CHAPTER SIX

Electrical Man

STARTING IN THE LATE 1740S, Franklin’s international celebrity soared because of his experiments in electricity. He set Europe and America to chattering about the possibility of harnessing lightning. Some even believed that electricity could heal people. Franklin soon had a steady stream of supplicants asking him to deliver shock cures. One of them, Joseph Huey, was convinced that Franklin’s treatments had alleviated his partial paralysis. But Huey, an evangelical, cautioned Franklin: he should not expect to win salvation by his good deeds, medical or otherwise, Huey said. Franklin replied to the “impertinent” Huey and declared that we serve God best by serving others. Doing so paid debts of gratitude for the kindnesses others had shown him, as well as for the “numberless mercies from God, who is infinitely above being benefited by our services. These kindnesses from men I can therefore only return on their fellow-men; and I can only show my gratitude for those mercies from God, by a readiness to help his other children and my brethren.”1

Charity was central to Franklin’s concept of true religion. (The great historian Edmund Morgan said charity was “the guiding principle of Franklin’s life.”) Franklin told Huey that he did not, in fact, expect to “merit heaven” by his good works. There was nothing that he could do to earn that eternal happy state. He simply intended to submit to the “will and disposal of that God who made me,” and trust that God would never consign his creatures to permanent misery. Huey countered by urging him to put his faith in Christ for salvation. Franklin conceded the value of belief, but only if it was “productive of good works,” especially “works of kindness, charity, mercy, and publick spirit.” Jesus himself preferred the doers of the Word to its mere hearers, Franklin reminded Huey.2

In Franklin’s world, there were pervasive connections between faith and science. Joseph Priestley, an English Unitarian (non-Trinitarian) minister and scientist, had a profound influence on both Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Priestley produced the most widely circulated account of Franklin’s electrical experiment with the kite. Pastor Aaron Burr, Sr., inspired partly by Franklin’s work, administered electric shock treatments to fellow evangelical Jonathan Belcher, the governor of New Jersey, seeking to alleviate symptoms of a “palsy.” (The treatments led to no improvements.)³

The scientist and former Baptist minister Ebenezer Kinnersley also trumpeted the significance of Franklin’s discoveries regarding lightning rods, which could protect buildings from lightning strikes. Kinnersley prayed that “this method of security from the destructive violence of one of the most [awful] powers of nature, [would] meet with such further success, as to induce every good and grateful heart to bless God for [the] important discovery. May the benefit thereof be diffused over the whole globe. May it extend to the latest posterity of mankind; and make the name of Franklin like that of Newton, immortal.”⁴

Unlike Kinnersley and Priestley, Franklin’s French competitor, the minister and physicist Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet, grumbled about the American’s discoveries. Nollet “speaks as if he thought it presumption in man to propose guarding himself against the thunders of Heaven,” Franklin wrote. Nollet quietly wished that his own electrical experiments were bringing him as much celebrity. For many followers, Franklin’s experiments held spiritual significance. His discoveries proceeded in a community full of pastor-scientists.⁵

Before he became the electrical man, Franklin needed to secure his status as a gentleman. He pressed into his print business, the prosperity of which depended a lot on George Whitefield and the Great Awakening. In 1740, Franklin unleashed a flood of Whitefield-related publications, including at least six different segments of Whitefield’s journals and autobiography. More than half of Franklin’s publications from 1739 to 1741 were by or about Whitefield. And Franklin was hardly alone. The total number of publications in the colonies went up 85 percent from 1738 to 1741, with most of the growth resulting from works by or related to the minister. Franklin’s ledger book filled with orders of individual titles, as well as subscriptions to the multivolume edition of Whitefield’s journals and sermons. The Gazette covered the itinerant’s travels, helping to boost sales. By 1742, Franklin was even selling “fine mezzotinto and grav’d pictures of Mr. Whitefield.” Whitefield, as preacher, writer, and personality, sold unlike any product Franklin had ever known.6

B. Franklin of Philadelphia, mezzotint by James McArdell, 1761 (detail). After a painting by Benjamin Wilson. Courtesy Library of Congress.

“The alteration in the face of religion here is altogether surprising,” Franklin reported in June 1740. “Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons, nor the preachers greater zeal and diligence in performing the duties of their function. Religion is become the subject of most conversations. No books are in request but those of piety and devotion; and instead of idle songs and ballads, the people are everywhere entertaining themselves with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs [Ephesians 5:19]. All which, under God, is owing to the successful labors of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield.” Business for religious books had never been better. This kind of newspaper report also helped to sell more products, by painting religion as fashion. Everyone was buying religious texts instead of more frivolous items, Franklin told his readers.7

In spite of their friendship, Franklin also helped to fan flames of controversy about the itinerant. He published Whitefield’s notorious Three Letters (1740), which denounced Archbishop John Tillotson, the craze for whom Franklin had satirized in the Silence Dogood letters. Now Whitefield averred that Tillotson knew no more about true Christianity than did the Prophet Muhammad. Three Letters also indicted southern slave masters for their horrid treatment of slaves. Franklin seems to have published the Philadelphia edition of The Querists (1740), the first major anti-Whitefield attack printed in the colonies, and Whitefield’s 1740 response to The Querists, too.⁸

