The First American

by H. W. Brands

  He did; they were not. He did again; they were not. Understandably, he began to worry. As luck would have it, the departure of the annual ship was several times postponed. Though this afforded more time for the governor to fulfill his pledge, it threw a cloud of additional uncertainty over the entire venture.

  Finally on November 5, 1724, the London Hope cast off and drifted down the Delaware. The governor’s promised letters still had not appeared. Franklin boarded at the last moment only on the express assurance of the governor’s personal secretary that the letters would be supplied at New Castle, a downstream destination for which the governor himself was about to depart and which he would reach before the ship did. Even as the ship was tying up at New Castle, Franklin leaped ashore in search of the governor. Once more the governor’s secretary intercepted him, saying again the governor was extremely busy. But he would include the letters with the rest of the official correspondence, to be loaded at the last moment.

  This seemed a plausible, if not persuasive, explanation, and was made the more so when Colonel French, the governor’s Delaware friend, personally carried the official packet aboard. He greeted Franklin warmly; this had the double effect of reassuring Franklin about Keith’s bona fides and elevating the young man in the opinion of the other passengers, who heretofore had deemed him unworthy of notice. He would have been even more reassured had he been allowed to see the letters, but the captain, concerned that their numerous delays would place them in mid-Atlantic when the gales of winter began to blow, refused to risk any further delay. Franklin could not go through the packet now. But if he would be patient, he would have any letters meant for his hand long before they landed at London. “I was satisfied for the present,” Franklin recalled, “and we proceeded on our voyage.”

  Franklin’s first ocean crossing was a tempestuous one. The winter weather did indeed catch them out; wind, rain, sleet, and snow battered the vessel and kept the passengers below decks most of the way. To his satisfaction—and, as it turned out, his lifelong convenience—Franklin discovered that stormy seas had little effect on his stomach or head. He employed the time and the close quarters to improve his acquaintance with certain individuals who had taken notice of him when Colonel French did. Indeed, these men called him out of steerage to berth with them in the cabin; they shared their victuals and all made merry together. “We had a sociable company …” Franklin said, “and lived uncommonly well.”

  As the craft entered the English Channel the captain kept his promise and allowed Franklin to sort through the Pennsylvania pouch. To his surprise he found no letters bearing his name. Thinking this an oversight, he selected several addressed to individuals evidently connected to the governor’s pledge and to the errand that had brought him hither. One such letter was to the king’s printer, another to a London stationer. Franklin could not well open the letters and discover for certain, but he assumed that the governor therein explained this fine young man’s mission and pledged political and financial support.

  Upon landing at London on Christmas Eve of 1724, Franklin looked up the addressees. The first he chanced upon was the stationer, to whom he delivered the missive as from Governor Keith. The stationer looked puzzled. I don’t know the man, he said—thereby puzzling Franklin. Opening the letter, the stationer exclaimed, “Oh, this is from Riddlesden.”

  William Riddlesden, as Franklin probably did not know, was a convicted felon who had been transported to Maryland in lieu of prison; as Franklin knew full well, Riddlesden had continued in his conniving ways in America, sucking John Read into one of his confidence schemes, to the persisting detriment of Sarah and their children. The Maryland assembly had conferred upon him the distinction of being officially proclaimed “a person of a matchless character in infamy.”

  This opinion was shared by the stationer who now read the letter Franklin delivered. “I have lately found him to be a complete rascal,” he said (in Franklin’s reconstruction of the conversation), “and I will have nothing to do with him, nor receive any letters from him.” With this he thrust the letter back into Franklin’s hand and turned to greet a customer.

  As he left the stationer’s shop, Franklin looked closely at the other letters. He realized that these were not from the governor either. For the first time he began seriously to doubt whether the mailbag contained any letters from Keith on his behalf, or even whether Keith had ever intended to write any such letters. Consulting Thomas Denham, one of his cabinmates and a prosperous Pennsylvania merchant who had known Keith for some time, Franklin learned that the governor had a habit of promising much and delivering little. Denham laughed aloud when Franklin mentioned the letter of credit Keith was to have sent. Sir William, Denham said, had no credit to give.

  This lesson in human nature came as a shock. When he had awakened that morning, Franklin fancied himself an independent artisan about to embark on a brilliant career. Now he was simply an out-of-work journeyman a very long way from home, with no place to stay and no friends within three thousand miles.

  Actually, he did have one friend, although this friend soon proved more trouble than any enemy. James Ralph had accompanied Franklin to London, determined, after his success in the small charade he and Franklin had committed against Charles Osborne, to seek artistic fame in the capital of English letters. He did not confide his plans to his wife, who remained in Philadelphia with their small child; instead he told her he was going to London to establish commercial connections that would allow him to set up a merchandising business upon his return. She and her relatives doubtless deemed this an improvement over idle versifying and bade him bon voyage. But no sooner had the London Hope arrived at the city of its name than Ralph informed Franklin he was not going back. He could not abide his in-laws, he said. His future lay in England.

