The colonel halts at the Academy

What happened

Franklin drafted the militia act of November 1755 himself, and when Philadelphia's men elected him their colonel, Governor Robert Hunter Morris signed his commission on 24 February 1756, reluctant, Leonard Labaree wrote, but unable to refuse a man so popular. Over a thousand more or less armed townsmen answered to him, and the proprietary party did not like it. Morris and his friends had already raised independent companies led by their own partisans, the first under William Vanderspiegle in December. On Saturday, 28 February, Franklin's regiment held its first review in State House Square and marched through the streets. It halted before the Academy, where a considerable number of inhabitants, leaders and followers of the independent companies, had met to find some expedient for spreading the use of arms. The men who called the meeting had already dispersed. Rothbard tells it as a near war in the city and says Franklin marched on the independents until they scattered. The quarrel was over who commanded Pennsylvania's arms: a force whose men chose their own officers, or one that answered to the governor. By 25 March four more independent companies had mustered in the city. Then in March, when Franklin rode off to Virginia on post office business, some twenty officers and thirty men escorted him to the ferry with drawn swords.