Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  “God has a quarrel with you,” he told the planters, “for your cruelty to the poor Negroes.” He listed the sins of the white man—“cruel task masters”—and against them he invoked the retribution of Jehovah. To Africans and whites alike, he vowed to preach the Gospel, but the planters were the ones who had most to fear. Smallpox and fever, the threat of murder by the slaves, and now the danger of invasion by the Spanish, such were the vessels of the wrath of God: “and unless you all repent,” said Mr. Whitefield, “you must all expect to perish.”

  In the whole of Franklin’s long career, he published no other words as forceful. It cannot be said that in 1740 he agreed with George Whitefield, because for many years to come Franklin continued to advertise the sale of slaves, and he owned slaves himself: at least one in 1745 and at least two in 1750.*2 He also printed many notices offering rewards for runaways. In Charleston, his partner Lewis Timothy had been just the kind of vicious man Whitefield had condemned; and Franklin knew that this was so. In 1735 Timothy had bought a slave and shaved off his hair as a punishment. When the young man ran away and was caught, Timothy clapped an iron frame over his head. When the slave escaped again, The South Carolina Gazette published the details as part of his description.14

  Franklin must have read this item. Even so their partnership went on. Not until the early 1750s can we find Franklin voicing doubts about slavery, and even then his qualms were purely economic. The pious words about benevolence spoken at the meetings of the Junto were, to this extent, tarnished with hypocrisy. If Whitefield could see the wickedness of what occurred in the Carolinas, then Franklin should have done so too. Even in Boston in the 1710s, Josiah’s friend Judge Sewall had felt deeply unhappy about slavery; and by the end of the 1730s it was already becoming the custom in Pennsylvania for principled Quakers to liberate their slaves. And yet it is only in 1772 that we come across Franklin opposing slavery on humanitarian grounds. In the 1740s he turned a blind eye to the terrible things that Whitefield saw. Whitefield had been to the South. He came away appalled. Franklin did not go there at all.

  During this phase of his career, Franklin had his mind on other things: including making money. The Whitefield story was simply too good to miss. With the boxes of the Journals almost ready to be shipped, Franklin felt he could be controversial. On Sunday, April 20, with Whitefield sitting in a pew at Christ Church, where Deborah could be found as well, they heard Mr. Cummings explode with his own tirade.

  Outraged by what he read in the Gazette, he called the boy parson “a rash young man.” At first he had thought George Whitefield was well-meaning; but now Cummings recognized that the preacher was full of “wild, distracted notions,” someone who dealt in “rude language” and “low scurrility.” It was just the kind of thing that Whitefield wanted to hear: the sort of condemnation he received from the clerical establishment in England. His followers had crowded into Christ Church. Afterward they told him what they thought of Mr. Cummings.15

  In the weeks that followed, Whitefield circled around again through New Jersey. He preached many times, with Gilbert Tennent at his side, before making another foray to New York and then another tour of rural Pennsylvania. Nobody rode so swiftly, worked so hard, or talked so much. Meanwhile in Philadelphia, his friend Mr. Seward had opened another battlefront against the ungodly. And here at last Franklin found himself in a little difficulty. After having been so cautious during the winter, in the spring he came to be caught up in a quarrel, and one that was more than just another Philadelphia story.

  Down south, Mr. Whitefield and William Seward had been shocked by something else besides the treatment of the slaves. Dancing: that was it. Everywhere below Annapolis, the planters and the merchants loved to dance and sing, to play music, or stage amateur theatricals, vices that Whitefield had come to despise. In between epidemics, how else could the planters maintain their morale? Surely it was healthier than merely drinking rum: but not so in the eyes of Mr. Seward and his friend.

  By this time Philadelphia had an assembly room, maintained by Robert Bolton, a dancing master. On Tuesday nights he held a ball and concert party, attended by some of the town’s most eminent people, men and women who were Franklin’s neighbors and clients. It was quite disgraceful, thought William Seward. He decided that the music and the dancing had to stop. Somehow he obtained the key to the ballroom. Although it was April, with the social season near its end, and only one last party left to come, Mr. Seward locked the door.

