Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (22 page)

What helped shift his attitude was another of his philanthropic endeavors. In the late 1750s, he became active in an organization that established schools for black children in Philadelphia and then elsewhere in America. After visiting the Philadelphia school in 1763, he would write a reflective letter about his previous prejudices:

In his later life, as we shall see, he became one of America’s most active abolitionists, one who denounced slavery on moral grounds and helped advance the rights of blacks.

As indicated by the phrase he used in “Observations” about increasing “the lovely white and red” faces in America, Franklin’s feelings about the Indians were generally positive. He marveled, in a letter to Collinson, that the simplicity of the Indians’ wilderness life had a romantic appeal. “They have never shown any inclination to change their manner of life for ours,” he wrote. “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”

White people also sometimes feel this preference for the Indians’ way of living, Franklin noted. When white children were captured and raised by Indians, then later returned to white society, “in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”

He also told the story of some Massachusetts commissioners who invited the Indians to send a dozen of their youth to study free at Harvard. The Indians replied that they had sent some of their young braves to study there years earlier, but on their return “they were absolutely good for nothing, being neither acquainted with the true methods for killing deer, catching beaver, or surprising an enemy.” They offered instead to educate a dozen or so white children in the ways of the Indians “and make men of them.”
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Serving as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, as he had since 1736, frustrated Franklin. Unable to take part in the debates, he amused himself by concocting his numerical magic squares. So when one of the members from Philadelphia died in 1751, Franklin readily accepted election to the seat (and passed on the clerkship to his unemployed son, William). “I conceived my becoming a member would enlarge my powers of doing good,” he recalled, but then admitted: “I would not, however, insinuate that my ambition was not flattered.”
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Thus began Franklin’s career in politics, which would last for most of thirty-seven years until his retirement as president of the Pennsylvania Executive Council. As a private citizen, he had proposed various civic improvement schemes, such as the library, fire corps, and police patrol. Now, as a member of the Assembly, he could do even more to be, as he put it, “a great promoter of useful projects.”

The quintessence of these was his effort to sweep, pave, and light the city streets. The endeavor began when he became bothered by the dust in front of his house, which faced the farmers’ market. So he found “a poor industrious man” who was willing to sweep the block for a monthly fee and then wrote a paper that described all the benefits of hiring him. Houses on the block would remain cleaner, he noted, and shops would attract more customers. He sent the paper around to his neighbors, who all agreed to contribute a portion of the street sweeper’s pay each month. The beauty of the scheme was that it opened the way for grander civic improvements. “This raised a general desire to have all the streets paved,” Franklin recalled, “and made the people more willing to submit to a tax for that purpose.”

As a result, Franklin was able to draw up a bill in the Assembly to pay for street paving, and he accompanied it with a proposal to install street lamps in front of each house. With his love of science and detail, Franklin even worked on a design for the lamps. The globes imported from London, he noticed, did not have a vent on the bottom to allow air in, which meant the smoke collected and darkened the glass. Franklin invented a new model with vents and a chimney, so that the lamp remained clean and bright. He also designed the style of lamp, common today, that had four flat panes of glass rather than one globe, making it easier to repair if broken. “Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding,” Franklin said, but they should remember that “human felicity is produced…by little advantages that occur every day.”
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There were, of course, more momentous issues to debate. The Assembly was dominated by Quakers, who were generally pacifist and frugal. They were often at odds with the family of the Proprietors, led by the great William Penn’s not-so-great son Thomas, who didn’t help relations when he married an Anglican and drifted away from the Quaker faith. The main concerns of the Proprietors were getting more land from the Indians and making sure that their property remained exempt from taxation.

(Pennsylvania was a Proprietary colony, which meant that it was governed by a private family that owned most of the unsettled land. In 1681, Charles II granted such a charter to William Penn, in repayment of a debt. A majority of the colonies started out as Proprietary ones, but by the 1720s most had become Royal colonies directly ruled by the king and his ministers. Only Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware remained under their Proprietors until the Revolution.)

Two big issues faced Pennsylvania at the time: forging good relations with the Indians and protecting the colony from the French. These were related, because alliances with the Indians became all the more important whenever the recurring wars with the French flared up.

Remaining on good terms with the Indians required significant sums of money for gifts, and colonial defense was also costly. This led to complex political struggles in Pennsylvania. The Quakers opposed military spending on principle, and the Penns (acting through a series of appointed lackey governors) opposed anything that would cost them much money or subject their lands to taxes.

Franklin had been instrumental in finessing these issues in 1747, when he formed the voluntary militia. But by the early 1750s, tensions with France over control of the Ohio valley were rising again and would soon erupt into the French and Indian War (an offshoot of what was known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War). The situation would lead Franklin to take two momentous initiatives that were to shape not only his political career but also the destiny of America:

• He became an increasingly fervent opponent of the Proprietors, and eventually of the British, as they stubbornly asserted their right to control the taxes and government of the colony, a stance that reflected his anti-authoritarian and populist sentiments.
  
