Pennsylvania General Loan Office | Benjamin Franklin's First Government Printing

Pennsylvania General Loan Office Mortgage Register for the 1729 Currency Emission

This Indenture Made the [blank space] Day of [blank space] in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and [blank space] Between [blank space] of the one Part, and Samuel Carpenter, Jeremiah Langhorne, William Fishbourn and Philip Taylor, Trustees of the General Loan-Office of the Province of Pensylvania, of the other Part, Witnesseth, that the said [blank space] in Consideration of the Value of [blank space] in Bills of Credit of the said Province to [blank space] in Hand paid by the said Trustees, (pursuant to the Trust reposed in them by an Act of General Assembly of this Province, entituled, An Act for Emitting of Thirty Thousand Pounds in Bills of Credit, for the better Support of Government, and the Trade of this Province) The Receipt whereof he the said [blank space] doth hereby acknowledge, Hath granted, bargained and sold, and by these Presents Doth grant, bargain and sell unto the said Trustees of the General Loan-Office of the Province of Pensylvania, their Successors and Assigns. … [Philadelphia: Printed by Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Meredith, August/September 1729]

Royal folio volume comprising 137 leaves (460 x 293 mm) of fine imported paper (watermarked Strasbourg bend, countermarked IV), printed recto and verso with the foregoing 51-line form in Franklin’s typefont pica no. 1 and cast heading A (This Indenture), first 132 leaves accomplished and witnessed recto and verso and paginated in a contemporary hand 1–264, final 5 leaves unaccomplished and unpaginated, 5 leaves evidently excised shortly after the volume was bound and certainly before being paginated; scattered light browning. Contemporary blind-panelled calf, by, or employing the tools of, William Davies, plain endpapers and edges; worn and restored, but covers and spine largely preserved. Half russet morocco folding-box, chemise.

Job printing, especially what Franklin called “little jobs”—blank forms (indentures, bonds, bills of lading, meeting invitations and notices, receipts), handbills, lottery tickets, bookplates, and all other manner of printed ephemera—was vital to eighteenth-century printers. “The importance of small jobs lay not so much in the amount of revenue they generated, but the fact that it was ready money. That is why Franklin stopped all other work to print them. Cash flow was a perennial problem for printers, and more generally, a shortage of cash was endemic in the early eighteenth-century American economy. Franklin was a tireless proponent of increasing the money supply by printing paper money, which in turn led to his getting the biggest ‘little Job’ of all” (Green & Stallybrass, p. 52).

Franklin’s biggest little job—also one of his first commissions and certainly the very first for the provincial government of Pennsylvania—is represented in the present volume of mortgage forms that backed 1729 emission of paper currency. 

At the time, paper money in Pennsylvania was issued by the Loan Office, essentially acting as a land bank. The Loan Office issued “mortgages that were paid out in newly created paper money. The loans were repaid over a period of time, but while the paper money was in circulation, it increased the money supply for all” (Green & Stallybrass, p. 52). Once the loans were fully repaid, the bills were taken out of circulation and destroyed, and much commerce would revert to barter, exchange of accepted commodities, or any available specie, mostly Spanish.

Like most tradesmen and small businessmen, Franklin opposed strict limits on how much paper money was in circulation. Unlike most tradesmen and small businessmen, Franklin did something about it: he anonymously wrote and printed A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency. He later reflected in the autobiography that the pamphlet “was well receiv'd by the common People in general; but the Rich Men dislik'd it; for it increas'd and strengthen'd the Clamor for more Money; and they happening to have no Writers among them that were able to answer it, their Opposition slacken'd, and the Point was carried by a Majority in the House.” The point carried by the Pennsylvania Assembly was An Act for Emitting of Thirty Thousand Pounds in Bills of Credit, for the better Support of Government, and the Trade of this Province, which revitalized the economy of Pennsylvania.

In the autobiography, Franklin wrote that his friends in the legislature, conceiving that his Modest Enquiry “had been of some Service, thought fit to reward me, by employing me in printing the Money, a very profitable Job, and a great Help to me.” This, however, was a faulty memory, at least in part: the commission for paper currency went to his rival Andrew Bradford, but Franklin was not entirely overlooked. He was engaged to print the mortgage indenture forms for the 1729 emission. Previous emissions of these bills of credit in 1723 and 1726 had been recorded by mortgage contracts written entirely by hand by clerks in the Loan Office. Since the text of each indenture was to follow a strict legal formula and be uniform with the others, they were an ideal object for typographic reproduction. Everyone benefitted, with the possible exception of the Loan Office scriveners. Had Franklin more accurately recalled the favor granted by the Assembly, the significance of this remarkable volume of accomplished and witnessed indenture forms from the 1729 emission of bills of credit might have been recognized earlier.

