Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  With their help, Franklin saw off the threat of competition from Mr. Keimer’s former apprentice, David Harry. The son of another Welsh farmer with an ample plot of land and with friends in politics, he was as unprofessional as Hugh Meredith. Too showy and too sociable, Harry turned out to be another failure in business so that in the end he sold his equipment and followed Keimer to Barbados. That left Franklin with only one publishing rival: Andrew Bradford.

  Although Franklin was inclined to sneer at Bradford, in fact he was a formidable foe, often quicker on the draw and also far less reliant on Andrew Hamilton, whom the Mercury attacked on many occasions. When it did so, Franklin had to leap to Hamilton’s defense. Bradford also ran the city’s post office, a position that enabled him to gather news and to distribute the Mercury. Franklin would spend much of the next ten years locked in professional combat with Bradford for the printing trade of Pennsylvania.1

  In time, Franklin would supplant his rival as the postmaster: but not until 1737. Bradford had his own network—he was one of the investors in the Durham Iron Company—and he would not be defeated easily. Franklin had to play a very long game, but that was one of his best attributes: sheer persistency. In 1730 he was also building bridges back to his family in Boston, from whom he had become so distant. His sister Jane, who was now Mrs. Edward Mecom, suffered the loss of a child in May. In reply to the news, Franklin wrote to another of his sisters, Sarah Davenport, with a letter in which he was kind and charming, showing concern for all his many siblings, and mentioning each one by name.2

  “At present I am much hurried in business but hope to make a short trip to Boston in the spring,” he writes. But three more years were to pass before the trip took place, which is revealing in itself. Franklin harbored no compelling urge to revisit his old haunts. However tenderly he felt toward his family, he had little time for Massachusetts as a place or as a state of mind. Cotton Mather was dead—he passed away early in 1728—and not a trace of evidence survives to show that Franklin mourned his loss. By this moment in his career, Franklin had gone far beyond whatever Mr. Mather might once have offered. He was now committed to Pennsylvania, where the dynamics of history and ideas were so different from those of New England.

  Be that as it may, his family in Boston had heard a rumor that he was about to marry. They felt entitled to know more. And although Franklin denied it, there was a grain of truth in the story. He had continued to share his house with his mathematical friend, Thomas Godfrey, whose wife had been trying to arrange a match between Franklin and the daughter of some relatives. The girl was “very deserving,” Franklin says, their courtship proceeded, and her family offered every encouragement. All of this seems to have happened late in 1729 and in the first few months of 1730.

  By the spring, the moment had come to talk about money. As a condition of the marriage going ahead, Franklin wanted £100 to clear away his remaining debts. This sort of gesture was a Franklin family tradition, dating back at least as far as his uncle John in Banbury, who had bided his time to marry until he found a wife with some wealth of her own. In Benjamin’s case the girl’s parents refused, pleading poverty. Franklin advised them to mortgage their house at the Loan Office, which was now in business again and lending freely.

  To which he received a deeply insulting reply. Mrs. Godfrey came back with the news that the family had gone to see the wily Andrew Bradford. A cunning adversary, he had informed them that printing was a wretched, unprofitable business and that Franklin would soon be bankrupt. And so he was barred from their house, and the girl was locked away. Of course, this might be a ploy—Franklin suspected as much—but when Mrs. Godfrey tried to keep the thing alive by hinting that the girl and her parents were still willing, he refused to have anything more to do with them.

  Proud as well as miffy people, the Franklins did not care to be manipulated. Two years later he turned the episode into a sketch for the Gazette, writing as Anthony Afterwit, in which he called the girl’s father an “old curmudgeon” and cast himself in the role of “an honest tradesman, who never meant harm to anybody.” Although he remained a friend of Mr. Godfrey, an honored member of the Junto, Franklin and Mrs. Godfrey fell out. In April the Godfreys left his house and Franklin was on his own again. He found that everywhere the story was the same. There were wives to be had, but not ones with money. Their parents would not tolerate a printer, so bad a reputation had the trade acquired.

