by Nick Bunker
Time and again in his early life, Franklin had a modus operandi that came down to this: read London writers—or better still, sail away to the metropolis, as he did—and then apply their style and their ideas to the life of the colonies. Up to a point, this made sense; but not indefinitely. Sooner or later, Franklin had to cease to think that England—the country of Addison, Pope, and Tillotson—could be the measure of all things in America as well.
For his nourishment by way of ideas, Franklin had to look to other places too. France would have been the best choice; but as it happened he began with Glasgow. However plagiaristic Hemphill had been, the opinions he expressed mostly had their roots in Scotland. And so Franklin began to turn his gaze in that direction. By the 1730s, among the liberal Presbyterians the most influential thinker was Francis Hutcheson, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, where Hemphill had studied. His ideas were similar to Hemphill’s, and they came to be Franklin’s as well. “The ingenious Mr Hutcheson”—as Franklin described him in 1749—served as one of the inspirations for the college that Franklin created in the town, which later developed into the University of Pennsylvania. With its wide and diverse curriculum, and its emphasis on the sciences as well as the arts, it would look very much like a Scottish university.16
After the Hemphill affair, Franklin also ceased to rely entirely on the London Whigs whose work he had been reading since his teens. In the pamphlets Franklin wrote with Hemphill, he had been influenced by the authors of Cato’s Letters, when they attacked the bishops of the Church of England. And this did not really make sense. When the radical Whigs took on the Anglican Church, they were up against an immensely powerful organization protected by law and built into the fabric of English society. In the Quaker colony, nothing of the sort existed. And so the points the Whig writers made were largely irrelevant in Pennsylvania. Other issues were far more germane: paper money, the frontier, the best way to coexist with Maryland, Virginia, and New York, the odd situation with the Penn family, and of course the economy. Whigs in London, radical or Walpolean, had little to say about any of this. Above all—as Franklin was gradually coming to see—America had to build an infrastructure of ingenuity, so that the colonies could grow swiftly and sustainably.17
This was a subject to which Franklin would become devoted. Although Franklin never ceased to be a Whig, in his thirties and his early forties he did not feel obliged to make their obsessions with tyranny and so forth the center of his life: because, in this period so very long before the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party, for a white male in America from Franklin’s social stratum there was rarely any tyranny to oppose. Science became a more fascinating subject, and it set his agenda in the next decade. In the meantime, Franklin endured something far worse than the embarrassment of the Hemphill affair. In 1736, he and Deborah suffered a true calamity, which came about by way of the scourge of the era: another epidemic of smallpox.
DEATH AND THE ASSEMBLY
It was a year of hard work and modest prosperity. Poor Richard’s Almanack was making headway, its sales creeping up to overtake those of its rivals. The Franklin store was busy too. As well as books and newspapers, Deborah began to sell groceries, cloth, and haberdashery, while her husband toiled away in the workshop, regular as ever. At about this time, to feed his printing press Franklin was reaching out to new contacts, Dutch and German papermakers who had built their paper mills with water power on Wissahickon Creek to the northwest of Philadelphia.
A colonial printer might require at least 1,500 sheets each week, the paper had to be made with rags, and so—starting in 1734—Franklin had begun to run little notices in the Gazette: “Ready money for old rags may be had of the printer hereof.” He and Deborah would collect the rags, two tons or more per annum, and ship them to the mill. At last, they no longer had to rely on paper imported expensively from England and bought through merchants such as William Allen.18
Like the ironworks at Durham and elsewhere, the paper mills were part of the beginnings of industry in Pennsylvania, and in 1736 their output was starting to soar as the colony grew wealthier. Besides the Gazette and the Almanack, Franklin printed at least eight books that year, including a German hymnbook and a long speech by James Logan. As time went by, Franklin and the sage of Stenton grew ever closer, bound together by mutual respect and by their shared commitment to the colony’s expansion.
