7
“We have had a very healthy summer, and a fine harvest. The country is filled with bread, but as trade declines since the war began, I know not what our farmers will do for a market.”
Franklin was writing to his parents in September 1744, and the war he referred to was the fourth installment of the colonial contest that formed the backdrop—and frequently the foreground—to the history of the Atlantic basin during Franklin’s lifetime. The contest had roots in the struggles of the rising nation-states of Europe for control of the new discoveries across the seas. Portugal and Spain were the early leaders, with the Portuguese monopolizing the trade routes to the East via the South
(that is, around Africa) and the Spanish capitalizing on their conquests in the Americas, encountered accidentally while searching for trade routes to the East via the West. The English and French were slower to exploit the opportunities of expansion overseas, but after sorting out the squabbles surrounding the Reformation of the sixteenth century—a sorting that left France in the Catholic camp but put England among the Protestants—these northerners launched their own imperial ventures. The English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 signaled the start of the eclipse of the Iberians; it was followed by the planting of English and French colonies in North America.
The English got the better of the planting, sowing the seeds of settlement in the relatively fertile soil and equable climates of the Atlantic seaboard between the middle thirties and low forties of northern latitude. The French put down roots, or tried to, in the rocky glacial leftovers of the St. Lawrence Valley. The French also tried to force their way into the Mississippi and Ohio valleys; this effort, superimposed upon the larger struggle between the English and French dynasties on the eastern shore of the Atlantic, was what led to the series of colonial wars in which Franklin eventually became involved.
The first of the series, named by the Americans for English King William, lasted eight years and entailed numerous atrocities, including one massacre in New Hampshire perpetrated by a raiding party that was, in Cotton Mather’s characterization, “half Indianized French, and half Frenchified Indians.” King William’s War ended a decade before Franklin was born, and terminated in a treaty that restored the status quo, to the relief of the monarchs and ministers responsible but the disgust of most of those who did the actual fighting.
The second war was under way at the time of Franklin’s birth and was christened for Queen Anne. (No one thought of naming wars after the French monarch, since for longer than most people lived in those days, specifically from 1643 to 1715, all the wars would have been named for the same person, Louis XIV). Queen Anne’s War featured the seizure by Britain—as it was now properly called, following the recent unification of England and Scotland—of Gibraltar from France’s ally Spain, and it ended during the seventh year of Franklin’s life. The settlement confirmed the Gibraltar seizure, to the everlasting humiliation of the Spanish; awarded Acadia and Newfoundland to Britain, to the lasting, if not quite everlasting, vexation of the French; and made Britain’s enterprising slave traders the exclusive (legal) suppliers of captured Africans for the Spanish American market (not to mention the British American market).
Had Louis XIV not finally died shortly after the conclusion of Queen Anne’s War, the third round of fighting probably would have started sooner than it did. But the regents who ruled in the name of Louis’s minor heir lacked the Sun King’s sense of entitlement to primacy among nations, a sense that almost certainly would have provoked His Solarity to repudiate the Treaty of Utrecht. Meanwhile the Mississippi Valley absorbed more of France’s expansionist energies than anyone had imagined, mitigating the hurt of the loss of territory in the northeast. As a consequence, an entire generation—Franklin’s generation—grew up with the odd notion that peace was the rule among the imperial powers, and war the exception.
The error of this notion became apparent during Franklin’s fourth decade. A British smuggler named Robert Jenkins was caught in the act by Spanish authorities, who chastised him by slicing off his ear. He retrieved the alienated part and for seven years carried it across the seven seas in a handkerchief in his pocket. Eventually he found his way to Westminster, arriving—not coincidentally—at a moment when English Protestant passions were again rising against the Spanish papists. He produced his leathery relic, to the professed shock of all the honorable members (who in fact saw far worse examples of human cruelty on the streets of London every day). It would be a few years yet before Samuel Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels; perhaps the pioneer lexicographer was inspired by Jenkins, who declared that at the moment the Spanish sword was flashing down, “I commended my soul to God, and my cause to my country!”
Parliament and country rose in anger—however belated—and war ensued. The War of Jenkins’s Ear was noteworthy for the massively stupid loss of British and American lives before the walls of Cartegena, Spain’s Caribbean stronghold in New Granada. The American survivors began to form an opinion once commonplace but since forgotten: that they were pawns in Britain’s imperial wars. And now it was evident that they were incompetently played pawns at that. (Whether from stubborn loyalty or as a reminder of what he had been through, an American captain named Lawrence Washington limped back to Virginia and called his hilltop plantation above the Potomac after the British admiral at Cartagena, Edward Vernon.)
The War of Jenkins’s Ear segued seamlessly into King George’s War when France joined the fight on the side of the Spanish. This conflict was the one Franklin referred to in his letter to Josiah and Abiah. The high point of the war, certainly from an American perspective, was the siege of Louisbourg, the French fortress on Cape Breton Island that commanded the entrance to the St. Lawrence River and harassed American fishing vessels on the Grand Banks. As far east as it was, Louisbourg received news of the formal declaration of war before that news reached New England; privateers out of Louisbourg exploited their informational advantage and swooped down upon American vessels, ultimately ranging as far south as the estuary of the Delaware River, where they seized ships almost within hailing distance of the docks of Philadelphia. The French military governor of Louisbourg meanwhile launched a surprise attack on an English fishing village on the Nova Scotian shore. The commander of the attack followed up his easy victory there with a fatal blunder: instead of transporting the prisoners straight to Boston as promised in the surrender terms, he stopped at Louisbourg on the way. This allowed the prisoners to observe that the fortress was poorly maintained and even less well manned. When they reached Boston they shared this intelligence with Governor William Shirley, who determined to put it to use. He advocated an offensive against Louisbourg to end forever the depredations of the French and their savage Indian allies upon the peace-loving and God-fearing people of New England. If the expedition made a hero of its sponsor, all the better.
Shirley struck a sympathetic nerve with his call for ships and troops and money. The maritime interests of Franklin’s birthplace itched to be rid of the Gallic menace. Every New England family recalled horror stories of women and children being slaughtered by fiendish red men, provoked and provisioned by the French. The infamous massacre at Deerfield, Massachusetts, was forty years old but more horrible for the telling and retelling. Everyone knew that the Indian raids would never cease until the French were thrust out of Canada. The Massachusetts General Court—the same body that had chastised James Franklin for sedition—instructed Shirley to raise an army of 3,000 volunteers. He persuaded the popular and civic-minded merchant William Pepperell to lead the force and promised easy plunder to all who participated in storming the fortress and reducing the town it guarded. Shirley figuratively brought aboard local preachers, who literally brought aboard their lay brothers. George Whitefield provided a motto for what quickly assumed the trappings of a Protestant crusade: “Nil desperandum Christo duce.” (“None despairing where Christ leads.” Apparently the great revivalist was not bothered by the fact that Latin was the language of the papists.) Shirley invited the other colonies to join the crusade. Rhode Island promised a ship, sailors, and soldiers. Connecticut voted to dispatch a force of 500 men. New York sent cannon, vital for use against the walls of the French fort.
