Conceived in Liberty (106 page)

It is no wonder that by the end of King George’s War in 1748, George Croghan had emerged as by far the largest Indian trader in Ohio and was commonly called “the king of the traders.” To keep these Indian allies, Croghan led the proprietors in forcibly driving the squatters off their lands. So enthusiastic was Croghan in going about his task that Thomas Penn was
moved to applaud Croghan. The proprietor’s agent commended the Reverend Mr. Peters, in overall command of the operation, for executing the job with a “hussar spirit, nothing [but] which will do with these people.”

Hardly had the war with France ended when Croghan and Thomas Penn each came to the conclusion that a government fort should be built in French territory on the Ohio River. Penn had power designs on the valley while Croghan was worried not so much about French trade as about the Ohio Company, a speculative land company to which Virginia had arbitrarily granted a huge amount of land and which stood to profit by any settling in this region. Such settlement would have ended Croghan’s opportunities for trade with the Indians. Typically, Croghan lied repeatedly to the Pennsylvania authorities, asserting that the Indians were demanding such a fort of the English. But while the Quaker Assembly was perfectly willing to supply Croghan with bribes for the Indians, they were still reluctant to build a fort. Thomas Penn and his officials were almost able to drive the fort through the Assembly in the fall of 1751; then, at the last minute, Croghan’s misrepresentations were publicly and dramatically revealed, and the project fell through. Quakers in the colony, slowly but surely dwindling in devotion to their principles, were saved despite themselves for a while longer. And Pennsylvania was stopped from aggression in France’s Ohio Valley.

Shorn of government favor, Croghan’s trade was left dependent on his own business acumen, which was hardly extensive. Overloaded in debt and swindling his partners and creditors to the end, Croghan became insolvent shortly after his disgrace and the defeat of the fort bill.

Despite its evasions and compromises, the Quaker Assembly managed to avoid direct armed participation in King George’s War. The colony came closest in 1747, the last full year of the war. Delaware, the non-Quaker sister colony under the proprietary of the Penn family, had gladdened the rulers by voting for a militia and a fund for participation in the war effort. It was repaid by a raid, during July, by a small landing party near Lewes from a few French and Spanish privateers. The landing party plundered a few farms. Its strength and the damage done were negligible, but hysteria began to sweep Philadelphia, an hysteria carefully fostered and abetted by the war party constituting the ruling executive oligarchy. Rumors of a feared Spanish expedition from Havana circulated throughout the colony. The Council suggested arms for the colony, as well as aid to Indians in New York. The Assembly, however, kept its head in the midst of the war hysteria, and coolly and properly disparaged the supposed threat from the sea. It also trenchantly pointed out that since the time aggression against Canada had been suspended, there had been little threat to worry about from Indians in the North. The Assembly concluded by pointing to the money they had saved the people of Pennsylvania by refraining from appropriating funds for other alleged threats in the past.

*
Herbert L. Osgood,
The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century
(Worcester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958), 4: 49.

At this point there entered the scene a man whose historical reputation is perhaps the most overinflated of the entire colonial period in America: Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, a printer from Philadelphia, a writer, inventor, and clerk of the Assembly, decided to circumvent the Assembly’s refusal to establish a militia by creating one himself. He began his campaign by publishing a pamphlet,
Plain Truth
(1747), which proved highly influential in whipping up war hysteria. He painted the menace and horrors of armed invasion in lurid colors, and demagogically appealed to the supposed fighting qualities of each ethnic group in the colony. Alarmist rumors were spread of a supposed enemy attack in the spring of 1748. In the midst of this fervid atmosphere, Franklin launched a voluntary militia “association,” which quickly gained over 10,000 adherents in the colony. The men formed themselves into companies and regiments and elected their own officers. Franklin then used a lottery to finance this private army, and used the funds to purchase cannons.

