The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (30 page)

And none
with such impact as George Whitefield. Returning to America in 1739, Whitefield set the colonies on fire. “The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous,” Franklin reported of Whitefield’s visit to Philadelphia, “and it was a matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and how much they
admired and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally
half beasts and half devils.”
The
Gazette
described the effect:

The alteration in the face of religion here is altogether surprising. Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons, nor the preachers greater zeal and diligence in performing the duties of their function. Religion is become the subject of most conversations. No books are in request but those of piety and devotion; and instead of idle songs and ballads, the people are everywhere entertaining themselves with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. All which, under God, is owing to the successful labours of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield.

Theologically, Franklin held aloof from the excitement. He was fairly certain he was neither beast nor devil, and his view of fire and brimstone was purely scientific—as indeed was his view of the Whitefield phenomenon generally. For the same reasons as in England—to wit, the disapproval of the regular clergy and the magnitude of his audiences—Whitefield preached in the open air. One evening he spoke from the top of the steps of the Philadelphia courthouse, in the middle of Market Street on the west side of Second. “I had the curiosity to learn how far he could be heard,” Franklin wrote. Franklin was already at the rear of the crowd; he walked slowly backward in the direction of the river. He could hear Whitefield’s “loud and clear voice” distinctly until he came to Front Street, where some street noise obscured it. Taking the distance from Front Street to Second as radius, he mentally constructed a semicircle and filled it with listeners, allowing two square feet to each. In this way he calculated that Whitefield might be heard by an audience of more than thirty thousand. “This reconciled me to the newspaper accounts of his having preached to 25,000 people in the fields, and to the ancient histories of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes doubted.”

The businessman in Franklin spied an opportunity in the enthusiasm for Whitefield. He arranged to publish Whitefield’s sermons and journals; so favorable was the reception that Franklin ran off eight installments of the journals and nine of the sermons and other writings. Subsequently he published Whitefield’s memoirs, which proved equally popular.

For Franklin this was principally a profit-making enterprise, yet, rationalist though he was, he was not immune to Whitefield’s charm. Whitefield had conceived the idea of an orphanage in Georgia for children left parentless by the hardships of life in that lately founded penal colony. He undertook to raise money to cover the expense of construction. Franklin approved the orphanage in principle but suggested that the donations would be better spent bringing the orphans to Philadelphia than sending the construction materials and workers to Georgia. Whitefield stuck to his plan, causing Franklin to refuse to contribute.

Yet Whitefield was a hard man to resist, as Franklin recounted:

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.

To some extent Franklin’s softening was a reaction to Whitefield’s power; to some extent to the worthy cause he was promoting—even if that cause might have been better served, in Franklin’s view, by relocation. There was yet another element as well. Though Franklin found Whitefield’s hellfire-and-damnation message as much beside the point of living a good life as he did the sectarian sophistry of Jedediah Andrews, he appreciated the discomfort the silver-throated itinerant inflicted on the local religious establishment. Doubtless recalling the unsatisfactory—to him—outcome of the Hemphill case, Franklin helped arrange the construction of a new building (prosaically called the “New Building”) for the express purpose of hosting preachers unwelcome in the regular pulpits of the city. Franklin spoke his desires rather than strict reality when he declared in his autobiography that “if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mahometanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” (For all the uproar the Great Awakening caused among Protestants, they retained sufficient composure to band together against such irredeemably lost souls as Muslims, Catholics, and Jews.)

Yet though Franklin supported Whitefield’s good works and defended his right to preach, he drew the line well short of his own conversion. Whitefield spared no effort on behalf of Franklin’s soul, but Franklin rebuffed them all. He was as skeptical of organized religion as ever, even religion that challenged prevailing orthodoxy. And the enthusiasms of the awakeners left him as cold as enthusiasms generally did.

All the same, Franklin counted Whitefield a friend. He housed the preacher in Philadelphia and defended him against charges that he had siphoned funds from the collection plate for his own comfort. In this regard Franklin’s unregeneracy worked in Whitefield’s favor, at least marginally. Most of Philadelphia had sided theologically with Whitefield or against him; Franklin, having taken no position in the dispute between the “New Lights” and the “Old Lights,” was well placed to offer objective testimony. “Ours was a mere civil friendship, sincere on both sides, and lasted to his death [in 1770].”

If the Awakening
was unsettling—many historians would see the roots of the American Revolution in the turmoil it produced—another affair of the period was downright bizarre. During the early summer of 1737 a gullible and perhaps mentally impaired apprentice named Daniel Rees fell in the way of several young Philadelphia rowdies, including one lapsed Freemason. Rees knew little of the Masons, but enough to think he wished to join the order. The rowdies, led by Rees’s master, took the opportunity to have some diversion at his expense. They conducted a bogus but elaborate “initiation” ceremony, which included a satanic oath and the administration of a strong purgative and culminated in Rees’s being required to kiss the buttocks of one of the initiators.