The printer was personally intrigued by Whitefield. But first and foremost, Whitefield was business. Franklin and his customers juxtaposed items related to the itinerant with other kinds of products and advertisements, including ones related to slaves. Thomas Rogers, a Franklin client and shoemaker by trade, paid four shillings in 1740 for two Whitefield imprints and five shillings to place an ad selling a slave boy. The 1740 news story about the “alteration in the face of religion” appeared in the same issue as this announcement: “TO BE SOLD, a likely Negro Boy, about 10 years old, born in the town, has had the small pox and measles: Enquire of the printer hereof.” Topics that may seem incongruous today reveal how much slavery was part of everyday life in Franklin’s world. Slavery and the Great Awakening both brought the printer greater profits.⁹

For financial and personal reasons, Franklin was sympathetic to the religious “alteration” taking place in Philadelphia. Franklin did not agree with Whitefield’s Calvinist evangelical doctrine, but he figured that anyone who could bring about real moral change was worth supporting. The printer even helped Whitefield and William Seward in their attempt to shut down the city’s dancing school and concert hall, which had been started by Robert Bolton in 1738. (Franklin had advertised its opening.) Seward procured the keys to the school’s dancing room and locked members out. “May the Lord strengthen me to carry on this battle against one of Satan’s strongest holds in this city,” Seward prayed. Some of the gentlemen supporters of the school threatened to beat Seward with a cane, and they broke open the door so meetings could continue.10

Seward, undaunted, supplied Franklin with a note for the Gazette. After providing information about Whitefield’s travels and fundraising for the Georgia orphanage, Seward stated that “Since Mr. Whitefield’s preaching here, the dancing school assembly and concert room have been shut up, as inconsistent with the doctrine of the gospel.” The passive voice made it unclear—who had shut up the room? Had Bolton’s dancing friends embraced Jesus as Savior and become convinced of the sinfulness of dancing? That was not the case, but Franklin ran Seward’s account anyway.¹¹

The dancing-school controversy precipitated a confrontation between the dancers and Seward at Franklin’s print shop on May 2, 1740. Bolton’s associates “accosted me very roughly,” Seward wrote. They said he had lied about the closing of the school. The lawyer and Anglican minister Richard Peters, who also served in the Pennsylvania government, was one of Seward’s accosters. Peters was a couple of years older than Franklin, and had emigrated from England to Philadelphia in 1734. Peters would later cooperate with Franklin on ventures such as the Philadelphia Academy, the Library Company, and the American Philosophical Society. But on Whitefield and the dancing school, Peters and Franklin were enemies. Peters had already voiced his opposition to Whitefield before Christ Church’s congregation. At the shop, Franklin watched as Seward challenged Peters to demonstrate that Jesus or his disciples would have approved of dancing. Peters could not do so, at least not to Seward’s satisfaction. Seward insisted that these pastimes were “odious in the sight of God, and did as effectually promote the Kingdom of Satan, as any of the heathen idolatries.” Peters and the dancers thought Seward was wrong and was missing the point. They insisted that Seward, abetted by Franklin, had deceived people by claiming that the “gentlemen were convicted of their error by Mr. Whitefield’s preaching.”12

Bolton’s friends pressured Franklin to allow them to respond in print to Seward. Whitefield’s and Seward’s enemies in turn claimed that “Mr. Whitefield had engaged all the printers”—most notably Franklin—not to criticize him. Only later would Franklin publish The Querists’ attacks on Whitefield. Now Franklin needed to establish some journalistic distance from the evangelist. So he accepted a letter from the pro-dancing faction, headed by an editorial note explaining his reasons for printing it. Franklin registered concern that the gentlemen intended not just to defend their character but to denigrate Whitefield and Seward. They again cited Seward’s dishonesty in the affair, and informed Whitefield that the “better sort of people” in the colony held “both him and his mischievous tenets in the utmost contempt.” They also took a swipe at Franklin for printing the crowd numbers at Whitefield’s meetings. Those numbers were double or triple the actual attendance, they claimed.¹³

Franklin had allowed Whitefield’s and Seward’s antagonists to have their say. Now Franklin would have his. Adopting the Puritan-sounding moniker “Obadiah Plainman,” Franklin railed against Peters’s “better sort of people” comment in the Gazette’s next issue. Perhaps the choice of “Obadiah” held some biblical significance to Franklin. In that one-chapter book, the prophet warns the enemies of Israel that “though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord.” Franklin was not convinced that the Seward account had damaged the dancers’ reputations. “I cannot conceive,” he wrote, “how any person’s reputation can be prejudiced, though it should be reported, that he has left off making of legs, or cutting of capers.” Franklin was fond of cheerful socializing, but this dancing club irritated him, not least because of their snooty attitude toward Whitefield’s followers.¹⁴

Franklin pounced on that elitism, and the club’s disdain for the “mob, or the rabble.” The writers Franklin admired—the heroes of classical antiquity and the opposition writers of recent British history—never looked down on the people, he told readers. “Your Demosthenes and Ciceroes, your Sidneys and Trenchards never approached us but with reverence. . . . They never took upon them to make a difference of persons, but as they were distinguished by their virtues or their vices.” Judge people by the quality of their characters, not their social station, Franklin wrote. Here was another reason for Franklin’s devotion to Whitefield. Franklin saw the minister as a champion of common people. Although he was well on his way to becoming an independent gentleman, he styled himself as a defender of regular folks too.15

