Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  Addison would come at his subject from all angles, using all the weapons of irony and paradox. Throwing in anecdotes from history, Greek and Latin tags or lines of verse—most often from Milton or Dryden—he would display just enough scholarship to lend him authority but not so much as to be pedantic. Best of all, from Franklin’s point of view, Steele and Addison would fill their pages with fictitious characters with names like Abraham Thrifty, Jack Modish, or Rebecca Nettletop. With a London accent, but in the different dialects of coachmen, milliners, jilted fiancées, and gentlemen of leisure, these invented citizens staged their own controversies. Addison made them nag away at the meaning of virtue, or the merits or the evils of ambition. They also had things to say about sex. Endlessly his characters talked about the rights and wrongs of chastity or wenching, the vagaries of gender, and the oddities of marriage.

  Reading The Spectator, Franklin learned how to write with a flair that Pemberton or the Mathers could never manage. An exercise in ventriloquism, The Spectator showed him how to take the messy, mundane realities of life in Boston and make them into sparkling prose. In the miffy little world of the Franklins, there were incidents for a young writer to explore. One such occurred in the March of 1720—the boy was just fourteen—when his half-brother Samuel passed away. Born in Banbury, and raised as the last blacksmith in the clan, Samuel Franklin died in Boston at only thirty-eight. He left behind him four children, his widow, Elizabeth, and a sordid narrative of marital woe.

  Only six months earlier, Uncle Benjamin had finally quit the Blue Ball. In the elegy he wrote for the blacksmith, the old man heaped abuse on Elizabeth, calling her a feckless gossip—“careless, sluttish, lazy and unfaithful”—and he implied that Josiah was to blame for his son’s poor choice of a spouse. Like the saga of the Worthylakes, Samuel’s early death was a tragedy; but in this family tale of adultery the young Franklin found excellent material. When the moment came, he would invent characters like Addison’s and make them play the parts of Elizabeth and Samuel in his own first forays into journalism.2

  In the meantime the boy had to perfect his style. He took items from The Spectator, and read them over and over again. He made brief notes and then—after a gap of a few days—he rewrote each one, comparing his effort with the original. “This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts,” Franklin remembered. As a way to extend his vocabulary he did it all again in verse, which called for a wider supply of words to fit the meter and the rhyme.

  In its own way, it was a discipline as rigorous as mathematics, but the young Franklin did not make do with Addison alone. In search of new ways to win debates, he fell in love with Socrates as well as The Spectator. From the Greek thinker, he could learn how to trounce an opponent like John Collins without ruining a friendship with a show of bad temper. Some fifty years later a young admirer in England, the daughter of an Anglican bishop, would pay him a supremely flattering compliment, when she looked up from her book and exclaimed, “Mama! Socrates talks just like Dr Franklin!” She had been reading Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, filled with examples of the Socratic method of crushing the other party to a dispute by gently asking questions until the flaws in his reasoning are plainly disclosed.3

  It was the very same book that Franklin studied in his teens, as he strove to master the Socratic technique for politely coming out on top. As he told his French friend Cabanis, “it was Socrates he wanted most to resemble,” not only as a thinker but also as a human being. He aspired to be wise, modest, and generous, full of intellectual finesse and yet devoid of arrogance. Even in Paris, at nearly eighty, these were virtues Franklin did not always exhibit: he could also be devious and disorganized, and he tried to seduce other men’s wives. And in his boyhood he irritated his neighbors almost as much as Socrates upset the Athenians.

  Gradually, his reading opened a rift between the boy and his family. It grew still wider with the years and could never be entirely closed while his parents were alive. Reading obsessively, Franklin came to inhabit a world of blasphemous ideas about God and the cosmos that would horrify even the liberal clergymen at Brattle Square. In the eyes of Abiah and Josiah, these ideas would have been still more alarming—the stuff of mortal sin—if they had known precisely what their son believed, and where the logic of Socrates had led him.