• He became a leader of the effort to get the colonies, heretofore truculently independent of one another, to join together and unite for common purposes, which reflected his penchant for forging associations, his nonparochial view of America, and his belief that people could accomplish more when they worked together than when they stood separately.
  

The process began in 1753, when Franklin was appointed one of three commissioners from Pennsylvania to attend a summit conference with a congregation of Indian leaders at Carlisle, halfway between Philadelphia and the Ohio River. The goal was to secure the allegiance of the Delaware Indians, who were angry with the Penns for cheating them in what was known as the “Walking Purchase.” (An old deed had given the Penns a tract of Indian land that was defined as what a man could walk in a day and a half, and Thomas Penn had hired three fleet runners to sprint for thirty-six hours, thus claiming far more land than intended.) Allied on the side of the Pennsylvanians were the Six Nations of the Iroquois confederacy, which included the Mohawk and Seneca tribes.

More than a hundred Indians came to the Carlisle conference. After the Pennsylvanians presented the traditional string of wampum, in this case, a whopping £800 worth of gifts,
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the Iroquois chief Scaroyady proposed a peace plan. The white settlers should pull back to the east of the Appalachians, and their traders should be regulated to operate honestly and sell the Indians more ammunition and less rum. They also wanted assurances that the English would help defend them from the French, who were militarizing the Ohio valley.

The Pennsylvanians ended up pledging little more than a stricter regulation of their traders, which eventually caused the Delaware to drift over to the French side. On the last night, Franklin saw a frightening display of the dangers of rum. The Pennsylvanians had refused to offer the Indians any until the summit was over, and when the ban was lifted, a bacchanal erupted. As Franklin described the scene:

Franklin and his fellow commissioners wrote an angry report decrying the white traders who regularly sold rum to the Indians. By doing so they threatened to “to keep these poor Indians continually under the force of liquor” and “entirely estrange the affections of the Indians from the English.”
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Upon his return, Franklin learned that he had been appointed by the British government to share, along with William Hunter of Virginia, the top post office job in America, known as the Deputy Postmaster for the Colonies. He had been eagerly seeking the position for two years and had even authorized Collinson to spend up to £300 lobbying on his behalf in London. “However,” Franklin joked, “the less it costs the better, as it is for life only, which is an uncertain tenure.”

His quest was driven by his usual mix of motives: control of the post would allow him to invigorate the American Philosophical Society, improve his publishing network by placing friends and relatives in postal jobs across America, and perhaps make some money. He installed his son as Philadelphia’s postmaster, and he later gave jobs in various towns to his brothers Peter and John, John’s stepson, his sister Jane’s son, two of Deborah’s relatives, and his New York printing partner James Parker.

Franklin drew up typically detailed procedures for running the service more efficiently, established the first home-delivery system and dead letter office, and took frequent inspection tours. Within a year, he had cut to one day the delivery time of a letter from New York to Philadelphia. The reforms were costly, and he and Hunter incurred £900 in debt over their first four years. But then they started turning a profit, earning at least £300 a year apiece.

By 1774, when the British fired him for his rebellious political stances, he would be making more than £700 a year. But an even greater benefit of the job, both to him and history, was that it furthered Franklin’s conception of the disparate American colonies as a potentially unified nation with shared interests and needs.
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The summit of Pennsylvanians and Indians at Carlisle had done nothing to deter the French. Their goal was to confine the British settlers to the East Coast by building a series of forts along the Ohio River that would create a French arc from Canada to Louisiana. In response, Virginia’s governor sent a promising young soldier named George Washington to the Ohio valley in late 1753 to demand that the French vacate. He failed, but his vivid account of the mission made him a hero and a colonel. The following spring, he began a series of haphazard raids against the French forts that would grow into a full-scale war.

Britain’s ministers had been wary of encouraging too much cooperation among their colonies, but the French threat now made it necessary. The Board of Trade in London thus asked each colony to send delegates to a conference in Albany, New York, in June 1754. They would have two missions: meeting with the Iroquois confederation to reaffirm their allegiance and discussing among themselves ways to create a more unified colonial defense.

Cooperation among the colonies did not come naturally. Some of their assemblies declined the invitation, and most of the seven that accepted instructed their delegates to avoid any plan for colonial confederation. Franklin, on the other hand, was always eager to foster more unity. “It would be a very strange thing,” he had written his friend James Parker in 1751, “if six nations of ignorant savages [the Iroquois] could be capable of forming a scheme for such a union…and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary.”

In his letter to Parker, Franklin sketched out a structure for colonial cooperation: there should be, he said, a General Council with delegates from all the colonies, in rough proportion to the amount each paid in taxes to the general treasury, and a governor appointed by the king. The meeting sites should rotate among the various colonial capitals, so delegates could better understand the rest of America, and money would be raised by a tax on liquor. Typically, he felt the council should arise voluntarily rather than being imposed by London. The best way to get it going, he thought, was to pick a handful of smart men to visit influential people throughout the colonies and enlist support. “Reasonable, sensible men can always make a reasonable scheme appear such to other reasonable men.”