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He was, during his eighty-four-year-long life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers.
Among the great romantic myths about America is that, as schoolbooks emphasize, the primary motive of its settlers was freedom, particularly religious freedom.
So even though their next son, Benjamin, would spend his youth in a house with ten older siblings, the youngest of them would be seven years his senior. And he would have two younger sisters, Lydia (born 1708) and Jane (1712), looking up to him.
young Benjamin ended up apprenticed in 1718, at age 12, to his brother James, 21, who had recently returned from training in England to set up as a printer.
It was a tradition among American pioneers, when their communities became too confining, to strike out for the frontier. But Franklin was a different type of American rebel. The wilderness did not beckon. Instead, he was enticed by the new commercial centers, New York and Philadelphia, that offered the chance to become a self-made success.
“A man [is] sometimes more generous when he has little money than when he has plenty,” he later wrote, “perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little.”3
Although divine revelation “had no weight with me,” he decided that religious practices were beneficial because they encouraged good behavior and a moral society. So he began to embrace a morally fortified brand of deism that held God was best served by doing good works and helping other people. It was a philosophy that led him to renounce much of the doctrine of the Puritans and other Calvinists, who preached that salvation came through God’s grace alone and could not be earned by doing good deeds.
Man is a sociable being, and it is, for aught I know, one of the worst punishments to be excluded from society.
2 Because there was no foundry in America for casting type, Franklin contrived one of his own by using Keimer’s letters to make lead molds. He thus became the first person in America to manufacture type.
One of the most popular contemporary typefaces, a sans-serif font known as Franklin Gothic that is often used in newspaper headlines, was named after him in 1902.
Like most other newspapers of the time, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was filled not only with short news items and reports on public events, but also with amusing essays and letters from readers. What made his paper a delight was its wealth of this type of correspondence, much of it written under pseudonyms by Franklin himself.
He expressed his credo as a publisher in a famous Gazette editorial “Apology for Printers,” which remains one of the best and most forceful defenses of a free press.
One ever reliable method, which had particular appeal to the rather raunchy unmarried young publisher, was the time-honored truth that sex sells.
By the early 1730s, Franklin’s business was thriving. He started building an extended little empire by sending his young workers, once they had served their time with him, to set up partnership shops in places ranging from Charleston to Hartford. He would supply the presses and part of the expenses, as well as some content for the publications, and in return take a portion of the revenue.
Around that time, Franklin developed a method for making difficult decisions. “My way is to divide a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro and the other Con,” he later recalled. Then he would list all the arguments on each side and weigh how important each was. “Where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out; if I find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con, I strike out the three.” By this bookkeeper’s calculus, it became clear to him “where the balance lies.”
Instead, he fit squarely into the tradition—indeed, was the first great American exemplar—of the Enlightenment and its Age of Reason.
That movement, which rose in Europe in the late seventeenth century, was defined by an emphasis on reason and observable experience, a mistrust of religious orthodoxy and traditional authority, and an optimism about education and progress.
Franklin’s talent was inventing a few new maxims and polishing up a lot of older ones to make them pithier.
He’s a fool that makes his doctor his heir . . . Eat to live, and not live to eat . . . He that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas . . . Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage . . . Necessity never made a good bargain . . . There’s more old drunkards than old doctors . . . A good example is the best sermon . . . None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing . . . A Penny saved is Twopence clear . . . When the well’s dry we know the worth of water . . . The sleeping fox catches no poultry . . . The used key is always bright . . . He that
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Franklin’s subscription library, which was the first of its type in America, began when he suggested to his Junto that each member bring books to the clubhouse so that the others could use them.
The Library Company of Philadelphia was incorporated in 1731, when Franklin was 27. Its motto, written by Franklin, reflected the connection he made between goodness and godliness: Communiter Bona profundere Deum est (To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine).
The Library Company thrives to this day. With 500,000 books and 160,000 manuscripts, it remains a significant historical repository and is the oldest cultural institution in the United States.2
So, in 1748 at age 42—which would turn out to be precisely the midpoint of his life—he retired and turned over the operation of his printing business to his foreman, David Hall. The detailed partnership deal Franklin drew up would leave him rich enough by most people’s standards: it provided him with half of the shop’s profits for the next eighteen years, which would amount to about £650 annually. Back then, when a common clerk made about £25 a year, that was enough to keep him quite comfortable. He saw no reason to keep plying his trade to make even more. Now he would have, he wrote
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But his retirement did indeed usher in a period in his life when he had aspirations to be, if not part of the aristocracy, at least, as Wood says, “a gentleman philosopher and public official” with a veneer of “enlightened gentility.”
“Franklin’s law of conservation of charge must be considered to be of the same fundamental importance to physical science as Newton’s law of conservation of momentum.”
