by Nick Bunker
Since Strahan had a wide range of products, including medical textbooks, which were challenging things to set into type, Hall came equipped with skills as advanced as Franklin’s. He was, as Franklin later described him, “obliging, discreet, industrious, but honest.” In short, he had the makings of an ideal partner in the firm. Franklin’s reply also marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship between him and Mr. Strahan, a gentleman printer of his own kind, who became his literary eyes and ears in London. In his early career, Strahan’s most notable success was the printing of Henry Fielding’s first novel, Joseph Andrews, which in time supplanted Robinson Crusoe to become Franklin’s favorite work of fiction. Their relationship, which deepened still further when Franklin went to live in London, endured until Strahan’s death in 1785, gravely tested though it was by the revolutionary crisis.
Franklin had a gift for friendship. Sometimes he also had the devil’s own luck. Not until March of 1744 did David Hall set sail from London on the Mercury, reaching Philadelphia on or about June 20, sick with jaundice but alive. This was an achievement in itself, because the Atlantic was now more dangerous than it had been at any time since the Royal Navy swept Blackbeard and his fellow pirates from the ocean. Nine days or so before the Mercury arrived, Governor Thomas made the long-awaited proclamation: Great Britain and France were officially at war.
On June 11, with an honor guard of seamen—“a parcel of roaring sailors,” wrote an eyewitness—George Thomas led the town’s elite in a procession through the streets. It was said that as many as four thousand people gathered to hear the beating drums and to watch him climb the courthouse steps. Richard Peters read the declaration, and then the governor spoke a few words. Every able-bodied man in Pennsylvania should pick up a musket, powder, and ball: “for depend upon it,” said Mr. Thomas, “this province shall not be lost through any neglect or oversight of mine.”14
If only the elected politicians would listen and respond in kind; but as Governor Thomas knew full well, Speaker Kinsey and his Quaker party would never vote the money for a militia or for the armaments it needed. The previous October, when the assembly convened for its autumn session, Thomas had made a request for military supplies only to be met with a rude rebuff. The one thing the governor could do was this: in the name of the king, he could issue letters of marque to yet more privateers like Captain Sibbald. This had to be done because, to protect the seaborne traffic of the Delaware, the best means of defense was attack.15
The British fleet could not do the job alone, stretched thinly as it was, guarding the English Channel and keeping watch on the enemy in the West Indies and the Mediterranean. The Royal Navy had few ships to spare for convoy duties. Spanish privateers were still at large, and now they were joined by French ships from Saint-Malo in Brittany, which made deep forays into colonial waters. The French enjoyed a happy time when they could strike at American vessels as freely as they chose. Because their sailing times were predictable—before and after the tobacco harvest—the ships that plied between Great Britain and the Chesapeake made a splendid target. In Pennsylvania the price of shipping and insurance soared; and when early in July a cargo of gunpowder arrived, every barrel soon found a buyer.
That summer eight privateers put out to sea from Philadelphia. Here at last was Franklin’s chance to join the fray, albeit from the safety of his store on Market Street. In June, the account books kept by Deborah began to feature a stream of new entries for sums of £5 or so at a time. In each case the formula was more or less identical: “Cr. William Allen by his bill against schooner Wilmington.” The meaning was easy to decipher. Mr. Allen, Franklin’s fellow mason, was the owner of the town’s most successful privateer, skippered by John Sibbald, and Franklin was helping to equip the vessel. In payment he took IOUs from William Allen, to be redeemed from the proceeds of the Wilmington’s raids against the enemy.