  This was too much to bear. The concert party broke the door down, and for many weeks the strife continued, with Seward and the dancers trading insults on the streets and in the columns of the press. The quarrel became all the harder to resolve when Whitefield converted the Boltons, who renounced their sinful ways. Since Mrs. Bolton and Deborah were friends, the affair was all the more embarrassing for Franklin, who had a foot in both camps.

  By now, with the Journals soon to appear, he was so close to Whitefield and Seward that he really had to take their part. On the other hand, the concert party included someone he did not wish to offend: Richard Peters, aged about thirty-six, a director of the Library Company, and a trusted servant of the Penns. He was an Anglican clergyman, but it seems that he had a little problem with bigamy; and so, having married a wife too many, Peters left the church to become an official of the province.

  Mr. Peters was also one of Franklin’s most important customers. He would put in big orders for paper, pens, and books, by the same authors that Franklin admired—Addison, and Shaftesbury, and Tillotson—and most of all he bought parchment for making out official documents. An influential man, Peters was a contact Franklin did not wish to lose, but for a while they came close to a permanent rift. Early in May, Peters was in Franklin’s shop with some political friends from the assembly, when in walked William Seward. The two men abhorred each other, and there was a verbal fracas. Peters and his friends “boiled with rage,” wrote Seward in his diary. Although nobody threw a punch it seems that this was only narrowly avoided.

  Even after Whitefield and Seward left the town—Whitefield for Savannah, and Seward for the mother country—the anger refused to die down, continuing until the end of May. Later that year, Seward met his death in England after being struck on the head by a stone while he was trying to preach. In Philadelphia he left behind a legacy of bitterness, and a new source of controversy between Franklin and his rival, Andrew Bradford, who fought out the concert party quarrel in their publications.

  In the Gazette, a writer in the guise of “Obadiah Plainman”—who must have been Franklin—took the side of Seward, accusing his opponents of “impertinent babble,” who dealt in what he called “the merriest gibberish.” Down the street at the Mercury, under an equally silly nom de plume, “Tom Truman” pointed the finger at Franklin. By aligning himself with Whitefield, said the Mercury, Franklin had shown that he was a hypocrite, “a false fellow of two faces…the author of much mischief.”16

  Goodness knows what their readers made of this. Up to a point, these tawdry exchanges were merely another episode in the long feud between the two printers: a vendetta that would only end when Bradford passed away. But trivial though the affair might seem, Franklin’s business ties with Seward put his standing in the town in danger. Not only in Philadelphia, but even more so in New England, Whitefield was a man who created enmity, with his extremes of language and his open contempt for anyone—especially the learned—who preferred either a quieter, less intense species of religion, or no religion at all. And that description would apply to most of Franklin’s oldest friends and his partners in his civic projects.

  Mr. Whitefield’s revival failed to excite the members of the Junto. In Franklin’s shop accounts, we find that only two of them—Robert Grace, and a carpenter, William Maugridge—signed up in advance for copies of the Journals. Did James Logan buy a set? This is most improbable. Neither his name, nor those of Andrew Hamilton or Willia
m Allen, appear in the list of subscribers. As for the Library Company, on May 5, at the height of the concert party feud, it held its annual meeting to choose its directors. Franklin’s support fell away, and he was nearly voted off the board.

  Had he upset his fellow members, by siding with Seward and the preacher? It seems highly likely that he had. In 1746, when the Library Company compiled a catalogue of the books it had bought in the previous five years, it contained not a single item by Whitefield, or indeed by any other preacher from the Great Awakening. While they devoured the works of skeptics, such as Bayle or Voltaire, they never owned a page of Whitefield’s Journals. In the eyes of the Library Company, always defiantly secular, the Awakening was something to be ignored.

