The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (50 page)

“I cannot but honour Franklin for the last clause of his advertisement,” chuckled Braddock’s military secretary upon reading Franklin’s broadside. General St. Clair, Braddock’s quartermaster, was not really a Hussar, one of those shock troops of the Habsburg Empire, but the uniform of his unit looked sufficiently similar to that of the Hungarian originals to unsettle the Pennsylvania Germans—people who knew how the Hussars acquired their unsavory reputation. St. Clair contributed to the effect by acting in the haughtiest manner imaginable. He refused to employ his soldiers in cutting roads through the forest, instead insisting that civilians do the work. He threatened fire and sword—he said he would burn their houses and kill their cattle—if they did not comply. If delays on the road prevented the defeat of the French, he would treat those responsible for the delay as a “parcel of traitors.”

Franklin got his horses and wagons, but not before putting his own money at risk. Hussar memories notwithstanding, the canny farmers of the backcountry wanted to make sure they got paid for their animals and kit. They did not know Braddock, but they did know that the British government had been slow to pay in other circumstances; before they accepted Franklin’s terms, they made him post personal bond for their property. This he loyally but nervously did.

Braddock, now provisioned for victory, rode off to accomplish it. Franklin returned to Philadelphia, where he encountered a confidence in Braddock’s prospects he did not share. Some of his fellow citizens got up a subscription for fireworks to celebrate the certain victory. Franklin
frowned and said there would be time enough for celebrating when the battle was won.

“What the devil!” said one of the sponsors. “You surely don’t suppose that the fort will not be taken?”

“I don’t know that it will not be taken,” Franklin replied. “But I know that the events of war are subject to great uncertainty.”

And so they were. Despite the train of wagons and horses Franklin had attracted (and was currently underwriting), Braddock found the going through the forest agonizingly slow. On the advice of Washington, who had rejoined the military as an aide to Braddock, the general divided the column, pushing ahead with the lighter and faster units and leaving the baggage train to follow.

On the morning of July 9, 1755, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage (who twenty years later would get to know Washington in a quite different capacity) led a contingent of some 450 troops toward a broad meadow just a few miles south of Fort Duquesne. Because he failed to send an adequate number of scouts ahead, he moved forward largely blind.

Meanwhile a force of French and Indian soldiers was reconnoitering south from the fort. Somewhat to their surprise they encountered the British, and in the forest the battle commenced. Gage had no good idea how many enemy soldiers he faced; rather than thrust forward into the clearing ahead, he retreated. Braddock, behind, hearing the gunfire, ordered an advance. The retreating column and the advancing unit collided on the narrow road, clumping in confusion. As they did, the forest-savvy French commander split his force into two files that streamed through the underbrush past the British on both sides, then opened a withering fire upon the redcoats from the shadowed cover.

“I cannot describe the horrors of that scene,” said a survivor. “No pen could do it. The yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me till the hour of my dissolution.” Washington, who had recovered from a violent fever just in time to ride into battle (albeit on a cushioned saddle), had two horses shot from under him and four bullets pierce his coat; miraculously he escaped injury.

Braddock was no less brave but much less lucky. The general lost four horses before being bowled off the fifth by a ball that penetrated his lung. He lived just long enough to appreciate the magnitude of the disaster: two-thirds of his 1,450 men killed or wounded. Among the officers the casualty rate was three-quarters.

In some instances the dead did better than the living. Prisoners taken
by the French-friendly Indians were subjected to torture. One British prisoner, captured earlier, told of the return of the Indians to Fort Duquesne “with about a dozen prisoners, stripped naked, with their hands tied behind their backs, and their faces and part of their bodies blacked. These prisoners they burned to death on the bank of the Allegheny river, opposite to the fort. I stood on the fort wall until I beheld them begin to burn one of these men; they had him tied to a stake and kept touching him with firebrands, red-hot irons, &c., and he screamed in the most doleful manner; the Indians, in the mean time, yelling like infernal spirits.”

11
The People’s Colonel
1755–57

Braddock’s defeat on the Ohio sent Pennsylvania into shock. Philadelphia got the bad news from the fleeing British troops. Colonel Thomas Dunbar, who inherited Braddock’s command, panicked at the thought of an enemy he could neither see nor number; convinced that his whole force risked destruction, he burned his baggage train and led his men in a rush to Philadelphia, where he proposed to go into winter quarters, although it was not yet August.

Dunbar’s disappearance left the frontier defenseless. The French commander, Captain Jean Dumas, had, like Dunbar, inherited command from a superior killed in the recent battle, but unlike Dunbar he knew what to do with his unanticipated authority. He immediately launched a campaign of terror from the Ohio south and east into the hinterlands of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. His intent was to intimidate England’s Indian allies into turning coat, and to drive the settlers of the English colonies back upon the Atlantic seaboard.

