BOSTON BEGINNINGS
Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706 (January 6, 1705, in the old-style calendar), of very humble origins, origins that always struck Franklin himself as unusually poor. Franklin’s father, Josiah, was a nonconformist from Northamptonshire who as a young man had immigrated to the New World and had become a candle and soap maker, one of the lowliest of the artisan crafts. Josiah fathered a total of seventeen children, ten, including Benjamin, by his second wife, Abiah Folger, from Nantucket. Franklin was number fifteen of these seventeen and the youngest son.
In a hierarchical age that favored the firstborn son, Franklin was, as he ruefully recounted in his Autobiography, “the youngest Son of the youngest Son for 5 Generations back.”1 In the last year of his life the bitterness was still there, undisguised by Franklin’s usual irony. In a codicil to his will written in 1789 he observed that most people, having received an estate from their ancestors, felt obliged to pass on something to their posterity. “This obligation,” he wrote with some emotion, “does not lie on me, who never inherited a shilling from any ancestor or relation.”2
Because the young Franklin was unusually precocious (“I do not remember when I could not read,” he recalled), his father initially sent the eight-year-old boy to grammar school in preparation for the ministry.3 But his father soon had second thoughts about the expenses involved in a college education, and after a year he pulled the boy out of grammar school and sent him for another year to an ordinary school that simply taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. These two years of formal education were all that Franklin was ever to receive. Not that this was unusual: most boys had little more than this, and almost all girls had no formal schooling at all. Although most of the Revolutionary leaders were college graduates—usually being the first in their families to attend college—some, including Washington, Robert Morris, Patrick Henry, Nathanael Greene, and Thomas Paine, had not much more formal schooling than Franklin. Apprenticeship in a trade or skill was still the principal means by which most young men prepared for the world.
Franklin’s birthplace on Milk Street, Boston, across from the Old South Church
Franklin’s father chose that route of apprenticeship for his son and began training Franklin to be a candle and soap maker. But since cutting wicks and smelling tallow made Franklin very unhappy, his father finally agreed that the printing trade might better suit the boy’s “Bookish Inclination.”4 Printing, after all, was the most cerebral of the crafts, requiring the ability to read, spell, and write. Nevertheless, it still involved heavy manual labor and was a grubby, messy, and physically demanding job, without much prestige.
In fact, printing had little more respectability than soap and candle making. It was in such “wretched Disrepute” that, as one eighteenth-century New York printer remarked, no family “of Substance would ever put their Sons to such an Art,” and, as a consequence, masters were “obliged to take of the lowest People” for apprentices.5 But Franklin fit the trade. Not only was young Franklin bookish, but he was also nearly six feet tall and strong with broad shoulders—ideally suited for the difficult tasks of printing. His father thus placed him under the care of an older son, James, who in 1717 had returned from England to set himself up as a printer in Boston. When James saw what his erudite youngest brother could do with words and type, he signed up the twelve-year-old boy to an unusually long apprenticeship of nine years.
That boy, as Franklin later recalled in his Autobiography, was “extremely ambitious” to become a “tolerable English Writer.”6 Although literacy was relatively high in New England at this time—perhaps 75 percent of males in Boston could read and write and the percentage was rapidly growing—books were scarce and valuable, and few people read books the way Franklin did.7 He read everything he could get his hands on, including John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Plutarch’s Lives, Daniel Defoe’s Essay on Projects, the “do good” essays of the prominent Boston Puritan divine Cotton Mather, and more books of “polemic Divinity” than Franklin wanted to remember.8 He even befriended the apprentices of booksellers in order to gain access to more books. One of these apprentices allowed him secretly to borrow his master’s books to read after work. “Often,” Franklin recalled, “I sat up in my Room reading the greatest Part of the Night, when the Book was borrow’d in the Evening & to be return’d early in the Morning lest it should be miss’d or wanted.”9 He tried his hand at writing poetry and other things but was discouraged with the poor quality of his attempts. He discovered a volume of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator papers and saw in it a tool for self-improvement. He read the papers over and over again and copied and recopied them and tried to recapitulate them from memory. He turned them into poetry and then back again into prose. He took notes on the Spectator essays, jumbled the notes, and then attempted to reconstruct the essays in order to understand the way Addison and Steele had organized them. All this painstaking effort was designed to improve and polish his writing, and it succeeded; “prose Writing” became, as Franklin recalled in his Autobiography, “of great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement.” In fact, writing competently was such a rare skill that anyone who could do it well immediately acquired importance. All the Founders, including Washington, first gained their reputations by something they wrote.10
In 1721 Franklin’s brother, after being the printer for another person’s newspaper, decided to establish his own paper, the New England Courant. It was only the fourth newspaper in Boston; the first, published in 1690, had been closed down by the Massachusetts government after only one issue. The second, the Boston News-Letter, was founded in 1704; it became the first continuously published newspaper not only in Boston but in all of the North American colonies. The next Boston paper, begun in 1719 and printed by James Franklin for the owner, was the Boston Gazette.11 These early newspapers were small, simple, and bland affairs, two to four pages published weekly and containing mostly reprints of old European news, ship sailings, and various advertisements, together with notices of deaths, political appointments, court actions, fires, piracies, and such matters. Although the papers were expensive and numbered only in the hundreds of copies, they often passed from hand to hand and could reach beneath the topmost ranks of the city’s population of twelve thousand, including even into the ranks of artisans and other “middling sorts.”
These early papers were labeled “published by authority.” Remaining on the good side of government was not only wise politically, it was wise economically. Most colonial printers in the eighteenth century could not have survived without government printing contracts of one sort or another. Hence most sought to avoid controversy and to remain neutral in politics. They tried to exclude from their papers anything that smacked of libel or personal abuse. Such material was risky. Much safer were the columns of dull but innocuous foreign news that they used to fill their papers, much to Franklin’s later annoyance. It is hard to know what colonial readers made of the first news item printed in the newly created South Carolina Gazette of 1732: “We learn from Caminica, that the Cossacks continue to make inroads onto polish Ukrania.”12
James Franklin did not behave as most colonial printers did. When he decided to start his own paper, he was definitely not publishing it by authority. In fact, the New England Courant began by attacking the Boston establishment, in particular the program of inoculating people for smallpox that was being promoted by the Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and his father. When this inoculation debate died down, the paper turned to satirizing other subjects of Boston interest, including pretended learning and religious hypocrisy, some of which provoked the Mathers into replies. Eager to try his own hand at satire, young Benjamin in 1722 submitted some essays to his brother’s newspaper under the name of Silence Dogood, a play on Cotton Mather’s Essays to Do Good, the name usually given to the minister’s Bonifacius, published in 1710. For a sixteen-year-old boy to assume the persona of a middle-aged woman was a daunting challenge, and young Franklin took “exquisite Pleasure” in fooling his brother and others into thinking that only “Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity” could have written the newspaper pieces.13
These Silence Dogood essays lampooned everything from funeral eulogies to “that famous Seminary of Learning,” Harvard College. Although Franklin’s satire was generally and shrewdly genial, there was often a bite to it and a good deal of social resentment behind it, especially when it came to his making fun of Harvard. Most of the students who attended “this famous Place,” he wrote, “were little better than Dunces and Blockheads.” This was not surprising, since the main qualification for entry, he said, was having money. Once admitted, the students “learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquire’d at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.”14 One can already sense an underlying anger in this precocious and rebellious teenager, an anger with those who claimed an undeserved social superiority that would become an important spur to his ambition.
When Franklin’s brother found out who the author of the Silence Dogood pieces was, he was not happy, “as he thought, probably with reason,” that all the praise the essays were receiving tended to make the young teenager “too vain.” Franklin, as he admitted, was probably “too saucy and provoking” to his brother, and the two brothers began squabbling. James was only nine years older than his youngest brother, but he nonetheless “considered himself as my Master & me as his Apprentice.” Consequently, as master he “expected the same Services from me as he would from another; while I thought he demean’d me too much in some he requir’d of me, who from a Brother expected more Indulgence.”15
Since the fraternal relationship did not fit the extreme hierarchical relationship of master and apprentice, the situation became impossible, especially when James began exercising his master’s prerogative of beating his apprentice.
Indentured apprentices were under severe contractual obligations in the eighteenth century and were part of the large unfree population that existed in all the colonies. In essence they belonged to their masters: their contracts were inheritable, and they could not marry, play cards or gamble, attend taverns, or leave their masters’ premises day or night without permission. With such restraints it is understandable that Franklin was “continually wishing for some Opportunity” to shorten or break his apprenticeship.16
In 1723 that opportunity came when the Massachusetts government—like all governments in that pre-modern age, acutely sensitive to libels and any suggestion of disrespect—finally found sufficient grounds to forbid James to publish his paper. James sought to evade the restriction by publishing the paper under Benjamin’s name. But it would not do to have a mere apprentice as editor of the paper, and James had to return the old indenture of apprenticeship to his brother. Although James drew up a new and secret contract for the remainder of the term of apprenticeship, Franklin realized his brother would not dare to reveal what he had done, and he thus took “Advantage” of the situation “to assert my Freedom.”