The response from Pennsylvania was less enthusiastic. Governor George Thomas spoke openly for the plan, commending the New Englanders’ initiative to the Assembly. “The enterprise shows a fine public spirit in that people!” he declared. “And, if it succeeds, it will be greatly for the honour of His Majesty and the interest of all his colonies in North America.” In private, however, he expressed reservations, which strengthened the skeptics in the Assembly. The theology of the Quakers had attenuated over time; pacifism was not as central to the self-conception of the third generation of Friends in America as it had been to William Penn’s contemporaries. Yet there remained an uneasiness with war and war preparations, especially when they entailed expense and risk, as these did. Non-Quakers in the Assembly joined the party of the founders in objecting to the cost and hazard and in complaining that they had not been consulted by the New Englanders in advance of the decision to sail against Cape Breton. “We should not think it prudent,” the Assembly concluded, “to unite in an enterprise where the expense must be great, perhaps much blood shed, and the event very uncertain.”
Franklin observed the Louisbourg debate as clerk of the Assembly. This extremely part-time job, which he had commenced in 1736, was hardly in demand, paying little in cash and less in honor. Its chief recommendation to Franklin was that it facilitated his work as printer of the Assembly’s proceedings, which did make him some money. It also afforded a firsthand view of Pennsylvania politics.
What he witnessed in the debate over the Louisbourg expedition did not impress him. “When I compare the Governor’s message to the House with his private conversation,” Franklin noted to himself, “I cannot but admire at his insincerity, to commend the undertaking publicly, that he might gain the applause of the Governor and people of New England, and the Ministry at home [that is, in England], at the same time that he privately does all in his power to disappoint it.” The Assembly was no more ingenuous. Remarking the enthusiasm of several members for New England’s success, even while they precluded a role for Pennsylvania, Franklin asserted, “If it be against their consciences, they ought not by any means to encourage military proceedings in others more than themselves.” To the faces of these same members he spoke more tartly. “I told them those people [the New Englanders] were as much obliged to them for their good wishes as the poor in the Scripture to those that say, Be ye warmed and ye filled.” Again speaking to himself, Franklin added, “I think they ought to be open and honest and give the true reason, and not trifle in the manner they do, by pretending, among other things, that they are offended in not being consulted in such an affair.” Neither side had done itself credit. “The Governor and Assembly have been only acting a farce and playing tricks to amuse the world.”
The Louisbourg offensive went forward without Pennsylvania’s help—but not without Pennsylvania’s attention. “Our people are extremely impatient to hear of your success at Cape Breton,” Franklin wrote his Boston brother John a month after the expedition set sail. “My shop is filled with thirty inquiries at the coming of every post.” Most of those who crowded into the Market Street shop were military innocents—this being Quaker country—and they wondered that the fortress had not already fallen. Franklin was scarcely surprised. “I tell them I shall be glad to hear that news three months hence,” he reported to John. “Fortified towns are hard nuts to crack; and your teeth have not been accustomed to it. Taking strong places is a particular trade, which you have taken up without serving an apprenticeship to it. Armies and veterans need skilful engineers to direct them in their attack. Have you any?” Yet these objections hardly registered with many who watched the proceeding from afar. “Some seem to think forts are as easy taken as snuff.”
Franklin could not resist a laugh at those who treated the expedition as a crusade and called upon God to guarantee its success. “You have a fast and prayer day for that purpose,” he wrote John, “in which I compute five hundred thousand petitions were offered up to the same effect in New England, which added to the petitions of every family morning and evening, multiplied by the number of days since January 25th, make forty-five millions of prayers; which, set against the prayers of a few priests in the garrison, to the Virgin Mary, give a vast balance in your favor.” There was serious theology at issue here, Franklin teased. “If you do not succeed, I fear I shall have but an indifferent opinion of Presbyterian prayers in such cases, as long as I live. Indeed, in attacking strong towns I should have more dependence on works than on faith, for, like the kingdom of heaven, they are to be taken by force and violence; and in a French garrison I suppose there are devils of that kind, that they are not to be cast out by prayers and fasting, unless it be by their own fasting for want of provisions.”
Whatever it did for popular piety, the Louisbourg expedition benefited Franklin’s news business. The Gazette had gained readers each year since its establishment, although Andrew Bradford’s Mercury fought a stubborn rearguard action. In November 1740 Bradford announced the inauguration of the first magazine to be published in the American colonies. Entitled The American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies, it would afford readers a broad perspective on public affairs, literature, and the arts and would cost twelve shillings in Pennsylvania currency for a year’s subscription. Publication would commence in March 1741, assuming that sufficient subscribers paid their fee.
The following week Franklin’s Gazette ran a notice of something strikingly similar. The General Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, for All the British Plantations in America would examine politics local and imperial, literature American and British, and sundry occurrences noteworthy and merely curious. Published monthly beginning in January, it would cost subscribers ninepence Pennsylvanian (or sixpence British sterling) per issue—that is, nine shillings per year.
To the reading public, Franklin appeared a shameless imitator. In fact he was an aggrieved originator, whose idea had been stolen—albeit through his own carelessness, which added anger at himself to his feeling of injury. And what made him even angrier at himself was that his mistake recapitulated his error of a dozen years earlier when he was planning to start his newspaper. Seeking assistance with the magazine project, he had revealed his plan to a person who, unsatisfied with Franklin’s terms, took the idea to his competitor.
In his anger Franklin struck out. The person to whom he had tipped his hand was John Webbe, a lawyer and sometime contributor to the Gazette. Convinced that Webbe was behind Bradford’s proposed magazine, Franklin—without explicitly naming Webbe—published a statement alleging breach of confidence and theft of ideas.
This provoked Webbe to identify himself, doubtless as Franklin intended. Webbe protested his innocence, saying Franklin was the wrongdoer. By making false, yet veiled, charges, Franklin practiced “the most mischievous kind of lying; for the strokes being oblique and indirect, a man cannot so easily defend himself against them.” Webbe’s complaint presaged many Franklin would hear in the future about his style of attack: that there was something “more mean and dastardly in the character of an indirect liar than a direct one. This has the audacity of a highwayman, thatthe slyness of a pickpocket. Both indeed rob you of your purse, and both deserve a gibbet; but, were I obliged to pardon either, I could sooner forgive the bold wickedness of the one, than the sneakingvillainy of the other.”
The exchange did not cover Franklin in glory. His own indiscretion—not some betrayal by Webbe—was the cause of his preemption. But the nasty back-and-forth had the effect, as Franklin certainly anticipated, of drawing attention to his new magazine.
With the battle joined, both publishers pushed forward their initial issues. Franklin lost the race to Bradford by three days in February 1741. Yet being a step behind had its advantages, for it allowed Franklin to throw rocks at Bradford from the rear. Bradford advertised his magazine in the Mercury most elaborately; Franklin responded in the Gazette with ridicule. With the partial exception of the title—“Teague’s Advertisement,” likening Bradford to the infamous pirate—this lampoon was one of Franklin’s less inspired offerings. He attempted to mimic the dialect of someone presumably German, but the result left confusion on that point. The wit fell short of the best of Richard Saunders—who in fact acquitted himself better in the contest against Bradford. “If you would keep your secret from an enemy,” reminded the edition of Poor Richard appearing about this time, “tell it not to a friend.”
