The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (70 page)

Nearly all the white people in the neighborhood were shocked and outraged at this display of barbarism, Franklin explained. The magistrates of Lancaster County brought the other members of the tribe under official protection, and the governor of the province ordered a search for the perpetrators.

But the evildoers were undeterred.

Those cruel men again assembled themselves, and hearing that the remaining fourteen Indians were in the work-house at Lancaster, they suddenly appeared in that town, on the 27th of December. Fifty of them, armed as before, dismounting, went directly to the work-house, and by violence broke open the door and entered, with the utmost fury in their countenances. When the poor wretches saw they had no protection nigh, nor could possibly escape, and being without the least weapon for defence, they divided into their little families, the children clinging to the parents. They fell on their knees, protested their innocence, declared their love to the English, and that, in their whole lives, they had never done them injury; and in this posture they all received the hatchet! Women and little children—were every one inhumanly murdered!—in cold blood!

The murderers again rode off, again congratulating themselves on their valor. As yet they remained at large, defiant of human and divine authority. “But the wickedness cannot be covered,” Franklin promised. “The guilt will lie on the whole land till justice is done on the murderers.
THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT WILL CRY TO HEAVEN FOR VENGEANCE.
”

Heaven
gave no sign of listening, instead leaving the mortals involved to sort matters out themselves. Franklin’s pamphlet struck some readers as melodramatic and factually suspect. How did he know what the Indians said and did in their last moments? The only surviving witnesses were the murderers, and they were not talking. Even so, the pamphlet galvanized opinion against the Paxtonites as they threatened to kill the Moravian Indians. “It would perhaps be vanity in me to imagine so slight a thing could have any extraordinary effect,” Franklin told Richard Jackson. “But however that may be, there was a sudden and very remarkable change; and above 1000 of our citizens took arms to support the government in the protection of those poor wretches.”

This spur-of-the-moment militia included many Quakers, which amazed Philadelphians who remembered when Friends categorically refused to bear arms. Yet by itself the rally to arms did not end the crisis. With the Paxton Boys, as they were called (doubly misleadingly, in that they were not boys nor all from Paxton), camped at Germantown, the provincial authorities hastened to devise means to keep them at bay. “You may judge what hurry and confusion we have been in for this week past,” Franklin told Jackson. “I was up two nights running, all night, with our governor; and my rest so broken by alarms on the other nights that the whole week seems one confused space of time, without any distinction of days.” During one alarm the governor ran to Franklin’s house at midnight and set up temporary headquarters there. Franklin’s suggestions became tantamount to orders. The governor sought to formalize this command by giving Franklin control of the militia, but he declined. “I chose to carry a musket and strengthen his authority.”

Yet he did agree to lead a delegation to parley with the Paxton mob. Representatives of the latter listed their grievances, which went beyond what they saw as the harboring of Indian enemies, and included neglect
by the provincial government of frontier security, and underrepresentation of the frontier counties in the Assembly. Franklin’s delegation agreed to present the grievances to the Assembly and to allow a (carefully supervised) search of the Moravian Indians’ camp for Indians involved in recent raids. As Franklin knew it would, all this took time; as he hoped, during that time the fury of the frontiersmen dissipated. They eventually returned to their homes.

It was a partial victory at best. Philadelphia was secure against insurrectionary violence, but the Paxton murderers remained at large.

Under the circumstances a partial victory would have to do. With a certain exhilarated satisfaction Franklin summarized events for John Fothergill in England: “Your old friend was a common soldier, a counsellor, a kind of dictator, an ambassador to the country mob, and on their returning home,
nobody,
again. All this has happened in a few weeks!”

The Paxton
rising afforded an opportunity for Franklin to reflect on something novel he had recently encountered. In his
Narrative of the Late Massacres
he pointed out that the behavior of the murderers would have put to shame even those considered savages by most Pennsylvanians. He recounted a story he had read of a New Englander marooned on the Guinea coast amid raids by Dutch slavers. A crowd of angry locals wished to vent their anger on the New Englander, the only white man in reach, but another African, who had befriended him and taken him in, refused to let the would-be murderers approach. They must not kill a man that had done no harm, simply for being white, he said. This was wrong, and he would not allow it. They would have to kill him before they killed his guest. “The Negroes,” Franklin concluded the story, “seeing his resolution, and convinced by his discourse that they were wrong, went away ashamed.”

Franklin might have used this anecdote anyway, because it served his current purpose, but he almost certainly was encouraged to do so by an observation he had made just the previous month, which compelled him to reconsider his perceptions of the African race. Since the visit of George Whitefield to America in 1739, Franklin had supported the idea of Negro education, even as he continued to hold slaves. In this he assumed, with most members of his own race and era, that education might improve black children but could never make them the equal of whites.

