9
In the late 1730s, while clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin had often found the proceedings of that body so wearisome that he filled his time with a minor form of arithmetical amusement known as “magic squares.” These arrays of integers, invented in antiquity, contain an equal number of rows and columns, with the property that the sum of the numbers in each row equals the sum for every other row, and also equals the sum for each column and each diagonal. Franklin had encountered magic squares as a boy; now, between his own cleverness and the dullness of the legislative proceedings, he elaborated extensively upon the basic idea. One square of his devising had eight rows
and eight columns with the defining properties but several others besides. Where the full rows and columns each totaled to 260, the half rows and half columns totaled to half of 260, or 130. Straight and bent diagonals summed to 260, as did truncated bent diagonals of six numbers, conjoined to the numbers in the closest corners. The four corner numbers, added to the four centermost numbers, summed to 260 as well.
James Logan, learning of Franklin’s interest in magic squares, showed him an old book, written by one Michael Stifelius and published two centuries earlier in Nuremburg, containing a magic square of sixteen rows and sixteen columns. Logan, no mathematician himself, offered that this large magic square must have required enormous effort and time to construct. Franklin—“not wishing to be out-done by Mr. Stifelius,” he later confessed—went home and that very night constructed a square of the same size but considerably greater complexity. Logan was amazed and told Franklin so. Franklin was proud of his work. After Logan wrote Peter Collinson about this unsuspected aspect of Franklin’s genius, and Collinson inquired of Franklin for a sample, Franklin sent along his big square, with the partly jesting but partly serious comment, “I make no question but you will readily allow this square of 16 to be the most magically magical of any magic square ever made by any magician.”
At the age of thirty, Franklin had found his numbers more compelling than the proceedings of the Assembly; at forty-five his priorities were shifting. Then he had been merely clerk, kept recorder of the sayings and doings of his betters. Now he was one of the most distinguished citizens of Philadelphia—an estimate confirmed by his selection to public office. In 1748 he was elected to the Philadelphia Common Council, in 1749 appointed justice of the peace for the city, in 1751 named city alderman. The first and last posts did not stretch him; in light of his civic activities of twenty years, he hardly noticed he was doing anything new. The post of justice of the peace was another matter, and for one of the few times in his life, he felt himself unequal to a task put before him. “More knowledge of the common law than I possessed was necessary to act in that station with credit,” he related. Consequently he withdrew from the service of the court.
In the summer of 1751 Franklin was nominated for a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, and elected. He candidly described his feelings at this latest mark of recognition:
I conceived my becoming a member would enlarge my power of doing good. I would not however insinuate that my ambition was not flattered by all these promotions. It certainly was. For considering my low beginning they were great things to me. And they were still more pleasing, as being so many spontaneous testimonies of the public’s good opinion, and by me entirely unsolicited.
No grand design motivated Franklin’s entry into provincial politics; yet it did reflect important aspects of his character and circumstances. Starting with the success of Silence Dogood, Franklin had gradually come to see himself as the most capable individual he knew. The accuracy of this perception was confirmed by his assorted subsequent successes and the honors that came his way. He could look around Philadelphia—at the Junto, the Library Company, the fire companies, the Philosophical Society, the Association, the academy—and recognize his hand in making the city a more civilized place. Current projects included raising money for a hospital (he devised a scheme for what later would be called matching grants) and organizing a fire insurance company. Who had done more—who was doing more—for his adopted home than he?
Election to the Assembly allowed him to expand the scope of his activities. Though he represented Philadelphia in the legislature, he would be making laws for the whole province. At successive moments of his career, Franklin entered successively larger arenas. Mather’s Boston became too small for him at seventeen; Philadelphia grew too small by forty-five. Pennsylvania was the obvious next venue.
There was another reason for the timing of his entry into provincial politics. As long as he had been in active business, Franklin felt obliged to observe the first rule of business relations: avoid gratuitous offense to potential customers. Ben Franklin, printer, was a man who generally kept his politics to himself, lest politics interfere with the printing business. With exceptions—his advocacy of paper currency, his defense of Samuel Hemphill—few enough merely to prove the rule, Franklin left political questions to the politicians.
But as the failure of the politicians to provide for defense during the late war demonstrated, the politicians could not be trusted to accomplish what needed to be done. Franklin knew he could do better; he had shown as much with the Association. His decision to leave the printing business to David Hall and his decision to enter Pennsylvania politics were closely linked. The former made the latter possible; the latter made the former desirable.