  Three centuries on, it serves no useful purpose to take sides in controversies like these. The important thing is this. Far from being trivial, the dance hall affair and the rifts that Whitefield caused were a symptom of a wider malaise, as the Quaker colony became in the 1740s a more polarized, acrimonious society. New sources of conflict had emerged, which a politician like Speaker John Kinsey could mediate but not resolve. The war, the economic downturn, religious strife, bitter and sectarian, and ethnic rivalries as well, not to mention the old, familiar struggle between the town of Philadelphia and the farmers inland, the burden of taxes each one should share, and the rents the Penn family required in return for grants of land: there were so many subjects on which people could disagree.

  As newspaper editor and public servant, Franklin was always in the thick of it. At his desk in the assembly, at the Junto, or with the proofs of the Gazette, he would hear every rumor, know many secrets, and try to make a profit while also seeking to keep his moral compass. His was not an easy path to tread. And so this period served as another important phase in Franklin’s education as a statesman. It was all the more essential for his future because—for the first time in Franklin’s life—the hostilities with Spain raised a question that would recur throughout his later career.

  How—if at all—should Americans prepare for battle? In the summer of 1740, a few Scottish merchants began to arm a privateer, a sloop called the George, to sail out to take the war to the Spanish. The Quakers could not do so, for reasons of belief. With Kinsey at their head they refused to form a militia or to levy taxes for cannons to guard the Delaware. By now the Penns had found a new governor, George Thomas, a planter from Antigua, duty bound to serve the king and also disposed to protect the British West Indies. He called for volunteers, for a regiment to join an expedition against the Spanish bases in Cuba or on the coast of South America.

  These volunteers were to be the first American marines. In May, as the dance hall feud dragged on, the Gazette and the Mercury printed the governor’s appeal for men in German and English, with James Hamilton—Andrew’s son—as one of the recruiting agents for Philadelphia. For their commanding officer, the marines were to have Franklin’s ally, Colonel Spotswood, who had chosen him to be the town’s postmaster. The Scottish privateers were also people Franklin knew well. Like his wife they were Episcopalians, kneeling every Sunday in the pews at Christ Church.

  It was a costly war, without much justice and with no real victor. It would divide Pennsylvania more deeply than any issue had done before. On one side, committed to peace and piety, and to low taxation, there stood John Kinsey and his allies, Quaker and German, with the rural counties behind them. On the other, in favor of King George, privateering, and a militia, there were the Philadelphia men: the governor and his officials, but also James Hamilton, William Allen, and their ally, Benjamin Franklin. However, in the second half of 1740 the war was still in its infancy. The divisions in the colony had yet to crystallize entirely.

  Instead, Franklin had to fight another kind of campaign: one last, annoying round in his bout with Andrew Bradford. After that, there would be more of Whitefield, stirring up the province again; and then at last, after so many years of delay, Franklin began to find his true vocation as a scientist.

  VILLAINY AND LIBEL

  In England meanwhile, his old printing colleague Charles Ackers had gone from strength to strength. The monthly he co-owned, The London Magazine, had come to be a feature of the parlors of the affluent. Since its authors were up against Samuel Johnson in The Gentleman’s Magazine, they were never quite the best; but they did well enough to make Mr. Ackers a profit. By 1740, the moment had arrived for Franklin to try to produce his colonial equivalent.

  That summer, as the privateer George set out to pillage the Spaniards, Franklin held some talks about a monthly with a lawyer, John Webbe, an Irishman who hoped to be an editor. After the success of Whitefield’s Journals, Franklin was in search of something new. To assist him he took on an extra member of staff: his nephew James, aged about eleven, son of the founder of The New-England Courant, just leaving school in Rhode Island where Franklin had helped to pay for his education. The plans were laid for a monthly magazine with a target circulation of one thousand, conceived—as Franklin put it—“in imitation of those in England.” Alas, the scheme collapsed when he and Webbe fell out about the formula for sharing the profits.

