On a larger scale than Oglethorpe, Franklin was fashioning a free-labor zone for the northern colonies. The magic elixir to achieve his idealized British America was, in a word, breeding. In his imagination, a continental expanse populated by fertile settlers would create a more stable society. Children would replace indentured servants and slaves as laborers, mirroring the system of labor that Oglethorpe had tried but failed to permanently institute in Georgia.
Franklin expanded his theory amid global war and shifting boundaries on the North American continent. By 1760, he was writing in support of Britain’s claim to Canada, eager to add that large territory to the empire after the British victory over France in the Seven Years’ War. British colonists would fill up the land, and the majority would remain a “middling population” happily engaged in agriculture. Unlike the structurally imbalanced sugar islands, North America’s desirable “mediocrity of fortunes” would lead the growing population to rely heavily on the consumption of British-made goods. This was a win-win situation for British merchants and American colonists, because population growth would at the same time augment commerce and manufacturing back in England. Not afraid of hyperbole, Franklin offered a warning to Parliament if it tried to hem in the colonial population. By refusing to add Canada, the highest legislative authority would be no better than a cruel midwife stifling the birth of every third or fourth child in North America.13
Franklin’s theory of breeding would remain a staple of American exceptionalism for centuries to come. He provided three irresistible arguments. First, he promised that class stability accompanied western migration. Second, he reasoned that the dispersal of people would reduce class conflict and encourage a wider distribution of wealth among the population. Third, what he called a “mediocrity of fortunes” was his belief in the growth of a middle-range class condition. His farming families were not poor or self-sufficient, but engaged in some form of commercial farming, producing enough to support their families and purchase British goods.14
The most startling feature of his theory was that the class contentment he described could be achieved through natural means, or, to put it more bluntly, by letting nature take its course. The British Empire, with its well-trained ground forces and powerful navy, secured the territory. From that moment forward, the unoccupied land was the lure for settlers much like the molasses pot for the ants. In a land of opportunity, procreating came more naturally, as families felt happy and secure. Rigid class distinctions and the hoarding of resources were less likely to take place. The compression of classes persisted as long as new land was acquired in which people could spread and settle. Industry, frugality, and fertility were the natural outgrowth of a happy mediocrity.
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How realistic was Franklin’s theory? And to what degree was his argument based on wishful thinking rather than a reasonable explanation for human behavior? To begin with, eighteenth-century American colonists—like twenty-first-century Americans—were not anything like ants or pigeons. Human nature does not follow some mechanistic model of predictable reactions to pain and pleasure. And Franklin’s omnipotent and guiding hand of nature was never left unmediated by other, equally powerful forces of politics and culture. Were people really mice in a maze? Or was colonization, migration, and peopling more messy and less certain than his grand theory promised?
Franklin’s own experiences belied his optimism as to the ease with which colonists moved from one place to another. As a teenager, he had run away from Boston to Philadelphia, cutting short the full term of an apprenticeship he had been contracted to serve with his elder brother. A fugitive and vagrant, he was part of the large class of servants on the lam. His movement, like so many others, was haphazard, less methodical than the ants he studied. William Moraley, who arrived in Philadelphia in the same decade as young Franklin and wrote a memoir about his experiences, may have said it best when he described himself as a “Tennis-ball of fortune,” bouncing from one new master to the next. Despite his literary skills, training as a law clerk and watchmaker, the un-Franklinesque Moraley seemed to migrate in circles and never up the social ladder. There was no guarantee that restlessness ensured social mobility.15
Poverty was increasingly common as the eighteenth century wore on. Philadelphia had its economic slumps, brutally cold winter weather, and shortages of wood that caused the poor nearly to freeze to death. In 1784, one man who was part of the working poor in the city wrote to the local newspaper that he had six children, and though he “strove in all his power,” he could not support them. Hard work by itself was not the magic balm of economic self-sufficiency, nor was Franklin correct that big families were always a boon. He was even wrong about his tabulations on American birthrates. Infant mortality in Philadelphia was surprisingly high, and comparable to English rates, proving that Franklin’s prediction of a healthy and happy population was more rhetorical than it was demographic fact.16
The quintessential self-made man was not self-made. The very idea is ludicrous given the inescapable network of patron-client relationships that defined the world of Philadelphia. To cushion his rise, Franklin relied on influential patrons, who provided contacts and loans that enabled him to acquire the capital he needed to set up his print shop and invest in costly equipment.
For Franklin to obtain patronage and navigate contending political factions was a tricky enterprise. Pennsylvania’s class structure had some unusual quirks. At the top were the proprietors, members of William Penn’s family, who owned vast tracts of land and collected quitrents. Next came the wealthy Quaker landowners and merchants, bound together by family and religious ties. In the eighteenth century, the Society of Friends disowned any member who married outside the sect, which inflicted real economic hardship by depriving the expelled of important commercial resources, loans, and land sales.17
Franklin was neither a Quaker nor a quasi Quaker (finding some special appeal in their religious principles), but he did develop strong personal relationships with several cosmopolitan and highly educated Friends in Philadelphia and in England. He relied on Quaker patrons, especially in the early days of his business. Like another one of his sponsors, the lawyer Alexander Hamilton, a non-Quaker leader of the Quaker Party (and no relation to the later politician), he initially sided with the Friends in local and imperial politics, except that he broke ranks when it came to an orthodox stand on pacifism. His friends were liberal Friends, who were not exclusive about who should wield influence within the political faction of the Quaker Party. That was how Hamilton rose to power in Pennsylvania and saw to Franklin’s appointment as clerk of the Assembly, which in turn led to his official entrance onto the local political stage.18