by H. W. Brands
Weiser thought a moment, then replied that they learned “good things” in the great house.
Canasatego rejoined that he had no doubt they told Weiser so, but as for himself, he was skeptical. He explained why. He had taken a batch of skins to a merchant in Albany, with whom he had done business before. He asked the merchant, a man named Hanson, how much he would pay for the skins. Hanson answered that he could not give more than four shillings per pound, a price Canasatego considered so low as to be almost insulting. But Hanson could not talk business now, as it was the day when all the Europeans gathered at the great house to learn good things.
Canasatego, knowing there would be no business done that day, decided to go to the great house himself and learn firsthand what happened there. He was intrigued, after entering the building, to see everyone listening intently to a man dressed in black, standing in the front and speaking rapidly in an angry voice. Unfortunately, Canasatego’s English could not keep up with the lesson, so he retired outdoors, where he smoked his pipe and waited for the meeting to end.
When it did, Hanson emerged, and Canasatego said he hoped the merchant had reconsidered his earlier offer. Four shillings a pound was much too low. Hanson said he had indeed reconsidered; he could not go higher than three shillings and sixpence. Surprised, Canasatego attempted to take his business elsewhere, only to hear every other fur buyer quote the same price: three and six. From this he concluded, as he explained to Weiser (and as Weiser related to Franklin), that the “good things” discussed in the great house were not good things at all but ways to cheat Indians on the price of beaver.
The Carlisle treaty—as the negotiation itself was called—was an education to Franklin. A strict and elaborate formality governed the speeches of both sides: the Pennsylvanians and the Six Nations on the one hand, and the Delawares, Twightwees, Shawonees, and Owandaets on the other. “Brethren,” the Pennsylvania commissioners jointly declared, delivering a string of wampum, “by this string we acquaint you that the Six Nations do, at our request, join with us in condoling the losses you have of late sustained by the deaths of several of your chiefs and principal men.”
This sentiment was seconded by Scarrooyady, the representative of the Iroquois. “Brethren, the Twightwees and Shawonees,” he said (as interpreted by Weiser), “It has pleased Him who is above that we shall meet here today and see one another. I and my Brother Onas join together to speak to you. As we know your seats at home are bloody, we wipe away the blood, and set your seats in order at your council fire.” Handing over another string of wampum and several blankets, Scarrooyady added: “We suppose that the blood is now washed off. We jointly, with our Brother Onas, dig a grave for your warriors, killed in your country, and we bury their bones decently, wrapping them in these blankets, and with these we cover their graves.”
After similar condolences to the Delawares and the Owandaets, Scarrooyady and the commissioners came to the point of the parley, which was to strengthen the tenuous alliance that currently obtained between the two sides. Speaking for both his own people and the Pennsylvanians, Scarrooyady addressed the others: “We, the English and Six Nations, do exhort every one of you to do your utmost to preserve this union and friendship, which has so long and happily continued among us. Let us keep the chain from rusting, and prevent every thing that may hurt or break it.” The commissioners warned that the French were doing their utmost to break the chain, trying to turn friend against friend. This must not be allowed to happen. “Do not separate. Do not part on any score. Let no differences nor jealousies subsist a moment between nation and nation.”
During the next four days the Delawares and the others indicated their willingness that the chain remain unbroken. But they and the other Indians, including the Iroquois, had some complaints they wished to air with the Pennsylvanians. Scarrooyady pointed out that the French governor of Canada blamed the English for the frontier troubles, contending that their advance toward the Ohio was the origin of all the conflict. Scarrooyady said the Six Nations did not take the French leader’s statements at face value—“He speaks with two tongues”—but there was no denying that the arrival of the English from the east made matters worse. “Call your people back on this side of the hills,” Scarrooyady said.
Of equal concern was the cost and quality of the trade goods the English merchants brought into the region. The English goods were too expensive and were not what the Indians wanted. The Indians wanted powder and lead, but the traders brought rum and flour. The rum was a curse, for the traders employed it to cheat the Indians. “These wicked whiskey sellers,” Scarrooyady said, “when they have once got the Indians in liquor, make them sell their very clothes from their backs.”
Franklin witnessed personally whereof Scarrooyady spoke. On their arrival at Carlisle the Pennsylvania commissioners forbade the sale of liquor by the merchants there. The embargo lasted the four days of the conference. At the end of that time the ban was lifted. Franklin described the result:
They were near 100 men, women and children, and were lodged in temporary cabins built in the form of a square just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walked out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square. They were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-coloured bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could be imagined. There was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum; of which we gave no notice.
The next day, sensible they had misbehaved in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counsellors to make their apology. The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavored to excuse the rum, by saying, “The Great Spirit who made all things made every thing for some use, and whatever use he designed any thing for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said, ‘Let this be for Indians to get drunk with.’ And it must be so.”
