The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (53 page)

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 about 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 once 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.
”