  In his sermons at the Old South, Pemberton had told the boy that religion had to measure up to reason. With his diluted form of Puritan belief, the pastor had dissolved old certainties; and so, following his advice, Franklin put the Christian God to the test of dialectic. He convicted God of failure. Full of what he read and bursting with intelligence, he chose to discard Josiah’s Presbyterian creed.

  In middle age, Franklin would find this aspect of his early life deeply embarrassing. As a man of substance, admired in America but increasingly at odds with the British, Franklin did not wish to be perceived as a libertine. For political reasons, he could not afford to be seen as a man who did not care for faith or conventional morality. And so he tried to suppress any evidence that at one time he had been so skeptical.

  Even posthumously, in the pages of his memoirs where he dealt with the subject, Franklin preferred to be evasive about it. But when all the evidence is gathered in—and this is not an easy task—there can be no doubt about the truth. By the time he was nineteen, and working as a printer in London, Benjamin Franklin had become a defiant atheist. Later he changed his mind, acquiring in his mid-twenties a new personal religion, including belief in a Supreme Being, which owed a debt to Archbishop Tillotson as well as to the English poets; but he never recovered Josiah’s form of Bible Christianity.

  CRAZY WITH PHILOSOPHY

  It took a while for the teenage Franklin to lose his faith. The process began in the traditional way: he skipped Sunday service at the Old South. Once indentured to James, he went into lodgings with James’s other apprentices, away from Josiah’s watchful eye. On the Sabbath, while everyone was at the meeting house, Franklin would find an excuse to shut himself up in the printing shop with his beloved books. Much of what he studied was austere and technical—An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, and a French textbook of reasoning, Logic, or the Art of Thinking by Antoine Arnauld—but he read books like these with as much excitement as his uncle had found in Bunyan and the scriptures.

  Ambitious though they were, the Franklins had never been purely career-minded people, narrowly focused on the main chance. Not Josiah, with his bold decision to leave Banbury on grounds of conscience; not Benjamin Senior, with his religious angst; not Thomas Junior, falling out with the Palmers at Ecton; not even the polite John Franklin, trying his hand at surgery and killing himself with a dirty needle. The family had a reckless streak. They courted controversy, and they loved travel and the sea. If they were miffy, it was because they were passionate as well.

  We remember Franklin as the apostle of hard work, temperance, and self-control. This is the way he hoped to be remembered. But when a human being writes so much about prudence, virtue, and sobriety, it may be because he or she would prefer to be wild, intemperate, and rash. This seems to have been true of Franklin as a young man. In adolescence—when, for obvious reasons, his battle with his instincts was hardest to win—he became obsessed with philosophy. It was his way of coping with the troubling emotions that also made him yearn to be a sailor.4

  His early reading in philosophy did many things for Benjamin Franklin. Like boxing, swimming, and building the wharf, it gave him an outlet for his energy. Like chess, it trained his mind; but it also started him thinking about politics, not as a professional career—he was never very good with speeches and elections—but as a means to human progress in pursuit of an ideal. Soon he fell under the influence of books by a strange but prolific English Baptist, Thomas Tryon. If Franklin was always a connoisseur of failure, intrigued by men and women who went astray, he also loved to meet eccentrics: people whose lifestyles and notions wer
e unusual. And Tryon was certainly that: an eccentric but also a highly original thinker, with a vision of an alternative social order, built from a marriage of ingenuity and faith.5

  Tryon was yet another London apprentice, from a generation slightly older than Josiah Franklin’s. He grew up to become an English version of a Hindu holy man. Indeed Tryon wrote an imaginary dialogue in which a Brahmin priest became the spokesman for his ideas. Although some of his thinking resembled Defoe’s—like Defoe, he urged his countrymen to devote themselves to “improvement,” trade, and manufacturing—at heart Thomas Tryon was a mystic. At twenty-three he underwent a form of conversion. The path to wisdom lay by way of self-denial, he was told by God. And so, to cleanse his soul of vice, Tryon took to eating only bread and fruit and drinking only water.