The rum did not merely corrupt the Indians. It also weakened the shield the Indians provided against the French. Franklin and his fellow commissioners emphasized this point in a scathing appendix to their report of the Carlisle proceedings. The quantities of liquor sold to the Indians, they said, had lately increased “to an inconceivable degree, so as to keep these poor Indians continually under the force of liquor.” As a result the tribes had become “dissolute, enfeebled and indolent when sober, and untractable and mischievous in their liquor, always quarrelling, and often murdering one another.” The actions of the traders, who acknowledged no obligation to anyone but themselves, threatened to “entirely estrange the affections of the Indians from the English, deprive them of their natural strength and activity, and oblige them either to abandon their country or submit to any terms, be they ever so unreasonable, from the French.” In light of this “deplorable state” of the Indians, the commissioners advocated “that good and speedy remedies may be provided, before it be too late.”
10
Join or Die
1754–55
It was already too late. Almost as Franklin was heading east with Richard Peters and Isaac Norris for Philadelphia, carrying news of their apparent success in affirming Pennsylvania’s Indian alliances, a young Virginian—at twenty-one years of age, not quite as old as William Franklin—was heading in the opposite direction. George Washington was a soldier in the Virginia militia; he showed such promise at soldiering that he already held the rank of major. And he was entrusted with an important mission. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, had ordered him to travel to the Ohio Valley and warn the French commander there that he was trespassing on English soil. The French commander must remove his troops and withdraw to Canada.
The Washington mission followed many months of risin
g tension over the fate of the trans-Appalachian west. The peace treaty of 1748 may have silenced the guns in Europe and compelled the privateers to abandon their licensed piracy for less thrilling (and less profitable) pursuits, but it did nothing to settle the question of ownership of the Ohio Valley. Various of the English colonies claimed Ohio by virtue of their charters, which audaciously (and ignorantly—no one had any idea of the distances involved) granted them territory from sea to sea. The French asserted ownership by claiming (ignorantly or disingenuously—he never got that far) that their man La Salle had reached the Ohio River on his voyage up the Mississippi in the 1670s.
Beyond their historic claims, the two sides had continuing competing interests in Ohio. The English coveted the opportunity to expand from their seaside colonies; the colonies’ growing agricultural populations made the rich bottomlands of the Ohio floodplain appear luscious almost beyond measure. Already, speculative land companies were surveying the region for subdivision and sale. Such surveying was what had propelled young Washington into the soldier’s trade; with only modest formal education but a head for trigonometry and a hand for draftsmanship, Washington at seventeen had joined a survey of the Shenandoah holdings of Lord Fairfax, an in-law. The hardy life of camp and march agreed with Washington; at the first chance he made the natural transition to the Virginia militia.
As for the French, in their thinking Ohio formed the keystone in a strategic arch that spanned North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Ohio would connect Canada to Louisiana, guaranteeing French control of the great North American heartland and forever condemning the hated British to a precarious existence on the continent’s eastern shore. More immediately, the French sought control of the Ohio fur trade, a commerce too small to support an empire but sufficient to incite the cupidity of corporations connected to government ministries.
News of the peace treaty had hardly reached America when the governor of Canada dispatched Captain Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville to Ohio to wave the French flag and plant lead plates bearing French territorial claims at strategic sites. In addition, he was to frighten off any English traders or settlers and convince the Indians of the region that their future lay with la belle France rather than perfidious Albion.
Céloron’s mission was only partly successful. Burying the lead plates was straightforward; convincing the Indians that France was their future was more involved, not least since the easier access of English traders (who came straight over the mountains from the Atlantic, rather than circuitously via Canada) meant they could undersell their French rivals. This cost differential had given the English an edge in Ohio—an edge visible in the much larger numbers of English traders, as compared to French, Céloron encountered. His own chaplain was forced to admit that Ohio was “little known to the French, and, unfortunately, too well known to the English.”
It was the French effort to alter this balance that led to the trouble that drew first Franklin and then Washington toward the Ohio. A new governor in Canada had sent several French traders to Logstown, located on the Ohio River in what would become the extreme western portion of Pennsylvania. One of the Virginia land companies—aptly named the Ohio Company—mobilized its merchants to counter the increased French presence. This triggered a minor competition between Pennsylvania and Virginia, as Pennsylvania traders hurried across the Alleghenies lest they lose the trade, and perhaps the land that supported the trade, to their southern cousins. The Pennsylvanians appealed to their provincial government for funds to build a fort at the Forks of the Ohio (where that river was formed from the Allegheny and Monongahela). But the Assembly was as stingy on frontier defense as it had traditionally been on every other form of defense, and the initiative remained with the Virginians.
The English initiative, that is. The French sponsored initiatives of their own. Most ominous of these was the construction of a line of forts running south from Lake Erie toward the Forks. This construction was what rang the alarm bells in the summer of 1753 and prompted Franklin’s trip to Carlisle. It was also what lay behind Washington’s expedition farther west just afterward.
