The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  In the 1760s as well, Franklin expressed a new sympathy for Native Americans and questioned his earlier belief that their skin marked their inferiority to whites. The paranoia and racism of Pennsylvania’s western colonists prompted his change of mind. In December 1763, around the time Franklin visited the “Negro School,” a group of armed settlers, the “Paxton Boys,” attacked some Indians in Lancaster County, killing and scalping six. Two weeks later, the Paxtonites tracked down and slaughtered the fourteen Indians who had survived the earlier attack and fled to the town workhouse in Lancaster. Between this and Pontiac’s uprising, it looked as if British officials had been right to worry about their ability to keep order over so many new people—and the expanse of new territory—at such a distance.

  The murder of the Indians shocked Franklin. He almost immediately produced a pamphlet to denounce it. He decried how “the only Crime of these poor Wretches seems to have been, that they had a reddish brown Skin, and black Hair.” To a British agent in charge of Indian affairs, Franklin stressed that new western settlements would “be of great National Advantage with respect to Trade” only if done “with the Approbation of the Indians.” Recent attacks on the Indians had proved that “our Frontier People are yet greater Barbarians than the Indians.” More significantly, Franklin—who, in his “Observations on the Increase of Mankind” had wished to see America “scoured” of its indigenous population—began to defend Indians’ territorial claims.55

  This move was not entirely selfless. If Indians had land rights, they could legally transfer them to colonists, which would undermine Britain’s claims to govern these transactions. It was a bit disloyal of Franklin to flout British law, though it was very common for colonists to do so in this regard.

  Taken together, Franklin’s ideas of blacks and Indians nonetheless represented an important readjustment. He had once coldly eyed them as things to be analyzed, as with the pores in Indians’ skin or the rates of smallpox deaths among African Americans. Now, he considered them as sociable beings similar to people of European descent. They were crafters of custom, respecters of property rights, students of written language. His prejudices moved from physical to cultural criteria, as when he agreed that freed blacks needed to be educated and Christianized. It was a limited advance but, in that era, an advance nonetheless. Still, it was not clear whether Franklin had repented his earlier opinion that Indians were a doomed population. Did he think that because their populations would inevitably decline, there was no need to mistreat them in the meantime? Or did he think they would be a lasting presence in the land—hence the need to treat them with more justice than the Paxton Boys handed out?

  The Paxtonites may have claimed another casualty: Franklin’s political reputation in Pennsylvania. The Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia in early 1764 to attack Indians (and pro-Indian policy); Franklin drummed up a volunteer defense force. At the governor’s request, he led a delegation that persuaded the Paxtonites to disperse—a narrow escape. But then, in his pamphlet Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation of Public Affairs, Franklin argued that the Paxton riots demonstrated the proprietors’ incompetence; the Crown should take over. The colony’s present government, he wrote, “has scarce authority enough to keep the common Peace. Mobs assemble and kill (we scarce dare say murder) Numbers of innocent People in cold Blood.” Meanwhile, even the colonists, “People of [the] three Countries” of Britain, Ireland, and Germany, suffered under the Penns’ misrule. At least some Pennsylvanians agreed—Franklin was elected speaker of the assembly in May.56

  The debate over making Pennsylvania a crown colony was extremely divisive, however, and Franklin was reckless in putting himself at its center. His 1764 campaign for reelection to the assembly was a grim affair. His detractors painted him as a hypocrite—he had benefited from the attentions of the proprietarial party before he turned on them. They also mocked him as a philosopher. One critic offered an epitaph: “He was the first Philosopher / Who, contrary to any known System, discovered / How to maltreat his / PATRONS.” Franklin lost in Philadelphia by a mere nineteen votes, his first defeat after thirteen consecutive elections. One wit concluded that he “died like a philosopher.” He never served in the assembly again. He summarized the Paxtonite affair and its fallout in the outline for his autobiography: “Sent out to the Insurgents—Turn them back. Little Thanks. Disputes revived.”57

  FRANKLIN RETURNED to London with almost unseemly haste. He lost his assembly seat on October 1 but was reelected as the assembly’s agent on October 25. He may have lost authority within the colony, but he was still prized for the famous face he presented in London. He embarked on the King of Prussia on November 9, leaving his family to finish the new house.