His situation with his brother had become intolerable, and his own standing in the Puritan-dominated community of Boston was little better. Since Franklin had become “a little obnoxious to the governing Party” and “my indiscreet Disputations about Religion began to make me pointed at with Horror by good People, as an Infidel or Atheist,” he determined to leave Boston. But because he still had some years left of his apprenticeship and his father opposed his leaving, he had to leave secretly. With a bit of money and a few belongings, the headstrong and defiant seventeen-year-old boarded a ship and fled the city, a move that was much more common in the mobile eighteenth-century Atlantic world than we might imagine. Thus Franklin began the career that would lead him “from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred, to a State of Affluence & some Degree of Reputation in the World.”17
PHILADELPHIA
Franklin arrived in the Quaker city renowned for its religious freedom in 1723, hungry, tired, dirty, and bedraggled in his “Working Dress,” his “Pockets stuffed out with Shirts and Stockings,” with only a Dutch dollar and copper shilling to his name. He bought three rolls, and “with a Roll under each Arm, and eating the other,” he wandered around Market, Chestnut, and Walnut Streets, and in his own eyes, and the eyes of his future wife, Deborah Read, who watched him from her doorway, made “a most awkward ridiculous Appearance.” He finally stumbled into a Quaker meetinghouse on Second Street, and “hearing nothing said,” promptly “fell fast asleep, and continu’d so till the Meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to wake me.”
Franklin tells us in his Autobiography that he offers us such a “particular”—and unforgettable—description of his “first Entry” into the city of Philadelphia so “that you may in your Mind compare such unlikely Beginnings with the Figure I have since made there.” Although he tried in his Autobiography to play down and mock his achievements, Franklin was nothing if not proud of his extraordinary rise. He always knew that it was the enormous gap between his very obscure beginnings and his later worldwide eminence that gave his story its heroic appeal.18
Philadelphia in the 1720s numbered about six thousand people, but it was growing rapidly and would soon surpass the much older city of Boston.19 The city, and the colony of Pennsylvania, had begun in the late seventeenth century as William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” for poor persecuted members of the Society of Friends. But by the time Franklin arrived, many of the Quaker families, such as the Norrises, Shippens, Dickinsons, and Pembertons, had prospered, and this emerging Quaker aristocracy had come to dominate the mercantile affairs and politics of the colony. At the same time, however, many non-English immigrants—Germans at first and later Scotch-Irish—had begun to pour into the colony in increasing numbers. Most of these new immigrants came as servants; indeed, at least half the population of Philadelphia during the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century was composed of indentured servants.
Since the Philadelphia that Franklin moved to was still a very small town, knit together by face-to-face relationships, Franklin was able to become acquainted with people fairly quickly. He first looked for work with the dominant printer of the colony, Andrew Bradford, who was the government printer and since 1719 had been publishing Pennsylvania’s only newspaper, the American Weekly Mercury. When Franklin discovered that Bradford had no place for him, he ended up working in the shop of a rival printer, Samuel Keimer.20 He eventually found lodging in the home of a plain carpenter, John Read, the father of the woman who had watched his awkward and ridiculous entry into the city.
He soon made friends in the town with clerks and other middling sorts who had intellectual and literary ambitions similar to his. He was unusually amiable, told a good story, and worked at getting along with people. He tells us that very early on he developed “the Habit of expressing my self in Terms of modest Diffidence, never using when I advance any thing that may possibly be disputed, the Words, Certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the Air of Positiveness to an Opinion.” Looking back, he realized that this habit had been “of great Advantage” to him in persuading people to come round to his point of view.21
With his amiability and talent he soon became an artisan to be reckoned with. He knew more about printing than his employer, Samuel Keimer; indeed, as Governor William Keith of Pennsylvania quickly surmised, this talented teenager knew more about printing than anyone in Philadelphia. He was extremely bright and naturally affable, and his future as an artisan looked very promising.
PATRONAGE
Although Franklin certainly wanted to make something of himself in Philadelphia, he could not have anticipated becoming what he eventually became—the archetype of the self-made man. Indeed, it would be a mistake to overemphasize this aspect of his life, as if his career was unique and he was somehow prefiguring the Horatio Alger success stories of the next century. Rising from obscure origins to success and eminence was not unheard of in the eighteenth century or earlier, and Franklin’s rise, however spectacular, was not unique in English history. Wasn’t it said that Cardinal Wolsey’s father had been a butcher?
In the eighteenth century many young men moved up the social ladder in both America and Britain. William Strahan, Franklin’s lifelong British friend and associate, began as a journeyman printer like Franklin and eventually became very rich, richer perhaps than Franklin, and even acquired a seat in Parliament. And then there was Edmund Burke, the Irishman of undistinguished origins who rose to become one of the great writers and orators of his age. But most of this mobility in the eighteenth century was sponsored mobility. On both sides of the Atlantic bright Englishmen of obscure origins could have spectacular rises, but they needed patrons and sponsors to do so. Burke would never have acquired the eminence he did without the patronage of William Hamilton and the Marquess of Rockingham. In that very different monarchical world, patrons were often on the lookout for bright young lads, and when they found them, they were eager to bring them along. Patronizing inferiors and creating obligations, after all, was an important mark of an aristocrat in that rank-conscious age.
The examples of such patronage in the colonial world are many. One evening in 1720 a swollen Virginia river forced John Carter, the provincial secretary and “a man of immense wealth,” to seek shelter in the home of a “plain planter” named John Waller. During the course of the evening Carter, impressed with the “quickness” and the “uncommon parts” of Waller’s ten-year-old son, Benjamin, proposed to the father that he take the boy and educate him. Perhaps money changed hands. At any rate, the bright young Benjamin Waller was brought into the Carter household, educated, sent to the College of William and Mary, and trained in the law. Eventually Waller became a member of the House of Burgesses, the holder of several crown offices, and a great man in his own right.22
Other examples of patrons’ sponsoring young men may not be as remarkable as this one, but the practice was common. Edmund Pendleton in Virginia succeeded in just this manner, as did many young New England farm boys discovered by their local ministers and sent on to Harvard and Yale. And then there was a brilliant seventeen-year-old merchant’s clerk, named Alexander Hamilton, who was rescued from his “groveling” obscurity in St. Croix by perceptive patrons and sent to the mainland for an education.23
Patronage was the basic means of social mobility in the eighteenth century, and Franklin’s rise was due to it—as a careful reading of his Autobiography shows. He could never have made it in the way he did in that hierarchical society if he had not been helped by men of influence and supported at crucial points. When Franklin’s brother-in-law, a ship captain who sailed a commercial sloop between Massachusetts and the Delaware region, learned that Franklin was in Philadelphia, working in a print shop, he wrote to persuade the young runaway to return to Boston. The brother-in-law happened to show Franklin’s reply to Governor Keith, who could not believe that a seventeen-year-old could have written such a letter. “He said,” Franklin recalled, “I appear’d a young Man of promising Parts, and therefore should be encouraged.”24 Unhappy with the two existing printers in Philadelphia, Bradford and Keimer, the governor called on Franklin, who was working for Keimer. The governor invited Franklin out for a drink in a local tavern and offered to help establish him as an independent printer if his father would supply the capital. When his father refused to put up the money, Governor Keith promised to do so himself.
Keith was not the only colonial governor to notice Franklin. When the young man was returning from Boston, having failed to get the money from his father, he stopped off in New York with a trunk of his books that he had retrieved from home. A youth with a trunk of books was rare enough in colonial New York that Governor William Burnet asked to meet with the young man to converse about authors and books. During Franklin’s trip to Boston, even Cotton Mather, whom Franklin had satirized so successfully in the Silence Dogood essays, had asked to meet the learned young man.
Once prominent Pennsylvanians grasped what Franklin was like, they were quick to patronize him. Thomas Denham, a Quaker merchant, befriended him, gave him money at a crucial moment, and brought him into his business. Even Franklin’s later enemy William Allen, who was Philadelphia’s richest man, helped Franklin at various times, especially in securing for him the position of deputy postmaster. Prominent Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton would continue to patronize Franklin throughout his life.25 Franklin’s patrons supported him in a variety of ways, lending money, inviting him to their homes, introducing him to others, becoming his “friends,” which was the common euphemism of the day for patron-client relations. All of “these Friends were . . . of great Use to me,” Franklin recalled, “as I occasionally was to some of them.”26 No doubt his own conspicuous talent was the main source of his rise, but once he had caught people’s attention, “the leading Men . . . thought it convenient to oblige and encourage me.”27 So it went. In the end Franklin was never quite as self-made as he sometimes implied or as the nineteenth century made him out to be.
In the end, of course, he did succeed in rising higher than any of his patrons could have imagined. But at the outset Franklin did not think much beyond becoming his own independent printer in the city of Philadelphia—a remarkable enough feat in itself, given the lowliness of his origins. We know the teenage printer’s social horizons were still limited; otherwise he would not have begun seeking the hand in marriage of Deborah Read, whose family was anything but rich or distinguished. When Deborah’s father suddenly died, her widowed mother suggested that marriage wait until Franklin was established. Trusting in Governor Keith’s promise to finance him in setting up his own printing firm, Franklin planned a trip to London to purchase the necessary equipment. There was time enough to get married after he returned from England. In November 1724, a year after he had arrived in Philadelphia, Franklin, with a friend, James Ralph, was on his way to the metropolitan center of the British Empire.