A visit to a school run by the Reverend William Sturgeon in Philadelphia
changed his mind. The students were bright, cooperative—and promising. As he explained to an English friend, also involved in Negro education:

They appeared all to have made considerable progress in reading for the time they had respectively been in the school, and most of them answered readily and well the questions of the catechism. They behaved very orderly, and showed a proper respect and ready obedience to the mistress, and seemed very attentive to, and a good deal affected by, a serious exhortation with which Mr. Sturgeon concluded our visit.

I was on the whole much pleased, and from what I then saw, have conceived a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black race, than I had ever before entertained. Their apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong, and their docility in every respect equal to that of white children.

Recollecting his audience, Franklin added, “You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my prejudices, nor to account for them.”

Nor in this letter did Franklin undertake to justify that massive social prejudice, slavery, in which he still participated. But having concluded—almost alone among his generation—that blacks were innately equal to whites in matters of intelligence, he had started down the road that would compel him to conclude that slavery was indefensible.

Under the guns
of the Paxton mob, Franklin had been willing to make common cause with the governor, but as the mob dispersed, the two men turned upon each other. John Penn was the grandson of William Penn and the nephew of Thomas Penn; like his grandfather he had incurred paternal wrath for youthful indiscretions, in his case a marriage to a young woman the Penn elders deemed below his (and their) station. Like his grandfather he returned to the fold—he sent his wife packing—and prepared to receive his inheritance: his father Richard’s quarter of the proprietary rights to Pennsylvania. Thomas and Richard thought the boy would benefit from personal experience of his estate-to-be, and they put him on a ship for Philadelphia, where he served for three years as a member of the provincial council. In this capacity he joined Franklin at
Albany for the 1754 congress. He returned to England for several years before the bribing of William Denny convinced his father and uncle that the only way to guarantee the loyalty of their American deputy was to make him one of them. John Penn was named (lieutenant) governor of Pennsylvania in June 1763; he arrived in Philadelphia in October (to a rare earthquake that rattled the windows of the city and shook down the autumn leaves).

Franklin determined to give the young man—who was thirty-four on arrival—a fair hearing. The first meetings went well enough. “He is civil, and I endeavoured to fail in no point of respect,” Franklin told Peter Collinson. “So I think we shall have no personal difference; at least I will give no occasion. For though I cordially dislike and despise the uncle, for demeaning himself so far as to back-bite and abuse me to friends and to strangers, as you well know he does, I shall keep that account open with him only.”

Franklin was fooling himself if he thought John Penn would not take personally Franklin’s attacks on Thomas Penn, which of course he did. By the spring of 1764 the governor was writing lurid letters home regarding the “rank abuse” of the proprietors and identifying Franklin as the “chief cause” of the troubles.

It is observed by every body that while he was in England there was at least an appearance of peace and quietness, but since his return the old sparks are again blown up, and at present the flame rages with more violence than ever. I really believe there never will be any prospect of ease or happiness here, while that villain has the liberty of spreading about the poison of that inveterate malice and ill nature, which is so deeply implanted in his own black heart.

The occasion for the governor’s comments was a renewal of Franklin’s antiproprietary campaign. Franklin had returned from London convinced that Pennsylvania needed to break the proprietary shackles that kept it from becoming the country it might be; in the ebullience of his Britishness he embraced royal rule as the solution to the problems of the province. The Indian troubles and the Paxton uprising had distracted him from this objective even as they confirmed his conviction that Pennsylvania was nearly ungovernable under current arrangements. During the spring of 1764 he resumed the offensive.

The opening salvo was a series of resolutions that Franklin guided through the Assembly. This “necklace of resolves,” as he called it,
amounted to a twenty-six-part indictment of proprietary government. The proprietors were said to be merely owners of private property, without the least authority regarding legislation; therefore it was “high presumption” in them to interfere between the Crown and the people. Despite the affectionate regard and continuing generosity of the people, the proprietors were endeavoring to “diminish and annihilate” the people’s rights. The Indian policy of the proprietors having rendered the inhabitants of the frontier “easy prey to the small skulking parties of the enemy,” the proprietors—acting in a manner “dishonourable, unjust, tyrannical and inhuman”—exploited this danger “to extort privileges from the people, or enforce claims against them, with the knife of savages at their throat.” The current victims of the proprietors were the people of Pennsylvania, but should the proprietors’ interpretation of the provincial charter prevail, their powers would inevitably become “as dangerous to the prerogatives of the Crown as to the liberties of the people.” In conclusion, “as all hope of any degree of happiness, under the proprietary government, is, in our opinion, now at an end,” the Assembly resolved that power ought to be taken from the proprietors “and lodged where only it can be properly and safely lodged, in the hands of the Crown.”