by H. W. Brands
In the autumn of 1682, just several months before Josiah Franklin left England for Boston, Penn traveled to America for the first time. He wished to see the forests and streams he had heard so much about; he also wanted to walk the streets—notional though they yet were—of the “large town or city” he had directed be laid out on the west bank of the Delaware River. Philadelphia—the name was a neoclassical rendering of “brotherly love”—was the first planned city in America and among the first in the world; its plan reflected Penn’s desire to mitigate the ills attached to Old World cities. The great plague and fire of the 1660s still seared the memories of Londoners; Penn would combat these egregious civic afflictions by making Philadelphia airy and open, “a green country town, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.” The main streets would be one hundred feet across—wider than anything in London—and the lesser avenues fifty feet, all arranged in a regular, rectangular grid. Lots would be large—half an acre or an acre—with room enough for gardens and orchards to surround houses set well back from the street. Four squares of several acres each and a central square of ten acres would guarantee additional open space to the city’s inhabitants. Unlike Boston, New York, and other colonial towns, Philadelphia would have no walls or fortifications; Penn’s enlightened Indian policy would provide all the protection necessary.
Reality on the American frontier did not immediately match Penn’s vision. Early inhabitants dug dwellings out of the steep banks of the Delaware River, living alternately amid the mud and dust of wet seasons and dry. Pigs, goats, chickens, dogs, and the occasional cow ran loose through the streets of the town, feeding on, in some cases, and contributing to, in all cases, the garbage and filth that made the summer air excruciatingly pungent. Front Street was a standing cesspool.
But time softened the rough edges, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century the town was starting to approach Penn’s blueprint. The inhabitants numbered somewhat more than two thousand, and they gave evidence of having been busy. A recent arrival from Sweden declared, “If anyone were to see Philadelphia who had not been there, he would be astonished beyond measure that it was founded less than twenty years ago…. All the houses are built of brick, three or four hundred of them, and in every house a shop, so that whatever one wants at any time he can have, for money.”
Money, however, was a problem. Philadelphia—like Boston, New York, and other North American cities—suffered from the chronic affliction of colonial commerce: a lack of money. The early eighteenth century was the heyday of mercantilism in British imperial thought and practice; according to the mercantilists, the measure of imperial power was ready cash (to build navies, outfit privateers, and pay mercenaries, besides less martial purposes). The function of colonies was to foster a favorable trade balance, which would funnel cash—most liquidly (or solidly, rather) in the form of gold and silver—into the treasury of the monarch, and into the pockets of his inhabitants in the metropolis (from whom it could be extracted when necessity arose). The maturity of the English economy relative to that of the American colonies, augmented by the navigation (that is, trade) laws passed by Parliament during the seventeenth century, ensured that money would flow into England with ease, in payment for high-value manufactured goods, and flow out, in payment for low-value raw materials, with difficulty. The result was a perennial shortfall of cash among colonial merchants and their customers.
As a result the colonists were often reduced to barter. One Philadelphia shipbuilder, James West, recorded charging £39 for building a sloop. His customer lacked cash, so West accepted payment in flour, butter, sugar, raisins, and beer. Partly because this was a recurrent problem, he had gone into the sideline of operating a tavern; he served the proceeds from his ship contract to his patrons. As part of this redefinition of liquidity, West boarded his boatwrights at the tavern and paid them their wages in beer.