While voluntarily financed, Franklin’s association was not truly private, for Franklin worked hand in hand with the delighted proprietary administration. Reverend Mr. Peters wrote to Thomas Penn that the association movement was in the interests of the proprietary and would be a means of escaping from Quaker control of the province. Penn, however, disagreed and declared that establishing an army outside the government apparatus virtually constituted treason. Besides, Penn had that instinctive bitter distrust of the bureaucrat and ruler, of
any
mass action of the people undirected by the state—for the very precedent of such action could some day redound against the state itself. But Peters as well as the Council hastened to assure Penn that the association was really a governmental body, taking orders from them, and that they were
in complete control of the appointment of officers, and of all the orders directed to them. Apprised of these facts, Penn relented and expressed his warm approval of the institution as a necessity of the time.

Franklin displayed his cunning in the affair by having a fast day proclaimed in honor of the association, in order to bring the clergy and God in on the side of the scheme. As Franklin himself boasted in his autobiography: “Calling in the aid of religion, I proposed to them (the Governor and Council) the proclaiming a fast to... implore the blessing of heaven on our undertaking.... This gave the clergy of the different sects an opportunity of influencing their congregation to join in the association, and it will probably have been general among all but Quakers if the peace had not soon intervened.”

Indeed, peace “intervened,” and disproved all the nonsensical claims and fears perpetrated by Franklin and the ruling war party. The Quakers emerged from the war more honored and entrenched than ever; they needed to retain only their unity and principle to continue the peace policy. As we shall soon see, however, this proved impossible, and a good part of the responsibility for the collapse of Quaker peace principles belongs to Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin was, indeed, a man of many and versatile attainments, but he lived, it must be remembered, in a versatile and unspecialized age when learned men were familiar with most of the ranges of human thought. Moreover, he was the opportunist par excellence; amidst all the uncritical adulation for Franklin, probably Professor Joseph Dorfman has given the most just estimate: “In an age where great flexibility of mind and action was called for, he [Franklin] was without peer in moving with the course of events. His inconsistencies were many, but they were the inevitable accompaniments of his diverse loyalties and his journalistic habits.”
*

Benajmin Franklin, the son of a Boston artisan, made his way to Philadelphia to work as a printer, setting up his own business in 1728, at the age of twenty-two. Characteristic of Franklin—the popular and inveterate spouter of copybook maxims—was the way he repaid the venerable Andrew Bradford, Pennsylvania’s first printer, and his son William, who had befriended the young Franklin and had gotten him his first job as a printer. Anxious to obtain the highly lucrative patronage of being public printer, and seeing that Bradford had printed an Assembly address containing some errors, Franklin quickly prepared a correct printing and sent a copy to every member of the Assembly. He was soon able to take the public printing business away from Bradford.

Franklin was able to develop a lucrative printing business at so young an age largely by keeping an eye to the main chance—that is, through an ability to win a favored place at the public trough by gaining the patronage of older
and influential men. Hardly had Franklin launched his business when he was able to snag several highly profitable plums of government privilege. The first and most important was his securing of the vital public printing business—won away not simply by the above device, but primarily by the influence of the venerable lawyer Andrew Hamilton, an extremely powerful member of the Assembly whose son was soon to be governor of the colony. Hamilton had taken a liking to young Franklin and continued to lavish patronage upon him until his death.

The second coup centered on paper money. In 1729, the question arose whether or not Pennsylvania should print another large issue of paper money. Franklin, spurred by the lucrative prize of the contract for printing the new money, wrote an anonymous pamphlet (
A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency
) that trumpeted the cause of paper money, and played an important role in driving the scheme through the Assembly. Let Franklin tell the happy ending to the story: “My friends there [in the Assembly] who conceived I had been of some service, thought fit to reward me by employing me in printing the money; a very profitable job and a great help to me.”
Some
service indeed received its due reward; but whether this service was virtue is another matter. Hamilton followed this handsome subsidy by securing to his protégé the public printing work in Delaware and its printing of paper money.

