Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  In October, Jeremiah Langhorne followed Andrew Hamilton to the grave. That left only James Logan still alive, sixty-eight years old and too frail to shape the political future. Now the General Assembly danced to a different tune. Led by John Kinsey, the Quaker party were still firmly in control, still against a militia and still refusing to vote any but the bare minimum of money for the use of Governor Thomas. At the election that fall, there was a riot when sailors came up from the docks—“beating and abusing a great number of people,” said one eyewitness—and tried to bar the Quakers and the Germans from voting. The people of the town fought back, chasing the sailors back to their ships, and the poll went ahead. Once again it was a triumph for the Kinsey ticket.5

  It was widely rumored—with some justice—that William Allen organized the riot, in collusion with the mayor, Andrew Hamilton’s old partner Clement Plumstead. If so, it was a sign of just how desperate they had become. While the Quaker-German coalition remained intact, Allen and his supporters were doomed to impotence. So was the governor, with whom they were loosely aligned. As for Franklin, again his loyalties were divided. Never a pacifist, he supported the war, he wanted to see a militia, and he and William Allen were old friends. Nor did Franklin have much time for Speaker Kinsey. When the latter passed away eight years later, the Gazette ran only the briefest of obituaries. On the other hand, Franklin was dismayed by the riot—the sailors, said his report of the incident in the Gazette, were “strangers,” with “no right to intermeddle”—and at the assembly he had to work with the ruling party.

  And so Franklin found himself in a sort of no-man’s-land: fascinated by politics, about which he had written and read so much, but unable to play an active role himself. It may be that he also suffered from the occupational disease of journalists in middle life. A mood of frustration overtakes them, as they tire of chronicling other people’s adventures and feel their own lack of lasting achievement. It seems that sometimes he was deeply bored. At his desk in the State House, during sessions of the assembly, Franklin would doodle with numbers, creating mathematical puzzles for himself to solve.

  His problems would have been less acute if he had been nothing more than a writer like James Ralph. But for Franklin, writing could never be an end in itself. If he had wished, he might have become a colonial version of Samuel Richardson. But an American answer to Pamela would not have done justice to Franklin’s other talents. Writing could not be the serious vocation he required. Despite Franklin’s love of satire, his hoaxes, and his affability, at heart he was always profoundly serious. He was also intensely ambitious. In fact he was so serious and so ambitious that he felt obliged to hide these attributes behind a cloak of levity. What Franklin needed was a new career. It had to be one that made full use of all his faculties: not merely his skill with language, but also his mechanical genius, with tools and apparatus, and his powers of logical analysis.

  Early in 1743, a calamity occurred that gives us Franklin at his best but also shows us how far he had yet to travel. Two hundred yards from his printing shop, down by the wharf where he landed twenty years before, there stood a wooden shed where a retired sea captain, Mr. Clymer, sold a variety of nautical tackle. It was wintertime, the season for fires, caused by warming pans or candles carelessly left burning. At two in the morning of January 5, with a cold breeze blowing down the Delaware, suddenly the word went up that the shed was ablaze.6

  Among the neighbors was a saddler who belonged to Franklin’s Union Fire Company. So out they turned, with their buckets, hooks, and chains. For three hours, as the wind blew the flames toward Market Street, Franklin and his comrades fought to control the fire. It was only halted by the stout party wall of a merchant’s new home. Even so, eight houses had been destroyed, a bakery, a tavern, and the saddlery. Franklin had lost two of his fire buckets. He placed a notice in the Gazette in the hope that they might be returned.

  The worst fire the town had witnessed for many years, the incident had its silver lining. In the days that followed, Philadelphians hurried to copy Franklin’s example and form new fire companies of their own: something that served as a vindication of Franklin’s zeal for neighborly virtue. But even now, he and his friends had to turn to the British for help. Five weeks before Clymer’s shed caught fire, the Union Company had voted to order the best apparatus they could find. And of course it had to come from London.