As it turned out, all the sniping was wasted—or perhaps it was too effective. Bradford’s magazine expired before its third month; Franklin’s lasted but half a year. The competition between the two, by splitting the audience, may have contributed to the demise of both; more likely, Franklin (and Bradford, imitating Franklin) simply misjudged the market. For now—and for a long time—America lacked a literary culture like that which supported the successful Gentleman’s Magazine of London, which served as the model for Franklin’s General Magazine. (Gentleman’s also served, to some extent, as Franklin’s competition, as it was brought over the Atlantic and distributed by booksellers in America.) Perhaps the attention span of busy Americans was shorter than that of their English counterparts. Americans would read newspapers and almanacs, but not magazines.
Another part of Franklin’s problem was that he was starting to stretch himself thin. The reason he approached John Webbe in the first place was that he lacked the time to produce the magazine himself. His basic business was better than ever. In 1742 he sponsored James Parker in a printing venture in New York. There was a certain historical symmetry here—although Andrew Bradford and his father might have taken it as additional evidence of Franklin’s ingratitude. The young Parker had fled an apprenticeship with William Bradford in much the way Franklin had fled his commitment to James Franklin. Just as the elder Bradford had assisted the struggling Ben Franklin to find work, so Franklin took in James Parker and gave him a job as a journeyman. In February 1742 Franklin sent Parker, then about twenty-seven, back to New York to enter competition with William Bradford. Franklin would provide the press and letters and one-third of expenses; in return he would receive one-third of proceeds. At the end of six years Parker would have the option to purchase the press and letters and terminate the partnership.
This arrangement proved even more successful than the earlier one with Thomas Whitemarsh—succeeded by Lewis Timothy—in South Carolina. Franklin may have guessed that William Bradford was on the verge of retirement (Bradford was approaching eighty); he may have calculated that a nudge from Parker might push him over the edge. As events transpired, Bradford—perhaps unwilling to take on such an energetic rival as Franklin—did indeed put down his composition stick, leaving the best of the New York market to the Franklin-Parker combine. Parker succeeded Bradford as official printer of the colony of New York, and he started a newspaper that subsequently assumed the name and the small readership of Bradford’s venerable but struggling New York Gazette.
The most successful of Franklin’s protégés was David Hall. A native of Edinburgh who had followed the printing craft to London, Hall came to Philadelphia highly recommended by his latest employer, William Strahan. Franklin found the recommendation well warranted. “From the short acquaintance I have had with him,” Franklin wrote Strahan in July 1744, “I am persuaded that he will answer perfectly the character you had given of him.” Franklin hoped to send Hall out on the same kind of commercial colonization scheme as Whitmarsh and Parker—in this case to the West Indies. But a snag arose when Hall developed jaundice, perhaps from hepatitis contracted in the close quarters of the ship from England. Then he and Franklin found themselves at odds over the expense of Hall’s passage west. Briefly it appeared that the partnership might founder before launch. Strahan, however, reassured Hall of Franklin’s good faith. “Trust to his generosity …” Strahan told Hall, “and he will deal honorably by you.” Strahan, who knew Franklin only by correspondence, added, “He seems to me by his manner of writing to have a very good heart, as well as to be a man of honour and good sense.”
Hall eventually agreed, while Franklin learned to value Hall’s talents so highly that he decided to keep him in Philadelphia. Hall became Franklin’s foreman, handling the affairs of the shop with a skill and efficiency that not even the fastidious Franklin could fault. The printing business grew more profitable to its owner, yet he had to devote less time to it than ever.
In the two centuries after his death Franklin would be cited—in praise by some, in scorn by others—as a prototype of the American capitalist. The citation was misleading. Had Franklin possessed the soul of a true capitalist, he would have devoted the time he saved from printing to making money somewhere else. But he did not. For Franklin the getting of money was always a means to an end, never the end itself. No one worked harder at the printing business than Franklin during the years when his printing house had to be established and placed on a sound footing. But once the footing was assured, his interests and increasingly his energies went elsewhere.
The test of his attitude toward money was his handling of what he called the “Pennsylvania fireplace.” For years Franklin had been convinced that fireplaces and stoves might be made more efficient; in hours borrowed from the printing business he tinkered with baffles and fireboxes to produce a better model. By the early 1740s he was satisfied with his design and arranged with Robert Grace, the Junto iron man, to manufacture and sell the new fireplace.
“In these northern colonies the inhabitants keep fires to sit by, generally seven months in the year,” wrote Franklin in a promotional pamphlet published in 1744. “Wood, our common fuel, which within these 100 years might be had at every man’s door, must now be fetched near 100 miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable article in the expense of families.” Any method for economizing on fuel, by improving fuel efficiency, would benefit private citizens and the public at large. “The NEW FIRE-PLACES are a late invention to that purpose (experienced now three winters by a great number of families in Pennsylvania).”
Governor Thomas was so pleased with Franklin’s innovation that he offered him a patent conferring exclusive rights to sell the fireplace within the province. Had Franklin accepted, he doubtless would have made a good deal of money (and if he had aggressively extended the patent to the other American colonies, he would have made a great deal of money), for the fireplace became very popular. And the colder the climate, the more popular it became. A correspondent to the Boston Evening Post could not speak highly enough of “the new-invented Philadelphia Fire Places, or as they ought to be called, both in justice and gratitude, Mr. Franklin’s stoves.” One cord, or at most one and a half cords, of quality firewood sufficed in Franklin’s invention to warm the common room of an ordinary house the entire winter. The benefit was obvious. “Every body can calculate what a saving this must be in one of the most necessary articles of house-keeping, and I believe all who have experienced the comfort and benefit of them will join with me, that the author of this happy invention merits a statue from his countrymen.”
Franklin would get his statues in time; for now he declined the offer of exclusive rights to his stove. His was not a patenting personality, one that perceived knowledge as the property of its discoverer. Rather he saw philosophy—broadly construed, as it was in those days—as a collective undertaking. What one investigator unearthed ought to become the common property of all. As it applied to patents, he explained, “That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”
Franklin’s view was evident in his pamphlet describing the fireplace. The pamphlet was an advertisement only incidentally; its heart was a scientific treatise on the theory of combustion and on practical applications to domestic heating. He cited authorities classical (supplying one long source in Latin) and exotic (quoting, in translation, from a Chinese work). He explained the various means by which heat is transmitted (paying particular attention to convection, overlooked or misapplied in most fireplace designs). He contended, with evidence, that rooms heated with the new fireplace were more healthful than rooms heated conventionally, for the heat permeated the rooms more evenly. He included a schematic rendering of the fireplace, together with instructions as to how it ought to be installed (including a hint to mix rum with water in the paste used to seal the joints). Being Franklin, he closed with a verse of the sort Richard Saunders regularly penned, extolling the fireplace as a second sun:
Another sun!—’tis true—but not the same.
Alike, I own, in warmth and genial flame.
But more obliging than his elder brother,
This will not scorch in summer, like the other, Nor, when sharp Boreas chills our shivering limbs
Will this sun leave us for more southern climes;
Or, in long winter nights, forsake us here,
To cheer new friends in t’other hemisphere;
But, faithful still to us, this new sun’s fire,
Warms when we please, and just as we desire.
