There was no great change in political conditions in Pennsylvania until
about the year 1755. The French in Canada had been gradually developing
their plans of spreading down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys behind
the English colonies. They were at the same time securing alliances with
the Indians and inciting them to hostilities against the English. But
so rapidly were the settlers advancing that often the land could not
be purchased fast enough to prevent irritation and ill feeling. The
Scotch-Irish and Germans, it has already been noted, settled on lands
without the formality of purchase from the Indians. The Government, when
the Indians complained, sometimes ejected the settlers but more often
hastened to purchase from the Indians the land which had been occupied.
"The Importance of the British Plantations in America," published in
1731, describes the Indians as peaceful and contented in Pennsylvania
but irritated and unsettled in those other colonies where they had
usually been ill-treated and defrauded. This, with other evidence,
goes to show that up to that time Penn's policy of fairness and good
treatment still prevailed. But those conditions soon changed, as the
famous Walking Purchase of 1737 clearly indicated.
The Walking Purchase had provided for the sale of some lands along the
Delaware below the Lehigh on a line starting at Wrightstown, a few miles
back from the Delaware not far above Trenton, and running northwest,
parallel with the river, as far as a man could walk in a day and a half.
The Indians understood that this tract would extend northward only to
the Lehigh, which was the ordinary journey of a day and a half. The
proprietors, however, surveyed the line beforehand, marked the trees,
engaged the fastest walkers and, with horses to carry provisions,
started their men at sunrise. By running a large part of the way, at
the end of a day and a half these men had reached a point thirty miles
beyond the Lehigh.
The Delaware Indians regarded this measurement as a pure fraud and
refused to abandon the Minisink region north of the Lehigh. The
proprietors then called in the assistance of the Six Nations of New
York, who ordered the Delawares off the Minisink lands. Though they
obeyed, the Delawares became the relentless enemies of the white man and
in the coming years revenged themselves by massacres and murder. They
also broke the control which the Six Nations had over them, became an
independent nation, and in the French Wars revenged themselves on the
Six Nations as well as on the white men. The congress which convened at
Albany in 1754 was an attempt on the part of the British Government to
settle all Indian affairs in a general agreement and to prevent separate
treaties by the different colonies; but the Pennsylvania delegates, by
various devices of compass courses which the Indians did not understand
and by failing to notify and secure the consent of certain tribes,
obtained a grant of pretty much the whole of Pennsylvania west of the
Susquehanna. The Indians considered this procedure to be another gross
fraud. It is to be noticed that in their dealings with Penn they had
always been satisfied, and that he had always been careful that they
should be duly consulted and if necessary be paid twice over for the
land. But his sons were more economical, and as a result of the shrewd
practices of the Albany purchase the Pennsylvania Indians almost
immediately went over in a body to the French and were soon scalping
men, women, and children among the Pennsylvania colonists. It is a
striking fact, however, that in all the after years of war and rapine
and for generations afterwards the Indians retained the most distinct
and positive tradition of Penn's good faith and of the honesty of all
Quakers. So persistent, indeed, was this tradition among the tribes of
the West that more than a century later President Grant proposed to
put the whole charge of the nation's Indian affairs in the hands of the
Quakers. The first efforts to avert the catastrophe threatened by the
alliance of the red man with the French were made by the provincial
assemblies, which voted presents of money or goods to the Indians to
offset similar presents from the French. The result was, of course, the
utter demoralization of the savages. Bribed by both sides, the Indians
used all their native cunning to encourage the bribers to bid against
each other. So far as Pennsylvania was concerned, feeling themselves
cheated in the first instance and now bribed with gifts, they developed
a contempt for the people who could stoop to such practices. As a
result this contempt manifested itself in deeds hitherto unknown in the
province. One tribe on a visit to Philadelphia killed cattle and robbed
orchards as they passed. The delegates of another tribe, having visited
Philadelphia and received 500 pounds as a present, returned to the
frontier and on their way back for another present destroyed the
property of the interpreter and Indian agent, Conrad Weiser. They felt
that they could do as they pleased. To make matters worse, the Assembly
paid for all the damage done; and having started on this foolish
business, they found that the list of tribes demanding presents rapidly
increased. The Shawanoes and the Six Nations, as well as the Delawares,
were now swarming to this new and convenient source of wealth.