Pennsylvania politics in the 1750s involved concentric circles of controversy. The innermost circle—at least by their thinking—comprised the proprietors, the heirs of William Penn. Unlike most British colonies in North America, proprietary Pennsylvania was ruled not by the Crown (at least not directly) but by the Penn family. Yet the family was not what it had been under William—or perhaps, considering the problems he had with his father, it was. William himself fell on hard times during his last years, to the point where Pennsylvania had to support the Penns, rather than the other way around. Times got harder after the great man’s death, as the heirs squabbled over the estate. William Jr. had renounced the Quaker way for Anglicanism and then died shortly after his father, but neither action prevented William Jr.’s son from trying to break the will on grounds of his grandfather’s septuagenarian senility. The assertion of mental incompetence was accurate enough, but it did not endear him to his father’s siblings. For two decades the heirs tussled over who should get what; not until the mid-1740s did Thomas Penn, the founding William’s son by his second wife, emerge as the controlling figure within the family and the prominent proprietor of the colony.
The quarrels were costly, for during that critical generation the initiative in Pennsylvania politics slipped from the proprietors to the Assembly, the second circle of controversy. The slippage started during the tenure of Franklin’s notional patron, Governor William Keith, whose flippant attitude toward financial commitments was hardly confined to Franklin. Keith’s many creditors lobbied to keep him in office, on the optimistic argument that a governor’s salary provided them at least the prospect of being repaid. But the English Quakers close to the Penns contended that the behavior of Keith—who disported himself with ladies-not-his-wife in a decidedly un-Quaker manner—constituted an insult and an embarrassment. As the creditors eventually lost hope of seeing their money, the Quakers had their way, and Keith was forced out of the governorship.
Yet he was far from finished. He charged his expulsion to the aristocratic machinations of the proprietors, and immediately recast himself as the champion of the people, who constituted the third circle. Taking up his pen, Keith fabricated a character called Roger Plowman, who argued the case for the common folk against the learned and favored. “We are made of the same flesh and bone, and after the same manner with themselves,” said Plowman, speaking to a character modeled on James Logan, “so that our sense and feeling of happiness and misery, justice and injustice, good fortune and ill fortune, are much the same with us all. And I appeal to you, Master, if a quiet enjoyment of, and equal support under these opposite states in life, respectively, be not the chief end, if not the whole business of civil government?”
The proprietors thought otherwise; the Penns expected their colony to provide them an income. And they understood that it would not do so if Keith won a following, as he appeared to be doing. Soon after his ouster as governor, the voters of Philadelphia elected him to the Assembly. His supporters celebrated their victory by burning the public pillory and stocks, which served as symbols of proprietary oppression of the ordinary people. (The collateral combustion of several stalls at the market was probably an accident.) Two weeks later, when Keith claimed his seat in the Assembly, he arrived leading a column of eighty horsemen, followed by a small army of the sweat-stained workforce—what a nervous Isaac Norris, the head of the Quaker party in the Assembly, scornfully called the “rabble butchers, porters and tag-rags.”
But then, after sending shivers through the likes of Logan and Norris, Keith abruptly disappeared. Because his creditors were the first to complain of his absence, gossip congealed around assertions that he was fleeing to escape debtors’ prison. As matters turned out, although he kept ahead of his American claimants, their English counterparts caught up with him, and he landed in a London jail. He never ceased spinning schemes for raising money, even when those schemes contradicted earlier-enunciated convictions. At one point, trying to curry favor with the imperial government, he proposed a plan for levying a stamp tax in the American colonies. Like most of his other concoctions, this one had come to naught by the time of his 1749 death.
The Keith phenomenon illuminated the overlap between the circles in Pennsylvania politics. Although the leaders of the Assembly often construed their interests in opposition to those of the proprietor, at times they found the proprietor an ally against challenge from below. Pennsylvania was far from a democracy, nor was it even a republic, but the limited suffrage it allowed to relatively ordinary people rendered the provincial status quo subject to disturbance by those who found the status quo unsatisfactory. The Penn family provided the focus of much of the dissatisfaction, especially when the proprietors insisted on their historic prerogatives, including exemption of their enormous landholdings from taxation. Yet the first families of the colony—the Logans, Norrises, Pembertons (this last including merchant Israel and his brothers)—by standing on their historic prerogatives, notably control of the Assembly and other offices, often appeared equal impediments to needed reforms.
To some extent Pennsylvania provided a scale model of British North America at large. What the king was to the colonies together, the Penns, mutatis mutandis, were to Pennsylvania. What the London-linked ruling elites were to the British colonies, the Logan-Norris-Pemberton clique was to Pennsylvania. It was no accident that when revolution began to bubble in America against the king and his colonial officers, much of the bubbling could be traced to Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians had been practicing for years.
Franklin practiced inconspicuously at first. Franklin was no political showman like William Keith; when he entered the Assembly in August 1751, he came not mounted but afoot, walking quietly up Chestnut Street to the State House. He made no large impression at first, possessing neither oratorical skills nor particular desire for attention. His legislative life consisted of committee work: a committee to locate a bridge across the Schuylkill River, a committee to report on expenditures relating to Indian affairs, a committee to revise the minutes of the Assembly, a committee to draft a message to the proprietors, a committee to prepare answers to the governor’s messages, a committee to regulate the size of bakers’ loaves, a committee to consider a tax on dogs.