LONDON, 1724–1726
London, with a population of over a half million people in the 1720s, was a far cry from any city in North America. London was growing rapidly, but since its death rate was so horrendous—two persons died for every child born—this growth was entirely from people moving into the city. The city teemed with movement. One third of its population were, like Franklin, recent arrivals; the city was absorbing about one half of the entire natural increase of England’s population. All these people made for congestion and confusion in the city’s labyrinth of narrow streets and dark alleys, which contrasted sharply with the neatly rectangular layout of colonial Philadelphia.28
London’s society was as different from that of Philadelphia in its hierarchical complexity and its luxurious splendor as in its number of people. It was dominated by a monarchical court and wealthy hereditary aristocrats who were busy buying property and erecting opulent town houses everywhere. Some of these nobles had annual incomes in the tens of thousands of pounds, exorbitant sums that no colonial aristocrat could match. Some of them spent on a single supper and ball what many Englishmen could not earn in a lifetime. These nobles lived in the country but maintained homes in London that they visited annually at fabulous cost. Lord Ashburnham, for example, spent over £4000 a year for his annual visit to London. But the British aristocracy was larger than the two hundred or so hereditary peers who sat in the House of Lords. It included not only several titled ranks of knights and esquires but also the large body of gentry, the lowest social rank entitled to bear a coat of arms. Below these were rich merchants and the growing numbers of middling shopkeepers, traders, artisans, and craftsmen, all resting on a huge population of beggars, sailors, prostitutes, street sellers, porters, servants, and laborers of every conceivable description.29
When Franklin arrived in this maelstrom of humanity, he discovered that Governor Keith had reneged on his promise to supply credit for him. Franklin the innocent youth was stunned. “Unsolicited as he was by me, how could I think his generous Offers insincere? I believ’d him one of the best Men in the World.” Since Keith had been, after all, the knighted governor of the colony, Franklin in his Autobiography milked the deception for all it was worth: “What shall we think of a Governor’s playing such pitiful Tricks, and imposing so grossly on a poor ignorant Boy!”30
Although Franklin learned from Governor Keith’s behavior something about the arbitrary nature of power in that severely hierarchical world, he had no recourse but to seek work as a printer in the great metropolis. Despite the complexity of London he seems to have made his way about with remarkable ease. He naturally impressed his London employers and indeed everyone else he met. In London he soon forgot about his engagement to Deborah Read and spent most of his money “going to Plays & other Places of Amusement.”31 In addition to these “Expenses” that kept him from earning enough to pay for his return passage, he seems to have indulged what he later called “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth” that hurried him “frequently into Intrigues with low Women.”32 He did, however, avoid the vices of smoking, drinking, and gambling. Unlike his fellow printers and most workers in those days, who were “great Guzzlers of Beer,” he drank only water while working.33 His extraordinary lifelong temperance, as he later pointed out, contributed not only to his health but also to his remarkable success in business. Unlike most other workers, Franklin had no “St. Mondays,” no absences from Monday work because of excessive weekend drinking.34
These initial experiences in London made a lasting impression on the nineteen-year-old Franklin, and he devoted a considerable number of pages in his Autobiography to them. Although he mentions several “errata” that he committed while in London, he clearly was proud of the way he had survived in the big city. At a time when most people, even many sailors, did not know how to swim, he tells us that the English much admired his prowess as a swimmer; he even imagined that he might have made a living teaching swimming and water sports to the sons of the English gentry.
While in London he wrote and printed on his employer’s press a rather sophomoric Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain that argued that since God determined everything, it was useless to debate the right and wrong of anything. This would seem to have been a nice justification for his self-indulgent behavior in London—except that he also argued that all pleasure was accompanied by equal sensations of pain or uneasiness, which suggests that his conscience may have been bothered by his apparent freedom from religious restraints. The essay attracted some attention from deists and gave him entrée to some intellectual circles, where he met Bernard Mandeville, the author of The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. Since Mandeville believed that private vice could have beneficial public consequences, he seemed to be a writer after the young Franklin’s own hard-to-be-governed heart.
Franklin later repudiated his Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, burning all but one of the copies still in his possession. He came to conclude that all such “Metaphysical Reasonings” were useless, and he gave them up. Although he never accepted the Bible as divine revelation or believed in the divinity of Christ, he always affirmed “the Existence of the Deity, that he made the World, and govern’d it by his Providence.” He came to believe that the only important thing about religion was morality, and the only basis for that morality was utility. “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden,” he later wrote in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, “but it is forbidden because it’s hurtful. . . . Nor is a Duty beneficial because it is commanded, but it is commanded, because it’s beneficial.”35
Although Franklin had been “religiously educated as a Presbyterian,” he never accepted the Calvinist conviction that faith alone was the source of salvation; indeed, he became convinced that “the most acceptable Service of God was the doing Good to Man.” His respect for the various religions in eighteenth-century America came to depend solely on their contributions to virtue or morality. After concluding in a 1735 newspaper polemic that “a virtuous Heretick shall be saved before a wicked Christian,” Franklin thereafter decided that religion was not a subject worth disputing in public. Although he continued to make contributions to many churches, he never belonged to any of them—a problem for his reputation in the early nineteenth century.36
BACK TO PHILADELPHIA
After eighteen months in London, Franklin got tired of the big city and wanted to get back to Philadelphia. Surely it was not because of his pining for Deborah Read—he wrote her only once during the nearly two years he was gone, and then simply to tell her that he was not likely soon to return. In London, he tells us, he had proceeded “by degrees” to forget his engagement to Deborah.37 Perhaps he wished to return because London in the 1720s was experiencing food shortages and more outbreaks of diseases than usual. Or perhaps he had come to realize that he would be a much bigger fish in the relatively small pond of Philadelphia than he was in the huge ocean of London with its hundreds of thousands of people. Or perhaps he sensed that printers in England were losing control of the publishing business, and he would have many more opportunities for advancement back in the colonies.38 At any rate, in 1726, when Philadelphia merchant Thomas Denham offered to pay Franklin’s passage back home and bring him into his business, he jumped at the opportunity.
Denham’s untimely death soon drove Franklin back into the printing trade, managing the shop of his former boss Samuel Keimer. In addition to training the five workers in the shop, Franklin cast type, engraved, made ink, and acted as warehouseman: “in short,” he recalled, he was “quite a Factotum.”39 The patrons of Keimer’s printing firm soon came to realize that young Franklin the employee was far more competent and presentable than his employer. Not only was Keimer an “odd Fish,” grouchy and “ignorant of common Life,” said Franklin, but he was “slovenly to extream dirtiness.” Consequently, the firm’s patrons, who included Judge William Allen, Samuel Bustill, the secretary of the province, Isaac Pearson, Joseph Cooper, several members of the important Smith family, and members of the assembly, found Franklin a much better companion than they did the owner of the business. “They had me to their Houses, introduc’d me to their Friends, and show’d me much Civility, while he, tho’ the Master, was a little neglected.” One of these patrons, Isaac Decow, the surveyor general, helped to fill Franklin with dreams of what he might become. Decow told the young artisan that he himself had begun humbly, wheeling clay for bricklayers and carrying chains for surveyors, but had “by his Industry acquir’d a good Estate.” Decow predicted that Franklin would soon work his employer out of his business and “make a fortune in it in Philadelphia.”40
In 1728 Franklin and one of his fellow workers, Hugh Meredith (whose father put up the capital), left Keimer and opened up their own printing business. There were now three printing firms in Philadelphia, which was more than most people thought the town could support. Franklin was determined that it would not be his business that would fail. He worked incredibly hard, “and this Industry visible to our Neighbours began to give us Character and Credit.”41 When in 1729 Meredith lost interest in printing and began drinking heavily, Franklin, with the aid of friends, bought him out. At last at age twenty-three, he was sole owner of his own printing firm. But he also had debts.
MARRIAGE
At the same time Franklin was thinking about getting married and settling down. Ever since he had returned from London, he recalled, he had come to realize that his frequent “Intrigues with low Women that fell in my Way . . . were attended with some Expence & great Inconvenience, besides a continual Risque to my Health.” Marriage would allow free rein to “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth” while removing the expense and the risk. He might have added that bachelors were regarded with a certain amount of suspicion in many of the colonies.
Since Deborah Read, to whom he had been engaged, had given up on him during his absence in London and married a potter named John Rogers, Franklin never gave her a thought and began courting the daughter of a relative of one of his friends. However, when he asked the young woman’s parents for a dowry of about £100 to pay off his debts, he was turned down. He asked acquaintances about other marital prospects and discovered that “the Business of a Printer being generally thought a poor one, I was not to expect Money with a Wife unless with such a one, as I should not other wise think agreeable.”42
Only then did Franklin realize that he might have to settle for Deborah Read. Although Deborah was already married, her husband had turned out to be a wastrel and perhaps a bigamist. Consequently, Deborah had left John Rogers and returned to her mother’s house. Rogers in turn ran off to the West Indies, where rumor had it he died, but no one could be sure. Since Pennsylvania law did not allow divorce for desertion, Franklin and Deborah in 1730 decided to avoid legal difficulties by simply setting up housekeeping as husband and wife.
Franklin’s entering at the age of twenty-four upon a common-law marriage (a much more prevalent practice in the eighteenth century than today) to the loud and lowly and scarcely literate Deborah Read suggests that his social ambitions were still quite limited. The other Founders generally made something of themselves by their marriages. Indeed, most of them tended to think of marriage in dynastic terms, as a means of building alliances and establishing or consolidating their position in society. Washington acquired a considerable estate by marrying the rich young widow Martha Custis. Upon his marriage to the widow Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson received 135 slaves, including the Hemings family, and 11,000 acres of land. Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, a member of one of the most distinguished families of New York. Only John Adams seems not to have worried much about his wife’s dowry, though Abigail Smith’s father was the minister in Weymouth and her mother was a Quincy, a member of a wealthy and important Massachusetts family.
