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Even after he left behind the charred remains of his
Dissertation
and set off for a new life back in Philadelphia, Franklin remained intent on exorcising the lingering effects of this particular erratum. The result was, in part, the moral code spelled out in what he called his plan of conduct, with which he busied himself during the long days of sea travel when he was not tending to his early experiments and recording his meticulous observations. This program ushered in a new and lasting turn in Franklin's outlook, activities, and pursuits, for its exhortations to do good—rather than to
think
well—brought a pronounced emphasis on the sociable and the workable at the expense of the purely logical.

“I grew convinced that
Truth, Sincerity and Integrity
in Dealings between Man and Man, were of the utmost Importance to the Felicity of Life, and I formed
written Resolutions … to practice them ever while I lived.”
52
In the assessment of one student of American thought, Franklin's only real recourse was to consign the metaphysics of his
Dissertation on Liberty
to the flames and start anew: “A world without a belief in virtue does not work. A machine that does not work is thrown out.… A philosophy that does not work is no philosophy at all.”
53

Despite the professional setbacks, ever-present financial worries, and a general feeling of disappointment at the time, Franklin would later come to recognize that his eventful year and a half in London had provided an important prelude to the scientific, social, and political successes to come. “Though I had by no means improved my Fortune. But I had picked up some very ingenious Acquaintance whose Conversation was of great Advantage to me, and I had read considerably.”
54

a
In accordance with his will, Franklin was buried in the Christ Church cemetery, next to his wife, Deborah. A plaque there simply reads, BENJAMIN AND DEBORAH FRANKLIN.

b
In its archaic usage, stew, or stewe, referred to a brothel, a tavern, or other place of ill repute. Here, Mandeville employs the former meaning.

c
The extant copies are housed at the British Museum, the Library of Congress, Yale University Library, and John Carter Brown University Library. Benjamin Franklin,
Autobiography
2003: 96, n7.

Chapter Three
The Leather Apron Men

Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers.
—Gottlieb Mittelberger

The city to which Franklin returned in the autumn of 1726 was on the cusp of a remarkable boom. No longer the idyllic “green country town” in the mind's eye of its founder, William Penn, Philadelphia was now the fastest growing of the major British settlements along the Eastern Seaboard.
1
Soon, it would leave the others—Boston, Newport, New York, and Charleston—far behind in terms of commercial power, economic development, and political and cultural influence.

By 1730, Pennsylvania province was home to around 51,000 colonists. This population would more than double to almost 120,000 in 1751, and double again to 240,000 two decades later.
2
While the birthrate in the North American settlements was high in comparison with Europe, much of this rapid population growth was due to the tide of immigration, which by its very nature promised to upend the established social order. “The rich stay in Europe, it is only the middling and the poor that emigrate,” reported J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French immigrant and country gentleman in his
Letters from an American Farmer
, begun shortly before the Revolution and published in 1782.
3

Philadelphia seemed to take this dizzying growth in stride. On its face at least, the city appeared an orderly, well-run sort of place, for it lacked much of the haphazard development and swelling urban chaos that characterized its northern rivals Boston and New York. The Scottish physician Alexander Hamilton (not the Founder of the same name), a transplant to Annapolis, Maryland, recorded impressions of Philadelphia in his travel account of 1744, the
Itinerarium
: “The plan or platform of the city lies betwixt the two rivers
Delaware and Schuylkill, the streets being laid out in rectangular squares which makes a regular, uniform plan, but upon that account, altogether destitute of variety.”
4

Other civic features of city life that caught the doctor's eye included the fashioning of painted cloth awnings to shield buildings from the sun and the regular practice of pouring cold water on the hot, dusty streets. “They are stocked with plenty of excellent water in this city, there being a pump at almost every 50 paces distant. There are a great number of balconies to their houses where sometimes the men sit in a cool habit and smoke.”
5

The German schoolmaster and organist Gottlieb Mittelberger, writing several years later in
Journey to Pennsylvania
, also remarked on Philadelphia's deliberate design: “The city is very large and beautiful, and laid out in regular lines, with broad avenues and many cross-streets.… It takes almost a whole day to walk around the city; and every year approximately three hundred new houses are built.”
6
Among its most prominent features were the central market and the fine wharves—numbering sixty-six along two miles fronting the Delaware River by 1760—which were central to the city's economic health and thus carefully maintained.
7

Like many other visitors, Hamilton was particularly struck by the residents' almost single-minded dedication to making money. At one point, he notes with alarm how the shops beneath his boardinghouse window regularly opened as early as five A.M. A member of a visiting delegation from Virginia esteemed Philadelphia as rich and vibrant a trading center as any in the colonies. “The days of Market are Tuesday and Friday,” wrote William Black, “when you may be Supplied with every Necessary for the Support of Life throughout the whole year, both Extraordinary Good and reasonable Cheap, it is allowed by Foreigners to be the best of its bigness in the known World, and undoubtedly the largest in America.”
8
And at least one quietist religious leader lamented the fact that Philadelphia's youth had long since forsaken the old “plain” ways of their forebears and adopted a worldly taste for cloaks and other clothes made of fine cloth, and “even velvet.”
9

Despite the hustle and bustle all around him, Hamilton, something of a bon vivant, found Philadelphia dour and its residents taciturn in the extreme, qualities he assigned to the town's Quaker origins. After one dinner party, he grouses that the guests simply grumbled about low prices for their grain and refused to be drawn on any other topic. “I never was in a place so populous where the
gout
[taste] for public gay diversions was so little. There is no such thing as assemblies of the gentry among them, either for dancing or music.… Their chief employ, indeed, is traffic and mercantile business which turns their thoughts from such levities.”
10
Even the town's lone public clock sported nothing more than a plain dial, devoid of markings in keeping with the Quaker distaste for ornamentation.