  And so he cast his eye up Market Street toward his old flame. Abandoned by her spouse, Deborah was sad and solitary. For this, Franklin blamed himself: if only he had not forgotten her when he went to London, she might never have married the unreliable potter. Rogers was still a problem—until he was proven to be dead or a bigamist, he was still her lawful husband—but Deborah had something extra that made up for any inconvenience that he might cause.

  The previous year, with her father’s mortgage still outstanding, the Loan Office had repossessed the Read house. Mrs. Read had bought it back at auction—her ointment business was clearly doing well—and so in time Deborah and her siblings could expect to inherit the property. The house was small but it was tangible, worth nearly £400, an asset that might be leveraged to help the Franklin firm.

  He was also very fond of Deborah, and she of him. In the summer of 1730 their courtship was resumed, and in September they became man and wife. Not legally—they could never marry while the fate of Mr. Rogers was unknown—but that did not seem to trouble anyone. A pillar of the congregation, Mrs. Franklin went on worshipping at Christ Church. It was a tolerant sort of place, where it seems that she was accepted as an Anglican without any quibbles about her marital status. The most distinguished member of the church was another woman cast aside by her husband: Lady Keith, left behind by Sir William when he sailed for England. In the circumstances of colonial life, where it was so easy for people to go missing, never to be traced, Deborah could expect her friends at Christ Church to be sympathetic.

  If anyone had misbehaved, it was her new partner. At some date before the Franklins moved in together, Benjamin had become a father. And here we arrive at what might appear to be another mystery: a secret perhaps so shameful that Franklin kept it locked away in one of the sealed compartments of his life. Reluctantly or not, Deborah agreed to take in the child—when this happened, and how old William was when it did, we cannot say—and he was raised as her own. But beyond that we know almost nothing.

  HIS NATURAL SON

  Just as we might never know the fate of Mrs. T, so the full story of the birth of William Franklin will probably never come to light. Notoriously, in his memoirs Franklin passed over the episode in complete silence. But this does not mean that it was always a mystery, or that Franklin went out of his way to hide what he had done. As we shall see, the story was most likely very simple, a commonplace incident that would have raised few eyebrows at the time. For that very reason, the episode may tell us something revealing about the Philadelphia of Franklin’s early life.

  As we try to get grips with this murky affair, the best place to start is close to the end, in 1777 and 1778 when the British Army occupied the city. Every officer who held the king’s commission would have seen it as his duty to sniff out any gossip that might damage the reputation of the traitor Franklin. But although they had plenty of time in which to do so, at parties or around the dinner table, nothing came to light. We know that the redcoats rifled through Franklin’s papers. They came away none the wiser.

  In England in 1779, an item about William’s birth appeared in The Morning Post, a newspaper whose editor was secretly in the pay of the British government. Accusing Franklin of what he called “consummate hypocrisy,” the writer claimed to know that William’s mother was “an oyster wench.” Franklin had left her to die of hunger and disease, or so he alleged: but he gave no further details. If the redcoats had unearthed anything concrete, the full story would have been all over London.3

 
From that, we can reach at least one firm conclusion: that by then, the wench in question had vanished long since, dead or gone far away. Did The Morning Post have a source? In all likelihood, the newspaper merely picked up old press clippings from the colonies and embellished the story, in British tabloid fashion, with an invented reference to oysters. In the 1750s and 1760s, when Franklin was fighting political battles with homegrown enemies in Pennsylvania, a few items had appeared in print in America seeking to smear his name. The most elaborate libel claimed that William’s mother was a prostitute named Barbara. It was said the Franklins had taken her on as a servant, cruelly mistreated her, and then left Barbara to die a pauper’s death. Could this really be true? If it were, the British would have left no stone unturned until they found someone who could confirm the story. And yet they failed to discover anything of the kind.

