by Nick Bunker
His new society would, he wrote, produce “surveys, maps and charts” of the coast and the interior, charting “the course and junction of rivers and great roads, and the situation of lakes and mountains.” It was something that John Bartram saw as his next priority. Two months after Franklin printed the manifesto, Bartram lit out again for the territory, on an expedition to map the wilderness that lay between the Delaware and the Bourbon enemy in Canada.13
His mission arose from the negotiations with the Iroquois. As Governor Thomas tried to preserve the old alliance, he relied on Conrad Weiser, a German and a brilliant linguist, who had helped to smooth the way for the Walking Purchase. In the spring and summer of 1743, Weiser journeyed back and forth unceasingly in the hope of making peace between the native people and the Virginians. On June 7, the Provincial Council in Philadelphia decided to send him on a hazardous journey to the village of Onondaga, 250 miles to the north, which served as the Iroquois capital. Few settlers from the Delaware had ever ventured this far up-country. So Weiser took with him two companions, chosen for their eye for terrain and their skill as surveyors.
One was John Bartram: an obvious choice. The other was Franklin’s neighbor and friend, the ingenious engineer Lewis Evans. He carried a quadrant for taking readings of latitude. Their role was to study the soil, the timber, and the mountains, and to plot the course of the rivers whose sources lay to the south of the Great Lakes. A task the British had shirked for far too long, this had now become imperative.14
For twenty years or so, James Logan and a few counterparts in New York had complained that the French had the only detailed maps of a region that, if it came to war, might hold the key to North America. Although every British colony had a surveyor general, their role was to mark out grants of land, calculate the rents due to King George or to the Penns or the other colonial proprietors, and to settle disputes about the boundaries of each province. They had little time for exploration. John Bartram had done what he could, making sketch maps in northern Pennsylvania and the Hudson valley, but he was the first to admit their failings.
His maps were “clumsily done,” Bartram wrote, “as in ye travails hitherto I have laboured under ye great inconveniency of being always in a hurry.” They had to do better, and here was the opportunity. With the words of Franklin’s manifesto fresh in his mind, Bartram set off for Onondaga with Evans at his side, pausing on the way to visit William Parsons at his farm near Allentown.15
Making noonday sightings of the sun, they traveled as far as Lake Ontario, where in the heat of July Bartram and Evans took a swim. While they did so Conrad Weiser plied the Iroquois with gifts, looking for another treaty to heal their quarrel with Virginia and to open the Ohio country to white settlers. Their expedition had also been a practical example of just the kind of research Franklin’s new society was supposed to undertake. In the meantime, Franklin had made an overland journey of his own, snatching a few weeks away from his workshop while the assembly was in recess. He was off to New England, there to be met with a mixed reception.
TO BOSTON, AGAIN
Soon after printing the manifesto, Franklin set out for Massachusetts. He reached Boston no later than May 25. On that date his name was listed among the Freemasons who attended the St. John’s Lodge. From the masons, Franklin could expect a convivial welcome. His family were another matter. To be sure, he had been reconciled with his parents, who were now very old—Josiah was almost eighty-six, and Abiah was seventy-five—and he was on excellent terms with his brother John, the tallow chandler, who sold Franklin’s products from his store. The rest of his kin were more difficult.
At the Blue Ball Franklin met his brother-in-law, Edward Mecom, the husband of Jane. He was always deeply in debt. Often the worse for ale, and too poor to rent a home of his own, Mecom had been left with no option but to come to live with his relations. The wooden house at Hanover and Union had to accommodate the Franklins, the Mecoms, and their seven children. Jane gave birth to the youngest, a little Josiah, only eight weeks before Franklin arrived.
Among his many sisters, Jane was always Franklin’s favorite. The proof of that is plain to see from the letters that passed between them. But at some point during this visit, they fell out with each other, and the rift took at least two months to heal. It was more than merely a family row, of the kind that might erupt in an overcrowded dwelling filled with noisy children and an irritating husband. It seems that Jane scolded her brother for being a heretic. She appears to have said as much in a letter—now lost—that she sent him after he returned to Philadelphia. As Franklin put it when he replied, in an attempt to call a truce, “you express yourself as if you thought I was against the worshipping of God.”16
This had often been said about Benjamin Franklin; but in Boston in the spring of 1743, Jane Mecom had every reason to be annoyed with her brother. From what little we know about her beliefs, it seems that Jane had become another follower of George Whitefield. As well she might. Her life had been hard and her husband feckless. Three years earlier Whitefield had preached at her church; and now she stood up for his doctrine that only by born-again faith in Jesus Christ could a sinner win redemption.
As far as she could tell, Franklin held to the woolly notion that good works alone could engineer salvation. Jane must also have known about the Hemphill affair. And so she accused her brother of impiety. Jane was bound to feel all the more dismay at his freethinking views because Whitefield and his followers were under attack from all sides. That very week, the Boston newspapers were running stories about yet another controversy that the preacher had aroused.
