The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Yet fortune refused to abandon the Americans. The continued pounding of the town, combined with some well-advertised preparations for a joint sea-land assault on the fortress, persuaded du Chambon to reconsider capitulation. He tested the idea on the leading merchants and citizens of Louisbourg, who urged him to surrender lest their property be destroyed. Satisfied he would not have to bear blame alone, he sued for peace. Pepperell and Warren accepted.

  The news of the victory traveled fast. In Philadelphia, Franklin made it a lead item in the Gazette:

  Wednesday last, a great number of guns were distinctly heard in several places round this city, the occasion of which, as well as the place where they were fired, was unknown until the evening of the day following, when an express arrived with advice of the surrender of Louisbourg, which had caused great rejoicings at New York. ’Twas near nine o’clock when the express came in, yet the news flying instantly round the town, upwards of 20 bonfires were immediately lighted in the streets. The next day was spent in feasting, and drinking the healths of Governor Shirley, Gen. Pepperell, Com. Warren, &c. &c. under the discharge of cannon from the wharfs and vessels in the river; and the evening concluded with bonfires, illuminations, and other demonstrations of joy. A mob gathered, and began to break the windows of those houses that were not illuminated, but it was soon dispersed, and suppressed.

  Not surprisingly, the Americans acquired a high opinion of their prowess at war. Those who participated in the conquest itself took home a comment by the French port captain at Louisbourg, that he had first thought the New England men cowards but had changed his mind: “If they had a pick ax and spade, they would dig their way to hell and storm it.” Echoes from across the Atlantic swelled the American heads still further. The Gentleman’s Magazine threw laurels:

  Hail, heroes born for action, not for show! Who leave toupees and powder to the beau, To war’s dull pedants tedious rules of art, And know to conquer by a dauntless heart. Rough English virtue gives your deeds to fame And o’er the Old exalts New England’s name.

  Although the greatest honor accrued to those who actually fought at Louisbourg, the glow warmed hearts all over America. It fostered a belief that England depended on America for defense—frontier defense, anyway—rather than vice versa. Americans could stand on their own.

  From the belief they could stand on their own to the conclusion that they should stand on their own required another generation and a half, but the seeds of independence were germinating in the soil of colonial self-help. Although Ben Franklin, a city boy from birth, knew next to nothing of plowing and planting, on this subject he helped loosen the ground from which the shoots would emerge.

  To the surprise of the myopic among the Americans, and to the disappointment of even the perspicacious, the victory at Louisbourg did not end the war. Indeed, it had little effect at all beyond demoralizing the New Englanders who now had to garrison that chilly and forbidding rock, as the same task had demoralized the French. On the frontier, raiding parties of French and Indians beset isolated villages. In one notorious incident of November 1745, a band of three hundred French Canadians and two hundred Indians swept down upon the undefended village of Saratoga, New York, killing thirty, taking two or three times that many captive, and burning much of what could not be carried away.

  Massachusetts Governor Shirley, whose wave of fame from Louisbourg had yet to break, advocated an encore: an invasion of Canada. The goal was to thrust the French finally out of America; with the French gone, their Indian allies would have to come to terms with the English, as the Iroquois, for example, had already done. When King George II bestowed his royal approval upon the project, the other colonies were obliged to participate. Pennsylvania’s official cooperation came grudgingly; the Assembly loosened the purse strings with typical reluctance. Unofficially the Pennsylvanians betrayed greater eagerness. Four companies of volunteers rallied to the colors and prepared to march to Albany to join the rest of the invasion force.

  Among the volunteers was William Franklin. Fifteen-year-old Billy was showing the same rebelliousness his father had evinced at that age. The boy’s existence was, in material respects, easier than the father’s had been. In previous years Benjamin had bought Billy a pony to ride; he engaged a tutor to instruct him in reading and writing and numbers; he sent him to study with the best teacher of mathematics in the city; he enrolled him in the academy where the sons of the city’s gentry received the finest classical education.

  But Billy grew bored and, like his father, found himself drawn to dockside. The ships that lined the Delaware waterfront, like those of Benjamin’s Boston, came from all over the world; they promised adventures untold—or at least an escape from a life that weighed increasingly upon Billy’s broadening shoulders. Much as Ben had longed to do but been dissuaded, Billy packed a small kit, walked the few blocks to the quay, and sought a vessel to ship out on.

  It was Billy’s good luck, or so it initially seemed, that there was a war in progress. The waterfront was full of privateers, licensed pirates who needed hands for their dangerous but potentially lucrative work. One first mate liked Billy’s looks and signed him aboard. But before the craft weighed anchor, Ben discovered the boy’s absence and hurried to the wharf. After a brief search he found the lad and unceremoniously fetched him home.

  Franklin declined to blame himself for Billy’s attempted escape. “No one imagined it was hard usage at home that made him do this,” he explained to his sister Jane. “Every one that knows me thinks I am too indulgent a parent.” Remembering his own youth, he attributed Billy’s restlessness to his age and to the allure of what the privateers might win. “When boys see prizes brought in, and quantities of money shared among the men, and their gay living, it fills their heads with notions.”