From Dumas’s perspective at Fort Duquesne, the campaign went very well. Several months after its start he informed the French government, “I have succeeded in setting against the English all the tribes of this region who had been their most faithful allies.” The policy was calculated and cruel. Referring to the tribes lately loyal to the English, Dumas boasted, “I have succeeded in making almost all of them attack the English, and if any of them resisted I have always managed to destroy them, so that I have put the Iroquois in fear of the Delawares and Shawnees unless they follow their example; and since the war-parties I have intercepted here have taken scalps and prisoners back to their towns, they find themselves engaged in the war, so to speak, in spite of themselves.” With some exaggeration, Dumas continued, “I have succeeded in ruining the three adjacent provinces, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, driving off the inhabitants, and totally destroying the settlements over a tract of country thirty leagues wide, reckoning from the line of Fort Cumberland.” Six or seven war parties were in the field at once, each headed by a Frenchman. “Thus far, we have lost only two officers and a few soldiers; but the Indian villages are full of prisoners of every age and sex. The enemy has lost far more since the battle than on the day of his defeat.”

From Franklin’s perspective in Philadelphia, the French campaign seemed hardly less effective. The autumn of 1755 brought regular reports of the terror on the frontier. From Penn’s Creek came a lurid tale of massacre and kidnapping: fourteen dead and scalped, eleven spirited away to God-knew-what fiendish fate. From Cumberland (later Fulton) County came reports that the Delaware chief Shingas—Shingas the Terrible, as he was now called—was leading his people against their former allies. “All burned to ashes,” wrote a person who escaped the destruction of the community of Great Cove by Shingas and his warriors. “It is really very shocking to see an husband looking on while these Indians are chopping the head off the wife of his bosom, and the children’s blood drank by these bloody and cruel savages.”

That the terror was inflicted by recent allies made it all the more
terrible. Franklin’s friend John Bartram recounted his backcountry informants’ assertion that “most of the Indians which are so cruel are such as was almost daily familiar at their houses: ate, drank & swore together, was even intimate play mates. And now without any provocation destroyeth all before them with fire, ball & tomahawk.” Bartram described how even apparently secure houses were ravaged:

If they attack a house that is pretty well manned, they creep up behind some fence or hedge or tree & shoot red hot iron slugs or punk into the roof & fires the house over their heads & if they run out they are sure to be shot at and most or all of them killed. If they come to a house where the most of the family is women & children they break into it, kills them all, plunders the house & burns it with the dead in it or if any escaped out they pursueth them & kills them.

The raiders crossed the Allegheny Mountains, then the Susquehanna River. A frontier offensive no longer, the French-inspired campaign endangered the oldest, most heavily settled parts of the province. Attacks near Reading prompted the German inhabitants of that town to threaten to occupy Philadelphia unless they received immediate support. “We must not be sacrificed,” their ultimatum declared, “and are therefore determined to go down to Philadelphia with all that will follow us, and quarter ourselves on its inhabitants and await our fate with them.” Getting no satisfaction, the Germans marched on the provincial capital, a thousand strong.

By this point the enemy was within a day’s ride of Philadelphia. The greatest portion of the province had been lost to the French and their Indian allies, and more continued to be lost. “Almost all the women & children over Sasquehannah [the Susquehanna River] have left their habitations,” wrote provincial secretary Richard Peters in November 1755, “and the roads are full of starved, naked, indigent multitudes.”

With
the populace on the run, Pennsylvania’s government was paralyzed. During the last crisis of provincial security, in 1747, the failure of the government to fund defense had resulted largely from the pacifist scruples and residual influence of the Quaker party. Since then the Quakers had undergone something of a conversion experience, the result of two
scares: one at the polls, where their opponents had mounted a vigorous campaign to oust them on grounds that they who would not defend the province should not govern the province, and the other in the west, from the French and the Indians. As this latter persisted and intensified, the Quakers conducted themselves as model citizens in regard to defense. “The Quakers have now shown that they can give and dispose of money for that purpose as freely as any people,” Franklin remarked approvingly.

The present paralysis arose not from the Quakers but from the proprietors. The Penns adamantly refused to countenance any tax upon their lands in Pennsylvania, even for provincial defense; the Assembly refused to exempt them, especially for defense. During the summer and autumn of 1755, while the frontier burned and the settlers fled for their lives, the proprietors and the Assembly locked in legislative stalemate.

The agent of the proprietors was the current governor, Robert Morris, in office since the previous autumn. Franklin had known Morris as a public official in New Jersey; he encountered him again in New York, on Morris’s route from England to Pennsylvania. As charming in his own way as Franklin, Morris asked Franklin whether he might expect a difficult time with the Assembly. Franklin responded, doubtless with the slight smile that accompanied those comments of his intended to be half jesting but half serious, that he need not expect any difficulty whatsoever as long as he avoided disputes with the Assembly.

“My dear friend,” Morris answered, perhaps with a smile of his own, “how can you advise my avoiding disputes? You know I love disputing; it is one of my greatest pleasures. However, to show the regard I have for your counsel, I promise you I will if possible avoid them.”

The problem was not Morris’s disputatious temperament, although that hardly helped matters. The problem was the Penns’ insistence that any candidate for governor promise, on pain of financial penalty, to veto any measure taxing the proprietary estates. Morris was particularly ill placed to refuse such a promise, or to break it once given; an impecunious sort, he needed every shilling of his salary (to pay, among other obligations, child support to his recent London landlady, a fetching widow who bore a son with a noticeable resemblance to the Pennsylvania governor).