6
Although Richard Saunders could say things Benjamin Franklin could not, the sustained success of the almanac afforded Franklin a financial security that allowed him—indeed, given his self-confidence in his own judgment, encouraged him—to test the waters of political controversy. One whirlpool surrounded the perennial problem of money—that is, currency. During the half decade after his arrival in Philadelphia, the economy of Pennsylvania improved dramatically. The boarded windows that had greeted him on his first morning there had reopened, with new and newly active merchants and tradesmen announcing their intention to do business, and customers responding with alacrity and cash.
The alacrity reflected the rapid growth of the population of the colony, as thousands of immigrants, including a large contingent of German Pietists, accepted the promise handed down from William Penn to his heirs, of free religion and cheap land. The filling-in of the hinterland spurred demand for the myriad things the farmers required and the city sold.
As for the cash, that was the consequence of an experiment in liquidity begun by the Pennsylvania Assembly in the year of Franklin’s arrival. Following the lead of Massachusetts and other colonies, Pennsylvania in 1723 authorized the issue of paper currency—actually, bills of credit backed by real estate—to the amount of £45,000. A similar law of 1726 extended the idea of a paper issue, eliciting an enthusiastic response from the business class, which accounted the currency responsible for lubricating the gears of commerce and thereby promoting the prosperity of the province.
Yet lunch was no freer in the eighteenth century than before or since, and what pleased merchants and debtors dismayed landlords and creditors. The latter groups alleged trickery, even fraud, in the issue of paper; the inflation that inevitably followed flimsy money, they said, was nothing but theft.
Franklin entered the fray in 1729. He wrote and printed A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency, a treatise that combined what he read with what he saw and heard. Most important of his reading was the work of William Petty, an early advocate of the labor theory of value later adopted by Marxists and others; Petty’s views would color Franklin’s thinking on political economy his whole life. As for his personal observations, these included his experiences as a businessman and the intelligence he gathered as a newspaper editor and a generally aware individual.
As with his earlier essay on metaphysics, his argument for a paper currency was less noteworthy for what it said about its subject than for what it said about its author. Franklin was not an original economist and would never become one, although his observations in other areas—population growth, for instance—would greatly influence the work of economists. Yet at twenty-three he did not hesitate to engage the theorists on their own ground, and if his insights gave little instruction to the experts, they conveyed the subject to the amateurs who formed his true—and growing—audience.
The gist of his argument was that a scarcity of circulating money elevated interest rates and thereby retarded trade. Merchants had to borrow to finance inventories; the greater the cost of the borrowing, the smaller the inventories financed. High interest rates also discouraged land sales by pricing potential buyers out of the market. The general phenomenon was at once an obvious application of the law of supply and demand and an observed inference from the behavior of the Pennsylvania economy. The opposite was equally obvious and observable. “We have already experienced how much the increase of our currency by what paper money has been made, has encouraged our trade.” The single example of shipbuilding illustrated the point:
It may not be amiss to observe under this head what a great advantage it must be to us as a trading country that has workmen and all the materials proper for that business within itself, to have ship-building as much as possible advanced: For every ship that is built here for the English merchants gains the province her clear value in gold and silver, which must otherwise have been sent home for returns in her stead; and likewise every ship built in and belonging to the province not only saves the province her first cost but all the freight, wages and provisions she ever makes or requires as long as she lasts, provided care is taken to make this her pay port, and that she always takes provisions with her for the whole voyage, which may easily be done.
By other examples Franklin elaborated his pro-paper argument. A plentiful currency would attract workmen drawn to high wages, as most workmen were. It would diminish dependence on imports from England as local manufacturers found markets for their goods, thereby righting the chronic imbalance in trade and cash flows with the motherland. It would improve social relations throughout the province as men of various stations found outlets for their talents and energies.
The opposition to paper often reflected an unwarranted reverence for specie, Franklin said. Gold and silver were nothing more than convenient measures of something more intrinsic: the amount of human labor that went into any commodity. “Suppose one man employed to raise corn, while another is digging and refining silver; at the year’s end, or at any other period of time, the complete produce of corn, and that of silver, are the natural price of each other; and if one be twenty bushels and the other twenty ounces, then an ounce of that silver is worth the labor of raising a bushel of that corn.” This fundamental principle had an important corollary: “The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of gold and silver they possess.”
Franklin acknowledged the temptation inherent in paper issues—namely, to print too much of the stuff. Current Pennsylvania practice avoided this pitfall by securing the notes with land. Franklin succinctly explained, “As bills issued upon money security are money, so bills issued upon land are in effect coined land.” The value of land was rising with the prosperity of the province and the growth of its population; this was the best security of all.
