The Old Glade (Forbes's) Road (Pennsylvania State Road)Hulbert, Archer Butler
History
The Old Glade (Forbes's) Road (Pennsylvania State Road)
Hulbert, Archer Butler
Forbes Road (Pa.); United States -- History -- French and Indian War, 1754-1763
Up to the time of Braddock's defeat the Pennsylvania Assembly had done
nothing toward the preservation of the colony, save ordering the road
cut from Carlisle to the Youghiogheny river. They furnished not a man
for Braddock's army and voted not a pound toward the expense of securing
the wagons and horses which made Braddock's march possible. The stores
which Governor Morris laid in along the line of the road, at
Shippensburg and McDowell's Mill, were secured and forwarded without aid
from the Assembly. Though many Pennsylvanians served, in one way or
another, in the unfortunate expedition, the public was divided on this
issue. Some were loyal to the Assembly and many favored warlike
measures. It has been asserted that had not Forbes's Road been built in
1758 its building would have been postponed twenty years.
Passing this interesting speculation, it is sure Braddock's defeat
brought to Pennsylvania a terrible and bloody awakening; nothing can
show this more strikingly than the fact that when Braddock's successor
came, only three years later, the Pennsylvania Assembly quickly
supported him by voting twenty-seven hundred men for offensive service
and appropriating half a million dollars for war.
The change was not more striking than was the need for it. All the
terrifying scenes in Virginia were reproduced in Pennsylvania; the
savages poured through the mountain gaps and fell with unparalleled fury
upon a hundred defenseless settlements. Pennsylvania had not expanded
further at this time than to the Blue Mountains. Her frontier was not,
therefore, nearly as broad as Virginia's, and the frontier firing-line
was not so far removed from the populated districts. At the same time it
is probable that the Indians from Logstown and Kittanning could get a
scalp quicker (so far as distance was concerned) from Pennsylvania than
from Virginia--and the French paid as much for one as for the other!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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