Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  On the post roads, Franklin had milestones erected so that post-office riders could pace themselves better. By talking with riders and postmasters, Franklin established an esprit de corps which also had much to do with getting a new vitality into the service. He consulted them on new roads, fords, and ferries. Some three years later, the service was completely overhauled, and its new speed and reliability made it ever more popular. In the fourth year of Franklin’s administration, it paid a profit for the first time in its history, collecting more revenue in twelve months than it had in the previous thirty-six.

  Traveling was a rough business in the 1750s, and only someone with Franklin’s strong constitution could have endured the terrible weather, the rutted roads, too often either quagmires of mud or suffocating dust storms, and the numerous rivers which the traveler had to ford or ferry. Taverns and inns were few and often crowded. Securing a seat by the fire, after hours on the road in rain or cold, was often difficult.

  Once, Franklin used his wit to overcome this particular challenge. He stopped at a Rhode Island tavern on a raw, blustery, rainy day and found two dozen locals and travelers around the only fire.

  “Boy,” said Franklin in stentorian tones to the tavern keeper’s son, “get my horse a quart of oysters.”

  “A quart of oysters?” gasped the boy.

  “You heard me, a quart of oysters,” Franklin boomed.

  The boy obeyed, and there was a general stampede out the door to see this incredible phenomenon, a horse who ate oysters.

  The horse snorted and snuffled in exasperation and refused to have anything to do with the oysters. Baffled, the curiosity-seekers trooped back into the tavern, where they found Deputy Postmaster General Franklin sitting serenely in the chair closest to the fire.

  Franklin had always been a passionate traveler. He had made three previous return visits to New England, and these - combined with his newspaper, his almanac, and his fame as a scientist - had woven a web of friendship and acquaintances in every settlement along his route. In New Jersey was James Alexander, a Scottish nobleman who had fled to the New World after the collapse of the 1745 rebellion. As a lawyer, he had helped defend the New York printer, Peter Zenger, in a case that established the first rudiments of a free press in America. In New York, Archibald Kennedy was a wealthy merchant who wanted to see the colonies united for mutual defense. Cadwalader Colden was a Crown official, as well as an expert on American botany and Indian history.

  In Connecticut, Franklin had long corresponded with Jared Eliot, an expert on agriculture, who doubled as pastor of the Congregational Church in Killingworth. He and Franklin discussed many topics besides farming. Franklin wrote a number of clever letters, including one in which he tried to convince Eliot that the world would take a step forward if it allowed people to heap praise on themselves instead of pretending they were indifferent to it. He pointed out that children regularly praised themselves, declaring, “I am a good boy; am I not a good girl?” But they soon gave it up when adults corrected them, The result, Franklin argued, was “being forbid to praise themselves, they learn instead of it to censure others; which is only a roundabout way of praising themselves; for condemning the conduct of another, in any particular, amounts to as much as saying, I am so honest or wise or good or prudent that I could not do or approve of such an action. This fondness for ourselves, rather than malevolence to others, I take to be the general source of censure and backbiting; and I wish men had not been taught to damn up natural currents, to the overflowing and damage of their neighbor’s grounds.”

  Dr. Samuel Johnson, an Episcopal clergyman and educator, whom one person called “the apostle of sound learning and elegant literature in New England,” was another Connecticut friend. Franklin did his utmost to tempt him to Philadelphia to take over the school he had helped to establish. He apologized for an outline of the school’s program, which he sent Johnson, explaining that he had no education of his own (except as a tradesman) nor had ever been concerned in educating others. Nonetheless, he was brilliantly novel in his sketch of an educational program designed for the emerging modern world. He boldly discarded Latin and Greek as useless and urged, in their place, the study of modern languages and science. “Nobody would imagine that the draught you have made for an English education was done by a tradesman,” Dr. Johnson told him. “But so it sometimes is, a true genius will not content itself without entering more or less into almost everything, and of mastering many things more in spite of fate itself.”

  Ezra Stiles - another pastor who combined a strong interest in science with a subtle theological mind - was always ready to greet Franklin whenever he visited his parsonage in Newport, Rhode Island.

  Boston abounded in Franklin friends. Among the most notable were John Winthrop, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard College; Josiah Quincy, one of America’s richest merchants; Dr. Samuel Cooper, pastor of Boston’s Brattle Square Church; and James Bowdoin, wealthy businessman and pioneering astronomer. Another friend was Mather Byles, minister of the Hollis Street Church and one of the earliest American poets.

  Many of these men were members of the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin had founded in 1743. It was barely breathing, largely because so many of its members were, in Franklin’s words, “very idle gentlemen.” It would take another decade and a half before it merged with another scientific group, the American Society, which had grown out of Franklin’s old Junto, and began dispensing the “useful knowledge” that Franklin hoped to create by pooling the best brains in America.

