13. The Emergence of Benjamin Franklin

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.

During the early 1750s, the proprietary party, favoring the war, was led by provincial and proprietary secretary Richard Peters, an Anglican priest; the Reverend William Smith, another Anglican priest; Chief Justice William Allen; and the appointed governor. The proprietary clique was dismayed to find itself in an unpopular minority, and Governor James Hamilton despaired at the general public hatred toward appointed magistrates, whom they understandably regarded as a power above and apart from them. Peters even desired a law disenfranchising the Germans, under the excuse that they were not proficient in English. But so long as the Quakers stood firm and united, a peace policy would prevail.

The Quakers, however, were no longer firm in purpose or principle. We have already noted their tendency to evade principle, for their principles to wither away. Now, as a great new war was brewing, an increasing number of Quakers desired to join the conflict. The Quakers were ripe for a crumbling from internal weakness.

The culminating Quaker crisis began in late 1754, when the newly appointed Governor Robert Hunter Morris, a staunch partisan of the proprietary, openly urged the Assembly to appropriate a huge amount of funds for military purposes; before this, appropriations had been carefully designed to appear nonmilitary. But so far were the Quakers from pacifist purity that they promptly voted to raise the enormous sum of 20,000 pounds “for the King’s use,” in paper-money issue ultimately repayable from existing taxation. Governor Morris, however, was forced by royal instructions restricting paper-money issue to veto the bill. Morris also blocked a bill for issuing 20,000 pounds of paper money to finance a British military expedition under General Edward Braddock in the Ohio Valley.

Into this situation shrewd Benjamin Franklin now stepped and took a hand. Franklin saw that Quaker devotion to pacifist principle was now largely pro forma, and saw also that he could take the leadership of the Quaker party in the Assembly by leading it into a constitutional and political fight against the proprietary. In particular, he could desert the proprietary party on the issue of tax exemption for the proprietors’ lands—an issue that became very important as heavy taxes had to be levied for military affairs. By leading a fight by the Quaker Assembly on this issue, Franklin was to become a popular hero while at the same time indirectly but effectively scuttling Quaker opposition to the war effort. Franklin’s opportunity came in 1755. In the spring, Massachusetts had asked Pennsylvania for help in financing an expedition against Canada. Franklin went so far as to write the request, and to push through the Assembly an aid appropriation of 10,000 pounds, thus earning the praise and gratitude of the British Crown.

General Braddock’s appropriation, however, had been defeated on the rock of the paper-money dispute. Braddock’s disastrous defeat at Fort Duquesne now forced Governor Morris to summon a special session of the Assembly in the summer, to renew a request for aid. Subsequent to Braddock’s attack and rout, the Delaware Indians, allied to the French, retaliated by turning on their tormentors, the frontier Scots, as well as against the Pennsylvania government that had driven them off their lands. Pennsylvania was beginning to reap the reward for its aggression against the Delawares. The Scotch-Irish demanded arms and ammunition from the Assembly under virtual threat of mob invasion of Philadelphia. Under this pressure, the Assembly now decided to grant no less than 50,000 pounds, to be raised by a twelve-pence-per-pound and twenty-shilling-per-person tax for two years on all real and personal property in Pennsylvania. Morris, however, was again forced to reject the bill, this time because there was no exemption for the proprietors’ estates.

Here was the perfect issue for Franklin to exploit. Now Franklin, carrying the Quakers along with him, could quite cogently berate the proprietary for endangering the war effort by refusing to pay the very taxes that it sought to impose on its subjects. The frame of reference of the debate had been shifted away from problems of pacifism, and indeed of old-fashioned Quaker individualism and opposition to taxation. As Morris shrewdly wrote at the end of 1755: “Franklin has views that they [the Quakers] know nothing of... the truth, I believe, is that he is courting them in order to distress you [the proprietary], and, at the same time, leading them into measures that will in the end deprive them of any share in the administration.”*

