eness of the enemy.

The other undertaking was a military one, the famous attack upon
Kittanning conducted by Colonel John Armstrong, an Ulsterman from
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the first really aggressive officer the
province had produced. The Indians had two headquarters for their raids
into the province, one at Logstown on the Ohio a few miles below Fort
Duquesne, and the other at Kittanning or, as the French called it,
Attique, about forty miles northeast. At these two points they assembled
their forces, received ammunition and supplies from the French, and
organized their expeditions. As Kittanning was the nearer, Armstrong in
a masterly maneuver took three hundred men through the mountains without
being discovered and, by falling upon the village early in the morning,
he effected a complete surprise. The town was set on fire, the Indians
were put to flight, and large quantities of their ammunition were
destroyed. But Armstrong could not follow up his success. Threatened
by overwhelming numbers, he hastened to withdraw. The effect which the
fighting and the Quaker treaty had on the frontier was good. Incursions
of the savages were, at least for the present, checked. But the root of
the evil had not yet been reached, and the Indians remained massed
along the Ohio, ready to break in upon the people again at the first
opportunity.

The following year, 1757, was the most depressing period of the war.
The proprietors of Pennsylvania took the opportunity to exempt their own
estate from taxation and throw the burden of furnishing money for the
war upon the colonists. Under pressure of the increasing success of the
French and Indians and because the dreadful massacres were coming nearer
and nearer to Philadelphia, the Quaker Assembly yielded, voted the
largest sum they had ever voted to the war, and exempted the proprietary
estates. The colony was soon boiling with excitement. The Churchmen, as
friends of the proprietors, were delighted to have the estates exempted,
thought it a good opportunity to have the Quaker Assembly abolished, and
sent petitions and letters and proofs of alleged Quaker incompetence
to the British Government. The Quakers and a large majority of the
colonists, on the other hand, instead of consenting to their own
destruction, struck at the root of the Churchmen's power by proposing
to abolish the proprietors. And in a letter to Isaac Norris, Benjamin
Franklin, who had been sent to England to presen