Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  But while Colonel Spotswood often found himself at odds with the Virginians, Sir William endeared himself to the people of the Quaker colony. He framed new laws, reformed the courts and the system of taxes, and worked with Spotswood to make a lasting peace with the Iroquois. His poetic friend and protégé, Aquila Rose, called him “great Keith,” in an ode in praise of his achievements. Quakers supported Sir William, because he defended their civil rights; the Anglicans likewise, because he worshipped at Christ Church, where Lady Keith’s gravestone can still be seen next to the porch; and he also had a following among the Germans and the Irish, whom he urged to settle in the colony. When German settlers squatted illegally in the interior, Sir William turned a blind eye.

  He could be enormous fun, just as he was when he and Colonel French took Franklin to the tavern. In the rural bliss of what is now Montgomery County, Sir William built a little mansion, Graeme Park, modeled on the houses that Scottish lairds inhabited, where he entertained his guests. In Philadelphia he was equally generous. One observer spoke of Keith’s “sweetness of temper and carriage,” which won him the affection of the people. Unlike so many other governors, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, he did not quarrel with the General Assembly. In 1721, the people’s party—small farmers, tradesmen, and shopkeepers—won a landslide victory in the annual election. They became Sir William’s coalition. As the economic slump grew deeper he saw it as his task to rescue them from hardship.

  Early in 1723, when the recession was at its most severe, the governor set out his philosophy in a rousing speech to the legislature. “It is neither the great, the rich, nor the learned, that compose the body of any people,” Keith told them. “Civil government ought carefully to protect the poor, laborious, and industrious part of mankind, in the enjoyment of their just rights, and equal liberties and privileges with the rest of their fellow creatures.” It was the task of politicians, said Sir William, to secure the good of the whole community. These were more than merely empty words.6

  He had already written to the royal authorities in London, seeking their support for a bold experiment in finance. Drawing upon ideas first conceived much earlier, in the Cromwellian England of the 1650s, and then revived in the colonies by the likes of Boston’s Elisha Cooke, Sir William wished to found a land bank: or in other words, a scheme with which to make real estate an engine of recovery for the blighted citizens of Pennsylvania. Anybody who owned land or houses would be allowed to borrow on mortgage from the bank, up to a loan-to-value ratio of 50 percent. The loans would be made with paper money, but once it was in circulation it would oil the wheels of commerce. At last the people could afford to buy the food the colony produced so lavishly, and at last they could repay their debts.

  Of course, all this would horrify a financial purist, someone wedded to bullion and hard cash, like Dr. Cooke’s opponents in Boston. Surely prices would rise, and creditors would lose out, as their debtors met their liabilities not with silver dollars or with gold but with Sir William’s dubious paper? Indeed: but in the dire circumstances of the time, the risk of inflation had to be taken. In the March of 1723, the assembly voted for the land bank and Sir William’s paper money, and then in October, just as Franklin was taking his first footsteps in Philadelphia, they approved another tranche of the new currency. By Christmastime, the paper bills were flowing round the market. We can leave economists to argue about the rights and wrongs and wherefores and if nots, but the recession was over, and Keith could claim the credit for bringing back prosperity.7

  As the new year began, so Keimer and Franklin started to make their profits, and John Read found a way to ease his own financial plight. As a house builder, Deborah’s father could only stand to gain from Sir William’s policies. When the land bank opened for business the previous spring, Mr. Read had taken out a mortgage on one of his houses on Market Street; and early in 1724 he mortgaged the other one as well.

  Some fifty years later, when Franklin sat writing his memoirs, he found himself in a quandary about Sir William Keith. Fascinated as he was by economics, and himself an advocate of paper money, Franklin knew that in some ways Keith had been a fine administrator. “Several of our best laws were of his planning,” Franklin wrote, seeking to be fair to a man for whose legacy he still had some respect. But he had also seen the governor’s dark side. Try as he might, even half a century after their encounter Franklin could not prevent his anger at Sir William from exploding on the page. “What shall we think of a governor playing such pitiful tricks, and imposing so grossly on a poor ignorant boy!” This was one of the most passionate sentences that Franklin ever composed, but he had every reason to resent Sir William’s memory. As they sipped their Madeira in the tavern, Keith was engaged in an intricate political maneuver in which the young printer was a piece to be manipulated.

