The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Franklin’s exchange with Governor Shirley followed a personal meeting between the two men. In the autumn of 1754 Franklin returned to Boston on a trip that combined public and private affairs. Abiah Franklin had died in May 1752 after some years of declining health. “I am very weeke and short bretht so that I cant set to rite much,” she informed her son several months earlier, in her untutored manner. She was not one to complain, though, and was thankful for what was left to her. “I slepe well anits [a-nights] and my coff is better and I have a prity good stumak to my vettels.”

  News of her death came as no great surprise the following spring; and as in the case of Josiah seven years before, the news arrived too late for Benjamin to attend the funeral or do more than commiserate with his siblings. “I received yours with the affecting news of our dear good mother’s death,” he wrote Jane. “I thank you for your long continued care of her in her old age and sickness. Our distance made it impracticable for us to attend her, but you have supplied all. She has lived a good life, as well as a long one, and is happy.”

  After his own fashion Franklin sought to repay his familial debt to his sister and her husband, Edward Mecom. The couple had eleven children; for reasons not hard to fathom, Franklin took a special shine to the third, who was named after him. Benjamin Mecom possessed the same independent mind as his uncle, the same impatience with life close to kin, the same desire to get out of Boston. Franklin arranged for the lad to apprentice with James Parker, Franklin’s New York printer-partner. “I am confident he will be kindly used there,” Franklin assured the boy’s mother, “and I shall hear from him every week.” By way of admonition, the uncle added, “You will advise him to be very cheerful, and ready to do every thing he is bid, and endeavour to oblige every body, for that is the true way to get friends.”

  If Jane relayed the advice to Benny, it failed to make an impression. The apprenticeship with Parker yielded numerous complaints from both apprentice and master, complaints that usually intersected in the correspondence of Franklin. Whether Benny was more fractious than Franklin himself had been at the same stage of his career is impossible to tell from the distance of more than two hundred years; it was almost as hard for Franklin to tell from the distance of one hundred miles. Benny’s mother heard her son’s complaints and echoed them back to her brother; Parker related his side of the story directly.

  Franklin found himself at something of a loss as to how to handle the matter. The best he could do was reassure Jane that her son’s sufferings were exaggerated in the telling and really nothing out of the ordinary, while inquiring of Parker to determine whether such was indeed the case. His own visits to New York supplemented his inquiries of his partner.

  “I am frequently at New York,” he wrote Jane, exaggerating for soothing effect, “and I never saw him unprovided with what was good, decent, and sufficient.” Benny had complained of being sent on petty errands. “No boys love it, but all must do it,” his uncle said. Benny made a habit of staying out all night; Parker had good reason for reprimanding him. “If he was my own son, I should think his master did not do his duty by him, if he omitted it, for to be sure it is the high road to destruction.” Benny had been beguiled by a privateer that brought rich prizes into port, prizes shared among the crew; like William Franklin, he determined to have done with dreary terrestrial existence and make for the open sea and the life of the licensed pirate. Parker had to pull him off, as Franklin pulled William off; now Franklin explained the attempted escape to the attempter’s mother: “When boys see prizes brought in, and quantities of money shared among the men, and their gay living, it fills their heads with notions that half distract them and put them quite out of conceit with trades and the dull ways of getting money by working.”

  Having essentially said Benny was making up the stories of his poor treatment, Franklin offered his sister a comforting estimate of the boy. “I have a very good opinion of Benny in the main, and have great hopes of his becoming a worthy man, his faults being only such as are commonly incident to boys of his years, and he has many good qualities, for which I love him.”

  Franklin was willing to gamble on those good qualities when it became apparent that the apprenticeship to Parker would not work out. In 1748 Franklin had dispatched a journeyman to Antigua to establish a print shop there; shop and printer thrived until 1752, when a tropical fever carried him off. Franklin thought to solve two problems by relieving Parker of Benny and sending the young man to Antigua to fill the vacancy. Especially as the boy was not yet twenty, his mother was mildly appalled.

  The uncle attempted to assuage her fears. “That island is reckoned one of the healthiest in the West Indies,” he declared. “My late partner there enjoyed perfect health for four years, till he grew careless and got to sitting up late in taverns, which I have cautioned Benny to avoid.” The opportunity trumped anything Benny would encounter closer to home. “He will find the business settled to his hand, a newspaper established, no other printing-house to interfere with him or beat down his prices, which are much higher than we get on the continent.” Yet despite his assuring tone, Franklin had to grant that human provision would warrant only so much. “Having taken care to do what appears to be for the best, we must submit to God’s Providence, which orders all things really for the best.”

  Perhaps God got distracted, or simply had other ideas regarding Benny. Independence suited the young man no better than apprenticeship, and he quickly found trouble in Antigua. He ran up debts to Franklin’s friend William Strahan in London, failed by any reasonable measure of diligence, and nonetheless blamed his uncle for his problems. Even as Franklin decried such misbehavior, he accepted responsibility for at least part of it. “I fear I have been too forward in cracking the shell,” he told Jane, “and producing the chick to the air before its time.”

