Penguin History of the United States of America (18 page)

Like the Puritans, Penn had been spurred on by the fear of religious persecution in England. Friends who shared his anxiety emigrated to the new colony in large numbers: by 1690, a mere seven years after her foundation, Philadelphia was the second city of the colonies, with a population of 4,000 (in the same year Boston’s was 7,000). The spectacular rise of Pennsylvania was accelerated by persecution in another place than England (where, as it turned out, the Quakers were left in peace). The Friends had established contacts with European religious groups of the same quietist, undogmatic stripe in the days of George Fox, their founder; and William Penn himself had visited such groups in Germany. Accordingly he took pains to advertise his project by having his promotional pamphlets translated into German and distributed in the Rhineland, where they had a great success. For the incessant wars of Louis XIV in that region, and rigid oppression of the new sects by native rulers who, whether Lutheran, Calvinist or Catholic, were
all equally unsympathetic, made the idea of a fresh start in a new world irresistible, though the journey to America was even more beset with difficulty and hardship than it had been for the Pilgrims. Poor peasants for the most part, the sectarians had somehow to find their way down the Rhine, past innumerable tolls and customs barriers, first to Holland, then to England, then to America. At every stage they encountered cheats and oppressors, and the ships which carried them to America (in return for the privilege of selling them as indentured servants when they arrived) were all too often what were later known as ‘coffin-ships’ – vessels quite unfit for the voyage: unhealthy, overcrowded, liable to founder. Whereas the Pilgrims had at least enjoyed a comparatively quick crossing, these Germans (or Palatines, from the Rhenish Palatinate, as they were called in Pennsylvania)
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often were confined at sea for months, waiting for favourable winds to carry them into harbour. Sometimes they found assistance or revenge when they arrived. When one such ship, the
Loving Unity
, sailing from Rotterdam, arrived in Boston, the authorities discovered that half the 142 passengers had died on the voyage and the other half had been monstrously oppressed by a brutal captain and crew. Judge Byfield of the vice-admiralty court punished the scoundrels heavily. But the Palatines cannot even so have been very happy to be in Boston, for there was little land left to take up in New England, where the soil was anyway none too good. New York might have attracted them, but the great proprietors, Dutch and English, who dominated that colony had no intention of endangering their titles to the land by admitting too numerous and vigorous a farming population, even as tenantry.

Pennsylvania was the place. Penn had laid it down from the first that there should be no religious test for the holding of office or the exercise of political rights, let alone molesting or prejudice in person or estate because of ‘conscientious persuasion or practice’. With him, it was a matter of noble religious principle: ‘How can any man’s conscience be at another’s dispose?’ he asked. This was in line with the practical colonial policy of the Board of Trade; but the policy of religious freedom was so zealously carried out in Pennsylvania that a German traveller in 1750 reported:

Coming to speak of Pennsylvania, that colony possesses great liberties above all other English colonies, inasmuch as all religious sects are tolerated there. We find there Lutherans, Reformed, Catholics, Quakers, Mennonites or Anabaptists, Herrnhuter or Moravian Brethren, Pietists, Seventh Day Baptists, Dunkers, Presbyterians, Newborn, Freemasons, Separatists, Freethinkers, Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, Negroes and Indians. The Evangelicals and Reformed, however, are in the majority. But there are many hundred unbaptized souls there that do not even wish to be baptized.

The attractiveness of such a state of affairs to the Palatines amply justifies, in a worldly sense, both William Penn and the Board of Trade; but Pennsylvania had charms for everybody. The coastal plain, gently sloping a hundred miles inland from Philadelphia to the feet of the Appalachians, watered by three great rivers – the Susquehanna, the Schuylkill and the Delaware – was ideal country for European farmers, whether Palatines, English, Scottish or Irish. The temperate climate made it possible for them to grow the crops they were used to: wheat above all, but also rye, oats, barley, hemp and flax; maize was the only new grain they attempted. The immense fertility of the soil, and the large acreage to be had for the asking, ensured large harvests for everyone, although Pennsylvanian methods of agriculture were distinctly backward, compared to English or even south German ones. Some settlers had money enough to get land, implements and housing immediately; others served out indentures, learning the way of the new country, and then set out westward. However it was, development was rapid. The first settlement of any size to be founded after the Quaker city herself was Germantown on the Schuylkill (1683). Others soon followed. Big German barns, spreading orchards and fertile fields soon gave a new character to the back country. Before long a vast and ever-increasing tide of farm produce began to pour into Philadelphia; and a city’s fortune was made.