In good times the dearth of money was merely annoying; in bad times it threatened to strangle the colonial economy. And times were rarely worse than following the collapse of the South Sea bubble in 1720. The South Sea Company had been chartered in 1711 and granted a monopoly of British trade with South America and the islands of the Pacific Ocean (formerly and still sentimentally the “South Sea”). During the next several years this monopoly rewarded shareholders handsomely, prompting wealthy and influential individuals, including King George I and many close to the court, to purchase stock. To tighten the company’s connections to the Crown still further, the directors made George a governor of the company in 1718. A year later the directors concocted a scheme to privatize the national debt; they would assume the Crown’s obligations in exchange for an annual payment—and, most significantly, the chance to persuade the Crown’s creditors to exchange their notes for stock in the South Sea Company. With the company’s stock appreciating rapidly, the task of persuasion was easy enough, which made the stock rise all the faster. Between January and July of 1720 it octupled in value, sucking in all manner of speculators and inspiring no end of imitators. In August the inevitable occurred: the price broke. By November nearly nine-tenths of the stock value of the company had vanished, shaking such rocks of the establishment as the Bank of England, disgracing the directors of the company (who proved to have collaborated in assorted other shenanigans with the company’s accounts), ruining thousands of investors, and wreaking havoc on the finances of the entire British empire.
Philadelphia was still reeling when Ben Franklin arrived in October 1723. If he had known how bad things were, he might not have come. In any event, Philadelphia was not his first choice. Franklin’s original plan upon leaving Boston was to settle in New York, the thriving town on the island at the mouth of the Hudson River that retained the Dutch character of its founders, including the burghers’ ambitions of worldly success. In such a setting a young man of similar ambition ought to have no difficulty finding work, unbothered by the formalities of an unfulfilled contract back in Boston.
But once out of Boston, Franklin found himself at the mercy of forces beyond his control. After two days at sea the fair wind that had swept his escape vessel south failed, leaving the fugitive and his shipmates becalmed near Block Island, off the mouth of Narragansett Bay. The ship’s hands, accustomed to the vagaries of sea travel, employed the time to fish for the cod that had drawn seafarers to the northeastern coast of America for more than two centuries. The fish were thick, and the crew hauled them up by the hundredweight. The smaller ones were cleaned, boned, and tossed into a pan of hot oil, emerging moments later golden brown, steaming hot, and exuding an aroma that enclouded the ship and stirred the digestive juices of all hands and passengers.
When he had entered the ship, Ben Franklin still held to his vegetarian philosophy. One leg of this philosophy—which proscribed both flesh and fish—was economic; the other was moral. The essence of the latter was that the creatures to be eaten had done nothing to deserve death at the hands of humans and therefore ought to be allowed to live out their innocent lives. Franklin continued to reason thus as the first codfish were pulled up over the ship’s gunwales. But his reason wavered as the smell of the frying fish wafted across the deck. Before his vegetarian days he, like most Bostonians, had loved fish: fried, steamed, boiled, stewed. The present smell conjured recollections of memorable meals past, and he decided to revisit the argument for interspecies pacifism. To his delight he discovered a loophole. “I recollected that when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then I thought, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” And so he did, dining “very heartily” with the rest of the passengers and crew. This was the beginning of the end of Ben Franklin’s vegetarianism; he remarked later, with signature irony, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”
The ship’s eventual arrival in New York overturned Franklin’s expectations in another respect. For all their commerc
ial energy—perhaps because of it—the Dutch merchants and tradesmen in Manhattan evinced scant interest in the services of printers. The town lacked a newspaper, the merchants evidently being too busy to read about the world they lived in. And sermons had no such sale as in Boston, the merchants being equally unable to focus on the world to which they were going. The single printer who kept a shop in New York, William Bradford, had no difficulty supplying the town’s needs with the helpers he already had. There was no room for Franklin.
But Bradford had a son, Andrew, who operated a print shop in Philadelphia. Andrew had just lost a journeyman, a promising and engaging young fellow who had died suddenly. A replacement was needed. William Bradford thought it worth Franklin’s time to explore the possibility.
Franklin could see little alternative. The money that remained from the sale of his books would not last more than several days, and he had no marketable skill but what he had learned in James’s print shop. Philadelphia had the added attraction of being even farther from Boston. It seemed unlikely that James would send someone after him, but it would not hurt to put another hundred miles between himself and what he owed on his apprenticeship.
