Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  Much of this was true, no doubt. From comments in business letters written by Quakers—people who had no cause to exaggerate the preacher’s success—we can see that, indeed, many people found George Whitefield deeply moving. For a while he set the tone of life in Philadelphia. In politics, however, the voters kept on reelecting Speaker Kinsey, who appears to have shunned the Awakening. Neither he nor the Penn family or their officials wished to bring about a godly renewal of the sort that Whitefield hoped to achieve. Even if they had, the preacher was a man of faith and charisma but not an organizer. He could not create the institutions he needed to carry on his work. On the contrary: as his most visible memento, Whitefield gave Philadelphia a building that stood empty for many years.

  At the time when Franklin’s story appeared in the Gazette, Whitefield’s friends were raising money to build a new meeting house, the largest in the city. It was ready by November. Whitefield had briefly returned, in search of donations for his orphanage, and to preach a few times before he left for England. But then the building fell quiet. From time to time, Gilbert Tennent would turn up to fill the seats, but other than that the hall lay vacant. Money was owing to the owners of the land; the debts piled up; and the trustees could not agree about what to do. For nearly a decade the wrangling went on. At last, with a combination of diplomacy and sound finance, Franklin resolved the situation. The building became the home for his brainchild, the new Philadelphia Academy, the town’s first university: a place where the students would study the work of Archbishop Tillotson, the Anglican dignitary whom Whitefield so despised.

  Time and again with his heated language, Whitefield merely set people at each other’s throats. By the midsummer of 1741, the Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had split down the middle. The schism lasted for nearly twenty years, with Gilbert Tennent and Whitefield’s allies on one side, and more conservative pastors on the other. Seeing that schisms of the kind had already taken place in Scotland and in Ulster, this was probably unavoidable; but it was Whitefield’s campaign that brought the trouble to a head. All this rhetoric, and weeping, and the boasts about his audience: was it really helpful? Could faith of such a kind be sustained for a lifetime, once the moments of passion had faded away?

  Only rarely did Whitefield finish what he started. Although in his youth he attacked the evils of slavery, as he grew older he lost interest in the subject. Indeed, at his mission in Georgia he owned slaves himself. Later, in the 1760s, when Whitefield was still preaching in London—he died in 1770—the anti-slavery movement began to gain ground in the city. Whitefield might have led the campaign: but as he strove to be respectable, somehow he forgot about the Africans, and so the movement had to do without him. As for the future of Methodism, in Great Britain it belonged not to Whitefield but to the Wesleys, people more subtle and more scrupulous, who displayed the talent for organization that Whitefield so very plainly lacked.18

  What lasting impact did he have on Franklin? In his autobiography, the latter makes it clear that Whitefield’s teaching had no influence on his beliefs. “We had no religious connection,” Franklin wrote. The most we can say is this. In George Whitefield, Franklin saw a gifted but a troubled man—in later years the vomiting was evidence of that—of the kind he always found fascinating. There can be no doubt that he admired Whitefield for his energy, his dedication, his voice, and his skill as an orator. Franklin also recognized that Whitefield, for all his arrogance, spoke to the genuine needs of people hungry for some form of spirituality. Although Franklin did not feel that religion—which, in his century in America, was almost bound to mean some form of Christianity—had to be codified into a specific set of doctrines, the yearning for faith was something Franklin came to value as a force that might help to build and to preserve a republic.

  Having been through the Hemphill affair, and then been a witness to the Great Awakening, the middle-aged and elderly Franklin took a pragmatic view of the benefits of religion. As a lover of poetry, a Freemason, and a follower of Tillotson, he preferred to keep his distance from rigid dogma. Indeed, this may explain why it is that in the twenty-first century Franklin scholars find it so hard to define his creed. While Franklin believed in something he called God, he kept his faith deliberately vague. It was ethical and poetic, a generalized belief in benevolence and beauty: but it could not be said to be specifically Christian.

