10
It was already too late. Almost as Franklin was heading east with Richard Peters and Isaac Norris for Philadelphia, carrying news of their apparent success in affirming Pennsylvania’s Indian alliances, a young Virginian—at twenty-one years of age, not quite as old as William Franklin—was heading in the opposite direction. George Washington was a soldier in the Virginia militia; he showed such promise at soldiering that he already held the rank of major. And he was entrusted with an important mission. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, had ordered him to travel to the Ohio Valley and warn the French commander there that he was trespassing on English soil. The French commander must remove his troops and withdraw to Canada.
The Washington mission followed many months of rising tension over the fate of the trans-Appalachian west. The peace treaty of 1748 may have silenced the guns in Europe and compelled the privateers to abandon their licensed piracy for less thrilling (and less profitable) pursuits, but it did nothing to settle the question of ownership of the Ohio Valley. Various of the English colonies claimed Ohio by virtue of their charters, which audaciously (and ignorantly—no one had any idea of the distances involved) granted them territory from sea to sea. The French asserted ownership by claiming (ignorantly or disingenuously—he never got that far) that their man La Salle had reached the Ohio River on his voyage up the Mississippi in the 1670s.
Beyond their historic claims, the two sides had continuing competing interests in Ohio. The English coveted the opportunity to expand from their seaside colonies; the colonies’ growing agricultural populations made the rich bottomlands of the Ohio floodplain appear luscious almost beyond measure. Already, speculative land companies were surveying the region for subdivision and sale. Such surveying was what had propelled young Washington into the soldier’s trade; with only modest formal education but a head for trigonometry and a hand for draftsmanship, Washington at seventeen had joined a survey of the Shenandoah holdings of Lord Fairfax, an in-law. The hardy life of camp and march agreed with Washington; at the first chance he made the natural transition to the Virginia militia.
As for the French, in their thinking Ohio formed the keystone in a strategic arch that spanned North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Ohio would connect Canada to Louisiana, guaranteeing French control of the great North American heartland and forever condemning the hated British to a precarious existence on the continent’s eastern shore. More immediately, the French sought control of the Ohio fur trade, a commerce too small to support an empire but sufficient to incite the cupidity of corporations connected to government ministries.
News of the peace treaty had hardly reached America when the governor of Canada dispatched Captain Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville to Ohio to wave the French flag and plant lead plates bearing French territorial claims at strategic sites. In addition, he was to frighten off any English traders or settlers and convince the Indians of the region that their future lay with la belle France rather than perfidious Albion.
Céloron’s mission was only partly successful. Burying the lead plates was straightforward; convincing the Indians that France was their future was more involved, not least since the easier access of English traders (who came straight over the mountains from the Atlantic, rather than circuitously via Canada) meant they could undersell their French rivals. This cost differential had given the English an edge in Ohio—an edge visible in the much larger numbers of English traders, as compared to French, Céloron encountered. His own chaplain was forced to admit that Ohio was “little known to the French, and, unfortunately, too well known to the English.”
It was the French effort to alter this balance that led to the trouble that drew first Franklin and then Washington toward the Ohio. A new governor in Canada had sent several French traders to Logstown, located on the Ohio River in what would become the extreme western portion of Pennsylvania. One of the Virginia land companies—aptly named the Ohio Company—mobilized its merchants to counter the increased French presence. This triggered a minor competition between Pennsylvania and Virginia, as Pennsylvania traders hurried across the Alleghenies lest they lose the trade, and perhaps the land that supported the trade, to their southern cousins. The Pennsylvanians appealed to their provincial government for funds to build a fort at the Forks of the Ohio (where that river was formed from the Allegheny and Monongahela). But the Assembly was as stingy on frontier defense as it had traditionally been on every other form of defense, and the initiative remained with the Virginians.
The English initiative, that is. The French sponsored initiatives of their own. Most ominous of these was the construction of a line of forts running south from Lake Erie toward the Forks. This construction was what rang the alarm bells in the summer of 1753 and prompted Franklin’s trip to Carlisle. It was also what lay behind Washington’s expedition farther west just afterward.
Washington arrived at Venango (near what would become the town of Franklin) only to see a French flag flying over a trading post lately English. Here he encountered the same problem of Indian weakness for alcohol—and European exploitation of that weakness—that had so struck Franklin. At Venango, Washington tried to talk the Indians out of any attachment to the French. He initially had some luck with Tanachrison, a Seneca chief, who showed a desire to resume his alliance with the English after having been wooed away by the French. Tanachrison agreed to return the symbolic wampum he had received from French captain Philippe de Joincaire. Joincaire’s first reaction, on learning of this double cross (or perhaps triple cross), was to mutter of Tanachrison, “He is more English than the English.” But Joincaire masked his anger and insisted that Tanachrison join him in a series of toasts. By the time the keg was empty, Tanachrison was too drunk to hand back the wampum.
The rest of Washington’s expedition was no more successful. Joincaire refused the letter Washington carried from Governor Dinwiddie; he told Washington to take it to Fort Le Boeuf, north near Lake Erie. Washington wearily pushed through the rain and snow of December, finally reaching the fort and finding someone willing to accept Dinwiddie’s letter—albeit simply for forwarding to the governor of Canada. The French commander at Fort Le Boeuf politely informed Washington that evacuation of this French territory was out of the question.
Washington retired the way he had come. His horses failed on the way home, and he was reduced to walking. He came under Indian fire in the forest; he almost drowned in the Allegheny when a makeshift raft crashed against floes in the ice-laden stream. On several occasions he nearly succumbed to hypothermia. But his diary of the journey told a gripping story, which impressed Governor Dinwiddie and made Washington locally famous when the governor had it printed.
