The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (69 page)

Franklin was phlegmatic about the change. He understood London’s logic in lowering the molasses tax. “A moderate duty on foreign molasses may be collected, when a high one could not,” he told Jackson. At the time he wrote, duties on tea and slaves were under consideration, along with those on molasses and wine; Franklin thought such taxes could benefit both the character and commerce of the empire. “A duty not only on tea but on all East India goods might perhaps not be amiss, as they are generally rather luxuries than necessaries, and many of your Manchester manufactures might well supply their places. The duty on Negroes I could wish large enough to obstruct their importation, as they everywhere prevent the increase of Whites.”

Although an imprudent ministry and Parliament might get carried away with taxing the colonies, Franklin hoped for prudence—or, more specifically, an appreciation that the interests of the empire subsumed, but need not subordinate, those of the colonies. “If you lay such duties as may destroy our trade with the foreign colonies, I think you will greatly hurt your own interest as well as ours,” he said. He elaborated: “I am not much alarmed about your schemes of raising money on us. You will take care for your own sakes not to lay greater burthens on us than we can bear; for you cannot hurt us without hurting your selves. All our profits center with you, and the more you take from us, the less we can lay out with you.”

As neither
an importer of molasses nor a heavy consumer of the rum into which the molasses was made, Franklin fretted little over the Sugar Act. (He preferred milk punch, made with brandy.) But as a student of population growth, an expansive imperialist, and a promoter of settlement schemes, he remained intensely interested in the question of land.

Americans—including Franklin—interpreted the end of the war as
the beginning of a new age of expansion, across the mountains and into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Two other interested parties took a different view. The British government, having just finished a long and expensive war that began on the American frontier, had no desire to let the frontier trigger another such war. To be sure, the French were no longer as able to provoke unrest among the Indians as formerly, but the English (and Scottish and German) settlers had shown themselves sufficiently provocative on their own. The best way to minimize such provocations, it seemed to Grenville and his associates, was to insulate the Indians and the settlers from each other. To this end the government issued a proclamation in October 1763 placing the transmontane territories essentially off-limits to settlement.

The Proclamation of 1763 came too late to mollify the third party interested in the question of western lands—the party, in fact, most interested of all. If the defeat of the French augured peace and cheap land for the English, it did so at the expense of the Indians. As long as two imperial powers had vied for control of North America, the Indians had been able to play one against the other; now, with but one imperial power, the Indians were at that power’s mercy. To what extent the Indians appreciated that London wished to protect them against the Americans is unclear; considering their experience of the last few decades they might have been forgiven for thinking all English acted alike. In any event, while the British government prepared the proclamation it would make regarding the American west, the Indians launched a war against the settlers.

Almost at once the war became associated with the name of Pontiac, an Ottawa chief of uncertain origins but undeniable ambition and charisma. Pontiac invoked the Great Spirit, as translated by a mystic called the Delaware Prophet, in calling for Indians to return to their traditional ways and drive out the invaders. One account (historically problematic, to be sure, in that it was fourth hand, quoting Pontiac quoting the Delaware Prophet quoting God) caught the gist of the message:

Why do you suffer the white man to dwell among you? My children, you have forgotten the customs and traditions of your forefathers. Why do you not clothe yourselves in skins, as they did, and use the bows and arrows, and the stone-pointed lances, which they used? You have bought guns, knives, kettles, and blankets from the white men, until you can no longer do without them; and, what is worse, you have drunk the poison fire-water, which turns you into fools. Fling all these away; live as your wise fore-fathers lived before you. And as for these English—these dogs dressed in red, who have come to rob you of your hunting grounds and drive away the game—you must lift the hatchet against them. Wipe them from the face of the earth. And then you will have my favor back again, and once more be happy and prosperous.

The message caught on. The fighting between British and French had hardly ended before fighting erupted between British and the Indians under Pontiac. During the spring and summer of 1763 Pontiac’s forces swept through the region of the Ohio and the Great Lakes, capturing half a dozen British forts and besieging British garrisons at Detroit and Pittsburgh. The British commander for North America, General Jeffrey Amherst, was sufficiently alarmed to suggest employing biological warfare against Pontiac’s soldiers, in the form of smallpox-laced blankets. Whether the local commander complied is unclear (like others in similar positions, Colonel Henry Bouquet feared that his own troops would succumb to the germ attack).

Reports of the new war in the west reached Franklin at New York on his postal journey in the summer of 1763. Amherst, aware of Franklin’s experience with Indians, summoned him for an interview. Underestimating the seriousness of Pontiac’s offensive, the British general judged it a vestige of the French war that would subside once word got out to the Indians that England was now the master of the continent.

Franklin did not deny this explanation but deemed it incomplete. The source of the trouble touched the fundamental relationship between Indians and whites, he said. “The Indians are disgusted that so little notice has lately been taken of them, and are particularly offended that rum is prohibited [not all the Indians followed the Prophet in forswearing alcohol], and powder dealt among them so sparingly. They have received no presents. And the plan of preventing war among them, and bringing them to live by agriculture, they resent as an attempt to make women of them, as they phrase it, it being the business of women only to cultivate the ground. Their men are all warriors.”

