The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (37 page)

At present we are like the separate filaments of flax before the thread is formed, without strength because without connection. But UNION would make us strong and even formidable. Though the
Great
should neither help nor join us, though they should even oppose our uniting, from some mean views of their own, yet if we resolve upon it, and if it please GOD to inspire us with the necessary prudence and vigour, it
may
be effected.

Franklin’s warning and appeal found a ready audience among ordinary Pennsylvanians, and to a lesser extent in other colonies. The first edition of this pamphlet—numbering two thousand—sold out quickly, requiring a second printing. A German translation soon appeared, for that growing community of German immigrants in the Pennsylvania backcountry. Selections from the pamphlet ran in newspapers in the leading cities of America.

Encouraged by this response, Franklin supplied specific recommendations for provincial defense. He drafted a charter for an “Association,” or militia, of volunteers drawn from the public at large. Members would furnish their own weapons, form companies according to neighborhoods, choose officers by ballot of the men, and convene a general military council of representatives from each company. Civic virtue, rather than compulsion, would serve as the basis for the actions of all involved.

Franklin presented the plan at a meeting in the public hall built for George Whitefield and the awakeners. “The house was pretty full,” Franklin recalled. “I harangued them a little on the subject, read the paper and explained it, and then distributed the copies.” Public speaking had never been Franklin’s forte and never would be; he felt obliged to elaborate his “harangue” in the
Gazette
in the following days.

Here the radical nature of his plan became apparent. Government having failed the people, he said, the people were entirely justified in assuming for themselves an essential role of government. “Where a Government takes proper measures to protect the people under its care, such a proceeding might have been thought both unnecessary and unjustifiable. But here it is quite the reverse.” The insistence on organizing companies according to neighborhoods was intended “to prevent people’s sorting themselves into companies according to their ranks in life, their quality or station.” The tradesman-author was also a leveler. “’tis designed to mix the great and small together, for the sake of union and encouragement. Where danger and duty are equal to all, there should be no distinction from circumstances, but all be on the level.” In the closest thing to an admission of the radicalism of his proposal, Franklin took pains to express “a dutiful regard to the government we are under.” The Association was a wartime organization only. “’tis heartily to be wished that a safe and honourable peace may the very next year render it useless.”

The plan was a stunning success and Franklin the hero of the hour. Five hundred men took the pledge at that first meeting; within days the number from the city alone surmounted one thousand; eventually some ten thousand subscribed from all over the colony. Soon the companies were drilling, converting the facility with firearms many American males (not to mention some females) acquired in childhood into something approximating military effectiveness. Women’s auxiliaries complemented the work of the men, sewing flags for the different companies, often with colors and mottoes suggested by Franklin. He himself was voted colonel of the Philadelphia regiment, but, lacking any military experience, he declined the honor.

There was more to the scheme. Enlisting bodies in the defense of home and hearth was relatively easy, especially when actual fighting remained merely hypothetical. Arming those enlistees with rifles and other small weapons was scarcely harder, especially since many already owned such weapons. (For the weaponless, or those wishing to upgrade the household arsenal, Franklin advertised in the
Gazette:
“A parcel of good muskets, all well fitted with bayonets, belts and cartouch-boxes, and buff slings to cast over the shoulder, very useful to such as have occasion to ride with their arms; to be sold by B. Franklin.”)

Artillery was another matter. Needed to defend the city against marine assault, cannons were not the sort of thing hanging in everyman’s back room. Instead they had to be purchased, at a price commensurate with their scarcity.

Because the Assembly refused to appropriate the funds, Franklin proposed another extragovernmental scheme. He organized a lottery in which £20,000 of tickets would be sold; £17,000 would be paid out in prizes, with the balance of £3,000 being set aside for the purchase of cannons and the like. The idea of a lottery did not originate with Franklin; the practice had already come over from England and been employed in New England and New York. But he adapted it to Pennsylvania’s circumstances. Many of the same persons who objected on pacifist grounds to buying weapons for the province now objected on anti-gambling grounds to a lottery. To overcome their objections, Franklin enlisted the support of the leading men of the city, including James Logan, whose Quaker credentials went back to William Penn. Logan once explained to Franklin the difference between his own and Penn’s views on the legitimacy of self-defense. Queen Anne’s War was on while Penn and Logan made the crossing to America; en route their ship encountered another vessel, which the prudent captain presumed to be an
enemy. He ordered all hands and passengers to prepare to defend the craft and themselves, but he made special allowance for Penn and his Quaker company, knowing their scruples. They might retire belowdecks. James Logan, however, remained above and was assigned to a gun. After a tense half hour, the approaching ship turned out to be a friend, and Logan went below to share the welcome news with Penn and the others. To his surprise, Penn upbraided him for staying on deck and making ready to fight. Such was not the Quaker way. Logan, irritated at being chastised in front of the entire company, spoke more than he might have in private; he replied that it was rather late for Penn to be complaining. As he—Logan—worked for Penn, Penn might have ordered him below with the rest but had not, instead being willing to let Logan face the danger on behalf of those who would not.

Nearly a half century later, Logan continued to believe that while nonviolence was an ideal toward which humanity ought to strive, it need not be an altar on which pacifists must sacrifice themselves. “Thy project of a lottery to clear £3,000 is excellent,” he wrote Franklin, “and I hope it will be speedily filled; nor shall I be wanting.” Indeed he was not, putting down £250 toward the first issue of lottery tickets. Others followed Logan’s lead, snatching tickets by the fistful for self-defense and civic pride—and in some cases for resale in other provinces. Fire companies purchased tickets in bulk—leading Franklin to suggest a ruse to one of his fellow firemen. If the lottery subscription appeared to be falling short, the two of them would propose to their company the purchase of a fire engine. “The Quakers can have no objection to that,” Franklin explained. “And then if you nominate me, and I you, as a committee for that purpose, we will buy a great gun, which is certainly a
fire engine.”