This story illustrates, as well as any other, how hugely America was to benefit from her immigrants (she would also be shaped and changed by them in non-economic, non-utilitarian ways).
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The rise of Philadelphia illustrates another general truth about American history: the importance of the cities, and of the processes of urbanization.

Philadelphia had great advantages. The city acted as the essential export-import channel for Pennsylvania, for the ‘Three Counties’ (the future state of Delaware), for ‘West Jersey’ (the lower area of New Jersey) and, until the belated rise of Baltimore, for Maryland, though the areas were all politically distinct. The Great Philadelphia Wagon Road was built to bring the farmers’ produce swiftly to market: it was transported in the famous Conestoga wagons,
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forerunners of the covered wagons in which the pioneers were to settle the Great West in the nineteenth century. The corporation of Philadelphia spent large sums between 1720 and 1736 on building, improving and regulating the city market, until it was the envy of other towns and was

allowed by foreigners to be the best of its bigness in the known world, and undoubtedly the largest in America; I got to this place by 7 [our informant continues] and had no small satisfaction in seeing the pretty creatures, the young ladies, traversing the place from stall to stall, where they could make the best market, some with their maid behind them with a basket to carry home the purchase, others that were designed to buy trifles, as a little fresh butter, a dish of green peas, or the like, had the good nature and humility enough to be their own porters.

The wagoners, once they had sold their produce, bought what they needed, and so trade went on merrily. By the eve of the Revolution it was thought that there were no fewer than 20,000 wagons in Pennsylvania, and they went down to Philadelphia in hundreds. More than eighty carriages for the gentry added to the hurly-burly. The din and danger of the streets were sometimes unendurable.

On this solid economic foundation city life flourished. By 1760 Philadelphia had a population of 23,750, and was the largest town in the colonies, leading its nearest rival, New York (swelling from wartime profits), by more than 5,000. By 1775 it had nearly doubled, having 40,000 inhabitants, and left all others behind.
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At the top, dominating the city, were the mercantile gentry, revelling in their wealth, their pomp, their power, their town and country houses. Many were still Quakers, but a drift into the more showy and aristocratic Anglican communion had begun, as in Boston. These merchants enjoyed and patronized, though they did not create, an intellectual life which was threatening to surpass Boston’s. The great Linnaeus, for example, founder of modern botany, called the Quaker Dr John Bartram of Philadelphia ‘the greatest natural botanist in the world’. At the bottom was a comparatively small class of the poor, the unemployed, the transient. Their condition was appreciably less pitiable than that of their more numerous English and European counterparts, but such Old World evils as unemployment, slums, beggary, prostitution, hunger and the degradations of poor relief were present in the New, and the very poor were miserable enough.

Between the extremes came the great bulk of the citizens, ‘the middling sort’, the intelligent, energetic, thriving artisan class, the real beneficiaries of America, who gave the city its character and did most to exploit its opportunities. Honest, earnest workmen could be sure of making a good living in Philadelphia, where skills were always in demand; and many could do better, rising to fortune and sometimes to fame. It was such men whom Justice William Allen had in mind when he cheerfully asserted: ‘You may depend upon it that this is one of the best poor man’s countries in the world.’ It was most fitting that the first world-famous American should
spring from among them, and that he should still be the symbol at once of his city and his country.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) is, of all great Americans, the one I should most like to dine with in heaven. He was physically unremarkable, though he had a sagacious, twinkling face, a strong, sturdy build, and spectacles. His character was an enchanting blend of simplicity, drollery, shrewdness, energy, intellectual curiosity, benevolence and integrity. Apart from touches of endearing vanity, his only weakness was for women: he confessed that in youth he could not resist them, and in old age he was still an incorrigible flirt. He was middle-class to the core: the prophet of the cult of rising in the world by hard work and honest worth. I can see nothing wrong in this, though others have professed to do so. Franklin had a genius for enjoying life without ever failing in his duty to society and to his conscience. He was a walking paradox: a hedonistic Puritan. Thus his life well illustrates, among other things, an extraordinary transformation that was threatening Puritanism in the eighteenth century.