  Disappointingly for Ralph, and unluckily for Franklin, that future was slow to unfold. He initially thought to broaden from written art to performance; approaching a local theater troupe, he inquired about acting. The director auditioned him briefly before pronouncing that literature could not spare his gifts. Ralph thereupon proposed to write a weekly paper, a competitor to the Spectator, for a rival publisher. The publisher, however, could not be convinced that Ralph’s talent warranted the terms he was demanding. Ralph lowered his sights again, applying for work as a clerk and copyist for the stationers and lawyers who crowded London’s Temple district. He was told no openings existed.

  Ralph had arrived in London with empty pockets, having spent his last on the passage from America. His failure to find work extended his impecunious period. So he imposed on Franklin to underwrite his portion of a room they shared on the street called Little Britain, to the north of St. Paul’s Cathedral. One of their neighbors was a young woman they both found attractive; Ralph, the older and more worldly of the two, beat Franklin to her favors. When she moved to other quarters, Ralph moved in with her. For a time he lived off her earnings as a milliner, but when these proved insufficient to support him, her, and her young daughter, he resolved once more to get work. He advertised himself as a schoolmaster and indeed set up an establishment of learning in the countryside, in Berkshire. He acquired some dozen pupils, a modest income—and a new name. He had not abandoned his literary ambitions, and, evidently fearing that such a low post as schoolmaster might be held against a budding genius, he borrowed his friend’s name. Franklin learned this fact upon receiving a letter from Ralph in which the latter explained his circumstances and requested that any reply be addressed to “Mr. Franklin, Schoolmaster.”

  His family name was common enough that Franklin did not feel obliged to object to its borrowing—any more than he had objected to Ralph’s borrowing of his money. He calculated that he would eventually get his name back; as for the money, that seemed to have slipped down the same hole that had swallowed the generosity he extended to John Collins.

  Yet Ralph was not without collateral of sorts. His absence in Berkshire left his paramour, the madam milliner, in distress both
emotional and financial. Her relationship with Ralph had cost her friends and a job. She knew Franklin as an easy mark for a hard tale; with tears, sighs, and doubtless the well-timed coquettish glance, she took up where Ralph had left off fishing in Franklin’s purse.

  Yet Franklin was not a complete naïf, at least not on this point. He favored her requests for money, then made a request of his own. As he phrased it later: “Presuming on my importance to her, I attempted familiarities.”

  The vigor of his attempt exceeded its welcome. The initiative was “repulsed with a proper resentment,” forcing Franklin to withdraw. The miscue cost him more than embarrassment. The woman informed Ralph of the real Mr. Franklin’s improper advance, prompting Ralph to declare his friendship with Franklin ended and his financial obligations canceled.

  Franklin felt himself in no position to make an issue of his loss. As he was learning to do, he philosophized that this was all for the best. He never would have seen the money anyway; nothing had been sacrificed save his good reputation in the eyes of a woman whose own reputation was hardly the finest, and of a friend who was no true friend. “In the loss of his friendship,” Franklin concluded of Ralph, “I found myself relieved from a burden.”

  With almost equal ease Franklin dispensed with the burden of his relationship with Deborah Read. Perhaps his eyes were opened by Ralph’s flippant abandonment of his wife and child; perhaps the allure of the millineress distracted him; perhaps London simply enticed him in a way staid Philadelphia never had. Certainly he was stunned by his abrupt return to poverty; after the promises, explicit or otherwise, he had made about his imminent success, he probably did not want to face Sarah Read, let alone Debbie. Finally, as much of his adult life would demonstrate, Franklin possessed a lively libido, which now hindered faithfulness to one so far away, when other females were close at hand. Debbie soon slipped from his mind. During his entire stay he wrote her only once, and then merely to inform her that he would not be returning soon.

  London in the early eighteenth century was enough to turn the head of any young man. The city that would play a central role in Franklin’s life still carried scars and memories from its twin scourges of the 1660s, the plague and the great fire. Puritan types (the Cotton Mathers who stayed in old England) attributed the pestilence and the holocaust to the ungodly and often downright lewd celebrations that greeted the restoration of the Stuarts after the death of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. The plague began during the spring of 1665, creeping out of the slums of the city and spreading silently—except for the wailing of friends and relatives, before they themselves succumbed—across every district and neighborhood. By summer thousands of men, women, and children were dying each week. Those who could fled the city for the countryside in hopes of eluding the invisible destroyer. (Isaac Newton, sitting out the plague in Woolsthorpe, watched an apple fall from a tree and extrapolated its trajectory into a theory of universal gravitation.) Persons too poor to leave kept to their houses, fearing contact with carriers of the disease. Taverns, inns, and theaters were closed by decree of the frantic civic authorities; a curfew reinforced the popular desire to avoid unnecessary contact with anyone who might be a carrier.

  A hundred thousand souls went to their reward, and grass was growing in the streets by the time the great fire of 1666 brought the plague to an end. The sight of this new disaster turned discouragement to despair. “Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle!, such as happily the world had not seen the like since the foundation of it, nor be outdone till the universal conflagration of it,” wrote an eyewitness.

  All the sky was of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven, and the light seen above forty miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw above 10,000 houses all in one flame. The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like an hideous storm, and the air all about so hot and inflamed that at the last one was not able to approach it…. The stones of Paul’s flew like granados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness.

