The First American

by H. W. Brands

  His father was devastated. “I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation,” he wrote a half century later. With a grim sense of civic duty, he noted in the Gazette that Franky had not died following inoculation, as was widely assumed of the son of a known supporter of the practice, but following failure to inoculate.

  It was part of Franklin’s credo to look forever forward, to dwell not on the past but on the future. On most subjects he followed this aspect of his own advice. For Franky he made an exception. The grieving father allowed himself—or perhaps he simply could not help it—to wonder what the boy would have become. For the rest of his life the sight of other boys caused him to reflect on Franky. In 1772 he responded to reports that one of his grandsons was growing up to be a fine lad, by declaring that such information “brings often afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky, though now dead thirty-six years, whom I have seldom seen equaled in every thing, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh.”

  What effect Franky’s death had on Deborah can only be imagined. She did not keep a diary, and although she certainly shared her sorrow with her husband, and perhaps even more with her mother, still living with them, neither of them recorded her feelings for posterity.

  The pain of losing a child is always excruciating, but for Debbie it was all the more excruciating from the fact that she confronted the real possibility that she might never have another. At the time of Franky’s death she and Franklin had been married for more than six years. There is no reason to believe they were not trying to have more children; certainly Franklin, he of the dozen siblings plus two, looked forward to numerous progeny. (Debbie was one of seven children, four of whom died before reaching adulthood.) But in those six years the two had been able to produce just one child. And now that one was gone. In little more than a year Debbie would be thirty, her best childbearing years probably behind her. She might never see a child of hers grow up, might never have grandchildren. It was a bleak prospect.

  The effect of Franky’s death on Franklin’s other son is harder to guess. Billy was six or nearly so at his half brother’s passing. He may have been too young to appreciate that his situation was different from Franky’s—specifically, that he was Franklin’s son but not Debbie’s. The loss of Franky likely made his father appreciate Billy more than ever, but the effect it had on Debbie’s feelings toward Billy is problematic. She would have been more than human not to feel a certain resentment that her son had been taken but not that other woman’s. In the close quarters of the crowded house—which sheltered not only Franklin, Debbie, Billy, and Sarah Read but also one or more apprentices and journeymen and, at various times, Debbie’s siblings John and Frances—this resentment must have been palpable. Franklin would have felt it and understood. Billy would have felt and not understood.

  Full as it was, the house would soon be fuller—but not of the children of Debbie. In 1733 Franklin had journeyed to New England to visit his parents and sister Jane (and Jane’s children, including a son named Benjamin) in Boston, and his brothers John and Peter (the soap-makers) and James (who had finally given up on Boston) in Newport. A decade had diminished the antagonism between Ben and James; so also did a decline in James’s health. Though not yet forty, James felt himself failing, and after evincing his love and affection for his younger brother, he implored Ben to look after his ten-year-old son and namesake when he was gone. In particular he wanted the lad brought up in the printing trade, to carry on his father’s work—and his uncle’s. Ben, who had never forgotten that he had absconded from James with time left on his indenture, could hardly refuse.

  What Debbie thought of the arrangement when Ben got back to Philadelphia is open to speculation. Perhaps she judged that another body in the household—especially a relatively small one—would scarcely be noticed. On the other hand, it may have been Debbie who was behind the decision to send young James off to school for a few years following the elder James’s death in 1735. Not till 1740 was he brought into the household as an apprentice. Ben duly taught him the trade while his mother, James’s widow, Ann, carried on the business in Rhode Island. When the lad achieved the appropriate age and expertise, his uncle updated the Newport shop with new types and got him off to a fair start. “Thus it was that I made my brother ample amends for the service I had deprived him of by leaving so early.”

  7

  Arc of Empire

  1741–48

  “We have had a very healthy summer, and a fine harvest. The country is filled with bread, but as trade declines since the war began, I know not what our farmers will do for a market.”