  However, Franklin also knew that this would never satisfy all of his fellow Americans. If they wished to subscribe to Christian doctrine, and revivals such as Whitefield’s, he would not stand in their path. It was wiser to accept their faith and, if need be, try to channel it away from bigotry, in the hope that faith would also make for justice and for virtue. And so in 1787, when the convention met in Philadelphia to make the Constitution, it was Franklin who proposed that they begin each day’s session with a prayer “imploring the assistance of Heaven.” Christian he might not be: but Franklin had evolved since the scandalous days of The New-England Courant.19

  Fascinating though it was, Whitefield’s American tour amounted to nothing more than a passing episode in Franklin’s life. It did not produce the new departure he required. As he approached the age of thirty-five, Franklin was going around in circles, doing very well as a printer but not yet achieving the feats of creativity of which he was capable. If he were to do so, Franklin would need to find a higher calling that would lift him out of feuds and anger, small-town stuff and futile journalistic prose, however witty, the grinding out of endless words without a practical result.

  Or rather he needed two callings. In the second half of his life, he would have two vocations—politics and science—and gradually the moment approached when he could fulfill them. For the time being the politics would have to wait, as the war with Spain settled into a stalemate that also left the Quaker colony in a state of deadlock. In the spring of 1741, the American Regiment went into action under British officers, making an assault on the Spanish base at Cartagena on the coast of what is now Colombia. Poorly planned and led chaotically, the attack was a bloody fiasco. After failing there, the British force moved on to Guantánamo Bay, where their losses from fever—the infamous “Yellow Jack”—were almost as severe. In March, on the eve of Cartagena, the American Regiment was two thousand strong. By the time they left Cuba in December, fewer than three hundred were fit to bear a musket.20

  So the war dragged on and on, blighting the economy but posing—as yet—no direct military threat to Pennsylvania. The Quaker party still refused to raise a militia or to fortify the Delaware, and there was nothing the governor could do to persuade them otherwise. Politics ground to a halt for a while, while beneath the surface the divisions grew deeper. In the meantime, however, at last Franklin found a practical use for the science he had studied in the books at the Library Company.

  The winter of 1740 and 1741 was said to be the worst of the eighteenth century so far. Ice sealed up the Delaware, the cattle died of cold and hunger, and the price of bread and firewood soared. “The poor have suffered much,” wrote a Quaker merchant in January. Not until the end of March did the snow start to melt. With times so hard, Franklin was thinking about a practical way to keep his neighbors warm if the next year’s winter proved to be equally severe.21

  Further back than any living Franklin could remember, his family’s finest powers of ingenuity had lain not with words but with things: iron in the forge, and skill with a hammer, a vat of dye, or a copper full of molten wax for candles. In the course of 1741, Franklin rediscovered this heritage of craftsmanship and added the scientific theory he had acquired from the best European authors. He was going to build an iron fireplace: an emblem of the new, ingenious America that was gradually coming into being.

  THE WAGON, THE RIFLE, AND THE FIREPLACE

  In those early days of Pennsylvania, the colony gave birth to three famous inventions. Two of them were highly successful, new products that would help to
transform the continent. The first was the Conestoga wagon: long, narrow but sturdy, covered with canvas, and built to carry loads down a rocky trail or across a river, or to feature in films by John Ford. We can be sure that wagons of the sort had emerged by 1717. In that year the name appears in the papers of James Logan, who had settled the portion of Lancaster County around Conestoga Creek, where the wagons were created. The second was a gun: the Pennsylvania rifle, with the distinctive long barrel that made it a weapon ideal for hunting, the firearm of choice for Hawkeye and Daniel Boone.