Franklin doubtless hoped that if the Assembly could be persuaded to authorize another paper issue, he would receive the contract for the printing; as always, he expected that what was good for Pennsylvania would be good for him. In fact his arguments, joined to those of others of like mind, did carry the day, and although Andrew Bradford got the first contract, Franklin received a subsequent one: for £40,000 of notes, on which his fee was £100.
Civic-mindedness and self-interest intersected in another area, though not so directly. No city in America had ever suffered a fire on the scale of the London fire of 1666, but that had less to do with American circumspection than with the lesser combustible density of American urban life. As noted, the original plan of Philadelphia had taken the London disaster to heart and specified wide streets and ample spacing of buildings; but with time and prosperity the open spaces of Penn’s “green town” filled in. As they did, one person’s carelessness became his neighbors’ hazard, and consequently their concern.
Franklin employed one of his tested methods to register this concern. At the beginning of 1735 he assumed yet another literary persona; this “A.A.” wrote a letter to the editor of the Gazette, which Franklin obligingly published. A.A. was, by his own account, “old and lame of my hands, and thereby uncapable of assisting my fellow citizens when their houses are on fire”; all he had to offer was the wisdom of his years. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said, sounding oddly like Poor Richard. Prevention was particularly important in matters inflammatory. Citizens ought to take care how they transported hot embers and coals from one room to the next—“for scraps of fire may fall into chinks and make no appearance till midnight; when your stairs being in flames, you may be forced (as I once was) to leap out of your windows and hazard your necks to avoid being over-roasted.”
Other points of prevention called for collective effort. The city currently regulated bakeries and coopers’ shops; A.A. suggested appending to those regulations a measure proscribing all hearths that lacked sufficient depth to keep the flames within, and a similar ban on the practice of framing the fronts of fireplaces in wood molding, which frequently was fashioned of the heartwood of pine and therefore oozed flammable resins. Under present practice anyone could call himself a chimney sweep, whether or not he knew the first thing about ridding chimneys of creosote and other combustible buildup. For civic safety, chimney sweeps ought to be licensed by the mayor and fined for any chimney that caught fire within fifteen days after exercise of their services.
An ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure, but sometimes civic safety had to be purchased in larger lots. A.A. explained that “a city in a neighboring province”—the well-traveled among his readers would recognize Boston—had formed clubs of active men to combat fires. Each club commanded a fire engine, with which the members practiced regularly; each included specialists in the use of other equipment, including axes and hooks; each was led by an officer who directed their efforts and could compel obedience of the citizenry in times of fire emergency. Prior to the establishment of this system, fire had scourged their city; since then the flames had been kept in check. Philadelphia should learn from the example. To date, no extraordinary fire had ever raked the city on the Delaware, but given a hardly unthinkable combination of drought, wind, and place of outbreak, a small fire might easily become extraordinary in the absence of preparations to suppress it.
Franklin had already circulated these ideas in the Junto; after airing them in the Gazette, he took the obvious next step of organizing a fire club. Combining what he knew of Boston with what he had seen in London, the Union Fire Company incorporated itself in December 1736. Each member pledged to provide two leather buckets for carrying water and four cloth bags for rescuing goods, to be devoted exclusively to the activities of the fire company and marked accordingly. Failure to have this equipment at the ready would result in a fine of five shillings per missing piece—although any equipment lost fighting a fire would be replaced at the expense of the company. Members would meet monthly for inspection and consideration of policies (and socializing); absent members would be fined one shilling. As to the business of fire fighting:
We will all of us, upon hearing of fire breaking out at or near any of our dwelling houses, immediately repair to the same with all our buckets and bags, and there employ our best endeavours to preserve the goods and effects of such as shall be in danger…. And if more than one of us shall be in danger at the same time, we will divide ourselves as near as may be to be equally helpful. And to prevent suspicious persons from coming into, or carrying any goods out of, any such house, two of our number shall constantly attend at the doors until all the goods and effects that can be saved shall be secured in our bags, and carried to some safe place.
The twenty-five charter members included Franklin and friends from the Junto and Library Company, also merchants, city and provincial officials, and various other persons hoping to protect their property from fire. Significantly—and perhaps realistically—the members pledged to protect their own houses, not those of nonmembers. Accordingly, many of those nonmembers formed companies of their own, until much of the city fell under the protection of one company or another. Franklin’s company devoted the fines it collected to purchasing equipment; in 1743 it bought a fire engine like those he had seen in London.
