Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  Even so, enough material survives to tell us what they were striving to achieve. In the Delaware valley, with Indian country still so close at hand, the Junto’s members were immersed in the challenging affairs of a colony engaged in headlong expansion. In the year the club was founded, as many as 1,200 immigrants arrived from Germany, and by the early 1730s settlers from Pennsylvania had crossed the Susquehanna and were spilling to the south toward Virginia. In the next fifteen years, the population would double in the Quaker province.

  For Coleman, Grace, and the other members of the Junto, all of this spelled opportunity. The opening up of the interior, the flying sparks of iron furnaces and forges, the ships sailing in and out of the river: to make the best of all this, they needed adult education of the kind the Junto could provide. Never meant to be merely a talking shop, the club addressed the practical needs of young men with work to do. Take William Parsons, for example, a Junto member whose career was very Pennsylvanian. Franklin remembered him as an agitated soul. Given how much he was trying to accomplish, this is understandable. Parsons is said to have been born in England in 1701 and brought over to America as a child. By the mid-1720s he was married to a German immigrant, devoutly Lutheran in her beliefs, and he was earning a living making and mending shoes for customers who included William Coleman: a menial trade from which he longed to escape.10

  Somehow William Parsons made enough money to become a partner of Scull’s in the Indian Head. He also acquired the skills of a scrivener; but his true love was mathematics and geometry. He dabbled in astrology, perhaps with a view to writing almanacs, but by 1730 he had found his calling as a surveyor of land. After a slow start, Parsons became the surveyor of choice for demanding clients, including not only James Logan and the Penns, but also German-speaking settlers staking out their farms around the new township of Reading, sixty miles inland. His field books survive, containing not only hundreds of surveys but also an exercise in which, by way of triangulation, he precisely measured the width of the Delaware.

  It was just the kind of puzzle that Franklin also enjoyed. At the Junto, he and his friends could help each other by finding new clients, by learning how to write reports and letters, and even by perfecting their skills with algebra. Another member was Thomas Godfrey, a glazier who taught himself to be a fine mathematician. Awkward in company, Godfrey could be pedantic and tiresome; but he invented a new kind of quadrant, an instrument for fixing latitude on land and sea by observations of the sun and the stars. What better friend could William Parsons have?

  And so at their Friday night sessions, well supplied with wine, the Junto cultivated their minds and each other. The meetings began with the reading of twenty-four “standing queries,” as Franklin described them, a program of work ideally suited to the Pennsylvania of 1727. “Hath any citizen in your knowledge,” it was asked, “failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause? Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what cause?” And so the Junto queries went on.

  Have we met good people, or bad ones, the healthy or the sick, what makes them as they are and what can be done to help them? What fascinating things have we seen or read about, in books to do with history, medicine, travel, or—of course—“mechanic arts”? Can the colonial laws be improved? Is freedom in danger, from what they called “any encroachment on the just liberties of the people”? There spoke Benjamin Franklin, the Whig; his club took little interest in party politics. “Do you think of anything at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind? To their country, to their friends, or to themselves?” It was as broad an agenda as anyone could wish for.

  As well as being apolitical, the club was also entirely secular. As far as we know, nothing quite like the Junto had been seen before in America, where the usual venues for debate were the elected assemblies or the chapel. And so the question arises: how did Franklin arrive at something so new to the colonies? Of course, when Franklin invented the Junto he drew upon his reading; but by now it had been so voracious that it is often hard to say exactly which of the books he studied had tilted him in a particular direction. One school of thought finds his inspiration for the club in Cotton Mather, who in the early 1700s had convened two discussion groups for “congenial gentlemen,” with the aim of fostering civic and religious virtue in Boston. Possibly; but Franklin was not long home from London, a city full of clubs and societies, created in the pursuit of ingenuity, and above all the Royal Society, intended from its outset to be a vehicle for what its founders called “the improvement of peaceable arts.” There were English models for the Junto more relevant than Mather’s clubs, with their narrower focus on religion.11

