by Nick Bunker
Religious freedom, law and order, fiscal prudence: such were the Whig ideals of the Triumvirate. Franklin had no cause to disagree. Many years had yet to pass before, in the late 1740s, he had to enter politics himself in opposition to Thomas Penn and his supporters, who came to be known as the Proprietary Party. In the 1730s, Franklin had no reason to seek elected office: all he had to do was to cling to Speaker Hamilton. Franklin came to play the same kind of role as his uncle Thomas had performed in England. In Northamptonshire in the 1690s, Thomas had been a trusty servant of the local Whig grandees; and Franklin did something of the sort for Andrew Hamilton, acting as his ally in the press.
During the paper money affair, Franklin had shown how useful he could be. In his appendix to Busy-Body No. 8, he had appeared to side with the Keithites, which may be because he was still hoping to become the assembly’s printer of choice. But the article was pulled, and when Franklin’s Modest Enquiry appeared the following week it did Hamilton a favor. While his essay kept up the pressure on the governor, Frankln did so with reasoned argument, not a tirade of invective. As he negotiated with his fellow politicians, Hamilton could brandish the essay and use it to corral them into line. A piece of prose put together so well was something they could all admire.
We know for certain that Andrew Hamilton was very grateful. “I soon after obtained, through my friend Hamilton, the printing of the New Castle paper money,” Franklin recalled; he already had a contract to print the mortgage deeds issued by the Pennsylvania Loan Office. By the autumn of 1729, with Hamilton as his patron he could begin to glimpse a bright future ahead. And all the more clearly, because Samuel Keimer had finally admitted defeat. Letting it be known that he was leaving Philadelphia, he put the Gazette up for sale with its paltry list of subscribers.
As Keimer prepared to ship out for a new life in Barbados, Franklin bought the newspaper for a song. On October 2 there came the relaunch, in which—like Charles Foster Kane, with his New York Inquirer—Franklin issued a declaration of principles. His paper would never be quite as exciting as Citizen Kane’s; but by the end of that year it would be clear that Franklin knew an immense amount about the trade of journalism. The early issues of his Gazette drew on the best models he had seen in the eight years since his brother founded the Courant.
“To publish a good newspaper is not so easy an undertaking as many people imagine it to be,” Franklin told his readers, assuring them that he would make The Pennsylvania Gazette “as agreeable and useful an entertainment as the nature of the thing will allow.” As always in the eighteenth-century press, variety was the essential element, and so that was what he gave his readers: a miscellany of forthright political opinion, tales of crime and tragedy, drownings, fires, and gunshot wounds, jokes and puzzles, and serious news from Maine down to Jamaica. Franklin gave them London too, the city where he had learned so much.
On October 23 he listed the English papers he used as his sources. Franklin told his readers their politics, which—thanks to his period in Little Britain, that street so intensely political—he knew so very well: The London Journal and The British Journal (Walpolean Whig); The Craftsman (a blend of Whig and Tory, but above all anti-Walpole); and of course Mist’s Weekly Journal, now renamed Fog’s (which was still defiantly Tory). In America at the time, nobody could have understood these papers better than did Benjamin Franklin.
As for his own ideological slant, he made no secret of it: Franklin still believed in “English Liberties.” In their defense, but rather ungratefully, Franklin took a swipe at William Burnet, the royal governor of New York who had shown him his library while he was traveling through the town so many years earlier. Burnet had been transferred to Massachusetts, where he feuded with the House of Representatives. Citing the Magna Carta they refused to commit to paying his salary, on the grounds that if they did so he would be free to act the tyrant.
