The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (10 page)

At the time, Franklin could not connect the empty houses and shuttered shops with the collapse of the money supply in London. The money supply that worried him was his own. He touched shore in Philadelphia with a single Dutch dollar in his pocket, received in change in
New York. He also had a hole in his belly from four days on the road and a long night of rowing and shivering.

He got his first lesson in imperial economics when he tried to purchase breakfast and discovered, to his relief and gratification, that one Dutch dollar went further in Philadelphia than it did farther north. Upon meeting a boy carrying a basket of bread, he inquired as to the loaves’ provenance. The boy pointed in the direction of Second Street; Franklin’s hunger-sharpened senses guided him the rest of the way to the bakery. He asked for biscuit, the sort of thing Boston’s bakers produced by the barrel for the ship trade. Philadelphia’s bakers made nothing of the sort, he was told. He requested a threepenny loaf—in Boston a step up from biscuit. He learned that threepenny loaves were not made in Philadelphia either. At a loss, he asked for threepence’ worth of whatever they
did
make in this city. The baker handed him three large, puffy rolls, each the size of the threepenny loaves he had been accustomed to purchase in Boston. The rolls were too big to fit in his pockets, and he had no bag to carry them—customers being expected to supply their own. So he tucked one under his right arm, one under his left, and walked out the door taking large bites from the third.

As he proceeded up Market Street, munching his breakfast, he began to feel both conspicuous and out of place. He had not bathed in several days. He was wearing the same clothes that had been soaked by the salt water of the Hudson estuary and the rain of New Jersey; from his pockets hung dirty stockings, shirts, and underwear. He knew no one in the town, nor where he was going. Years later he remembered the “most awkward ridiculous appearance” he made.

Another person who evidently thought so was a girl somewhat younger than he, standing in the door of her father’s house on the city’s main thoroughfare. Ben did not know her name, nor she his. But he noticed her, and she him—which made him feel all the more awkward.

He turned and headed back toward the river, where at least he had the passing acquaintance of those he had come downstream with, some of whom were continuing on shortly. Although the first roll merely dulled his hunger, he decided to stop advertising his poverty and gave the other two to a woman and her child in the boat. The bread had made him thirsty; he helped himself to water from the river and freshened his face at the same time.

By now the inhabitants of the town were up and about. As a group they were clean and well dressed—which again reminded Franklin that
he was neither—and as a group they seemed to be walking in a single direction. He fell into step and was carried along to the Friends’ meeting house. No one questioned him at the door, and he allowed himself to be swept on in. As he had not been a regular at Boston’s South Church for years, he may or may not have expected a learned disquisition on the Scriptures or a soul-stirring description of the fate that awaited those who spurned God’s grace; what he did get was decidedly lower-key, in the Quaker fashion. After being up all night, and now warm and with at least a little food in his stomach, he soon grew drowsy and fell asleep. His hosts did not take his fatigue amiss; they let him slumber and gently woke him when the service was over.

Franklin followed the congregation out and, propelled as much by gravity as by any notion of where he was going, wandered back down toward the waterfront. A friendly-faced young man in the sober dress of a Quaker caught his eye; Franklin inquired as to where a stranger might find lodging. They were standing almost under the sign of the Three Mariners’ inn; how about this place? he asked. The Quaker replied that strangers did indeed lodge there, but not the sort a decent fellow ought to share a table or a bed with. If Franklin would follow him, he said—employing the thees and thous of his sect—he would point out a more reputable establishment. Together they walked a short way to the Crooked Billet on King Street, next to the river.

Franklin’s morning bread had lost its effect by now, and he ordered dinner. The host and patrons were accustomed to sailors and other strangers, but this one particularly engaged their attention. From his worn and tattered clothing and his beardless, dirty face, he gave every indication of being a runaway. No one challenged him directly; his host was too canny a businessman to allow his patrons to frighten off other paying customers on mere suspicion. But by oblique queries—Been traveling long? Whither bound?—they probed to discover who might be chasing him and why. Franklin answered civilly but unforthcomingly; he kept his head in his plate and finished his meal as quickly as he decently could. He may have aroused additional suspicion when he asked about a bed where he could sleep the afternoon—and, as it must have seemed, hide out. But no one gainsaid him, and he recouped several hours more of the slumber he had missed the previous two nights. His host roused him for supper, which he ate as discreetly as dinner, before returning to bed. He slept the night through, waking the next morning almost as fit as when he had left Boston.

As he
gathered himself for his interview with Andrew Bradford, Franklin may have reflected that it was a good thing his beard had not yet begun to grow. At least he did not need a shave. But he could have used a bath—and some clean clothes, and breakfast. His money, however, was nearly gone, and he chose to husband what he had. So, without bathing or changing his clothes or eating, he headed off for the printing shop of Bradford the younger.