  Given that it met in a tavern at the end of the working week—because of Keimer’s preference for keeping the Jewish Sabbath, he shut up shop at sunset on Fridays, not Saturdays—the club may really have begun as a more civilized version of the Chapel Drinks that Franklin knew in London. But if we need literary sources for what Franklin was trying to achieve, they can be found in John Locke, in The Spectator, and even perhaps in Gulliver’s Travels. When Scull wrote a poem in praise of the sessions at the Indian Head, his proudest boast was that when they talked philosophy, they used “lofty language…such as fam’d Swift or Addison might own.”12

  In the opening essays of their masterpiece, Steele and Addison described their fictional society, the Spectator Club, devoted, as they put it, to “the advancement of the public weal”: a phrase that described the Junto as well. As for Jonathan Swift, his most famous book went on sale in 1726 and rapidly made its way to America. In its pages we find the noble Houyhnhnms, the virtuous horses who pondered weighty questions while they munched their hay: and perhaps they were another model for the Junto. Of one thing there can be no doubt at all. For help in drafting the Junto’s detailed rules, Franklin turned to Locke the philosopher.13

  Each new member had to make an affirmation—not to swear an oath, which Quakers could not do—of his goodwill, his love of mankind and the truth, and his commitment to free speech. “Do you think any person ought to be harmed,” they were asked, “for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship?” They were supposed to answer “no.” As the scholar Dorothy Grimm showed in 1956, Franklin took the text of the affirmation almost word for word from an essay by Locke, in which the philosopher laid down rules for a weekly society that met “for their improvement in useful knowledge.”14

  Three centuries on, we might choose to be cynical, dismissing the Junto as a clique of careerists who merely hoped to make friends, influence people, and grow rich. Of course there was an element of that; but as always with Franklin, there were also doubts and scruples and debates about what it meant to be successful. Just as Hogarth had asked questions in his paintings about the definition of virtue and success, in a new, commercial world where the Christian God so often seemed to be absent, so the Junto wondered what it meant to be good.

  Certainly they wished to make money: how could they not, in such a dynamic colony? But their reading of Addison and the like told them that they should be gentlemen as well, tolerant, polite, and generous. Torn between these motives, they asked themselves: Should we be rich or should we be virtuous? And what did words such as virtue, gentility, wisdom, and prudence really signify? Did a life of commerce have to be filled with greed alone? Or was the pursuit of riches virtuous in itself, if it encouraged honesty and thrift, and provided the means for philanthropy? As they put it: “what general conduct of life is most suitable for men in such circumstances as most of the members of the Junto are?…Which is best: to make a friend of a wise and good man that is poor; or a rich man that is neither wise nor good? Which of the two is the greatest loss to a country, if they both die?”

  These were pressing questions for young men who knew that if they were to survive in Pennsylvania, they would require powerful friends and patrons. From his differing experiences with Keith, R
alph, and Denham, Franklin also knew how difficult it was to find and to keep them. In the autumn of 1727, with the Junto only just off the ground, he met with a cruel reminder that he had yet to acquire the patron he needed. All he had was a boss, and a bad one.

  OUT ON HIS OWN, AGAIN

  A moment of crisis was bound to occur, when Franklin struck out on his own: he had to be independent. The moment came with a shout in the street and a melodrama in Mr. Keimer’s workshop.

  That fall they were printing the 1728 issue of Titan Leeds’s almanac, enlarged by Samuel Keimer to include what he called “very remarkable and notable things, more than usual”: chiefly a poem warning that excessive drinking led to sodomy and a report from the Royal Society explaining how to use pigeon dung to make a liquid fertilizer. Well before year end, copies of this edifying volume had to be shipped up to Massachusetts, where Keimer was now in competition with James Franklin. With the Courant now defunct, James had moved to Newport, where he entered the market for calendars with his new Rhode Island Almanac, also known as Poor Robin’s. In Boston, John Franklin would sell it from his soap and candle store.

