Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  As well he might. In Birmingham, the workshops were already shipping hardware to the colonies—hoes, spades, and other plantation tools—and nails most of all, in vast quantities. Americans needed millions of nails for building ships and houses, and the slitting mills of Birmingham made the cheapest available. Early in the eighteenth century, the flow of goods across the ocean created close ties between the town and Philadelphia, and craftsmen from Warwickshire crossed the Atlantic to the Quaker colony. This was the movement to which the Reads belonged; and this tide of migration rose to a new peak when it was realized that Pennsylvania could fashion metal of its own.15

  From the colony’s earliest days, it had been known that within easy reach there were deposits of iron ore, especially in the upper valley of the Schuylkill, where the red stains were hard to miss in the water and the soil. So William Penn began to reach out to the ironmasters of the English Midlands in the hope that they would invest in his province. By 1710 or so, Quaker merchants from the Delaware were making long trips to the Birmingham area, looking to find heiresses to marry and hoping to do business.

  Soon enough, in 1716, the moment came when steel and iron could be made in Pennsylvania. By a creek called Manatawny, fifty miles inland from Philadelphia, a blacksmith from the English Midlands—Thomas Rutter—built a forge and started to turn out iron bars. Two years later, a recent Quaker arrival by the name of Samuel Nutt opened a forge in Chester County. There was a war in the Baltic between the Russians and the Swedes; the British lost their sources of iron from the region; and so these new American ironmasters were given a chance to grow their business. Rutter and Nutt built blast furnaces, and bought many acres of the timber they required for charcoal. Mr. Nutt had come from Warwickshire, and he christened his forge and his furnace with English names taken from the towns he knew at home.16

  Although John Read never did anything so ambitious, he belonged to the same diaspora of craftsmen from Birmingham and its hinterland of ingenuity. Once established across the sea in Philadelphia, he built houses with enough success to enable him to buy the adjoining lot on Market Street, where he erected the house that Keimer rented. By 1720 Read was doing business in style, dealing in land worth hundreds of pounds. He put up a brick house on 3rd Street, complete with sash windows and cellars, and placed a notice in the Mercury, offering to sell it in a lottery. Meanwhile Mrs. Read had a business of her own making ointments for itches and burns and selling them to her neighbors.17

  The slump of 1721 seems to have hit John Read quite hard, because he ran no more advertisements in the press. Nor did it help when he lent money to a confidence trickster, William Riddlesden, wanted for fraud on both sides of the ocean. But while Mr. Read was running into difficulties, his relations in the town were looking to the future. In 1715, Sarah Read’s cousin Mary Cash had married one John Leacock, a vestryman at Christ Church, who had arrived by way of Barbados. Like Sarah’s father, Leacock was a whitesmith, working with pewter. Soon enough he branched out into iron. By the middle of the 1720s he was an investor in new forges on the Manatawny and elsewhere where his partners included Samuel Nutt, the iron Quaker.18

  And so, when Franklin met and later married Deborah Read, he joined an extended family of craftsmen and manufacturers whose activities encompassed both sides of the Atlantic. This heritage was something he came to share. All too often biographers write about Franklin as though he did everything by himself. That is what he might have wished us to think, but the truth of the matter is very different. Almost from the moment he set foot in Philadelphia, he found people willing to help him and make friends, and best of all the Reads.

  Although they had land, timber, and minerals, the Pennsylvania colonists never had enough of something else: and that was labor, especially when it came with skills. With his height, his muscles, and his talent with words and with his hands, Franklin was always going to be welcome. Young men like him were necessary. When he arrived in 1723, Pennsylvania was about to enter a remarkable phase of economic growth, which had more than two decades to run before the next disaster struck. With its steel and iron, its farmers, and its pluralism, the colony on the Delaware would make Franklin a new kind of American.19

