The First American

by H. W. Brands

  The conspicuous exception to the general delight over the return of the runaway was James. Having resented Ben’s talents, now he envied him his success. “He received me not very frankly,” Ben noted, “looked me all over, and turned to his work again.” James’s journeymen were more inquisitive; they wanted to know all about Philadelphia, what life was like there, whether printers found employment. When they asked what wages workingmen made in Pennsylvania, Ben spread his silver coins before them. Such solid currency was rare in Boston, where paper notes were the norm. He displayed his watch, impressing them the more, then gave them a piece of eight to drink his health.

  James, across the room, affected not to notice. But to Ben he seemed “grum and sullen,” and, as Ben heard from his mother later, felt so insulted at Ben’s carrying on in front of his workers that he could never forgive the offense.

  When Ben broached to his father the purpose of his visit, producing the letter from Governor Keith extolling Ben’s talents and prospects and forecasting wonderful success for the printing venture, Josiah could not help feeling proud. Imagine such an exalted personage taking an interest in his boy! But having worked long for his money, he was loath to part with it lightly. He asked himself, then asked Robert Homes when the latter arrived in Boston, what sort of person—governor or no—would have him place such faith in a boy still three years from legal manhood. Homes could not entirely vouch for Keith’s judgment but said what he could in favor of Ben and the project. Yet Josiah would not be moved. He wrote a letter to Keith expressing gratitude for the patronage the governor was offering his son, but said the money involved and the responsibilities to be incurred were more than should be placed on the shoulders of a boy.

  All the same, he did not leave Ben bereft. He had hoped for a reconciliation between Ben and James; seeing the impossibility of this, he granted Ben his paternal blessing to return to Philadelphia. He enjoined his youngest son to work diligently and keep a rein on his rebellious streak. If Ben stuck to his task for three years and lived frugally, he would be able to save most of what he needed to establish himself in business; if at that time he fell short, he should come back to Boston for the balance.

  This was less than Ben wanted but more than he had right—or reason, really, knowing his father—to expect. When he left his parents’ house now, he did so in the light of day and full public view. James remained angry, but the rest of the family wished him Godspeed and continued success.

  He also received a parting gift from Cotton Mather. To Franklin’s surprise the minister evinced a desire to see the young man. Franklin visited his library, where Mather indicated that all was forgiven. But not quite forgotten: on showing Franklin out via a side passage, he suddenly said, “Stoop, stoop!” Franklin did not understand him and ran into a low beam. Never one to let a sermonizing moment pass, Mather explained, “You are young and have the world before you. Stoop as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps.”

  Franklin’s education in life continued on the journey south. His sloop called at New York, where his Boston friend John Collins awaited him. Collins, having seen how Franklin prospered in Pennsylvania, had determined to join him in the city of the Friends. Collins traveled overland to New York, where he joined Franklin for the rest of the trip.

  Franklin had known Collins as an industrious and sober scholar, but lately his friend had acquired a taste for brandy. Like many another young man suddenly unsupervised in unfamiliar surroundings, Collins found his freedom more than he could manage; he descended into a state of constant inebriation. He compounded his problem by frequent visits to gaming tables. When Franklin reached New York, he found his friend drunk, broke, and just ahead of the sheriff. Franklin paid Collins’s bills and resigned himself to paying the rest of Collins’s way to Philadelphia.

  Despite his friend’s antics, Franklin’s New York stopover was not a dead loss. On this trip south, Franklin was transporting some books he had left behind in Boston when he departed covertly the previous year; he was also carrying Collins’s small library. The captain of the sloop evidently did not have regular contact with bookish types, and in a casual conversation with William Burnet, the governor jointly of New York and New Jersey, he remarked on his learned passenger. The governor, himself a scholar, and feeling isolated in an intellectual wasteland, invited Franklin to pay him a visit. Franklin was flattered at this attention from another governor, and he accepted the invitation with pleasure. The two conversed about books and authors; the governor doubtless had his favorable indirect impression of Franklin confirmed firsthand.