Franklin’s marriage was very different from that of the other Founders. It was sudden and seemingly without great advantage. Only two months after telling his sister that he was definitely not planning to get married, Franklin unexpectedly changed his mind.43 We are not sure why. Franklin tells us in his Autobiography that marrying Deborah Read eased his conscience over his earlier treatment of her, but we have no evidence of his guilt except his later recollection of it. If he felt guilty over his earlier treatment of her, how much more guilty he must have felt over his later treatment of her; but we have no evidence of that either. No doubt, as he recalled, the couple “throve together,” but the marriage scarcely helped Franklin socially.44 She may in fact have become something of an embarrassment to him. Certainly the Philadelphia gentry, when they began mingling with Franklin, never included his wife in invitations to their homes. Deborah did, however, help him economically; she was as shrewd and as frugal as he was, and she never ceased working to bring money into the household.45
In newspaper essays written shortly after his marriage Franklin expressed his dislike of tradesmen’s wives who aspired to become gentlewomen. Such wives shunned work, refused to knit their husbands’ stockings, bought extravagant goods, and lived beyond their means.46 Franklin knew that Deborah would never behave in this way. Indeed, in his “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness,” written at the time of his marriage, he advised a prospective wife to “have a due Regard to [her husband’s] Income and Circumstances in all your Expenses and Desires.” But, most important, the wife was to “Read frequently with due Attention the Matrimonial Service; and take care in doing so, not to overlook the Word obey.” His experience with Deborah eventually proved that such wives did not have to bring dowries to their artisan husbands. As he later pointed out to a prospective tradesman contemplating marriage, “If you get a prudent healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.”47
There may have been other reasons for Franklin to marry Deborah. Franklin almost immediately took into his home an illegitimate son born to him and another woman, a son whom his new wife had to raise. Under the circumstances Deborah may have been the only woman in Philadelphia who would have put up with this added responsibility, and she did so only reluctantly. (After three centuries the identity of the mother of the illegitimate son, whom Franklin named William, remains a mystery. Franklin apparently made some small provision for the mother who, as the son of one of Franklin’s close friends later said, “being none of the most agreeable of Women,” was neither noticed nor acknowledged by Franklin or William.)48
Franklin indeed ought to have been grateful to Deborah for taking on the burden of bringing up some other woman’s child. Deborah never liked the boy and, according to a visiting Virginian who lived in the Franklin household for a short time in 1755, often treated the then twenty-four-year-old William with unusual coldness. To the visitor’s consternation, she called William “the greatest Villain upon Earth,” denounced him in foul and vulgar language, and kept trying to put him down in front of their guest. She apparently never said any such thing in front of her husband, however, for Franklin adored his son.49
Franklin’s marriage to Deborah seemed to confirm his status as a commoner. As a printer who had to work for a living and with a wife like Deborah, he was a long way from being regarded as a gentleman.
GENTLEMEN AND COMMONERS
Many people in the eighteenth-century English-speaking world, especially those in the topmost ranks, still tended to divide the society into only two parts, a tiny elite of gentlemen on the top dominating the bulk of commoners on the bottom. A gentleman was someone quite different from ordinary folk—even in the colonies, which lacked the extremes of English society, with its great opulent aristocrats set against the most appalling poverty. “The title of a gentleman,” wrote one early-eighteenth-century observer, “is commonly given in England to all that distinguish themselves from the common sort of people, by a good garb, genteel air, or good education, wealth or learning.” Although the numbers trying to enter the rank of gentleman were increasing, becoming a gentleman was still not easy, especially as the bar of politeness and refinement kept being raised. “A finished Gentleman,” wrote the English essayist Richard Steele, someone whose writings Franklin knew well, “is perhaps the most uncommon of all the great Characters in Life.”50
This separation between gentlemen and commoners, which John Adams called “the most ancient and universal of all Divisions of People,” overwhelmed all other divisions in colonial culture, even that between free and enslaved that we today find so horribly conspicuous. Although the eighteenth century was becoming increasingly confused over precisely who ought to constitute the categories of gentlemen and ordinary people, many were still sure that in all societies some were patricians and most were plebeians, some were officers and most were common soldiers, some were “the better sort” and most were not. The awareness of the “difference between gentle and simple,” recalled the Anglican minister Devereux Jarratt of his humble youth in colonial Virginia, was “universal among all of my rank and age.”51
Since this distinction has lost almost all of its older meaning (Jarratt himself lived to see “a vast alteration, in this respect”), it takes an act of imagination to recapture the immense importance of the difference between gentleman and commoner in the eighteenth century.52 Common soldiers captured in war were imprisoned; captured officers, however, could be released “on parole,” after giving their word to their fellow gentleman officers that they would not flee the area or return to their troops. Southern squires entered their churches as a body and took their pews only after their families and the ordinary people had been seated. The courts of Massachusetts debated endlessly over whether or not particular plaintiffs and defendants were properly identified as gentlemen, for, as John Adams noted, it was important in law that writs “not call Esquires Labourers, and Labourers Esquires.”53 Inevitably, the law treated gentlemen and commoners differently. Although English colonial law was presumably equal for all, the criminal punishments were not: gentlemen, unlike commoners, did not have their ears cropped or their bodies flogged.
In the southern parts of colonial America the distinction between gentleman and commoner was there practically from birth: “Before a boy knows his right hand from his left, can discern black from white, good from evil, or knows who made him, or how he exists,” wrote one Virginian, “he is a Gentleman.” And as a gentleman, “it would derogate greatly from his character, to learn a trade; or to put his hand to any servile employment.”54 Although the precise nature of a gentleman might have been in more doubt in the northern colonies, even there the distinction was very real. As late as 1761 the young attorney John Adams at least thought he knew when someone was not a gentleman, “neither by Birth, Education, Office, Reputation, or Employment,” nor by “Thought, Word, or Deed.” A person who springs “from ordinary Parents,” who “can scarcely write his Name,” whose “Business is Boating,” who “never had any Commissions”—to call such a person a gentleman was “an arrant Prostitution of the Title.”55
For most people the principal means of distinction between the gentry and commoners was still “Birth and Parentage.” Many colonists continued to believe that all men were created unequal. God, it was said, had been “pleas’d to constitute a Difference in Families.” Although most children were of “low Degree or of Common Derivation, Some are Sons and Daughters of the Mighty: they are more honorably descended, and have greater Relations than others.”56 The word “gentry” was after all associated with birth, derived from the Latin gens, or stock. English and colonial writers such as Henry Fielding and Robert Munford, even when poking fun at the false pretensions of the aristocracy, had to have—for the harmony of their stories and the comfort of their genteel audiences—their apparently plebeian heroes or heroines turn out to be secretly the offspring of gentlemen.
In addition to genealogy, wealth was important in distinguishing a gentleman, for “in vulgar reckoning a mean condition bespeaks a mean man.” But more and more in the eighteenth century these traditional sources of gentry status—birth and wealth—were surrounded and squeezed by other measures of distinction—artificial, man-made criteria having to do with manners, taste, and character. “No man,” it was increasingly said, “deserves the appellation a Gentleman until he has done something to merit it.”57
Gentlemen walked and talked in certain ways and held in contempt those who did not. They ate with silver knives and forks while many common people still ate with their hands. Gentlemen prided themselves on their classical learning, and in their privately circulated verse and in their public polemics they took great pains to display their knowledge. They took up dancing and fencing, for both “contribute greatly to a graceful Carriage.” “A Gentleman,” they were told, “should know how to appear in an Assembly [in] Public to Advantage, and to defend himself if attacked.” Young aspiring gentlemen were urged by their parents to study poetry and to learn to play musical instruments. Unlike common people, gentlemen wore wigs or powdered their hair, believing that “nothing [was] a finer ornament to a young gentleman than a good head of hair well order’d and set forth,” especially when appearing “before persons of rank and distinction.” They dressed distinctively and fashionably. In contrast to the plain shirts, leather aprons, and buckskin breeches of ordinary men, they wore lace ruffles, silk stockings, and other finery. They sought to build elaborate houses and to have their portraits painted. Little gratified the gentry’s hearts more than to have a “coach and six,” or at least a “chariot and four,” to have servants decked out in “fine liveries,” to have a reputation for entertaining liberally, to be noticed.58
But central to these cultural attributes of gentility was “politeness,” which had a far broader and richer significance for the eighteenth century than it does for us. It meant not simply good manners and refinement but being genial and sociable, possessing the capacity to relate to other human beings easily and naturally. It was what most obviously separated the genteel few from the vulgar and barbaric mass of the population. “Politeness,” said the Reverend William Smith in 1752, “is the Bond of social life,—the ornament of human nature.” By “softening . . . our natural roughness,” politeness developed in men “a certain Easiness of Behavior,” which, said Smith, was the main “Characteristic of the Gentleman.” Gentlemen were admired for their “real humility, condescension, courteousness, affability, and great good manners to all the world.”59
Only a hierarchical society that knew its distinctions well could have placed so much value on a gentleman’s capacity for condescension—that voluntary humiliation, that willing descent from superiority to equal terms with inferiors. For us today condescension is a pejorative term, suggesting snobbery or haughtiness. But for the eighteenth century it was a positive and complimentary term, something that gentlemen aspired to possess and commoners valued in those above them. Rufus Putnam, a young Massachusetts enlisted man serving with the provincial forces attached to the British army in northern New York during the Seven Years War, was especially taken with the ability of one British officer to condescend. The officer frequently came among his men, said Putnam, “and his manner was so easy and fermiller, that you loost all that constraint or diffidence we feele when addressed by our Superiours, whose manners are forbidding.”60
Ultimately, beneath all these strenuous efforts to define gentility was the fundamental classical quality of being free and independent. The liberality for which gentlemen were known connoted freedom—freedom from material want, freedom from the caprice of others, freedom from ignorance, and freedom from having to work with one’s hands. The gentry’s distinctiveness came from being independent in a world of dependencies, learned in a world only partially literate, and leisured in a world of laborers.