Franklin, ingenious as he was, was no Galileo or Newton. He was a practical experimenter more than a systematic theorist.
Franklin’s scientific work was distinguished less for its abstract theoretical sophistication than for its focus on finding out facts and putting them to use.
At its core was a somewhat new concept that became known as federalism. A “General Government” would handle matters such as national defense and westward expansion, but each colony would keep its own constitution and local governing power.
Only a few revisions had been made to the scheme sketched out in the “Short Hints” that Franklin had carried with him to Albany, and he accepted them in the spirit of compromise. “When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair,” he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, “one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater.”
It was to no avail. The Albany Plan was rejected by all of the colonial assemblies for usurping too much of their power, and it was shelved in London for giving too much power to voters and encouraging a dangerous unity among the colonies.
Looking back on it near the end of his life, Franklin was convinced that the acceptance of his Albany Plan could have prevented the Revolution and created a harmonious empire.
Throughout his life, Franklin would find himself torn (and amused) by the conflict between his professed desire to acquire the virtue of humility and his natural thirst for acclaim.
But he held these views as a proud and loyal Englishman, one who sought to strengthen his majesty’s empire rather than seek independence for the American colonies. Only much later, after he was indeed looked on coldly by great people in London, would Franklin prove a dangerous enemy to the imperial cause.
He proposed, instead, a radically different alternative: attempting to take Pennsylvania away from the Penns and turning it into a Crown colony under the king and his ministers.
More ominously, it noted that “inferior assemblies” like those in the colonies “must not be compared in power or privileges to the House of Commons.”30
As he wrote Kames soon after his departure, “The future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America.” For all his problems with the Penns, he had not yet turned into a rebel.
“I looked around for God’s judgments but saw no signs of them.” He concluded, with a touch of amusement, that this provided evidence that the Lord did not care so much about preventing pleasure on the Sabbath as the strict Puritans would have people believe.
On September 4, William married Elizabeth Downes at the fashionable St. George’s Church on Hanover Square, without his father in attendance.
That reignited his resolve to continue pursuing, against all odds, his dream of convincing the British to revoke the Proprietors’ charter and make Pennsylvania a Crown colony.
Most people in Pennsylvania still did not share his fervor for a royal rather than Proprietary government.
Franklin had been developing a vision of an American future that went beyond even wresting Pennsylvania from the Proprietors. It involved a greater union among the colonies, along the lines of his Albany Plan, and a more equal relationship between the colonies and the mother country as part of a greater British Empire.
Franklin was about to become embroiled in a controversy over the notorious Stamp Act, which would require a tax stamp on every newspaper, book, almanac, legal document, and deck of cards.5
The Stamp Act crisis sparked a radical transformation in American affairs. A new group of colonial leaders, who bristled at being subservient to England, were coming to the fore, especially in Virginia and Massachusetts. Even though most Americans harbored few separatist or nationalist sentiments until 1775, the clash between imperial control and colonial rights was erupting on a variety of fronts.
Franklin felt the best way to force repeal, one that appealed to his Poor Richard penchant for frugality and self-reliance, was for Americans to boycott British imports and refrain from transactions that would require use of the stamps. This approach would also rally British tradesmen and manufacturers, hurt by the loss of exports, to the cause of repeal.
On February 13, 1766, Franklin got the chance to present his case directly to Parliament. His dramatic appearance was a masterpiece of both lobbying and theater, helpfully choreographed by his supporters in that body. In one afternoon of highly charged testimony, he would turn himself into the foremost spokesman for the American cause and brilliantly restore his reputation back home.
On both sides of the Atlantic, there was great rejoicing when Parliament promptly repealed the Stamp Act, even though it laid the ground for future conflict by adding a Declaratory Act stating that Parliament had the right “in all cases whatsoever” to enact laws for the colonies.
Famed in Britain as a writer and scientist, he was now widely recognized as America’s most effective spokesman. He also became, in effect, the ambassador for America in general; besides representing Pennsylvania, he was soon named the agent for Georgia, and then New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Thus, he was intrigued, even hopeful, about securing a government job in which he could try to hold the two parts of the empire together.42
It was not to be. Franklin’s hope of joining the British government ended abruptly when he had a long and contentious meeting with Lord Hillsborough in August 1768.
Separatist sentiments were, in fact, already being inflamed, especially in Boston. On March 5, 1770, a young apprentice insulted one of the redcoats sent to enforce the Townshend duties, a fight broke out, bells rang, and a swarm of armed and angry Bostonians came out in force. “Fire and be damned,” the crowd taunted. The British soldiers did. Five Americans ended up dead in what soon became known as the Boston Massacre.