  Coming so late in the season, the voyage ran into “terrible Weather.” Friends had prayed that Franklin would get “thirty Days fair Wind”; the thirty days expired—the wind then whipped up. A borrowed woolen gown kept Franklin warm. It also helped, he wrote Deborah, that “every body on board” treated him well, particularly the captain: “No Father could be tenderer to a Child, than Capt. [James] Robinson has been to me.” Franklin arrived in Portsmouth on December 9. He drew up to Craven Street the next day, and the maid showed him in. Returning home herself, Mrs. Stevenson “was a good deal surpriz’d to find me in her Parlour,” Franklin chuckled to Polly. Of course, an Atlantic crossing meant illness; he dutifully suffered “a most violent Cold” for nearly a dozen days in mid-December. 58

  Franklin settled back into his metropolitan roles as a famous man of letters (he was reelected to the Royal Society’s council in 1765, 1766, and 1772), a man of influence (he helped Collinson engineer the title of Royal Botanist for John Bartram in 1765), and a high-ranking postal official. He was more determined than ever to wrest Pennsylvania away from the Penns and put it under Crown rule. His antiproprietorial campaign made him a champion of colonial interests. Other colonies procured his services, so that Franklin began representing the Georgia colony (in 1768) and the New Jersey and Massachusetts assemblies (in 1769 and 1770, respectively). He took these appointments seriously. His records indicate payments to the “doorkeeper of ye Board of Trade”—tipping the servants kept the door open.59

  Franklin was also watching out for his own interests, and during this time, he became a land speculator. His retirement from the printing business meant he could not expect any significant increase in income from his printshop, and his salaries as colonial agent were small; being a philosopher paid nothing. He needed other income. All that new territory in North America led to many settlement schemes, if not outright land grabs. Franklin followed debates in the Board of Trade over western territory, where colonists and British traders jockeyed for access to the fur trade, and he invested in several land companies. His earlier contribution to cartography proved useful; in 1766, he showed a potential investor the boundaries of a projected land company by giving him “one of [Lewis] Evans’s maps” on which he had “marked with a wash of red ink the whole country included” in the scheme.60

  Like many others, Franklin looked north and west for new land. He tried to help “the Nantucket Whalers, who are mostly my Relations,” to get land on St. John’s Island. There, they would be less cooped up and would gain access to “excellent” whaling and fishing. For himself, Franklin petitioned and in 1767 received a grant of 20,000 acres in Nova Scotia, a nice scrap snipped from the immense tapestry of French cession. Though he was ordered to settle one inhabitant per 200 acres within ten years, he never did. The grant eventually lapsed.61

  Franklin took more seriously a collective venture, the Grand Ohio Company, also called the Walpole Company, organized in 1769. This company sought the lands west of Virginia and south of the Ohio River—territory that Indians had ceded in 1768, following the collapse of Pontiac’s and other uprisings. The company’s royal petition for nearly two and a half million acres described the “said Tract of Land” as “vacant and unsettled by any of your Majestys Subjects.” (Even after the United
States spurned Britain, Franklin retained his Walpole Company shares, hoping they would enrich his heirs.)62

  With borders in a constant state of flux, the sciences of surveying and cartography were more important than ever. In 1764, British America was divided into northern and southern districts, each endowed with specialized administrators. A Surveyor General presided over each section, Samuel Holland in the north and William Gerard De Brahm (for East Florida) and George Gauld (for West Florida) in the south (the south was informally divided into two sections). Colonists worried that new surveys might slice into their holdings. At great expense, the astronomers and geodetic surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon labored from 1763 until 1768 to determine the line between Pennsylvania and Maryland that still bears their names. The mission was both scientific and imperial. Mason and Dixon measured a degree of longitude and a degree of latitude during their survey and determined the magnitude of gravity at the forks of the Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania, comparing it to a reading done at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.63

