The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (42 page)

In the summer of 1751 Franklin was nominated for a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, and elected. He candidly described his feelings at this latest mark of recognition:

I conceived my becoming a member would enlarge my power of doing good. I would not however insinuate that my ambition was not flattered by all these promotions. It certainly was. For considering my low beginning they were great things to me. And they were still more pleasing, as being so many spontaneous testimonies of the public’s good opinion, and by me entirely unsolicited.

No grand design motivated Franklin’s entry into provincial politics; yet it did reflect important aspects of his character and circumstances. Starting with the success of Silence Dogood, Franklin had gradually come to see himself as the most capable individual he knew. The accuracy of this perception was confirmed by his assorted subsequent successes and the honors that came his way. He could look around Philadelphia—at the Junto, the Library Company, the fire companies, the Philosophical Society, the Association, the academy—and recognize his hand in making the city a more civilized place. Current projects included raising money for a hospital (he devised a scheme for what later would be called matching grants) and organizing a fire insurance company. Who had done more—who was doing more—for his adopted home than he?

Election to the Assembly allowed him to expand the scope of his activities. Though he represented Philadelphia in the legislature, he would be making laws for the whole province. At successive moments of his career, Franklin entered successively larger arenas. Mather’s Boston became too small for him at seventeen; Philadelphia grew too small by forty-five. Pennsylvania was the obvious next venue.

There was another reason for the timing of his entry into provincial politics. As long as he had been in active business, Franklin felt obliged to observe the first rule of business relations: avoid gratuitous offense to potential customers. Ben Franklin, printer, was a man who generally kept his politics to himself, lest politics interfere with the printing business. With exceptions—his advocacy of paper currency, his defense of Samuel Hemphill—few enough merely to prove the rule, Franklin left political questions to the politicians.

But as the failure of the politicians to provide for defense during the late war demonstrated, the politicians could not be trusted to accomplish what needed to be done. Franklin knew he could do better; he had shown as much with the Association. His decision to leave the printing business to David Hall and his decision to enter Pennsylvania politics
were closely linked. The former made the latter possible; the latter made the former desirable.

Pennsylvania
politics in the 1750s involved concentric circles of controversy. The innermost circle—at least by
their
thinking—comprised the proprietors, the heirs of William Penn. Unlike most British colonies in North America, proprietary Pennsylvania was ruled not by the Crown (at least not directly) but by the Penn family. Yet the family was not what it had been under William—or perhaps, considering the problems he had with
his
father, it was. William himself fell on hard times during his last years, to the point where Pennsylvania had to support the Penns, rather than the other way around. Times got harder after the great man’s death, as the heirs squabbled over the estate. William Jr. had renounced the Quaker way for Anglicanism and then died shortly after his father, but neither action prevented William Jr.’s son from trying to break the will on grounds of his grandfather’s septuagenarian senility. The assertion of mental incompetence was accurate enough, but it did not endear him to his father’s siblings. For two decades the heirs tussled over who should get what; not until the mid-1740s did Thomas Penn, the founding William’s son by his second wife, emerge as the controlling figure within the family and the prominent proprietor of the colony.

The quarrels were costly, for during that critical generation the initiative in Pennsylvania politics slipped from the proprietors to the Assembly, the second circle of controversy. The slippage started during the tenure of Franklin’s notional patron, Governor William Keith, whose flippant attitude toward financial commitments was hardly confined to Franklin. Keith’s many creditors lobbied to keep him in office, on the optimistic argument that a governor’s salary provided them at least the prospect of being repaid. But the English Quakers close to the Penns contended that the behavior of Keith—who disported himself with ladies-not-his-wife in a decidedly un-Quaker manner—constituted an insult and an embarrassment. As the creditors eventually lost hope of seeing their money, the Quakers had their way, and Keith was forced out of the governorship.

Yet he was far from finished. He charged his expulsion to the aristocratic machinations of the proprietors, and immediately recast himself as the champion of the people, who constituted the third circle. Taking up his pen, Keith fabricated a character called Roger Plowman, who argued
the case for the common folk against the learned and favored. “We are made of the same flesh and bone, and after the same manner with themselves,” said Plowman, speaking to a character modeled on James Logan, “so that our sense and feeling of happiness and misery, justice and injustice, good fortune and ill fortune, are much the same with us all. And I appeal to you, Master, if a quiet enjoyment of, and equal support under these opposite states in life, respectively, be not the chief end, if not the whole business of civil government?”

The proprietors thought otherwise; the Penns expected their colony to provide them an income. And they understood that it would not do so if Keith won a following, as he appeared to be doing. Soon after his ouster as governor, the voters of Philadelphia elected him to the Assembly. His supporters celebrated their victory by burning the public pillory and stocks, which served as symbols of proprietary oppression of the ordinary people. (The collateral combustion of several stalls at the market was probably an accident.) Two weeks later, when Keith claimed his seat in the Assembly, he arrived leading a column of eighty horsemen, followed by a small army of the sweat-stained workforce—what a nervous Isaac Norris, the head of the Quaker party in the Assembly, scornfully called the “rabble butchers, porters and tag-rags.”

