Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  “This was much spoken of as a useful piece,” Franklin recalled in his autobiography, so he set about organizing the Union Fire Company, which was incorporated in 1736. He was fastidious in detailing its rules and the fines that would be levied for infractions. This being a Franklin scheme, it included a social component as well; they met for dinner once a month “for a social evening together discussing and communicating such ideas as occurred to us on the subject of fires.” So many people wanted to join that, like the Junto, it spawned sister fire companies around town.

  Franklin remained actively involved in the Union Fire Company for years. In 1743, the Gazette carried a little notice: “Lost at the late fire on Water Street, two leather buckets, marked B. Franklin & Co. Whoever brings them to the printer hereof shall be satisfied for their trouble.” Fifty years later, when he returned from Paris after the Revolution, he would gather the four remaining members of the company, along with their leather buckets, for meetings.3

  Franklin also sought to improve the town’s ineffective police forces. At the time, the ragtag groups of watchmen were managed by constables who either enlisted neighbors or dunned them a fee to avoid service. This resulted in roaming gangs that made a little money and, Franklin noted, spent most of the night getting drunk. Once again, Franklin suggested a solution in a paper he wrote for his Junto. It proposed that full-time watchmen be funded by a property tax levied according to the value of each home, and it included one of the first arguments in America for progressive taxation. It was unfair, he wrote, that “a poor widow housekeeper, all of whose property to be guarded by the watch did not perhaps exceed the value of fifty pounds, paid as much as the wealthiest merchant, who had thousands of pounds worth of goods in his stores.”

  Unlike the fire associations, these police patrols were conceived as a government function and needed Assembly approval. Consequently, they did not get formed until 1752, “when the members of our clubs were grown more in influence.” By that time, Franklin was an assemblyman, and he helped draft the detailed legislation on how the watchmen would be organized.4

  The Freemasons

  One fraternal association, more exalted than the Junto, already existed in Philadelphia, and it seemed perfectly tailored to Franklin’s aspirations: the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons. Freemasonry, a semisecret fraternal organization based on the ancient rituals and symbols of the stone-cutting guilds, had been founded in London in 1717, and its first Philadelphia lodge cropped up in 1727. Like Franklin, the Freemasons were dedicated to fellowship, civic works, and nonsectarian religious tolerance. They also represented, for Franklin, another step up the social ladder; many of the town’s top merchants and lawyers were Freemasons.

  Social mobility was not very common in the eighteenth century. But Franklin proudly made it his mission—indeed, helped it become part of America’s mission—that a tradesman could rise in the world and stand before kings. This was not always easy, and at first he had trouble getting invited to join the Freemasons. So he began printing small, favorable notices about them in his newspaper. When that did not work, he tried a tougher tactic. In December 1730, he ran a long article that purported, based on the papers of a member who had just died, to uncover some of the secrets of the organization, including the fact that most of the secrets were just a hoax.

  Within a few weeks, he was invited to join, after which the Gazette retracted its December article and printed some small, flattering notices. Franklin became a faithful Freemason. In 1732, he helped draft the bylaws of the Philadelphia lodge, and two years later became the Grand Master and printed its constitution.5

  Franklin’s fealty to the Freemasons embroiled him in a scandal that illustrated his aversion to confronting people. In the summer of 1737, a naïve apprentice named Daniel Rees wanted to join the group. A gang of rowdy acquaintances, not Freemasons, sought to have sport with him and concocted a ritual filled with weird oaths, purgatives, and butt kissing. When they told Franklin of their prank, he laughed and asked for a copy of the fake oaths. A few days later, the hooligans enacted another ceremony, where the hapless Rees was accidentally burned to death by a bowl of flaming brandy. Franklin was not involved, but he was called as a witness in the subsequent manslaughter trial. The newspaper printed by his rival Andrew Bradford, no friend of either Franklin or Freemasonry, charged that Franklin was indirectly responsible because he encouraged the tormentors.

  Responding in his own paper, Franklin admitted that he initially laughed at the prank. “But when they came to those circumstances of their giving him a violent purge, leading him to kiss T’s posteriors, and administering him the diabolical oath which R——n read to us, I grew indeed serious.” His credibility, however, was not helped by the fact that he had asked to see the oath and then merrily showed it to friends.

  News of the tragedy, and Franklin’s involvement, was published in anti-Mason papers throughout the colonies, including the Boston News Ledger, and reached his parents. In a letter, he sought to allay his mother’s concerns about the Freemasons. “They are in general a very harmless sort of people,” he wrote, “and have no principles or practices that are inconsistent with religion or good manners.” He did concede, however, that she had a right to be displeased that they did not admit women.6

  The Great Awakening

  Although he was nondoctrinaire to the point of being little more than a deist, Franklin remained interested in religion, particularly its social effects. During the 1730s, he became enthralled by two preachers, the first an unorthodox freethinker like himself, the other an evangelical revivalist whose fiery conservatism ran counter to most of what Franklin believed.

