But the presence of Peter and Jemima is telling. The slaves remind us that this experimental space existed in the British colonies at midcentury, the heyday of imperial expansion and of a drive to control extra-European territories and peoples.
AS FRANKLIN ENJOYED his new consequence in the 1750s, Britain’s first empire entered its most significant period of growth. Everyone in North America was, for different reasons, obsessed by territorial expansion. Conflicts among different nations, Indian and European, took center stage. But there were also signs of tension between Britain and its colonies. In all this, the sciences played a part. It would be too simple to state that natural science was the handmaiden to empire. But whether as metaphor of power over the globe or as source of actual power, the sciences certainly served British imperial ambitions. And the empire provided men of science new scope for their investigations.
Consider James Alexander’s plan, in the early 1750s, to use British North America to measure the speed of electricity. Earlier tests had been inconclusive. In one English trial, reported in the Royal Society’s 1748 Philosophical Transactions, two men held between them a wire, four miles long but twisted back and forth so many times that they could stand side by side. They connected one end of the wire to a Leyden jar but did not detect any interval between the charge’s initiation and transmission.50
A greater distance was perhaps necessary: where was there a better place to find it than on the vast North American continent? Alexander proposed to Franklin that (after an initial test spanning the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers) thousands of miles of wire be run along yet more waterways, even down to the Ohio River, thence to the “Missisippi, to the Bay of Mexico, round Florida, and round the South Cape of Virginia; which, I think would give some observable time, and discover exactly the velocity.” Franklin gently responded that the experiment, “though well imagined, and very ingenious,” would merely confirm “the extream facility with which the electric fluid moves in metal.”51
But was it such a mad idea? Franklin and his merry Philadelphia electricians had, after all, conducted electricity through the Schuylkill River when they picnicked on its banks in 1749. Franklin had told Collinson that they had done this, and Collinson had told the Royal Society—Alexander probably read the letter in question, which was why he consulted Franklin. Wiring a great expanse of North America was not even the remarkable part of his plan. More astonishing was Alexander’s assumption that the continent must somehow lack creatures of any kind to snag or snip his wire. That was, indeed, the usual fantasy. British subjects, including Franklin, were convinced that North America was a vast, underpopulated space in which they could carry out some unprecedented scheme or another.
Indeed, Franklin was preparing to scheme his way into the most important political role of his career. The postal service was reinstating the Atlantic packets that connected the continental colonies to England. In early 1751, Franklin learned that the deputy postmaster for North America, Virginian Elliott Benger, was dying. Franklin wanted the job, a promotion from his local postmastership, and knew he needed friends in London to help. So even before Benger ceased to draw breath, Franklin asked Peter Collinson for assistance: “The Place is in the Disposal of the Postmasters General of Britain, with some of whom or their Friends you may possibly have Acquaintance.” Franklin somewhat disingenuously professed himself “quite a Stranger to the Manner of Managing these Applications” but provided Collinson with a copy of the previous occupant’s commission so his patron would know the job requirements to the letter.52
The position was reputed to be worth £150 a year, income Franklin could use now that he was retired, but he claimed a higher motive. The Post Office would support his “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge.” Location mattered, too. “I need not tell you,” Franklin nevertheless told Collinson, “that Philadelphia being the Center of the Continent Colonies, and having constant Communication with the West India Islands, is by much a fitter Place for the Situation of a General Post Office than Virginia.” Franklin won the campaign. In 1753, he and William Hunter of Williamsburg, Virginia, were appointed, the Post Office having decided that the volume of mail warranted two men on the job. Franklin the Copley Medalist thus gained his first significant political appointment. Prowess in natural philosophy led to patronage in the republic of letters—and in the carrying of letters. Already, science had brought Franklin successes he might otherwise never have achieved.53
In hindsight, he would conflate his blooming political career and his new status as a philosopher. In his Autobiography, he wrote that Pennsylvania’s new governor, William Denny, had delivered the Copley Medal to him in 1756. Denny bore the award along with “very polite Expressions of his Esteem for me” and took Franklin aside to confide that “his Friends in England” had advised him “to cultivate a Friendship with me, as one who was capable of giving him the best Advice.” Franklin misremembered. He had received the medal two years earlier, when the (sadly forgettable) Reverend William Smith took it to him. But the false memory revealed the truth: Franklin’s fortunes rose generally as his philosophical reputation shot heavenward.54
So confident was Franklin that he began to criticize British imperial policy, using political arithmetic to defend colonists’ interests. He thus built on his earlier analysis of colonial populations—and his fascination with numerical addition and multiplication—but renounced his earlier statements that the colonies might need migrants. (That notion had underpinned his plea for a Pennsylvania currency, and it had influenced Polly Baker’s spirited defense of her duty to increase and multiply.) In Poor Richard Improved for 1750, Franklin claimed for the first time that the colonies were growing too fast to need immigrants. English political arithmeticians had estimated that the continental colonies doubled their population every thirty years but assumed that migration accounted for much of the growth. Franklin accepted the estimate but doubted its cause: “I believe People increase faster by Generation in these Colonies, where all can have full Employ, and there is Room and Business for Millions yet unborn,” in contrast to “old settled Countries” that offered no such opportunities.55
Franklin next used this argument to question British colonial policies. Since the previous century, British officials had been sending convicted felons to the colonies, where they served out their sentences in the employ of whoever purchased their labor. (The assumption was that the rough-and-ready colonies needed any kind of labor and guaranteed conditions that would both punish and reform criminals.) Then came the British Iron Act of 1750, which prohibited most new iron and steel production in the colonies in order to secure markets for British metal manufactures. Together, these policies made clear that Britons valued the colonies as a marketplace for their exports but also considered them a dumping ground for people they did not want.