Not all the work was so mundane. Perhaps in recognition of his earlier advocacy of paper currency, perhaps reflecting his experience printing the paper notes, Franklin gained appointment to a committee on the currency. Although the report submitted by the committee to the entire Assembly carried the signature of the five committee members, the substance and style of the report plainly indicate Franklin’s authorship.
In this report Franklin evinced an even stronger conviction than he had in 1729 that more money meant a better future for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. He described the moment in the early 1720s when the colonial economy had languished for want of means of exchange; in the prose of the report the reader can almost hear the echoing footsteps of the fugitive lad from Boston who was dismayed to discover the shops shut up in this city where he hoped to find a job. But then the Assembly had seen fit to print paper money, and “from that period both the city and country have flourished and increased in a most surprising manner.” Franklin detailed the growth at considerable length, adducing evidence from tax rolls, customhouse accounts, and bills of mortality. He contended that the creation of new currency would allow the past growth to continue, principally by maintaining or increasing rates paid to laborers, which in turn would enable them, as it had their counterparts in the past, to become landowners. While acknowledging that this would harm employers of labor, Franklin argued that the benefits to society as a whole outweighed the costs to that small group. “By rendering the means of purchasing land easy to the poor, the dominions of the Crown are strengthened and extended; the Proprietaries dispose of their wilderness territory; and the British nation secures the benefit of its manufactures, and increases the demand for them. For so long as land can be easily procured for settlements between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, so long will labour be dear in America; and while labour continues dear, we can never rival the artificers, or interfere with the trade of our Mother Country.”
Franklin’s associates in the Assembly found his arguments convincing. The house resolved that an expansion of the currency was essential to the well-being of the province, and it directed Franklin and several other members with longer legislative service to draft a bill implementing the resolution. The bill passed the Assembly but then encountered objection from Governor James Hamilton, who declared that recent irresponsibilities on currency issues in other colonies made any application to the Crown “very unseasonable.” The governor’s veto touched off a battle with the Assembly that would busy Franklin for several years.
Other battles were more easily won. For nearly two decades Franklin had lamented the lack of safety on the streets of Philadelphia after dark. The Quakers’ aversion to violence produced a criminal code decidedly less harsh than that of England or the other colonies; quite possibly for this reason, Philadelphia had a higher crime rate than other colonial cities. Franklin detected another reason as well: an inattention to policing that in itself was almost criminal. Householders in the city were liable for watch duty after dark but might buy their way out of this responsibility by paying the ward constable six shillings a year, with the fee ostensibly to be used to hire substitutes. In practice the money was more than necessary, and the watch fees became a profitable perquisite of the constables’ office. They also undermined the security of the city. “The Constable for a little drink often got such ragamuffins about him as a watch that reputable housekeepers did not choose to mix with,” Franklin wrote. “Walking the rounds too was often neglected, and most of the night spent in tippling.”
Franklin first proposed a reform of the watch system to the Junto, but after gaining approval there it failed to elicit the necessary official support. Not until the early 1750s, following a continued deterioration of street safety, was the Assembly persuaded to approve legislation enabling Philadelphia to effect necessary improvements—in particular, to raise the taxes required to light the streets and pay constables and watchmen sufficiently to make them take their jobs seriously.
Franklin, having pondered the problem for years, and now both an assemblyman and an alderman, was a natural to help draft orders for the new system. The orders specified the hours of duty for constables (ten at night till four in the morning from March to September, nine at night till six in the morning from September to March). They identified the precise street corners on which the watchmen were to stand and the rounds they were to walk (“Up Front-street, on the east side, to the first corner,” for the watchman stationed at Front and Union, “thence down Water-street, up Pine-street, down Second …”). They listed the sorts of troublemakers the constables and watchmen should be on the lookout for (“Night walkers, malefactors, rogues, vagabonds, and disorderly persons, who they shall find disturbing the public peace, or shall have just cause to suspect of any evil design”). And they characterized the duties of the watch (“To prevent any burglaries, robberies, outrages, and disorders and to apprehend any suspected persons who, in such times of confusion, may be feloniously carrying off the goods and effects of others”). In addition the watchmen should immediately raise the alarm “in case of fire breaking out or other great necessity.”
Enhancing official vigilance addressed one aspect of the crime problem, but it missed the problem’s roots: the proliferation of criminals. Since the seventeenth century the American colonies had been forced to serve as a dumping ground for criminals convicted in England. Colonial legislatures protested the practice of transportation of felons, only to have their protests ignored. Colonial editors denounced the policy, appending to their editorials lurid descriptions of what the policy produced. The Gazette did its part in April 1751:
Last Thursday, a horrid murder was committed at Elk Ridge by Jeremiah Swift, a convict servant of Mr. John Harberley’s, about 23 years of age. While himself and wife were gone to a funeral, this wretch quarreled with two boys in the field, both Mr. Harberley’s sons, one about eleven, the other about nine years of age, and with a hoe knocked one of their brains out, and killed him on the spot; the other he knocked down and left him for dead…. After that he went to the house and murdered a young woman (Mr. Harberley’s daughter) about 14 or 15 years of age, as is supposed, with an axe, for she was found dead and very much mangled….