  Its horrible destructiveness apart, the fire had two positive consequences. The first was the sterilization of the city against the plague, in what was an inadvertent and extreme but nonetheless successful application of the principle of burning down the house to get rid of the rats. The second was the creation of an elaborate system of men and machines to fight future fires. As Daniel Defoe observed in his Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, written during the period of Franklin’s stay in England, “No city in the world is so well furnished for the extinguishing fires when they happen.” Trained firemen, organized into squadrons with special uniforms and insignias, operated pumping engines that drew water from the Thames and other streams and directed it through hoses onto the flames. Iron hooks on ropes were employed to pull down burning buildings; in stubborn cases gunpowder was detonated to blast the fuel beyond the fire’s reach.

  The performance of the firefighters obviously impressed Franklin, who after his return to Philadelphia set about organizing similar crews. Other aspects of city life were less worthy of imitation but hardly less fascinating to a lad from the provinces. London afforded endless amusements, some innocuous, others dangerous, still others indicative of the often brutal nature of life in that era. In the category of the at-least-potentially harmful—to body and perhaps to soul—were the prostitutes who put in the shade any on offer in Philadelphia (let alone Boston). “As we stumbled along,” wrote a chronicler of the period, “my friend bid me take notice of a shop wherein sat three or four very provoking damsels, with as much velvet on their backs as would have made a burying-pall for a country parish, or a holiday coat for a physician, being glorified at bottom with gold fringes, that I thought at first they might be parsons’ daughters, who had borrowed their fathers’ pulpit-clothes to use as scarfs, and go a-visiting in; each with as many patches in her market-place as are spots in a leopard’s skin or freckles in the face of a Scotchman.” The writer inquired of his friend who or what these ladies were. He answered that “they were a kind of first-rate punks by their rigging, of about a guinea purchase.” The writer asked his friend how he knew they were prostitutes (“lechery-layers,” was the term he used). “He replied, because they were sitting in a head-dresser’s shop; which, he says, is as seldom to be found without a whore as a bookseller’s shop in Paul’s Churchyard without a parson.”

  Leisured gentlemen partook of the services of such entrepreneurs of intimacy; when satisfied in this regard they might, along with persons of lesser means, seek diversion at the justice court at Bridewell, where they would watch assorted transgressors—including women and girls—being flogged for their poverty and related misdeeds. Another favorite stop was the royal hospital at Bedlam—a corruption, in at least two regards, of “Bethlehem”—where guests would laugh at the antics of the lunatics. So popular was mental illness as a spectator sport that rules for visitors had to be posted: “No person do give the inmates strong drink, wine, tobacco, or spirits; nor be permitted to sell any such thing in the hospital.” Public pillories at Charing Cross and executions at Newgate drew consistent and enthusiastic crowds; persons unlucky enough to miss the judicial killings could examine the decorporated heads displayed on Temple Bar, otherwise known as London’s Golgotha.

  Spectators who preferred their cruelty inflicted on nonhuman species could take in the combat among various animals at Hockley-in-the-Hole. A handbill forecast the fun:

  This is to give notice to all gentlemen, gamesters, and others, that on this present Monday is a match to be fought by two dogs, one from Newgate market, against one from Honylane market … Likewise a green bull to be baited, which was never baited before; and a bull to be turned loose with fireworks all over him; also a mad ass to be baited, with variety of bull-baiting and bear-baiting, and a dog to be drawn up with firew
orks. Beginning exactly at three of the clock.

  Even unintentionally, London life could be cruel. At inns and public houses the guests ate out of a common dish; armed with their own cutlery, they speared for the choicest morsels on what occasionally turned out to be a first-come, first-severed basis. The Grub Street Journal reported, “Last Wednesday a gentleman met with an odd accident in helping himself to some roast chicken. He found that he had conveyed two joints of another gentleman’s forefinger to his plate together with the wing which he had just taken off.”

  That the digit-deprived gentleman did not complain more loudly may have owed to the anesthetizing effect of the alcohol in which Londoners swam from morning till night. Like all large cities, London suffered serious problems of public sanitation, exemplified perhaps most odiously, although hardly uniquely, by the Fleet River, which ran as an open sewer to the Thames. The authorities regularly railed against the popular habit of discharging human, animal and vegetable waste into the stream; that they had to do so on such a regular basis betrayed their lack of success at compelling compliance. Not until the 1760s was the problem solved, or at least covered over, when the Fleet River became Fleet Street.

  Partly as a health measure—to avoid drinking contaminated water—Londoners quaffed alcoholic beverages of all proofs and flavors. They drank beer with breakfast, perhaps following a dram of sherry as an eye-opener; more beer as the morning progressed, perhaps interspersed with brandy to ward off the English chills; ale with lunch; raisin or elder wine with afternoon tea (which was a relative novelty and the principal alternative to alcoholic beverages, with the boiling of the water serving to kill the microorganisms that infested the water supply); grape wine with dinner, followed by punch and liqueurs of one sort or another—“White and Wormwood,” “Ratafia,” “Nectar and Ambrosia,” “Rosolio”—till bedtime.