2
Only later, with age and distance, would Franklin learn to appreciate the more admirable aspects of Cotton Mather’s character and thinking. Now, upon leaving Boston, he landed in a city established by a contemporary of Mather’s, but a man whose view of the proper relation between ministers and magistrates could hardly have been more different from Mather’s—or more congenial to Franklin, both then and during the rest of Franklin’s life.
William Penn first ran afoul of religious authority at about the same age as Franklin (and at about the same time as Josiah Franklin, then still in England). Attending university in Oxford, Penn fell under the sway of the Quaker Thomas Loe, and when Charles II restored strict enforcement of Anglican orthodoxy, Penn resisted. Whether he was thrown out of Oxford or departed of his own disgust at what now seemed to him “a den of hellish ignorance and debauchery” was perhaps a fine point; in either case he left. His father, the formidable Admiral Sir William Penn, was not any more pleased than the boy’s tutors at his strange beliefs; he greeted the lad with blows, turned him out of the house, and threatened to disown him. (Paternal displeasure aside, Sir William may simply have been a difficult man to get along with; his neighbor and navy colleague Samuel Pepys had to put up with him for professional reasons but declared in his diary, “I hate him with all my heart.” On the other hand, it may have been Pepys who was the difficult one. Although he did not disdain his neighbor’s invitations to dinner, he complained confidentially that Mrs. Penn’s cooking “stank like the very Devil.”)
The threat of disownment triggered a temporary lapse from Quaker conscience; young William reconciled with his father and went off to the Continent for a holiday at the court of Louis XIV. He did not stay long and by 1667 was securely back within the fold of his English Friends. He published a series of tracts contending for freedom of conscience; he preached the same doctrine before crowds large and small. In 1670 he was arrested for unlawful address to an unruly assembly. At the trial he argued eloquently that a man’s mind and soul must remain beyond the reach of the magistrate; the jury voted to acquit—whereupon the judge ordered the jury arrested. (The latter arrests were subsequently overturned in a case that became a landmark in the evolution of the common law.)
At about this time Penn’s father died. The admiral had learned to accept his son’s sincerity if not his beliefs, and he left young William a sizable fortune. This included an annuity of £1,500 and, more portentously for English and American history, a claim of £16,000 upon the impecunious Charles for loans outstanding. The younger Penn was in and out of prison during this period—for declining to doff his hat in court, for further unauthorized preaching, for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. When he was not behind bars, he spent extended periods in Europe disseminating Quaker ideas and values. In court, in prison, and on the Continent, he sharpened his arguments for religious toleration, and when a Quaker friend who had an interest in what would become the colony of New Jersey ran into financial trouble and needed rescue, Penn took the opportunity to draft a set of “concessions and agreements” for the venture, guaranteeing to settlers the most sweeping religious liberty anywhere in England’s empire. Unfortunately for freedom of conscience in New Jersey, the concessions never went into effect, being swallowed up in some further commercial restructuring of the colony.
Disappointed but determined to try again, Penn pressed Charles to redeem his debt to him by granting him a large tract of land west of New Jersey. Charles consented, and after some haggling Penn became the proprietor of what may have been the largest single piece of real estate ever legally held by someone other than a monarch. Penn wanted to call the well-forested territory “Sylvania,” but Charles insisted on honoring the admiral—not the son—by prefixing “Penn.” Both parties were happy to portray the transaction as a case of balancing the royal books, but both understood that there was more involved. Speaking of himself and his fellow Friends, Penn observed, “The government was anxious to be rid of us at so cheap a price.”
As proprietor of Pennsylvania, Penn enjoyed sweeping powers subject only to the constraints of the common law, applicable Parliamentary measures such as the navigation acts, and the sensitivities of imperial politics. This left a great deal of latitude in all his longitude. He immediately prescribed the closest thing to democracy within the empire, allowing the election of a representative council based on broad manhood suffrage. Not surprisingly, in light of his convictions—both the theological kind and those handed down by the courts—he guaranteed freedom of religion. Equally predictably, in light of the pacifism of the Quakers, he called for amicable relations with the Indian tribes that occupied his new possessions.
In the autumn of 1682, just several months before Josiah Franklin left England for Boston, Penn traveled to America for the first time. He wished to see the forests and streams he had heard so much about; he also wanted to walk the streets—notional though they yet were—of the “large town or city” he had directed be laid out on the west bank of the Delaware River. Philadelphia—the name was a neoclassical rendering of “brotherly love”—was the first planned city in America and among the first in the world; its plan reflected Penn’s desire to mitigate the ills attached to Old World cities. The great plague and fire of the 1660s still seared the memories of Londoners; Penn would combat these egregious civic afflictions by making Philadelphia airy and open, “a green country town, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.” The main streets would be one hundred feet across—wider than anything in London—and the lesser avenues fifty feet, all arranged in a regular, rectangular grid. Lots would be large—half an acre or an acre—with room enough for gardens and orchards to surround houses set well back from the street. Four squares of several acres each and a central square of ten acres would guarantee additional open space to the city’s inhabitants. Unlike Boston, New York, and other colonial towns, Philadelphia would have no walls or fortifications; Penn’s enlightened Indian policy would provide all the protection necessary.