We today have so many diverse forms of work and recreation and so much of our society shares in them that we can scarcely appreciate the significance of the earlier stark separation between a leisured few and a laboring many. In the eighteenth century, labor, as it had been for ages, was still associated with toil and trouble, with pain, and manual productivity did not yet have the superior moral value that it would soon acquire. To be sure, industriousness and hard work were everywhere extolled, and the puritan ethic was widely preached—but only for ordinary people, not for gentlemen. Hard steady work was good for the character of common people: it kept them out of trouble; it lifted them out of idleness and barbarism; and it instilled in them the proper moral values.
Most people, it was widely assumed, would not work if they did not have to. Franklin certainly thought so: it was conventional wisdom. “It seems certain,” he wrote in 1753, “that the hope of becoming at some time of Life free from the necessity of care and Labour, together with fear of penury, are the mainsprings of most people’s industry.”61 People labored out of necessity, out of poverty, and that necessity and poverty bred the contempt in which laboring people had been held for centuries. Since servants, slaves, and bonded laborers did much of the work of the society, it seemed natural to associate leisure with liberty and toil with bondage.62 A gentleman’s freedom was valued because it was freedom from the necessity to labor, which came from being poor.
Indeed, only the need of ordinary people to feed themselves, it was thought, kept them busy working. “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower class must be kept poor or they will never be industrious,” declared the English agricultural writer Arthur Young. Only “poverty,” wrote Thomas Hutchinson in 1761, by then the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, “will produce industry and frugality” among the common people. Franklin agreed. Since people were naturally indolent, “giving mankind a dependence on anything for support in age and sickness, besides industry and frugality during youth and health, tends . . . to encourage idleness and prodigality, and thereby to promote and increase poverty, the very evil it was intended to cure.”63
Thus even in the eighteenth century the age-old contempt for those who had to work for a living, those who had occupations, lingered on. In the ideal polity, Aristotle had written thousands of years earlier, “the citizens must not live a mechanical or commercial life. Such a life is not noble, and it militates against virtue.” Not even agricultural workers could be citizens, for men “must have leisure to develop their virtue and for the activities of a citizen.”64 This leisure, or what was best described as not exerting oneself for profit, was supposed to be a prerogative of gentlemen only. Gentlemen, James Harrington had written in the seventeenth century, were those who “live upon their own revenue in plenty, without engagement either to the tilling of their lands or other work for their livelihood.” In the early eighteenth century Daniel Defoe defined “the gentry” as “such who live on estates, and without the mechanism of employment, including the men of letters, such as clergy, lawyers and physicians.” A half century later Franklin’s colleague, Richard Jackson, similarly characterized the gentry as those who “live on their fortunes.”65
Ideally gentlemen did not work for a living. A gentleman, it was said, was someone “who has no visible means of support.” His income was supposed to come to him indirectly from his wealth—from rents and from interest on bonds or money out on loan—and much of it often did. Although some northern colonists might suggest that gentlemen-farmers ought to set “a laborious example to their Domesticks,” perhaps by taking an occasional turn in the fields, a gentleman’s activity was supposed to be with the mind. Managing one’s landed estate in the way that Cicero and other Roman patricians had managed theirs meant exercising authority—the only activity befitting a truly free man. Therefore, when a planter like George Washington totaled up his accounts or rode through his fields to check on his slaves or even when he occasionally took a hand at some task, he was not considered to be engaged in work.66
Immense cultural pressure often made gentlemen pretend that their economic affairs were for pleasure or for the good of the community, and not for their subsistence. They saw themselves and, more important, were seen by others as gentlemen who happened to engage in some commercial enterprises. Unlike ordinary people, gentlemen, or the better sort, traditionally were not defined or identified by what they did, but by who they were. They had avocations, not vocations. The great eighteenth-century French naturalist the Comte de Buffon did not like to think of himself as anyone other than “a gentleman amusing myself with natural history.” He did not want to be called a “naturalist,” or even a “great naturalist.” “Naturalists, linkboys, dentists, etc.”—these, said Buffon, were “people who live by their work; a thing ill suited to a gentleman.” The fifth Duke of Devonshire knew exactly his cousin’s status: “He is not a gentleman; he works.”67 Clergymen, doctors, and lawyers were not yet modern professionals, working long hours for a living like common artisans. Their gentry status depended less on their professional skills than on other sources—on family, wealth, or a college education in the liberal arts—and those doctors, lawyers, and clergymen who had none of these were therefore something less than gentlemen: pettifoggers, charlatans, or quacks.
Without understanding the age-old belief, as John Locke had expressed it, that “trade is wholly inconsistent with a gentleman’s calling,” we will never be able to fully comprehend Franklin’s career or his reputation following his death. Dr. Johnson defined the word “mechanic” as “mean, servile; of mean occupation.” Such mechanics or artisans were supposed to know their place. So in 1753 when printer Hugh Gaines attempted to defend himself in writing against opponents of his New-York Mercury, he was forced to apologize for his boldness. He was wrong, he said, “to appear in print in any other Manner, than what merely pertains to the Station in Life in which I am placed.”68 In the eighteenth century artisans and mechanics—shoemakers, coopers, silversmiths, printers—all those who worked for a living, especially with their hands, no matter how wealthy, no matter how many employees they managed, could never legitimately claim the status of gentleman. Even a great painter with noble aspirations like John Singleton Copley was socially stigmatized because he worked with his hands. Copley painted the portraits of dozens of distinguished colonial gentlemen, and he knew what his patrons thought of his art. For them, Copley said bitterly in 1767, painting was “no more than any other useful trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a Carpenter tailor or shoemaker.”69
THE MIDDLING SORTS
By the first third of the eighteenth century this dichotomous social structure was changing, and changing rapidly. The astonishing growth of commerce, trade, and manufacturing in the English-speaking world was creating hosts of new people who could not easily be fitted into either of the two basic social categories. Commercial farmers, master artisans, traders, shopkeepers, petty merchants—ambitious “middling” men, as they were increasingly called—were acquiring not only wealth but some learning and some awareness of the world and were eager to distance themselves from the “vulgar herd” of ordinary people. Already there were thinkers like Daniel Defoe who were trying to explain and justify these emerging middling people, including the “working trades, who labour hard but feel no want.”70 These were people who more and more prided themselves on their industriousness and frugality and their separation from the common idleness and dissipation of the gentry above them and the poor beneath them. These were the beginnings of what would become the shopkeepers, traders, clerks, and businessmen of the new middle class of the nineteenth century.71
This was the incipient middling world that Franklin entered in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and no one epitomized it in all of its aspirations and ambitions better than he did. Almost immediately after returning to Philadelphia in 1726, he revealed his interest in intellectual and literary activities in the city. In effect, he began acquiring some of the attributes of a gentleman while still remaining one of the common working people. In 1727 he organized a group of artisans who met weekly for learned conversation—a printer, several clerks, a glazier, two surveyors, a shoemaker, a cabinetmaker, and subsequently “a young Gentleman of some Fortune,” named Robert Grace, who did not have to work for a living.72 Calling themselves first the Leather Apron, then the Junto (perhaps because they had admitted a gentleman, and the mechanics’ title was no longer applicable), they aimed at self-improvement and doing good for the society.
Not that they ignored their businesses and the making of money. At their meetings they asked themselves such questions as “Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?” or “Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?”73 It was this kind of aspiring and prosperous middling man that was beginning to challenge the hierarchical network of privilege and patronage that dominated eighteenth-century society, and in the process blurring the traditionally sharp social division between gentlemen and commoners.
Already Franklin’s field of vision extended far beyond the boundaries of Philadelphia, and even of Pennsylvania. In 1731 he toyed with the idea of forming a United Party for Virtue that would organize “the Virtuous and good Men of all Nations into a regular Body, to be govern’d by suitable good and wise Rules, which good and wise Men may probably be more unanimous in their Obedience to, than common People are to common Laws.”74 In that same year he discovered just the organization he was looking for: Freemasonry.
FREEMASONRY
Although the origins of Masonry supposedly went back centuries, it was only in 1717 in England that it had become the modern secret fraternity that expressed Enlightenment values. The institution, which worked to blur the distinction between gentlemen and commoners, was made for someone like Franklin. Although fewer than one in ten of its members in Philadelphia were artisans, Masonry became a means by which those men—usually the most ambitious and wealthy artisans—could mingle with members of the upper social ranks without themselves formally becoming gentlemen. (Maybe for that reason many of the gentry elite did not take their own membership as seriously as they might otherwise have.) Most of the Masonic artisans tended to belong to those crafts, like printing, that involved close association with gentlemen or large amounts of capital, and because of the high fees involved in membership they tended to be fairly well off. Since Masonry emphasized benevolence and sociability, all those members of the brotherhood who were still working artisans and tradesmen could believe that they were nevertheless participating in the world of genteel politeness and thus were separated from the vulgar and barbaric lower orders beneath them. For such men Masonry became a kind of halfway house to gentility. Although the brothers wore aprons, a reminder of the organization’s artisanal roots, their aprons were not the leather ones of common craftsmen but instead were made of soft white lambskin, befitting their quasi-genteel status.75
With Franklin’s affable nature and his obsession with benevolence, not to mention his rapidly growing wealth, he was naturally attracted to the organization. He joined the St. John’s Lodge of Free Masons, the earliest known lodge in America. It satisfied his growing desire to dominate affairs. Knowing that only a “few in Public Affairs act from a meer View of the Good of their Country, whatever they may pretend,” he wanted to be one of those few. He still thought that his projected United Party for Virtue, which the Masonic society resembled, could contain artisans and tradesmen like him. He thought one of the functions of his proposed party was to have its members give “their Advice Assistance and Support to each other in promoting one another’s Interest, Business and Advancement in Life.”76
Freemasonry more than fulfilled Franklin’s Enlightenment dreams of establishing a party for virtue, and he became an enthusiastic and hardworking member of the fraternity. Two years after he joined St. John’s Lodge in Philadelphia, he drafted its bylaws and became its warden. A year later, in 1734, he printed the Constitutions of the Free-Masons, the first Masonic book in America. A month later he became master of St. John’s Lodge. Eventually he became the grand master of all the lodges in the colony of Pennsylvania. No organization could have been more congenial to Franklin, and although he seldom mentioned the organization in his correspondence, he remained a Mason throughout his life. Not only was Masonry dedicated to the promotion of virtue throughout the world, but this Enlightenment fraternity gave Franklin contacts and connections that helped him in his business.