  They ordered England’s finest, an engine that could shoot water one hundred feet in the air. It came from a workshop in Smithfield that Franklin must have seen in 1725, when he sat at his printing bench at Mr. Palmer’s only a few minutes’ walk away. As yet, no American engineer could build a machine of such sophistication. Although the Union Fire Company broke new ground in America, it was still a London idea transplanted to the colonies; so that Franklin had yet to show that he was more than an imitator of English models.7

  This was about to change. Seventeen forty-three would prove to be a watershed year for Franklin. It was his climacteric, when at last he began to fulfill his vocation as a scientist. It was also a year that brought some happiness for Deborah. By the spring, the Franklins knew that Mrs. Franklin was pregnant again, with a child conceived at about Christmastime. He left so few personal papers from this period that we cannot say precisely how Franklin felt about the news; but in May, after a gap of ten years, the expectant father went to see his family in Boston. This is surely evidence that he was delighted about it.

  Much as he disliked that irritating town, his journey back to Massachusetts would prove to be decisive for his future. In New England he made new acquaintances with people of learning who threw open new windows in Franklin’s life. Step by step, between 1743 and 1746, Franklin resolved his dilemmas and began to achieve the originality he craved. These were also years when the pace of political life in the colonies began to accelerate, as three decades of peace between Britain and France came to a close.

  Amid the clamor of war, Franklin’s circle of friends grew ever larger. In these critical years, he and like-minded people from New York and New England began to collaborate with a degree of urgency rarely witnessed in the colonies. In the birth of science in America, patriotism and military zeal walked hand in hand with botany, physics, and the study of terrain. The colonists most committed to philosophy, including Franklin and his new acquaintances, were also among the most eager to fight the French, and to use their expertise to secure the interior. It was against this background, in the spring of 1743, that Franklin produced one of his boldest ideas: his scheme for an American Philosophical Society. He meant it to be a club for what he called “virtuosi or ingenious men”: a scientific version of the Junto writ large.

  INDIANS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND MAPS

  Soon after the waterfront fire, the Gazette ran a tale of bloodshed in the wilderness, a clash between the Iroquois and settlers in Virginia. Appearing on January 27, it was a story of a kind that Franklin rarely covered at length. It seems that his readers cared more about the price of corn in Jamaica, a fiery sermon in Boston, or the death of a European king than they did about Indian affairs. Even the Walking Purchase had gone unrecorded in his columns. But in the early weeks of 1743, any news of a skirmish with the Iroquois was worth an inch or so. They were supposed to be allies of the British, who at this moment in their history in America needed all the friends they could find.

  Franklin called the incident “this unhappy action.” The first reports of the affair had arrived a few days earlier, from a frontiersman, Thomas McKee, who kept a store on an island in the Susquehanna. Governor Thomas summoned him to Philadelphia for a session of his cabinet, the Provincial Council. The previous fall, said McKee, a band of Iroquois had come down the river, on their way to settle a feud with some enemies in the Carolina Piedmont. The Iroquois called on a judge at Lancaster, who gave them a pass to take them as far as Maryland. Beyond the line, they could expect to be treated as hostiles.8

  On they w
ent until they entered a tract of land, sixty miles west of Charlottesville, recently settled by the Scots-Irish. Cold and hungry, the Iroquois killed and ate some of the settlers’ hogs, and then they ran into a troop of Ulstermen on horseback. Seven days before Christmas they fought a battle that left ten settlers dead and four of the Iroquois. The Indians escaped to the north, pausing at McKee’s to tell him their side of the story.

  Whoever was to blame, the incident came as a cruel surprise to George Thomas and his colleagues. For the next nine months it filled their agenda as they scrambled to find a way to keep the peace. Their problem was obvious. For the past fifteen years, since Logan struck his first deal with the Iroquois, the colony’s alliance with them had held firm. It was only with Iroquois consent that Logan and his friends could trample over the rights of the Lenape and make the Walking Purchase. To the southwest, the same alliance had allowed Pennsylvania to grow into the interior. By the early 1740s, Irish and German farmers had followed Logan’s traders across the Susquehanna, to create the township of York, ninety miles from the sea. From there, the Conestoga wagons were rattling down the southern trail toward the Shenandoah.

