Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  Since his boyhood Franklin had liked to think of himself as a latter-day Socrates, defending the truth against authority and deceit. He was still only twenty-nine, and when Hemphill arrived in Pennslyvania, and found himself on trial for heresy, Franklin leaped to his defense. He saw the case as a clear-cut matter in which religious liberty was under attack, from what he called “ignorance…bigotry and superstition.” Whig that he was, Franklin felt obliged to intervene, and all the more eagerly because Andrew Hamilton also supported the preacher.

  “Let us endeavor,” Franklin wrote as the affair was at its height, “to preserve and maintain Truth, commonsense, universal charity, and brotherly love in this our infant and growing nation.” In fact his behavior was neither fraternal nor benevolent. Nor was the Hemphill affair the worthy cause Franklin took it to be. Far from being purely a matter of principle, it was really a clash of cultures, with its roots in an ethnic and economic divide between different sections of a colony now extraordinarily diverse. The case would teach Franklin a salutary lesson about the new America that was emerging around him.5

  THE HEMPHILL AFFAIR

  If the young Franklin were telling the Hemphill story as it seemed to him at the time, it would have looked like this. An educated man, thoughtful and progressive, Samuel Hemphill first set foot in Philadelphia in the fall of 1734, ready to preach an enlightened form of Christian doctrine. Seven months later he fell victim to a clerical conspiracy, in which he was done down by reactionaries who rejected his liberal ideas. They declared him a heretic, and kicked him out of the ministry: a wicked case of persecution by the powerful.

  This was the simple view that Franklin put across as the events unfolded, but the truth was rather different. Far from being cut-and-dried, the Hemphill affair had many nuances and many complications. Religious disputes always do, especially when—as in this case—they come muddled up with politics. Let us begin at the beginning: first with Benjamin Franklin.

  Coming as he did from a Presbyterian home, each year Franklin paid his fee to support the minister in Philadelphia. In the 1730s, the cleric in question was Jedediah Andrews, a Harvard man from the class of 1695, when the witch trials at Salem were a recent memory. Indeed he had been a protégé of Increase Mather, and technically Andrews was not a Presbyterian at all but a Congregationalist. At this period in America the two churches were practically identical.6

  A friendly soul, Mr. Andrews would visit Franklin from time to time, urging him to come to Sunday service, which Franklin sometimes did—“once for five Sundays successively,” he recalled—but with little pleasure. He soon stopped going to the chapel, preferring to use his own Articles of Belief, rather than listen to sermons that he found “very dry, and unedifying.” The pastor tended to insist on the formalities of religion, rather than the moral teaching that Franklin wanted to hear.

  Or so Franklin tells us in his memoirs: but there was another side to Jedediah. True, his preaching style was soporific. According to a writer in the Mercury, he spoke “so dull and slowly that I fell asleep.” But while he may have been boring, Mr. Andrews was never a bully. When colleagues tried to insist that everyone, clergy and laity alike, had to sign up to the Westminster Confession, a statement of orthodox Calvinist belief, Jedediah refused to cooperate. Not only was he tolerant of other people’s opinions; he also presided over a rapidly expanding congregation.

  Until about 1718, the town had only a few Presbyterians, but then Jedediah’s church began to grow dynamically until at the end of the 1720s they had to extend the building. If this was partly a tribute to Mr. Andrews, it was chiefly a consequence of immigration as the Scots-Irish, who were mostly Presbyterians, came pouring in by sea from Ulster. In 1734, Andrews reached the age of sixty, and he felt that to care for such a large flock he really ought to have an assistant. He went to the local synod, whose elders included Andrew Hamilton, and they agreed. At which point another question arose: what kind of Presbyterian should the new man be?7

  Just what sort of faith should he teach? Calvinist, or middle-of-the-road, or liberal? And furthermore: how should he be chosen? By popular vote, or by the elders, with the biggest say going to the wealthier members of the laity, who supplied the funds for the church? One of the problems was that the rich men, the lawyers and merchants, like Andrew Hamilton or William Allen—he was a Presbyterian too—were inclined to be deists and freethinkers, something that put them at odds with the rank and file in the pews.