The first fifteen of those miles proved to be the hardest. Husbanding his shrinking supply of cash, Franklin boarded the cheapest boat he could find to carry him across the estuary of the Hudson to Perth Amboy. But an autumn squall caught the craft midpassage and tore away its rotted sail, preventing it from entering the sheltered strait west of Staten Island, driving it instead east across the Hudson’s mouth toward Long Island. Amid the pitching of the small vessel, a drunken Dutch passenger was hurled overboard; Franklin, the most alert and active person on the boat, pulled him back in by the scruff of his shaggy head. The fellow, sobered only slightly by his close brush with a watery death, proceeded to fall asleep in the scuttle.
As the wind drove the stricken vessel closer to Long Island, Franklin and the others looked for a suitable landing. But the beach was rocky and the surf high, and to risk both was more than the ferryman was willing. So they dropped anchor to ride out the storm. By now the drunken Dutchman clearly had the better part of the bargain; the spray from the water had doused everyone almost as thoroughly as his ducking had wetted him, but at least he was unconscious. Some villagers on shore saw the boat bouncing beyond the breakers; the ferryman, Franklin, and the others shouted for them to come fetch them in smaller boats they could see lying by. But the villagers chose not to hazard their lives for these strangers and went back to their houses.
Although the wind gradually abated, Franklin and the others spent a most uncomfortable night on the water—cold, wet, hungry, and thirsty. A single dirty bottle of rum had to sustain them as what should have been a passage of a few hours stretched well beyond twenty-four. The next morning, with the storm over and the wind shifting again to the east, the master of the craft jury-rigged a sheet that carried them by nightfall on the second day to Perth Amboy.
Franklin, feverish from the strain and the exposure, collapsed into the first bed he could find. Just before passing out, however, he remembered reading somewhere that a large dose of water at the onset of a fever could forestall it. So he quaffed several glasses, then collapsed again. During most of the night he tossed fitfully, sweating profusely, but finally he fell asleep, and he awoke feeling as hale as healthy seventeen-year-olds generally do.
He made another ferry passage, uneventful this time, across the Raritan River and set out on foot in the direction of Burlington. There he hoped to catch a boat down the Delaware for Philadelphia. The storm of two days earlier had given way to a hard rain, which, after what he had already experienced, dampened his spirits as much as his body. “I was thoroughly soaked, and by noon a good deal tired, so I stopped at a poor inn, where I stayed all night, beginning now to wish that I had never left home.” Moreover, in his bedraggled condition he looked the fugitive he was, or something similar. “I found by the questions asked me I was suspected to be some runaway servant, and in danger of being taken up on that suspicion.” But he kept to himself, found a dark corner to the side of the fire, and retired early.
The next morning he headed out with the first travelers and made it almost to Burlington by nightfall. This evening passed more pleasantly than the previous; his host, a Dr. Brown, delighted to find a guest whose reading and interests approached his. Franklin and the physician spent hours conversing on various topics. (The acquaintance struck up on this occasion continued, as it happened, for the rest of Brown’s life.)
Rested and with his spirits revived, Franklin walked the remaining several miles to Burlington the following morning, a Saturday. To his renewed discouragement, however, he discovered that he had just missed the regular packet boat to Philadelphia and that the next would not be leaving until Tuesday. An elderly matron of the village took pity on him, fed him a dinner of ox cheek, and offered to lodge him till the boat came. He accepted the invitation and resigned himself to a long weekend in the hinterlands of New Jersey. But that evening after supper, while stretching his legs by the bank of the Delaware, he spied a boat that appeared to be headed decisively downstream. His inquiries revealed that it was indeed bound for Philadelphia, and, yes, there was room for one more. With no time to beg leave of his hostess, he climbed aboard, and off they went. The current was nearly slack in this part of the river, and the wind afforded little help, so the young and strong among the passengers took turns at the oars. Franklin, younger and stronger than most, pulled more than his share.
They rowed for several hours through the darkness until some on board wondered whether they had passed their destination by mistake. Tired and uncertain, the rowers refused to pull anymore. A collective decision was made to put in to shore, where several of the passengers started a fire of old fence rails they stumbled upon, to ward off the cold of the October night. At daylight one of them recognized their campsite as being only a short distance above Philadelphia. They wearily clambered back into the boat and finished their voyage, landing early on Sunday morning at the wharf at the foot of Market Street.
