by Nick Bunker
The problem began when the sloop arrived in New York. On the way down from Newport, Franklin had narrowly avoided two calamities, when the sloop scraped a rock at sea, and then when he caught the eye of two young women on board. Given what he knew about what went on by night on Boston Common, he should have seen that they were dangerous, but he was still all too naive. It was only when a Quaker lady on the boat warned him against them that he saw that he had to steer clear. They turned out to be strumpets and petty thieves, who had lifted a silver spoon from the captain’s cabin. This had been a lucky escape, but when he reached Manhattan he could not avoid a hazard of another kind.
It was John Collins, fresh down from Boston, and on his breath he carried the odor of brandy. A prey not only to drink but also to gambling, he needed money, and thanks to Mr. Vernon the young Franklin had money to offer. Between them, John Collins and Governor Keith had the potential to end his career almost before it began.
IDLENESS AND INDUSTRY
Just as we remember Franklin as the master of the positive, so we also think of him as someone with a genius for sociability. The founder of clubs and societies, he was a fascinating companion whom people wanted to know: the only exceptions being the more pompous variety of British politicians. It was taken for granted that an ingenious person had to be affable. One had to be clever but also to wear one’s intellect lightly, so as to be a person everybody hoped to run into at the coffeehouse. And not only that: an ingenious woman or man was also somebody with experience. He or she had learned to be discerning, knowing how to choose friends carefully.
That was the way Franklin was, but only after the age of twenty-five or so. In his youth and very early manhood, he was sociable but he knew nothing about discernment. His early friendships were mostly disastrous. It was inevitable, really. With his history of irreverence on The New-England Courant, his skeptical ideas, and with what the disapproving Josiah called his talent for “lampooning and libelling,” Franklin appeared to be someone who could be persuaded to bend the rules. So it was with John Collins. Seduced by Franklin’s tales of life amid the Quakers, he had quit his job at the Boston post office, and hoped to find a place as a clerk in Philadelphia.
During their years of friendship in Boston, Franklin had seen Collins as a paragon of virtue, industrious and sober. By the time they met again in New York he was penniless. Franklin had to pay his bill and his fare to Philadelphia, and when they reached the town things went from bad to worse. They were only together for three months before Collins left for Barbados in August, in search of a post as a tutor. These would be three of the longest months of Franklin’s life.
While he went back to work for Samuel Keimer, Collins moved in with his friend at the Read house, where at the age of forty-seven John Read was gravely ill. He would die in September, bequeathing his mortgage debt to Sarah. Still drinking, and quarrelsome when he was in liquor, Collins with his taint of alcohol could not find a job. By now, Franklin had collected the sum owed to Samuel Vernon, and so Collins pestered him for loans. Of course Franklin should have said no, but he had more than a touch of vanity. Not one but two colonial governors had singled him out as a brilliant young man: the second was William Burnet, the governor of New York, who—while Franklin was passing through the town—had heard about his chest full of books from John Phillips and had given him a tour of his library. And so Franklin dipped into Vernon’s money. In dribs and drabs he lent it to Collins, until it had all but disappeared.
In the meantime his conspiracy with Sir William continued, over more private dinners at the governor’s mansion. Keith read Josiah’s letter, politely disagreed with what he wrote, and made a very generous suggestion. He would lend Franklin the money to buy a printing press and whatever else he needed from England. Deeply grateful, Franklin compiled an inventory—the equipment would cost £100 in sterling, as much as James had spent on his apparatus—and the governor gave his approval. Better still, what if the young man went to London himself, to choose the lead type and everything else? Deeply flattered, Franklin said yes. It was agreed that he would sail for England later that year on the annual mail boat, the London Hope. He would carry a letter of credit from Sir William, promising to pay for everything the young man acquired.
What was going on? Franklin could not see what the governor was up to. On May 28—King George’s birthday—while Franklin was in Boston, Keith and Colonel French had carried through their plan to make New Castle independent. Keimer was given the task of printing the city charter, issued in the name of His Majesty: something Sir William had no authority to do. And then in June at last James Logan reappeared from England on the London Hope, a ship so racked with fever that the master died soon after they landed. With him Logan carried the ultimatum from Hannah Penn, ordering Sir William to curtail the flow of paper money.