  Was this because Franklin had taken the utmost care to cover his tracks? In the 1990s, Professor Carla J. Mulford made the suggestion that, in fact, William’s mother was not a woman of the streets at all, but a lady of reputation. If so, then perhaps all the things Franklin said about his low intrigues were merely a smokescreen, intended to hide her identity forever. In the same vein, the Franklin biographer Leo Lemay argued that perhaps she was the wife of a friend, with whom he had an affair while the husband was away on business.

  These are interesting ideas, but for two reasons we can probably leave them on one side. First, Philadelphia was still a small place. Even Franklin could not be ingenious enough to have the child delivered, spirited away, suckled by a wet nurse, and taken in by Deborah without the neighbors (or the cuckold) noticing that something was afoot. Pregnancies are not so easy to conceal. Second, we have some evidence from a family friend that points in a different direction.

  It would appear that the British simply never persuaded the right people to talk. In 1777, the few old Junto members who were still alive in Philadelphia would have known the truth: but they were not the kind of people who would betray their old comrade. The most relevant was one of Franklin’s closest friends and political allies, Hugh Roberts. A man by now in his seventies, he was ideally placed to have known who William’s mother was. In the 1730s he owned a store selling tobacco and hardware on 2nd Street, a short walk from the house where Benjamin lived with Deborah. But Roberts was also a lifelong Quaker and a pacifist, who kept firmly neutral during the Revolutionary War, by which time he was devoted to the cause of freeing the African slaves. He had no reason to want to help the redcoats. Although he lived on until 1786, it seems that Roberts never told the British what he knew.4

  However, in earlier times Hugh Roberts had been a garrulous fellow, happy to share his memories of the Junto. In 1758, when Franklin the scientist had recently sailed off to London to receive the acclaim of the Royal Society, Roberts attended a party to celebrate the news of his safe arrival. That evening he told a string of anecdotes—now sadly lost—about the young Franklin. Five years later, his son George wrote a private letter that appears to draw upon the stories he heard on this or a similar occasion.

  He put pen to paper in 1763, when the speculation about William’s mother was at its height. “ ’Tis generally known here his birth is illegitimate and his mother is not in good circumstances,” George Roberts wrote, “but the report of her begging bread in the streets of this city is without the least foundation in truth. I understand small provision is made by him for her, but her being none of the most agreeable women prevents particular notice being shown, or the father and son acknowledging any connection with her.”5

  I agree with another Franklin biographer, Walter Isaacson, that these words are the nearest we will get to the truth. There is nothing here that is unlikely. Indeed the story sounds all too familiar. Perhaps the most significant phrase is this: “ ’Tis generally known.” The conclusion to which we are driven has to be as follows. Hugh Roberts knew the facts because in the 1730s, when the affair was so recent, Franklin made no effort to conceal what had occurred. It would have been impossible to do so. Nor would anyone have expected him to try. On Market Street, so close to the waterfront where human beings black or white were put up for sale as a matter of routine, nobody would have found the incident surprising.

  In the city of Andrew Hamilton, a freethinking place full of transients, it was taken for granted that young men would have affairs of the sort. Only later—when Franklin was an eminence, in politics and science—did he feel obliged to draw a veil over the episode. And by then, in the 1760s, perhaps the tone of public life in Philadelphia had changed as well, to become more pious or more hypocritical. He was also lucky to have friends like Hugh Roberts who knew how to keep what had become an embarrassing secret.

  There is another thing of which we can be sure. In his young manhood, when he was still only twenty-five, the affair did Franklin no harm at all. On the contrary, his readiness to accept the little boy as his own may well have enhanced his reputation for honesty. In the twelve months after he and Deborah moved in together, Franklin enjoyed something close to an annus mirabilis. Happily married at last, he entered 1731 in what seems to have been a confident mood, ready to seize every chance that came to hand.

  It would be an excellent year for him and for the Junto, a year in which he reached out beyond Mr. Hamilton to win the esteem of other men quite as influential. At the same time, his career in business entered a new chapter. By the end of 1731, Franklin had begun to create a publishing network that would take him far beyond the borders of his colony. Other men had tried to do this before; not only the Bradfords, but also Franklin’s brother James and even Samuel Keimer, with his string of agents selling his almanacs from Maryland to Massachusetts. But Franklin would find a new, more ingenious way to spread his wings beyond Pennsylvania, at a moment that proved to be ideal.

