This gregarious outlook would lead him, as a twentysomething printer during the 1730s, to use his Junto to launch a variety of community organizations, including a lending library, fire brigade, and night watchmen corps, and later a hospital, militia, and college. “The good men may do separately,” he wrote, “is small compared with what they may do collectively.”
Franklin picked up his penchant for forming do-good associations from Cotton Mather and others, but his organizational fervor and galvanizing personality made him the most influential force in instilling this as an enduring part of American life. “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations,” Tocqueville famously marveled. “Hospitals, prisons and schools take shape this way.”
Tocqueville came to the conclusion that there was an inherent struggle in America between two opposing impulses: the spirit of rugged individualism versus the conflicting spirit of community and association building. Franklin would have disagreed. A fundamental aspect of Franklin’s life, and of the American society he helped to create, was that individualism and communitarianism, so seemingly contradictory, were interwoven. The frontier attracted barn-raising pioneers who were ruggedly individualistic as well as fiercely supportive of their community. Franklin was the epitome of this admixture of self-reliance and civic involvement, and what he exemplified became part of the American character.1
Franklin’s subscription library, which was the first of its type in America, began when he suggested to his Junto that each member bring books to the clubhouse so that the others could use them. It worked well enough, but money was needed to supplement and care for the collection. So he decided to recruit subscribers who would pay dues for the right to borrow books, most of which would be imported from London.
The Library Company of Philadelphia was incorporated in 1731, when Franklin was 27. Its motto, written by Franklin, reflected the connection he made between goodness and godliness:Communiter Bona profundere Deum est (To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine).
Raising funds was not easy. “So few were the readers at the time in Philadelphia and the majority of us so poor that I was not able with great industry to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay.” In doing so, he learned one of his pragmatic lessons about jealousy and modesty: he found that people were reluctant to support a “proposer of any useful project that might be supposed to raise one’s reputation.” So he put himself “as much as I could out of sight” and gave credit for the idea to his friends. This method worked so well that “I ever after practiced it on such occasions.” People will eventually give you the credit, he noted, if you don’t try to claim it at the time. “The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.”
The choice of books, recommended by learned Philadelphians such as James Logan, a wealthy fur trader and gentleman scholar whom Franklin got the chance to befriend for this purpose, reflected Franklin’s practical nature. Of the first forty-five bought, there were nine on science, eight on history, and eight on politics; most of the rest were reference books. There were no novels, dramas, poetry, or great literature, other than two classics (Homer and Virgil).
Franklin spent an hour or two each day reading the books in the library, “and thus repaired in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me.” His involvement also helped him climb socially: the Junto was composed mainly of poor tradesmen, but the Library Company allowed Franklin to elicit the patronage of some of the more distinguished gentlemen of the town and also begin a lifelong friendship with Peter Collinson, a London merchant who agreed to help acquire the books. Eventually, the idea of local subscription libraries caught on in the rest of the colonies, and so did the benefits. “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans,” Franklin later noted, and “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” The Library Company thrives to this day. With 500,000 books and 160,000 manuscripts, it remains a significant historical repository and is the oldest cultural institution in the United States.2
Franklin often floated his ideas for civic improvements by writing under a pseudonym for his paper. Using the name Pennsylvanus, he wrote a description of the “brave men” who volunteer to fight fires, and suggested that those who didn’t join them should help bear the expense of ladders, buckets, and pumps. A year later, in an essay he read to the Junto and subsequently published as a letter to his newspaper, he proposed the formation of a fire company. Again taking care not to claim credit, he pretended the letter was written by an old man (who, in declaring that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” sounded quite like Poor Richard). Philadelphia had a lot of spirited volunteers, he noted, but they lacked “order and method.” They should therefore consider following the example of Boston, he said, and organize into fire-fighting clubs with specific duties. Always a stickler for specifics, Franklin helpfully enumerated these duties in great detail: there should be wardens, who carry “a red staff of five feet,” as well as axmen and hookmen and other specialties.
“This was much spoken of as a useful piece,” Franklin recalled in his autobiography, so he set about organizing the Union Fire Company, which was incorporated in 1736. He was fastidious in detailing its rules and the fines that would be levied for infractions. This being a Franklin scheme, it included a social component as well; they met for dinner once a month “for a social evening together discussing and communicating such ideas as occurred to us on the subject of fires.” So many people wanted to join that, like the Junto, it spawned sister fire companies around town.