Yet this interpretation did not prompt Franklin to advocate a more moderate policy toward the Indians, at least not under current circumstances. Indeed he recommended just the opposite. “We stooped too much in begging the last peace of them, which has made them vain and insolent…. We should never mention peace to them again till we have given them some severe blows and made them feel some ill consequences of breaking with us.”

British troops belatedly delivered the blows Franklin spoke of. In August, Bouquet smote the Indians at the battle of Bushy Run and rescued Pittsburgh; three months later, Pontiac dropped the siege of Detroit. An uncertain peace settled upon the Pennsylvania hinterland.

Franklin worried that the peace, such as it was, came too soon. “I only fear they have not smarted enough to make them careful how they break with us again.”

Many of
Franklin’s Pennsylvania compatriots felt the same way. Some of them attempted, in the most brutal fashion, to make the peace more permanent.

If the Paris treaty had not seemed to promise an end to the warfare that had plagued the frontier for a generation, the Pontiac uprising might not have provoked the overreaction it did. But to settlers who looked for a respite from the terror and guerrilla warfare, the renewal of fighting came as a heartbreaking last straw. In December 1763 a band of armed frontiersmen from the town of Paxton, on the Susquehanna River, descended on a small community of Indians living on the proprietors’ Conestoga Manor near Lancaster. Reports had indicated the presence of arms among Conestoga Indians; rumors suggested that an Indian implicated in recent raids was hiding there. The Paxtonites did not tarry long with questions; instead they massacred the six Indians unfortunate enough to be at home, and burned the village to the ground.

The other fourteen Indian members of the (very small) Conestoga community were thereupon taken into protective custody in Lancaster. Tragically for them, the custody afforded insufficient protection, and on December 27 the Paxton mob battered down the doors of the workhouse that provided their refuge, and murdered them all: men, women, and children.

The Lancaster County massacres shocked even those Pennsylvanians not especially sympathetic to the Indians; the shock intensified when the Paxton mob threatened to march on Philadelphia. Some weeks earlier a group of Indians living among the Moravians near Bethlehem had been accused of abetting the recent uprising. The Pennsylvania government encouraged these “Moravian Indians” to take refuge near the provincial capital. More than a hundred accepted the offer. The Paxtonites, hot with the lust of killing, vowed to dispatch all these Indians—and anyone who tried to prevent them.

As his earlier remarks revealed, Franklin shed no tears for warpath Indians, but this murder of innocents appalled him. And the threat the Paxton mob posed to government and order dismayed him almost beyond bearing. A man of reason, he saw reason being challenged by the darkest, bloodiest forces of unreason.

At first he took up pen. Near the end of January he wrote
A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, Friends of This Province.
The pamphlet was quickly published and began circulating.

Franklin never wrote a more emotional piece. To some degree his lamentations were calculated, designed to impress on readers the terrible wrong inflicted not only on the unfortunate victims of the violence but on society itself. But without doubt the murders troubled him deeply. Much of his philosophy of life was based on the premise that human nature was, if not perfectible, at least improvable. That such savage acts could be perpetrated, with apparent impunity, in his own Pennsylvania, by his fellow Pennsylvanians, hit at the heart of this premise.

Franklin reminded readers that the Conestoga Indians were descendants of the Indians who welcomed the first settlers in Pennsylvania, with gifts of venison, corn, and skins. They had peaceably sold land to the settlers and moved to their present community, which had been guaranteed them by the proprietors. “There they have lived many years in friendship with their white neighbours, who loved them for their peaceable inoffensive behaviour.”

Franklin identified the victims by name. One very old man, Shehaes, had known William Penn and had sat down to treaty with the original proprietor in 1701. Peggy was Shehaes’s daughter: “She worked for her aged father, continuing to live with him, though married, and attended him with filial duty and tenderness.” John was “another good old man.” John Smith was “a valuable young man,” Peggy’s husband and father of their three-year-old child (whose name Franklin apparently did not know). Betty was “a harmless old woman.” Her son Peter was “a likely young lad.” Sally was “a truly good and an amiable woman” with no children of her own; but a relative had died, leaving a child, whom Sally had adopted “to bring up as her own, and performed toward it all the duties of an affectionate parent.”

“The reader will observe,” Franklin editorialized, “that many of their names are English. It is common with the Indians that have an affection for the English to give themselves, and their children, the names of such English persons as they particularly esteem.”

The reader would also note how few the Indians were. “It has always
been observed that Indians settled in the neighbourhood of white people do not increase, but diminish continually.” At the time of the murders the tribe consisted of twenty souls altogether—by no stretch of the imagination a threat to anyone.

Franklin related the atrocities in heartrending detail. He told how fifty-seven mounted and heavily armed men had ridden down upon Conestoga Manor.

They surrounded the small village of Indian huts, and at just break of day broke into them all at once. Only three men, two women, and a young boy were found at home, the rest being out among the neighbouring white people, some to sell the baskets, brooms and bowls they manufactured, and others on other occasions. These poor defenceless creatures were immediately fired upon, stabbed and hatcheted to death! The good Shehaes, among the rest, cut to pieces in his bed. All of them were scalped, and otherwise horribly mangled. Then their huts were set on fire, and most of them burnt down. When the troop, pleased with their own conduct and bravery, but enraged that any of the poor Indians had escaped the massacre, rode off.