Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  But one thing he would never lose: his faith in the original ideals that Freemasons were supposed to embody. Franklin had been one of Philadelphia’s first Freemasons, joining St. John’s Lodge early in 1731. He ranked number nine in the list of members—the wealthy William Allen was number one—and soon the lodge came to overlap with the Junto. In its first decade, the lodge remained small and exclusive, with still only forty-six masons even in 1737, but among them were three other Junto members: Thomas Hopkinson, a recent arrival from England who joined the lodge in 1733; Joseph Breintnall, whose vintage was 1734; and a silversmith, Philip Syng Jr., who would later help Franklin with his experiments with electricity. Another early member was Andrew Hamilton’s son James, who was Allen’s brother-in-law.7

  There can be no doubt that in those pioneering days Franklin was an enthusiastic Freemason. He helped to draft new bylaws for the lodge in 1732, and two years later he served as grand master. What did it mean to him? It may be—though this cannot be shown conclusively—that he had first encountered the movement in London. Even if he did not, by 1731 he would certainly have known that the members of the London lodges were often people of high rank and status.

  They included not only stonemasons and architects, among whom the Craft apparently began, but also men of science; actors, who were especially keen masons; senior officials in Walpole’s government; and members of the aristocracy. When Franklin arrived in the city in 1724, the grand master of England was the Duke of Richmond. His deputy was Martin Folkes, a physician who went on to become the president of the Royal Society. None of this was secret. The names of the leading Freemasons and reports of their principal meetings were published in the London press, and although in theory their rituals were supposed to be private mysteries, in practice their details circulated freely.8

  And so in becoming a mason Franklin knew that he was joining an international fraternity of distinguished people. Of course, one of his motives for doing so must have been ambition, plain and simple. However, evidence survives in plenty from the early 1730s to show that he was sincere in his belief in the principles of brotherhood that his lodge and others tried to uphold. Having witnessed the feuds of Whigs and Tories in England and Sir William Keith’s efforts to bring the same tactics to Pennsylvania, at twenty-five Franklin was already disillusioned with “parties,” in politics or in religion.

  In the winter and spring of 1730–31, one of the London journals he followed—The Craftsman—ran a series of articles headed Remarks on the History of England. The writer traced the evils of the kingdom to what Jonathan Swift and others had called “the rage of party,” dating from the 1670s when the Franklins had seen it at first hand. Whether or not he read those articles Franklin had been studying English history and he came to the same conclusion. In a little memorandum he sent to himself in May 1731, he called for an end to party strife, which he saw as nothing but a mask for self-interest and malice.9

  “Few in public affairs act from a mere view of the good of their country,” he wrote. “Fewer still in public affairs act with a view to the good of mankind.” His solution? In his teens Franklin had known the work of Thomas Tryon, eccentric idealist, and now he proposed something that Tryon would have endorsed. He hoped to see the formation of “an united party of virtue,” to consist of “the virtuous and good men of all nations into a regular body, to governed suitable good and wise rules.” In other words: something like the Freemasons or the Junto, but expanded to encompass the globe.

  While he waited for this brotherhood to appear, he did the best he could to cultivate his virtues. Because in his memoirs Franklin was often rather vague about chronology, it is hard to say precisely when he devised his famous “project of arriving at moral perfection.” With its thirteen-week course of exercises, intended to instill thirteen kinds of virtue, from Temperance to Humility by way of Frugality, Industry, Chastity, and Cleanliness, the project has come in for its share of ridicule from modern writers. In places, as he describes the process, even the elderly Franklin makes gentle fun of his younger self, striving for excellence in morality by way of fearless self-examination: a form of striving, the old man pointed out, that might all too easily lead to what he called “a kind of foppery in morals.” But if we place the project in its original setting—about 1731 or 1732, in his early years of married life and Freemasonry—there is nothing absurd or ridiculous about it.

  Here was a young man who had seen what the lack of these virtues had done to the likes of Collins, Ralph, Governor Keith, and so many others. His affair with William Franklin’s mother was fresh in his memory. While in the eyes of the world he had gotten away with it, his conscience was another matter. But now that he was married to Deborah, Franklin had every chance of being chaste; his industry was going well; and as for being humble, the sessions of the Junto and the masonic lodge were exercises in equality where no one lorded it over his fellows. He was also falling under the influence of James Logan, whose writings about morality in the 1720s consisted of similar lists of virtues—sobriety, industry, frugality, and so on—as he too, in a very Franklinian phrase, looked for what he called “ways to get wealth” that would also keep a man from doing evil.10

  And so Franklin embarked on his course of ethical self-improvement, which—being Franklin—of course he had to put down on paper. “I made a little book in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues,” he tells us. “I rul’d each page with red ink so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I cross’d these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line and in its proper column I might mark by a little black spot every fault I found upon examination, to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day…I was surpris’d to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined, but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.” The little book traveled everywhere with Franklin: and “…tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was by the endeavour made a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been.”

