The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Debbie Read was not his first choice. A young man with promise might expect a dowry as accompaniment to his bride, and Franklin, judging his promise to be as bright as that of anyone else in the city, chose to test the marriage market. His housemate and fellow Juntoist, Thomas Godfrey, and especially Godfrey’s wife encouraged a courtship between Franklin and the daughter of one of Mrs. Godfrey’s relatives. Franklin took the encouragement and initiated the suit. As the matter grew more serious, Mrs. Godfrey inquired as to what Franklin would need in the way of a dowry. Franklin, feeling quite full of himself, said he would like to retire his debt in the print shop, at that time somewhat less than £100. When Mrs. Godfrey responded that the girl’s parents had no such sum on hand, he suggested that they mortgage their house.

  After some research the parents rejected Franklin’s terms. The printing business, they said, was not so profitable as Franklin supposed—certainly not so profitable that they would risk their house to marry their daughter to a printer who had yet to prove himself. Rather than make a counteroffer, they abruptly broke off relations, shutting up their daughter and forbidding Franklin to see her.

  Franklin was shocked. Reasonable and honest people would have met him halfway; these parents, he suspected, having lured him into a relationship with their daughter, now hoped to exploit the strength of his feelings for her by provoking him to elope with her—in the event of which they would have to supply no dowry whatsoever. He resolved to have nothing to do with them. His suspicions seemed confirmed when, sometime later, the parents—evidently judging that their bluff had been called—indicated they would be willing to entertain his suit once more. Franklin stood on his pride, repeating that he would have nothing to do with that family. In his anger he managed to alienate the Godfreys, who packed their belongings and left his house. Subsequently Thomas Godfrey left the Junto as well. (Franklin gave another reason for Godfrey’s withdrawal from the discussion club: “He knew little out of his way, and was not a pleasing companion, as like most great mathematicians I have met with, he expected unusual precision in every thing said, or was forever denying or distinguishing upon trifles, to the disturbance of all conversation.”)

  Yet as Franklin’s anger cooled and he surveyed the situation further, he discovered that the opinion that printing was an unpromising trade was hardly unique to the Godfrey’s relations. He might get a dowry, but only attached to an unattractive or otherwise disagreeable woman. Practical though he was, he was not so calculating as to consign himself to life with a woman he did not desire nor think he could learn to love.

  So he settled for Debbie Read. She was happy to see him again, if only because he appeared her one escape from the predicament into which she had fallen. Sarah Read likewise approved the suit, for similar reasons.

  But the complications of Debbie’s predicament seemed almost overwhelming. If John Rogers really was dead, Franklin might inherit his debts along with his wife. If alive, he might return and charge Franklin and Debbie with bigamy. The same mores that prevented Debbie’s divorce took an even sterner view of bigamy. Upon conviction both parties might receive thirty-nine strokes of the lash upon their bare backs, followed by life imprisonment at hard labor.

  These perils persuaded the prospective newlyweds to postpone their union many months. But with each turn of the calendar leaf the likelihood of Rogers’s reappearance diminished, and in the summer of 1730 Franklin and Debbie decided to go through with their plan. Yet even then they adopted an expedient: rather than celebrate a formal wedding, they simply set up housekeeping as husband and wife. This kind of common-law arrangement had evolved for precisely such ambiguous situations; the official sanction it bestowed on relationships grew out of their durability and demonstrated success. Franklin had no relatives nearby to raise objections to such an irregular, if not exactly unusual, approach to marriage. Debbie’s relations understood her plight and recognized this as the best, perhaps only, remedy. From September 1, 1730, they presented themselves to a largely approving community as husband and wife.

  The marriage was tested almost at once, in a manner many wives would have found unendurable. Sometime in late 1730 or early 1731 a son was born to Benjamin Franklin by a woman other than Deborah Read Franklin.

  The timing of events suggests that Franklin already knew, when he and Debbie decided to marry, that his child was on the way. He would have been unthinkably imprudent not to tell her of such a significant impending occurrence. Perhaps he also knew at that time that he, rather than the child’s mother, would take charge of the infant; perhaps not. If he did know, he must have obtained Debbie’s consent, since she would be the child’s stepmother and, in light of contemporary customs and Franklin’s heavy workload, primary caretaker. If he did not know ahead of the birth that he would assume custody of the child, Debbie’s consent must have been obtained after the fact—a circumstance fraught with potential for anger and resentment.

  The identity of the mother of Franklin’s son has been a mystery for nearly three centuries. Because there evidently was no question as to Franklin’s paternity, she must not have been a prostitute or someone otherwise particularly promiscuous (at least not around the time of conception). Debbie must have known who she was—as Franklin’s fiancée and then wife she certainly would have asked if she did not know already. Therefore Sarah must have known also. Doubtless some other people close to Franklin or Debbie must have wondered where this child came from; the nosiest would have pried the secret out. Some authors have suggested that the boy—named William—was actually Debbie’s child, conceived before her marriage to Franklin. By this argument the refusal of the couple to acknowledge her maternity reflected their continuing concern that John Rogers might return and that one or both of them would be charged with bigamy or adultery. Though the child could not well be hidden, the mother might be, shielding all concerned from the harshest consequences.

