Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  He was alone, all but penniless, and he was not eighteen. At home, despite his quarrels, his fads, and his daring ideas, he had lived a life protected by routine, in a structured town with an array of familiar institutions. He was about to venture into an adult world without maps, where an apprentice was all too liable to go astray.

  * On May 22 for example: “Women are the prime cause of a great many male enormities.”

  Chapter Eight

  THE CRUSOE OF THE DELAWARE

  New York did not detain him long. The city had an eminent printer, William Bradford, a prosperous man in his early sixties, well supplied with staff and with no vacancy for Franklin. If you need a job, you might try Philadelphia instead, the old man told him. There he had a son in the same trade, Andrew Bradford, who had recently lost a talented worker, a poet-cum-printer by the name of Aquila Rose. In August, Rose had succumbed to a chill after a mishap with his boat in bad weather. His death left a gap at the Bradford firm in the City of Brotherly Love. So off Franklin went in the hope of taking Rose’s place. To get to Philadelphia, the young athlete planned to walk across New Jersey in the cold and the rain of October.

  The first stage of the journey should have been easy. It was just a question of leaving the lower end of Manhattan in a small boat in the morning, and then passing westwards around the back of Staten Island to reach the Jersey shore. Then a squall blew in from the sea, ripping their sails off the mast, and the gusts of wind grew into a gale. A heavy swell was running, driving the vessel in the wrong direction, away to the east. A trip that should have taken no more than half a day became instead an odyssey of thirty hours that all but ended in catastrophe. As the afternoon wore on they approached a rocky beach somewhere in Brooklyn, only to find that the surf made it far too dangerous to land.

  Seeing people with canoes at the water’s edge, Franklin and the boatman tried to call for help. But, as he put it in his autobiography, with the waves still beating at the stones all their efforts were in vain: “the wind was so high…that we could not hear to understand each other.” Darkness fell, and the gale continued. They spent the night on the water, huddled in the bows against the spray. It was not until late the next day, rowing hard at the oars, that they entered the mouth of the Raritan River, docking at the harbor town of Perth Amboy: hungry, thirsty, and worn out, but still alive.

  In his memoirs, Franklin recalled his journey to Philadelphia in far more detail and with far more emotion than he gives to any other episode. Only rarely, there or in his letters, does Franklin show that he is scared, or even mildly anxious. He can be funny, charming, and enthusiastic; he can be flirtatious (very); and in the 1770s, as he falls out of love with Great Britain, we can feel his anger grow with each exasperated letter that he sends from London. But with Franklin fear is very hard to find: except in this account of his journey in the autumn of 1723. As far as we know, he had never left the Boston area before. This first experience of danger left a mark on his soul that remained with him all his life.

  One detail stands out with a peculiar intensity. On the boat, Franklin has a fellow passenger: a Dutchman, soused with rum, the only stuff they had to drink. As the squall blows them off course, the drunken man falls overboard. Benjamin Franklin, muscular but agile, leans out of the pitching boat and hauls him back by his hair. From out of his pocket, the man takes a book, which he wants Benjamin to dry off while he sleeps away the liquor. It turns out to be Franklin’s childhood favorite, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Rendered into Dutch, it was finely printed on good paper.

  It was an odd discovery to make at such an alarming moment: odd or even uncanny, as though it were some kind of omen or a symbol. It was all the more striking because—unusually for him—Franklin had no books of his own. He had sent his chest around to Philadelphia by sea. In his memoirs, Franklin makes sure to be very precise in his description of the Dutchman and his expensive copy of John Bunyan. He mentions the book’s illustrations, more skillfully engraved than any he was used to. It is not too hard to see why the appearance of The Pilgrim’s Progress on the boat made such a deep impression, or why he wished to write so much about it.