  For Sir William, the stakes were immensely high. From the earliest period of English adventures on the mainland of America, the era of Sir Walter Raleigh and then of the plantation at Jamestown, investors had hoped to find there a new El Dorado of precious metals. Their dreams had met with little but frustration; until at last, in New Jersey in about 1715, someone came across a vein of copper, which in time was developed into the Schuyler copper mine. By 1721 the mine was in full swing, shipping its ingots to Europe. Fired up by the prospect of mineral wealth, prospectors began to look for the red metal in every corner of Pennsylvania as well.8

  Among them were Keith and his friend Colonel French, whose diplomatic missions into Indian country took them far to the west, across the Susquehanna River, where traces of more copper were discovered in land to which the Quaker colony laid claim. It might be a mine as rich as Schuyler’s; and if such it proved to be, Keith and French intended to be the masters of its destiny. This they could achieve only if they clung onto power in Pennsylvania.

  Sir William’s problem was this: with his populism and his paper money, he had won the hearts and minds of the electorate, but he had also made some powerful enemies. None was more dangerous than James Logan, who served as the land agent in the colony for Hannah Penn and her family. A tough but brilliant man, who would come in time to be Franklin’s scientific mentor, Logan had every reason to dislike the governor. A Quaker, born in 1674, Logan had been raised in poverty amid the strife of northern Ireland, where his family and friends suffered at the hands of the forces loyal to the Catholic King James. He loathed Tories and Jacobites and everything for which they stood.

  Austere and abrasive, Logan was the ultimate meritocrat. He had taught himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; he immersed himself in Newton’s mathematics; he studied botany, investigating the reproductive system of plants; and he also built a handsome fortune. With the help of a network of French trappers, Logan monopolized the fur trade in the west, shipping the skins to London for his own profit. At first he rather liked Sir William Keith, whose diplomatic skills he admired. But by the end of 1722 James Logan had come to detest the Scotsman as a schemer who hoped to make himself the overlord of Pennsylvania. “His designs are deep laid to serve himself,” Logan told the Penns, warning them that Keith was bent on “absolute power.”9

  At best, Sir William would fill every official post with his cronies, and persuade the General Assembly to vote him an ever larger salary; at worst, Keith might convince the king that Pennsylvania should at last become a royal province, with Sir William as the Crown’s representative. If so, then everything—vast tracts of virgin land, the iron, the copper, and the trade in skins—might fall into the hands of the Keithites.

  Logan could accept Sir William’s paper money, but only in small doses. As more and more of it was issued, he began to see it something tantamount to fraud. James Logan spoke for the wealthiest merchants of Philadelphia: people dismissed by Sir William as “the lawyers and a few rich usurers.” In their eyes and Logan’s, Keith’s paper money was nothing but a ploy designed to benefit debt-ridden men and to cheat their creditors.
Sir William had borrowed heavily against his country properties.

  From the colonial records in London, a relic of the mining craze of the early 1720s that followed the discovery of copper in New Jersey. As Master of the Royal Mint, Sir Isaac Newton is giving his opinion in 1722 on some rocks shipped over from Pennsylvania.

  If the feud between Keith and Logan had been merely personal, just another squabble between ambitious men, it would not merit much attention. In fact, the issues at stake were profoundly serious and classically American. The politics of money, the fate of the frontier, the conflicting interests of debtors and creditors, and a clash between a popular movement and a mercantile elite: before and after the Revolution of 1775, in almost every colony questions of the kind kept recurring, with many local variations, giving rise to sectional strife that could never entirely be resolved. In Pennsylvania, with its odd legal status, its diversity, its mineral wealth, and its rapid growth, the issues were especially complex and the personalities especially colorful.

