The First American

by H. W. Brands

  By any reckoning, Beissel was a singular character. He denounced marriage as the “penitentiary of carnal man,” and he conjectured (and repeatedly—but unsuccessfully—attempted to prove) that elimination was not a necessary function of the body. He banned pork from Ephrata on the unoriginal ground that it was unclean; he barred geese on the slightly more imaginative reasoning that their feathers and down tempted followers to sinful luxury. When he preached, he closed his eyes and spoke very rapidly, saying he had to “hurry after the Spirit”; when at length he stopped and discovered that most of his auditors had gone home, he lamented their inability to endure “the Spirit’s keenness.” Beissel opened his door and his heart to all who suffered and sought relief. These included unhappy wives who found him hypnotizing, and found his Order of Spiritual Virgins about the only escape—in that era of prohibitively difficult divorce—from unsatisfactory husbands. It did not help Beissel’s reputation with those husbands that he spent a surprising amount of time in the quarters of the Virgins. He said he was consoling them and testing his resistance to carnality; none but believers believed him.

  Franklin knew Beissel chiefly as a customer. When the sect leader brought some of his writings to the print shop to be published, Franklin welcomed the business. He declined to get exercised about Beissel’s religious or moral views, judging the unorthodoxy of the Ephratans and the other German cultists a harmless eccentricity.

  At the same time Franklin wondered whether English Pennsylvania could well absorb large numbers of Germans. Many were ignorant, and though this by itself was no disqualifying trait, combined with their lack of English it made remediation difficult. “As few of the English understand the German language,” Franklin told Peter Collinson, “and so cannot address them either from the press or pulpit, ’tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain.”

  In days past, the Germans had kept to themselves, leaving public affairs to the English majority. No longer. “I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two counties.” Yet in joining the larger political community, the Germans refused to join the predominant cultural community. Halfway through the eighteenth century Franklin expressed a fear like those that would infuse American thinking about immigration until the twenty-first.

  Few of their children in the country learn English; they import many books from Germany…. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal writings in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say.

  In peacetime the separateness of the Germans was troubling; in wartime it struck at the very safety of the province. Franklin suspected—mistakenly, it seems—that the French were deliberately encouraging German settlements in the Ohio Valley, as a means of containing the British colonies. Yet French strategy or no, the Germans already settled in Pennsylvania were doing the French king’s work. When Franklin had been trying to summon support for the provincial militia, the Germans had been opposing it. “The Germans, except a very few in proportion to their numbers, refused to engage in it, giving out one among another, and even in print, that if they were quiet the French, should they take the country, would not molest them.” Even where they were not actively seditious, the Germans complained against the cost of defense, forming a passive impediment to measures necessary for security.

  Franklin did not wish the Germans barred entirely. “They have their virtues; their industry and frugality is exemplary; they are excellent husbandmen and contribute greatly to the improvement of a country.” Nor were such changes in policy as the situation demanded especially great. “All that seems to be necessary is to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English, establish English schools where they are now too thick settled, and take some care to prevent the practice lately fallen into by some of the ship owners, of sweeping the German gaols to make up the number of their passengers.” Yet absent such changes, the future could inspire only additional concern. “Unless the stream of their importation could be turned to other colonies …” Franklin told Collinson, “they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”

  Collinson concurred with Franklin and forwarded several proposals for diluting the German influence in Pennsylvania. Franklin agreed with one, to invalidate all deeds and contracts written in a language other than English. The printer in Franklin demurred from another Collinson recommendation, to suppress German printing houses. The scholar and bibliophile in Franklin similarly resisted Collinson’s suggestion that the importing of German books be banned. As to a recommendation that intermarriage between Germans and English be encouraged by government subsidy, Franklin simply thought it unworkable.

  The German women are generally so disagreeable to an English eye, that it would require great portions to induce Englishmen to marry them. Nor would German ideas of beauty generally agree with our women; dick und starcke; that is, thick and strong, always enters into their description of a pretty girl, for the value of a wife with them consists much in the work she is able to do. So that it would require a round sum with an English wife to make up to a Dutch man the difference in labour and frugality.

  As a citizen, Franklin sought solutions to the German problem; as a philosopher, he sought its origins. Franklin conjectured why Germans and English differed so deeply in character despite their common background. The English were the “offspring” of the Germans, he told Collinson, and the climate of England was similar to the climate of Germany. Therefore, he concluded, the differences in character between the two peoples must arise from differences in their institutions.