CIVIC AFFAIRS
Franklin, as he said in his Autobiography, “always thought that one Man of tolerable Abilities may work great Changes, and Accomplish great Affairs among Mankind, if he first forms a good Plan and . . . makes the Execution of that same Plan his sole Study and Business.”77 To the young Franklin it made no difference whether this man of tolerable abilities was an artisan or not. He had set out from the beginning to demonstrate that middling sorts of craftsmen, tradesmen, and shopkeepers like himself could fulfill this Enlightenment hope in Philadelphia.
In 1731 Franklin and the other members of the Junto organized a subscription lending library, the Library Company, which would enable subscribers to have access to many more books than they otherwise would. Although he was the originator of the library, he soon came to realize that people were suspicious of a mere printer soliciting money and objected to his raising his reputation above that of his neighbors. Consequently, he decided to remain in the background and pass off his library as “a Scheme of a Number of Friends.” By his willingness to deny himself credit, his “Affair went on more smoothly,” a lesson he applied when he came to promote subsequent ventures. As he later said, with some excusable exaggeration, the Library Company became “the Mother of all the North American Subscription Libraries now so numerous. . . . These Libraries had improv’d the general Conversation of the Americans, [and] made the common Tradesmen & Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries.”78
This was just one part of his civic activity. In 1729 he wrote a pamphlet promoting the printing of paper money, which was a boon for “every industrious Tradesman” and all those who bought and sold goods. (It was also a boon to those printers like Franklin who received government contracts to print the paper money.) With a sufficient supply of paper currency, wrote Franklin, “Business will be carried on more freely, and Trade be universally enlivened by it.” Although he tried to assure gentlemen-creditors and others who lived on fixed incomes that they should not fear such paper currency, he knew that these leisured gentlemen were not the real source of prosperity in the society. It was the “Labouring and Handicrafts Men” who were “the chief Strength and Support of a People.”79
But Franklin was not just interested in creating wealth in the community. No civic project was too large or too small for his interest. Because of the ever present danger of fire, he advised people on how to carry hot coals from one room to another, how to keep chimneys safe, how to organize fire companies for the city, and how to insure themselves against the damages of fire. He worked hard to promote inoculation against smallpox in the face of strong opposition, taking the position of the Mathers, which his brother James’s paper had opposed in 1721.80 To make the city streets safe he proposed organized night watchmen to be supported by taxes. To earn support for a hospital to be open free of charge to the poor of the city he concocted the idea of matching grants and persuaded the Pennsylvania General Assembly to put up £2000 if the same amount could be raised privately. To deal with smoky chimneys and poor indoor heating he invented his Pennsylvania stove. Almost single-handedly he made life notably more comfortable for his fellow citizens and helped to create a civic society for the middling inhabitants of Philadelphia. Individually, these were small matters perhaps, but they were all designed to add to the sum of human happiness—which after all was what the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was all about. “Human Felicity,” Franklin noted, “is produc’d not so much by great Pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day.”81
FRANKLIN’S AWKWARD MIDDLING STATUS
With all his success Franklin found himself caught between two worlds, between that of aspiring artisans and tradesmen and that of wealthy gentlemen, with whom he mingled constantly. Because he came to believe that “common Tradesmen and Farmers” in America were “as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries,” he thought commoners in America often expected to pass as gentlemen more easily than elsewhere. He had discovered earlier in his life that an ordinary person with the right sponsorship could be admitted to the society of gentlemen. When he and James Ralph had boarded their ship to sail to England in 1724, they “were forc’d to take up with a Berth in the Steerage,” since “none on board knowing us, [we] were considered as ordinary Persons.” But when Colonel John French, justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, later came on board, recognized the eighteen-year-old Franklin, and paid him “great Respect,” he was “more taken Notice of,” and he and Ralph were immediately invited “by the other Gentlemen to come into the Cabin.”82
Yet he knew that such socializing was often the consequence of gentry condescension. He knew too that no matter how successful and wealthy he had become, he still remained a laborer in the eyes of most of the gentry, and thus one of the common people or “meaner Sort” who had to work for a living as a printer. The gentry knew how to put a mere mechanic, no matter how wealthy or talented, in his place.
In 1740 Franklin came up with the idea of starting a magazine in Philadelphia and offered the job of editing it to John Webbe, a lawyer he knew. But Webbe took the idea to Franklin’s competitor Andrew Bradford, who quickly brought out The American Magazine. (The next year in his Almanack, Poor Richard proclaimed: “If you would keep your Secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.”) A week later Franklin announced that he would publish his own periodical, The General Magazine. At the same time he told the world that he had originated the idea of a magazine and that Webbe had betrayed him. Webbe, the lawyer, using the usual gentry put-down of a mechanic, replied that Franklin had never been expected to participate in the magazine “in any other capacity than that of a meer Printer.”83
This was just the sort of sneer that would have made Franklin both angry and uncomfortable. He naturally preferred to call himself a member of the new emerging middling sort. But when confronted with the dichotomous social division favored by the gentry—“the BETTER SORT of People” set against “the meaner Sort”—he was willing to be lumped with those he considered to constitute the populace, which, he pointed out, “your Demosthenes’ and Ciceroes, your Sidneys and Trenchards never approached . . . but with Reverence.” Writing in his newspaper in 1740 as Obadiah Plainman, Franklin let loose some of his resentment at those who used the expression “the BETTER SORT of People.” Such gentlemen, he said with a good deal of scorn, looked upon “the Rest of their Fellow Subjects in the same Government with Contempt, and consequently regard them as Mob and Rabble,” who constituted nothing more than “a stupid Herd, in whom the Light of Reason is extinguished.” In contrast to this arrogant “better Sort,” he said, he was but “a poor ordinary Mechanick of this City, obliged to work hard for the Maintenance of myself, my Wife, and several small Children.”84
Yet, of course, he knew that in reality he was anything but “a poor ordinary Mechanick.” His genteel newspaper opponent Richard Peters, a former clergyman and secretary of the colony’s land office, knew that too. When pressed to defend his use of the “better Sort,” Peters declared that he could think of no better example of such persons than those who were members of the Library Company—to which Franklin, as Obadiah Plainman, had already admitted in the newspaper exchanges to belonging. If “poor ordinary Mechanicks” could be classed as members of “the better Sort,” the gentry’s dichotomous social categories were not working well at all. More so perhaps than anyone in colonial America, Franklin was living in two social worlds simultaneously.85
Franklin’s proposals for education vividly reveal the ambivalence he felt as someone caught between the better and meaner sorts. As early as 1743 he had drawn up plans for an academy in Philadelphia, but it was not until 1749 that he laid them out in a pamphlet, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania. He originally wanted a school dedicated to teaching the English language and not Latin. The school, in other words, was mainly designed for young men with origins similar to his own—tradesmen and mechanics who wished to better themselves. But, as he recalled with some resentment in an unpublished tract written at the end of his life, this plan was foiled by a number of “Persons of Wealth and Learning, whose Subscriptions and Countenance we should need,” and who believed that the school “ought to include the learned Languages.”86
With his original plan for an English academy transformed into a traditional Latin school favoring the sons of the gentry, Franklin had to create a separate English school that he hoped would fulfill his original intentions. “Youth would come out of this School,” he wrote in a piece published in 1751, “fitted for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except wherein Languages are required; and tho’ unacquainted with any antient or foreign Tongue, they will be Masters of their own, which is of more immediate and general Use.”87 Unfortunately, however, the gentry trustees who were in charge of both schools so discriminated against the English school in favor of the Latin school—paying the Latin head twice as much as the English head, for example, even though he taught fewer students—that the English school eventually dwindled into insignificance. At the end of his life, however, Franklin had some consolation to discover that things had changed. The executor of his estate told him that “public opinion” had now “undergone a revolution,” and was now “undoubtedly in favor of an English Education, in spite of the prejudices of the learned on this subject.”88
Franklin’s attempt to form a philosophical society revealed a similar tension between the different worlds of tradesmen and gentry. In 1743 he published A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America, in which he suggested the formation of a society composed of “Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies,” a kind of intercolonial version of his old Junto. This organization, to be called “The American Philosophical Society,” would promote “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniences or Pleasures of life.” He got the society on its feet, but at the outset it was not as active as Franklin had hoped. “The Members of our Society are very idle Gentlemen,” he complained to the New York official and scientist Cadwallader Colden in 1745. “They will take no Pains.”89 Apparently the ambitious middling sorts that had made up his Junto had had more energy and more intellectual curiosity than the gentry.