  Chapter Nine

  FORGETTING BOSTON

  “I have some reason to believe our trade is on the mending,” wrote a Quaker merchant in January 1724, as he urged his friends in England to send him nails and lead shot, calico, and blankets, to be sold in Philadelphia. Suddenly that winter people found they had some money in their pockets. In Jamaica the planters were thriving again, buying all the grain the colony could offer. Meanwhile in London the markets regained their confidence. As the South Sea Company crisis receded into the past, on both sides of the ocean the economy improved.1

  With Franklin to help him, even Keimer could prosper in this new environment. Driven together by chance and by necessity, the two men found a way to earn a profit. They published little books that dealt with two of the period’s favorite subjects—health and religion—in a quirky style that suited them both. From The Curiosities of Common Water, their readers learned of the benefits of drinking H2O, “an universal remedy,” fit to cure gout, kidney stones, dropsy, and sciatica. Another pamphlet, written by a pastor in Barbados, warned of the evils of alcohol, telling sad stories of people ruined by wine.2

  For those of a more metaphysical bent, Keimer wrote a religious tract, which he called A Parable. It contained the most appalling heresy. No copy has survived; but his ideas so upset the Quakers that in December they bought space in the Mercury to make it clear that Keimer was definitely not one of their number. The following month, he and Franklin set out to annoy the Anglicans and the Presbyterians as well, by reprinting a scandalous book that had recently appeared in London. Written by a renegade Anglican priest soon after his release from a madhouse, it was called A Free Gift to the Clergy. The author insulted ministers of all denominations, calling them dunces, drones, and caterpillars.3

  Although the books Keimer and Franklin published were eccentric or even outrageous, they found a wide market in freethinking Philadelphia. Here was a town where people wished to be challenged and provoked by writing that owed nothing to any kind of orthodoxy. The same had been true of some readers in Boston, but the Courant could only go so far before the authorities called the Franklins to heel. In Pennsylvania no holds were barred. The Anglicans were impotent politically; as yet, the Presbyterians were still a small minority; and as for the Quakers, they might huff and puff, but they could not ban anything Keimer and Franklin sold from their shop. Although in theory the English laws against blasphemy extended to the colonies, in practice the Quakers could not act as censors; it would have been against their principles.

  By the spring of 1724, the two printers were thriving. Because the younger man had clung to his frugal Boston ways, saving his wages whenever he could, soon he had a wallet full of English silver. Franklin dressed with style; he owned a watch, in an era when that was still a rarity; and he built a social life in a town where young people were highly literate. During his own six years in Philadelphia, working as a printer and acting as clerk to the colony’s General Assembly, Aquila Rose had gathered around him a circle of book-loving friends. Franklin joined their number. “I lived very agreeably,” he recalled, “forgetting Boston as much as I could.”

  He saw no reason to rock any boats by writing to his parents. He kept in touch with only one old friend in his hometown: John Collins, his debating partner, who earned his living as a clerk in Boston’s post office. Collins was sworn to secrecy as to his whereabouts. Even so, word leaked out that Franklin was in the Quaker capital. Soon it reached the ears of his brother-in-law, Robert Holmes, the Ulsterman who sailed his sloop up and down the eastern seaboard. By this time the little port of New Castle, forty miles down the Delaware, had become the principal landing place for immigrants arriving from the north of Ireland and so Holmes had connections in t
he town. From New Castle, Holmes wrote to Benjamin, telling him all was forgiven and imploring him to come back to Boston. Franklin sent a gracious reply, refusing to do any such thing and giving his reasons. Then he thought no more about it.

  Life in Philadelphia was simply too enjoyable. Although he and Mr. Keimer were never really close, they took pleasure in each other’s company. They had so much in common: a taste for the bizarre, a history of clashes with authority, and political views at the radical end of the spectrum. Later that year, Keimer brought out an American edition of a book that Franklin was bound to admire: The Independent Whig, a collection of London newspaper columns from the team responsible for Cato’s Letters, the series that had so inspired the Franklin brothers.