Here was an issue—the governor’s salary, and how it should be funded—that would remain a running sore in politics in Boston until the 1770s, the Tea Party, and the Revolution. In the late summer of 1729, Governor Burnet had brought the debate to a temporary halt by dying from a fever: only to be posthumously slandered by Franklin. A few weeks after his death The Pennsylvania Gazette published a stern editorial, calling Burnet a man of “arts and menaces…cunning and politicks,” bent on the subversion of freedom. A radical Whig to his toes, Franklin praised the men of the Bay Colony for their stand against the governor. They had displayed, he wrote, “that ardent spirit of liberty…which has in every age distinguished BRITONS and ENGLISHMEN from all the rest of mankind.”
In writing that, Franklin was merely giving voice to opinions that were widely shared in Philadelphia, where the editorial made him more friends. His circulation grew and grew, and so did his advertising revenue. The next step was obvious. Andrew Hamilton and his colleagues—“the leading men,” as Franklin described them—were keen to have a printer so ingenious and so trustworthy. In the January of 1730 they gave him what he wanted, and made Franklin and Meredith the official printers for the Pennsylvania Assembly.
However, no amount of Whiggish talk of liberty would solve the economic questions that beset the colony. In his October declaration of principles, Franklin had touched on these again. From time to time, he would reprint items from the same encyclopedia that Keimer had been copying, but Franklin promised to do so only when they served a useful purpose. The articles he chose would be, as he put it, those that gave “such hints to the excellent geniuses of our country, as may contribute either to the improvement of our present manufactures, or toward the invention of new ones.”
Not only was he picking up a theme from A Modest Enquiry, where he had urged his fellow colonists to raise and manufacture “hemp, silk, iron, and many other things.” Franklin was also putting forth in America the language of “improvement” and of “ingenuity” that his family had known in the England of Cromwell and Charles II. In the Quaker province, these were words that influential people wanted to hear, including the Triumvirate: who had projects for improvements of their own.
PENNSYLVANIA’S TRUE INTEREST
In the early years of Franklin’s Junto, his friend the surveyor Nicholas Scull would occasionally miss their debates. Working for the government, Scull would be away in Indian country. Sometimes he would travel a hundred miles or so to map out land and to visit Sassoonan, the leader of the Lenape, at his village above the Susquehanna River. These were sensitive missions. In the spring of 1728, native people and the European settlers had come to blows in incidents close to the new ironworks near Reading, and the lives of Lenape people had been lost.
That summer Sassoonan came down to Philadelphia for peace talks, held in public at the Quaker meeting house. Tensions were rising, and blood was being shed, because the ironmasters needed land and timber to feed their furnaces with charcoal. German settlers wanted land as well, and if they could they preferred to settle together on Tulpehocken Creek, where William Parsons was their surveyor. There were also looming questions about another region, the Forks of the Delaware, sixty miles north of the city. By fair means or foul, James Logan and the Penns were eager to take possession of the Forks from the Lenape who lived there.7
As the 1730s began, so the pace of encroachment on Indian land grew faster. At every stage the men around Franklin were deeply involved, and not only Scull and Parsons of the Junto. Andrew Hamilton had his eye turned further west toward the town of Lancaster, but his intentions were the same: he meant to see the colony grow swiftly into its hinterland. By 1731 he had outmaneuvered Logan to acquire the site of the town, which Hamilton and his son James sold in slices to German and Scots-Irish settlers. The town was strategically vital, because from here the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road led away into the wilderness toward the south. By the middle of the decade, the Irish and the Germans were pouring down the trail, traveling as far as North Carolina.8
B
enjamin Franklin has been called “the consummate networker.” Indeed he was; but the people with whom he networked most avidly were businessmen and public officials, not laborers or artisans. His friends were either members of an economic elite, or—like Joseph Breintnall, Scull, or Parsons—they were professionals who earned their fees from services they did for the same elite. Their commitment to good deeds might well be genuine, but sometimes it took second place to other, less high-minded goals: and especially the expansion of their province.9
A prime example was another of Franklin’s associates, a rich young man named William Allen. A Presbyterian with roots in Ulster, he married Hamilton’s daughter in 1734. Seven years earlier, at the tender age of twenty-three, William Allen had become one of James Logan’s partners in a farsighted new venture. With Jeremiah Langhorne also among them but with Logan as their leader, the partners created the Durham Iron Company, building a forge and a furnace on top of rich deposits of ore at the northern end of Bucks County.