Reality on the American frontier did not immediately match Penn’s vision. Early inhabitants dug dwellings out of the steep banks of the Delaware River, living alternately amid the mud and dust of wet seasons and dry. Pigs, goats, chickens, dogs, and the occasional cow ran loose through the streets of the town, feeding on, in some cases, and contributing to, in all cases, the garbage and filth that made the summer air excruciatingly pungent. Front Street was a standing cesspool.
But time softened the rough edges, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century the town was starting to approach Penn’s blueprint. The inhabitants numbered somewhat more than two thousand, and they gave evidence of having been busy. A recent arrival from Sweden declared, “If anyone were to see Philadelphia who had not been there, he would be astonished beyond measure that it was founded less than twenty years ago…. All the houses are built of brick, three or four hundred of them, and in every house a shop, so that whatever one wants at any time he can have, for money.”
Money, however, was a problem. Philadelphia—like Boston, New York, and other North American cities—suffered from the chronic affliction of colonial commerce: a lack of money. The early eighteenth century was the heyday of mercantilism in British imperial thought and practice; according to the mercantilists, the measure of imperial power was ready cash (to build navies, outfit privateers, and pay mercenaries, besides less martial purposes). The function of colonies was to foster a favorable trade balance, which would funnel cash—most liquidly (or solidly, rather) in the form of gold and silver—into the treasury of the monarch, and into the pockets of his inhabitants in the metropolis (from whom it could be extracted when necessity arose). The maturity of the English economy relative to that of the American colonies, augmented by the navigation (that is, trade) laws passed by Parliament during the seventeenth century, ensured that money would flow into England with ease, in payment for high-value manufactured goods, and flow out, in payment for low-value raw materials, with difficulty. The result was a perennial shortfall of cash among colonial merchants and their customers.
As a result the colonists were often reduced to barter. One Philadelphia shipbuilder, James West, recorded charging £39 for building a sloop. His customer lacked cash, so West accepted payment in flour, butter, sugar, raisins, and beer. Partly because this was a recurrent problem, he had gone into the sideline of operating a tavern; he served the proceeds from his ship contract to his patrons. As part of this redefinition of liquidity, West boarded his boatwrights at the tavern and paid them their wages in beer.
In good times the dearth of money was merely annoying; in bad times it threatened to strangle the colonial economy. And times were rarely worse than following the collapse of the South Sea bubble in 1720. The South Sea Company had been chartered in 1711 and granted a monopoly of British trade with South America and the islands of the Pacific Ocean (formerly and still sentimentally the “South Sea”). During the next several years this monopoly rewarded shareholders handsomely, prompting wealthy and influential individuals, including King George I and many close to the court, to purchase stock. To tighten the company’s connections to the Crown still further, the directors made George a governor of the company in 1718. A year later the directors concocted a scheme to privatize the national debt; they would assume the Crown’s obligations in exchange for an annual payment—and, most significantly, the chance to persuade the Crown’s creditors to exchange their notes for stock in the South Sea Company. With the company’s stock appreciating rapidly, the task of persuasion was easy enough, which made the stock rise all the faster. Between January and July of 1720 it octupled in value, sucking in all manner of speculators and inspiring no end of imitators. In August the inevitable occurred: the price broke. By November nearly nine-tenths of the stock value of the company had vanished, shaking such rocks of the establishment as the Bank of England, disgracing the directors of the company (who proved to have collaborated in assorted other shenanigans with the company’s accounts), ruining thousands of investors, and wreaking havoc on the finances of the entire British empire.
Philadelphia was still reeling when Ben Franklin arrived in October 1723. If he had known how bad things were, he might not have come. In any event, Philadelphia was not his first choice. Franklin’s original plan upon leaving Boston was to settle in New York, the thriving town on the island at the mouth of the Hudson River that retained the Dutch character of its founders, including the burghers’ ambitions of worldly success. In such a setting a young man of similar ambition ought to have no difficulty finding work, unbothered by the formalities of an unfulfilled contract back in Boston.
But once out of Boston, Franklin found himself at the mercy of forces beyond his control. After two days at sea the fair wind that had swept his escape vessel south failed, leaving the fugitive and his shipmates becalmed near Block Island, off the mouth of Narragansett Bay. The ship’s hands, accustomed to the vagaries of sea travel, employed the time to fish for the cod that had drawn seafarers to the northeastern coast of America for more than two centuries. The fish were thick, and the crew hauled them up by the hundredweight. The smaller ones were cleaned, boned, and tossed into a pan of hot oil, emerging moments later golden brown, steaming hot, and exuding an aroma that enclouded the ship and stirred the digestive juices of all hands and passengers.