Whether the proprietors or the Assembly should meet this increasing
expense or divide it between them, became a subject of increasing
controversy. It was in these discussions that Thomas Penn, in trying to
keep his family's share of the expense as small as possible, first got
the reputation for closeness which followed him for the rest of his life
and which started a party in the province desirous of having Parliament
abolish the proprietorship and put the province under a governor
appointed by the Crown.
The war with the French of Canada and their Indian allies is of interest
here only in so far as it affected the government of Pennsylvania.
From this point of view it involved a series of contests between the
proprietors and the Crown on the one side and the Assembly on the other.
The proprietors and the Crown took advantage of every military necessity
to force the Assembly into a surrender of popular rights. But the
Assembly resisted, maintaining that they had the same right as the
British Commons of having their money bills received or rejected by the
Governor without amendment. Whatever they should give must be given on
their own terms or not at all; and they would not yield this point to
any necessities of the war.
When Governor Morris asked the Assembly for a war contribution in
1754, they promptly voted 20,000 pounds. This was the same amount that
Virginia, the most active of the colonies in the war, was giving. Other
colonies gave much less; New York, only 5000 pounds, and Maryland 6000
pounds. Morris, however, would not assent to the Assembly's bill unless
it contained a clause suspending its effect until the King's pleasure
was known. This was an attempt to establish a precedent for giving up
the Assembly's charter right of passing laws which need not be submitted
to the King for five years and which in the meantime were valid. The
members of the Assembly very naturally refused to be forced by the
necessities of the war into surrendering one of the most important
privileges the province possessed. It was, they said, as much their duty
to resist this invasion of their rights as to resist the French.
Governor Morris, besides demanding that the supply of 20,000 pounds
should not go into force until the King's pleasure was known, insisted
that the paper money representing it should be redeemable in five years.
This period the Assembly considered too short; the usual time was ten
years. Five years would ruin too many people by foreclosures. Moreover,
the Governor was attempting to dictate the way in which the people
should raise a money supply. He and the King had a right to ask for aid
in war; but it was the right of the colony to use its own methods
of furnishing this assistance. The Governor also refused to let the
Assembly see the instructions from the proprietors under which he
was acting. This was another attack upon their liberties and involved
nothing less than an attempt to change their charter rights by secret
instructions to a deputy governor which he must obey at his peril.
Several bills had recently been introduced in the English Parliament for
the purpose of making royal instructions to governors binding on all the
colonial assemblies without regard to their charters. This innovation,
the colonists felt, would wreck all their liberties and turn colonial
government into a mere despotism.
The assemblies of all the colonies have been a good deal abused for
delay in supporting the war and meanness in withholding money. But
in many instances the delay and lack of money were occasioned by the
grasping schemes of governors who saw a chance to gain new privileges
for the Crown or a proprietor or to weaken popular government by
crippling the powers of the legislatures. The usual statement that
the Pennsylvania Assembly was slow in assisting the war because it was
composed of Quakers is not supported by the facts. The Pennsylvania
Assembly was not behind the rest. On this particular occasion, when
their large money supply bill could not be passed without sacrificing
their constitutional rights, they raised money for the war by appointing
a committee which was authorized to borrow 5000 pounds on the credit of
the Assembly.
Other contests arose over the claim of the proprietors that their
estates in the province were exempt from taxation for the war or any
purpose. One bill taxing the proprietary estates along with others was
met by Thomas Penn offering to subscribe 5000 pounds, as a free gift to
the colony's war measures. The Assembly accepted this, and passed the
bill without taxing the proprietary estates. It turned out, however,
to be a shrewd business move on the part of Thomas Penn; for the 5000
pounds was to be collected out of the quitrents that were in arrears,
and the payment of it was in consequence long delayed. The thrifty
Thomas had thus saddled his bad debts on the province and gained a
reputation for generosity at the same time.
