The First American

by H. W. Brands

  The situation elsewhere was less promising. The commissioners traveled from Bethlehem to Easton, at the eastern terminus of the Pennsylvania frontier (next door was the Delaware River, across which lay New Jersey). On Christmas Day, James Hamilton wrote to Governor Morris, “The people here are not very numerous and are besides very backward in entry into the service, though the encouragement is great, and one would think they would gladly embrace the opportunity of avenging themselves on the authors of their ruin.” But they lacked the nerve to do so. “The terror that has seized them is so great, or their spirits so small, unless men come from other parts of the province I despair of getting such a number here as will be sufficient to garrison the block houses we proposed to build.”

  Franklin adopted the attitude that the building of a block house would go far toward bolstering those quavering souls. Hamilton at first had charge of the commission, although his inclusion at all seems to have represented as much an effort by Morris to keep watch on Franklin as a measure to strengthen the frontier. Hamilton had no sympathy whatever with Franklin’s militia bill, describing it to Thomas Penn as “the quintessence of absurdity.” In the field he got in the way, and before long Franklin elbowed him aside. By the end of December, Franklin was drafting orders like a career soldier. “You are immediately to raise and take into pay for one month a company of foot consisting of 24 men, to be employed as a garrison, guard and watch for the town of Easton,” he wrote Major William Parsons. “You are to keep a constant regular watch with your company every night, 4 sentinels being placed at the outer ends of the four principal streets, and one near the guard room…. You are likewise once at least in every day to send out a scout to range some miles round the town, to examine all thickets and places capable of concealing parties of the enemy.” A week later, following a dismaying new report from Gnadenhutten that enemy Indians had routed not merely isolated settlers, as in the recent past, but a well-armed company of militia, Governor Morris acknowledged the obvious and formally appointed Franklin military commander for that sector of the frontier, with complete authority over all aspects of the emergency.

  On January 15 Franklin led a march across the Blue Mountains to Gnadenhutten. The winter weather was miserable, with the temperature just above freezing and a heavy rain that soaked the men and, more worryingly, their firearms. The Indians of that region were used to winter warfare and knew how to keep their powder and gunlocks dry; had Franklin’s column been attacked on the march, the men would have had difficulty returning fire. Indeed, the one survivor of an earlier raid said his ten companions had been killed because the wetness had incapacitated their weapons.

  The route of the march intensified the danger. One of Franklin’s men, Thomas Lloyd, left a description of a particularly perilous stretch: “Hills like Alps on each side and a long narrow defile where the road scarcely admitted a single wagon at the bottom of it; a rapid creek with steep banks and bridge made of a single log situated so the Indians might with safety to themselves from the caverns in the rocks have cut us all off notwithstanding all human precaution.”

  The column arrived intact, only to witness what the unseen enemy was capable of. “All round appears nothing but one continued scene of horror and destruction,” wrote Lloyd. “Where lately flourished a happy and peaceful village is now all silent and desolate, the houses burnt, the inhabitants butchered in the most shocking manner, their mangled bodies for want of funerals exposed to birds and beasts of prey and all kinds of mischief perpetrated that wanton cruelty can invent.”

  The first order of business was burying the dead; the second, commencing construction of a fort. Of necessity the men of that part of the country were adept at hewing wood; as important as the firearms Franklin’s men brought were the seventy axes. Amid the danger and destruction Franklin indulged his scientific curiosity to time two men felling a tree (six minutes for a tree fourteen inches in diameter). Once the branches were removed, each pine trunk was cut into three pieces eighteen feet long. One end was pointed with the axes; the other was tipped into a trench three feet deep that served as the foundation of the stockade. Raised and secured, some 450 timbers made a fortress 150 yards in circumference. Carpenters constructed a platform several feet above the ground on the inside of the walls, from which the men might fire through loopholes at attackers. At one of the corners was mounted a small swivel gun. Franklin ordered a round fired to apprise any enemies within hearing that the English now had a cannon to defend themselves. From start to finish the construction required less than a week, despite downpours that recurrently halted the work.

