NOVEMBER 1739
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
DAY
Benjamin Franklin is now a hedonist.
Yet he is mesmerized by a large crowd of the Christian faithful assembling in the streets of Philadelphia. Franklin is still more than a quarter mile from the enthusiastic gathering when he hears the loud voice of a powerful young man preaching to the enthralled crowd. The printer is amazed “to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and how much they admired and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were half beasts and half devils.”
Franklin gets closer, eventually joining the crowd. He studies twenty-four-year-old Reverend George Whitefield, a thickset man with a British accent who wears a white wig as he preaches. Whitefield’s evangelism is well known throughout the colonies, at the forefront of what many are calling a spiritual “Great Awakening” in America. Seeing Whitefield’s power for himself, Franklin is sure that he is witnessing a transformation in the people around him. “It seemed as if all the world was growing religious,” he will later write. “So that one could not walk through town in an evening without hearing psalms being sung in different families of every street.” *
Yet Benjamin Franklin remains a nonbeliever.
For now.
The successful printer is thirty-three years old. Much has changed about him in the thirteen years since returning from London. His hairline is receding, and his long brown hair shows flecks of gray. Franklin is no longer the slender athlete of his youth, but he still has broad shoulders and a powerful build. He suffers from a chronic disease known as pleurisy, causing sharp chest pain when the lining of his lungs becomes inflamed. Having learned a hard lesson about business from Governor William Keith, Ben Franklin now ranks among the most famous and prosperous men in Philadelphia.†
The rise to success began when Franklin purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette from Samuel Keimer a decade ago. The paper provides income and has a recurring enemy in the form of Andrew Bradford, whose print business is suffering as Franklin becomes more well known. Bradford recently served as the postmaster of Philadelphia. During his tenure, he forbade his postal riders from delivering Franklin’s Gazette. At first, Ben responded by bribing those carriers, ensuring his newspaper got circulated. Later, he successfully schemed to have Andrew Bradford replaced as postmaster of Philadelphia—by a man named Benjamin Franklin.
The Gazette allows Franklin a powerful voice in all things political. The opinions formed over a lifetime of observation and reading are given full vent, though Ben has learned to be more diplomatic in his written attacks, softening the blows with gentle humor.
He has used the Gazette to argue for a fire department and lending library in Philadelphia. Franklin has even branched out from local matters to lobby for change at a national level, railing against the cruel taxation of Great Britain’s Molasses Act of 1733—which he labels “mortifying.” A thorough Anglophile who still misses his freewheeling days in London, this is one of Franklin’s first known disagreements with the English Crown.*
From his large print shop and home on Market Street, Ben Franklin has also brought a new version of Silence Dogood to life. Using the pseudonym “Poor Richard”—a pen name he denies as being his own—Franklin publishes an annual almanac that has become a fixture in the American colonies, selling thousands of copies each year. Readers are treated to weather predictions, astronomical observances, as well as pithy reminders such as “a penny saved is a penny earned” and the blunt “fish and visitors stink after three days.”
The almanac is so lucrative that Franklin sends five hundred copies to his brother James’s widow in New England, allowing her to sell them for profit as a means of staying financially afloat.
The thirteen years since Benjamin Franklin’s return from England is a time when Philadelphia almost doubles in population and thrives as one of America’s leading seaports. The printer’s personal success mirrors that of the city. Ben is now grand master of the local Freemason lodge, serves as clerk of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, and prints Pennsylvania’s state currency.
Notably, beginning in 1732, Franklin has been watching the construction of a new Georgian-style structure with a redbrick facade. It will not be completed for two decades, but the towering profile and prominent location on Chestnut Street already makes it a city centerpiece. The Pennsylvania State House, as the building is known, will serve as a legislative meeting place. In the future the structure will become synonymous with the birth of an entire nation—its name changed to Independence Hall.
Benjamin Franklin will also play a prominent role in that transformation.
So it is that Franklin becomes a powerful and wealthy young man, but along with that has come a complicated private life—one that would shock his religious ancestors.
Benjamin Franklin and Deborah Read are a couple once more. Her husband ran off in 1728, after being charged with stealing a slave. It is rumored that John Rogers fled to the West Indies, where he was killed. Yet Deborah has no proof of his demise, therefore no death certificate.
But she is sure he is never coming back. So she is receptive when Benjamin Franklin resumes their courtship and begins talking of marriage. But that presents a problem: bigamy.
In Pennsylvania, the penalty for being married to more than one person at the same time is life imprisonment. However, such a sentence is hard to enforce in a territory that borders open wilderness. There is no state prison. Local jails are poorly constructed and prone to easy escapes. If she marries, it is likely that Deborah will be banished. She will be forced to leave Pennsylvania.
As usual, Benjamin Franklin proposes a solution.
He will enter into a common-law marriage with Deborah—that is, a relationship agreed on by both partners but not formally recorded with legal documents. This is a Quaker invention. There is no such thing as common-law marriage in Puritan Massachusetts, except for the slaves’ practice of “quasi-marriage.” There is only adultery, punished by whipping and even execution.
But not so in Philadelphia. By proposing common-law marriage, Franklin protects Deborah Read from adultery charges—and also prevents her former husband’s creditors from coming after her for payment.
