The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (45 page)

The episode won Thomas Penn a large tract of land but lost his family the friendship of the Delawares. Even the English settlers in the area, many of whom stood to gain from the younger Penn’s duplicity, shook their heads. “The unfairness practiced in the walk,” recalled one eyewitness, “both in regard to the way where, and the manner how, it was performed, and the dissatisfaction of the Indians concerning it, were the common subjects of conversation in our neighborhood for some considerable time after it was done.” As dissatisfied in his own fashion as the Indians was Edward Marshall, who never received his promised reward, despite repeated assurances from the governor that he would.

Under other circumstances, the fiasco of the Walking Purchase
might have alienated the Delawares from the Pennsylvanians permanently. But politics among the Indians was almost as competitive as politics among the Europeans—in no small part
because
the politics among the Europeans was so competitive. With the French pushing eastward from the Ohio Valley, even as English settlers moved west from the Delaware Valley, the various Indian tribes and confederations, including the Delawares, had to fashion alliances where they could.

Such alliance-fashioning carried Franklin to Carlisle in the autumn of 1753. For some time the Pennsylvania Assembly had been supplying what the Quakers called the “necessities of life”—and everyone else called guns and ammunition—to the Delawares and other Indian opponents of the French. As the French stepped up their pressure, instigating raids upon the pro-English Indians, the latter requested additional help. In September 1753 they informed Pennsylvania Governor Hamilton that they would send a delegation to Carlisle in a few days. If Brother Onas (a word meaning “quill” or “pen,” and signifying the governor of Pennsylvania, at the same time that it served as a pun on the name of the proprietary family) wished to keep their loyalty, he had better act quickly. Hamilton immediately commissioned Richard Peters, the secretary of the provincial Council; Isaac Norris, at that time speaker of the Assembly; and Benjamin Franklin to head west to parley.

Peters and Norris supplied the political gravity in the Pennsylvania delegation; Franklin much of the common sense. For expertise on Indian affairs the group turned to Conrad Weiser, a German immigrant who had spent years living with and around various Indian tribes, learning their languages and customs, and making himself indispensable as a mediator between the Indians and the whites. Weiser was especially friendly with the Iroquois and had been largely responsible for winning the Six Nations to the English side. The Six Nations would be joining the Pennsylvanians at Carlisle; by way of preparing Franklin and the other commissioners for the negotiations, Weiser told of a recent conversation between himself and Canasatego, an important Iroquois chief. Canasatego had just returned from Albany, where he noticed that the white men there worked hard for six days, then shut up their shops on the seventh and retired to a great house. What were they doing in the great house?, he asked Weiser.

Weiser thought a moment, then replied that they learned “good things” in the great house.

Canasatego rejoined that he had no doubt they told Weiser so, but as for himself, he was skeptical. He explained why. He had taken a batch of
skins to a merchant in Albany, with whom he had done business before. He asked the merchant, a man named Hanson, how much he would pay for the skins. Hanson answered that he could not give more than four shillings per pound, a price Canasatego considered so low as to be almost insulting. But Hanson could not talk business now, as it was the day when all the Europeans gathered at the great house to learn good things.

Canasatego, knowing there would be no business done that day, decided to go to the great house himself and learn firsthand what happened there. He was intrigued, after entering the building, to see everyone listening intently to a man dressed in black, standing in the front and speaking rapidly in an angry voice. Unfortunately, Canasatego’s English could not keep up with the lesson, so he retired outdoors, where he smoked his pipe and waited for the meeting to end.

When it did, Hanson emerged, and Canasatego said he hoped the merchant had reconsidered his earlier offer. Four shillings a pound was much too low. Hanson said he had indeed reconsidered; he could not go higher than three shillings and sixpence. Surprised, Canasatego attempted to take his business elsewhere, only to hear every other fur buyer quote the same price: three and six. From this he concluded, as he explained to Weiser (and as Weiser related to Franklin), that the “good things” discussed in the great house were not good things at all but ways to cheat Indians on the price of beaver.

The Carlisle
treaty—as the negotiation itself was called—was an education to Franklin. A strict and elaborate formality governed the speeches of both sides: the Pennsylvanians and the Six Nations on the one hand, and the Delawares, Twightwees, Shawonees, and Owandaets on the other. “Brethren,” the Pennsylvania commissioners jointly declared, delivering a string of wampum, “by this string we acquaint you that the Six Nations do, at our request, join with us in condoling the losses you have of late sustained by the deaths of several of your chiefs and principal men.”

This sentiment was seconded by Scarrooyady, the representative of the Iroquois. “Brethren, the Twightwees and Shawonees,” he said (as interpreted by Weiser), “It has pleased Him who is above that we shall meet here today and see one another. I and my Brother Onas join together to speak to you. As we know your seats at home are bloody, we wipe away the blood, and set your seats in order at your council fire.”
Handing over another string of wampum and several blankets, Scarrooyady added: “We suppose that the blood is now washed off. We jointly, with our Brother Onas, dig a grave for your warriors, killed in your country, and we bury their bones decently, wrapping them in these blankets, and with these we cover their graves.”