  If nephew Benny’s course ran crooked, son William’s was somewhat straighter, if not always less difficult. In Philadelphia, William adopted the pose of the demobilized war hero. “William is now 19 years of age, a tall proper youth, and much of a beau,” Franklin had written Abiah in the spring of 1750. The beau was living off his father—to his stepmother’s distress—and hoped to continue to do so. The father disabused him. “I have assured him that I intend to spend what little I have, my self, if it please God that I live long enough.”

  The friction between William and Deborah was no secret. Daniel Fisher, a clerk who worked for Franklin during the 1750s, kept a diary in which he recorded the stepmother’s complaints.

  I have often seen pass to and from his father’s apartment upon business (for he does not eat, drink or sleep in the house) without the least compliment between Mrs. Franklin and him or any sort of notice taken of each other, till one day, as I was sitting with her in the passage when the young gentleman came by, she exclaimed to me (he not hearing): “Mr. Fisher, there goes the greatest villain upon earth!” This greatly confounded and perplexed me, but did not hinder her from pursuing her invectives in the foulest terms I ever heard from a gentlewoman.

  William read law with Joseph Galloway, the scion of a respected Philadelphia family and a man who would become one of Franklin’s closest political allies before the American Revolution estranged them. When Franklin was elected to the Assembly in 1751, he got William appointed to the clerkship he was vacating.

  He found the young man better work two years later. Since his appointment as Philadelphia postmaster in 1737, Franklin had moved in rather desultory fashion up the postal ranks, eventually becoming comptroller of the American posts. In 1751 he set his mind more determinedly to advancement. He wrote his English friend Peter Collinson that the deputy postmaster general of America, Elliott Benger of Virginia, who had been in poor health for some time, “is thought to be near his end.” Franklin asked Collinson to use his influence to secure the position for him. “I would only add that as I have a respect for Mr. Benger, I should be glad the application were so managed as not to give him any offence, if he should recover.
” Benger did no such thing—although he took his time about dying—and two years later Franklin got the job, albeit in conjunction with William Hunter of Virginia.

  Half the deputy postmaster position afforded Franklin the opportunity to improve mail service throughout the colonies, to increase his knowledge of conditions across America, and to engage the leading citizens of the different provinces. Eventually the job would earn him a fair income, but for the time being the investments required to put the American mails on an efficient footing ate up all profits and more.

  The job also gave Franklin the ability to throw work to his son. Franklin was no stickler for disinterest in appointments to office; he was happy to keep within the family the perquisites of whatever positions he acquired. In this case he exercised his authority as deputy postmaster to appoint William postmaster of Philadelphia. A year later he named William continental comptroller.

  Perhaps William now concluded that his father had something to offer; perhaps the young man had simply outgrown the annoyances of adolescence. Whatever the cause, the filial relationship warmed and ramified. William developed an interest in Franklin’s experiments, contributing observations and hypotheses of his own. Significantly, it was William who served as the sole assistant of his father in the kite experiment. That the experiment led to international acclaim for Franklin only increased his son’s respect.

  For his part, Franklin could hope William was growing into a worthy manhood. A rebel himself in youth, Franklin could hardly hold William’s earlier experiments—in life, not electricity—against him. But now the boy seemed to be finding himself. His father could only be gratified.

  While William kept the accounts of the post office and read his law books, he dreamed of grander things. Grandest was an empire of western land. Like many others of his era—including George Washington—William caught a highly infectious disease during his journey to the Ohio Valley, a disease whose most significant symptom was a belief that fabulous wealth awaited whoever could win title to those boundless acres. William would spend years seeking such title. For now he dreamed.

  Franklin would share his son’s dream, if not the symptoms of virulent infection. Franklin would join William in speculating in western land, but in Franklin’s case the western dream was less personal than imperial. As his exchanges with William Shirley revealed, Franklin saw America as a potentially coequal part of the British empire, and the basis for American equality was land. In land lay the future of America; in American land lay the future of Britain.

  Franklin addressed precisely this issue in what became one of the most influential essays he ever wrote. In 1751 he drafted “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.” and circulated it to Peter Collinson and others. Collinson urged Franklin to publish the piece. “I wish, my Dear Friend, you’ll oblige the ingenious part of mankind with a public view of your observations &c. on the increase of mankind,” Collinson wrote. “I don’t find anyone has hit it off so well.” The draft was rough, however, and Franklin hoped to polish it before release to the “ingenious part” or anyone else. But politics, postmastering, and other interests intervened, and the polishing never took place. Finally, in 1754, Franklin consented to its publication as it stood, and the next year it was printed in Boston. It quickly crossed the Atlantic and was reproduced in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Economists Adam Smith and later Thomas Malthus, among many others, read it appreciatively.

