Braddock's Defeat and Franklin's Experiments — The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Franklin keeps supplying General Braddock's army with food and money until news arrives of a terrible defeat. He had packed twenty supply parcels for officers and advanced more than one thousand pounds of his own money. Braddock pays him one thousand pounds just before the battle, but the rest of Franklin's advance is lost when wagons, stores, and horses are abandoned to the enemy. Franklin had warned that a long line marching through woods could be cut apart by ambush, but Braddock smiled and said disciplined regulars could not be hurt by savages. The enemy attacks from behind trees, officers fall fast, and panic spreads until most of the picked troops are killed or fleeing. Braddock himself is wounded, and Americans begin to doubt whether British regulars are as unbeatable as they had thought.

When others plan victory fireworks too early, Franklin refuses to join them, saying war's outcome is uncertain. After the disaster, wagon owners sue him for the bonds he signed, and he nearly faces ruin until General Shirley orders payment of claims near twenty thousand pounds. Governor Morris then presses harder for tax bills that exempt the proprietors' estates, even trying to change one word from taxing all estates to taxing only some. Franklin keeps fighting that fight in the Assembly while helping pass defense money and a volunteer militia law he models to leave Quakers free.

Franklin commands frontier defense at the governor's request, raising more than five hundred men and building forts in harsh winter rain. At Gnadenhut he buries the dead, raises palisades in a week, and sees that working men stay cheerful while idle men quarrel. He gets better prayer attendance by letting the chaplain hand out the daily rum ration right after service. Moravian neighbors surprise him with their own stockades and armed watch, and he later accepts election as colonel of a large Philadelphia regiment whose salute accidentally breaks his electrical glassware before commissions are voided by a repeal in England.

The chapter also turns to Franklin's electrical experiments after a Boston demonstration and a glass tube from London. His house fills with visitors, Kinnersley lectures for pay, and papers on lightning reach the Royal Society, where some first laugh and later print them in a bestselling pamphlet. French philosophers translate the work across Europe, and Buffon helps spread it in Paris. When Abbé Nollet attacks his experiments in print, claiming an American could not have written them, Franklin decides not to answer because anyone can repeat the tests and arguing across languages will waste time he would rather spend making new discoveries.