Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  But once more, he let experience be his teacher. He made significant progress in all the virtues except order. But he soon realized that his dream of moral perfection was illusory and probably unwise. He saw that it might end in “a kind of foppery in morals, which if it were known would make me ridiculous.” He also realized “a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated.” He saw, above all, “a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.”

  He summed up this wisdom in a story about a man who bought an ax from a Franklin neighbor. The purchaser decided that he wanted the entire surface as bright as the edge. The neighbor, who was a blacksmith, said he would be happy to polish it for him if he would turn the grinding stone wheel. “He turn’d while the smith pressed the broad face of the ax hard and heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing.” The weary purchaser finally said he would take his ax as it was and go home.

  “No,” said the smith, “turn on, turn on. We shall have it bright by and by. As yet ‘tis only speckled.”

  “Yes,” said the buyer, wiping the sweat from his forehead and examining what he had purchased with a more experienced eye, “but I think I like a speckled ax best.”

  Another favorite Franklin story, which he told and retold all his life, was the memory of a difficult boyhood experience. When he was seven years old, visitors to his father’s house had given him some small change. A few hours later, he saw another boy playing with a whistle. Charmed with the sound, he gave the boy all his money for it. He loved the toy and went tooting all around the house with it. But he made the mistake of boasting to his older brothers and sisters about the purchase.

  They told him that he had given four times as much for it as the whistle was worth. The whistle suddenly lost all its charm. When Franklin thought of what he could have bought with the rest of the money and heard the horse laughs of the rest of the family, he “cry’d with vexation.”

  He never forgot the experience. As he grew older, whenever he was tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, he would tell himself, “Do not give too much for the whistle.” In time, the memory generalized to an even larger truth. When he saw a man too fond of political popularity, neglecting his own affairs and ruining himself, Franklin would say, “He pays too much for his whistle.” If he saw a miser who gave up all of life’s comforts for “all the pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship for the sake of accumulating wealth,” he drew the same conclusion. “Poor man, you pay too much for your whistle.” When he met a man of pleasure who ignored all opportunities to improve his mind or his position, abandoning himself to sensuality, the childhood voice again spoke in Franklin’s mind, “You pay too much for your whistle.” He drew the same conclusion when he saw “a beautiful, sweet-temper’d girl, marry’d to an ill natur’d brute of a husband.” Wrote Franklin: “In short, I conceiv’d that the great part of the miseries of mankind were brought upon them by the false estimates they had made of the value of things and by their giving too much for the whistle.”

  At the heart of this judgment was the same insight that had inspired Franklin to experiment with the art of virtue. By giving too much for the whistle, he saw that people deprived themselves of a wider freedom, the freedom of the balanced, self-disciplined person. The individual, who surrendered himself or herself to any extreme, whether it was political passion or physical vice, was, in Franklin’s view, sinning against this greatest of all human values, freedom.

  In the Philadelphia of his time, one of the greatest vices, in Franklin’s opinion, was what he called “the pursuit of wealth to no purpose.” He was convinced that once a man - and man is the word he would have used - had accumulated enough money to assure himself and his family of independence and moderate comfort, the good citizen should turn to public service. There is again a vivid story that illustrates Franklin’s point. He liked to talk of the time that a friend showed him through his magnificent new mansion. He took him into a living room large enough to quarter a congress. Franklin asked him why in the world he wanted a room this size. “Because I can afford it,” said the man. Next, came a dining room big enough to seat fifty people. Franklin again wondered at the size, and the man reiterated, “I can afford it.” Franklin turned to him and asked: “Why are you wearing such a small hat? Why not get one ten times the size of your head? You can afford that, too.”

  As much as he loved science, Franklin was even more devoted to the ideal of public service. He once remarked, “Had Newton been pilot but of a single common ship, the finest of his discoveries would scarce have excus’d or aton’d for his abandoning the helm one hour in time of danger; how much less if she had carried the fate of the Commonwealth.” As a newspaperman and keen observer of human nature, he was also deeply committed to improving the condition of the common man. He once remarked to a minister he respected that the person who discovered how to persuade people to practice virtue would “deserve more, ten thousand times, than the inventor of the longitude.”

  Thus, when his fellow citizens elected him to the Pennsylvania Assembly in October 1752, Franklin accepted the call and more or less abandoned his laboratory. It was not a action taken with complete reluctance, out of some purely abstract sense of duty. This man who displayed to observers the cool, sunny serenity of a philosopher was by no means incapable of deep emotion. He had a really deep affection for his adopted “country,” as he called Pennsylvania. He summed it up one day in a letter to a friend in England, who had asked his advice on buying property in Connecticut. Franklin assured him that land there was a good buy and that the citizens of Connecticut were respectable. He had often thought of settling there himself. “But Pennsylvania is my darling,” he said, and he had decided to stay where he was happiest.

  When Benjamin Franklin took his seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, he resigned his clerkship. The Assembly promptly appointed William Franklin as his replacement. Here was someone else about whom Benjamin Franklin cared deeply.