With Logan sure to be enraged by the events at New Castle, it was all the more essential for Keith to have allies in the press. For a while he could ignore the letter from Mrs. Penn, whose contents were private. But elections were due in the fall, and the assembly would meet in full session in January. Sooner or later Logan would reveal what Hannah Penn had written. Sir William would need the assembly’s support, and then he would have to battle it out with Logan in the press, on the streets, and in the offices of ministers in London. And so Keith enlisted the help of his old Virginia friend Colonel Spotswood. By now the colonel had been fired from his post as lieutenant governor, with questions being asked about the quantities of land he had accumulated in the west. That summer Spotswood was off to England to defend himself; and since the colonel still had friends at court, Sir William wanted him to lobby on his behalf.14
Meanwhile James Logan gathered his own supporters. Of these, the most important was a lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. A Presbyterian, but also a freethinker, he certainly had Scottish roots but whether he was born in Scotland or in Ulster it is impossible to say. A man who never spoke about his past—it was rumored that he had come to the colonies as an indentured servant, or even as a felon—Hamilton was a brilliant advocate. He was also a bully. Another man who liked his drink, he had a manner so brusque that a judge in London once censured him for “scandal and impertinence.” He too was in the game of real estate, amassing his own empire of American soil.15
Hamilton, Logan, Spotswood: these were powerful but dangerous men, whose names would recur time and again in Franklin’s early career, long after Sir William Keith had vanished from the scene. Only by learning how to understand their tactics and their goals could he hope to prosper. When at last he did so, becoming especially close to Andrew Hamilton, Franklin could begin to make his own fortune; but that took time. As yet he was too young to understand their maneuvers.
But not too young to be contemplating marriage. As John Read succumbed to his final illness, Franklin and Deborah began to woo each other. With Mr. Read having died so deeply in debt, the Read family faced what might be a bleak future. Deborah had a brother, John, a carpenter like his father, but he was still only a boy: and so she had every reason to be responsive when their attractive lodger began to make advances. By the time Franklin was ready to sail for London, he had told her the secret of his intrigue with Sir William. Mrs. Read stopped them going too far, too quickly—she wanted to see Franklin set up in business as a printer, before they married—but by November they were more or less betrothed. Or as Franklin put it in his memoirs, as people put it at the time, he and Deborah had “interchanged some promises.”
One obstacle had been removed: the appalling John Collins. He had continued to drink and to borrow money. He quarreled with Franklin, until their friendship reached its end with an ugly incident on the river. They had been out with some other friends in a rowboat, but on the way back Collins refused to take his turn with the oars. Exasperated with his friend, Franklin did the same. Collins swore at him and shaped up for a fight, stepping along the thwarts of the boat and lunging wi
th his fists. Franklin ducked down, grabbed Collins under the thigh, and hurled him into the water. As Collins swam around the boat, still vowing not to lift an oar, Franklin and the others kept him at bay. Each time he came close, they pulled away. Only as night fell and Collins was nearly exhausted did they drag him on board. Soon afterward he vanished off to the West Indies, never to be heard from again. He left Franklin sick with worry about the money he owed to Mr. Vernon.
For consolation he could turn not only to Deborah but to other companions as well. Aquila Rose had made it the fashion for young men with literary tastes to ramble among the trees by the Schuylkill on a Sunday afternoon. So Franklin did the same with three new acquaintances, office clerks who shared his passion for books. Among them was a gifted young man named James Ralph, a few years older than Franklin, already married with a child but restless, frustrated, and eager to see London. His parentage and place of birth are unknown—while there is some evidence that Ralph came from the west of England, this is far from certain—but he was to replace John Collins as Franklin’s closest friend. Their relationship would end almost as badly.
At the hands of most of Franklin’s biographers, James Ralph has been treated still more unkindly than Deborah. While Mrs. Franklin has been sneered at for her looks, her poor spelling, or merely for being a woman, James Ralph has been brushed aside as nothing but an idle dreamer. Like Deborah, he deserves a better fate from posterity. Just as she had a life and a role beyond the making of her husband’s breakfast, so Ralph was far more than merely a foil for Franklin’s genius.
“The celebrated Mr James Ralph”: so he was described in London after his death in 1762. Certainly he had his faults. In his youth he was feckless and unfaithful, a bigamist in fact, and he antagonized people who could ruin his career. But although Ralph came close to disaster, he recovered and eventually enjoyed a modest degree of fame as a fine historian and a shrewd writer about politics. Among his close friends he counted the greatest actor of the eighteenth century, David Garrick, and one of the greatest novelists, Henry Fielding. James Ralph would never have advanced that far if he had been no more than a wastrel.16
Although he could be pompous, Ralph had excellent manners. Somebody who knew him in later life recalled that in conversation Ralph was “agreeable, instructive, and entertaining.” So he was in his youth as well: in Franklin’s words, “I think I never knew a prettier talker.” Besides their ingenuity, the two young men had other things in common. It seems that Ralph had been a Presbyterian, but under Franklin’s influence he became a freethinker. And they both loved poetry. The difference was that Ralph intended to make it his career.17
Among their friends, they held a literary competition of a kind that Uncle Benjamin would have enjoyed. The old man had loved turning the Hebrew psalms into English verse. Now Franklin and his friends set themselves the same challenge, with James Ralph emerging as the winner. He wrote with energy, with color, and with such a command of diction that his poem was met with a round of applause. And that was that: James Ralph decided he was born to be a poet, on a par with Dryden or Pope.
Franklin disagreed. Much as he loved poetry, and much as he admired his friend’s sublimities, he took the same view as Josiah: you couldn’t make a living in that way. He and James Ralph thrashed the matter out, until Ralph appeared to see sense. Married though Ralph was, with a child to provide for, it was agreed that he would cross the Atlantic with Franklin, but not to join the aspiring literati of the capital. Instead, Ralph hoped to make business contacts in England who would use him as their agent to sell their wares in Philadelphia: where, once established as a merchant, he could dedicate his leisure to his Muse. Again, Franklin believed what he was told: that James Ralph planned to remain in London only briefly. Again he allowed himself to be deceived.
