One of the good things done by Parliament at this time was the formation of the Royal American Regiment of four battalions, each a thousand strong. Of the fifty officers commissioned, nearly one third were Germans and Swiss. Most of the rank and file were Palatine and Swiss-Germans in America, who enlisted for three years. None of the officers could rise above the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and the Earl of Loudon was appointed first colonel-in-chief. Loudon was succeeded in 1757 by Abercrombie, and in 1758 by Lord Amherst. Until the Revolutionary War, this cosmopolitan regiment did noble service under Stanwix, Bouquet, Forbes, Prideaux, Wolfe, and Johnson. From 1757 to 1760 we find one or more battalions of the regiment in active service in the various parts of New York. The famous Rev. Michael Schlatter, the organizer of the German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, was the regimental chaplain. On the 15th of June, 1756, the forty German officers who were to raise the recruits arrived, one of the ablest being Colonel Bouquet. This Swiss officer, with the Germans, at Bushy Run in Pennsylvania largely retrieved the disasters caused by Braddock’s defeat, and restored the frontiers of Pennsylvania to comparative safety and comfort. While Abercrombie, who was one of those military men whose reliance is less upon the sword than the spade, was digging ditches in Albany, Johnson was arranging for a great Indian council at his house on the Mohawk. He had in view the double purpose of winning the Delawares and other Pennsylvania tribes from war against the English colonists, and of inducing all the Northern Indians to join in the expedition against the French posts on Lake Ontario. Braddock’s defeat had been the signal for the Delawares, under the direct influence of the French, to break the peace of more than seventy years, and to scatter fire and blood in Pennsylvania, from the Monongahela to the Delaware. The solemn treaty of Penn—which Voltaire, with more wit than truth, declared was “never sworn to and never broken”—was now a thing of the past. The wampum was unravelled, and the men with hats and the men with scalp-locks were in deadly conflict. While the Friends remained at their Philadelphia firesides, the German and Scotch settlers on the frontier bore the brunt of savage fury. When public action was taken, it was in the double and contradictory form of peace-belts of wampum sent by the Friends, and a declaration of war by Governor Morris. In this mixed state of things it was hard for Johnson to know what to do. Through his influence the Iroquois, uncles and masters, had summoned by wampum belts their nephews and vassals to the great conference which was opened at his house in February, 1756. To prepare for this, Johnson had made a journey to the council-fire of the Confederacy at Onondaga, arriving June 15. There he succeeded in neutralizing in part the work done by the French, and obtained an important concession.