  In the British Isles, questions such as these had already given rise to the fiercest of quarrels in the Presbyterian Church. The deepest schism occurred in the middle of the 1720s in the north of Ireland, where the Hemphill case had its origins. On the liberal side, known as the “New Lights,” there stood the merchants of Belfast and the wealthier owners of land in Ulster, people similar to Andrew Hamilton. Mr. Hemphill belonged to this faction in the church. But they were vastly outnumbered by their opponents, the “Old Light” ministers and their supporters, the tenant farmers of the Ulster hinterland. Clinging to Calvinism, the farmers saw only one means to salvation: rebirth in the Spirit, by way of a Gospel faith in Jesus. These were precisely the people—Scots-Irish Presbyterians, driven from their homes by poor harvests, high rents, and a chronic shortage of land—who were sailing westward to the Delaware.8

  And so Ireland exported its religious conflicts to the colonies. In Pennsylvania, the diaspora from Ulster led to the creation of sectional divisions, as the Scots-Irish built enclaves in the interior; and this was partly the work of Franklin’s friend James Logan. As he made grants of land, Logan channeled the new arrivals toward the fine soil near Lancaster: not to form some kind of ghetto, but because the area was strategically important, and because he wanted a buffer against the native tribes.9

  By the early 1730s, the Scots-Irish had created a string of new townships between Lancaster and the port of entry at New Castle. As an Ulsterman himself, albeit a Quaker, Logan had his doubts about the settlers with their Calvinist ideas. In a complaining letter to Belfast, he called them “over zealous,” “bigoted,” and “tricky and contentious.” Be that as it was, Logan needed them on the frontier, and they had come to stay. They built their own Presbyterian chapels; as their ministers, they chose Old Light preachers from Ireland; and soon they became a distinctive voice in the province.10

  There was also another ingredient to be thrown into the mix. In the annals of religion in America, 1734 will always count as a date of high importance. A revival began, known to historians as the Great Awakening, which sprang into life at Northampton, Massachusetts, where Jonathan Edwards, a Calvinist through and through, was engaged in an arduous campaign of conversion. Not for him the flabby notions of liberals and deists. Instead Mr. Edwards looked for emotion, the weeping, the travails, and at last! the joys of a sinner lost and born again. Hundreds of souls were converted, and the movement began.

  Northampton was a long way off; but something similar was happening far closer to Franklin. In New Jersey there lay the town of Freehold, where the minister came from a preaching family called the Tennents, who were Ulstermen, and there they led their own evangelical awakening. Like Jonathan Edwards, they were Calvinists, intent upon the saving of souls, but also striving to achieve what amounted to a second Reformation, this time in America, with the Presbyterian clergy as its leaders: but only those who shared their definition of their creed. Of all the family, the most energetic was young Gilbert Tennent, pastor at New Brunswick, who was also a member of the Philadelphia Synod. In the September of 1734, he urged the synod to apply a new and rigorous test to any minister they licensed to preach.

  Did the preacher really know his calling? His task, according to Mr. Tennent, was to urge the sinners to repent, convincing them that they were “lost and miserable,” until they felt the touch of the Spirit. If the preacher did not undertake that mission, he was no minister at all: or so said Gilbert Tennent. His message was uncompr
omising, but this much can be said for it. As the Great Awakening would show, it was a message that many tens of thousands of people dearly wanted to hear.

  And especially the Scots-Irish. What they did not want was Samuel Hemphill. He shipped up in the Delaware that fall, to become the deputy pastor that Andrews required. In the winter of 1734 and 1735, Hemphill made a splash in Philadelphia with his New Light sermons, bringing people flocking to the meeting house: or so Franklin claims, since Franklin was one of his admirers. Mr. Andrews gives another side to the story. He makes it plain that Hemphill was foisted on him by the powerful, by which he can only mean Andrew Hamilton and William Allen. According to Andrews, the only people who wanted to hear Hemphill were “freethinkers, deists, and nothings,” while what he calls “the best of people” began to stay away.11

  What did Hemphill say about the Bible? Worth reading, he thought, but not entirely obligatory: because, or so he argued, Almighty God had given us “the light of nature,” with which we could arrive at the truths of religion by ourselves. Those truths he and Franklin defined as “morality, virtue, and universal benevolence,” words that had come into vogue with liberal thinkers in Scotland where Hemphill had attended the University of Glasgow.

