Franklin’s offbeat story touched on all the points that he was trying to prove by demographic calculations and point-by-point reasoning in his “Observations.” The two essays should be read side by side. Nor was it an accident that he named his character Baker, a sly reference to the womb as an oven, a popular jest among English writers at the time. For Franklin, a man of both science and commerce, reproductive labor was work and should be valued as such. By adding to the “numbers of the King’s subjects,” reproductive labor was an imperial asset.
It also made sense for Franklin to target bachelors in his tale. In the American colonies and in England, the unmarried man of means was a scandalous figure. He was ridiculed as a hermaphrodite, as half man, half woman; his prescribed punishment, as one New York newspaper demanded, should be to have half of his beard shaved from his face to indicate his diminished manliness. Others felt he should lose his inheritance. In the same way that land could be left fallow, human fertility could be wasted. Having no children, wasting their seed, bachelors indulged in the worst kind of reproductive idleness.10
On the other hand, bastards added to the population and increased the wealth of the empire. Franklin’s own circumstances reinforced his view. His son William (later royal governor of New Jersey) was a bastard. William, too, fathered a bastard son, William Temple Franklin, and Temple, as he was known, added two known illegitimate children to the family tree. Bastards were a Franklin family tradition.11
Like John Locke, Franklin was certain that healthy children were the “riches of every country.” Yet his promotion of natural increase in the 1750s had more to do with colonial politics than strictly scientific curiosity. More than anywhere else, he asserted unambiguously, fit and fertile children were the special assets of British North America. In “Observations,” he sought to convince British policy makers that the Caribbean islands should not be the preferred colonial model. Franklin deplored the racial imbalance in the West Indies, which kept the population of laboring whites at artificially low numbers. Slaveowners, who didn’t perform their own labor, suffered from physical defects: they were “enfeebled, and therefore not so generally prolific.” In short, he concluded that slavery made Englishmen idle and impotent.12
Franklin also believed that slavery taught children the wrong lessons: “White Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry.” His words here echoed what William Byrd had written about poor whites in Virginia. Byrd admitted to the Georgia trustees in 1726 that poor white laboring men learned to despise labor, and would rather steal than work in the fields. Franklin changed the above equation: slavery corrupted all white men, rich and poor alike.
On a larger scale than Oglethorpe, Franklin was fashioning a free-labor zone for the northern colonies. The magic elixir to achieve his idealized British America was, in a word, breeding. In his imagination, a continental expanse populated by fertile settlers would create a more stable society. Children would replace indentured servants and slaves as laborers, mirroring the system of labor that Oglethorpe had tried but failed to permanently institute in Georgia.
Franklin expanded his theory amid global war and shifting boundaries on the North American continent. By 1760, he was writing in support of Britain’s claim to Canada, eager to add that large territory to the empire after the British victory over France in the Seven Years’ War. British colonists would fill up the land, and the majority would remain a “middling population” happily engaged in agriculture. Unlike the structurally imbalanced sugar islands, North America’s desirable “mediocrity of fortunes” would lead the growing population to rely heavily on the consumption of British-made goods. This was a win-win situation for British merchants and American colonists, because population growth would at the same time augment commerce and manufacturing back in England. Not afraid of hyperbole, Franklin offered a warning to Parliament if it tried to hem in the colonial population. By refusing to add Canada, the highest legislative authority would be no better than a cruel midwife stifling the birth of every third or fourth child in North America.13
Franklin’s theory of breeding would remain a staple of American exceptionalism for centuries to come. He provided three irresistible arguments. First, he promised that class stability accompanied western migration. Second, he reasoned that the dispersal of people would reduce class conflict and encourage a wider distribution of wealth among the population. Third, what he called a “mediocrity of fortunes” was his belief in the growth of a middle-range class condition. His farming families were not poor or self-sufficient, but engaged in some form of commercial farming, producing enough to support their families and purchase British goods.14
The most startling feature of his theory was that the class contentment he described could be achieved through natural means, or, to put it more bluntly, by letting nature take its course. The British Empire, with its well-trained ground forces and powerful navy, secured the territory. From that moment forward, the unoccupied land was the lure for settlers much like the molasses pot for the ants. In a land of opportunity, procreating came more naturally, as families felt happy and secure. Rigid class distinctions and the hoarding of resources were less likely to take place. The compression of classes persisted as long as new land was acquired in which people could spread and settle. Industry, frugality, and fertility were the natural outgrowth of a happy mediocrity.
• • •
How realistic was Franklin’s theory? And to what degree was his argument based on wishful thinking rather than a reasonable explanation for human behavior? To begin with, eighteenth-century American colonists—like twenty-first-century Americans—were not anything like ants or pigeons. Human nature does not follow some mechanistic model of predictable reactions to pain and pleasure. And Franklin’s omnipotent and guiding hand of nature was never left unmediated by other, equally powerful forces of politics and culture. Were people really mice in a maze? Or was colonization, migration, and peopling more messy and less certain than his grand theory promised?