  If a single word had to be chosen to describe Benjamin Franklin, paternal would come close to saying it all. This burly, broad-shouldered man seemed to fulfill himself most when he was in a fathering role, sharing his strength, his wisdom, his generosity, and his humor with other people. This inevitably brought a special fire to his relationship with his only son.

  Another factor added further urgency to Franklin’s concern for William. He was illegitimate, the product of a liaison with a working class woman, into which Franklin had stumbled during his first bachelor years in Philadelphia. William had apparently been born six months before Franklin married Deborah Read. As soon as he could do so, when William was about six months old, Franklin had acknowledged the boy and taken him into his home and raised him as his son. Franklin gave William’s mother a modest sum of money each year, and she had accepted the agreement amicably. But Deborah Read - who had a violent temper and a shrew’s tongue - had much more difficulty reconciling herself to William’s existence. When her own son, Francis Folger Franklin died of smallpox at the age of four, she became even more antagonistic to the boy.

  A young clerk named Daniel Fisher, who lived in Franklin’s house for a time, left a vivid picture of Deborah Franklin’s feelings toward William. In his diary, Fisher wrote of seeing young Franklin pass through the house “without the least compliment between Mrs. Franklin and him or any sort of notice taken of each other.” Then one day, as Deborah was chatting with Fisher and William Franklin passed them in silence as usual, Deborah Franklin exclaimed, “Mr. Fisher, there goes the greatest villain upon earth.” While Fisher stared in bewilderment, Deborah proceeded to criticize William Franklin “in the foulest terms I ever heard from a gentlewoman.” Young Fisher eventually quit his job and moved out of the Franklin household. He just could not tolerate Deborah Franklin’s “turbulent temper.”

  At first glance, Deborah seemed not suited to be the wo
man for Benjamin Franklin. She was practically illiterate. She would sign her letters to him “Your afeckthone wife.” He always began his letters to her: “My dear child.” She was childishly jealous of the time he gave to public affairs. She told Daniel Fisher, “All the world claimed a privilege of troubling her Pappy,” which was her family name for Franklin. Deborah was a living witness of the distance Franklin had traveled since his birth to a Boston candle maker. She was a shopkeeper’s daughter with whom Franklin had flirted when he first arrived in Philadelphia. He thought of marrying her, but he went to England instead. When he returned, Deborah was a widow. Her ne’er-do-well husband had skipped town, leaving behind nothing but bills. He reportedly died in the West Indies. Franklin was perhaps attracted by the fact that Deborah had the burden of this fiasco while he had the problem of his illegitimate son. A woman with a failed marriage - and a husband who was not certifiably dead - was less likely to reproach him. As usual, his judgment of human nature proved on the mark. Deborah was clearly grateful for being rescued from a life of moral limbo, even if she never controlled her animosity toward William.

  A large woman with some training as a bookkeeper, Deborah proved herself an invaluable helpmate. With obvious affection, Franklin later recalled how she “assisted me cheerfully in my business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing old linen rags for the papermakers, etc., etc.” He also proudly recalled that, in those days, he had been “clothed from head to foot in woolen and linen of my wife’s manufacture.” Deborah kept the books and maintained good order in the shop, something Franklin freely admitted was beyond him. With her help, Franklin found the time to begin a program of self-education, which had swiftly carried him into a world of ideas and achievements infinitely beyond Deborah’s intellectual horizon. But he never forgot the strong, middle-class virtues and, above all, the dedication and hearty affection with which his wife had worked beside him in those often difficult early years.

  Along with her doomed son, Francis, Deborah gave birth to a daughter, Sarah, who was intellectually and physically like her mother. Inevitably, this meant yet more stress in the family, since William Franklin had inherited his father’s brains, was an enthusiastic participant in his electrical experiments, and a willing companion in all of Franklin’s academic pursuits. Much of the bitterness Deborah felt for William may well have been jealousy, caused by the feeling that Franklin paid him far more attention than his less intelligent daughter.

  The moment William obtained his first earnings as clerk of the Assembly, he moved out of the Franklin home to avoid Deborah. He was already cutting a romantic swath through Philadelphia society, thanks to his good looks and engaging personality. But because the truth of his birth was well-known, he certainly met with some painful slights and backhand remarks. In his teens, he had toyed with escaping this small world and had tried to run away as a sailor aboard a privateer. Returning home, he had badgered his father into getting him an army commission and had marched off to fight the French in Canada. The war concluded before he heard a shot fired, but he came home with a military bearing that did him no harm in his pursuit of women.

  Almost immediately, William embarked on another, more significant adventure. With fur trader George Croghan, he traveled west to an Indian conference on the Ohio. Like many other Americans of his generation, young Franklin was struck by the richness of the land beyond the Alleghenies and the almost endless plenty of it. He poured out his story about “the country back of us” to his father, who listened with keen interest and was so impressed that he sent copies of William’s diary to friends in England. William was convinced that enormous wealth was waiting for the men who first possessed these lands, so haphazardly “owned” by small bands of Indians, who regarded them only as hunting preserves. In fact, when he returned home, he talked of nothing but ways of organizing trading companies and colonizing expeditions that would identify the territory as England’s. For a while, Ohio seemed to be all that concerned him, aside from the pursuit of Philadelphia’s belles at the Assembly Balls.