Franklin, who had worked so hard to prove himself worthy of metropolitan regard, was offended. In a biting 1751 “letter” to the Pennsylvania Gazette, he complained of the policy on convicted felons. British ministers argued that the convicts would assist the “WELL PEOPLING of the Colonies,” but Franklin wondered whether the migrants were such a prize. He suggested a swap: British convicts for American rattlesnakes, which could happily slither in English gardens, “particularly” those belonging to “the Prime Ministers, the Lords of Trade, and Members of Parliament” who had advocated the traffic in felons. Those “Rattle-Snakes seem the most suitable Returns for the Human Serpents sent us by our Mother Country.”56
That same year and possibly in response to the Iron Act, Franklin began a longer analysis, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.” He circulated it in manuscript while his fame was building and only published it in 1755 as an appendix to another man’s pamphlet. His pamphlet rejected estimates of population based on “Bills of Mortality.” He had earlier accepted this as a model, derived from William Petty’s groundbreaking analysis, for examining his colony. This method would not “suit new Countries, as America,”
where ample land gave ample “means of subsistence.” “Plants or Animals” would increase until they crowded each other out—unlikely in the colonies. Franklin calculated an even faster rate of population growth: colonists doubled every twenty years, exclusive of immigration, which must soon tip the population balance of the British empire to the western Atlantic. It would then be absurd for the small metropole to make colonial commercial policies unilaterally—“Britain should not too much restrain Manufactures in her Colonies. A wise and good Mother will not do it.”57
This was a shattering conceptual shift and possibly the most aggressive claim that Franklin could have made against Great Britain. Britons had long feared that the small population of their island nation would diminish their efforts to establish colonies, and they worried about overextending their power. Franklin preyed on that fear and nimbly reversed the transatlantic balance of power. Size and productivity of population should, he declared, determine political authority.58
Tempting though it may be to see a revolutionary message smoldering within this tract, Franklin intended his criticisms to strengthen the empire, not declare independence from it. In fact, he argued, the more numerous colonists became, the greater their economic contribution to the British state: they produced valuable commodities for sale and then used the profits to buy British manufactures. As they increased, so did their production and consumption—“a glorious Market wholly in the Power of Britain.” Rather than regulate colonial economies, as in the Iron Act, British officials should consider the natural increase of colonial population “an Accession of Power to the British Empire by Sea as well as Land! What Increase of Trade and Navigation! What Numbers of Ships and Seamen!” Franklin’s imagery summoned a vivid image of the British Atlantic empire at full tide, producing wealth, consuming goods, and dominating the sea.59
More than any other of his investigations into the natural world, Franklin’s political arithmetic politicized an argument about nature. He was, in fact, consciously comparing human and animal populations. In 1751, the same year he drafted his “Observations,” Franklin had published in Poor Richard his essay on microscopy, in which he referred to the teeming unseen animalcules that vastly outnumbered humans. Microscopes also allowed people to examine the polyp, an aquatic creature whose self-regeneration raised interesting questions about the nature of life. Franklin’s “Observations” duly compared a colonizing nation to “a Polypus.” “Take away a Limb” from the home country and “its Place is soon supplied” while the severed limb grew into another polyp. Thus, he wrote, “you may of one make ten Nations, equally populous and powerful.”60
But this analogy between animal and human populations brought Franklin back to the vexing question of human difference and particularly the racist categories he had used in his earlier writings on mortality. In his “Observations,” the increase of white colonists mattered most to him. They married earlier and oftener, compared to Europeans, and produced twice as many children per marriage. So their overall numbers “must at least be doubled every 20 Years.” His assumption was, of course, that America’s land lay open to colonists, whether Indians lived on the land or not. And slaves introduced a complicated variable into the equation. The excruciating conditions under which they worked prevented their natural increase (here, Franklin focused on the sugar islands), “so that a continual Supply is needed from Africa.” The more slaves, the less natural increase and the greater the dependence on expensive, imported labor.61
Franklin probably did not care about the sugar islands—he simply wanted to be sure that the continental colonies did not end up resembling them. For that reason, he wished to see the slave trade to the continent slowed, if not ended. Europeans, he said, “make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.” In America, “we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys,” meaning Africans and Indians, and “increasing” those with complexions of “the lovely White and Red” mixed together.62
Nor were all white and red complexions welcome. In his essay, Franklin gave ill-considered vent to his dislike of Pennsylvania’s German-speaking population. “Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements,” crowding out English “Language and Manners”? He used a watery metaphor to tell Collinson he hoped that “the Stream” of Germans might be “turned to the other Colonies you mention,” ones too new to be choosy about their settlers. Pennsylvania’s Germans unsurprisingly resented Franklin’s prejudice—and they could vote. His political opponents would find it easy, in future, to turn his statements against him. Franklin would later repent and omit the offending material, as well as the assessments of black and tawny complexions, from reprintings of his treatise during the 1760s.63
