Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  Beyond 4th Street, a new arrival saw the fields and the orchards, with their herds of swine, and a hint of blue hills in the distance. Somewhere behind the hills, where no one had mapped the rivers or the colony’s boundary, there rose the smoke from the fires of the Lenape, soon to be dispossessed. Beyond them there lay the distant hunting grounds of the Iroquois, with whom the colonists had recently signed a treaty of alliance. For Franklin, coming off the boat, the town was his equivalent of Crusoe’s island: the wide, flat plain between the two rivers, the Delaware and the Schuylkill, where his ingenuity would have to leave its mark.

  Once again his timing was perfect. With its lack of definition, its open borders, and its ambiguities, Pennsylvania would prove to be ideal for a young man eager to make his own way. And besides: in his first winter in the city, the economy began to recover. Not that Franklin could have expected that on his arrival in this confusing town. He was just another runaway, close to destitution.

  HIS PHILADELPHIA STORY…

  Up he came from the wharf, lonely and dirty, but determined to do some good even so. Almost as though he wished to strip away any legacy he had from his family and Massachusetts, so that he could feel like Crusoe that he had done his best entirely alone, he gave his copper coins to the people on the boat. They took the money only with reluctance, so manfully had Franklin done his share with the oars.

  Taken in 1855, this rare photograph shows an early-eighteenth-century Philadelphia house—at the corner of Chestnut and 2nd Streets—of the kind that Franklin saw on his first arrival in the town in 1723. It can be compared with Peter Cooper’s painting of the city in about 1720, reproduced elsewhere in this book.

  Having nowhere to go, since it was Sunday and the Bradford printing shop was closed, he wandered aimlessly up Market Street. He saw some bread, and found the baker’s shop. The shop was open, which he would have found very odd: in his hometown, the Sabbath was obligatory. Here in Philadelphia it was a matter of choice. And when Franklin asked for some food, he was still more perplexed by what occurred.

  By the Delaware, his Dutch silver dollar was a rarity, with a purchasing power far greater than he had expected. In return for threepence, which would have bought only a loaf in Boston, Franklin came away with three puffy rolls, of a size he had never seen at home. With a roll beneath each brawny arm, he drifted up the street, chewing away on the third, then circled back down to the wharf. He drank from the Delaware, and saw the poor woman from the boat. He gave her and her child the rolls he did not require. By now the Quakers were drifting by as well, on their way to their Sunday gathering at their meeting house: which, as it happened, was opposite the Bradford premises. He followed the Quakers—why not? he had nowhere else to go—and while the Quakers meditated, the young man fell asleep.

  And then he relied on the kindness of strangers. One of the Quakers woke him when the meeting was done. In the street another one found him an inn: not the first one Franklin saw, the Three Mariners, a house of ill repute, but instead a ramshackle old tavern by the waterfront, called the Crooked Billet. There he began to recover from the rigors of the journey. Exhausted, and suspected yet again of being a fugitive, as he tells us in his autobiography, Franklin ate and slept and then he ate and slept again. On Monday morning, October 7, refreshed and a little less untidy, he went looking for work without any breakfast. Soon enough he discovered that despite the high ideals with which it had been founded by the Quakers, the colony had its darker side.7

  The following year another brilliant man arrived in Philadelphia, not from Boston but from Germany. He wrote his own account of the town that made this very point with brutal candor. In the eyes of Johann-Christoph Sauer, son of a Lutheran pastor, the city of brotherly love was a Babylon as sinful as anything in Europe. Or perhaps it was even worse: Sauer was appalled by the sight of brothels like the Three Mariners. In later years, Sauer would become a printer too, serving the German people in Pennsylvania. He never aspired to be an English gentleman; and so although he could never write as stylishly as Franklin, often his tales of what he saw are more informative and more direct.