Franklin took as much pride in encouraging the creation of the Philadelphia fire companies as in nearly anything else he did. Writing late in life, after he had visited every city in America and many of those in Europe, he said, “I question whether there is a city in the world better provided with the means of putting a stop to beginning conflagrations; and in fact since those institutions, the city has never lost by fire more than one or two houses at a time.” By then Franklin was a world-renowned scientific and political figure, feted for taming lightning and tyrants; that such a mundane improvement as fire prevention gave him such pleasure reflected his solid grounding in the affairs of ordinary life.
Another contribution to civic betterment began as an undiluted expression of self-interest. Although Franklin’s Gazette was the livelier paper, Bradford’s Mercury benefited from its publisher’s second job as postmaster. Not only did this give Bradford first view of news from beyond the city, but his assured circulation via the mail attracted advertisers, who—then as later—supplied a crucial portion of any paper’s revenues. As if this double advantage were not enough, Bradford forbade his carriers from delivering the Gazette.
Franklin resented this last measure as pushing competition too far; consequently he felt no compunction about bribing the carriers to disobey their boss and tuck copies of the Gazette beneath their saddlebags. For a time he and Bradford engaged in a game of cat and mouse. Eventually, however, the cat got snarled in his own ball of yarn, as Bradford hopelessly tangled the post-office accounts. Bradford’s boss, the postmaster general for America, demanded his resignation. The postmaster general offered the job to Franklin, who accepted readily.
The position paid little directly, and in fact left Franklin liable for the debts of his customers. In those days of uncertain delivery, recipients rather than senders paid the postage on letters. Or did not pay: Franklin kept hundreds of customers on credit. Meanwhile he had to pay the colonial post office for the charges incurred. Collecting from such a crowd was a headache; more than a few ran years behind.
Franklin had no idea when he took the job in 1737 what he was getting into—in particular, how the post office would pull him into American and then imperial politics. All he knew then was that the job would boost his newspaper business, which it soon did. “Though the salary was small, it facilitated the correspondence that improved my newspaper, increased the number demanded, as well as the advertisements to be inserted, so that it came to afford me a very considerable income.”
As postmaster, Franklin was among the first to hear of a tempest sweeping across the Atlantic from England, a tempest about to turn much of American life upside down. At the eye of the storm was the most charismatic man Franklin ever met—perhaps the most charismatic man to speak the English language during Franklin’s lifetime. It was said of George Whitefield that he could reduce listeners to tears merely by uttering the word “Mesopotamia.” Charles Wesley wrote of their first meeting, “I saw, I loved, and clasped him to my heart.” An eyewitness described “the awe, the silence, the attention” with which audiences listened to Whitefield. “Many thought, He spoke as never a man spoke, before him. So charmed were people with his manner of address, that they shut up their shops, forgot their secular business, and laid aside their schemes for the world.” Another observer was moved to meter:
See! See! He comes, the heav’nly Sound
Flows from his charming Tongue;
Rebellious Men are seiz’d with Fear
With deep Conviction stung.
The object of these effusions was a young man, a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday when Franklin met him in 1739. He was “graceful and well-proportioned,” in the opinion of one who knew him: “his stature rather above middle size. His complexion was very fair. His eyes were of a dark blue colour, and small, but sprightly. He had a squint in one of them, occasioned either by ignorance or the carelessness of the nurse who attended him in the measles, when he was about four years old.” This observer, a Whitefield partisan, took pains to characterize his countenance as “manly”; this may have been a reaction against those who found his features delicate, even effeminate. Whitefield himself was sensitive on this score. Recalling a school play in which he was cast as a girl, he declared, “The remembrance of this has often covered me with confusion of face, and I hope will do so, even to the end of my life.”
By his own account, perhaps magnified for effect, Whitefield spent a dissolute boyhood and youth. He lied, talked dirty, stole from his mother, and indulged in “abominable secret sin.” Yet salvation, of a secular sort, beckoned when he learned of the possibility of attending university at Oxford as a servitor, a student who worked to earn his way. “Will you go to Oxford, George?” his mother implored. He would.
Yet Oxford initially attempted to corrupt him. His classmates habitually engaged in an “excess of riot” and encouraged him to come along. By now at least aware of the evil nature of such a life, Whitefield prayed for the strength to resist temptation.
God answered his prayers by leading him to the brothers Wesley, John and Charles, who had formed a small group devoted to piety, prayer, and an ascetic “method” of living. These “Methodists” were the butt of ridicule of most of Whitefield’s classmates, and at first he attempted to keep his connection secret. But, driven by a deep conviction that he was unworthy of salvation, he soon became more methodical—indeed fanatical—than the Wesleys. He fasted for days at a time and deprived himself of everything that gave him pleasure, thinking that somehow this mortification of the flesh would save him. Yet the more he strove, the more convinced he grew of his sinfulness.
