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Toolbox Library, primary resources thematically organized with notes and discussion questionsOnline Seminars, professional development seminars for history and literature teachersBecoming American: The British Atlantic Colonies, 1690-1763
Becoming American: The British Atlantic Colonies, 1690-1763
Theme: GrowthTheme: PeoplesTheme: EconomiesTheme: IdeasTheme: American
Theme: Economies

4.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Room from the Hewlett House, Woodbury, New York, ca. 1740-60
Consumers
- Benjamin Franklin on wealth, luxury, and virtue, selections, 1727-1784 (PDF)
- Luxury consumer goods:1
- Home interiors of the wealthy:


In 1766, Benjamin Franklin testified before a committee of the British House of Commons to oppose the Stamp Act. The testimony included this exchange:2
Question:  What used to be the pride of the Americans?
Franklin:  To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain.
Question:  What is now their pride?
Franklin:  To wear their old clothes over again, till they can make new ones.
Franklin's point, of course, was to contrast colonists previous pride in being British—and in displaying success by acquiring the "fashions and manufactures" from the mother country—with their anger over unfair taxation by the mother country. More and more, the wealthiest Americans owned and displayed luxury items unknown to their seventeenth-century predecessors. Silver teapots, silk brocade draperies, ornately carved portrait frames, hand-carved wall paneling—luxuries that not only announced wealth but signified power. "From the 1680s forward, and especially from 1720 to 1750," writes historian Jon Butler, "leading families grouped together in each colony to display a formidable combination of wealth, material consumption, and (usually) political and social power."3 How did these goods convey power as well as wealth?
  • Benjamin Franklin on wealth, luxury, and virtue. Franklin is well-known for his aphorisms—usually printed in his almanacs and public essays—promoting frugality, hard work, and plain living as the road to success. This does not mean that Franklin was opposed to wealth in itself, nor that his later acquisition of luxury goods was hypocritical. What mattered to Franklin was how one achieved wealth (honestly) and how one displayed it (unostentatiously). Indeed, the growing personal wealth of American colonists in the mid 1700s was taken by Franklin as a proud sign of the colonies' success within the empire and their future value to the world. Presented here are selections from his public and personal writings, spanning six decades, on economic success, wealth, luxury—and virtue. When do riches betray a lack of virtue? When does wealth signify the rewards of virtue?
    • - Benjamin Franklin, selections from his autobiography, publications, personal correspondence, and testimony before a British parliamentary committee, 1727-1784.

  • Luxury consumer goods. "May not luxury therefore produce more than it consumes," asks Franklin in his later years, "if without such a spur people would be, as they are naturally enough inclined to be, lazy and indolent?" In this way luxury goods could benefit the whole by influencing the individual to earn money—an economic philosophy that would find more formal elucidation later in the century. Here we view an assortment of these "spurs": luxury goods available to wealthy Americans in pre-revolutionary America, exhibited online by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Note the artisanship and ownership of the works. What makes them luxury items rather than "necessaries," as Franklin says?
    • - Silver, gold, ceramic, and wooden luxury consumer goods, and three house interiors of elite families, ca. 1695-ca. 1780, in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Compare these eighteenth-century manifestations of colonial prosperity with those of earlier centuries in North America, in the toolbox American Beginnings (1492-1690). (18 pages.)


Discussion questions
  1. What overall impression do you have of the luxury goods and house interiors of the 1700s?
  2. How would these goods convey power as well as wealth?
  3. Which of these objects do you or your family own, in some form?
  4. Which item would most "spur" you to earn money to purchase it? Why? What would you do with it?
  5. Would a less expensive version of the item be a "necessary" rather than a luxury? Or would it be, in any form, a luxury? What would Franklin say?
  6. According to Franklin and historian Jon Butler, why would families of any income be spurred to own luxury goods in eighteenth-century colonial America?
  7. How it is that Franklin was not opposed to wealth and luxury goods when he so often warned his readers to resist the enticement to luxury?
  8. To Franklin, when do riches betray the lack of virtue? When does wealth signify the rewards of virtue?
  9. To Franklin, how can luxury goods benefit the whole by influencing the individual?
  10. What does Franklin mean in this statement from his seventies? "If all but myself were blind, I should want neither fine clothes, fine houses nor fine furniture."
  11. Take the interchange between Franklin and a member of the British House of Commons in 1766, and expand each line to represent the major economic themes in this section.
    Question:  What used to be the pride of the Americans?
    Franklin:  To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain.
    Question:  What is now their pride?
    Franklin:  To wear their old clothes over again, till they can make new ones.

Framing Questions
  •  What were the local, regional, and global economies of pre-revolutionary America in the 1700s?
  •  How did they influence the colonies—their self-determination and sense of the future?
  •  How did they shape the lives of individuals—free, bonded, and enslaved?


Printing
Benjamin Franklin on wealth, luxury, and virtue:  8
Luxury consumer goods & residential interiors: 10
TOTAL 18 pages
Supplemental Sites




1 The consumer goods and house interiors are in online exhibitions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.


2 The Examination of Doctor Benjamin Franklin, before an August Assembly, relating to the Repeal of the Stamp Act, &c., 13 February 1766 (Philadelphia: Hall and Sellers, 1706); in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Yale University and the American Philosophical Society); online ID online ID 624675 = 013-124a.html.


3 Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 84.



Images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Permission pending:
- Room from the Hewlett House, Woodbury, New York, ca. 1740-60. 10.183.
- Teapot, silver, 1700-1715, by Jacob Boelen. 61.246a,b.
- Bureau table, mahogany, chestnut, tulip poplar, white pine, ca. 1765, detail; attributed to John Townsend, Newport, Rhode Island. 10.125.83.


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ECONOMIES
1. Commerce I   2. Commerce II   3. Merchants
4. Consumers   5. Planters   6. Servitude








TOOLBOX: Becoming American: The British Atlantic Colonies, 1690-1763
Growth | Peoples | Economies | Ideas | American


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