The Nation's Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America

chapter 2

chapter 2 the geopolitical continent, 1713–1763 Few, if any, American scientists in the past two hundred years have attained the international renown enjoyed by Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century. Yet Franklin was much more than a scientist, and his unfaltering commitment to public service garnered him as much celebrity as his intellectual pursuits. At forty-two, he gave up his successful printing business to sit on the Philadelphia City Council. Five years later, he assumed royal o≈ce as the deputy postmaster-general for North America. After that, he spent most of his time before the American Revolution in England, where he unsuccessfully lobbied to change Pennsylvania from a proprietary colony to one with a royal charter. He returned to the American colonies in 1775, a fervent patriot, saddened by his perception that British policymakers had blundered the empire to the precipice of a fratricidal war. Then he sailed almost immediately back to Europe, where, in France, he won the admiration of the cream of society, successfully negotiated an alliance, and helped shape the peace treaty that created the United States. Franklin had devoted much of his public life before the Revolution to defining and defending North America as an integral part of the British Empire. Whether coming from the perspective of an Anglo-American, a Pennsylvanian, or a Briton, Franklin had many worries about the possible trajectories his continent might take. In the early 1750s, he was fearful that the growing German and African populations would somehow taint the cultural and racial purity of the colonies. By the middle of the decade, the threat of French and Indian attacks made him fret that the British colonies might not have any future at all. And by the 1760s, imperial reforms forced him to defend the political status of the colonists as coequals with inhabitants of the home country. When defending his vision of the colonies, Franklin proved a master rhetorician. He constructed images and metaphors on a variety of scales to 68 ) Continental Preconditions figure 12. ‘‘join, or die,’’ Pennsylvania Gazette, May 9, 1754. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (lc-uszc4–5315) illuminate the plights British North Americans faced. He asked readers to assume a celestial position and imagine how North America might reflect a brighter light toward inhabitants of Mars and Venus if settled by more Britons. To drive home the fate the French and their Indian allies presented to the colonies, he drew people to ground level with the image of a severed snake symbolizing the lack of unity among the colonies. Without unity, the far larger English population would not be able to resist an enemy it outnumbered thirty to one. Its fate would be the same as that of the snake, so the colonists must ‘‘JOIN, or DIE’’ (fig. 12). The snake image was pregnant with the potential of American independence, and after the Stamp Act raised taxes, a move decried by colonists as a violation of their rights, the image took on a life of its own as radical elements of the American resistance movement appropriated it and gave it seditious overtones. Franklin, still ever the patriotic and politically moderate Briton, countered with a new image of the colonies as limbs severed from a British body. ‘‘magna Britannia : Her Colonies reduc’d’’ suggested that, unlike a snake, the colonies could not survive detached from the empire, and in turn, the empire could not survive the loss of its colonies (fig. 13).∞ Franklin and others frequently and consciously manipulated emblems The Geopolitical Continent ( 69 figure 13. Benjamin Franklin, ‘‘magna Britannia: Her Colonies reduc’d’’ (c. 1766). Courtesy Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division and metaphors of American community to serve their political aims. Images and metaphors took on partisan overtones as weapons whose provenance could easily be traced. The North American colonies appeared in the guise of any number of animals, an Indian, or a child. But when done, the arti ficiality of the construct was obvious, for as persuasive as such images could be, North America was simply not a snake, a Mohawk, or a young boy. Presumably, it was a continent. Political debates, even when carried out with figurative representations, often swirled around the question of what exactly that meant geopolitically. Over the first half of the eighteenth century, a geopolitical vision, anchored in the intellectual trends and modes of thought traced...