Washington arrived at Venango (near what would become the town of Franklin) only to see a French flag flying over a trading post lately English. Here he encountered the same problem of Indian weakness for alcohol—and European exploitation of that weakness—that had so struck Franklin. At Venango, Washington tried to talk the Indians out of any attachment to the French. He initially had some luck with Tanachrison, a Seneca chief, who showed a desire to resume his alliance with the English after having been wooed away by the French. Tanachrison agreed to return the symbolic wampum he had received from French captain Philippe de Joincaire. Joincaire’s first reaction, on learning of this double cross (or perhaps triple cross), was to mutter of Tanachrison, “He is more English than the English.” But Joincaire masked his anger and insisted that Tanachrison join him in a series of toasts. By the time the keg was empty, Tanachrison was too drunk to hand back the wampum.
The rest of Washington’s expedition was no more successful. Joincaire refused the letter Washington carried from Governor Dinwiddie; he told Washington to take it to Fort Le Boeuf, north near Lake Erie. Washington wearily pushed through the rain and snow of December, finally reaching the fort and finding someone willing to accept Dinwiddie’s letter—albeit simply for forwarding to the governor of Canada. The French commander at Fort Le Boeuf politely informed Washington that evacuation of this French territory was out of the question.
Washington retired the way he had come. His horses failed on the way home, and he was reduced to walking. He came under Indian fire in the forest; he almost drowned in the Allegheny when a makeshift raft crashed against floes in the ice-laden stream. On several occasions he nearly succumbed to hypothermia. But his diary of the journey told a gripping story, which impressed Governor Dinwiddie and made Washington locally famous when the governor had it printed.
Washington’s report encouraged Dinwiddie to mount a more serious effort against the French. The Virginia governor requested assistance from Pennsylvania. To no one’s surprise, Franklin’s fellows in the Assembly displayed their customary aversion to military spending and refused Dinwiddie’s invitation. The Virginians were left to press on alone.
In the spring of 1754 Washington led two (rather skimpy) companies of militia toward the Forks of the Ohio, there to oversee construction of a fort. Unluckily for them, a larger French force had other ideas. The French troops scattered the English and leveled their unfinished handiwork. They then proceeded to lay the foundation for a more impressive French version, which they called Fort Duquesne.
Yet Washington did not discourage easily. After the embarrassment of the previous winter, he vowed to retake the Forks. He led his men on a swift night march and surprised a French scouting party, killing the commander and several others and capturing nearly all the rest. He then fell back to await reinforcements, which soon arrived.
These, however, created as many problems as they solved. They had outrun their supply train, which remained bogged in the woods behind; until the supplies arrived, the reinforcements simply ate the bread of Washington’s men. Moreover, one company consisted of British regulars from South Carolina who refused to take orders from a colonial—even a colonial colonel, as Washington now was. Neither did they warm to the work of digging trenches and constructing other necessary defenses.
The French struck while the redcoats quarreled. In a July rainstorm French muskets raked the English lines; at nightfall the French commander ceased fire and urged Washington to surrender. After all, the Frenchman argued, their countries were not at war. Washington conceded this point, and, surveying his four dozen wounded and dozen dead and the enfeebled condition of many of the unwounded, he accepted the French terms.
Whereupon he came to wish he had learned French. The terms included a pledge to pull back across the mountains to Virginia; they also included an admission that the leader of the Fren
ch scouting party had been “assassinated.” Only later did Washington realize what he had signed; the knowledge mortified and angered him immensely.
Perhaps Washington’s proud heart sensed that this defeat was but the beginning of a much longer and much more violent struggle. Perhaps, despite this second humiliation, he suspected that under arms he had found his calling. In a letter to his brother he described the first skirmish—the successful one: “I fortunately escaped without a wound, though the right wing where I stood was exposed to and received all the enemy’s fire…. I can with truth assure you, I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there was something charming in the sound.”
The response of King George to this comment (Washington’s brother shared the letter) was reported to be “He would not say so if he had been used to hear many.” Washington soon heard plenty, for the fighting on the banks of the Ohio that summer of 1754 escalated into a major war, in which Washington took a major part.
Franklin’s part in what Americans called the French and Indian War involved fewer bullets but was no less significant for that. At least since he had begun pondering the problem of colonial defense during the previous war, Franklin had been struck by the inexcusable inefficiencies consequent to the several colonies’ failure to coordinate actions. When France could count on Virginia’s jealousies of Pennsylvania and New York’s suspicions of New England, the far fewer Frenchmen in North America could effectively stymie the more numerous and otherwise more resourceful Englishmen. The example of their neighbors the Iroquois should shame those provincials who placed particular interest ahead of the common good. “It would be a very strange thing,” Franklin wrote in 1751, “if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted for ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous.”