The next issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette announced the publication of multiple Whitefield imprints, as well as Franklin’s edition of pastor Gilbert Tennent’s fiery sermon The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (1740). Tennent called on supporters of the revivals to abandon ministers who showed signs of being unconverted. In this issue Franklin also promised delivery of the inaugural volumes of Whitefield’s works to subscribers. He reported on the minister’s travels through Pennsylvania, noting that at some stops “people were under such deep convictions, that by their cries they almost drowned his voice.” By his defense of Seward and by these publications, Franklin became among the most active revival proponents in America.¹⁶

Still, Franklin allowed the dancing faction to print a rebuttal to “Obadiah Plainman” in the same edition of the Gazette. Controversy and sales went together. The author of the anonymous piece (likely Richard Peters) contended that Franklin fancied himself as the “prince and leader of a set of people,” meaning the lowly folks who supported Whitefield. But this was hypocrisy: Franklin was no believer! The printer was “only a temporizing convert, drawn in with regard to your worldly gain, [who has] never understood Mr. Whitefield’s spiritual doctrine of saving faith.”¹⁷

Just how hypocritical was Franklin’s support of Whitefield? Their subsequent friendship, which endured long after Whitefield’s height of notoriety, suggests that Franklin sincerely appreciated the evangelist. But a correspondent in the American Weekly Mercury, replying to Obadiah Plainman as “Tom Trueman” (again likely Richard Peters), made the most pointed charges yet about Franklin’s hypocrisy. Trueman implied that Franklin hid his skepticism now because he was making so much money off of Whitefield. Everyone knew that Franklin had published skeptical views about Christianity in the past. Trueman even suggested that Franklin privately “sneered” at Whitefield and his gospel message, in settings where the printer “thought it would not hurt his interest.” There was nothing more contemptible, Trueman concluded, than a “false fellow who carries two faces.”18

If Franklin spoke ill of Whitefield in private, then the printer was indeed guilty of deep hypocrisy. One could imagine Franklin’s sheer desire for profit overcoming his initial contempt for Whitefield. But however much Franklin disdained Whitefield at first, he warmed to the itinerant as time passed. Franklin responded as Plainman to Tom Trueman in the next issue of the Gazette, but the debate now centered around semantics in the various newspaper pieces more than the substance of the revivals. As for the charges of hypocrisy by Peters, Franklin declined to make “any return for those stagnant UNMERITED civilities, which I have received from your polite hand.”¹⁹

Whatever Franklin’s real personal view of Whitefield, Franklin always regarded the preacher’s Calvinism as unacceptable. Franklin poked fun at the minister decades later when he commented on that “extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and how much they admired and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally half Beasts and half Devils.” Franklin was not making up this line about “beasts and devils”: it was a staple of Whitefield’s preaching. Franklin found it befuddling that Whitefield remained so popular in spite of his Calvinism. Indeed, Whitefield’s frankness made him many enemies, who banned him from a number of churches, including some Anglican parishes. These prohibitions, paired with the swelling throngs attending his sermons, sent Whitefield and his supporters looking for unconventional venues, including fields and town commons.²⁰

In Philadelphia, Whitefield’s supporters decided to erect an interdenominational preaching facility called the “New Building.” It would serve as Whitefield’s base when he visited the city. As Franklin recalled, “It being found inconvenient to assemble in the open air, subject to its inclemencies, the building of a house to meet in was no sooner proposed and persons appointed to receive contributions, but sufficient sums were soon received to procure the ground and erect the building which was 100 feet long and 70 broad.” The so-called New Building was “expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something to the people of Philadelphia, the design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect, but the inhabitants in general.” Franklin embraced a fanciful view of the building’s broad religious purposes. He claimed that “even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mahometanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” Whitefield disagreed—he was a pioneer of evangelical ecumenism, but that ecumenism had distinct limits. It did not include Muslims.21

To the New Building’s supporters, the plan was to permit “such Protestant ministers to preach the gospel in the said house as they should judge to be sound in their principles, zealous and faithful in the discharge of their duty, and acquainted with the religion of the heart and experimental piety, without any regard to those distinctions or different sentiments in lesser matters which have to the scandal of religion unhappily divided real Christians.” Franklin could affirm that last note against pointless divisions among Christians. Because of Whitefield’s incessant travels, the New Building stood underused much of the time. Franklin found a more permanent function for it eventually, in creating the Academy of Philadelphia, which later became the University of Pennsylvania.²²

Philadelphia’s churches and pastors were split over Whitefield. At the city’s Baptist church, Whitefield divided the pastoral staff, with long-term implications for Franklin’s fame as a scientist. Baptist senior pastor Jenkin Jones welcomed Whitefield and radical itinerants such as the Presbyterian John Rowland to speak in his church. Rowland preached there in July 1740, with a forceful explication of the horrors of hell. A number of terrified people in attendance fainted, and some had to be carried out. Even Rowland’s radical colleague Gilbert Tennent thought that Rowland was giving undue weight to the “terrors of the divine law,” so Tennent interrupted the sermon and asked Rowland, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Rowland changed tone mid-sermon and reminded the people that Jesus had the power to save.²³