  Upon arrival in Philadelphia, Collins continued to cost Franklin. Collins’s alcoholic habit prevented his obtaining employment, and Franklin saw no alternative to paying his room and board till his circumstances improved. Unfortunately, they did not. Collins found new gambling partners among the Pennsylvanians and ran into debt again. He pleaded with Franklin for loans, which Franklin provided, against his better judgment. Franklin lectured Collins to mend his affairs; Collins told him to mind his own. Sharp words gave way to physical violence on at least one occasion. Franklin and Collins were in a boat on the Delaware River with some other young men; Collins was drunk as usual. When it came his turn to row, he refused. He was in no shape to pull an oar, he said. Franklin declared hotly that he must row, as everyone else had done. Collins replied that he would not; they could spend the entire night on the water for all he cared. The others in the boat told Franklin to let it go; they simply wanted to get home. But Franklin would not drop the matter, nor would he let the others row. Collins thereupon took the offensive; vowing to throw Franklin overboard, he charged at his friend. Franklin sidestepped the attack, grabbed Collins under the crotch, and hurled him headlong into the river. This sobered him only slightly, for as he swam back toward the boat he responded to queries as to whether he would finally agree to row by cursing them all and declaring that he would never do so. Franklin, happy enough now to take an oar, pulled the boat beyond Collins’s reach. Again those in the boat asked whether Collins would row; again he profanely refused. Again Franklin pulled the boat ahead of Collins. This continued for some time. Eventually, fearing that Collins might drown, the others convinced Franklin to let him be hauled up.

  This episode ended what was left of the friendship. Not long afterward Collins shipped out to Barbados to serve as tutor to the sons of a planter there. In one of his rare clearheaded and remorseful moments he promised to pay Franklin what he owed him with the first money he received in his new post. But he never did, and Franklin never heard from him again.

  William Keith was disappointed on learning of Josiah Franklin’s refusal to stake his son as a printer. The old man was entirely too cautious, Keith said; mere youth was no warrant of indiscretion, financial or otherwise, just as age was no guarantee of judgment. Perhaps afraid that Philadelphia would lose this bright lad, perhaps swept away by his own vision and magnanimity, Keith declared that if Josiah Franklin of Boston would not back his boy, William Keith of Philadelphia would. Pennsylvania needed printers, and the governor would see that it got them. He told Franklin to draw up a list of the equipment and supplies he would require from England, and they would be ordered at once. Franklin could repay the debt when he was able; the important thing was to put the project in motion.

  Franklin’s head had been turned by Keith’s previous solicitude, then turned further by the flattering attention of Governor Burnet; now this offer sent it fairly spinning. The greatest man of the city and the province was putting his own money into a venture whose sole source of promise was the intelligence and skill of eighteen-year-old Ben Franklin. The young man’s future was assured. Philadelphia was a wonderful city.

  Walking home from this interview, Franklin began calculating what he would require to commence business. A quick tally brought the total to £100. Keith found the inventory entirely acceptable when Franklin explained it; he asked, in a manner that presupposed a positive answer, whether the venture would
benefit from Franklin’s presence in London when the fonts and other items were selected. Besides, he intimated, Pennsylvania’s leading printer must make acquaintances among his counterparts in the imperial capital. The outset of the project was the obvious occasion to do so. Franklin could sail in the autumn on the annual ship—at provincial expense, of course.

  Once more Franklin was amazed at how marvelously his career was progressing. The governor had endorsed his business judgment by accepting his proposal; now he was sending him off to London as the all-but-official printer of the province. To be sure, the ship would not be sailing for some months; but that would simply allow time to perfect his plans.