In his Modest Enquiry, Franklin had called for precisely this sort of enterprise. But Durham was only ten miles from the Forks of the Delaware, with its hunting grounds and streams and fields for maize still occupied by the Lenape; and so, in the years that followed, Logan and Allen made it their goal to wrest the Forks away from the native people. Their accomplices were the Junto members, Parsons and Scull, who mapped out the land they intended to acquire for the sake of its timber and its farming potential.10
In ventures like the ironworks at Durham, we can see a new economic model coming into being in America. In his Modest Enquiry, Franklin had urged his readers to ask themselves a question: what is the true interest of Pennsylvania? As the 1730s unwound, that question came to be answered in a new way; and Franklin and his Junto friends were among the people who made the new model viable and convincing.
Hitherto in Philadelphia the merchants who traded by sea had occupied the pinnacles of rank. Men of the ocean, Quakers or not, they cast their eyes across the Atlantic toward England, the West Indies, or to Portugal or Italy, to places where they could sell their grain and flour, trade in tobacco, slaves or indentured servants, and buy sugar, wine, olive oil, or British hardware and textiles. Of course this sort of seagoing enterprise would remain alive for many, many decades to come. Indeed in the early 1730s the Atlantic trade was gaining a new momentum, as the danger of war with the Spanish receded into the distance.
Late in 1729, Sir Robert Walpole and his envoys had struck a new deal with France and Spain, the Treaty of Seville, which kept the peace for another ten years. Protected by the Pax Walpoleana, the merchants of the Delaware could trade by sea in safety. Their shipping traffic grew by leaps and bounds, deepening the connections between Pennsylvania and the mother country. But essential though it was, maritime business of such a kind—based mostly on the trade in soft commodities—was not the economic future for what would become the United States.
By the end of the 1730s Andrew Hamilton and his allies would have a different vision of what might lie ahead for North America. A thrust into the wilderness in search not only of land but also of raw materials: that would be the aim. Coupled with that would be manufacturing, using the iron they made at places such as Durham, the copper they hoped to find, or the trees they felled. But all of this would require many more people to do the work of settlement. In 1739, when at last Hamilton decided to relinquish his role as speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly, he made an unusual gesture, giving a farewell speech, something that was not the custom. Rising to his feet, Andrew Hamilton put the case for progress, immigration, and the pushing back of the frontier.11
As he sang a hymn of praise to what he called “the excellency of our constitution,” he spoke the familiar language of Whiggery, finding the secret of Pennsylvania’s success in its commitment to what he called “civil and religious liberty.” But when Hamilton sought to define the achievements of his colony, all of them were matters of material prosperity. He spoke of “the great progress this province has made…in improvements, wealth, trade, and navigation, and the extraordinary increases of people, who have been drawn hither from almost every country in Europe.”
More voyagers to the west: this was what Andrew Hamilton hoped to see. Without more people, more improvements could not be accomplished, and so he urged his fellow Pennsylvanians to see the new arrivals as the sign of their success. But once ashore the people had to go somewhere; and that had to be into the interior, over the mountains, down to the Carolinas, or up the valley of the Susquehanna. And so Hamilton proclaimed his vision of the future: destiny made manifest along the Wagon Road.
His was a vision that Franklin would share but only with a few misgivings. A far more subtle person than the foulmouthed lawyer, Franklin certainly believed in westward expansion, but only if it came with virtue as well. He liked the notion of an ever-growing population; but Franklin did not think that wealth and trade were everything. The sensitive, private man who read Milton and The Seasons and composed the Articles of Belief could never conceive of “improvement” purely in material terms. For Benjamin Franklin, improvement had to be an inner quality as well. It had to be a means to be virtuous as well as to make money.