But then, after sending shivers through the likes of Logan and Norris, Keith abruptly disappeared. Because his creditors were the first to complain of his absence, gossip congealed around assertions that he was fleeing to escape debtors’ prison. As matters turned out, although he kept ahead of his American claimants, their English counterparts caught up with him, and he landed in a London jail. He never ceased spinning schemes for raising money, even when those schemes contradicted earlier-enunciated convictions. At one point, trying to curry favor with the imperial government, he proposed a plan for levying a stamp tax in the American colonies. Like most of his other concoctions, this one had come to naught by the time of his 1749 death.

The Keith phenomenon illuminated the overlap between the circles in Pennsylvania politics. Although the leaders of the Assembly often construed their interests in opposition to those of the proprietor, at times they found the proprietor an ally against challenge from below. Pennsylvania was far from a democracy, nor was it even a republic, but the limited suffrage it allowed to relatively ordinary people rendered the provincial status quo subject to disturbance by those who found the status quo unsatisfactory. The Penn family provided the focus of much of the dissatisfaction, especially when the proprietors insisted on
their historic prerogatives, including exemption of their enormous landholdings from taxation. Yet the first families of the colony—the Logans, Norrises, Pembertons (this last including merchant Israel and his brothers)—by standing on
their
historic prerogatives, notably control of the Assembly and other offices, often appeared equal impediments to needed reforms.

To some extent Pennsylvania provided a scale model of British North America at large. What the king was to the colonies together, the Penns,
mutatis mutandis,
were to Pennsylvania. What the London-linked ruling elites were to the British colonies, the Logan-Norris-Pemberton clique was to Pennsylvania. It was no accident that when revolution began to bubble in America against the king and his colonial officers, much of the bubbling could be traced to Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians had been practicing for years.

Franklin
practiced inconspicuously at first. Franklin was no political showman like William Keith; when he entered the Assembly in August 1751, he came not mounted but afoot, walking quietly up Chestnut Street to the State House. He made no large impression at first, possessing neither oratorical skills nor particular desire for attention. His legislative life consisted of committee work: a committee to locate a bridge across the Schuylkill River, a committee to report on expenditures relating to Indian affairs, a committee to revise the minutes of the Assembly, a committee to draft a message to the proprietors, a committee to prepare answers to the governor’s messages, a committee to regulate the size of bakers’ loaves, a committee to consider a tax on dogs.

Not all the work was so mundane. Perhaps in recognition of his earlier advocacy of paper currency, perhaps reflecting his experience printing the paper notes, Franklin gained appointment to a committee on the currency. Although the report submitted by the committee to the entire Assembly carried the signature of the five committee members, the substance and style of the report plainly indicate Franklin’s authorship.

In this report Franklin evinced an even stronger conviction than he had in 1729 that more money meant a better future for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. He described the moment in the early 1720s when the colonial economy had languished for want of means of exchange; in the prose of the report the reader can almost hear the echoing footsteps of the fugitive lad from Boston who was dismayed to discover the shops
shut up in this city where he hoped to find a job. But then the Assembly had seen fit to print paper money, and “from that period both the city and country have flourished and increased in a most surprising manner.” Franklin detailed the growth at considerable length, adducing evidence from tax rolls, customhouse accounts, and bills of mortality. He contended that the creation of new currency would allow the past growth to continue, principally by maintaining or increasing rates paid to laborers, which in turn would enable them, as it had their counterparts in the past, to become landowners. While acknowledging that this would harm employers of labor, Franklin argued that the benefits to society as a whole outweighed the costs to that small group. “By rendering the means of purchasing land easy to the poor, the dominions of the Crown are strengthened and extended; the Proprietaries dispose of their wilderness territory; and the British nation secures the benefit of its manufactures, and increases the demand for them. For so long as land can be easily procured for settlements between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, so long will labour be dear in America; and while labour continues dear, we can never rival the artificers, or interfere with the trade of our Mother Country.”

Franklin’s associates in the Assembly found his arguments convincing. The house resolved that an expansion of the currency was essential to the well-being of the province, and it directed Franklin and several other members with longer legislative service to draft a bill implementing the resolution. The bill passed the Assembly but then encountered objection from Governor James Hamilton, who declared that recent irresponsibilities on currency issues in other colonies made any application to the Crown “very unseasonable.” The governor’s veto touched off a battle with the Assembly that would busy Franklin for several years.

Other battles were more easily won. For nearly two decades Franklin had lamented the lack of safety on the streets of Philadelphia after dark. The Quakers’ aversion to violence produced a criminal code decidedly less harsh than that of England or the other colonies; quite possibly for this reason, Philadelphia had a higher crime rate than other colonial cities. Franklin detected another reason as well: an inattention to policing that in itself was almost criminal. Householders in the city were liable for watch duty after dark but might buy their way out of this responsibility by paying the ward constable six shillings a year, with the fee ostensibly to be used to hire substitutes. In practice the money was more than necessary, and the watch fees became a profitable perquisite of the constables’ office. They also undermined the security of the city. “The Constable for
a little drink often got such ragamuffins about him as a watch that reputable housekeepers did not choose to mix with,” Franklin wrote. “Walking the rounds too was often neglected, and most of the night spent in tippling.”