From Virginia we hear that six convicts, who were transported for fourteen years, and shipped at Liverpool, rose at sea, shot the captain, overcame and confined the seamen, and kept possession of the vessel 19 days; that coming in sight of Cape Hatteras, they hoisted out the boat to go on shore, when a vessel passing by, a boy they had not confined, hailed her, and attempted to tell their condition, but was prevented; and then the villains drove a spike up through his under and upper jaws, and wound spunyarn round the end that came out near his nose, to prevent his getting it out….
From Maryland we hear that a convict servant, about three weeks since, went into his master’s house, with an axe in his hand, determined to kill his mistress; but changing his purpose on seeing, as he expressed it, how d—d innocent she looked, he laid his left hand on a block, cut it off, and threw it at her, saying, Now make me work, if you can. (N.B. ’tis said this desperate villain is now begging in Pennsylvania, and ’tis thought he has been seen in this city; he pretends to have lost his hand by an accident. The public are therefore cautioned to beware of him.)
The Gazette—meaning, at this time, David Hall—editorialized, “When we see our papers filled continually with accounts of the most audacious robberies, the most cruel murders, and infinite other villainies perpetrated by convicts transported from Europe, what melancholy, what terrible reflections it must occasion! What will become of our posterity! These are some of thy favours, Britain! Thou art called our Mother Country; but what good mother ever sent thieves and villains to accompany her children; to corrupt them with their infectious vices, and murder the rest?”
Franklin was as outraged as Hall (they certainly discussed the issue), yet he articulated his outrage with a lighter touch and sharper pen. Writing anonymously, Franklin asserted in all apparent seriousness that every argument adduced for sending convicts to the colonies argued equally for sending rattlesnakes from Pennsylvania to England. These serpents—“felons-convict from the beginning of the world”—were a hazard to public safety, to be sure, but this might be simply due to an unfavorable environment (as was said of the transported convicts). “However mischievous those creatures are with us, they may possibly change their natures if they were to change the climate.” To test this hypothesis, Franklin proposed that a bounty be awarded to any enterprising person who collected rattlesnakes—he suggested the spring, when, heavy and sluggish, they emerged from their winter quarters and might easily be captured—and transported them to Britain. “There I would propose to have them carefully distributed in St. James’s Park, in the Spring Gardens and other places of pleasure about London; in the gardens of all the nobility and gentry throughout the nation; but particularly in the gardens of the Prime Ministers, the Lords of Trade and Members of Parliament; for to them we are most particularly obliged [for the transport of felons to America].” The upper classes as a whole would benefit from proximity to Pennsylvania’s slithering class. “May not the honest rough British gentry, by a familiarity with these reptiles, learn to creep, and to insinuate, and to slaver, and to wriggle into place (and perhaps to poison such as stand in their way), qualities of no small advantage to courtiers!”
Franklin noted that transport of felons to the colonies was treated by the British government as a trade, with the convicts’ services being sold like other bound labor. Trade required returns. “And rattlesnakes seem the most suitable returns for the human serpents sent us by our Mother Country.” Yet the trade in serpents would not be quite equal, for snakes posed fewer dangers than felons. “The Rattlesnake gives warning before he attempts his mischief, which the convict does not.”
Felons posed an obvious threat to Pennsylvania; the threat from unchecked immigration was more subtle. At least this was Franklin’s view. Certain of his neighbors were considerably more alarmed. Lutheran pastor Henry Muhlenberg declared, “It is almost impossible to describe how few good and how many exceptionally godless, wicked people have come into this country every year. The whole country is being flooded with ordinary, extraordinary and unprecedented wickedness and crimes…. Our old residents are mere stupid children in sin when compared with the new arrivals! Oh, what a fearful thing it is to have so many thousands of unruly and brazen sinners come into this free air and unfenced country!”
Such comments were striking, coming from Muhlenberg, himself a recent immigrant (1742) and from the same region (Germany) where most of the troublesome newcomers originated. German immigration to Pennsylvania was as old as the colony itself, and it grew with each passing decade, until by the mid-eighteenth century the Germans constituted perhaps a third of Pennsylvania’s population. Most of the Germans were sober and industrious, yet some displayed an unsettling religious enthusiasm. A millennial sect of German Pietists known as the “Society of the Woman in the Wilderness” built—or dug—a communistic colony in caves above Wissahickon Creek, not far from Philadelphia, where they ascetically awaited the Second Coming. Another group, led by Johann Conrad Beissel, established a frontier village of the godly at Ephrata, near the Susquehanna River some fifty miles west of Philadelphia. The core of Beissel’s sect was the “Spiritual Order of the Solitary,” forty men who devoted themselves to a rigorous regimen of work, fasting, and prayer. Although avowedly celibate, the Ephratans admitted women, who enrolled in the “Order of Spiritual Virgins.”
