Politics and the Revolution

IN the winter of 1763–64 a band of Scots-Irish frontiersmen from Paxton township murdered twenty Conestoga Indians under the protection of the Pennsylvania government, and then marched on Philadelphia to finish the job. Franklin met them at Germantown with a delegation and talked them into going home. It was the beginning of the most bitter year in Pennsylvania politics. The Paxton affair became a proxy war between the Assembly, which Franklin led, and the Proprietors, whom he had come to despise. By the autumn Franklin had lost his Assembly seat in a savage election and been sent to London to petition for the province to be taken from the Penns and made a royal colony.

Franklin reached London in December 1764 to find Parliament preparing something far larger than a Pennsylvania quarrel. The Stamp Act, passed the following March, laid a tax on every legal document, newspaper, almanac, and pack of cards in the colonies, to be paid with embossed stamps from London. Franklin, who thought resistance futile, recommended a friend for the Philadelphia stamp distributorship and nearly lost his house to a mob for it. Then, as the colonies exploded, he found his footing. In February 1766 he stood for four hours before the House of Commons and answered a hundred and seventy-four questions, and his examination — printed, reprinted, and read everywhere — did more than any other single document to bring the Act down.

The news reached Boston in May 1766, and the town hung lanterns in the great elm at the corner of Essex and Orange streets that had become, since the previous August, the Liberty Tree. The illumination was one of the great public celebrations of the colonial era: the tree strung with lanterns, an obelisk of oiled paper lit from within on the Common, fireworks and church bells until midnight. Very few of the lanterns survive. One of them is in Wynnewood.

Read the full chapter: The Assembly, the Stamp, and the Lantern (Catalog IV)