All attempts by William Black and his colleagues to hold a farewell ball in the city failed miserably, for they “could find none of the female sex in a humor for it.”
11
After one particularly trying day, a portion of which was spent auditing the “absurdities” of a Sunday sermon that he found “contradictory or repugnant to our human reason,” Hamilton was only able to relax when he accompanied some fellow Scots to a tavern. “We dismissed at eleven o'clock after having regaled ourselves with music and good viands and liquor.”
12

The bright prospects that clearly lay ahead for the city and its surrounding province of Pennsylvania brought with them a number of important economic and political changes that began to open up new opportunities for social advancement, intellectual betterment, and personal enrichment. This transformation was driven by shifting demographics, the accelerating local economy, and the rapid expansion of foreign and intercolonial trade—all accompanied by steadily increasing demands for greater political and social power among emerging elements of this new society.

Penn, who in 1681 received the vast province in settlement of a royal debt owed to his late father, had proven a highly effective recruiter and entrepreneur. His promise of religious tolerance and relative political freedom in the colony, as well as the availability of land on favorable terms, attracted a steady flow of European immigrants into the city and, from there, into the rich farming regions of the valleys beyond. Large numbers of other religious nonconformists, chiefly from England, Ireland, and Germany, joined Penn's fellow Quakers.

Among the most notable of the early German arrivals was the pietist lawyer Francis Daniel Pastorius, local agent for the Mennonites and other religious dissidents seeking “a quiet, godly & honest life in the howling wilderness” of Pennsylvania.
13
Pastorius negotiated the purchase of land from Penn for the large immigrant settlement of Germantown, later absorbed into the city of Philadelphia proper. By one estimate, Germans comprised around one third of the province's population in 1775, by which time Philadelphia was already reckoned among the largest cities in the British Empire.
14

As a result of such startling growth, the city's Quakers found themselves in the minority, representing just one quarter of the city's population by 1750, and considerably less twenty years later. Nevertheless, members of the Society of Friends long held their near monopoly on social and economic influence, even as the German influx brought with it a highly skilled agricultural and manufacturing workforce.
15

This Quaker elite flourished along with the burgeoning volume of trade. Drawing on the rich production in the province's agricultural heartland, as well as that of neighboring colonies, including western New Jersey and the Delaware Valley, local merchants shipped wheat and flour, pork, beef, flax, and lumber, among other products, up and down the seaboard and overseas. The large southern plantations, which often relied on a single cash crop, such as tobacco or indigo, provided considerable demand for food and other necessities from the Middle Colonies, shipped from the thriving port at Philadelphia.

In return, the city's merchants imported quantities of molasses, rum, sugar, and wine. According to Franklin's own “surprising though authentic” reckoning, rum imports exceeded 212,000 gallons in 1728, and taverns outnumbered churches by ten to one. The favorite drink was known as cider royal, fresh cider fermented with applejack.
16
Philadelphia enjoyed a highly favorable balance of trade, in part due to its growing artisan class, which was largely able to meet local demand for finished goods without extensive reliance on expensive British imports. Black market—and thus highly lucrative—commerce with the Dutch and French settlements in the Caribbean, in violation of British trade regulations, further enriched these wily merchants.
17

With their firm grip on much of this mercantile activity, the Quakers were able to retain considerable influence on everything from politics and defense policy to matters of public taste—in books and education, in manners and forms of address, and crucially in work habits, even as their proportion of the city population declined precipitously. It was membership in these same commercial circles to which Franklin had aspired when he entered into his business alliance with Thomas Denham, the Quaker merchant. However, Denham took ill after their lengthy return voyage from London on the
Berkshire
and later died. With Denham's support gone, Franklin's career in trade was over almost before it had even begun.

Once again at loose ends, Franklin returned to the printer's craft to seek his fortune, a development that thrust him firmly into the ranks of Philadelphia's
middle class—the artisans, farmers, shopkeepers, mechanics, and other skilled workers—who were just beginning to carve out a prominent place for themselves in provincial society. The European guild system, which had allowed the ruling nobility to keep the artisans in check for centuries through rigid regulation, never really took hold in the American colonies.

With labor of all types in short supply, colonial tradesman, such as Franklin's father, Josiah, were increasingly free to choose their craft and pursue their business outside of any meaningful government or social control. This same freedom allowed those interested to acquire additional skills and supplemental knowledge through educational lectures, evening vocational courses, and similar projects aimed at artisans and workingmen.

In fact, notes historian Gordon S. Wood, the first third of the eighteenth century saw the rapid emergence of a colonial middle class that shattered what had long been a rigid social division between “gentlemen and plebes.” Many in this rising social cohort acquired considerable wealth and, with it, greater intellectual curiosity and political sophistication about the world around them, as well as the necessary leisure time to devote to these new pursuits.
18
Printers such as Franklin stepped in to meet the growing demand for new information, ideas, and opinions expressed in pamphlets, books, and newspapers. This was particularly the case in Philadelphia, with its vibrant economy and seemingly boundless promise.

Equally important, William Penn had bequeathed the colony the strong humanitarian streak that ran throughout his Quaker faith, as well as through Franklin's later social activism: “True Godliness does not turn out Men into the World but enables them to live better in it and excites their Endeavors to mend it,” Penn declared in
No Cross No Crown
, written while a temporary prisoner in the Tower of London.
19

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