Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution - Softcover

Waldstreicher, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809083159 ISBN 13: 9780809083152

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2005

Synopsis

Scientist, abolitionist, revolutionary: that is the Benjamin Franklin we know and celebrate. To this description, the talented young historian David Waldstreicher shows we must add runaway, slave master, and empire builder. But Runaway America does much more than revise our image of a beloved founding father. Finding slavery at the center of Franklin's life, Waldstreicher proves it was likewise central to the Revolution, America's founding, and the very notion of freedom we associate with both.

Franklin was the sole Founding Father who was once owned by someone else and was among the few to derive his fortune from slavery. As an indentured servant, Franklin fled his master before his term was complete; as a struggling printer, he built a financial empire selling newspapers that not only advertised the goods of a slave economy (not to mention slaves) but also ran the notices that led to the recapture of runaway servants. Perhaps Waldstreicher's greatest achievement is in showing that this was not an ironic outcome but a calculated one. America's freedom, no less than Franklin's, demanded that others forgo liberty.

Through the life of Franklin, Runaway America provides an original explanation to the paradox of American slavery and freedom.

About this title

About the Author:

David Waldstreicher, professor of history at Notre Dame, is author of In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism and editor of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (Bedford Books).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

RUNAWAY AMERICA
PART ONEOrigins: Slavery, Religion, and Family 
 
ONERunaways and Self-Made Men 
 
In 1723 Benjamin Franklin was a seventeen-year-old apprentice printer and the servant of a master in serious trouble. James Franklin, who was also his brother, had printed sharp criticisms of the Massachusetts authorities in Boston and had twice been taken to jail. The General Court decreed that he "should no longer print the paper called the New England Courant." The elder Franklin brother escaped worse punishment in part because of the laws of servitude. His inquisitors chose not to badger young Benjamin for information about who had written the offensive articles, reasoning that the younger Franklin was bound to do the bidding of his master and remain silent.The magistrates of Boston valued their domination of public institutions, but they also valued the rights of masters. To them, the two were inseparable--so inseparable, in fact, that they missed the loophole that James Franklin would seize to keep his paper afloat and himself out of the hands of the law. He signed the back of the old indenture, or servant contract, that Ben had signed binding himself until the age of twenty-one, with a "full discharge." This seemed to free Ben, but meanwhile James had him sign "new Indentures for the remainder of the Term," another four years. These were kept secret, to be produced if necessary--that is, in the event that Ben decided that, as a servant no longer, he could do what he pleased. The Courant appeared to adhere with the letter of the decree: the name of Benjamin Franklin, not James, now graced the masthead as printer. At seventeen, Benjamin Franklin appeared to the public as what he was not--a free man--to serve his brother's dreams of success.Almost fifty years later Franklin remembered James's "harsh andtyrannical treatment," his grasping at every advantage he could get. "Tho' a Brother, he considered himself as my Master, & me as his Apprentice; and accordingly expected the same Services from me as he would from Another." Hoping for "more indulgence," Benjamin complained to his father--a tactic that succeeded, for a time. When Josiah Franklin turned arbitrator, his youngest son came out ahead, perhaps because James had "often beaten" his brother-servant. But now another kind of authority, the General Court, in the very act of putting a rebellious printer in his place, had affirmed James's power over his brother. Even under threat of incarceration, he was a master. The collective power of masters, in the end, trumped even the authority of Josiah Franklin over his sons.Benjamin edited the paper while James remained incarcerated for libel and contempt. As printer, Benjamin got credit for what he had begun to do without even his brother's knowledge: writing pseudonymous articles for the paper, exercising his considerable intellectual talents and his "Turn for Satyr." For the first of many times, he invented personae and set them to speak and act in the marketplace. The experience emboldened him. The next time he and his brother argued, perhaps the next time he received blows, he proclaimed himself free, daring James to admit publicly that he had shown false indentures.1By speaking to his fellow master printers--men with whom he otherwise competed--James saw to it that Benjamin could not find printing work in Boston. And father Josiah sided, this time, with his elder son. So Benjamin Franklin, free or not (or free and not), did what unfree people did at last resort. He made up stories. He ran away.A master in jail. A servant playing master. Both playing author--anonymously. An artisan manipulating the letter of the law, trying to keep his business going. A talented young apprentice, knowing he was being exploited, telling a succession of tales to serve his master, to gain advantage with reigning patriarchs, to preserve himself, and finally to escape. A friend helped him concoct a likely story to tell the ship captain, about getting a "naughty girl" pregnant and needing to escape a marriage forced by "her friends." He sailed to New York. Only after failing to find work there did he turn to Philadelphia. 
 
