The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (23 page)

(In the 1760s one of Franklin’s political rivals anonymously put out that William’s mother was a woman servant named Barbara, who worked in the Franklin household for years, at £10 per annum, until her recent death. There is no reason to credit the story and much to discredit it, starting with the fact that it boggles the mind to think that Deborah would have tolerated the continuing presence of her husband’s former paramour. William she could not turn out, though she was frequently tempted; “Barbara” she could have, and certainly would have.)

By all evidence, marriage to Debbie settled Franklin down. This, of course, was much of the point of the match from his perspective, but Debbie could have been forgiven for wondering. For several years his passion had ruled him, with little William being only the most obvious evidence. Whether Franklin could rule his passion remained to be seen. Debbie must have kept close watch.

In the second year of their marriage she discovered, doubtless to her joy and satisfaction, and likely to his joy and relief, that she was pregnant. No longer would that other woman’s brat be the only child in the house; this new child would bond Ben to her in a way mere (common-law) marriage could not. On October 20, 1732, Francis Folger Franklin was born. Debbie may have chosen the boy’s Christian name, since obviously Ben selected his own mother’s family name as the baby’s middle name. Sarah, who had joined her daughter and son-in-law in the house on Market Street that served as both domicile and workplace, assisted in the delivery and in the care of the newborn. In addition, Sarah almost certainly tended to little William while Debbie nursed and otherwise doted on Franky. Downstairs, Ben hoped for an extrapolation of Debbie’s maternal good feelings from Franky to William.

Marriage
and the birth of two sons, coming after the establishment of his own printing business, fairly well rooted Franklin in Philadelphia.
Much of his life to this point had been a search for a place that suited his temperament and talents. Boston was too confining, London too loose. Eventually Philadelphia would grow too small for him—or rather he would grow too large for Philadelphia. But during the three decades that spanned his twenties, thirties, and forties, Philadelphia provided a congenial home.

Of course, the congeniality was as much Franklin’s doing as Philadelphia’s. His founding of the Junto was a first step in this direction. The club allowed Franklin to surround himself with individuals of similar intellectual interests; in time, as the members of the group assumed positions of leadership in the city, its influence leavened the community as a whole.

A second step was the organizing of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Private libraries were common enough among men of wealth in the colonies; Franklin had taken advantage of a few himself. Nor were institutional libraries unheard of; these were usually joined to churches or other bodies heavenly bent. A secular subscription library, however, was something new. Subscribers would pool their resources to buy books all would share and from which all might benefit. Franklin floated the idea in the Junto; upon favorable reception he drew up a charter specifying an initiation fee of forty shillings and annual dues of ten shillings. The charter was signed in July 1731, to take effect upon the collection of fifty subscriptions.

Franklin led the effort to obtain the subscriptions. At first, in doing so, he presented the library as his own idea, as indeed it was. But he encountered a certain resistance on the part of potential subscribers, a subtle yet unmistakable disinclination in some people to give credit by their participation to one so openly civic-minded. They asked themselves, if they did not ask him, what was in this for Ben Franklin that made him so eager to promote the public weal. To allay their suspicions, Franklin resorted to a subterfuge. “I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a
number of friends,
who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading.”

Within four months the Library Company had its requisite two score and ten commitments. Compiling the initial book order involved identifying favorite titles and consulting James Logan, the most learned man in Pennsylvania. Logan knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian and was said to be the only person in America sufficiently conversant with mathematics to be able to comprehend Newton’s great
Principia Mathematica.
Before Franklin’s emergence, Logan—who was thirty years the
elder and had been the personal protégé of William Penn—was the leading figure of Pennsylvania letters (and numbers). Naturally Franklin cultivated him as source of advice, patronage, and civic goodwill. Logan listed several items essential to the education of any self-respecting person; between these and the titles Franklin and the other library directors chose on their own, early purchases covered topics ranging from geometry to journalism, natural philosophy to metaphysics, poetry to gardening.

Louis Timothée, a journeyman in Franklin’s shop, was hired as librarian, and a room to house the collection was rented. Franklin and the other directors of the library instructed Timothée to open the room from two till three on Wednesday afternoons and from ten till four on Saturdays. Any “civil gentlemen” might peruse the books, but only subscribers could borrow them. (Exception was made for James Logan, in gratitude for his advice in creating the collection.) Borrowers might have one book at a time. Upon accepting a volume each borrower must sign a promissory note covering the cost of the book. This would be voided upon return of the book undamaged. The borrower might then take out another, building his edifice of knowledge, as it were, one brick at a time.

