Philadelphia, 1726–1732
Franklin was a natural shopkeeper: clever, charming, astute about human nature, and eager to succeed. He became, as he put it, “an expert at selling” when he and Denham opened a general store on Water Street shortly after their return to Philadelphia in late 1726. Denham served as both a mentor and a surrogate parent to the aspiring 20-year-old. “We lodged and boarded together; he counseled me as a father, having a sincere regard for me. I respected and loved him.”1
But Franklin’s dreams of becoming a prosperous merchant ended after a few months, when Denham took ill and later died. In his oral will, he forgave Franklin the £10 he still owed for his ocean passage, but he did not leave him the business they had built. With no money and few prospects, Franklin swallowed his pride and accepted an offer from the eccentric Keimer to come back to his print shop, this time as the manager.2
Because there was no foundry in America for casting type, Franklin contrived one of his own by using Keimer’s letters to make lead molds. He thus became the first person in America to manufacture type. One of the most popular contemporary typefaces, a sans-serif font known as Franklin Gothic that is often used in newspaper headlines, was named after him in 1902.
When Keimer began to assert his power, the aversion to arbitrary authority that was part of Franklin’s heritage and breeding flared. One day, there was a commotion outside of the shop, and Franklin poked his head out of the window to watch. Keimer, who was on the street below, shouted at him to mind his own business. The public nature of the rebuke was humiliating, and Franklin quit on the spot. But after a few days, Keimer came begging for him to return, and Franklin did. They each needed the other, at least for the time being.
Keimer had won the right to print a new issue of paper currency for the New Jersey assembly, and only Franklin had the skills to do the job properly. He contrived a copperplate press to make bills so ornate they could not easily be counterfeited, and together they traveled to Burlington. Once again, it was young Franklin, the willing and witty conversationalist, rather than his slovenly master, who befriended the dignitaries. “My mind, having been much more improved by reading than Keimer’s, I suppose it was for that reason my conversation seemed more valued. They had me to their houses, introduced me to their friends, and showed me much civility.”3
The relationship with Keimer was not destined to last. Franklin, ever striving and chafing, realized that he was being used. Keimer was paying him to train the four “cheap hands” who worked at the shop with the intention of laying him off once they were in shape. Franklin, in turn, was willing to use Keimer. He and one of those apprenticed hands, Hugh Meredith, made secret plans to open a competing print shop, funded by Meredith’s father, once Meredith’s servitude was completed. Though not an outright devious scheme, it did not fully comport with Franklin’s high-minded pledge to “aim at sincerity in every word and action.”
Meredith, 30, was fond of reading but also of alcohol. His father, a Welsh-bred farmer, took a liking to Franklin, especially because he had persuaded his son to abstain (at least temporarily) from drinking. He agreed to provide the funding necessary (£200) for the two young men to set up a partnership, Franklin’s contribution being his own talent. They sent to London for equipment,I which arrived early in 1728, shortly after the New Jersey job was completed and Meredith’s indenture had expired.
The two partners bid farewell to the hapless Keimer, leased a house on Market Street, set up shop, and promptly served their first customer, a farmer referred by a friend. “This country man’s five shillings, being our first fruits and coming so seasonably, gave me more pleasure than any crown I have since earned.”
Their business succeeded largely because of Franklin’s diligence. When they were hired by a group of Quakers to print 178 pages of their history, the rest to be printed by Keimer, Franklin did not leave the shop each night until he had completed a four-page folio, often working past eleven. One night, just as he was finishing that day’s sheet, the plate dropped and broke; Franklin stayed overnight to redo it. “This industry visible to our neighbors began to give us character and credit,” Franklin noted. One of the town’s prominent merchants told members of his club, “The industry of that Franklin is superior to anything I ever saw of the kind; I see him still at work when I go home from club, and he is at work again before his neighbors are out of bed.”
Franklin became an apostle of being—and, just as important, of appearing to be—industrious. Even after he became successful, he made a show of personally carting the rolls of paper he bought in a wheelbarrow down the street to his shop, rather than having a hired hand do it.4
Meredith, on the other hand, was far from industrious, having taken again to drink. In addition, his father had paid only half of the money he had committed for their equipment, which prompted threatening letters from the suppliers. Franklin found two friends who were willing to finance him, but only if he dumped Meredith. Fortunately, Meredith realized that he was better off returning to farming. All ended well: Meredith let Franklin buy him out of their partnership, headed off to the Carolinas, and later wrote letters describing the countryside there, which Franklin published.
And so Franklin finally had a print shop of his own. More to the point, he had a career. Printing and its related endeavors—publisher, writer, newspaperman, postmaster—began to seem not merely a job but an interesting calling, both noble and fun. In his long life he would have many other careers: scientist, politician, statesman, diplomat. But henceforth he always identified himself the way he would do sixty years later in the opening words of his last will and testament: “I, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, printer.”5
Franklin was the consummate networker. He liked to mix his civic life with his social one, and he merrily leveraged both to further his business life. This approach was displayed when he formed a club of young workingmen in the fall of 1727, shortly after his return to Philadelphia, that was commonly called the Leather Apron Club and officially dubbed the Junto.
Franklin’s small club was composed of enterprising tradesmen and artisans, rather than the social elite who had their own fancier gentlemen’s clubs. At first, the members went to a local tavern for their Friday evening meetings, but soon they were able to rent a house of their own. There they discussed issues of the day, debated philosophical topics, devised schemes for self-improvement, and formed a network for the furtherance of their own careers.
The enterprise was typical of Franklin, who seemed ever eager to organize clubs and associations for mutual benefit, and it was also typically American. As the nation developed a shopkeeping middle class, its people balanced their individualist streaks with a propensity to form clubs, lodges, associations, and fraternal orders. Franklin epitomized this Rotarian urge and has remained, after more than two centuries, a symbol of it.
Franklin’s Junto initially had twelve young members, among them his printing partner Hugh Meredith; George Webb, a witty but imprudent runaway Oxford student who was also apprenticed to Keimer; Thomas Godfrey, a glassworker and amateur mathematician; Joseph Breintnall, a scrivener and poetry lover; Robert Grace, a generous and pun-loving man with some family money; and William Coleman, a clear-headed and good-hearted clerk with exacting morals, who later became a distinguished merchant.
Besides being amiable club mates, the Junto members often proved helpful to one another personally and professionally. Godfrey boarded at Franklin’s shop and his wife cooked for them. Breintnall was the friend who procured the Quaker printing commission. And Grace and Coleman funded Franklin when he broke with Meredith.
The tone Franklin set for Junto meetings was earnest. Initiates were required to stand, lay their hand on their breast, and answer properly four questions: Do you have disrespect for any current member? Do you love mankind in general regardless of religion or profession? Do you feel people should ever be punished because of their opinions or mode of worship? Do you love and pursue truth for its own sake?
Franklin was worried that his fondness for conversation and eagerness to impress made him prone to “prattling, punning and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company.” Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.” So in the Junto, he began to work on his use of silence and gentle dialogue.
One method, which he had developed during his mock debates with John Collins in Boston and then when discoursing with Keimer, was to pursue topics through soft, Socratic queries. That became the preferred style for Junto meetings. Discussions were to be conducted “without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.” Franklin taught his friends to push their ideas through suggestions and questions, and to use (or at least feign) naïve curiosity to avoid contradicting people in a manner that could give offense. “All expressions of positiveness in opinion or of direct contradiction,” he recalled, “were prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.” It was a style he would urge on the Constitutional Convention sixty years later.
In a witty newspaper piece called “On Conversation,” which he wrote shortly after forming the Junto, Franklin stressed the importance of deferring, or at least giving the appearance of deferring, to others. Otherwise, even the smartest comments would “occasion envy and disgust.” His secret for how to win friends and influence people read like an early Dale Carnegie course: “Would you win the hearts of others, you must not seem to vie with them, but to admire them. Give them every opportunity of displaying their own qualifications, and when you have indulged their vanity, they will praise you in turn and prefer you above others . . . Such is the vanity of mankind that minding what others say is a much surer way of pleasing them than talking well ourselves.”6
Franklin went on to catalog the most common conversational sins “which cause dislike,” the greatest being “talking overmuch . . . which never fails to excite resentment.” The only thing amusing about such people, he joked, was watching two of them meet: “The vexation they both feel is visible in their looks and gestures; you shall see them gape and stare and interrupt one another at every turn, and watch with utmost impatience for a cough or pause, when they may crowd a word in edgeways.”
The other sins on his list were, in order: seeming uninterested, speaking too much about your own life, prying for personal secrets (“an unpardonable rudeness”), telling long and pointless stories (“old folks are most subject to this error, which is one chief reason their company is so often shunned”), contradicting or disputing someone directly, ridiculing or railing against things except in small witty doses (“it’s like salt, a little of which in some cases gives relish, but if thrown on by handfuls spoils all”), and spreading scandal (though he would later write lighthearted defenses of gossip).
The older he got, the more Franklin learned (with a few notable lapses) to follow his own advice. He used silence wisely, employed an indirect style of persuasion, and feigned modesty and naïveté in disputes. “When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.” Instead, he would agree in parts and suggest his differences only indirectly. “For these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me,” he recalled when writing his autobiography. This velvet-tongued and sweetly passive style of circumspect argument would make him seem sage to some, insinuating and manipulative to others, but inflammatory to almost nobody. The method would also become, often with a nod to Franklin, a staple in modern management guides and self-improvement books.
Though the youngest member of the Junto, Franklin was, by dint of his intellectual charisma and conversational charm, not only its founder but its driving force. The topics discussed ranged from the social to the scientific and metaphysical. Most of them were earnest, some were quirky, and all were intriguing. Did importing indentured servants make America more prosperous? What made a piece of writing good? Why did condensation form on a cold mug? What accounted for happiness? What is wisdom? Is there a difference between knowledge and prudence? If a sovereign power deprives a citizen of his rights, is it justifiable for him to resist?
In addition to such topics of debate, Franklin laid out a guide for the type of conversational contributions each member could usefully make. There were twenty-four in all, and because their practicality is so revealing of Franklin’s purposeful approach, they are worth excerpting at length:
1. Have you met with anything in the author you last read remarkable or suited to be communicated to the Junto? . . .
2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?
3. Hath any citizen in your knowledge failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?
4. Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?
5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?