The previous December, Franklin had printed Mr. Logan’s new translation of some Latin poetry, intended for schoolchildren. In April he sent a box of copies up to his sister-in-law, the widow Anne in Rhode Island, to be sold among the well-heeled citizens of Newport. And that same month, we find the first evidence that at last the Franklins could afford a little luxury. In their accounts, Deborah recorded the spending of five shillings on new shoes “for the maid.”19
Until then their lives had been hard and austere, their table “plain and simple,” as Franklin later recalled. In the Gazette he would advertise sales of tea, but he and Deborah could not afford to drink it themselves. It was too rare and too precious. But in the 1730s the British were ramping up their imports from China, bringing down the price of tea and making the leaves affordable to ordinary people. One morning at about this time, Franklin came down to breakfast to find something new. On the table he saw some china crockery—a little bowl—and a silver spoon: items of the kind that today we come across in small museums in colonial towns that have somehow escaped the juggernaut of progress.
For Deborah Franklin, these fragile articles, a spoon and a bowl, were deeply significant. She had to have a maid, but in her life she also needed some beauty. Coming as she did from Birmingham in England, that town so dynamic, she knew—the letters she received must have told her so—that her kin across the ocean possessed delightful objects such as these. So did other people in her street in Philadelphia. And so Deborah wanted to have the same lovely things, to remind her of her mother’s country.
In his memoirs Franklin gives us his account of her desires. “She thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbors,” he says. Which may well be true; but Deborah also had a life of her own. Stranded in America, so far from her family, she needed to know that the hard work was worthwhile. Would her life ever be as satisfying as the one she might have had in England? The crockery and the spoon were a sign that one day the drudgery might turn out for the best, for her and for her son. Deborah could never join the Junto or the masons, which were only for men. Of an evening, when they met to ruminate about the secrets of the cosmos, she would have to stay at home, with at her side another small item as flimsy as a bowl of porcelain. Little Franky was only three years old: a dangerous age, all too exposed to the hazards of infection.
During the course of 1736, Deborah’s husband went from strength to strength. Fortified by the Junto and by his alliance with Logan and with Hamilton, Franklin could not fail to be successful. In October the politicians had to appoint a new official to record their decisions. Once again, Andrew Hamilton was the Speaker; and so their choice fell upon his protégé. At a stipend of six shillings a day, Franklin became the clerk of the Pennsylania assembly. It was a post he would hold for fifteen years, until his son William took over in 1751.
A page from Franklin’s shop accounts, May 29, 1738, in Deborah’s handwriting with examples of her spelling—“chocklet” and “seling wax.” The number of entries shows how busy the Franklins were. Also interesting are the books the customers bought, including Addison’s Spectator and the Historical and Critical Dictionary by the French skeptic Pierre Bayle.
In the meanwhile his other child was suffering. From the meager details that Franklin provides, all we know is that Franky was delicate. He suffered from “a flux,” meaning some kind of gastric complaint that led to diarrhea. Because of that, his parents deferred the day when he should be inoculated. Two weeks after Franklin was made the assembly
clerk, Franky celebrated his fourth birthday. A month after that, on November 21, the boy died of smallpox. They buried him in the graveyard at Christ Church, with above him a stone with the words: “The delight of all who knew him.” Nearly forty years later, in a letter he wrote to his sister Jane Mecom, Franklin said that in all his life it was Franky “whom I have seldom since equalled in everything, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh.”
A few weeks after Franky’s death, some unpleasant people went about saying that it was all his father’s fault, for having him inoculated and thus giving him the disease. Which was the reverse of the case. In the last issue of the Gazette for 1736, Franklin printed a dignified rebuttal urging every couple to have their children vaccinated. His feelings as he wrote the piece can only be imagined. At a time when painting in America was in its own infancy, and they had little money, he and Deborah commissioned a portrait of their son, made after death, but as lifelike as the image could be done. Dressed up in red, against a green background of trees and hills, with his father’s wide forehead and with his left arm flung out to his side in a gesture of happiness, little Franky can be seen: a child gone forever.20
Never again would Deborah bear a son. Seven years later she gave birth to a daughter, but the period in between must have been full of sadness. She kept on going to Christ Church while at this period it was being rebuilt to become what it remains today, with its tall east window, a peaceful place filled with sunlight. For her husband, the rest of the 1730s were also quiet years, with less by way of feuds or acrimony.
