Part 15

In his _Gazette_ Franklin published a Dialogue written by himself, which was intended to answer criticisms on the law and especially the objections of those who were disgusted because the new law exempted the Quakers. Why, it was asked, should the combatant portion of the people fight for the lives and property of men who are too cowardly to fight for themselves? These objectors required as delicate handling as the Quakers, and Franklin approached them with his usual skill.

"Z. For my part I am no coward, but hang me if I will fight to save the Quakers.

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

As a consequence of his success in writing in favor of war, the philosopher, electrician, and editor found himself elected colonel of the men he had persuaded, and was compelled to lead about five hundred of them to the Lehigh Valley, where the German village of Gnadenhutten had been burnt and its inhabitants massacred. He had no taste for such business, and would have avoided it if he could; for he never used a gun even for amusement, and would not keep a weapon of any kind in his house. But the province with its peace-loving Quakers and Germans had never before experienced actual war, nor even difficulties with the Indians, and Franklin was as much a military man as anybody.

So the philosopher of nearly fifty years, famous the world over for his discoveries in electricity and his "Poor Richard's Almanac," set forth in December, slept on the ground or in barns, arranged the order of scouting parties, and regulated the serving of grog to his men. He built a line of small forts in the Lehigh Valley, and during the two months that he was there no doubt checked the Indians who were watching him all the time from the hilltops, and who went no farther than to kill ten unfortunate farmers. He had no actual battle with them, and was perhaps fortunate in escaping a surprise; but he was very wily in his movements, and in his shrewd common-sense way understood Indian tactics. He has left us a description in one of his letters how a force like his should, before stopping for the night, make a circuit backward and camp near their trail, setting a guard to watch the trail so that any Indians following it could be seen long before they reached the camp.

He, indeed, conducted his expedition in the most thorough and systematic manner, marching his men in perfect order with a semicircle of scouts in front, an advance-guard, then the main body, with scouts on each flank and spies on every hill, followed by a watchful rear-guard. He observed all the natural objects with his usual keen interest, noting the exact number of minutes required by his men to fell a tree for the palisaded forts he was building. After two months of roughing it he could not sleep in a bed on his return to Bethlehem. "It was so different," he says, "from my hard lodging on the floor of a hut at Gnadenhutten with only a blanket or two."

Very characteristic of him also was the suggestion he made to his chaplain when the good man found it difficult to get the soldiers to attend prayers. "It is perhaps beneath the dignity of your profession," said Franklin, "to act as steward of the rum; but if you were only to distribute it after prayers you would have them all about you." The chaplain thought well of it, and "never," Franklin tells us, "were prayers more generally or more punctually attended."

On the return of the troops to Philadelphia after their two months' campaign they had a grand parade and review, saluting the houses of all their officers with discharges of cannon and small-arms; and the salute given before the door of their philosopher colonel broke several of the glasses of his electrical apparatus.

The next year, 1756, brought some relief to the colonists by Armstrong's successful expedition against the Indians at Kittanning. But the year 1757 was more gloomy than ever. Nothing was wanting but a few more soldiers to enable the French to press on down the Mississippi and secure their line to New Orleans, or to fall upon the rear of the colonies and conquer them. The proprietors of Pennsylvania took advantage of the situation to force the Assembly to abandon all its most cherished rights. The new governor came out with full instructions to assent to no tax bill unless it exempted the proprietary estates, to have the proprietary quit-rents paid in sterling instead of Pennsylvania currency, and to assent to no money bill unless the money to be raised was appropriated for some particular object or was to be at the disposal of the governor and Assembly jointly.

Their attack on the liberties of the province was well timed; for, the English forces having been everywhere defeated, the Assembly felt that it must assist in the prosecution of the war at all hazards. It therefore resolved to waive its rights for the present, and passed a bill for raising thirty thousand pounds to be expended under the joint supervision of the Assembly and the governor. So the proprietors gained one of their points, and they soon gained another. The Assembly was before long obliged to raise more money, and voted one hundred thousand pounds, the largest single appropriation ever made. It was to be raised by a general tax, and the tax was to include the proprietary estates. The governor objected, and the Assembly, influenced by the terrible necessities of the war, yielded and passed the bill in February, 1757, without taxing the estates.

But it was determined to carry on its contest with the governor in another way, and resolved to send two commissioners to England to lay before the king and Privy Council the conduct of the proprietors. The first avowed object of the commissioners was to secure the taxing of the proprietary estates, and the second was to suggest that the proprietorship be abolished and the province taken under the direct rule of the crown. Franklin and Isaac Norris, the Speaker of the Assembly, were appointed commissioners, but Norris being detained by ill health, Franklin started alone.