After similar condolences to the Delawares and the Owandaets, Scarrooyady and the commissioners came to the point of the parley, which was to strengthen the tenuous alliance that currently obtained between the two sides. Speaking for both his own people and the Pennsylvanians, Scarrooyady addressed the others: “We, the English and Six Nations, do exhort every one of you to do your utmost to preserve this union and friendship, which has so long and happily continued among us. Let us keep the chain from rusting, and prevent every thing that may hurt or break it.” The commissioners warned that the French were doing their utmost to break the chain, trying to turn friend against friend. This must not be allowed to happen. “Do not separate. Do not part on any score. Let no differences nor jealousies subsist a moment between nation and nation.”

During the next four days the Delawares and the others indicated their willingness that the chain remain unbroken. But they and the other Indians, including the Iroquois, had some complaints they wished to air with the Pennsylvanians. Scarrooyady pointed out that the French governor of Canada blamed the English for the frontier troubles, contending that their advance toward the Ohio was the origin of all the conflict. Scarrooyady said the Six Nations did not take the French leader’s statements at face value—“He speaks with two tongues”—but there was no denying that the arrival of the English from the east made matters worse. “Call your people back on this side of the hills,” Scarrooyady said.

Of equal concern was the cost and quality of the trade goods the English merchants brought into the region. The English goods were too expensive and were not what the Indians wanted. The Indians wanted powder and lead, but the traders brought rum and flour. The rum was a curse, for the traders employed it to cheat the Indians. “These wicked whiskey sellers,” Scarrooyady said, “when they have once got the Indians in liquor, make them sell their very clothes from their backs.”

Franklin witnessed personally whereof Scarrooyady spoke. On their arrival at Carlisle the Pennsylvania commissioners forbade the sale of liquor by the merchants there. The embargo lasted the four days of the conference. At the end of that time the ban was lifted. Franklin described the result:

They were near 100 men, women and children, and were lodged in temporary cabins built in the form of a square just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walked out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square. They were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-coloured bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could be imagined. There was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum; of which we gave no notice.

The next day, sensible they had misbehaved in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counsellors to make their apology. The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavored to excuse the rum, by saying, “The Great Spirit who made all things made every thing for some use, and whatever use he designed any thing for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said, ‘Let this be for Indians to get drunk with.’ And it must be so.”

The rum did not merely corrupt the Indians. It also weakened the shield the Indians provided against the French. Franklin and his fellow commissioners emphasized this point in a scathing appendix to their report of the Carlisle proceedings. The quantities of liquor sold to the Indians, they said, had lately increased “to an inconceivable degree, so as to keep these poor Indians continually under the force of liquor.” As a result the tribes had become “dissolute, enfeebled and indolent when sober, and untractable and mischievous in their liquor, always quarrelling, and often murdering one another.” The actions of the traders, who acknowledged no obligation to anyone but themselves, threatened to “entirely estrange the affections of the Indians from the English, deprive them of their natural strength and activity, and oblige them either to abandon their country or submit to any terms, be they ever so unreasonable, from the French.” In light of this “deplorable state” of the Indians, the commissioners advocated “that good and speedy remedies may be provided, before it be too late.”

10
Join or Die
1754–55

It was already too late. Almost as Franklin was heading east with Richard Peters and Isaac Norris for Philadelphia, carrying news of their apparent success in affirming Pennsylvania’s Indian alliances, a young Virginian—at twenty-one years of age, not quite as old as William Franklin—was heading in the opposite direction. George Washington was a soldier in the Virginia militia; he showed such promise at soldiering that he already held the rank of major. And he was entrusted with an important mission. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, had ordered him to travel to the Ohio Valley and warn the French commander there that he was trespassing on English soil. The French commander must remove his troops and withdraw to Canada.

The Washington mission followed many months of rising tension over the fate of the trans-Appalachian west. The peace treaty of 1748 may have silenced the guns in Europe and compelled the privateers to abandon their licensed piracy for less thrilling (and less profitable) pursuits, but it did nothing to settle the question of ownership of the Ohio Valley. Various of the English colonies claimed Ohio by virtue of their charters, which audaciously (and ignorantly—no one had any idea of the distances involved) granted them territory from sea to sea. The French asserted ownership by claiming (ignorantly or disingenuously—he never got that far) that their man La Salle had reached the Ohio River on his voyage up the Mississippi in the 1670s.

Beyond their historic claims, the two sides had continuing competing interests in Ohio. The English coveted the opportunity to expand from their seaside colonies; the colonies’ growing agricultural populations made the rich bottomlands of the Ohio floodplain appear luscious almost beyond measure. Already, speculative land companies were surveying the region for subdivision and sale. Such surveying was what had propelled young Washington into the soldier’s trade; with only modest formal education but a head for trigonometry and a hand for draftsmanship, Washington at seventeen had joined a survey of the Shenandoah holdings of Lord Fairfax, an in-law. The hardy life of camp and march agreed with Washington; at the first chance he made the natural transition to the Virginia militia.