Rowland’s performance was also too much for the Baptist church’s assistant pastor, Ebenezer Kinnersley. The next Sunday, in Jones’s absence, Kinnersley denounced Rowland and Whitefield’s evangelical movement. He deplored Rowland’s “enthusiastic ravings” and suggested that the revivals’ chief supporters were common, ignorant people. Indeed, a group of these folks stormed out of Kinnersley’s sermon against Rowland, headed by an outspoken woman and a “multitude of Negroes, and other servants.” Kinnersley’s address drew a public rebuke from Jones and the Baptist congregation. Kinnersley, incensed, approached Franklin about printing the text of his sermon against Rowland. As with Richard Peters’s letters, Franklin was ambivalent. Where was the balance between journalistic fairness, and undermining his active support for Whitefield? Could printing Kinnersley’s screed jeopardize his lucrative arrangement with Whitefield?24

Franklin adopted the same approach to Kinnersley as he had with Peters. Let the critic air his opinions, but Franklin would also weigh in. He prefaced Kinnersley’s piece with a defense of his even-handedness. “It is a principle among printers,” he wrote, “that when the truth has fair play, it will always prevail over falsehood.” Printing opposing voices would allow the reading public to make their own decisions. Franklin was confident that truth, not bombast, would win out. Publishing antagonists’ views deprived them of the complaint that the press was muzzling them. Critics (presumably including Kinnersley) had accused the “printers of this city” of partiality in favor of Whitefield and the evangelical cohort. Printing Kinnersley would demonstrate that this charge was “false and groundless.” Franklin hoped readers would forgive him as the printer and blame Kinnersley alone for his invective. The Pennsylvania Gazette published another rejoinder from church members against Kinnersley, but after that, Franklin stayed clear of the Baptist church’s controversy. He had made his point: he remained open to distributing anti-Whitefield content. For his part, Kinnersley managed to reconcile with the Philadelphia Baptist congregation and received ordination there in 1743. Later he became a teacher at the Philadelphia Academy and an evangelist in his own right—an evangelist for Franklin’s electricity.²⁵

Whitefield was constantly traveling through the colonies, but in November 1740, he returned to Philadelphia. He recruited Franklin to help him with a plan to open a “Negroe school” on thousands of acres Whitefield had bought north of Philadelphia. The scheme fit into Whitefield’s paternalistic sense of Christian responsibility toward African slaves with a focus on bettering the lot of African Americans and evangelizing them, not on abolishing slavery. Even as Whitefield procured the land for the Pennsylvania school, he was beginning to pressure Georgia’s trustees to open that colony to slaves, where they were originally prohibited. Franklin, already a slave owner, loved the idea of the school. He helped to publicize it for fundraising. Franklin saw such strategies for charitable reform as the epitome of true religion. Thus Franklin announced in the Gazette that anyone wishing to contribute to the school could give money to a group of pastors and merchants including the evangelist Gilbert Tennent, or to Franklin himself.26

The school for African Americans never materialized. Franklin and Whitefield both had more ideas than they could feasibly implement. Whitefield in particular established almost no institutional legacy beyond the Bethesda Orphanage in Savannah (which struggled to stay afloat for much of the eighteenth century). Critics routinely charged Whitefield with raising vast amounts of money for charity but using the money for his own purposes. Franklin publicly denied this accusation.

Meanwhile, Whitefield was heading back to England. In a typical exchange between the men, Whitefield left Franklin with instructions about forthcoming publications. Franklin had requested to publish an autobiography of Whitefield’s early life, which Whitefield granted. He asked Franklin to stay in contact with him, so they could coordinate plans from a distance. Then Whitefield inquired after Franklin’s soul: “Dear sir, adieu. I do not despair of your seeing the reasonableness of Christianity. Apply to God; be willing to do the divine will, and you shall know it.” Whitefield would make a number of such appeals in the coming decades, but to no avail.²⁷

Whitefield’s ministry was enormously profitable for Franklin, but still, not everything the printer tried was successful. As he expanded his business, Franklin had the idea of starting a magazine to supplement the Gazette. The General Magazine would mimic publications becoming popular in Britain, but it would focus on reprinting American news, including content related to the Great Awakening. The magazine stood somewhere between a newspaper and a book, and represented a new niche for Franklin. His rival Andrew Bradford heard of the plan for a magazine and preempted Franklin with one of his own, the American Magazine. Neither publication survived long. Franklin’s suffered from a lack of clear distinction between the magazine and the well-established Gazette, and there was not enough of a market to support two new periodicals in Philadelphia.28