  Samuel Hemphill was a young preacher from Ireland who, in 1734, came to Philadelphia to work as a deputy at the Presbyterian church that Franklin had sporadically visited. More interested in preaching about morality than Calvinist doctrines, Hemphill started drawing large crowds, including a curious Franklin, who found “his sermons pleasing me, as they had little of the dogmatical kind, but inculcated strongly the practice of virtue.” That dearth of dogma did not endear Hemphill to the church elders, however. Jedediah Andrews, the senior minister whose sermons had bored Franklin, complained that Hemphill had been imposed on his church and that “free thinkers, deists, and nothings, getting a scent of him, flocked to him.” Soon Hemphill was brought before the synod on charges of heresy.

  As the trial began, Franklin came to his defense with a deft article purporting to be a dialogue between two local Presbyterians. Mr. S., representing Franklin, listens as Mr. T. complains about how the “new-fangled preacher” talks too much about good works. “I do not love to hear so much of morality; I am sure it will carry no man to heaven.”

  Mr. S. rejoins that it is what “Christ and his Apostles used to preach.” The Bible makes it clear, he says, that God would have us lead “virtuous, upright and good-doing lives.”

  But, asks Mr. T., isn’t faith rather than virtue the path to salvation?

  “Faith is recommended as a means of producing morality,” Franklin’s mouthpiece Mr. S. replies, adding heretically, “That from such faith alone salvation may be expected appears to me to be neither a Christian doctrine nor a reasonable one.”

  As a believer in tolerance, Franklin might have been expected to tolerate the Presbyterians’ imposing whatever doctrine they wanted on their own preachers, but instead he had Mr. S. argue that they should not adhere to their orthodoxies. “No point of faith is so plain as that morality is our duty,” Mr. S. concludes, echoing Franklin’s core philosophy. “A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.”

  It was a typical Franklin effort at persuasion: clever, indirect, and using fabricated characters to make his point. But when the synod unanimously censured and suspended Hemphill, Franklin shed his usual velvet gloves and, as he put it, “became his zealous partisan.” He published an anonymous pamphlet (and, unlike his newspaper dialogue, made sure that the pamphlet remained anonymous) filled wi
th uncharacteristic anger. Not only did he offer detailed theological rebuttals to each of the synod’s charges, but he accused its members of “malice and envy.”

  Hemphill’s accusers responded with their own pamphlet, which prompted Franklin to write another, even more vitriolic anonymous response that hurled phrases like “bigotry and prejudice” and “pious fraud.” In a subsequent poem, he labeled Hemphill’s critics “Rev. Asses.”

  It was a rare violation by Franklin of his Junto rule of avoiding direct contradiction or argumentation, one that was all the more odd because in the past he had cheerily forsaken any claim to care much about doctrinal disputes. His resentment of the entrenched, pious clerical establishment seemed to get the better of his temper.

  Franklin’s defense became more difficult when Hemphill was exposed as having plagiarized many of his sermons. Nevertheless, Franklin still stuck by him, explaining later that “I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture, though the latter was the practice of our common teachers.” In the end, Hemphill left town and Franklin quit the Presbyterian congregation for good.7

  The Hemphill affair occurred just as an emotional tide of revivalism, known as the Great Awakening, began sweeping America. Fervent Protestant traditionalists, most notably Jonathan Edwards, were whipping congregants into spiritual frenzies and convulsive conversions with tales of fire and brimstone. As Edwards told his congregation in the most famous of his “terror” sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the only thing that kept them from eternal damnation was the inexplicable grace of “the God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over fire.”

  Nothing could have been further from Franklin’s theology. Indeed, Edwards and Franklin, the two preeminent Americans of their generation, can be viewed, Carl Van Doren noted, as “symbols of the hostile movements that strove for the mastery of their age.” Edwards and the Great Awakeners sought to recommit America to the anguished spirituality of Puritanism, whereas Franklin sought to bring it into an Enlightenment era that exalted tolerance, individual merit, civic virtue, good deeds, and rationality.8

  Thus, it might seem surprising, indeed somewhat odd, that Franklin became enthralled by George Whitefield, the most popular of the Great Awakening’s roving preachers, who arrived in Philadelphia in1739. The English evangelist had been an unhappy soul at Pembroke College, Oxford, and then had a “new birth” into Methodism and later Calvinism. He was doctrinally pure in his insistence that salvation came only through God’s grace, but he was nevertheless deeply involved in charitable work, and his year-long tour through America was to raise money for an orphanage in Georgia. He raised more money than any other cleric of his time for philanthropies, which included schools, libraries, and almshouses across Europe and America. So perhaps it was not so surprising that Franklin took a liking to him though never embraced his theology.

  Whitefield’s nightly outdoor revival meetings in Philadelphia (by then America’s largest town, with a population of thirteen thousand) drew huge crowds, and Franklin, sensing a great story, covered him lavishly in the Pennsylvania Gazette. “On Thursday,” he reported, “the Rev. Mr. Whitefield began to preach from the Court House gallery in this city, about six at night, to nearly 6,000 people before him in the street, who stood in an awful silence to hear him.” The crowds grew throughout his week-long visit, and Whitefield returned to the city three more times during his year-long American crusade.