  He also arrived at a new philosophy. Since his teenage years in Boston, when he began to skip the chapel, he had been pondering deeply, thinking many thoughts about God, about metaphysics, and about the meaning of virtue. In 1731, at last Franklin completed the creation of his own personal, synthetic religion, in a form that would endure, with occasional shifts in tone and emphasis, until the day of his death. Best of all perhaps, it was a system of belief that he could own up to in public and share with other people.

  The Articles of Belief that Franklin drew up in 1728 had been poetically satisfying, but they were too emotional. They contained elements—multiple worlds and multiple gods—that might sound too esoteric, or even bizarre. And so he kept the Articles a secret. His new creed would be rather vague, but that was all to the good: Franklin did not wish to be dogmatic. Although it could never truly be described as Christian, his system could not be called anti-Christian either. For all practical purposes, it was little different from the liberal Anglican views of the old “latitude man,” Archbishop Tillotson. And it was a set of ideas that did not have to be concealed.

  In a word: Franklin became a Freemason. His interpretation of what it meant to be a mason was very much his own, but that was part of the magic of Freemasonry. It was a form of belief that made perfect sense in the free and easy atmosphere of Pennsylvania. At one and the same time, a man could be a mason and also an Anglican, or a Presbyterian, or even a Roman Catholic, or he might choose to be a Quaker or to worship in no church at all. It was a creed for all seasons; and becoming a mason could also be rather good for one’s career.

  THE ALMIGHTY ARCHITECT

  In the middle years of the eighteenth century, there was nothing secret or subversive about the Freemasons of Philadelphia. The masons were the most respectable of people and they could be as visible as they chose. Indeed they were the rulers of the city, its landlords, and its most successful men of business. No one could imagine that among the oligarchs there might be a rebel in the making. Least of all Benjamin Franklin, who as yet had not the slightest inkling that he might one day be a revolutionary.

 
; In the summer of 1755, on the feast day of their patron saint, John the Baptist, the Freemasons gathered in public at Christ Church, with Franklin among them, to hear a sermon from “their reverend brother,” William Smith. An Anglican minister, he was also the provost of the town’s new college. “My worthy brethren”—or so he described his fellow masons, sisters not being permitted to join—you belong to “a society of friends, linked in a strong bond of brotherly love, together with their other ties, for the advancement of humanity and good fellowship, rational religion, true liberty and useful knowledge.” United they stood, as one in their allegiance to King George. The king was mentioned many, many times.6

  Apart from his majesty, the Freemasons also acknowledged a rather higher deity. The God in whom they chose to believe went by the name of “the Almighty Architect.” Alias “the Master Builder,” he was an ecumenical divinity who smiled upon success, and there were few towns that had done as splendidly as this one. Or so they were told by William Smith. His oratory went down well. The masons gave a vote of thanks to Mr. Smith, and ordered that his sermon should be published.

  Giving the decree was the merchant and land owner William Allen, grand master of the masons of the province, and also—since 1750—chief justice of Pennsylvania. Nearby was an Englishman, invited as a guest, their masonic friend John Penn, who was one of the co-owners of the colony. And at the very heart of the same elite we also find Benjamin Franklin. At the age of forty-nine, he was present at the meeting as William Allen’s deputy. And when the sermon came to be printed, Franklin was the man who preserved it for posterity.

  As we know today, in later life he would drift away from the complacency that was so obvious at civic functions such as this. As he grew older, Franklin would evolve to be more radical, and more egalitarian: an unusual destiny for someone who had been so successful. Over time, it seems that he gradually lost interest in the details of Freemasonry, with its meetings and its ceremonies. Perhaps he came to feel that it was rather phony; perhaps he did not care for the rhetoric about King George; or perhaps he just had other ways to spend his time.