  First published in England four years earlier, The Independent Whig was fiercely anticlerical, but also very well written—forceful, pithy, and ironic, like the best material in the Courant. And so, although in this period Franklin was no longer a journalist but had to make do with setting in type the words of other men, his partnership with Samuel Keimer kept alive the flame of satire. His first six months in Philadelphia were some of the happiest in Franklin’s life. With no commitments, well paid and with excellent prospects, how could he not have fun?

  He was working for somebody who could never be accused of being dull. Besides growing his beard, there were two things Keimer liked best of all. One of them was eating—he was “a great glutton,” Franklin remembered—and the other was disputation. He loved to argue, and in his hired hand he found a splendid adversary. And so while Keimer entertained them both with his comic impression of the Camisards, Franklin displayed his mastery of dialectic. The two men would argue about everything, but of course Franklin usually won, thanks to his skill with the methods of Socrates in Boston. Keimer admired the young man’s expertise with logic; so much so, that it occurred to him that it could be put to good use.

  Always looking for God, Samuel Keimer proposed that they should form their own religious sect. He would preach the doctrines and Franklin would crush their opponents with his intellect. From his reading of Tryon, Plutarch, and the deists, Franklin knew about the oddities of sects; he had no intention of joining any such thing; but he saw a chance to have some fun. And so he played along with the idea. When Keimer specified that members of the sect would have to do as he did, never shaving their facial hair and keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, Franklin made a stipulation of his own. They would have to eat vegetables only.

  Keimer did not feel that this was sound theology. But Franklin convinced him that if he could abstain from meat and fish, he would emerge a better man. As it happens, by this time Franklin had already relaxed his own strict dietary rule, by permitting himself to eat fried cod. His lapse had occurred the previous autumn on the sea voyage down from Boston to New York. The sailors had landed some fish that were simply too tasty not to be consumed. Seduced by the smell of cod in the pan, Franklin ate the forbidden food. He consoled himself with the thought that cod were cannibals themselves, as shown by the fact that in their stomachs, the cod had smaller fish. Later, he had also eaten his slice of offal at Burlington: another breach of the code. But none of this did he reveal to Keimer.

  Instead Franklin posed as a stern vegetarian. He demanded a menu taken from the works of Mr. Tryon, for whom the eating of fish was as culpable as chewing on a steak. Altogether there were forty recipes, close to vegan in their austerity. A woman from the neighborhood came in to cook them, until three months had passed and Keimer was reduced to despair. After so many pints of gruel and so much cauliflower, he longed for the taste of roast pork. So he ordered a pig, had it cooked, and invited Franklin and two women friends to share it for dinner. By the time the ladies and Franklin arrived, Keimer had eaten the lot.

  Amusing though it was for a while, his relationship with Franklin had no future. It could only survive as long as Franklin failed to find another mentor, somebody far more powerful, an eminent man with a deeper appreciation of his talents. The fact was that Franklin needed a patron. On both sides of the Atlantic, that had always been the Franklin way.

  It was the way things had to be in a deferential society, where the fabric of success was woven from threads of patronage and service, as lesser men attached themselves to the wealthy, in the hope of advancement in reward for being humble, clever, and industrious. In England, the Franklins had prospered not only because of their ingenuity, but also because they found benevolent patrons: John Palmer, Lord Halifax, and the Whig aldermen of Banbury. In America, although it took many years, Josiah had at last become a trusted friend of Judge Sewall, another patron of a kind. Only when he did so could he claim to have secured his status in Boston.

  If Franklin were to do the same in Pennsylvania, he would need to acquire his own equivalent of Halifax or Sewall. And soon enough, it seemed that he had found the patron he required. The patron in question turned out to be a terrible disappointment: and this was important too. Far from being a good, kind man of God and science—in other words, another Archdeacon Palmer—his new patron in Philadelphia was a clever but volatile politician who could not be trusted. He deceived the young man, but in doing so he gave Franklin an education in the ways of politics.