  And so it was here in the Quaker colony that Franklin acquired his first lessons in the adult realities of politics. In Boston, his brother James had run The New-England Courant for money and for laughs, chiefly at the clergy’s expense. The paper was clever, but also rather shallow, and it owed too much to English models. It was funny, but it was futile too. For all its talk of politics, the Courant never thought about the subject seriously. The question it did not ask was the essential one: what was the best way to run a government in America, on the edge of the wilderness, where the issues were so different from those of Great Britain? In later life, Franklin would have to think deeply about that very thing. His training began when he met Sir William Keith.

  In the spring of 1724, when the governor and Colonel French turned up on Keimer’s doorstep, they were looking for ways to outwit James Logan, who was away in England playing what he thought was his trump card. Six months earlier, just before Franklin arrived in Philadelphia, Logan had set out for London, with the aim of seeing Hannah Penn and turning her against the governor. Logan wanted her to send an ultimatum, telling Keith to toe the line, rein in the paper money scheme, and do what Logan told him: if not, he would be dismissed. Since Sir William knew exactly what Logan was up to, he began to prepare for what might be the decisive battle of his life. In his own poker hand he held two aces: not only the General Assembly, where he was so popular, but also the town of New Castle and the area roundabout, including his mines at Iron Hill, in what later became the state of Delaware.

  In the 1720s this tract of land still counted as part of Pennsylvania, but this was in dispute because the proprietors of Maryland claimed that it was rightfully theirs. In the Lower Counties, as the area was known, Keith had built a power base, from which—if he were ever fired as governor—he hoped to defy James Logan and the Penns. And so, to secure his position, he hatched a scheme to grant a city charter to New Castle, giving it a government of its own. This would happen in May, with Colonel French to be installed as the mayor. To produce the necessary documents, here and up in Philadelphia, they would need a printer: hence the proposition they had made to Franklin.10

  There was something else as well. During his long years in London, Sir William had seen the machinery used by Whigs and Tories as they competed for control of the city. Caucuses and clubs, run from inns or coffeehouses, or the occasional use of a mob in the streets to riot or intimidate opponents: these were English tactics that Keith would adopt in America. He could also use the printed word as a weapon, just as it was in London where Defoe and Swift and so many other writers fought out the party strife of the day. To fight his corner, Sir William would need his own pamphlets—even a newspaper, maybe—when Logan returned from England and the struggle between them began in earnest. Here again, Franklin the printer might be very useful.

  Everything was agreed in secret. Keeping Keimer in the dark about his true intentions, Franklin would take the next boat for Boston, carrying a private letter from Sir William, urging Josiah to help finance his son’s new printing firm. In the meantime, the governor had the young man round for dinner now and then. Amid so much flattery, Franklin decided that Keith was “the best man in the world.” Toward the end of April 1724, with James Logan expected home from England imminently, at last Franklin set off for Massachusetts. It was a difficult passage—they hit a shoal, sprang a leak, and again he had to use his muscles, helping to pump water from the bilges—but after two weeks they reached their destination. On their arrival, they found that it was business as usual in the Bay Colony, that peevish land of piety and violence.

  THE PRODIGAL SON

  On the frontier, the war continued with the Abenaki, with ever more cruelty as each month went by. More pirates were caught at sea, their heads carried back to Boston for the reward. The president of Harvard died in his sleep, prompting Cotton Mather to revile the dead man as “an infamous drone.” In the Courant, James Franklin was taking after his father and advertising African slaves for sale: “two very likely negroes (a boy and a girl), each about fourteen…enquire of the printer hereof.” To comply with the law, the paper still appeared above Benjamin’s name, but it had lost its excitement. James had retreated to an older journalistic model. To fill most of his space, he merely recycled the politics of Europe, printing long accounts of the activities of kings and diplomats.

  Three months earlier he had taken a wife. Even so James remained as miffy as before. Perhaps the couple were unhappy, because while Franklin was in town, the Courant ran an item about the plight of husbands who “have suffer’d shipwreck in their choice of wives.” At the house on Hanover and Union, where Franklin arrived without warning, he received a warm welcome, the prodigal come home; but just as it was in the parable, his brother was a different story. The breach between them seemed to be irreparable.