With this enormous advantage, Franklin could soon expand his business. And more privilege was soon to come his way. In 1736 he was chosen clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, a highly important post that Franklin could use as a springboard to secure the privileges of his other governmental business. As Franklin later candidly admitted: “Besides the pay for the immediate service as Clerk, the place gave me a better opportunity of keeping up an interest among the members, which secured to me the business of printing the votes, laws, paper money, and other occasional jobs for the public, that on the whole were very profitable.”

Franklin lets us in on some of the ways in which he was able to attract patronage. When opposed as clerk by one of the members of the Assembly, Franklin took the trouble to borrow a rare book of the assemblyman’s and quickly to write him a note of profuse thanks. He proudly paints the copybook lesson in his autobiography that this incident “shows how much more profitable it is prudently to remove than to resent, return and continue inimicable proceedings,” and notes how this confirms the old maxim, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”

The following year young Franklin was further rewarded with the important job of postmaster of Philadelphia, again taken away from Bradford. Here again Franklin notes the post to be of “great advantage; for, though the salary was small, it facilitated the correspondence and improved my newspaper,
increased the numbers demanded, as well as the advertisements to be inserted, so that it came to afford me a considerable income. My old competitor’s newspaper declined proportionally....”

With his business success thus assured, Benjamin Franklin had the leisure to turn more attention to public affairs. Here he was helped by the Junto, a club of young men Franklin had founded in 1727. Members of the Junto, formed for philosophical discussion and later transformed into the American Philosophical Society, formed their own clubs and thus the Junto became a center of intellectual life in Philadelphia. Franklin was able to tap the Junto for financial aid and to mobilize it for help in his various public projects.

Franklin’s first meddling in public affairs set the model for what was to follow. The police force of Philadelphia was financed by a uniform tax of six shillings a year on each householder; the bulk of the duties of the force were undertaken by householders themselves, serving unpaid, in lieu of tax payment. Franklin decided that it would be better to hire a full-time police bureaucracy and to pay for it by a proportional tax on property. Franklin never bothered to explain why it should be perfectly common and proper for a wealthy man and a poor man to pay the
same
price for every
other
conceivable commodity, but that morality suddenly shifted its answers regarding the service of police protection. Working through his Junto and its numerous front clubs, Franklin was able to change public opinion, and then to win acceptance of a change in the law a few years later.

By the end of the war, Franklin had assumed a leading role in Pennsylvania politics through his association movement. Having accumulated a sufficient fortune as printer and publisher, Franklin turned more zealously to the quest for political power. From being a clerk of the Assembly, Franklin now became an assemblyman. In the Assembly, Franklin continued to push for government intervention in urban affairs; for example, he sponsored a grant-in-aid of 4,000 pounds for constructing a local hospital, conditioned on the hospital’s raising a matching sum among the public. His grant-in-aid device enabled Franklin to override the opposition of the country members, who did not relish subsidizing the rich city of Philadelphia by paying for a hospital there. He also drove through a bill providing for governmental paving and lighting of the city’s streets.

Franklin added to his power and income by linking himself to the proprietary party in the Assembly and securing its patronage, particularly that of the powerful chief justice, William Allen. In 1753, Allen used his influence to gain Franklin the appointment of joint deputy postmaster general of the colonies, a lucrative post for its own sake and for aiding the circulation of Franklin’s newspaper. Franklin had begun to scramble for the post two years before the death of the previous, ailing deputy postmaster general. Chief Justice Allen put up 300 pounds to purchase the post for Franklin.

Despite the fact that peace had hardly yet broken out, Great Britain was
getting ready to strike a mortal blow at the French empire. It began to attack French territory in the Ohio Valley in 1754, and in 1756 the war was made official and generalized into the Seven Years’ War, known in America as the French and Indian War. Once again Quaker Pennsylvania was faced with a crucial decision on support of a war—a more important decision since the scale of the new war was far greater.