By any reckoning, Beissel was a singular character. He denounced marriage as the “penitentiary of carnal man,” and he conjectured (and repeatedly—but unsuccessfully—attempted to prove) that elimination was not a necessary function of the body. He banned pork from Ephrata on the unoriginal ground that it was unclean; he barred geese on the slightly more imaginative reasoning that their feathers and down tempted followers to sinful luxury. When he preached, he closed his eyes and spoke very rapidly, saying he had to “hurry after the Spirit”; when at length he stopped and discovered that most of his auditors had gone home, he lamented their inability to endure “the Spirit’s keenness.” Beissel opened his door and his heart to all who suffered and sought relief. These included unhappy wives who found him hypnotizing, and found his Order of Spiritual Virgins about the only escape—in that era of prohibitively difficult divorce—from unsatisfactory husbands. It did not help Beissel’s reputation with those husbands that he spent a surprising amount of time in the quarters of the Virgins. He said he was consoling them and testing his resistance to carnality; none but believers believed him.
Franklin knew Beissel chiefly as a customer. When the sect leader brought some of his writings to the print shop to be published, Franklin welcomed the business. He declined to get exercised about Beissel’s religious or moral views, judging the unorthodoxy of the Ephratans and the other German cultists a harmless eccentricity.
At the same time Franklin wondered whether English Pennsylvania could well absorb large numbers of Germans. Many were ignorant, and though this by itself was no disqualifying trait, combined with their lack of English it made remediation difficult. “As few of the English understand the German language,” Franklin told Peter Collinson, “and so cannot address them either from the press or pulpit, ’tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain.”
In days past, the Germans had kept to themselves, leaving public affairs to the English majority. No longer. “I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two counties.” Yet in joining the larger political community, the Germans refused to join the predominant cultural community. Halfway through the eighteenth century Franklin expressed a fear like those that would infuse American thinking about immigration until the twenty-first.
Few of their children in the country learn English; they import many books from Germany…. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal writings in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say.
In peacetime the separateness of the Germans was troubling; in wartime it struck at the very safety of the province. Franklin suspected—mistakenly, it seems—that the French were deliberately encouraging German settlements in the Ohio Valley, as a means of containing the British colonies. Yet French strategy or no, the Germans already settled in Pennsylvania were doing the French king’s work. When Franklin had been trying to summon support for the provincial militia, the Germans had been opposing it. “The Germans, except a very few in proportion to their numbers, refused to engage in it, giving out one among another, and even in print, that if they were quiet the French, should they take the country, would not molest them.” Even where they were not actively seditious, the Germans complained against the cost of defense, forming a passive impediment to measures necessary for security.
Franklin did not wish the Germans barred entirely. “They have their virtues; their industry and frugality is exemplary; they are excellent husbandmen and contribute greatly to the improvement of a country.” Nor were such changes in policy as the situation demanded especially great. “All that seems to be necessary is to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English, establish English schools where they are now too thick settled, and take some care to prevent the practice lately fallen into by some of the ship owners, of sweeping the German gaols to make up the number of their passengers.” Yet absent such changes, the future could inspire only additional concern. “Unless the stream of their importation could be turned to other colonies …” Franklin told Collinson, “they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”
Collinson concurred with Franklin and forwarded several proposals for diluting the German influence in Pennsylvania. Franklin agreed with one, to invalidate all deeds and contracts written in a language other than English. The printer in Franklin demurred from another Collinson recommendation, to suppress German printing houses. The scholar and bibliophile in Franklin similarly resisted Collinson’s suggestion that the importing of German books be banned. As to a recommendation that intermarriage between Germans and English be encouraged by government subsidy, Franklin simply thought it unworkable.
The German women are generally so disagreeable to an English eye, that it would require great portions to induce Englishmen to marry them. Nor would German ideas of beauty generally agree with our women; dick und starcke; that is, thick and strong, always enters into their description of a pretty girl, for the value of a wife with them consists much in the work she is able to do. So that it would require a round sum with an English wife to make up to a Dutch man the difference in labour and frugality.
As a citizen, Franklin sought solutions to the German problem; as a philosopher, he sought its origins. Franklin conjectured why Germans and English differed so deeply in character despite their common background. The English were the “offspring” of the Germans, he told Collinson, and the climate of England was similar to the climate of Germany. Therefore, he concluded, the differences in character between the two peoples must arise from differences in their institutions.