  Franklin’s central idea was simple: that the increase of population depended on the availability of land. The critical element in reproductive rates was the age of marriage; couples who married young had more children than couples who married old. (Needless to say, Franklin’s observation antedated convenient contraception.) The age of marriage in turn depended on the opportunities to establish economic independence. In Franklin’s preindustrial day, economic independence for the many required access to land—of which America had an abundance relative to Europe. Europe was already filled with farmers; adding more required displacing some of those already there. America was filled with Indians, who subsisted by hunting, an occupation that resulted in a population far less dense, leaving ample room for farmers.

  Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap that a labouring man that understands husbandry can in a short time save money enough to purchase a piece of new land sufficient for a plantation, whereon he may subsist a family; such are not afraid to marry, for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more land is to be had at rates equally easy, all circumstances considered.

  Hence marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe. And if it is reckoned there that there is but one marriage per annum among 100 persons, perhaps we may here reckon two; and if in Europe they have but 4 births to a marriage (many of their marriages being late), we may here reckon 8, of which if one half grow up, and our marriages are made, reckoning one with another, at 20 years of age, our people must at least be doubled every 20 years.

  This was the part that caught the eye of Malthus—this and Franklin’s assertion that “there is in short no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other’s means of subsistence.” From these (and contributions of his own, of course) Malthus extrapolated the theory of inevitable impoverishment that made him famous.

  Adam Smith was taken by another part of Franklin’s argument. In 1750 the British Parliament had bent to the demands of British manufacturers and prohibited the construction of ironworks in America; Franklin’s essay was at least partly a response to this prohibition. He argued that despite the rapid increase in the American population, the vastness of the land available to these growing numbers would for generations dictate a dearness of labor compared to that in the old country. “The danger, therefore, of these colonies interfering with their Mother Country in trades that depend on labour, manufactures, &c. is too remote to require the attention of Great Britain.” Far from weakening demand for manufactures of the home country, the growth of the colonies would strengthen it. “Therefore Britain should not restrain too much manufactures in her colonies. A wise and good mother will not do it. To distress is to weaken, and weakening the children weakens the whole family.” Adam Smith, who made his name attacking the protectionist policies of British mercantilism—and who kept not one but two copies of Franklin’s essay in his library—could not have put it better.

  In an early indication that his views on slavery were changing, Franklin contended that the introduction of slaves could only diminish a nation. Slavery enabled whites to avoid labor, thereby undermining their health and rendering them “not so generally prolific.” Slavery also sapped the moral health of the nation. Franklin at this point did not contend that trafficking in human souls was inherently immoral; rather he decried the bad example it set. “White children become proud, disgusted with labour, and being educated in idleness, are rendered unfit to get a living by industry.” Franklin thought it significant that the northern colonies, having fewer slaves than the southern, multiplied their populations more rapidly.

  The laws of population growth, as exhibited in America, promised a brilliant future for the colonies—a future whose brilliance need not dull in the slightest that of Britain.

  There are supposed to be now upwards of one million English souls in North America (though ’tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over sea), and yet there is perhaps not the one fewer in Britain, but rather many more, on account of the employment the colonies afford to manufacturers at home. This million doubling, suppose but once in 25 years, will in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side the water. What an accession of power to the British Empire by sea as well as land! What increase of trade and navigation!

  That the future of America, and with it of the British empire, depended on the avail
ability of land was what made the contest with France so important. The defeat incurred by George Washington in 1754 inspired the British government to action; early the following year it dispatched an expedition of regular army officers and men to America to smite the French intruders and regain Britain’s rightful hold on the Ohio. The commander of the expedition was Major General Edward Braddock of the Coldstream Guards. Braddock was sixty years old, had served occasionally as governor of Gibraltar, and hoped to cap his otherwise undistinguished military career with appointment as royal governor somewhere or other. Although fond of his pipe, his claret, and his mistresses, he liked to convey a stoic impression. “Braddock is very Iroquois in disposition,” declared British diarist Horace Walpole. “He had a sister who, having gamed away all her little fortune at Bath, hanged herself with a truly English deliberation, leaving only a note upon the table with these lines: ‘To die is landing on some silent shore,’ etc. When Braddock was told of it, he only said, ‘Poor Fanny! I always thought she would play till she would be forced to tuck herself up.’”

  Braddock was not pleased at having to travel to a New World wilderness to win his governorship, but, as no other theater beckoned—other than the theaters of London, where he took in the performances of George Anne Bellamy, a famous actress who was one of his two current flames—away he must go. In leaving he demonstrated that some of Miss Bellamy’s dramatic flair had rubbed off. “The General told me that he should never see me more,” she recalled, “for he was going with a handful of men to conquer whole nations; and to do this they must cut their way through unknown woods. He produced a map of the country, saying at the same time: ‘Dear Pop, we are sent like sacrifices to the altar.’”