  Did Christians have to undergo a rebirth in the Spirit, of the kind the Tennents thought was indispensable? Definitely not, said Mr. Hemphill. All we need do, said he, is “to live and act according to our nature.” He dismissed the idea that human beings are born in a condition of depravity. As far as Hemphill was concerned, the doctrine of original sin was nothing, or so he told his readers, but “a notion invented, a bugbear set up by priests…to fright and scare an unthinking populace out of their senses.”

  It was the kind of thing Franklin had encountered in the works of the deists, language he had used himself in Boston. Now he could hear it from a pulpit. But what Franklin did not see was this: that on the frontier, among the Scots-Irish, these ideas would be angrily rejected. A man of the street and the city, Franklin knew enough about agriculture to create Poor Richard, but he had no affinity with Irish farmers, and neither did Franklin understand their politics or their religion.

  Before he left the shores of Donegal, Hemphill had made an enemy, an Old Light minister named Patrick Vance who heard him preach and decided that he was nothing but “a vile heretic.” As Hemphill set sail, Vance wrote to his brother-in-law in Pennsylvania, warning him about the new arrival. In the letter, he called his New Light opponent “the devil’s instrument,” among many other epithets equally damning. The letter reached the eyes of Jedediah Andrews, who had already heard complaints from the frontier towns. If Hemphill had stayed put in Philadelphia, perhaps he might have survived; but he made the error of venturing forty miles to the west, to the little farming settlement of New London, where his sermons caused a stir among the settlers. Outraged, they contacted their friends in the city, where Mr. Andrews was already so unhappy with his new deputy.12

  Armed with the letter from Vance, Andrews went to the synod and asked them to have Hemphill put on trial. Events moved fast. On April 7, 1735 Andrews filed his charges; ten days later, the trial began; and ten days after that, they suspended Hemphill from his ministry. He was never reinstated. This could scarcely be otherwise, because of the seven commissioners who conducted the trial, four were Old Light ministers from the colony’s Scots-Irish interior. Gilbert Tennent testified, giving evidence that Hemphill had lied about his beliefs. In response, Franklin and Hemphill denounced the trial as a mockery or even worse, comparing it to “that hellish tribunal, the Spanish Inquisition.” It was a fatuous remark, since the trial was nothing of the sort; because the Presbyterian Church had no prisons, no instruments of torture, and no status in law, and no means of redress other than those its members had freely given to their ministers.

  The worst they could do was bar Hemphill from the pulpit. At this early stage of their history in America the Presbyterian clergy had no political clout, and their resources were slender. Among the most forceful critics of Hemphill was another Harvard man, somebody Franklin knew from Boston: Ebenezer Pemberton Jr., son of the late, methodical pastor at the Old South whose sermons he had heard as a boy. In New York, Pemberton Jr. eked out a meager living tending to a flock with fewer than a hundred members. If in the Hemphill affair anyone played the role of the brave underdog, it was Pemberton, who might risk the loss of his career by standing up against Franklin and his rich friends in politics: especially because, with the Zenger trial still under way, Andrew Hamilton was a hero in Manhattan.13

  If anyone acted the part of the bully, it was Benjamin Franklin. In May he fell ill, spending six or seven weeks fighting a severe attack of pleurisy. Before the trial began, the Gazette had taken Hemphill’s side, printing a dialogue—almost certainly by Franklin—defending his views about the Christian faith. The prose was bright and witty; but once the trial was over, and when Franklin had risen from his sickbed, the sense of humor vanished and the Hemphillites began to savage their opponents. “I became his zealous partisan,” Franklin recalled in his autobiography.

