by H. W. Brands
Pennsylvania politics in the 1750s involved concentric circles of controversy. The innermost circle—at least by their thinking—comprised the proprietors, the heirs of William Penn. Unlike most British colonies in North America, proprietary Pennsylvania was ruled not by the Crown (at least not directly) but by the Penn family. Yet the family was not what it had been under William—or perhaps, considering the problems he had with his father, it was. William himself fell on hard times during his last years, to the point where Pennsylvania had to support the Penns, rather than the other way around. Times got harder after the great man’s death, as the heirs squabbled over the estate. William Jr. had renounced the Quaker way for Anglicanism and then died shortly after his father, but neither action prevented William Jr.’s son from trying to break the will on grounds of his grandfather’s septuagenarian senility. The assertion of mental incompetence was accurate enough, but it did not endear him to his father’s siblings. For two decades the heirs tussled over who should get what; not until the mid-1740s did Thomas Penn, the founding William’s son by his second wife, emerge as the controlling figure within the family and the prominent proprietor of the colony.
The quarrels were costly, for during that critical generation the initiative in Pennsylvania politics slipped from the proprietors to the Assembly, the second circle of controversy. The slippage started during the tenure of Franklin’s notional patron, Governor William Keith, whose flippant attitude toward financial commitments was hardly confined to Franklin. Keith’s many creditors lobbied to keep him in office, on the optimistic argument that a governor’s salary provided them at least the prospect of being repaid. But the English Quakers close to the Penns contended that the behavior of Keith—who disported himself with ladies-not-his-wife in a decidedly un-Quaker manner—constituted an insult and an embarrassment. As the creditors eventually lost hope of seeing their money, the Quakers had their way, and Keith was forced out of the governorship.
Yet he was far from finished. He charged his expulsion to the aristocratic machinations of the proprietors, and immediately recast himself as the champion of the people, who constituted the third circle. Taking up his pen, Keith fabricated a character called Roger Plowman, who argued the case for the common folk against the learned and favored. “We are made of the same flesh and bone, and after the same manner with themselves,” said Plowman, speaking to a character modeled on James Logan, “so that our sense and feeling of happiness and misery, justice and injustice, good fortune and ill fortune, are much the same with us all. And I appeal to you, Master, if a quiet enjoyment of, and equal support under these opposite states in life, respectively, be not the chief end, if not the whole business of civil government?”
The proprietors thought otherwise; the Penns expected their colony to provide them an income. And they understood that it would not do so if Keith won a following, as he appeared to be doing. Soon after his ouster as governor, the voters of Philadelphia elected him to the Assembly. His supporters celebrated their victory by burning the public pillory and stocks, which served as symbols of proprietary oppression of the ordinary people. (The collateral combustion of several stalls at the market was probably an accident.) Two weeks later, when Keith claimed his seat in the Assembly, he arrived leading a column of eighty horsemen, followed by a small army of the sweat-stained workforce—what a nervous Isaac Norris, the head of the Quaker party in the Assembly, scornfully called the “rabble butchers, porters and tag-rags.”
But then, after sending shivers through the likes of Logan and Norris, Keith abruptly disappeared. Because his creditors were the first to complain of his absence, gossip congealed around assertions that he was fleeing to escape debtors’ prison. As matters turned out, although he kept ahead of his American claimants, their English counterparts caught up with him, and he landed in a London jail. He never ceased spinning schemes for raising money, even when those schemes contradicted earlier-enunciated convictions. At one point, trying to curry favor with the imperial government, he proposed a plan for levying a stamp tax in the American colonies. Like most of his other concoctions, this one had come to naught by the time of his 1749 death.
The Keith phenomenon illuminated the overlap between the circles in Pennsylvania politics. Although the leaders of the Assembly often construed their interests in opposition to those of the proprietor, at times they found the proprietor an ally against challenge from below. Pennsylvania was far from a democracy, nor was it even a republic, but the limited suffrage it allowed to relatively ordinary people rendered the provincial status quo subject to disturbance by those who found the status quo unsatisfactory. The Penn family provided the focus of much of the dissatisfaction, especially when the proprietors insisted on their historic prerogatives, including exemption of their enormous landholdings from taxation. Yet the first families of the colony—the Logans, Norrises, Pembertons (this last including merchant Israel and his brothers)—by standing on their historic prerogatives, notably control of the Assembly and other offices, often appeared equal impediments to needed reforms.
To some extent Pennsylvania provided a scale model of British North America at large. What the king was to the colonies together, the Penns, mutatis mutandis, were to Pennsylvania. What the London-linked ruling elites were to the British colonies, the Logan-Norris-Pemberton clique was to Pennsylvania. It was no accident that when revolution began to bubble in America against the king and his colonial officers, much of the bubbling could be traced to Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians had been practicing for years.
Franklin practiced inconspicuously at first. Franklin was no political showman like William Keith; when he entered the Assembly in August 1751, he came not mounted but afoot, walking quietly up Chestnut Street to the State House. He made no large impression at first, possessing neither oratorical skills nor particular desire for attention. His legislative life consisted of committee work: a committee to locate a bridge across the Schuylkill River, a committee to report on expenditures relating to Indian affairs, a committee to revise the minutes of the Assembly, a committee to draft a message to the proprietors, a committee to prepare answers to the governor’s messages, a committee to regulate the size of bakers’ loaves, a committee to consider a tax on dogs.