  Franklin did not presume to banish those notions; such would be a fool’s errand. Instead he sought to redirect them slightly, from the unforgiving sea to the somewhat safer land. He let Billy know he would not object if the boy enlisted among the volunteers for the Canada expedition. Billy happily took the offer. Delighted at putting whatever distance between himself and his home—yet unaware that in doing so he was simultaneously putting himself on a path that would lead to a terminal distancing from his father—Ensign William Franklin marched up the road toward Albany in the service of his king.

  At forty Franklin felt no desire to head off to Canada himself. Yet he supported the idea of colonial defense, and when the Assembly continued to ignore the necessities of provincial security, he took up the weapon he had long since mastered: the printing press. In the autumn of 1747 he wrote and published a pamphlet entitled Plain Truth: Or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia and Province of Pennsylvania. “War at this time rages over a great part of the known world,” he declared. “Our news-papers are weekly filled with fresh accounts of the destruction it every where occasions.” Heretofore Pennsylvania had been spared the worst of the violence, Franklin said, but this was due to an accident of geography—that Pennsylvania was surrounded by other colonies more directly in the line of fire—rather than the exertions of its inhabitants. Such safety as circumstance afforded could not be expected to last. Philadelphia’s wealth supplied a strong inducement to attack by enemy privateers or warships, an inducement the city’s defenseless condition only intensified. As for the countryside beyond the city, it lay open to assault by Indians allied to the French. To be sure, Pennsylvania’s enlightened policies had won over the most important of the neighboring tribes, but the loyalty of those tribes could hardly be taken for granted when France aided their enemies and neither England nor Pennsylvania provided countervailing assistance.

  Should the tissue of what passed for provincial defense be torn, the consequence for Philadelphians would be swift and brutal:

  On the first alarm, terror will spread over all; and as no man can with certainty depend that another will stand by him, beyond doubt very many will seek safety by a speedy flight
. Those that are reputed rich will flee through fear of torture to make them produce more than they are able. The man that has a wife and children will find them hanging on his neck, beseeching him with tears to quit the city, and save his life, to guide and protect them in that time of general desolation and ruin. All will run into confusion, amidst cries and lamentations.

  If such were the case in the event of advance alarm, what would happen if the blow fell by surprise?

  Confined to your houses, you will have nothing to trust to but the enemy’s mercy. Your best fortune will be to fall under the power of commanders of king’s ships, able to control the mariners, and not into the hands of licentious privateers. Who can, without the utmost horror, conceive the miseries of the latter! when your persons, fortunes, wives and daughters, shall be subject to the wanton and unbridled rage, rapine and lust, of Negroes, Molattoes, and others, the vilest and most abandoned of mankind. A dreadful scene!

  The author of this lurid forecast identified himself only as “A Tradesman of Philadelphia,” and it was as a tradesman that Franklin made his appeal. Neither the party of religion—the Quakers—nor the party of wealth—the rich merchants and their allies—had lifted a finger in defense of the city. Between the “mistaken principles of religion” of the former and the “pride, envy and implacable resentment” of the latter, the lives and fortunes of “the middling people, the farmers, shopkeepers and tradesmen of this city and country” were in the dire jeopardy they faced. Franklin called on the middling classes to seize control of their fate:

  At present we are like the separate filaments of flax before the thread is formed, without strength because without connection. But UNION would make us strong and even formidable. Though the Great should neither help nor join us, though they should even oppose our uniting, from some mean views of their own, yet if we resolve upon it, and if it please GOD to inspire us with the necessary prudence and vigour, it may be effected.

  Franklin’s warning and appeal found a ready audience among ordinary Pennsylvanians, and to a lesser extent in other colonies. The first edition of this pamphlet—numbering two thousand—sold out quickly, requiring a second printing. A German translation soon appeared, for that growing community of German immigrants in the Pennsylvania backcountry. Selections from the pamphlet ran in newspapers in the leading cities of America.

  Encouraged by this response, Franklin supplied specific recommendations for provincial defense. He drafted a charter for an “Association,” or militia, of volunteers drawn from the public at large. Members would furnish their own weapons, form companies according to neighborhoods, choose officers by ballot of the men, and convene a general military council of representatives from each company. Civic virtue, rather than compulsion, would serve as the basis for the actions of all involved.

  Franklin presented the plan at a meeting in the public hall built for George Whitefield and the awakeners. “The house was pretty full,” Franklin recalled. “I harangued them a little on the subject, read the paper and explained it, and then distributed the copies.” Public speaking had never been Franklin’s forte and never would be; he felt obliged to elaborate his “harangue” in the Gazette in the following days.