He set forth as a sort of minister plenipotentiary to London, where he had at one time worked as a journeyman printer. He had left London an obscure, impoverished boy; he was returning as a famous man of science, retired from worldly business on an assured income. He remained in England for five years, and so full of pleasure, interesting occupation, and fame were those years that it is remarkable that he was willing to come back to Pennsylvania.

He secured lodgings for himself and his son William at Mrs. Stevenson's, No. 7 Craven Street. Here he lived all of the five years and also during his subsequent ten years' residence in London. He had been recommended to her house by some Pennsylvania friends who had boarded there; but he soon ceased to be a mere lodger, and No. 7 Craven Street became his second home. He and Mrs. Stevenson became firm friends, and for her daughter Mary he formed a strong attachment, which continued all his life. His letters to her are among the most beautiful ever written by him, and he encouraged her to study science. "In all that time," he once wrote to her, referring to the happy years he had spent at her mother's house, "we never had among us the smallest misunderstanding; our friendship has been all clear sunshine, without the least cloud in its hemisphere."

Mrs. Stevenson took care of the small every-day affairs of his life, advised as to the presents he sent home to his wife, assisted in buying them, and when a child of one of his poor English relatives needed assistance, she took it into her house and cared for it with almost as tender an interest as if she had been its mother. Many years afterwards, in a letter to her written while he was in France, Franklin regrets "the want of that order and economy in my family which reigned in it when under your prudent direction."[22]

The familiar, pleasant life he led with her family is shown in a little essay written for their amusement, called "The Craven Street Gazette." It is a burlesque on the pompous court news of the English journals. Mrs. Stevenson figures as the queen and the rest of the family and their friends as courtiers and members of the nobility, and we get in this way pleasant glimpses of each one's peculiarities and habits, the way they lived, and their jokes on one another.

He had an excellent electrical machine and other apparatus for experiments in her house, and went on with the researches which so fascinated him in much the same way as he had done at home. It was at No. 7 Craven Street that he planned his musical instrument, the armonica, already described, and exhibited it to his friends who came to see his electrical experiments. He quickly became a member of all the learned societies, was given the degree of doctor of laws by the universities of St Andrew's, Edinburgh, and Oxford, and soon knew all the celebrities in England. But he does not appear to have seen much of that burly and boisterous literary chieftain, Dr. Johnson. This was unfortunate, for Franklin's description of him would have been invaluable.

Peter Collinson, to whom his letters on electricity had been sent, of course welcomed him. He became intimate with Dr. Fothergill, the fashionable physician of London, who had assisted to make his electrical discoveries known. This was another of his life-long friendships: the two were always in perfect sympathy, investigating with the enthusiasm of old cronies everything of philosophic and human interest.

Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and one of the foremost men of science of that time, became another bosom friend, and Franklin furnished him the material for his "History of Electricity." William Strahan, the prosperous publisher and friend of Dr. Johnson, also conceived a great liking for the Pennsylvania agent. Strahan afterwards became a member of Parliament, and was fond of saying to Franklin that they both had started life as printers, but no two printers had ever risen so high. He was a whole-souled, jovial man, wanted his son to marry Franklin's daughter, and wanted Mrs. Franklin to come over to England and settle there with her husband, who, he said, must never go back to America. He used to write letters to Mrs. Franklin trying to persuade her to overcome her aversion to the sea, and he made bets with Franklin that his persuasions would succeed.

We need not wonder that Franklin spent five years on his mission, when he was so comfortably settled with his own servant in addition to those of Mrs. Stevenson, his chariot to drive in like an ambassador, and his son William studying law at the inns of court. During his stay, and about the year 1760, William presented him with an illegitimate grandson, William Temple Franklin. This boy was brought up exclusively by his grandfather, and scarcely knew his father, who soon married a young lady from the West Indies. In his infancy Temple was not an inmate of the Craven Street house, but he lived there afterwards during his grandfather's second mission to England, and accompanied him to France.

The birth of Temple and his parentage were probably not generally known among Franklin's English friends during this first mission. It has been said also that William's illegitimacy was not known in London, but this is unlikely. It did not, however, interfere with the young man's advancement; for in 1762, just before Franklin returned to America, William was appointed by the crown governor of New Jersey. This honor, it is said, was entirely unsolicited by either father or son, and the explanation usually given is that it was intended to attach the father more securely to the royal interest in the disputes which were threatening between the colonies and the mother country.