Pennsylvania, though governed by Quakers assisted by noncombatant
Germans, had a better protected frontier than Maryland or Virginia; no
colony, indeed, was at that time better protected. The Quaker Assembly
did more than take care of the frontier during the war; it preserved
at the same time constitutional rights in defense of which twenty-five
years afterwards the whole continent fought the Revolution. The Quaker
Assembly even passed two militia bills, one of which became law, and
sent rather more than the province's full share of troops to protect
the frontiers of New York and New England and to carry the invasion into
Canada.
General Braddock warmly praised the assistance which Pennsylvania gave
him because, he said, she had done more for him than any of the other
colonies. Virginia and Maryland promised everything and performed
nothing, while Pennsylvania promised nothing and performed everything.
Commodore Spy thanked the Assembly for the large number of sailors sent
his fleet at the expense of the province. General Shirley, in charge
of the New England and New York campaigns, thanked the Assembly for
the numerous recruits; and it was the common opinion at the time that
Pennsylvania had sent more troops to the war than any other colony. In
the first four years of the war the province spent for military purposes
210,567 pounds sterling, which was a very considerable sum at that time
for a community of less than 200,000 people. Quakers, though they hate
war, will accept it when there is no escape. The old story of the Quaker
who tossed a pirate overboard, saying, "Friend, thee has no business
here," gives their point of view better than pages of explanation.
Quaker opinion has not always been entirely uniform. In Revolutionary
times in Philadelphia there was a division of the Quakers known as the
Fighting Quakers, and their meeting house is still pointed out at the
corner of Fourth Street and Arch. They even produced able military
leaders: Colonel John Dickinson, General Greene, and General Mifflin in
the Continental Army, and, in the War of 1812, General Jacob Brown,
who reorganized the army and restored its failing fortunes after many
officers had been tried and found wanting.
There was always among the Quakers a rationalistic party and a party of
mysticism. The rationalistic party prevailed in Pennsylvania all through
the colonial period. In the midst of the worst horrors of the French and
Indian wars, however, the conscientious objectors roused themselves and
began preaching and exhorting what has been called the mystical side of
the faith. Many extreme Quaker members of the Assembly resigned their
seats in consequence. After the Revolution the spiritual party began
gaining ground, partly perhaps because then the responsibilities of
government and care of the great political and religious experiment in
Pennsylvania were removed. The spiritual party increased so rapidly
in power that in 1827 a split occurred which involved not a little
bitterness, ill feeling, and litigation over property. This division
into two opposing camps, known as the Hicksites and the Orthodox,
continues and is likely to remain.
Quaker government in Pennsylvania was put to still severer tests by
the difficulties and disasters that followed Braddock's defeat. That
unfortunate general had something over two thousand men and was hampered
with a train of artillery and a splendid equipment of arms, tools, and
supplies, as if he were to march over the smooth highways of Europe.
When he came to drag all these munitions through the depths of the
Pennsylvania forests and up and down the mountains, he found that he
made only about three miles a day and that his horses had nothing to eat
but the leaves of the trees. Washington, who was of the party, finally
persuaded him to abandon his artillery and press forward with about
fifteen hundred picked men. These troops, when a few miles from Fort
Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), met about six hundred Indians and three
hundred French coming from the fort. The English maintained a close
formation where they were, but the French and Indians immediately spread
out on their flanks, lying behind trees and logs which provided rests
for their rifles and security for their bodies. This strategy decided
the day. The English were shot down like cattle in a pen, and out of
about fifteen hundred only four hundred and fifty escaped. The French
and Indian loss was not much over fifty.
This defeat of Braddock's force has become one of the most famous
reverses in history; and it was made worse by the conduct of Dunbar who
had been left in command of the artillery, baggage, and men in the rear.
He could have remained where he was as some sort of protection to the
frontier. But he took fright, burned his wagons, emptied his barrels of
powder into the streams, destroyed his provisions, and fled back to Fort
Cumberland in Maryland. Here the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia
as well as the Pennsylvania Assembly urged him to stay. But, determined
to make the British rout complete, he soon retreated to the peace and
quiet of Philadelphia, and nothing would induce him to enter again the
terrible forests of Pennsylvania.