6. Do you know of any fellow citizen who has lately done a worthy action deserving praise and imitation? Or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?
7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed or heard? Of imprudence? Of passion? Or of any other vice or folly? . . .
12. Hath any deserving stranger arrived in town since last meeting that you heard of? And what have you heard of his character or merits? And whether you think it lies in the power of the Junto to oblige him or encourage him as he deserves? . . .
14. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country of which it would be proper to move the legislature for an amendment?
15. Have you lately observed any encroachments on the just liberties of the people?
16. Has anybody attacked your reputation lately, and what can the Junto do toward securing it?
17. Is there any man whose friendship you want and which the Junto or any of them can procure for you? . . .
20. In what manner can the Junto or any of them assist you in any of your honorable designs?7
Franklin used the Junto as a launching pad for a variety of his public-service ideas. Early on, the group discussed whether Pennsylvania should increase its supply of paper currency, a proposal Franklin heartily favored because he thought it would benefit the economy and, of course, his own printing business. (Franklin and, by extension, the Junto were particularly fond of things that could help the public as well as themselves.) When the Junto moved into its own rented rooms, it created a library of books pooled from its members, which later formed the foundation for America’s first subscription library. Out of the Junto also came Franklin’s proposals for establishing a tax to pay for neighborhood constables, for creating a volunteer fire force, and for establishing the academy that later became the University of Pennsylvania.
Many of the rules and proposed queries for the Junto were similar to, though a bit less judgmental than, those that Cotton Mather had devised for his neighborhood benevolent societies a generation earlier in Boston. One of Mather’s, for example, was: “Is there any particular person whose disorderly behavior may be so scandalous and so notorious that we may do well to send unto the said person our charitable admonitions?” Daniel Defoe’s essay “Friendly Societies” and John Locke’s “Rules of a Society which Met Once a Week for the Improvement of Useful Knowledge,” both of which Franklin had read, also served as models.8
But, for the most part, with its earnest tenor and emphasis on self-improvement, the Junto was a product of Franklin’s own persona and part of his imprint on the American personality. It flourished with him at the helm for thirty years. Although it operated in relative secrecy, so many people sought to join that Franklin empowered each member to form his own spinoff club. Four or five affiliates flourished, and the Junto served as an extension and amplification of Franklin’s gregarious civic nature. Like Franklin himself, it was practical, industrious, inquiring, convivial, and middle-brow philosophical. It celebrated civic virtue, mutual benefits, the improvement of self and society, and the proposition that hardworking citizens could do well by doing good. It was, in short, Franklin writ public.
Frugal and industrious, with a network of Junto members to steer business his way, Franklin was doing modestly well as one of three printers in a town that would naturally have supported only two. But he had learned from his apprentice days in Boston that true success would come if he had not only a printing operation but also his own content and distribution network. His competitor Andrew Bradford published the town’s only newspaper, which was paltry but profitable, and that helped Bradford’s printing business by giving him clout with the merchants and politicians. He also was the postmaster, which gave him some control over what papers got distributed plus first access to news from afar.
Franklin decided to take Bradford on, and over the next decade he would succeed by building a media conglomerate that included production capacity (printing operations, franchised printers in other cities), products (a newspaper, magazine, almanac), content (his own writings, his alter ego Poor Richard’s, and those of his Junto), and distribution (eventually the whole of the colonial postal system).
First came the newspaper. Franklin decided to launch a competitor to Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury, but he made the mistake of confiding his plan to George Webb, a fellow member of the Junto who was an apprentice at Keimer’s print shop. Webb, to Franklin’s dismay, told Keimer, who immediately launched a slapdash newspaper of his own, to which he gave the unwieldly name The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Sciences, and Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin realized that it would be difficult to launch a third paper right away, and he did not have the funds. So he came up with a plan to first crush Keimer’s paper by using the most powerful weapon at his disposal: the fact that he was the best writer in Philadelphia, and probably, at 23, the most amusing writer in all of America. (Carl Van Doren, a Franklin biographer and great literary critic of the 1930s, flatly declared of Franklin that in 1728, “he was the best writer in America.” The closest rival for that title at the time would probably be the preacher Jonathan Edwards, who was certainly more intense and literary, though far less felicitous and amusing.)
In a competitive bank shot, Franklin decided to write a series of anonymous letters and essays, along the lines of the Silence Dogood pieces of his youth, for Bradford’s Mercury to draw attention away from Keimer’s new paper. The goal was to enliven, at least until Keimer was beaten, Bradford’s dull paper, which in its ten years had never published any such features.
The first two pieces were attacks on poor Keimer, who was serializing entries from an encyclopedia. His initial installment included, innocently enough, an entry on abortion. Franklin pounced. Using the pen names “Martha Careful” and “Celia Shortface,” he wrote letters to Bradford’s paper feigning shock and indignation at Keimer’s offense. As Miss Careful threatened, “If he proceeds farther to expose the secrets of our sex in that audacious manner [women would] run the hazard of taking him by the beard in the next place we meet him.” Thus Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America, not because he had any strong feelings on the issue, but because he knew it would help sell newspapers.
The next week Franklin launched a series of classic essays signed “Busy-Body,” which Bradford published on his front page with a large byline. Franklin wrote at least four on his own and two others in part before turning the series over to fellow Junto member Joseph Breintnall. “By this means the attention of the public was fixed on that paper, and Keimer’s proposals, which we burlesqued and ridiculed, were disregarded.”9
The Busy-Body began by cleverly establishing the inadequacies of Bradford’s paper (“frequently very dull”) and declaring his intention to make it (at least temporarily) better. He would do so by being a scold and tattle, in the tradition of the character Isaac Bickerstaff that the English essayist Richard Steele had created, thus adding gossip columnist to the list of Franklin’s American firsts. He readily admitted that much of this was “nobody’s business,” but “out of zeal for the public good,” he volunteered “to take nobody’s business wholly into my own hands.” Some might find themselves offended, he warned. Yet, he pointed out what was, and is, the basic appeal of gossip: “As most people delight in censure when they themselves are not the objects of it, if any are offended at my publicly exposing their private vices, I promise they shall have the satisfaction, in a very little time, of seeing their good friends and neighbors in the same circumstances.”
Keimer responded with a fusty admonition that the Busy-Body series might initially raise for readers of Bradford’s paper the “expectation that they would now have some entertainment for their money,” but they would soon feel “a secret grief to see the reputation of their neighbors blasted.” When the Busy-Body merrily continued to publish his barbs, the excitable Keimer became more shrill. He responded with limp doggerel: “You hinted at me in your paper. Which now has made me draw my rapier. With scornful eye, I see your hate. And pity your unhappy fate.” He paired this with a convoluted tale called “Hue and Cry after the Busy-Body,” portraying Franklin and Breintnall as a two-headed monster, with Franklin described as “every Ape’s epitome . . . as threadbare as his great coat, and skull as thick as his shoe soles.”10
Keimer thus became one of Franklin’s first outspoken foes. The betrayal, the press war, the dueling essays would all be repeated a decade later when Franklin and Bradford each decided to start magazines.
Sadly for those who enjoy titillation, the Busy-Body essays in fact failed to deliver much gossip. Instead, they tended to be clever tales with thinly disguised real-life counterparts (in one instance, a reader took the effort to publish a key to whom each character referred). Franklin employed what is now a standard disingenuous disclaimer: “If any bad characters happen to be drawn in the course of these papers, they mean no particular person.”
The final Busy-Body that was mainly written by Franklin made fun of treasure seekers who used divining rods and dug up the woods looking for buried pirate loot. “Men otherwise of very good sense have been drawn into this practice through an overweening desire of sudden wealth,” he wrote, “while the rational and almost certain methods of acquiring riches by industry and frugality are neglected.” The fable, an attack on the get-rich-quick schemes of the time, went on to preach Franklin’s favorite theme: slow and steady diligence is the true way to wealth. He ended by quoting what his imaginary friend Agricola said on giving his son a parcel of land: “I assure thee I have found a considerable quantity of gold by digging there; thee mayst do the same. But thee must carefully observe this, Never to dig more than plow deep.”
The essay had a second half that advocated more paper currency for Pennsylvania. Franklin wrote most of it, with a small section written by Breintnall. Franklin implied that those who opposed more paper currency were trying to protect their own financial interests, though he of course had his own financial interest in the approval of more printing work. He also launched the first of what would be many attacks on the province’s Proprietors, the Penn family, and their appointed governor, by implying that they were trying to make the bulk of Pennsylvania’s residents “their tenants and vassals.” This ending was deleted in most editions of Bradford’s newspaper, perhaps because Bradford was allied with the Penn family and their party.11
Another reason for pulling back the snide section on paper currency was that Franklin had produced a far more thoughtful essay on the subject, which he discussed in the Junto and published as a pamphlet the following week. “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency” was Franklin’s first serious analysis of public policy, and it holds up a lot better than his metaphysical musings on religion. Money was a concept he had a solid feel for, unlike theological abstractions.
Franklin argued that the lack of enough currency caused interest rates to rise, kept wages low, and increased dependence on imports. Creditors and big landowners opposed an increase in currency for selfish reasons, he charged, but “those who are lovers of trade and delight to see manufactures encouraged will be for having a large addition to our currency.” Franklin’s key insight was that hard currency, such as silver and gold, was not the true measure of a nation’s wealth: “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 silver and gold they possess.”
The essay was very popular, except among the wealthy, and it helped to persuade the legislature to adopt the proposed increase in paper currency. Although Bradford got the first commission to print some of the money, Franklin was given the next round of work. In the spirit of what Poor Richard would call “doing well by doing good,” Franklin was not averse to mingling his private interests with his public ones. His friends in the legislature, “who considered I had been of some service, thought it fit to reward me by employing me in printing the money—a very profitable job and a great help to me. This was another advantage gained by my being able to write.”12
Franklin’s scheme to put Keimer out of business, which was aided by the quirky printer’s own incompetence and inability to ignore barbs, soon succeeded. He fell into debt, was briefly imprisoned, fled to Barbados, and as he was leaving sold his newspaper to Franklin. Jettisoning the serialized encyclopedia and part of the paper’s unwieldy name, Franklin became the proud publisher of The Pennsylvania Gazette in October 1729. In his first letter to his readers, he announced that “there are many who have long desired to see a good newspaper in Pennsylvania,” thus taking a poke at both Keimer and Bradford.13
There are many types of newspaper editors. Some are crusading ideologues who are blessed with strong opinions, partisan passions, or a desire to challenge authority. Benjamin’s brother James was in this category. Some are the opposite: they like power and their proximity to it, and are comfortable with the established order and feel vested in it. Franklin’s Philadelphia competitor Andrew Bradford was such.