Washington’s report encouraged Dinwiddie to mount a more serious effort against the French. The Virginia governor requested assistance from Pennsylvania. To no one’s surprise, Franklin’s fellows in the Assembly displayed their customary aversion to military spending and refused Dinwiddie’s invitation. The Virginians were left to press on alone.
In the spring of 1754 Washington led two (rather skimpy) companies of militia toward the Forks of the Ohio, there to oversee construction of a fort. Unluckily for them, a larger French force had other ideas. The French troops scattered the English and leveled their unfinished handiwork. They then proceeded to lay the foundation for a more impressive French version, which they called Fort Duquesne.
Yet Washington did not discourage easily. After the embarrassment of the previous winter, he vowed to retake the Forks. He led his men on a swift night march and surprised a French scouting party, killing the commander and several others and capturing nearly all the rest. He then fell back to await reinforcements, which soon arrived.
These, however, created as many problems as they solved. They had outrun their supply train, which remained bogged in the woods behind; until the supplies arrived, the reinforcements simply ate the bread of Washington’s men. Moreover, one company consisted of British regulars from South Carolina who refused to take orders from a colonial—even a colonial colonel, as Washington now was. Neither did they warm to the work of digging trenches and constructing other necessary defenses.
The French struck while the redcoats quarreled. In a July rainstorm French muskets raked the English lines; at nightfall the French commander ceased fire and urged Washington to surrender. After all, the Frenchman argued, their countries were not at war. Washington conceded this point, and, surveying his four dozen wounded and dozen dead and the enfeebled condition of many of the unwounded, he accepted the French terms.
Whereupon he came to wish he had learned French. The terms included a pledge to pull back across the mountains to Virginia; they also included an admission that the leader of the French scouting party had been “assassinated.” Only later did Washington realize what he had signed; the knowledge mortified and angered him immensely.
Perhaps Washington’s proud heart sensed that this defeat was but the beginning of a much longer and much more violent struggle. Perhaps, despite this second humiliation, he suspected that under arms he had found his calling. In a letter to his brother he described the first skirmish—the successful one: “I fortunately escaped without a wound, though the right wing where I stood was exposed to and received all the enemy’s fire…. I can with truth assure you, I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there was something charming in the sound.”
The response of King George to this comment (Washington’s brother shared the letter) was reported to be “He would not say so if he had been used to hear many.” Washington soon heard plenty, for the fighting on the banks of the Ohio that summer of 1754 escalated into a major war, in which Washington took a major part.
Franklin’s part in what Americans called the French and Indian War involved fewer bullets but was no less significant for that. At least since he had begun pondering the problem of colonial defense during the previous war, Franklin had been struck by the inexcusable inefficiencies consequent to the several colonies’ failure to coordinate actions. When France could count on Virginia’s jealousies of Pennsylvania and New York’s suspicions of New England, the far fewer Frenchmen in North America could effectively stymie the more numerous and otherwise more resourceful Englishmen. The example of their neighbors the Iroquois should shame those provincials who placed particular interest ahead of the common good. “It would be a very strange thing,” Franklin wrote in 1751, “if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted for ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous.”
In this letter Franklin offered a blueprint for just such a colonial union. The several colonies should select delegates to a general council, which would be headed by a governor general appointed by the Crown. This council, acting with the governor general, would direct matters relating to Indian affairs and colonial defense.
Franklin acknowledged the political difficulties such a scheme would encounter. The separate provinces were possessive of their independence and privileges; anything essayed in common would tend to diminish these. Governors often mouthed approval of colonial coordination only to subvert it privately lest it undermine their authority or diminish their perquisites.
For this reason the initiative toward the union Franklin proposed ought to be entrusted to a handpicked cadre of perhaps half a dozen men of insight, public spirit, and persuasive skills. Such a group would travel from colony to colony explaining the benefits of union and rebutting criticism. “I imagine such an union might thereby be made and established, for reasonable sensible men can always make a reasonable scheme appear such to other reasonable men, if they take pains, and have time and opportunity for it.” Like the Association Franklin had devised for Philadelphia, this should be an organization that grew upward from below, rather than downward from above. “A voluntary union entered into by the Colonies themselves, I think, would be preferable to one imposed by Parliament.”
As did many other Franklin schemes, this one took time to mature. The provinces were then at peace, and Franklin’s fellow provincials felt little inclination to accept the limitations on colonial autonomy his union entailed.
The resumption of hostilities on the Ohio frontier altered calculations. In June 1754 a convention of delegates from seven colonies gathered in Albany to discuss measures for intercolonial cooperation. The auguries were not especially promising; as a group the delegates were hardly the most influential men of their provinces, and such important provinces as Virginia shunned the proceedings entirely. Yet, for what it was worth, the convention had the blessing of the British Board of Trade, the London body that oversaw colonial affairs.
