The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (27 page)

Alas! ’tis easy as pissing abed. For instance: the stargazer peeps at the heavens through a long glass; he sees perhaps Taurus, or the great bull, in a mighty chase, stamping on the floor of his house, swinging his tail about, stretching out his neck, and opening wide his mouth. ’tis natural from these appearances to judge that this furious bull is puffing, blowing, and roaring. Distance being considered, and time allowed for all this to come down, there you have wind and thunder.

He spies perhaps Virgo (or the Virgin); she turns her head round as it were to see if anybody observed her; then crouching down gently, with her hands on her knees, she looks wistfully for a while right forward. He judges rightly what she’s about; and having calculated the distance and allowed time for its falling, finds that next spring we shall have a fine April shower.

6
Citizen
1735–40

Although Richard Saunders could say things Benjamin Franklin could not, the sustained success of the almanac afforded Franklin a financial security that allowed him—indeed, given his self-confidence in his own judgment, encouraged him—to test the waters of political controversy. One whirlpool surrounded the perennial problem of money—that is, currency. During the half decade after his arrival in Philadelphia, the economy of Pennsylvania improved dramatically. The boarded windows that had greeted him on his first morning there had reopened, with new and newly active merchants and tradesmen announcing their intention to do business, and customers responding with alacrity and cash.

The alacrity reflected the rapid growth of the population of the colony, as thousands of immigrants, including a large contingent of German Pietists, accepted the promise handed down from William Penn to his heirs, of free religion and cheap land. The filling-in of the hinterland spurred demand for the myriad things the farmers required and the city sold.

As for the cash, that was the consequence of an experiment in liquidity begun by the Pennsylvania Assembly in the year of Franklin’s arrival. Following the lead of Massachusetts and other colonies, Pennsylvania in 1723 authorized the issue of paper currency—actually, bills of credit backed by real estate—to the amount of £45,000. A similar law of 1726 extended the idea of a paper issue, eliciting an enthusiastic response from the business class, which accounted the currency responsible for lubricating the gears of commerce and thereby promoting the prosperity of the province.

Yet lunch was no freer in the eighteenth century than before or since, and what pleased merchants and debtors dismayed landlords and creditors. The latter groups alleged trickery, even fraud, in the issue of paper; the inflation that inevitably followed flimsy money, they said, was nothing but theft.

Franklin entered the fray in 1729. He wrote and printed
A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency,
a treatise that combined what he read with what he saw and heard. Most important of his reading was the work of William Petty, an early advocate of the labor theory of value later adopted by Marxists and others; Petty’s views would color Franklin’s thinking on political economy his whole life. As for his personal observations, these included his experiences as a businessman and the intelligence he gathered as a newspaper editor and a generally aware individual.

As with his earlier essay on metaphysics, his argument for a paper currency was less noteworthy for what it said about its subject than for what it said about its author. Franklin was not an original economist and would never become one, although his observations in other areas—population growth, for instance—would greatly influence the work of economists. Yet at twenty-three he did not hesitate to engage the theorists on their own ground, and if his insights gave little instruction to the experts, they conveyed the subject to the amateurs who formed his true—and growing—audience.

The gist of his argument was that a scarcity of circulating money elevated interest rates and thereby retarded trade. Merchants had to
borrow to finance inventories; the greater the cost of the borrowing, the smaller the inventories financed. High interest rates also discouraged land sales by pricing potential buyers out of the market. The general phenomenon was at once an obvious application of the law of supply and demand and an observed inference from the behavior of the Pennsylvania economy. The opposite was equally obvious and observable. “We have already experienced how much the increase of our currency by what paper money has been made, has encouraged our trade.” The single example of shipbuilding illustrated the point:

It may not be amiss to observe under this head what a great advantage it must be to us as a trading country that has workmen and all the materials proper for that business within itself, to have ship-building as much as possible advanced: For every ship that is built here for the English merchants gains the province her clear value in gold and silver, which must otherwise have been sent home for returns in her stead; and likewise every ship built in and belonging to the province not only saves the province her first cost but all the freight, wages and provisions she ever makes or requires as long as she lasts, provided care is taken to make this her pay port, and that she always takes provisions with her for the whole voyage, which may easily be done.

By other examples Franklin elaborated his pro-paper argument. A plentiful currency would attract workmen drawn to high wages, as most workmen were. It would diminish dependence on imports from England as local manufacturers found markets for their goods, thereby righting the chronic imbalance in trade and cash flows with the motherland. It would improve social relations throughout the province as men of various stations found outlets for their talents and energies.