  Franklin’s approach to military command was typical of his approach to social affairs generally. The furthest thing from a martinet, he preferred to appeal to his men’s reason and self-interest. The chaplain of the company complained that the men were insufficiently attendant to prayers and his sermons; Franklin suggested a change in the rationing system. Each man, as part of the enlistment agreement, had been promised a gill (roughly four ounces) of rum a day. “It is perhaps below the dignity of your profession to act as steward of the rum,” Franklin told the chaplain. “But if you were to deal it out, and only just after prayers, you would have them all about you.” Attendance at prayers improved at once.

  Upon completion of the stockade Franklin sent a scouting party into the forest about the fort; the rangers found that there had indeed been an audience for the warning shot—and apparently an audience for the entire construction process. On a wooded hill overlooking the fort Franklin’s men discovered several holes dug in the dirt. At the bottom of these holes were the ashes of charcoal fires; in the grass at the edges of the holes were the imprints where the Indians had sat, their feet hanging down in the holes next to the smoldering (but nonsmoking) fires. Thus warm and invisible, the Indians had watched the fort go up. Presumably they had decamped to give notice of the construction to their comrades.

  The fort at Gnadenhutten, named Fort Allen for William Allen, the chief justice of Pennsylvania and a longtime friend of Franklin, was one of three built under Franklin’s command. The others—subsequently called Fort Norris for the speaker of the Assembly, and Fort Franklin—were fifteen miles to either side of Fort Allen along a southwest-to-northeast line that paralleled the mountains.

  By themselves the forts did little to secure the frontier from Indian attack. Although they did provide a refuge for settlers in the event of further attacks, their primary purpose was psychological. The Indians of Pennsylvania and the neighboring provinces must have known long before this time that they would never be able to resume the ways of life that had sustained their ancestors prior to the arrival of the Europeans; in light of the conveniences consequent to European contact—guns, metal tools, and the like—it was doubtful that many of the present generation wanted to recapture their ancestors’ less sophisticated lifestyle. In any case, the Europeans were here to stay. The only question was which Europeans the Indians would have to deal with. If the French drove out the English, the Indians would have to make peace with the French. During the last two years the French had indeed seemed about to drive the English into the sea. But if the English were determined to stay, then the Indians would have to accommodate themselves to the English. More than outposts for defense, Franklin’s forts were a statement of imperial purpose.

  In time of danger, capable military leaders capture the hearts of their countrymen. Franklin’s part in rallying the Assembly and then leading the militia made him the hero of the hour in Pennsylvania. At the beginning of February 1756 he learned that Governor Morris was convening the Assembly; hoping to ensure that what he had accomplished in the backwoods of Northampton County not be lost in the back rooms of Philadelphia, Franklin relinquished operational command to Colonel William Clapham, a veteran of the Indian wars on the frontier, and, riding hard, covered the seventy-five miles from Fort Allen to the capital in two long days and a short night.

  Yet only part of Franklin’s hurry reflected his anxiety abou
t the governor’s aims. The rest revealed a desire to avoid what he considered excessive praise. As he prepared to return to Philadelphia, he heard that a large body of citizens intended to ride out and greet him and to escort him back to the capital. “To prevent this,” Franklin explained to Peter Collinson, “I made a forced march, and got to town in the night, by which they were disappointed, and some a little chagrinned.”

  The chagrin and disapproval did not, however, prevent Franklin’s being elected colonel of the Philadelphia regiment. Now it was Governor Morris who was chagrined. Although he had been forced to turn to Franklin in the hour of maximum danger, he did not wish to make Franklin’s command official—both because he knew that the proprietors despised Franklin and because he himself distrusted him. Yet in light of the clear requirements of the militia bill, which he had signed, he had no alternative to accepting whom the militiamen chose. After two weeks of hoping for providential deliverance in one form or another, Morris grudgingly gave his approval.

