Indian violence against white settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier had reached a frightening pitch. Gruesome tales circulated of scalping, torture, and wholesale slaughter. Many wanted to strike back, and, for some, any group of Indians would do.

On the morning of December 14 a group of about fifty rangers, scouts, and sturdy backwoods types from the town of Paxton and vicinity closed in on a tiny village of Conestoga Indians near the town of Lancaster. The Conestogas were peaceful, and the charges against them ludicrous (one of the raiders claimed an Indian had melted down his pewter spoons), but the vigilantes were out for blood. They killed the six Conestogas who were there, including a small boy, and set fire to the settlement.

Fourteen terrified survivors, who had been out foraging and trading during the massacre, fled to Lancaster and were put in the town jail to protect them from further violence. The lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, John Penn, issued a proclamation condemning the slaughter. But the “Paxton Boys,” as they had become known, were not deterred. The government may have been against them, but God, they believed, was on their side. They rode into Lancaster on December 27, stormed the jailhouse, and massacred the rest of the Conestogas.

The next month Benjamin Franklin wrote an uncharacteristically impassioned diatribe against the Paxton Boys, whom many regarded as heroes. “O ye unhappy Perpetrators of this horrid wickedness!” wrote Franklin. “Reflect a Moment on the Mischief ye have done. . . . Cowards can handle Arms, can strike where they are sure to meet with no Return, can wound, mangle and murder; but it belongs to brave Men to spare, and to protect.”

As the specter of genocide loomed, Franklin had several hundred Moravian Indians brought to Philadelphia under armed escort. The Paxton Boys, their ranks now grown to hundreds, rode to Philadelphia to spill more Indian blood.

Lancaster had offered little resistance; Philadelphia was a different story. Even the city’s Quakers took up arms, and thousands of men stood ready to meet the raiding party. The Paxton Boys turned around and went home. Although thwarted from committing further slaughter, they were never apprehended or punished for their deeds.

The rise of the U.S. population in the first half of the nineteenth century resulted in a corresponding rise in the number of representatives in Washington. Wings added to the Capitol building in the 185Os solved the overcrowding but made the building’s original dome look disproportionately small. Congress hired the architect Thomas U. Walter to design a new, larger one.

Made of iron and inspired by the domes of the cathedrals of St. Paul and St. Peter, the Walter dome—at 307 feet—stood almost twice as tall as the old one. During Lincoln’s first inauguration, the skeleton of the half-finished dome had loomed above him like an emblem of the disheveled Union. But by the end of 1863 the structure was complete, and in a ceremony on December 2 the shining new dome was capped with an allegorical statue by the sculptor Thomas Crawford depicting the “Goddess of Freedom.”

Edward Everett Male’s patriotic fable “The Man without a Country” appeared in December’s Atlantic Monthly. In it, Philip Nolan, on trial for conspiracy with Aaron Burr, cries out, “Damn the United States. I wish I may never hear of the United States again.” Taken at his word, Nolan receives an unorthodox sentence: a lifetime at sea, on an American man-of-war, denied any news of his land. Years later he redeems himself through heroism and on his deathbed he is finally given news of the republic he has come to love. A wistful plea for national unity in a country in the grip of civil war, the story was immensely popular.

The Gulf Refining Company opened the nation’s first drive-in service station on December 1 at the corner of Baum Boulevard and St. Clair Street in Pittsburgh. The station was open twenty-four hours and offered free crankcase service, but despite these enticements the manager, Frank McLaughlin, pumped only thirty gallons of gas on the first business day.

Mack Sennett needed a comedian. The “Keystone Kops” director had just fired Harold Lloyd (soon to become one of the nation’s most famous screen comics) for not being funny, and his top man, Ford Sterling, had quit because $750 a week was not enough. Sennett remembered an English comedian from a vaudeville act in New York City. He made a few telephone calls and found out the man’s name was Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin snapped up Sennett’s offer of $125 a week, more than three times his vaudeville salary, and reported to work on December 16. His first film, a one-reeler called Making a Living, was a flop, but Chaplin soon found his distinctive “Little Tramp” persona, and films such as The Gold Rush and Modern Times made him perhaps the most famous man in the world.

President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer with the Atomic Energy Commission’s Enrico Fermi Medal on December 2. As the brilliant leader of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had headed the team of scientists that developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but after the war he opposed the development of the far more destructive hydrogen bomb, warning that the United States could find itself trapped in a suicidal arms race.

His controversial positions and a youthful flirtation with the Communist party made him the target of an investigation by federal agents. In 1954, despite a complete lack of evidence of wrongdoing, he was stripped of his top-level security clearance. The waning of McCarthy-era anti-Communist fervor eventually brought the disillusioned Oppenheimer into better standing with the government, but he never got his security clearance back.