by Nick Bunker
Would the Franklins be sabotaged by the war and the slump it might cause? So long as the Spanish were Britain’s only enemy, and the fighting was confined to the Caribbean, the military threat to Pennsylvania was only indirect. Ships would be lost, but galleons of Spain were unlikely to come sailing up the Delaware. However, anyone who followed European politics—and Franklin most certainly did—would know of the pacte de famille, the alliance between the French and Spanish branches of the Bourbon dynasty.*1
If the Bourbon pact were invoked by the Spanish, then the War of Jenkins’ Ear might escalate into something more alarming. All that was required was a crisis in Europe, and by the early 1740s such a crisis was imminent. The fate of Austria held the key to international politics. The Habsburgs in Vienna were Britain’s closest allies; but they had long-standing differences with Madrid and Paris. Until now, with Walpole as prime minister, the British and the French had watched each other warily but still kept the peace. If a point of crisis arrived, and worst of all if Austria came under attack, then a general war in Europe would be the result, pitting the British and the Austrians against the might of France as well as Spain.4
And if that were to happen, the people of the Quaker province would find themselves close to the front line. For many years, James Logan had been warning that one day this was bound to occur. The French up in Canada, with their allies among the Indian tribes: he had always viewed them as a looming threat. Hence the effort he devoted to strategies intended to protect the frontier.
For those with eyes as sharp as Logan’s, the winter of 1739 and 1740 marked a turning point in the history of America. For Benjamin Franklin, the next ten years would present fresh challenges but also new opportunities, as he came to share not only Logan’s anxieties about colonial security, but also his preoccupation with biology and physics. In time, Franklin would make contact with like-minded people in New York, equally worried about a French advance down the Hudson valley but also devoted to science. These fertile interactions, between New York and Philadelphia, but with input from London as well, would eventually lead to Franklin’s work with electricity.
At the end of 1739 his work with sparks and batteries still lay a long time in the future. For now he had more pressing matters on his mind. Late at night on November 2, as the Royal Navy were on their way to war, Philadelphia welcomed a new arrival. Dressed in clerical black, he was a young evangelist from England. In time he became the finest exhibit in Franklin’s museum of eccentric human nature.
WAKING UP AMERICA
Into the town rode an Anglican minister, George Whitefield, weary from sixty miles in the saddle. After sailing into the Delaware a few days earlier, he was about to begin a preaching tour of the colonies. In the space of the next fifteen months, Whitefield took the Great Awakening, which until that time had been a sporadic affair of Christian revivals in little towns connected only by the letters that passed between the clergymen involved, and turned it into a national movement. In doing so he stamped his mark on North America. Quite how deep and lasting that impression would turn out to be is a question that historians still debate. But we can be sure of this: Whitefield had a powerful effect on Franklin. For one thing, the preacher helped him achieve perhaps the greatest commercial success of his career.
Whitefield was twenty-four, slender but extremely fit. He had piercing blue eyes, one with a squint left behind by measles in his childhood; and as he called on sinners to repent and come to Jesus, those eyes would often overflow with tears. He looked so young that Londoners called him “the boy parson.” Youthful he might be, but Whitefield, cofounder of the Methodists, was perhaps the finest English preacher of the eighteenth century, vying for that title with John Wesley: his friend, his rival, and in time his adversary.5
You might love or hate George Whitefield, and indeed he divided Franklin’s circle of friends, some of whom loathed the preacher as a charlatan. What you could not do was ignore the young man or the questions he posed so vehemently. “The churches will not contain the multitudes that throng to hear him,” wrote Wesley’s brother Charles, during Whitefield’s first preaching campaign in London. There he made his name as a superb fund-raiser, bringing in money for charity schools in England and for missions and later an orphanage in the new colony in Georgia. In his school days in a cathedral city where his parents ran a coaching inn, Whitefield had adored the theater. His preaching style was always dramatic, as though he were performing a soliloquy from Hamlet. In later life the strain of doing so became so severe that after he preached he would vomit uncontrollably.6
His listeners were just as passionate. As he wept, so would they, and then they would faint, tremble and fall, and at last proclaim that he had rescued them from Satan. Despite his success—or rather because of it—Whitefield also made a host of enemies. They included the Bishop of London, who wrote a pastoral letter in the summer of 1739 telling his flock that the young man was deluded. Barred from the pulpits of the city, Whitefield took to the open air, holding prayer meetings in the fields and drawing in vast crowds of artisans, milliners, and merchants.7
As he strove to break down what he called “the partition wall of bigotry,” Whitefield tried to go everywhere to preach. His brother was a sea captain, a privateer who captured at least one Spanish ship, and he helped organize the expedition to America. There Whitefield styled himself “an amphibious itinerant,” as he hurried up and down the coast, on horseback or by boat, from Savannah to New Hampshire and back. Venturing deep inland as well, he met Quakers, Germans, Matherites, and merchants, and also the African slaves.8
An English print from 1739 mocking the preacher George Whitefield. Titled Enthusiasm Displayed, it portrays him at an outdoor meeting in London surrounded by admiring female figures labeled Hypocrisy, Deceit, and Folly.
