The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  The excruciating ship’s passage, the work, and the onset of winter all took a toll on Franklin. Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, in February 1727, both he and Denham became ill. “My Distemper was a Pleurisy, which very nearly carried me off,” Franklin recounted many years later: “I suffered a good deal, gave up the Point in my own mind, and was rather disappointed when I found my Self recovering; regretting in some degree that I must now some time or other have all that disagreable Work to do over again.” Denham was not so fortunate; he died that winter. His will specified that Franklin was to be forgiven the cost of his passage. Rather incredibly, Franklin later would not remember what felled his sponsor—“I forget what his Distemper was”—even though Denham’s death “left [him] once more to the wide World.”2

  The experience was Franklin’s first brush with death. Indeed, it was the first time he admitted any physical weakness. His body had survived the 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston, had carried him to Philadelphia as a runaway, and had astonished Londoners with its feats of swimming. Now, however, mortality haunted Franklin. Around 1728, he wrote himself an epitaph, which was never used and never published. Franklin kept and privately circulated it as a lifelong memento mori:3 The Body of

  B. Franklin,

  Printer;

  Like the Cover of an old Book,

  Its Contents torn out,

  And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,

  Lies here, Food for Worms.

  But the Work shall not be wholly lost:

  For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more,

  In a new & more perfect Edition,

  Corrected and amended

  By the Author.

  He was born Jan. 6. 1706.

  Died 17

  What would the terminal date be? As if fearful it might come soon, Franklin was anxious to follow the “Plan of Conduct” he had written on the Berkshire. He became maniacally productive. He founded a club, took over a newspaper, established a public library, became a Freemason, married and acquired property, published an almanac, gained political office, and proposed a learned society and academy for his adopted city—all within six years.

  He became a man of letters, in several senses. He was a printer, whose successes derived from arranging small lead letters and other “sorts” to form words on a page. He wrote a variety of letters (signed with his own name or a variety of pseudonyms) in which he offered his opinions on every topic of contemporary interest. He continued the reading and discussion he had enjoyed in London, making himself into a person of letters, someone conversant with topics of current learning, including natural science. And he aspired to join the international republic of letters, a sociable network of learned men and women.

  FRANKLIN missed the garrulous, disputatious life of London. So he worked to re-create it in Philadelphia. The city lacked clubs—its taverns and coffeehouses, whatever their sturdy contributions to civic life, were not known for their witty conversation. And the colonies still lacked Masonic lodges, the new clubs that were spreading over Europe. (An infant lodge was rumored in Philadelphia in the early 1720s, but Franklin was not part of it.) If he was going to continue the talking and reading he regarded as his most important activities in London, he would have to create a venue for them.

  His first accomplishment on returning to Philadelphia was to help found a club. In 1727, Franklin and other young Philadelphia tradesmen organized themselves to read and debate the ideas of the day. The club might have been partially based on the colonial self-improvement associations Cotton Mather had advocated in his Essays to Do Good, as well as on learned societies such as the Royal Society of London. The ideal of human sociability that was drifting around the Atlantic had found a berth in Philadelphia.

  Franklin’s group initially bore two names: the Junto and the Leather Apron Club. The latter name was a problem because it emphasized its members’ status as craftworkers. So did the rumor that the group was a political cabal in the pocket of the governor, Sir William Keith. The implication was that workingmen could not possibly have time to read, let alone think, unless they were bankrolled by a patron; that individual’s patronage made them his fawning creatures, and they merely parroted his opinions. The allegation represented quite well the contemporary assumption that reading, reflection, and debate belonged to propertied men, the only people capable of forming ideas that were not beholden to the support of others. That seems to have been precisely the prejudice that Franklin and his friends were trying to escape. They read to improve themselves and make themselves into independent gentlemen. So, at some point before 1731, the name Junto edged out that of the Leather Apron Club.4

  The early members of the Junto nevertheless rejected the gentlemanly atmosphere of the Royal Society and of London’s grander clubs. The original club contained many craftsmen who, like printers, worked with head and hands; these included a mathematical instrument maker, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford (who had been reduced to indentured servitude), and two surveyors, all of whom were presumably as eager as Franklin to exercise their wits. Franklin would maintain a friendship with one cofounder, William Coleman, for forty years. He claimed Coleman had “the coolest clearest Head, the best Heart, and the exactest Morals, of almost any Man I ever met with.” Franklin also grew close to Philip Syng, a silversmith and, along with Franklin, one of the last three surviving members of the original Junto.5

  The club was organized on one principle: devotion to truth. Reading and discussion were intended to make constant and critical distinctions between true knowledge and mere opinion (which varied between individuals, sects, and factions). Religious and political differences were never to affect club relations or conversation. No one was admitted to the Junto unless he agreed to these stipulations. Any prospective member was required—“hand on his breast”—to state four things, affirming: first, that he bore no ill will to any current member; second, to “sincerely declare that you love mankind in general; of what profession or religion soever”; third, to reject any penalty for anyone holding “mere speculative opinions” or unorthodox “way of worship”; and fourth, that he “love[d] truth for truth’s sake.”6