And then there are those who are charmed and amused by the world and delight in charming and amusing others. They tend to be skeptical of both orthodoxies and heresies, and they are earnest in their desire to seek truth and promote public betterment (as well as sell papers). There fits Franklin. He was graced—and afflicted—with the trait so common to journalists, especially ones who have read Swift and Addison once too often, of wanting to participate in the world while also remaining a detached observer. As a journalist he could step out of a scene, even one that passionately engaged him, and comment on it, or on himself, with a droll irony. The depths of his beliefs were often concealed by his knack for engaging in a knowing wink.
Like most other newspapers of the time, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was filled not only with short news items and reports on public events, but also with amusing essays and letters from readers. What made his paper a delight was its wealth of this type of correspondence, much of it written under pseudonyms by Franklin himself. This gimmick of writing as if from a reader gave Franklin more leeway to poke fun at rivals, revel in gossip, circumvent his personal pledge to speak ill of no one, and test-drive his evolving philosophies.
In a classic canny maneuver, Franklin corrected an early typo—he had reported that someone “died” at a restaurant when he meant to say “dined” at it—by composing a letter from a fictitious “J.T.” who discoursed on other amusing misprints. For example, one edition of the Bible quoted David as saying he was “wonderfully mad” rather than “made,” which caused an “ignorant preacher to harangue his audience for half an hour on the subject of spiritual madness.” Franklin then went on (under the guise of J.T.) to praise Franklin’s own paper, point out a similar typo made by his rival Bradford, criticize Bradford for being generally sloppier, and (with delicious irony) praise Franklin for not criticizing Bradford: “Your paper is most commonly very correct, and yet you were never known to triumph upon it by publicly ridiculing and exposing the continual blunders of your contemporary.” Franklin even turned his false modesty into a maxim to forgive his typo: “Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself.”14
The Franklin–Bradford newspaper war also included disputes over scoops and stolen stories. “When Mr. Bradford publishes after us,” Franklin wrote in one editor’s note, “and has occasion to take an Article or two out of the Gazette, which he is always welcome to do, he is desired not to date his paper a day before ours lest readers should imagine we take from him, which we always carefully avoid.”
Their competition had been going on for a year when Franklin set out to win from Bradford the job of being the official printer for the Pennsylvania Assembly. He had already begun cultivating some of the members, especially those in the faction that resisted the power of the Penn family and its upper-crust supporters. After Bradford printed the governor’s address to the Assembly in a “coarse and blundering manner,” Franklin saw his opening. He printed the same message “elegantly and correctly,” as he put it, and sent it to each of the members. “It strengthened the hands of our friends in the House,” Franklin later recalled, “and they voted us their printers.”15
Even as he became more political, Franklin resisted making his newspaper fiercely partisan. He expressed his credo as a publisher in a famous Gazette editorial “Apology for Printers,” which remains one of the best and most forceful defenses of a free press.
The opinions people have, Franklin wrote, are “almost as various as their faces.” The job of printers is to allow people to express these differing opinions. “There would be very little printed,” he noted, if publishers produced only things that offended nobody. At stake was the virtue of free expression, and Franklin summed up the Enlightenment position in a sentence that is now framed on newsroom walls: “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
“It is unreasonable to imagine that printers approve of everything they print,” he went on to argue. “It is likewise unreasonable what some assert, That printers ought not to print anything but what they approve; since . . . an end would thereby be put to free writing, and the world would afterwards have nothing to read but what happened to be the opinions of printers.”
With a wry touch, he reminded his readers that publishers are in business both to make money and inform the public. “Hence they cheerfully service all contending writers that pay them well,” even if they don’t agree with the writers’ opinions. “If all people of different opinions in this province would engage to give me as much for not printing things they don’t like as I could get by printing them, I should probably live a very easy life; and if all printers everywhere were so dealt by, there would be very little printed.”
It was not in Franklin’s nature, however, to be dogmatic or extreme about any principle; he generally gravitated toward a sensible balance. The rights of printers, he realized, were balanced by their duty to be responsible. Thus, even though printers should be free to publish offensive opinions, they should generally exercise discretion. “I myself have constantly refused to print anything that might countenance vice or promote immorality, though . . . I might have got much money. I have also always refused to print such things as might do real injury to any person.”
One such example involved a customer who asked the young printer to publish a piece in the Gazette that Franklin found “scurrilous and defamatory.” In his effort to decide whether he should take the customer’s money even though it violated his principles, Franklin subjected himself to the following test:
To determine whether I should publish it or not, I went home in the evening, purchased a twopenny loaf at the baker’s, and with the water from the pump made my supper; I then wrapped myself up in my great-coat, and laid down on the floor and slept till morning, when, on another loaf and a mug of water, I made my breakfast. From this regimen I feel no inconvenience whatever. Finding I can live in this manner, I have formed a determination never to prostitute my press to the purposes of corruption and abuse of this kind for the sake of gaining a more comfortable subsistence.
Franklin ended his “Apology for Printers” with a fable about a father and son traveling with a donkey. When the father rode and made his son walk, they were criticized by those they met; likewise, they were criticized when the son rode and made the father walk, or when they both rode the donkey, or when neither did. So finally, they decided to throw the donkey off a bridge. The moral, according to Franklin, was that it is foolish to try to avoid all criticism. Despite his “despair of pleasing everybody,” Franklin concluded, “I shall not burn my press or melt my letters.”16
Along with such high-minded principles, Franklin employed some more common strategies to push papers. One ever reliable method, which had particular appeal to the rather raunchy unmarried young publisher, was the time-honored truth that sex sells. Franklin’s Gazette was spiced with little leering and titillating items. In the issue a week after his “Apology for Printers,” for example, Franklin wrote about a husband who caught his wife in bed with a man named Stonecutter, tried to cut off the interloper’s head with a knife, but only wounded him. Franklin ends with a smirking pun about castration: “Some people admire that when the person offended had so fair and suitable opportunity, it did not enter his head to turn St-n-c-tt-r himself.”
The next issue had a similar short item about an amorous constable who had “made an agreement with a neighboring female to watch with her that night.” The constable makes the mistake of climbing into the window of a different woman, whose husband was in another room. Reported Franklin: “The good woman perceiving presently by the extraordinary fondness of her bedfellow that it could not possibly be her husband, made so much disturbance as to wake the good man, who finding somebody had got into his place without his leave began to lay about him unmercifully.”
And then there was the story of the sex-starved woman who wanted to divorce her husband because he could not satisfy her. She “at times industriously solicited most of the magistrates” to gain sympathy for her plight. After her husband was medically examined, however, she moved back in with him. “The report of the physicians (who in form examined his abilities and allowed him in every respect to be sufficient) gave her but small satisfaction,” Franklin wrote. “Whether any experiments more satisfactory have been tried, we cannot say; but it seems she now declares it as her opinion that ‘George is as good as de best.’ ” In another passing reference to sexual virility, which was also his first published notice of lightning, Franklin reported about a bolt that melted the pewter button on the pants of a young lad, adding: “ ’Tis well nothing else thereabouts was made of pewter.”
Writing as “The Casuist,” Franklin even helped to pioneer the genre of sexual and moral advice columns. (Although the literal definition of the word “casuistry” refers to the application of moral principles to everyday conduct, Franklin used it, with a touch of irony, in its more colloquial sense, which implies a slightly off-kilter or misleading application of those principles.) One letter from a reader, or from Franklin pretending to be a reader, posed the following dilemma: Suppose a person discovers that his wife has been seduced by his neighbor, and suppose he has reason to believe that if he reveals this to his neighbor’s wife, then she might agree to have sex with him, “is he justifiable in doing it?” Franklin, writing as the Casuist, gave an earnest answer. If the questioner were a Christian, he would know that he should “return not evil for evil, but repay evil with good.” And if he is not a Christian but instead “one who would make reason the rule of his actions,” he would come to the same conclusion: “such practices can produce no good to society.”17
Franklin also knew another maxim of journalism: crime stories sell, particularly when they are outlandish. In a report on the death of a young girl, for example, he provided the mix of reporting and outrage later perfected by racier tabloids. The case involved a couple who were charged with murdering the man’s daughter from a previous marriage by neglecting her, forcing her “to lie and rot in her nastiness,” giving her “her own excrements to eat,” and “turning her out of doors.” The child died, but a physician testified she would have died anyway from other ailments she had, so the judge sentenced the couple merely to be burned on the hand. Franklin raged at the “pathetic” ruling and delivered his own harsh verdict that the couple “had not only acted contrary to the particular law of all nations, but had even broken the universal law of nature.”18
A third reliable method of selling papers was through a light and rather innocent willingness to gossip and scandalmonger. In his first Busy-Body essay for Bradford, Franklin had defended the value of nosiness and tattling. Now that he had his own paper, he made it clear that the Gazette was pleased, indeed proud, to continue this service. Using the same tone as the Busy-Body, Franklin wrote an anonymous letter to his paper defending gossip, backbiting, and censure “by showing its usefulness and the great good it does to society.
“It is frequently the means of preventing powerful, politic, ill-designing men from growing too popular,” he wrote. “All-examining Censure, with her hundred eyes and her thousand tongues, soon discovers and as speedily divulges in all quarters every least crime or foible that is part of their true character. This clips the wings of their ambition.” Gossip can also, he noted, promote virtue, as some people are motivated more by fear of public humiliation than they are by inner moral principles. “ ‘What will the world say of me if I act thus?’ is often a reflection strong enough to enable us to resist the most powerful temptation to vice or folly. This preserves the integrity of the wavering, the honesty of the covetous, the sanctity of some of the religious, and the chastity of all virgins.”
It is amusing that Franklin, though he was willing to impugn the innate resolve of “all” virgins, protected himself by impugning only “some” religious people. In addition, he showed a somewhat cynical side by implying that most people act virtuously not because of an inner goodness, but because they are afraid of public censure.19
The following week Franklin defended the value of gossip in another letter, even more flavorful, purportedly penned by the aptly named Alice Addertongue. Franklin, who was then 26, had his fictional Alice identify herself, with an edge of irony, as a “young girl of about thirty-five.” She lived at home with her mother and, she said, “find it my duty as well as inclination to exercise my talent at censure for the good of my country folks.”