Despite all his gentlemanly activities—his philanthropic ventures and his practical projects for self-education in the art of virtue—Franklin still saw himself as a printer and businessman and not a gentleman in these early Philadelphia years. But if he was not a gentleman, he was obviously not a commoner either. Instead, he had become the principal spokesman for the growing numbers of artisans, shopkeepers, and other middling sorts in Philadelphia who were his main supporters in all of his civic endeavors. He identified completely with these middling people: “Our Families and little Fortunes,” he said, were “as dear to us as any Great Man’s can be to him.” And he was not at all embarrassed to call himself publicly “an honest Tradesman.”90
“THE MOLATTO GENTLEMAN”
Although he was constantly mingling with gentlemen, he did not yet think of turning himself into one; that is, he had not yet imagined himself having all the qualities that would allow him to retire from his business and shed his leather apron entirely. However wealthy an artisan he might become, and Franklin’s income was growing rapidly, this young printer well knew that entering into the status of a gentleman was not a simple matter, and he was not at all sure that he even wanted to try.
There were many people, he wrote in an anonymous newspaper piece in 1733, who, “by their Industry or good Fortune, from mean Beginnings find themselves in Circumstances a little more easy.” Many of these people were immediately seized by “an Ambition . . . to become Gentlefolks.” But it was “no easy Thing for a Clown or a Labourer, on a sudden to hit in all respects, the natural and easy Manner of those who have been genteely educated: And ’tis the Curse of Imitation, that it almost always either under-does or over-does.”
Franklin’s newspaper persona—“an ordinary Mechanick” who prays that “I may always have the Grace to know my self and my Station”—went on to describe the problems faced by the newly wealthy artisan trying to pass as a gentleman. “The true Gentleman, who is well known to be such, can take a Walk, or drink a Glass, and converse freely, if there be occasion, with honest Men of any Degree below him, without degrading or fearing to degrade himself in the least.” In other words, a true gentleman, confident of his status, could condescend with ease. The parvenu was not able to act in this easy manner. Whenever Franklin’s persona witnessed such a person acting “mighty cautious” in company with those who appear to be his inferiors, he knew that that person was “some new Gentleman, or rather half Gentleman, or Mungrel, an unnatural Compound of Earth and Brass like the Feet of Nebuchadnezzar’s Image.”
The same was true of women who did not know how to act with their supposed inferiors. If Franklin’s artisan persona found “some young Woman Mistress of a new fine furnished House, treating me with a kind of Superiority, a distant sort of Freedom, and high Manner of Condescension that might become a Governor’s Lady, I cannot help imagining her to be some poor Girl that is but lately married.” Or if she acted in a “very haughty and imperious” manner, “I conclude that ’tis not long since she was somebody’s Servant Maid.”
These kinds of upstarts had the respect of neither the gentry nor the commoners. “They are the Ridicule and Contempt of both sides.” A “lumpish stupid” artisan who “kept to his natural Sphere” may not have been envied by his fellow artisans, but “none of us despis’d him.” Yet when he got “a little Money, the Case is exceedingly alter’d.”
Without Experience of Men or Knowledge of Books, or even common Wit, the vain Fool thrusts himself into Conversation with People of the best Sense and the most polite. All his Absurdities, which were scarcely taken Notice of among us, stand evident among them, and afford them continual Matter of Diversion. At the same time, we below cannot help considering him as a Monkey that climbs a Tree, the higher he goes, the more he shows his Arse.
There were many kinds of “Molattoes” in the world, Franklin concluded—in race, in religion, in politics, in love. “But of all sorts of Molattoes, none appear to me so monstrously ridiculous as the Molatto Gentleman.”91
Since Franklin did not want to appear ridiculous, he was not about to act the gentleman unless he was fully prepared to assume the rank and the rank was fully prepared to accept him. Like Daniel Defoe, who was wrestling with some of the same problems of tradesmen trying to become gentlemen, Franklin knew only too well the nature of the society he lived in. Since Defoe had written that a gentleman was someone “whose Ancestors have at least for some time been rais’d above the Class of Mechanicks,” Franklin knew it would not be easy for him to hoist himself up in one generation.92
Besides, he had the example of the failure of David Harry, who had taken over Samuel Keimer’s print shop, to make him cautious. Earlier Franklin had actually proposed a partnership with Harry, which Harry, said Franklin, “fortunately for me, rejected with Scorn.” Harry, observed Franklin, messed up his life by trying to become a gentleman without having the wherewithal to bring it off. “He was very proud, dress’d like a Gentleman, liv’d expensively, took much diversion and Pleasure abroad, ran in debt, and neglected his Business, upon which all Business left him.”93
Franklin knew better.
FRANKLIN’S WEALTH
If he was not yet one of “the better sort,” as a printer and tradesman Franklin had prospered beyond what anyone could have expected and become wealthier than most of the so-called gentlefolk. Contemporaries never described Franklin in any great detail, and we have no portraits of Franklin during this period of his late twenties and thirties. But we can imagine that he was a fairly tall man, a shade under six feet and well built, perhaps already tending toward that corpulence that was for the eighteenth century a mark of prosperity. He had brown hair, a head that was large in proportion to his body, and a mild and pleasant countenance. He still worked in his printing firm, no doubt more as an editor, writer, and manager of his journeymen and apprentices and his other businesses than as someone who wore a leather apron and set type.
Despite his growing wealth, the several houses on lower Market Street that he rented at various times were modest and unpretentious. Home was still the place where he worked. Attached to his home was a shop where his wife and mother-in-law sold books and stationery and a wide variety of other goods, including soap, cheese from Rhode Island, and bohea tea. Franklin seems to have also acted as agent for the sale of the unexpired indentures of servants and a few slaves. Although apprentices, journeymen, servants, and some relatives, including his mother-in-law, often lodged in the house, Franklin’s immediate family was small. In 1732 Deborah had given birth to a baby boy, Francis, called Franky, who died of smallpox at the age of four, a loss that Franklin never got over. In 1743 the Franklins had a second child, a baby girl, Sarah, called Sally. With them lived Franklin’s illegitimate teenage son, William, whom his father increasingly indulged.94
Despite all of his unpretentiousness he could not help making money, a great deal of it. He had a natural genius for business. Not only did he run his printing business successfully, but he never stopped looking out for new opportunities. In 1736 he was appointed clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, which, he said, gave him “a better Opportunity of keeping up an Interest among the Members.” This interest paid off when he became the official printer for the assembly, securing for him the “Business of Printing the Votes, Laws, Paper Money, and other occasional Jobbs for the Public that on the whole were very profitable.”95 Eventually he became the public printer for Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland as well.
Unlike printers in London, who had enough business to specialize exclusively in printing, printers in the colonies always lacked sufficient work to support themselves, and they were generally driven to expand into related fields.96 Franklin was especially adept at adding on new businesses to his printing firm. In 1729 he started a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, which became the leading paper in the colony. With all of his government contracts, mostly from the patronage of the colony’s legislature, it was important for Franklin’s newspaper not to offend people in authority. Therefore he continually voiced the conventional wisdom that he was a mere mechanic, impartially delivering the various views of other people to his readers.
He wrote in his famous “Apology for Printers” (1731) that, as a printer, he was just like any other artisan—a blacksmith, a shoemaker, or a carpenter—an ordinary tradesman, just trying to make a living. Printers “chearfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute. . . . Being thus continually employ’d in serving all Parties,” he wrote, “Printers naturally acquire a vast Unconcernedness as to the right or wrong Opinions contain’d in what they print; regarding it only as the Matter of their daily labour.”97 This neutral and impartial conception of his role as a printer may have significantly affected his political behavior later on when he was in London as an agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly.98
Most important for Franklin’s income was his launching of an almanac. He considered an almanac “a proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People, who bought scarce any other Books.” By featuring both Poor Richard’s essays and proverbs in the almanac, he “endeavour’d to make it both entertaining and useful.” His almanac soon “came to be in such Demand,” recalled Franklin, “that I reape’d considerable Profit from it, vending annually near ten Thousand.”99 In fact, it became the most successful almanac in all of colonial America. Franklin’s persona Poor Richard noted that his almanac’s printer—who, of course, was also Franklin—was making most of the profit, but “I do not grudge it him; he is a Man I have a great Regard for, and I wish his Profit ten times greater than it is.” (Poor Richard even blamed his printer for the errata in the almanacs.)100
In 1737 Franklin became postmaster of Philadelphia. “Tho’ the salary was small,” he said, “it facilitated the Correspondence that improv’d my Newspaper, encreas’d the Number demanded, as well as the Advertisements to be inserted, so that it came to afford me a very considerable Income.”101 In addition to his store, which brought in a good income, Franklin began as early as 1731 to set up or sponsor printing shops in other colonies, usually by entering into partnerships with younger men who were often his own journeymen—such as Thomas Whitmarsh in South Carolina and James Parker in New York. He supplied presses and type and other materials, and in return took one third of the profits of his partner’s printing shop for the duration of the contract, which was usually for six years. By 1743 he owned three printing firms in three different colonies and was thinking of opening more.102 Before he was done he had partnerships and other working arrangements with over two dozen individuals all over the colonies, from New England to Antigua.103 He was more than a craftsman; he was an entrepreneur, and an extremely successful one.
