Читать книгу Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed - Wiliam Cabell Bruce - Страница 16

Captain Orme [says Franklin], who was one of the general's aids-de-camp, and, being grievously wounded, was brought off with him, and continu'd with him to his death, which happen'd in a few days, told me that he was totally silent all the first day, and at night only said "Who would have thought it?" That he was silent again the following day, saying only at last, "We shall better know how to deal with them another time"; and dy'd in a few minutes after.

There was not to be another time for this intrepid but reckless soldier, who, true to the broad, red banner of England, died like a bulldog with his iron jaws set to the last, but the first time might have sufficed for his task if he had only taken Franklin's hint, or freely consulted the advice of George Washington and the other provincial officers who accompanied him, or had not reduced his army merely to the condition of legs without eyes by treating the hundred Indians, invaluable as guides and scouts, whom George Croghan had brought to his aid, with such neglect and slights that they all, by successive defections, gradually dropped away from him.

In the Autobiography Franklin contrasts the conduct of the British on their way from the sea to the unbroken wilderness with the conduct of the French allies when making their way from Rhode Island to Yorktown. The former, he says, from their landing till they got beyond the settlements, plundered and stripped the inhabitants, totally ruining some poor families, besides insulting, abusing and confining such persons as remonstrated. This was enough, he adds, to put the Americans out of conceit of such defenders, if they had really wanted any. The French, on the other hand, though traversing the most inhabited part of America for a distance of nearly seven hundred miles, occasioned not the smallest complaint for the loss of a pig, a chicken, or even an apple. Perhaps this was partly because the people gratefully gave them everything that they wanted before there was any occasion to take it. But it was the pusillanimous misbehavior of Colonel Dunbar, left by Braddock in the rear of his army to bring along the heavier part of his stores, provisions and baggage which converted disaster into disgrace. As soon as the fugitives from the battle reached his camp, the panic that they brought with them was instantly imparted to him and his entire force. Though he had at his command more than a thousand men, he thought of nothing better to do than to turn his draft horses to the purposes of flight, and to give all his stores and ammunition to the flames. When he reached the settlements, he was met with requests from the Governors of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania that he would station his troops on the frontier of those states so as to protect them from the fury of the savages, but, so far from stopping to protect anybody else, not one jot of speed did he abate until, to use Franklin's words, "he arriv'd at Philadelphia, where the inhabitants could protect him." "This whole transaction," declares the Autobiography, "gave us Americans the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regulars had not been well founded."

When Dunbar did abandon the shelter which he had found at Philadelphia, it was only to give the people of Pennsylvania a parting whiff of his quality. He promised Franklin that, if three poor farmers of Lancaster County would meet him at Trenton, where he expected to be in a few days on his march to New York, he would surrender to them certain indentured servants of theirs whom he had enlisted. Although they took him at his word, and met him at Trenton, at considerable sacrifice of time and money, he refused to perform his promise.

The defeat of Braddock and its consequences left the province fully exposed to Indian incursions, and again its ablest and most public-spirited man was compelled to take the lead in providing for its defense. His first act was to draft and push through the Assembly a bill for organizing and disciplining a militia. Each company was to elect a captain, a lieutenant and an ensign, subject to the confirmation of the Governor, and the officers, so elected, of the companies forming each regiment, were to elect a colonel, a lieutenant-colonel and a major for the regiment, subject to the same confirmation. But nothing about the bill is so interesting as the further evidence that it affords of Franklin's finesse in the management of Quakers. The Articles of Association, provided for in the Act, were to be purely voluntary, and nothing in the Act was to be taken as authorizing the Governor or the military officers mentioned in it to prescribe any regulations that would in the least affect such of the inhabitants of the Province as were scrupulous about bearing arms, either in their liberties, persons or estates. There is almost a gleam of the true Franklin humor in the recital in the Act, which, though other parts of the Act safeguarded the Quaker crotchet as to fighting, made the Quaker majority in the Assembly admit that there were some persons in the Province who had been disciplined in the art of war, and even—strange as that might be—conscientiously thought it their duty to fight in defense of their country, their wives, their families and estates. The Militia Act was followed by Franklin's Dialogue between X Y and Z explaining and defending it. This paper is garnished with apt references to the Bible, and, as a whole, is written with much vivacity and force. Its object was to convince the English, Scotch-Irish and German Pennsylvanians that they should fight to keep their own scalps on their heads even though they could not do this without accomplishing as much for the Quakers. "For my part," says Z, "I am no coward, but hang me if I'll fight to save the Quakers." "That is to say," says X, "you won't pump ship because 'twill save the rats, as well as yourself." And to Z's suggestion that, if the Act was carried into execution, and proved a good one, they might have nothing to say against the Quakers at the next election, X, no unknown quantity, but Franklin himself, replies with this burst of eloquent exhortation which makes us half doubt Franklin when he says that he was not an orator:

O my friends, let us on this occasion cast from us all these little party views, and consider ourselves as Englishmen and Pennsylvanians. Let us think only of the service of our king, the honour and safety of our country, and vengeance on its murdering enemies. If good be done, what imports it by whom 'tis done? The glory of serving and saving others is superior to the advantage of being served or secured. Let us resolutely and generously unite in our country's cause, (in which to die is the sweetest of all deaths) and may the God of Armies bless our honest endeavours.

When the defeat of Braddock first became known to Governor Morris, he hastened to consult with Franklin about the proper measures for preventing the desertion of the back counties of Pennsylvania, and he even went so far as to offer to make him a general, if he would undertake to conduct a force of provincials against Fort Duquesne. Franklin had, or with his wise modesty affected to have, a suspicion that the offer was inspired not so much by the Governor's confidence in his military abilities as by the Governor's desire to utilize his great personal influence for the purpose of enlisting soldiers and securing money to pay them with; and that, perhaps, without the taxation of the Proprietary estates. The suspicion we should say was groundless. In the land of the blind the one-eyed mole is king, and the probability is that the Governor was actuated by nothing more than the belief that in a province, where there were no seasoned generals, a man with Franklin's talents, energy and resource would be likely to prove the best impromptu commander that he could find. If so, his calculations came to nothing, for Franklin, who always saw things as they were, could discern no reason why he should be unfit to be a colonel and yet fit to be a general. When, however, the Militia Act had been passed, and Z had been silenced by X, and military companies were springing up as rapidly as mushrooms in a Pennsylvania meadow, he did permit himself to be prevailed upon by the Governor to take charge of the northwestern frontier of the Province, and to bend his energies to the task of enlisting soldiers and erecting forts for its protection. He did not think himself qualified for even this quasi-military post, but posterity has taken the liberty of differing from him in this regard. Having speedily rallied five hundred and sixty men to his standard, and called his son, who had had some military training, to his side, as his aide-de-camp, he assembled his little army at Bethlehem, the chief seat of the Moravians, and divided it into three detachments. One he sent off towards the Minisink to build a fort in the upper part of the exposed territory, another he sent off to build a fort in the lower part of the same territory, and the third he conducted himself to Gnadenhutten, a Moravian village, recently reduced to blood and ashes by the Indians, for the purpose of erecting a third fort there.

When he reached Bethlehem, he found that not only had the Moravian brethren, who, he had had reason to believe, were conscientiously averse to war, erected a stockade around the principal buildings of the town, and purchased a supply of arms and ammunition for themselves in New York, but that they had even placed a quantity of stones between the windows of their high houses, to be thrown down by their women upon the heads of any Indians by whom these buildings might be invested. "Common sense, aided by present danger, will sometimes be too strong for whimsical opinions," dryly comments Franklin in the Autobiography.