As the months went by, and the naval war intensified, so dispatches from the privateers came to fill the pages of The Pennsylvania Gazette. All his life Franklin had been fascinated by the sea, and as a boy he had read about the exploits of Sir Francis Drake. Now he became a stay-at-home war correspondent, fed with his stories by John Sibbald and the other privateering captains. He printed so many that one wonders why he did not rename his paper The Weekly Privateer. Indeed the subject became so all-absorbing that when Franklin’s Junto friend Thomas Godfrey set the newspaper’s readers a mathematical puzzle, it concerned the time it would take a swift privateer to catch a slower-moving target ship.16
Because most of her merchants were Quakers, Philadelphia lagged far behind Rhode Island and New York in the number of privateers the town commissioned. And yet, in the four years of war against the French, Franklin ran far more stories about privateering than any other American editor. There were hundreds in fact, especially at the peak of the campaign in 1744–45, when stories of the kind in the Gazette outnumbered those in the press in Boston and New York by a factor of two or three to one. Franklin loved the war, or at least this side of it, and his patriotic fervor led to something new. He began to print pictures on the page. When the Gazette ran notices calling for “gentlemen sailors” to join the Wilmington and the other privateers, each one carried an illustration of the ship.
Here was another component of Franklin’s change of life. He found the war exciting. And why not? While the Quaker merchants of the town worried about the disruption it caused to peaceful commerce, Franklin found that as the war went on the pace of his own career accelerated. In business, he now had David Hall to help him.
In the first twelve months after Hall’s arrival, the two men trod rather warily around each other, each one suspicious of the other man’s intentions. Franklin gradually came to feel that Hall could be relied upon, but Hall remained uneasy. He complained to Strahan, who wrote back urging Hall to trust his employer.
“He seems to me by his manner of writing to have a very good heart,” said Strahan, “as well as to be a man of honour and good sense.” Soon enough the atmosphere improved, and instead of sending Hall to start a printing venture in the West Indies—that was his initial intention—Franklin made him the foreman of his workshop. Here was the man who might be his successor, taking the business forward while Franklin devoted himself to public affairs and to science.17
He was making progress in that direction too. In April 1744, while Hall was still at sea, Dr. Spencer came down to Philadelphia to give his lectures, advertised in the Gazette, and they helped to build support for Franklin’s scientific club. James Logan was a little skeptical about it, but John Bartram remained an enthusiast. As he wrote to Colden, “our Philosophick Society increaseth very finely,” even though, as he explained, “I am full as much hurried in business as our friend Benjamin.” At about the same time Franklin went up to Manhattan, where he collected a letter from Colden, and when he replied he also had splendid news about the club.18
They had their first roster of members: from Philadelphia, Thomas Hopkinson as president, Bartram as the botanist, William Parsons as the geographer, and also two physicians, Thomas and Phineas Bond. There were nine in all, with Franklin as the secretary, but the best news he had to tell concerned the members he recruited from New Jersey and New York. If his club was to function as Franklin intended, it had to be truly American and so it could not remain confined to a single province. It also had to feature people of distinction: not for reasons of snobbery, but because that was the best way for it to make its mark, and because—to be blunt—Franklin needed people who had money, time, and influence.
Among his new recruits, the member from New York was the most impressive: yet another Scot, James Alexander, a powerful and wealthy man of fifty-three. In his leisure hours he studied astronomy and he was another of Colden’s closest friends. By profession Alexander was a lawyer, perhaps the finest in the city. Seven years earlier, he had been the attorney who briefed Andrew Hamilton in the landmark
case of John Peter Zenger, the printer accused of seditious libel. In reaching out to people of this caliber, Franklin was being highly ambitious. He was also transmitting a message about the wider aims he hoped to fulfill.
In New York, Mr. Colden was surveyor general; Parsons held that office in Pennsylvania; and Alexander had the same title in New Jersey, where he amassed his own portfolio of soil. Moving to and fro across the Hudson River, he acted as the agent for New Jersey’s principal landlords, the people for whom Franklin had been doing printing work for nearly twenty years. Not content with Mr. Alexander, Franklin also sought out New Jersey’s chief justice, Robert Hunter Morris, another man who spanned both sides of the river: he came from one of the wealthiest families in New York.19
Nearly three centuries on, lists of names such as these might make for tedious reading, but the pattern they reveal is the point to grasp. Like Franklin’s old mentor Speaker Hamilton, the people he recruited for his philosophical society shared his commitment to colonial expansion. They were also high officials, advisers to the governor in each colony. In New York, both Colden and James Alexander sat on the governor’s council, while down in Philadelphia William Parsons reported directly to the Penns and to Governor Thomas.