Every so often, he would have a burst of wildness—he was still young—and it would find an outlet by way of his pen. Seven weeks after Franky died, Franklin wrote one of his funniest columns for the Gazette. In The Drinker’s Dictionary, he gives us a long alphabet of intoxication. He lists all the words he knew for drunkenness, running into hundreds, from “addled” to “wet” by way of boozy, fuzzled, hammered, oiled, pungey, stewed, and soaked, and perhaps the best of the lot: “he’s had a thump over the head with Samson’s jawbone.” In modern England many of the terms on the list are still current with the same meaning, serving as a reminder that Franklin knew London, and he knew the waterfront, and he never wanted to lose touch with the way the sailors spoke. Or it might be that for a while after Franky’s death he took more solace from alcohol than he cared to admit in his memoirs.21
Which would be understandable. Briefly he also came to be caught up in a dismal affair, a prank that went terribly wrong, when some scallywags in Philadelphia played a cruel trick on a young apprentice, Daniel Rees. The boy hoped to become a Freemason. And so in the spring of 1737 the comedians pretended to give him the oath of membership, embroidered with obscenities. They showed the oath to Franklin, who thought it was hilarious. But the joke turned sour when they tried to make Rees undergo a fake ceremony of initiation. Carried out in a dark cellar, it involved a flaming bowl of brandy, and two days later Daniel Rees died of his burns.
While all this was going on, Franklin was still at war with the wily Andrew Bradford. The Rees affair became a cause célèbre that the latter could exploit to Franklin’s detriment. When the case came to trial early in 1738, with Franklin as a witness for the prosecution, the Mercury made out that although Franklin had never set foot in the cellar, he had been something close to an accessory to murder. These were “false and malicious insinuations,” Franklin wrote: but in the Gazette he had to print a long statement of self-defense.22
When news of all this arrived in Boston, his parents were appalled, and especially his mother. And so once again he had to try to mend a breach with Josiah and Abiah, composing a letter of apology. Their letter to him has not survived, but from what Franklin wrote it is painfully clear that Abiah was aghast at what she heard about the freethinking ways of Freemasonry. Benjamin assured her that they were “a very harmless sort of people,” but he did not pretend to be orthodox himself.23
“I think vital religion has always suffered,” he wrote, “when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. And the scripture assures me that at the last day, we shall not be examined what we thought, but what we did; and our recommendation will not be that we said, Lord, Lord, but that we did good to our fellow creatures.” To reinforce his case he cited the Gospel according to Matthew, but he might also have mentioned his role in a new project. Two weeks after Franky died, he had helped to create the Union Fire Company, a body of people pledged to douse any blaze that broke out on Market Street. Like the Junto, the Library Company, and the masons, it was virtue in action, a civic entity that would endure.
And so would Franklin and Deborah. In the autumn of 1737, while the Rees affair was still in the news, at last his rival Andrew Bradford lost control of the town’s post office. Bradford had fallen out with America’s postmaster general, Governor Spotswood, long ago the ally of Sir William Keith. Every six months Spotswood had to file reports with his masters in London and send over the cash that was owing to King George. But Bradford was slow about accounting; and so Spotswood fired him and handed the role to Franklin. Here was another coup, bringing with it a new stream of income at a time when Pennsylvania was expanding yet again, by way of a push deep into the interior.
Franklin began his career as postmaster on October 5. Just two weeks earlier his patrons and friends Logan, Hamilton, and Allen had achieved their ambition: the seizure of the Forks of the Delaware. Reviving an ancient title deed, dating back to the 1680s, they claimed that William Penn had acquired from the Lenape people an area to the north of the ironworks at Durham. In the document, it was defined by the distance a man could walk in a day and a half. At Stenton in August they met the leaders of the Lenape and insisted that the walk should take place without delay.