How death kept his court in that tortured land may be inferred from an incident recorded by Franklin in the Autobiography. Just before he left Bethlehem for Gnadenhutten, eleven farmers who had been driven from their plantations by the Indians obtained from him each a gun with a suitable supply of ammunition, and returned to their homes to fetch away their cattle. Ten of the eleven were killed by the Indians. The one who escaped reported that they could not discharge their guns because the priming had become wet with rain—a mishap which the Indians were too dexterous to allow to befall their pieces. The same rain descended upon Franklin and his men on their march from Bethlehem to Gnadenhutten, and disabled their guns too, but fortunately, though at one point they had to pass through a gap in the mountains which their foes might well have turned to deadly account, they were not attacked on the march. Once arrived at Gnadenhutten, as soon as the detachment had sheltered itself under rude huts, and interred with more decent completeness the massacred victims, who had been only half buried by their demoralized neighbors, it proceeded to fell trees and to erect a fort, or rather stockade, with a circumference of four hundred and fifty-five feet. "How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke," was not more aptly written of the peasants whom Gray's Elegy has immortalized, than it might have been of the seventy brawny axemen in Franklin's camp, two of whom could by Franklin's watch in six minutes cut down a pine fourteen inches in diameter. In a week, in spite of drenching rains, a stockade had been constructed of sufficient strength, flimsy as it was, to fend off cannonless Indians. It consisted of palisades eighteen feet long, planted in a trench three feet deep, loopholes, and a gallery, at an elevation of six feet around its interior, for its defenders to stand on and take aim through the loopholes. When it had been finished, a swivel gun was mounted at one of its angles and discharged to let the Indians know that the garrison was supplied with such pieces. They were not far off; for when Franklin began, after he had furnished himself with a place of refuge, in case of retreat, to throw out scouting parties over the adjacent country, he found that they had been watching his movements from the hills with their feet dangling in holes, in which, for warmth, fires, made of charcoal, had been kindled. With their fires going in this way, there was neither light, flame, sparks, nor even smoke, to betray their presence; but it would seem that they were too few in numbers to feel that they could hazard an attack upon the stockade-builders.

The impression left upon the mind by this expedition is that it was managed by Franklin with no little good sense and efficiency, though it does seem to us that a man who never lacked the capacity to invent any mechanical device called for by his immediate needs ought to have been too provident to find himself in a narrow defile with guns as impotent as those of the ten poor farmers who had perished that very day. It was inexcusable in Poor Richard at any rate to forget his own saying, "For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the Enemy; all for want of care about a Horse-shoe Nail." In his instructions, before he left Bethlehem, to Captain Vanetta, in relation to certain operations, which the latter was to undertake with a separate force against the Indians, Franklin, though he said nothing about trusting in God, took care to warn the captain to keep his powder dry. The expedition was cut short by a letter from the Governor and letters from Franklin's friends in the Assembly urging him to attend the sessions about to be held by that body. There was no reason why he should not do so; for the three forts were completed, and the country people, relying upon the protection afforded by them, were content to remain on their farms; and especially too as Colonel Clapham, a New England officer, conversant with Indian warfare, had accepted the command in the place of Franklin, and had been introduced by the latter to his men as a soldier much better fitted to lead them than himself. But Franklin, though he had never been engaged in battle, found on his return to Philadelphia that he had won a military prestige upon which he could not easily turn his back. He was elected colonel of the Philadelphia regiment under such circumstances that he was unable to again decline the honor of a colonelcy on the score of unfitness. His regiment consisted of about twelve hundred presentable men, with an artillery company, furnished with six brass field-pieces, which the company had become expert enough to fire off twelve times in a minute.

The first time [says Franklin in the Autobiography] I reviewed my regiment they accompanied me to my house, and would salute me with some rounds fired before my door, which shook down and broke several glasses of my electrical apparatus. And my new honour proved not much less brittle; for all our commissions were soon after broken by a repeal of the law in England.