The importance of the 1729 General Loan Office Mortgage Register is not simply in the information it provides about Benjamin Franklin’s early career, or about eighteenth-century job-printing practices in general, but rather for the rich background material it supplies about Philadelphia in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The 264 mortgages recorded herein account almost entirely for the total sum lent out by the 1729 emission act: the Assembly authorized £26,000 to be lent (with another £4,000 reserved for other purposes), and the value of the mortgages included in the present register total £25,971.

A very useful appendix in Keith Arbour’s indispensable study of the Snider mortgage register indexes all of the mortgagees by name, with their occupation, place of residence, and amount of the paper money loaned. As Arbour writes, “The Snider volume provides equally useful information for historians of the early Pennsylvania economy, and for prosopographers of colonial Pennsylvania. Some of the data recorded in the Snider volume may prompt re-examination of conclusions reached by historians who necessarily worked without access to the long-lost register” (p. 78).

In his highly engaging memoir, Fifty Years a Bookseller: or, The Wolf at Your Door (Bryn Mawr: Privately Printed, 2025), Clarence Wolf amusingly writes of his purchase in the early 1990s of the mortgage register from a bookshop that did not recognize its significance—and that had reneged on an major deal with him earlier. Wolf realized that the bound forms could only have been printed by Andrew Bradford, Samuel Keimer, or the recently established firm of Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Meredith. With his suspicion that the pica type employed was from Franklin’s shop confirmed by James Green, Librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Wolf placed the mortgage register—as he had done with many other Franklin rarities—with Jay Snider. He never told the seller what he had overlooked.

All of Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable achievements in science, invention, writing, government service, diplomacy, and the many other intellectual spheres that he orbited were made possible by his success as a printer, which provided him funds and leisure to live a (very active) life of the mind. And Franklin’s success as a printer was due in large part to these mortgage forms printed for the 1729 Pennsylvania act of emission of bills of credit.

“[T]he register was Franklin's first piece of official printing for any arm of the provincial government. As such, it was the opportunity he had sought formally since February 18, 1729. In seeking this first opportunity he had three goals: to demonstrate his ability to produce fine work for the province on demand; to prove (with something more substantial than a broadside) the superiority of his work to Andrew Bradford's; and thereby to break Bradford's lock on government printing. Awarded the printing of the register, Franklin used the opportunity to great effect. Within three months of presenting the nearly flawlessly printed register to the Loan Office trustees, Franklin and Meredith ‘obtain’d, thro' [Franklin's] Friend [speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly Andrew] Hamilton’ a weightier and more lucrative job: ‘the Printing of the NewCastle Paper Money.’ Shortly thereafter, on January 30, 1730, the Pennsylvania Assembly voted to have Franklin and Meredith—rather than Bradford—print the next installment of the Assembly's session laws. This is generally interpreted as the vote that made Franklin and Meredith the Assembly's official printers. Whether or not this interpretation is entirely correct, Franklin and his printing office held this remunerative position for the next thirty-six years” (Arbour, pp. 24–25). (Referring to the printing of these mortgage forms as “flawless” is not an exaggeration. According to Arbour, just a single line of the 14,178 lines contained in the volume was poorly inked and had to be supplied in manuscript by a clerk.)

REFERENCES

Keith Arbour, Benjamin Franklin’s First Government Printing: The Pennsylvania General Loan Office Mortgage Register of 1729, and Subsequent Franklin Mortgage Registers and Bonds (American Philosophical Society, 1999); Arbour, Additions to Miller 1 (in the preceding); James N. Green & Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (Oak Knoll, 2006), pp. 47–55; cf. Farley Grubb, Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia & The Library Company of Philadelphia, 2006)

PROVENANCE

William Desmpster (the gift of his aunt, Mrs. Mclain, 1891; inscription on front free endpaper) — Baldwin's Book Barn, West Chester, Pennsylvania — Clarence Wolf, George MacManus Company