At the end of the year, Franklin reintroduced a war-fund bill, of 60,000 pounds, to be issued in paper money and redeemed in property taxes, with no exemption for Penn’s property. A group of principled Quakers rallied to protest the measure as “inconsistent with peaceable testimony,” but they could muster only seven dissenting votes against passage in the Assembly. Franklin’s purposes were greatly aided by the renegacy of the Quaker Speaker, Isaac Norris, who had completely abandoned the peace policy. The purists in the Assembly were led by James Pemberton, brother of the beloved “king of the Quakers,” the prominent merchant Israel Pemberton. Apart from this handful, the Quakers had been taken into camp. Eventually, when Norris again objected, Franklin had the bill repassed without taxing the proprietary. However, the Crown was now stimulated to force the proprietor to contribute 5,000 pounds “voluntarily” to the Pennsylvania war effort. This “gift,” nevertheless, was highly dubious, as it was to come from the arrears in largely uncollectible quitrents. The upshot was that the Quakers had agreed to a large war budget without even gaining the principle of taxing the proprietary itself. Hearing also that hundreds of violent Scots frontiersmen were marching on Philadelphia, the Assembly increased its own appropriation by 5,000 pounds.

The Quaker Assembly not only assented supinely to a huge military program, but also was induced to agree for the first time to an official governmental militia for Pennsylvania. The militia bill was introduced by Franklin at the end of 1755. Franklin won Quaker support by proclaiming the voluntarism of the militia; no one, Quaker or non-Quaker, was to be conscripted into its service who might be “conscientiously scrupulous.” Furthermore, the volunteer soldiers could democratically choose their own officers. The Quakers, however, seemed to have forgotten that their principle was to oppose any governmental militia, any coercive body imposed by the state. So shrewdly did Franklin maneuver that this unprecedented bill passed the Assembly in two days with only four pacifist Quakers in opposition—again led by the courageous James Pemberton.

Thus, in less than a year’s time, Benjamin Franklin had succeeded in radically transforming the politics and policies of the Quaker party and of the Assembly. He had managed to work himself into the party leadership on a program of war expenditures and a militia, by leading the Assembly into a political struggle with the proprietary and its appointed executive.* The pure Quakers, devoted to the principle of peace and individualism, had been isolated and routed. The Pembertons organized a petition urging that Quakers “suffer” rather than pay war taxes, but this scarcely succeeded in turning the tide.

In the meanwhile, the proprietary party was pursuing an old dream of the younger Penns: the barring of the Quakers and their supporters from the Assembly in Pennsylvania. The new campaign to gain parliamentary legislation to this effect was launched in London in early 1755 by the Reverend William Smith, who urged a Test Oath for willingness to fight, as well as a disenfranchisement for all Germans until “they have a sufficient knowledge of our language and constitution.” He also proposed the outlawing of all newspapers or journals printed in any foreign language. In the fall a petition for barring Quakers from the Assembly was circulated in Pennsylvania, led by William Allen. Alarmed, the English Quakers, a group prominent in English affairs, counterattacked with sustained pressure. In hearings before the Board of Trade, the successful war-supply and militia bills were used as evidence that the Quakers were no longer pacifist, and therefore, no longer a source of worry. The board and the Privy Council, however, disallowed the Pennsylvania militia bill in the summer of 1756, because it dared to allow exemptions to conscientious objectors.

While the English Quakers were able to prevent a Test Oath, they too had no patience with peace or pacifism, and they insisted that the pacifist Quakers end all evidence of their principled opposition to war by resigning en masse from the Assembly. Unfortunately, Pemberton and his handful of colleagues did not believe the fight worth pursuing. With the bulk of their constituency and even their fellow Quakers swept into a war position, they decided in the summer of 1756 to abandon the effort and resign, using an additional war grant to the king as their excuse.

Franklin was overjoyed at the resignation of the “stiff rump” of the Quakers, his “conquest” of Quaker principle being now complete. Moreover, four more Quakers resigned in the fall, many others refused to be candidates, and others refused to vote. Yearly and monthly Quaker meetings urged resignations upon all Quaker officials. The sect had become politically demoralized; many members felt it easier to evade the entire issue and passively permit non-Quakers to pursue the war effort. The result was that Benjamin Franklin was left in complete control of the Pennsylvania Assembly, the remaining Quakers now being thoroughly committed to the war effort and to Franklin’s leadership. Thereafter the political issues were constitutional ones: waged over proprietary rule versus the rights of the Assembly.