And Franklin was far from consistent in his opinions. Recall Poor Richard’s claim that all blood was ancient and that inherited statuses were not natural facts. In the same year Franklin composed the openly racist “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” Poor Richard published another jibe at hereditary entitlements. He considered it “an amusing Speculation to look back, and compute what Numbers of Men and Women among the Ancients, clubb’d their Endeavours to the Production of a single Modern.” Over the course of twenty-one generations, a person’s ancestors would run, “supposing no Intermarriages among Relations,” to the number of 1,048,576. If a “Nobleman” traced his genealogy back to “the Norman Conquest,” he would discover that over a million people had sired him. Indeed, the more ancient an ancestry, the less likely its nobility. The “Purity of Blood” was “a mere joke,” and all the world’s people were of one “Blood.”64
Humanity’s red circulating juice even connected the hated Germans to Pennsylvania’s British settlers, including Franklin. Despite his objections to German migrants, he explained in a private letter of 1753 that he did not think them physically distinct from the British peoples. After all, following the myth of Germanic settlement of ancient Britain, “the English are the Offspring of Germans,” and both peoples lived in a “Climate” that was “much of the same Temperature.” Therefore, Franklin confessed, “I can see nothing in Nature that should create this Difference, I am apt to suspect it must arise from [human] Institution.” English-language schooling and familiarity with English customs would make Germans British. In the same letter, Franklin allowed the same possibility for Indians, who if “brought up among us” were virtually European in their beliefs and manners. Whether the same was true for Africans was something Franklin did not, at that point, explore.65
Whatever his inconsistencies, he continued to think of his work in the human sciences as similar to his investigation of the natural world. Thus, to his brother John, he complained that he had never heard back about “my Electrical Papers nor of that on the Peopling of Countries, nor that on Meteorology, which have passed thro’ your Hands.” To Collinson, Franklin sent drafts of three pamphlets dating from the 1750s: “The Increase of Mankind / The Properties and Phaenomena of the Air and / The present State of the Germans in America.” The bundle of ideas made clear, however, Franklin’s different conceptions of the natural and human realms: air circulated freely, but the humans who lived around the Atlantic should not.66
FROM POLITICAL ARITHMETIC, Franklin turned to hydrography, especially to questions about the extent, configuration, and characteristics of the Atlantic. He was already familiar with maritime cartography. In the sixteenth century, the Dutch had created detailed and highly coveted sea charts. Many were packaged in “quarter waggoners,” maritime atlases named after the Dutch publisher Lucas Wagenaer. These images proliferated in the early eighteenth century as practical guides to navigation but also as political—meaning imperial—statements that designated European overseas holdings. In 1745, with an eye to this demand, Franklin had advertised for sale the fourth book of the canonical English Pilot (first published in London in 1737), an atlas that described “the West India Navigation, from Hudson’s-Bay to th
e River Amazones.”67
He was venturing into literally uncharted waters. Despite all the advances in mapping land, open ocean cartography barely existed. Instead, charts mostly surveyed known sea routes and indicated coastline—meaning what navigators were trying not to run into. Most of the open ocean was known only to the sailors who managed to stay afloat in it.68
Edmond Halley had pushed further. Franklin had followed much of Halley’s work, so he probably knew of his pioneering attempt, from 1698 to 1701, to chart the entire Atlantic. Halley wrote on many nautical subjects, including tides and the trade winds, explaining the latter according to thermal trends, which may have influenced Franklin’s analysis of Atlantic storms. Halley had also been the first English person to command a naval vessel for work in the sciences. Three times, he commanded the Paramore to determine the lines of magnetic variation in the North and South Atlantic—an unprecedented mapping of physical pattern over the earth, of immense value to the British navy and merchant marine. The premier London maritime cartographic firm, Mount and Page, published Halley’s chart in 1701. It circulated widely as a model of how to investigate a vast and turbulent part of nature. Yet Halley had charted an ocean whose very boundaries remained unknown.69
Around the time he was forming his “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” Franklin explored those boundaries by investing in an attempt to find the Northwest Passage. We now scoff at this fantasy, the geographic equivalent of the philosopher’s stone. But many reasonable people had, since the sixteenth century, sought a passage through the northern part of North America. Such a waterway would unite the Atlantic and Pacific, giving whatever European power controlled it unprecedented access to two oceanic systems. For the time being, only the Spanish could claim this advantage because their empire straddled the isthmus of Panama and held strategic islands in the Philippines and West Indies.
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