At last, after months of waiting, October arrived and the London Hope was ready to sail, free from disease and with a new skipper. At the end of the month, with Franklin and Ralph on board, she dropped down the river to New Castle to pick up the mail. Besides the pelts and the deerskins gathered in by Logan, she was a rather empty ship by way of cargo. That year the tobacco crop failed in Virginia and Maryland, ruined by a tropical storm. Neither did she carry much bullion: in Philadelphia, the merchants still had scarcely a dollar to send to their English creditors, who were always hungry for Spanish silver. Her list of passengers was more impressive, and to Franklin they must have seemed like ideal company. In a month or so at sea, he could mingle as he pleased with men who might be as useful as Sir William Keith.
The list included the greedy Andrew Hamilton. Like Colonel Spotswood, who had left weeks earlier, he was bound for London: in Hamilton’s case to advise Hannah Penn and to defend in the law courts his doubtful title to some real estate he coveted in Philadelpha. There were also two English ironmasters, off to the empire’s capital to do business on behalf of a new forge and foundry in Maryland. For some reason, Franklin noted their names in his memoirs: Mr. Onion and Mr. Russell. It is not clear why they meant so much to him, but the reason may be this. Thomas Russell also came from the Reads’ English hometown of Birmingham, where the Russells were in the iron trade. His partner, Stephen Onion, had his own roots nearby. Most likely, Franklin mentioned their names because steel and iron was a subject he enjoyed, and because he knew—how could he not, being married to Deborah?—how much that business owed to pioneers like these.18
And then there was a Quaker sailing on the London Hope, by the name of Thomas Denham. The son of a shoemaker in the English port of Bristol, he had known adversity and shame. In his youth he had suffered a fate like that of John Collins. He fell into bad company and ran up bad debts, until he had to sail to Pennsylvania. By the time Franklin met him on the boat, Denham had built a new livelihood importing wine and indentured servants, he was a friend of Andrew Hamilton, and he had raised the money to repay his creditors. A chastened man, wise by virtue of experience, Denham became Franklin’s best source of counsel.19
HIS VOYAGE TO LONDON
So there we find Franklin and James Ralph, waiting on the ship at New Castle early in November 1724: but as Franklin tells us in his autobiography, something was wrong. Before leaving Philadelphia, Franklin had called at the governor’s mansion—several times—to collect Sir William’s letter of credit, and some others recommending him to people in London as a trustworthy fellow. Somehow the letters were never forthcoming. The governor would be at New Castle before the ship sailed, Franklin was told: and so indeed Keith was, but still no letters. Franklin went down to the governor’s lodgings in the little town, to be told with the finest courtesy that the letters in his favor would be brought aboard the London Hope before she set sail.
Puzzled or even dismayed, but giving Sir William the benefit of the doubt, Franklin climbed back aboard. Just before the ship set out, Colonel French appeared with the mailbag. He greeted Franklin kindly. Deeply impressed, his fellow passengers invited Ralph and Franklin to share the largest cabin. Andrew Hamilton had gone ashore—in return for a handsome fee, he went back to Philadelphia to plead a case, on behalf of a ship arrested for smuggling—and so he would have to follow them to London on another vessel. But Denham and the ironmasters made the two young men very welcome. Assured by the captain that the pouch would be unsealed once they were in sight of England, Franklin put his anxieties aside, assuming that the letter of credit was inside.
Although Hamilton’s stores kept them well fed, the voyage was long and miserable. The storms that had ravaged the tobacco crop went on until late in the year, crossed the Atlantic, and blew up a hurricane off the coast of Portugal. In such heavy weather they made slow progress. It was only on December 21 that the London Hope dropped anchor in the English Channel. Three days later, Franklin came ashore in the city where Josiah and his brothers had spent so many years: the London where they had listened to the preachers, read the word of God, and colored silk with arsenic and urine
.20
A city with more than 600,000 inhabitants, vastly larger than any American town, it kept on growing and it kept on changing: and so London was now a different place from the one the Franklins of the past had known. The obvious temptations were still there, as they would be in any town—drink, and sex, and gambling—and so were the preachers: but the culture and politics of London had moved on yet again. Even James Franklin, who had been there only six years earlier, would have found that it had characteristics he would not recognize.
After the South Sea Bubble, for a while it had seemed that the Whigs were doomed, so deeply were they tarnished by the financial crash. But they refused to be defeated. Instead they found a new, more competent leader in the shape of Sir Robert Walpole. Obese and a lecher, a man devoid of high ideals, Sir Robert would never be anyone’s hero, but he did have many talents and some virtues: including an aversion to war, and an aptitude for finance. He also commanded the support of George I. By the time Franklin arrived, Walpole had become in effect Great Britain’s first prime minister. Cunning and resilient, he remained in power for the next twenty years.21