Franklin was selected to represent Pennsylvania, along with Richard Peters, Isaac Norris, and John Penn, a grandson of William Penn. Planning for the event coincided with the setbacks suffered by the Virginians on the Ohio that spring. “Friday last an express arrived here from Major Washington,” noted the Gazette on May 9, in a piece Franklin enclosed in a letter to a correspondent in England. Washington’s dispatch described the French attack at the Forks, and it elicited reflection from the Gazette article’s anonymous author on the need for unity among the English colonies. From the style of the writing, and from what is known of Franklin’s views on the matter, the author quite likely was Franklin himself. To hear from Washington and other witnesses, the author said, the French were confident of success in their offensive. And why not? “The confidence of the French in this undertaking seems well-grounded on the present disunited state of the British colonies, and the extreme difficulty of bringing so many different governments and assemblies to agree in any speedy and effectual measures for our common defence and security, while our enemies have the very great advantage of being under one direction, with one council, and one purse.” So long as the English colonies remained disunited, the French would retain their advantage. “They presume that they may with impunity violate the most solemn treaties subsisting between the two crowns, kill, seize and imprison our traders, and confiscate their effects at pleasure (as they have done for several years past), murder and scalp our farmers, with their wives and children, and take an easy possession of such parts of the British territory as they find most convenient for them; which if they are permitted to do, must end in the destruction of the British interest, trade and plantations in America.”
Attached to the Gazette article was an illustration, a woodcut of a dismembered snake. The eight segments of the snake’s body were labeled for the two Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England. Beneath the illustration was the motto “Join, or Die.” This illustration has often been characterized as the first original political cartoon printed in America; whether the artist was Franklin or someone else, the concept for the cartoon almost certainly was his. As the Gazettecirculated through the mail, other papers reprinted the illustration, allowing readers to absorb the essence of Franklin’s argument for unity at a glance.
Consequently it was to a collective mind preconditioned to union that Franklin addressed further thoughts on the nature of an American union. In New York City en route to Albany he began buttonholing fellow delegates and other influential persons. He showed an outline for a supracolonial government to Cadwallader Colden and James Alexander, requesting each man to supply suggestions for improvements.
Franklin’s outline was just that; it supplied only sufficient detail to serve as a basis for discussion at Albany. Heading the union, in this conception, would be a governor general, a military man appointed and paid by the king and charged with executing measures adopted by a “grand council,” except for those measures he vetoed. The grand council would consist of persons selected by the provincial assemblies; the smaller provinces each would send one member, the larger two, in rough proportion to the payments each colony made to a general treasury. Franklin suggested that the general treasury be funded by excise taxes collected by the several provinces; these excise taxes might be levied upon liquor or tea, items consumed at fairly equal rates across the land and therefore serving as a fiscal stand-in for population.
Franklin’s was a federal system, its members answerable to the provincial assemblies that selected them, rather than to the people of the colonies. Its responsibilities lay in the realm of what might have been called foreign and defense policy: relations with the Indian tribes, construction and garrisoning of forts, outfitting of naval vessels for the protection of the coast and the security of trade in wartime.
While more specific than his plan of 1751, Franklin’s 1754 version was an extension of the principles outlined in that earlier draft, with one important exception. Where previously he had preferred a confederation organized by the provinces on their own, without the involvement of London’s Parliament, by now he recognized that the provinces would not act on their own. Accordingly he advocated that the commissioners at Albany debate his proposal and modify it as suited their perceptions of necessity, with the result “to be sent home [that is, to England], and an Act of Parliament obtained for establishing it.”
Alexander and Colden commented, as Franklin had requested, but another man played a larger part in persuading the Albany Congress to agree to Franklin’s plan of union. Thomas Hutchinson was a Boston boy, like Franklin, born five years later; although there is no record of it, the paths of the two may well have crossed on the streets of the Massachusetts capital. Yet if they crossed they hardly coincided, for Hutchinson enjoyed all the advantages of birth and breeding Franklin lacked. Hutchinson’s family was of the first generation of New Englanders; Anne Hutchinson, Thomas’s great-great-grandmother, out-Puritaned the Puritans in insisting that faith alone sufficed for salvation and that works were secondary. Ben Franklin later rejected this view; so too, for different reasons did Thomas Hutchinson.
What Hutchinson disliked about Anne’s doctrine was that it earned her excommunication and exile (and ultimately death, inflicted by Indians who were seen by Anne’s accusers as agents of divine wrath against the heretic). All his life Thomas Hutchinson was a man of the status quo. He described himself as “a quietist,” believing “that what is, is best.” He certainly looked so. The only surviving portrait of him, painted when he was thirty, shows a slender man (“Tommy, skin and bones,” jibed his political opponents after he became controversial). He has a wide and high forehead, a large nose, eyes that bulge ever so slightly, and a mouth set in a careful but self-satisfied smile.
At thirty he had reason to be self-satisfied. The heretics and theologians of the family were on the female side; for several generations the males were merchants, conservatives who sought salvation through commerce. Thomas fit the male mold. His father staked him to a start in trade (“two or three quintals of fish,” by Thomas’s recollection); this he parlayed by “adventuring to sea” (that is, purchasing shares in ships) into the not inconsiderable sum of perhaps £500 sterling by the time he was twenty-one. An inheritance enlarged his fortune; the bequest included a magnificent house, the finest in Boston (“the first developed example of provincial Palladianism in New England,” according to a later historian of architecture). This house became Hutchinson’s pride and joy, the emblem of his earthly success.
Affluence—if not salvation—assured, Hutchinson entered politics. He was elected to the Boston town council and to the provincial House of Representatives. By the mid-1740s he had ascended to the speakership of the House and was one of the most influential figures in the public life of the colony.
The issues in Massachusetts mirrored some of those in Pennsylvania. While Franklin was promoting paper money in Philadelphia, Hutchinson—as might have been expected of a man who had made his fortune and was concerned with keeping it—championed hard currency in Boston. Through persistence and skill, and the canny employment of the gold and silver sent to Massachusetts by London in repayment for that colony’s expenses in the Louisbourg expedition, Hutchinson and his hard-money allies carried the day. It helped that they had the strong arm of the government behind them, for when the partisans of paper became particularly rowdy, Governor Jonathan Belcher forcibly crushed the incipient insurrection. “They are grown so brassy and hardy as to be now combining in a body to raise a rebellion,” Belcher said of the rioters, in words capturing Hutchinson’s view. “I have this day sent the sheriff and his officers to apprehend some of the heads of the conspirators, so you see we are becoming ripe for a smarter sort of government.”