It was characteristic of Franklin to combine theory and application in his pamphlet on the fireplace, for just as he did not have the heart of a modern capitalist, neither was he what the modern age would call a true intellectual. He had an inquisitive mind—ceaselessly inquisitive, in fact, as his whole life attested. But he found knowledge for knowledge’s sake to be an unsatisfying formula. The kind of knowledge he prized was that which made life easier, more productive, or happier. In this regard his view of science mirrored his view of religion. Where faith was sterile if it failed to produced good works, so science was sterile—even if interesting—if it failed to produce good inventions.
In May 1743 Franklin printed A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America. Others had bruited the idea before, chiefly John Bartram of Philadelphia and Cadwallader Colden of New York. But neither of them was a printer, which in this as in many of his other projects gave Franklin a crucial advantage. Bartram and Colden might—and did—communicate between themselves and with a small circle of correspondents, but Franklin could reach hundreds or thousands through his printing press. How many copies he produced of his broadside Promoting Useful Knowledge is unknown, but without doubt it spread the idea among a wider audience than had heard any such notion theretofore.
“The first drudgery of settling new colonies, which confines the attention of people to mere necessaries, is now pretty well over,” Franklin wrote. “And there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts and improve the stock of knowledge.” To such as were of a philosophical turn of mind, curiosity and insight must from time to time produce discoveries “to the advantage of some or all of the British plantations, or to the benefit of mankind in general.”
They would, at any rate, if properly encouraged and communicated. This was the purpose of Franklin’s publication. He proposed “that one society be formed of Virtuosi or ingenious men residing in the several colonies, to be called The American Philosophical Society.” The society would be centered at Philadelphia, the city closest to the center of the colonies, where the post roads converged and where they intersected the sea-lanes to the settlements in the West Indies. In addition, Philadelphia already possessed a respectable and growing library, essential to any such endeavor.
At Philadelphia would reside the core of the society, consisting of a physician, a botanist, a mathematician, a chemist, a “mechanician,” a geographer, and a natural philosopher of broad interests and expertise. The society’s president, treasurer, and secretary would also be based in Franklin’s home city. The group would meet at least once a month, and would discuss their own latest findings and those transmitted to them by members in other cities and colonies. A principal function of the Philadelphia nucleus would be to facilitate the flow of information among members with common interests but no common meeting ground. To this end the society would sponsor publication of the most noteworthy findings and hypotheses.
Topics suitable for investigation covered the range of human interests and needs. “All new-discovered plants, herbs, trees, roots, &c., their virtues, uses, &c., methods of propagating them…. Improvements of vegetable juices, as ciders, wines &c. New methods of curing or preventing disease. All new-discovered fossils in different countries, as mines, minerals, quarries, &c. New and useful improvements in any branch of mathematics. New discoveries in chemistry, such as improvements in distillation, brewing, assaying of ores, &c. New mechanical inventions for saving labour, as mills, carriages, &c.” And so on, through geography, geology, animal husbandry, and more horticulture, and concluding with “all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life.”
Franklin released this manifesto—characteristically, a roster of questions rather than of answers—to the world in May 1743. The reaction was slow but promising. Cadwallader Colden wrote from New York, “I long very much to hear what you have done in your scheme of erecting a society at Philadelphia for promoting of useful arts and sciences in America. If you think any thing in my power whereby I can promote so useful an undertaking I will with much pleasure receive your instructions for that end.”
This response encouraged Franklin, especially as it came from one as distinguished as Colden. A physician by training, Colden was surveyor general of New York, and a man almost as catholic in his interests as Franklin would become. Colden refused to be intimidated by the awesome reputation of Isaac Newton, convincing himself that Newton had erred on certain important points. He devoted much of his adult life to correcting the mistakes. Yet the effort hardly exhausted him. He found time to write a history of the Indian tribes in and around the colony of New York, a taxonomy of the flora near his Orange County home (which he rendered in Latin and sent to the Swedish patriarch of plant science and Latin nomenclature, Linneaus, who duly published it), assorted treatises on moral philosophy, medical accounts of major diseases and lesser distempers, and a translation of Cicero’s letters.
Franklin knew Colden by reputation and was flattered to hear from him. He replied at once. “I cannot but be fond of engaging in a correspondence so advantageous to me as yours must be,” Franklin said. “I shall always receive your favours as such, and with great pleasure.”
This exchange commenced a correspondence between Franklin and Colden that enlightened and delighted both parties. Colden encouraged Franklin in gathering the “Virtuosi” into his philosophical society. “I long to know what progress you make in forming your society,” he inquired. “If it meet with obstruction from the want of proper encouragement or otherwise, I would have you attempt some other method of proceeding in your design, for I shall be very sorry to have it entirely dropped.”
Franklin reported progress, but less than he would have liked. The charter membership included John Bartram as botanist; the disagreeable but ingenious Thomas Godfrey as mathematician; Thomas Bond, a medical doctor trained in Britain and France, as physician; his brother Phineas Bond as natural-philosopher-at-large; Samuel Rhoads, a master carpenter active in local politics, as mechanician; William Parsons, original member of the Junto, lately librarian of the Library Company, and currently surveyor general of Pennsylvania, as geographer; William Coleman, who underwrote Franklin’s escape from his partnership with Hugh Meredith, as treasurer; and Thomas Hopkinson, a director of the Library Company and former city councilman, as president. Franklin served as secretary. Several meetings took place during the first half of 1744, and out-of-town members were added to the group. But most lacked Franklin’s energy, to his frustration and annoyance. “The members of our Society here are very idle gentlemen,” he complained to Colden. “They will take no pains.”
Franklin did not guess when he floated the idea of the Philosophical Society that its establishment would mark a turning point in his life. What he envisioned was a more sophisticated and geographically inclusive version of the Junto: a discussion group that brought together inquiring minds from across the continent rather than across the city. What he got was a network of kindred spirits that spurred him to better and more original work than he knew he had in him. The expansion of Franklin’s universe continued; his world came to include the best minds in America. And those minds came to recognize the preeminence of his.
With the letter to Colden in which he lamented the idleness of his fellow philosophers in Philadelphia, Franklin enclosed speculations on the flow of fluids throughout the human body. He granted that his ideas suffered from lack of opportunity for personal experimentation; he knew only what he had read and could infer therefrom. Yet he hoped to remedy the deficiency. He described an apparatus he had devised to test a hypothesis in hydrodynamics that had direct bearing on the flow of fluids through the human skin. “You shall know the success,” he promised Colden.
In fact the experiment proved inconclusive. Franklin was disappointed but not discouraged. “I intend to try a farther experiment, of which I shall give you an account,” he assured Colden.
Meanwhile the two men communicated on other topics. Franklin puzzled over Colden’s comments on “fluxions,” the infinitesimals devised by Newton as the basis for calculus and the physical theories that grew out of it; Franklin wished for a stronger background in mathematics and promised himself to acquire it. He shared some of Colden’s reservations about current thinking in mechanical dynamics, including a theory of inertia that seemed to imply that a very small force could not move very large objects. Franklin countered this with a thought experiment. “Suppose two globes each equal to the sun and to one another, exactly equipoised in Jove’s balance. Suppose no friction in the center of motion in the beam or elsewhere. If a mosquito then were to light on one of them, would he not give a motion to them both, causing one to descend and the other to rise?”