Knowing that Logan had built a firm alliance with the Iroquois, who far outnumbered them, the Lenape had little choice but to agree. The walk began on September 19; Edward Marshall, a frontier settler and athlete, kept on going for nearly seventy miles; and by the evening of the 20th he had encompassed a tract of land that amounted to more than 700,000 acres. The Junto member William Parsons had been the surveyor who supplied him with a map. At once the Penn family took possession and began to sell the land, with the largest piece going to William Allen, who created a new settlement which he called Allentown.
Not a word appeared in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the Walking Purchase, as the incident came to be known. We cannot say what Franklin thought about it, but here was the shadowy side of the projects for virtue and improvement of which he and the Junto were so fond. It was an act of fraud, and among the Lenape it left the bitterest of memories. Nineteen years later they took their revenge. In 1756 they raided Marshall’s homestead in New Jersey, where they murdered and scalped his wife, his daughter, and his son.
Chapter Sixteen
WAR AND MR. WHITEFIELD
For Franklin there had to come a moment when the quiet years after Franky’s death drew to a close, to be replaced by a new era of uncertainty. It arrived in the fall of 1739, when Andrew Hamilton stepped down as speaker of the assembly. As he slid away into retirement, so a changing of the guard began, and Franklin’s allies in the Triumvirate began to lose their grip on the province. A new speaker emerged, John Kinsey, leading an alliance of Quakers and Germans that won a sweeping victory at the election in October. For the next decade, Mr. Kinsey—a master of the hustings—occupied the chair of the assembly.
Although Franklin kept his post as the assembly clerk, they were never close. He and Kinsey had nothing in common. The new speaker was not a Freemason, and his name rarely appears in Franklin’s shop accounts. He took no interest in the Library Company or Franklin’s other civic good deeds. Heavy drinking, lavish parties, and corruption were more in Mr. Kinsey’s line. He was a pacifist, a Quaker, a broker of deals but also a hypocrite. When he died of a stroke in 1750, it was revealed that while Kinsey was chief justice of Pennsylvania he had
stolen vast sums of public money.1
With Hamilton gone and Kinsey in the ascendant, Franklin had to pick his away across a less familiar landscape, still with many friends but without the Triumvirate behind him. His business faced new challenges as well. For years he had been sailing steadily forward with a wind of economic growth behind him, but at last the economy began to falter. As 1739 began, he and Deborah had felt bold enough to move house, four doors down Market Street, to a larger property rented from his Junto friend Robert Grace. In February, they fell victim to a thief, “a tall, thin Irishman,” and the list of stolen goods that Franklin printed in the Gazette showed that their days of austerity were over. The list included a coat lined with silk, four fine sheets, a ruffled shirt, new shoes, and a new beaver hat. But as the year drew to a close, the horizon grew darker amid rumors of a shooting war in the West Indies.
After so many false alarms, this time the stories were true. On October 23, George II declared war on Spain, a move that spelled the beginning of the end of the Pax Walpoleana that had endured since Franklin’s boyhood. For many years, the Spanish from Cuba had been seizing British ships for trading illegally with Mexico and Panama, testing to the full Sir Robert’s powers of diplomacy. At last a moment came when Walpole could do no more. In London his opponents were eager to fight, and the press was howling for blood. The War of Jenkins’ Ear began, taking its name from an English skipper part of whose ear had been sliced off by a coast guard from Havana.2
Although the king’s proclamation would not reach Philadelphia until the spring of 1740, the effects had already been felt months before. “Trading is dead,” wrote a Quaker merchant, as he saw the return of what he called “troublesome times,” the worst since the South Sea Bubble and its aftermath. Business fell away and money grew scarce again, as Spanish privateers took to sea. For the Franklins this must have been a worrying time, because they had been among the beneficiaries of peace, immigration, and transatlantic trade. As the reading public grew by leaps and bounds, so had Franklin’s sales and his advertising revenue, as he ran items posted by sea captains, ironmasters, and the purveyors of slaves.3