One day revelation came to him in the form of a desperate woman. For some time Whitefield had been carrying the message of the gospel to prisoners in the local jail; this woman was the wife of one of the prisoners. Distraught at her inability to support her children with her husband behind bars, she had attempted to escape their hungry cries by the sole expedient she knew: to hurl herself into the river and drown. The chance intervention of a passerby had prevented her from carrying out her plan; now she turned to the only one she could think of who might help her, the one who had visited her husband in jail. Whitefield comforted her as best he could at the moment, and told her to meet him at the jail that afternoon. She did so. He read to the woman and her husband from the Gospel of John, and suddenly, as he later described it, “God visited them both by his free grace.” The woman was “powerfully quickened from above”; the man, trembling and crying out, “I am upon the brink of hell!” likewise felt the powerful rush of salvation. “From this time forward, both of them grew in grace.”
Having now witnessed this instantaneous rebirth through grace, Whitefield longed to experience it himself. He mortified the flesh more than ever, increasing his fasts, taking long walks on cold mornings till his fingers turned black from the frost. His health began to fail and his body to break down.
One day, perceiving an uncommon drought and disagreeable clamminess in my mouth, and using things to allay my thirst, but in vain, it was suggested to me that when Jesus Christ cried out, “I thirst,” His sufferings were near at an end. Upon which I cast myself down on the bed, crying out, “I thirst! I thirst!” Soon after this, I found and felt in myself that I was delivered from the burden that had so heavily oppressed me. The spirit of mourning was taken from me, and I knew what it was truly to rejoice in God my Saviour…. Now did the Spirit of God take possession of my soul, and, as I humbly hope, seal me unto the day of redemption.
Having felt for himself what he soon took to calling “the new birth,” Whitefield set to sharing the experience with others. In 1736 he was ordained at Gloucester; he shortly began preaching the message of the new birth. Despite his inexperience and his youth (he was only twenty-one), he vowed to speak the truth as it had been revealed to him. “I shall displease some, being determined to speak against their assemblies,” he confided to a friend on the eve of his inaugural sermon. “But I must tell them the truth, or otherwise I shall not be a faithful minister of Christ.”
The “boy parson,” as he was dubbed, made a sensation from the start—a matter not lost on the parson himself. “I preached at Bishopsgate Church, the largeness of which, and the congregation together, at first a little dazed me,” he wrote, regarding his initial appearance in London. But God saw him through. “My mind was calmed, and I was enabled to preach with power. The effect was immediate and visible to all; for as I went up the stairs almost all seemed to sneer at me on account of my youth; but they soon grew serious and exceedingly attentive, and, after I came down, showed me great tokens of respect, blessed me as I passed along, and made great enquiry who I was.”
The clergy did not all bless Whitefield. Some were simply jealous of his oratorical brilliance; others questioned the orthodoxy of his message. Consequently, few men of the cloth—although many of the laity—lamented the news that he intended to take his message to America, to pursue his ministry among the debtors and other poor of James Oglethorpe’s new colony in Georgia. The Wesleys had already gone; Whitefield would follow.
His first American mission lasted four months. He generated as much excitement in Georgia as he had at home. “Mr. Whitefield’s auditors increase daily,” wrote one who saw him in Savannah. “And the place of worship is far too small to contain the people who seek his doctrine.” That doctrine was the doctrine of the new birth; Whitefield called on his hearers to cast aside their sinful ways and take God directly into their lives.
He returned to England to even more popular acclaim than before, and even more clerical disapproval. One by one the churches closed their pulpits to him. Yet the people demanded to hear him, so he began preaching in the open fields. His first outdoor sermon was heard by some two hundred coal miners on a hill near Bristol. Within weeks the crowds numbered twenty thousand. What even Whitefield at first characterized as the “mad trick” of preaching in the fields became the centerpiece of his ministry. “Blessed be God that I have now broken the ice!” he recorded after the Bristol performance. “I believe I never was more acceptable to my Master than when I was standing to teach those hearers in the open fields. Some may censure me; but if I thus pleased me, I should not be the servant of Christ.”