As Franklin walked up from the dock, the ravages of the South Sea collapse remained everywhere apparent. “I saw most of the houses in Walnut Street between Second and Front Streets with bills on their doors, to be let,” he recalled; “and many likewise in Chestnut Street and other streets, which made me then think the inhabitants of the city were one after another deserting it.”
At the time, Franklin could not connect the empty houses and shuttered shops with the collapse of the money supply in London. The money supply that worried him was his own. He touched shore in Philadelphia with a single Dutch dollar in his pocket, received in change in New York. He also had a hole in his belly from four days on the road and a long night of rowing and shivering.
He got his first lesson in imperial economics when he tried to purchase breakfast and discovered, to his relief and gratification, that one Dutch dollar went further in Philadelphia than it did farther north. Upon meeting a boy carrying a basket of bread, he inquired as to the loaves’ provenance. The boy pointed in the direction of Second Street; Franklin’s hunger-sharpened senses guided him the rest of the way to the bakery. He asked for biscuit, the sort of thing Boston’s bakers produced by the barrel for the ship trade. Philadelphia’s bakers made nothing of the sort, he was told. He requested a threepenny loaf—in Boston a step up from biscuit. He learned that threepenny loaves were not made in Philadelphia either. At a loss, he asked for threepence’ worth of whatever they did make in this city. The baker handed him three large, puffy rolls, each the size of the threepenny loaves he had been accustomed to purchase in Boston. The rolls were too big to fit in his pockets, and he had no bag to carry them—customers being expected to supply their own. So he tucked one under his right arm, one under his left, and walked out the door taking large bites from the third.
As he proceeded up Market Street, munching his breakfast, he began to feel both conspicuous and out of place. He had not bat
hed in several days. He was wearing the same clothes that had been soaked by the salt water of the Hudson estuary and the rain of New Jersey; from his pockets hung dirty stockings, shirts, and underwear. He knew no one in the town, nor where he was going. Years later he remembered the “most awkward ridiculous appearance” he made.
Another person who evidently thought so was a girl somewhat younger than he, standing in the door of her father’s house on the city’s main thoroughfare. Ben did not know her name, nor she his. But he noticed her, and she him—which made him feel all the more awkward.
He turned and headed back toward the river, where at least he had the passing acquaintance of those he had come downstream with, some of whom were continuing on shortly. Although the first roll merely dulled his hunger, he decided to stop advertising his poverty and gave the other two to a woman and her child in the boat. The bread had made him thirsty; he helped himself to water from the river and freshened his face at the same time.
By now the inhabitants of the town were up and about. As a group they were clean and well dressed—which again reminded Franklin that he was neither—and as a group they seemed to be walking in a single direction. He fell into step and was carried along to the Friends’ meeting house. No one questioned him at the door, and he allowed himself to be swept on in. As he had not been a regular at Boston’s South Church for years, he may or may not have expected a learned disquisition on the Scriptures or a soul-stirring description of the fate that awaited those who spurned God’s grace; what he did get was decidedly lower-key, in the Quaker fashion. After being up all night, and now warm and with at least a little food in his stomach, he soon grew drowsy and fell asleep. His hosts did not take his fatigue amiss; they let him slumber and gently woke him when the service was over.
Franklin followed the congregation out and, propelled as much by gravity as by any notion of where he was going, wandered back down toward the waterfront. A friendly-faced young man in the sober dress of a Quaker caught his eye; Franklin inquired as to where a stranger might find lodging. They were standing almost under the sign of the Three Mariners’ inn; how about this place? he asked. The Quaker replied that strangers did indeed lodge there, but not the sort a decent fellow ought to share a table or a bed with. If Franklin would follow him, he said—employing the thees and thous of his sect—he would point out a more reputable establishment. Together they walked a short way to the Crooked Billet on King Street, next to the river.