After taking a swipe at a “silly” piece in Bradford’s Mercury that criticized women for being gossipy, Alice recounts how she once found herself at odds with her mother on this issue. “She argued that scandal spoiled all good conversation, and I insisted without it there could be no such thing.” As a result, she was banished to the kitchen when visitors came for tea. While her mother engaged guests in high-minded discourse in the parlor, Alice regaled a few young friends with tales of a neighbor’s intrigue with his maid. Hearing the laughter, her mother’s friends began drifting from the parlor into the kitchen to partake in the gossip. Her mother finally joined them. “I have long thought that if you would make your paper a vehicle of scandal, you would double the number of your subscribers.”
Franklin’s playful defenses of busybodies, among the most amusing pieces he ever wrote, set a lighthearted tone for his paper. Because of his gregarious personality and fascination with human nature, he appreciated tales about people’s foibles and behavior, and he understood why others did as well. But he was, of course, only half-serious in his defense of gossip. The other part of his personality was more earnest: he continually resolved to speak ill of nobody. As a result, he toyed in the Gazette with the argument for gossip, but he did not really indulge in it much. For example, in one issue he noted that he had gotten a letter describing the disagreements and conduct of a certain couple, “but for charitable reasons the said letter is at present thought not fit to be published.”20
Likewise, he was ambiguous when writing about drinking. He was a temperate man who nevertheless enjoyed the joviality of taverns. In one famous Gazette piece, destined to become a poster in countless pubs, he produced a “Drinker’s Dictionary” listing 250 or so synonyms for being drunk: “Addled . . . afflicted . . . biggy . . . boozy . . . busky . . . buzzey . . . cherubimical . . . cracked . . . halfway to Concord . . . ” Yet he also frightened readers with colorful news accounts of the deaths of drunks, and he wrote editorials on the “poisonous” effect of spirits. As a printer in London, he had lectured coworkers that strong drink made them less industrious; as an editor in Philadelphia, he continued this crusade.21
Franklin also perfected the art of poking fun at himself. He realized, as have subsequent American humorists, that a bit of wry self-deprecation could make him seem more endearing. In one small item in the Gazette, he recounted how “a certain printer” was walking along the wharf when he slipped and stuck his leg into a barrel of tar. His awkward escape resembled the saying about being “as nimble as a bee in a tarbarrel.” Franklin ended the item with a little play on words: “ ’Tis true he was no Honey Bee, nor yet a Humble Bee, but a Boo-bee he may be allowed to be, namely B.F.”22
By the early 1730s, Franklin’s business was thriving. He started building an extended little empire by sending his young workers, once they had served their time with him, to set up partnership shops in places ranging from Charleston to Hartford. He would supply the presses and part of the expenses, as well as some content for the publications, and in return take a portion of the revenue.
Now that he had established himself in business, Franklin found himself in want of a good wife. Bachelorhood was frowned on in colonial America, and Franklin had a sexual appetite that he knew required discipline. So he set out to find himself a mate, preferably one with a dowry attached.
Boarding at his house was a friend from the Junto, glazier and mathematician Thomas Godfrey, and his wife, who tended to their meals and homemaking. Mrs. Godfrey proposed a match with one of her nieces, whom Franklin found “very deserving,” and a courtship ensued. Dowries being common, Franklin sought to negotiate his through Mrs. Godfrey: approximately £100, the amount he still owed on his printing business. When the girl’s family replied that they could not spare that much, Franklin suggested rather unromantically that they could mortgage their home.
The girl’s family promptly broke off the relationship, either out of outrage or (as Franklin suspected) in the hope that the courtship had gone so far that they would elope without a dowry. Resentful, Franklin refused to have anything more to do with the girl, even after Mrs. Godfrey suggested they were open to negotiations.
Not only did the courtship end, so did yet another Franklin friendship. Godfrey moved out, quit the Junto, and eventually turned over the printing of his little almanac to Franklin’s competitor, Bradford. Years later, Franklin wrote dismissively about the man who once shared his house, club, and presumably affection. Godfrey “was not a pleasing companion, as like most great mathematicians I have met with he expected unusual precision in everything said, or was forever denying or distinguishing upon trifles to the disturbance of all conversation.”
Franklin’s annoyance also led him to satirize the situation in the Gazette not long thereafter, using the pseudonym Anthony Afterwit. The “honest tradesman” complains that when he was courting his wife, her father hinted that he could be in for a nice dowry, and he “formed several fine schemes” of how to spend the money. “When the old gentleman saw I was pretty well engaged, and that the match was too far gone to be easily broke off, he . . . forbid me the house and told his daughter that if she married me he would not give her a farthing.” Afterwit, unlike the real Franklin, elopes. “I have since learned that there are old curmudgeons besides him who have this trick to marry their daughters and yet keep what they might well spare.”
(The Anthony Afterwit essay had an interesting side effect. His fictional wife, Abigail Afterwit, was the name of a character that had been created almost a decade earlier by Franklin’s estranged brother, James, in the New England Courant. James, who had since moved to Rhode Island, reprinted the Anthony Afterwit piece in his own paper along with a reply from a Patience Teacraft. Benjamin in turn reprinted the reply in his Philadelphia paper, and the following year he visited his brother for an emotional reconciliation. James’s health was failing, and he begged his younger brother to look after his 10-year-old son. That Benjamin did, arranging for his education and taking him on as an apprentice. A dominant theme in Franklin’s autobiography is that of making mistakes and then making amends, as if he were a moral bookkeeper balancing his accounts. Running away from his brother was, Franklin noted, “one of the first errata of my life.” Helping James’s son was the way to set the ledger back into balance. “Thus it was that I made my brother ample amends for the service I had deprived him of by leaving him so early.”)
After his courtship of Mrs. Godfrey’s niece was scuttled, Franklin scouted around for other possible brides, but he discovered that young printers were not valued enough to command a sure dowry. He could not expect money unless it was to marry a woman “I should not otherwise think agreeable.” In his autobiography, which he began years later as a letter to the illegitimate son he fathered while looking for a wife, Franklin wrote a memorable line: “In the meantime, that hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience.”23
Deborah Read, the girl who had laughed at him when he first straggled into Philadelphia, was also in a rather desperate situation. After Franklin left her to live in London, she had received only one curt letter from him. So she made the mistake of marrying a charming but unreliable potter named John Rogers. He was unable to make a living, and Deborah soon heard rumors that he had abandoned a wife in England. So she moved back in with her mother, and Rogers stole a slave and absconded to the West Indies, leaving behind a load of debt. Although there were reports he had died there in a brawl, these were unconfirmed, which meant Deborah would have difficulty legally remarrying. Bigamy was a crime punishable by thirty-nine lashes and life imprisonment.
Since the death of Deborah’s father, her mother had been eking out a living by selling homemade medicines. An advertising bill, printed by Franklin, notes: “The widow Read . . . continues to make and sell her well-known ointment for the itch, with which she has cured abundance of people . . . It also kills or drives away all sorts of lice in once or twice using.” Franklin frequently visited the Reads, advised them on business matters, and took pity on the dejected Deborah. He faulted himself for her plight, though Mrs. Read kindly took most of the blame for not having let them marry before he left for London. Fortunately for all, according to Franklin, “our mutual affection was revived.”
Around that time, Franklin developed a method for making difficult decisions. “My way is to divide a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro and the other Con,” he later recalled. Then he would list all the arguments on each side and weigh how important each was. “Where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out; if I find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con, I strike out the three.” By this bookkeeper’s calculus, it became clear to him “where the balance lies.”
However exactly he came to his decision, the balance of considerations eventually tipped toward Deborah, and in September 1730 they began living together as a married couple. There was no official ceremony. Instead, they entered into a type of common-law arrangement that served to protect them from charges of bigamy if Rogers un-expectedly reappeared. But he never did. Franklin viewed his union with Deborah, like his reconciliation with his brother, as an example of his rectifying an earlier error. “Thus I corrected that great erratum as well as I could,” Franklin later wrote of his mistreatment of the younger Deborah.
Franklin is often described as (or accused of) being far more practical than romantic, a man of the head rather than heart. The tale of his common-law marriage to Deborah provides some support for this view. But it also illustrates some complexities of Franklin’s character: his desire to tame his hard-to-govern passions by being practical, and the genuine fondness he felt for kindred companions. He was not given to starry-eyed soulful commitments or poetic love; instead, his emotional attachments tended to be the more prosaic bonds of affection that grew out of partnership, self-interest, collaboration, camaraderie, and good-humored kinship.
A wife who brought with her a dowry would have likely also brought expensive social airs and aspirations. Instead, Franklin found “a good and faithful helpmate” who was frugal and practical and devoid of pretensions, traits that he later noted were far more valuable to a rising tradesman. Their union remained mutually useful, if not deeply romantic, until Deborah’s death forty-four years later. As Franklin would soon have Poor Richard pronounce in his almanac: “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”24
There was one major complication facing the new marriage. Around that time, Franklin fathered and took sole custody of an illegitimate son named William, which was probably the “great inconvenience” that he coldly wrote in his autobiography was the result of consorting with “low women.”
The identity of William’s mother is one of history’s delicious mysteries, a source of speculation among scholars. Franklin never revealed the secret, nor did William, if he knew. In fact, even the date of his birth is unclear. Let’s start there.
Most historians say that William was born sometime between April 12, 1730, and April 12, 1731. This is based on a letter Franklin wrote to his own mother on April 12, 1750, referring to William as “now 19 years of age, a tall, proper youth, and much of a beau.”
Willard Sterne Randall in A Little Revenge, a fascinating but somewhat speculative account of Franklin’s troubled relationship with his son, questions this. In September 1746, William left home with an ensign’s commission on a military expedition to Canada, and Randall argues that he was unlikely to have been only 15 or 16. Perhaps, in writing his mother, Franklin was shaving a year or two off William’s age to make him seem legitimate. Likewise, the meticulous Franklin scholar J. A. Leo Lemay, on his Web site detailing Franklin’s life, surmises he was born in 1728 or 1729, as do some nineteenth-century biographers.