  A grievous loss for literature: so Mr. Webbe went down the street, and did a deal with Andrew Bradford. In November 1740, the Mercury advertised their new periodical, to be called The American Magazine. Encroaching on Franklin’s territory, it would supply “a Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies.” It was just the sort of thing that Franklin, who knew the London press so well, regarded as his rightful territory. Determined not to be outdone, the following week he issued a scornful rejoinder, printed in the columns of the Gazette, telling his readers that in January he would launch a monthly of his own, The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle. In the process, Franklin also accused John Webbe of stealing the idea.

  Now Franklin had been here before, at the time of the almanac wars, The Busy-Body, and his feud with Keimer. This time, however, in successive issues of the Mercury Webbe unleashed a stream of invective more horrid than anything Franklin had yet endured. He found himself accused of lies, and ignorance, “scandalous insinuations,” and “sneaking villainy.” Most dangerously of all, John Webbe alleged that he had been guilty of misconduct in his office as the town’s postmaster.

  According to Webbe, Franklin had unlawfully barred the mailmen from carrying the Mercury free of charge, a privilege newspapers were supposed to enjoy. For a few weeks Franklin kept his temper; but at last, in the middle of December, he printed his own version of events. As Franklin pointed out, by imposing sanctions on the Mercury he was merely following the orders of Colonel Spotswood, who was trying to compel Bradford to pay the overdue money he owed to the king. The diatribe from Webbe was all the more vexing because, at his home in Annapolis, Spotswood had recently passed away.

  Spotswood’s death left the American regiment bound for the Caribbean without a seasoned commander. It also meant the loss of a man Franklin admired, a visionary who—since the days of Queen Anne—had been beating the drum for colonial expansion. Old pillars of stability were disappearing, not only Colonel Spotswood, but also Andrew Hamilton, who was fading fast: he would die in 1741. As Franklin’s patrons vanished from the scene, the Mercury attacked him all the more aggressively. Seven days before Christmas, Webbe made one final onslaught, filling most of that week’s issue, claiming that Franklin had “a violent inclination to defame.” This time Franklin refused to rise to the bait. He waited until the new year, and then ran just a few little articles making fun of Webb’s Irish brogue.

  As for the new monthly magazines, both of them flopped for lack of readers. This was a pity because the six issues that Franklin produced of his General Magazine and Historical Chronicle did indeed contain some excellent material, almost as diverse and entertaining as those of its older rivals in London. Instead of reprinting English articles, Franklin trawled up and down the eastern seaboard, and as far as Ba
rbados, to find American poetry and prose that was as witty as it was informative.

  There were dispatches from the Caribbean war, patriotic verses but also skits and satires, more essays about paper money, a scheme for a factory in Boston, and instructions for making molds for casting bullets. Political news as well, and of course religion: all the many aspects of colonial life found their way into Franklin’s short-lived magazine. And by including many articles about George Whitefield, both for and against, Franklin could clear himself from the charge that the two men had become too close. This was all the easier because at last the preacher’s mission to America had drawn to a temporary close.

  Early in 1741, George Whitefield left Savannah, where he had founded his orphanage, to travel home to England where John Wesley was developing the Methodist movement. What mark had Whitefield left in Pennsylvania? He had certainly helped to keep Franklin in business. Besides the Journals, he printed another forty books and pamphlets inspired in some way by the Great Awakening. Other than that, Whitefield’s legacy was mixed and also very difficult to assess.

  In the summer of 1740, the Gazette had given its verdict in a story that must have been written by Franklin, because—nearly fifty years later—he quoted it in précis in his memoirs. “The alteration in the face of religion here is altogether surprizing,” wrote the author. “Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons, nor the preachers’ greater zeal…religion is become the subject of most conversations. No books are in request but those of piety and devotion; and instead of idle songs and ballads, the people are everywhere entertaining themselves with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. All which, under God, is owing to the successful labor of the reverend Mr. Whitefield.”17