While Whitefield was learning to antagonize established religion in England on the way to his sermon on the mount, Franklin was engaged in a similar dispute in Philadelphia. Not since Boston had he attended church regularly, although he judged the institution of religion conducive to civic welfare and, accordingly, contributed to its upkeep. The object of his subscription was the Presbyterian congregation in Philadelphia, which, encompassing a congeries of dissenters from both the Church of England and the Society of Friends—Congregationalists, Baptists, English Nonconformists, in addition to Presbyterians—was the closest thing Franklin could call to a church of his own. The pastor of the Presbyterians since before Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia was Jedediah Andrews, an able organizer and energetic proselytizer. Andrews engaged in a running contest with an Anglican minister, Thomas Clayton, to capture the loyalty, or at least the attendance, of those souls not irretrievably lost to Quakerism. Andrews had observed the emergence of Franklin as one of the city’s leading citizens, and he determined to bring him into his fold. From either his own persuasive skills or some lingering sense in Franklin that he ought to attend church, Andrews got Franklin to agree to come to service for five successive Sundays. If Franklin remained disinclined to join the church after that time, presumably Andrews would bother him no more.
Andrews may have been persuasive, but he was not eloquent. “His discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments or explications of the peculiar doctrines of our sect,” Franklin said, “and were all to me very dry, uninteresting and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens.” Franklin served out his time, then left in disappointment and no little disgust.
He stayed away until the arrival of a new preacher. The growth of population in the colony more than offset Andrews’s inadequacy in the pulpit, and the pastor’s workload increased. In 1733 he called across the Atlantic for an assistant, who arrived in the latter part of 1734. For all its amenities, Philadelphia was not the first choice of every promising young minister in the British Isles; as a result, Andrews and the Presbyterian synod had to take whom they could get. Whom they got was Samuel Hemphill, lately of Ireland, oratorically gifted but, according to his critics, doctrinally suspect. A fellow minister who knew him in Ireland called him a “new-light man”—a term denoting an unsettling latitudinarianism, either theological or institutional or both—as well as, more specifically, “a vile heretic, a preacher of morality rather than dogma.”
Franklin cared nothing for the purity of Presbyterian dogma, and if Hemphill preached morality rather than dogma, he was probably worth a hearing. Franklin returned to Sunday services and enjoyed “most excellent discourses,” which “had little of the dogmatical kind, but inculcated strongly the practice of virtue, or what in the religious style are called good works.” Franklin was not alone in his enthusiasm for the new man; according to Andrews, who was now having second thoughts about Hemphill, “free-thinkers, Deists, nothings, getting a scent of him, flocked to him.”
Hemphill’s popularity with this unholy mob was prima facie evidence of his irregularity. At Andrews’s urging, the Presbyterian synod conducted an investigation, which culminated in a trial. Franklin might have let the matter alone, as being solely the concern of narrow-minded sectarians, but he believed that Hemphill’s emphasis on good works could have only a beneficent influence on civic life, and he was loath to lose it. Besides, the actions of Andrews and the synod struck the same anti-authoritarian nerve in Franklin that had made it impossible for him to remain in Boston. Let the dogmatists speak their piece, he believed, but do not let them stifle the opinions of others.
Franklin joined the fray, though he had no standing in the matter. The week before Hemphill’s trial Franklin published an imagined dialogue between two Presbyterians on the streets of Philadelphia. One defends the position of the Presbyterian synod; the other—clearly speaking for Franklin—dismantles the synod’s arguments. When the first complains that the new minister preaches morality rather than faith, the second says, “What is Christ’s Sermon on the Mount but an excellent moral discourse?” The first replies that, regardless, the Presbyterians have the right to determine who will preach from their pulpit; anyone who will not subscribe to the Westminster Confession should be barred. The second answers that just as Luther had found error in the practices of the Church of Rome, and Calvin been obliged to modify Luther, so might synods today correct Westminster. “Why must we be for ever confined to that, or any, Confession?” The first says that most Presbyterians are perfectly happy with the Westminster Confession; this being so, they have every right to prohibit their pulpit to an innovator. The second responds that a majority can be mistaken. At the beginning of the Reformation, the reformers were in a distinct minority. Besides, Presbyterians deem it their right to preach their version of the Gospel to unbelievers; they ought to accord a similar right to others, even if they think those others misguided. They might learn something. “We have justly denied the infallibility of the Pope and his councils and synods in their interpretations of scripture, and can we modestly claim infallibility for our selves or our synods?” None can know, this side of heaven, where lies true orthodoxy. In the meantime, “No point of faith is so plain as that morality is our duty, for all sides agree in that. A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.”
