The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (22 page)

Franklin accepted at once. He reckoned he would be responsible for the debts to the merchants and to Meredith’s father in any event, so long as the business continued. Consequently the price of the purchase came to a saddle plus £30 and change. This he got from the two friends who had offered him loans; in addition he borrowed enough from them to satisfy his creditors and to pay back Meredith’s father.

The document of the partnership’s dissolution was dated July 14, 1730. Although Meredith’s name remained on the
Gazette
for some time longer, out of inertia as much as anything else, on that date the twenty-four-year-old Franklin gained his professional independence.

5
Poor Richard
1730–35

Two months later Franklin gained independence of another sort—even if many persons taking the same step have interpreted it as just the opposite. In September 1730 Ben Franklin married. Love’s pathways are rarely straight; in the case of Franklin and Deborah Read they were more crooked than usual. He lost her once by his distraction and neglect while he was in London. Tired of waiting, she married another, a potter named John Rogers. Rogers was a competent ceramicist but rather loose with promises to pay—and, as rumors that

succeeded the wedding suggested, loose with other promises as well. Someone heard from someone else who knew secondhand that Rogers already had a wife, abandoned in England. Needless to say, this upset Debbie considerably. Rogers must have been a charming fellow to cause both Debbie and the vigilant Sarah to overlook his lack of references; almost certainly heartache accompanied the embarrassment Debbie felt at falling for someone so unworthy. Beyond the bigamy, his free spending threatened them both with debts that could not be paid. Debbie, disgusted, left him and returned to her mother’s house, where she refused to have anything to do with men or most women either.

Not surprisingly, it was with mixed feelings that she subsequently learned that he had left Philadelphia for the West Indies. No one knew when he would return, or whether. Was he doing to her what he had done to his first wife? (Was that other woman even the first?) His creditors wanted to know, even if Debbie, who wished him good riddance, did not.

Yet the uncertainty of his whereabouts, combined with the importunities of his creditors, left Debbie in a more tenuous position than ever. If Rogers indeed still had a wife in England, then Debbie would have no difficulty getting her marriage annulled, freeing her from his debts and likewise liberating her to enter another marriage, should the occasion arise. But no one knew where this said first wife lived, and Debbie and Sarah certainly lacked the resources to conduct an investigation to confirm her existence. If the first wife did not exist, Debbie was stuck with Rogers, for Pennsylvania law did not allow divorce for mere desertion. The situation grew only more complicated when unconfirmable reports arrived from the Caribbean that Rogers had died. With no body or death certificate, Debbie would have to wait years for legal release from a union that may have been illegal from the start.

Franklin carried some of Debbie’s misfortune upon his own conscience. At least so he said in his autobiography, written four decades after the fact. “I considered my giddiness and inconstancy when in London as in a great degree the cause of her unhappiness.” This was the noble pose for the world-famous man; it was also rather self-centered. As noted, such guilt as Franklin felt about Debbie at the time of which he spoke was slow to surface. This is hardly surprising in a young man with much on his mind, however poorly it matched the persona the older Franklin projected back onto his past.

Whatever portion guilt played in his thinking, Franklin decided to resume his courtship of Debbie. His primary reasons were far from
romantic. A journeyman printer might sow wild oats with little care for the opinion of others, and Franklin, by his own admission and by subsequent undeniable evidence, had continued to do so upon his return from London. “That hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way.” But a man of business, one who hoped to win the approval of the respectable element of Philadelphia, could hardly continue such illicit liaisons. Besides, money was tight and time tighter in the new business, and these liaisons “were attended with some expence and great inconvenience”—not to mention “a continual risque to my health by a distemper which of all things I dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it.” Unwilling to press his luck further, or to offend propriety any longer, Franklin determined to wed.

Debbie Read was not his first choice. A young man with promise might expect a dowry as accompaniment to his bride, and Franklin, judging his promise to be as bright as that of anyone else in the city, chose to test the marriage market. His housemate and fellow Juntoist, Thomas Godfrey, and especially Godfrey’s wife encouraged a courtship between Franklin and the daughter of one of Mrs. Godfrey’s relatives. Franklin took the encouragement and initiated the suit. As the matter grew more serious, Mrs. Godfrey inquired as to what Franklin would need in the way of a dowry. Franklin, feeling quite full of himself, said he would like to retire his debt in the print shop, at that time somewhat less than £100. When Mrs. Godfrey responded that the girl’s parents had no such sum on hand, he suggested that they mortgage their house.

After some research the parents rejected Franklin’s terms. The printing business, they said, was not so profitable as Franklin supposed—certainly not so profitable that they would risk their house to marry their daughter to a printer who had yet to prove himself. Rather than make a counteroffer, they abruptly broke off relations, shutting up their daughter and forbidding Franklin to see her.