The natural result of the blunder soon followed. The French, finding
the whole frontier of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia abandoned,
organized the Indians under French officers and swept the whole region
with a devastation of massacre, scalping, and burning that has never
been equaled. Hurons, Potawatomies, Ojibways, Ottawas, Mingoes,
renegades from the Six Nations, together with the old treaty friends of
Penn, the Delawares and Shawanoes, began swarming eastward and soon
had killed more people than had been lost at Braddock's defeat. The
onslaught reached its height in September and October. By that time all
the outlying frontier settlers and their families had been killed or
sent flying eastward to seek refuge in the settlements. The Indians even
followed them to the settlements, reached the Susquehanna, and crossed
it. They massacred the people of the village of Gnadenhutten, near
Bethlehem on the Lehigh, and established near by a headquarters for
prisoners and plunder. Families were scalped within fifty miles of
Philadelphia, and in one instance the bodies of a murdered family
were brought into the town and exhibited in the streets to show the
inhabitants how near the danger was approaching. Nothing could be done
to stem the savage tide. Virginia was suffering in the same way: the
settlers on her border were slaughtered or were driven back in herds
upon the more settled districts, and Washington, with a nominal strength
of fifteen hundred who would not obey orders, was forced to stand
a helpless spectator of the general flight and misery. There was no
adequate force or army anywhere within reach. The British had been
put to flight and had gone to the defense of New England and New York.
Neither Pennsylvania nor Virginia had a militia that could withstand
the French and their red allies. They could only wait till the panic had
subsided and then see what could be done.
One thing was accomplished, however, when the Pennsylvania Assembly
passed a Quaker militia law which is one of the most curious legal
documents of its kind in history. It was most aptly worded, drafted by
the master hand of Franklin. It recited the fact that the province had
always been ruled by Quakers who were opposed to war, but that now it
had become necessary to allow men to become soldiers and to give them
every facility for the profession of arms, because the Assembly though
containing a Quaker majority nevertheless represented all the people of
the province. To prevent those who believed in war from taking part in
it would be as much a violation of liberty of conscience as to force
enlistments among those who had conscientious scruples against it. Nor
would the Quaker majority have any right to compel others to bear arms
and at the same time exempt themselves. Therefore a voluntary militia
system was established under which a fighting Quaker, a Presbyterian, an
Episcopalian, or anybody, could enlist and have all the military glory
he could win.
It was altogether a volunteer system. Two years afterwards, as the
necessities of war increased, the Quaker Assembly passed a rather
stringent compulsory militia bill; but the governor vetoed it, and the
first law with its volunteer system remained in force. Franklin busied
himself to encourage enlistments under it and was very successful.
Though a philosopher and a man of science, almost as much opposed to war
as the Quakers and not even owning a shotgun, he was elected commander
and led a force of about five hundred men to protect the Lehigh Valley.
His common sense seems to have supplied his lack of military training.
He did no worse than some professional soldiers who might be named.
The valley was supposed to be in great danger since its village of
Gnadenhutten had been burned and its people massacred. The Moravians,
like the Quakers, had suddenly found that they were not as much opposed
to war as they had supposed. They had obtained arms and ammunition from
New York and had built stockades, and Franklin was glad to find them so
well prepared when he arrived. He built small forts in different parts
of the valley, acted entirely on the defensive, and no doubt checked the
raids of the Indians at that point. They seem to have been watching
him from the hilltops all the time, and any rashness on his part would
probably have brought disaster upon him. After his force had been
withdrawn, the Indians again attacked and burned Gnadenhutten.
The chain of forts, at first seventeen, afterwards increased to fifty,
built by the Assembly on the Pennsylvania frontier was a good plan so
far as it went, but it was merely defensive and by no means completely
defensive, since Indian raiding parties could pass between the forts.