Franklin must have realized this last statement made him sound almost like a papist; the crux of the Reformation had been Luther’s conviction that faith, not good works, was what allowed a person to be saved. Whether he expected that his little dialogue would help Hemphill before the synod is unclear; in the event, that body voted unanimously to censure the preacher and suspend him from his ministerial office. It did not help Hemphill’s case that he was caught having cribbed his sermons from others. He explained to Franklin that he had an exceedingly retentive memory; he needed to read a text only once and he knew it by heart. Franklin, embarrassed at seeming to defend plagiarism, nonetheless made the best of things. “I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture.”
In fact, by now Hemphill was almost the least of Franklin’s concerns. Franklin could hardly contest the right of the synod to dismiss Hemphill, but he could challenge their wisdom in doing so. He did precisely this, in language that grew more vehement as the controversy continued. In July 1735 Franklin published a pamphlet dissecting the proceedings to date. He rebutted, article by article, the prosecution’s charges and evidence. He alleged “malice and envy” in certain of the accusers, “hot distempered zeal” in others, and he likened the entire affair to the Inquisition. When the synod responded with a defense of its actions, Franklin put out another pamphlet, in which such slight circumspection as his first one exhibited had evaporated entirely. He called the camp of the synod “the dominion of bigotry and prejudice”; their evidence showed “pious fraud.” Of those who defended Andrews against the allegation of bringing false evidence, he declared, “Vain is their endeavour to wipe out the indelible stain he has fixed upon his character by his conduct in that affair. They flounder and wallow in his quagmire, and cover themselves with that dirt which before belonged to him alone.” One charge by Andrews was “ridiculous, false and absurd”; another was “abominably ridiculous and absurd” and “absolutely a stranger” to Holy Scripture. To what he judged an especially egregious lapse of logic in the prosecution’s case, Franklin responded sarcastically, “Admirable reasoning! To which I answer that
Asses are grave and dull animals,
Our authors are grave and dull animals; therefore
Our authors are grave, dull, or if you will, Rev. Asses.
Lest calling the Presbyterian clergy “asses” was insufficient insult, Franklin asserted that those involved in the Hemphill prosecution fell into three categories: “first, the men of honesty who wanted sense; secondly, the men of sense who wanted honesty; and lastly, those who had neither sense nor honesty.” The instigators of the investigation were of the last sort. “Malice, rancour and prejudice” motivated their actions; “animosity” and “false zeal” gave rise to “injustice, fraud, oppression”; the prosecution was already deep and appeared about to go deeper into “the dirt and filth of hypocrisy, falsehood and impiety.”
Franklin’s outburst of anticlericalism was unlike him—or rather, unlike the side of him he preferred to present to the world. The sweet reasonableness with which he normally cloaked his actions withered before his anger at the suppression of a dissenting voice in the Presbyterian pulpit. In this regard the Presbyterians of Philadelphia were as closed-minded as the Puritans of Boston; the struggle over Hemphill aroused the same emotions in Franklin that had driven him from the city of his birth. He was not proud of his performance in the Hemphill case; in his autobiography he glossed it over almost to the point of prevarication.
Yet in this, as in so many other things, Franklin was a man of his times. Matters of religion were provoking people all across the American colonies to unusual emotions. During the late 1730s and early 1740s a religious eruption occurred, rending congregations from New England to the Carolinas. This “Great Awakening” grew out of the pietistic preaching of Theodore Frelinghuysen among his Dutch Reformed flock in New Jersey in the 1720s, and of William and Gilbert Tennent among Presbyterians in the same province. Gilbert Tennent was a particularly compelling character: brawny, earthy, and direct. Where many other preachers appealed to the intellects of their congregants, Tennent spoke to their emotions in a language to which they were unused but which they could not resist. He preached “like a boatswain of a ship, calling the sailors to come to prayers and be damned,” said one witness, who did not entirely approve. The sailors—congregants, rather—came, were damned, and came back for more.
Equally compelling, though in a style oratorically opposite to Tennent’s, was Jonathan Edwards. Two years older than Franklin, Edwards was an intellectual prodigy. He entered Yale before his thirteenth birthday and finished by his seventeenth. At twenty he was the head tutor at the college and, in effect, president. His early interests were as varied as those of Franklin—or more aptly, Cotton Mather—and he speculated on atoms, rainbows, and the lives of spiders. He never forgot about those spiders, but in time he narrowed his focus to the cure of the souls he inherited from his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, at the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Edwards’s devotion to his calling soon became legendary. He rose by four on summer mornings, by five in winter. He ate sparingly, to keep his mind clear and sharp. He devoted fully half of each twenty-four hours to the study of the Scriptures and other volumes conducive to holiness. He chopped wood and rode horseback for exercise, yet with each fall of the ax he reflected on Adam’s fall, and with each hill his horse ascended he thought of the uplifting power of God’s grace. Like Franklin—and Mather—he sought moral self-improvement; in his case he vowed “never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if I expected it would not be above an hour before I should hear the last trump.”