  In Boston he had been outrageous, but only verbally. In other ways he had lived a sheltered life, with a family to whom he could turn if need be. For the first time, Franklin found himself wandering in the dark, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim in quest of the heavenly city. As a lover of books, he saw his adventures through a literary lens. By now, however, although Franklin still admired Bunyan’s skill as a writer, he had ceased to think of life in Bunyan’s terms, as a pilgrimage where the only reliable guide was the Gospel. And so the sight of the book was something Franklin found deeply significant: a last glimpse of home, as it were, as he left the pieties of Boston forever. At this point in his memoirs, suddenly he mentions other, more up-to-date writers whose narratives felt closer to his own experience.

  After praising Bunyan’s style, Franklin moves swiftly on to speak still more highly of the English novelists: Defoe of course, but also Samuel Richardson, the author of Pamela, the literary sensation of the 1740s, telling the story of a young woman who had to fight off seduction by her employer. As we read about Franklin in his teens, he wishes us to think of him as though he were another Crusoe or a Pamela: a young hero, cast adrift from the family home, often in peril, and at risk of deceit and abuse by adults with their own vicious agenda.

  Later, when he reaches London, a city full of moral danger, the parallels with Pamela become more relevant. As he describes his adventures on the way to Philadelphia, Franklin wants us to think about Robinson Crusoe. His story echoes Crusoe’s brushes with calamity. Indeed Franklin writes in a style so close to Defoe’s that he must have intended us to see the connection. Here were two runaways, at odds with their parents, with only their ingenuity to save them from ruin. The difference between them is this. An orthodox man when it came to religion, Defoe made his hero a devout believer in Christian providence: but this was a factor that Franklin, young or old, could never count on with Defoe’s degree of certainty. In his memoirs or his letters, he would acknowledge his belief in something he called Providence and then skip swiftly forward to tell us what he did to help it on its way.1

  That evening Franklin struggled into bed, feeling very feverish. Rather than say his prayers he drank pints of cold water, something he had read about: it was supposed to be a cure for fever. After sweating through the night, feeling healthy once again Franklin crossed the river by ferry at dawn, landing at South Amboy. Ahead of him lay forty miles of wilderness.

  THE SKEPTICAL DOCTOR

  It was Thursday, October 3. Again it was raining heavily. From the Raritan what passed for a highway carrying the mail across New Jersey followed the route of an old Indian trail. It took Franklin up a long slope, through a belt of stunted little pines three miles deep. From the top of the ridge the trail dropped him down into a boggy plain where the going was difficult: loose sand, or thick, muddy clay, with streams often crossing the path and only a log or two to serve as a crude kind of bridge.2

  It was like that for most of the day: hard walking, dark skies, a landscape of little value for the farmer. There was almost no one to greet or from whom to ask the way. Forty years after the English had named it Middlesex County, this tract of land remained almost devoid of settlers. That afternoon, tired and bedraggled, Franklin reached a little inn by the wayside. It was somewhere near the town of Cranbury, almost in earshot today of the traffic thumping down I-95. Then the country was so desolate that even in 1800 there were still barely a dozen houses in the neighborhood.

  There at the inn Franklin spent the night, “beginning now to wish that I had never left home.” So it had been with his fictional cousin, Robinson Crusoe, as he made his weary way to London, filled with “many struggles with myself,” in the words of Daniel Defoe. At Cranbury, Franklin found himself under interrogation, as any stranger would be in a place so
bleak, if he was very young, dressed in working clothes, and had no horse and no belongings. His landlord guessed, correctly, that he was a runaway, an apprentice or an indentured servant—only a runaway would look so wretched—and Franklin was afraid that he would be detained. Next morning, he rose early. He hurried down the track as fast as he could go, his pockets stuffed with his spare shirts and stockings. Gradually, the countryside grew softer and more inviting; and gradually his luck began to change.