They served chiefly as refuges for neighboring settlers. The colonial
troops or militia, after manning the fifty forts and sending their quota
to the operations against Canada by way of New England and New York,
were not numerous enough to attack the Indians. They could only act on
the defensive as Franklin's command had done. As for the rangers, as
the small bands of frontiersmen acting without any authority of either
governor or legislature were called, they were very efficient as
individuals but they accomplished very little because they acted at
widely isolated spots. What was needed was a well organized force which
could pursue the Indians on their own ground so far westward that the
settlers on the frontier would be safe. The only troops which could
do this were the British regulars with the assistance of the colonial
militia.
Two energetic efforts to end the war without aid from abroad were made,
however, one by the pacific Quakers and the other by the combatant
portion of the people. Both of these were successful so far as they
went, but had little effect on the general situation. In the summer
of 1756, the Quakers made a very earnest effort to persuade the two
principal Pennsylvania tribes, the Delawares and Shawanoes, to withdraw
from the French alliance and return to their old friends. These two
tribes possessed a knowledge of the country which enabled them greatly
to assist the French designs on Pennsylvania. Chiefs of these tribes
were brought under safe conducts to Philadelphia, where they were
entertained as equals in the Quaker homes. Such progress, indeed, was
made that by the end of July a treaty of peace was concluded at Easton
eliminating those two tribes from the war. This has sometimes been
sneered at as mere Quaker pacifism; but it was certainly successful in
lessening the numbers and effectiveness of the enemy.
The other undertaking was a military one, the famous attack upon
Kittanning conducted by Colonel John Armstrong, an Ulsterman from
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the first really aggressive officer the
province had produced. The Indians had two headquarters for their raids
into the province, one at Logstown on the Ohio a few miles below Fort
Duquesne, and the other at Kittanning or, as the French called it,
Attique, about forty miles northeast. At these two points they assembled
their forces, received ammunition and supplies from the French, and
organized their expeditions. As Kittanning was the nearer, Armstrong in
a masterly maneuver took three hundred men through the mountains without
being discovered and, by falling upon the village early in the morning,
he effected a complete surprise. The town was set on fire, the Indians
were put to flight, and large quantities of their ammunition were
destroyed. But Armstrong could not follow up his success. Threatened
by overwhelming numbers, he hastened to withdraw. The effect which the
fighting and the Quaker treaty had on the frontier was good. Incursions
of the savages were, at least for the present, checked. But the root of
the evil had not yet been reached, and the Indians remained massed
along the Ohio, ready to break in upon the people again at the first
opportunity.
The following year, 1757, was the most depressing period of the war.
The proprietors of Pennsylvania took the opportunity to exempt their own
estate from taxation and throw the burden of furnishing money for the
war upon the colonists. Under pressure of the increasing success of the
French and Indians and because the dreadful massacres were coming nearer
and nearer to Philadelphia, the Quaker Assembly yielded, voted the
largest sum they had ever voted to the war, and exempted the proprietary
estates. The colony was soon boiling with excitement. The Churchmen, as
friends of the proprietors, were delighted to have the estates exempted,
thought it a good opportunity to have the Quaker Assembly abolished, and
sent petitions and letters and proofs of alleged Quaker incompetence
to the British Government. The Quakers and a large majority of the
colonists, on the other hand, instead of consenting to their own
destruction, struck at the root of the Churchmen's power by proposing
to abolish the proprietors. And in a letter to Isaac Norris, Benjamin
Franklin, who had been sent to England to present the grievances of the
colonists, even suggested that "tumults and insurrections that might
prove the proprietary government unable to preserve order, or show the
people to be ungovernable, would do the business immediately."
Turmoil and party strife rose to the most exciting heights, and the
details of it might, under certain circumstances, be interesting to
describe. But the next year, 1758, the British Government, by sending
a powerful force of regulars to Pennsylvania, at last adopted the
only method for ending the war. Confidence was at once restored. The
Pennsylvania Assembly now voted the sufficient and, indeed, immense sum
of one hundred thousand pounds, and offered a bounty of five pounds
to every recruit. It was no longer a war of defense but now a war of
aggression and conquest. Fort Duquesne on the Ohio was taken; and the
next autumn Fort Pitt was built on its ruins. Then Canada fell, and
the French empire in America came to an end. Canada and the Great West
passed into the possession of the Anglo-Saxon race.