The Society for Useful Knowledge (24 page)

Franklin had already devoted much of his middle years in Philadelphia to redressing a number of these problems with ambitious plans for civic improvements. His chief prerevolutionary efforts, such as the creation of the Junto, the Library Company, the American Philosophical Society, and the Philadelphia academy, the drafting of the Albany Plan of Union, improvements to the
colonial postal system, and the campaign on behalf of paper currency, had all come in response to the immediate demands of a specific time and place. None of these schemes were undertaken in anticipation of American independence, or to hasten its arrival. They were simply a recognition on Franklin's part that the needs of a maturing community had outgrown its old institutions.

Even his startling prediction, published in 1755, that the American population would within a century outpace that of Great Britain could not help, Franklin confidently proclaimed at the time, but redound to the greater glory of the mother country: “What an Accession of Power to the British Empire by Sea as well as Land! What Increase of Trade and Navigation! What Numbers of Ships and Seamen!”
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Yet, each of Franklin's projects was to prove invaluable on the path first to colonial independence and then to the success of the new federated United States.

Well to the south, in a world away from the urban ferment of prerevolutionary Boston and Philadelphia, the structural weaknesses of the American economy and its vulnerability to British pressure were also being driven home to the grandees of Virginia's rich tobacco country. The region's almost exclusive focus on the production of tobacco meant that the plantations and their large populations of slaves were at the mercy of British-controlled trade just to meet basic needs for food, supplies, tools, and even clothing. Like Benjamin Rush and Charles Thomson, a number of Virginia planters—including the future rebel George Washington—began to draw a direct connection between the encouragement of American science and technology and greater freedom from imperial domination, if not outright independence.

Since the late seventeenth century, the leading planters relied almost exclusively on the so-called consignment system, whereby British merchants acted as agents for the transport and marketing of their sweet Tidewater tobacco and credited the growers' accounts upon final sale on the English and Continental markets. These same firms also controlled the supply of British-made goods to the growers, whether luxuries for the family home or basic implements and foodstuffs for the plantations, charging the costs against current or future earnings.
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One list of English suppliers to Washington's plantation at Mount Vernon included an apothecary, a toolmaker, a milliner, a stationer, a plate-maker, and a rope maker, as well as purveyors of pickles, wine, and ale.
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As early as the 1720s, the local assembly, the House of Burgesses, had sought ways to reduce Virginia's dependence on tobacco. Other proposals followed
that would have restricted imports of the slaves needed to work the leaf plantations or set strict production quotas, but opposition at the English court, led by merchants eager to protect their transatlantic interests, helped block such moves.
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Decades later, one anonymous writer noted in the
Virginia Gazette
, little had changed. “The tobacco trade cannot so properly be called the trade of this colony as of Great Britain, in as much as the merchants concerned therein mostly reside there, where the profits center.”
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What had changed, however, was a new urgency to the problem of colonial economic dependence, exemplified in the eyes of Washington and his Virginia colleagues by overreliance on tobacco cultivation and the growing recognition of the threat this posed to their aspirations for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Significant weakness in world tobacco prices throughout much of the 1760s only added to the pressure on the growers, as did a number of simultaneous British measures designed to tighten control over the colonies and to raise additional revenue above and beyond the huge economic value inherent to the mercantilist system.

These included the Sugar Act, which promised stricter enforcement of duties on sugar, molasses, and other items; the Currency Act, which required the costly retirement of local paper currency, already in very short supply; and, perhaps most incendiary of all, the short-lived Stamp Act, with its taxes on such everyday items as newsprint, legal documents, and even playing cards. The Townshend Acts, which followed repeal of the Stamp Act, imposed fresh duties on tea, glass, paint pigment, and other items as well as punitive measures against colonial dissenters, and only served to exacerbate transatlantic enmity. So, too, did a separate Declaratory Act, by which Parliament asserted its absolute authority over the colonies.

In response, the colonists began to adopt a number of strategies against what were in effect backhanded attempts to impose new taxes, under the guise of duties and related measures, without their consent, in violation of the implied British social contract between ruler and ruled. Here was the origin of the rallying cry, “Taxation without Representation.” In addition to formal protests pursued by the local assemblies, and amplified by colonial agents at the royal court, such as Franklin, individual communities rallied around nonimportation campaigns. These were designed both to reduce colonial dependence on Britain's exports and to pressure British merchants to lobby for repeal of the new duties as injurious to their own long-term economic interests.

“The Eyes of our People (already beginning to open) will perceive, that many of the Luxuries which we have heretofore lavished our Substance to Great Britain for can well be dispensed with whilst the Necessaries of Life are to be procured (for the most part) within ourselves,” Washington, by now a leader in Virginia's campaign against imports, warned his tobacco merchants, Robert Cary and Co. “This consequently will introduce frugality, and be a necessary stimulation to Industry. Great Britain may then load her Exports with as Heavy Taxes as She pleases but where will the consumption be?”
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Up and down the colonies, inventors, entrepreneurs, and visionaries of various stripes turned their attention to the production of goods traditionally imported from the mother country, or otherwise subject to imperial trade restrictions. Isaac Bartram, son of the Pennsylvania botanist, experimented with the brewing of spirits from homegrown persimmons as a substitute for heavily taxed imported molasses, used to make rum. The
Boston Gazette
proudly reported in 1770 that the entire graduating class at Harvard appeared that year at commencement in American-made clothes. The industrious folk at Germantown, meanwhile, were said by one English visitor to be capable of turning out thousands of high-quality stockings per year.
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These efforts were backed by voluntary nonimportation campaigns throughout much of the 1760s and 1770s, organized either by local authorities or extralegal citizens' committees and carried out by sympathetic merchants.

