The Friends did not rule uncontested. There was a rising non-Quaker elite faction, with ties to both the proprietors and the Anglican Church. Their political influence derived from strong commercial ties with England and to the essential Scottish countinghouses. Their power was enhanced upon the purchase of thousands of acres of the most lucrative tracts of real estate, which was made possible because the land office was overseen by the powerful proprietors. They became known as the Proprietary Party—a rival group to the wealthy Quakers. Though Franklin began his rise by becoming a master tradesman and a printer, he could not ignore the colonial merchants of either party. Merchants dealt in world markets; they were wholesalers, a distinctly different class from shopkeepers or tradesmen like Franklin, and many were extremely wealthy. Sound paper money helped with overseas trade, and Franklin’s contract from the Assembly to print money drew him closer to the commercial elite.19
Class status was still based on family name in Pennsylvania, for the top tier was dominated by the Penn, Pemberton, and Logan families—the proprietors and Quaker elites. Below them was a growing transatlantic merchant class that set itself apart by engaging in a conspicuous display of wealth. These families owned slaves and servants, and silver tea sets; they wore rich fabrics, had grand homes, and drove carriages. At the time Franklin retired from his printing operations in 1748, he was in the top tenth percentile in wealth, owning a horse and chaise and having invested in a large tract of land. Even among the plain Quakers, known for their simple dress, carriages were a status symbol. In 1774, in a city of fifteen thousand, only eighty-four Philadelphians owned a carriage.20
Class was about more than wealth and family name; it was conveyed through appearances and reputation. Franklin understood this. The first portrait of him, painted in 1746, did not show him in his leather apron setting print type; nor was he pushing a wheelbarrow along the street, as he described himself—a dutiful tradesman—in his Autobiography. He was wearing a respectable wig and a fine ruffled shirt, and assumed all the airs of the “Better Sort.”21
If material appearances defined the proprietors and wealthy classes as the “Better Sort,” then the same rule applied at the other end of the social spectrum among the “Meaner Sort.” A legal distinction existed between the free and the unfree, the latter including not only slaves but also indentured servants, convict laborers, and apprentices. As dependents, they were all classified as mean, servile, and ill-bred. Thousands of unfree laborers flooded Philadelphia, so that as early as 1730, Franklin was complaining about “vagrants and idle persons” entering the colony. He wrote these words after having escaped impoverished circumstances not many years before. He had arrived in Philadelphia in 1723 as a runaway, meanly dressed in filthy, wet clothing.22
For better or worse, the word “sorts” was meaningful. It loosely referred to different grades of commercial goods. Buttons and tobacco were classified in “sorts.” A 1733 advertisement in a New York newspaper offered “fans made and sold of richer and meaner sort.” Unlike the idiom of breeding stocks, which measured value through family bloodlines, commercial sorts placed more emphasis on outward appearance, as in the separation of quality goods from cheaper ones. As a commercial people, the British were inclined to think of their social classes along the same lines. When a newspaper referred to people of the “meanest quality,” it could as easily have been an appraisal of the texture of cloth, meaning something that was coarse, unfinished, composed of baser materials, and cheaply made.23
In general, meanness meant poverty and a disagreeable dependence, whether in the form of a reliance upon charity or forced labor in a workhouse. Philadelphia, Boston, and New York all had almshouses. But meanness also attached to the condition of servitude, and was embodied in submissiveness. There was a stigma assigned to those of the lower classes, because they allowed themselves to be looked down upon, despised, and abused. The meaner sort was thought to possess a rude appearance, dull mind, and unrefined manners, and to indulge in vulgar speech. Meanness was filth and lowliness, yet another variation of the enduring class of waste people.24
Franklin was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor. His design for the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 was intended to assist the industrious poor, primarily men with physical injuries. The permanent class of impoverished were not welcome; they were simply shooed over to the almshouse. He felt the English were too charitable, an opinion he based on observing German settlers in his own colony, who worked with greater diligence because they came from a country that offered its poor little in the way of relief. When he talked about the poor, he sounded like William Byrd. In complaining about British mobs of the poor that raided the corn wagons in 1766, he charged that England was becoming “another Lubberland.”25
Most men wanted a “life of ease,” Franklin concluded, and “freedom from care and labor.” Sloth was in itself a form of pleasure. This was why he contended that the only solution to poverty was some kind of coercive system to make the indigent work: “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” The poor’s instinct of being “uneasy in rest” had been impaired; so what they needed was a jolt (of electricity?) to work again.26
Here we see the double meaning inherent in Franklin’s theory of forced migration. In his projected model of emigration, a continental expanse populated by fertile settlers would allow people to escape the onus of working for others. Parents and children would work for themselves, stripping away a culture of subservience that was part and parcel of being of the meaner sort. But with newfound liberty, their fate rested on the most impersonal of forces: survival of the fittest. The harsh environment of the frontier forced settlers either to work hard or perish. Only the more frugal, fertile, and industrious would succeed, while the slothful and incompetent would have to keep moving or die.
If Franklin valued the middling sort on the frontier, he was already their champion before he wrote “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.” The “middling people” of Pennsylvania were, he had written, the “Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, and Farmers.” He had no desire to eliminate the “Better Sort,” of course, but he rejected the idea that if some were “better,” everyone else was automatically “the meaner Sort, i.e., the Mob, or the Rabble.”
In a pamphlet of 1747, “Plain Truth,” he demonstrated that the middle had a crucial role to play for the colony. That year Delaware was invaded by an irregular French and Spanish force. Franklin wrote to warn his fellow Philadelphians, especially the Quakers, that the same fate awaited them unless they organized a voluntary militia. He called for a “militia of FREEMEN,” by which he meant men of the better and middling sorts, working together to defend their property and their colony.27
To rally support for his militia plan, he cast the dangers of a foreign invasion in terms of class warfare. Who, he posed, could be expected to lead the attack on a civilized people? It would be those “licentious Privateers,” the dregs of society: “Negroes, Mulattoes, and others of the vilest and most abandoned of Mankind.” He insisted that no indentured servants would be allowed to join the army of freemen. Besides advocating for defense of the colony, what was Franklin up to? Simple. He was redrawing class lines, bringing industrious middling men up the social ladder and refortifying the line that separated the middling from the meaner sort.28