Success at Plymouth

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, died on this day in 1657 in Plymouth, Massachusetts at the age of about 67.

William Bradford's record of building a permanent settlement out of the virgin lands of the Massachusetts coast almost makes Walter Raleigh, John White and John Smith look like Moe, Larry and Curly. Raleigh and White misplaced a couple of groups of colonists at Roanoke between 1588 and 1590; Smith's Jamestown colony was an unmitigated disaster of Indian wars, internal mistrust and starvation which limped along until James I took it over from the brink of bankrupcty after 17 years; but within 6 short years, Bradford led the Plymouth colony in the repayment of all of its debts and the successful buy-out of its original investors amid relative peace and prosperity.

The difference may have been in their aims: while Moe, Larry and Curly came to North America in search of a quick score of gold nuggets lying on the shore, Bradford came to honor God. When he was 12 he became a member of the Separatist Church in Yorkshire, an offshoot of the Puritans, and at 19 he moved to Holland with a group of like-minded "nonconformists" in search of religious freedom. Not finding it there, he helped to organize the Mayflower voyage in which about 100 "pilgrims" sailed to the New World in 1620.

Upon arriving, he was one of the framers of the "Mayflower Compact," an agreement for voluntary civic cooperation, and as governor during almost every year from 1621 to 1656, he maintained peace treaties with Massasoit and the Wampanoag Indians; initiated such democratic institutions as town meetings and elections; helped to avoid starvation by directing the cultivation of corn; and maintained an environment of toleration for all nonconformists. He also left behind a valuable, well-written account of the colony, History of Plymouth Plantation (1620-47).

Sauer & Son

Christopher Sauer (the Elder), a great-grandfather of mine, died on this day in 1758 in Germantown, Pennsylvania.

Born in 1695 in Ladenburg, Germany, Sauer worked as a tailor and spectacle-maker there until 1724, when he brought his wife and son to America in search of religious freedom. In Pennsylvania he became associated with the German Baptist Brethren church, a non-conformist, pacifist sect. After his wife, Maria, left him to join Conrad Beissel's Ephrata Commune as sub-prioress of the convent, Sauer buried himself in his work, first as a cabinet-maker, wheelwright and clockmaker, and eventually as the first successful German-language printer in the New World. His chief rival, Benjamin Franklin, had tried to reach the German-language market in Pennsylvania with his own publications, but failed largely due to the poor literacy of his German help. Nevertheless, Franklin controlled the paper supply in Pennsylvania; and at first he refused to sell paper to Sauer for his printing press (regarding German immigrants to be poor credit risks), but later relented when a wealthy German put his credit behind Sauer's enterprise. Like Franklin, Sauer published a daily almanac (aimed at the German readership), as well as numerous religious and pacifist tracts.

In 1742, Sauer published the first European-language Bible printed in North America; up to that time, not even an English Bible had been printed in America, as that was a privilege enjoyed only by the King's printer in England. In his later years, Sauer battled against Franklin's efforts to "anglicize" the religious German immigrants and bring them under secular political influences. Sauer's wife later left the Ephrata Commune and returned to Sauer, and his son, Christopher Sower, took over the printing business and became a leader among the German Brethren.

His only child, Christopher Sower the Younger -- born on tomorrow's date in 1721 in Laasphe, Germany -- became a minister in the German Baptist Church at the age of 32, but even as his role within the church became more important, he continued to assist his father in his printing business, taking charge of the English-language publications and printing the first religious periodical in America, the Geistliche Magazien (1764).

As the American Revolution unfolded, Sower the Younger came under fire for his pacifist beliefs, which were mistaken for loyalty to England, and in 1778 Sower was arrested by the Continental Army as a spy. His print shop and all of his worldly possessions were impounded, and to add insult to injury, the Army forcibly shaved Sower's beard, which had been one of the hallmarks of his religious practice. As church historian/one-time Pennsylvania governor Martin Brumbaugh observed, "Men in public life had cleanly shaven faces. It is interesting to note that every signer of the Declaration of Independence was smooth-shaven. The indignity heaped upon Sower was two-fold. When his beard was removed his religion was ridiculed and his face was made to appear like that of his oppressors."

Sower was eventually released, but his property was never returned, and Sower lived out the rest of his years with friends and relatives. In 1792, recognizing the mistake that the Continental Army had made in its treatment of the late Father Sower, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law giving Sower's heirs whatever remained of his confiscated property -- by that time, a regrettably empty gesture.

Ben Franklin: Overrated Founding Father

Forgive me if I don't join in the nation's year-long celebration of the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's birth. My lack of enthusiasm actually runs in my family. One of my great-great-etc grandfathers, a noted Germantown printer and a contemporary of Franklin's named Christoph Sauer, was pretty sure that Franklin was a greedy and selfish man, and he was a victim of some of Franklin's most uncouth prejudices.

To most of posterity, Franklin and his friend Thomas Jefferson were the twin poles of the American Enlightenment, titans of ingenuity and revolutionary thinking. While it is true that Franklin's tinkering led to some interesting scientific advancements (not as many, it would seem, as he receives credit for), and that he was an industrious fellow with a good business head and a charming raconteur, Franklin's outlook was sometimes quite provincial, and his goals were middle-class goals. Much of his activity must be viewed through the prism of personal commercial gain to be properly understood. His greatest contribution to the American revolution was that he found effective ways of clothing middle-class economic grievances as matters of fundamental liberty.