  In Boston, family mattered as much as science, however. Benjamin’s favorite among the Boston Franklins was his sister, Jane Mecom, younger than Franklin, a vivacious, spirited woman who already doted on her famous brother. She had married a nobody. To cover the cost of caring for his eleven children, Edward Mecom, a saddler, was forced to rent rooms to strangers. Franklin’s older brother, John, on the other hand, had married a wealthy widow, Elizabeth Hubbard. Franklin made him Postmaster of Boston. He never had the slightest qualm about appointing relatives to posts in his power. He had already appointed William Franklin Postmaster of Philadelphia before he departed. In this, Franklin was a man of his generation. The British government was organized around families, and factions and jobs were regularly handed out to family retainers and loyal followers. The idea of appointing the best qualified person, regardless of his political affiliation, had not yet occurred to anyone.

  More important, it was essential to Franklin to keep in these jobs people he could trust and whom he knew would follow his reformist lead. Earlier Postmasters had had a habit of sloppy bookkeeping and pocketing loose change. In Newport, Franklin appointed another man he knew well, Thomas Vernon. It was also an emotional gesture. When Franklin was a young man, Thomas’s father, Samuel Vernon, had asked him to collect a debt for him in Pennsylvania. Franklin had collected the money, but he never forwarded it to Vernon.

  Instead, he frittered it away on trifles and loans to out-of-work friends. Only years later, when he was wealthy, did he repay it. Now he did his best to rectify this “erratum” of his youth.

  While Franklin traveled and hobnobbed, he did not stop thinking. In fact, moving from colony to colony inspired him to write down one of his more important scientific insights. He waited a few years to publish it, under the title “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries &c.” With a brilliant combination of mathematics and social observation, Franklin noted that there were now well over a million Englishmen in North America. Yet, little more than 80,000 had emigrated from England. This fact alone showed a fundamental difference between the New World and the Old World, where the population was relatively steady. America, with its almost unlimited land and productive capacity, placed no impediment to marriage and the raising of families, as the economically cramped Old World did. For this reason, the population of America would double every twenty or twenty-five years, a prediction which was fulfilled with mat
hematical exactitude until 1860, when massive immigration created even more rapid growth. For Franklin, contemplating this increase in the early 1750s, it meant one crucial thing. America will “in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the water.”

  Franklin did not see this as a threat to the mother country. He boldly spoke and wrote as an Anglo-American and loyal member of the Empire. “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!” Underlying this emotion, however, was a more uniquely American sentiment. In 1750, Parliament restricted the manufacture of iron in Pennsylvania because British ironmasters had complained that American-made iron was competing with their products. This made no sense to Franklin because the population of the colonies was increasing so fast that there was sure to be an ever growing market for manufactures, whether British or American. “A wise and good mother,” Franklin said, placed no upsetting restraints on her children. “To distress is to weaken, and weakening the children weakens the whole family.”

  Franklin circulated this article among the members of the American Philosophical Society and then printed it in 1755. Although it is largely forgotten now, it was, in his lifetime, almost as crucial to his international reputation as his achievements in electricity.

  The article was reprinted widely throughout the British Isles, and more than one member of Parliament realized for the first time that America was no longer a vague entity on the other side of the world that could be treated with what one Prime Minister called a policy of “salutary neglect.”

  Unfortunately, where power is concerned, people’s first instinct is not to share but to grip more tightly what appears to be threatened. This was the British Establishment’s reaction to Franklin’s essay. Instead of creating an atmosphere of freedom, it inspired even more restrictive regulations on American manufacturing and commerce by conservative men determined to maintain their traditional (if seldom-exercised) authority.

  Franklin returned to Philadelphia from his first postal journey to discover Pennsylvania in a swirl of excitement over two issues - one old and one new. The Proprietary Party and the Assembly were locked in the usual wrangle over taxation. But this time, the importance of the discussion made earlier quarrels seem academic. The French and their Indian allies were moving down the Ohio River valley, showing ominous signs of planning to stay in this territory, where both they and the English had nebulous claims. This meant that Pennsylvania’s frontier was in danger of attack. The Indians there had long been allied to England, but this new French pressure on one side, coupled with little evidence of sufficient support from Pennsylvania, made them extremely anxious. Most ominous of all was report the Indians brought of a French fort on the southern shores of Lake Erie. A fort was expensive. It was also permanent. It meant the French forces were moving south to stay.

  On May 9, 1754, Franklin printed in his newspaper a report from an obscure officer of the Virginia Militia named George Washington. The report told of a French army of more than a thousand men appearing at the forks of the Monongahela (present-day Pittsburgh) where Virginians were building a small fort. With less than fifty men on duty, the fort’s commander was forced to surrender to this overwhelming force. Franklin immediately grasped the essence of the crisis, and he summed it up in a unique way. Underneath the news story that told in straightforward terms what was happening on the frontier, he published America’s first political cartoon. It was a snake broken into eight parts looking decidedly dead. Under it was the motto: JOIN, OR DIE. In the news story he made the same point.