Still, the General Magazine offered Franklin another venue for disseminating news and publications he found interesting, as well as an outlet for occasional editorials of his own. One, written as “Theophilus,” suggests that for all of his work with Whitefield, Franklin’s theological interests had not shifted that much since his youthful sojourn in London. The essay defended the idea that “God concurs with all human actions,” taking Franklin back to themes from his Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity. In the Theophilus essay, Franklin postulated that if God had eternally decreed all things, then people did not have free will. Even if God simply foreknew everything that would happen, then nothing was contingent on human decisions. Either God had “immediate concourse with every action we produce,” or God did not have complete foreknowledge. Franklin left implicit what he had made explicit in the Dissertation: if God was responsible for everything that happened, then he was either the author of sin or there was no such thing as evil.²⁹

Franklin used the magazine to reprint news of Whitefield controversies elsewhere in the colonies. The same issue with the Theophilus essay printed a letter from the South-Carolina Gazette from Whitefield’s supporter Hugh Bryan. Bryan blamed a recent fire, which had burnt much of Charleston, on the faithlessness of the city’s pastors. The piece was so offensive that it earned both Bryan and Whitefield, who had edited it, a brief stay in jail. The juxtaposition of the Theophilus essay and the Bryan letter speaks to the eclecticism of Franklin’s religious musings. As intriguing as he found the revivals, and as profitable as they were, his theological concerns ran in different channels. These non-evangelical concerns help explain Whitefield’s routine pleadings with Franklin to believe in Jesus.30

The most controversial piece Franklin wrote in this period was, like the Theophilus essay, unsigned. It was titled “The Religion of the Indian Natives of America” and ostensibly records a response by a Susquehanna chief in Pennsylvania to a Swedish Lutheran minister’s gospel preaching around the year 1700. Published in Bradford’s American Magazine, Franklin scholar J. A. Leo Lemay argues that Franklin authored the speech’s preface and translated the text. The content certainly accords with Franklin’s opinions about the importance of virtue, and Franklin’s authorship seems certain. Franklin revised the Native leader’s speech, which he had acquired in a Latin version, to suit his essay’s purposes. Franklin apparently knew enough Latin to make a workable translation of the piece, which came to him via Swedish ministers in America. How much of the Susquehanna chief’s actual words remained is hard to say.³¹

The preface and speech were inflammatory stuff for traditional Christians. Although the piece affirmed monotheistic tenets such as a Creator God and an afterlife, it took a deistic approach to those who had not heard the Christian gospel. (Deism here meant anticlericalism, moralism, and a nonexclusive view of Christianity’s truth.) When Franklin’s New York associate James Parker republished an edition of the speech in 1752, local authorities charged Parker with heresy. People’s happiness in the afterlife depended on their “good or bad behavior in this” life, Franklin averred. Because of the “depravity of human nature, mankind is vastly more prone to vice than to the pursuit of virtue.” This fact made people anxious about their future state, an anxiety that deceiving priests exploited. They set up the false worship of idols to replace the “Religion of Nature.” But Christianity had come as a “divine revelation” to restore the essence of natural religion in “its original purity and perfection.”³²

The crux of Christianity was what Christ had taught in the second greatest commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This powerful but simple precept undercut the priests who had corrupted Christianity. “No wonder the Pope took the Bible out of the hands of the laity,” Franklin wrote. But it was not Catholics alone who suffered from priestly deception. Others invented arcane theological systems and fostered “infinite wrangles on the meaning of sounds.” (Here Franklin was recalling the Presbyterian controversy over Samuel Hemphill.) Still, some honest men sought to restore biblical interpretation to its original purity. “They interpreted Scripture by reason, and improved their reason by Scripture. The Religion of Nature was again revived.” Virtuous teachers countered the abuses of priests who insisted on their “arbitrary interpretation of the Scripture.” Among these arbitrary beliefs was the notion that God’s mercy only extended to those who believed in Jesus.33

Franklin possessed an account of a Swedish missionary telling Indians that God’s saving love only applied to Christian believers. The response of the Susquehanna chief illustrated how “palming such tenets on Christianity must necessarily obstruct the propagation of it,” Franklin concluded. In his address, the chief said he could not accept the missionary’s overtures because the Swede wanted the Indians to give up their own religion and accept Christianity. The Natives’ religion sounded a lot like Franklin’s. Their forefathers had taught them that good deeds in this life would be rewarded in the next according to a person’s “virtue.” The wicked would suffer punishment in the next life according to the severity of their crimes. As to the nature of religious truth, they regarded it the “sacred, inviolable, natural right of every man to examine and judge for himself.”³⁴

Franklin’s chief posed rigorous questions to the missionary. Did he believe that their virtuous forefathers were now in hell? Why did God reveal himself to them only through nature, and not give them enough information to be saved? “Supposing our understandings to be so far illuminated, as to know it to be our duty to please God, who yet had left us under an incapacity of doing it; will this missionary notwithstanding conclude that we shall be eternally damned?” Should they be condemned for failing to do that which was impossible for them to do? Perhaps God dealt with “different races of people in a different manner,” the Indian posited. Every person had sufficient knowledge in order to be saved, the chief argued. Salvation did not require possession of the Christians’ book. In spite of these skeptical views about Christian exclusivity, Franklin did not oppose missions per se, because they might “civilize” Native people. For example, in 1778, Franklin advised American ship captains to allow safe passage for a sloop carrying supplies to a Moravian mission in Labrador, which sought to convert “to Christianity the barbarians who live there.” This was an “enterprise beneficial to humanity,” Franklin wrote.35