Writing the first part of his Autobiography in 1771, Franklin took great pleasure in narrating the moment when, after various nautical mishaps,he finally strolled off Philadelphia's Market Street wharf in his sodden, filthy clothes. Stopping at inns, he was "suspected to be some runaway Servant, and in danger of being taken up on that Suspicion."2 The humor in such scenes derives from what we, and Franklin, know happened afterward.Benjamin Franklin quickly impressed some important Philadelphians with his hard work and his skills as a printer. He went to England to learn the trade, as his brother had done, and returned with a Quaker merchant who taught him business skills. Within a few years he had his own printing operation. He survived a number of competitors, and potentially ruinous debts, by making his newspaper and general store efficient operations that well served the larger community in a region that, just at that moment, was experiencing its first major growth spurt. He made friends, married the hardworking Deborah Read, founded a series of mutual improvement societies and public works projects, and by his thirtieth birthday in 1736 could consider himself a prosperous artisan.Franklin sent his own former apprentice to open the first printing operation in Charleston, South Carolina, to be followed by others up and down the coast. He cultivated the patronage of great men, observed their doings as clerk of the colony's General Assembly, and subtly commented on public affairs in his Pennsylvania Gazette. In 1740 he risked his good relations with the pacifist Quakers and exhorted the citizens to defend themselves against a possible Spanish attack. He invented a stove and founded America's first scientific society. By the age of forty he was experimenting with electricity and could afford to devote more and more time to such projects. He had made enough money to hand over the day-to-day operations of his printing shop to a partner in exchange for half of the profits. In twenty-five years he had turned himself from a servant into a gentleman, a learned man, a statesman.Franklin worked for himself and yet had time to work for the public good. He was nobody's servant; nobody was his. Imagine Benjamin Franklin being mistaken for "some runaway Servant"! It is enough to make one forget that he was a runaway servant, at least as far as his master was concerned. He could well have been arrested, had James Franklin decided that his claim to four more years of Ben's labor was important enough to risk exposure of the fraudulent indentures and his own manuevers. And then Ben's life story might have turned out quite differently.How did Benjamin Franklin become free? Through ingenuity, byseizing opportunities. But also by trickery. By lying. By taking advantage of distance, of the newness of the seaboard colonies and their lack of legal comity or economic integration. Out of Boston, out of Massachusetts, young Franklin could rely on appearances and on skill--not on what was already known, already said about him on the streets of Boston. It took a real crime, the stealing of his own labor, to make the self-made man.In the nineteenth century Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, and his life, were read as a story about how in America ingenuity, virtue, and hard work were rewarded. But when we see only that part of Benjamin Franklin's America, the rise of a self-made man and a nation of strivers, we miss the other side of the story, that of the runaway Benjamin Franklin, the unfree Benjamin Franklin. America is also the story of the James Franklins, the not-so-fortunate sons who tried to become self-sufficient and found that other people's unfreedom was one of the few resources at their disposal.In so many ways, American freedom often depended on running away and on keeping others from running away. The flip side of the self-made man in eighteenth-century America was the servant and the slave. In some cases they were the same people. In others, one person might play different roles in an ongoing drama of personal liberation and subjugation, freedom and unfreedom. But even those who never served or ran away were touched by the remarkable extremes of freedom and unfreedom that characterized the Atlantic littoral.3 When Franklin fled to New York and Philadelphia, he entered a changing social world. It was a world of new opportunity that depended on the unfreedom of a great many people, people just as mobile, and often just as creative and skilled, as Franklin. Some were able to use those skills to reinvent themselves. Others found that masters got the best of them. 
 