  If the Iroquois went to war with the Virginians, and Virginia called for help from its neighbors, the treaties would be broken. And if that were so, far more would lie at stake than the fate of a few homesteads in the wilderness. On the contrary: the gloomiest of Mr. Logan’s prophecies might be fulfilled. Hitherto, Logan had been a lonely Cassandra, with his talk of a global war between Britain and France and the effect it might have in America, if the French and their Indian friends swept down the Hudson valley to invade the colonies. In 1732, Walpole’s officials had ignored the memo about defense that Logan sent over to England; but now, after the debacle at Cartagena, Sir Robert had fallen from power. His system of diplomacy had collapsed as well. A terminal rift between London and Versailles seemed to be inevitable: the outcome that Logan had feared for so long.9

  The fate of Austria had always been the thing to watch. By the summer of 1742 the young queen in Vienna, Maria Theresa, was facing an attack from a coalition of her enemies, with France at its head. In response the British sent an army to Flanders, from which it could enter the War of the Austrian Succession on her side. If and when the redcoats crossed the Rhine, they were sure to collide with the French. As 1743 began, this was widely expected in America, not least by Franklin. In the year’s first issue of the Gazette, he printed some somber lines of poetry—“On the Present Troubles in Europe”—warning of the horrors that would flow from what he called “infernal discord.”

  Hence the mood of alarm when McKee arrived with his story. Thirty years later, when he wrote his memoirs, Franklin said that in the early 1740s he had two regrets about the state of the colony. The colony had, he wrote, “no provision for defence, nor for a complete education of youth.” At the time of the skirmish in Virginia, Franklin was trying to correct the lack of schooling with a project for an academy in Philadelphia. He was also beginning to fret about the danger of war: not a distant war in the West Indies, but a war at home against the Indians as well as the French.

  Until the autumn of 1742, and despite the American losses in the West Indies, Franklin had been a detached observer of the fighting. To be sure, he printed the exploits of the town’s privateers, especially those of a Scotsman, John Sibbald, who worshipped with Deborah at Christ Church and captured Spanish ships at sea.*1 He and Sibbald became personal friends. But the war on land, such as it was, did not capture Franklin’s imagination. In the new edition of Poor Richard, printed in November, he made fun of the latest little battle between the British and the Spaniards in Florida. The almanac featured a sarcastic little poem, ending with the words: “Say, Children, is not this your Play, Bo-peep?”10

  But then, as the War of Jenkins’ Ear threatened to become a war with France as well, this kind of joke ceased to be amusing. Out west the Shawnee were already pawns of the French, seduced by gifts of guns and liquor: or so it was believed. If the Iroquois succumbed as well, and abandoned the alliance with the British, America would lie at the mercy of King Louis XV. As the weeks went by, Governor Thomas hurried to and fro, looking for people to help him defend his province. To win some support from the assembly he gave the corrupt John Kinsey the post of chief justice. In return the assembly voted the governor some money from the taxes.

  Mr. Thomas also looked for help from members of Franklin’s circle. The first man to answer the call was his best bookstore customer, the Anglican cleric Richard Peters. In February, the Provincial Council chose Peters for the post of secretary that James Logan had held for so long. This was why Franklin had to postpone his scheme for an academy. Franklin had seen Peters, he later recalled, as “a fit person to superintend such an institution”; but Peters, who needed a better-paid job, preferred his new role with the government.

  In his turn, Peters enlisted the support of a Junto member, William Parsons, the surveyor. Beyond the Susquehanna, rumors were rife of an Indian plot to kill every white fur trader in the region. Peters and Parsons were already due to go out to Lancaster County on some business for the Penn family. With panic setting in among the settlers, the two men were told to calm them down, and to assure them that the Iroquois treaties were secure.

