by Nick Bunker
At the beginning of 1729, as Ralph’s career was heading for the rocks, Franklin had his own obstacles to surmount. First of all Keimer had to be crushed; and then he had to pick his way through the maze of politics in Pennsylvania, where Franklin had to be sure to be a winner. Nothing else would do for a printer so ambitious.
THE BUSY-BODY
Franklin began by throwing in his lot with Andrew Bradford. The latter was still fighting the war of the almanacs against Samuel Keimer. And so he was very receptive when Franklin and his Junto friend Joseph Breintnall came forward with a series of columns for The American Weekly Mercury. Appearing over the byline of The Busy-Body, they were intended to make Mr. Keimer’s new Gazette look foolish and inferior. The columns were composed as stylishly as possible, because—as Franklin knew from Boston—elegance in prose was a sign of gentility. They wanted to make it plain that this was a quality they possessed and the Gazette did not.
The shaggy Mr. Keimer had done something that left him exposed to scandal. As he printed his extracts from the encyclopedia, starting with the letter A, he soon came to “Abortion.” Printing such a piece was not the way “to please all and offend none,” as Keimer had promised he would do. Franklin seized his opportunity. He wrote two letters to the Mercury, purporting to come from Martha Careful and Celia Shortface, two ladies most upset by such material. While Miss Careful threatened to pull Keimer’s beard, Miss Shortface took an oath to box his ears if there were any repetition.
And then on February 1 the Busy-Body series began. Seven years on from Silence Dogood, Franklin had become a still more expert writer in the manner of The Spectator. Cleansed of vulgarity, his diction was wide but always polite, his grammar was flawless, and his flowing syntax did what syntax should, always drawing the reader forward, making the columns immensely easy to read. Franklin quoted Alexander Pope and Latin poets too, Horace and Virgil; and although he intended to kill Mr. Keimer’s Gazette, he did the job with wit, not acrimony.4
The best of the series was a lively sketch about a single woman with a shop. Was he thinking of Sarah Read, Mrs. Holt, or Mrs. T the milliner? Whatever his source, Franklin shows us a woman beset by awkward customers who run amok amid her wares. The columns were done with a light, entertaining touch, so as to disarm any critics. When Franklin called Keimer “a sowre philosopher” and labeled the Gazette a “book of crudities,” his opponent could only look absurd by replying with clumsy insults. Keimer tried to make fun of Franklin’s lack of money and the threadbare coat he wore, but Franklin dealt with this by creating a character called Cato. He is a poor but honest farmer who personifies the patriotic virtues of the Romans, transplanted to the colonies.
Poverty is not a sin, says Franklin. In the Busy-Body items, he chiefly intended to undermine Keimer’s new venture: that was why Bradford wanted them for the Mercury. But apart from wrecking the sales of the Gazette, he had other things he wished to discuss. Politics, above all; in the shape of Cato, we can see Franklin sketching out a political philosophy of his own, with economics at its heart. By birth and education of course he was a Whig, committed to the Protestant succession and to “English Liberties.” But by the late 1720s, the practical issues that arose in Pennsylvania were not the same as those that divided opinion in Great Britain.
In the Quaker province, they did not have a Walpole to protest against, and although there were élites and inequalities, they did not take the form of an English aristocracy. Religious freedom was already guaranteed; and there was no established Church of Pennsylvania with bishops to be mocked. The arguments that raged in England about Walpole’s taxes and the heavy burden of the National Debt simply did not apply in Pennsylvania, where there were no armed forces and so the government spent very little. Although Franklin and his friends read The Craftsman, The London Journal, and so on, and often used the same language, it did not really fit their circumstances.
They had issues of their own to deal with, issues more specifically American. In Mr. Cato, a self-reliant man from the frontier, dressed “in the plainest country garb,” but always kind and pious, humane and public spirited, Franklin is giving us a colonial farmer, not some crusty English Tory squire left over from the reign of Queen Anne. As his Busy-Body essays unfolded, so Franklin lost interest in his feud with Keimer. Instead, he began to touch on serious topics to do with the future of Pennsylvania.
The province had been built by farmers, Anglo-Saxon, white, and Protestant, people like Cato or the Merediths, each one freely settled on his homestead with his pigs, his orchards, and the Bible. But by 1729, Pennsylvania was also a land of speculators, whether their ambitions lay in the West Indian trade, in steel and iron, in westward expansion, or in all three. Could Cato really coexist with this kind of thing? Or to put it another way: could the patient, homespun virtues of the farmer or the artisan survive in a colony where so many people just wanted to get rich quickly? This was a question that troubled the Junto. The members had to decide what sort of Pennsylvanians they wished to be.
“The rational and almost certain methods of acquiring riches by industry and frugality are almost neglected or forgotten,” Franklin wrote on March 27 in Busy-Body No. 8. “If the sands of Schuylkill were so much mixed with small grains of gold, that a man might in a day’s time with care and application get together the value of a half a crown, I make no question but we should find several people employ’d there, that can with ease earn five shillings a day at their proper trades.”