Franklin’s own experiences belied his optimism as to the ease with which colonists moved from one place to another. As a teenager, he had run away from Boston to Philadelphia, cutting short the full term of an apprenticeship he had been contracted to serve with his elder brother. A fugitive and vagrant, he was part of the large class of servants on the lam. His movement, like so many others, was haphazard, less methodical than the ants he studied. William Moraley, who arrived in Philadelphia in the same decade as young Franklin and wrote a memoir about his experiences, may have said it best when he described himself as a “Tennis-ball of fortune,” bouncing from one new master to the next. Despite his literary skills, training as a law clerk and watchmaker, the un-Franklinesque Moraley seemed to migrate in circles and never up the social ladder. There was no guarantee that restlessness ensured social mobility.15
Poverty was increasingly common as the eighteenth century wore on. Philadelphia had its economic slumps, brutally cold winter weather, and shortages of wood that caused the poor nearly to freeze to death. In 1784, one man who was part of the working poor in the city wrote to the local newspaper that he had six children, and though he “strove in all his power,” he could not support them. Hard work by itself was not the magic balm of economic self-sufficiency, nor was Franklin correct that big families were always a boon. He was even wrong about his tabulations on American birthrates. Infant mortality in Philadelphia was surprisingly high, and comparable to English rates, proving that Franklin’s prediction of a healthy and happy population was more rhetorical than it was demographic fact.16
The quintessential self-made man was not self-made. The very idea is ludicrous given the inescapable network of patron-client relationships that defined the world of Philadelphia. To cushion his rise, Franklin relied on influential patrons, who provided contacts and loans that enabled him to acquire the capital he needed to set up his print sho
p and invest in costly equipment.
For Franklin to obtain patronage and navigate contending political factions was a tricky enterprise. Pennsylvania’s class structure had some unusual quirks. At the top were the proprietors, members of William Penn’s family, who owned vast tracts of land and collected quitrents. Next came the wealthy Quaker landowners and merchants, bound together by family and religious ties. In the eighteenth century, the Society of Friends disowned any member who married outside the sect, which inflicted real economic hardship by depriving the expelled of important commercial resources, loans, and land sales.17
Franklin was neither a Quaker nor a quasi Quaker (finding some special appeal in their religious principles), but he did develop strong personal relationships with several cosmopolitan and highly educated Friends in Philadelphia and in England. He relied on Quaker patrons, especially in the early days of his business. Like another one of his sponsors, the lawyer Alexander Hamilton, a non-Quaker leader of the Quaker Party (and no relation to the later politician), he initially sided with the Friends in local and imperial politics, except that he broke ranks when it came to an orthodox stand on pacifism. His friends were liberal Friends, who were not exclusive about who should wield influence within the political faction of the Quaker Party. That was how Hamilton rose to power in Pennsylvania and saw to Franklin’s appointment as clerk of the Assembly, which in turn led to his official entrance onto the local political stage.18
The Friends did not rule uncontested. There was a rising non-Quaker elite faction, with ties to both the proprietors and the Anglican Church. Their political influence derived from strong commercial ties with England and to the essential Scottish countinghouses. Their power was enhanced upon the purchase of thousands of acres of the most lucrative tracts of real estate, which was made possible because the land office was overseen by the powerful proprietors. They became known as the Proprietary Party—a rival group to the wealthy Quakers. Though Franklin began his rise by becoming a master tradesman and a printer, he could not ignore the colonial merchants of either party. Merchants dealt in world markets; they were wholesalers, a distinctly different class from shopkeepers or tradesmen like Franklin, and many were extremely wealthy. Sound paper money helped with overseas trade, and Franklin’s contract from the Assembly to print money drew him closer to the commercial elite.19
Class status was still based on family name in Pennsylvania, for the top tier was dominated by the Penn, Pemberton, and Logan families—the proprietors and Quaker elites. Below them was a growing transatlantic merchant class that set itself apart by engaging in a conspicuous display of wealth. These families owned slaves and servants, and silver tea sets; they wore rich fabrics, had grand homes, and drove carriages. At the time Franklin retired from his printing operations in 1748, he was in the top tenth percentile in wealth, owning a horse and chaise and having invested in a large tract of land. Even among the plain Quakers, known for their simple dress, carriages were a status symbol. In 1774, in a city of fifteen thousand, only eighty-four Philadelphians owned a carriage.20
Class was about more than wealth and family name; it was conveyed through appearances and reputation. Franklin understood this. The first portrait of him, painted in 1746, did not show him in his leather apron setting print type; nor was he pushing a wheelbarrow along the street, as he described himself—a dutiful tradesman—in his Autobiography. He was wearing a respectable wig and a fine ruffled shirt, and assumed all the airs of the “Better Sort.”21
If material appearances defined the proprietors and wealthy classes as the “Better Sort,” then the same rule applied at the other end of the social spectrum among the “Meaner Sort.” A legal distinction existed between the free and the unfree, the latter including not only slaves but also indentured servants, convict laborers, and apprentices. As dependents, they were all classified as mean, servile, and ill-bred. Thousands of unfree laborers flooded Philadelphia, so that as early as 1730, Franklin was complaining about “vagrants and idle persons” entering the colony. He wrote these words after having escaped impoverished circumstances not many years before. He had arrived in Philadelphia in 1723 as a runaway, meanly dressed in filthy, wet clothing.22