  Franklin, the colonial man of letters, was a consultant on this project. Acting as colonial postmaster and as a Fellow of the Royal Society, he advised the society how to contact Mason and Dixon, who together made a distant—and moving—target during their survey. The monthly packet had already sailed by the time the society made its inquiry, so Franklin offered another way to get the materials to the surveyors, via his remarkable network of friends and ships’ captains.64

  As important, he followed developments in marine cartography. There were few seaborne counterparts to North America’s official surveyors. Until 1795, Britain lacked a governmental hydrographic office (which France had), so it usually encouraged such work indirectly, by permitting private firms to publish charts. Little was censored—an unprecedented amount of maritime information was publicly available, especially in Portsmouth and London. The London market flourished on Tower Hill, a lively nautical nest where “Press Gangs” snatched men for His Majesty’s ships (one in ten British men had been impressed into wartime naval service) while customers perused charts. Anyone with enough money—women, landsmen, even foreigners—could buy a British chart of the Atlantic. Franklin was one such customer, purchasing several new maps and charts during his third London residence.65

  By the 1760s, three agencies dominated British marine cartography, and Franklin patronized them all. The oldest, Mount and Page, was a grand old firm that, under a variety of names, spanned four centuries. By the early eighteenth century, it was the sole publisher of the canonical English Pilot, a classic sea atlas. Mount and Page produced several editions by Samuel Sturmy and John Seller, which Franklin had conquered in his youth, and it had published Edmond Halley’s charts of magnetic variation. The second firm, Sayer and Bennett, was newer, dating from 1720, and specialized in charts rather than atlases or books. It scored a coup in 1775 when it obtained the rights to Captain James Cook’s surveys of the Canadian coastline, then carried on to publish Cook’s cartographic surveys of the Pacific. Last, there was Thomas Jefferys, a newcomer who published two important maritime atlases, The American Neptune and The Atlantic Pilot. The former gorgeously represented the coastline; the latter was more innovatively hydrographic in that it indicated the routes of voyages of exploration.66

  Hydrographic and navigational discoveries were of sufficient interest to appear in cheaper media, such as newspapers, including Franklin’s old paper. In early 1765, the Pennsylvania Gazette recounted the ordeal of a ship that, sailing to Philadelphia from Connecticut, “got into the Gulph Stream, and was carried so far to the Eastward, that the first Land she made was Newfoundland.” The current was not so well known that it was avoidable, yet it was familiar enough that the gazette felt no need to explain what the “Gulph Stream” was—by the 1760s, colonists knew.67

  This was the moment, above all, to solve the problem of longitude, the empire’s greatest problem of distance. Franklin had arrived back in London in time to get a front-row seat on the final race for the prize, from 1763 to 1773. Parliament had yet to pay anyone the money it had promised in 1714, when Franklin was a child on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Two solutions were possible. A navigator could either compare a celestial body’s position at sea against that at a fixed point on land (represented by an accurate timepiece) or determine position based on the locations of the celestial bodies that had predictable patterns.

  Franklin knew the men, John Harrison and Nevil Maskelyne, who championed each solution. Harrison, an artisan, made the first working chronometer, a timepiece whose elaborate gimbaling enabled it to keep time despite a ship’s jarring motion; Maskelyne, astronomer royal, produced the Nautical Almanac and the Tables Requisite with which navigators could determine longitude by lunar distances. Franklin served on the Royal Society’s council when, in 1761, it advised the Board of Longitude on the equipment to accompany Harrison’s celebrated chronometer during its test voyage to Jamaica. (Franklin sent Harrison’s 1767 essay on his marine “Watch” to a friend in Philadelphia.) But chronometers were prohibitively expensive, unlike star charts, which was why Maskelyne’s solution remained competitive. In an uneasy compromise, Parliament awarded some of the prize money to Harrison but did not proclaim him the contest’s winner.68

  Born an artisan (like Harrison) and formerly an almanac maker and currently a Fellow of the Royal Society (like Maskelyne), Franklin was uniquely suited to be cordial to both men, who hated each other. Despite this antipathy, each had helped to make the oceans safer.

