The Society for Useful Knowledge (27 page)

This meant realizing the promise of earlier Puritan and Quaker attitudes toward learning and overthrowing the established economy of knowledge. “The door to knowledge seems to be wider open than it ever was.… It is now perceived, that it is not absolutely
necessary
that a man should be what is called
learned
in order to be a [natural] philosopher,” argued Hopkinson. “A judicious and careful examination of the phenomena of nature, and experiments, simple and easily made, may, and often do, lead the attentive enquirer to most important discoveries, even without any knowledge of what are called the learned languages.”
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Accompanying this intellectual opening to the leather aprons, most of whom lacked much in the way of traditional education, was an equally inviting political one: the opportunity for the independent artisan to take meaningful part in postwar affairs. One result was the branching out of the useful knowledge societies to encompass activities specifically aimed at improving the art of manufacturing. Others specifically addressed improvements in agriculture. Inventors, amateur scientists, and the curious all flocked to the new associations, frequently joining more than one at a time.
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The United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures formed in 1775, and similar societies were soon active in Boston, Baltimore, and New York. Smaller communities, including Richmond, Virginia; Wilmington, Delaware; Morristown and Newark, New Jersey; and Elkton, Maryland, followed in their footsteps.
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The United Company combined the established institution of the workhouse with the new enthusiasm for the outright development of American technology and industry. Unlike traditional schemes to address poverty and idleness, it also set out to enhance productivity and to make a profit, relying on advances in automation and power, and the expansion of the workforce to include women and young children to operate the machines.

The United Company gave way after the war to the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts, essentially a commercial enterprise without its predecessor's charitable or other social functions.
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This and other such associations mostly served as clearinghouses for new ideas and as sources of prizes and other financial incentives for technological
innovation.
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Little was actually added in the way of manufacturing capacity by such early efforts, but they nonetheless helped lay the political, social, and intellectual foundations for the coming industrialization of the new republic.

This was particularly striking not so much in the creation of large-scale enterprises, which generally failed to take root before the turn of the century, as in the immediate strengthening of the role of artisans, mechanics, and craftsmen in the less-visible reaches of the national economy and their associated entry into the political arena. Some farsighted merchants supported these efforts and even invested their capital in manufacturing, but most were more concerned with returning to lucrative prewar trade patterns in which they acted as passive middlemen rather than as entrepreneurs. As a result of agitation mostly by the leather aprons, the notions of patriotism, practical invention, and industrial development began to converge.
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Pennsylvania, with its Quaker traditions of craftsmanship and respect for labor, proved particularly receptive to the efforts of the mechanics, whose presence on the political and economic scene was already greater there than in the other colonies. For decades, Franklin and his fellow artisans had carved out significant influence in the affairs of the province, promoting everything from practical education to expanded civic amenities and the useful knowledge movement.

In an early sign of this influence, Philadelphia artisans under the leadership of Franklin acolyte Charles Thomson thwarted efforts to hold the First Continental Congress in September 1774 at the official State House, where they feared it could fall under the sway of the provincial establishment. Instead, the sessions were held in Carpenters' Hall, a mechanics stronghold that also played host to the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and like-minded groups. Three leading members of the artisan class, Franklin foremost among them, signed the Declaration of Independence.
^c

After the war, the mechanics and their allies emerged as major supporters of a strong federal government to protect their economic interests as manufacturers, as well as their recent social and political gains. On July 4, 1788, the mechanics' associations of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York took leading
roles in celebratory parades to mark the ratification of the federal Constitution and the introduction of a centralized government to replace the old Confederation. Fourteen hundred marchers, representing forty separate crafts, took part in Boston. Another two thousand gathered in New York, and around five thousand in Philadelphia.
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Elaborate floats, pulled by teams of horses, celebrated the new federal government and the individual craft associations, while banners hoisted by the marchers expressed the artisans' support for government intervention in the economy on behalf of both traditional crafts and the new mechanized industry. A pale blue carriage, “in the shape of a bald eagle” and carrying the newly ratified Constitution, led the Philadelphia procession. The Manufacturing Society float featured a wool carding machine, a spinning machine with eighty spindles, and other machinery, under the motto: MAY THE UNION GOVERNMENT PROTECT THE MANUFACTURES OF AMERICA.

