The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  At the age of seventeen, after several years as a restless apprentice printer to an older brother, Ben decamped from Boston to Philadelphia. The city delighted Franklin from the day he arrived. Its Quaker rulers were religious men, but they did not impose their beliefs on everyone in the rancorous style of Boston’s puritans. Philadelphia was equally delighted with young Franklin. His engaging personality charmed everyone he met. In this atmosphere of easygoing bonhomie, Ben soon lost touch with his pious parents and the moral and spiritual creed they had taught him.

  In Boston, Franklin had devoted his spare time to books and became a freethinker, liberated from the religion of his boyhood. He gave little time to another important subject, women. In Philadelphia, Franklin was attracted to Deborah Read, his landlord’s buxom daughter. “I had a great respect and affection for her and had some reason to believe she felt the same for me,” he later recalled. But her widowed mother objected to an early marriage. Franklin was still only a journeyman printer, working for weekly wages.

  Stung, Franklin accepted an offer from William Keith, the governor of Pennsylvania, to go to London and buy a printing press and other equipment to start a newspaper. The governor, also seemingly charmed by the clever young Bostonian, would provide the credit. Deborah and Benjamin “interchanged some promises” before he sailed. This semi-engagement was all that her mother would tolerate. She may have known enough about Governor Keith to make her doubt that they would see Benjamin again.

  In the imperial capital, Benjamin discovered that the governor had no credit and had sent him on a fool’s errand. Keith was one of those men who wanted to please everybody and was locally famous for making promises he could not fulfill. Benjamin proceeded to break Deborah’s heart by informing her that he might never return to Philadelphia. Finding work as a printer’s assistant in London, he and a Philadelphia friend, James Ralph, a would-be poet who had sailed with him, proceeded to enjoy themselves in a city where women of pleasure swarmed the streets and some shopgirls were ready to give themselves to a man who bought them a drink and dinner.

  Over the course of a year of dissipation, Benjamin loaned James Ralph almost thirty pounds—the equivalent, today, of about $2,500. Benjamin decided this generosity entitled him to enjoy Ralph’s mistress. When the lady informed Ralph, the yet unpublished poet angrily told Ben that he was never going to see his money. Around the same time, it dawned on Franklin that he was unlikely to become more than a printer’s helper in London, where the business was controlled by men of wealth. His only hope of independence was a return to Philadelphia. Grimly, he settled down to daily toil at low wages, saving a few shillings a week to pay his passage back to America. He ate only the simplest food and avoided all amusements.

  When he returned to Philadelphia eighteen months later, Benjamin found more disarray. Deborah Read had made a bad marriage to a potter named John Rogers, a spendthrift who ran through her dowry and then mistreated her. Rogers had turned out to be a bigamist in the bargain, with a wife in London. He capped matters by fleeing to the West Indies to escape his creditors. Deborah was living forlornly with her mother, too disconsolate to face anyone but her family.

  Franklin’s conscience bothered him acutely, but there was little he could do about the situation as he struggled to make a fresh start as a printer. He also found it difficult to control what he later called “that hard to be governed passion of youth.” His “intrigues with low women” cost him money and were frequently “inconvenient”—he meant embarrassing. A man struggling to start a business needed a good reputation. There was also the danger of catching a venereal disease, a possibility that repeatedly filled Franklin with dread.

  The more Ben thought about his life, the more he began to suspect that his pious parents had some worthwhile ideas after all. He also grew critical of his freethinking friends—and of himself. He noted that James Ralph, whom he had converted to a freethinker, had felt no compunction about cheating him out of his money—and had incidentally abandoned a Philadelphia wife and child to stay in London (where he eventually became the first American-born professional writer). Several other friends who had joined Benjamin in irreligion had also welshed on their debts to him. He himself, he ruthlessly concluded in this spasm of insight, had behaved with equal lack of decency toward Deborah Read.