Franklin was shocked. Reasonable and honest people would have met him halfway; these parents, he suspected, having lured him into a relationship with their daughter, now hoped to exploit the strength of his feelings for her by provoking him to elope with her—in the event of which they would have to supply no dowry whatsoever. He resolved to have nothing to do with them. His suspicions seemed confirmed when, sometime later, the parents—evidently judging that their bluff had been called—indicated they would be willing to entertain his suit once more.
Franklin stood on his pride, repeating that he would have nothing to do with that family. In his anger he managed to alienate the Godfreys, who packed their belongings and left his house. Subsequently Thomas Godfrey left the Junto as well. (Franklin gave another reason for Godfrey’s withdrawal from the discussion club: “He knew little out of his way, and was not a pleasing companion, as like most great mathematicians I have met with, he expected unusual precision in every thing said, or was forever denying or distinguishing upon trifles, to the disturbance of all conversation.”)

Yet as Franklin’s anger cooled and he surveyed the situation further, he discovered that the opinion that printing was an unpromising trade was hardly unique to the Godfrey’s relations. He might get a dowry, but only attached to an unattractive or otherwise disagreeable woman. Practical though he was, he was not so calculating as to consign himself to life with a woman he did not desire nor think he could learn to love.

So he settled for Debbie Read. She was happy to see him again, if only because he appeared her one escape from the predicament into which she had fallen. Sarah Read likewise approved the suit, for similar reasons.

But the complications of Debbie’s predicament seemed almost overwhelming. If John Rogers really was dead, Franklin might inherit his debts along with his wife. If alive, he might return and charge Franklin and Debbie with bigamy. The same mores that prevented Debbie’s divorce took an even sterner view of bigamy. Upon conviction both parties might receive thirty-nine strokes of the lash upon their bare backs, followed by life imprisonment at hard labor.

These perils persuaded the prospective newlyweds to postpone their union many months. But with each turn of the calendar leaf the likelihood of Rogers’s reappearance diminished, and in the summer of 1730 Franklin and Debbie decided to go through with their plan. Yet even then they adopted an expedient: rather than celebrate a formal wedding, they simply set up housekeeping as husband and wife. This kind of common-law arrangement had evolved for precisely such ambiguous situations; the official sanction it bestowed on relationships grew out of their durability and demonstrated success. Franklin had no relatives nearby to raise objections to such an irregular, if not exactly unusual, approach to marriage. Debbie’s relations understood her plight and recognized this as the best, perhaps only, remedy. From September 1, 1730, they presented themselves to a largely approving community as husband and wife.

The marriage
was tested almost at once, in a manner many wives would have found unendurable. Sometime in late 1730 or early 1731 a son was born to Benjamin Franklin by a woman other than Deborah Read Franklin.

The timing of events suggests that Franklin already knew, when he and Debbie decided to marry, that his child was on the way. He would have been unthinkably imprudent not to tell her of such a significant impending occurrence. Perhaps he also knew at that time that he, rather than the child’s mother, would take charge of the infant; perhaps not. If he did know, he must have obtained Debbie’s consent, since she would be the child’s stepmother and, in light of contemporary customs and Franklin’s heavy workload, primary caretaker. If he did not know ahead of the birth that he would assume custody of the child, Debbie’s consent must have been obtained after the fact—a circumstance fraught with potential for anger and resentment.

The identity of the mother of Franklin’s son has been a mystery for nearly three centuries. Because there evidently was no question as to Franklin’s paternity, she must not have been a prostitute or someone otherwise particularly promiscuous (at least not around the time of conception). Debbie must have known who she was—as Franklin’s fiancée and then wife she certainly would have asked if she did not know already. Therefore Sarah must have known also. Doubtless some other people close to Franklin or Debbie must have wondered where this child came from; the nosiest would have pried the secret out. Some authors have suggested that the boy—named William—was actually Debbie’s child, conceived before her marriage to Franklin. By this argument the refusal of the couple to acknowledge her maternity reflected their continuing concern that John Rogers might return and that one or both of them would be charged with bigamy or adultery. Though the child could not well be hidden, the mother might be, shielding all concerned from the harshest consequences.

The initial reasonableness of this argument fails upon the protracted, and finally permanent, absence of Rogers. Even after the passage of years precluded any further concerns about Rogers, Debbie declined to claim William as her own—an omission impossible to imagine in any mother, let alone one who had to watch from close at hand while her son spent his life labeled a bastard. Besides, Franklin’s friends all assumed
that Debbie was not the mother. “’tis generally known here his birth is illegitimate and his mother not in good circumstances,” wrote George Roberts, albeit thirty years after the fact. Apparently Franklin had a financial arrangement of sorts with the mother, who was content to remain anonymous. “I understand some small provision is made by him for her,” Roberts said, “but her being one of the most agreeable of women prevents particular notice being shown, or the father and son acknowledging any connection with her.”