  Like the young Franklin, he was “mightily addicted to reading and study.” In 1683, the year of crisis when Josiah left for the colonies, Tryon had published his masterpiece, The Way to Health, whose title Franklin would later borrow and adapt for a famous piece of writing of his own. In the book, Tryon designed an ideal commonwealth, whose citizens would live lives of charity, peace, and honest industry. Of course they would give up meat and alcohol. For Tryon, the drinking of wine and the eating of flesh had their roots in humanity’s worst inclinations, or what he called “the high lofty spirit of wrath and sensuality.” There had to be another way—“meek love,” said Tryon—and he hoped to see it come to pass in America. He wrote to the Quakers who were sailing to Philadelphia, urging them not to hold slaves or hunt game.6

  Somehow Tryon’s work found its way to Franklin. In Plutarch, the Boston boy had already come across vegetarian ideas, because Plutarch the Greek was a moralist, a disciple of Plato and Pythagoras, and so he denounced all forms of luxury and wrote essays against the slaughter of animals. Tryon went a step further and produced a cookery book for vegetarians, containing recipes for porridge, onion soup, boiled cauliflower and cabbage—“for they purge by urine”—and his dish of choice: hasty pudding, made with milk, flour, water, and a dash of ginger.7

  Entitled The Way to Save Wealth: Shewing How a Man May Live Plentifully for Two-pence a Day, the book became Franklin’s dietary manual, with a host of austere menus to follow. He practiced hard, mastered the régime, and offered his brother a deal that James could not refuse. What if, every week, James paid him just half the money he spent on his board at the lodging house? Out of that, the apprentice would feed himself. Using Tryon’s methods, Franklin soon found that he could survive on even less—he spent only half of what James gave him—and he used the spare cash as a fund for buying books. Better still, he could eat his biscuits, bread, and water at his workbench in the printing shop, reading all the time, while his colleagues wasted precious minutes going out for meals.

  In his memoirs, Franklin dwells only briefly on this episode, as though it had been just an adolescent fad. But in his conversations in Paris with his young friend Cabanis, he insisted that it was Plutarch—an author whom French intellectuals revered—who inspired his vegetarian phase. This suggests that he never really dismissed it as a passing whim. Instead he always thought of it as his first serious essay in virtue. It seems that his mother agreed. Franklin told Cabanis that when his friends mocked him for refusing to eat meat or fish, Abiah replied that her son was “un fou de philosophe”—“a crazy philosopher”—and then she added in an undertone, “He’s learning that with willpower, we can achieve anything.”

  He was also learning how to dismantle Christianity. In 1721, when he was just fifteen, Franklin read a course of lectures about science and religion that began to undermine his faith in the Bible. Because in his memoirs Franklin was a little vague about the details, it is impossible to say exactly which lectures they were. A little digging reveals that they must have been the work of one of two English clergymen: Samuel Clarke, who gave his lectures in 1704, or his brother John, whose turn came later. But since their views were identical, it does not really matter which of the brothers Franklin read.

  Samuel Clarke was a controversial figure, rector of one of London’s most fashionable churches. A scientist as well as a cleric—he belonged to the small elite who had fully grasped Newton’s calculus—Mr. Clarke was widely suspected of heresy. He was said to be an Arian; or in other words, he denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. Although they meant to be defenders of orthodox belief, using Newton’s model of the solar system to prove the existence of God, the Clarkes had an unfortunate tendency, often seen among clergymen who venture into physics. They tended to raise more questions than they answered; so that readers came away more baffled than they had been before.8

  So it was with Franklin, who pored over what the Clarkes had to say. As he put it later, with a degree of understatement, they “wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended.” After reading their work, he became ever more doubtful about religion. In their lectures, the Clarkes had tried to bridge the gap between the deist and the Christian by invoking the essence of Newtonian physics. Gravity, said Newton, was a universal force, defined by equations, and sufficient to explain the motion of the planets. But gravity must have a cause, said the Clarkes; that cause was God; and if gravity acted everywhere, as it must, so too did God; and if God was universal, then his providence must be everywhere as well, by the Sea of Galilee, among the rings of Saturn, or in a pew in Boston or in London.