None of these people had been voted into office. On the contrary, in all three colonies often they found themselves at loggerheads with the elected assemblies: Colden most of all. He loathed the New York assembly, whose members included men who traded illegally with the French in Montreal. In their turn, they detested Cadwallader Colden. And so, at this critical stage of Franklin’s life, he found his best allies among the elite, people like Logan and James Alexander, men of property whose loyalties lay chiefly with the Crown in England.20
Today we mostly think of Franklin as he was in his heyday in the 1770s and 1780s, a democrat with a small “d,” helping to make new, republican constitutions for the United States and also for Pennsylvania. Some writers argue that Franklin had always been a champion of the common people, and that his Junto began as a “leathern apron club” for artisans. In fact, no contemporary record has been found in which Franklin or his fellow members used that phrase to describe it. Although most of the founding members were employed as printers by Samuel Keimer, its proceedings show that the Junto was really a society for people who aspired to be gentlemen.
One of the most remarkable things about Franklin was that as he grew older he became more radical and more democratic, a friend of populists and revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine. In the 1740s, this sort of radicalism did not feature in Franklin’s program. At that time, the promotion of democracy would have been irrelevant to his concerns. At heart he was always an old-fashioned Whig like his uncle Benjamin, with values harking back to London in the 1680s, where “English Liberties” was the Whig battle cry. Indeed Franklin never ceased to believe in English liberties—taxation by consent, trial by jury, and so on—but in 1744 these freedoms were not in danger from King George. As for the Penns, the colony’s proprietors, they certainly behaved like grasping landlords, but as yet they did not seek to undermine Pennsylvania’s constitution. It was only much later that Franklin became the consistent opponent in politics of the family’s leader, Thomas Penn.
In the 1740s, the powerful ruler Franklin had to fear was not an English king or landed plutocrat but a Frenchman, Louis XV at Versailles. He was the enemy, while George II was a friend who did not try to curtail the freedoms the Quaker colony enjoyed. Since democracy was not in danger from a homegrown enemy, Franklin had no cause to be its strident advocate. Indeed he had mixed feelings about a system of government that could not be relied upon to produce sound leadership. While democracy might be a worthy concept, in practice it gave birth in Pennsylvania to a machine politician, the embezzling Speaker Kinsey. And anyway, at this phase of his life what Franklin really cared about was ingenuity. America had to be improved, and it also had to be defended militarily—in the 1740s those were his priorities—and Franklin made common cause with people who shared the same agenda.
Which actually meant the powerful, unelected likes of Cadwallader Colden or James Alexander, whose genteel support Franklin had to win if he were to make a go of his American Philosophical Society. In its first incarnation the society turned out to be a disappointment. It fizzled out in 1745, when its other members failed to sustain the momentum that Franklin and Bartram had given it. It was only in 1767 that the society came to life again, revived to become a fixture of the American scene. Even so the early days were highly productive. Franklin’s efforts to create it had the effect of speeding up the circulation of ideas.
