Later, however, Philadelphia received another visit from much more unruly mountaineers. A large number of these men, known as the Paxton boys, met a battalion of British regulars at Lancaster, demanded the latter's horses and ammunition wagons, and told them that "if they fired so much as one shot their scalps would ornament every cabin from the Susquehanna to the Ohio."
The regulars didn't fire, and the mountaineers helped themselves to everything they wanted and set out for Philadelphia. Some Indians were being held as prisoners in the town, and the Paxton boys, growing insolent with power as they saw British regulars and Quaker farmers yielding to their orders, determined to make the people of Philadelphia give the Indians to them. The mountaineers marched to the high ground of Germantown, north of the town, nearly a thousand in number, and sent their envoys to the town officers. The officers knew, quite as well as Governor Evans had known before, that there was no militia sufficient to take the field against the frontiersmen, and that the citizens would never arm against them. The leading people of the town went to talk with the Paxton boys, trying to persuade them to leave peacefully. Finally by agreeing to give the mountaineers everything they asked, except only the opportunity to massacre the captive Indians, the townspeople succeeded in persuading their unwelcome visitors to leave. For long, however, the men of the frontiers and the mountains looked on the people who dwelt along the Delaware as a cowardly race, who had to be bullied before they would do their share in protecting the province.
The governors of Pennsylvania were not always as fair in dealing with their neighbors as the people were. When John Penn, grandson of William Penn, held the office of governor he sent a gang of rascals to attack men from Connecticut who had settled in the Wyoming Valley, which was claimed by Penn as part of his province. The settlers had built homes and planted crops in the Wyoming Valley, and they had no intention of letting John Penn's mercenary troopers despoil them without a fight. They built a fort, and defied the governor's soldiers. John Penn's men had finally to retreat before their stubborn resistance.
The attack on the Wyoming settlers was in 1770, and only five years later the men of Lexington and Concord fired the shots that were to echo from New Hampshire to Georgia. In the war that followed Pennsylvania did her part. Philadelphia, then the leading city of the colonies, became the home of the new government. In the very street where Governor Evans had urged the townsfolk to organize a militia to fight a few French frigates, men went to Independence Hall to proclaim a Declaration of Independence against the king of England. No one could have accused Philadelphia in July, 1776, of a lack of patriotic spirit. The Liberty Bell rang out its message to all, to the Quaker descendants of William Penn's first settlers as well as to those of other faiths who had come to his province since, and all alike responded to its appeal to proclaim liberty throughout the world.
VIII THE PIRATES OF CHARLES TOWN HARBOR
(South Carolina, 1718)
I
Antony Evans was rowing slowly round the southern point of Charles Town, the bow of his boat pointing out across the broad expanse of water that lay to the east. It was early morning of a bright summer day, and the harbor looked very inviting, the breeze freshening it with little dancing waves of deep blue, tipped with silver, and bringing the salt fragrance of the ocean to the sunlit town. Deep woods ringed the bay; here and there tall, stately palmettos standing out on little headlands, looking like sentries stationed along the shore to keep all enemies away.