When he had entered the ship, Ben Franklin still held to his vegetarian philosophy. One leg of this philosophy—which proscribed both flesh and fish—was economic; the other was moral. The essence of the latter was that the creatures to be eaten had done nothing to deserve death at the hands of humans and therefore ought to be allowed to live out their innocent lives. Franklin continued to reason thus as the first codfish were pulled up over the ship’s gunwales. But his reason wavered as the smell of the frying fish wafted across the deck. Before his vegetarian days he, like most Bostonians, had loved fish: fried, steamed, boiled, stewed. The present smell conjured recollections of memorable meals past, and he decided to revisit the argument for interspecies pacifism. To his delight he discovered a loophole. “I recollected that when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then I thought, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” And so he did, dining “very heartily” with the rest of the passengers and crew. This was the beginning of the end of Ben Franklin’s vegetarianism; he remarked later, with signature irony, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”
The ship’s eventual arrival in New York overturned Franklin’s expectations in another respect. For all their commercial energy—perhaps because of it—the Dutch merchants and tradesmen in Manhattan evinced scant interest in the services of printers. The town lacked a newspaper, the merchants evidently being too busy to read about the world they lived in. And sermons had no such sale as in Boston, the merchants being equally unable to focus on the world to which they were going. The single printer who kept a shop in New York, William Bradford, had no difficulty supplying the town’s needs with the helpers he already had. There was no room for Franklin.
But Bradford had a son, Andrew, who operated a print shop in Philadelphia. Andrew had just lost a journeyman, a promising and engaging young fellow who had died suddenly. A replacement was needed. William Bradford thought it worth Franklin’s time to explore the possibility.
Franklin could see little alternative. The money that remained from the sale of his books would not last more than several days, and he had no marketable skill but what he had learned in James’s print shop. Philadelphia had the added attraction of being even farther from Boston. It seemed unlikely that James would send someone after him, but it would not hurt to put another hundred miles between himself and what he owed on his apprenticeship.
The first fifteen of those miles proved to be the hardest. Husbanding his shrinking supply of cash, Franklin boarded the cheapest boat he could find to carry him across the estuary of the Hudson to Perth Amboy. But an autumn squall caught the craft midpassage and tore away its rotted sail, preventing it from entering the sheltered strait west of Staten Island, driving it instead east across the Hudson’s mouth toward Long Island. Amid the pitching of the small vessel, a drunken Dutch passenger was hurled overboard; Franklin, the most alert and active person on the boat, pulled him back in by the scruff of his shaggy head. The fellow, sobered only slightly by his close brush with a watery death, proceeded to fall asleep in the scuttle.
As the wind drove the stricken vessel closer to Long Island, Franklin and the others looked for a suitable landing. But the beach was rocky and the surf high, and to risk both was more than the ferryman was willing. So they dropped anchor to ride out the storm. By now the drunken Dutchman clearly had the better part of the bargain; the spray from the water had doused everyone almost as thoroughly as his ducking had wetted him, but at least he was unconscious. Some villagers on shore saw the boat bouncing beyond the breakers; the ferryman, Franklin, and the others shouted for them to come fetch them in smaller boats they could see lying by. But the villagers chose not to hazard their lives for these strangers and went back to their houses.
Although the wind gradually abated, Franklin and the others spent a most uncomfortable night on the water—cold, wet, hungry, and thirsty. A single dirty bottle of rum had to sustain them as what should have been a passage of a few hours stretched well beyond twenty-four. The next morning, with the storm over and the wind shifting again to the east, the master of the craft jury-rigged a sheet that carried them by nightfall on the second day to Perth Amboy.
Franklin, feverish from the strain and the exposure, collapsed into the first bed he could find. Just before passing out, however, he remembered reading somewhere that a large dose of water at the onset of a fever could forestall it. So he quaffed several glasses, then collapsed again. During most of the night he tossed fitfully, sweating profusely, but finally he fell asleep, and he awoke feeling as hale as healthy seventeen-year-olds generally do.
He made another ferry passage, uneventful this time, across the Raritan River and set out on foot in the direction of Burlington. There he hoped to catch a boat down the Delaware for Philadelphia. The storm of two days earlier had given way to a hard rain, which, after what he had already experienced, dampened his spirits as much as his body. “I was thoroughly soaked, and by noon a good deal tired, so I stopped at a poor inn, where I stayed all night, beginning now to wish that I had never left home.” Moreover, in his bedraggled condition he looked the fugitive he was, or something similar. “I found by the questions asked me I was suspected to be some runaway servant, and in danger of being taken up on that suspicion.” But he kept to himself, found a dark corner to the side of the fire, and retired early.
The next morning he headed out with the first travelers and made it almost to Burlington by nightfall. This evening passed more pleasantly than the previous; his host, a Dr. Brown, delighted to find a guest whose reading and interests approached his. Franklin and the physician spent hours conversing on various topics. (The acquaintance struck up on this occasion continued, as it happened, for the rest of Brown’s life.)