Such shenanigans proved unnecessary, as the tickets disappeared as fast as Franklin could print them. Within a short while he was able to boast, in the name of his fellow citizens, that “the late lotteries in New-England and New-York have taken more
months
to fill than this has
weeks.”

Having raised the money for a battery of guns, Franklin now had to find the guns. This was the more difficult part of the task, as the absence of cannon foundries in America meant, in the short term (that is, until the arrival of reinforcements from England) that each piece added to Pennsylvania’s arsenal subtracted a piece from New Jersey’s or New York’s or Massachusetts’s. In the state of general alarm at the time, few governors or assemblies were willing to sell cannon that might be needed in their own colonies’ defense; the most they would do was loan some ordnance.

Aware of the difficulty, Franklin led a committee of the Association
north to negotiate with Governor George Clinton of New York. At first Clinton refused even to consider letting any guns out of his province. “But at a dinner with his council there was great drinking of Madeira wine,” Franklin recounted, “as the custom of that place then was; he softened by degrees, and said he would lend us six. After a few more bumpers he advanced to ten. And at length he very good-naturedly conceded eighteen.”

Though Franklin did not believe that God took sides in human quarrels, he was not above an appeal to Providence if such seemed necessary to solidify public opinion behind the defense effort. His activities had won him the confidence of Governor Thomas and the governor’s council, and Franklin proposed to this group a public fast day. During these twenty-four hours the populace would entreat heaven for forgiveness of sins and for assistance in the colony’s hour of need. No such occasion had ever been held in Pennsylvania, but the governor and council thought it a capital idea. Franklin remarked that such events were an annual occurrence in Boston, where he grew up; he would be happy to compose an appropriate proclamation. This he proceeded to do, with as much apparent fervor as ever Cotton Mather invested in a sermon. Speaking through the mouth of the governor and council, he recited past and current perils, and declared, “Unless we humble ourselves before the Lord, and amend our ways, we may be chastised with yet heavier judgments.” The designated day of fasting and prayer—January 7, 1748—would allow all ministers and people of the city “to join with one accord in the most humble and fervent supplications, that Almighty God would mercifully interpose, and still the rage of war among the nations, and put a stop to the effusion of Christian blood; that he would preserve and bless our gracious king, guide his councils, and give him victory over his enemies.”

Even for Franklin, his performance on behalf of his adopted city during the winter of 1747–48 was a tour de force. James Logan, probably the most respected person in Philadelphia, certainly thought so. “He it was,” Logan wrote to Thomas Penn, son of William Penn and current proprietor of the colony, “that by publishing a small piece in the year 1747 with his further private contrivances, occasioned the raising of ten companies of near one hundred men each in Philadelphia and above one hundred companies in the province and counties…. He it was who set on foot two lotteries for erecting of batteries, purchasing great guns and to dispatch which he went himself to New York … and all this without appearing in any part of it himself, unless in his going to New York himself in company with others of whose going he was the occasion, for he is the principal mover and very soul of the whole.”

8
Electricity and Fame
1748–51

Thomas Penn read Franklin quite differently than James Logan did. “This Association is founded on a contempt to government,” the proprietor declared, “and cannot end in anything but anarchy and confusion.” Penn understood the implications of recent events, even if others did not. Franklin had shown the people they could act independently of government; Penn asked, “Why should they not act against it?” Franklin’s brainchild amounted to a “military commonwealth”; its creation was “little less than treason.” As to its instigator, “He is a dangerous man and I should be very glad he inhabited any other country, as I believe him of a very uneasy spirit.”

James Logan knew Franklin as a neighbor, a friend, a fellow philosopher, a political ally; Thomas Penn knew him solely by reputation. Yet, perhaps because he possessed keener intuition, perhaps because he had more to lose, Penn understood Franklin as Logan did not. Franklin was indeed dangerous—dangerous, that is, to the proprietary prerogatives Penn had inherited and was endeavoring to defend. And Franklin was indeed of an uneasy spirit, unwilling to leave well enough alone, insistent on asking whether well might be better, impatient to make it so.

In certain respects Penn knew Franklin better than Franklin knew himself. Franklin had not set out to undermine authority; he simply wanted to see his city defended. And he had chosen the same devices of voluntarism that had led to the creation of the Junto, the Library Company, the fire brigades, and the Philosophical Society. Yet as Penn recognized, even if Franklin did not, there was an obvious, almost inevitable, progression from acting independently of government to acting against government. Penn was the first defender of the imperial status quo to detect the danger in Franklin’s restless intelligence; he would not be the last.

If Franklin
had wanted to challenge authority, he could readily have exploited the favorable notice the Association’s activities brought his way. He did not lack the time, for at the beginning of 1748 he retired from the printing business. David Hall continued to exceed Franklin’s expectations for a foreman, being no less adept at the business side of his work than at the craft of the printer per se. Isaiah Thomas, a fellow printer who knew both men (and who wrote a comprehensive history of printing in America), said of Hall, “Had he not been connected with Franklin he might have been a formidable rival to him.” Franklin thought so too, and determined to keep Hall from becoming a rival by making him a partner.