  When Franklin turned up at the printing shop in brand-new clothes, with his watch and a pocket full of English coins, James looked him up and down and then ignored him. It did not help when James’s workmen plied Franklin with questions about Philadelphia, or when he stood them all a round of drinks. Sullen and very proud—another Franklin family trait—James took his brother’s behavior as an insult. Time passed, and Abiah begged him to forgive her youngest son. James would not relent.

  Franklin’s visit to his hometown was brief and unsuccessful. It left him in no hurry to return to a place for which he had little affection, however much he tried in later life to pretend that this was not so. He would not see Boston again for another nine years. Josiah read Sir William’s letter, and found it very odd: who had ever thought of setting up a boy in business, still three years short of adulthood? Impressed though he was by his son’s success in Pennsylvania, he would not offer anything financial. Even when Captain Holmes stopped by, and told him what he knew about the governor, the answer was still no. The house on Hanover and Union still had a mortgage, Josiah had not yet repaid the money he borrowed to pay for James’s printing press, and he had gone into debt again to help one of his sons-in-law. He wrote to Sir William thanking him politely, but refusing to help.

  So Benjamin set off for Philadelphia, with his father’s letter and a cargo of books. Early in May, he signed an IOU for three guineas in favor of a Boston bookseller, John Phillips. This was a lot of money to spend on books—in 1724, three guineas would have purchased five annual subscriptions to the Courant—and so it must be that Franklin was buying stock to sell from Keimer’s shop. Phillips had a title on offer that would have been ideal: Onania, or “the heinous sin of self-pollution,” an exposé of the evil effects of masturbation. The book had sold well in London. It was exactly the kind of thing that Keimer dealt in. Since the IOU would not fall due for repayment until the following January, they would have plenty of time to sell any copies they bought.11

  At this moment, at the very outset of his business career, Franklin made a foolish error. Many decades later, i
t would still make him wince with regret. Once again, we find that the finest passages of Franklin’s memoirs concern episodes of frailty—sometimes his own, sometimes other people’s—and this one was even more painful because it involved his betrayal of a sibling.

  The sloop that carried Franklin called in at Newport, Rhode Island. There amid the traders in rum and whale oil, his favorite brother, sixteen years his senior, followed the family craft of boiling soap and making candles. John Franklin was another ingenious artisan, who loved his copper vats and iron furnace and his imported English encyclopedias. A man with an eye for business—in the press, he promised to sell his wares “at the lowest prices for present money”—John was trying to develop a secret recipe for making “crown soap,” a premium product that might make his fortune. He greeted Benjamin warmly, and then he introduced him to an acquaintance. And this led to the episode that caused Franklin so much distress.12

  In affluent Newport, John was friendly with a silversmith, Samuel Vernon. A successful man in his forties, an elder of his church with a career in public service ahead of him, Vernon made bowls and tankards for clients that included Yale College. His business contacts extended as far as Pennsylvania, where Vernon had a debtor who owed him some £35 in local money. It was another large sum, about a year’s earnings for a skilled workman. But since Benjamin was John Franklin’s brother, and John was a churchgoer too, Vernon had every reason to think that Benjamin could be trusted. The silversmith signed a document authorizing the young man to receive the money on his behalf.13

  A tankard made by the Rhode Island silversmith and politician Samuel Vernon, who in 1723 entrusted Franklin with money Vernon was owed in Pennsylvania.

  In England and the colonies alike, aspiring young men needed patrons; but they also needed to be seen as people of integrity, whose word was their bond. Their IOUs had to be honest, and when they acted as intermediaries their probity had to be unquestionable. How else could the economy function? In an America where hard cash was scarce, and paper money like Sir William’s was new and unproven, people in business had to trust each other. Communications were slow. Long-distance debts would often go unpaid for months or years, as merchants waited for the harvest to come in, for trappers to return from the interior, or for ships to sail back from the West Indies or Great Britain. In trusting Franklin as he did, Samuel Vernon was taking a risk; but he was also setting the young man a test, to see if he was an honest broker who could meet his obligations. Despite his studies of virtue in Plutarch or the life of Socrates, Franklin failed the test first time around.