  Where did religion come into Franklin’s scheme? Although in private Franklin still clung to his Articles of Belief, they were too poetic for everyday use or for exposure to the public gaze. But by now—after ten years of reading the deists and Shaftesbury, Locke, Tillotson, and so much else—Franklin was ready to distill his conclusions into a few simple points. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” he wrote, a maxim that neatly tied together practical ethics and sublime philosophy. The reference to Socrates tells us that Franklin believed in a divine creator, a God who was benevolent but not specifically Christian; he also believed in something he called “Providence,” even though its workings were often hard to discern; and like Socrates, he thought the soul might be immortal. As for the best form of religious service, it consisted of doing good to other human beings, even at the cost of self-sacrifice: in other words, New Testament morality but without any excess baggage of theology.

  He even conceived the idea of a new, ecumenical group, the Society of the Free and Easy, who would complete the thirteen-week course in virtue and then acknowledge this new creed as their own. Although this society never materialized, Franklin had the Junto and the masons to serve as an approximation. The Almighty Architect in which they believed was not so very different from the God of Socrates or Plato, a God of mathematics and reason, and Franklin could live with that. By about 1731 he had come to a resting place, intellectually speaking. Franklin had a system of beliefs that would serve its purpose: not only his, but also that of Pennsylvania, if only its people would listen. Here was a colony where great things were being born.

  INGENIOUS THOUGHTS, INGENIOUS BOOKS

  Forty miles north of the falls at Trenton, a traveler who ventured up the Delaware would come around a wide bend in the river and see a high rang
e of hills. Densely covered with trees, they fell steeply down toward the water’s edge. Stepping ashore in the early 1730s our traveler would see men cutting timber; and if he climbed up the hills to the west, he would enter a valley filled with the sound of hammers and the smell of burning charcoal.

  This was Durham, Pennsylvania, the site of the ironworks owned by James Logan, William Allen, and their partners. The fires of the forge and the furnace were lit on an eminence called Mine Hill. Just below the surface, there was a layer of red hematite, an iron ore mottled with veins of quartz. Today the little town is a place of beauty, green and fragrant, but the gaping black mouth of one of the tunnels of the mine can still be seen, to show that this is one of the most important sites in the early history of industry in North America.

  It was a hard slog by wagon or by mule for supplies to get to a location so remote, or for the iron to get out again to reach the customer. The Delaware ought to have made a far better highway; but there were too many stretches of shallow water strewn with rocks and boulders. One answer to the problem was this: to use long, flat-bottomed vessels, the famous Durham boats that carried George Washington’s army across the river in 1776. Another solution was to go around the shallows with some kind of canal.

  In 1731 a scheme for just such a canal was in the air. It gives us our first glimpse of Benjamin Franklin as an apostle of science and engineering as a means to make America wealthy. His Junto friend Thomas Godfrey knew a Presbyterian minister by the name of Joseph Morgan, a many-sided cleric with a touch of eccentricity. Morgan tended his flock at a chapel close to Trenton, but he also took a deep interest in matters scientific, and especially the works of Newton. Keen to open up the interior, Morgan conceived the idea of an artificial waterway, built into the bank of the Delaware, with dams to hold back the river and a system of locks to carry boats over any obstacles. Mr. Morgan wrote a paper describing the plan, and Godfrey gave it to James Logan, who had every reason to welcome a faster mode of transit for his iron. On May 1 Logan wrote a courteous letter back to Franklin with his comments.11

  He called the young man “Friend B.F.”: a form of address that speaks volumes about the esteem that Franklin had already won from the most powerful men in Pennsylvania. Logan thought it would be easier simply to remove the rocks, but he welcomed these signs of initiative from Franklin and his circle. “It would be well I believe to have the paper made public,” James Logan wrote, “for ’tis a pity that such ingenious thoughts should be lost.” And so Franklin did just that. He shared Morgan’s paper with his friends, and then he ran it as a series in The Pennsylvania Gazette in the May and June of 1732.

  Although it came to nothing, the scheme was a visionary foretaste of a later period, looking forward to the age of the Erie Canal. Which was exactly the kind of thing Joseph Morgan had in mind. With a view to challenging France for supremacy in the wilderness, in 1732 he sent the same material to the Royal Society in the hope of winning their support for this and another project. Morgan also proposed a new kind of military technology: a portable boat with which to explore the upper reaches of the Delaware and the Susquehanna, and to take troops and settlers as far as the Great Lakes.

  And so, when he was only twenty-five, we see Franklin closely involved with men of science who hoped to put their ingenuity to work in the cause of western expansion. In James Logan’s career as well as Morgan’s, we find the same cluster of interests: Newtonian science, internal “improvements” such as mines and canals, the western frontier, and imperial defense. The last of these—defense—was gradually coming to be an obsession with Logan, and so in time it would be for Franklin as well.