  The philosophy was part of a broader commitment to self-improvement. For Franklin and the other Junto members, learning and social advancement were linked goals. The first of the club’s “Standing Queries” asked that members relate whether they had “met with any thing in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto.” Further questions followed, for a total of twenty-four, many of which addressed issues that concerned young men eager, as Franklin was, to rise in the world. (“Hath any body attacked your reputation lately?” “Have you any weighty affair in hand, in which you think the advice of the Junto may be of service?”) Franklin and his friends were not, however, tedious sobersides—consider a slightly later proposal that the queries be “read distinctly each Meeting” with a “Pause between each while one might fill and drink a Glass of Wine.” The club, after all, met in a tavern.7

  Franklin had created a forum for mental stimulation and amusement—now, he had to make money. In 1728, he formed a printers’ partnership with Hugh Meredith, a fellow Junto founder. Franklin and Meredith planned to begin a newspaper. But they unwisely revealed their intention to a potential employee. This journeyman leaked the news, which encouraged a rival printer, Samuel Keimer (Franklin’s former employer), to inaugurate, in December 1728, his Universal Instructor in All Arts and Sciences: and Pennsylvania Gazette. “I resented this,” Franklin later said, with some understatement. Philadelphia now had two newspapers, and Franklin was in the same position his brother had been in when he had to ram the New-England Courant into an already crowded newspaper market.8

  Keimer’s presumption that he was Pennsylvania’s universal instructor of all arts and sciences must have particularly galled Franklin, fresh from London and busy keeping up with current ideas in the Junto. The only solution for Franklin was to wreck Keimer’s pr
oject, a task from which he did not shrink. He used the town’s other newspaper, Andrew Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury, to launch another series of anonymous essays, this one written (as fair warning to Keimer) by “the Busy-Body.”

  The Busy-Body took it on himself to be “a Kind of Censor Morum,” or arbiter of manners, for Philadelphia. He adopted Silence Dogood’s seemingly artless yet self-promoting sanctimony: “What is every Body’s Business is no Body’s Business, and the Business is done accordingly. I, therefore, upon mature Deliberation, think fit to take no Body’s Business wholly into my own Hands.” The Busy-Body worried particularly that his neighbors suffered from scarcity of “good Books”; “good Conversation is still more scarce.” Thus, there was a need for a qualified commentator to “deliver Lectures of Morality or Philosophy.” In short, the Busy-Body would supply the true wisdom and enlightening conversation that Keimer only thought his ostentatiously named paper was delivering.9

  The ongoing debate over publication of “secrets” offered the perfect opening for an attack on Keimer. Keimer had been padding his Universal Instructor with excerpts from Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia , an alphabetically organized compendium of knowledge. By January 21, 1729, he had reached the entry on abortion, which he incautiously printed.

  Franklin had learned a thing or two from his brother’s strategic assault on inoculation. He was probably the author of two essays, ostensibly by “Martha Careful” and “Caelia Shortface,” that denounced Keimer’s decision to print knowledge once restricted to doctors and married women. Careful and Shortface offered scathing letters to the American Weekly Mercury; each claimed to speak for others in Philadelphia. Shortface’s phrasing hinted that she was Quaker and represented those exacting matrons: “If thou proceed any further in that Scandalous manner,” she told Keimer, “we intend very soon to have thy right Ear for it.” Careful added that “the Secrets of our Sex” should not be “read in all Taverns and Coffee-Houses, and by the Vulgar.” Such matters might be revealed to men only as part of “the Repositary of the Learned,” a tenet Franklin probably did not hold but found useful to claim against Keimer.10

  Altogether, the contributions of the Busy-Body and Mesdames Careful and Shortface made the American Weekly Mercury far more interesting to read than the dutiful Universal Instructor ever was. On October 2, 1729, less than a year after Keimer had begun his newspaper, he gave up and sold it to Franklin, who would maintain a connection with it until 1766. Franklin used the subtitle of Keimer’s paper for his paper’s name—the Pennsylvania Gazette. And the Busy-Body vanished. Franklin had won his first trade battle. Pity poor Keimer, who would die in 1742. He would have needed to survive another decade to be able to console himself that he had, after all, been outwitted by no less than the famous Benjamin Franklin.

  The Pennsylvania Gazette would help Franklin make himself into Philadelphia’s paramount man of letters. The newspaper gave him his first successes as a printer-publisher, led him into political discussions (unavoidable for a newspaperman), and allowed him to continue Keimer’s discussion of learning, as with extracts from Chambers’s Cyclopedia, to which Franklin no longer objected now that Keimer was out of the way.