The smarter sort of government Hutchinson had in mind in 1754 was one that encouraged common action among the several colonies. Hutchinson agreed with Franklin that the present disunity endangered the English colonies in North America, and that decisive action must be taken to knit the too-often-competing colonies into a coherent whole. The two men—the most capable public figures of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania—joined heads and pens on a committee appointed by the Albany Congress to consider means for effecting such a union.
With Franklin’s approval, Hutchinson took the lead in drafting a report that made the arguments Franklin had been making for some time. The British colonies were suffering badly, the report said, from their lack of cooperation. “There has never been any joint exertion of their force, or counsels to repel or defeat the measures of the French.” Each colony devised its own land policy, which typically conflicted with those of its neighbors. This produced “great uneasiness and discontents” among the Indians, who were either cheated by the competing colonies or caused to think they were being cheated. English traders, under the spur of the intercolonial competition, corrupted the Indians with rum “in vast and almost incredible quantities, the laws of the colonies now in force being insufficient to restrain the supply.”
A reversal of direction was imperative, the report said. Common laws must be implemented to restrain the traders and the competition in land. Frontier forts must be constructed from a common fund. Most important, the colonies must be encouraged to establish “a Union of His Majesty’s several governments on the continent, that so their councils, treasure, and strength may be employed in due proportion against their common enemy.”
The Albany Congress found the argument compelling. The body accepted the report, unanimously approved the principle of union, and appointed Franklin, as the originator of the idea, to draw up a concrete proposal to lay before Parliament.
With his usual discretion, Franklin accommodated the suggestions of others. “When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair,” he explained to Cadwallader Colden, “one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater.” Under Franklin’s revised plan the unified government would be headed by a “President General.” The “Grand Council” would comprise seven members each from Massachusetts and Virginia, six from Pennsylvania, and so on down to two from Rhode Island and New Hampshire. The council would meet at Philadelphia, at least initially. On the critical matter of powers, the “President General with the advice of the Grand Council” would be responsible for making war and peace with the Indian nations, for regulating trade and land sales on the frontier, for raising soldiers and building forts, for levying taxes and other duties. The individual colonies would retain their own governments, which would continue to act in those areas not preempted by the common government.
Franklin’s revisions provoked further discussion, at times heated. “We had a great deal of disputation about it, almost every article being contested by one or another,” he told Colden. But finally the Congress strongly approved the union plan and referred it to the individual provinces and to Parliament.
Gratified though he was at this endorsement, Franklin appreciated that the hard work lay ahead. In the confines of the Albany gathering, Franklin’s reasonableness, his understated style, his willingness to work through such others as Thomas Hutchinson, and his ability to accommodate varying viewpoints made his arguments almost irresistible. In the larger world, however—the world of the provincial assemblies and Parliament—the fate of the union plan might be far different. “How they will relish it,” he said of the assemblies, “or how it will be looked on in England, I know not.”
He did what he could to whet the pertinent appetites. In late July he produced an extensive explanation of the reasons and motives behind the union plan. This gloss answered objections already raised, anticipated others, and amplified the arguments for union made by Franklin himself, by Hutchinson, and by other advocates.
Subsequently Franklin parried alternatives to the Albany plan, explaining where and why they fell short. In December 1754 he took on Governor Shirley of Massachusetts, who proposed a scheme diluting the popular role of the provinces in selecting the members of the union government. Franklin judged such dilution deadly, and told Shirley so. One letter explicating his views revealed much not only about the Albany plan but about Franklin’s developing theories of government and of the relation of the American colonies to the British homeland.
“Excluding the people of the Colonies from all share in the choice of the Grand Council would probably give extreme dissatisfaction,” Franklin said. The people of the colonies considered themselves, with justice, “as loyal and as firmly attached to the present Constitution and reigning family as any subjects in the King’s dominions.” They were as willing as any Englishmen to furnish supplies for the defense of their country. But to be required to do so by a Council unanswerable to them contravened one of the most venerable English traditions. “It is supposed an undoubted right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own consent given through their own representatives.”
To this, Governor Shirley responded with a proposal that the colonies receive representation in Parliament—effecting, in essence, a union of the colonies with Britain. Franklin thought the idea a good one, if correctly construed. “Such an Union would be very acceptable to the Colonies provided that they had a reasonable number of representatives allowed them, and that all the old Acts of Parliament restraining the trade or cramping the manufactures of the Colonies be at the same time repealed, and the British subjects on this side the water put in those respects on the same footing with those in Great Britain till the new Parliament, representing the whole, shall think it for the interest of the whole to re-enact some or all of them.”
Needless to say, this proviso severely diminished the appeal to Parliament of Shirley’s suggestion. What was the point of having colonies if not to be able to discriminate against them in trade, manufacture, or otherwise? Franklin knew this. Yet his stricture allowed him to explicate a larger argument: that the American colonists were and ought to be considered full members of the English nation. “I should hope too, that by such an union, the people of Great Britain and the people of the Colonies would learn to consider themselves, not as belonging to different communities with different interests, but to one community with one interest.”