  Franklin was writing to his parents in September 1744, and the war he referred to was the fourth installment of the colonial contest that formed the backdrop—and frequently the foreground—to the history of the Atlantic basin during Franklin’s lifetime. The contest had roots in the struggles of the rising nation-states of Europe for control of the new discoveries across the seas. Portugal and Spain were the early leaders, with the Portuguese monopolizing the trade routes to the East via the South

  (that is, around Africa) and the Spanish capitalizing on their conquests in the Americas, encountered accidentally while searching for trade routes to the East via the West. The English and French were slower to exploit the opportunities of expansion overseas, but after sorting out the squabbles surrounding the Reformation of the sixteenth century—a sorting that left France in the Catholic camp but put England among the Protestants—these northerners launched their own imperial ventures. The English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 signaled the start of the eclipse of the Iberians; it was followed by the planting of English and French colonies in North America.

  The English got the better of the planting, sowing the seeds of settlement in the relatively fertile soil and equable climates of the Atlantic seaboard between the middle thirties and low forties of northern latitude. The French put down roots, or tried to, in the rocky glacial leftovers of the St. Lawrence Valley. The French also tried to force their way into the Mississippi and Ohio valleys; this effort, superimposed upon the larger struggle between the English and French dynasties on the eastern shore of the Atlantic, was what led to the series of colonial wars in which Franklin eventually became involved.

  The first of the series, named by the Americans for English King William, lasted eight years and entailed numerous atrocities, including one massacre in New Hampshire perpetrated by a raiding party that was, in Cotton Mather’s characterization, “half Indianized French, and half Frenchified Indians.” King William’s War ended a decade before Franklin was born, and terminated in a treaty that restored the status quo, to the relief of the monarchs and ministers responsible but the disgust of most of those who did the actual fighting.

  The second war was under way at the time of Franklin’s birth and was christened for Queen Anne. (No one thought of naming wars after the French monarch, since for longer than most people lived in those days, specifically from 1643 to 1715, all the wars would have been named for the same person, Louis XIV). Queen Anne’s War featured the seizure by Britain—as it was now properly called, following the recent unification of England and Scotland—of Gibraltar from France’s ally Spain, and it ended during the seventh year of Franklin’s life. The settlement confirmed the Gibraltar seizure, to the everlasting humiliation of the Spanish; awarded Acadia and Newfoundland to Britain, to the lasting, if not quite everlasting, vexation of the French; and made Britain’s enterprising slave traders the exclusive (legal) suppliers of captured Africans for the Spanish American market (not to mention the British American market).

  Had Louis XIV not finally died shortly after the conclusion of Queen Anne’s War, the third round of fighting probably would have started sooner than it did. But the regents who ruled in the name of Louis’s minor heir lacked the Sun King’s sense of entitlement to primacy among nations, a sense that almost certainly would have provoked His Solarity to repudiate the Treaty of
Utrecht. Meanwhile the Mississippi Valley absorbed more of France’s expansionist energies than anyone had imagined, mitigating the hurt of the loss of territory in the northeast. As a consequence, an entire generation—Franklin’s generation—grew up with the odd notion that peace was the rule among the imperial powers, and war the exception.

  The error of this notion became apparent during Franklin’s fourth decade. A British smuggler named Robert Jenkins was caught in the act by Spanish authorities, who chastised him by slicing off his ear. He retrieved the alienated part and for seven years carried it across the seven seas in a handkerchief in his pocket. Eventually he found his way to Westminster, arriving—not coincidentally—at a moment when English Protestant passions were again rising against the Spanish papists. He produced his leathery relic, to the professed shock of all the honorable members (who in fact saw far worse examples of human cruelty on the streets of London every day). It would be a few years yet before Samuel Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels; perhaps the pioneer lexicographer was inspired by Jenkins, who declared that at the moment the Spanish sword was flashing down, “I commended my soul to God, and my cause to my country!”