The previous year, in the Scottish town of Cambuslang, Whitefield had preached to vast crowds, but his techniques had alarmed even his closest allies in the Presbyterian Church. He quarreled with his Calvinist friends, who found his theology too vague and himself too conceited. Worst of all, they feared that the conversions he claimed to bring about were hallucinations created by the devil. In the months that followed, Whitefield came under fire in Scotland in sermons and pamphlets of which the most strident bore the title “Fraud and Falsehood Detected.” The controversy at Cambuslang spilled over to America, where it filled the front page of The Boston Gazette on May 24. The following day, as Franklin met his fellow Freemasons, another meeting took place a few streets away: the annual convention of the clergymen of Massachusetts. By a narrow margin they voted to condemn the excesses of the Great Awakening.17
As so often in the past, Mr. Whitefield was the cause of strife and angry words. It was said that he was on his way back to America, where Jane Mecom was one of many Christians who felt a duty to take sides, even if this meant a feud with her brother. With some courtesy and a little time, Franklin found a way to smooth things over. “There are some things in your New England doctrines and worship which I do not agree with, but I do not condemn them, or desire to shake your belief,” he wrote to Jane later that summer, before signing off as her “affectionate brother.” Even so the incident serves as a reminder that Franklin could never have lived happily in Massachusetts. Only in the Quaker colony did he have the space and the freedom he required.18
He spent only a few weeks in Boston, selling books and almanacs, before heading south again by way of Rhode Island, where in Newport he could visit another good customer, Anne Franklin, the widow of his brother James. However, his time spent in his hometown had been long enough for Franklin to rediscover at least one aspect of New England that he found attractive.
If Jane was his dearest sister, the brother he liked best was John. At fifty-three he was quietly prosperous. Although his spelling was as bad as Deborah’s—for John Franklin, the Eighth Commandment was “Thou shalt not steel”—he was also a keen student of Boston’s history. And so John upheld a town tradition by joining its militia, the Artillery Company. On June 7 they held their annual parade with Franklin looking on. He went with them when they sailed out to Castle William,
the British fort in the harbor, to exercise the cannons. A militia was just what Philadelphia did not possess. The Quaker colony had yet to create a citizen army, such as Boston’s, made up of “tradesmen and shopkeepers,” as Franklin described the part-time soldiers with their guns. Later they served as a model for a force he helped to create to defend the Delaware against the French.
While he was visiting his family, Franklin had also been able to deepen his knowledge of science. As luck would have it, his comrades among the Freemasons had another visitor, a man of ingenuity from London. Time and again, Franklin had crossed paths with unusual people with a flair for showmanship, whose company he enjoyed because they extended his horizons, leading him on to be all the more creative. Whitefield, for all his flaws, had been just such a person. So was the new friend that Franklin made in Boston.
THE ELECTRIC BOY AND DOCTOR RHUBARB
In April the first London ships of the year had reached the harbors of New England, with their usual cargoes of calico, tea, and Irish bonded laborers, hoping for a chance to skip overboard and vanish into the streets. They also carried the latest political news. A year after Walpole fell from power, his opponents were still baying for his impeachment. All the time war with France drew nearer.
On board one of the ships was a man in his forties, dressed in black, who wore a wig that made him resemble an army chaplain. His eyes were gray; his complexion was fair, but pitted by smallpox; and he spoke in a Scottish accent. A bankrupt and a fugitive, he had left angry creditors in London, where a bailiff posted his description in the press. In Britain, the Scotsman went by the name of Archibald Spens, physician, man-midwife, and lecturer in science. In America he altered his identity to Spencer and swiftly found friends. A Freemason, he made contact with his brethren at St. John’s, and on May 11 1743, they enrolled him in their ranks.19
When biographers write about Franklin, sometimes they dismiss Dr. Spencer as nothing more than an entertainer or a quack. This is unfair. He certainly had his critics in America, to whom he was known as “an ostentatious pedant,” or even as “Doctor Rhubarb,” for his habit of pontificating at the dinner table. But although he was down on his luck, Archibald Spencer was a clever man who wore his learning with a touch of wit and style. Coming from humble origins, he had acquired his medical degree with the help of some eminent members of the Royal Society. He had also made his mark in London.
In Spencer’s words, taken from his advertising copy, he was “well known to the nobility and gentry” for his “easy manner of teaching philosophy.” Since 1736 it had kept him in business in the empire’s capital. There he gave his lectures in what he called his “experimental room,” moving it from one site to another until he finished up above a grocer’s shop in Soho, his last address before he fled to America. If he failed financially, the reason was probably this: he had a more illustrious rival, John Theophilus Desaguliers, whose books were among Franklin’s favorites. Above a coffeehouse in Covent Garden, Desaguliers kept his own experimental studio where he too gave lectures. The English papers ran their advertisements side by side.20
In his London heyday, Spencer would give talks to twenty people at a time, telling them about the human eye, the circulation of the blood, and much else. With a microscope, Spencer revealed the antics of the tiniest of creatures dancing on the head of a needle. With a prism he repeated Newton’s experiments with light, conjuring up a rainbow in a darkened room. With an orrery, a mechanical model of the planets, he explained the workings of the solar system. In the closing talk of the series Dr. Spencer would display what he called—with the same excitement as Madame du Châtelet—“the wonderful effects of Fire.”