  And so, one by one, Franklin’s allies in Philadelphia were recruited into public service, as the colony’s future seemed to be in peril. With his printing business and the assembly still taking up so much of his time, Franklin could do little directly to help, but in the spring he found another way to be of use. On May 14, as the governor entered talks with the Iroquois, Franklin published his manifesto for a new scientific club. It would be his gift to the patriotic cause: a society of clever people, working together to promote the well-being of what he called “the British plantations in America.”

  To begin with, it was somebody else’s idea. It came from one of Franklin’s many friends, John Bartram, a truly extraordinary person: a farmer, an explorer, and a self-taught expert on America’s botany and animal life. Seven years older than Franklin, born of Quaker stock but by now a freethinker, Bartram lived in a gray stone house, complete with Grecian columns on the porch, that he had built himself. It still stands today, with its scientific garden on a bluff above the Schuylkill and a distant view of the office towers in downtown Philadelphia. From there Mr. Bartram made long forays into the wilderness, collecting specimens for clients in England. He was “a most wonderful genius,” said the best of them, Peter Collinson, a Quaker friend of James Logan. A successful merchant in textiles, Collinson had helped to arrange the first shipments of books from London for the Library Company.

  In 1737, after a field trip to Chesapeake Bay, gathering seeds and pinecones, Bartram wrote to Collinson to tell him about his pet project: an “academy or society” of “most ingenious and curious men,” who would pursue research in America into the arts and sciences. A member of London’s Royal Society, Collinson liked the idea of an American equivalent but he had his doubts about its feasibility. He did not think such a thing could be achieved during what he called “the infancy of your colony.”

  And so at first John Bartram’s concept came to nothing. However, he was already acquainted not only with Robert Grace, who met Collinson while he was in England studying metallurgy, but also with Franklin. When Franklin saw scientific items in the press, he would pass them on to Mr. Bartram. As the years went by, the two men became close collaborators. In 1742, when Bartram needed money to fund his travels in the interior, the Gazette ran a notice asking for donations to support him. The following year, the Library Company gave Bartram free membership: devoted as he was to natural history, he never had much money to spare and he could not afford the subscription.11

  As their friendship matured, he and Franklin put together the scheme for an American Philosophical Society. In the spring of 1743, the time seemed right for such a project. By now the colonies—a
nd especially Pennsylvania—had outgrown their childhood. Contrary to what Mr. Collinson had said, they had developed to a point at which the pursuit of science was feasible. The State House in Philadelphia, the making of furniture, clocks, and silverware, the Franklin fireplace, the rifle, and the fine country houses that gentlemen were building near the town: all of them were evidence of a new creativity in the Delaware region where the economy, insecure though it was, appeared to be ready for a new adventure of ingenuity.

  “The first drudgery of settling new colonies,” Franklin wrote in his manifesto, “is now pretty well over and there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease…to cultivate the finer arts, and improve the common stock of knowledge.” To “men of speculation,” as he put it, “many hints must from time to time arise, many observations occur, which if well-examined, pursued and improved, might produce discoveries to the advantage of some or all of the British plantations, or to the benefit of mankind in general.” Far from being purely academic, his society would aim to satisfy practical needs as well to delight the intellect. “Useful knowledge”: that was his goal. He and his colleagues would seek to cultivate what he called “all new arts, trades and manufactures,” of a kind that would “increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life.”12

  Mines, minerals, quarries, and new mechanical inventions: these were dear to the hearts of Franklin, Logan, and the ironmasters. And so they featured high on his list of the sciences they would investigate. Chemistry, botany, and new techniques for farming: Franklin mentioned them as well. Long ago in Northamptonshire, his uncle Thomas had belonged to a similar cult of ingenuity, with some of the same preoccupations. With a war with France so close at hand, Franklin and Bartram also had to think about defense. On Franklin’s scientific menu, there was an item that could not have been more relevant at this anxious time in Pennsylania’s evolution.