Franklin
was twenty-seven when the Library Company was founded, twenty-eight by the time the first shipment of books arrived from London. Colonial life was noteworthy for the opportunities it afforded able and ambitious young men, but few took such advantage of these opportunities as Franklin—not least since none were more able and not many more ambitious. The skeptics on the subject of the library were right to wonder what Franklin stood to gain from the project; he expected to gain from everything he did. But his gain, as he interpreted it, would be the community’s gain, and the community’s gain his.

In February 1731 Franklin became a Freemason. Shortly thereafter he volunteered to draft bylaws for the embryonic local chapter, named for St. John the Baptist; upon acceptance of the bylaws he was elected warden and subsequently grand master of the lodge. Within three years he became grand master of all of Pennsylvania’s Masons. Not unforeseeably—indeed, this was much of the purpose of membership for everyone involved—his fellow Masons sent business Franklin’s way. In 1734 he printed the
Constitutions,
the first formally sponsored Masonic book in America; he derived additional work from his brethren on an un-sponsored basis.

Masonic connections may have been behind Franklin’s success in winning work from the provincial government. On the other hand, when the Assembly selected him to print the colony’s paper money, the legislators may simply have based their decision on the quality of his product—as demonstrated, on this topic, by the New Jersey notes he had printed while with Keimer. Success bred success; soon he became the official printer to the Assembly. This provided the print shop with steady work and a predictable income, which in turn allowed Franklin to expand his other activities. The stationery store was enlarged; under Debbie and Sarah’s supervision new items were ordered and new business solicited. Franklin sent one of his journeymen, Thomas Whitmarsh, to South Carolina to open a print shop there after the South Carolina assembly offered a bounty for a printer. Following Whitmarsh’s death of yellow fever in September 1733, Franklin dispatched Louis Timothée to replace him, presumably with a warning about staying clear of low-lying areas during hot weather.

Meanwhile
the
Pennsylvania Gazette
grew into the leading paper of the province. It printed news of Philadelphia and the rest of the province, gleaned from official notices, Franklin’s conversations with persons of high station and low, and sundry other sources. It reprinted articles and notices from papers elsewhere in America and from those London papers and magazines that found their way across the Atlantic.

It also published opinion. Some journalists enter their profession from a zeal to right wrong and oppose entrenched authority; this was what had motivated Franklin’s brother James—and landed James in jail. Ben Franklin certainly learned from James’s experience and from his own experience on James’s paper. He had no desire to publish from prison, and even less desire to
not
publish from prison or anywhere else. Journalism for him was a business rather than a calling, or perhaps it was a calling that could call only so long as the business beneath it flourished. Unlike James, Ben Franklin would not provoke the authorities into closing him down. If nothing else, such rashness would lose him his printing contract with the provincial government.

In another person such an attitude might have seemed opportunistic, even cynical. Although Franklin was not cynical, it
is
true that few opportunities escaped him. Yet his attitude toward journalism honestly reflected his personality, to wit, his innate skepticism. No argument ever so
convinced him as to preclude his entertaining the opposite. Many people find uncertainty unsettling and insist on definite answers to the large and small questions of life. Franklin was just the opposite, being of that less numerous tribe that finds certainty—or certitude, rather—unsettling. Doubtless this reflected, at least in part, his experience of the stifling certitude of the Mathers in Boston. It also reflected his wide, and ever-widening, reading, which exposed him to multiple viewpoints. Above all, it probably reflected something innate: an equipoise that nearly everyone who knew him noticed and that many remarked upon. It could make him seem smug or shallow; while others agonized upon life’s deep issues, Franklin contented himself with incomplete answers, maintaining an open mind and seeming to skate upon life’s surface.

In short, Franklin possessed the ideal temperament for a newspaper editor who hoped to make money, rather than win converts. He opened the columns of the
Gazette
to opinions of all kinds, thereby attracting readers of all kinds and allowing the paper to thrive.

Occasionally his broad-mindedness brought him trouble. An outbreak of criticism prompted him to explain his philosophy in an “Apology for Printers,” published in the
Gazette
in June 1731. The apology began with a subapology for not crafting his case better, but “I have not yet leisure to write such a thing in the proper form, and can only in a loose manner throw those considerations together which should have been the substance of it.”

Franklin was being modest, if not coy. In fact a single sentence summarized his case and that of printers everywhere, while adding the characteristic twist that readers would learn to expect of him. “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence they cheerfully serve all contending writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the question in dispute.”