A more immediately practical problem motivated another letter to Colden. For centuries it had been noted that voyages from the Americas to England took less time than voyages in the opposite direction. Prevailing winds accounted for part of the discrepancy, but not all of it. Franklin wondered whether the rotation of the earth was involved. A ship at the equator was carried eastward by the earth’s rotation faster—in an absolute, although not a longitudinal, sense—than a ship in the latitude of Philadelphia, which in turn was carried faster than a ship at the latitude of London. Was some residue of the rotational speed responsible for the more rapid transit from southeast to northwest, compared to the reverse? “I have not time to explain my self farther, the post waiting,” Franklin wrote to Colden, “but believe I have said enough for you to comprehend my meaning.” (Although he later would realize that the effect was more complicated than he supposed here, Franklin was definitely onto something, as the French mathematician Coriolis, after whom the effect was named, would make explicit a century later.)
Neither devoted capitalist nor pure intellectual, Franklin was not a strict scientist either. He accepted the unscientific and irrational for what it was—an inescapable aspect of human nature, and not necessarily ignoble for that. He could give a dozen reasons for restraining human passion but was not in the least surprised that it defied restraint. As a young man he had failed to restrain his own passions, irrational though they were; he fully expected that young men—and not a few older men, as well as women of various ages—would continue to succumb. Such was life; a person would be a fool to deny it.
Franklin was no fool, and no prude. In the summer of 1745 he wrote a letter—or perhaps an essay in the form of a letter—to “My dear Friend,” an unnamed young man. The subject of this letter was so shocking to the sensibility of the several generations that followed Franklin’s that the piece was effectively suppressed for nearly two centuries. Yet Franklin considered it matter-of-factly, as though it were a topic as fit for reflection and inquiry as any other.
The question was, what sort of mistress was best for an unmarried young man? Franklin prefaced his remarks by declaring that marriage was the proper condition for man. If Deborah had read this passage, she would have been touched:
It is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness…. It is the man and woman united that make the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility and acute discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the world. A single man has not nearly the value he would have in that state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors. If you get a prudent, healthy wife, your industry in your profession, with her good economy, will be a fortune sufficient.
Yet Franklin would not have been writing were his correspondent—whoever he was—likely to be swayed by such rational arguments. Male youth would sow its oats, whatever Franklin might say.
Accepting this, Franklin advised the young gent on the sort of mistress he should choose. “In all your amours, you should prefer old women to young ones,” he said. He granted that this flew against inclination; consequently, on the premise that passion need not entirely banish practicality, he adduced eight reasons in favor of mature mistresses:
1. Because as they have more knowledge of the world and their minds are better stored with observations, their conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreeable.
2. Because when women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their influence over men, they supply the diminution of beauty by an augmentation of utility. They learn to do 1000 services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old woman who is not a good woman.
3. Because there is no hazard of children, which irregularly produced may be attended with much inconvenience.
4. Because through more experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an intrigue to prevent suspicion. The commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the affair should happen to be known, considerate people might be rather inclined to excuse an old woman who would kindly take care of a young man, form his manners by her good counsels, and prevent his ruining his health and fortune among mercenary prostitutes.
5. Because in every animal that walks upright, the deficiency of the fluids that fill the muscles appears first in the highest part. The face grows lank and wrinkled, then the neck, then the breast and arms, the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever. So that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all cats are grey, the pleasure of corporal enjoyment with an old woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every knack being by practice capable of improvement.
6. Because the sin is less. The debauching a virgin may be her ruin, and make her for life unhappy.
7. Because the compunction is less. The having made a young girl miserable may give you frequent bitter reflections, none of which can attend making an old woman happy.
8thly and lastly. They are so grateful!!
Perhaps Debbie did read this; if so, she must have had mixed feelings. At thirty-seven her face was starting to sag, her neck and arms to lose their tone. Yet here her husband was singing praise to the woman she was becoming—unless he was singing praise to some other older woman. How did he know that all women looked alike from the girdle down? It sounded as though he had done a survey. Was he complimenting her in declaring that the “knack” of lovemaking improved with practice? Or someone else? And who, precisely, was “so grateful” for an illicit liaison?
The other women in Franklin’s life would occasion international comment, but there is little evidence of wandering at this stage in his life. On the contrary, he made much of his affection for Debbie. Franklin spent many, perhaps most, evenings in various taverns, meeting with members of the Junto and other associates. The distaste for alcohol he evinced in England had worn off; while never a lush, he hoisted a pint with his friends quite freely. As the tongues loosened, they often broke into song, to which Franklin contributed with voice and pen. One of his ditties he entitled “The Antediluvians Were All Very Sober”:
The Antediluvians were all very sober,
For they had no wine, and they brewed no October [an autumn ale];
All wicked, bad livers, on mischief still thinking,
For there can’t be good living where isn’t good drinking.
’Twas honest old Noah first planted the vine,
And mended his morals by drinking its wine.
He justly the drinking of water decried,
For he knew that all mankind, by drinking it, died.
From this piece of history plainly we find
That water’s good neither for body or mind;
That virtue and safety in wine-bibbing’s found,
While all that drink water deserve to be drowned.
The choristers often selected songs that spoke of relations between the sexes; frequently these extolled the virtues of women to whom the songs’ narrators were not married. One of Franklin’s friends remarked on the dearth of drinking music that made married life appear attractive. Franklin responded with another composition—the lyrics, anyway, for as with most such inventions, these were set to a tune the taverners already knew. The song praised his domestic existence with Debbie, who was discreetly rechristened as “My Plain Country Joan”:
Of their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate;
I sing my plain country Joan.
Now twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life;
Blest day that I made her my own.
Not a word of her face, her shape or her eyes,
Of flames or of darts shall you hear.
Though I beauty admire, ’tis virtue I prize,
That fades not in seventy years….
Some faults we have all, and so may my Joan
But then they’re exceedingly small.
And now I’m used to ’em, they’re just like my own,
I scarcely can see ’em at all.
After 1743 Franklin had even more to be thankful to Debbie about. In the late summer of that year she gave birth to a daughter, named Sarah for her maternal grandmother. Eleven years after Franky’s birth, seven years after his death, and almost certainly long past the time when she had despaired of having any children to survive her—and any children of her own to offset the presence of Benjamin’s bastard William—Debbie delighted in little Sally. She insisted that the child be baptized at Christ Church, up Market Street past the market and around the corner on Fifth (next to the burial ground where young Franky lay). She did not have to insist that Sally be inoculated against smallpox; her husband’s still-sore conscience made certain that his daughter would not suffer the fate of his second son. “Sally was inoculated April 18 [1746], being Friday at 10 o’clock in the morning,” he noted to himself, as if to confirm in writing that he had done for Sally what he should have done for Franky.
Sally proved a true Franklin. “Your granddaughter is the greatest lover of her book and school of any child I ever knew,” he wrote his mother just after Sally’s fourth birthday. Precocity persisted through the next three years. “Sally grows a fine girl, and is extremely industrious with her needle, and delights in her book,” he informed Abiah after Sally turned seven. “She is of a most affectionate temper, and perfectly dutiful and obliging, to her parents and to all. Perhaps I flatter my self too much; but I have hopes that she will prove an ingenious, sensible, notable, and worthy woman.”
