Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (18 page)

The light humor of the piece hides the fact that it is actually a sharp attack on hypocritical customs and unfair attitudes toward women and sex. Polly argues that she has been doing good by obeying God’s injunction to be fruitful and multiply. “I have brought five fine children into the world, at the risk of my life; I have maintained them well by my own industry.” Indeed, she complains, she could have maintained them a little better were it not for the fact that the court kept fining her. “Can it be a crime (in the nature of things I mean) to add to the number of the King’s subjects in a new country that really wants people? I own it, I should think it a praiseworthy rather than a punishable action.”

Franklin, who had fathered an illegitimate child but taken responsibility for it, is particularly scathing about the double standard that subjects Polly, but not the men who had sex with her, to humiliation. As Polly says, “I readily consented to the only proposal of marriage that ever was made me, which was when I was a virgin; but too easily confiding in the person’s sincerity that made it, I unhappily lost my own honor by trusting his; for he got me with child, and then forsook me. That very person you all know; he is now become a magistrate of this county.”

By doing her duty to bring children into the world, despite the fact that no one would marry her and despite the public disgrace, she argued that she deserved, “in my humble opinion, instead of a whipping, to have a statue erected to my memory.” The court, Franklin wrote, was so moved by the speech that she was acquitted, and one of the judges married her the next day.
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Franklin was among the first to view the British settlements in America not only as separate colonies but also as part of a potentially unified nation. That was, in part, because he was far less parochial than most Americans. He had traveled from one colony to another, formed alliances with printers from Rhode Island to South Carolina, and gathered news for his paper and magazine by reading widely other American publications. Now, as the postmaster in Philadelphia, his connections to other colonies were easier, and his curiosity about them grew.

In a May 1743 circular, “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America,” he proposed what was, in effect, an intercolonial Junto, to be called the American Philosophical Society. The idea had been discussed by the naturalist John Bartram, among others, but Franklin had the printing press, the inclination, and the postal contacts to pull it all together. It would be based in Philadelphia and include scientists and thinkers from other cities. They would share their studies by post, and abstracts would be sent to each member four times a year.

As with the detailed charter he created for the Junto, Franklin was very specific about the type of subjects to be explored, which were, unsurprisingly, more practical than purely theoretical: “newly discovered plants, herbs, trees, roots, their virtues, uses, etc.;…improvements of vegetable juices, such as ciders, wines, etc.; new methods of curing or preventing diseases;…improvements in any branch of mathematics…new arts, trades, and manufactures…surveys, maps and charts…methods of improving the breeds of animals…and all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things.” Franklin volunteered to serve as secretary.

By the spring of 1744 the society began meeting regularly. The pedantic mathematician Thomas Godfrey was a member, indicating that his feud with Franklin over dowries and almanacs was over. One of the most important members was Cadwallader Colden, a scholar and official from New York whom Franklin had met on his travels the year before. They were to become lifelong friends and spur each other’s scientific interests. Their club was not very active at first—Franklin complained that its members were “very idle gentlemen”—but it eventually grew into a learned society that thrives to this day.
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Most of the voluntary associations that Franklin had thus far formed—the Junto, library, philosophical society, even fire squad—had not usurped the core functions of government. (When he came up with a plan for a police patrol, he had suggested that the Assembly enact and control it.) But in 1747, he proposed something that was, though he may not have realized it, far more radical: a military force that would be independent of Pennsylvania’s colonial government.

Franklin’s plan for a volunteer Pennsylvania militia arose because of the feckless response by the colony’s government to the ongoing threats from France and her Indian allies. Ever since 1689, the intermittent wars between Britain and France had been played out in America, with each side enlisting various Indian tribes and thuggish privateers to gain advantage. The latest American installment was known as King George’s War (1744–48), which was an offshoot of Europe’s War of Austrian Succession and a quaint British struggle with Spain known as the War of Jenkins’s Ear (after a British smuggler who had that body part removed by the Spanish). Among those Americans who marched off toward Canada to fight the French and Indians on behalf of the British in 1746 was William Franklin, then perhaps 16 or so, whose father realized it was futile to resist the wanderlust he himself had felt at that age.

William never saw any action, but the war soon threatened the safety of Philadelphia when French and Spanish privateers began raiding towns along the Delaware River. The Assembly, dominated by pacifist Quakers, dithered and failed to authorize any defenses. Franklin was appalled by the unwillingness of the various groups in the colony—Quakers and Anglicans and Presbyterians, city and country folks—to work together. So in November 1747, he stepped into the breach by writing a vibrant pamphlet entitled “Plain Truth,” signed by “a Tradesman of Philadelphia.”

His description of the havoc that a privateer raid might wreak sounded like a Great Awakening terror sermon:

With a small pun on the word “Friends,” Franklin first blamed the Quakers of the Assembly: “Should we entreat them to consider, if not as Friends, at least as legislators, that protection is as truly due from the government to the people.” If their pacifist principles prevent them from acting, he said, they should step aside. He then turned on the “great and rich men” of the Proprietary faction, who were refusing to act because of their “envy and resentment” toward the Assembly.

