George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[225] from excise; to restrain and regulate the emissions

chap. IX.} 1756.

of paper money; to make their own will, rather than good behavior, the tenure of office. But the Assembly was inflexible in connecting their grants for the public service with the preservation of their executive influence and the taxation of ‘all estates real and personal, those of the proprietaries not excepted.’

While these passionate disputes were raging, it was represented in England that the frontier of the province was desolate and defenceless; that the Shawnees had scaled the mountains, and prowled with horrible ferocity along the branches of the Susquehanna and the Delaware; that, in the time of a yearly meeting of Quakers, the bodies of a German family, murdered and mangled by the savages, had been brought down to Philadelphia; that men had even surrounded the Assembly, demanding protection, which was withheld.

But the Assembly had already, by provincial laws, provided quarters for the British soldiers; had established a voluntary militia; and, when the proprietaries consented to pay five thousand pounds towards the public defence, had granted fifty-five thousand more. Franklin, who was one of the commissioners to apply the money, yielded to the wish of the governor, and took charge of the northwestern border. Men came readily under his command, and he led them through dangerous defiles, to build a fort at Gnadenhutten on the Lehigh. The Indians had made the village a scene of silence and desolation; the mangled inhabitants lay near the ashes of their houses unburied, exposed to birds and beasts of prey. With Franklin came every thing that could restore