Franklin remained actively involved in the Union Fire Company for years. In 1743, the Gazette carried a little notice: “Lost at the late fire on Water Street, two leather buckets, marked B. Franklin & Co. Whoever brings them to the printer hereof shall be satisfied for their trouble.” Fifty years later, when he returned from Paris after the Revolution, he would gather the four remaining members of the company, along with their leather buckets, for meetings.3
Franklin also sought to improve the town’s ineffective police forces. At the time, the ragtag groups of watchmen were managed by constables who either enlisted neighbors or dunned them a fee to avoid service. This resulted in roaming gangs that made a little money and, Franklin noted, spent most of the night getting drunk. Once again, Franklin suggested a solution in a paper he wrote for his Junto. It proposed that full-time watchmen be funded by a property tax levied according to the value of each home, and it included one of the first arguments in America for progressive taxation. It was unfair, he wrote, that “a poor widow housekeeper, all of whose property to be guarded by the watch did not perhaps exceed the value of fifty pounds, paid as much as the wealthiest merchant, who had thousands of pounds worth of goods in his stores.”
Unlike the fire associations, these police patrols were conceived as a government function and needed Assembly approval. Consequently, they did not get formed until 1752, “when the members of our clubs were grown more in influence.” By that time, Franklin was an assemblyman, and he helped draft the detailed legislation on how the watchmen would be organized.4
The Freemasons
One fraternal association, more exalted than the Junto, already existed in Philadelphia, and it seemed perfectly tailored to Franklin’s aspirations: the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons. Freemasonry, a semisecret fraternal organization based on the ancient rituals and symbols of the stone-cutting guilds, had been founded in London in 1717, and its first Philadelphia lodge cropped up in 1727. Like Franklin, the Freemasons were dedicated to fellowship, civic works, and nonsectarian religious tolerance. They also represented, for Franklin, another step up the social ladder; many of the town’s top merchants and lawyers were Freemasons.
Social mobility was not very common in the eighteenth century. But Franklin proudly made it his mission—indeed, helped it bec
ome part of America’s mission—that a tradesman could rise in the world and stand before kings. This was not always easy, and at first he had trouble getting invited to join the Freemasons. So he began printing small, favorable notices about them in his newspaper. When that did not work, he tried a tougher tactic. In December 1730, he ran a long article that purported, based on the papers of a member who had just died, to uncover some of the secrets of the organization, including the fact that most of the secrets were just a hoax.
Within a few weeks, he was invited to join, after which the Gazette retracted its December article and printed some small, flattering notices. Franklin became a faithful Freemason. In 1732, he helped draft the bylaws of the Philadelphia lodge, and two years later became the Grand Master and printed its constitution.5
Franklin’s fealty to the Freemasons embroiled him in a scandal that illustrated his aversion to confronting people. In the summer of 1737, a naïve apprentice named Daniel Rees wanted to join the group. A gang of rowdy acquaintances, not Freemasons, sought to have sport with him and concocted a ritual filled with weird oaths, purgatives, and butt kissing. When they told Franklin of their prank, he laughed and asked for a copy of the fake oaths. A few days later, the hooligans enacted another ceremony, where the hapless Rees was accidentally burned to death by a bowl of flaming brandy. Franklin was not involved, but he was called as a witness in the subsequent manslaughter trial. The newspaper printed by his rival Andrew Bradford, no friend of either Franklin or Freemasonry, charged that Franklin was indirectly responsible because he encouraged the tormentors.
Responding in his own paper, Franklin admitted that he initially laughed at the prank. “But when they came to those circumstances of their giving him a violent purge, leading him to kiss T’s posteriors, and administering him the diabolical oath which R——n read to us, I grew indeed serious.” His credibility, however, was not helped by the fact that he had asked to see the oath and then merrily showed it to friends.
News of the tragedy, and Franklin’s involvement, was published in anti-Mason papers throughout the colonies, including the Boston News Ledger, and reached his parents. In a letter, he sought to allay his mother’s concerns about the Freemasons. “They are in general a very harmless sort of people,” he wrote, “and have no principles or practices that are inconsistent with religion or good manners.” He did concede, however, that she had a right to be displeased that they did not admit women.6
The Great Awakening
Although he was nondoctrinaire to the point of being little more than a deist, Franklin remained interested in religion, particularly its social effects. During the 1730s, he became enthralled by two preachers, the first an unorthodox freethinker like himself, the other an evangelical revivalist whose fiery conservatism ran counter to most of what Franklin believed.
Samuel Hemphill was a young preacher from Ireland who, in 1734, came to Philadelphia to work as a deputy at the Presbyterian church that Franklin had sporadically visited. More interested in preaching about morality than Calvinist doctrines, Hemphill started drawing large crowds, including a curious Franklin, who found “his sermons pleasing me, as they had little of the dogmatical kind, but inculcated strongly the practice of virtue.” That dearth of dogma did not endear Hemphill to the church elders, however. Jedediah Andrews, the senior minister whose sermons had bored Franklin, complained that Hemphill had been imposed on his church and that “free thinkers, deists, and nothings, getting a scent of him, flocked to him.” Soon Hemphill was brought before the synod on charges of heresy.