For though Franklin early became a deist, he was born in Boston of perfectly orthodox parents. They could not afford to keep him at school for more than a year, but ‘I do not remember when I could not read’: he educated himself, with great success, eventually mastering French, Italian, Spanish and Latin, as well as some degree of arithmetic, and reading extensively in everything English that came his way, which, as he was a printer by trade, was a great deal. In due course he became a more than competent natural scientist. At first he worked for his elder brother James in Boston; but young Benjamin grew weary of his apprenticeship and ran away to New York. There was no work for him there, so he found his way to Philadelphia, where, after a few years, he began a rapid rise to great prosperity.

His printing business throve, and by 1748 he was rich enough to retire, young though he was, and do as he pleased – a fact which in itself tells us much about the growth of his chosen city; but it is the extraordinary variety and number of his occupations that best convey the nature of life in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. His most famous ventures, next to his political career, were his experiments with electricity, in the course of which he proved the single nature of the ‘fluid’, demonstrated the identity of lightning and electricity, and with characteristic, and characteristically American, practicality invented the lightning-rod – no small thing this, for American thunderstorms are ferocious and the largely wooden towns
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of colonial America suffered again and again from devastating fires. Franklin well knew this: he had pioneered a volunteer fire-fighting society at Philadelphia, an example which was widely followed. (This was also characteristically American in that a private group of citizens undertook to do what
elsewhere was left to the authorities.) It was as an electrical scientist that he first attained international celebrity and was awarded honorary degrees at St Andrew’s (1759) and Oxford (1762), so that it is only proper to speak of him in later life as Dr Franklin. (He loved the title.) His great reputation at home was founded on his journalism. At this time the power of the newly mature press to influence opinion and conduct was immense, and growing. It threatened to rival, if not to eclipse, that of the pulpit. Like his brother James and most other colonial printers of any importance, Benjamin Franklin, as part of his printing business, ran a newspaper (the
Pennsylvania Gazette)
, most of which consisted of advertisements and reprints from English and colonial papers, but the original part of which he chiefly wrote himself. He also, again following usual practice, published an almanac, under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders. As
Poor Richard’s Almanac
it soon became immensely popular, selling 10,000 copies annually, and was, says the author, ‘generally read, scarce any neighbourhood in the province being without it’. Franklin peppered it with proverbs, invented or improved by himself, which passed into the language: ‘Great Talkers, little Doers’; ‘God heals and the doctor takes the fee’; ‘Necessity has no Law: I know some Attorneys of the name’; ‘Neither a fortress nor a maid will hold out long after they begin to parley’; ‘Lost time is never found again’ (one of the Puritan axioms of behaviour). The plain people of America, in need about equally of amusement and good advice, delighted in this sort of thing, and in the author, who encouraged the taste for reading (good business to do so) by founding first a book-club (it arose out of a discussion group called the Junto that he started in Philadelphia) and then an academy which soon grew into the College of Philadelphia (chartered 1755; later the University of Pennsylvania – the first university, as distinct from a college, in America).

Franklin had always been interested in public affairs: his zeal for improving himself and the world around him implied as much. He had a hundred schemes which needed political action: there was one for reforming the night watch, and one for building a public hospital (both succeeded).
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Inevitably he was drawn into politics, in the first place by the needs of military defence. Pennsylvania had two fundamental problems: the political power of the pacifist Quakers, and that of the Proprietors, the Penn family. Both were restricting the free growth of the colony; the former threatened its life. The Friends relied on God and their treaties with the Indians, so in 1747 French and Spanish vessels were able to enter the Delaware and attack plantations and shipping. Another time they might descend on Philadelphia
itself. Franklin proposed a voluntary association, like his fire-fighting one, for the defence of the province. As usual, his scheme was a great success, and after that he was irretrievably set on a public career. In 1748 he entered the Pennsylvanian assembly. His influence and his popularity grew; he formed a political party which in time defeated the Proprietors and incorporated those Quakers who were ready to fight in self-defence (the Indians devastated the frontier in 1756, so the number was large). In 1757 he was sent to England to act as Pennsylvania’s London agent in the attempt finally to crush the Penns. The apprenticeship of a statesman was complete.