Such hopes led Franklin lightheartedly to consider a match between Sally and William Strahan, the son of Franklin’s English correspondent, and increasingly his friend, of the same name. The idea appealed to William’s father, offering the two fathers an excuse to share details of the development of their children. “I am glad to hear so good a character of my son-in-law,” Franklin replied to one of Strahan’s letters, written when young William was ten and Sally seven. “Please to acquaint him that his spouse grows finely, and will probably have an agreeable person. That with the best natural disposition in the world, she discovers daily the seeds and tokens of industry and economy, and in short, of every female virtue, which her parents will endeavour to cultivate for him.” Talk of a dowry or other such arrangement was premature, but Franklin broached the subject obliquely, which was to say morally: “If the success [of his and Debbie’s parenting efforts] answers their fond wishes and expectations, she will, in the true sense of the word, be worth a great deal of money, and consequently a great fortune.”
Sally’s arrival added a life to Franklin’s universe; his father’s death subtracted one. Josiah Franklin died in January 1745 at the age of eighty-seven. “By an entire dependence on his redeemer and a constant course of the strictest piety and virtue,” the Boston Weekly News-Letter noted on his passing, “he was enabled to die, as he lived, with cheerfulness and peace.” What Josiah in his last years thought of his youngest son is impossible to ascertain; the father was as frugal with his emotions as with his money. He must have been proud of Benjamin’s worldly accomplishments, but he likely worried at Ben’s lack of that piety Josiah’s obituarist applauded in him. Father and son had never been close, and they were not close at the end. Needless to say, by the time Ben heard of the death, it was too late to travel to Boston for the funeral. Yet the death goes unremarked in Franklin’s surviving correspondence. Although he must have written condolences to Abiah, the closest thing to an extant expression of feeling appears in a letter to his sister Jane, who lived near their father and mother. “Dear Sister, I love you tenderly for your care of our father in his sickness,” he said.
From Philadelphia it was often easy to forget there was a war going on in the north and on the western frontier. After its enthusiastic commencement, the Louisbourg expedition settled down to a difficult siege. The summer soldiers from New England could not help being impressed—indeed awed—by the “Gibraltar of the New World,” with its thirty-foot-high stone walls; the 250 cannon protruding from the apertures in the ramparts; the curtain-wall that ran three-quarters of a mile across the neck of land that contained the town, anchored at one end in the harbor and buried at the other in the surf; the island battery commanding the harbor, positioned to blast any ships that slipped through the reefs jutting like the tines of a giant fork from the bottom, ready to rake the hulls of intruders ignorant of their exact position; the “Grand Battery” located a mile from the town, covering the entire harbor from mouth to head, eager to deliver a deadly crossfire against enemy forces.
Yet God was watching over the attackers, as their preachers had promised. At least so it seemed by the evidence of the first engagements. The French defenders fell for a feint that allowed the landing party to establish a beachhead with but minor casualties. Two days later Providence smiled again, persuading the French, who could see they were badly outnumbered, to consolidate their forces in the town itself. They abandoned the Grand Battery, spiking the guns there but unaccountably failing to blow up the magazine and destroy the structure. As it turned out, their spiking operation failed as well: the clever New Englanders had brought along blacksmiths and special tools, and dislodged the spikes from the powder holes of the guns. These they trained upon the walls of Louisbourg proper.
William Pepperell was no waster of human life; neither was Peter Warren, the commander of the squadron of the Royal Navy recently arrived to reinforce the Americans. “To prevent the effusion of Christian blood,” as they put it, they called upon the French commander to surrender. The messenger sent to deliver the proposed terms was duly blindfolded at the gate of the town and conducted to the headquarters of Governor Louis du Chambon. The governor disdained these untested, untrained attackers, even if they had him cornered; equally to the point, he hoped for the arrival of a French naval squadron that would raise the siege. “The King of France, our King,” he answered, having turned the blindfolded envoy around and sent him back out the west gate, “has given us the responsibility of defending this city; we cannot, except after the most vigorous attack, consider a similar proposition. The only reply we make to this demand is from the mouths of our cannon.”
The Anglophone artillery spoke louder. The Americans heated their iron balls to glowing before firing them over the walls, where they set many of the wood-frame houses ablaze. Reports of the approach of several hundred French and Indian soldiers received credibility from the actual sighting of a French warship; together these developments caused Pepperell to escalate the siege into a direct assault. To secure his flank he ordered an attack on the island battery. The first such attack fizzled when the attackers bolstered their courage excessively with rum and arrived at the beach too drunk to make the crossing. A second landing, launched at night, clandestinely secured a beachhead on the island, but one hero spoiled the surprise by leading his comrades in a rousing cheer, which alerted the French sentries and triggered a near-massacre of the landing party.
Yet fortune refused to abandon the Americans. The continued pounding of the town, combined with some well-advertised preparations for a joint sea-land assault on the fortress, persuaded du Chambon to reconsider capitulation. He tested the idea on the leading merchants and citizens of Louisbourg, who urged him to surrender lest their property be destroyed. Satisfied he would not have to bear blame alone, he sued for peace. Pepperell and Warren accepted.
The news of the victory traveled fast. In Philadelphia, Franklin made it a lead item in the Gazette:
Wednesday last, a great number of guns were distinctly heard in several places round this city, the occasion of which, as well as the place where they were fired, was unknown until the evening of the day following, when an express arrived with advice of the surrender of Louisbourg, which had caused great rejoicings at New York. ’Twas near nine o’clock when the express came in, yet the news flying instantly round the town, upwards of 20 bonfires were immediately lighted in the streets. The next day was spent in feasting, and drinking the healths of Governor Shirley, Gen. Pepperell, Com. Warren, &c. &c. under the discharge of cannon from the wharfs and vessels in the river; and the evening concluded with bonfires, illuminations, and other demonstrations of joy. A mob gathered, and began to break the windows of those houses that were not illuminated, but it was soon dispersed, and suppressed.
Not surprisingly, the Americans acquired a high opinion of their prowess at war. Those who participated in the conquest itself took home a comment by the French port captain at Louisbourg, that he had first thought the New England men cowards but had changed his mind: “If they had a pick ax and spade, they would dig their way to hell and storm it.” Echoes from across the Atlantic swelled the American heads still further. The Gentleman’s Magazine threw laurels:
Hail, heroes born for action, not for show! Who leave toupees and powder to the beau, To war’s dull pedants tedious rules of art, And know to conquer by a dauntless heart. Rough English virtue gives your deeds to fame And o’er the Old exalts New England’s name.
Although the greatest honor accrued to those who actually fought at Louisbourg, the glow warmed hearts all over America. It fostered a belief that England depended on America for defense—frontier defense, anyway—rather than vice versa. Americans could stand on their own.
From the belief they could stand on their own to the conclusion that they should stand on their own required another generation and a half, but the seeds of independence were germinating in the soil of colonial self-help. Although Ben Franklin, a city boy from birth, knew next to nothing of plowing and planting, on this subject he helped loosen the ground from which the shoots would emerge.