  One day as Benjamin was hard at work, he heard a commotion down the street, outside the courthouse. Probably it was October 2, when the elections for the General Assembly were held, and Franklin put his head out of the window to see what was happening. From the sidewalk, Keimer saw him taking time off from his printing and instantly he lost his temper. The neighbors heard the vile words that Keimer threw at Franklin, making him out to be no better than a lazy chattel. Perhaps the bearded heretic was drunk—Franklin does not say so, but that is the way it sounds—and he stormed up into the workshop, where they had a fierce quarrel.

  When Keimer gave him three months’ notice to quit, Franklin did the inevitable. He walked out, pausing only to ask his colleague Hugh Meredith to mind his belongings. That evening, when the Welshman brought them round, he had more to offer than sympathy: he also had a business proposition. After persuading Franklin not to go back to Boston, he pointed out that Keimer, so careless, so rude, and so eccentric, had no real future in Philadelphia. Being heavily in debt, he was bound to fail sooner or later; at which point Franklin could take his place.

  What if we set up in business together? That was Meredith’s suggestion. His time as an apprentice with Keimer would be up the following spring. In the meanwhile, they could import from London the equipment they required. The money would come from his landowning father, Simon Meredith, who was in Philadelphia for the assembly: in that year’s election, he won a seat for Chester County. The old man had a high opinion of Franklin, hoping that he could keep Hugh away from hard liquor.

  Mr. Meredith liked the plan; so did Franklin; and a deal was rapidly agreed. The year’s last ships for London were due to sail by the end of November, and one of them carried an inventory, drawn up by Franklin, setting out what they needed. With the new venture cloaked in secrecy, Meredith went back to Keimer while Franklin tried to find work with Andrew Bradford: who had nothing to offer. For a few days he was idle; and then Keimer sent an olive branch, offering to take him back, all bitterness forgotten, so that he could undertake a lucrative new assignment.

  During the recession of 1722, New Jersey had also issued paper money, backed by mortgages granted by a land bank. By now the paper bills were worn out and ragged, passing as they did through many hands. In those distant days, New Jersey was seen as a paragon of fiscal prudence, and so its currency circulated widely and traded at a premium to notes issued elsewhere. Besides being faded and decrepit, the Jersey bills were also far too easy to forge.

  So toward the end of 1727, the assemblymen of New Jersey decided to print £10,000 in new notes to be swapped with the old. Their usual printer was William Bradford in Manhattan, but they put the deal out to tender and Samuel Keimer made a bid, with Franklin as his selling point. With the skills he had acquired in London, Franklin could create a new, more elaborate bill that would be impossible to fake; and so they won the contract.

  Off they went to Burlington early in 1728, where Franklin fit in at once. Having met so long ago with John Browne, the freethinking doctor at nearby Bordentown, he already had a link to the area; and now as he printed their new paper money, he gained a wider reputation in New Jersey as a young man of ingenuity. Where Keimer was difficult and crude, Franklin was refined and literary, but also very competent. In the three months he spent there, Franklin made a long list of new friends whose names he carefully recorded in his memoirs.

  Allen, Pearson, Bustill, and Decow: none of whom were famous, so that today the list feels like an awkward interruption to the flow of Franklin’s narrative, but if he thought the names had to be mentioned, then we must ask why this was so. Of course, they were a local elite—the officials who supervised the paper money—and so, by giving us their names, Franklin is telling us that he was moving up in the world. That had always been the Franklin goal, from Northamptonshire onward. In his memoirs, Franklin writes at length about Isaac Decow, who acted as surveyor general of the western section of New Jersey. Decow was “shrewd” and “sagacious,” says Franklin, who likes the fact that Decow started his working life in a brickworks, wheeling a barrow of clay. He also admires the manner in which Decow came to be a surveyor: self-taught, like William Parsons or his uncle Thomas, land agent and surveyor at Ecton. In the shape of Isaac Decow, he saw the kind of person he wanted to be: someone who emerged from obscurity to command respect.