Franklin's Autobiography is the culmination of the self-inventions that he began when he wrote anonymously for his brother's newspaper and that continued when he ran away. The book, in turn, inspired many self-made men of the nineteenth century and the development of the secular memoir as a popular genre--how-to books for the making of self-made men.For the other runaways of eighteenth-century America, though, we have few memoirs.4 Rather, we have other kinds of printed stories about the daring fugitives: the advertisements that their masters publishedin newspapers like the one Franklin printed, the Pennsylvania Gazette. The ads from the mid-Atlantic region show us a world of remarkable freedom and unfreedom. In brief but revealing fashion, they tell the stories of self-transforming Franklinian characters, and in doing so they give the lie to stereotypes about white and black, slave and free, in early northern America.5Consider the advertisement Nicholas Everson placed in 1751, ten months after the disappearance of his slave, Tom:Run away in July last, from Nicholas Everson, living in East-New-Jersey, two miles from Perth-Amboy ferry, a mulatto Negroe, named Tom, about 37 years of age, short, well-set, thick lips, flat nose, black curled hair, and can play well upon the fiddle: Had on when he went away, a red-colored watch-coat, without a cape, a brown coloured leather jacket, a hat, blue and white twisted yarn leggins; speaks good English, and Low Dutch, and is a good Shoemaker; his said master has been informed that he intends to cut his watchcoat, to make him Indian stockings, and to cut off his hair, and get a blanket, to pass for an Indian; that he inquired for one John and Thomas Nutus, Indians at Susquehanna, and about the Moravians, and the way there. Whoever secures him in the nearest goal or otherwise, so that his master may have him again, shall have Forty Shillings reward, and reasonable charges, paid byNICHOLAS EVERSON.6Who was Tom? We like to think that the early American past was composed of discrete groups of people who largely hewed to their communities, who belonged to one culture. But Everson's ad paints a portrait of someone very much aware of the diversity and complexity of his world, a diversity that was reflected in his own background as a mulatto and, more important, evident in the path he took to liberty. Somehow Everson learned that Tom planned to pass for Indian, possibly among the Moravians, which must have made sense to someone as multilingual and multiracial as Tom.Tom's savvy use of clothing is also typical of successful runaways. Slaves and servants themselves owned few changes of clothes, and those they wore, though of low quality, might be so distinctively combined or patched as to render them easily identifiable. Slaves who stole their masters'clothes, to which they often had access because of their household duties, might more easily evade capture--or if they sold the clothing on the ubiquitous informal market, they might provide themselves with needed capital. Tom's particular use of clothing to aid his racial camouflage was only one variant on the ways runaways used popular stereotypes about color and deportment to their advantage. A man who made shoes, Tom probably knew exactly how to dress to avoid suspicion.Tom was more, even, than a "good shoemaker": he had multiple skills. Like many other runaways, he could fiddle--a talent that could bring in surplus income and, like other learned skills, made him more valuable. If Tom made the most of his rural existence, urban slaves took advantage of the city's more market-oriented opportunities to stretch the bounds of servitude. Evan Powel, a Philadelphia master, found it necessary to place an ad to prevent "Molatto Bess, who used to go about selling Cakes," from "borrowing of and taking up Goods upon Trust in her Master's Name, and unknown either to her Master or Mistress."7 Powel's moneymaking scheme--to turn a domestic into a freelance baker, a hawker of pastries, or both--had backfired, because Bess was at least as (and possibly more) aware of the possibilities of the marketplace as her owners.Runaways, whose descriptions at times took up several columns of newspaper space, were adept at role-playing. Many had traveled or worked at different tasks or jobs. These characteristics were not limited to urban slaves like Bess. One Kent County, Maryland, mulatto had "worked some Time in a Mill, in a Tan-Yard, and on a Plantation." A Virginia slave advertised in a Pennsylvania paper could "turn his hand to many sorts of trades, and particularly that of a Carpenter." Benjamin Hill, a master from North Carolina, thought enough of the skills of Virginia-born Tony, a "good sawyer," that he sought to track him as far as Pennsylvania two years after he absconded.Hill underlined the fact that Tony also "pretends to making and burning Bricks." Why is this detail important? Had Tony been seen at a brickyard? Slaves who ran and sought to use their skills mirrored the efforts of runaway apprentices and indentured servants escaping a system that squeezed profit out of scarce labor. Remembering his own efforts to stay in the class of independent artisans, Benjamin Franklin described how, in order to appear industrious, he theatrically wheeled his purchases of paper back to his shop. People who worked with their handshad to prove their value in public demonstrations. The more one could pretend to do, the greater one's chances of employment or status.These skills and experiences made slaves and servants valuable and gave masters an incentive to rent them out and sometimes to overwork them. The irony, for the masters, is that these skills also made it easier, and more attractive, for their laborers to run away. As a result, masters were reluctant to admit that their fugitives filled the ranks of the skilled--or aspired to do so. Disinclined to grant servants and slaves the status of artisan, they would say that a runaway "pass[es] for a currier," "pretends to be a Tanner," "pretends to be a Black-Smith," "professes to be a Barber, Cook and Sailor."8Even when masters had to admit to such skills and aspirations in a runaway (for mentioning them increased the chances that readers would recognize the person), they still disparaged the fugitive. A rhetoric of pretense suffuses the ads: as Simon, for one, "talks good English, can read and write, is very slow in his Speech, can bleed and draw Teeth, Pretending to be a great Doctor and very religious and says he is a Churchman." The "famous infamous" Tom Bell, the best-known confidence man of the day, pre...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0809083159
• ISBN 13: 9780809083152
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336