Rested and with his spirits revived, Franklin walked the remaining several miles to Burlington the following morning, a Saturday. To his renewed discouragement, however, he discovered that he had just missed the regular packet boat to Philadelphia and that the next would not be leaving until Tuesday. An elderly matron of the village took pity on him, fed him a dinner of ox cheek, and offered to lodge him till the boat came. He accepted the invitation and resigned himself to a long weekend in the hinterlands of New Jersey. But that evening after supper, while stretching his legs by the bank of the Delaware, he spied a boat that appeared to be headed decisively downstream. His inquiries revealed that it was indeed bound for Philadelphia, and, yes, there was room for one more. With no time to beg leave of his hostess, he climbed aboard, and off they went. The current was nearly slack in this part of the river, and the wind afforded little help, so the young and strong among the passengers took turns at the oars. Franklin, younger and stronger than most, pulled more than his share.
They rowed for several hours through the darkness until some on board wondered whether they had passed their destination by mistake. Tired and uncertain, the rowers refused to pull anymore. A collective decision was made to put in to shore, where several of the passengers started a fire of old fence rails they stumbled upon, to ward off the cold of the October night. At daylight one of them recognized their campsite as being only a short distance above Philadelphia. They wearily clambered back into the boat and finished their voyage, landing early on Sunday morning at the wharf at the foot of Market Street.
As Franklin walked up from the dock, the ravages of the South Sea collapse remained everywhere apparent. “I saw most of the houses in Walnut Street between Second and Front Streets with bills on their doors, to be let,” he recalled; “and many likewise in Chestnut Street and other streets, which made me then think the inhabitants of the city were one after another deserting it.”
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 didmake 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.”
Deborah Read evidently thought so too, either at once or shortly thereafter. Nor was she alone in her opinion. During the winter of 1724–25 Ben Franklin began forming a circle of friends, acquaintances, and admirers. He was a pleasant-looking young man, with a broad forehead, firm nose, and square jaw. On the tall side of average, he was thick through the shoulders and chest. His eyes were lucid, suggesting a lively intelligence; his well-formed mouth pursed when he was concentrating but smiled easily and often, revealing an equally well formed sense of humor. His self-confidence—never lacking—had grown since his arrival in Philadelphia. Having measured himself against the printers of a second city, he appreciated his skills more than ever. As much to the point, he had discovered—as every young person does who successfully leaves home—that he could make his way in the world. His native intelligence and common sense served him well; so too the social skills absorbed in the crowded bosom of the family he had left behind. The former gifts gave him the ascendancy in nearly any group he joined; the latter prevented that ascendancy from annoying any but the most envious in the group.
As was the case throughout the American colonies, the population of Philadelphia was growing rapidly, and had been for some time; one result was the large number of young people Franklin found to socialize with. His work with Keimer threw him into contact with the more literary-minded of the city; he was delighted to find a cohort of contemporaries who shared his interest in reading, questioning, and exploring the life of the mind generally. They debated topics classical and literary, current and political. Most were just starting on careers in the crafts or professions; few had much more to spend on books or beer than Franklin did. So they swapped books as they swapped arguments, and as long as they enlivened the conversation at one tavern or another, the proprietors did not mind that they nursed their glasses longer than was strictly profitable.
In feudal times arose a saying that city air made a man free; Franklin certainly felt that way during his first winter in Philadelphia. To be sure, Philadelphia was no more a city than Boston, but in Boston he had borne the double burden of Puritan clerisy and sibling jealousy. The tolerant spirit of William Penn still protected Penn’s city half a decade after his death, and to a person of Franklin’s questioning temperament it was infinitely more congenial than the forced certitude of the Mathers.
If Franklin was pleased to put Puritanism behind him, he was no less happy to be beyond the reach of his brother James. With James, Ben’s life had always been an emotional—and sometimes a physical—struggle. Ben was smarter than James and more talented, as James and Ben both knew. James had resented this, and in his resentment insisted on his prerogatives as master—not to mention older brother—all the more. But James’s insistence backfired. Ben, as the younger brother, naturally had to assert his independence; James’s attempts to suppress that independence simply provoked Ben to rebellion. Keimer was not half the printer James was, but because Ben’s relationship with Keimer was strictly business, he could accept his boss’s odd ways for the harmless idiosyncrasies they were. Acceding to idiosyncrasy for the sake of wages did not touch Ben’s self-esteem the way bending to brotherly dictate had.
As a result, Franklin’s first winter in Philadelphia marked a vast improvement over recent circumstances in the city of his birth. “I lived very agreeably, forgetting Boston as much as I could and not desiring that any there should know where I resided, except my friend Collins who was in my secret and kept it when I wrote to him.” By chance a brother-in-law, Robert Homes, who sailed a commercial sloop between Massachusetts and the Delaware region, heard that his wife’s brother had landed in Philadelphia. Homes wrote Franklin a letter explaining the family’s distress at his disappearance and assuring him that all would be put right if he returned to Boston. Ben did not question Homes’s worthy intentions, but he replied that he had left Boston for good cause, was quite happy in Philadelphia, and had not the slightest desire to go back.
Yet this seventeen-year-old master of his fate discovered he was not so independent as he thought. On the day Robert Homes received Franklin’s letter at New Castle, Delaware, the provincial governor of Pennsylvania, William Keith, happened to be present. Captain Homes evidently made some remark about Franklin, perhaps about the boy’s obduracy, and shared the letter with the governor. Keith was surprised and impressed to learn that the author of the letter was not even a man yet. Keith had arrived independently at the same opinion Franklin was forming of Philadelphia’s two printers: that they were a sorry pair for a province of promise and ambition. On the spot, apparently, Keith conceived a plan to keep Franklin in Philadelphia and encourage him in his craft.