  At some point early in 1724—the date cannot be fixed, but it was probably in February or March, as he and Keimer were starting to turn a profit—Franklin made the acquaintance of the paramount official in the colony. One day, as they were upstairs in the workshop, through the window they saw none other than the hero of Pennsylvania, the governor himself, approaching them across Market Street. Popular, clever, and charming, and dressed to perfection, Sir William Keith was fifty-four and in his prime. With him was his friend John French, colonel of militia and the leading citizen of New Castle, a town where the Quakers did not rule the roost and so they had a little fort with artillery and a man could tote a gun and be a soldier as well as a merchant.

  They knocked at the door. Keimer ran down, only to find that it was Franklin that Governor Keith wished to see. Mr. Keimer stared “like a pig poisoned,” as Franklin recalled in his memoirs, when Sir William invited the young man to an inn nearby, for a bottle of Madeira and a business meeting. It transpired that down in New Castle, Keith and French had met Captain Holmes. They had read Franklin’s letter and they liked the young man’s style. We need an ingenious printer, the governor said, to do official business. We’d like to set you up on your own. Although Franklin had some doubts—how would they raise the money?—it was an offer he could not refuse.

  In the months that followed, Franklin became an unwitting pawn in Sir William’s games of political chess. The governor was a Scottish baronet: a title that sounds more impressive than it is. Sir William came from the lower reaches of the aristocracy of Scotland, an impoverished country where men such as he often had to live on borrowed money or the handouts they could scrounge from the government in London. The colonies offered an alternative, a field of opportunity where he might make his fortune. Because he was a Tory and a Jacobite, Keith had languished in obscurity for most of the reign of Queen Anne. But as she neared her end in 1714, with the Tories in office for a while, at last Sir William found his niche. He was sent to America to run the customs service from the Delaware down to Jamaica, and he did it rather well.

  Like so many other Scots, Keith fell in love with the colonies; and so when the Whigs returned to power with George I, and fired him from his post, he longed to find another way to be an American. In London he met Hannah Penn, the acting proprietor of Pennsylvania, who was permanently resident in England. Deeply impressed with the gallant Sir William, she chose him to be the colony’s chief executive. For a while he proved to be a very competent governor, farsighted and creative. But if he was gifted, he was dangerous too: a hungry man, deeply in debt, with a flawed agenda of his own.

  “Capable to do mischief”: those were the words the authorities had used about Sir William, when he wa
s under arrest as a Jacobite. And mischief was the side of Keith that Franklin would eventually discover. More than sixty years later, when Franklin sat in the convention in Philadelphia that drafted the Constitution for the United States, he would warn his fellow delegates that the republic they produced must be made safe against the frailties of the human beings who would fill the offices of government. Sir William was a case in point: a man who promised far more than he could deliver.4

  THE LAIRD OF IRON HILL

  Ten miles or so from the town of New Castle, Delaware, the old turnpike highway to Baltimore passes beneath a patch of high ground. It does not look like much; but make your way up the winding road to the top, and hidden among the trees you will find some pits, with puddles of water at the bottom. The soil is streaked with red, and sometimes in the sunlight the puddles take on a deep ruddy color that explains why the pits came into being. This is Iron Hill. In the eighteenth century, the land hereabouts was known as Keithsborough, because it belonged to Sir William. Here the governor built a forge. The muddy holes are what remain of his mines for iron ore and his quest for riches in the earth.

  At his worst, Sir William Keith could be a selfish opportunist. But at his best Keith was something else: a visionary who understood his colony’s potential and did all he could to make it flourish. His inspiration was his friend and fellow Scotsman Colonel Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant governor of Virginia, who was trying to settle the western frontier and enrich himself in the process. In 1717, Spotswood had begun to develop iron mines and foundries along the Rappahannock. When Sir William arrived that same year as governor of Pennsylvania of course he wished to do likewise.5