Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed, Volume 2 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own WritingsBruce, Wiliam Cabell
History
Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed, Volume 2 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings
Bruce, Wiliam Cabell
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790
For a time, after Franklin returned to Pennsylvania in 1762, there was
something like peace between the Proprietaries and the people. When a
nephew of Thomas Penn was appointed governor, the Assembly accepted him as
a family pledge of restored good feeling.
The Assembly [Franklin wrote to Dr. Fothergill]
received a Governor of the Proprietary family with open
arms, addressed him with sincere expressions of
kindness and respect, opened their purses to them, and
presented him with six hundred pounds; made a Riot Act
and prepared a Militia Bill immediately, at his
instance, granted supplies, and did everything that he
requested, and promised themselves great happiness
under his administration.
And no governor was ever so dependent upon the good will of the Assembly.
It was during his administration that the Scotch-Irish inhabitants of the
frontier, inflamed by Indian outrages, imbrued their hands in the blood of
the Conestoga Indians, and, so far from being intimidated by the public
proclamations issued by the Governor for their arrest and punishment,
marched to the very threshold of Philadelphia itself with the purpose of
destroying the Moravian Indians huddled there in terror of their lives. The
whole Province outside of the City of Philadelphia was given over to
lawlessness and disorder. In the contagious excitement of the hour, a
considerable portion of its population even believed that the Quakers had
gained the friendship of the Indians by presents, supplied them secretly
with arms and ammunition, and engaged them to fall upon and kill the whites
on the Pennsylvania frontier. Under these circumstances, the Governor
simply did what Governor Morris and Governor Denny had been compelled to do
before him, namely, call in the aid of the man who could in a letter to
Peter Collinson truthfully sum up all that there was in the military
demonstration which angered Thomas Penn so deeply with the simple
utterance, "The People happen to love me." The whole story was told by
Franklin to Dr. Fothergill in the letter from which we have just quoted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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