However, we know that before he was allowed to enlist, perhaps sometime in early 1746, William tried to run away to sea, and his father had to fetch him home from a ship in the harbor, which indicates that he indeed might have been not any older than 15 or 16 at the time (his father had considered running off to sea at age 12, and did run away to Philadelphia at 17). Sheila Skemp’s comprehensive biography of William makes it seem quite logical that he embarked with the military at 16, well after he finished his schooling. In addition, William was responsible for the belief reported in a magazine that he was 82 when he died in 1813 (which would place his birth in late 1730 or early 1731).
On balance, because neither man ever denied William’s illegitimacy, it makes sense to believe that Franklin was telling the truth to his mother when he referred to William’s age, and it makes equal sense to believe that William was never (intentionally or not) misleading about his age. Based on these assumptions, it is likely that William was born around the time that Deborah began living with Franklin in late 1730.25
That being the case, might Deborah actually have been his mother, as some scholars speculate? Might the common-law marriage have been partly occasioned by her pregnancy, while William’s origin was left murky in case Rogers reappeared and charged her with bigamy and adultery? As Carl Van Doren muses, “There was bound to be a scandal. But of course it would be less if the child appeared to be Franklin’s and an unknown mother’s. The lusty philosopher could take all the blame.”
But this theory doesn’t bear much scrutiny. If Deborah had been pregnant and given birth, there would surely be some friends and relatives, including her mother, who would have known. As H. W. Brands puts it, “Even after the passage of years precluded any further concerns about Rogers, Debbie declined to claim William as her own—an omission impossible to imagine in any mother, let alone one who had to watch from close at hand while her son spent his life labeled a bastard.” On the contrary, she was openly hostile to him. According to a clerk who later worked for the Franklins, Deborah referred to William as “the greatest villain upon earth” and heaped upon him “invectives in the foulest terms I ever heard from a gentlewoman.”26
During a heated election in 1764, William’s paternity became an issue. One abusive pamphlet charged that he was the son of a prostitute named Barbara who was subsequently exploited by the Franklins as a maid until she died and was buried in an unmarked grave. Given the scurrilous nature of that campaign and the unlikelihood that any of the Franklins could have abided having William’s real mother around as their maid, this also seems implausible.
The best explanation comes from a 1763 letter about William, rediscovered more than two centuries later, which was written by George Roberts, a prosperous Philadelphia merchant who was a close family friend. “ ’Tis generally known here his birth is illegitimate and his mother not in good circumstances,” Roberts wrote to a friend in London, “but the report of her begging bread in the streets of this city is without the least foundation in truth. I understand some small provision is made by him for her, but her being none of the most agreeable women prevents particular notice being shown, or the father and son acknowledging any connection with her.” As Roberts was probably in a position to know, and as he had no ulterior motive, we are left with this as the likeliest scenario.27
In his autobiography (which extols the virtues of “industry” and “frugality” a total of thirty-six times), Franklin wrote of his wife, “It was lucky for me that I had one as much disposed to industry and frugality as myself.” He gives her even more credit in a letter written later, near the end of his life: “Frugality is an enriching virtue, a virtue I could never acquire in myself, but I was lucky enough to find it in a wife, who thereby became a fortune to me.” For Franklin, this passed for true love. Deborah helped at the print shop, stitched pamphlets, and purchased rags for papermaking. At least initially, they had no servants, and Franklin ate his bread-and-milk porridge each morning from a twopenny bowl.
In later years, after a conflicted Franklin had developed some taste for finery while still clinging to his admiration for frugality, he wryly recounted a little lapse on Deborah’s part that showed “how luxury will enter families and make a progress, in spite of principle.” One day he arrived at breakfast to find it served in a china bowl with a silver spoon. Deborah had bought them at the “enormous sum” of 23 shillings, with “no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbors.” With a droll mix of pride and disdain, Franklin recalled how, over many years, as their wealth grew, they ended up with china and furnishings worth several hundred pounds.
When the young Franklin heard that his little sister Jane was planning to marry, he wrote her a letter that reflected his view that a good wife should be frugal and industrious. He had thought about sending her a tea table, he said, but his practical nature got the better of him. “When I considered that the character of a good housewife was far preferable to that of being only a pretty gentlewoman, I concluded to send you a spinning-wheel.” As Poor Richard would soon phrase it in his first almanac: “Many estates are spent in the getting/ Since women for tea forsook spinning and knitting.”28
The virtue of frugality was also one of young Franklin’s favorite themes in his newspaper writings. In Anthony Afterwit’s letter, after complaining about having to elope with no dowry, he goes on to ridicule his wife for adopting the airs and spending habits of a gentlewoman. First she pays for a fancy mirror, which then requires a nice table under it, then a tea service, and then a clock. Facing mounting debts, Anthony decides to sell these things when his wife leaves town to visit relatives. To replace the fancy furniture, he buys a spinning wheel and some knitting needles. He asks the Gazette to publish the letter so that she will read it before she returns and thus be prepared. “If she can conform to this new scheme of living, we shall be the happiest couple perhaps in the province.” And then, as a reward, he might let her have the nice mirror back.
Less sexist than most men of his day, Franklin also aimed his barbs at men. Afterwit’s letter was answered two weeks later by one from another Franklin creation, Celia Single. With the delightful gossipy voice of his other female characters, such as Silence Dogood and Alice Addertongue, Single recounts a visit to a friend whose husband is trying to replicate Afterwit’s approach. A raucous argument ensues. “There is neither sin nor shame in knitting a pair of stockings,” the husband says. She replies, “There are poor women enough in town that can knit.” Single finally leaves, “knowing that a man and his wife are apt to quarrel more violently when before strangers than when by themselves.” She later hears that the knitting thread ended up in the fireplace.
Single (or rather Franklin) goes on to admonish Franklin for publishing more tales of self-indulgent women than men. “If I were disposed to be censorious, I could furnish you with instances enough,” she says, then proceeds to rattle off a long list of men who waste their time playing pool, dice, or checkers and buying fancy clothes. Finally, Franklin has her cleverly poke at his veil of pseudonymity. “There are holes enough to be picked in your coat as well as others; and those who are affronted by the satires you may publish will not consider so much who wrote as who printed.”29
On a more serious and less modern note, Franklin published, four weeks after he married, “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness.” He began with a paean to marriage, “the surest and most lasting foundation of comfort and love.” However, the folly of some who enter into it often makes it “a state of the most exquisite wretchedness and misery.” He apologized for aiming his advice at women, as men were in fact more faulty, “but the reason is because I esteem them better disposed to receive and practice it.”
Among his rules: avoid all thoughts of managing your husband, never deceive him or make him uneasy, accept that he “is a man not an angel,” “resolve every morning to be good-natured and cheerful,” remember the word “obey” in your marriage vows, do not dispute with him, and “deny yourself the trivial satisfaction of having your own will.” A woman’s power and happiness, Franklin wrote, “has no other foundation than her husband’s esteem and love.” Therefore, a wife should “share and soothe his cares, and with the utmost diligence conceal his infirmities.” And when it comes to sex: “Let the tenderness of your conjugal love be expressed with such decency, delicacy and prudence as that it may appear plainly and thoroughly distinct from the designing fondness of a harlot.”30
Franklin’s essays and fictional letters make it clear that he entered into his union with Deborah holding some traditional views on matrimony: wives should be supportive, households should be run frugally and industriously. Fortunately for him, Deborah tended to share those views. In general, she had plain tastes, a willingness to work, and a desire to please her spouse. Of course, as he might have pointed out, the same could be said of him at the time.
And so they settled into a partnership that was both more and less than a conventional marriage. A tireless collaborator both in the house and at work, Deborah handled most of the accounts and expanded their shop’s inventory to include ointments made by her mother, crown soap made by Franklin’s Boston relatives, coffee, tea, chocolate, saffron, cheese, fish, and various other sundries. She strained her eyes binding books and sewing clothes by candlelight. And though her spelling and choice of words reflected her lack of education—the sexton of the church was noted as the “seck stone” and one customer was called “Mary the Papist”—her copious entries in their shop book are a delightful record of the times.
Franklin’s affection for her grew from his pride at her industry; many years later, when he was in London arguing before the House of Commons that unfair taxes would lead to boycotts of British manufacturers, he asserted that he had never been prouder than when he was a young tradesman and wore only clothes that had been made by his wife.
But Deborah was not merely a submissive or meek partner to the man she often addressed (as he did her) as “my dear child” and whom she sometimes publicly called “Pappy.” She had a fierce temper, which Franklin invariably defended. “Don’t you know that all wives are in the right?” he asked a nephew who was having a dispute with Deborah. Soon after their marriage, he wrote a piece called “A Scolding Wife,” in which he defended assertive women by saying they tended to be “active in the business of the family, special good housewives, and very careful of their husband’s interests.”31
The only extant painting of Deborah makes her appear to be a sensible and determined woman, plump and plain but not unattractive. In a letter he wrote her years later from London, he described a mug he was sending and compared it to her: “I fell in love with it at first sight, for I thought it looked like a fat, jolly dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on, good natured and lovely, and just put me in mind of—somebody.”
It was a relationship that did not inspire great romantic verse, but it did produce an endearing ballad that he put into the mouth of Poor Richard. In it, Franklin paid tribute to “My Plain Country Joan” and blessed the day he made her his own. Among the lyrics:
Not a word of her shape, or her face, or her eyes,
Of flames or of darts shall you hear:
Though I beauty admire, ’tis virtue I prize,
Which fades not in seventy years . . .
In peace and good order my household she guides,
Right careful to save what I gain;
Yet cheerfully spends, and smiles on the friends
I’ve the pleasure to entertain . . .
The best have some faults, and so has my Joan,
But then they’re exceedingly small,
And now, I’m used to ’em, they’re so like my own.
I can scarcely feel them at all.
Over the years, Franklin would outgrow Deborah in many ways. Though they shared values, he was far more worldly and intellectual than she was, or ever wanted to be. There is some evidence that she may have been born in Birmingham and brought to America as a young child, but during her adult life she seems never to have spent a night away from Philadelphia, and she lived most of her life on Market Street within two blocks of the house where she was raised.