  “A gathering place for…restless and eccentric people”: that was how Sauer described the Quaker colony in 1724. Although he admired its fertile soil, its woods, and its religious liberty, the province contained “so many scheming people that one can hardly believe what intrigues are here thought of.” Franklin did not use language such as this, but his first encounter with Philadelphia was very much the same. It was a slippery place where you had to be wary.8

  On that Monday morning, Franklin made for an address on 2nd Street. Here beneath the sign of the Bible—the holy book, painted on a board—Andrew Bradford sold chocolate and printed the town’s newspaper, the American Weekly Mercury. That week, its lead story was the trial for treason of a Jacobite in London, but the paper also advertised rewards for the recapture of runaways. So Franklin was putting himself in danger, by venturing into the printing shop. And yet he received a welcome so warm that it had to be a matter for suspicion.

  William Bradford had come down to the Delaware, making better time on horseback than Benjamin had achieved on foot. He greeted Franklin like a long-lost friend. His son Andrew Bradford gave the boy something to eat, and then he made what seemed to be a helpful suggestion. A new printer had set up in town, Samuel Keimer, an immigrant from England. Perhaps he needed a likely lad like Franklin? So off they went, to find Keimer’s home on Market Street, and to see what he might have to offer.

  By sunset Franklin had a promise of a job with Keimer, but it was not the job he would have preferred. He also discovered that in Philadelphia nothing could be taken at face value, including the sign of the Bible. It turned out that William Bradford—a Quaker in his youth, and then a keen Anglican, apparently so kind and so moral—had a sly and cunning streak. In taking Franklin to see Mr. Keimer, the old man had an ulterior motive, his purpose being to ask questions and to spy on a rival. Without revealing his identity, Bradford wanted to find out just how Keimer proposed to run his business; who his backers were; and where he stood politically.

  Franklin listened while the game was played. Soon he decided that Bradford was nothing but “a crafty old sophister.” In years to come Franklin and the Bradfords would become sworn enemies, as they competed in the printing trade. In the meantime Franklin had to work for Keimer. In making his acquaintance, Franklin collected another exhibit for his private museum of unusual people.

  The printing shop was a shambles, with a broken press and only a meager supply of lead type, bearing little resemblance to the costly apparatus James Franklin had brought home from London. As for Samuel Keimer, he was an example of the restless people Sauer had seen flooding into Pennsylvania. At thirty-five, Keimer was a refugee from debts he could not pay and from a wife and family he did not love. He was poor and unkempt, with a beard that hung down toward his waist because a Bible passage had forbidden him to shave. By an odd coincidence, Keimer had grown up by the Thames in the 1690s in Southwark, the district where Franklin’s uncle was coloring silk. Indeed, Keimer’s mother had been another follower of Nathaniel Vincent, the minister whose sermons had meant so much to Benjamin Senior. But while the Franklins strove to be respectable, the pursuit of faith had taken Mr. Keimer into the realm of the extreme.9

  In 1707, aged nineteen and apprenticed as printer, Keimer fell in with a cult known as the Camisards, because it was their custom to wear a linen smock, or in the dialect of southern France, a camisa. Otherwise known as the “French Prophets,” the Camisards were Huguenots who had fled from persecution by King Louis XIV. Once arrived in London, the Prophets dealt in religious ecstasy, receiving the Holy Spirit by way of what they called “agitations”: fits of weeping, trembling, gasping, and hiccups, followed by a trance, from which they would awake to speak in tongues. Among city people eager for faith they made a few converts, whose number for a while included
Samuel Keimer.

  Taking the name of “Jonathan, of the Tribe of Asser,” he began to grow his beard. Around his neck he wore a long green ribbon: so that at the moment of the Second Coming, Jesus Christ would recognize him as a Camisard. For a time Keimer did rather well as a printer, with his own paper, the London Post, and he got to know Defoe, some of whose work he published. Sadly, he made the mistake of flirting with the Jacobites at the time of their failed rebellion of 1715, and so the Whigs sent him to prison for seditious libel. After that, he was jailed for insolvency. By 1718 he had broken with the Camisards. He broadcast the fact to the world in his own autobiography, A Brand Pluck’d From the Burning: a book that Franklin must have seen, but never mentions.10

  Some time later Keimer shipped up in Philadelphia, where early in 1722 he ran a notice in the Mercury in which he offered “to teach his poor brethren, the Male Negroes, to read the Holy Scriptures.” There he was far ahead of his time—seventy years had yet to pass before people of color were allowed to have a church of their own, in this city so devoted to religious freedom—and so the project came to nothing. Keimer found himself living in poverty, inhabiting his rented house and shop on Market Street with barely a stick of furniture.