Among these institutions were the English statutes for the maintenance of the poor. Franklin asked himself whether these laws had not instilled in the poor “a dependence that very much lessens the care of providing against the wants of old age.” He did not question the morality of aiding the poor, only the efficacy. “To relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures is concurring with the Deity; ’tis Godlike, but if we provide encouragements for laziness, and supports for folly, may it not be found fighting against the order of God and nature, which perhaps has appointed want and misery as the proper punishments for, and cautions against as well as necessary consequences of, idleness and extravagancy?”
Tampering with natural order was hazardous business. Franklin told a story of how an excess of blackbirds in New England’s cornfields prompted the locals to pass laws encouraging the destruction of those pests. The blackbirds were duly diminished, but the New Englanders soon discovered their meadows engulfed in worms on which the blackbirds had fed. “Finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their black-birds.” Drawing the moral, Franklin cautioned, “Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of Providence and to interfere in the government of the world, we had need be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good.”
Franklin told another story apropos of human motivation. A well-traveled and well-read individual from the Balkans, a Greek Orthodox priest, had passed through Philadelphia. Franklin, always eager to engage interesting people, sought him out.
He asked me one day what I thought might be the reason that so many, and such numerous, nations, as the Tartars in Europe and Asia, the Indians in America, and the Negroes in Africa, continued a wandering careless life, and refused to live in cities, and to cultivate the arts they saw practiced by the civilized part of mankind. While I was considering what answer to make him, I’ll tell you, says he, in his broken English. God make man for Paradise, he make him for to live lazy; man make God angry, God turn him out of Paradise, and bid him work; man no love work; he want to go to Paradise again, he want to live lazy; so all mankind love lazy.
Franklin had doubts about the theology of this argument, but he agreed that certain groups of people were less inclined to toil than others. American Indians, for example, had resisted every effort by the English to teach them the arts of civilization. Franklin thought this striking, yet hardly inexplicable. “They visit us frequently,” he told Collinson, “and see the advantages that arts, sciences, and compact society procure us. They are not deficient in natural understanding, and yet they have never shewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our arts.” The reason was plain enough: “In their present way of living, almost all their wants are supplied by the spontaneous productions of nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when game is so plenty.”
Significantly, when an Indian child was brought up in white ways, the education often failed to stick. “If he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” More significantly, the opposite was not true. White children raised as Indians demonstrated no desire, after visits to English settlements, to stay there. “In a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” In one case an Englishman raised with the Indians inherited a substantial estate; he came home to test his new circumstances but soon abandoned them, leaving the estate to a younger brother and carrying off only a gun and a coat.
Franklin related yet another story that further illustrated his point. Some years earlier one of the colonies had concluded a treaty with the Six Nations (the Iroquois confederacy of the lower Great Lakes region). All that remained was the exchange of civilities. The English commissioners offered to underwrite the education of half a dozen of the brightest Indian lads at the College of William and Mary, the finest educational institution in the region. The Indians responded that they were most grateful for this kind offer but must decline. Some Indian youths had been educated in this way several years before and had returned good for nothing, being unable to hunt, trap, or fight. The Indians made a counteroffer: to take a dozen English children to the Indians’ great council, where they would be raised as real and useful men.
Franklin had special reason for thinking about Indians at just this time. In the autumn of 1753 he represented the province at an emergency meeting with the Indians of the frontier region, held at Carlisle, about halfway between Philadelphia and the Ohio River.
While William Penn had lived, relations between the provincial government and the local Indians were reasonably amicable. Penn interpreted his royal grant of Pennsylvania as giving him not title per se to the lands therein (after the custom of conquerors and other charter holders) but as conveying first right to purchase land from the Indians. Penn insisted that dealings in land be handled by the proprietor and his agents; individuals were generally prohibited from buying land directly from the Indians. For his own part—and therefore for the province’s part—he was conscientious in adhering to the terms of purchases he negotiated with Indian leaders.
His heirs were less conscientious, in this as in other matters touching the founder’s “holy experiment.” The most notorious instance of proprietary overreaching was the “Walking Purchase” of 1737. By this time the predominance in western Pennsylvania of the Delaware Indians, the fluid confederation of Algonquin-speaking tribes that occupied territory from the Delaware Bay to the Hudson Valley, was being seriously challenged by the Six Nations, whose roots were in the north but whose ambitions stretched south into the Delaware lands. Meanwhile immigrants from Europe were pushing into the interior and onto Indian lands; this created friction between the settlers and the Indians and deprived the proprietors of revenue that would have been theirs had the immigrants purchased proprietary lands, as they were supposed to do.
To Thomas Penn this last was the critical consideration. The grandson of the founder always viewed Pennsylvania as a source of income rather than a venture in godly living. Calculating how he could increase his revenues, he resurrected a long-forgotten (some said fabricated) deed conveying Delaware Indian land to William Penn. The language of the deed was no more precise than that of other deeds of that bygone era, when land was limitless and the word of the Penn family was better than law; it gave the proprietor title to a tract starting at the Delaware River and extending into the woods “as far as a man can go in a day and a half.”
