The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (6 page)

With his amiability and talent he soon became an artisan to be reckoned with. He knew more about printing than his employer, Samuel Keimer; indeed, as Governor William Keith of Pennsylvania quickly surmised, this talented teenager knew more about printing than anyone in Philadelphia. He was extremely bright and naturally affable, and his future as an artisan looked very promising.

PATRONAGE

Although Franklin certainly wanted to make something of himself in Philadelphia, he could not have anticipated becoming what he eventually became—the archetype of the self-made man. Indeed, it would be a mistake to overemphasize this aspect of his life, as if his career was unique and he was somehow prefiguring the Horatio Alger success stories of the next century. Rising from obscure origins to success and eminence was not unheard of in the eighteenth century or earlier, and Franklin’s rise, however spectacular, was not unique in English history Wasn’t it said that Cardinal Wolsey’s father had been a butcher?

In the eighteenth century many young men moved up the social ladder in both America and Britain. William Strahan, Franklin’s lifelong British friend and associate, began as a journeyman printer like Franklin and eventually became very rich, richer perhaps than Franklin, and even acquired a seat in Parliament. And then there was Edmund Burke, the Irishman of undistinguished origins who rose to become one of the great writers and orators of his age. But most of this mobility in the eighteenth century was sponsored mobility. On both sides of the Atlantic bright Englishmen of obscure origins could have spectacular rises, but they needed patrons and sponsors to do so. Burke would never have acquired the eminence he did without the patronage of William Hamilton and the Marquess of Rockingham. In that very different monarchical world, patrons were often on the lookout for bright young lads, and when they found them, they were eager to bring them along. Patronizing inferiors and creating obligations, after all, was an important mark of an aristocrat in that rank-conscious age.

The examples of such patronage in the colonial world are many. One evening in 1720 a swollen Virginia river forced John Carter, the provincial secretary and “a man of immense wealth,” to seek shelter in the home of a “plain planter” named John Waller. During the course of the evening Carter, impressed with the “quickness” and the “uncommon parts” of Waller’s ten-year-old son, Benjamin, proposed to the father that he take the boy and educate him. Perhaps money changed hands. At any rate, the bright young Benjamin Waller was brought into the Carter household, educated, sent to the College of William and Mary, and trained in the law. Eventually Waller became a member of the House of Burgesses, the holder of several crown offices, and a great man in his own right.
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Other examples of patrons’ sponsoring young men may not be as remarkable as this one, but the practice was common. Edmund Pendleton in Virginia succeeded in just this manner, as did many young New England farm boys discovered by their local ministers and sent on to Harvard and Yale. And then there was a brilliant seventeen-year-old merchant’s clerk, named Alexander Hamilton, who was rescued from his “groveling” obscurity in St. Croix by perceptive patrons and sent to the mainland for an education.
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Patronage was the basic means of social mobility in the eighteenth century, and Franklin’s rise was due to it—as a careful reading of his
Autobiography
shows. He could never have made it in the way he did in that hierarchical society if he had not been helped by men of influence and supported at crucial points. When Franklin’s brother-in-law, a ship captain who sailed a commercial sloop between Massachusetts and the Delaware region, learned that Franklin was in Philadelphia, working in a print shop, he wrote to persuade the young runaway to return to Boston. The brother-in-law happened to show Franklin’s reply to Governor Keith, who could not believe that a seventeen-year-old could have written such a letter. “He said,” Franklin recalled, “I appear’d a young Man of promising Parts, and therefore should be encouraged.”
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Unhappy with the two existing printers in Philadelphia, Bradford and Keimer, the governor called on Franklin, who was working for Keimer. The governor invited Franklin out for a drink in a local tavern and offered to help establish him as an independent printer if his father would supply the capital. When his father refused to put up the money, Governor Keith promised to do so himself.

Keith was not the only colonial governor to notice Franklin. When the young man was returning from Boston, having failed to get the money from his father, he stopped off in New York with a trunk of his books that he had retrieved from home. A youth with a trunk of books was rare enough in colonial New York that Governor William Burnet asked to meet with the young man to converse about authors and books.

