by Jill Lepore
“The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small,” Franklin began. As he saw it, Africans were “black”; Asians and Native Americans were “tawny”; Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, Swedes, and Germans were “swarthy.” That left very few people, and chiefly the English, as the only “white people” in the world. “I could wish their Numbers were increased,” Franklin said, adding, wonderingly, “But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”85
Franklin stumbled over his partiality for people of his own “complexion.” Was it really “natural”? Perhaps. Plainly, he was troubled by it. But, with his trademark alacrity, he wrote all this down, and then he moved on to another subject, the bonds that hold people together: Join, or die.
At the Albany Congress in 1754, Franklin proposed a Plan of Union, to be administered by a “President General, To be appointed and Supported by the Crown, and a Grand Council to be Chosen by the Representatives of the People of the Several Colonies, met in their respective Assemblies.” The Union was to include the seven colonies labeled in his snake—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina—and the four colonies represented, in the snake, as “New England”—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.
Franklin’s plan apportioned representatives for each of the eleven colonies in the Union according to the size of their populations (two each for sparsely settled New Hampshire and tiny Rhode Island, seven each for populous Virginia and Massachusetts). The government, meeting in Philadelphia, would have the power to pass laws, to make treaties, to raise money and soldiers “for the Defence of any of the Colonies,” and to protect the coasts. Delegates to the Albany Congress approved the Plan of Union, and brought it back to their colony assemblies, which, fearing the loss of their own authority, rejected it. The British government, too, disapproved; as Franklin said, “it was judg’d to have too much of the Democratic.”86
Franklin’s Plan of Union failed. What lasted was the woodcut, which had a great deal in common with Powhatan’s deerskin, stitched together a half century before. “JOIN, or DIE” is, among other things, a map, but it’s a particular kind of map, known as a “dissected map.” Dissected maps were the very first jigsaw puzzles, made by mapmakers, out of paper glued to wood. One of the first dissected maps was called “Europe Divided into its Kingdoms,” made in London in the 1760s by a mapmaker who had apprenticed with the king’s geographer; it was a toy, meant to teach children geography. It also taught children how to understand the nature of kingdoms, and of rule.
Franklin’s “JOIN, or DIE” did some of that, too: it offered a lesson about the rulers and the ruled, and the nature of political communities. It made a claim about the colonies: they were parts of a whole.
Three
OF WARS AND REVOLUTIONS
Boston-born artist John Singleton Copley left the colonies in 1774, never to return; in 1783, while living in London, he depicted the 1781 Battle of Jersey in a 12 × 8 foot painting—only a detail is shown here—and offered his own argument about American liberty by picturing, near its center, a black man firing a gun.
BENJAMIN LAY STOOD BARELY OVER FOUR FEET TALL, hunchbacked and bowed, with a too-big head and a barrel chest and legs so spindly it did not appear possible they could bear his weight. As a boy in England, he’d worked on his brother’s farm before being apprenticed to a glove maker, shearing and stitching skins. At twenty-one, he went to sea; in his hammock, by the light of tallow, he read books. Lay liked to call himself “a poor common sailor and an illiterate man,” but in truth, he was widely read and well traveled. He sailed to Syria and to Turkey, where he met “four men that had been 17 Years Slaves”—Englishmen who’d been enslaved by Muslims. He swabbed decks with men who’d sailed on English slave-trading ships, carrying Africans. He heard tales of dark and terrible cruelties. In 1718, Lay sailed to Barbados, where he saw people branded and tortured and beaten, starved and broken; he decided that everything about this arrangement was an offense against God, who “did not make others to be Slaves to us.”1
In protest of slavery, Benjamin Lay rejected anything produced by slave labor, became a hermit, and lived in a cave. Lay and his also hobbled wife—a Quaker preacher with a crooked back—left Barbados after only eighteen months and returned to England. Maybe it was something about being so bowed, so easily dismissed, so set aside, that left them reeling at the horrors of slavery, the breaking of backs, the butchering of bodies. In 1732, they embarked for Pennsylvania to join William Penn’s Holy Experiment. In Philadelphia, Lay turned bookseller, selling Bibles and primers along with the works of his favorite poets, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and of his favorite philosophers, like Seneca’s Morals, essays on ethics by an ancient Roman stoic.2 He traveled from town to town and from colony to colony, only ever on foot—he would not spur a horse—to denounce slavery before governors and ministers and merchants. “What a Parcel of Hypocrites and Deceivers we are,” he said.3 His arguments fell on deaf ears. After his wife died, he lost his last restraint. In 1738, he went to a Quaker meeting in New Jersey carrying a Bible whose pages he’d removed; he’d placed inside the book a pig’s bladder filled with pokeberry juice, crimson red. “Oh all you negro masters who are contentedly holding your fellow creatures in a state of slavery,” he cried, entering the meetinghouse, “you who profess ‘to do unto all men as ye would they should do unto you,’” you shall see justice “in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colours of men with an equal regard.” Then, taking his Bible from his coat and a sword from his belt, he pierced the Bible with the sword. To the stunned parishioners, it appeared to burst with blood, as if by a miracle, spattering their heads and staining their clothes, as Lay thundered, from his tiny frame: “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures.”4
The next month, Benjamin Franklin printed Lay’s book, All Slave-Keepers That keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, a rambling and furious three-hundred-page polemic. Franklin sold the book at his shop, two shillings a copy, twenty shillings a dozen. Lay handed out copies for free.5 Then he became a hermit. Outside of Philadelphia, he carved a cave out of a hill. Inside, he stowed his library: two hundred books of theology, biography, poetry, and history. He’d decided to protest slavery by refusing to eat or drink or wear or use anything that had been made with forced labor. He also refused to eat animals. He lived on water and milk, roasted turnips and honey; he kept bees and spun flax and stitched clothes. Franklin used to visit him in his cave. Franklin at the time owned a “Negro boy” named Joseph. By 1750 he owned two more slaves, Peter and Jemima, husband and wife. Lay pressed him and pressed him: By what right?
