Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 5).djvu/51

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A BLOOD-RED FRONTIER
47

Youghiogheny river. They furnished not a man for Braddock's army and voted not a pound toward the expense of securing the wagons and horses which made Braddock's march possible. The stores which Governor Morris laid in along the line of the road, at Shippensburg and McDowell's Mill, were secured and forwarded without aid from the Assembly. Though many Pennsylvanians served, in one way or another, in the unfortunate expedition, the public was divided on this issue. Some were loyal to the Assembly and many favored warlike measures. It has been asserted that had not Forbes's Road been built in 1758 its building would have been postponed twenty years.

Passing this interesting speculaion, it is sure Braddock's defeat brought to Pennsylvania a terrible and bloody awakening; nothing can show this more strikingly than the fact that when Braddock's successor came, only three years later, the Pennsylvania Assembly quickly supported him by voting twenty-seven hundred men for offensive service and appropriating half a million dollars for war.