If, however, his colonelcy had not been marked by any considerable effusion of blood, he had acquired fame enough to arouse the intense jealousy of Thomas Penn, the Proprietary. When Franklin was on the point of setting out on a journey to Virginia, the officers of his regiment took it into their heads to escort him out of town as far as the Lower Ferry. This ceremonious proceeding was unexpectedly sprung upon him; otherwise, he says, he would have prevented it, being naturally averse to all flourishes of that sort. As it was, just as he was getting on horseback, the officers, thirty or forty in number, came to his door, all mounted, and in their uniforms, and, as soon as the cavalcade commenced to move, made things worse by drawing their swords and riding with them naked the entire distance to the Lower Ferry. The Proprietary, when he heard of the incident, was deeply affronted. No such honor, forsooth, he declared, had ever been paid to him, when in the Province, nor to any of his Governors, and was only proper when due homage was being paid to princes of the blood royal; all of which Franklin innocently tells us might be so for aught such a novice in matters of this kind as he knew. So aroused indeed was the Proprietary by the affair, coming as it did on the heels of the grudge that he already owed Franklin for his part in insisting that the Proprietary estates should sustain their just share of the common burden of taxation, that he even denounced Franklin to the British ministry as the arch obstructionist of measures for the King's service, citing the pomp of this occasion as evidence of the fact that Franklin harbored the intention of taking the government of the Province out of his hands by force. His malice, in fact, did not stop short even of an effort to deprive Franklin of his office as Deputy Postmaster-General for the Colonies; with no effect, however, except that of eliciting a gentle admonition to Franklin from Sir Everard Fawkener, the British Postmaster-General.

Thus ended for a time the military career of Franklin amid the crash of his electrical apparatus and the gleam of unfleshed swords. Susceptible of subdivision as his life is, it would hardly justify a separate chapter on Franklin the Soldier; but, all the same, by the splendidly efficient service rendered by him to Braddock, by his pamphlet, Plain Truth, by his Articles of Association and his battery, by his X Y Z dialogue and Militia Act, by his tact in conciliating and circumventing the awkward Quaker conviction that "peace unweaponed conquers every wrong," and by the energy and sound judgment brought by him to the expedition to Gnadenhutten he had established his right to be considered in war as well as in peace the man whose existence could be less easily spared than that of any other Pennsylvanian. There is a pleasure in speculating on the turn that his future might have taken if the terms in which Braddock recommended him to the favor of the Crown had been followed by the fall of Fort Duquesne instead of the battle of the Monongahela. While in his relations to Braddock's expedition he was influenced, as he always was in every such case, mainly by generous public spirit, yet it is manifest, too, that he was fully alive to the significance that his first helpful contact with such a British commander as Braddock might have for his own self-advancement.

The sterner stuff in the character of Franklin, however, was to be still further tried. During the year succeeding his second return from England in 1762, the minds of the people in the western counties of Pennsylvania, and especially of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, whose passions were easily deflected into channels of religious fanaticism, were inflamed almost to madness by Indian atrocities, and this mental condition resulted in an act of abominable butchery, such as has rarely blackened even the history of the American Indian himself. Living not far from the town of Lancaster, on the Manor of Conestoga, was the remnant of what had once been a considerable tribe of the Six Nations. The members of this tribe sent messengers to welcome the first English settlers of Pennsylvania with presents of venison, corn and furs, and entered into a treaty of friendship with William Penn which, in the figurative language of the savage, was to last "as long as the Sun should shine, or the Waters run in the Rivers," and which in point of fact was faithfully observed by both parties. In the course of time, as the whites purchased land from them, and hemmed them in more and more closely, they settled down upon a part of the Manor assigned to them by William Penn which they were not allowed by the Provincial Government to alienate, and here they lived on terms of unbroken amity with their white neighbors. In the further course of time, the tribe dwindled to such an extent that there were only twenty survivors, seven men, five women, and eight children of both sexes, whose means of subsistence were supplied to some extent by mendicancy and the chase, but mainly by the sale to the whites of the brooms, baskets and wooden ladles made by the women. The oldest of the band, a man named Shehaes, was old enough to have been present when the original chain of friendship between the tribe and William Penn was brightened by a second treaty between the same contracting parties. The youngest were infants. There is good reason to believe that at least one or two of the band had been in secret commerce with the hostile Indians whose shocking barbarities had filled the souls of such of the Pennsylvania borderers as had not been tomahawked, carried off into captivity or driven from their homes with sensations little short of frenzied desperation. On Wednesday, the 14th of December, 1763, fifty men from the territory about Paxton, a small town in Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna above Conestoga, all mounted, and armed with firelocks, hangers and hatchets, descended upon the squalid huts of this band, about dawn, and slaughtered in cold blood three men, two women and a young boy—the only members of the vagabond band whom they found at home. The firelocks, hangers and hatchets were all used in perpetrating the bloody work, and the miserable victims were scalped and horribly mangled besides. Shehaes himself was cut to pieces in his bed. Then, after seizing upon such booty as was to be found, and applying the torch to most of the huts, the murderers rode away through the snow-drifts to their homes. A shudder of horror passed through the whites in the vicinity, and a cry of bitter lamentation went up from the younger survivors of the band when they returned to the sickening spot, where the charred bodies of their parents and other relations, looking as one observer said like half burnt logs, told the hideous story.