But physical attraction and personal fondness are not the only reason Benjamin Franklin proposes marriage to Deborah.
Franklin’s busy career makes little time for distractions—like children.
The printer already has a son. William Franklin was born of an affair with an affluent woman whose name is forgotten by history. The child came into the world on February 22, 1730. William has never been baptized, for this would compel the mother to sign her name into the baptismal record and reveal her identity. Ben Franklin keeps the situation quiet but does not deny being the father.
The common-law marriage between Franklin and Deborah is sealed on September 1, 1730, seven months after William’s birth. Deborah becomes pregnant soon after. She gives birth to Franklin’s second son, Francis, in 1732. But the boy does not live long, dying at age four from smallpox.
As his son’s illness takes hold, Benjamin Franklin becomes an advocate for inoculation. He has not forgotten Cotton Mather’s long-ago smallpox preventative, even though his brother James was an outspoken opponent. The Gazette runs editorials encouraging parents to treat their children for smallpox with a vaccine. This will prove embarrassing to Ben Franklin, for many in Philadelphia will point to Francis’s death as a sign that inoculation does not work. He will publicly backpedal when it is learned that he did not inoculate his son.*
The death of Francis Folger Franklin deeply affects his father. Ben Franklin also lost his older sister, Sarah, to smallpox a few years prior. Writing of her death, Franklin showed a belief in the afterlife, stating that her family should “be comforted they have enjoyed her so long and that she has passed through the world happily … and that she is now secure in rest, in the place provided for the virtuous.”
Clearly, spiritual matters occupy Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts. Deborah remains a devout Anglican but Franklin’s short attempt at being a Presbyterian has come to an end.
So instead of attending church with his wife, he makes up his own list of commandments, to which he rigorously adheres.
They are thirteen in number: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, humility.
Yet as rooted in Puritan beliefs as these traits may be, none of them apply directly to faith in God.
For Benjamin Franklin, one afternoon in Philadelphia makes him reconsider that.
“In 1739 arrived among us from Ireland the Reverend Mr. Whitefield, who had made himself remarkable there as an itinerant preacher,” Franklin will write in his autobiography.
The printer knows of Whitefield from the London newspapers that arrive regularly in the colonies. He is aware that the fervent evangelist draws crowds numbering in the thousands, with one sermon in Britain allegedly drawing an astounding twenty thousand listeners. Franklin finds this ludicrous, thinking it impossible that the voice of one man is strong enough to carry over such a large crowd. So when Whitefield arrives in Philadelphia as part of an extended evangelical journey through the colonies, Franklin reluctantly decides to investigate. He thinks Whitefield might be a charlatan.
Benjamin Franklin bides his time, uninterested in hearing Whitefield speak to small local congregations. Church leaders in Philadelphia are at first enthusiastic about allowing him into their meetinghouses. This does not last long. Whitefield is so charismatic that entire congregations follow him to wherever he might be speaking next, abandoning their normal places of worship.
Whitefield begins giving large open-air sermons, which capture Franklin’s attention. He does not agree with all of Whitefield’s tenets, such as the gospel of salvation through Christ. Yet he is intrigued that the preacher is doing good works, like opening a large orphanage outside Savannah, Georgia.
As Franklin stands on the edge of the crowd on a cold winter day listening to George Whitefield for the first time, he knows that a collection plate will soon be passed. The skeptic in him thinks Whitefield is attempting to fleece the crowd. He makes a mental list of the currency in his pockets—“a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold”—and vows not to donate. “I silently resolved he should get nothing from me.”
Then, for the first time in decades, the boy in Benjamin Franklin who once longed to become a minister is revived. Whitehead’s words boom over the large crowd. Franklin is taken in by the sincere message of faith: “A wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers, of which I myself was.”
The collection plate is passed. Franklin empties his pockets wholly into the dish.
Benjamin Franklin sees more than just a preacher in Reverend George Whitefield. The two men meet and soon become business partners, with Franklin securing an arrangement to print Whitefield’s sermons. The two develop a deep “civil friendship,” in Franklin’s words. Whitefield becomes a frequent visitor to the Franklin household, also forming a tight bond with Deborah.
Eventually, Reverend Whitefield becomes one of the most famous religious figures in the world.
Whitefield travels to America seven times over the course of his life. His message of self-determination in religion and civil affairs would resonate throughout the colonies, inspiring rebellion against England. He died on Sunday, September 30, 1770, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he is buried under the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church.
For all his success, George Whitefield never secures Ben Franklin’s conversion to Christianity, which will have ramifications for the new experiment in democracy that is coming.
As the 1740s unfold, the vast majority of colonists are, unlike Ben Franklin, devoted Christians. But many lack the insight of Jesus and persecute their rivals.
In New England, Puritans have lost their power but not their intolerance. However, the situation is the opposite in the Virginia Colony. A few hundred Puritans migrated there in the 1620s and 1630s. Some are on the run, as are Quakers—a group admired by Franklin.
Unlike mother country England, where the king’s church rules, the thirteen colonies are divided by religion, and that will cause a tremendous amount of trouble in the years ahead.*