The ringleaders were acquaintances of Franklin’s, and when they shared the story with him, he shared their laughter. “’tis true I laughed (and perhaps heartily, as my manner is),” he admitted afterward. He even asked for a copy of the oath, which he showed to friends.

Had the imposition on young Rees stopped there, it would have been merely cruel, after the cruel fashion of the age. But hoping to improve on their performance, Rees’s taunters conducted a second ceremony, purporting to elevate him to a higher rank in the secret fraternity. On the night of June 13, in a dark and gloomy cellar, the group gathered about one of their number who was draped in a cowhide, with horns upon his head, pretending to be the devil incarnate. The only light in the room
emanated from a bowl of brandy set alight. To intensify the terror, Rees’s master raised the bowl and approached the boy. What happened next occasioned dispute. Either accidentally or on purpose, the master splashed the boy with the flaming spirits; this ignited his clothes and caused such injury that he died two days later.

“The coroner’s inquest are now sitting on the body,” the
Gazette
reported on June 16. That inquest, doubtless reflecting the testimony of those responsible for the death, found the tragedy to have been inadvertent. In the following few days, however, certain of the participants changed their story, causing the authorities to investigate further. A grand jury brought an indictment for murder against Rees’s master and two others.

Franklin became involved in the matter at trial. The prosecution called him as a witness, for although absent from both mock ceremonies, he was known to have been familiar with the accused and presumably with their intentions. His testimony does not survive; it must not have been especially helpful to the prosecution, since two of the three were convicted only of the lesser charge of manslaughter and the third was acquitted.

But this was not the end of the story for Franklin. Andrew Bradford had never liked the Masons and from the moment of Rees’s death had used the tragedy to attack them. He—or at least an anonymous writer in his
Mercury
—detailed Franklin’s role in the sordid affair, suggesting that Franklin had through his approbation of the first prank encouraged the criminal behavior on the part of the accused, even if he did not participate in the homicide directly.

Franklin was familiar enough with printed controversy to know that any answer from him would probably prolong the scandal, but he deemed the allegations against him sufficiently grave as to require a response. He labeled the charges in the
Mercury
“very false and scandalous.” He conceded that he had initially laughed at the discomfiture related of young Rees. “But when they came to those circumstances of their giving him a violent purge, leading him to kiss T’s posteriors, and administering to him the diabolical oath which R——n read to us, I grew indeed serious, as I suppose the most merry man (not inclined to mischief) would on such an occasion.”

Franklin subsequently undermined his own testimony on this point by admitting that he had asked to see the oath. Finding it “a piece of a very extraordinary nature,” he said he wanted to show it to his friends, which he did until “so many people flocked to my house for a sight of it
that it grew troublesome, and therefore when the mayor sent for it [as part of the investigation], I was glad of the opportunity to be discharged from it.”

Far from encouraging additional ill treatment of young Rees, Franklin said, he had tried to prevent it. The boy happened into the tavern where the discussion of his initiation was taking place; his master pointed to Franklin and identified him as a Freemason. The master urged the lad to make the secret sign he had been taught. “Which whether he did or not, I cannot tell,” Franklin declared, “for I was so far from encouraging him in the delusion, or taking him by the hand, or calling him brother, and welcoming him into the fraternity, as is said, that I turned my head to avoid seeing him make his pretended sign, and looked out of the window into the garden.” The allegation that he—Franklin—had desired to attend the fatal session was “absolutely false and groundless.” “I was acquainted with, and had a respect for the young lad’s father, and thought it a pity his son should be so imposed upon, and therefore followed the lad down stairs to the door when he went out, with a design to call him back and give him a hint of the imposition; but he was gone out of sight and I never saw him afterwards.”

It was hardly Franklin’s finest hour, and he knew it. Of course he had no direct responsibility for the death of young Rees; he was righteously, and rightly, indignant at any intimation that he had. But he certainly might have done more to discourage those who were making inexcusable sport of the boy. His contention that he meant to warn him, but that he slipped away, was lame, as was his assertion—contradicted by his own words—that he had taken a serious view of the satanic oath. For years Franklin had been cultivating a pleasing personal style, one that accommodated others rather than confronting them. This style generally served him well, allowing his business to flourish and his reputation to grow. Some occasions, however, call for confrontation, as when a wrong demands to be righted, or at least addressed. This was one of those occasions, and here Franklin’s style failed.