During Franklin’s trip to Boston, even Cotton Mather, whom Franklin had satirized so successfully in the Silence Dogood essays, had asked to meet the learned young man.

Once prominent Pennsylvanians grasped what Franklin was like, they were quick to patronize him. Thomas Denham, a Quaker merchant, befriended him, gave him money at a crucial moment, and brought him into his business. Even Franklin’s later enemy William Allen, who was Philadelphia’s richest man, helped Franklin at various times, especially in securing for him the position of deputy postmaster. Prominent Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton would continue to patronize Franklin throughout his life.
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Franklin’s patrons supported him in a variety of ways, lending money, inviting him to their homes, introducing him to others, becoming his “friends,” which was the common euphemism of the day for patron-client relations. All of “these Friends were ...of great Use to me,” Franklin recalled, “as I occasionally was to some of them.”
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No doubt his own conspicuous talent was the main source of his rise, but once he had caught people’s attention, “the leading Men ... thought it convenient to oblige and encourage me.”
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So it went. In the end Franklin was never quite as self-made as he sometimes implied or as the nineteenth century made him out to be.

In the end, of course, he did succeed in rising higher than any of his patrons could have imagined. But at the outset Franklin did not think much beyond becoming his own independent printer in the city of Philadelphia—a remarkable enough feat in itself, given the lowliness of his origins. We know the teenage printer’s social horizons were still limited; otherwise he would not have begun seeking the hand in marriage of Deborah Read, whose family was anything but rich or distinguished. When Deborah’s father suddenly died, her widowed mother suggested that marriage wait until Franklin was established. Trusting in Governor Keith’s promise to finance him in setting up his own printing firm, Franklin planned a trip to London to purchase the necessary equipment. There was time enough to get married after he returned from England. In November 1724, a year after he had arrived in Philadelphia, Franklin, with a friend, James Ralph, was on his way to the metropolitan center of the British Empire.

LONDON, 1724-1726

London, with a population of over a half million people in the 1720s, was a far cry from any city in North America. London was growing rapidly, but since its death rate was so horrendous—two persons died for every child born—this growth was entirely from people moving into the city The city teemed with movement. One third of its population were, like Franklin, recent arrivals; the city was absorbing about one half of the entire natural increase of England’s population. All these people made for congestion and confusion in the city’s labyrinth of narrow streets and dark alleys, which contrasted sharply with the neatly rectangular layout of colonial Philadelphia.
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London’s society was as different from that of Philadelphia in its hierarchical complexity and its luxurious splendor as in its number of people. It was dominated by a monarchical court and wealthy hereditary aristocrats who were busy buying property and erecting opulent town houses everywhere. Some of these nobles had annual incomes in the tens of thousands of pounds, exorbitant sums that no colonial aristocrat could match. Some of them spent on a single supper and ball what many Englishmen could not earn in a lifetime. These nobles lived in the country but maintained homes in London that they visited annually at fabulous cost. Lord Ashburnham, for example, spent over £4000 a year for his annual visit to London. But the British aristocracy was larger than the two hundred or so hereditary peers who sat in the House of Lords. It included not only several titled ranks of knights and esquires but also the large body of gentry, the lowest social rank entitled to bear a coat of arms. Below these were rich merchants and the growing numbers of middling shopkeepers, traders, artisans, and craftsmen, all resting on a huge population of beggars, sailors, prostitutes, street sellers, porters, servants, and laborers of every conceivable description.
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When Franklin arrived in this maelstrom of humanity, he discovered that Governor Keith had reneged on his promise to supply credit for him. Franklin the innocent youth was stunned. “Unsolicited as he was by me, how could I think his generous Offers insincere? I believ’d him one of the best Men in the World.” Since Keith had been, after all, the knighted governor of the colony, Franklin in his
Autobiography
milked the deception for all it was worth: “What shall we think of a Governor’s playing such pitiful Tricks, and imposing so grossly on a poor ignorant Boy!”
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Although Franklin learned from Governor Keith’s behavior something about the arbitrary nature of power in that severely hierarchical world, he had no recourse but to seek work as a printer in the great metropolis. Despite the complexity of London he seems to have made his way about with remarkable ease. He naturally impressed his London employers and indeed everyone else he met. In London he soon forgot about his engagement to Deborah Read and spent most of his money “going to Plays & other Places of Amusement.”
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In addition to these “Expenses” that kept him from earning enough to pay for his return passage, he seems to have indulged what he later called “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth” that hurried him “frequently into Intrigues with low Women.”
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He did, however, avoid the vices of smoking, drinking, and gambling. Unlike his fellow printers and most workers in those days, who were “great Guzzlers of Beer,” he drank only water while working.
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His extraordinary lifelong temperance, as he later pointed out, contributed not only to his health but also to his remarkable success in business. Unlike most other workers, Franklin had no “St. Mondays,” no absences from Monday work because of excessive weekend drinking.
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These initial experiences in London made a lasting impression on the nineteen-year-old Franklin, and he devoted a considerable number of pages in his
Autobiography
to them. Although he mentions several “errata” that he committed while in London, he clearly was proud of the way he had survived in the big city. At a time when most people, even many sailors, did not know how to swim, he tells us that the English much admired his prowess as a swimmer; he even imagined that he might have made a living teaching swimming and water sports to the sons of the English gentry.