  Between July and October 1735 he printed three tracts in defense of Mr. Hemphill, co-written by himself and by the preacher. By this time Andrew Hamilton had swept all before him in the courtroom, winning the Zenger case in August, a victory that also won him the freedom of New York and a salute of cannons. Now that Hamilton had reached the summit of his power and influence, his friend the young Franklin could write and publish more or less what he pleased; and indeed, with each pamphlet that appeared, his rhetoric on Hemphill’s behalf became more coarse and more insulting. It reached its unpleasant climax at the end of October with a diatribe that dealt in misogyny and libel, sneering at Jedediah Andrews and his friends.

  “ ’Tis well known,” said the pamphleteer, that “all the silly women of the congregation were…zealous abettors of Mr Andrews, who crept into their houses, and led them away captive to the Commission to say and swear whatever he had prepared for them.” Earlier in the controversy, Franklin and Hemphill had already sneered at Andrews as a weak old man, filled with envy of his younger rival.14

  The ministers refused to give in. Instead the Presbyterians fought back, with pamphlets of their own showing precisely how Franklin’s friend had broken the rules of the faith. They pointed out that if anybody was a hypocrite, it was Hemphill. Not once but twice, first in Ireland and then in America, he had signed up to a statement of orthodox Calvinist belief, the Westminster Confession, dating from the 1640s, and having done so, he chose to disparage the creed it contained. And then, in January, the ministers fired their heaviest artillery and with it they blew Mr. Hemphill out of the Delaware. During the proceedings, he had been oddly reluctant to share his sermon notes. It had been rumored that he was a plagiarist, and now his guilt was proven. A pamphlet appeared in Philadelphia, printed by Andrew Bradford, who must have relished the opportunity to make Franklin look silly. Authored by one “Obadiah Jenkins,” a nom de plume for Pemberton Jr., the pamphlet revealed that Hemphill had lifted his homilies, almost verbatim, from sermons published long ago in London, written by preachers who denied the sacred doctrine of the Holy Trinity.15

  The game was up and Samuel Hemphill vanished forever. It does not seem that he possessed much of a vocation as a pastor because, try as one might, it has proved impossible to find his name in any document, ecclesiastical or otherwise, dated after 1736. One suspects that he sailed back to northern Ireland, where the records are often sparse, but there were Hemphills owning land near Londonderry.

  As Franklin admits in his autobiography, he emerged from the Hemphill affair in a state of deep embarrassment. Among Hemphill’s friends, the proof of plagiarism had caused “disgust,” he writes; and indeed the affair came to represent one of the defining moments of Franklin’s life. At this point, Franklin ceased to attend the Presbyterian Church. Although from time to time he went to Christ Church with
Deborah—who was doubtless thanking goodness that she was an Episcopalian—he avoided any other kind of organized religion.

  Never again would Franklin take sides in a public dispute about the details of theology. It was a minefield best left unexplored. As the years went by, he would often find himself at odds with the Presbyterian clergy in Pennsylvania, but for political reasons, not for the sake of differing notions about God or the nature of redemption. The Hemphill affair also taught him something about the place of religion in American life.

  Prior to 1735, Franklin had never shown much patience with evangelical faith, grounded in the Bible, and indeed he behaved as if it were something that would one day disappear, probably in the not-too-distant future, as the ideas of Tillotson or the Freemasons steadily won over hearts and minds. As the Great Awakening unfolded, with the Hemphill affair as a curtain-raiser, Franklin began to see that this was most unlikely to occur. In America there would always be evangelical Christians, there would be revivals, and there would also be sectional differences, social, political, and economic, that would generate conflicts that took on a religious form as the pulpit, the pews, and the seminary became a theater of controversy. That was just the way America was. You could no more argue Bible Christianity away—or any other religion, come to that—than you could stop the Delaware River flowing down from the hills.

  As Franklin approached the age of thirty, the Hemphill affair also began to free him from English models. Very far from entirely, of course: Franklin always loved London, and the values for which the best thinkers in London stood, whatever they might be, even when after the Boston Tea Party the English stopped liking him. But in the wake of the Hemphill affair a subtle change occurred in his thinking.