  Franklin shortly treated the city to a review of the troops. The ghost of William Penn must have groaned to hear the tramp of a thousand soldiers’ boots across his city of brotherly love. The first company reached the reviewing stand, drew up, waited until the second company neared, then fired into the air and retreated in close order. The second company did the same, and so on. Four freshly painted cannon were hauled along the street by teams of powerfully built horses. Oboes (“haut-boys”) and fifes filled the air with their martial melodies; just after them rode Franklin alone, master of all he surveyed. “So grand an appearance was never before seen in Pennsylvania,” asserted the Gazette.

  Franklin’s triumph was not without minor amusements. As the troops marched past his house, they honored their colonel with thunderous volleys—“which shook down and broke several glasses of my electrical apparatus,” Franklin noted wryly.

  Governor Morris, and Thomas Penn at a distance, could only shudder at the swelling enthusiasm for their chief adversary. For a decade Penn had suspected Franklin of designs against the established government of the province. During most of that period Franklin had challenged the status quo by political means, but briefly in the days of the Association, and now again as colonel of the Philadelphia regiment, he appeared capable of leading a military revolt.

  The appearance only intensified a few days later when Franklin set off for Virginia. This time he was wearing his postmaster’s cap rather than his colonel’s hat, but his men provided a send-off suited to a victorious general. “Twenty officers of my regiment with about 30 grenadiers presented themselves on horseback at my door just as I was going to mount, to accompany me to the ferry about 3 miles from town,” Franklin told Collinson. “Till we got to the end of the street, which is about 200 yards, the grenadiers took it in their heads to ride with their swords drawn.”

  The show was hardly Franklin’s idea; inwardly he groaned, knowing that it could “serve only to excite envy or malice.” In fact it excited both. Provincial secretary Richard Peters wrote Penn describing Franklin’s behavior as an “abomination” and declaring, “The city is in infinite distraction all owing to the officers of the militia puffed up and now solely directed by Colonel Franklin…. Matters are ten times worse in the city than ever and the Antiproprietary party will gain more ground than ever by means of the Colonel who continues to evidence a most implacable enmity against the Proprietors.”

  Thomas Penn was less alarmed than Peters, living much farther from the scene, but he was no less concerned. “I much wonder the Governor would appoint Mr. Franklin colonel,” Penn told Peters. “He should never have any commission given to him till it is certain he has changed his sentiments.” Penn decried Franklin’s “republican principles” and asserted, “I have scarcely seen such an instance of baseness as in this of Franklin’s.”

  Penn’s criticism of Franklin must have reflected at least a little annoyance at himself for misjudging the man. Franklin almost certainly could not have received his appointment as deputy postmaster without Penn’s approval, at least tacit. Doubtless the proprietor hoped that the appointment would purchase Franklin’s cooperation on matters touching proprietary prerogatives. It was not an unreasonable hope. It had been borne out in Penn’s gubernatorial appointments; applied generally, the principle was what held the empire together.

  But it underestimated Franklin badly. Financially, Franklin did not need the job; this alone set him apart from most placemen. Indeed, he had yet to make a pound from the post. Penn had no real experience with civic-mindedness; that a person might assume a task for the good of his country and people was beyond him.

  Before long, Penn would get to know Franklin personally and would come to appreciate the extent of his misjudgment of Franklin’s motives. Meanwhile he sought to neutralize Franklin’s influence. One method set fire against fire, figuratively. Franklin’s current influence derived from his control of the provincial militia; Penn encouraged Governor Morris to create anti-Franklin military units. Either from want of imagination or from conscious irony, the governor’s companies modeled their organization on Franklin’s 1747 Association; they even appropriated the Association’s name. Needless to say, the supporters of this new group cited public spirit and a desire to defend the province as their reasons for taking arms; almost as needless to say, their taking arms was interpreted—just as it was intended—as a riposte to Franklin’s growing fame and influence.