Penn cared even less for Indian sensitivities than for Quaker conscience, and he determined to make the most of this vague description (which almost certainly had never been meant to be taken literally). He advertised for the fittest and fleetest men in the province, offering five hundred acres and five pounds money to the one who could cover the most territory in the specified time. Three men showed the greatest promise; this trio—Edward Marshall, James Yates, and Solomon Jennings—placed themselves at the starting line at dawn on the appointed day, which had been selected, as standard days often were, to fall near the autumn equinox.
Two Indians were to accompany the Englishmen; they expected the walk to be a leisurely stroll. To their surprise and dismay, Marshall and the others bolted west as the first shaft of sun lit the eastern sky, and set a killing pace. The feet of one Indian gave out early; asserting he would have brought better footwear had he known there was to be a race, he complained that the least the proprietor could have done was to provide decent shoes to the participants in the walk. Some English observers on horseback offered the Indians a ride; they gladly accepted, even as they grumbled about the miscarriage the walk was proving to be. Marshall maintained his pace throughout the day, leading the others till the country sheriff called time at sunset, twelve hours after the start. Marshall, belatedly admitting to exhaustion, clasped a sapling to keep from falling down.
At first light the next morning the race resumed. The Indians had gone home in disgust; one Delaware elder was heard to say, “No sit down to smoke, no shoot a squirrel, but run, run, run all day long.” Marshall, clearly the fittest, or most determined, of the three walkers, plunged through the woods till the noon finish. By then he had covered some sixty-five miles, at least twice what William Penn and the Delawares probably contemplated when they put their marks to the contract (if indeed they did) fifty years before.
The episode won Thomas Penn a large tract of land but lost his family the friendship of the Delawares. Even the English settlers in the area, many of whom stood to gain from the younger Penn’s duplicity, shook their heads. “The unfairness practiced in the walk,” recalled one eyewitness, “both in regard to the way where, and the manner how, it was performed, and the dissatisfaction of the Indians concerning it, were the common subjects of conversation in our neighborhood for some considerable time after it was done.” As dissatisfied in his own fashion as the Indians was Edward Marshall, who never received his promised reward, despite repeated assurances from the governor that he would.
Under other circumstances, the fiasco of the Walking Purchase might have alienated the Delawares from the Pennsylvanians permanently. But politics among the Indians was almost as competitive as politics among the Europeans—in no small part because the politics among the Europeans was so competitive. With the French pushing eastward from the Ohio Valley, even as English settlers moved west from the Delaware Valley, the various Indian tribes and confederations, including the Delawares, had to fashion alliances where they could.
Such alliance-fashioning carried Franklin to Carlisle in the autumn of 1753. For some time the Pennsylvania Assembly had been supplying what the Quakers called the “necessities of life”—and everyone else called guns and ammunition—to the Delawares and other Indian opponents of the French. As the French stepped up their pressure, instigating raids upon the pro-English Indians, the latter requested additional help. In September 1753 they informed Pennsylvania Governor Hamilton that they would send a delegation to Carlisle in a few days. If Brother Onas (a word meaning “quill” or “pen,” and signifying the governor of Pennsylvania, at the same time that it served as a pun on the name of the proprietary family) wished to keep their loyalty, he had better act quickly. Hamilton immediately commissioned Richard Peters, the secretary of the provincial Council; Isaac Norris, at that time speaker of the Assembly; and Benjamin Franklin to head west to parley.
Peters and Norris supplied the political gravity in the Pennsylvania delegation; Franklin much of the common sense. For expertise on Indian affairs the group turned to Conrad Weiser, a German immigrant who had spent years living with and around various Indian tribes, learning their languages and customs, and making himself indispensable as a mediator between the Indians and the whites. Weiser was especially friendly with the Iroquois and had been largely responsible for winning the Six Nations to the English side. The Six Nations would be joining the Pennsylvanians at Carlisle; by way of preparing Franklin and the other commissioners for the negotiations, Weiser told of a recent conversation between himself and Canasatego, an important Iroquois chief. Canasatego had just returned from Albany, where he noticed that the white men there worked hard for six days, then shut up their shops on the seventh and retired to a great house. What were they doing in the great house?, he asked Weiser.
Weiser thought a moment, then replied that they learned “good things” in the great house.
Canasatego rejoined that he had no doubt they told Weiser so, but as for himself, he was skeptical. He explained why. He had taken a batch of skins to a merchant in Albany, with whom he had done business before. He asked the merchant, a man named Hanson, how much he would pay for the skins. Hanson answered that he could not give more than four shillings per pound, a price Canasatego considered so low as to be almost insulting. But Hanson could not talk business now, as it was the day when all the Europeans gathered at the great house to learn good things.
Canasatego, knowing there would be no business done that day, decided to go to the great house himself and learn firsthand what happened there. He was intrigued, after entering the building, to see everyone listening intently to a man dressed in black, standing in the front and speaking rapidly in an angry voice. Unfortunately, Canasatego’s English could not keep up with the lesson, so he retired outdoors, where he smoked his pipe and waited for the meeting to end.