After drawing in New Jersey and New York, he wanted to broaden his society by bringing in people of science from the South. Soon a qualified candidate arrived. In 1741–42 there had been epidemics of yellow jack in Virginia and New York, spread no doubt by veterans returning from the Caribbean war. The death toll had led John Mitchell, a physician from a harbor town on the lower Rappahannock, to investigate the disease. Visiting Philadelphia in September 1744, he spent a day with Bartram and Franklin, showing them his essays about yellow fever, which Franklin gave to Lewis Evans to copy out. Franklin shared them with Colden.21
And so Franklin’s network became ever wider. That autumn, he took another step forward by publishing his pamphlet about the fireplace. Like the Conestoga wagon and the Pennsylvania rifle, it was tangible proof of the virtues of “improvement.” To reproduce the technical drawings, he had to hire an engraver up in Boston—he and Bartram badly needed a Hogarth of their own in Philadelphia—but the job was done, with the money to print the pamphlet coming from Robert Grace. James Alexander thought the little book was excellent, its author “a man of sense and of a good style,” and Colden agreed. In December 1744 he sent a copy to Leiden, the home of the Dutch Newtonians, the very people whose books Franklin had been reading for so long. Calling Franklin “a very ingenious man,” Colden urged the scientific Dutchmen to study the pamphlet closely, if only as a means “to keep you warm at your studies.”22
Before the essay about the fireplace appeared, Colden had primarily seen Franklin as a printer—albeit the best in the colonies—and as a go-between. That fall he had sent Franklin a draft of his two essays, on the nature of matter and on Newton’s “fluxions,” asking him to pass them on to James Logan. Franklin took the essays up to Stenton, where Logan spotted the mistakes in Colden’s algebra. As for Colden’s piece on “the different species of matter,” Logan could make neither head nor tail of it.
But what Colden could now see, after reading the fireplace pamphlet, was that Franklin was a highly talented scientist in his own right. As the snow began to fall on the Hudson, he received a message from Franklin informing him about the errors Logan found in his mathematics. It was another diplomatic letter—no one could be as courteous as Franklin—in which he assured Mr. Colden that doubtless the mistakes were merely slips of the pen. Taken aback though he was, Colden replied to Franklin in terms that showed that his respect for Franklin was increasing all the time.23
As Colden lost a little of his faith in his work on Newton’s calculus, so he came to place more emphasis on his other treatise, the one that dealt with gravity. In a moving letter, written by a man eager for scientific recognition after laboring so long in the wilderness, Colden begged Franklin to give it his full attention. “I know none besides Mr Logan, Mr Alexander and yourself in this part of the world,” Colden wrote, “to whose judgment I can refer any thing of this kind.” High praise indeed. In the next two years Franklin repaid the compliment as Colden would have wished, by studying his letters closely and always replying at length. But the problem was this: Colden had simply too many notions, none of which he mastered completely.24
Confined to his farm that winter, he revived another old obsession, dating back some twenty-five years. It was an analysis of what he called “animal economy.” Like Henry Pemberton, the Newtonian whom Frank
lin had known in London, Colden hoped to show that Newton’s physics could explain the inner workings of the human body. Here was another hugely ambitious project, undertaken by Colden at a time when he was busy with another bold scheme. He was also drawing up plans for a fort at Oswego on the shore of Lake Ontario: something he and Captain Rutherfurd believed was essential as a bulwark against the French.
Trying always to do too much, Mr. Colden achieved far too little. He was a catalyst, giving Franklin food for thought, but a moment had to come when Franklin left behind the sort of unfocused speculation to which Cadwallader Colden was all too prone. That moment was close at hand. In Europe people of science were yet again preoccupied with electricity. Four years after the death of Du Fay, a series of new experiments had been carried out in Germany, and early in 1745, the spectacular details appeared in the London press. Although they had elements of theater, the results the Germans produced with electricity breathed new life into the subject. By way of Peter Collinson and the British papers, the excitement was conveyed to the colonies; where Franklin, the avid reader, would soon see its significance.
THE GERMAN SPARK
In the middle of the eighteenth century, there existed a gradient of power in Europe. At the summit stood the French, because their population and their army were the largest, and their intellectuals the most illustrious. England occupied the next step down, with her much smaller army but her powerful navy, her robust finances, and her trading empire. Then came Austria and Spain, while everyone else—including the Dutch, whose economy had fallen into stagnation—lay somewhere far below. Away to the west, the colonies in America were barely visible at all. The slope of power was also a gradient of ingenuity, where the ranking was rather different, with the Dutch still holding their own. Even so, the leadership in science belonged to Paris and to London.