  Parliament and country rose in anger—however belated—and war ensued. The War of Jenkins’s Ear was noteworthy for the massively stupid loss of British and American lives before the walls of Cartegena, Spain’s Caribbean stronghold in New Granada. The American survivors began to form an opinion once commonplace but since forgotten: that they were pawns in Britain’s imperial wars. And now it was evident that they were incompetently played pawns at that. (Whether from stubborn loyalty or as a reminder of what he had been through, an American captain named Lawrence Washington limped back to Virginia and called his hilltop plantation above the Potomac after the British admiral at Cartagena, Edward Vernon.)

  The War of Jenkins’s Ear segued seamlessly into King George’s War when France joined the fight on the side of the Spanish. This conflict was the one Franklin referred to in his letter to Josiah and Abiah. The high point of the war, certainly from an American perspective, was the siege of Louisbourg, the French fortress on Cape Breton Island that commanded the entrance to the St. Lawrence River and harassed American fishing vessels on the Grand Banks. As far east as it was, Louisbourg received news of the formal declaration of war before that news reached New England; privateers out of Louisbourg exploited their informational advantage and swooped down upon American vessels, ultimately ranging as far south as the estuary of the Delaware River, where they seized ships almost within hailing distance of the docks of Philadelphia. The French military governor of Louisbourg meanwhile launched a surprise attack on an English fishing village on the Nova Scotian shore. The commander of the attack followed up his easy victory there with a fatal blunder: instead of transporting the prisoners straight to Boston as promised in the surrender terms, he stopped at Louisbourg on the way. This allowed the prisoners to observe that the fortress was poorly maintained and even less well manned. When they reached Boston they shared this intelligence with Governor William Shirley, who determined to put it to use. He advocated an offensive against Louisbourg to end forever the depredations of the French and their savage Indian allies upon the peace-loving and God-fearing people of New England. If the expedition made a hero of its sponsor, all the better.

  Shirley struck a sympathetic nerve with his call for ships and troops and money. The maritime interests of Franklin’s birthplace itched to be rid of the Gallic menace. Every New England family recalled horror stories of women and children being slaughtered by fiendish red men, provoked and provisioned by the French. The infamous massacre at Deerfield, Massachusetts, was forty years old but more horrible for the telling and retelling. Everyone knew that the Indian raids would never cease until the French were thrust out of Canada. The Massachusetts General Court—the same body that had chastised James Franklin for sedition—instructed Shirley to raise an army of 3,000 volunteers. He persuaded the popular and civic-minded merchant William Pepperell to lead the force and promised easy plunder to all who participated in storming the fortress and reducing the town it guarded. Shirley figuratively brought aboard local preachers, who literally brought aboard their lay brothers. George Whitefield provided a motto for what quickly assumed the trappings of a Protestant crusade: “Nil desperandum Christo duce.” (“None despairing where Christ leads.” Apparently the great revivalist was not bothered by the fact that Latin was the language of the papists.) Shirley invited the other colonies to join the crusade. Rhode Island promised a ship, sailors, and soldiers. Connecticut voted to dispatch a force of 500 men. New York sent cannon, vital for use against the walls of the French fort.

  The response from Pennsylvania was less enthusiastic. Governor George Thomas spoke openly for the plan, commending the New Englanders’ initiative to the Assembly. “The enterprise shows a fine public spirit in that people!” he declared. “And, if it succeeds, it will be greatly for the honour of His Majesty and the interest of all his colonies in North America.” In private, however, he expressed reservations, which strengthened the skeptics in the Assembly. The theology of the Quakers had attenuated over time; pacifism was not as central to the self-conception of the third generation of Friends in America as it had been to William Penn’s contemporaries. Yet there remained an uneasiness with war and war preparations, especially when they entailed expense and risk, as these did. Non-Quakers in the Assembly joined the party of the founders in objecting to the cost and hazard and in complaining that they had not been consulted by the New Englanders in advance of the decision to sail against Cape Breton. “We should not think it prudent,” the Assembly concluded, “to unite in an enterprise where the expense must be great, perhaps much blood shed, and the event very uncertain.”