In the magazine piece, however, the Indians’ withering questions continued. Would God create people but block them from the path of salvation? Surely he would only damn those who merited it by some heinous crime. If one of their ancestors had indeed committed such an offense, would God hold a whole race accountable for it? (Here Franklin signaled his objection to the doctrine of original sin, in which the whole human family fell under judgment for Adam’s transgression in the Garden of Eden.) God would never punish descendants for an ancestor’s guilt. “Those who teach otherwise,” the chief chided the missionary, “paint the Almighty, as a very whimsical ill-natured being.”³⁶

In such essays, Franklin sought to turn traditional Christians’ arguments against themselves. You say you wish to evangelize Native Americans? Then why, he asked, impose extra-biblical doctrines on them, which present unnecessary obstacles to faith? The speech was a virtuoso performance, and it was frequently reprinted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in both England and America. If we can be certain that it was written by Franklin, then the preface and speech give a strong indication of Franklin’s enduring skepticism regarding the unique truth of Christianity, even as he facilitated Whitefield’s ministry.³⁷

Franklin returned to the account of the Swedish minister’s encounter with the Susquehannas more than forty years later, in his Paris imprint Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America. There Franklin asserted that while Indians would listen politely to missionaries’ overtures, they saw no reason to believe in the superior veracity of Christianity. To illustrate, Franklin related a story of the Swede and the Susquehannas swapping creation narratives. The missionary told of Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden, and Christ’s redemptive work. An Indian orator replied drily that it was “indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider.” Then the Susquehanna told how a kind woman, descending from the clouds, gave their original fathers maize, beans, and tobacco. The missionary did not care for this tale, calling it a “fable, fiction, and falsehood.” The Susquehannas, taken aback, said that they had listened patiently and believed all the Europeans’ stories. Why now did the Swedes refuse to believe theirs?38

In spite of his doubts about Christianity’s exclusive truth, working with Whitefield tempered Franklin’s outspokenness against traditional faith. Memories of his Boston upbringing also softened his views. In 1743, Franklin and his son William visited New England. They stayed in Boston with his sister Jane Mecom, at his childhood house. Jane remained a serious Calvinist and evangelical. They seem to have quarreled about religion while he was there, given a subsequent exchange of letters between them. She implored him to return to the faith of his upbringing. Her letter to him is lost, but it included an “admonition” about his lack of faith. Ben wrote back, saying that she had expressed herself as if he “was against worshipping of God, and believed good works would merit heaven.” These were mere fancies of her mind, he commented. It seems unlikely that Jane accused Ben of being against the worship of God altogether. But Franklin did believe that works were the determinant of one’s standing before God. Jane hardly made that up.³⁹

Ben reminded Jane that he had composed his own book of devotions. Fifteen years after writing it, the prayer guide was still meaningful to him. At a minimum it served as a tool to counter Jane’s charge that he was impious. But Franklin especially refuted the notion (at least in this conversation) that he believed anyone could merit God’s favor by good works. He knew that traditionalists did believe that works were essential to the Christian life. Those good deeds could not earn God’s favor, however, or resolve the problem of unforgiven sin. Few would imagine that our paltry good deeds could merit us eternal life in heaven, he told Jane. However God assesses people in the afterlife, all stood in need of grace.⁴⁰

Still, good deeds were the core of authentic Christianity. To demonstrate this, Franklin again turned a Calvinist argument to his advantage. He conceded that there were aspects of “your New England doctrines and worship” that he did not agree with. (“Your” New England theology is an interesting phrase. It was her theology, not his, as if they had not grown up in the same house. Here he postured as a sophisticated man to whom New England Calvinism was an object of analysis, not a personal legacy.) But he did not “condemn” those Calvinist beliefs, the Hemphill writings notwithstanding. Nor did he wish to turn Jane away from Calvinism. He just asked that she show him the same courtesy regarding his focus on good deeds. In a surprising move, he told Jane that even the great Calvinist theologian and Great Awakening leader Jonathan Edwards was on his side. He suggested that she consult Edwards on good works, providing a specific citation of seven pages from Edwards’s tome Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742). This was not a book Franklin had published, so he must have consulted Some Thoughts closely if he was able to reference a passage on works deep within the text.41

In the passage Ben cited, Edwards contended that “moral duties” such as loving your neighbor were more important to God than external acts of worship, such as church attendance. What better authority to confirm Franklin’s religious philosophy than the great Edwards? But Edwards had made clear elsewhere that the heart’s love for God, not any external actions, was the core of true virtue. That did not concern Franklin. He told Jane that she should judge people by their fruit. If the fruit was good, she should not worry that the tree might be evil. He backed his admonition by citing Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew, where he taught that people would show their true nature by their fruit. “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” Christ asked. In spite of their disagreements, Jane’s influence exerted significant pressure on Franklin, helping to set limits to his heterodoxy.⁴²