Franklin, himself a runaway, knew, as every printer knew, and every newspaper reader knew, that every newspaper contained, within its pages, tales of revolution, in the stories of everyday escapes. Among them, in those years, were the following. Bett, who had “a large scar on her breast,” ran away in 1750 from a man on Long Island. She was wearing nothing but a petticoat and a jacket in the bitter cold of January. Primus, who was thirty-seven, and missing the first joint of one of his big toes, probably a punishment for an earlier attempted escape, ran away from Hartford in 1753, carrying his fiddle. Jack, “a tall slim fellow, very black, and speaks good English,” left Philadelphia in July of 1754. Sam, a carpenter, thirty, “a dark Mulatto,” ran away from a shop in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in the winter of 1755. “He is supposed to be lurking in Charles County,” his owner wrote, “where a Mulatoo Woman lives, whom he has for some Time called his Wife; but as he is an artful Fellow, and can read and write, it is probable he may endeavor to make his Escape out of the Province.” Will, forty, ran away from a plantation in Virginia in the summer of 1756; he was, his owner said, “much scar’d on his back with a whip.”6
When Benjamin Franklin began writing his autobiog
raphy, in 1771, he turned the story of his own escape—running away from his apprenticeship to his brother James—into a metaphor for the colonies’ growing resentment of parliamentary rule. James’s “harsh and tyrannical Treatment,” Franklin wrote, had served as “a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life.”7 But that was also the story of every runaway slave ad, testament after testament to an aversion to arbitrary power.
In April 1757, before sailing to London, Franklin drafted a new will, in which he promised Peter and Jemima that they would be freed at his death. Two months later, when Franklin reached London, he wrote to his wife, Deborah, “I wonder how you came by Ben. Lay’s picture.” She had hung on the wall an oil portrait of the dwarf hermit, standing outside his cave, holding in one hand an open book.8
The American Revolution did not begin in 1775 and it didn’t end when the war was over. “The success of Mr. Lay, in sowing the seeds of . . . a revolution in morals, commerce, and government, in the new and in the old world, should teach the benefactors of mankind not to despair, if they do not see the fruits of their benevolent propositions, or undertakings, during their lives,” Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush later wrote. Rush signed the Declaration of Independence and served as surgeon general of the Continental army. To him, the Revolution began with the seeds sown by people like Benjamin Lay. “Some of these seeds produce their fruits in a short time,” Rush wrote, “but the most valuable of them, like the venerable oak, are centuries in growing.”9
In 1758, when Benjamin Lay’s portrait hung in Benjamin Franklin’s house, the Philadelphia Quaker meeting formally denounced slave trading; Quakers who bought and sold men were to be disavowed. When Lay heard the news he said, “I can now die in peace,” closed his eyes, and expired.10 Within the year, another Pennsylvania Quaker, Anthony Benezet, published a little book called Observations on the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes, in which he argued that slavery was “inconsistent with the Gospel of Christ, contrary to natural Justice and the common feelings of Humanity, and productive of infinite Calamities.”11 Bett and Primus and Jack and Sam and Will had not run away for nothing.
There were not one but two American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won.
I.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WROTE a new will before he sailed to London in 1757 because Britain and France were attacking each other’s ships, and he feared his might get sunk. The fighting had broken out three years before, only weeks after Franklin printed his “JOIN, or DIE” snake, slithering across a page. The battling had begun not at sea but on land, in Franklin’s own colony of Pennsylvania. Britain sorely wanted land that the French had claimed in the Ohio Valley, complaining, “the French have stripped us of more than nine parts in ten of North America and left us only a skirt of coast along the Atlantic shore.”12 Leaving that skirt behind, English settlers had begun advancing farther and farther inland, into territories occupied by native peoples but claimed by France. To stop them, the French had starting building forts along their borders. The inevitable skirmish came in May 1754, when a small force of Virginia militiamen and their Indian allies, led by twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, ambushed a French camp at the bottom of a glen.
