The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (49 page)

Perhaps William now concluded that his father had something to offer; perhaps the young man had simply outgrown the annoyances of adolescence. Whatever the cause, the filial relationship warmed and ramified. William developed an interest in Franklin’s experiments, contributing observations and hypotheses of his own. Significantly, it was William who served as the sole assistant of his father in the kite experiment. That the experiment led to international acclaim for Franklin only increased his son’s respect.

For his part, Franklin could hope William was growing into a worthy manhood. A rebel himself in youth, Franklin could hardly hold William’s earlier experiments—in life, not electricity—against him. But now the boy seemed to be finding himself. His father could only be gratified.

While
William kept the accounts of the post office and read his law books, he dreamed of grander things. Grandest was an empire of western land. Like many others of his era—including George Washington—William caught a highly infectious disease during his journey to the Ohio Valley, a disease whose most significant symptom was a belief that fabulous wealth awaited whoever could win title to those boundless acres. William would spend years seeking such title. For now he dreamed.

Franklin would share his son’s dream, if not the symptoms of virulent infection. Franklin would join William in speculating in western land, but in Franklin’s case the western dream was less personal than imperial.
As his exchanges with William Shirley revealed, Franklin saw America as a potentially coequal part of the British empire, and the basis for American equality was land. In land lay the future of America; in American land lay the future of Britain.

Franklin addressed precisely this issue in what became one of the most influential essays he ever wrote. In 1751 he drafted “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.” and circulated it to Peter Collinson and others. Collinson urged Franklin to publish the piece. “I wish, my Dear Friend, you’ll oblige the ingenious part of mankind with a public view of your observations &c. on the increase of mankind,” Collinson wrote. “I don’t find anyone has hit it off so well.” The draft was rough, however, and Franklin hoped to polish it before release to the “ingenious part” or anyone else. But politics, postmastering, and other interests intervened, and the polishing never took place. Finally, in 1754, Franklin consented to its publication as it stood, and the next year it was printed in Boston. It quickly crossed the Atlantic and was reproduced in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Economists Adam Smith and later Thomas Malthus, among many others, read it appreciatively.

Franklin’s central idea was simple: that the increase of population depended on the availability of land. The critical element in reproductive rates was the age of marriage; couples who married young had more children than couples who married old. (Needless to say, Franklin’s observation antedated convenient contraception.) The age of marriage in turn depended on the opportunities to establish economic independence. In Franklin’s preindustrial day, economic independence for the many required access to land—of which America had an abundance relative to Europe. Europe was already filled with farmers; adding more required displacing some of those already there. America was filled with Indians, who subsisted by hunting, an occupation that resulted in a population far less dense, leaving ample room for farmers.

Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap that a labouring man that understands husbandry can in a short time save money enough to purchase a piece of new land sufficient for a plantation, whereon he may subsist a family; such are not afraid to marry, for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more land is to be had at rates equally easy, all circumstances considered.

Hence marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe. And if it is reckoned there that there is but one marriage per annum among 100 persons, perhaps we may here reckon two; and if in Europe they have but 4 births to a marriage (many of their marriages being late), we may here reckon 8, of which if one half grow up, and our marriages are made, reckoning one with another, at 20 years of age, our people must at least be doubled every 20 years.

This was the part that caught the eye of Malthus—this and Franklin’s assertion that “there is in short no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other’s means of subsistence.” From these (and contributions of his own, of course) Malthus extrapolated the theory of inevitable impoverishment that made him famous.

Adam Smith was taken by another part of Franklin’s argument. In 1750 the British Parliament had bent to the demands of British manufacturers and prohibited the construction of ironworks in America; Franklin’s essay was at least partly a response to this prohibition. He argued that despite the rapid increase in the American population, the vastness of the land available to these growing numbers would for generations dictate a dearness of labor compared to that in the old country. “The danger, therefore, of these colonies interfering with their Mother Country in trades that depend on labour, manufactures, &c. is too remote to require the attention of Great Britain.” Far from weakening demand for manufactures of the home country, the growth of the colonies would strengthen it. “Therefore Britain should not restrain too much manufactures in her colonies. A wise and good mother will not do it. To distress is to weaken, and weakening the children weakens the whole family.” Adam Smith, who made his name attacking the protectionist policies of British mercantilism—and who kept not one but two copies of Franklin’s essay in his library—could not have put it better.

In an early indication that his views on slavery were changing, Franklin contended that the introduction of slaves could only diminish a nation. Slavery enabled whites to avoid labor, thereby undermining their health and rendering them “not so generally prolific.” Slavery also sapped the moral health of the nation. Franklin at this point did not contend that trafficking in human souls was inherently immoral; rather he decried the bad example it set. “White children become proud, disgusted with labour, and being educated in idleness, are rendered unfit to get a living by industry.” Franklin thought it significant that the northern colonies,
having fewer slaves than the southern, multiplied their populations more rapidly.