  The Pennsylvania Gazette was, in many ways, a typical colonial paper, much more so than James Franklin’s argumentative Courant. The Gazette jumbled together news from the metropolis, the empire, and the rest of the world, along with local headlines. And the paper was a tool for the editors’ political ambitions and preferences—readers expected this. Reporting news of Britain’s peace with Spain in 1729, the Gazette offered four paragraphs, “from four different London Papers”: two related the government’s opinions; one leaned toward the Whig party, which was critical of the current administration; and the fourth came from “a Tory Paper” that was critical of both administration and Whigs. “When the Reader has allowed for these Distinctions,” the Gazette editors warned, “he will be better able to form his Judgment on the Affair.”11

  Pennsylvania’s politics likewise required careful treatment. The colony was a proprietary one, meaning it was privately owned. It had been founded by Quaker William Penn, and his descendants retained title to it; Quakers dominated the House of Assembly and government offices. But Penn had thrown his colony open to settlers of all religions and nations, thus guaranteeing a diversity of people and ideas. By the 1720s, some residents had begun to criticize the proprietors (and Quakers generally) and to press for their own power. The result was a set of factions whose different interests would forever enliven Franklin’s political awareness and activities.12

  Franklin and Meredith were extremely careful to remain on the good side of Pennsylvania’s authorities. For example, when Burlington officials restricted access to their town fair in order to prevent Philadelphia’s smallpox from invading their area, Franklin and Meredith did not merely describe the town order but also warned that any who did not obey “will answer for their Contempt at their Perils.” Their deference paid off. At the end of January 1730, a mere four months after Keimer had consigned the Pennsylvania Gazette to them, they became the official printers to the Pennsylvania Assembly—a great boost to their visibility and business. 13

  His new visibility made Franklin even more cautious. He made sure that he and his printing business avoided partisan positions. And he was extremely careful not to give offense on the subject of religion. Pennsylvania was an example of a society based on religious toleration; Franklin had to respect all its faiths while favoring none. He knew that his actions were now matters of record, not youthful foibles. He could no longer afford to publish irreligious philosophical works. In fact, he bought up and burned as many copies as he could of his Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, the libertine text he had published in London. He later described the work as an “Erratum,” a printer’s term for an error in composition. Only four copies of the offending work survive. However much Franklin would become known for his free dissemination of knowledge, he took great care to restrict the circulation of information that put him in a bad light.14

  Franklin now accepted a new theory, derived from the sciences, which softened his antipathy to religion. In the late seventeenth century, naturalists who were Christian believers (and sometimes even ministers) had defined an “argument from design.” This theory specified that the material creation was too vast and complicated to be anything but the work of a divine power; hence God must exist. The argument from design drew on an older tradition of an emblematic nature—natural things were emblems of spiritual meaning. These doctrines united science and religion, and they unified a range of people, from deists (who saw God as a remote creator but not an intervener) to traditional churchgoers (who regarded everything in nature as evidence of God’s constantly present and providential authority).15

  Several of Franklin’s writings from the late 1720s and early 1730s endorsed the argument from design. His 1728 “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” a private liturgy, thus offered nature as proof of God: “Thy Wisdom, thy Power, and thy GOODNESS are every where clearly seen; in the Air and in the Water, in the Heavens and on the Earth.... Thou givest Cold and Heat, Rain and Sunshine in their Season, and to the Fruits of the Earth Increase. Praised be thy Name for ever.” Franklin evidently recited these and similar invocations, then reminded himself to read not scripture but modern writings that likewise addressed God as “O Creator, O Father.” His point was that humans could appreciate divine power if they used their reason to scan nature; books, clerics, and organized religion were not essential. Thus, in a 1732 statement of his beliefs, Franklin emphasized his use of “plain Reasoning, devoid of Art and Ornament; unsupported by the Authority of any Books or Men how sacred soever.” This convention did not mean he mocked religion, merely that he sought new proof for it within the Creation.16

  Franklin made clear, in 1731, that he was not intimidated by religious orthodoxies. That year, he published his celebrated “Apology for Printers” in the Pennsylvania Gaze
tte. The piece rebutted critics who had attacked him for printing an advertisement soliciting passengers for a ship heading to Barbados. The advertiser had specified that the ship would not carry any “Black Gowns”—clergy—“on any Terms.” In his “Apology,” Franklin emphasized that he himself was not anticlerical and that he regretted any offense the advertisement may have caused. He then elaborated beyond the case at hand. He could not, he explained, make a policy of never printing things that some people would “say ought not to be printed.” He argued that a printer had to reflect a world in which “the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces.” After all, “the Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Mens Opinions.” If printers decided never to print anything offensive, he pointed out, “there would be very little printed.” Regrettable though prejudice against the clergy might be, Franklin did not consider it his business to censor it.17

  Clearly, he modeled his “Apology” on James Franklin’s similar defense against the Reverend Cotton Mather’s criticism. Franklin’s apology reminded readers that public life required toleration of varied beliefs. Religious differences did not have to disturb the peace unless people were determined that they should. Yet rather subversively, Franklin had reiterated his conviction that most religious beliefs were mere “opinions” that could never be vindicated as universal truths.

  On other matters, he was far less tolerant—as he reminded his readers. He rejected anything that resembled “Party or Personal Reflections” and was particularly wary of anything potentially slanderous. A foolish public greatly needed his caution. He wryly observed that a printed collection of songs about Robin Hood was currently outselling a volume of the Psalms. He avoided items that would “countenance Vice, or promote Immorality.” Throughout his “apology,” Franklin put himself forward as a cautious censor morum—a reincarnation of the moralizing “Busy-Body” who had insinuated himself into Philadelphia’s public life at Samuel Keimer’s expense.18