  When Franklin first saw him, Keimer was struggling to complete an elegy in memory of Aquila Rose, the gifted young poet who had worked for the Bradfords. Dead before the age of thirty, leaving a widow and a baby son, Rose had been immensely popular in Philadelphia, where he was given almost a state funeral at Christ Church, the Anglican place of worship. As if to pay his own tribute to Aquila, whose untimely end had brought him to the city, Franklin did what he could to help. He repaired Keimer’s press. A few days later, the strange old Camisard summoned him round to his shop to print the finished version of his poem.

  And so their complicated relationship began. When the mood took him, Samuel Keimer would amuse his new employee by performing the agitations of his former brethren. In time, Franklin formed the view that Keimer had “a good deal of the knave in his composition,” a judgment for which we have only Franklin’s evidence. It is just as plausible to think of Keimer as a visionary of a kind, the sort of visionary who sometimes emerged from the dissenting chapels of eighteenth-century London: someone who looked for God in the taverns, the prisons, and the squalor of the streets, and yearned—like William Blake, whose background was similar to Keimer’s—to build a new Jerusalem beside the Thames. With no hope of fulfilling his dreams in England, Keimer turned to Philadelphia, but once there he had to live by his wits. Did this make him a knave, as Franklin described him? Although his style and his methods were unconventional, Keimer survived in the town for nearly ten years as a printer and publisher, which suggests that he was more talented than Franklin cared to admit. To begin with, Keimer was also somebody Franklin found indispensable.

  Besides giving Franklin a job, Keimer could also give the young man another kind of opening. Keimer rented his little house from an Englishman who lived in another little house next door, a carpenter named John Read, married to Sarah. At first Franklin had roomed with the Bradfords, but Keimer did not care for that, seeing how duplicitous his competitors could be. So the young man came to lodge with the Reads, and there he met his future partner: their daughter Deborah, whom later he would take as his wife.

  …AND DEBORAH’S

  She first saw him on the Sunday morning, as he walked up Market Street eating his bread roll. When he came by, tall but ragged, his pockets bulging with spare linen, she was standing on her father’s doorstep. No doubt she was on her way to prayer. All her life Deborah knelt in the pews at Christ Church. Although Franklin looked silly, he caught her eye. In time he found her attractive too. Deborah Read was only nineteen or so, but behind her she had her own heritage of talent.

  At this point we come to perhaps the most difficult problem to face anyone who writes about Franklin. We know far too little about his wife and about their relationship. In the eighteenth or the nineteenth centuries nobody took the trouble to gather up Deborah’s letters, other than some of those she wrote to him. It seems that no one preserved her belongings, her family history—even her date and place of birth—or anything more than a few anecdotes about her. Because of that, and because in the 1750s they parted when he went to live in London, causing some embarrassment for Franklin devotees who would prefer every aspect of his life to resemble a scene by Norman Rockwell, she has suffered a humiliating fate at the hands of some of his biographers. They have sneered at Mrs. Franklin, damned her with faint praise, or made fun of her atrocious spelling. Often they just ignore her, as if she were irrelevant.11

  The best that is usually said about Deborah Read Franklin is that she was frugal, honest, and hardworking; the worst, that she was plain and plump and dowdy, with a fearsome temper and a foul mouth. Her husband did not help her cause. In the second section of his memoirs—composed in 1784, when she was ten years dead—he described her in terms that made her sound like a hired hand. “She assisted me cheerfully in my business,” Franklin wrote, “folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing old linen rags for the paper makers etc etc.”