The more prescient colonists, Washington among them, recognized that simply doing without imported British goods was not much of a strategy for the long term. Over time, many of these boycotts ran out of steam, although not without inflicting some financial hardship on their intended targets. Still, the colonies would have to restructure their economies, diversify their agricultural production, develop their own manufacturing industries, and modernize their currency regimes and credit systems. This, in turn, required a far greater understanding of colonial resources, as well as the useful knowledge and technological expertise to exploit them to full advantage. It would also entail a direct challenge to British economic and political authority over every aspect of colonial life.

Washington informed Robert Cary and Co. that he had begun to explore the substitution of industrial crops, such as hemp and flax, for his customary tobacco, and he even placed an order in an enclosed invoice for specialty tools
needed for this new venture: “1 Set of (Haynes's) best Heckles for Flax [and] 1 Ditto … for Hemp.”
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He later experimented with sowing wheat at Mount Vernon, developed a thriving fisheries operation nearby, and attempted large-scale production of textiles to supply the day-to-day needs of his plantations.

Meanwhile, the Virginian Arthur Lee, at the time studying medicine in Edinburgh, suggested to friends and family back home that the local authorities offer premiums to encourage the development of domestic industry, a practice he would have encountered firsthand among the improvement societies then gaining popularity in England and Scotland. He also proposed the recruitment of skilled British workers, to be carried out in secret so as to evade “that jealous eye, with which Britain will ever view the rise & progress of Arts & Manufactures in America.”
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Agrarian Virginia, like its southern neighbors, found itself hard-pressed to mount an effective nonimportation regime, for it lacked a strong urban merchant class to enforce such a boycott. Attention, instead, turned to the political arena and the elected House of Burgesses, now increasingly at odds with the colony's royal governor. The burgesses took up a proposal to create a nonimportation association, drafted by George Mason and backed enthusiastically by Washington, who personally carried the text to Williamsburg for consideration by the assembled delegates.

In addition to proposing a sharp reduction in British imports, Mason, a staunch defender of colonial rights whose ideas later helped shape Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, floated a more radical plan to overhaul the colony's tobacco-based economy in favor of industrial development. “If we were to desist purchasing Slaves, and making Tobacco, we should have a Number of Spare Hands to employ in Manufactures, and other Improvements; every private Family would soon be able to make whatever they wanted, for their own Use,” Mason argued in the
Virginia Gazette
, writing under the pen name Atticus. “Many of the Manufactures of
Great-Britain
, finding no longer the usual Encouragement at Home, would remove hither for Employment, a general Spirit of Frugality and Industry would prevail, and our Difficulties daily decrease.”
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On return from his studies in Scotland, Arthur Lee pressed for an organized boycott of British goods and a concomitant focus on the creation of domestic industry to be accompanied by petitions for relief to the Crown. “Let us … by our frugality and industry in manufacturing for ourselves convince our adversaries of their mistake in one grand point, that we are under a necessity of
using the manufactures of
Britain
,” Lee wrote in the first of a series of ten polemical letters published in the
Virginia Gazette
in 1768.

Underscoring the degree to which cultivating and harnessing the know-how necessary for industrial development had now converged with the push for colonial self-determination, Lee added, “Let
the people of every county instruct their members to petition, and let associations be formed to promote manufactures
, that we may manifest to all the world, how unanimously we are determined, both with hand and heart, to maintain our freedom, and frustrate the designs of those, who, by
dividing
, would
enslave us
.”
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The rebellious burgesses, forced to meet in the Apollo Room at the Raleigh Tavern after their formal suspension by the royal governor in 1769, approved a limited nonimportation drive—cheap clothing for the colony's large slave population was excepted—but balked at any halt to tobacco exports.
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Over the succeeding years, however, the assembly took a number of steps to promote domestic industry and to widen the colony's agricultural base.

Bounties were offered for the production of hemp, in high demand for ships' rigging, as well as for the establishment of Virginia's first vineyards and, with notably less success, the cultivation of olives and the raising of silkworms. Tellingly, the same meeting of the Virginia Convention in late March 1775 that voted to make George Washington part of the colony's delegation to the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia appointed him a member of a special committee to “prepare a plan for the encouragement of Arts and Manufactures in this Colony.”
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The push for modernization of the colonial economy that accompanied the growing differences with Great Britain further piqued the general public's interest in scientific and technical matters, a trend to which predominantly pastoral Virginia was not immune. The
Virginia Gazette
did its best to address this growing market, particularly on medical topics such as the ever-worrisome threat of smallpox.
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Other articles covered the latest reports of wonders from the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences. The international effort, spearheaded by the French and British societies and taken up by colonial enthusiasts, to track the transit of Venus across the face of the sun in 1769, prompted the
Gazette
to carry a number of items on the science of the stars. One year later, the newspaper published details of the revolutionary device to pump water automatically from leaky ships proposed by a member of Charles Thomson's American Society.

The growing social campaign for greater self-sufficiency, resting on practical and applied learning, culminated in the autumn of 1772 with the creation of the Virginia Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, an explicit effort to copy the earlier example of Philadelphia. There had already been several failed attempts in Virginia to form a lasting scientific association, along the lines of the European societies. William Small, a celebrated professor at William and Mary and an inspiration to the young Thomas Jefferson, founded a circle in 1759 to inquire into medicinal plants and other problems in the natural world, but it faded away after Small's return to England. This time, however, prominent members of Virginia society rallied to the idea, and one local newspaper account later noted that the new society now consisted of one hundred members and was under the patronage of the provincial governor.
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