Peaceable Kingdom Lost by Kenny Kevin

Author:Kenny, Kevin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2009-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

“Paxton Expedition, Inscribed to the Author of the Farce by HD.” Cartoon by Henry Dawkins, 1764. Cartoon 1764 [Pax]/795.F.20a. #2. 66984.0.9. Courtesy of Library Company of Philadelphia.

On Sunday, February 5, at about 2 a.m., the bells sounded the alarm. Watchmen spread the word that the Paxton Boys were coming, and the residents of Philadelphia assembled in the Council House square. “After two o’clock at night the watchmen began to cry, ‘Fire!,’“ the Lutheran clergyman Henry Muhlenberg recalled, “because the . . . backwoodsmen were approaching. Thereupon all the alarm bells began to ring at once and a drum was sounded to summon the inhabitants of the city to the town hall plaza. The ringing sounded dreadful in the night.” It turned out to be a false alarm. By now, Muhlenberg wrote, rumors “were flying in every direction: The rebels had divided into three groups and were going to attack the open city in three places simultaneously; then they were near; then they were still far away; now they were coming from the east, then from the west, and so on.” Hundreds or even thousands of frontiersmen were said to be marching on the city. Several more times during the night the bells rang out, but still the Paxton Boys did not come. In the morning men were sent out to bring the ferry boats to the Philadelphia side of the Schuylkill River to prevent the marchers from crossing. But one ferry was forgotten, and by the time the men reached it the rebels had crossed the river. On the afternoon of February 5 they reached Germantown, six miles northwest of the city.14

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