Of course, Governor Morris and the proprietary were unhappy at the result of the crisis, especially at Franklin’s near absolute control over the new Pennsylvania militia and its democratic system of the soldiers electing their officers. In fact, Morris formed “independent” militia companies in Philadelphia, under the rule of the proprietary. A near war broke out in the city, in the spring of 1756, as Franklin, colonel of the Philadelphia militia, marched his regiment to a meeting of the independents and forced the participants to disperse.

Franklin, however, was not at all interested in a truly voluntary militia. With the Quakers having been cajoled into establishing the militia, Franklin soon felt the time ripe to extend the rigorously disciplinary mutiny act to Pennsylvania. The act made a mockery of the supposedly voluntary nature of the militia by decreeing a death penalty for mutiny or even desertion. The bill was temporarily blocked by the Quakers (who had not yet resigned), but an impassioned plea by Franklin again managed to dissipate their opposition.

With the decks of Pennsylvania cleared for war and coercion, Governor Morris and the Council in April 1756 declared all-out warfare against the Indians, including subsidies for scalps of male and female Indians alike. Morris, and Franklin to some extent, believed that the Indians needed “a good drubbing.” This illegal declaration by governor and Council, bypassing the Quaker Assembly, was the precipitant of the Quaker bloc’s decision to resign and to leave the prosecution of the war to others. The Scotch-Irish frontiersmen were, of course, happy to heed the call for murder and terror against the Indians, and their ministers joined the fight. The pacific German farmers, in contrast, retired from their farms rather than fight the Indians. The peace Quakers, led by Israel Pemberton, seeing the historic policy of peace with the Red man abandoned, formed a private Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures.

A restraining influence soon appeared on the Morris proprietary policy of massive annihilation of the Indians. General Sir William Johnson, the chief British official for Indian Affairs, was becoming dominant in setting Indian policy in the colonies. The keystone of Sir William’s program was the old alliance with the Iroquois, and this could hardly be secured by exterminating their dependent tribes. Two forces now drew the teeth of Pennsylvania aggression against the Indians: protests by Johnson, and the willingness of the Delawares to attend a peace conference proposed by their old friends, the Quakers. Furthermore, Morris was succeeded as governor by the weak William Denny, while Franklin had become a political ally of Johnson’s major theoretician, Thomas Pownall.

A policy of peace with the Indians was now coming to the fore, and led to a peace conference with the Delaware chief, Tedyuscung, at Easton. Tedyuscung placed the blame for his attacks upon Pennsylvania on the infamous walking purchase and the ouster of the Delawares from their land: “This very ground that is under me was my land and... was taken from me by fraud.”

While negotiations were proceeding, the buildup for war with New France continued in Pennsylvania. The Crown and the proprietary insisted, over the objections of the Assembly, on compulsorily quartering over one thousand British soldiers, who were suffering from a smallpox epidemic, with the citizens of Philadelphia. The following year, a battle ensued over the military appropriations bill—a huge sum of 100,000 pounds to be raised by a property tax. Again the governor refused to agree to taxing the proprietor’s estates, and the Assembly, after being pressured to vote for funds with the exemption, sent Benjamin Franklin to England to argue its case with the proprietary. Franklin managed to persuade the Penns to agree to be taxed, but the proprietors soon rescinded this agreement.

The Delaware Indians proved more tractable, however. By 1758 the peace negotiations had borne fruit. Chief Tedyuscung received recognition by the Pennsylvania government of the unfairness of the walking purchase, as well as compensation for his stolen land. The more westerly Indians were bought off by a gift of 5,000 pounds loaned to the Assembly by the Friendly Association. By 1758, also, the tide of war with the French had turned decisively in favor of England, and this helped end any serious conflict with the Indians. The war with France ended in 1763, with France forced to cede Canada and all of its colonial possessions in North America east of the Mississippi River. England had succeeded in crushing and eradicating New France.

*Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking Press, 1946), 1: 178.

*Quoted in John J. Zimmerman, “Benjamin Franklin and the Quaker Party, 1755–1756” William and Mary Quarterly (1960): 305.

*See ibid., p. 307.