The governor returned to Philadelphia and paid a visit to Keimer’s print shop. Keimer and Franklin were working together in the window of the shop; both saw the governor and an obviously important friend approaching from across the street. Keimer had been hoping to win the official business of the province; here it came, he thought. He greeted the governor and the friend at the door and invited them in. To his chagrin they scarcely acknowledged him, instead seeking out Franklin. The governor belatedly welcomed Franklin to Philadelphia, kindly blamed him for hiding in the print shop and not presenting himself at the governor’s house, praised his skill and intelligence, and invited him to join Colonel John French of Delaware and himself for a glass of excellent Madeira kept by the proprietor of a tavern just down the street. Franklin wondered at the cause of this benign attention; his boss was stunned. “Keimer stared like a pig poisoned,” Franklin recalled.
Over the wine, the governor again praised Franklin’s gifts and urged him to start his own printing business. Such a venture, he said, would have every chance of success, including his own support in procuring the public business of the province. Colonel French endorsed the governor’s comments and added, in tones that sounded authoritative, that he would similarly recommend that Franklin receive the public printing business of Delaware. (Delaware at this time was administratively attached to Pennsylvania, under a 1682 lease—of ten thousand years’ duration!—from the Duke of York to William Penn. The “lower counties,” as Delaware was called by Pennsylvanians, had their own legislature and executive council but shared Pennsylvania’s governor, currently Keith.)
The notion of his own print shop certainly had occurred to Franklin—probably as soon as he sized up Bradford and Keimer. He may or may not have asked himself why Philadelphia was so deficient in the printing and allied trades. He had not been in town long enough to agree or disagree with the opinion given some years earlier by one disgusted scholar: “The reason there are no bookbinders here, where all sorts of other craftsmen are found, is that there is no scholarship here, and nothing counts but chopping, digging, planting, plowing, reaping.” Even at first glance Franklin could tell that the printed word mattered less in Philadelphia than in Boston, but that might simply reflect the deficiencies of the local printers. An enterprising and talented young man need not be discouraged by present conditions. Such, at any rate, was the expressed opinion of Governor Keith, who was placed to know.
Franklin did not doubt his own talents, but he painfully felt his lack of capital. Without money for a press and related equipment, not even the most gifted printer could set up shop. At his present pay he might put aside sufficient funds to purchase equipment in several years, but hardly before then. An older man with an established reputation might borrow money, but who would lend to a lad just arrived from distant parts—a lad who, as the governor evidently knew from Robert Homes, had fled his contractual obligations there?
Keith conceded that capital was a problem. Perhaps a relative could supply the initial funds? How about Franklin’s father?
Franklin was dubious. He had no desire to return to Boston, certainly not to ask for money. For all he knew, James might try to enforce the apprentice agreement—out of jealousy if nothing else.
But Keith refused to be deterred by Franklin’s family problems. He offered to write Josiah Franklin a letter laying out the plan he had just described and underscoring the bright prospects of the venture. Surely no father would deny his son the chance to pursue such an opportunity.
The governor’s enthusiasm proved infectious. Reflecting, Franklin could scarcely believe his good fortune. Only weeks before, he had hauled himself up on Philadelphia’s wharf hungry, ragged, and all but penniless, a runaway apprentice. Now the governor of Pennsylvania, and another man who evidently spoke for Delaware, were promising every assistance in the establishment of his own print shop. How could his father say no?
Franklin agreed to make the request. Winter weather had suspended most shipping to New England, but come spring he would take the first vessel for Boston. Meanwhile, as Keith suggested, prudence dictated keeping their plan to themselves; otherwise Franklin might run into trouble with his employer.
Franklin returned to Keimer’s shop, where his still-stunned boss queried him as to what he and the governor had spoken of. Nothing of importance, Franklin replied; the governor was simply being polite. Keimer probably doubted he was hearing the whole story, and his doubts likely increased during the next several weeks, when Franklin accepted several invitations to dine with the governor. Franklin did not share with his employer how Keith conversed with him in the “most affable, familiar, and friendly manner imaginable,” and certainly not how the governor reiterated his support for an independent Franklin shop. If Keimer suspected that competition was afoot, he suppressed his suspicions sufficiently to keep Franklin on. The boy was a good printer and could not easily be replaced.
By the time the shipping lanes reopened in April 1724, Franklin was more than ready to sail for Boston. His return voyage proved less eventful than his departing voyage had been, although the vessel he sailed on hit a shoal going down the Delaware Bay and began taking on water. The captain declined to stop for repairs, instead putting the pumps to work and putting the passengers to the pumps. Franklin did not begrudge the exercise, which warmed him against the chill of the North Atlantic spring. After two weeks they spied the heights of Beacon Hill; after a few more hours they landed at the Boston waterfront.