  What did it mean? Benjamin could only conclude that “truth, sincerity and integrity” in dealings between people were of the “utmost importance” to a man’s happiness. While he could not join his father and mother in practicing these virtues as commandments of God, he vowed in his journal to observe them as long as he lived. He had learned the hard way that virtues were good in themselves.3

  III

  Taking on a partner and borrowing money from his father, Ben set up as an independent printer. After more vicissitudes with the partner, who turned out to be a drunk, Ben shed him, started a newspaper, and seemed on his way to success. But he still found it difficult to control that “hard to be governed passion of youth.” Deciding he needed a wife, he at first tried to find one with a dowry. But printing was not considered a prosperous trade, and he met with several humiliating rebuffs.

  Meanwhile, Franklin’s ungovernable sex drive had presented him with a problem that threatened to be extremely inconvenient. One of the lower-class women with whom Ben satisfied his desires presented him with a son. Here the record grows murky—and Franklin the autobiographer evasive. Scholars have spilled a lot of ink trying to identify this woman and what happened to her. In 1779, an American loyalist wrote a hostile sketch of Franklin for a London newspaper. He claimed the woman was “an oyster wench in Philadelphia whom he left to die in the streets of disease and hunger.” Another hostile sketch, written by a political enemy in 1764, described her as “his hand maid Barbara” whom he allowed his wife and daughter to mistreat abominably. But most scholars have concluded it would have been impossible for Ben to have hired his illegitimate son’s mother in the glare of Deborah’s hostility. The most probable description comes from a letter written by a Franklin friend around this time to an acquaintance in England: “Tis generally known,” he wrote, that the mother “is not in good circumstances.” But the “report of her begging bread in the streets” was untrue. “Some small provision is made by him (BF) for her, but her not being one of the most agreeable of women prevents particular notice being shown, or the father and son acknowledging any connection with her.”4

  One thing is certain: at some point in the year 1730 Benjamin turned to Deborah Read, who was still “generally dejected and seldom cheerful.” He explored with her the possibility of becoming man and wife. There were serious problems to be solved on her side of the equation. If her husband, John Rogers, returned from the West Indies—where rumor had him killed in a drunken brawl—Deborah could be charged with bigamy. That crime carried a life sentence in 1730 Pennsylvania. Rogers still owed money to several people in Philadelphia and if Benjamin and Deborah married in a formal way, Ben could be sued for those debts. Franklin declared himself ready to accept a common-law arrangement, whereby Deborah would simply move in with him and set up a household. That would keep the debtors at bay—and if Rogers showed up they could claim they were committing nothing more heinous than adultery.

  It would seem more than probable that, at this point, Franklin displayed the first sign of those skills that later made him a master diplomat. Having declared himself ready to risk bigamy and lawsuits on her behalf, Benjamin now wondered whether Deborah would be willing to do something for him. It must have been hard for the grateful young woman to imagine anything she was not ready to do to please this ingenious young man who was rescuing her from a dismal future as an abandoned wife.

  Raise my illegitimate son as your own child, Franklin said.

  How could Deborah Read say no? She may have been momentarily dismayed to discover that Franklin was not a paragon of virtue or a lovelorn swain who had been pining for her with anguished fidelity all these years. But her encounter with
John Rogers and her observations of street life in Philadelphia must have left her with few illusions about the perfectibility of mankind. Deborah agreed to the bargain. She and the infant, soon named William Franklin, began sharing Benjamin’s house on lower Market Street.

  IV

  Deborah’s dislike of William Franklin probably began on the day her husband persuaded her to take the boy into their house. But her jealousy became acute when their only son, Francis Folger Franklin, died of smallpox in 1736, at the age of four. She later bore Franklin a daughter, Sarah, who had a strong resemblance to her big, bustling mother. Daniel Fisher reported that in one of Deborah’s rants she accused Franklin of having “too great an esteem for his son” and far less warm feelings for her and their daughter. There is no doubt that Sarah (soon nicknamed Sally) was never able to compete with William for their father’s affections. William inherited his father’s brains and was remarkably handsome in the bargain.