  There was something else as well. During his period in Burlington, Franklin mingled with men whose lives revolved around real estate: not urban property, but rural land in what was still a frontier province, with empty space available for settlers from Europe. Although technically New Jersey was now a royal colony, governed from New York, the power in the province really lay with the men who owned its land, the Proprietors, as they were known; and the people with whom Franklin made friends were their local representatives.

  Isaac Pearson, for instance: in western New Jersey, he was the Proprietors’ clerk. Working with Samuel Bustill, in the late 1720s he secured Decow’s appointment as the provincial surveyor, earning fees from every farmer who wanted to carve out his slice of soil. In New Jersey, each plot had to be registered with a map, and so Decow conducted many hundreds of surveys during his twenty-year career.15

  For Franklin the printer, Decow and the others could be immensely valuable friends. In the 1730s, Bustill became the clerk to the governor’s council, and John Allen and Decow took turns to serve as treasurer of western New Jersey, holding the colony’s tax revenues. They would need not only new paper money, but also mortgage deeds, official forms, printed copies of laws and regulations, and much else which Franklin would supply. They could also be of use in a less tangible way, by helping with the evolution of his ideas about America.

  Frontier expansion: that was the point. Throughout his career in politics, from the 1740s until his death, Franklin would always have a passion for the west. Franklin hoped one day to see the far away Ohio valley filled with former Europeans: preferably Anglo-Saxon, though if Englishmen were not available he was prepared to make do with the Irish or the Germans. Back in Boston, in the days of the Courant, western dreams of such a kind had never entered his mind. For James Franklin and the Couranteers, Indian affairs and the frontier might provide an opportunity for colorful tales and tasteless humor, but they did not command their serious attention. The Philadelphia Franklin was very different, with expansion to the west a fundamental element of his philosophy.

  His passion for the frontier had its roots in the friendships he made in his twenties. In 1741 his fellow member of the Junto, William Parsons, became Decow’s opposite number as the surveyor general of Pennsylvania. With friends and allies such as these, whose careers depended on the flow of immigrants and the opening up of new territory, it was bound to be the case that Franklin would also turn his eyes across the watersh
ed, into the deep hinterland whose rivers drained down into the Mississippi.

  In the meantime he had to break free from Samuel Keimer. In the spring of 1728, at last the London ships came back to Philadelphia, and with them the type and the printing press he needed. And so Franklin and Meredith left Keimer for good, took a lease on a house in Market Street, and sublet a part of it to the mathematical glazier Thomas Godfrey and his wife and children. In came the first printing client, a farmer with five shillings to spend on a small job; and so they on their way.

  More work arrived from their Junto friends, with Joseph Breintnall the scrivener giving them their first big break. The son of a haberdasher who had been among William Penn’s earliest settlers, Breintnall was their contact among the leaders of the Quaker community. For the past five years, the Quakers had been trying to publish an American edition of a history of their movement, seven hundred pages long, turning for help first to Bradford, and then to Keimer, only to be met with endless delays. Determined to get the job done, with Breintnall as the go-between they went to Franklin, asking him to print the final section of the book.16

  It was a job well within his capabilities, just forty-four sheets, each one accounting for four pages of text, but with other work piling up much of it had to be done after-hours. The hard part was the compositing, which often kept Franklin up until eleven. With the tidy habits of a London printer, once each sheet of the Quaker book was printed off he insisted on replacing all the lead characters in the correct place in his racks of type before he went to bed, so that the following morning he could make a prompt start. Here again was the “regularity” that Samuel Palmer had looked for in his staff. One night, by accident Franklin broke one of his trays, scattering the little letters all over the floor. He put them all back together before turning in.