While in London he wrote and printed on his employer’s press a rather sophomoric
Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain
that argued that since God determined everything, it was useless to debate the right and wrong of anything. This would seem to have been a nice justification for his self-indulgent behavior in London—except that he also argued that all pleasure was accompanied by equal sensations of pain or uneasiness, which suggests that his conscience may have been bothered by his apparent freedom from religious restraints. The essay attracted some attention from deists and gave him entrée to some intellectual circles, where he met Bernard Mandeville, the author of
The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits.
Since Mandeville believed that private vice could have beneficial public consequences, he seemed to be a writer after the young Franklin’s own hard-to-be-governed heart.

Franklin later repudiated his
Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity,
burning all but one of the copies still in his possession. He came to conclude that all such “Metaphysical Reasonings” were useless, and he gave them up. Although he never accepted the Bible as divine revelation or believed in the divinity of Christ, he always affirmed “the Existence of the Deity, that he made the World, and govern’d it by his Providence.” He came to believe that the only important thing about religion was morality, and the only basis for that morality was utility. “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden,” he later wrote in his
Poor Richard’s Almanack,
“but it is forbidden because it’s hurtful.... Nor is a Duty beneficial because it is commanded, but it is commanded, because it’s beneficial.”
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Although Franklin had been “religiously educated as a Presbyterian,” he never accepted the Calvinist conviction that faith alone was the source of salvation; indeed, he became convinced that “the most acceptable Service of God was the doing Good to Man.” His respect for the various religions in eighteenth-century America came to depend solely on their contributions to virtue or morality. After concluding in a 1755 newspaper polemic that “a virtuous Heretick shall be saved before a wicked Christian,” Franklin thereafter decided that religion was not a subject worth disputing in public. Although he continued to make contributions to many churches, he never belonged to any of them—a problem for his reputation in the early nineteenth century.
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BACK TO PHILADELPHIA

After eighteen months in London, Franklin got tired of the big city and wanted to get back to Philadelphia. Surely it was not because of his pining for Deborah Read—he wrote her only once during the nearly two years he was gone, and then simply to tell her that he was not likely soon to return. In London, he tells us, he had proceeded “by degrees” to forget his engagement to Deborah.
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Perhaps he wished to return because London in the 1720s was experiencing food shortages and more outbreaks of diseases than usual. Or perhaps he had come to realize that he would be a much bigger fish in the relatively small pond of Philadelphia than he was in the huge ocean of London with its hundreds of thousands of people. Or perhaps he sensed that printers in England were losing control of the publishing business, and he would have many more opportunities for advancement back in the colonies.
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At any rate, in 1726, when Philadelphia merchant Thomas Denham offered to pay Franklin’s passage back home and bring him into his business, he jumped at the opportunity.