The laws of population growth, as exhibited in America, promised a brilliant future for the colonies—a future whose brilliance need not dull in the slightest that of Britain.

There are supposed to be now upwards of one million English souls in North America (though ’tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over sea), and yet there is perhaps not the one fewer in Britain, but rather many more, on account of the employment the colonies afford to manufacturers at home. This million doubling, suppose but once in 25 years, will in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side the water. What an accession of power to the British Empire by sea as well as land! What increase of trade and navigation!

That the
future of America, and with it of the British empire, depended on the availability of land was what made the contest with France so important. The defeat incurred by George Washington in 1754 inspired the British government to action; early the following year it dispatched an expedition of regular army officers and men to America to smite the French intruders and regain Britain’s rightful hold on the Ohio. The commander of the expedition was Major General Edward Braddock of the Coldstream Guards. Braddock was sixty years old, had served occasionally as governor of Gibraltar, and hoped to cap his otherwise undistinguished military career with appointment as royal governor somewhere or other. Although fond of his pipe, his claret, and his mistresses, he liked to convey a stoic impression. “Braddock is very Iroquois in disposition,” declared British diarist Horace Walpole. “He had a sister who, having gamed away all her little fortune at Bath, hanged herself with a truly English deliberation, leaving only a note upon the table with these lines: ‘To die is landing on some silent shore,’ etc. When Braddock was told of it, he only said, ‘Poor Fanny! I always thought she would play till she would be forced to
tuck herself up.’
”

Braddock was not pleased at having to travel to a New World wilderness to win his governorship, but, as no other theater beckoned—other
than the theaters of London, where he took in the performances of George Anne Bellamy, a famous actress who was one of his two current flames—away he must go. In leaving he demonstrated that some of Miss Bellamy’s dramatic flair had rubbed off. “The General told me that he should never see me more,” she recalled, “for he was going with a handful of men to conquer whole nations; and to do this they must cut their way through unknown woods. He produced a map of the country, saying at the same time: ‘Dear Pop, we are sent like sacrifices to the altar.’”

The general conveyed a different impression to Franklin and others in America. Franklin encountered Braddock at Frederick, Maryland, having been sent there by the Pennsylvania Assembly, which wanted a personal assessment from one of their own of this officer come to rescue the colony from the French and the Indians. Rather than acknowledge his role as eye of Assembly, though, Franklin wore his postmaster’s hat and averred his desire to facilitate the general’s communications.

Braddock boasted he would make short work of his adversaries. “After taking Fort Duquesne,” he told Franklin, “I am to proceed to Niagara; and having taken that, to Frontenac, if the season will allow time; and I suppose it will, for Duquesne can hardly delay me above three or four days; and then I see nothing that can obstruct my march to Niagara.”

From William, and from his reading of recent history—including the experiences of George Washington—Franklin appreciated the peculiar difficulties attending frontier warfare. The Indians were masters of ambush; was the general taking this into account?

“These savages may indeed be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia,” Braddock replied. “But upon the King’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.”

Only one thing worried the British general. The Americans, for whom he and his men would accomplish their heroics, were failing to do their part. “These Americans,” he grumbled to an associate, “coaxed us over here to fight their battles and then, by God, they overcharge us for wagons and supplies and refuse to fight in their own quarrel.” To Franklin he declared that the lack of cooperation, particularly in providing transport, could scuttle the expedition before it had well started.

Franklin could not deny that his own province was acting the miser in its defense; as before, the Quakers in the Assembly were blocking military appropriations. But he thought the people of Pennsylvania would be happy to hire out their wagons and horses to the Crown, and told Braddock as much.

“Then you, sir,” Braddock answered, “who are a man of interest there, can probably procure them for us; and I beg you will undertake it.”

Franklin accepted the invitation. He printed a broadside advertising for the use of 150 wagons and teams, and 1,500 horses, on attractive financial terms. In an accompanying letter Franklin assured the owners that “the service will be light and easy, for the Army will scarce march above 12 miles per day.” He additionally assured his audience that he himself had no pecuniary interest in the matter. “I shall have only my labour for my pains.” Patriotism should inspire those who found the financial incentives insufficient; to those indifferent to finances and patriotism both, Franklin closed with a caution: “If this method of obtaining the waggons and horses is not like to succeed, I am obliged to send word to the General in fourteen days; and I suppose Sir John St. Clair the Hussar, with a body of soldiers, will immediately enter the province for the purpose aforesaid, of which I shall be sorry to hear.”