The opposition to paper often reflected an unwarranted reverence for specie, Franklin said. Gold and silver were nothing more than convenient measures of something more intrinsic: the amount of human labor that went into any commodity. “Suppose one man employed to raise corn, while another is digging and refining silver; at the year’s end, or at any other period of time, the complete produce of corn, and that of silver, are the natural price of each other; and if one be twenty bushels and the other twenty ounces, then an ounce of that silver is worth the labor of raising a bushel of that corn.” This fundamental principle had an important
corollary: “The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of gold and silver they possess.”

Franklin acknowledged the temptation inherent in paper issues—namely, to print too much of the stuff. Current Pennsylvania practice avoided this pitfall by securing the notes with land. Franklin succinctly explained, “As bills issued upon money security are money, so bills issued upon land are in effect
coined land.”
The value of land was rising with the prosperity of the province and the growth of its population; this was the best security of all.

Franklin doubtless hoped that if the Assembly could be persuaded to authorize another paper issue, he would receive the contract for the printing; as always, he expected that what was good for Pennsylvania would be good for him. In fact his arguments, joined to those of others of like mind, did carry the day, and although Andrew Bradford got the first contract, Franklin received a subsequent one: for £40,000 of notes, on which his fee was £100.

Civic-mindedness
and self-interest intersected in another area, though not so directly. No city in America had ever suffered a fire on the scale of the London fire of 1666, but that had less to do with American circumspection than with the lesser combustible density of American urban life. As noted, the original plan of Philadelphia had taken the London disaster to heart and specified wide streets and ample spacing of buildings; but with time and prosperity the open spaces of Penn’s “green town” filled in. As they did, one person’s carelessness became his neighbors’ hazard, and consequently their concern.

Franklin employed one of his tested methods to register this concern. At the beginning of 1735 he assumed yet another literary persona; this “A.A.” wrote a letter to the editor of the
Gazette,
which Franklin obligingly published. A.A. was, by his own account, “old and lame of my hands, and thereby uncapable of assisting my fellow citizens when their houses are on fire”; all he had to offer was the wisdom of his years. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said, sounding oddly like Poor Richard. Prevention was particularly important in matters inflammatory. Citizens ought to take care how they transported hot embers and coals from one room to the next—“for scraps of fire may fall into
chinks and make no appearance till midnight; when your stairs being in flames, you may be forced (as I once was) to leap out of your windows and hazard your necks to avoid being over-roasted.”

Other points of prevention called for collective effort. The city currently regulated bakeries and coopers’ shops; A.A. suggested appending to those regulations a measure proscribing all hearths that lacked sufficient depth to keep the flames within, and a similar ban on the practice of framing the fronts of fireplaces in wood molding, which frequently was fashioned of the heartwood of pine and therefore oozed flammable resins. Under present practice anyone could call himself a chimney sweep, whether or not he knew the first thing about ridding chimneys of creosote and other combustible buildup. For civic safety, chimney sweeps ought to be licensed by the mayor and fined for any chimney that caught fire within fifteen days after exercise of their services.

An ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure, but sometimes civic safety had to be purchased in larger lots. A.A. explained that “a city in a neighboring province”—the well-traveled among his readers would recognize Boston—had formed clubs of active men to combat fires. Each club commanded a fire engine, with which the members practiced regularly; each included specialists in the use of other equipment, including axes and hooks; each was led by an officer who directed their efforts and could compel obedience of the citizenry in times of fire emergency. Prior to the establishment of this system, fire had scourged their city; since then the flames had been kept in check. Philadelphia should learn from the example. To date, no extraordinary fire had ever raked the city on the Delaware, but given a hardly unthinkable combination of drought, wind, and place of outbreak, a small fire might easily become extraordinary in the absence of preparations to suppress it.

Franklin had already circulated these ideas in the Junto; after airing them in the
Gazette,
he took the obvious next step of organizing a fire club. Combining what he knew of Boston with what he had seen in London, the Union Fire Company incorporated itself in December 1736. Each member pledged to provide two leather buckets for carrying water and four cloth bags for rescuing goods, to be devoted exclusively to the activities of the fire company and marked accordingly. Failure to have this equipment at the ready would result in a fine of five shillings per missing piece—although any equipment lost fighting a fire would be replaced at the expense of the company. Members would meet monthly for inspection and consideration of policies (and socializing); absent members would be fined one shilling. As to the business of fire fighting:

We will all of us, upon hearing of fire breaking out at or near any of our dwelling houses, immediately repair to the same with all our buckets and bags, and there employ our best endeavours to preserve the goods and effects of such as shall be in danger…. And if more than one of us shall be in danger at the same time, we will divide ourselves as near as may be to be equally helpful. And to prevent suspicious persons from coming into, or carrying any goods out of, any such house, two of our number shall constantly attend at the doors until all the goods and effects that can be saved shall be secured in our bags, and carried to some safe place.