General Braddock warmly praised the assistance which Pennsylvania gave him because, he said, she had done more for him than any of the other colonies.Virginia and Maryland promised everything and performed nothing, while Pennsylvania promised nothing and performed everything.Commodore Spy thanked the Assembly for the large number of sailors sent his fleet at the expense of the province.General Shirley, in charge of the New England and New York campaigns, thanked the Assembly for the numerous recruits;and it was the common opinion at the time that Pennsylvania had sent more troops to the war than any other colony.In the first four years of the war the province spent for military purposes 210,567 pounds sterling, which was a very considerable sum at that time for a community of less than 200,000 people.Quakers, though they hate war, will accept it when there is no escape.The old story of the Quaker who tossed a pirate overboard, saying, "Friend, thee has no business here," gives their point of view better than pages of explanation.Quaker opinion has not always been entirely uniform.In Revolutionary times in Philadelphia there was a division of the Quakers known as the Fighting Quakers, and their meeting house is still pointed out at the corner of Fourth Street and Arch.They even produced able military leaders: Colonel John Dickinson, General Greene, and General Mifflin in the Continental Army, and, in the War of 1812, General Jacob Brown, who reorganized the army and restored its failing fortunes after many officers had been tried and found wanting.
There was always among the Quakers a rationalistic party and a party of mysticism.The rationalistic party prevailed in Pennsylvania all through the colonial period.In the midst of the worst horrors of the French and Indian wars, however, the conscientious objectors roused themselves and began preaching and exhorting what has been called the mystical side of the faith.
Many extreme Quaker members of the Assembly resigned their seats in consequence.After the Revolution the spiritual party began gaining ground, partly perhaps because then the responsibilities of government and care of the great political and religious experiment in Pennsylvania were removed.The spiritual party increased so rapidly in power that in 1827 a split occurred which involved not a little bitterness, ill feeling, and litigation over property.This division into two opposing camps, known as the Hicksites and the Orthodox, continues and is likely to remain.
Quaker government in Pennsylvania was put to still severer tests by the difficulties and disasters that followed Braddock's defeat.That unfortunate general had something over two thousand men and was hampered with a train of artillery and a splendid equipment of arms, tools, and supplies, as if he were to march over the smooth highways of Europe.When he came to drag all these munitions through the depths of the Pennsylvania forests and up and down the mountains, he found that he made only about three miles a day and that his horses had nothing to eat but the leaves of the trees.Washington, who was of the party, finally persuaded him to abandon his artillery and press forward with about fifteen hundred picked men.These troops, when a few miles from Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), met about six hundred Indians and three hundred French coming from the fort.The English maintained a close formation where they were, but the French and Indians immediately spread out on their flanks, lying behind trees and logs which provided rests for their rifles and security for their bodies.This strategy decided the day.The English were shot down like cattle in a pen, and out of about fifteen hundred only four hundred and fifty escaped.The French and Indian loss was not much over fifty.
This defeat of Braddock's force has become one of the most famous reverses in history; and it was made worse by the conduct of Dunbar who had been left in command of the artillery, baggage, and men in the rear.He could have remained where he was as some sort of protection to the frontier.But he took fright, burned his wagons, emptied his barrels of powder into the streams, destroyed his provisions, and fled back to Fort Cumberland in Maryland.Here the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia as well as the Pennsylvania Assembly urged him to stay.But, determined to make the British rout complete, he soon retreated to the peace and quiet of Philadelphia, and nothing would induce him to enter again the terrible forests of Pennsylvania.