  Finally, Franklin took William aside and quietly informed him that Ohio, compelling and powerful as it might someday become, was, at the moment, about as solid as a castle in the clouds. What Franklin feared was the possibility that William was assuming he could spend his time in cloud castles and Assembly Balls because one day he would be the recipient of a handsome inheritance. Franklin bluntly told his son that he planned to spend the small estate he had accumulated on himself. William had better start thinking about choosing a career. Shortly after the kite experiment, William, too, abandoned electricity and began studying law in the office of Franklin’s good friend and political aide; stocky, erudite Joseph Galloway. At the same time, Franklin wrote to England and asked friends there to register William in the Inns of Court, where the cream of the British legal profession studied the common law. Hopefully, he said, he would make the trip to England with William when the time came for him to go.

  Franklin was scarcely seated in the Assembly when another form of public service called for his aid. As a man with a half ownership in a newspaper with the largest circulation on the American continent, Franklin had long been interested in the postal service. For some sixteen years he had served as postmaster of Philadelphia, a job that he had taken to protect his paper. It was the practice of postmasters to allow the mailing of no newspapers except those they owned. This was one among the many defects of the American postal system. Letter delivery was disorganized and slow; it took six weeks for a letter to get from Boston to Philadelphia. When the deputy postmaster general for North America died, Franklin applied for his job. Peter Collinson - the London Quaker agent who had arranged for the publication of Franklin’s experiments in electricity - used his influence. Approval came through early in 1753.

  The job opened a new era in Franklin’s life. Although Pennsylvania remained his “darling” and he maintained a passionate interest in its politics, his deputy postmaster general’s responsibilities drew his eyes beyond the boundaries of the Quaker colony. He turned his enthusiasm for improvement and his imaginative mind toward thinking about all of British North America. The slow transformation of Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvanian to American had begun.

  In Pennsylvania politics, Franklin tried to play the role of peacemaker. Governor Robert Hunter Morris was an American, formerly Chief Justice of New Jersey, and a man Franklin had known for years. He was, of course, the spokesman for the Proprietary Party. The Proprietors’ main objective was to prevent taxation on millions of acres they owned throughout the colony. For years, they had taken the offensive against the Assembly, which was dominated by Quakers who found it difficult to vote for appropriations for arming the colony or raising a militia, even when the intent was strictly defensive. Franklin liked and admired the Quakers for their virtues, and he did his best to help them around the absurdities in which their absolute pacifism often involved them.

  For instance, when he first organized the Philadelphia Associaters in 1747, the Union Fire Company proposed to purchase a cannon by raising sixty pounds in a lottery. There were twenty-two Quakers in the Fire Company, and eight from other religions. The plan looked doomed until Franklin suggested that the twenty-two Quakers quietly stay away from the meeting at which the cannon-buying proposition came to a vote. The motion was carried, and the Quakers’ consciences were simultaneously protected.”

  On large and small issues, Franklin soon proved himself a shrewd politician. More than once he demonstrated that the creator of Poor Richard had read his own maxims. In later years he told how he had converted one recalcitrant assemblyman. He wrote the man a letter, asking if he could borrow “a certain scarce” and “curious book” that was in his library. A week later, Franklin returned it with an effusive note of gratitude. “When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before) and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends
and our friendship continued to his death,” Franklin said. “This is another instance of the truth of an old maxim I learned, which says, ‘He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.’”

  But Franklin discovered that peacemaking is often a difficult and thankless job. He was soon writing his friend Collinson in England that “both sides expect more from me than they ought.” Except for the fact that he was “able now and then to influence a good measure,” he said, “I should be ready to swear never to serve again as an Assembly man.”

  He found the challenge of reorganizing the post office a welcome excuse to escape from Pennsylvania’s political feuding. Like the scientist that he was, Franklin preferred to learn from firsthand observation, and within a few months after his appointment, he set out on a ten-week journey “to the East,” as he called it, in the language of the born Bostonian. He traveled across New Jersey, through New York, and up into Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.

  The improvements he achieved in the postal service were nothing less than spectacular. He reduced the traveling time of a Boston-Philadelphia letter from six weeks to three. He abolished the old monopolistic system by which each postmaster sent the newspaper of his choice through the mail free and opened the service to all papers, for a small charge. He insisted on postmasters keeping detailed accounts of their revenues, and he ordered them to print in the newspapers the names of people who had letters waiting for them, a practice he had long followed in Philadelphia. People who did not call for their letters on the day they arrived had them delivered the following day and were charged an extra penny. Again, this was an innovation that Franklin had tried first in Philadelphia, and it made the post office much more popular. Too often, in many cities, letters were allowed to lie around for weeks and were sometimes lost or read by idlers. After some three months, unclaimed letters were forwarded to the main post office in Philadelphia, thus creating the first dead-letter office.