  The third invention was the Franklin fireplace, made from cast iron and first manufactured in 1741. Intended to be economical with fuel, for a while it sold well until some flaws in its design became apparent. It had to be modified before it could evolve into the Franklin stove that made its name in the next century. But despite its defects, the original Franklin fireplace richly deserves its place in history alongside the rifle and the wagon. If we step back from the detail and view these items as part of the broader sweep of events, they take on a new significance. All three were part of the same phenomenon: the birth of engineering in the colonies, and with engineering there came science.22

  By the late 1730s, in places like the valley of the Schuylkill, small clusters of technology had come into being to serve the practical needs of people in the wilderness. The paper mills at Wissahickon were a fine example, but what they required most of all was iron: all three of the Delaware region’s notable inventions were made with that or with steel. Even the wooden Conestoga wagon relied for its strength and its flexibility on the bolts and braces with which it was fitted. And by now the iron industry of Maryland and Pennsylvania could provide local craftsmen with almost everything they required. In Parliament in London in 1737, a Birmingham ironmaster, another friend of Logan, testified about the quality of the iron and steel these two colonies produced: it was good enough, said Joseph Farmer, to make the firing mechanism for the British army’s muskets. He urged the House of Commons to remove the taxes the British imposed on imports of American iron: because if this were done the Americans would swiftly overtake the Russians and the Swedes to become the mother country’s principal suppliers of metal.23

  Farmer’s arguments fell on deaf ears at Westminster. Unable to satisfy all the vested interests who argued the case for and against free trade between Great Britain and the colonies, Parliament chose to do nothing, leaving the import duties in place. And so in the years before the Revolution the colonies shipped only modest quantities of their iron to Great Britain. Instead, the metal remained at home in America to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from a growing population for tools, construction materials, and kitchenware, and to make parts for the ships the colonists built. But while steel and iron were fine things for the Quaker colony to have, even more important were the people: the migrants flowing into Pennsylvania from the British Isles, Switzerland, and Germany, bringing with them their different traditions of artisan skills. Precisely because the colony had grown to be so diverse, Pennsylvania became an environment ideal for innovation. Borrowing from each other’s heritage, craftsmen from many parts of Europe mingled in the Delaware region, swapping ideas until they had the solutions they needed to their problems of manufacture and design.

  If we examine the origins not only of the Pennsylvania rifle but also of the Franklin fireplace, we find that both products arose from this process of cultural exchange. By the 1740s at the latest, the long rifle had emerged as a new, distinctive kind of firearm, probably invented by a Swiss German blacksmith, a Mennonite—in other words, a Baptist refugee—who lived not far from Lancaster in a tract of land that Andrew Hamilton had opened up for settlement. A fusion of English and German designs, the gun derived from the short Swiss hunting rifle of the seventeenth century, and so it had a flintlock and an octagonal barrel. If the barrel was extended to the length of an English fowling piece, as it was in Pennsylvania, the rifle could hit a target at twice the range of a conventional musket. In the case of the fireplace, the same kind of intermingling of cultures occurred. Franklin took a German model, borrowed some features of the design, and then adapted it to appeal to English-speaking customers. With the appliance of some science, Franklin created what he hoped would be the ideal heating engine.24

  When they arrived in America, the Germans had brought with them their traditional iron stoves, built to cope with winters far colder than those in England. “The German stove is like a box, one side wanting,” wrote Franklin. “ ’Tis composed of five iron plates screwed together; and fixed so that you may put the fuel into it from another room, or from the outside of the house.” Because they were Lutherans or Mennonites, the German immigrants wished to do more with their stoves than merely heat a room. The stove plates were cast with images of Bible stories, each one intended to teach a holy lesson.

  An early example of a Pennsylvania rifle, dating from about 1740. This gun belonged to Edward Marshall, the frontier settler who, during the notorious Walking Purchase of land from the Lenape Indians in 1737, covered seventy miles on foot in thirty-six hours. From the collection of the Mercer Museum of the Bucks County Historical Society