Born in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, Washington had inherited his first human property at the age of ten, traveled to the West Indies as a young man, and accepted his first military commission at the age of twenty. Tall, imposing, and grave, he cut a striking figure. He was, as yet, inexperienced, and his first battle proved disastrous for the Virginians, who retreated to a nearby meadow and hastily erected a small wooden garrison that they named, suitably, Fort Necessity. After losing a third of his men in a single day, like so many stalks of wheat hacked down by a scythe, the young lieutenant surrendered. Only weeks later, delegates from the colonies met in Albany to consider Franklin’s proposal to form a defensive union, and, though they approved the plan, their colonial assemblies rejected it.
The war came all the same, a war over the trade in the East Indies, over fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland, over shipping along the Mississippi River, and over sugar plantations on West Indian islands. Like all wars, its costs were borne most heavily by the poor, who did the fighting, while traders, who sold weapons and supplied soldiers, saw profits. “War is declared in England—universal joy among the merchants,” wrote one New Yorker in 1756.13 The colonists called it the French and Indian War, after the people they were fighting in North America, but the war stretched from Bengal to Barbados, drew in Austria, Portugal, Prussia, Spain, and Russia, and engaged armies and navies in the Atlantic and the Pacific, in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. The French and Indian War did what Franklin’s woodcut could not: as far north as New England, it brought Britain’s North American colonies together. Not least, it also led to the publication of an American Magazine, printed in Philadelphia and sent to subscribers from Jamaica to Boston. As its editors boasted: “Our readers are a numerous body, consisting of all parties and persuasions, thro’ British America.”14
During earlier wars between the British and the French, the colonists had mostly done their own fighting, raising town militias and provincial armies. But in 1755, Britain sent regiments of its regular army to North America, under the command of the stubborn and tempestuous General Edward Braddock. Franklin viewed the appointment of Braddock as the Crown’s attempt to keep the colonies weak. “The British Government not chusing to permit the Union of the Colonies, as propos’d at Albany, and to trust that Union with their Defence, lest they should thereby grow too military,” he wrote, they “sent over General Braddock with two Regiments of Regular English Troops.”15 Charged with moving the French line, Braddock began to prepare to engage the French at Fort Duquesne, at the mouth of the Ohio River, on the western edge of the frontier. Franklin warned the general that his planned route, as serpentine as a snake’s path, would expose his troops to Indian attack. “The slender Line near four Miles long, which your Army must make,” he explained, “may expose it to be attack’d by Surprize in its Flanks, and to be cut like a Thread into several Pieces.” Braddock, it would seem, gave Franklin a condescending smile, the same smile the king gave his subjects. “These Savages may indeed be a formidable Enemy to your raw American Militia,” he said. “But upon the King’s regular and disciplin’d Troops, Sir, it is impossible they should make any Impression.”
Braddock and his troops proceeded with their march. Along the way, they plundered the people. Before long, many colonists found themselves fearing the British army as much as the French. “This was enough to put us out of Conceit of such Defenders if we had really wanted any,” wrote Franklin bitterly. Braddock’s troops were ignominiously defeated and Braddock was shot. During a beleaguered retreat, the dying general was carried off the field by Washington.16
Nothing daunted, William Pitt, the new secretary of state, determined to win the war and settle Britain’s claims in North America once and for all. In his honor, when the British and American troops finally seized Fort Duquesne, they renamed it Fort Pitt. But Pitt’s lasting legacy would lie in the staggering cost of the war. Before long, forty-five thousand troops were fighting in North America; half were British soldiers, half were American troops. Pitt promised the colonies the war would be fought “at His Majesty’s expense.” It was the breaking of that promise, and the laying of new taxes on the colonies, that would, in the end, lead the colonists to break with England.
Even before then, the most expensive war in history cost Britain the loyalty of its North American colonists. British troops plundered colonial homes and raided colonial farms. Like Braddock, they also sneered at the ineptness of colonial militias and provincial armies. In close quarters, in camps and on marches, few on either side failed to notice the difference between British and American troops. The British found the coloni
sts inexpert, undisciplined, and unruly. But to the Americans, few of whom had ever been to Britain, it was the British who were wanting: lewd, profane, and tyrannical.17
A clash proved difficult to avoid. In the British army, rank meant everything. British officers were wealthy gentlemen; enlisted men were drawn from the masses of the poor. In the colonial forces, there were hardly any distinctions of rank. In Massachusetts, one in every three men served in the French and Indian War, whether they were penniless clerks or rich merchants. In any case, differences of title and rank that existed in Britain did not exist in the colonies, at least among free men. In England, fewer than one in five adult men could vote; in the colonies, that proportion was two-thirds. The property requirements for voting were met by so many men that Thomas Hutchinson, who lost a bid to become governor in 1749, complained that the town of Boston was an “absolute democracy.”18