To say Edwards walked in the fear of God would be to put matters mildly (and here he walked away from Franklin); to say that he attempted to instill this same fear in his congregation would be equally bland. Unlike Gilbert Tennent or George Whitefield, Edwards spoke without gestures. His eyes did not search his audience but stayed fixed on the bell-rope at the back of the meeting hall; his words came out in a flat monotone that would have put his listeners to sleep had the message not been so hair-raising:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathesome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.
You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment; it is ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to wake again in this world after you closed your eyes to sleep; and there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.
Edwards may have remained calm, but his auditors shrieked and moaned, their horror exceeded only by the exquisiteness of their agony. Periodically their wailing compelled the speaker to pause, lest his message be lost in the din. At least one listener was so moved that he decided to end his life rather than continue his torment. (As it happened, this lost soul was married to Edwards’s aunt Rebekah Stoddard, who showed true Stoddard grit when, informed in the buttery that her husband had fatally cut his throat, she finished her cheese work before seeing to her dead husband.)
Such excesses merely underscored the excitement the new preachers brought to the religious and social life of the colonies. The persecutions that had driven the colonial founders from England were history, and tired history, to the third and fourth generations. Meanwhile an insidious rationalism—the work of Newton and the other apostles of the Enlightenment—had driven the center of religious gravity from the bowels of believers up toward their brains. In meeting halls in every province, congregants nodded assent to received doctrines but knew that something was missing from their experience of the divine. The new preachers—the awakeners—supplied that missing element.
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 Gazettedescribed 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.
As he surely guessed, Franklin’s defense of his conduct did not put the matter to rest. Bradford’s Mercury ran a rejoinder, and before long, papers in other cities had picked up the story. Josiah and Abiah Franklin read of Rees’s death and of the trial at which their son testified. Abiah, especially, had long questioned this Freemasonry foolishness; her doubts now appeared confirmed. A letter to their son conveyed her worries, and Josiah’s.
“They are in general a very harmless sort of people,” Franklin replied, regarding the Masons, “and have no principles or practices that are inconsistent with religion or good manners.” Unfortunately, Abiah would have to take her son’s word for this, since the secrets of the order were not vouchsafed to women. “I must entreat her to suspend her judgment till she is better informed, and in the mean time exercise her charity.”
Franklin took the opportunity of this letter to attempt to assuage his parents’ concern over the larger and continuing issue of his lapse from orthodoxy. “I am sorry you should have any uneasiness on my account, and if it were a thing possible for one to alter his opinions in order to please others, I know none whom I ought more willingly to oblige in that respect than your selves.” But such was not possible. “It is no more in a man’s power to think than to look like another.”
Franklin granted that some of his opinions were probably wrong. “When the natural weakness and imperfection of human understanding is considered, with the unavoidable influences of education, custom, books and company, upon our ways of thinking, I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds, are true, and all he rejects, are false.” The same applied to churches and councils, sects and synods. Yet though truth, in some transcendent sense, might elude mere mortals, efficacy need not. “I think opinions should be judged of by their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded he holds none that are dangerous; which I hope is the case with me.”
Here Franklin missed the point, either inadvertently or by design. Devout Calvinists like his parents believed that truth—in matters of faith—was everything, works next to nothing. All their son’s good works and all he might encourage others to perform would avail him nothing at the final judgment. Did he believe? That was the question. And by his own admission, if only oblique in this letter, he did not. They could hardly help being concerned.
Franklin anticipated their objections, which were the same ones he had been tilting against for years. “I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. And the Scripture assures me that at the last day, we shall not be examined what we thought, but what we did; and our recommendation will not be that we said Lord, Lord, but that we did GOOD to our fellow creatures. See Matth. 26.”
Josiah and Abiah knew their Gospels (better than Benjamin: the chapter he meant to cite was Matthew 25), and they knew the appropriate Protestant riposte to his essentially Roman Catholic dependence on works. Franklin knew they knew, knew they would not be convinced, and threw himself on their love and understanding. “Methinks all that should be expected from me is to keep my mind open to conviction, to hear patiently and examine attentively whatever is offered me for that end; and if after all I continue in the same errors, I believe your usual charity will induce you rather to pity and excuse than blame me. In the mean time your care and concern for me is what I am very thankful for.”
