(Benjamin Franklin) | A very rare work written and printed by Franklin, containing "the earliest American political cartoon"

(Benjamin Franklin)

Plain Truth: or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia, and Province of Pennsylvania. By a Tradesman of Philadelphia. [Philadelphia:] Printed [by Benjamin Franklin] in the Year MDCCXLVII (1747)

8vo in half-sheets (190 x 117 mm). Woodcut vignette on title-page verso, type-ornament headpiece and initial-frame, with terminal blank C4; title-page quite foxed, some scattered lighter foxing throughout. Late nineteenth-century blue morocco over marbled boards, marbled endpapers, red-sprinkled edges; extremities rubbed. Red cloth slipcase, chemise.

First edition; very rare: only one other copy, in 1930 at Henkels, is recorded in Rare Book Hub since the 1905 Pennypacker auction. This is a previously unrecorded—and likely unique—second state of the first edition: the press correction to A2 recto has been made (deleting the repeated word "those" and rejustifying the final line of text), but the final leaf C4, which is genuine and conjunct with C1, is entirely blank; in the second edition the final leaf has been printed with an English translation of the Latin excerpt from Sallust that appears on the title-page.

Written and printed by Benjamin Franklin in 1747, Plain Truth is one of Franklin’s most significant pre-Revolutionary works. Plain Truth is the first work in which Franklin combined the promotion of a nascent Americanism with criticism of British colonial authorities. Faced on the one hand with a pacifist, Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania Assembly and on the other with French and Spanish privateers on the Delaware River and the increasing confederation of French and Native American forces on the colony’s western border, Franklin’s pseudonymous pamphlet led to the creation of a voluntary Pennsylvania militia of 10,000 men. Many were persuaded of the necessity of an "Association for Defence" by Franklin's argument that "The Way to secure Peace is to be prepared for War."

The first edition of Plain Truth was 1,000 copies, nearly three times as many as a typical political pamphlet or sermon of the time. Franklin gave these copies away, but the demand was so great that two weeks later he printed a second edition of 1,000 further copies. The second edition, significantly more common than the first, can be distinguished because the final leaf, which is blank in the first edition, has printed on it an English translation of the Latin extract from the Roman historian and politician Sallust that appears on the title-page. (Franklin also arranged to have Plain Truth translated and printed in German by Gotthard Armbrüster for the use of the extensive Pennsylvania German community.)

Plain Truth is also significant for its use of a woodcut illustration of "Hercules and the Wagoneer," printed on the verso of the title-page, that Franklin had first used earlier in 1747 to illustrate one of Aesop’s Fables in Thomas Dilworth's schoolbook, A New Guide to the English Tongue. In this context, however, J. A. Leo Lemay, the preeminent Franklin scholar and biographer, calls the woodcut—in which Hercules urges the wagoneer to try to move his mud-bound wagon on his own before asking others for help—"the earliest American political cartoon" (Life 1:230).

Copies of the second edition appear on the market periodically, although none have since 2004. However, we have been able to trace only one true first edition of Plain Truth in the auction records since the celebrated Pennypacker sale of 1905—and that single post-Pennypacker copy is itself nearing a century ago. Adrian Van Sinderen recognized the importance and rarity of Plain Truth, including it in Foundation Stones, the survey of highlights from his Americana collection, and describing it as a "spicy exposition."

Plain Truth is the first work by Franklin that foreshadows an independent America—and his own passionate involvement with civic affairs. Because of close similarities to the thesis and language of the pamphlet, Lemay attributed two unsigned contributions to the Pennsylvania Gazette to Franklin's pen: "'Queries' urging establishing a Pennsylvania militia" (6 March 1733/4) and "The Necessity for Self-Defense" (Postscript to the 19 December 1747 issue).

REFERENCE

Miller 416; ESTC W2472; Evans 5948; Hildeburn 1010; Campbell 355; Sabin 25563; Van Sinderen, Foundation Stones, pp. 84–85; Benjamin Franklin in Search of a Better World, p. 31; cf. Lemay, The Canon of Benjamin Franklin nos. 55, 85

PROVENANCE

Adrian Van Sinderen — by descent to an undesignated consignor (Sotheby's New York, 20 July 2023, lot 1003)