We had known the greater part of them from children [said Susannah Wright, a humane white woman, who resided near the spot], had been always intimate with them. Three or four of the women were sensible and civilized, and the Indians' children used to play with ours, and oblige them all they could. We had many endearing recollections of them, and the manner of effecting the brutal enormity so affected us, that we had to beg visitors to forbear to speak of it.

The public officials of the Province appear to have faithfully performed their duty immediately after the tragedy. The survivors were gathered together by the sheriff of Lancaster, and placed in the workhouse for safety. A hundred and forty other friendly Indians, who had been converted by the Moravians, fearing that they might be visited with just such violence, had found, before the descent upon Conestoga, shelter near Philadelphia, at the public expense, under the guidance of a good Moravian minister. The Governor, John Penn, issued a proclamation calling upon all the civil and military officers of the Colony and all His Majesty's other liege subjects to do their duty. But the Governor soon found that he was reckoning with that Scotch-Irish temper, which, at its highest point of rigidity, is like concrete reinforced with iron rods, and which in this instance was more or less countenanced by the sympathy of the entire Province. Despite the proclamation of the Governor under the great seal of the Colony, the incensed frontiersmen, now fired by the fresh taste of blood as well as by the original conviction of the settlements from which they came that an angry God had turned his face from the inhabitants of Pennsylvania, because they had not smitten, hip and thigh, and utterly destroyed the red-skinned Amorites and Canaanites, again assembled, and riding into Lancaster, armed as on the previous occasion, broke in the door of its workhouse and dispatched every solitary one of the poor wretches who had escaped their pitiless hands. Thereupon, they mounted their horses, huzzaed in triumph, and rode off unmolested. The whole thing was like the flight of the pigeon-hawk, so swift and deadly was it; for, within ten or twelve minutes after the alarm was given, the borderers were again in their saddles. By a large part of the population of the Province the deed was applauded as the infliction of just vengeance upon a race which had many unspeakable enormities to answer for in its relations to the whites; by the people of the Province generally, except the Quakers, it was but languidly condemned, and the proclamations of the Governor proved to be mere paper trumpets, for all the efforts of the Government to bring the criminals to justice were wholly unsuccessful.

But there was one man in the Province, and he not a Quaker either, to whom justice, mercy and law had not lost their meaning. In his Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, Franklin, in words as burning as any ever inspired by righteous wrath, denounced with blistering force the assassins and their crimes. Anger, Lord Bacon tells us, makes even dull men witty. Just indignation in this case lifted one of the soberest and most self-contained of men to the level of impassioned feeling and of almost lyrical speech. With a firm yet rapid hand, Franklin sketched the history of the tribe, its peaceful intercourse with the whites, its decline until it numbered only the twenty creatures whom he brings vividly before us with a few familiar strokes of individual description, the infamous circumstances that attended the destruction of defenseless weakness in hut and workhouse. Then, along with illustrations of clemency and magnanimity derived from many different historical and national sources, and even from the annals of semi-civilized and barbarous communities, and graphically contrasted with the conduct of the ruthless men who had wreaked their will upon the Conestoga villagers, male and female, and their children, he poured out a tide of scathing execration upon the heads of the malefactors which showed as nothing else in all his life ever showed how deep were the fountains that fed the calm flow of his ordinary benevolence.