William and his father were on very good terms at this time. Every summer they took a little tour together, and on one occasion travelled in Holland. On a visit they made to the University of Cambridge they were entertained by the heads of colleges, the chancellor, and the professors in the most distinguished manner, discussed new points of science with them, and with Professor Hadley experimented on what was then a great wonder, the production of cold by evaporation. They wandered also to the old village of Ecton, where the Franklins had lived poor and humble for countless generations, saw many of the old people, and copied inscriptions on tombstones and parish registers. But Scotland they enjoyed most of all. There they met Lord Kames, the author of the "Elements of Criticism," and the historians Hume and Robertson. It was an atmosphere of philosophy and intelligence which Franklin thoroughly enjoyed. "The time we spent there," he wrote to Lord Kames, "was six weeks of the _densest_ happiness I have met with in any part of my life."

During his stay in England the war against the French and Indians, which was raging when he left America, came to a close, and Quebec and Canada were surrendered. It became a question in settling with France whether it would be most advantageous for Great Britain to retain Canada or the Guadeloupe sugar islands, and there were advocates on both sides. Franklin published an admirable argument in favor of retaining Canada, without which the American colonies would never be secure from the Indians instigated by the French, and the acquisition of Canada would also tend to a grander development of the British empire. It was an able appeal, but there is no evidence that it alone influenced the final decision of the ministry, as has been claimed, any more than there is evidence that Franklin suggested the policy of William Pitt which had brought the war to a successful close. There were many advocates of these opinions and suggestions, and Franklin was merely one of them, though unquestionably an able one.

He also published his essay on the "Peopling of Countries" and an article in favor of the vigorous prosecution of the war in Europe. These, with his pleasures and experiments in science, occupied most of the five years, and the work of his mission, though well done, was by no means absorbing.

When he arrived, in July, 1757, he had, under the advice of Dr. Fothergill, first sought redress from the proprietors themselves before appealing to the government; but meeting with no success, he tried the members of the Privy Council, and first of all William Pitt, the great minister who was then conducting the war against France and recreating England. But he could not even secure an interview with that busy minister, which is a commentary on the extravagant claims of those who say that Franklin suggested Pitt's policy.

Two years and more passed without his being able to accomplish anything except enlighten the general public concerning the facts of the situation. An article appeared in the _General Advertiser_ abusing the Pennsylvania Assembly, and his son William replied to it. The reply being extensively copied by other newspapers, the son was set to work on a book now known as the "Historical Review of Pennsylvania," which went over the whole ground of the quarrels of the Assembly with the proprietors and their deputy governors. It was circulated quite widely, some copies being sold and others distributed free to important persons. But it is doubtful whether it had very much influence, for it was an extremely dull book, and valuable only for its quotations from the messages of the governors and the replies of the Assembly.

His opportunity to accomplish the main object of his mission came at last by accident. The Assembly in Pennsylvania were gradually starving the governor into submission by withholding his salary, and under pressure for want of money, he gave his assent to a bill taxing the proprietary estates. The bill being sent to England, the proprietors opposed it before the Privy Council as hostile to their rights, and obtained a decision in their favor in spite of the arguments of Franklin and his lawyers. But Franklin secured a reconsideration, and Lord Mansfield asked him if he really thought that no injury would be done the proprietary estates by the Assembly, for the proprietors had represented that the colonists intended to tax them out of existence. Franklin assured him that no injury would be done, and he was immediately asked if he would enter into an engagement to assure that point. On his agreeing to do this, the papers were drawn, the Assembly's bill taxing the estates was approved by the crown, and from that time the assaults of the proprietors on the liberties of the colony were decisively checked.

Franklin was now most furiously attacked and hated by the proprietary party in Pennsylvania, but from the majority of the people, led by the Quakers, he received increased approbation and applause, and his willingness to risk his own personal engagement, as in the affair with Braddock, was regarded as an evidence of the highest public spirit.

He remained two years longer in England on one pretext or another, and no doubt excuses for continuing such a delightful life readily suggested themselves. He returned in the early autumn of 1762, receiving from the Assembly three thousand pounds for his services, and during the five years of his absence he had been annually elected to that body. For a few months he enjoyed comparative quiet, but the next year he was again in the turmoil of a most bitter political contest.