As the trial began, Franklin came to his defense with a deft article purporting to be a dialogue between two local Presbyterians. Mr. S., representing Franklin, listens as Mr. T. complains about how the “new-fangled preacher” talks too much about good works. “I do not love to hear so much of morality; I am sure it will carry no man to heaven.”
Mr. S. rejoins that it is what “Christ and his Apostles used to preach.” The Bible makes it clear, he says, that God would have us lead “virtuous, upright and good-doing lives.”
But, asks Mr. T., isn’t faith rather than virtue the path to salvation?
“Faith is recommended as a means of producing morality,” Franklin’s mouthpiece Mr. S. replies, adding heretically, “That from such faith alone salvation may be expected appears to me to be neither a Christian doctrine nor a reasonable one.”
As a believer in tolerance, Franklin might have been expected to tolerate the Presbyterians’ imposing whatever doctrine they wanted on their own preachers, but instead he had Mr. S. argue that they should not adhere to their orthodoxies. “No point of faith is so plain as that morality is our duty,” Mr. S. concludes, echoing Franklin’s core philosophy. “A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.”
It was a typical Franklin effort at persuasion: clever, indirect, and using fabricated characters to make his point. But when the synod unanimously censured and suspended Hemphill, Franklin shed his usual velvet gloves and, as he put it, “became his zealous partisan.” He published an anonymous pamphlet (and, unlike his newspaper dialogue, made sure that the pamphlet remained anonymous) filled with uncharacteristic anger. Not only did he offer detailed theological rebuttals to each of the synod’s charges, but he accused its members of “malice and envy.”
Hemphill’s accusers responded with their own pamphlet, which prompted Franklin to write another, even more vitriolic anonymous response that hurled phrases like “bigotry and prejudice” and “pious fraud.” In a subsequent poem, he labeled Hemphill’s critics “Rev. Asses.”
It was a rare violation by Franklin of his Junto rule of avoiding direct contradiction or argumentation, one that was all the more odd because in the past he had cheerily forsaken any claim to care much about doctrinal disputes. His resentment of the entrenched, pious clerical establishment seemed to get the better of his temper.
Franklin’s defense became more difficult when Hemphill was exposed as having plagiarized many of his sermons. Nevertheless, Franklin still stuck by him, explaining later that “I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture, though the latter was the practice of our common teachers.” In the end, Hemphill left town and Franklin quit the Presbyterian congregation for good.7
The Hemphill affair occurred just as an emotional tide of revivalism, known as the Great Awakening, began sweeping America. Fervent Protestant traditionalists, most notably Jonathan Edwards, were whipping congregants into spiritual frenzies and convulsive conversions with tales of fire and brimstone. As Edwards told his congregation in the most famous of his “terror” sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the only thing that kept them from eternal damnation was the inexplicable grace of “the God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over fire.”
Nothing could have been further from Franklin’s theology. Indeed, Edwards and Franklin, the two preeminent Americans of their generation, can be viewed, Carl Van Doren noted, as “symbols of the hostile movements that strove for the mastery of their age.” Edwards and the Great Awakeners sought to recommit America to the anguished spirituality of Puritanism, whereas Franklin sought to bring it into an Enlightenment era that exalted tolerance, individual merit, civic virtue, good deeds, and rationality.8
Thus, it might seem surprising, indeed somewhat odd, that Franklin became enthralled by George Whitefield, the most popular of the Great Awakening’s roving preachers, who arrived in Philadelphia in1739. The English evangelist had been an unhappy soul at Pembroke College, Oxford, and then had a “new birth” into Methodism and later Calvinism. He was doctrinally pure in his insistence that salvation came only through God’s grace, but he was nevertheless deeply involved in charitable work, and his year-long tour through America was to raise money for an orphanage in Georgia. He raised more money than any other cleric of his time for philanthropies, which included schools, libraries, and almshouses across Europe a
nd America. So perhaps it was not so surprising that Franklin took a liking to him though never embraced his theology.
Whitefield’s nightly outdoor revival meetings in Philadelphia (by then America’s largest town, with a population of thirteen thousand) drew huge crowds, and Franklin, sensing a great story, covered him lavishly in the Pennsylvania Gazette. “On Thursday,” he reported, “the Rev. Mr. Whitefield began to preach from the Court House gallery in this city, about six at night, to nearly 6,000 people before him in the street, who stood in an awful silence to hear him.” The crowds grew throughout his week-long visit, and Whitefield returned to the city three more times during his year-long American crusade.
Franklin was awed. He published accounts of Whitefield’s appearances in forty-five weekly issues of his Gazette, and eight times he turned over his entire front page to reprints of the sermons. Franklin recounted in his autobiography, with a wryness born only after years of detachment, the enthusiasm that infected him at the time:
I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably, that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.
Franklin was also impressed with the transforming effect that Whitefield had on Philadelphia’s citizenry. “Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons,” he reported in the Gazette. “Religion is become the subject of most conversation. No books are in request but those of piety.”9
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