  Were these arguments for God a plausible option? Possibly, thought Franklin, but not if they were coupled with the notion that the deity chose to come to earth in Roman Palestine. The boy could not subscribe to the teachings of Josiah’s Christian church. “In short, I soon became a thorough Deist,” he recalled in his autobiography. Then he moved on from the Clarkes to more compelling philosophers, who gradually led the young Franklin into the depths of apostasy. One of the authors he read was Lord Shaftesbury, the English accomplice of the skeptic, Pierre Bayle. Courteous and discreet, Shaftesbury sought to mend the holes in the fabric of belief by turning the Christian God into something different: not the Jesus of Calvary, or the Jehovah of Mount Horeb, but instead an aesthete and a gentleman. Here was a God that Franklin felt more inclined to worship.

  In our love of beauty, wrote Lord Shaftesbury, we feel elevated, edified, and pious. Sin and evil are ugly; we perceive them as such; and when we do so we follow the best promptings of our nature. Human beings have a moral sense—this must be true, because instinctively, we know right from wrong—and it is identical with our sense of what is beautiful or hideous. But if this is so, said Shaftesbury, there must be a benevolent creator. Only an artistic God, who has made the moon and stars, the rainbow and the rose, could endow us with a soul that appreciates their beauty, and also feels the beauty of goodness.9

  Put in this way, Shaftesbury’s notions might sound shallow or naive. Be that as it may, his lordly vision of cosmic benevolence did not seem superficial to Franklin. It cannot be said too often that the Boston boy was vastly precocious. He simply would not stop until he had drilled down to what he took to be the bedrock of truth. This disposition began in Franklin’s teenage years. It came to its fulfillment in his work with electricity; and it explains why, as a boy, he devoured the writings of philosophers such as Shaftesbury.

  Intensely serious, even when he made a joke, Benjamin Franklin was not a man who could cease his exploration halfway. Like Tolstoy, the thinker whom sometimes he seems to resemble, Franklin had to arrive at a personal statement of his philosophy about God, about human nature, and about the place of human beings in the universe: a statement of belief that he could endorse without reservation. This statement might have to be secret, since otherwise it would open him to ridicule or worse. But just such a statement he had to find. It was what he was looking for when he read books with such a frenzy. Years afterward, in Philadelphia in the 1730s, Franklin would take Shaftesbury’s ideas, develop them with the help of Tillotson and the poets, and make th
em into the personal creed, vague though it might be, that would carry him through to the end of his days.

  Once he had accomplished that—and when he had made enough money, and acquired enough leisure, to permit him to do as he pleased—Franklin could move forward, and become a scientist. But all of this took many years of effort. In the meanwhile, Franklin had yearnings and emotions to deal with, a business to build, and other, more subversive notions to contemplate. Although he deeply admired Lord Shaftesbury, the English thinker who influenced Franklin the most in his youth was someone far more radical, who could never be described as naive. This was Anthony Collins, an ultra-Whig, whose writings were profane. By adopting his ideas, Franklin made himself a pariah in Boston.

  THE GOSPEL OF FREE THOUGHT

  John Locke the philosopher had many disciples, but none more controversial than Anthony Collins. Born into wealth, the son of a lawyer, Collins married an heiress from a banking family. Schooled at Eton and Cambridge, he served as a justice of the peace and displayed, like Thomas Franklin, the skills with tax and finance that Whigs such as Collins regarded as their forte. And yet this defender of good order in the state was also a cynic who dealt in heresy and scandal.

  In 1713 the London hangman publicly burned his most notorious treatise, A Discourse of Free Thinking. Copies of the book found their way to Boston, where Franklin read it. In its pages he discovered some of the most radical ideas that Europe had to offer at the time. Anthony Collins adopted the philosophy of Bayle; and since the early 1700s, he had also been a close friend of John Toland. When the Discourse appeared, Collins and Toland were leading a club of freethinkers who met in a London coffeehouse, where they acquired their reputation as atheists.10