  Fifteen miles on, in a district where the native people of the Lenape still inhabited the woods with their maize and their canoes, the soil became more fertile. Here the farmers were more numerous. The harvest had been poor that year, but there were signs that the country had excellent prospects. At a place called Crosswicks, the trail ran between groves of trees with beyond them wide fields, cold and bare in the fall but ready for wheat in the spring. Franklin was approaching the land of the Quakers. Since the 1680s, they had been settling in the region, in search of a Utopia of peace and love and fruitful economics. On the road beyond Crosswicks he would have passed a small brick building mentioned in the records from the period. It was probably the first time he had seen a Quaker meeting house.3

  It may be that until this moment Franklin had never even spoken to a Quaker. In Boston, the Society of Friends was legal but frowned upon, like so much else in that prickly town. But as he trudged along the road, there came a moment when at last he crossed an invisible line. At a tree stump or by somebody’s barn, Franklin passed beyond the orbit of New England, and he entered the world the Quakers had created.

  With its northern end in New Jersey, and its center in Philadelphia, the region of the Quakers reached out as far as the Susquehanna River in the west. To the south it laid its fingertips on Maryland, where they grew tobacco. It was a much looser world, less predictable, and far more diverse than New England. It was also a world where Franklin would feel more at home than he ever had in Boston. As if to make the point, the first person he recalls that he met in Quaker country was a kindred spirit. He was a clever man who gave him a friendly welcome and to whom Franklin awarded his highest praise. His new acquaintance was “ingenious.”

  Turning west toward the Delaware on October 4, with still thirty miles to go to his destination, Franklin walked along the street of a little place called Farnsworth’s Landing. It was just ten houses or so, at a spot where a ravine cut a slot through the bluff by the river and took a traveler down to the water’s edge. Today it is known as Bordentown, a charming little suburb for commuters, with a riverfront that is perhaps the only place on Franklin’s route where one can still see the terrain as it was when he came by. The township had an inn, where he could find a bed. It was kept by John Browne, a medical man. Dr. Browne had traveled in Europe but somehow he made his way to the frontier, where he built a practice among the Quakers.4

  Browne and Franklin hit it off at once. As Franklin ate his supper, they talked. John Browne could soon tell that his guest was a well-read individual. A friendship sprang up between them, lasting fourteen years until the ingenious doctor died from “a stoppage in his urine.” Those words come from the obituary Franklin ran in The Pennsylvania Gazette, calling his old friend “a gentleman of singular skill in the profession of surgery.” Like Franklin, the doctor was a freethinking man—“much of an unbeliever,” Franklin recalled in his memoirs—and like the young Franklin he was controversial: which is clearly what made Browne so appealing.

  All his life, Franklin loved to come across clever but eccentric people, flesh-and-blood equivalents of his vegetarian mentor Thomas Tryon. He kept them stored in his memory to form his own cabinet of human curiosities. This became an essential part of Franklin’s modus operandi. Only by meeting unusual men and women, with views and ways of life that deviated from the norm, could he extend his horizons and cultivate his own ingenuity. Time and again, Franklin would seek out people of that kind and record their quirky doings for posterity.

  In John Browne’s case—as so often in the eighteenth century—the quirkiness took the form of poetry. Toward the end of his life, the doctor decided to turn the Bible into doggerel verse. Being an unbeliever or a deist, of course he tried to make the stories sound ridiculous: that was what the skeptics were up to in London. The difference was that Browne was doing so at the western edge of the empire, amid the Lenape and the Quaker farmers, people used to living with no authority but their own. The doctor could say what he pleased, with no danger of censorship or prosecution. And that was one of the things Franklin liked most about the Quaker hinterland. Although he was never a Quaker himself, he knew that in their midst he could be as skeptical as Browne, without suffering the death of Socrates.

  So he slept Friday night at the doctor’s inn. Next morning Franklin walked down the riverbank to Burlington. He was looking for a seat on one of the boats that carried wheat downstream to the wharves of Philadelphia, for shipment out to feed the slaves in the West Indies. He missed the boats due that day, the 5th, and found shelter for the afternoon with a kind old woman who sold him gingerbread. She cooked him a little offal, the cheek of an ox. He gave her some ale in return.