While in Boston visiting Jane, Franklin attended an electricity demonstration by Dr. Archibald Spencer, a traveling Scottish scientist and fellow Freemason. Franklin was not impressed with the display itself, as Spencer was “not very expert.” But Franklin was drawn to the promise of electrical research, which “surprised and pleased” him.⁴³ In his new scientific interests, Franklin was entering a field of study that had deep Anglo-American and Continental roots. One of the first colonial proponents of electrical theory was the religious dissenter and scientist Charles Morton, who came to Massachusetts in the 1680s to teach at Harvard College. (In England, Morton had been one of Daniel Defoe’s tutors.) Morton also became minister at Charlestown, Massachusetts. For Morton, studying the natural world would inculcate wonder and “magnifye the Creator.” Isaac Greenwood, another electrical theorist, was Harvard’s first professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. Greenwood was also a childhood friend of Franklin’s. Greenwood went to England in the 1720s and interacted with leading scientists, including Isaac Newton. Upon returning to Boston, Greenwood became one of the colonies’ champions of experimental science, including that of “electrical attraction and repulsion.” Typical adherents of experimental science did not promote religious skepticism. They emphasized people’s ability to rationally discern the facts of nature by proper experiments, however. “All fanciful suppositions” would fall before this new experimental method. Its devotees, Greenwood insisted, would “take nothing for granted but what is shown to be really in nature.”44

In 1735, Franklin reprinted an ode to Greenwood, which suggests the worship-inducing and superstition-killing effects of scientific knowledge (in this case, of astronomy):

Great GOD! what Voice could into Being call

These mighty Globes, and form this beauteous ALL!

What Power can all their various Motions guide?

And from what Hand but thine are they supply’d?

GREENWOOD, with what Delight we hear you prove

The hidden Laws by which those Bodies move. . . .

No more we’ll gaze with superstitious Fear,

While you the secret Laws of Nature clear.

After Harvard authorities dismissed Greenwood in 1738 for drunkenness, Franklin helped the scientist get work in Philadelphia. He arranged for the Library Company to promote lectures by Greenwood in 1740, and he advertised them in the Gazette in mid-1740, as the furor over Whitefield’s ministry was at high tide. Franklin even loaned Greenwood twenty pounds to help the scientist get back on his feet. Franklin gave similar assistance to Archibald Spencer when he lectured in Philadelphia in 1744.45

At this stage, Franklin remained more of a scientific connector than an experimenter. This accounts for his work to create the American Philosophical Society. Botanist John Bartram of Philadelphia and New York’s Cadwallader Colden joined Franklin in founding this society to link learned American colonists. Franklin was one of the best positioned people to facilitate communication among the colonies’ top scientific minds. In a 1743 proposal for “promoting useful knowledge,” he emphasized that correspondents of the society would advise one another of “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.” The American Philosophical Society, in Franklin’s vision, would link people seeking to use science to do good.⁴⁶

Colden, a leading politician and polymath, endorsed Franklin’s proposal. Although the society was slow to start, Colden and Franklin exchanged dozens of letters in the coming decades regarding their common interests in science, politics, and social improvement. Bartram, Colden, and Franklin kept up a correspondence with the London-based Quaker Peter Collinson, a fellow of London’s Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge and a prominent botanist. Colden, whose Scottish parents also once hoped for him to become a pastor, shared Franklin’s views regarding Christianity’s social usefulness. Colden told Collinson that scientific discovery should lead us to worship God. But worship only represented half of anyone’s religious duties. Loving one’s neighbor was the other half. “The practice of the second command,” Colden declared, “gives no less pleasure to a good man than the speculations of” admiring God’s creation.⁴⁷

Between the years 1742 and 1745, as Franklin’s interest in electricity escalated, business related to George Whitefield declined, with Whitefield in Britain for most of that time. Franklin devoted more attention to a burgeoning controversy over the Moravians, a German pietist sect that was drawing away a number of Whitefield’s converts. In 1742, Franklin printed nineteen pamphlets by or about the Moravians and their leader, Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf. After that, his publishing on the Great Awakening waned. The year 1744, however, saw renewed interest, prompted by reports of Whitefield’s imminent return to the colonies. Franklin printed an attack on Whitefield by an anti-revivalist pastor in 1744. Late that year, the Gazette began to report on Whitefield’s travels again. Then came word that the itinerant had come back, landing first in Maine. After recuperating from illness in New England, Whitefield arrived in Philadelphia in September 1745. He began preaching two or three times a day at the New Building to “large audiences.”48

Peter Collinson, by J. S. Miller, [1768?] (detail). Courtesy Wellcome Library, London. Creative Commons attribution-only license, CC BY 4.0.