The war with France was over, and Canada and the Ohio Valley had been ceded to the English by the treaty of Paris, signed in February, 1763. But the Indians, having lost their French friends, determined to destroy the English, and, inspired by the genius of Pontiac, they took fort after fort and, rushing upon the whole colonial frontier of Pennsylvania, swept the people eastward to the Delaware with even worse devastation and slaughter than they had inflicted after Braddock's defeat. I cannot give here the full details of this war,[23] and must confine myself to one phase of it with which Franklin was particularly concerned.

The Scotch-Irish who occupied the frontier counties of Pennsylvania suffered most severely from these Indian raids, and believed that the proprietary and Quaker government at Philadelphia neglected the defence of the province. Their resentment was strongest against the Quakers. They held the Quaker religion in great contempt and viewed with scorn the attempts of the Quakers to pacify the Indians and befriend those of them who were willing to give up the war-path and adopt the white man's mode of life.

Some friendly Indians, descendants of the tribes that had welcomed William Penn, were living at Conestoga, near Lancaster, in a degenerate condition, having given up both war and hunting, and following the occupations of basket- and broom-making. They were the wards of the proprietary government, and were given presents and supplies from time to time. There were also at Bethlehem some other friendly Indians who had been converted to Christianity by the Moravians.

The Scotch-Irish believed that all of these so-called friendly Indians were in league with the hostile tribes, furnished them with information, and even participated in their murders. They asked the governor to remove them, and assured him that their removal would secure the safety of the frontier. Nothing being done by the governor, a party of Scotch-Irish rangers started to destroy the Moravian Indians, but were prevented by a rain-storm. The governor afterwards, through commissioners, investigated these Moravian Indians, and finding reason to suspect them, they were all brought down to Philadelphia and quartered in barracks. But the Conestoga Indians were attacked by a party of fifty-seven Scotch-Irish, afterwards known as the "Paxton Boys," who, finding only six of them in the village,--three men, two women, and a boy,--massacred them all, mangled their bodies, and burnt their property. The remaining fourteen of the tribe were collected by the sheriff and put for protection in the Lancaster jail. The Paxtons hearing of it, immediately attacked the jail and cut the Indians to pieces with hatchets.

We have grown so accustomed to lynch law that this slaughter of the Conestogas would not now cause much surprise, especially in some parts of the country; but it was a new thing to the colonists, who in many respects were more orderly than are their descendants, and a large part of the community were shocked, disgusted, and indignant. Franklin wrote a pamphlet which had a wide circulation and assailed the Scotch-Irish as inhuman, brutal cowards, worse than Arabs and Turks; fifty-seven of them, armed with rifles, knives, and hatchets, had actually succeeded, he said, in killing three old men, two women, and a boy.

The Paxton lynchers, however, were fully supported by the people of the frontier. A large body of frontiersmen marched on Philadelphia with the full intention of revolutionizing the Quaker government, and they would have succeeded but for the unusual preparations for defence. They were finally, with some difficulty, persuaded to return without using their rifles.

The governor was powerless to secure even the arrest of the men who had murdered the Indians in the jail, and the disorder was so flagrant and the weakness of the executive branch of the government so apparent that the Quakers and a majority of the people thought there was now good reason for openly petitioning the crown to abolish the proprietorship. While in England, Franklin had been advised not to raise this question, and he had accordingly confined his efforts to taxing the proprietary estates.

The arrangement he had made provided that the estates should be fairly taxed, but the governor and the Assembly differed in opinion as to what was fair. The governor claimed that the best wild lands of the proprietors should be taxed at the rate paid by the people for their worst, and he tried the old tactics of forcing this point by delaying a supply bill intended to defend the province against Pontiac and his Indians. The Assembly passed the bill to suit him, but immediately raised the question of the abolition of the proprietorship. Twenty-five resolutions were passed most abusive of the proprietors, and the Assembly then adjourned to let the people decide by a general election whether a petition should be sent to the king asking for direct royal government.

A most exciting political campaign followed in which Franklin took the side of the majority in favor of a petition, and wrote several of his most brilliant pamphlets. He particularly assailed Provost Smith, who, in a preface to a printed speech by John Dickinson defending the proprietary government, had eulogized William Penn in one of those laudatory epitaphs which were the fashion of the day:

"Utterly to confound the assembly, and show the excellence of proprietary government, the Prefacer has extracted from their own votes the praises they have from time to time bestowed on the first proprietor, in their addresses to his son. And, though addresses are not generally the best repositories of historical truth, we must not in this instance deny their authority.