To the surprise of the myopic among the Americans, and to the disappointment of even the perspicacious, the victory at Louisbourg did not end the war. Indeed, it had little effect at all beyond demoralizing the New Englanders who now had to garrison that chilly and forbidding rock, as the same task had demoralized the French. On the frontier, raiding parties of French and Indians beset isolated villages. In one notorious incident of November 1745, a band of three hundred French Canadians and two hundred Indians swept down upon the undefended village of Saratoga, New York, killing thirty, taking two or three times that many captive, and burning much of what could not be carried away.
Massachusetts Governor Shirley, whose wave of fame from Louisbourg had yet to break, advocated an encore: an invasion of Canada. The goal was to thrust the French finally out of America; with the French gone, their Indian allies would have to come to terms with the English, as the Iroquois, for example, had already done. When King George II bestowed his royal approval upon the project, the other colonies were obliged to participate. Pennsylvania’s official cooperation came grudgingly; the Assembly loosened the purse strings with typical reluctance. Unofficially the Pennsylvanians betrayed greater eagerness. Four companies of volunteers rallied to the colors and prepared to march to Albany to join the rest of the invasion force.
Among the volunteers was William Franklin. Fifteen-year-old Billy was showing the same rebelliousness his father had evinced at that age. The boy’s existence was, in material respects, easier than the father’s had been. In previous years Benjamin had bought Billy a pony to ride; he engaged a tutor to instruct him in reading and writing and numbers; he sent him to study with the best teacher of mathematics in the city; he enrolled him in the academy where the sons of the city’s gentry received the finest classical education.
But Billy grew bored and, like his father, found himself drawn to dockside. The ships that lined the Delaware waterfront, like those of Benjamin’s Boston, came from all over the world; they promised adventures untold—or at least an escape from a life that weighed increasingly upon Billy’s broadening shoulders. Much as Ben had longed to do but been dissuaded, Billy packed a small kit, walked the few blocks to the quay, and sought a vessel to ship out on.
It was Billy’s good luck, or so it initially seemed, that there was a war in progress. The waterfront was full of privateers, licensed pirates who needed hands for their dangerous but potentially lucrative work. One first mate liked Billy’s looks and signed him aboard. But before the craft weighed anchor, Ben discovered the boy’s absence and hurried to the wharf. After a brief search he found the lad and unceremoniously fetched him home.
Franklin declined to blame himself for Billy’s attempted escape. “No one imagined it was hard usage at home that made him do this,” he explained to his sister Jane. “Every one that knows me thinks I am too indulgent a parent.” Remembering his own youth, he attributed Billy’s restlessness to his age and to the allure of what the privateers might win. “When boys see prizes brought in, and quantities of money shared among the men, and their gay living, it fills their heads with notions.”
Franklin did not presume to banish those notions; such would be a fool’s errand. Instead he sought to redirect them slightly, from the unforgiving sea to the somewhat safer land. He let Billy know he would not object if the boy enlisted among the volunteers for the Canada expedition. Billy happily took the offer. Delighted at putting whatever distance between himself and his home—yet unaware that in doing so he was simultaneously putting himself on a path that would lead to a terminal distancing from his father—Ensign William Franklin marched up the road toward Albany in the service of his king.
At forty Franklin felt no desire to head off to Canada himself. Yet he supported the idea of colonial defense, and when the Assembly continued to ignore the necessities of provincial security, he took up the weapon he had long since mastered: the printing press. In the autumn of 1747 he wrote and published a pamphlet entitled Plain Truth: Or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia and Province of Pennsylvania. “War at this time rages over a great part of the known world,” he declared. “Our news-papers are weekly filled with fresh accounts of the destruction it every where occasions.” Heretofore Pennsylvania had been spared the worst of the violence, Franklin said, but this was due to an accident of geography—that Pennsylvania was surrounded by other colonies more directly in the line of fire—rather than the exertions of its inhabitants. Such safety as circumstance afforded could not be expected to last. Philadelphia’s wealth supplied a strong inducement to attack by enemy privateers or warships, an inducement the city’s defenseless condition only intensified. As for the countryside beyond the city, it lay open to assault by Indians allied to the French. To be sure, Pennsylvania’s enlightened policies had won over the most important of the neighboring tribes, but the loyalty of those tribes could hardly be taken for granted when France aided their enemies and neither England nor Pennsylvania provided countervailing assistance.
Should the tissue of what passed for provincial defense be torn, the consequence for Philadelphians would be swift and brutal:
On the first alarm, terror will spread over all; and as no man can with certainty depend that another will stand by him, beyond doubt very many will seek safety by a speedy flight. Those that are reputed rich will flee through fear of torture to make them produce more than they are able. The man that has a wife and children will find them hanging on his neck, beseeching him with tears to quit the city, and save his life, to guide and protect them in that time of general desolation and ruin. All will run into confusion, amidst cries and lamentations.
If such were the case in the event of advance alarm, what would happen if the blow fell by surprise?
Confined to your houses, you will have nothing to trust to but the enemy’s mercy. Your best fortune will be to fall under the power of commanders of king’s ships, able to control the mariners, and not into the hands of licentious privateers. Who can, without the utmost horror, conceive the miseries of the latter! when your persons, fortunes, wives and daughters, shall be subject to the wanton and unbridled rage, rapine and lust, of Negroes, Molattoes, and others, the vilest and most abandoned of mankind. A dreadful scene!
The author of this lurid forecast identified himself only as “A Tradesman of Philadelphia,” and it was as a tradesman that Franklin made his appeal. Neither the party of religion—the Quakers—nor the party of wealth—the rich merchants and their allies—had lifted a finger in defense of the city. Between the “mistaken principles of religion” of the former and the “pride, envy and implacable resentment” of the latter, the lives and fortunes of “the middling people, the farmers, shopkeepers and tradesmen of this city and country” were in the dire jeopardy they faced. Franklin called on the middling classes to seize control of their fate:
At present we are like the separate filaments of flax before the thread is formed, without strength because without connection. But UNION would make us strong and even formidable. Though the Great should neither help nor join us, though they should even oppose our uniting, from some mean views of their own, yet if we resolve upon it, and if it please GOD to inspire us with the necessary prudence and vigour, it may be effected.
Franklin’s warning and appeal found a ready audience among ordinary Pennsylvanians, and to a lesser extent in other colonies. The first edition of this pamphlet—numbering two thousand—sold out quickly, requiring a second printing. A German translation soon appeared, for that growing community of German immigrants in the Pennsylvania backcountry. Selections from the pamphlet ran in newspapers in the leading cities of America.
Encouraged by this response, Franklin supplied specific recommendations for provincial defense. He drafted a charter for an “Association,” or militia, of volunteers drawn from the public at large. Members would furnish their own weapons, form companies according to neighborhoods, choose officers by ballot of the men, and convene a general military council of representatives from each company. Civic virtue, rather than compulsion, would serve as the basis for the actions of all involved.
Franklin presented the plan at a meeting in the public hall built for George Whitefield and the awakeners. “The house was pretty full,” Franklin recalled. “I harangued them a little on the subject, read the paper and explained it, and then distributed the copies.” Public speaking had never been Franklin’s forte and never would be; he felt obliged to elaborate his “harangue” in the Gazette in the following days.