Franklin had been gone seven months, and because Robert Homes had not been back since discovering his presence in Philadelphia, none of his family or friends—with the exception of the discreet Collins—had any idea where he was, or even if he was alive. To some considerable degree his deliverance from the dead, as it appeared, absolved him of whatever guilt remained from his running away. His father and mother embraced him; his siblings marveled at his fine suit of clothes, his watch and fob, and the pocketful of silver he dispensed so freely. If such was Philadelphia, it must be a fine place.
The conspicuous exception to the general delight over the return of the runaway was James. Having resented Ben’s talents, now he envied him his success. “He received me not very frankly,” Ben noted, “looked me all over, and turned to his work again.” James’s journeymen were more inquisitive; they wanted to know all about Philadelphia, what life was like there, whether printers found employment. When they asked what wages workingmen made in Pennsylvania, Ben spread his silver coins before them. Such solid currency was rare in Boston, where paper notes were the norm. He displayed his watch, impressing them the more, then gave them a piece of eight to drink his health.
James, across the room, affected not to notice. But to Ben he seemed “grum and sullen,” and, as Ben heard from his mother later, felt so insulted at Ben’s carrying on in front of his workers that he could never forgive the offense.
When Ben broached to his father the purpose of his visit, producing the letter from Governor Keith extolling Ben’s talents and prospects and forecasting wonderful success for the printing venture, Josiah could not help feeling proud. Imagine such an exalted personage taking an interest in his boy! But having worked long for his money, he was loath to part with it lightly. He asked himself, then asked Robert Homes when the latter arrived in Boston, what sort of person—governor or no—would have him place such faith in a boy still three years from legal manhood. Homes could not entirely vouch for Keith’s judgment but said what he could in favor of Ben and the project. Yet Josiah would not be moved. He wrote a letter to Keith expressing gratitude for the patronage the governor was offering his son, but said the money involved and the responsibilities to be incurred were more than should be placed on the shoulders of a boy.
All the same, he did not leave Ben bereft. He had hoped for a reconciliation between Ben and James; seeing the impossibility of this, he granted Ben his paternal blessing to return to Philadelphia. He enjoined his youngest son to work diligently and keep a rein on his rebellious streak. If Ben stuck to his task for three years and lived frugally, he would be able to save most of what he needed to establish himself in business; if at that time he fell short, he should come back to Boston for the balance.
This was less than Ben wanted but more than he had right—or reason, really, knowing his father—to expect. When he left his parents’ house now, he did so in the light of day and full public view. James remained angry, but the rest of the family wished him Godspeed and continued success.
He also received a parting gift from Cotton Mather. To Franklin’s surprise the minister evinced a desire to see the young man. Franklin visited his library, where Mather indicated that all was forgiven. But not quite forgotten: on showing Franklin out via a side passage, he suddenly said, “Stoop, stoop!” Franklin did not understand him and ran into a low beam. Never one to let a sermonizing moment pass, Mather explained, “You are young and have the world before you. Stoop as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps.”
Franklin’s education in life continued on the journey south. His sloop called at New York, where his Boston friend John Collins awaited him. Collins, having seen how Franklin prospered in Pennsylvania, had determined to join him in the city of the Friends. Collins traveled overland to New York, where he joined Franklin for the rest of the trip.
Franklin had known Collins as an industrious and sober scholar, but lately his friend had acquired a taste for brandy. Like many another young man suddenly unsupervised in unfamiliar surroundings, Collins found his freedom more than he could manage; he descended into a state of constant inebriation. He compounded his problem by frequent visits to gaming tables. When Franklin reached New York, he found his friend drunk, broke, and just ahead of the sheriff. Franklin paid Collins’s bills and resigned himself to paying the rest of Collins’s way to Philadelphia.
Despite his friend’s antics, Franklin’s New York stopover was not a dead loss. On this trip south, Franklin was transporting some books he had left behind in Boston when he departed covertly the previous year; he was also carrying Collins’s small library. The captain of the sloop evidently did not have regular contact with bookish types, and in a casual conversation with William Burnet, the governor jointly of New York and New Jersey, he remarked on his learned passenger. The governor, himself a scholar, and feeling isolated in an intellectual wasteland, invited Franklin to pay him a visit. Franklin was flattered at this attention from another governor, and he accepted the invitation with pleasure. The two conversed about books and authors; the governor doubtless had his favorable indirect impression of Franklin confirmed firsthand.