On the face of it, he and Franklin had nothing in common. Eventually, they became personal friends, but only in 1745, when Whitefield was toning down his rhetoric. To begin with, their relationship was cordial but no more, as Franklin trod carefully in dealing with a man whose views about religion were the opposite of his. Like a frigate arriving fully armed for war, Whitefield made himself the ally of the Calvinists, with among them the Tennents, who had been so hostile to Franklin during the Hemphill affair.
For Whitefield, like the Tennents, to be a Christian meant to undergo rebirth in the Spirit. This could only come about when a sinner admitted his or her depravity. And so he found his closest soul mates among the Presbyterian Scots-Irish, who shared the same beliefs, a creed that Franklin rejected entirely. Gilbert Tennent led Whitefield out toward the frontier and then up through New Jersey to New York. There he was given a hero’s welcome by Mr. Pemberton Jr., who four years earlier had helped to end Hemphill’s career. And so, at least in theory, Franklin should have kept his distance from the young evangelist.
However, by this time Franklin was nearly thirty-four. He had learned from past mistakes, including those he made in the Hemphill case. Cautiously, Franklin the journalist took his time to express an editorial opinion about the preacher. Long before Whitefield set foot in Philadelphia, the colonial press had been following his activities, picking up stories from London. The Pennsylvania Gazette had been among the papers that did so. As yet, however, Americans could not be sure what Whitefield meant to do when he came among them. And so in the early weeks of Whitefield’s mission, the Gazette kept its coverage to a minimum, allowing Andrew Bradford and the Mercury to make the running with the story.9
At first it seemed that Whitefield meant to shun controversy. At Christ Church the Anglican minister, Archibald Cummings, greeted him politely; so did the colony’s co-proprietor, Thomas Penn; and everything was light and sweetness. Five days into his visit, Whitefield preached from the steps of the courthouse to a crowd he estimated at six thousand. While his figures are open to doubt—if we add up the numbers he gave for his audience on each occasion when he spo
ke in Philadelphia, they come to many times the town’s population—there can be no doubt that people flocked to hear Whitefield as eagerly as they had done in England.
“The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous,” Franklin recalled. At first he stood among the throng rather skeptically, but soon he could see that Whitefield was extraordinary. The preacher’s delivery, for one thing: it was so loud and so clear that it carried for nearly two blocks down Market Street. Franklin measured the distance by pacing backward toward the waterfront, listening as he went. As the years went by and Franklin heard Whitefield speak many times, he came to admire the way the preacher kept on polishing his sermons, until “every accent, every emphasis, every modulation was…perfectly well turn’d and well plac’d.”
His skill at extracting money from his audience: that was remarkable too. On one occasion when Franklin had a pocket full of gold and silver coins, none of which he meant to donate, he found Whitefield’s oratory so compelling that he left them all in the plate for the orphanage in Georgia. One other thing struck Franklin very forcibly: that when Whitefield told his listeners that they were wicked sinners—“half beasts and half devils”—the crowd only loved him all the more.
To the Franklin of the 1720s, a skeptic and for a while an atheist, this would have seemed absurd. But now that he was in his early middle age, Franklin had come to recognize that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in his earlier philosophy. At one time, it had seemed to Franklin that the colonies were evolving into a thoroughly secular society: that is what he must have thought, to make him behave as he did during the Hemphill affair. Now it was clear that he had been mistaken. Time and again, as the centuries went by, Christian revivals would take place in America, with profound implications for politics as well as for religion. Why this should be so is a question too deep for a Franklin biographer to fathom. The relevant point is this. In the face of the excitement that Whitefield aroused, Franklin had to recognize that in his America, evangelical faith was a permanent feature of the landscape. Like it or not, Franklin would have to come to terms with it.
How should he react to Whitefield? In the Gazette, Franklin began by maintaining a strict neutrality. In the early weeks he did not flatter Whitefield with glowing accounts of his adventures. Nor did he seek to slander the man by reprinting the fiercest attacks on Methodism from the London press. Instead, as the Delaware froze over and the town fell quiet for the winter, Franklin simply tried to make some money from the Calvinist revival. He did so with the help of Whitefield’s friend and business manager, William Seward.10
In London, Seward had made a small fortune working for the South Sea Company and dealing in bonds and commodities. The rest of the time he also raised funds for the charity schools. Converted to the cause of Methodism, Seward became a literary agent, arranging the publication of Mr. Whitefield’s journals of his travels. In England the Journals had sold very well, and so it made sense to look for an American edition. Soon after their arrival in Philadelphia, Seward met both printers in the town, but Franklin came up with the better offer. In November they signed the contract: seven volumes already published in London, and also the ones that Whitefield would write in the colonies.
The timing was perfect. So was the product. At this time of year, with work just finished on the new issue of Poor Richard, Franklin always had some spare capacity. And by now—thanks to the almanacs—he had created a network of agents through which he could push the Journals out to the largest audience. Being so religious, Boston was likely to take the lion’s share; but Franklin also had his sister-in-law in Rhode Island, the Timothys down in Charleston, and keepers of country stores all the way up the Delaware, in southern New Jersey, and in Maryland. In New York, he could rely for distribution on Hamilton’s friend, Mr. Zenger. In fact he could probably sell as many books as he could print.