Franklin, on the other hand, loved to travel, and although he would, in later years, occasionally express some hope that she would accompany him, he knew that she was not so inclined. He seemed to sense that she would not be socially comfortable in his new realms. So, in this regard, they respected each other’s independence, perhaps to a fault. For fifteen of the last seventeen years of Deborah’s life, Franklin would be away, including when she died. Nevertheless, their mutual affection, respect, and loyalty—and their sense of partnership—would endure.32
Two years into their marriage, in October 1732, Deborah gave birth to a son. Francis Folger Franklin, known as Franky, was doted on by both parents: he had his portrait painted when still a baby, and his father advertised for a tutor to teach both his children when Francis was 2 and William about 4. For the rest of his life, Franklin would marvel at the memory of how precocious, curious, and special Franky was.
These were, alas, destined to be only sorrowful memories. In one of the few searing tragedies of Franklin’s life, Franky died of smallpox just after his fourth birthday. On his grave, Franklin chose a simple epitaph: “The delight of all who knew him.”
The bitter irony was that Franklin had become a fervent advocate of smallpox vaccinations after they had been ridiculed in the New England Courant when Franklin worked there for his brother. In the years preceding Franky’s birth, he had editorialized in the Pennsylvania Gazette in support of inoculations and published statistics showing how effective they were. In 1730, for example, he wrote an account of a Boston epidemic in which most people who had been vaccinated were spared.
He had planned to inoculate Franky, but he had delayed doing so because the boy had been ill with the flux. In a sad announcement that appeared in his paper a week after the boy’s death, Franklin denied rumors that he died from being vaccinated. “I do hereby sincerely declare that he was not inoculated, but received the distemper in the common way of infection.” He went on to declare his belief that inoculation was “a safe and beneficial practice.”
The memory of Franky was one of the few things ever to cause Franklin painful reflections. When his sister Jane wrote to him in London years later with happy news about his grandsons, Franklin responded that it “brings often afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky, though now dead thirty-six years, whom I have seldom since seen equaled in everything, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh.”33
Adding to the poignancy, Franklin had written for his paper, while Franky was still alive, an unusually deep rumination on “The Death of Infants,” which was occasioned by the death of a neighbor’s child. Drawing on his observations of the tiny Franky, he described the magical beauty of babies: “What curious joints and hinges on which limbs are moved to and fro! What an inconceivable variety of nerves, veins, arteries, fibers, and little invisible parts are found in every member! . . . What endless contrivances to secure life, to nourish nature, and to propagate the same to future animals!” How could it be, Franklin then asked, that “a good and merciful Creator should produce myriads of such exquisite machines to no other end or purpose but to be deposited in the dark chambers of the grave” before they were old enough to know good from evil or to serve their fellow man and their God? The answer, he admitted, was “beyond our mortal ken” to understand. “When nature gave us tears, she gave us leave to weep.”34
When we last took Franklin’s spiritual pulse in London, he had written his ill-conceived “Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity,” which attacked the idea of free will and much of Calvinist theology, and then he had repudiated the pamphlet as an embarrassing “erratum.” That left him in a religious quandary. He no longer believed in the received dogmas of his Puritan upbringing, which taught that man could achieve salvation only through God’s grace rather than through good works. But he was uncomfortable embracing a simple and unenhanced version of deism, the Enlightenment-era creed that reason and the study of nature (instead of divine revelation) tell us all we can know about our Creator. The deists he knew, including his younger self, had turned out to be squirrelly in their morals.
On his return to Philadelphia, Franklin showed little interest in organized religion and even less in attending Sunday services. Still, he continued to hold some basic religious beliefs, among them “the existence of the Deity” and that “the most acceptable service of God was doing good to man.” He was tolerant toward all sects, particularly those that worked to make the world a better place, and he made sure “to avoid all discourse that might tend to lessen the good opinion another might have of his own religion.” Because he believed that churches were useful to the community, he paid his annual subscription to support the town’s Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Jedediah Andrews.35
One day, Andrews prevailed on him to sample his Sunday sermons, which Franklin did for five weeks. Unfortunately, he found them “uninteresting and unedifying since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us good Presbyterians than good citizens.” On his final visit, the reading from the Scripture (Philippians 4:8) related to virtue. It was a topic dear to Franklin’s heart, and he hoped that Andrews would expound on the concept in his sermon. Instead, the minister focused only on dogma and doctrine, without offering any practical thoughts about virtue. Franklin was “disgusted,” and he reverted to spending his Sundays reading and writing on his own.36
Franklin began to clarify his religious beliefs through a series of essays and letters. In them, he adopted a creed that would last the rest of his life: a virtuous, morally fortified, and pragmatic version of deism. Unlike most pure deists, he concluded that it was useful (and thus probably correct) to believe that a faith in God should inform our daily actions; but like other deists, his faith was devoid of sectarian dogma, burning spirituality, deep soul-searching, or a personal relationship to Christ.37
The first of these religious essays was a paper “for my own private use,” written in November 1728, entitled “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion.” Unlike his London dissertation, which was clogged with convoluted imitations of analytic philosophy, it was elegant and sparse. He began with a simple affirmation: “I believe there is one Supreme most perfect being.”38
It was an important statement, because some mushier deists shied even from going that far. As Diderot once quipped, a deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist. Franklin lived very long, and despite the suspicions of John Adams and others that he was a closet atheist, he repeatedly and indeed increasingly asserted his belief in a supreme God.
In the deist tradition, Franklin’s Supreme Being was somewhat distant and uninvolved in our daily travails. “I imagine it great vanity in me to suppose that the Supremely Perfect does in the least regard such an inconsiderable nothing as man,” he wrote. He added his belief that this “Infinite Father” was far above wanting our praise or prayers.
There is in all humans, however, a desire and a deeply felt duty to worship a more intimate God, Franklin surmised. Therefore, he wrote, the Supreme Being causes there to be lesser and more personal gods for mortal men to worship. Franklin thus has it both ways: combining the deist concept of God as a distant First Cause with the belief of other religions that worship a God who is directly involved in people’s lives. The result is a Supreme Being that can be manifest in various ways, depending on the needs of different worshipers.
Some commentators, most notably A. Owen Aldridge, read this literally as Franklin’s embracing some sort of polytheism, with a bevy of lesser gods overseeing various realms and planets. Occasionally throughout his life, Franklin would refer to “the gods,” but these later references are quite casual and colloquial, and Franklin seems to be speaking more figuratively than literally in his 1728 paper. As Kerry Walters writes in Benjamin Franklin and His Gods, “It is an error to presume they point to a literal polytheism. Such a conclusion is as philosophically bizarre as it is textually unwarranted.” (Given the difficulties Franklin sometimes seems to have in believing in one God, it seems unlikely he could find himself believing in many.)39
Franklin went on to outline how he viewed and worshiped his own personal God. This involved offering suitable prayers, and Franklin produced a whole liturgy that he had composed. It also required acting virtuously, and Franklin engaged in a moral calculus that was very pragmatic and even somewhat utilitarian: “I believe He is pleased and delights in the happiness of those He has created; and since without virtue man can have no happiness in this world, I firmly believe He delights to see me virtuous.”
In a paper he subsequently read to his friends in the Junto, Franklin elaborated his religious beliefs by exploring the issue of “divine providence,” the extent to which God gets involved in worldly matters. The Puritans believed in a detailed and intimate involvement, called “special providence,” and regularly prayed to God for very specific intercessions. As Calvin himself put it, “Supposing that He remains tranquilly in heaven without caring for the world outrageously deprives God of all effective power.” Most deists, on the other hand, believed in a “general providence,” in which God expresses his will through the laws of nature he set in motion instead of by micromanaging our daily lives.
As was typical, Franklin sought a pragmatic resolution in his Junto talk, which he called “On the Providence of God in the Government of the World.” He began by apologizing to “my intimate pot companions” for being rather “unqualified” to speak on spiritual matters. His study of nature, he said, convinced him that God created the universe and was infinitely wise, good, and powerful. He then explored four possibilities: (1) God predetermined and predestined everything that happens, eliminating all possibility of free will; (2) He left things to proceed according to natural laws and the free will of His creatures, and never interferes; (3) He predestined some things and left some things to free will, but still never interferes; (4) “He sometimes interferes by His particular providence and sets aside the effects which would otherwise have been produced by any of the above causes.”40
Franklin ended up settling on the fourth option, but not because he could prove it; instead, it resulted from a process of elimination and a sense of which belief would be most useful for people to hold. Any of the first three options would mean that God is not infinitely powerful or good or wise. “We are then necessarily driven into the fourth supposition,” he wrote. He admitted that many find it contradictory to believe both that God is infinitely powerful and that men have free will (it was the conundrum that stymied him in the London dissertation he wrote and then renounced). But if God is indeed all powerful, Franklin reasoned, he surely is able to find a way to give the creatures he made in his image some of his free will.
Franklin’s conclusion had, as might be expected, practical consequences: people should love God and “pray to Him for His favor and protection.” He did not, however, stray too far from deism; he placed little faith in the use of prayers for specific personal requests or miracles. In an irreverent letter he later wrote to his brother John, he calculated that 45 million prayers were offered in all of New England seeking victory over a fortified French garrison in Canada. “If you do not succeed, I fear I shall have but an indifferent opinion of Presbyterian prayers in such cases as long as I live. Indeed, in attacking strong towns I should have more dependence on works than on faith.”
Above all, Franklin’s beliefs were driven by pragmatism. The final sentence of his Junto talk stressed that it was socially useful for people to believe in the version of divine providence and free will that he proposed: “This religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our own minds, and render us benevolent, useful and beneficial to others.”41
Not all of Franklin’s religious musings were this earnest. Around the time of his Junto paper, he wrote for his newspaper a tale called “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly,” which was a delightful parody of Puritan mystical beliefs clashing with scientific experimentation. The accused witches were to be subjected to two tests: weighed on a scale against the Bible, and tossed in the river with hands and feet bound to see if they floated. They agree to submit to these tests—on the condition that two of the accusers take the same test. With colorful details of all the ridiculous pomp, Franklin described the process. The accused and accusers all succeed in outweighing the Bible. But both of the accused and one of the accusers fail to sink in the river, thus indicating that they are witches. The more intelligent spectators conclude from this that most people naturally float. The others are not so sure, and they resolve to wait until summer when the experiment could be tried with the subjects unclothed.42
Franklin’s freethinking unnerved his family. When his parents wrote of their concern over his “erroneous opinions,” Franklin replied with a letter that spelled out a religious philosophy, based on tolerance and utility, that would last his life. It would be vain, he wrote, for any person to insist that “all the doctrines he holds are true and all he rejects are false.” The same could be said of the opinions of different religions as well. They should be evaluated, the young pragmatist said, by their utility: “I think opinions should be judged 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 that he holds none that are dangerous, which I hope is the case with me.” He had little use for the doctrinal distinctions his mother worried about. “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 by what we thought, but what we did . . . that we did good to our fellow creatures. See Matth 26.” His parents, a bit more versed in the Scripture, probably caught that he meant Matthew 25. They did, nonetheless, eventually stop worrying about his heresies.43
Franklin’s historical reputation has been largely shaped, for disciples and detractors alike, by his account in his autobiography of the famous project he launched to attain “moral perfection.” This rather odd endeavor, which involved sequentially practicing a list of virtues, seems at once so earnest and mechanical that one cannot help either admiring him or ridiculing him. As the novelist D. H. Lawrence later sneered, “He made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a gray nag in a paddock.”
