the best American advice he could get. He and Franklin had several long discussions about how best to quiet the frontier. Between them, they conceived the idea of a military colony, which would be a buffer state between the settled colonies and the Indian nations.
Franklin had already suggested a similar idea to the Albany Congress. Now, stimulated by Bouquet, he wrote a letter to a man in England who could play a strong role in making the idea a reality. His name was George Whitefield, and he was one of the greatest preachers of his time. He had been one of the prime movers of the “great awakening,” a religious revival which had swept the American colonies in 1735. Franklin and he became devoted friends when Whitefield preached in Philadelphia, and the minister and the philosopher had long intense discussions of theology that deepened their relationship but did not change either of their minds.
Franklin loved to tell the story of the time he had gone to see Whitefield preach, determined not to be impressed, and especially not to contribute to the inevitable collection at the close. “I had in my pocket,” he said, “a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he [Whitefield] proceeded, I began to soften and concluded to give him the copper. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”
Once, when Whitefield was in Philadelphia, Franklin invited him to stay at his house. Whitefield answered, “If you make that offer for Christ’s sake, you will not miss of the reward.”
Franklin, disliking such one-upmanship, bluntly replied, “Don’t let me be mistaken. It was not for Christ’s sake, but for your sake.”
In spite of this and no doubt other rebuffs, Whitefield’s relationship with Franklin remained close. Franklin regularly published all his journals and sermons on his press. No matter what he thought of his theology, Franklin regarded him as a powerful leader of men.
It was from this viewpoint that the philosopher wrote to the preacher, suggesting that they join forces to establish a colony in the Ohio Valley. Sitting on the edge of the wilderness at Gnadenhutten the previous winter, Franklin had listened with freshly opened ears to his son William as he expounded upon the richness and beauty of the Ohio country. The visit to the wilderness had awakened memories of William’s journey west with George Croghan in 1748. Then, Franklin had been inclined to ignore his passion as the effusion of a seventeen-year-old. Besides Franklin considered himself preeminently a city man; he had little or no appetite for roughing it on the frontier, which he had never visited. But his foray through the Lehigh Gap had awakened his sense of adventure. It was hardly surprising; there is always much of the explorer in the scientist, and much of the scientist in the explorer. Franklin was also pleasantly surprised by how well he had withstood the hardships of the wilderness, “There are a great number of things besides what we have, that used to seem necessary to comfortable living, yet we have learned to do without them,” he had written to Deborah.
But Franklin’s primary motivation was his concern for William. For all his warnings that he had no intention of leaving his son a handsome patrimony, Franklin was much too paternal to avoid this strongest of fatherly desires. At Albany he had proposed an Ohio colony as an abstract proposition in the hope that the Crown might undertake it. But now to his old friend Whitefield he revealed a larger ambition. Together they might build it, organize it, and administer it. More and more, the idea became to Franklin the project with which to complete his career.
“What a glorious thing it would be,” he told Whitefield, “to settle in that fine country a large, strong body of religious and industrious peoples! What a security to the other colonies; an advantage to Britain, by increasing her people, territory, strength, and commerce. . . . Life, like a dramatic piece, should not only be conducted with regularity, but me thinks it should finish handsomely. Being now in the last act, I begin to cast about for something fit to end with. Or if mine be more properly compar’d to an epigram, as some of its lines are but barely tolerable, I am very desirous of concluding with a bright point.”
Back in Philadelphia Franklin was engulfed once more in the old controversy between the Assembly and the Proprietors. At a public dinner, William Denny, the new governor, presented Franklin with the Gold Medal of the Royal Society. After dinner, over several decanters of Madeira, the governor
tried to convince Franklin to join the Proprietary camp, promising him “every service” in his power, plus “acknowledgements and recompences” from Thomas Penn. Franklin coolly replied that he bore no personal enmity against the Penns, but he intensely disliked seeing a man promote his own interests at the expense of the people. He only hoped, he added, that the governor’s freedom of action was not bound by “the same unfortunate instructions” that had hamstrung his predecessors.
Denny’s eyes fell; he drank his Madeira, and said nothing.”
No sooner was the Assembly convened than the usual fighting began again. Franklin and his followers were outraged to discover that the 5,000 pounds generously donated by Penn to the war effort consisted of back rents in Pennsylvania that they would have to collect. Then came a new disaster. The fort at Gnadenhutten was stormed by the Indians while half of the garrison was skating on the Lehigh River. Colonel Clapham - the professional soldier Franklin had put in charge - had been too much of a disciplinarian for the militiamen, and they had connived to get him fired. Without him, the garrison’s organization had evaporated, and now the fort, constructed at the expense of so much time, money, and effort, was a mound of charred logs and the frontier was exposed to war parties once more.
Worse, the Indians were now bolstered by French troops; a French officer had even been captured not far from Easton. From New York, Lord Loudon was demanding money from Pennsylvania to fund his northern offensive. Reluctantly the Assembly decided to raise 100,000 pounds for the King’s use by taxing “all estates, real and personal.” This included the Proprietors’ estates, but when they submitted the bill to the governor and his council, these worthies proceeded to demand so many exceptions in the Penns’ favor that the Assembly exploded in rage. Marching en masse through the streets, they delivered a scorching “remonstrance” to the governor, which said in part: “. . . The Proprietaries professed willingness to be taxed . . . can be intended only to amuse and deceive their superiors; since they have in their instructions excepted . . . so much of their vast estate, as to reduce their tax as far as it appears to us, below that of a common farmer or trades-man.” When the governor querulously insisted on following his instructions, the Assembly ripped off another resolution: “That a commissioner or commissioners, be appointed to go home to England, in behalf of the people of this province, to solicit a removal of the grievances we labour under by reason of proprietary instructions, &c.” The Assembly then named the Speaker of the House, Isaac Norris, and his good friend, Benjamin Franklin, as these emissaries to London. Norris declined. He was old and sick. But Franklin quietly accepted, calling the nomination “a high honour.”
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