For better or worse, the word “sorts” was meaningful. It loosely referred to different grades of commercial goods. Buttons and tobacco were classified in “sorts.” A 1733 advertisement in a New York newspaper offered “fans made and sold of richer and meaner sort.” Unlike the idiom of breeding stocks, which measured value through family bloodlines, commercial sorts placed more emphasis on outward appearance, as in the separation of quality goods from cheaper ones. As a commercial people, the British were inclined to think of their social classes along the same lines. When a newspaper referred to people of the “meanest quality,” it could as easily have been an appraisal of the texture of cloth, meaning something that was coarse, unfinished, composed of baser materials, and cheaply made.23
In general, meanness meant poverty and a disagreeable dependence, whether in the form of a reliance upon charity or forced labor in a workhouse. Philadelphia, Boston, and New York all had almshouses. But meanness also attached to the condition of servitude, and was embodied in submissiveness. There was a stigma assigned to those of the lower classes, because they allowed themselves to be looked down upon, despised, and abused. The meaner sort was thought to possess a rude appearance, dull mind, and unrefined manners, and to indulge in vulgar speech. Meanness was filth and lowliness, yet another variation of the enduring class of waste people.24
Franklin was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor. His design for the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 was intended to assist the industrious poor, primarily men with physical injuries. The permanent class of impoverished were not welcome; they were simply shooed over to the almshouse. He felt the English were too charitable, an opinion he based on observing German settlers in his own colony, who worked with greater diligence because they came from a country that offered its poor little in the way of relief. When he talked about the poor, he sounded like William Byrd. In complaining about British mobs of the poor that raided the corn wagons in 1766, he charged that England was becoming “another Lubberland.”25
Most men wanted a “life of ease,” Franklin concluded, and “freedom from care and labor.” Sloth was in itself a form of pleasure. This was why he contended that the only solution to poverty was some kind of coercive system to make the indigent work: “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” The poor’s instinct of being “uneasy in rest” had been impaired; so what they needed was a jolt (of electricity?) to work again.26
Here we see the double meaning inherent in Franklin’s theory of forced migration. In his projected model of emigration, a continental expanse populated by fertile settlers would allow people to escape the onus of working for others. Parents and children would work for themselves, stripping away a culture of subservience that was part and parcel of being of the meaner sort. But with newfound liberty, their fate rested on the most impersonal of forces: survival of the fittest. The harsh environment of the frontier forced settlers either to work hard or perish. Only the more frugal, fertile, and industrious would succeed, while the slothful and incompetent would have to keep moving or die.
If Franklin valued the middling sort on the frontier, he was already their champion before he wrote “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.” The “middling people” of Pennsylvania were, he had written, the “Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, and Farmers.” He had no desire to eliminate the “Better Sort,” of course, but he rejected the idea that if some were “better,” everyone else was automatically “the meaner Sort, i.e., the Mob, or the Rabble.”
In a pamphlet of 1747, “Plain Truth,” he demonstrated that the middle had a crucial role to play for the colony. That year Delaware was invaded by an irregular French and Spanish force. Franklin wrote to warn his fellow Ph
iladelphians, especially the Quakers, that the same fate awaited them unless they organized a voluntary militia. He called for a “militia of FREEMEN,” by which he meant men of the better and middling sorts, working together to defend their property and their colony.27
To rally support for his militia plan, he cast the dangers of a foreign invasion in terms of class warfare. Who, he posed, could be expected to lead the attack on a civilized people? It would be those “licentious Privateers,” the dregs of society: “Negroes, Mulattoes, and others of the vilest and most abandoned of Mankind.” He insisted that no indentured servants would be allowed to join the army of freemen. Besides advocating for defense of the colony, what was Franklin up to? Simple. He was redrawing class lines, bringing industrious middling men up the social ladder and refortifying the line that separated the middling from the meaner sort.28
Franklin proved that he had little faith in human nature. From his early days in Pennsylvania, he had fulminated against the intractable poor. In 1731, he wrote a piece in the Pennsylvania Gazette about the “scandalous Collection” of slaves, drunks, and low white servants who gathered at the outdoor fairs. As he gazed on his fellow Philadelphians, he accepted the cynical view of humanity that virtue was a rare and malleable trait. In his Autobiography, he told a story of how he gave up vegetarianism as a young man after he saw the belly of a fish cut open and all the little fish fall out. This story was a class parable, the lesson being that the big fish (or powerful elites) devoured weaker men. Franklin was not a disciple of the “Sermon on the Mount,” but believed instead that the poor were neither less greedy nor naturally humble compared to those above. If the little fish in his world were allowed to rise, they would be just as rapacious.29
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