It was a question that William Hogarth dealt with and it would always remain a Franklin favorite: how should we try to get wealth? and how do we retain our virtue while we do so? No one was really panning for gold in the Schuylkill—Franklin was being metaphorical—but they were engaged in avid speculation, and that was what he was discussing. There are times when we might think that Franklin is too smug a moralist, but only when we forget that his writing always had a context. In this case, he was dealing with questions that exercised the minds of Pennsylvanians far beyond the confines of the Junto.
In March, the elected assembly was nearing the end of a session that would mark another turning point in the colony’s history. They had two items on their agenda, each one intertwined with the other and with the economic dilemmas that the colony had to resolve. Immigration, first of all: how should they respond to the arrival by sea of so many newcomers, most of whom were Irish, including Catholics and felons? Alarmed by what they called these “crowds of foreigners…Papists and convicts,” the assemblymen and the governor were at one in their desire for something to be done.5
The honest Catos of the Delaware did not wish to see their culture—or their wages—undermined by people whom even the most pious of Quakers dismissed as “idle trash” or “the scum of mankind.” They needed a law, said Governor Gordon, “to prevent an English plantation being turned into a colony of aliens”: their solution being a new tax imposed on the importers of every indentured servant or African slave who came ashore. But while it was very easy to be racist, it was rather harder to design policies that made economic sense.
In reality Pennsylvania needed more people: to work the forges and the furnaces, for instance, whose laborers were bondservants or slaves. The trade in human beings was one of the few branches of commerce that were thriving in the spring of 1729. Off Jamaica, Spanish ships from Havana were molesting British traders; and although Sir Robert Walpole was looking for a diplomatic means to keep the peace, an all-out war was still a possibility. And so that year the trade of Philadelphia was temporarily in the doldrums.
Hence arose the second item that the assembly was eager to debate. Although Sir William Keith was now a fading memory, his party still fought on with the same old battle cry: paper money. Since the session began in earnest in December, the Keithite members from the city had been pressing for a large new issue of currency as a way to revive the economy. If this was to occur, the relevant law would have
to be passed by the end of the session in May. With time running out, and the governor dragging his heels, Benjamin Franklin plunged into the controversy. Hard on the heels of Busy-Body No. 8, he produced his first political pamphlet. Bearing the title A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, it appeared on April 3.
There was nothing modest about the description he gives us of this episode. According to the Franklin of 1771, writing his memoirs, his essay was decisive, turning the tide in favor of the new paper bills. The essay, he wrote, was “well receiv’d by the common people in general; but the rich men dislik’d it; for it increas’d and strengthen’d the clamor for money; and they happening to have no writers among them that were able to answer it, their opposition slacken’d, and the point was carried by a majority in the house.” There is just one problem with Franklin’s account of what occurred: less than half of it is true.
Although his pamphlet was highly accomplished, Franklin did not win the day. New paper money was issued by the land bank, the Loan Office, but not in the way Franklin claims; and the real victor was his friend Andrew Hamilton. Even so, the episode amounted to another turning point in Franklin’s career. The paper money affair proved to be the last stand of the Keithites, and its outcome was to make Mr. Hamilton invincible. The episode ushered in a new decade in which, in alliance with the Hamilton family, the young Franklin would indeed become a gentleman printer, affluent, relatively secure, and a force to be reckoned with in public life. He and the Hamiltons also came to share a common vision of what America should be.
HAMILTON’S VICTORY, AND FRANKLIN’S ROLE
Since his return from London late in 1726, Andrew Hamilton had drawn ever closer not only to James Logan, but also to another broker of power, Jeremiah Langhorne. Depicted by their enemies as “the Triumvirate,” they had several things in common with each other and with Franklin. In religious matters they were all freethinkers; they all worked immensely hard; and they had all fallen out with Sir William Keith and his followers.
Early in 1728 Logan suffered a dreadful accident, slipping on the ice outside his house in Philadelphia, which left him a cripple at fifty-four. And so although he lived on for more than two decades, still an agent of the Penns and still a leading figure in the colony, he played only a minor part in the paper money affair. But his allies Hamilton and Langhorne were energetic men still in the prime of life. At fifty-five Langhorne was the uncrowned king of Bucks County to the north of the city. There he held every major public office and he led their delegation to the General Assembly. In the autumn of 1728 he procured the election of Andrew Hamilton as one of the Bucks County members. Amid the signs of a recession, and with tempers running high in Philadelphia, both men fully accepted the need for some new paper money. So did Governor Gordon, who at this point was on excellent terms with Hamilton. Even the Penn family, who far preferred to receive their rents in sterling, were prepared to cut a deal to accommodate the public.6
Everyone knew that there had to be more liquidity, but the question was this: how much new money, and on what terms? On the last day of 1728—not in the spring of 1729, after his essay, as Franklin suggests—the assembly voted overwhelmingly to have some new paper currency; but the detailed legislation still had to be drawn up. If it were too large and the terms too generous, the measure might be vetoed by the government in England. If the issue were too small and the terms too strict, the assembly might not pass the law at all; and the Keithites might run riot.