Here the radical nature of his plan became apparent. Government having failed the people, he said, the people were entirely justified in assuming for themselves an essential role of government. “Where a Government takes proper measures to protect the people under its care, such a proceeding might have been thought both unnecessary and unjustifiable. But here it is quite the reverse.” The insistence on organizing companies according to neighborhoods was intended “to prevent people’s sorting themselves into companies according to their ranks in life, their quality or station.” The tradesman-author was also a leveler. “’tis designed to mix the great and small together, for the sake of union and encouragement. Where danger and duty are equal to all, there should be no distinction from circumstances, but all be on the level.” In the closest thing to an admission of the radicalism of his proposal, Franklin took pains to express “a dutiful regard to the government we are under.” The Association was a wartime organization only. “’tis heartily to be wished that a safe and honourable peace may the very next year render it useless.”
The plan was a stunning success and Franklin the hero of the hour. Five hundred men took the pledge at that first meeting; within days the number from the city alone surmounted one thousand; eventually some ten thousand subscribed from all over the colony. Soon the companies were drilling, converting the facility with firearms many American males (not to mention some females) acquired in childhood into something approximating military effectiveness. Women’s auxiliaries complemented the work of the men, sewing flags for the different companies, often with colors and mottoes suggested by Franklin. He himself was voted colonel of the Philadelphia regiment, but, lacking any military experience, he declined the honor.
There was more to the scheme. Enlisting bodies in the defense of home and hearth was relatively easy, especially when actual fighting remained merely hypothetical. Arming those enlistees with rifles and other small weapons was scarcely harder, especially since many already owned such weapons. (For the weaponless, or those wishing to upgrade the household arsenal, Franklin advertised in the Gazette: “A parcel of good muskets, all well fitted with bayonets, belts and cartouch-boxes, and buff slings to cast over the shoulder, very useful to such as have occasion to ride with their arms; to be sold by B. Franklin.”)
Artillery was another matter. Needed to defend the city against marine assault, cannons were not the sort of thing hanging in everyman’s back room. Instead they had to be purchased, at a price commensurate with their scarcity.
Because the Assembly refused to appropriate the funds, Franklin proposed another extragovernmental scheme. He organized a lottery in which £20,000 of tickets would be sold; £17,000 would be paid out in prizes, with the balance of £3,000 being set aside for the purchase of cannons and the like. The idea of a lottery did not originate with Franklin; the practice had already come over from England and been employed in New England and New York. But he adapted it to Pennsylvania’s circumstances. Many of the same persons who objected on pacifist grounds to buying weapons for the province now objected on anti-gambling grounds to a lottery. To overcome their objections, Franklin enlisted the support of the leading men of the city, including James Logan, whose Quaker credentials went back to William Penn. Logan once explained to Franklin the difference between his own and Penn’s views on the legitimacy of self-defense. Queen Anne’s War was on while Penn and Logan made the crossing to America; en route their ship encountered another vessel, which the prudent captain presumed to be an enemy. He ordered all hands and passengers to prepare to defend the craft and themselves, but he made special allowance for Penn and his Quaker company, knowing their scruples. They might retire belowdecks. James Logan, however, remained above and was assigned to a gun. After a tense half hour, the approaching ship turned out to be a friend, and Logan went below to share the welcome news with Penn and the others. To his surprise, Penn upbraided him for staying on deck and making ready to fight. Such was not the Quaker way. Logan, irritated at being chastised in front of the entire company, spoke more than he might have in private; he replied that it was rather late for Penn to be complaining. As he—Logan—worked for Penn, Penn might have ordered him below with the rest but had not, instead being willing to let Logan face the danger on behalf of those who would not.
Nearly a half century later, Logan continued to believe that while nonviolence was an ideal toward which humanity ought to strive, it need not be an altar on which pacifists must sacrifice themselves. “Thy project of a lottery to clear £3,000 is excellent,” he wrote Franklin, “and I hope it will be speedily filled; nor shall I be wanting.” Indeed he was not, putting down £250 toward the first issue of lottery tickets. Others followed Logan’s lead, snatching tickets by the fistful for self-defense and civic pride—and in some cases for resale in other provinces. Fire companies purchased tickets in bulk—leading Franklin to suggest a ruse to one of his fellow firemen. If the lottery subscription appeared to be falling short, the two of them would propose to their company the purchase of a fire engine. “The Quakers can have no objection to that,” Franklin explained. “And then if you nominate me, and I you, as a committee for that purpose, we will buy a great gun, which is certainly a fire engine.”
Such shenanigans proved unnecessary, as the tickets disappeared as fast as Franklin could print them. Within a short while he was able to boast, in the name of his fellow citizens, that “the late lotteries in New-England and New-York have taken more months to fill than this has weeks.”
Having raised the money for a battery of guns, Franklin now had to find the guns. This was the more difficult part of the task, as the absence of cannon foundries in America meant, in the short term (that is, until the arrival of reinforcements from England) that each piece added to Pennsylvania’s arsenal subtracted a piece from New Jersey’s or New York’s or Massachusetts’s. In the state of general alarm at the time, few governors or assemblies were willing to sell cannon that might be needed in their own colonies’ defense; the most they would do was loan some ordnance.
Aware of the difficulty, Franklin led a committee of the Association north to negotiate with Governor George Clinton of New York. At first Clinton refused even to consider letting any guns out of his province. “But at a dinner with his council there was great drinking of Madeira wine,” Franklin recounted, “as the custom of that place then was; he softened by degrees, and said he would lend us six. After a few more bumpers he advanced to ten. And at length he very good-naturedly conceded eighteen.”
Though Franklin did not believe that God took sides in human quarrels, he was not above an appeal to Providence if such seemed necessary to solidify public opinion behind the defense effort. His activities had won him the confidence of Governor Thomas and the governor’s council, and Franklin proposed to this group a public fast day. During these twenty-four hours the populace would entreat heaven for forgiveness of sins and for assistance in the colony’s hour of need. No such occasion had ever been held in Pennsylvania, but the governor and council thought it a capital idea. Franklin remarked that such events were an annual occurrence in Boston, where he grew up; he would be happy to compose an appropriate proclamation. This he proceeded to do, with as much apparent fervor as ever Cotton Mather invested in a sermon. Speaking through the mouth of the governor and council, he recited past and current perils, and declared, “Unless we humble ourselves before the Lord, and amend our ways, we may be chastised with yet heavier judgments.” The designated day of fasting and prayer—January 7, 1748—would allow all ministers and people of the city “to join with one accord in the most humble and fervent supplications, that Almighty God would mercifully interpose, and still the rage of war among the nations, and put a stop to the effusion of Christian blood; that he would preserve and bless our gracious king, guide his councils, and give him victory over his enemies.”
Even for Franklin, his performance on behalf of his adopted city during the winter of 1747–48 was a tour de force. James Logan, probably the most respected person in Philadelphia, certainly thought so. “He it was,” Logan wrote to Thomas Penn, son of William Penn and current proprietor of the colony, “that by publishing a small piece in the year 1747 with his further private contrivances, occasioned the raising of ten companies of near one hundred men each in Philadelphia and above one hundred companies in the province and counties…. He it was who set on foot two lotteries for erecting of batteries, purchasing great guns and to dispatch which he went himself to New York … and all this without appearing in any part of it himself, unless in his going to New York himself in company with others of whose going he was the occasion, for he is the principal mover and very soul of the whole.”