He might also have said he was thankful for their health and longevity, for such fundamental blessings were not bestowed upon all the members of his family. From birth, little Francis was his mother’s darling and his father’s delight. When he learned to crawl, and then walk, Franky doubtless followed his father from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs print shop; he certainly marveled at the mysteries of composing, inking, pressing, and cutting. By all evidence Franklin indulged him; recollecting his own precocious curiosity, he was hardly one to chase his child away from the objects of such fascination. Besides, he almost certainly expected Franky to enter the printing trade, at least on a trial basis. The earlier he learned the basics, the better.
But fate, in the form of infectious disease, disrupted these plans. In 1736 Franky contracted smallpox. Since the days when Franklin had joined James to assault the Mathers for promoting inoculation against the disease, he had altered his view; he now advocated the practice as beneficial to private and public health. Yet he was a busy man, and Franky was not always in the most robust of health; between finding his own time and waiting for the boy to get stronger, he never got around to inoculating him. When the disease swept through the city in the autumn of the child’s fifth year, it carried Franky off.
His father was devastated. “I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation,” he wrote a half century later. With a grim sense of civic duty, he noted in the Gazette that Franky had not died following inoculation, as was widely assumed of the son of a known supporter of the practice, but following failure to inoculate.
It was part of Franklin’s credo to look forever forward, to dwell not on the past but on the future. On most subjects he followed this aspect of his own advice. For Franky he made an exception. The grieving father allowed himself—or perhaps he simply could not help it—to wonder what the boy would have become. For the rest of his life the sight of other boys caused him to reflect on Franky. In 1772 he responded to reports that one of his grandsons was growing up to be a fine lad, by declaring that such information “brings often afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky, though now dead thirty-six years, whom I have seldom seen equaled in every thing, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh.”
What effect Franky’s death had on Deborah can only be imagined. She did not keep a diary, and although she certainly shared her sorrow with her husband, and perhaps even more with her mother, still living with them, neither of them recorded her feelings for posterity.
The pain of losing a child is always excruciating, but for Debbie it was all the more excruciating from the fact that she confronted the real possibility that she might never have another. At the time of Franky’s death she and Franklin had been married for more than six years. There is no reason to believe they were not trying to have more children; certainly Franklin, he of the dozen siblings plus two, looked forward to numerous progeny. (Debbie was one of seven children, four of whom died before reaching adulthood.) But in those six years the two had been able to produce just one child. And now that one was gone. In little more than a year Debbie would be thirty, her best childbearing years probably behind her. She might never see a child of hers grow up, might never have grandchildren. It was a bleak prospect.
The effect of Franky’s death on Franklin’s other son is harder to guess. Billy was six or nearly so at his half brother’s passing. He may have been too young to appreciate that his situation was different from Franky’s—specifically, that he was Franklin’s son but not Debbie’s. The loss of Franky likely made his father appreciate Billy more than ever, but the effect it had on Debbie’s feelings toward Billy is problematic. She would have been more than human not to feel a certain resentment that her son had been taken but not that other woman’s. In the close quarters of the crowded house—which sheltered not only Franklin, Debbie, Billy, and Sarah Read but also one or more apprentices and journeymen and, at various times, Debbie’s siblings John and Frances—this resentment must have been palpable. Franklin would have felt it and understood. Billy would have felt and not understood.
Full as it was, the house would soon be fuller—but not of the children of Debbie. In 1733 Franklin had journeyed to New England to visit his parents and sister Jane (and Jane’s children, including a son named Benjamin) in Boston, and his brothers John and Peter (the soap-makers) and James (who had finally given up on Boston) in Newport. A decade had diminished the antagonism between Ben and James; so also did a decline in James’s health. Though not yet forty, James felt himself failing, and after evincing his love and affection for his younger brother, he implored Ben to look after his ten-year-old son and namesake when he was gone. In particular he wanted the lad brought up in the printing trade, to carry on his father’s work—and his uncle’s. Ben, who had never forgotten that he had absconded from James with time left on his indenture, could hardly refuse.
What Debbie thought of the arrangement when Ben got back to Philadelphia is open to speculation. Perhaps she judged that another body in the household—especially a relatively small one—would scarcely be noticed. On the other hand, it may have been Debbie who was behind the decision to send young James off to school for a few years following the elder James’s death in 1735. Not till 1740 was he brought into the household as an apprentice. Ben duly taught him the trade while his mother, James’s widow, Ann, carried on the business in Rhode Island. When the lad achieved the appropriate age and expertise, his uncle updated the Newport shop with new types and got him off to a fair start. “Thus it was that I made my brother ample amends for the service I had deprived him of by leaving so early.”