page_title: Penn's Creek massacre
section_title: Pennsylvania's response
hierarchical_section_title: Penn's Creek massacre / Aftermath / Pennsylvania's response
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Franklin painted by Benjamin Wilson in 1759
context_page_description: The Penn's Creek massacre was an October 16, 1755 raid by Lenape Native Americans on a settlement along Penn's Creek, a tributary of the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania. It was the first of a series of deadly raids on Pennsylvania settlements by Native Americans allied with the French in the French and Indian War.
  Of the 26 settlers they found living on Penn's Creek, the Lenape killed 14 and took 11 captive. Three of the preteen girls who were taken captive regained their freedom after years of slavery, and their stories have been popularized in several young adult novels and a film.
  The Lenape had been angered by years of European settlers encroaching on their land. They had lost their traditional lands in the Lehigh Valley to the provincial government of Pennsylvania in a fraudulent deal known as the Walking Purchase, and many of them had subsequently moved into the Susquehanna Valley by permission of the Iroquois. One year before the Penn's Creek massacre, the Iroquois had sold much of the Susquehanna Valley to the governments of Pennsylvania and Connecticut without consulting the Lenape, who once again found themselves being displaced by arriving settlers.
context_section_description: Pennsylvania had been founded by Quakers, and that religion's core doctrine of pacifism meant that the province's Assembly had always refused to establish a permanent military force. As the settlements were decimated, Governor Robert Hunter Morris and the Assembly argued over whether or not proprietary estates should be taxed to raise money to defend them. In desperation, hundreds of Berks County German settlers marched on Philadelphia on November 25, 1755 carrying with them the scalped and mutilated bodies of some of their murdered neighbors. They dragged the bodies through the streets with placards attached declaring that these were the victims of the Quaker policy of non-resistance. They then surrounded the House of Assembly and placed the rotting corpses in its doorways.
  Benjamin Franklin sat on the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1755. Gauging the panic that was spreading throughout the province, he had strongly urged Governor Morris and his fellow assemblymen that military force was necessary in the face of the Native American threat. On November 25, the same day the settlers' corpses were left on their doorstep, the Assembly acquiesced to Franklin's proposal for an unpaid volunteer force and passed Pennsylvania's first Militia Act. Two days later, a defense fund was created by a compromise hammered out by Franklin and fellow Assemblyman Joseph Galloway; it allowed for the taxing of colonists but exempted William Penn's sons and their land in exchange for a contribution from them. By early 1756, construction was underway on a chain of frontier forts, including Fort Augusta in the northern Susquehanna Valley, that ran along the Blue Mountains from the Delaware River to the Maryland line.
  In mid-December 1755, two months after the Penn's Creek massacre, Franklin himself set out to help the colonists prepare for battle. He visited towns like Bethlehem and Easton, now crowded with settlers who had fled their land, and signed up volunteers. Franklin appointed sentries and organized armed patrols and defenses.
  On New Year's Day 1756, twenty new militiamen who were building a fort on the site of the Gnadenhuetten massacre were lured into an ambush and killed by Indians who had come through the Lehigh Gap. Stunned at this breach, Governor Morris granted Franklin blanket authority to appoint and dismiss military officers and distribute weapons in Northampton County. By February, Pennsylvania had 919 paid colonial troops, with 389 in Northampton County alone. Later that year, a law was passed that subjected the commonwealth's troops to military discipline, and in 1757, the last vestiges of pacifism fell as military service was made compulsory for men in Pennsylvania.
  
  Still, they could not stop the Lenape and their Native American allies from continuing the raids. Nor could the Iroquois Confederacy, which ostensibly had authority over all of the Native American tribes in the region and which had thus far remained neutral in the war. The Lenape, still angry over the sale of the Susquehanna Valley in the Albany Purchase, were further angered when the Iroquois noted their lesser status by reminding them that they were the "women" in the relationship between their two tribes during a contentious March 1756 conference of all the Susquehanna Indian leaders. An eastern Lenape spokesman spat back: 
  We are Men and are determined not to be ruled any longer by you as Women. We are determined to cut off all the English except those that may make their escape from us in ships; so say no more to us on that head, lest we cut off your private parts, and make Women of you, as you have done of us. 
  In April 1756, Pennsylvania declared that it would pay a bounty of $130 for the scalp of every Lenape male over ten years of age and $50 for a Lenape woman's scalp, or $150 for a male Lenape prisoner and $130 for a female one.  New Jersey soon followed suit. Pennsylvania assemblyman James Hamilton justified the bounties as “the only way to clear our frontiers of … savages & … infinitely cheapest in the end." There were fears that this would encourage indi
caption: Benjamin Franklin in 1759, as painted by Benjamin Wilson (1721-1788)
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