Franklin offered an analogy to the situation in which the colonies currently found themselves. At the eastern entrance to the Strait of Dover lay a line of shoals called the Goodwin Sands. Low tide exposed a stretch of the sands, lending the appearance that England’s land area had grown.
Could the Goodwin Sands be laid dry by banks, and land equal to a large country thereby gained to England, and presently filled with English inhabitants, would it be right to deprive such inhabitants of the common privileges enjoyed by other Englishmen, the right of vending their produce in the same ports, or of making their own shoes, because a merchant or a shoemaker, living on the old land, might fancy it more for his advantage to trade or make shoes for them? Would this be right, even if the land were gained at the expence of the state? And would it not seem less right, if the charge and labour of gaining the additional territory had been borne by the settlers themselves?
The American colonies stood in an even stronger position than the hypothesized province, for unlike the imagined Goodwinites, the British Americans produced raw materials unavailable in England’s latitude, and their distance across the sea served to strengthen Britain’s shipping, essential to national defense.
The present habit of thinking of old England and New England as distinct diminished them both. “What imports it to the general state whether a merchant, a smith, or a hatter grow rich in Old or New England?” In either case the empire gained. Imperial laws ought to recognize this reality and reward effort wherever it occurred. “If, through increase of people, two smiths are wanted for one employed before, why may not the new smith be allowed to live and thrive in the new Country, as well as the old one in the old?” Britain must eventually realize the fundamental truth: “The strength and wealth of the parts is the strength and wealth of the whole.”
Franklin’s exchange with Governor Shirley followed a personal meeting between the two men. In the autumn of 1754 Franklin returned to Boston on a trip that combined public and private affairs. Abiah Franklin had died in May 1752 after some years of declining health. “I am very weeke and short bretht so that I cant set to rite much,” she informed her son several months earlier, in her untutored manner. She was not one to complain, though, and was thankful for what was left to her. “I slepe well anits [a-nights] and my coff is better and I have a prity good stumak to my vettels.”
News of her death came as no great surprise the following spring; and as in the case of Josiah seven years before, the news arrived too late for Benjamin to attend the funeral or do more than commiserate with his siblings. “I received yours with the affecting news of our dear good mother’s death,” he wrote Jane. “I thank you for your long continued care of her in her old age and sickness. Our distance made it impracticable for us to attend her, but you have supplied all. She has lived a good life, as well as a long one, and is happy.”
After his own fashion Franklin sought to repay his familial debt to his sister and her husband, Edward Mecom. The couple had eleven children; for reasons not hard to fathom, Franklin took a special shine to the third, who was named after him. Benjamin Mecom possessed the same independent mind as his uncle, the same impatience with life close to kin, the same desire to get out of Boston. Franklin arranged for the lad to apprentice with James Parker, Franklin’s New York printer-partner. “I am confident he will be kindly used there,” Franklin assured the boy’s mother, “and I shall hear from him every week.” By way of admonition, the uncle added, “You will advise him to be very cheerful, and ready to do every thing he is bid, and endeavour to oblige every body, for that is the true way to get friends.”
If Jane relayed the advice to Benny, it failed to make an impression. The apprenticeship with Parker yielded numerous complaints from both apprentice and master, complaints that usually intersected in the correspondence of Franklin. Whether Benny was more fractious than Franklin himself had been at the same stage of his career is impossible to tell from the distance of more than two hundred years; it was almost as hard for Franklin to tell from the distance of one hundred miles. Benny’s mother heard her son’s complaints and echoed them back to her brother; Parker related his side of the story directly.
Franklin found himself at something of a loss as to how to handle the matter. The best he could do was reassure Jane that her son’s sufferings were exaggerated in the telling and really nothing out of the ordinary, while inquiring of Parker to determine whether such was indeed the case. His own visits to New York supplemented his inquiries of his partner.
“I am frequently at New York,” he wrote Jane, exaggerating for soothing effect, “and I never saw him unprovided with what was good, decent, and sufficient.” Benny had complained of being sent on petty errands. “No boys love it, but all must do it,” his uncle said. Benny made a habit of staying out all night; Parker had good reason for reprimanding him. “If he was my own son, I should think his master did not do his duty by him, if he omitted it, for to be sure it is the high road to destruction.” Benny had been beguiled by a privateer that brought rich prizes into port, prizes shared among the crew; like William Franklin, he determined to have done with dreary terrestrial existence and make for the open sea and the life of the licensed pirate. Parker had to pull him off, as Franklin pulled William off; now Franklin explained the attempted escape to the attempter’s mother: “When boys see prizes brought in, and quantities of money shared among the men, and their gay living, it fills their heads with notions that half distract them and put them quite out of conceit with trades and the dull ways of getting money by working.”
Having essentially said Benny was making up the stories of his poor treatment, Franklin offered his sister a comforting estimate of the boy. “I have a very good opinion of Benny in the main, and have great hopes of his becoming a worthy man, his faults being only such as are commonly incident to boys of his years, and he has many good qualities, for which I love him.”
Franklin was willing to gamble on those good qualities when it became apparent that the apprenticeship to Parker would not work out. In 1748 Franklin had dispatched a journeyman to Antigua to establish a print shop there; shop and printer thrived until 1752, when a tropical fever carried him off. Franklin thought to solve two problems by relieving Parker of Benny and sending the young man to Antigua to fill the vacancy. Especially as the boy was not yet twenty, his mother was mildly appalled.