So it’s important to note the hints of irony and self-deprecation in his droll recollection, written when he was 79, of what he wryly dubbed “the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” His account has touches of the amused-by-his-younger-self tone to be found in the diverting little tales he wrote in France at the same time that he was writing this part of his autobiography. Yet it should also be noted that, as a young man, he seemed to approach his moral perfection program with an endearing sincerity, and even as an old man seemed proud of its worthiness.
Franklin began his quest around the time he ended his unsatisfactory visits to Presbyterian services and started spelling out his own religious creed. The endeavor was typically pragmatic. It contained no abstract philosophizing nor any reference to religious doctrines. As he later noted with pride, it was not merely an exhortation to be virtuous, it was also a practical guide on how to achieve that goal.
First he made a list of twelve virtues he though desirable, and to each he appended a short definition:
Temperance: Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; (i.e., waste nothing).
Industry: Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
A Quaker friend “kindly” informed him that he had left something off: Franklin was often guilty of “pride,” the friend said, citing many examples, and could be “overbearing and rather insolent.” So Franklin added “humility” to be the thirteenth virtue on his list. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”44
The descriptions, such as the notably lenient one for chastity, were rather revealing. So too was the endeavor itself. It was also, in its passion for self-improvement through diligent resolve, enchantingly American.
Franklin’s focus was on traits that could help him succeed in this world, instead of ones that would exalt his soul for the hereafter. “Franklin celebrated a characteristically bourgeois set of virtues,” writes social theorist David Brooks. “These are not heroic virtues. They don’t fire the imagination or arouse the passions like the aristocratic love of honor. They are not particularly spiritual virtues. But they are practical and they are democratic.”
The set of virtues was also, as Edmund Morgan and others have pointed out, somewhat selfish. It did not include benevolence or charity, for example. But in fairness, we must remember that this was a young tradesman’s plan for self-improvement, not a full-blown statement of his morality. Benevolence was and would continue to be a motivating ideal for him, and charity, as Morgan notes, “was actually the guiding principle of Franklin’s life.” The fundamental tenet of his morality, he repeatedly declared, was “The most acceptable service to God is doing good to man.”45
Mastering all of these thirteen virtues at once was “a task of more difficulty than I had imagined,” Franklin recalled. The problem was that “while my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another.” So he decided to tackle them like a person who, “having a garden to weed, does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength, but works on one of the beds at a time.”
On the pages of a little notebook, he made a chart with seven red columns for the days of the week and thirteen rows labeled with his virtues. Infractions were marked with a black spot. The first week he focused on temperance, trying to keep that line clear while not worrying about the other lines. With that virtue strengthened, he could turn his attention to the next one, silence, hoping that the temperance line would stay clear as well. In the course of the year, he would complete the thirteen-week cycle four times.
“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined,” he dryly noted. In fact, his notebook became filled with holes as he erased the marks in order to reuse the pages. So he transferred his charts to ivory tablets that could be more easily wiped clean.
His greatest difficulty was with the virtue of order. He was a sloppy man, and he eventually decided that he was so busy and had such a good memory that he didn’t need to be too orderly. He likened himself to the hurried man who goes to have his ax polished but after a while loses patience and declares, “I think I like a speckled ax best.” In addition, as he recounted with amusement, he developed another convenient rationalization: “Something that pretended to be reason was every now and then suggesting to me that such extreme nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in morals, which if it were known would make me ridiculous; that a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated.”
Humility was also a problem. “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it,” he wrote, echoing what he had said about how he had acquired the appearance of industry by carting his own paper through the streets of Philadelphia. “There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride; disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself.” This battle against pride would challenge—and amuse—him for the rest of his life. “You will see it perhaps often in this history. For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I would probably be proud of my humility.”
Indeed, he would always indulge a bit of pride in discussing his moral perfection project. Fifty years later, as he flirted with the ladies of France, he would pull out the old ivory slates and show off his virtues, causing one French friend to exult at touching “this precious booklet.”46
This plan for pursuing virtue, combined with the religious outlook that he had simultaneously been formulating, laid the foundation for a lifelong creed. It was based on pragmatic humanism and a belief in a benevolent but distant deity who was best served by being benevolent to others. Franklin’s ideas never ripened into a profound moral or religious philosophy. He focused on understanding virtue rather than God’s grace, and he based his creed on rational utility rather than religious faith.
His outlook contained some vestiges of his Puritan upbringing, most notably an inclination toward frugality, lack of pretense, and a belief that God appreciates those who are industrious. But he detached these concepts from Puritan orthodoxy about the salvation of the elect and from other tenets that he did not consider useful in improving earthly conduct. His life shows, the Yale scholar A. Whitney Griswold has noted, “what Puritan habits detached from Puritan beliefs were capable of achieving.”
He was also far less inward-looking than Cotton Mather or other Puritans. Indeed, he poked fun at professions of faith that served little worldly purpose. As A. Owen Aldridge writes, “The Puritans were known for their constant introspection, fretting about sins, real or imaginary, and agonizing about the uncertainty of their salvation. Absolutely none of this soul-searching appears in Franklin. One can scrutinize his work from first page to last without finding a single note of spiritual anxiety.”47
Likewise, he had little use for the sentimental subjectivity of the Romantic era, with its emphasis on the emotional and inspirational, that began rising in Europe and then America during the later part of his life. As a result, he would be criticized by such Romantic exemplars as Keats, Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Melville.48
Instead, he fit squarely into the tradition—indeed, was the first great American exemplar—of the Enlightenment and its Age of Reason. That movement, which rose in Europe in the late seventeenth century, was defined by an emphasis on reason and observable experience, a mistrust of religious orthodoxy and traditional authority, and an optimism about education and progress. To this mix, Franklin added elements of his own pragmatism. He was able (as novelist John Updike and historian Henry Steele Commager, among others, have noted) to appreciate the energies inherent in Puritanism and to liberate them from rigid dogma so they could flower in the freethinking atmosphere of the Enlightenment.49
In his writings about religion over the next five decades, Franklin rarely displayed much fervor. This is largely because he felt it was futile to wrestle with theological questions about which he had no empirical evidence and thus no rational basis for forming an opinion. Thunderbolts from heaven were, for him, something to be captured by a kite string and studied.
As a result, he was a prophet of tolerance. Focusing on doctrinal disputes was divisive, he felt, and trying to ascertain divine certainties was beyond our mortal ken. Nor did he think that such endeavors were socially useful. The purpose of religion should be to make men better and to improve society, and any sect or creed that did so was fine with him. Describing his moral improvement project in his autobiography, he wrote, “There was in it no mark of any of the distinguishing tenets of any particular sect. I had purposely avoided them; for, being fully persuaded of the utility and excellency of my method, and that it might be serviceable to people in all religions, and intending some time or other to publish it, I would not have any thing in it that should prejudice any one, of any sect, against it.”
This simplicity of Franklin’s creed meant that it was sneered at by sophisticates and disqualified from inclusion in the canon of profound philosophy. Albert Smyth, who compiled volumes of Franklin’s papers in the nineteenth century, proclaimed, “His philosophy never got beyond the homely maxims of worldly prudence.” But Franklin freely admitted that his religious and moral views were not based on profound analysis or metaphysical thinking. As he declared to a friend later in life, “The great uncertainty I found in metaphysical reasonings disgusted me, and I quitted that kind of reading and study for others more satisfactory.”
What he found more satisfactory—more than metaphysics or poetry or exalted romantic sentiments—was looking at things in a pragmatic and practical way. Did they have beneficial consequences? For him, there was a connection between civic virtue and religious virtue, between serving his fellow man and honoring God. He was unashamed by the simplicity of this creed, as he explained in a sweet letter to his wife. “God is very good to us,” he wrote. “Let us . . . show our sense of His goodness to us by continuing to do good to our fellow creatures.”50
Poor Richard’s Almanack, which Franklin began publishing at the end of 1732, combined the two goals of his doing-well-by-doing-good philosophy: the making of money and the promotion of virtue. It became, in the course of its twenty-five-year run, America’s first great humor classic. The fictional Poor Richard Saunders and his nagging wife, Bridget (like their predecessors Silence Dogood, Anthony Afterwit, and Alice Addertongue), helped to define what would become a dominant tradition in American folk humor: the naïvely wicked wit and homespun wisdom of down-home characters who seem to be charmingly innocent but are sharply pointed about the pretensions of the elite and the follies of everyday life. Poor Richard and other such characters “appear as disarming plain folk, the better to convey wicked insights,” notes historian Alan Taylor. “A long line of humorists—from Davy Crockett and Mark Twain to Garrison Keillor—still rework the prototypes created by Franklin.”51
Almanacs were a sweet source of annual revenue for a printer, easily outselling even the Bible (because they had to be bought anew each year). Six were being published in Philadelphia at the time, two of which were printed by Franklin: Thomas Godfrey’s and John Jerman’s. But after falling out with Godfrey over his failed matchmaking and losing Jerman to his rival Andrew Bradford, Franklin found himself in the fall of 1732 with no almanac to help make his press profitable.