  The initial reasonableness of this argument fails upon the protracted, and finally permanent, absence of Rogers. Even after the passage of years precluded any further concerns about Rogers, Debbie declined to claim William as her own—an omission impossible to imagine in any mother, let alone one who had to watch from close at hand while her son spent his life labeled a bastard. Besides, Franklin’s friends all assumed that Debbie was not the mother. “’tis generally known here his birth is illegitimate and his mother not in good circumstances,” wrote George Roberts, albeit thirty years after the fact. Apparently Franklin had a financial arrangement of sorts with the mother, who was content to remain anonymous. “I understand some small provision is made by him for her,” Roberts said, “but her being one of the most agreeable of women prevents particular notice being shown, or the father and son acknowledging any connection with her.”

  (In the 1760s one of Franklin’s political rivals anonymously put out that William’s mother was a woman servant named Barbara, who worked in the Franklin household for years, at £10 per annum, until her recent death. There is no reason to credit the story and much to discredit it, starting with the fact that it boggles the mind to think that Deborah would have tolerated the continuing presence of her husband’s former paramour. William she could not turn out, though she was frequently tempted; “Barbara” she could have, and certainly would have.)

  By all evidence, marriage to Debbie settled Franklin down. This, of course, was much of the point of the match from his perspective, but Debbie could have been forgiven for wondering. For several years his passion had ruled him, with little William being only the most obvious evidence. Whether Franklin could rule his passion remained to be seen. Debbie must have kept close watch.

  In the second year of their marriage she discovered, doubtless to her joy and satisfaction, and likely to his joy and relief, that she was pregnant. No longer would that other woman’s brat be the only child in the house; this new child would bond Ben to her in a way mere (common-law) marriage could not. On October 20, 1732, Francis Folger Franklin was born. Debbie may have chose
n the boy’s Christian name, since obviously Ben selected his own mother’s family name as the baby’s middle name. Sarah, who had joined her daughter and son-in-law in the house on Market Street that served as both domicile and workplace, assisted in the delivery and in the care of the newborn. In addition, Sarah almost certainly tended to little William while Debbie nursed and otherwise doted on Franky. Downstairs, Ben hoped for an extrapolation of Debbie’s maternal good feelings from Franky to William.

  Marriage and the birth of two sons, coming after the establishment of his own printing business, fairly well rooted Franklin in Philadelphia. Much of his life to this point had been a search for a place that suited his temperament and talents. Boston was too confining, London too loose. Eventually Philadelphia would grow too small for him—or rather he would grow too large for Philadelphia. But during the three decades that spanned his twenties, thirties, and forties, Philadelphia provided a congenial home.

  Of course, the congeniality was as much Franklin’s doing as Philadelphia’s. His founding of the Junto was a first step in this direction. The club allowed Franklin to surround himself with individuals of similar intellectual interests; in time, as the members of the group assumed positions of leadership in the city, its influence leavened the community as a whole.

  A second step was the organizing of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Private libraries were common enough among men of wealth in the colonies; Franklin had taken advantage of a few himself. Nor were institutional libraries unheard of; these were usually joined to churches or other bodies heavenly bent. A secular subscription library, however, was something new. Subscribers would pool their resources to buy books all would share and from which all might benefit. Franklin floated the idea in the Junto; upon favorable reception he drew up a charter specifying an initiation fee of forty shillings and annual dues of ten shillings. The charter was signed in July 1731, to take effect upon the collection of fifty subscriptions.

  Franklin led the effort to obtain the subscriptions. At first, in doing so, he presented the library as his own idea, as indeed it was. But he encountered a certain resistance on the part of potential subscribers, a subtle yet unmistakable disinclination in some people to give credit by their participation to one so openly civic-minded. They asked themselves, if they did not ask him, what was in this for Ben Franklin that made him so eager to promote the public weal. To allay their suspicions, Franklin resorted to a subterfuge. “I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading.”

  Within four months the Library Company had its requisite two score and ten commitments. Compiling the initial book order involved identifying favorite titles and consulting James Logan, the most learned man in Pennsylvania. Logan knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian and was said to be the only person in America sufficiently conversant with mathematics to be able to comprehend Newton’s great Principia Mathematica. Before Franklin’s emergence, Logan—who was thirty years the elder and had been the personal protégé of William Penn—was the leading figure of Pennsylvania letters (and numbers). Naturally Franklin cultivated him as source of advice, patronage, and civic goodwill. Logan listed several items essential to the education of any self-respecting person; between these and the titles Franklin and the other library directors chose on their own, early purchases covered topics ranging from geometry to journalism, natural philosophy to metaphysics, poetry to gardening.