  William’s importance grew larger for Ben after he achieved wealth as a newspaper publisher and fame as a scientist. He began envisioning a distinguished family, a line of Franklins who would play a dynamic role in their nation’s history. William helped fuel this dream by displaying talent as a politician and a soldier. Ben’s pride in his accomplishments only added to the tension between husband and wife.

  Ben did his best to cope with his short-tempered, resentful spouse. He repeatedly paid tribute to the way she had helped him survive his precarious early years, when he was struggling to launch his newspaper and the print shop and general store attached to it. She “assisted me cheerfully in my business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing old linen rags for the papermakers etc etc.” Thanks to Deborah’s skill with a needle, for a while he was “clothed head to foot in woolen and linen of my wife’s manufacture.”

  In the store, where Deborah presided, she did a profitable business selling everything from spectacles to sealing wax to an ointment made by her mother that was guaranteed to cure “the most inveterate itch.” Another profitable item was Crown Soap, made in Boston by Franklin’s older brother, John. Even more of a moneymaker was the annual edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac, a book in which Ben mingled wise and witty aphorisms and weather predictions. Deborah called it “Poor Dick.”

  Deborah kept the books for the business, a task Franklin admitted was beyond him. In spite of his fondness for telling everyone that a penny saved was a penny earned, frugality did not come naturally to his expansive nature. In his autobiography he remarked: “We have an English proverb that says, ‘He that would thrive must ask his wife’ it was lucky for me that I had one as much disposed to industry and frugality as myself…We kept no idle servants.” He was soon declaring that his wife “became a fortune to me.” There was not the slightest doubt in his mind that a money-wise wife was the key to a prosperous marriage. “What we get the women save.”

  For eighteen years Ben and Deborah were partners in a constantly expanding business. The store’s inventory eventually included goose feathers, Rhode Island cheese, Franklin-designed stoves, and lottery tickets. Even slaves flowed in and out of its busy doors. Quakers were only beginning to question the morality of slavery during these years. Like other shopkeepers in Philadelphia, Deborah opened at 5 a.m. and did business until darkness fell. The sales of Poor Richard’s Almanac topped ten thousand a year—the equivalent in today’s vastly more populous America of a million and a half copies annually.

  Without Deborah’s help Ben could never have combined success as a newspaper and almanac publisher with politics, which enabled him to acquire the plum job of postmaster of Philadelphia. That entitled him to send copies of the Pennsylvania Gazette through the mail free. More important, hundreds of people came to the print shop and store, because it was the city’s post office.

  During these years, the limitations as well as the advantages of their marriage slowly became apparent to both Franklins. Deborah remained the same poorly educated shopgirl who had married Ben in 1730. Her letters to him were a blizzard of misspellings. Ben was becoming a political and scientific thinker of world-class proportions. When he wrote a letter to Deborah, he addressed her as “My Dear Child.” There was affection in the words, but also more than a hint of paternal superiority.

  In this unspoken drama, Ben played both a villain and a savior’s role. If he had remained faithful to his original promise to Deborah, she would not have married Rogers and undergone the public humiliation of discovering he was both a bigamist and a thief. She also undoubtedly knew, thanks to the gossip that pervaded the small business world of Philadelphia, that Ben had shopped around for a better marriage deal before retreating to her. These memories would not contribute to any woman’s peace of mind—especially one born with a hot temper.

  By 1748, the Franklins were earning 2,000 pounds a year—the equivalent of about 300,000 modern dollars. Only very successful merchants and prominent lawyers made that much money. Franklin decided he and Deborah could relax. They closed the shop and moved to a bigger, more comfortable house. Ben handed the Pennsylvania Gazette to his well-trained assistant, David Hall, who agreed to pay him 650 pounds a year as his share of its profits.