So he hastily assembled his own. In format and style, it was like other almanacs, most notably that of Titan Leeds, who was publishing, as his father had before him, Philadelphia’s most popular version. The name Poor Richard, a slight oxymoron pun, echoed that of Poor Robin’s Almanack, which had been published by Franklin’s brother James. And Richard Saunders happened to be the real name of a noted almanac writer in England in the late seventeenth century.52
Franklin, however, added his own distinctive flair. He used his pseudonym to permit himself some ironic distance, and he ginned up a running feud with his rival Titan Leeds by predicting and later fabricating his death. As his ad in the Pennsylvania Gazette immodestly promised:
Just published for 1733: Poor Richard: An Almanack containing the lunations, eclipses, planets motions and aspects, weather, sun and moon’s rising and setting, highwater, etc. besides many pleasant and witty verses, jests and sayings, author’s motive of writing, prediction of the death of his friend Mr. Titan Leeds . . . By Richard Saunders, philomath, printed and sold by B. Franklin, price 3s. 6d per dozen.53
Years later, Franklin would recall that he regarded his almanac as a “vehicle for conveying instruction among the common folk” and therefore filled it with proverbs that “inculcated industry and frugality as the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue.” At the time, however, he also had another motive, about which he was quite forthright. The beauty of inventing a fictional author was that he could poke fun at himself by admitting, only half in jest, through the pen of Poor Richard, that money was his main motivation. “I might in this place attempt to gain thy favor by declaring that I write almanacks with no other view than that of the public good; but in this I should not be sincere,” Poor Richard began his first preface. “The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife . . . has threatened more than once to burn all my books and Rattling-Traps (as she calls my instruments) if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family.”54
Poor Richard went on to predict “the inexorable death” of his rival Titan Leeds, giving the exact day and hour. It was a prank borrowed from Jonathan Swift. Leeds fell into the trap, and in his own almanac for 1734 (written after the date of his predicted death) called Franklin a “conceited scribbler” who had “manifested himself a fool and a liar.” Franklin, with his own printing press, had the luxury of reading Leeds before he published his own 1734 edition. In it, Poor Richard responded that all of these defamatory protestations indicate that the real Leeds must indeed be dead and his new almanac a hoax by someone else. “Mr. Leeds was too well bred to use any man so indecently and scurrilously, and moreover his esteem and affection for me was extraordinary.”
In his almanac for 1735, Franklin again ridiculed his “deceased” rival’s sharp responses—“Titan Leeds when living would not have used me so!”—and also caught Leeds in a language mishap. Leeds had declared it was “untrue” that he had himself predicted that he would “survive until” the date in question. Franklin retorted that if it were untrue that he survived until then, he must therefore be “really defunct and dead.” “ ’Tis plain to everyone that reads his last two almanacks,” Poor Richard jibed, “no man living would or could write such stuff.”55
Even after Leeds in fact did die in 1738, Franklin did not relent. He printed a letter from Leeds’s ghost admitting “that I did actually die at that time, precisely at the hour you mentioned, with a variation only of 5 minutes, 53 seconds.” Franklin then had the ghost make a prediction about Poor Richard’s other rival: John Jerman would convert to Catholicism in the coming year. Franklin kept up this jest for four years, even while he had, once again, the contract to print Jerman’s almanac. Jerman’s good humor finally ran out, and in 1743 he took his business back to Bradford. “The reader may expect a reply from me to R——S——rs alias B——F——ns way of proving me no Protestant,” he wrote, adding that because “of that witty performance [he] shall not have the benefit of my almanack for this year.”56
Franklin had fun hiding behind the veil of Poor Richard, but he also occasionally enjoyed poking through the veil. In 1736 he had Poor Richard deny rumors that he was just a fiction. He would not, he said, “have taken any notice of so idle a report if it had not been for the sake of my printer, to whom my enemies are pleased to ascribe my productions, and who it seems is as unwilling to father my offspring as I am to lose credit of it.” The following year, Poor Richard blamed his printer (Franklin) for causing some mistakes in the weather forecasts by moving them around to fit in holidays. And in 1739, he lamented that his printer was pocketing his profits, but added, “I do not grudge it him; he is a man I have great regard for.”
Richard and Bridget Saunders did, in many ways, reflect Benjamin and Deborah Franklin. In the almanac for 1738, Franklin had the fictional Bridget take a turn at writing the preface for Poor Richard. This was shortly after Deborah Franklin had bought her husband the china breakfast bowl, and it came at the time when Franklin’s newspaper pieces were poking fun at the pretensions of wives who acquire a taste for fancy tea services. Bridget Saunders announced to the reader that year that she read the preface her husband had composed, discovered he had “been slinging some of his old skits at me,” and tossed it away. “Cannot I have a little fault or two but all the country must see it in print! They have already been told at one time that I am proud, another time that I am loud, and that I have a new petticoat, and abundance of such kind of stuff. And now, forsooth! all the world must know that Poor Dick’s wife has lately taken a fancy to drink a little tea now and then.” Lest the connection be missed, she noted that the tea was “a present from the printer.”57
Poor Richard’s delightful annual prefaces never, alas, became as famous as the maxims and sayings that Franklin scattered in the margins of his almanacs each year, such as the most famous of all: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Franklin would have been amused by how faithfully these were praised by subsequent advocates of self-improvement, and he would likely have been even more amused by the humorists who later poked fun at them. In a sketch with the ironic title “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” Mark Twain jibed, “As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms. The sorrow that that maxim has cost me, through my parents, experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell. The legitimate result is my present state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration. My parents used to have me up before nine o’clock in the morning sometimes when I was a boy. If they had let me take my natural rest where would I have been now? Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all.” Groucho Marx, in his memoirs, also picked up the theme: “ ‘Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man you-know-what.’ This is a lot of hoopla. Most wealthy people I know like to sleep late, and will fire the help if they are disturbed before three in the afternoon . . . You don’t see Marilyn Monroe getting up at six in the morning. The truth is, I don’t see Marilyn Monroe getting up at any hour, more’s the pity.”58
Most of Poor Richard’s sayings were not, in fact, totally original, as Franklin freely admitted. They “contained the wisdom of many ages and nations,” he said in his autobiography, and he noted in the final edition “that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my own.” Even a near version of his “early to bed and early to rise” maxim had appeared in a collection of English proverbs a century earlier.59
Franklin’s talent was inventing a few new maxims and polishing up a lot of older ones to make them pithier. For example, the old English proverb “Fresh fish and new-come guests smell, but that they are three days old” Franklin made: “Fish and visitors stink in three days.” Likewise, “A muffled cat is no good mouser” became “The cat in gloves catches no mice.” He took the old saying “Many strokes fell great oaks” and gave it a sharper moral edge: “Little strokes fell great oaks.” He also sharpened “Three may keep a secret if two of them are away” into “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.” And the Scottish saying that “a listening damsel and a speaking castle shall never end with honor” was turned into “Neither a fortress nor a maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parley.”60
Even though most of the maxims were adopted from others, they offer insight into his notions of what was useful and amusing. Among the best are:
He’s a fool that makes his doctor his heir . . . Eat to live, and not live to eat . . . He that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas . . . Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage . . . Necessity never made a good bargain . . . There’s more old drunkards than old doctors . . . A good example is the best sermon . . . None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing . . . A Penny saved is Twopence clear . . . When the well’s dry we know the worth of water . . . The sleeping fox catches no poultry . . . The used key is always bright . . . He that lives on hope dies farting [he later wrote it as “dies fasting,” and the early version may have been a misprint] . . . Diligence is the mother of good luck . . . He that pursues two hares at once does not catch one and lets the other go . . . Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices . . . Kings and bears often worry their keepers . . . Haste makes waste . . . Make haste slowly . . . He who multiplies riches multiplies cares . . . He’s a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom . . . No gains without pains . . . Vice knows she’s ugly, so puts on her mask . . . The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom spun too fine . . . Love your enemies, for they will tell you your faults . . . The sting of a reproach is the truth of it . . . There’s a time to wink as well as to see . . . Genius without education is like silver in the mine . . . There was never a good knife made of bad steel . . . Half the truth is often a great lie . . . God helps them that help themselves.
What distinguished Franklin’s almanac was its sly wit. As he was completing his 1738 edition, he wrote a letter in his newspaper, using the pen name “Philomath,” that poked at his rivals by giving sarcastic advice about writing almanacs. A requisite talent, he said, “is a sort of gravity, which keeps a due medium between dullness and nonsense.” This is because “grave men are taken by the common people for wise men.” In addition, the author “should write sentences and throw out hints that neither himself nor anybody else can understand.” As examples, he cited some phrases used by Titan Leeds.61
In his final edition, completed while on his way to England in 1757, Franklin would sum things up with a fictional speech by an old man named Father Abraham who strings together all of Poor Richard’s adages about the need for frugality and virtue. But Franklin’s wry tone was, even then, still intact. Poor Richard, who is standing in the back of the crowd, reports at the end: “The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary.”62
All of this made Poor Richard a success and his creator wealthy. The almanac sold ten thousand copies a year, surpassing its Philadelphia rivals. John Peter Zenger, whose famous 1735 libel trial was covered by Franklin’s paper, bought thirty-six dozen one year. James’s widow sold about eighty dozen a year. Father Abraham’s speech compiling Poor Richard’s sayings was published as The Way to Wealth and became, for a time, the most famous book to come out of colonial America. Within forty years, it was reprinted in 145 editions and seven languages; the French one was entitled La Science du Bonhomme Richard. Through the present, it has gone through more than thirteen hundred editions.
Like Franklin’s moral perfection project and Autobiography, the sayings of Poor Richard have been criticized for revealing the mind of a penny-saving prig. “It has taken me many years and countless smarts to get out of that barbed wire moral enclosure that Poor Richard rigged up,” wrote D. H. Lawrence. But that misses the humor and irony, as well as the nice mix of cleverness and morality, that Franklin deftly brewed. It also mistakenly confuses Franklin with the characters he created. The real Franklin was not a moral prude, and he did not dedicate his life to accumulating wealth. “The general foible of mankind,” he told a friend, is “in the pursuit of wealth to no end.” His goal was to help aspiring tradesmen become more diligent, and thus more able to be useful and virtuous citizens.
Poor Richard’s almanacs do provide some useful insights into Franklin, especially into his wit and outlook. But by half hiding behind a fictional cutout, Franklin once again followed his Junto rule of revealing his thinking only through indirection. In that, he was acting according to the advice he put in Poor Richard’s mouth. “Let all men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly: Men freely ford that see the shallows.”63
I The fonts that Franklin ordered were those created in the early 1720s by the famed London type-maker William Caslon, and they are the model for the Adobe Caslon typeface used for the text in this book.