Upon arrival in Philadelphia, Collins continued to cost Franklin. Collins’s alcoholic habit prevented his obtaining employment, and Franklin saw no alternative to paying his room and board till his circumstances improved. Unfortunately, they did not. Collins found new gambling partners among the Pennsylvanians and ran into debt again. He pleaded with Franklin for loans, which Franklin provided, against his better judgment. Franklin lectured Collins to mend his affairs; Collins told him to mind his own. Sharp words gave way to physical violence on at least one occasion. Franklin and Collins were in a boat on the Delaware River with some other young men; Collins was drunk as usual. When it came his turn to row, he refused. He was in no shape to pull an oar, he said. Franklin declared hotly that he must row, as everyone else had done. Collins replied that he would not; they could spend the entire night on the water for all he cared. The others in the boat told Franklin to let it go; they simply wanted to get home. But Franklin would not drop the matter, nor would he let the others row. Collins thereupon took the offensive; vowing to throw Franklin overboard, he charged at his friend. Franklin sidestepped the attack, grabbed Collins under the crotch, and hurled him headlong into the river. This sobered him only slightly, for as he swam back toward the boat he responded to queries as to whether he would finally agree to row by cursing them all and declaring that he would never do so. Franklin, happy enough now to take an oar, pulled the boat beyond Collins’s reach. Again those in the boat asked whether Collins would row; again he profanely refused. Again Franklin pulled the boat ahead of Collins. This continued for some time. Eventually, fearing that Collins might drown, the others convinced Franklin to let him be hauled up.
This episode ended what was left of the friendship. Not long afterward Collins shipped out to Barbados to serve as tutor to the sons of a planter there. In one of his rare clearheaded and remorseful moments he promised to pay Franklin what he owed him with the first money he received in his new post. But he never did, and Franklin never heard from him again.
William Keith was disappointed on learning of Josiah Franklin’s refusal to stake his son as a printer. The old man was entirely too cautious, Keith said; mere youth was no warrant of indiscretion, financial or otherwise, just as age was no guarantee of judgment. Perhaps afraid that Philadelphia would lose this bright lad, perhaps swept away by his own vision and magnanimity, Keith declared that if Josiah Franklin of Boston would not back his boy, William Keith of Philadelphia would. Pennsylvania needed printers, and the governor would see that it got them. He told Franklin to draw up a list of the equipment and supplies he would require from England, and they would be ordered at once. Franklin could repay the debt when he was able; the important thing was to put the project in motion.
Franklin’s head had been turned by Keith’s previous solicitude, then turned further by the flattering attention of Governor Burnet; now this offer sent it fairly spinning. The greatest man of the city and the province was putting his own money into a venture whose sole source of promise was the intelligence and skill of eighteen-year-old Ben Franklin. The young man’s future was assured. Philadelphia was a wonderful city.
Walking home from this interview, Franklin began calculating what he would require to commence business. A quick tally brought the total to £100. Keith found the inventory entirely acceptable when Franklin explained it; he asked, in a manner that presupposed a positive answer, whether the venture would benefit from Franklin’s presence in London when the fonts and other items were selected. Besides, he intimated, Pennsylvania’s leading printer must make acquaintances among his counterparts in the imperial capital. The outset of the project was the obvious occasion to do so. Franklin could sail in the autumn on the annual ship—at provincial expense, of course.
Once more Franklin was amazed at how marvelously his career was progressing. The governor had endorsed his business judgment by accepting his proposal; now he was sending him off to London as the all-but-official printer of the province. To be sure, the ship would not be sailing for some months; but that would simply allow time to perfect his plans.
Frustratingly, he could not share those plans with anyone—least of all Keimer, with whom he continued to spend his working hours. “He suspected nothing of my setting up,” Franklin later asserted. One wonders. Franklin paid frequent visits to the governor’s house; Keimer must have asked himself—although he apparently did not ask Franklin—what the young man and the governor talked about. Further, Franklin was obviously too talented to remain a journeyman forever. Unless he relocated again he must one day set himself up as Keimer’s competitor.
Quite possibly Keimer thought he could keep Franklin till the boy turned twenty-one; only then would Franklin be fully able to conclude contracts and do all the other things necessary to direct a business. And it was entirely possible Keimer thought he himself might be out of the printing business by that time. Other enthusiasms beckoned. Foremost of these was a dream to found a new religious sect, one that embodied his own peculiar interpretation of the Scriptures. Keimer loved disputation; since Franklin did too, the pair spent many hours over their frame and fonts arguing the finer points of theology and philosophy. Franklin employed the indirect style he had learned in Boston and regularly used it to tie Keimer in intellectual knots. Keimer eventually discovered the equally venerable rhetorical device of refusing to accept any premise whatever—in his case from a plausible fear Franklin would find a devious path from premise to refutation. Whether or not the experience shook Keimer’s beliefs, it heightened his regard for Franklin’s forensic skills. He offered Franklin a place next to the throne in his new order. Keimer would dispense doctrine; Franklin would defend it by confounding their opponents.
To himself, Franklin laughed at Keimer’s delusions—the more easily now that he saw the terminus of his dependence on his employer approaching. To Keimer, he put on a grave face and indicated he was flattered at the invitation but wondered if he might have some say about the sect’s practices. A vegetarian diet, for example, would benefit both body and soul. Keimer was skeptical, but when Franklin agreed to accept Keimer’s teaching on the proper observance of the Sabbath (Saturday instead of Sunday) and the Levitican ban on cropping beards (prospectively a problem once Franklin’s whiskers started seriously growing, but not yet), the elder man agreed to give vegetarianism a test. Franklin supplied a neighbor woman with a list of forty dishes containing neither meat nor fish nor fowl; for eighteen pence per week she would cook from this list.