In New York, the shipwrights proclaimed, “The federal ship will commerce revive, And merchants and shipwrights and joiners shall thrive.”
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Delivering the ceremonial oration at the Philadelphia parade, the nation's largest, James Wilson, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence and later a Supreme Court justice, paid the required homage to America's agricultural roots, before adding, “The
industrious village
, the
busy city
, the
crowded port
—all these are the gifts of liberty; and without a good government,
liberty
cannot exist.”
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Upon his return from Paris in the autumn of 1785, Franklin displaced Rittenhouse as the nation's most famous mechanic. This set off an immediate scramble among the main factions and personalities of the American Philosophical Society for his support. But it also helped reinvigorate the organization, and experimental work in general. Hopkinson, Franklin, and Rittenhouse set aside one evening a week for what the latter described as “a little, pleasing philosophical Party.” This prompted a jealous rebuke from his absent friend Jefferson, still on diplomatic duty in Paris. Meanwhile, the long-delayed second volume of the Society's
Transactions
finally appeared in print.
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Plans, proposals, and new inventions and designs began to pour into the American Philosophical Society, which found itself, like its forerunner the Royal Society of London, pressed to arbitrate among competing claims of intellectual property, feasibility, and practical utility. “We have abundance of projectors and pretenders to new Discoveries, and many applications to the
Legislature for exclusive privileges, some of them ridiculous enough,” a bemused Rittenhouse wrote to Jefferson. “The self-moving boat, the Mechanical Miller, the improved Ring Dial for finding the Variations of the Needle. The Surveying Compass to serve 20 other purposes, and a project for finding the Longitude by the Variation of the Magnetical Needle.”
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Ever the intellectual entrepreneur, the eighty-one-year-old Franklin created his last study circle in February 1787, this time dedicated to the improvement of a branch of useful knowledge that he had so far largely ignored. The inaugural meeting of the Society for Political Inquiries was held at Philadelphia's City Tavern, although the fortnightly sessions—suspended during the oppressive heat of the mid-Atlantic summer—soon shifted to Franklin's home, in deference to his declining health.
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The American Philosophical Society likewise moved its regular gatherings to the Franklin residence, which had recently been expanded to accommodate such sessions and to make room for his “very considerable” library.
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“The moral character and happiness of mankind, are so interwoven with the operations of government, and the progress of the arts and sciences, is so dependent on the nature of our political institutions, that it is essential to the advancement of civilized society to give ample discussion to these topics,” declared the opening lines of the new group's constitution, written by the revolutionary publicist Thomas Paine. This was all the more the case with the American republic, which by necessity had “grafted on an infant commonwealth the manners of ancient and corrupted monarchies.”
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In addition to Paine, founders of the new political society included such longtime Franklin stalwarts as Rittenhouse, Rush, the printer William Bradford, and Franklin's grandson and personal secretary William Temple Franklin. The fathers of six of the participants had taken part in Franklin's earlier ventures, the Library Company and the Union Fire Company; twenty-two members were on the rolls of the American Philosophical Society, of which he remained president; and nine, led by Franklin himself, were delegates to the Constitutional Convention, which met in Philadelphia over the summer of 1787.
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Franklin and his fellow leather aprons brought the same attitudes, ideas, and approaches to the study of politics that they had earlier applied to other branches of useful knowledge, those of collective discussion, social action, and experimentation. Shortly before the creation of the Society for Political Inquiries, Franklin wrote to a sympathetic English bishop of the Americans'
steady progress toward the drafting of the Constitution: “You seem desirous of knowing what Progress we make here in improving our Governments. We are, I think, in the right Road of Improvement, for we are making Experiments.”
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Also finding a home in the Society for Political Inquiries was the unlikely figure of Tench Coxe, a notorious speculator and former Royalist who only narrowly avoided prosecution for treason at the hands of the patriots. Coxe had spent much of the immediate postwar period churning out polemics in support of a strong federal Constitution, a talent that drew the attentions of such leading revolutionaries as Jefferson, Rush, Hamilton, and James Madison, and kept him one step ahead of the law. A good word to the court from Pennsylvania's chief justice, an old friend of the Coxe family, no doubt helped as well. The charges were dropped, though never forgotten.

Such were Coxe's exertions as a publicist that he served at various times as virtual co-editor of three Philadelphia newspapers, and by his own count authored thirty articles in support of the proposed federal Constitution, designed to replace the wartime Articles of Confederation.
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He also took an oath of loyalty to the new nation, whose independence he had once opposed. Ever the optimist, Coxe summed up his hopes of rehabilitation in a letter to his brother John, written in 1778 as British forces were withdrawing from his native Philadelphia: “I am (
if
permitted) likely to become a good American.”
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Coxe likewise benefited from long-standing personal ties to Franklin. Their two families cooperated in speculative land deals, and Franklin had nominated Coxe's father, William, as collector of the ill-fated Stamp Tax for the province of New Jersey. In 1786, Franklin used his influence as formal head of Pennsylvania's government to appoint Coxe to represent the state at preliminary talks on the future of the confederation, held at Annapolis, Maryland. Franklin, Coxe, and Rush also served together in the leadership of the state abolitionist movement.
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Yet Coxe was never fully trusted, due to his past Tory sympathies and his ill-concealed aristocratic airs. The public repeatedly denied him elected office, while many among his newfound friends in the revolutionary generation eventually tired of his naked careerism. Jefferson, an aristocrat of a slightly different order, later grouped Coxe among those “cormorants hungry for office,” while Hamilton, with whom he often collaborated, dismissed him as “too cunning to be wise.” To John Quincy Adams, Coxe was a “wily, winding, subtle, and insidious character.”
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This did not keep most of them from relying heavily on Coxe, whose expertise, boundless energy, and vigorous rhetorical support they valued, and his views certainly would have merited close attention from Franklin's Society for Political Inquiries. Coxe soon found himself one of the few major figures of the day able to cross the divide that was beginning to open between the Federalists around Hamilton and the Jeffersonian Republicans, for he somehow managed to juggle support for the fiscal policies of the former and the commercial policies of the latter.
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Among the questions debated by the Society for Political Inquiries were the limits to press freedom in a constitutional system; the efficacy of public punishment for criminals; the fairest system of taxation; and the utility, if any, of the study of Greek and Latin. One matter before the circle was particularly dear to Coxe's heart: “How far may the interposition of government be advantageously directed to the regulation of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce?” The group considered this last issue so vital that it established a prize in the form of an inscribed gold plate for the best essay on the subject.
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Coxe had already arrived at his own answer. A more recent convert to the American cause than others in this illustrious cohort, he nonetheless used an early meeting of the Society for Political Inquiries as a sounding board for what was perhaps the most revolutionary and prescient vision to date of the new nation's future. He then published an expanded version in a pamphlet,
An Enquiry into the Principles on which a Commercial System for the United States Should be Founded
, dedicating the slim volume to the delegates to the Constitutional Convention and effectively placing his far-reaching prescriptions before the public at large.
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He also sent a personal copy to Franklin, who had actively assisted in its publication.