When it did, Hanson emerged, and Canasatego said he hoped the merchant had reconsidered his earlier offer. Four shillings a pound was much too low. Hanson said he had indeed reconsidered; he could not go higher than three shillings and sixpence. Surprised, Canasatego attempted to take his business elsewhere, only to hear every other fur buyer quote the same price: three and six. From this he concluded, as he explained to Weiser (and as Weiser related to Franklin), that the “good things” discussed in the great house were not good things at all but ways to cheat Indians on the price of beaver.
The Carlisle treaty—as the negotiation itself was called—was an education to Franklin. A strict and elaborate formality governed the speeches of both sides: the Pennsylvanians and the Six Nations on the one hand, and the Delawares, Twightwees, Shawonees, and Owandaets on the other. “Brethren,” the Pennsylvania commissioners jointly declared, delivering a string of wampum, “by this string we acquaint you that the Six Nations do, at our request, join with us in condoling the losses you have of late sustained by the deaths of several of your chiefs and principal men.”
This sentiment was seconded by Scarrooyady, the representative of the Iroquois. “Brethren, the Twightwees and Shawonees,” he said (as interpreted by Weiser), “It has pleased Him who is above that we shall meet here today and see one another. I and my Brother Onas join together to speak to you. As we know your seats at home are bloody, we wipe away the blood, and set your seats in order at your council fire.” Handing over another string of wampum and several blankets, Scarrooyady added: “We suppose that the blood is now washed off. We jointly, with our Brother Onas, dig a grave for your warriors, killed in your country, and we bury their bones decently, wrapping them in these blankets, and with these we cover their graves.”
After similar condolences to the Delawares and the Owandaets, Scarrooyady and the commissioners came to the point of the parley, which was to strengthen the tenuous alliance that currently obtained between the two sides. Speaking for both his own people and the Pennsylvanians, Scarrooyady addressed the others: “We, the English and Six Nations, do exhort every one of you to do your utmost to preserve this union and friendship, which has so long and happily continued among us. Let us keep the chain from rusting, and prevent every thing that may hurt or break it.” The commissioners warned that the French were doing their utmost to break the chain, trying to turn friend against friend. This must not be allowed to happen. “Do not separate. Do not part on any score. Let no differences nor jealousies subsist a moment between nation and nation.”
During the next four days the Delawares and the others indicated their willingness that the chain remain unbroken. But they and the other Indians, including the Iroquois, had some complaints they wished to air with the Pennsylvanians. Scarrooyady pointed out that the French governor of Canada blamed the English for the frontier troubles, contending that their advance toward the Ohio was the origin of all the conflict. Scarrooyady said the Six Nations did not take the French leader’s statements at face value—“He speaks with two tongues”—but there was no denying that the arrival of the English from the east made matters worse. “Call your people back on this side of the hills,” Scarrooyady said.
Of equal concern was the cost and quality of the trade goods the English merchants brought into the region. The English goods were too expensive and were not what the Indians wanted. The Indians wanted powder and lead, but the traders brought rum and flour. The rum was a curse, for the traders employed it to cheat the Indians. “These wicked whiskey sellers,” Scarrooyady said, “when they have once got the Indians in liquor, make them sell their very clothes from their backs.”
Franklin witnessed personally whereof Scarrooyady spoke. On their arrival at Carlisle the Pennsylvania commissioners forbade the sale of liquor by the merchants there. The embargo lasted the four days of the conference. At the end of that time the ban was lifted. Franklin described the result:
They were near 100 men, women and children, and were lodged in temporary cabins built in the form of a square just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walked out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square. They were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-coloured bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could be imagined. There was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum; of which we gave no notice.
The next day, sensible they had misbehaved in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counsellors to make their apology. The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavored to excuse the rum, by saying, “The Great Spirit who made all things made every thing for some use, and whatever use he designed any thing for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said, ‘Let this be for Indians to get drunk with.’ And it must be so.”
The rum did not merely corrupt the Indians. It also weakened the shield the Indians provided against the French. Franklin and his fellow commissioners emphasized this point in a scathing appendix to their report of the Carlisle proceedings. The quantities of liquor sold to the Indians, they said, had lately increased “to an inconceivable degree, so as to keep these poor Indians continually under the force of liquor.” As a result the tribes had become “dissolute, enfeebled and indolent when sober, and untractable and mischievous in their liquor, always quarrelling, and often murdering one another.” The actions of the traders, who acknowledged no obligation to anyone but themselves, threatened to “entirely estrange the affections of the Indians from the English, deprive them of their natural strength and activity, and oblige them either to abandon their country or submit to any terms, be they ever so unreasonable, from the French.” In light of this “deplorable state” of the Indians, the commissioners advocated “that good and speedy remedies may be provided, before it be too late.”