Having worked in London in a printing factory, Franklin had the skills to handle a very long run of a book meant to be a best-seller. In 1726, when he was employed by John Watts, Franklin had been part of a team who dealt in mass production. In the Watts workshop, the most lucrative moneymaker had been the pocket editions, done in the small format of duodecimo, to be sold at attractive prices to a wide market eager to read the finest writers of the age. For the Whitefield Journals, Franklin would use the same format in a way that had not been viable in America before.
At last the reading public had reached the necessary size, and—thanks to Mr. Whitefield—Franklin had a series of books that might be as popular as those of Defoe or Addison. The preacher was causing a sensation, and his books were bound to sell. The little volumes, only five inches tall, were advertised in the Gazette in November. Within days, Franklin took advance orders for two hundred sets. The readers would not be disappointed.
George Whitefield had a flair for writing. Breaking new ground in literature, his Journals were a hybrid of autobiography, travelogue, and Christian piety. Composed in plain but sprightly English, they also supplied some barbed social commentary from a young man willing to be controversial. Often they read like a novel. That was another secret of Whitefield’s success: his readers were keen to have new forms of narrative. In London, Samuel Richardson was writing his best-seller, Pamela, to appear in the fall of 1740. James Ralph’s old friend Henry Fielding was soon to follow suit with Joseph Andrews. These were novels that Franklin would come to know and love, dealing as they did with themes akin to those of his memoirs. In Whitefield’s Journals, he would find something similar: a picaresque account of a young man’s adventures, the only things absent being erotica and violence. At this early stage, although later he changed his mind, Whitefield opposed the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
That winter Bradford filled the Mercury with coverage of the Awakening. Some of it was excellent. For example, in December the Mercury printed something new, a personal profile of the preacher, of the sort that every journalist has to write today; in the eighteenth century so far, such a thing was very rare. As Whitefield began to make enemies, especially in Boston, where the Puritan clergy—Harvard people—saw him as a dangerous man, who divided families and congregations, so Bradford kept his readers fully informed. In the meantime Franklin kept on churning out the books. They would turn a far better profit than a few extra copies sold of the Mercury.11
At last, by the end of May, the Journals were ready for their readers. Nothing like this had been seen in America hitherto. Off they went from Market Street, the boxes of books, up and down the coast and deep into the hinterland. But not before Mr. Whitefield had given rise to some unpleasantness. After his trip to Manhattan, the preacher had traveled to the Carolinas and to Savannah. In rice and tobacco country, he saw the slave economy up close. Whitefield was horrified. In time his views about Africans would prove to be as ambivalent as his feelings about the military. But to begin with, the preacher was ready to be outspoken: not only about slavery, but also about his superiors in England.
A RASH YOUNG MAN
In April 1740, Whitefield came hurtling back from Charleston, entering Philadelphia with Seward on the evening of Monday the 14th. Earlier that day, the citizens had heard the royal proclamation: the British and their colonies were now at war with Spain. “The people express’d their joy in loud huzzas,” wrote the Gazette, in a gleeful item welcoming the chance to loot the Spanish towns in the Caribbean. As Whitefield arrived the liquor was still flowing, and a bonfire was burning on the highest spot in the city. The following morning, while Whitefield prepared to preach again, he ran into Mr. Cummings. Never again would he be welcome in the pulpit at Christ Church. The rector told him that quite plainly.12
Along with the news of war, there had come stories from London making it clear that Whitefield was finished as an Episcopalian. Before he left for America, he had formed an alliance in Scotland with rigorous men from the Old Light wing of the Presbyterian comm
unity. The closer he drew to Calvinists such as these, the more distant he became from most of his colleagues in the Anglican Church. In 1739, as he fought back against Bishop Gibson, he had scandalized his brethren by insulting the memory of Archbishop Tillotson, saying that the grand old latitude man knew “no more of Christianity than Mohammed.” He repeated the charge in an open letter published in South Carolina.
While Whitefield was on his way north, Franklin printed the same letter in the Gazette. Mr. Cummings was furious; and all the more so because, he told the preacher, the press were refusing to carry items putting the case for authority and tradition. It was said that Mr. Seward had both printers in his wealthy pocket. That afternoon Whitefield found a balcony from which to speak. Again he denounced John Tillotson, his creed of good works, and his liberal species of Christianity. The prelate was worse than a deist, said Mr. Whitefield. He likened the late archbishop to “Goliath of the Philistines,” and cast himself in the role of David.
Two days later, the Gazette came out again and Franklin tossed gunpowder on the flames. While Whitefield hurried to and fro, preaching six times in three days, the Gazette ran another of his open letters: this time a polemic against slavery, addressed to the planters of the South. Just seven months earlier, there had been a slave revolt near Charleston. The Stono Rebellion had ended in a massacre of the rebels, their heads cut off and mounted on the mile posts by the highway. As he rode by, Whitefield must have seen the skulls; and in his letter he makes it clear that he knew all about the insurrection and its aftermath.13