  Here the radical nature of his plan became apparent. Government having failed the people, he said, the people were entirely justified in assuming for themselves an essential role of government. “Where a Government takes proper measures to protect the people under its care, such a proceeding might have been thought both unnecessary and unjustifiable. But here it is quite the reverse.” The insistence on organizing companies according to neighborhoods was intended “to prevent people’s sorting themselves into companies according to their ranks in life, their quality or station.” The tradesman-author was also a leveler. “’tis designed to mix the great and small together, for the sake of union and encouragement. Where danger and duty are equal to all, there should be no distinction from circumstances, but all be on the level.” In the closest thing to an admission of the radicalism of his proposal, Franklin took pains to express “a dutiful regard to the government we are under.” The Association was a wartime organization only. “’tis heartily to be wished that a safe and honourable peace may the very next year render it useless.”

  The plan was a stunning success and Franklin the hero of the hour. Five hundred men took the pledge at that first meeting; within days the number from the city alone surmounted one thousand; eventually some ten thousand subscribed from all over the colony. Soon the companies were drilling, converting the facility with firearms many American males (not to mention some females) acquired in childhood into something approximating military effectiveness. Women’s auxiliaries complemented the work of the men, sewing flags for the different companies, often with colors and mottoes suggested by Franklin. He himself was voted colonel of the Philadelphia regiment, but, lacking any military experience, he declined the honor.

  There was more to the scheme. Enlisting bodies in the defense of home and hearth was relatively easy, especially when actual fighting remained merely hypothetical. Arming those enlistees with rifles and other small weapons was scarcely harder, especially since many already owned such weapons. (For the weaponless, or those wishing to upgrade the household arsenal, Franklin advertised in the Gazette: “A parcel of good muskets, all well fitted with bayonets, belts and cartouch-boxes, and buff slings to cast over the shoulder, very useful to such as have occasion to ride with their arms; to be sold by B. Franklin.”)

  Artillery was another matter. Needed to defend the city against marine assault, cannons were not the sort of thing hanging in everyman’s back room. Instead they had to be purchased, at a price commensurate with their scarcity.

  Because the Assembly refused to appropriate the funds, Franklin proposed another extragovernmental scheme. He organized a lottery in which £20,000 of tickets would be sold; £17,000 would be paid out in prizes, with the balance of £3,000 being set aside for the purchase of cannons and the like. The idea of a lottery did not originate with Franklin; the practice had already come over from England and been employed in New England and New York. But he adapted it to Pennsylvania’s circumstances. Many of the same persons who objected on pacifist grounds to buying weapons for the province now objected on anti-gambling grounds to a lottery. To overcome their objections, Franklin enlisted the support of the leading men of the city, including James Logan, whose Quaker credentials went back to William Penn. Logan once explained to Franklin the difference between his own and Penn’s views on the legitimacy of self-defense. Queen Anne’s War was on while Penn and Logan made the crossing to America; en route their ship encountered another vessel, which the prudent captain presumed to be an enemy. He ordered all hands and passengers to prepare to defend the craft and themselves, but he made special allowance for Penn and his Quaker company, knowing their scruples. They might retire belowdecks. James Logan, however, remained above and was assigned to a gun. After a tense half hour, the approaching ship turned out to be a friend, and Logan went below to share the welcome news with Penn and the others. To his surprise, Penn upbraided him for staying on deck and making ready to fight. Such was not the Quaker way. Logan, irritated at being chastised in front of the entire company, spoke more than he might have in private; he replied that it was rather late for Penn to be complaining. As he—Logan—worked for Penn, Penn might have ordered him below with the rest but had not, instead being willing to let Logan face the danger on behalf of those who would not.

  Nearly a half century later, Logan continued to believe that while nonviolence was an ideal toward which humanity ought to strive, it need not be an altar on which pacifists must sacrifice themselves. “Thy project of a lottery to clear £3,000 is excellent,” he wrote Franklin, “and I hope it will be speedily filled; nor shall I be wanting.” Indeed he was not, putting down £250 toward the first issue of lottery tickets. Others followed Logan’s lead, snatching tickets by the fistful for self-defense and civic pride—and in some cases for resale i
n other provinces. Fire companies purchased tickets in bulk—leading Franklin to suggest a ruse to one of his fellow firemen. If the lottery subscription appeared to be falling short, the two of them would propose to their company the purchase of a fire engine. “The Quakers can have no objection to that,” Franklin explained. “And then if you nominate me, and I you, as a committee for that purpose, we will buy a great gun, which is certainly a fire engine.”

  Such shenanigans proved unnecessary, as the tickets disappeared as fast as Franklin could print them. Within a short while he was able to boast, in the name of his fellow citizens, that “the late lotteries in New-England and New-York have taken more months to fill than this has weeks.”

  Having raised the money for a battery of guns, Franklin now had to find the guns. This was the more difficult part of the task, as the absence of cannon foundries in America meant, in the short term (that is, until the arrival of reinforcements from England) that each piece added to Pennsylvania’s arsenal subtracted a piece from New Jersey’s or New York’s or Massachusetts’s. In the state of general alarm at the time, few governors or assemblies were willing to sell cannon that might be needed in their own colonies’ defense; the most they would do was loan some ordnance.