We do not know a great deal about his business activities or his income. But we do know that he became a very wealthy man, perhaps one of the richest colonists in the northern parts of the North American continent. His print-shop partnership with David Hall, established in 1748, in itself brought in well over £600 a year on average for him alone, a considerable sum when we realize that Washington’s Mount Vernon was earning only £300 a year in the early 1770s.104 Between 1756 and 1765 more than £250 annually came to the partnership from work for the government, and this doesn’t include the money Franklin and Hall made from printing the colony’s paper currency.105 Some have estimated that Franklin’s total income eventually reached nearly £2000 a year, twice the salary of Pennsylvania’s governor and ten times the salary of the rector of Franklin’s proposed academy.106 When we realize that manufacturers in England made about £40 a year and lawyers about £200 a year, we know that Franklin was very well off indeed. Not only did he have his partnerships and his shares in a number of printing businesses in other colonies, but he also established at least eighteen paper mills at one time or another; in fact, he may have been the largest paper dealer in the English-speaking world.107 He also owned a good deal of rental property in Philadelphia and in many coastal towns.108 He was a substantial creditor, practically a banker, with a great amount of money out on loan, some loans as small as two shillings and others as large as £200.109 And throughout much of his life he was deeply involved in land speculation. The fact that in the mid- 1740s he refused to acquire exclusive patent rights to his immensely popular and profitable stove on the grounds that his invention offered him “an Opportunity to serve others” suggests that he was already rich enough to begin thinking like a public-spirited gentleman.110
A GENTLEMAN AT LAST
In 1748, at the age of forty-two, Franklin believed he had acquired sufficient wealth and gentility to retire from active business. This retirement had far more significance in the mid-eighteenth century than it would today. It meant that Franklin could at last become a gentleman, a man of leisure who no longer would have to work for a living.
Up to this point Franklin had made a name for himself in Philadelphia essentially as an ingenious tradesman. In organizing and promoting all of his benevolent and philanthropic projects for the city he had generally relied on his fellow middling sorts. As late as 1747 he still chose to identify himself as “A Tradesman of Philadelphia,” which was the pseudonym he used for his pamphlet Plain Truth: Or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia and Province of Pennsylvania. Franklin directed his pamphlet at “the middling People, the Farmers, Shopkeepers and Tradesmen of this city and country,” who, being ignored by “those Great and rich Men”—that is, wealthy merchants and government officials—had to unite and protect themselves from the war with the French that raged all around the colony.111 Franklin followed up his pamphlet by drafting a charter for a “Militia Association” composed of volunteers drawn from the people at large. In essence he proposed that the people of Pennsylvania form a private army.
But that year Franklin realized that middling sorts could not do everything by themselves. When he met with a group of mostly artisans, as Richard Peters reported to the Penn family, he assumed “the Character of a Tradesman” and praised his “middling” audience for being “the first Movers in every useful undertaking that had been projected for the good of the City—Library Company, Fire Company &c. . . . By this Artifice,” said Peters, he sought “to animate all the middling Persons to undertake their own Defense in Opposition to the Quakers and the Gentlemen.” But after Franklin had pulled out a draft of his association and read it, and all the middling people present approved it and immediately offered to sign on, Franklin told them that that was not enough. “No,” he said, “let us not sign yet, let us offer it at least to the Gentlemen and if they come into it, well and good, we shall be the better able to carry it into Execution.” It worked, because a few days later, according to Peters, “all the better sort of the People” agreed to the plan.112
By 1747 Franklin was changing his mind about his notion of a United Party for Virtue. In 1731 he had thought that virtuous and ingenious men from all ranks could constitute its membership. But now he thought he might be mistaken. Perhaps only gentlemen were the “few in Public Affairs” who were capable of acting “from a meer View of the Good of their Country.” Perhaps those middling people who had occupations—craftsmen and tradesmen, merchants and mechanics—were as yet too occupied with their particular interests to look after the common good. They were, as one genteel poet put it, the “vulgar” caught up “in trade, / Whose minds by miser avarice were sway’d.”113 In other words, Aristotle’s principle that people who worked for a living could never possess virtue was still alive in the mid-eighteenth century. Only gentlemen, as Adam Smith later pointed out, only “those few, who being attached to no particular occupation themselves, have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people.”114 Franklin had come to believe that only those who were free of the need for money should be involved in public affairs—a principle that eventually became a fixation with him. He had decided that to be a mover and shaker in the province, he would have to become a gentleman, one of “the better Sort of People” he had earlier scorned.
He had no intention, however, of becoming one of those “molatto gentlemen,” one of those stupid rich artisans who was way over his head in genteel circles. He had read enough, knew enough, was worldly enough to mingle and converse with the most polite and cultivated gentry in America, indeed, as he later demonstrated, in the courts of Europe as well. He taught himself languages, and learned enough Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and German to read what he needed. And he was rich enough not to have to work as a printer ever again. Few parvenus in history have ever been as well prepared to assume a genteel station in life as Franklin.
His retirement was a major event for him, and he took it very seriously. He now acquired several slaves and moved to a new and more spacious house in “a more quiet Part of the Town,” renting a house on the northwest corner of Sassafras (Race) and Second Streets. He left his printing office and shop in the old quarters on Market Street, where his new partner David Hall moved in to run the firm. Since most artisans worked where they lived, separating his home from his business in this way was a graphic reminder that Franklin had left his occupation as a tradesman behind.
As he had long been interested in his family genealogy, sometime before 1751 he adopted a Franklin coat of arms and began sealing his letters with it. He continued to write his Poor Richard’s Almanack without violating his new gentry status, writing being acceptable as a genteel activity, especially if it was done anonymously. For its final decade, until 1757, Franklin called the almanac Poor Richard Improved and made it much more didactic and condescending—perhaps befitting his recently heightened rank.115
With the same patronizing tone that he brought to the revised version of the almanac, he also wrote in 1748 “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One.” He more or less designed this piece to counsel all those young men who would emulate his achievement in becoming rich. The secret to “the Way to Wealth,” he said, was plain: “It depends chiefly on two Words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY; i.e., Waste neither Time nor Money, but make the best Use of both.” Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them, everything is possible, unless “that Being who governs the World” determines otherwise. Only someone who had been as successful as he had could write with such confidence. Of course, Franklin left out of his advice the most important ingredient involved in his success—his genius.116
Most important in distinguishing his move into gentility, he had a remarkable coming-out portrait painted to mark the occasion (see page ref). Portraits, after all, had long been attributes of nobility and family rank and were expensive, which is why aspiring gentlemen would be eager to have one. This first portrait of Franklin is attributed to the American-born painter Robert Feke and is like no other of the Franklin portraits we are familiar with. The painting announces the arrival of a gentleman: there is none of the famous Franklin simplicity of dress found in his later portraits. Although his dress is not as elegant as that of many colonial aristocrats, Franklin nevertheless stands in an aristocratic pose, stiff and mannered and wearing a dark green velvet coat and tightly curled brown wig, with his right arm extended to reveal the frilled ruffle of his silk sleeve.117
Franklin, portrait of a new gentleman, by Robert Feke, 1748
Franklin had waited until he was fully ready for this important step; he did not want to rush it. In that rank-conscious age Franklin had always been sensitive not to act too much beyond his station. “In order to secure my Credit and Character as a Tradesman,” he wrote in his Autobiography, “I took care not only to be in Reality Industrious & frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the Contrary.” As a tradesman he dressed plainly, shunned places of idle diversion, and put on no airs. Indeed, “to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow.” He won his superiors over by allowing them to patronize him. When one member of the legislature, a gentleman of fortune and education, opposed his election as clerk of the assembly, Franklin made him his friend by borrowing a book from him, thus, he would say, demonstrating the truth of an old maxim, “He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”118
Franklin was not the only wealthy colonial artisan or merchant who moved into the gentry in eighteenth-century America, but he was certainly one of the most prominent of those who did. In fact, he had been so long mingling with the gentry and engaged in civic affairs that most gentlemen in Philadelphia scarcely noticed the significance of his retirement. No doubt there were some gentlemen who wondered what this prosperous upstart printer was doing organizing clubs, starting libraries, promoting schools, leading the Masons, and becoming involved in dozens of activities that were well beyond the reach and consciousness of nearly all tradesmen and artisans. Franklin knew he had to take their views and prejudices very much into account and not move upward too rapidly or too conspicuously. Since bright rich colors and elaborate patterns in clothing were associated with nobility and especially high rank, even the dark green, almost black, color of Franklin’s coat in his coming-out portrait suggests that he did not want to overstep his exact position in the social order. He was at last a gentleman, but, sure as he was that he was smarter and more talented than any of them, he was not as yet ready to presume full equality with the leading aristocrats of colonial Philadelphia.119
Franklin was always sensitive about his proper place in the world. When he had organized the extra-legal Militia Association in Philadelphia in 1747, the year before his retirement, the officers of the Philadelphia regiment had chosen him its colonel. “Conceiving myself unfit,” he had declined the honor. Instead, he recommended Thomas Lawrence, a “Man of Influence,” and instead took his turn as a common soldier in the regiment.120 He conceived himself unfit not because he was ignorant of military matters—this never stopped other eighteenth-century gentlemen from becoming militia colonels—but because he realized that he was not yet quite a gentleman and it might be thought presumptuous of him to act above his social rank.
By 1756, a decade later, he had become a full-fledged gentleman and was more than ready to become an officer. He then accepted another election to the colonelcy of the militia regiment. His military rank now seemed commensurate with his social status as a well-established gentleman. But by that time he was more than a gentleman. He had become a major player in the politics of the British Empire.121