But virtue was not so easy to achieve. You do not get to be a genius by being tranquil or complacent or by never making mistakes: and Franklin had his share of those. He was never an uncomplicated human being, spared from inner conflict or from frailties. It does a disservice to his memory to pretend that he was. At some point in 1730—the precise date will never be established—Franklin ran up against the obstacle that he had feared he might encounter: his own emotions and their consequences.
As the year began, everything seemed to be going well. Keimer had been defeated, they had the printing contract from the assembly, and the Junto was great fun on a Friday night. Sadly, Hugh Meredith spent too much time at the alehouse, playing billiards or skittles or the like; but even so the firm of Franklin & Meredith was set upon the path to profit and success. There was just one small detail. Franklin had been at the women again; and one of them conceived a child. He never tells us the mother’s name or anything about her, but she gave birth to a little boy who would be called William. It was just the kind of mishap that might have befallen James Ralph.
Chapter Fourteen
YEARS OF SUCCESS
In the spring of 1730, the colonies appeared to be in fine shape and so did Benjamin Franklin. Far away in London, the government was pondering a concession, a law to permit the slave owners of South Carolina to ship their rice directly to eager buyers in Italy and Spain. Until now they had been obliged to send it by a costly detour through Great Britain. If Walpole gave the nod and the rice could flow freely, then Charleston, a port already thriving, would enjoy another spurt of growth. So might Philadelphia, whose ships would have many more cargoes. In the meantime, with so much paper money now in issue and with the economy again on the move, Franklin had his hands full of business.
Apart from The Pennsylvania Gazette, the paper bills, and the assembly’s proceedings, he was doing printing jobs for his allies in New Jersey and for Nicholas Scull. He had become a deputy sheriff and so Mr. Scull needed bail bonds. With all this to do, Franklin worked very hard indeed. No more time for poetry: instead he was out with his wheelbarrow, carting back the paper he required to feed his hungry press. He never went fishing or shooting and he avoided the tavern. By now the Junto had moved its meeting place to a room in the home of Robert Grace.
Like anybody starting out on his own, Franklin had his share of disappointment and worry; but he was riding a wave of colonial prosperity, and so—given time and application—all of his problems were soluble. A letter arrived from Rhode Island, from the silversmith Samuel Vernon, asking about the money he had entrusted to Franklin six years earlier, money that Franklin still could not repay. He wrote back apologetically, promising to do his best, but in the meantime the Merediths had turn
ed out to be a broken reed. Quite apart from Hugh’s long sessions in the pub, his father suddenly revealed that, actually, he did not have the money to pay for the printing apparatus they had bought from London. Only half of the money had been put up in cash. The rest had been borrowed by Simon Meredith. Now the debt was falling due, and their creditor had filed a lawsuit. The case would come to court, and if it were lost the bailiffs would seize Franklin’s equipment.
Just as he was falling into despair, two saviors arrived from the Junto. They came in the shape of his closest friends, William Coleman and Mr. Grace, who offered to put up the money to refinance the Franklin firm, but with one proviso. If they were to assume the debt, his tippling partner really had to go.
Not so fast, said Franklin—I have an agreement with Hugh, and I cannot break it—but when he discussed it with the Welshman, he found that his partner understood what needed to be done. A countryman by birth, Hugh Meredith had never really taken to the printing trade. All he wanted was a horse and saddle, so that he could ride down the Wagon Road to the Carolinas, where many other families from Wales intended to settle.
A new deal was done in July, dissolving the partnership. From that moment forth, Benjamin Franklin would be the boss. Earlier that year, he had already taken on two employees, one from Philadelphia—Joseph Rose, son of the poet Aquila—while the other was somebody he knew from London. Just around the corner from Little Britain, Thomas Whitmarsh had trained as a compositor in the workshop of a printer of sheet music: another demanding specialty. To America he carried with him the best London habits of diligence and regularity.