The uncle attempted to assuage her fears. “That island is reckoned one of the healthiest in the West Indies,” he declared. “My late partner there enjoyed perfect health for four years, till he grew careless and got to sitting up late in taverns, which I have cautioned Benny to avoid.” The opportunity trumped anything Benny would encounter closer to home. “He will find the business settled to his hand, a newspaper established, no other printing-house to interfere with him or beat down his prices, which are much higher than we get on the continent.” Yet despite his assuring tone, Franklin had to grant that human provision would warrant only so much. “Having taken care to do what appears to be for the best, we must submit to God’s Providence, which orders all things really for the best.”
Perhaps God got distracted, or simply had other ideas regarding Benny. Independence suited the young man no better than apprenticeship, and he quickly found trouble in Antigua. He ran up debts to Franklin’s friend William Strahan in London, failed by any reasonable measure of diligence, and nonetheless blamed his uncle for his problems. Even as Franklin decried such misbehavior, he accepted responsibility for at least part of it. “I fear I have been too forward in cracking the shell,” he told Jane, “and producing the chick to the air before its time.”
If nephew Benny’s course ran crooked, son William’s was somewhat straighter, if not always less difficult. In Philadelphia, William adopted the pose of the demobilized war hero. “William is now 19 years of age, a tall proper youth, and much of a beau,” Franklin had written Abiah in the spring of 1750. The beau was living off his father—to his stepmother’s distress—and hoped to continue to do so. The father disabused him. “I have assured him that I intend to spend what little I have, my self, if it please God that I live long enough.”
The friction between William and Deborah was no secret. Daniel Fisher, a clerk who worked for Franklin during the 1750s, kept a diary in which he recorded the stepmother’s complaints.
I have often seen pass to and from his father’s apartment upon business (for he does not eat, drink or sleep in the house) without the least compliment between Mrs. Franklin and him or any sort of notice taken of each other, till one day, as I was sitting with her in the passage when the young gentleman came by, she exclaimed to me (he not hearing): “Mr. Fisher, there goes the greatest villain upon earth!” This greatly confounded and perplexed me, but did not hinder her from pursuing her invectives in the foulest terms I ever heard from a gentlewoman.
William read law with Joseph Galloway, the scion of a respected Philadelphia family and a man who would become one of Franklin’s closest political allies before the American Revolution estranged them. When Franklin was elected to the Assembly in 1751, he got William appointed to the clerkship he was vacating.
He found the young man better work two years later. Since his appointment as Philadelphia postmaster in 1737, Franklin had moved in rather desultory fashion up the postal ranks, eventually becoming comptroller of the American posts. In 1751 he set his mind more determinedly to advancement. He wrote his English friend Peter Collinson that the deputy postmaster general of America, Elliott Benger of Virginia, who had been in poor health for some time, “is thought to be near his end.” Franklin asked Collinson to use his influence to secure the position for him. “I would only add that as I have a respect for Mr. Benger, I should be glad the application were so managed as not to give him any offence, if he should recover.” Benger did no such thing—although he took his time about dying—and two years later Franklin got the job, albeit in conjunction with William Hunter of Virginia.
Half the deputy postmaster position afforded Franklin the opportunity to improve mail service throughout the colonies, to increase his knowledge of conditions across America, and to engage the leading citizens of the different provinces. Eventually the job would earn him a fair income, but for the time being the investments required to put the American mails on an efficient footing ate up all profits and more.
The job also gave Franklin the ability to throw work to his son. Franklin was no stickler for disinterest in appointments to office; he was happy to keep within the family the perquisites of whatever positions he acquired. In this case he exercised his authority as deputy postmaster to appoint William postmaster of Philadelphia. A year later he named William continental comptroller.
Perhaps William now concluded that his father had something to offer; perhaps the young man had simply outgrown the annoyances of adolescence. Whatever the cause, the filial relationship warmed and ramified. William developed an interest in Franklin’s experiments, contributing observations and hypotheses of his own. Significantly, it was William who served as the sole assistant of his father in the kite experiment. That the experiment led to international acclaim for Franklin only increased his son’s respect.
For his part, Franklin could hope William was growing into a worthy manhood. A rebel himself in youth, Franklin could hardly hold William’s earlier experiments—in life, not electricity—against him. But now the boy seemed to be finding himself. His father could only be gratified.
While William kept the accounts of the post office and read his law books, he dreamed of grander things. Grandest was an empire of western land. Like many others of his era—including George Washington—William caught a highly infectious disease during his journey to the Ohio Valley, a disease whose most significant symptom was a belief that fabulous wealth awaited whoever could win title to those boundless acres. William would spend years seeking such title. For now he dreamed.
Franklin would share his son’s dream, if not the symptoms of virulent infection. Franklin would join William in speculating in western land, but in Franklin’s case the western dream was less personal than imperial. As his exchanges with William Shirley revealed, Franklin saw America as a potentially coequal part of the British empire, and the basis for American equality was land. In land lay the future of America; in American land lay the future of Britain.
Franklin addressed precisely this issue in what became one of the most influential essays he ever wrote. In 1751 he drafted “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.” and circulated it to Peter Collinson and others. Collinson urged Franklin to publish the piece. “I wish, my Dear Friend, you’ll oblige the ingenious part of mankind with a public view of your observations &c. on the increase of mankind,” Collinson wrote. “I don’t find anyone has hit it off so well.” The draft was rough, however, and Franklin hoped to polish it before release to the “ingenious part” or anyone else. But politics, postmastering, and other interests intervened, and the polishing never took place. Finally, in 1754, Franklin consented to its publication as it stood, and the next year it was printed in Boston. It quickly crossed the Atlantic and was reproduced in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Economists Adam Smith and later Thomas Malthus, among many others, read it appreciatively.