Modern Americans will recognize what happened next: five months of horse-trading in their equivalent of Congress. Early in January the assembly voted for £50,000 in new currency to be secured by mortgages from the land bank, lent out to the borrowers at only 4 percent and for a term of sixteen years. Off went a committee packed with Keithites to write the legislation. Meanwhile Governor Gordon played for time, scratching his head over the complications and waiting until the end of March before he replied.
“I am fully persuaded,” said Patrick Gordon, that there had to be more paper currency; but he could not consent to £50,000, and 4 percent interest was too low. The assembly made a lower bid, just £40,000, but left everything else in the bill unchanged. And that was how matters stood when Franklin entered the fray. One extra point is relevant. Six weeks earlier, Franklin and Meredith had made a pitch to the assembly to be chosen as their official printer, in place of Andrew Bradford, only to be turned down.
Thanks to fine scholarship by the Franklin biographer Leo Lemay, we now know that the Modest Enquiry was not his opening gambit. Earlier, when Busy-Body No. 8 appeared in the Mercury on March 27, it carried an appendix—almost certainly composed by Franklin—which took a more radical stance, calling for the new paper money law to be passed immediately, or otherwise there would be mayhem. “The whole country is at this instant filled with the greatest heat and animosity,” the author wrote. He warned of “publick disturbances” if rich men tried to block a measure the people were eager to see. But those words appeared only in the Mercury’s first edition. “A gentleman” visited his office and called for the appendix to be removed. Under pressure from a powerful man, Bradford agreed.
As well he might: because this was a dangerous moment, with lawmakers complaining that they were being threatened in the streets. Rumors were rife, picked up by Logan, that protesters planned to storm the governor’s mansion. Until now, Langhorne and Hamilton had stood on the sidelines, or so it appears: but with the situation looking ugly, Andrew Hamilton stepped forward to defuse the crisis. He persuaded the assembly to stand firm, passing a motion calling on Gordon to crush any riots that occurred.
With that the threat of violence died away. And then Franklin came out with his Modest Enquiry. Written in a hurry, said the author, even so it was an eloquent plea for paper money, with the interest rate to be set at no more than 4 percent. The arguments he advanced were not entirely original—there had been many such pamphlets before—and indeed in one long passage Franklin plagiarized an English treatise from the 1660s. But the Modest Enquiry made its points extremely well. Putting it in something close to modern terms, Franklin argued that a paper currency could be as reliable as gold if the colony that issued it had a robust, competitive economy.
Productivity: that was Franklin’s point. If Pennsylvania was fertile and its produce in demand, if its people were hardworking and ready to turn their hands to trade as well as farming, then what did they have to fear? Some inflation would occur, but it would not be disastrous. Provided the economy was flexible and open—which meant that immigration would have to persist—the forces of the market would keep wages and prices from spiraling out of control. Demand for real estate was most unlikely to collapse, and so the value of their paper bills would be secure.
So long as the land bank lent prudently, the mortgages would always be repaid from the growing wealth of the province. In the meantime, the paper bills would keep the wheels of commerce turning; but there had to be enough of them available to do so. “Upon the whole it may be observed,” wrote Franklin, “that it is the highest interest of a trading country…to make money plentiful.” His arguments were excellent, but they were not decisive: it was Andrew Hamilton, not Franklin, who arranged a compromise that kept everyone content.
The day before the essay appeared, Governor Gordon had told the assembly that he would not authorize £40,000 of new notes. From that point forward the Keithites had to work with Hamilton to make a deal that the governor could accept. After another month of to and fro, at last the job was done; but the law that Gordon signed in May was not the one the Keithites had demanded. All they got in the end was £30,000 of new paper currency, issued for sixteen years but at 5 percent, and not the 4 percent that Franklin had preferred.
For Andrew Hamilton the episode had been a triumph, from which he had emerged as the person who could bring all the parties to the table. When the assembly met again in October 1729, they c
hose Hamilton as the speaker, the post he already held in New Castle, where the Lower Counties were at his beck and call. With the followers of Keith pushed to the sidelines, Hamilton remained the speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly for nine of the next ten years. The Triumvirate held all the winning cards.
Although James Logan’s friendship with the Penns was weakening, even so they found him indispensable. Disabled though he was, for many years he sat as the chief justice of Pennsylvania with Jeremiah Langhorne as his deputy. When at last Logan stepped down, Langhorne took over. Meanwhile Andrew Hamilton served as the recorder of Philadelphia, meaning that he was the city’s general counsel, a very useful post to hold. A hot-tempered man, still fond of his liquor, he could not keep himself from bad-mouthing Governor Gordon; and after they began to quarrel in 1732, Hamilton endured a rocky period when, in 1733–34, he briefly lost the speakership. Even so, with Langhorne at his side he regained his grip and the Triumvirate continued on its way. When Gordon died in 1736, the Penns chose Logan as the acting governor.
By then Thomas Penn, the co-proprietor, had come over from England to the colony to live, but he was less concerned with politics than he was with making money from his vast holdings of land. And so—until the late 1730s—while the Triumvirate sometimes had their differences with the Penns, the three men remained the real leaders of the colony. Not once did Franklin seek to question their hegemony. There was no reason why he should. His goals and values were the same as Logan’s, Hamilton’s, and Langhorne’s.