  Among these institutions were the English statutes for the maintenance of the poor. Franklin asked himself whether these laws had not instilled in the poor “a dependence that very much lessens the care of providing against the wants of old age.” He did not question the morality of aiding the poor, only the efficacy. “To relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures is concurring with the Deity; ’tis Godlike, but if we provide encouragements for laziness, and supports for folly, may it not be found fighting against the order of God and nature, which perhaps has appointed want and misery as the proper punishments for, and cautions against as well as necessary consequences of, idleness and extravagancy?”

  Tampering with natural order was hazardous business. Franklin told a story of how an excess of blackbirds in New England’s cornfields prompted the locals to pass laws encouraging the destruction of those pests. The blackbirds were duly diminished, but the New Englanders soon discovered their meadows engulfed in worms on which the blackbirds had fed. “Finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their black-birds.” Drawing the moral, Franklin cautioned, “Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of Providence and to interfere in the government of the world, we had need be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good.”

  Franklin told another story apropos of human motivation. A well-traveled and well-read individual from the Balkans, a Greek Orthodox priest, had passed through Philadelphia. Franklin, always eager to engage interesting people, sought him out.

  He asked me one day what I thought might be the reason that so many, and such numerous, nations, as the Tartars in Europe and Asia, the Indians in America, and the Negroes in Africa, continued a wandering careless life, and refused to live in cities, and to cultivate the arts they saw practiced by the civilized part of mankind. While I was considering what answer to make him, I’ll tell you, says he, in his broken English. God make man for Paradise, he make him for to live lazy; man ma
ke God angry, God turn him out of Paradise, and bid him work; man no love work; he want to go to Paradise again, he want to live lazy; so all mankind love lazy.

  Franklin had doubts about the theology of this argument, but he agreed that certain groups of people were less inclined to toil than others. American Indians, for example, had resisted every effort by the English to teach them the arts of civilization. Franklin thought this striking, yet hardly inexplicable. “They visit us frequently,” he told Collinson, “and see the advantages that arts, sciences, and compact society procure us. They are not deficient in natural understanding, and yet they have never shewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our arts.” The reason was plain enough: “In their present way of living, almost all their wants are supplied by the spontaneous productions of nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when game is so plenty.”

  Significantly, when an Indian child was brought up in white ways, the education often failed to stick. “If he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” More significantly, the opposite was not true. White children raised as Indians demonstrated no desire, after visits to English settlements, to stay there. “In a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” In one case an Englishman raised with the Indians inherited a substantial estate; he came home to test his new circumstances but soon abandoned them, leaving the estate to a younger brother and carrying off only a gun and a coat.

  Franklin related yet another story that further illustrated his point. Some years earlier one of the colonies had concluded a treaty with the Six Nations (the Iroquois confederacy of the lower Great Lakes region). All that remained was the exchange of civilities. The English commissioners offered to underwrite the education of half a dozen of the brightest Indian lads at the College of William and Mary, the finest educational institution in the region. The Indians responded that they were most grateful for this kind offer but must decline. Some Indian youths had been educated in this way several years before and had returned good for nothing, being unable to hunt, trap, or fight. The Indians made a counteroffer: to take a dozen English children to the Indians’ great council, where they would be raised as real and useful men.

  Franklin had special reason for thinking about Indians at just this time. In the autumn of 1753 he represented the province at an emergency meeting with the Indians of the frontier region, held at Carlisle, about halfway between Philadelphia and the Ohio River.

  While William Penn had lived, relations between the provincial government and the local Indians were reasonably amicable. Penn interpreted his royal grant of Pennsylvania as giving him not title per se to the lands therein (after the custom of conquerors and other charter holders) but as conveying first right to purchase land from the Indians. Penn insisted that dealings in land be handled by the proprietor and his agents; individuals were generally prohibited from buying land directly from the Indians. For his own part—and therefore for the province’s part—he was conscientious in adhering to the terms of purchases he negotiated with Indian leaders.

  His heirs were less conscientious, in this as in other matters touching the founder’s “holy experiment.” The most notorious instance of proprietary overreaching was the “Walking Purchase” of 1737. By this time the predominance in western Pennsylvania of the Delaware Indians, the fluid confederation of Algonquin-speaking tribes that occupied territory from the Delaware Bay to the Hudson Valley, was being seriously challenged by the Six Nations, whose roots were in the north but whose ambitions stretched south into the Delaware lands. Meanwhile immigrants from Europe were pushing into the interior and onto Indian lands; this created friction between the settlers and the Indians and deprived the proprietors of revenue that would have been theirs had the immigrants purchased proprietary lands, as they were supposed to do.