  With those hasty “etceteras,” Franklin dismissed the woman he had chosen as his partner. Then he hurried on to write about himself, telling us next to nothing about Deborah. He also made a curious omission. He forgot to mention this: she kept his firm’s accounts—six bulky ledgers still survive in the library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, almost entirely in her handwriting—and on two occasions he granted her a power of attorney over his affairs. The first one, granted in 1733, may have been only temporary. The second one was signed by Franklin in 1757, just before he sailed for England, and it left her in permanent control of all his assets in America.12

  From this, it should be clear that Mrs. Franklin was far more than just “a fat, jolly dame, clean and tidy”: another patronizing description offered by her husband, in a letter in which he likened her to a Toby jug. Deborah had a life of her own in Philadelphia. At Anglican Christ Church and elsewhere she was a woman who had many friends and commanded respect. In the absence of the documents we ought to have, the balance cannot be redressed entirely; but we can at least try to establish how the Reads came to be in Pennsylvania, and what kind of people they were. The trail of clues starts with a letter that Franklin wrote to Deborah in 1758.

  After going to Ecton that summer in search of his genealogy, Franklin went further into the heart of the English Midlands, to the county of Warwickshire and the town of Birmingham, the industrial center from which Deborah’s family had come. Britain was at war with France, and so the gunsmiths were hard at work, making muskets and ammunition for the redcoats. Every branch of trade was booming. Franklin toured the factories—“seeing all the curious machines,” as he told Deborah—but he also saw her relations, who had reaped the benefits of life in England’s most dynamic region. He came away overwhelmed: so many people, eager to see him, with so many names—Cash and Guest, Salt and Wheat, Wilkinson and Tyler—a baffling array, all of them somehow related to his wife. He called them “working people,” but there was nothing poor or humble about them. Instead they were busy, proud, and comfortably off, and one of them was rich: Benjamin Tyler, Mrs. Franklin’s first cousin, who had built his fortune in the button trade.13

  It was the sort of thing Birmingham did to perfection: the mass production of buttons, pins, and needles, as well as the more skillful trade of making guns and clocks and tools, and the forging of the iron and steel from which they were created. Benjamin Tyler owned a factory with many hands, and he counted among his acquaintances the town’s leading men of business. He invited Franklin round to supper, where Tyler boasted of the money being made in Birmingham, as the nation embraced the cult of engineering.

  A building Deborah Read Franklin knew well: the Slate Roof House on 2nd and Sansom Streets, Philadelphia. Occupied at one time
by the colony’s founder, William Penn, in 1704 it was acquired by the Quaker merchant and politician Isaac Norris (1671–1735) and remained the Norris family’s town house until the 1730s. Mrs. Franklin and Isaac’s daughter Deborah were close friends from childhood. This picture was taken not long before the house was demolished in 1867.

  If the Franklins had an endowment of ingenuity, so did Deborah’s family. Her mother, Sarah White, was the daughter of a Birmingham whitesmith, meaning a craftsman with pewter, brass, and tin, another trade for which the place was renowned. By the time she was in her twenties, the town was rapidly expanding, and in 1700 Sarah White married a carpenter, John Read, a London man who built houses. Three years later, Sarah gave birth to a daughter, Mary, and then the Reads vanished from the parish registers of Birmingham, only to reappear eight years later in America. In 1711, John Read bought an empty lot on Market Street, Philadelphia, and there he put his home. In the meantime Deborah had been born, in about 1705, but whether in Britain or the colonies we cannot say. No record of her baptism has yet been found: perhaps because few scholars have tried to look for it.14

  Why had the Reads crossed the Atlantic? All we know is that Sarah had an uncle, Caleb Cash, a shoemaker from Birmingham, who had taken his family to Philadelphia at some date before 1700. So the most likely story is this: Caleb wrote home about the opportunities available in Pennsylvania, and John Read decided to try his luck.