Did North America offer the environment to achieve this happy medium? Franklin thought so. Its unique environment could strip away the unnatural conditions of the Old World system. The vast continent would give Americans a demographic advantage in breeding quickly and more fruitfully than their English counterparts. Freed from congested cities, as well as the swelling numbers of unemployed and impoverished, Americans would escape the extremes of great wealth and grinding poverty. Instead of a frantic competition over resources, the majority would be perfectly content to occupy a middling stage, what he called a “happy mediocrity.”
The industrious ant, another favorite insect of the English, provided Franklin with the evidence he needed. In 1748, as he watched one ant lead a procession of his fellows along a string to a molasses pot hanging from the ceiling, he discovered that ants communicated with each other. His curiosity about animal behavior grew, and two years later he tried an experiment with pigeons. Arranging pairs of the birds in a box, he noted that they reproduced quickly but never permitted the box to get overcrowded. The birds engaged in natural selection, the “old and strong driving out the young and weak, and obliging them to seek new habitations.” As he added more boxes, the pigeons filled them, reproducing in response to the available space and food.5
Ants and pigeons. Communal creatures could be easily compared to people. Reducing all human action to the overriding impulse to seek pleasure and avoid pain, the utilitarian Franklin was convinced that the driving forces of social development had little to do with religion or morality. If men and women were at their core animals, then they were instinctively driven to eat, procreate, and move. The last of these qualities, what Franklin called the feeling of “uneasy in rest,” came from the apparent similarity he found between animal and human migration. People displayed the desire to roam, to move forward, and to improve their state. Unsettled land sparked the instinct to migrate, as did limited resources encourage emigration—little different from the lives of the young pigeons who were forced to seek out new habitations. Franklin’s notion of “uneasy in rest” echoed Richard Hakluyt the younger, who had claimed all Englishmen to be “stirrers abroad,” a people who were searchers of new places and seekers of new avenues of wealth.6
In “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (1751), one of his most important treatises, Franklin predicted that Americans would double in population in twenty years. Idleness would be bred out of the English constitution. Large families encouraged parents to be industrious. Children would be put to work, imitating their parents, and spurred on by the will to survive. Class formation would occur, but it would be in a state of flux and adjustment, as people spread outward and filled the available territory.7
People needed incentives to produce more children. Franklin reminded his readers in “Observations” that in the Roman Empire, fruitful women had been rewarded for the number of offspring they produced. Slave women were rewarded with their liberty, while freeborn widows with large broods earned property rights and the autonomy ordinarily reserved for freeborn men. His point was that great empires needed large populations (strength came in numbers) in order to people and settle new territories. The incentives that America offered were of a different kind than elsewhere: an abundance of land and the liberty to marry young.8
The purest expression of Franklin’s reproductive philosophy came in his 1747 satire “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker.” Appearing before a judge, Polly was found guilty of having borne an illegitimate child for the fifth time. Speaking in her own defense, Miss Baker described herself as an industrious woman: “I have brought Five fine Children into the World, at the Risque of my Life; I have maintain’d them well by my own Industry, without burthening the Township.” Her self-confidence was bolstered by the knowledge of her patriotic service. She had added to the “Number of the King’s Subjects, in a new Country that really wants People.” She should be praised, not punished, was the message.
Baker’s plight was not of her own doing. She wanted to be married; she wanted to display the “Industry, Frugality, Fertility, and Skill in Oeconomy, appertaining to a good Wife’s Character.” Was it her fault that bachelors abounded? she pleaded. How could her action be considered sinful when one gazed on the “admirable workmanship” of God in creating her beautiful children? Had she not fulfilled her higher duty, “the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature’s God, Encrease and Multiply?” As Franklin saw it, God and nature were on the side of Miss Baker, and foolish laws and outdated church sanctions on the other. To make his point, he added a humorous coda: the judge who heard her speech was convinced and he married her himself the next day.9
Franklin’s offbeat story touched on all the points that he was trying to prove by demographic calculations and point-by-point reasoning in his “Observations.” The two essays should be read side by side. Nor was it an accident that he named his character Baker, a sly reference to the womb as an oven, a popular jest among English writers at the time. For Franklin, a man of both science and commerce, reproductive labor was work and should be valued as such. By adding to the “numbers of the King’s subjects,” reproductive labor was an imperial asset.
It also made sense for Franklin to target bachelors in his tale. In the American colonies and in England, the unmarried man of means was a scandalous figure. He was ridiculed as a hermaphrodite, as half man, half woman; his prescribed punishment, as one New York newspaper demanded, should be to have half of his beard shaved from his face to indicate his diminished manliness. Others felt he should lose his inheritance. In the same way that land could be left fallow, human fertility could be wasted. Having no children, wasting their seed, bachelors indulged in the worst kind of reproductive idleness.10
On the other hand, bastards added to the population and increased the wealth of the empire. Franklin’s own circumstances reinforced his view. His son William (later royal governor of New Jersey) was a bastard. William, too, fathered a bastard son, William Temple Franklin, and Temple, as he was known, added two known illegitimate children to the family tree. Bastards were a Franklin family tradition.11
Like John Locke, Franklin was certain that healthy children were the “riches of every country.” Yet his promotion of natural increase in the 1750s had more to do with colonial politics than strictly scientific curiosity. More than anywhere else, he asserted unambiguously, fit and fertile children were the special assets of British North America. In “Observations,” he sought to convince British policy makers that the Caribbean islands should not be the preferred colonial model. Franklin deplored the racial imbalance in the West Indies, which kept the population of laboring whites at artificially low numbers. Slaveowners, who didn’t perform their own labor, suffered from physical defects: they were “enfeebled, and therefore not so generally prolific.” In short, he concluded that slavery made Englishmen idle and impotent.12
Franklin also believed that slavery taught children the wrong lessons: “White Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry.” His words here echoed what William Byrd had written about poor whites in Virginia. Byrd admitted to the Georgia trustees in 1726 that poor white laboring men learned to despise labor, and would rather steal than work in the fields. Franklin changed the above equation: slavery corrupted all white men, rich and poor alike.