The 15th child of a soap maker, born on this day in 1706 in Boston, Franklin worked in his father's shop until he was 12, when he became an apprentice (under a 9-year indenture) to his brother James, a printer. He read voraciously and, unbeknownst to James, secretly began to contribute a regular satirical column to his brother's newspaper, the New England Courant, under the pseudonym "Silence Dogood." Franklin briefly took over the paper in 1723 when his brother was banned for his supposedly seditious publications, but James was habitually ungrateful and abusive, so Benjamin skipped out on the indenture to Philadelphia later that year and joined another print shop.

At the advice of the governor of Pennsylvania who had agreed to help him start his own shop, Franklin went to London in 1724, but found that the governor had duped him and that he was stuck there without money or leads. He found work with a London printer and set the type for William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated; having had occasion to read it carefully, he prepared an ironic, humorous (and anonymous) reply, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain. Its popularity led to his entry into freethinking circles in London before he returned to Philadelphia in 1726.

Continuing to work as a printer while writing columns, Franklin had an affair with Mrs. Deborah Rogers (Franklin later took her as his common law wife, the whereabouts of her husband being unknown). He took over the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1730, founded a subscription library the following year, and began to extend his media empire by the unusual act of starting a partnership with one of his apprentices to open a shop in Charleston, South Carolina; most print shops were local, owned by families, but Franklin sought to expand his "franchise" with invested capital and regional reps.

In fact, Franklin was North America's first vertically-integrated media mogul. He even controlled the colonial paper supply in Pennsylvania, which caused my great-grandfather no small amount of discomfort. "No credit to the Dutch," was Franklin's haughty note to my ancestor. Despite murmuring that Germans were smelly and ignorant, Franklin also tried to set up a few German-speaking newspapers in an effort to compete with Christoph Sauer's popular offerings in the large German market around Philadelphia, but Franklin never figured out how to make them succeed.

For Franklin, the Germans represented not only a ripe market, but a populace in need of secular instruction. Germans would become a thorn in his side for some time to come, however, as a demographic group he couldn't conquer commercially, and as an ethnic group whose separateness and Anabaptist pacifism frustrated his civic goals. Expressing the belief that Germans had swarthy complexions and that Anglo-Saxons were the only "White People" in the world, Franklin wrote:

"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanicize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion?"

The less he was able to control people like my great-grandfather, the more he felt compelled to villify them.

In 1733, Franklin started to publish Poor Richard's Almanac, for which he created the persona of "Poor Richard" as a disarmingly naive send-up of astrologers, whose pragmatic proverbs and advice outdid the rival almanacs Franklin had intended to spoof in common wisdom. The apparent influence of the popular "Poor Richard" gave Franklin a soapbox, and emboldened his confidence in his own advice, although he saw himself as somewhat undisciplined, privately recording his violations of "thirteen virtues" which he set for himself to improve his conduct. His jocularity was at times a matter for private shame, but it didn't still his pen; some of his literary hoaxes included "Reasons for Preferring an Old Mistress to a Young One," 1745; "The Speech of Miss Polly Baker," in which a woman who is prosecuted for the fifth time for having an illegitimate child convinces a judge to throw out the charges and marry her; and numerous mock biblical parables.

His reputation as a sensible merchant got him elected clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1736, marking his first furtive entry into electoral politics. Meanwhile, it was science which held most of his attention -- particularly the study of electricity. In 1747, he proved, with the use of a Leyden jar as a capacitor, that there were not 2 types of electricity but one, to which he applied the terms "positive" and "negative," and in 1749, experimenting with charged metal bowls, he invented a "lightning rod" for redirecting lightning during electrical storms. In his most famous (and reckless) experiment, he confirmed for the public that lightning was merely electricity when in 1752 he flew a kite into an electrical storm while standing on an insulated surface, drawing sparks from a key tied to the kite string; another scientist, Georg Richmann, died the following year when he was struck by lightning trying to recreate the experiment. The experiment, and Franklin's book Experiments and Observations on Electricity made him an international celebrity, however; even Immanuel Kant called him the "Prometheus of modern time."

In 1747, Franklin faced down the Quaker-dominated Assembly by raising a militia to fight against French and Indians who were raiding Pennsylvania frontier towns and mucking up trade; in 1751, as the dominant cultural figure in Philadelphia, he was elected to the Assembly. As a legislator, he spent of his time trying to diminish the influence of the descendants of William Penn for the benefit of the merchant class. As the war against the French intensified on the borders, Franklin proposed a union of English colonies for purposes of raising a continental militia, but the proposal was shut down (despite his now-famous engraving of a snake cut into pieces with the words "Join or Die!" underneath); otherwise, he concerned himself with converting Pennsylvania from Penn's colony into a royal colony as agent of Pennsylvania in England.