  FOR EVERY chronometer that crossed the Atlantic, there were thousands of letters. Quieter and less flamboyant than the quest for longitude, the further development of the postal system was nevertheless the most effective way to bridge distances. For that reason, reforms of the post were central to the empire and to Franklin’s imperial career.

  The reforms were ongoing. In 1764, Franklin met with the secretary of the Post Office, Anthony Todd, probably to discuss the changes Franklin and Foxcroft had recommended in September. Their main point, that postage should be based on distance, was accepted. The two American officials published a table of rates based on travel outward from New York, where the Atlantic post arrived. More ships were laid on between North America and Britain, and service within the continent became more frequent, partly by “making the Mails travel by Night as well as by Day, which has never heretofore been done in America.” Franklin and Foxcroft requested “Maps delineated and adapted to the Post Roads of America” to keep postal riders moving even in gloom of night. After the Postal Act of 1765, the northern postal district gathered up the new Canadian territories and the southern one added East Florida.69

  With the expansion of the British Post Office, communication across the Atlantic became both regular and regulated. It still took from one to three months, depending on the route and sailing conditions, but service became more predictable and more frequent, which was a tremendous boon. No longer would colonists suspect that they received news, books, and letters only haphazardly; no longer would merchants and ministers fear that colonists were unaware of official news and policy.70

  Imagine a postal customer—say, Franklin himself—using this system. Look at all the paper he used. Paper, that marvelous substance, represented him to distant friends, and it let him glimpse those friends from a distance.

  At a stationers’, Franklin could buy writing paper and, if he did not make them himself, quills and ink. He might also purchase an epistolary novel for himself or, for a young friend, a how-to guide on writing letters—both were best-selling genres. He could consult a newspaper, which published the schedule for packet boats. After that would come writing, folding, sealing, and addressing the letter. He could take it to the local post office (usually a shop licensed to handle mail) or wait until a postboy blew a horn or rang a bell in the street and then hurry the letter out to him. If he felt very grand or pitied his correspondent’s poverty, he sent the letter “post paid.” This was rare�
�mostly, he paid postage on whatever arrived. Thus, the sociable souls of the eighteenth century honored their relations with each other: they paid for each other’s letters. (In this regard, we live in a similar era, as anyone who has printed out a long e-mail attachment knows.)71

  Thousands of eighteenth-century letters show signs of having been written according to postal schedules, not the writer’s inclinations. Even postal officials were caught unawares. To apologize for the brevity of one letter to Deborah, Franklin scribbled at its bottom, “I write this in hopes of [it] reaching the Packet” in time. Shortly after Polly Stevenson married William Hewson, Franklin began a chatty letter to her that ended abruptly when he heard “the Post-man’s Bell, so can only add my affectionate Respects to Mr. Hewson, and best Wishes of perpetual Happiness for you both.” But a regular post was a marvel—proof positive that human sociability defied distance. Writing to Polly Stevenson, as she then was, Franklin called down “Blessings on his Soul that first invented Writing, without which I should, at this Distance, be as effectually cut off from my Friends in England, as the Dead are from the Living.”72

  The administrators and packet captains of the postal system were themselves a sociable group. Franklin became friends with Anthony Todd, and both men invested in the Ohio Company. London-based postal officials, including Franklin, regularly dined on venison that the postmasters general provided. And Franklin, long a collector of maritime clients, became patron to several packet boat captains, especially Nathaniel Falconer. He gave business advice to Falconer; Falconer in turn carried news of Franklin’s Philadelphia family (including his yet-unseen grandchildren) and transported books from London for the Library Company. Falconer had a standing invitation to spend Christmas with Franklin at Craven Street.73