The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (43 page)

Franklin first proposed a reform of the watch system to the Junto, but after gaining approval there it failed to elicit the necessary official support. Not until the early 1750s, following a continued deterioration of street safety, was the Assembly persuaded to approve legislation enabling Philadelphia to effect necessary improvements—in particular, to raise the taxes required to light the streets and pay constables and watchmen sufficiently to make them take their jobs seriously.

Franklin, having pondered the problem for years, and now both an assemblyman and an alderman, was a natural to help draft orders for the new system. The orders specified the hours of duty for constables (ten at night till four in the morning from March to September, nine at night till six in the morning from September to March). They identified the precise street corners on which the watchmen were to stand and the rounds they were to walk (“Up Front-street, on the east side, to the first corner,” for the watchman stationed at Front and Union, “thence down Water-street, up Pine-street, down Second …”). They listed the sorts of troublemakers the constables and watchmen should be on the lookout for (“Night walkers, malefactors, rogues, vagabonds, and disorderly persons, who they shall find disturbing the public peace, or shall have just cause to suspect of any evil design”). And they characterized the duties of the watch (“To prevent any burglaries, robberies, outrages, and disorders and to apprehend any suspected persons who, in such times of confusion, may be feloniously carrying off the goods and effects of others”). In addition the watchmen should immediately raise the alarm “in case of fire breaking out or other great necessity.”

Enhancing
official vigilance addressed one aspect of the crime problem, but it missed the problem’s roots: the proliferation of criminals. Since the seventeenth century the American colonies had been forced to serve as a dumping ground for criminals convicted in England. Colonial legislatures protested the practice of transportation of felons, only to have their protests ignored. Colonial editors denounced the policy, appending to their editorials lurid descriptions of what the policy produced. The
Gazette
did its part in April 1751:

Last Thursday, a horrid murder was committed at Elk Ridge by Jeremiah Swift, a convict servant of Mr. John Harberley’s, about 23 years of age. While himself and wife were gone to a funeral, this wretch quarreled with two boys in the field, both Mr. Harberley’s sons, one about eleven, the other about nine years of age, and with a hoe knocked one of their brains out, and killed him on the spot; the other he knocked down and left him for dead…. After that he went to the house and murdered a young woman (Mr. Harberley’s daughter) about 14 or 15 years of age, as is supposed, with an axe, for she was found dead and very much mangled….

From Virginia we hear that six convicts, who were transported for fourteen years, and shipped at Liverpool, rose at sea, shot the captain, overcame and confined the seamen, and kept possession of the vessel 19 days; that coming in sight of Cape Hatteras, they hoisted out the boat to go on shore, when a vessel passing by, a boy they had not confined, hailed her, and attempted to tell their condition, but was prevented; and then the villains drove a spike up through his under and upper jaws, and wound spunyarn round the end that came out near his nose, to prevent his getting it out….

From Maryland we hear that a convict servant, about three weeks since, went into his master’s house, with an axe in his hand, determined to kill his mistress; but changing his purpose on seeing, as he expressed it,
how d—d innocent she looked,
he laid his left hand on a block, cut it off, and threw it at her, saying,
Now make me work, if you can.
(N.B. ’tis said this desperate villain is now begging in Pennsylvania, and ’tis thought he has been seen in this city; he pretends to have lost his hand by an accident. The public are therefore cautioned to beware of him.)

The
Gazette
—meaning, at this time, David Hall—editorialized, “When we see our papers filled continually with accounts of the most audacious robberies, the most cruel murders, and infinite other villainies perpetrated by convicts transported from Europe, what melancholy, what terrible reflections it must occasion! What will become of our posterity! These are some of thy favours, Britain! Thou art called our Mother Country; but what good mother ever sent thieves and villains to accompany her children; to corrupt them with their infectious vices, and murder the rest?”

Franklin was as outraged as Hall (they certainly discussed the issue), yet he articulated his outrage with a lighter touch and sharper pen. Writing anonymously, Franklin asserted in all apparent seriousness that every argument adduced for sending convicts to the colonies argued equally for sending rattlesnakes from Pennsylvania to England. These serpents—“felons-convict from the beginning of the world”—were a hazard to public safety, to be sure, but this might be simply due to an unfavorable environment (as was said of the transported convicts). “However mischievous those creatures are with us, they may possibly change their natures if they were to change the climate.” To test this hypothesis, Franklin proposed that a bounty be awarded to any enterprising person who collected rattlesnakes—he suggested the spring, when, heavy and sluggish, they emerged from their winter quarters and might easily be captured—and transported them to Britain. “There I would propose to have them carefully distributed in St. James’s Park, in the Spring Gardens and other places of pleasure about London; in the gardens of all the nobility and gentry throughout the nation; but particularly in the gardens of the Prime Ministers, the Lords of Trade and Members of Parliament; for to them we are most particularly obliged [for the transport of felons to America].” The upper classes as a whole would benefit from proximity to Pennsylvania’s slithering class. “May not the honest rough British gentry, by a familiarity with these reptiles, learn to creep, and to insinuate, and to slaver, and to wriggle into place (and perhaps to poison such as stand in their way), qualities of no small advantage to courtiers!”