  Saturday night saw him gazing down the Delaware, with his stock of money now reduced to a Dutch silver dollar and a shilling in copper pennies. He saw a boat come by, with on board a few people, including a woman with an infant. They took him in. He put his muscles to the oars—the wind had died away—and at midnight they took refuge in a creek. With the broken rails of a fence, they made a fire against the cold. They woke to find themselves in sight of journey’s end.

  At breakfast time on Sunday, October 6, filthy, exhausted, and again very hungry, Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia, passing the place where today the suspension bridge is named in his honor. Looking awkward and ridiculous—his own words—he stepped ashore and found himself gazing up a thoroughfare far broader than any he had seen at home. It was Market Street, one hundred feet across. Even today, when so much careless modern building has wrecked the riverfront that Franklin knew, we can see a little of the Philadelphia he entered. The wide streets, the spacious grid: they still survive, laid out as they were by the Quakers.

  What Franklin saw was a raw, unfinished city, very different from Boston. Here by the Delaware, life had far less definition than it did in New England. Although in early Massachusetts the wilderness was never far away, even so the colony had a perimeter, guarded by a militia, it had a charter, and a royal governor—however disliked he might be—and some of its towns had a hundred years of history. And so they had sheriffs, juries, county courts, and a settled code of laws. In theory, Pennsylvania had the same: but in fact, although it had a constitution, based on a charter granted by its Quaker proprietor William Penn in 1701, there were still a host of decisions yet to be made in a colony with vast potential but an ambiguous status quo.

  It was a rather peculiar province. On the one hand, no one who arrived there in the 1720s could fail to see that one day Pennsylvania might be very prosperous. If they survived the sea crossing from Europe, newcomers entered what one of them called “a precious land…a good and free country,” where wages were high, the soil fertile, and rents and taxes and the price of soil were low. In the woods that surrounded Philadelphia, even the pigs dined on apples and peaches, and every farming family had its garden and its orchard. It was a place, said another immigrant, where “whoever is willing to work can become rich.”5

  So they might: but could they agree about who owned the land, how to govern themselves, and how best to share the benefits of progress? There were 45,000 settlers, more or less, but fewer than two thirds of them were English or Welsh. The remainder were German, or Scots-Irish people from the north of Ireland, or African slaves. To whom did they owe allegiance? They were supposed to be loyal subjects of King George. But in practice the Crown took little interest in people whose only purpose in life, from a British point of view, was to sen
d their grain and pork to the sugar islands. In 1712, tired of endless squabbles with the locals, who simply would not pay the rents they owed him, William Penn had tried to sell Pennsylvania to the government in England. A deal was struck, but then fell through. And so the opportunity was lost to bring the province firmly within the British fold. In time this led to a messy situation in which nobody really knew who owned the colony, or who was the rightful governor.

  When Penn died in 1718, he left two wills—not his fault, the poor man, because the old Quaker hero had been broken by two strokes, and he could scarcely hear or speak—but from his incapacity, the consequence arising was chaotic. With Mr. Penn consigned to the grave, to whom did Pennsylvania belong? To the children of Penn’s first marriage, or to those of his second? For the time being, in London his widow, Hannah, acted as the colony’s proprietor, hoping to hand it on to her sons; but their title to the province would remain in dispute until 1731. While the lawyers in England argued the rights and wrongs, Pennsylvania did the best it could. Even so, the 1720s were years of strife as rival parties vied for control of its fate.6

  As for Philadelphia, it was an odd sort of place: no college, no state house, no militia, no cannons by the shore—like Thomas Tryon, the Quakers would not fight or arm themselves—and little by way of a city government. Although Market Street had aspirations, when Franklin arrived it was still paved with nothing but dirt. It ended abruptly after three blocks. Times were hard in Philadelphia, thanks to the same recession that blighted the affairs of Boston. Many lots were vacant and many houses stood empty. The wide streets and the grid were only part of the story: the rest was squalor. Wooden shacks and narrow alleys, wells and water pumps too close to privies, poverty by the waterfront, immigrants from Ulster and the Rhineland, mostly coming in as bonded servants to be bought and sold, and also the Africans relied upon, but also feared and despised: all of this was Philadelphia too.