To his surprise he was greeted there by Bradford the elder. William Bradford had practiced his craft in Philadelphia before moving to New York; now he had returned—on horseback, a more reliable but more expensive mode than Franklin could afford—to see old friends and check on his son. Franklin, after his friendly encounter with the father in New York, doubtless hoped that the older man’s presence would work to his benefit. It did, but not to the degree he desired. William Bradford made the introductions, and Andrew appeared favorably disposed, asking Franklin about himself and insisting that he join the two of them for breakfast. Unfortunately, he said, he had just engaged a journeyman to replace his untimely-departed assistant, and business did not allow adding another hand. He expected some special orders presently; when these arrived, he
would
need more help and could offer Franklin piecework.

But there was another printer in town, he continued, a new man who might well desire a second. Franklin should call on him. If something worked out there, all the good; if not, Franklin was welcome to come back and lodge at the Bradford house till business warranted hiring him.

Franklin finished his breakfast and extended thanks for the advice and the offer. As he headed out the door to the other printer’s, William Bradford accompanied him, saying he would show the boy the way. On arrival Bradford introduced himself and Franklin to Samuel Keimer. Neighbor, he said, here is a young man about your own business; perhaps you have work for him?

Keimer may have been puzzled as to why this stranger should bring him a second stranger to hire, but he marked it up to the friendliness of the City of Brotherly Love. A voluble sort, Keimer began telling Bradford his plans for capturing the bulk of the printing business in Pennsylvania. Bradford, not wishing to interrupt the flow of useful intelligence, declined to reveal his own background or his connection to Keimer’s
only rival. Instead he drew Keimer out by the artful question and the quizzical glance, till Keimer had divulged his entire business agenda and strategy. Franklin observed the performance with interest and no little admiration. It was apparent to Franklin—though obviously not to Keimer—“that one of them was a crafty old sophister and the other a mere novice.”

What Franklin heard caused him to wonder whether he wished to work for such a novice; what he saw while walking around the shop as Keimer and Bradford talked doubled his doubts. The equipment was far inferior to what he had employed at James’s; it consisted of a broken-down press and a single worn-out font. Keimer was clearly unfamiliar with its operation and was currently engaged in the woefully inefficient method of composing directly into type—which precluded anyone’s assisting him. His project was an elegy to Aquila Rose, Andrew Bradford’s late journeyman, whose contributions to local civic life had transcended his print work. Rose operated a ferry on the Schuylkill River, served as clerk of the colonial assembly, and wrote well-received poems. If Franklin thought it at all odd that Keimer was eulogizing the former assistant of his rival, the thought simply added to the conception he was forming of Keimer as eccentric.

But Franklin needed work and indicated he would be happy with whatever Keimer could offer. Keimer handed Franklin a composing stick and asked him to demonstrate; impressed by Franklin’s efforts, he said he would have work for him soon, although not just now. Franklin put the press into such working order as it was capable of, and said that when Keimer had finished setting the type for the elegy he would come back and print it. He left, shaking his head, if only to himself.

He returned to Andrew Bradford’s and took up the invitation to lodge there. In the next few days Bradford found odd jobs for him, but not so many that when Keimer belatedly accepted his offer to print the Rose elegy, Franklin was inclined to say no. By then Keimer had acquired additional type and an order for some pamphlets; together these allowed him to hire Franklin on a regular basis.

Briefly Franklin continued to live with Bradford while working for Keimer. The arrangement enabled him to form an opinion of the state of the printing craft in Pennsylvania, and he quickly judged it less than he was accustomed to. Bradford was “very illiterate”—an obvious handicap for one who lived on letters. Keimer was better read and indeed fancied himself a scholar. But in fact he was “very ignorant of the world”—including the printer’s craft. In addition he professed a strange variant of
French Protestantism, one given to mystical trances and alarming revelations of the messianic age to begin at any moment. Having discovered too late the true identity of William Bradford—from Franklin—Keimer was suspicious of spies in his shop, and he announced one day that Franklin must cancel his housing arrangement with his rival or find other work. Franklin would have been happy to find other work had such existed, but none did. He inquired whether he might lodge with Keimer, who owned a house. But though Keimer had a house, he had no furniture, and no plans to purchase any; Franklin could not stay with him, he said. Instead the young man should seek a room with John Read, a carpenter who lived on Market Street.

Franklin
presented himself at the Read house, where he encountered the fifteen-year-old girl he had noticed, to his embarrassment, on his first morning in Philadelphia. By now, though, his trunk had arrived from New York, and with clean clothes and a few recently earned coins in his pocket, he felt much better able to stand scrutiny by the fair sex. “I made rather a more respectable appearance in the eyes of Miss Read than I had done when she first happened to see me eating my roll in the street.”