  It was not inconceivable that at some point the contest between Franklin’s soldiers and the governor’s would take direct, armed form; for now the clashes consisted of rival reviews in the streets of Philadelphia and nasty clashes in the newspapers of the city. Franklin scored the governor for dividing the province when he should have been uniting it. The governor’s friends responded that Franklin’s fame had gone to his head. From experimenting with electricity, he now experimented with the welfare of the people. “To be convinced whether a shock of the electric fluid will kill rats or turkeys, must the experiment be made general on all the rats and turkeys on the face of the earth?”

  As the controversy raged, Franklin went about his business—which only incensed the proprietary party the more. When King George dispatched Lord Loudoun to America as commander in chief, following the belated formal declaration of war, Franklin traveled to New York to meet him. Loudoun apparently found Franklin’s counsel useful, for he conferred with him repeatedly during the summer of 1756 on the state of frontier defense and the politics of provincial security. Franklin in turn developed a high regard for the new commander. “I have had the honour of several conferences with him on our American affairs,” Franklin told William Strahan, “and am extremely pleased with him. I think there cannot be a fitter person for the service he is engaged in.”

  Meanwhile the proprietary campaign against Franklin continued. Thomas Penn tried to have Franklin stripped of his postmastership. When this failed—after Franklin defended himself to his postal superiors—Penn tried another approach. Franklin’s Militia Act had challenged not merely proprietary control of Pennsylvania politics but some of the basic principles of imperial rule, among these the selection of officers. As Penn explained to Morris, “The militia is taken out of the hands of the Crown, and the appointment of officers given to the people, which can never be allowed.”

  Penn revealed Franklin’s offense to the appropriate officers of the Crown, who, agreeing, canceled the Militia Act. This neat trick not only solved Penn’s problem with the turbulent colonel but placed the proprietor in the comfortable and relatively unusual position of defending His Majesty’s authority in North America.

  Franklin viewed this latest development with equanimity. After half a century on earth he knew—better than most great men do—what he was good at and what not. He knew he was no soldier. He might organize frontier defense and command construction battalions, but he had no experience of combat and little inclination to acquire it. Franklin had met Colonel Washington of Virginia on the road; he could tell at o
nce that Washington possessed far more of the martial spirit than he would ever have. At one point of maximum alarm, Governor Morris offered to make Franklin a general if he would lead a campaign to capture Fort Duquesne. Franklin rejected the offer. “I had not so good an opinion of my military abilities as he professed to have,” he said later. Consequently he could not be too disappointed at Parliament’s decision to terminate his military career.

  Besides, he had something better than a military command. “The people happen to love me,” he told Peter Collinson in November 1756. Franklin could put aside military authority, but his ego was not immune to popular acclaim. A warrior like Washington might find charm in the sound of bullets whistling overhead; Franklin was more beguiled by the sense of embodying the virtuous desires of ordinary people. This feeling of being virtue’s agent was not new in Franklin’s life. His earlier civic initiatives had afforded a taste of it. But only upon entering politics—upon placing himself before voters—had he felt it so directly. And it was this that allowed him to shrug off the attacks by the proprietors and their agents. Referring to a recent barrage, he told Collinson, “I am not much concerned at that, because if I have offended them by acting right, I can, whenever I please, remove their displeasure by acting wrong.”

  Franklin appreciated the possibility of self-delusion in such matters. He regularly examined his motives. For the present at least, regarding the struggle with the proprietors, he was satisfied. “I am persuaded that I do not oppose their views from pique, disappointment, or personal resentment, but, as I think, from a regard to the public good. I may be mistaken in what is that public good; but at least I mean well.” The proprietors quite clearly did not. “I am sometimes ashamed for them, when I see them differing with their people for trifles, and instead of being adored, as they might be, like demi-gods, become the object of universal hatred and contempt.”