  It was the beginning of a new life for Ben, with ever-widening intellectual and political horizons. He resigned as postmaster of Philadelphia, making William his successor, and became deputy postmaster general for America, a job that required him to travel throughout the thirteen burgeoning colonies. Deborah never went with him. She did not share Ben’s exuberant delight in meeting new people and exploring distant colonies and towns. She preferred familiar Philadelphia, with the same friends and relatives she had known since girlhood.

  We have only one portrait of Deborah, the work of an unknown Philadelphia painter. She looks prosperous; her dress is expensive and she has an ornament in her hair. Her fleshy face has not a hint of refinement, but she looks fiercely determined to be herself and deal with life’s problems on her own terms. It does not take much effort to imagine her brow furrowing, her thick lips curling, and angry words exploding from them. Her figure verges on the plump—which did not displease her husband. When Ben’s penchant for travel took him to England again, he sent Deborah a large jug with a note explaining that he thought it resembled “a fat jolly dame, clean and tidy…and just put me in mind of—somebody.”

  Franklin never faulted Deborah for her stubborn refusal to change her ways or broaden her interests. “Don’t you know a wife is always right?” he wrote wryly to a friend. In Poor Richard’s Almanac he published a song that paid tribute to his hardworking helpmate. It also inadvertently summed up their marriage:

  My Plain Country Joan

  Of their Chloes and Phillises poets may prate

  I sing of my plain country Joan

  Now twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life

  Blest day that I made her my own.

  My dear friends

  Blest day that I made her my own.

  Not a word of her face, of her shape, or her eyes

  Or of flames or darts you shall hear:

  Tho’ beauty I admire, tis virtue I prize,

  That fades not in seventy year.

  My dear friends…

  Some faults have we all, and so may my Joan

  But then they’re exceedingly small

  And now I’m so us’d to ’em, they’re just like my own

  I scarcely can see them at all.

  My dear friends…

  Were the finest young princess, with million in purse

  To be had in exchange for my Joan

  She could not be a better wife, mought be a worse,

  So I’ll stick to my Joggy alone

  My dear friends

  I’d cling to my lovely ould Joan.5

  V

  Franklin’s trips as deputy postmaster general often took him to Boston, where he stayed in the mansion of his brother John, who had grown wealthy as a soap maker. There, in 1754, Franklin met a slim, flirta
tious twenty-three-year-old brunette named Catherine Ray. She had grown up on isolated Block Island, the child of older parents, and was hugely excited by this opportunity to visit bustling Boston and meet an already famous American.

  Catherine took delicious pleasure in tormenting men with her dancing eyes and low-cut gowns. Simultaneously she proclaimed her pride in her virginity, which she was determined to yield only to a man of surpassing charm and ability. The forty-nine-year-old Franklin found himself mesmerized. For the first time, Ben met a woman whose beauty and seeming availability made him realize a dimension of love that he had never encountered in his relationships with the lower class women of his early amours—or in his practical, self-interested marriage to Deborah.

  This deeper attraction, known today as romantic love, was (and is) ancient and forever modern. It was just beginning to emerge in Europe as an experience that plumbed the depths and heights of human emotions and sometimes involved the surrender of a man or woman’s soul.

  Ben plunged into a half real, half make-believe dance of desire and mutual delight. He and Katy, as he began calling her, talked about sex and love with a candor that came naturally to their era. Playing the sorcerer, a role that came naturally to him, Ben invented a game that required Katy to tell him every detail of her previous loves. He warned her that if she held anything back, he had powers that would enable him to penetrate her deception. Katy’s eyes gleamed with delight; she poured out her youthful heart to Franklin.

  One night the sorcerer revealed he was human. He suggested that he could become a lover who would send Katy into transports beyond imaginative shivers. Katy recoiled and reminded the sorcerer that he was a married man. With a sigh, Franklin retreated to a bittersweet affection in which words remained ardent but actions were firmly within the bounds of propriety. His rational head had prevailed over his wayward heart.