A rare promissory note raising subscriptions for America’s first hospital, from the press of Benjamin Franklin.
Benjamin Franklin’s manifold talents as statesman, writer, inventor and more, somewhat eclipse the fact that he was also considered to be Colonial America’s most accomplished printer. Here we see Franklin’s press in the service of one of his own endeavours - a fundraising effort for the Pennsylvania Hospital.
“In 1751 Franklin’s friend Dr. Thomas Bond decided to establish a hospital in Philadelphia and enlisted Franklin. He wrote two essays on the subject in the Pennsylvania Gazette (8 and 15 Aug. 1751) and helped raise subscriptions for the hospital. When they began to flag, he petitioned the legislature for additional funds. The county legislators objected that it would only benefit the city and claimed that even the Philadelphians were not really supporting the plan. Franklin then devised the first matching grant. He proposed a bill making the grant conditional: when the hospital’s subscribers had raised £2,000, then the legislature would add 2,000 more. The Pennsylvania Hospital, America’s first, opened 6 February 1752” (ANB).
These printed blank promissory notes would have been a vital tool for keeping track of subscriptions raised, with other known examples demonstrating how the signatures were clipped away upon collection of promised funds by the hospital’s treasurer. This particular copy has not been completed, nor clipped upon collection, and as such is a bright and clear example of Franklin’s presswork.
Such pieces were, within the Franklin and Hall Philadelphia print shop, referred to as “little jobs”. These short order imprints were often single-page affairs, catering to the needs of all manner of trades. Franklin’s compositors and journeymen would set the forms, tickets, indentures etc, knowing that the job could be completed quickly without tying up too much of the printshop’s type on the chase for any long period. “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” (Green & Stallybrass, p.52). In this particular case, we see some indication of his influence and multifaceted involvement in colonial Philadelphia, with his press employed to fulfil a little job in service to a cause with which he was deeply invested.
Though the slip does not bear an imprint it is “[a]scribed to the Franklin and Hall press on the assumption that DH was doing all the printing for the Hospital managers” (Miller). A later run of these promissory notes from the 1760s, which do not include the word ‘fifty’ in the date line, are recorded in the BF and DF workbooks. Of course, Franklin and Hall also printed Some Accounts of the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1754, a 40pp pamphlet describing the efforts and achievements of the hospital scheme to that date, also with the intention of soliciting further funds.
The survival rate for these ephemeral Franklin imprints is extremely low: “In the twenty years during which Franklin was sole proprietor of his printing business, he printed at least 228 such small jobs, of which 201 are lost and known only from his records” (Green & Stallybrass, p.49).
None located through OCLC as of June 2023, though Miller records multiple copies bound together in the Pennsylvania Hospital Archives, Philadelphia, PA.
Miller, C. William, Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Printing: 1728-1766, 598, (cf. 724); not in Campbell, Franklin Imprints at the Curtis Publishing Company. Green, James N & Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin Writer and Printer, Oak Knoll Press, 2006. pp.49-52.