Franklin’s central idea was simple: that the increase of population depended on the availability of land. The critical element in reproductive rates was the age of marriage; couples who married young had more children than couples who married old. (Needless to say, Franklin’s observation antedated convenient contraception.) The age of marriage in turn depended on the opportunities to establish economic independence. In Franklin’s preindustrial day, economic independence for the many required access to land—of which America had an abundance relative to Europe. Europe was already filled with farmers; adding more required displacing some of those already there. America was filled with Indians, who subsisted by hunting, an occupation that resulted in a population far less dense, leaving ample room for farmers.
Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap that a labouring man that understands husbandry can in a short time save money enough to purchase a piece of new land sufficient for a plantation, whereon he may subsist a family; such are not afraid to marry, for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more land is to be had at rates equally easy, all circumstances considered.
Hence marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe. And if it is reckoned there that there is but one marriage per annum among 100 persons, perhaps we may here reckon two; and if in Europe they have but 4 births to a marriage (many of their marriages being late), we may here reckon 8, of which if one half grow up, and our marriages are made, reckoning one with another, at 20 years of age, our people must at least be doubled every 20 years.
This was the part that caught the eye of Malthus—this and Franklin’s assertion that “there is in short no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other’s means of subsistence.” From these (and contributions of his own, of course) Malthus extrapolated the theory of inevitable impoverishment that made him famous.
Adam Smith was taken by another part of Franklin’s argument. In 1750 the British Parliament had bent to the demands of British manufacturers and prohibited the construction of ironworks in America; Franklin’s essay was at least partly a response to this prohibition. He argued that despite the rapid increase in the American population, the vastness of the land available to these growing numbers would for generations dictate a dearness of labor compared to that in the old country. “The danger, therefore, of these colonies interfering with their Mother Country in trades that depend on labour, manufactures, &c. is too remote to require the attention of Great Britain.” Far from weakening demand for manufactures of the home country, the growth of the colonies would strengthen it. “Therefore Britain should not restrain too much manufactures in her colonies. A wise and good mother will not do it. To distress is to weaken, and weakening the children weakens the whole family.” Adam Smith, who made his name attacking the protectionist policies of British mercantilism—and who kept not one but two copies of Franklin’s essay in his library—could not have put it better.
In an early indication that his views on slavery were changing, Franklin contended that the introduction of slaves could only diminish a nation. Slavery enabled whites to avoid labor, thereby undermining their health and rendering them “not so generally prolific.” Slavery also sapped the moral health of the nation. Franklin at this point did not contend that trafficking in human souls was inherently immoral; rather he decried the bad example it set. “White children become proud, disgusted with labour, and being educated in idleness, are rendered unfit to get a living by industry.” Franklin thought it significant that the northern colonies, having fewer slaves than the southern, multiplied their populations more rapidly.
The laws of population growth, as exhibited in America, promised a brilliant future for the colonies—a future whose brilliance need not dull in the slightest that of Britain.
There are supposed to be now upwards of one million English souls in North America (though ’tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over sea), and yet there is perhaps not the one fewer in Britain, but rather many more, on account of the employment the colonies afford to manufacturers at home. This million doubling, suppose but once in 25 years, will in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side the water. What an accession of power to the British Empire by sea as well as land! What increase of trade and navigation!
That the future of America, and with it of the British empire, depended on the availability of land was what made the contest with France so important. The defeat incurred by George Washington in 1754 inspired the British government to action; early the following year it dispatched an expedition of regular army officers and men to America to smite the French intruders and regain Britain’s rightful hold on the Ohio. The commander of the expedition was Major General Edward Braddock of the Coldstream Guards. Braddock was sixty years old, had served occasionally as governor of Gibraltar, and hoped to cap his otherwise undistinguished military career with appointment as royal governor somewhere or other. Although fond of his pipe, his claret, and his mistresses, he liked to convey a stoic impression. “Braddock is very Iroquois in disposition,” declared British diarist Horace Walpole. “He had a sister who, having gamed away all her little fortune at Bath, hanged herself with a truly English deliberation, leaving only a note upon the table with these lines: ‘To die is landing on some silent shore,’ etc. When Braddock was told of it, he only said, ‘Poor Fanny! I always thought she would play till she would be forced to tuck herself up.’”
Braddock was not pleased at having to travel to a New World wilderness to win his governorship, but, as no other theater beckoned—other than the theaters of London, where he took in the performances of George Anne Bellamy, a famous actress who was one of his two current flames—away he must go. In leaving he demonstrated that some of Miss Bellamy’s dramatic flair had rubbed off. “The General told me that he should never see me more,” she recalled, “for he was going with a handful of men to conquer whole nations; and to do this they must cut their way through unknown woods. He produced a map of the country, saying at the same time: ‘Dear Pop, we are sent like sacrifices to the altar.’”
The general conveyed a different impression to Franklin and others in America. Franklin encountered Braddock at Frederick, Maryland, having been sent there by the Pennsylvania Assembly, which wanted a personal assessment from one of their own of this officer come to rescue the colony from the French and the Indians. Rather than acknowledge his role as eye of Assembly, though, Franklin wore his postmaster’s hat and averred his desire to facilitate the general’s communications.
Braddock boasted he would make short work of his adversaries. “After taking Fort Duquesne,” he told Franklin, “I am to proceed to Niagara; and having taken that, to Frontenac, if the season will allow time; and I suppose it will, for Duquesne can hardly delay me above three or four days; and then I see nothing that can obstruct my march to Niagara.”