  Late in 1731, Logan’s fur traders had brought word that in the Ohio country the Shawnee had hoisted the flag of France. Was this part of a cunning French scheme to encircle the British colonies with a chain of forts, and to bar their entry to the interior? Logan feared that it was. He was already trying to persuade the Penn family to create a frontier militia made up of Germans and the Scots-Irish. That winter, while Franklin was circulating Morgan’s paper, Logan wrote a memorandum to Sir Robert Walpole, warning him that the empire was in danger.12

  His paper reached Walpole’s desk in 1732, only to be ignored. At this point, the Pax Walpoleana appeared to be secure, and so the government did not share Mr. Logan’s anxieties. His memorandum was too far ahead of its time. It contained, for example, Logan’s attempt to revive a frontier project first mooted in Virginia by Governor Spotswood, another man who loved iron and feared the French. Spotswood had wanted to see the British march over the hills and build their own forts on Lake Erie, in an alliance with the Iroquois. That would not happen for another thirty years; and Logan’s other suggestion—to create a new colony of Germans in what is now West Virginia—was equally premature.

  Even so, the Logan memorandum shows us what was on the minds of the leaders of the Quaker colony at the time when Franklin was emerging into public life. In matters of the intellect, Franklin’s debts to James Logan were immense. At his country house at Stenton, five miles from the heart of Philadelphia, where the Iroquois would come to camp out on the lawn, Logan lived among his magnificent collection of books; and from there he maintained a lively correspondence with his friends in New York, in Ireland, and in England, who kept him in touch with the learning of the period. If the Franklin of the early 1730s needed a mentor, Logan was ideal. And at just this moment, when the young man was newly married, confident, and hitting his stride in business, Logan gave his support to one of Franklin’s most successful and farsighted projects, the Library Company of Philadelphia.

  In the Junto’s early days, the members had pooled their books together to create a small collection kept in their meeting room at Robert Grace’s house for all of them to use. The arrangement not working out—some of the books were lost or damaged—each member took his books home again. Then in the summer of 1731 Franklin suggested they create something more permanent. It was to be a lending library, paid for by subscriptions from the members. Each one would make an upfront payment of forty shillings to start the venture and then there would be an annual fee of ten shillings.

  They formed a board of ten directors, including Franklin, Parsons, Grace, and Godfrey, and also the young Freemason, lawyer, and Junto member Thomas Hopkinson. He had come from London, where his family were real estate developers in the heart of the capital.* Hopkinson intended to spend some time in London the following year, and he would take with him a list of books they wished to have. They drew up articles of association, and had them signed and sealed. Franklin wanted everything watertight so that the company would endure.13

  By November they had fifty subscribers and the venture was off the ground. Once the money was raised—Nicholas Scull was the treasurer—the next step for the Library Company was to choose the books they wished to acquire. And so in the spring of 1732, Thomas Godfrey and Benjamin Franklin made their way to Stenton to seek the wise counsel of James Logan. The list they compiled with the help of Mr. Logan can fairly be described as remarkable.

  The most striking thing about the list of books is what it did not contain. No theology, no sermons—certainly nothing by Cotton Mather—no fiction, no drama, no metaphysics, and only the very best of poetry: the translations by Pope and Dryden of Homer and Virgil. Of course the Library Company wanted the complete works of Addison and Steele; perhaps because Franklin was tired of people borrowing his set of The Spectator. But most of all they wished to have modern history, geography, astronomy, and science. Textbooks of geometry, a teach-yourself guide to Newton’s calculus, and a treatise on conic sections: that was the sort of thing. As far as philosophy went, the only author on their menu was Pierre Bayle, the notorious skeptic, whose name Franklin had known since his teenage years in Boston. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary was now the favorite reading of enlightened people in London.

  One item on the Library Company’s
list of books has an extra resonance, because it made such a special contribution to Franklin’s scientific career. After consulting James Logan, Franklin and Godfrey and their friends chose to have something called Gravesend’s Nat. Philos. 2 vols. To give him his title correctly, Professor Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande taught science at Leiden University in Holland, where he was Europe’s leading exponent of the work of Newton. He strove to apply Newton’s ideas to every field of science, even those—such as heat and electricity—where Newton had run up against questions he felt unable to solve.

  It was by reading ’s Gravesande, in the hours he could snatch from the printing press and the Gazette, that Franklin prepared himself for his electrical discoveries. Writings such as these, recommended by Logan, would eventually give him his agenda for research; but only when he had the time, the money, and the moment of opportunity. Another thirteen years had yet to elapse before those conditions would be satisfied. While Hopkinson sailed off to London and came back with the books, Franklin had to ply his trade: and he did so splendidly.

  PRINTING AND POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK

  While the Library Company was being formed, in Charleston the planters had obtained the concession they required. In future they would be allowed to ship their rice directly to southern Europe. South Carolina had also issued paper money; it had a popular, capable governor, Robert Johnson; and its frontier was steadily moving inland. The governor led the creation of new townships to be filled with the Germans, the Scots-Irish, and migrating Welshmen such as Hugh Meredith. Unhealthy though the climate was, with frequent epidemics, the colony entered a period of growth even more dynamic than Pennsylvania’s.14