Franklin noted that transport of felons to the colonies was treated by the British government as a trade, with the convicts’ services being sold like other bound labor. Trade required returns. “And rattlesnakes seem the most suitable returns for the human serpents sent us by our Mother Country.” Yet the trade in serpents would not be quite equal, for snakes posed fewer dangers than felons. “The Rattlesnake gives warning before he attempts his mischief, which the convict does not.”

Felons
posed an obvious threat to Pennsylvania; the threat from unchecked immigration was more subtle. At least this was Franklin’s view. Certain of his neighbors were considerably more alarmed. Lutheran pastor Henry Muhlenberg declared, “It is almost impossible to describe how few good and how many exceptionally godless, wicked people have come into this country every year. The whole country is
being flooded with ordinary, extraordinary and unprecedented wickedness and crimes…. Our old residents are mere stupid children in sin when compared with the new arrivals! Oh, what a fearful thing it is to have so many thousands of unruly and brazen sinners come into this free air and unfenced country!”

Such comments were striking, coming from Muhlenberg, himself a recent immigrant (1742) and from the same region (Germany) where most of the troublesome newcomers originated. German immigration to Pennsylvania was as old as the colony itself, and it grew with each passing decade, until by the mid-eighteenth century the Germans constituted perhaps a third of Pennsylvania’s population. Most of the Germans were sober and industrious, yet some displayed an unsettling religious enthusiasm. A millennial sect of German Pietists known as the “Society of the Woman in the Wilderness” built—or dug—a communistic colony in caves above Wissahickon Creek, not far from Philadelphia, where they ascetically awaited the Second Coming. Another group, led by Johann Conrad Beissel, established a frontier village of the godly at Ephrata, near the Susquehanna River some fifty miles west of Philadelphia. The core of Beissel’s sect was the “Spiritual Order of the Solitary,” forty men who devoted themselves to a rigorous regimen of work, fasting, and prayer. Although avowedly celibate, the Ephratans admitted women, who enrolled in the “Order of Spiritual Virgins.”

By any reckoning, Beissel was a singular character. He denounced marriage as the “penitentiary of carnal man,” and he conjectured (and repeatedly—but unsuccessfully—attempted to prove) that elimination was not a necessary function of the body. He banned pork from Ephrata on the unoriginal ground that it was unclean; he barred geese on the slightly more imaginative reasoning that their feathers and down tempted followers to sinful luxury. When he preached, he closed his eyes and spoke very rapidly, saying he had to “hurry after the Spirit”; when at length he stopped and discovered that most of his auditors had gone home, he lamented their inability to endure “the Spirit’s keenness.” Beissel opened his door and his heart to all who suffered and sought relief. These included unhappy wives who found him hypnotizing, and found his Order of Spiritual Virgins about the only escape—in that era of prohibitively difficult divorce—from unsatisfactory husbands. It did not help Beissel’s reputation with those husbands that he spent a surprising amount of time in the quarters of the Virgins. He said he was consoling them and testing his resistance to carnality; none but believers believed him.

Franklin knew Beissel chiefly as a customer. When the sect leader
brought some of his writings to the print shop to be published, Franklin welcomed the business. He declined to get exercised about Beissel’s religious or moral views, judging the unorthodoxy of the Ephratans and the other German cultists a harmless eccentricity.

At the same time Franklin wondered whether English Pennsylvania could well absorb large numbers of Germans. Many were ignorant, and though this by itself was no disqualifying trait, combined with their lack of English it made remediation difficult. “As few of the English understand the German language,” Franklin told Peter Collinson, “and so cannot address them either from the press or pulpit, ’tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain.”

In days past, the Germans had kept to themselves, leaving public affairs to the English majority. No longer. “I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two counties.” Yet in joining the larger political community, the Germans refused to join the predominant cultural community. Halfway through the eighteenth century Franklin expressed a fear like those that would infuse American thinking about immigration until the twenty-first.

Few of their children in the country learn English; they import many books from Germany…. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal writings in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say.

In peacetime the separateness of the Germans was troubling; in wartime it struck at the very safety of the province. Franklin suspected—mistakenly, it seems—that the French were deliberately encouraging German settlements in the Ohio Valley, as a means of containing the British colonies. Yet French strategy or no, the Germans already settled in Pennsylvania were doing the French king’s work. When Franklin had been trying to summon support for the provincial militia, the Germans had been opposing it. “The Germans, except a very few in proportion to their numbers, refused to engage in it, giving out one among another, and even in print, that if they were quiet the French, should they take the country,
would not molest them.” Even where they were not actively seditious, the Germans complained against the cost of defense, forming a passive impediment to measures necessary for security.