  Frustratingly, he could not share those plans with anyone—least of all Keimer, with whom he continued to spend his working hours. “He suspected nothing of my setting up,” Franklin later asserted. One wonders. Franklin paid frequent visits to the governor’s house; Keimer must have asked himself—although he apparently did not ask Franklin—what the young man and the governor talked about. Further, Franklin was obviously too talented to remain a journeyman forever. Unless he relocated again he must one day set himself up as Keimer’s competitor.

  Quite possibly Keimer thought he could keep Franklin till the boy turned twenty-one; only then would Franklin be fully able to conclude contracts and do all the other things necessary to direct a business. And it was entirely possible Keimer thought he himself might be out of the printing business by that time. Other enthusiasms beckoned. Foremost of these was a dream to found a new religious sect, one that embodied his own peculiar interpretation of the Scriptures. Keimer loved disputation; since Franklin did too, the pair spent many hours over their frame and fonts arguing the finer points of theology and philosophy. Franklin employed the indirect style he had learned in Boston and regularly used it to tie Keimer in intellectual knots. Keimer eventually discovered the equally venerable rhetorical device of refusing to accept any premise whatever—in his case from a plausible fear Franklin would find a devious path from premise to refutation. Whether or not the experience shook Keimer’s beliefs, it heightened his regard for Franklin’s forensic skills. He offered Franklin a place next to the throne in his new order. Keimer would dispense doctrine; Franklin would defend it by confounding their opponents.

  To himself, Franklin laughed at Keimer’s delusions—the more easily now that he saw the terminus of his dependence on his employer approaching. To Keimer, he put on a grave face and indicated he was flattered at the invitation but wondered if he might have some say about the sect’s practices. A vegetarian diet, for example, would benefit both body and soul. Keimer was skeptical, but when Franklin agreed to accept Keimer’s teaching on the proper observance of the Sabbath (Saturday instead of Sunday) and the Levitican ban on cropping beards (prospectively a problem once Franklin’s whiskers started seriously growing, but not yet), the elder man agreed to give vegetarianism a test. Franklin supplied a neighbor woman with a list of forty dishes containing neither meat nor fish nor fowl; for eighteen pence per week she would cook from this list.

  Franklin experienced no difficulty reacquainting himself with a non-sanguinary regime, but Keimer suffered—as Franklin knew he would. “He was usually a great glutton, and I promised myself some diversion in half-starving him.” For three months Keimer held out, dreaming day and night of beefsteaks, lamb chops, and fried ham. Though the spirit remained willing, the flesh finally succumbed. He ordered a roast suckling pig and invited Franklin and two women friends to celebrate his delivery from this ill-advised experiment. But the pig arrived before the guests did, and Keimer, unable to wait fifteen minutes more, ate the whole thing himself.

  Keimer was not the only person who found himself the object of Franklin’s amusements. Collins having departed in disgrace, Franklin devoted more time to his Philadelphia friends. Three in particular—Charles Osborne, Joseph Watson, and James Ralph—formed his literary circle. The group met regularly for Sunday walks; these provided a peripatetic forum for discussions of this author or that. Occasionally one or another would produce a piece of writing and submit it to the group for critique.

  Of the four, James Ralph had the highest ambitions for a career in writing—poetry, to be specific. Charles Osborne likewise had poetic pretensions, but he also possessed the askant eye of the critic—especially toward Ralph’s poetry and hopes of making a living by it. Franklin, recalling his own humbling efforts at versifying, shared Osborne’s opinion that a career in poetry was a fool’s quest, although he allowed that if Ralph wanted to write poetry merely to please himself, that was his affair. Franklin added the opinion he had formed some years earlier that even poetry that did not rise to art could serve as a tool for the improvement of one’s prose. The others concurred in this sensible opinion, and an assignment—setting the Eighteenth Psalm to verse—was agreed upon.

