In December 1763 a party of frontiersmen from Paxton township, in the back country near modern Harrisburg, murdered the last twenty Conestoga Indians: six in their village, and fourteen more in the workhouse at Lancaster where the authorities had put them for safety. The Conestoga were a small, peaceable community who had lived under a treaty with William Penn for eighty years. In February the Paxton men marched on Philadelphia, several hundred strong, intending to kill the Moravian Indians whom the government had sheltered on an island in the Delaware. The city armed itself. Franklin organised the defence, rode out to Germantown with the Governor's commissioners to meet the marchers, and talked them into going home.
Then he lost. The pamphlet war that followed set the frontier counties and the Presbyterian interest against the Quaker party that had run Pennsylvania since its founding, and Franklin, who had written the most savage of the pamphlets against the marchers, made himself the target. Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony, owned and governed by the heirs of William Penn rather than by the Crown, and Franklin's party wanted the King to take it over. In the Assembly election of October 1764 he was defeated for the first time in fourteen years. His party sent him to London anyway, to petition for the end of proprietary government. He was still there when Parliament passed the Stamp Act.
The Stamp Act of 1765 required a tax stamp on every printed sheet in America: newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, legal forms, even playing cards. The printers, who had the most to lose, made the most noise, and several stopped their presses rather than pay. Franklin misjudged it badly at first, recommending a friend for the post of stamp distributor in Pennsylvania, and a crowd nearly pulled his house down for it. He recovered in February 1766 by standing before the House of Commons for four hours and telling the members plainly that the colonies would never submit. The Act was repealed in March, and the colonies celebrated with bonfires, illuminations and lanterns hung in the streets.
Asked what would happen if a military force were sent to enforce the Act, Franklin gave the answer that was printed from London to Charleston: "They cannot force a man to take stamps who chuses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one." Five weeks later the Act was repealed. Parliament saved its face with a Declaratory Act, passed the same day, asserting its right to bind the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." That clause would be remembered when the celebrations were over.
This room holds the year that changed him and the celebration that followed, and it runs on a few years further, because the other business of the decade did. While the pamphlets flew and the stamps were burned, the same men were buying land. Croghan and Trent were pressing their claims for the losses of the war, William Franklin was taking shares in the Otsego tract, and his father stayed in London long after the repeal, pursuing grants in the west. The last two pieces here belong to that quieter quarrel.