From William, and from his reading of recent history—including the experiences of George Washington—Franklin appreciated the peculiar difficulties attending frontier warfare. The Indians were masters of ambush; was the general taking this into account?
“These savages may indeed be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia,” Braddock replied. “But upon the King’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.”
Only one thing worried the British general. The Americans, for whom he and his men would accomplish their heroics, were failing to do their part. “These Americans,” he grumbled to an associate, “coaxed us over here to fight their battles and then, by God, they overcharge us for wagons and supplies and refuse to fight in their own quarrel.” To Franklin he declared that the lack of cooperation, particularly in providing transport, could scuttle the expedition before it had well started.
Franklin could not deny that his own province was acting the miser in its defense; as before, the Quakers in the Assembly were blocking military appropriations. But he thought the people of Pennsylvania would be happy to hire out their wagons and horses to the Crown, and told Braddock as much.
“Then you, sir,” Braddock answered, “who are a man of interest there, can probably procure them for us; and I beg you will undertake it.”
Franklin accepted the invitation. He printed a broadside advertising for the use of 150 wagons and teams, and 1,500 horses, on attractive financial terms. In an accompanying letter Franklin assured the owners that “the service will be light and easy, for the Army will scarce march above 12 miles per day.” He additionally assured his audience that he himself had no pecuniary interest in the matter. “I shall have only my labour for my pains.” Patriotism should inspire those who found the financial incentives insufficient; to those indifferent to finances and patriotism both, Franklin closed with a caution: “If this method of obtaining the waggons and horses is not like to succeed, I am obliged to send word to the General in fourteen days; and I suppose Sir John St. Clair the Hussar, with a body of soldiers, will immediately enter the province for the purpose aforesaid, of which I shall be sorry to hear.”
“I cannot but honour Franklin for the last clause of his advertisement,” chuckled Braddock’s military secretary upon reading Franklin’s broadside. General St. Clair, Braddock’s quartermaster, was not really a Hussar, one of those shock troops of the Habsburg Empire, but the uniform of his unit looked sufficiently similar to that of the Hungarian originals to unsettle the Pennsylvania Germans—people who knew how the Hussars acquired their unsavory reputation. St. Clair contributed to the effect by acting in the haughtiest manner imaginable. He refused to employ his soldiers in cutting roads through the forest, instead insisting that civilians do the work. He threatened fire and sword—he said he would burn their houses and kill their cattle—if they did not comply. If delays on the road prevented the defeat of the French, he would treat those responsible for the delay as a “parcel of traitors.”
Franklin got his horses and wagons, but not before putting his own money at risk. Hussar memories notwithstanding, the canny farmers of the backcountry wanted to make sure they got paid for their animals and kit. They did not know Braddock, but they did know that the British government had been slow to pay in other circumstances; before they accepted Franklin’s terms, they made him post personal bond for their property. This he loyally but nervously did.
Braddock, now provisioned for victory, rode off to accomplish it. Franklin returned to Philadelphia, where he encountered a confidence in Braddock’s prospects he did not share. Some of his fellow citizens got up a subscription for fireworks to celebrate the certain victory. Franklin frowned and said there would be time enough for celebrating when the battle was won.
“What the devil!” said one of the sponsors. “You surely don’t suppose that the fort will not be taken?”
“I don’t know that it will not be taken,” Franklin replied. “But I know that the events of war are subject to great uncertainty.”
And so they were. Despite the train of wagons and horses Franklin had attracted (and was currently underwriting), Braddock found the going through the forest agonizingly slow. On the advice of Washington, who had rejoined the military as an aide to Braddock, the general divided the column, pushing ahead with the lighter and faster units and leaving the baggage train to follow.
On the morning of July 9, 1755, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage (who twenty years later would get to know Washington in a quite different capacity) led a contingent of some 450 troops toward a broad meadow just a few miles south of Fort Duquesne. Because he failed to send an adequate number of scouts ahead, he moved forward largely blind.
Meanwhile a force of French and Indian soldiers was reconnoitering south from the fort. Somewhat to their surprise they encountered the British, and in the forest the battle commenced. Gage had no good idea how many enemy soldiers he faced; rather than thrust forward into the clearing ahead, he retreated. Braddock, behind, hearing the gunfire, ordered an advance. The retreating column and the advancing unit collided on the narrow road, clumping in confusion. As they did, the forest-savvy French commander split his force into two files that streamed through the underbrush past the British on both sides, then opened a withering fire upon the redcoats from the shadowed cover.
“I cannot describe the horrors of that scene,” said a survivor. “No pen could do it. The yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me till the hour of my dissolution.” Washington, who had recovered from a violent fever just in time to ride into battle (albeit on a cushioned saddle), had two horses shot from under him and four bullets pierce his coat; miraculously he escaped injury.
Braddock was no less brave but much less lucky. The general lost four horses before being bowled off the fifth by a ball that penetrated his lung. He lived just long enough to appreciate the magnitude of the disaster: two-thirds of his 1,450 men killed or wounded. Among the officers the casualty rate was three-quarters.
In some instances the dead did better than the living. Prisoners taken by the French-friendly Indians were subjected to torture. One British prisoner, captured earlier, told of the return of the Indians to Fort Duquesne “with about a dozen prisoners, stripped naked, with their hands tied behind their backs, and their faces and part of their bodies blacked. These prisoners they burned to death on the bank of the Allegheny river, opposite to the fort. I stood on the fort wall until I beheld them begin to burn one of these men; they had him tied to a stake and kept touching him with firebrands, red-hot irons, &c., and he screamed in the most doleful manner; the Indians, in the mean time, yelling like infernal spirits.”