  Just before the next meeting, Ralph approached Franklin, his updating of David in hand. Franklin read the piece and registered approval. Ralph thereupon asked him to take part in a deception. Osborne, Ralph complained, would never say anything positive about his—Ralph’s—poetry; he could not stand that someone—specifically Ralph—might write more gracefully than he. Would Franklin be willing to present Ralph’s piece as his own? Only by such a subterfuge could Ralph get an objective opinion.

  Franklin’s schedule at Keimer’s that week had prevented his writing a poem himself, and he consented. He cribbed Ralph’s work into his own hand and read it to the group. Osborne praised it extravagantly. Ralph suggested a few revisions; Osborne told him he was as dull a critic as a poet and did not know what he was talking about. After the meeting, while Osborne and Ralph were walking home together, the former continued to effuse over the purported Franklin poem. Such imagery! Such power! He confided to Ralph that he had not earlier praised the piece as fully as he might have; he did not want to seem a flatterer. He wondered aloud how a person who spoke so indifferently could write with such passion and fire.

  The confusion provoked laughter, at Osborne’s expense, when the ruse was revealed at the next meeting. The episode did not estrange Osborne from Franklin; the two remained friendly enough to pledge a pact that whichever of them predeceased the other should, after having surveyed the ground on that farther shore, return and apprise the living one of the landscape there. The obligation fell to Osborne, who died relatively young. “He never fulfilled his promise,” Franklin noted at sixty-five.

  Debating with his friends and dreaming of his future success filled most of Franklin’s leisure time during that summer of his nineteenth year; but not all. Love occupied him as well.

  The object of his affections was Deborah Read, with whom he had grown increasingly familiar since that inauspicious morning of his arrival the previous autumn. She had watched his career prospects improve with Keimer; partly in consequence he saw his romantic prospects improve with her. Ten months earlier, unknown and unemployed, he was the sort no father would have let near his daughter. Now, well placed in his craft, surrounded by friends hardworking and respectable, and waited upon by Governor Keith, he was one of the more eligible young men in town.

  Precisely what Franklin saw in Deborah Read is more difficult to discern. No one painted her portrait during that period, and the only surviving one from later years shows a woman with a not unpleasant but neither notably appealing face. She was two years younger than he, which especially in that age meant that she might physically have been hardly more than a girl. Yet he seems to have been quite attracted to her, for they spoke of marriage. Her father and mother did not dismiss the idea. They had been searching for a good match, not least because John Read had lately run into financial difficulties. The search grew more pressing that September, when Read suddenly died, leaving his debts and his daughter—among other children—to his wife. At this point Sarah Read must have listened carefully as Ben Franklin made his suit.

  Yet careful she was, and reflecting on Ben’s youth, she told them to wait until his return from
England. Perhaps she wished to gauge the seriousness of his intentions. Perhaps she wished to see whether the print shop he spoke of with such enthusiasm—to Debbie and her, yet still to almost no one else—actually materialized. Her husband’s money troubles had resulted from his lending credence, and cash, to glib retailers of fraudulent promises. A modest skepticism would become his widow and safeguard his daughter.

  Franklin could not gainsay this prudence in a mother-in-law. Nor was there much he could do about it if he had, for Sarah Read was not the sort to be trifled with. Love would have to wait the six months or so the crossing to England and the return would require. Then he would be older, and, with printing equipment in hand, his success would be assured. At that point Sarah Read could not deny him, and Debbie would not.

  3

  London Once

  1724–26

  It is a truism that one travels to learn about home, but Franklin was young, and consequently it came as a surprise that the most important lesson he learned in going to London was what sort of person William Keith was. The lesson commenced before his ship cleared the Delaware River. Right down to the dock the governor continued to pledge full support for Franklin’s printing project; he would provide not merely the letter of credit for the £100 Franklin’s inventory required but reference letters to friends well placed to see the project profitably started. Repeatedly Franklin called at the governor’s house to receive the letters; repeatedly he was told that the demands of duty had prevented the governor from drafting them. Come again next week and they would definitely be ready.