  The confidence of the French in this undertaking seems well grounded on the present disunited state of the British colonies, and the extreme difficulty of bringing so many different governments and Assemblies to agree in any speedy and effectual measures for our common defense and security; while our enemies have the very great advantage of being under one direction, with one council, and one purse. Hence, and from the great distance of Britain, they presume that they may with impunity violate the most solemn treaties subsisting between the two crowns, kill, seize and imprison our traders, and confiscate their effects at pleasure (as they have done for several years past), murder and scalp our farmers, with their wives and children, and take an easy possession of such parts of the British territory as they find most convenient for them; which if they are permitted to do, must end in the destruction of the British interest, trade and plantations in America.

  Franklin forwarded the cartoon as well as the story to Richard Partridge, Pennsylvania’s representative in London. Coincidentally, the Board of Trade in London took a step that seemed at first in line with Franklin’s position. As the officials in London saw it, the problem was the casual way in which the various colonies handled their Indian affairs, sometimes giving, and then refusing to give presents, haphazardly letting settlers wander into tribal lands in violation of treaties. Moreover, no single colony was able to match the grandness of French present giving. All this was causing the Indians to become more and more agitated, especially the Iroquois, who were the center of a kind of buffer state between the French and English. Accordingly, the Board of Trade ordered the governors of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, and New Jersey to join the governor of New York in appointing commissioners for an inter-colonial conference with the Iroquois and other tribes to be held at Albany in the middle of June 1754. It was almost inevitable that Franklin was named one of the commissioners. But he went to Albany with far larger ideas in his mind than Indian pacification.

  It was clear that England and France were headed for another war, a final death-grapple that would decide who was to control North America, the West Indies, and even far away India. In New York, Franklin met his good friend James Alexander and the conversation turned to the Albany Conference. Uniting the colonies was something Franklin had already discussed with Alexander, and their mutual friend, Archibald Kennedy, and Franklin now remarked that he thought he had an idea that would work. Alexander urged him to put it down on paper and three days later, shortly before he left New York for Albany, Franklin delivered a note with an enclosure which began:

  Short Hints Towards a Scheme for Uniting the Northern Colonies

  A Governeur General

  To be appointed by the King.

  To be a military man.

  To have a salary from the Crown.

  To have a negation on all acts of the Grand Council, and carry into execution whatever is agreed by him and that Council.

  Grand Council

  One member to be chosen by the Assembly of each of the smaller colonies and two or more by each of the larger, in proportion to the sums they pay yearly into the general treasury.

  The rest of the paper detailed how the Grand Council and governor would be paid, where they would meet, and when and what their powers would be.

  Off to Albany Franklin went, where, at the city’s courthouse, he joined twenty-five commissioners from the four New England colonies, from Maryland, from New York, as well as his own Pennsylvania. The Virginia and New Jersey assemblies had declined to send anyone - in itself a comment on colonial disunity. Franklin immediately proposed his idea of union, and to his delight, his fellow commissioners thought highly enough of it to appoint a committee consisting of one man from each delegation “to prepare and receive plans or schemes for the union of the colonies and to digest them into one general plan.” In the next two weeks of conferences and debates, Franklin’s Short Hints were amplified and modified in minor ways, the Governor General became a “President General” and instead of the “Northern Colonies,” the plan specified a “general union of the British colonies on the continent.” On the floor of the Congress, more changes were made, largely in the powers of the Grand Council to purchase Indian lands. But the plan remained more or less the same one that Franklin had jotted down for his friend Alexander in New York
.

  Every delegation except Connecticut voted enthusiastic support of Franklin’s plan. For a few hours, there in Albany, the philosopher of electricity lived in the dazzling world of the political visionary. How easy it was for an ingenious man with a flair for words to solve the problems of his country! In his exultation, Franklin suggested to the Albany delegates yet another idea, a plan to create two new colonies in the Ohio Valley to serve as buffers between the older colonies and the French. The idea called for a bold adaptation of the original English approach to colonization. Instead of moving the frontier westward “inch by inch” Franklin proposed sending an expedition, composed of a hundred families, supported by a well-armed young single men. They would, therefore, be strong enough to withstand Indian attacks and could quickly start laying out farms and organizing a government. Within this solid framework, more settlers would surely be attracted.

  But even as Franklin spun out these ideas, other men were acting out one of history’s harsher themes on the western frontier. Young Lieutenant Colonel Washington had returned to the frontier leading a Virginia militia regiment. After winning an early skirmish, he had retreated to a makeshift stockade called Fort Necessity, where he made a stand against overwhelming French and Indian forces. On July 4 - a date that meant nothing to the mortified young Virginian nor to Benjamin Franklin - he had been forced to surrender Fort Necessity and lead his beaten men in a humiliating retreat, abandoning to the victorious French everything except what they could carry on their backs.