Not all the work was so mundane. Perhaps in recognition of his earlier advocacy of paper currency, perhaps reflecting his experience printing the paper notes, Franklin gained appointment to a committee on the currency. Although the report submitted by the committee to the entire Assembly carried the signature of the five committee members, the substance and style of the report plainly indicate Franklin’s authorship.
In this report Franklin evinced an even stronger conviction than he had in 1729 that more money meant a better future for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. He described the moment in the early 1720s when the colonial economy had languished for want of means of exchange; in the prose of the report the reader can almost hear the echoing footsteps of the fugitive lad from Boston who was dismayed to discover the shops shut up in this city where he hoped to find a job. But then the Assembly had seen fit to print paper money, and “from that period both the city and country have flourished and increased in a most surprising manner.” Franklin detailed the growth at considerable length, adducing evidence from tax rolls, customhouse accounts, and bills of mortality. He contended that the creation of new currency would allow the past growth to continue, principally by maintaining or increasing rates paid to laborers, which in turn would enable them, as it had their counterparts in the past, to become landowners. While acknowledging that this would harm employers of labor, Franklin argued that the benefits to society as a whole outweighed the costs to that small group. “By rendering the means of purchasing land easy to the poor, the dominions of the Crown are strengthened and extended; the Proprietaries dispose of their wilderness territory; and the British nation secures the benefit of its manufactures, and increases the demand for them. For so long as land can be easily procured for settlements between the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, so long will labour be dear in America; and while labour continues dear, we can never rival the artificers, or interfere with the trade of our Mother Country.”
Franklin’s associates in the Assembly found his arguments convincing. The house resolved that an expansion of the currency was essential to the well-being of the province, and it directed Franklin and several other members with longer legislative service to draft a bill implementing the resolution. The bill passed the Assembly but then encountered objection from Governor James Hamilton, who declared that recent irresponsibilities on currency issues in other colonies made any application to the Crown “very unseasonable.” The governor’s veto touched off a battle with the Assembly that would busy Franklin for several years.
Other battles were more easily won. For nearly two decades Franklin had lamented the lack of safety on the streets of Philadelphia after dark. The Quakers’ aversion to violence produced a criminal code decidedly less harsh than that of England or the other colonies; quite possibly for this reason, Philadelphia had a higher crime rate than other colonial cities. Franklin detected another reason as well: an inattention to policing that in itself was almost criminal. Householders in the city were liable for watch duty after dark but might buy their way out of this responsibility by paying the ward constable six shillings a year, with the fee ostensibly to be used to hire substitutes. In practice the money was more than necessary, and the watch fees became a profitable perquisite of the constables’ office. They also undermined the security of the city. “The Constable for a little drink often got such ragamuffins about him as a watch that reputable housekeepers did not choose to mix with,” Franklin wrote. “Walking the rounds too was often neglected, and most of the night spent in tippling.”
Franklin first proposed a reform of the watch system to the Junto, but after gaining approval there it failed to elicit the necessary official support. Not until the early 1750s, following a continued deterioration of street safety, was the Assembly persuaded to approve legislation enabling Philadelphia to effect necessary improvements—in particular, to raise the taxes required to light the streets and pay constables and watchmen sufficiently to make them take their jobs seriously.
Franklin, having pondered the problem for years, and now both an assemblyman and an alderman, was a natural to help draft orders for the new system. The orders specified the hours of duty for constables (ten at night till four in the morning from March to September, nine at night till six in the morning from September to March). They identified the precise street corners on which the watchmen were to stand and the rounds they were to walk (“Up Front-street, on the east side, to the first corner,” for the watchman stationed at Front and Union, “thence down Water-street, up Pine-street, down Second …”). They listed the sorts of troublemakers the constables and watchmen should be on the lookout for (“Night walkers, malefactors, rogues, vagabonds, and disorderly persons, who they shall find disturbing the public peace, or shall have just cause to suspect of any evil design”). And they characterized the duties of the watch (“To prevent any burglaries, robberies, outrages, and disorders and to apprehend any suspected persons who, in such times of confusion, may be feloniously carrying off the goods and effects of others”). In addition the watchmen should immediately raise the alarm “in case of fire breaking out or other great necessity.”
Enhancing official vigilance addressed one aspect of the crime problem, but it missed the problem’s roots: the proliferation of criminals. Since the seventeenth century the American colonies had been forced to serve as a dumping ground for criminals convicted in England. Colonial legislatures protested the practice of transportation of felons, only to have their protests ignored. Colonial editors denounced the policy, appending to their editorials lurid descriptions of what the policy produced. The Gazette did its part in April 1751:
Last Thursday, a horrid murder was committed at Elk Ridge by Jeremiah Swift, a convict servant of Mr. John Harberley’s, about 23 years of age. While himself and wife were gone to a funeral, this wretch quarreled with two boys in the field, both Mr. Harberley’s sons, one about eleven, the other about nine years of age, and with a hoe knocked one of their brains out, and killed him on the spot; the other he knocked down and left him for dead…. After that he went to the house and murdered a young woman (Mr. Harberley’s daughter) about 14 or 15 years of age, as is supposed, with an axe, for she was found dead and very much mangled….