Among the most controversial news items about Whitefield was the status of the Bethesda orphanage in Georgia. The question of what Whitefield did with the funds he raised was tantalizing, even if Franklin was convinced that Whitefield was honest about money. Franklin admired Whitefield’s benevolent work in Georgia. But he also published critics’ claims that in Whitefield’s absence, the orphanage had gone to ruin, with livestock wandering its ground floor. Franklin printed friendly assessments of Whitefield’s work, too, including letters in 1746 from Whitefield about the condition of the orphanage. In a letter to Franklin, meant for publication, Whitefield shared an accounting report regarding Bethesda, which claimed that the minister had not converted any funds “to his own private use and property.” Whitefield admitted that only thirty people were living at Bethesda, but he thought this was good: it reduced the cost of operations. Whitefield argued that if he “could have but six Negroes” (the colony still banned slaves), Bethesda would pay for itself. Whitefield would keep pressing the Georgia trustees to allow slaves, and he seems to have illicitly permitted slaves to work at Bethesda before the colony legalized slave labor in 1751.49

Franklin was so convinced of the orphanage’s worthiness that he donated seventy-five pounds to it. Whitefield was grateful, but he discouraged Franklin from printing a list of donors to the orphanage. (Financial management was never Whitefield’s strength.) He worried that a big fundraising push would bring in too much money, more than he or Bethesda really needed. He told Franklin that he preferred depending on God’s provision. In a 1747 letter, Whitefield spoke to the printer as he might to an evangelical ministry partner. “Committing all my concerns to [God’s] hands,” he concluded, “I subscribe myself dear sir your very affectionate friend and servant.” Franklin’s contribution, and his ongoing schemes for promoting Bethesda, meant a great deal to Whitefield.⁵⁰

Whitefield’s influence, in addition to his parents’ and Jane Mecom’s, fostered Franklin’s defensiveness about his faith. This defensiveness could appear at unexpected times, such as when he tried to read Scottish philosopher Andrew Baxter’s An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul. This popular book used Newtonian physics to demonstrate the reality of God and the soul. A number of Franklin’s friends urged him to read it, but he hated Baxter’s approach. Disliking the mix of hard science with proofs about God, he said that he could not finish reading Baxter because he stumbled at the “threshold of the building.”⁵¹

Beyond his disagreements with Baxter’s physics, what especially bothered Franklin was Baxter’s notion that science could prove God’s existence. Baxter asserted that divine truths were demonstrable from scientific facts, and that science represented a fundamental threat to atheism. Franklin countered that if God’s reality was “demonstrable from no plainer principles, the Deist [by which Franklin meant a theist] hath a desperate cause in hand.” Baxter was hurting the cause of theism by his incoherence. But Franklin made clear that he was still a deist/theist, not an atheist. Deism and atheism were opposites, he insisted.52

While writing a letter about Baxter, Whitefield’s voice popped into Franklin’s mind. Franklin knew that Whitefield saw his rationalism and scientism as a cloak for unbelief. Quoting the minister’s journal (apparently from memory), Franklin recalled Whitefield saying that a certain Mr. B was “a deist, I had almost said an atheist.” This association was totally wrong, Franklin insisted. Atheism and deism were not synonyms, but antonyms. They were as different as chalk and charcoal. Whatever Whitefield thought of him, Franklin would continue to insist that he was no unbeliever.⁵³

Linking metaphysics and experimental science was no longer of interest to the printer. Franklin bore too many scars from theological battles with family members and Presbyterian authorities. Now he was reluctant to comment on matters in “the metaphysical way,” he wrote, concluding his thoughts on Baxter: “The great uncertainty I have found in that science; the wide contradictions and endless disputes it affords; and the horrible errors I led myself into when a young man, by drawing a chain of plain consequences as I thought them, from true principles, have given me a disgust to what I was once extremely fond of.” In a marginal note on this letter, Franklin made clear that by “horrible errors,” he meant those he committed in A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity two decades earlier.⁵⁴

Understanding God through metaphysics seemed an increasingly futile pursuit. But everywhere Franklin turned, new scientific discoveries bloomed. They held major promise for helping people live better lives, and he wanted in on the action. Drawing on publications of the Royal Society, books at the Library Company, and equipment sent to him by Peter Collinson, Franklin began to study electricity. He learned about it in conversation with fellow Pennsylvania polymaths such as James Logan. The somber Logan was a frequent officeholder in Philadelphia and a fellow bibliophile. While Franklin built the Library Company for public use, Logan kept a large personal library (now also held by the Library Company) that one historian calls “the greatest single intellectual monument of colonial America.” Logan mentored Franklin and modeled the kind of multivalent knowledge to which Franklin aspired. In addition to expertise in science and history, Logan knew a host of languages, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, and (extraordinarily for the time) Arabic.55

Remarks by Logan, naturalist John Bartram, and others would suggest that Franklin began performing his own experiments sometime in 1746 or early 1747. Bartram told Logan about Franklin’s displaying a cork ball rotating around an electrified body. Logan consulted his books and reports from the Royal Society, to check what others had already done in this field. Franklin’s experiments, Logan concluded, “exceed them all.”⁵⁶

Finally Franklin wrote to his English friend Peter Collinson in March 1747. He thanked Collinson for his “kind present of an electric tube, with directions for using it.” The gift had “put several of us on making electrical experiments, in which we have observed some particular phenomena that we look upon to be new.” Uncertain just how new these “phenomena” were, he sought news from England that might confirm if he was breaking new ground. Whatever the case, electricity had captured his imagination: “I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done; for what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my friends.” The experiments were drawing audiences. They were nothing like Whitefield’s throngs, of course. But the printer had gotten a taste of celebrity. “From the novelty of the thing, [people] come continually in crowds to see them. I have, during some months past, had little leisure for anything else.” Those crowds had started to envision him, in James Logan’s phrase, as “that most ingenious man, Benjamin Franklin.”⁵⁷