  Franklin was awed. He published accounts of Whitefield’s appearances in forty-five weekly issues of his Gazette, and eight times he turned over his entire front page to reprints of the sermons. Franklin recounted in his autobiography, with a wryness born only after years of detachment, the enthusiasm that infected him at the time:

  I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably, that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.

  Franklin was also impressed with the transforming effect that Whitefield had on Philadelphia’s citizenry. “Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons,” he reported in the Gazette. “Religion is become the subject of most conversation. No books are in request but those of piety.”9

  The financial implications of that last observation were not lost on Franklin. He met with Whitefield and arranged a deal to be the primary publisher of his sermons and journals, which no doubt added to his zeal to publicize him. After Whitefield’s first visit, Franklin ran an advertisement soliciting orders for a series of Whitefield’s sermons at two shillings a volume. A few months later, he ran a notice that he had received so many orders that those “who have paid or who bring the money in their hands will have the preference.”

  Thousands were sold, which helped to make Franklin rich and Whitefield famous. Franklin also published ten editions of Whitefield’s journals, each five times more expensive than his almanac, and enlisted a sales force of eleven printers he knew throughout the colonies to make them bestsellers. His sister-in-law Anne Franklin of Newport took a shipment of 250. During 1739–41, more than half the books that Franklin printed were by or about Whitefield.

  Some historians have consequently concluded that Franklin’s passion for Whitefield was merely pecuniary. But that is too simplistic. As was often the case, Franklin was able to weave together seamlessly his financial interests with his civic desires and personal enthusiasms. He had a companionable personality, and he was genuinely attracted by Whitefield’s mesmerizing charisma and charitable bent. He invited Whitefield to stay at his home, and when the preacher praised the invitation as being “for Christ’s sake,” Franklin corrected him: “Don’t let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ’s sake, but for your sake.”

  In addition, despite their theological differences, Franklin was attracted to Whitefield because he was shaking up the local establishment. Franklin’s long-standing disdain for the religious elite led him to enjoy the discomfort and schisms caused by the intrusion of wildly popular itinerant preachers onto their turf. The tolerant Franklin was pleased that Whitefield’s supporters had erected, with Franklin’s financial support, a large new hall that, among other uses, could provide a pulpit to anyone of any belief, “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”10

  Franklin’s populist delight at the discomfort of the elite was evident in the way he stoked up a controversy about a letter sent to the Gazette by some of the town’s gentry, who wrote that Whitefield had not “met with great success among the better sort of people.” The next week, using the pen name “Obadiah Plainman,” Franklin ridiculed the use of the phrase “the better sort of people” and its implication that Whitefield’s supporters were “the meaner sort, the mob or the rabble.” Mr. Plainman said that he and his friends were proud to call themselves part of the rabble, but they hated it when people who styled themselves “better sort” used such terms and implied that common folks were “a stupid herd.”

  A haughty-sounding gentleman named Tom Trueman (or perhaps, given the name, Franklin pretending to be such a gentleman) wrote the next week to William Bradford’s more upscale newspaper to deny that such offense was intended and to accuse Mr. Plainman of fancying himself a leader of the town’s common folks. Franklin, again replying as Mr. Plainman, said he was merely “a poor ordinary” craftsman who, after his labors, “instead of going to the alehouse, I amuse myself with the books of the Library Company.” As such, he rankled at those who proclaimed themselves to be of the better sort and “look on t
he rest of their fellow subjects with contempt.” Though he was rising in the world in a way that would have allowed him, if he were so inclined, to put on aristocratic airs, Franklin was still allergic to snobbery and proud to be a Plainman defending the middling people.11

  By the fall of 1740, Franklin showed signs of cooling slightly toward Whitefield, though not toward the profits that came from publishing him. The preacher’s efforts to make him a “new born” believer in Calvinist orthodoxy wore thin, and valuable patrons among the Philadelphia gentry began to denounce the Gazette’s ardent flackery. In response to such criticism, Franklin printed an editorial denying (unconvincingly) any bias and restating his philosophy, first propounded in his 1731 “Apology for Printers,” that “when truth has fair play, it will always prevail over falsehood.” But he also included in the issue a letter from a preacher who criticized Whitefield’s “enthusiastic ravings,” and he subsequently published two pamphlets harshly attacking Whitefield as well as one giving Whitefield’s response. The letters in Franklin’s Gazette, 90 percent of which had been favorable to Whitefield in the first nine months of 1740, tipped mostly negative beginning in September, though the pieces written by Franklin remained positive.

  Albeit with less ardor, Franklin continued to support Whitefield over the ensuing years, and they maintained an affectionate correspondence until the preacher’s death in 1770. In his autobiography, written after Whitefield died, Franklin added a dose of ironic detachment to his warm recollections. He recounted one sermon he attended where, rather than being moved by Whitefield’s words, Franklin spent the time calculating how far his voice carried. And as for Whitefield’s effect on his spiritual life, Franklin wryly recalled, “He used, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard.”12