Asking for silence, he would take a young boy and suspend him by cords from the ceiling. The doctor picked up a long glass tube and gave it a hearty massage with his hand or with a cloth. To the surface of the tube he applied little shreds of brass which would jump back and forth, now attracted, now repelled. He would rub the tube again, and hold it up against the boy. After a pregnant pause, Spencer would invite a member of the audience to approach the youth and stretch out a finger. From the boy’s hands, sparks would appear and flash across the gap.
While in Boston, most likely at the lodge—in London, Freemasons often heard a scientific lecture from one of their number—Franklin saw Spencer perform his trick with electricity.*2 And although Franklin felt that the doctor’s technique was clumsy, he came away “surprised and pleased,” as he recalled in his memoirs. The two men kept in touch as Spencer made his way up and down the seaboard giving his lectures. Eventually, when the doctor retired to become a country parson in Maryland, with a little brick church on a hill above the tobacco fields, Franklin bought his apparatus.21
At the time he first met Spencer his own electrical experiments were still a few years away, but their encounter set Franklin on the path that led toward them. From his reading of Desaguliers and the Dutch textbooks, and probably also from his conversations with James Logan, he already knew that the finest minds in Europe were fascinated by “Fire,” electricity, and the connections between them. Spencer could give him something else: firsthand exposure not only to the latest practical techniques for making electricity visible, but also to the most advanced thinking on the subject.
The “electrical boy” experiment, first performed in Paris in the 1730s, in an illustration from the Essai sur l’électricité des ccorps (1750) by the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet.
What Franklin had seen was more than just a parlor game. Among the electricians of the 1730s the finest was a Frenchman, Charles Du Fay, who electrified all kinds of things—rocks, crystals, wood, animals, and human beings—and the trick with a boy had first been performed as a serious experiment in his atelier in Paris, intended to show that electricity lay dormant everywhere in nature. He was the scientist who had sent a current four thousand yards along a wire to make a spark flash at the other end. But Du Fay had died young, struck down by smallpox in 1739, leaving a puzzling legacy of unanswered questions.22
It was from Du Fay that his friend Madame du Châtelet had learned about electricity; and that was how she had come to share Newton’s belief that here the deepest secrets of nature could be found. But there was a problem. Electric boys were fun to watch, but taken as a whole the effects that Du Fay created seemed to be too weak, too fleeting, and too trivial to bear a heavy weight of scientific theory. In an attempt to show how powerful electricity could be, Du Fay tried to make a flame strong enough to ignite a trail of gunpowder, only to fail every time. Nor could he find a way to store the electricity he created. His dangling boys and his electric crystals swiftly lost the charges he had made them carry.
In England his counterparts repeated his experiments, only to find that the outcomes were confusing or even contradictory. In 1742, shortly before Spencer left London, his rival Desaguliers had completed a series of electrical trials at the Royal Society, which had won him the society’s gold medal. But when he wrote up his results, Desaguliers had to admit that he could not explain how they came about. All he could say was that electricity seemed to be a kind of fluid, or vapor, or “effluvium,” which could be released by friction, so that it filled the atmosphere around an electrified object.
And that was how matters rested when Spencer set foot in Boston. In Europe the electricians were at a dead end, lost amid vague theories and ambiguous findings. When Desaguliers died early in 1744, there was no one in London to carry on his research. For the next two years the Royal Society lost interest in the subject. In time, this situation would create a perfect opportunity for Franklin: because, when at last British scientists did return to electricity, prompted to do so by exciting discoveries in continental Europe, he was as well prepared as they to make the next advances in the field.
In the intervening period, Franklin cemented a series of new friendships on both sides of the Atlantic, building perhaps the most important o
f the many networks he brought into being. This one gave him swift, unfettered access to the latest scientific intelligence from London, Paris, Holland, and Berlin. Dr. Spencer was one of its members, and so were Bartram and Collinson. But the person to whom Franklin owed most was another man he encountered on his travels in New England in 1743.
Their meeting occurred by chance, somewhere on the highway and probably in Connecticut. Free at last from the miffy stuff with his family, on the way home from Boston at the end of June Franklin ran into Cadwallader Colden, the surveyor general of New York. Their interests were all but identical, and they were both old friends of Logan. So the two men hit it off at once. Scottish by birth, Colden was fifty-four, a physician and another keen student of Newton. Frustrated by what he saw as the backward state of science in the colonies, he was delighted to hear of Franklin’s scheme for a philosophical society. Later that year they began to exchange a series of letters. They were to give Franklin the stimulus he required to devote himself to scientific research.
When Franklin came to write his autobiography, he chose not to refer to Mr. Colden. It was an understandable omission. By the time Colden died in 1776 the two men were politically estranged and Colden was one of the most hated people in the colonies. In old age he was a die-hard Loyalist, gloomy and cantankerous. As the Revolution approached, he served as lieutenant governor of New York, filling his letters to London with tirades against sedition. However, by failing to mention his old comrade Franklin did him a disservice. Colden made an essential contribution to the birth of science in America. By leaving him out of the story, Franklin produced a misleading account of what took place.23