  To Thomas Penn this last was the critical consideration. The grandson of the founder always viewed Pennsylvania as a source of income rather than a venture in godly living. Calculating how he could increase his revenues, he resurrected a long-forgotten (some said fabricated) deed conveying Delaware Indian land to William Penn. The language of the deed was no more precise than that of other deeds of that bygone era, when land was limitless and the word of the Penn family was better than law; it gave the proprietor title to a tract starting at the Delaware River and extending into the woods “as far as a man can go in a day and a half.”

  Penn cared even less for Indian sensitivities than for Quaker conscience, and he determined to make the most of this vague description (which almost certainly had never been meant to be taken literally). He advertised for the fittest and fleetest men in the province, offering five hundred acres and five pounds money to the one who could cover the most territory in the specified time. Three men showed the greatest promise; this trio—Edward Marshall, James Yates, and Solomon Jennings—placed themselves at the starting line at dawn on the appointed day, which had been selected, as standard days often were, to fall near the autumn equinox.

  Two Indians were to accompany the Englishmen; they expected the walk to be a leisurely stroll. To their surprise and dismay, Marshall and the others bolted west as the first shaft of sun lit the eastern sky, and set a killing pace. The feet of one Indian gave out early; asserting he would have brought better footwear had he known there was to be a race, he complained that the least the proprietor could have done was to provide decent shoes to the participants in the walk. Some English observers on horseback offered the Indians a ride; they gladly accepted, even as they grumbled about the miscarriage the walk was proving to be. Marshall maintained his pace throughout the day, leading the others till the country sheriff called time at sunset, twelve hours after the start. Marshall, belatedly admitting to exhaustion, clasped a sapling to keep from falling down.

  At first light the next morning the race resumed. The Indians had gone home in disgust; one Delaware elder was heard to say, “No sit down to smoke, no shoot a squirrel, but run, run, run all day long.” Marshall, clearly the fittest, or most determined, of the three walkers, plunged through the woods till the noon finish. By then he had covered some sixty-five miles, at least twice what William Penn and the Delawares probably contemplated when they put their marks to the contract (if indeed they did) fifty years before.

  The episode won Thomas Penn a large tract of land but lost his family the friendship of the Delawares. Even the English settlers in the area, many of whom stood to gain from the younger Penn’s duplicity, shook their heads. “The unfairness practiced in the walk,” recalled one eyewitness, “both in regard to the way where, and the manner how, it was performed, and the dissatisfaction of the Indians concerning it, were the common subjects of conversation in our neighborhood for some considerable time after it was done.” As dissatisfied in his own fashion as the Indians was Edward Marshall, who never received his promised reward, despite repeated assurances from the governor that he would.

  Under other circumstances, the fiasco of the Walking Purchase might have alienated the Delawares from the Pennsylvanians permanently. But politics among the Indians was almost as competitive as politics among the Europeans—in no small part because the politics among the Europeans was so competitive. With the French pushing eastward from the Ohio Valley, even as English settlers moved west from the Delaware Valley, the various Indian tribes and confederations, including the Delawares, had to fashion alliances where they could.

  Such alliance-fashioning carried Franklin to Carlisle in the autumn of 1753. For some time the Pennsylvania Assembly had been supplying what the Quakers called the “necessities of life”—and everyone else called guns and ammunition—to the Delawares and other Indian opponents of the French. As the French stepped up their pressure, ins
tigating raids upon the pro-English Indians, the latter requested additional help. In September 1753 they informed Pennsylvania Governor Hamilton that they would send a delegation to Carlisle in a few days. If Brother Onas (a word meaning “quill” or “pen,” and signifying the governor of Pennsylvania, at the same time that it served as a pun on the name of the proprietary family) wished to keep their loyalty, he had better act quickly. Hamilton immediately commissioned Richard Peters, the secretary of the provincial Council; Isaac Norris, at that time speaker of the Assembly; and Benjamin Franklin to head west to parley.

  Peters and Norris supplied the political gravity in the Pennsylvania delegation; Franklin much of the common sense. For expertise on Indian affairs the group turned to Conrad Weiser, a German immigrant who had spent years living with and around various Indian tribes, learning their languages and customs, and making himself indispensable as a mediator between the Indians and the whites. Weiser was especially friendly with the Iroquois and had been largely responsible for winning the Six Nations to the English side. The Six Nations would be joining the Pennsylvanians at Carlisle; by way of preparing Franklin and the other commissioners for the negotiations, Weiser told of a recent conversation between himself and Canasatego, an important Iroquois chief. Canasatego had just returned from Albany, where he noticed that the white men there worked hard for six days, then shut up their shops on the seventh and retired to a great house. What were they doing in the great house?, he asked Weiser.