So who could save the colony? Here came Franklin’s great rallying cry for the new American middle class. “We, the middling people,” he wrote proudly, using the phrase twice in the pamphlet. “The tradesmen, shopkeepers and farmers of this province and city!”

He then proceeded to spin an image that would end up applying to much of his work over the ensuing years. “At present we are like separate filaments of flax before the thread is formed, without strength because without connection,” he declared. “But Union would make us strong.”

Of particular note was his populist insistence that there be no class distinctions. The militia would be organized by geographic area instead of social strata. “This,” he said, “is intended to prevent people’s sorting themselves into companies according to their ranks in life, their quality or station. It is designed to mix the great and the small together…There should be no distinction from circumstance, but all be on the level.” In another radically democratic approach, Franklin proposed that each of the new militia companies elect its own officers rather than have them appointed by the governor or Crown.

Franklin concluded with an offer to draw up proposals for a militia if his plea was well received. It was. “The pamphlet had a sudden and surprising effect,” he later wrote. So, a week later, in an annotated article in his newspaper, he presented his plans for a militia, filled with his typical detailed description of its organization, training, and rules. Even though he was never an avid or effective public orator, he agreed to address a crowd of his fellow middling people at a sail-making loft and then, two days later, spoke to a more upscale audience of “gentlemen, merchants and others” at the New Hall that had been built for Whitefield.
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Soon some ten thousand men from all over the colony had signed up and formed themselves into more than one hundred companies. Franklin’s local company in Philadelphia elected him their colonel, but he declined the post by saying he was “unfit.” Instead, he served as a “common soldier” and regularly took his turn patrolling the batteries he had helped build along the Delaware River banks. He also amused himself by designing an array of insignia and mottos for the various companies.

To furnish the Militia Association with cannons and equipment, Franklin organized a lottery that raised £3,000. The artillery had to be purchased from New York, and Franklin led a delegation to convince Gov. George Clinton to approve the sale. As Franklin recounted with some amusement:

Franklin did not quite realize how radical it was for a private association to take over from the government the right to create and control a military force. His charter, both in its spirit and wording, faintly foreshadowed a declaration that would come three decades later. “Being thus unprotected by the government under which we live,” he wrote, “we do hereby, for our mutual defense and security, and for the security of our wives, children and estates…form ourselves into an Association.”

Thomas Penn, the colony’s Proprietor, understood the implications of Franklin’s actions. “This association is founded on a contempt to government,” he wrote the clerk of the governor’s council, “a part little less than treason.” In a subsequent letter, he called Franklin “a sort of tribune of the people,” and lamented: “He is a dangerous man and I should be very glad [if] he inhabited any other country, as I believe him of a very uneasy spirit.”

By the summer of 1748, the threat of war had passed and the Militia Association disbanded, without any attempt by Franklin to capitalize on his new power and popularity. But the lessons he learned stayed with him. He realized that the colonists might have to fend for themselves instead of relying on their British governors, that the powerful elites deserved no deference, and that “we the middling people” of workers and tradesmen should be the proud sinews of the new land. It also reinforced his core belief that people, and perhaps someday colonies, could accomplish more when they joined together rather than remained separate filaments of flax, when they formed unions rather than stood alone.
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Franklin’s print shop had by then grown into a successful, vertically integrated media conglomerate. He had a printing press, publishing house, newspaper, an almanac series, and partial control of the postal system. The successful books he had printed ranged from Bibles and psalters to Samuel Richardson’s novel
Pamela,
a tale whose mix of raciness and moralism probably appealed to him. (Franklin’s 1744 reprint of
Pamela
was the first novel published in America.) He also had built a network of profitable partnerships and franchises from Newport and New York to Charleston and Antigua. Money flowed in, much of which he invested, quite wisely, in Philadelphia property. “I experienced,” he recalled, “the truth of the observation, that after getting the first £100, it is more easy to get the second.”

Accumulating money, however, was not Franklin’s goal. Despite the pecuniary spirit of Poor Richard’s sayings and the penny-saving reputation they later earned Franklin, he did not have the soul of an acquisitive capitalist. “I would rather have it said,” he wrote his mother, “‘He lived usefully,’ than, ‘He died rich.’ ”

So, in 1748 at age 42—which would turn out to be precisely the midpoint of his life—he retired and turned over the operation of his printing business to his foreman, David Hall. The detailed partnership deal Franklin drew up would leave him rich enough by most people’s standards: it provided him with half of the shop’s profits for the next eighteen years, which would amount to about £650 annually. Back then, when a common clerk made about £25 a year, that was enough to keep him quite comfortable. He saw no reason to keep plying his trade to make even more. Now he would have, he wrote Cadwallader Colden, “leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large with such ingenious and worthy men as are pleased to honor me with their friendship.”
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Up until then, Franklin had proudly considered himself a leather-apron man and common tradesman, devoid and even contemptuous of aristocratic pretenses. Likewise, that is how he would portray himself again in the late 1760s, when his antagonism to British authority grew (and his hopes for high patronage posts were dashed), and that is how he would cast himself in his autobiography, which he began writing in 1771. It was also the role he would play later in life as a revolutionary patriot, fur-capped envoy, and fervent foe of hereditary honors and privileges.