  Franklin observed the Louisbourg debate as clerk of the Assembly. This extremely part-time job, which he had commenced in 1736, was hardly in demand, paying little in cash and less in honor. Its chief recommendation to Franklin was that it facilitated his work as printer of the Assembly’s proceedings, which did make him some money. It also afforded a firsthand view of Pennsylvania politics.

  What he witnessed in the debate over the Louisbourg expedition did not impress him. “When I compare the Governor’s message to the House with his private conversation,” Franklin noted to himself, “I cannot but admire at his insincerity, to commend the undertaking publicly, that he might gain the applause of the Governor and people of New England, and the Ministry at home [that is, in England], at the same time that he privately does all in his power to disappoint it.” The Assembly was no more ingenuous. Remarking the enthusiasm of several members for New England’s success, even while they precluded a role for Pennsylvania, Franklin asserted, “If it be against their consciences, they ought not by any means to encourage military proceedings in others more than themselves.” To the faces of these same members he spoke more tartly. “I told them those people [the New Englanders] were as much obliged to them for their good wishes as the poor in the Scripture to those that say, Be ye warmed and ye filled.” Again speaking to himself, Franklin added, “I think they ought to be open and honest and give the true reason, and not trifle in the manner they do, by pretending, among other things, that they are offended in not being consulted in such an affair.” Neither side had done itself credit. “The Governor and Assembly have been only acting a farce and playing tricks to amuse the world.”

  The Louisbourg offensive went forward without Pennsylvania’s help—but not without Pennsylvania’s attention. “Our people are extremely impatient to hear of your success at Cape Breton,” Franklin wrote his Boston brother John a month after the expedition set sail. “My shop is filled with thirty inquiries at the coming of every post.” Most of those who crowded into the Market Street shop were military innocents—this being Quaker country—and they wondered that the fortress had not already fallen. Franklin was scarcely surprised. “I tell them I shall be glad to hear that news three months hence,” he
reported to John. “Fortified towns are hard nuts to crack; and your teeth have not been accustomed to it. Taking strong places is a particular trade, which you have taken up without serving an apprenticeship to it. Armies and veterans need skilful engineers to direct them in their attack. Have you any?” Yet these objections hardly registered with many who watched the proceeding from afar. “Some seem to think forts are as easy taken as snuff.”

  Franklin could not resist a laugh at those who treated the expedition as a crusade and called upon God to guarantee its success. “You have a fast and prayer day for that purpose,” he wrote John, “in which I compute five hundred thousand petitions were offered up to the same effect in New England, which added to the petitions of every family morning and evening, multiplied by the number of days since January 25th, make forty-five millions of prayers; which, set against the prayers of a few priests in the garrison, to the Virgin Mary, give a vast balance in your favor.” There was serious theology at issue here, Franklin teased. “If you do not succeed, I fear I shall have but an indifferent opinion of Presbyterian prayers in such cases, as long as I live. Indeed, in attacking strong towns I should have more dependence on works than on faith, for, like the kingdom of heaven, they are to be taken by force and violence; and in a French garrison I suppose there are devils of that kind, that they are not to be cast out by prayers and fasting, unless it be by their own fasting for want of provisions.”

  Whatever it did for popular piety, the Louisbourg expedition benefited Franklin’s news business. The Gazette had gained readers each year since its establishment, although Andrew Bradford’s Mercury fought a stubborn rearguard action. In November 1740 Bradford announced the inauguration of the first magazine to be published in the American colonies. Entitled The American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies, it would afford readers a broad perspective on public affairs, literature, and the arts and would cost twelve shillings in Pennsylvania currency for a year’s subscription. Publication would commence in March 1741, assuming that sufficient subscribers paid their fee.