O, ye unhappy Perpetrators of this horrid Wickedness! [he exclaimed, rising with a natural crescendo of exalted feeling even into the sublimated province of the apostrophe] reflect a Moment on the Mischief ye have done, the Disgrace ye have brought on your Country, on your Religion, and your Bible, on your Families and Children! Think on the Destruction of your captivated Country-folks (now among the wild Indians) which probably may follow, in Resentment of your Barbarity! Think on the Wrath of the United Five Nations, hitherto our Friends, but now provoked by your murdering one of their Tribes, in Danger of becoming our bitter Enemies. Think of the mild and good Government you have so audaciously insulted; the Laws of your King, your Country, and your God, that you have broken; the infamous Death that hangs over your Heads; for Justice, though slow, will come at last. All good People everywhere detest your Actions. You have imbrued your Hands in innocent Blood; how will you make them clean? The dying Shrieks and Groans of the Murdered, will often sound in your Ears. Their Spectres will sometimes attend you, and affright even your innocent Children! Fly where you will, your Consciences will go with you. Talking in your Sleep shall betray you, in the Delirium of a Fever you yourselves shall make your own Wickedness known.

These were honest, fearless words, but, so far as we know, the Erynnes did not plant any stings of conscience in the breasts of the men from Paxton District whom Franklin elsewhere in this Narrative described as the Christian white savages of Paxton and Donegal. On the contrary, several hundred men from the same region, armed with rifles and hatchets, and clad in hunting shirts, marched towards Philadelphia with the avowed purpose of killing the Moravian Indians who had found refuge in its vicinity. The city was reduced to a state of terror, and Governor Penn, like his predecessors, could think of nothing more expedient to do than to invoke the advice and assistance of Franklin. He accordingly made Franklin's house his headquarters, and freely consulted with him touching every defensive measure required by the crisis. Again Franklin formed an association for the protection of Philadelphia; and, under his auspices, the citizens of Philadelphia were enrolled into nine companies, six of infantry, two of horse, and one of artillery. "Governor Penn," he afterwards declared in a letter to Lord Kames, "made my house for some time his headquarters, and did everything by my advice; so that, for about forty-eight hours, I was a very great man; as I had been once some years before, in a time of public danger." On came the insurgents until they reached Germantown, seven miles from the city. Here they were met by four citizens, of whom Franklin was one, who had been requested by the Governor and his Council to confer with them. While the conference was pending, Franklin's regiment, supported by a detachment of King's troops, remained in the city under arms, and even young Quakers labored incessantly to complete the intrenchments around the barracks, in which the menaced Indians with their Moravian shepherd had been placed. Indeed, now that the waves of the Presbyterian invasion were lapping his own doorsill, the Quaker of every age in Philadelphia appears to have entirely lost sight of the duty of non-resistance. The conference satisfied the insurgents that graver work was ahead of them than that of slaying and scalping old men, women and children, and they retraced their steps. "The fighting face we put on," said Franklin, in his letter to Lord Kames, "and the reasonings we used with the insurgents, … having turned them back and restored quiet to the city, I became a less man than ever; for I had, by these transactions, made myself many enemies among the populace." He had, indeed, but not one whose enmity was not more honorable to him than the friendship of even all his host of friends.

Nor did the eagerness of Franklin to bring the Paxton assassins to justice cease with the conference at Germantown. Though pamphlets were sold in the streets of Philadelphia lauding their acts, and inveighing against all who had assisted in protecting the Moravian Indians, though the Governor himself was weak or wicked enough to curry political favor with the party which approved the recent outrages, Franklin still inflexibly maintained that the law should be vindicated by the condign punishment of the Paxton ringleaders. In another place we shall see what his resolute stand cost him politically.