When Franklin returned to London in 1764 after a 2 year absence, the colonies were in the midst of protesting the proposed stamp tax to be imposed on them by the British Parliament. Franklin offered alternatives to the British which were ignored, but when the tax was passed Franklin initially decided that it could be tolerated and offered the name of a friend for the post of stamp distributor in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, on rumors that he had supported the tax, protesters threatened Franklin's home in Philadelphia.

Finding himself on the wrong side of the issue back home, he became a one-man anti-stamp tax propaganda machine in London with letters and pamphlets, and spoke against the tax before a session of the House of Commons. Increasingly, Franklin began to take the position that Great Britain's use of the American economy was repressive, and that America would ultimately need to become an independent nation. In 1773, a letter of Franklin's, in which he urged non-cooperation with British war activities around the world until the British guaranteed the colonists the rights of British citizens, was stolen and presented to the British colonial secretary, who judged it treasonous. He was brought before the King's Privy Council, where he was denounced in a 1-hour diatribe and stripped of his position as deputy postmaster of North America.

Now clearly identified with the independence movement which had been growing steadily in Massachusetts, Franklin returned to Pennsylvania and was chosen as a delegate to the 2nd Continental Congress. In February 1776, he was part of an unsuccessful mission to Canada to convince the Canadian colonies to join in the American resistance, and upon his return in June served on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence (with Jefferson, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston). When the Declaration was passed by the Congress on July 4, Franklin was the oldest of its signatories. Almost immediately afterward, Franklin was elected president of the Pennsylvania state convention and before the end of the year was chosen as an American commissioner in France.

In Paris, he enjoyed a return to his role as a great man of letters, charming the French intelligentsia (Voltaire among them) with his quaintly homespun manner and dress, his flirtatiousness and his wit. He helped direct the American negotiation of commercial and political alliances with the French republican government, and in 1783, at the age of 76, he served with Adams and John Jay as the American team at the Paris peace talks which successfully concluded the American revolution. Upon his return to Pennsylvania 2 years later, he was elected president of Pennsylvania's executive council for 2 years.

He later lent his prestige to the federal Constitution which was adopted by the states in 1787, and worked on his beguiling, self-congratulatory Autobiography (considered one of the finest works of early American literature), although his final public act was to sign a memorial to Congress calling for an end to African slavery in the United States. He died on April 17, 1790 in Philadelphia.

John Adams, who was no great admirer of what he took to be Franklin's lax morality, correctly predicted that Franklin would be given inflated credit for his role in the American revolution.

Meanwhile, today I'll refrain from attending any parades or cake-cuttings in Franklin's honor. Instead I'll hold my own private celebration in honor of my swarthy, stinky great-grandfather Christoph Sauer. Franklin does get the last laugh on us, however, for out of necessity, I'll have to conduct my private ceremony in English, just as Franklin wanted.

Poor Johnny White

John White is one of the more tragic figures of the early colonial period in North America. His story begins with the discovery of Roanoke Island (now off North Carolina) by ships financed by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584. The following year, Raleigh sent 107 men to Roanoke to colonize and John White went along as one of Raleigh's publicity team; he was designated by Raleigh to paint pictures of the new colony to attract funds and pioneers. His watercolors (including the accompanying illustrations of "Indians dancing around a circle of posts" and the "Indian Village of Pomeiooc") are obviously the product of a lively and wide-awake mind and contain a kind of Brueghelesque joy.

After suffering through a horrible year of starvation and Spanish and Indian attacks, John White and all of the rest of the surviving colonists returned to England with Francis Drake (who was just passing through; meanwhile, a few weeks later, one of Raleigh's captains arrived to find an abandoned colony and left 15 men behind to search for the colonists who returned with Drake). White's engravings of Roanoke illustrated Raleigh's commissioned travel brochure, the Briefe and True Report of the new found land of Virginia (written by Thomas Harriott; 1588).

White returned as "governor" to Roanoke with a band of 120 fresh colonists (including his wife and daughter) in 1587, finding no trace of the 15 men left the previous year. Very soon after arriving, White decided that 2 men should go back to England to secure additional supplies for the coming winter, but the colonists decided White himself should go. Reluctantly, he bade goodbye to his wife, his daughter and his newborn granddaughter, Virginia Dare (called, by tradition, the first English child born in North America) and set sail for England.

When he arrived he found England in the middle of its war with Spain, and White spent three agonizing years awaiting a ship to carry him back to Roanoke. When he arrived back in Roanoke in July 1590, not a soul was to be found -- no bodies, no signs of destruction or struggle, not even the agreed-upon distress signal of a cross.

What had happened to the Roanoke colonists? Surprisingly, there is good evidence that they were not massacred. In 1719, white settlers in Robinson County, North Carolina (100 miles inland from Roanoke) encountered a strange tribe of light-skinned, blue-eyed Indians who spoke English; the 1790 census moreover shows that 54 of the 95 family names in the County were those of people among the lost Roanoke colonists. The indications are that the colonists sought refuge with the friendly Croatan Indians nearby, and peacefully assimilated with them.

Such archaeological musings came too late to offer comfort to John White, who returned to England, and piteously faded from history -- likely as one of Raleigh's lieutenants in Ireland.