Franklin experienced no difficulty reacquainting himself with a non-sanguinary regime, but Keimer suffered—as Franklin knew he would. “He was usually a great glutton, and I promised myself some diversion in half-starving him.” For three months Keimer held out, dreaming day and night of beefsteaks, lamb chops, and fried ham. Though the spirit remained willing, the flesh finally succumbed. He ordered a roast suckling pig and invited Franklin and two women friends to celebrate his delivery from this ill-advised experiment. But the pig arrived before the guests did, and Keimer, unable to wait fifteen minutes more, ate the whole thing himself.
Keimer was not the only person who found himself the object of Franklin’s amusements. Collins having departed in disgrace, Franklin devoted more time to his Philadelphia friends. Three in particular—Charles Osborne, Joseph Watson, and James Ralph—formed his literary circle. The group met regularly for Sunday walks; these provided a peripatetic forum for discussions of this author or that. Occasionally one or another would produce a piece of writing and submit it to the group for critique.
Of the four, James Ralph had the highest ambitions for a career in writing—poetry, to be specific. Charles Osborne likewise had poetic pretensions, but he also possessed the askant eye of the critic—especially toward Ralph’s poetry and hopes of making a living by it. Franklin, recalling his own humbling efforts at versifying, shared Osborne’s opinion that a career in poetry was a fool’s quest, although he allowed that if Ralph wanted to write poetry merely to please himself, that was his affair. Franklin added the opinion he had formed some years earlier that even poetry that did not rise to art could serve as a tool for the improvement of one’s prose. The others concurred in this sensible opinion, and an assignment—setting the Eighteenth Psalm to verse—was agreed upon.
Just before the next meeting, Ralph approached Franklin, his updating of David in hand. Franklin read the piece and registered approval. Ralph thereupon asked him to take part in a deception. Osborne, Ralph complained, would never say anything positive about his—Ralph’s—poetry; he could not stand that someone—specifically Ralph—might write more gracefully than he. Would Franklin be willing to present Ralph’s piece as his own? Only by such a subterfuge could Ralph get an objective opinion.
Franklin’s schedule at Keimer’s that week had prevented his writing a poem himself, and he consented. He cribbed Ralph’s work into his own hand and read it to the group. Osborne praised it extravagantly. Ralph suggested a few revisions; Osborne told him he was as dull a critic as a poet and did not know what he was talking about. After the meeting, while Osborne and Ralph were walking home together, the former continued to effuse over the purported Franklin poem. Such imagery! Such power! He confided to Ralph that he had not earlier praised the piece as fully as he might have; he did not want to seem a flatterer. He wondered aloud how a person who spoke so indifferently could write with such passion and fire.
The confusion provoked laughter, at Osborne’s expense, when the ruse was revealed at the next meeting. The episode did not estrange Osborne from Franklin; the two remained friendly enough to pledge a pact that whichever of them predeceased the other should, after having surveyed the ground on that farther shore, return and apprise the living one of the landscape there. The obligation fell to Osborne, who died relatively young. “He never fulfilled his promise,” Franklin noted at sixty-five.
Debating with his friends and dreaming of his future success filled most of Franklin’s leisure time during that summer of his nineteenth year; but not all. Love occupied him as well.
The object of his affections was Deborah Read, with whom he had grown increasingly familiar since that inauspicious morning of his arrival the previous autumn. She had watched his career prospects improve with Keimer; partly in consequence he saw his romantic prospects improve with her. Ten months earlier, unknown and unemployed, he was the sort no father would have let near his daughter. Now, well placed in his craft, surrounded by friends hardworking and respectable, and waited upon by Governor Keith, he was one of the more eligible young men in town.
Precisely what Franklin saw in Deborah Read is more difficult to discern. No one painted her portrait during that period, and the only surviving one from later years shows a woman with a not unpleasant but neither notably appealing face. She was two years younger than he, which especially in that age meant that she might physically have been hardly more than a girl. Yet he seems to have been quite attracted to her, for they spoke of marriage. Her father and mother did not dismiss the idea. They had been searching for a good match, not least because John Read had lately run into financial difficulties. The search grew more pressing that September, when Read suddenly died, leaving his debts and his daughter—among other children—to his wife. At this point Sarah Read must have listened carefully as Ben Franklin made his suit.
Yet careful she was, and reflecting on Ben’s youth, she told them to wait until his return from England. Perhaps she wished to gauge the seriousness of his intentions. Perhaps she wished to see whether the print shop he spoke of with such enthusiasm—to Debbie and her, yet still to almost no one else—actually materialized. Her husband’s money troubles had resulted from his lending credence, and cash, to glib retailers of fraudulent promises. A modest skepticism would become his widow and safeguard his daughter.
Franklin could not gainsay this prudence in a mother-in-law. Nor was there much he could do about it if he had, for Sarah Read was not the sort to be trifled with. Love would have to wait the six months or so the crossing to England and the return would require. Then he would be older, and, with printing equipment in hand, his success would be assured. At that point Sarah Read could not deny him, and Debbie would not.