  Louis Timothée, a journeyman in Franklin’s shop, was hired as librarian, and a room to house the collection was rented. Franklin and the other directors of the library instructed Timothée to open the room from two till three on Wednesday afternoons and from ten till four on Saturdays. Any “civil gentlemen” might peruse the books, but only subscribers could borrow them. (Exception was made for James Logan, in gratitude for his advice in creating the collection.) Borrowers might have one book at a time. Upon accepting a volume each borrower must sign a promissory note covering the cost of the book. This would be voided upon return of the book undamaged. The borrower might then take out another, building his edifice of knowledge, as it were, one brick at a time.

  Franklin was twenty-seven when the Library Company was founded, twenty-eight by the time the first shipment of books arrived from London. Colonial life was noteworthy for the opportunities it afforded able and ambitious young men, but few took such advantage of these opportunities as Franklin—not least since none were more able and not many more ambitious. The skeptics on the subject of the library were right to wonder what Franklin stood to gain from the project; he expected to gain from everything he did. But his gain, as he interpreted it, would be the community’s gain, and the community’s gain his.

  In February 1731 Franklin became a Freemason. Shortly thereafter he volunteered to draft bylaws for the embryonic local chapter, named for St. John the Baptist; upon acceptance of the bylaws he was elected warden and subsequently grand master of the lodge. Within three years he became grand master of all of Pennsylvania’s Masons. Not unforeseeably—indeed, this was much of the purpose of membership for everyone involved—his fellow Masons sent business Franklin’s way. In 1734 he printed the Constitutions, the first formally sponsored Masonic book in America; he derived additional work from his brethren on an un-sponsored basis.

  Masonic connections may have been behind Franklin’s success in winning work from the provincial government. On the other hand, when the Assembly selected him to print the colony’s paper money, the legislators may simply have based their decision on the quality of his product—as demonstrated, on this topic, by the New Jersey notes he had printed while with Keimer. Success bred success; soon he became the official printer to the Assembly. This provided the print shop with steady work and a predictable income, which in turn allowed Franklin to expand his other activities. The stationery store was enlarged; under Debbie and Sarah’s supervision new items were ordered and new business solicited. Franklin sent one of his journeymen, Thomas Whitmarsh, to South Carolina to open a print shop there after the South Carolina assembly offered a bounty for a printer. Following Whitmarsh’s death of yellow fever in September 1733, Franklin dispatched Louis Timothée to replace him, presumably with a warning about staying clear of low-lying areas during hot weather.

  Meanwhile the Pennsylvania Gazette grew into the leading paper of the province. It printed news of Philadelphia and the rest of the province, gleaned from official notices, Franklin’s conversations with persons of high station and low, and sundry other sources. It reprinted articles and notices from papers elsewhere in America and from those London papers and magazines that found their way across the Atlantic.

  It also published opinion. Some journalists enter their profession from a zeal to right wrong and oppose entrenched authority; this was what had motivated Franklin’s brother James—and landed James in jail. Ben Franklin certainly learned from James’s experience and from his own experience on James’s paper. He had no desire to publish from prison, and even less desire to not publish from prison or anywhere else. Journalism for him was a business rather than a calling, or perhaps it was a calling that could call only so long as the business beneath it flourished. Unlike James, Ben Franklin would not provoke the authorities into closing him down. If nothing else, such rashness would lose him his printing contract with the provincial government.

  In another person such an attitude might have seemed opportunistic, even cynical. Although Franklin was not cynical, it is true that few opportunities escaped him. Yet his attitude toward journalism honestly reflected his personality, to wit, his innate skepticism. No argument ever so convinced him as to preclude his entertaining the opposite. Many people find uncertainty unsettling and insist on definite answers to the large and small questions of life. Franklin was just the opposite, being of that less numerous tribe that finds certainty—or certitude, rather—unsettling. Doubtless this reflected, at le
ast in part, his experience of the stifling certitude of the Mathers in Boston. It also reflected his wide, and ever-widening, reading, which exposed him to multiple viewpoints. Above all, it probably reflected something innate: an equipoise that nearly everyone who knew him noticed and that many remarked upon. It could make him seem smug or shallow; while others agonized upon life’s deep issues, Franklin contented himself with incomplete answers, maintaining an open mind and seeming to skate upon life’s surface.

  In short, Franklin possessed the ideal temperament for a newspaper editor who hoped to make money, rather than win converts. He opened the columns of the Gazette to opinions of all kinds, thereby attracting readers of all kinds and allowing the paper to thrive.

  Occasionally his broad-mindedness brought him trouble. An outbreak of criticism prompted him to explain his philosophy in an “Apology for Printers,” published in the Gazette in June 1731. The apology began with a subapology for not crafting his case better, but “I have not yet leisure to write such a thing in the proper form, and can only in a loose manner throw those considerations together which should have been the substance of it.”

  Franklin was being modest, if not coy. In fact a single sentence summarized his case and that of printers everywhere, while adding the characteristic twist that readers would learn to expect of him. “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence they cheerfully serve all contending writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the question in dispute.”