From Virginia we hear that six convicts, who were transported for fourteen years, and shipped at Liverpool, rose at sea, shot the captain, overcame and confined the seamen, and kept possession of the vessel 19 days; that coming in sight of Cape Hatteras, they hoisted out the boat to go on shore, when a vessel passing by, a boy they had not confined, hailed her, and attempted to tell their condition, but was prevented; and then the villains drove a spike up through his under and upper jaws, and wound spunyarn round the end that came out near his nose, to prevent his getting it out….
From Maryland we hear that a convict servant, about three weeks since, went into his master’s house, with an axe in his hand, determined to kill his mistress; but changing his purpose on seeing, as he expressed it, how d—d innocent she looked, he laid his left hand on a block, cut it off, and threw it at her, saying, Now make me work, if you can. (N.B. ’tis said this desperate villain is now begging in Pennsylvania, and ’tis thought he has been seen in this city; he pretends to have lost his hand by an accident. The public are therefore cautioned to beware of him.)
The Gazette—meaning, at this time, David Hall—editorialized, “When we see our papers filled continually with accounts of the most audacious robberies, the most cruel murders, and infinite other villainies perpetrated by convicts transported from Europe, what melancholy, what terrible reflections it must occasion! What will become of our posterity! These are some of thy favours, Britain! Thou art called our Mother Country; but what good mother ever sent thieves and villains to accompany her children; to corrupt them with their infectious vices, and murder the rest?”
Franklin was as outraged as Hall (they certainly discussed the issue), yet he articulated his outrage with a lighter touch and sharper pen. Writing anonymously, Franklin asserted in all apparent seriousness that every argument adduced for sending convicts to the colonies argued equally for sending rattlesnakes from Pennsylvania to England. These serpents—“felons-convict from the beginning of the world”—were a hazard to public safety, to be sure, but this might be simply due to an unfavorable environment (as was said of the transported convicts). “However mischievous those creatures are with us, they may possibly change their natures if they were to change the climate.” To test this hypothesis, Franklin proposed that a bounty be awarded to any enterprising person who collected rattlesnakes—he suggested the spring, when, heavy and sluggish, they emerged from their winter quarters and might easily be captured—and transported them to Britain. “There I would propose to have them carefully distributed in St. James’s Park, in the Spring Gardens and other places of pleasure about London; in the gardens of all the nobility and gentry throughout the nation; but particularly in the gardens of the Prime Ministers, the Lords of Trade and Members of Parliament; for to them we are most particularly obliged [for the transport of felons to America].” The upper classes as a whole would benefit from proximity to Pennsylvania’s slithering class. “May not the honest rough British gentry, by a familiarity with these reptiles, learn to creep, and to insinuate, and to slaver, and to wriggle into place (and perhaps to poison such as stand in their way), qualities of no small advantage to courtiers!”
Franklin noted that transport of felons to the colonies was treated by the British government as a trade, with the convicts’ services being sold like other bound labor. Trade required returns. “And rattlesnakes seem the most suitable returns for the human serpents sent us by our Mother Country.” Yet the trade in serpents would not be quite equal, for snakes posed fewer dangers than felons. “The Rattles
nake gives warning before he attempts his mischief, which the convict does not.”
Felons posed an obvious threat to Pennsylvania; the threat from unchecked immigration was more subtle. At least this was Franklin’s view. Certain of his neighbors were considerably more alarmed. Lutheran pastor Henry Muhlenberg declared, “It is almost impossible to describe how few good and how many exceptionally godless, wicked people have come into this country every year. The whole country is being flooded with ordinary, extraordinary and unprecedented wickedness and crimes…. Our old residents are mere stupid children in sin when compared with the new arrivals! Oh, what a fearful thing it is to have so many thousands of unruly and brazen sinners come into this free air and unfenced country!”
Such comments were striking, coming from Muhlenberg, himself a recent immigrant (1742) and from the same region (Germany) where most of the troublesome newcomers originated. German immigration to Pennsylvania was as old as the colony itself, and it grew with each passing decade, until by the mid-eighteenth century the Germans constituted perhaps a third of Pennsylvania’s population. Most of the Germans were sober and industrious, yet some displayed an unsettling religious enthusiasm. A millennial sect of German Pietists known as the “Society of the Woman in the Wilderness” built—or dug—a communistic colony in caves above Wissahickon Creek, not far from Philadelphia, where they ascetically awaited the Second Coming. Another group, led by Johann Conrad Beissel, established a frontier village of the godly at Ephrata, near the Susquehanna River some fifty miles west of Philadelphia. The core of Beissel’s sect was the “Spiritual Order of the Solitary,” forty men who devoted themselves to a rigorous regimen of work, fasting, and prayer. Although avowedly celibate, the Ephratans admitted women, who enrolled in the “Order of Spiritual Virgins.”
