The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (10 page)

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 1751 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.