  Hundreds of the plates survive in the Mercer Museum at Doylestown, not far from Philadelphia; and because they have a date and a maker’s mark they can be used to chart the prehistory of Franklin’s fireplace. At first, the Germans relied in America on the stove plates they had carried across the Atlantic. As yet, the English iron foundries in Pennsylvania only made simple cast iron firebacks for the open hearths the English had always preferred. But then—in the 1720s—the Germans began to order new plates when the old ones were damaged or they had a house to build. At first it seems that they bought only single plates, but soon enough the English ironmasters started to make complete five-sided stoves on German lines. In 1738, the tide of immigration reached a peak, when in that one year alone more than three thousand Germans arrived in the Delaware. With such a large market to cater to, by 1740 all the leading ironworks in Pennsylvania were selling German stoves.25

  At the heart of the trade stood a Baptist elder, William Branson, whom Franklin had known for fifteen years, since the days when Branson had been one of Thomas Denham’s customers at his waterfront store. By the end of the 1730s, Branson had risen to become not only the largest ironmaster in the colony but also a pillar of society in Philadelphia, where he was an ardent devotee of Whitefield. He also shared Franklin’s zeal for civic projects. Besides his workshop on Market Street, Branson owned the forge and furnace deep in the woods at Coventry in Chester County, with a crew of indentured servants who turned out iron bars and slabs and shipped them down to Philadelphia. In 1738, Franklin went to Branson and bought two stoves and some imported English steel: perhaps for his new home on the same street but more likely to be used in some kind of scientific experiment. By this time, the properties of iron had come to fascinate Franklin and his closest friends.26

  Examples of the cultural traditions that gave birth to the Franklin fireplace: an iron fireback made at the Durham ironworks for Franklin’s mentor, James Logan, and preserved at Stenton, his country house; and a German stove plate made in the Delaware region in the same period with a design showing David and Goliath.

  A few years earlier, his landlord Robert Grace had sailed to Europe for a long trip to study the latest techniques for smelting iron and for testing rocks for minerals. Safely home again in Pennsylvania, in 1740 Grace married into one of the colony’s oldest ironmaking dynasties, by taking as his wife a widow, Rebecca Nutt. She was, as Franklin put it in the Gazette, “an agreeable young lady, with a fortune of £10,000”: Franklin was never the most romantic of men. As her dowry, the new Mrs. Grace supplied a half share in another Chester County ironworks, the Warwick Furnace, where Robert Grace became the manager. It was here, a few miles from Branson’s enterprise, that the Franklin fireplace was assembled.27

  In the fall of 1741, Fra
nklin drew up a detailed set of designs, built a model, and gave it to Robert Grace. His men made the molds for casting the eight iron plates from which the fireplace was screwed together. In December, as the winter set in with a vengeance, the Gazette ran its first advertisement for “the new invented iron fireplaces,” in large and small sizes available from Franklin’s store. By February he had sold all his stock and he was waiting for a new delivery from Warwick, where Grace had high hopes for the future, with plans to turn out each year at least four tons of iron plates for Franklin’s pride and joy.

  THE BREATH OF GOD

  “Iron is always sweet,” wrote Franklin, “and every way taken is wholesome and friendly to the human body—except in weapons.” These words appear in one of his most important texts, published in the fall of 1744, a brilliant little essay describing his fireplace.*3 As a master of technical prose, lucid and logical, detailed but never pedantic, Franklin has rarely been surpassed. Here we find his talent for this kind of writing on show for the first time in his career. With a copy of the essay and a bricklayer to help him, any modern blacksmith could install a replica of Franklin’s invention, so precise are his instructions. The essay also shows us how deeply Franklin had immersed himself in the work of the finest physicists in Europe.28

  The German stoves were clean and effective, thought Franklin, with the smoke, soot, and ash all kept out of the room, but they lacked the glowing hearth that the English loved to see. And although the stoves were an efficient source of heat, the atmosphere inside the room was often stale and stuffy, as the people inside were obliged, as Franklin put it, “to breathe the same unchang’d air continually, mix’d with…the perspiration from one another’s bodies.” This was less of a problem with open fires of the English kind, but they had flaws of their own. They were dirty and unsafe. All too often they set chimneys and houses ablaze, and they wasted fuel by sending too much heat straight up the flue.