The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (81 page)

During much of 1768 various ministers dangled the possibility of appointment before Franklin. Under the circumstances existing between the colonies and the government this was a topic Franklin was reluctant to share with most correspondents; the one to whom he confided was his son, the recipient and continuing beneficiary of just such an appointment. In a letter of July, Franklin explained both his prospects and his predicament. Sometime earlier the secretary to the Treasury, Grey Cooper—“my fast friend,” Franklin called him—had said that the Duke of Grafton had lately been speaking favorably of him. Grafton headed the Treasury; more important, following Townshend’s sudden death, he had assumed the role of acting leader of the government, and heir apparent, in place of the still-ailing Chatham. Some question had been raised regarding Franklin’s long residence in England, and whether this hindered his fulfillment of his duties as deputy postmaster. There were two ways to skin this cat, Grafton intimated to Cooper, in words intended for Franklin. Grafton had directed Cooper to tell Franklin—as Franklin retold the story to William—“that though my going to my post might remove the objection, yet if I chose rather to reside in England, my merit was such in his opinion as to entitle me to something better here, and it should not be his fault if I was not well provided for.”

Franklin responded cagily. “I told Mr. Cooper that without having heard any exception had been taken to my residence here, I was really preparing to return home, and expected to be gone in a few weeks.” But his trunk was not on the boat yet. He informed Cooper “that I was extremely sensible of the Duke’s goodness in giving me this intimation and very thankful for his favourable disposition towards me; that having lived long in England, and contracted a friendship and affection for many persons here, it could not but be agreeable to me to remain among them some time longer, if not for the rest of my life.” Moreover, “there was no nobleman to whom I could from sincere respect for his great abilities and amiable qualities so cordially attach myself, or to whom I should so willingly be obliged for the provision he mentioned, as to the Duke of Grafton, if his Grace should think I could, in any station where he might place me, be serviceable to him and to the public.”

Cooper was delighted to hear this. He said he had hoped to keep Franklin in England and was pleased that Franklin was not averse to staying. Cooper suggested that Franklin call at the Treasury for a personal meeting with the duke.

Franklin did call, only to learn that the duke was out. Cooper instead ushered him to a meeting with Lord North, the chancellor of the
exchequer. North was as complimentary as Grafton had been, and said he hoped the government could find some way to make it worth the doctor’s while to remain in England. “I thanked his lordship, and said I should stay with pleasure if I could any ways be useful to government.”

Cooper insisted that Franklin come to his country house at Richmond with him, where they dined and Franklin spent the night. Shortly thereafter Cooper introduced Franklin to other ministerial worthies, including Lord Sandwich, who had been a critic but was won over by Franklin’s charm. “We parted very good friends,” Franklin told William. Lord Clare, lately president of the Board of Trade, was another admirer. “He gave me a great deal of flummery, saying that though at my examination [before Commons] I answered some of his questions a little pertly, yet he liked me from that day, for the spirit I showed in defence of my country; and at parting, after we had drank a bottle and a half of claret each, he hugged and kissed me, protesting he never in his life met with a man he was so much in love with.”

Since then nothing had come of these overtures. Franklin could not say whether Grafton had changed his mind about him, or whether some appointment impended. He had another meeting scheduled with Grafton at the Treasury in a few days. If a post were offered, he indicated to William, he would not turn it down. “I did not think fit to decline any favour so great a man expressed an inclination to do me, because at court if one shews an unwillingness to be obliged it is often construed as a mark of mental hostility, and one makes an enemy.”

Yet there were limits on what a person could ethically accept. “If Mr. Grenville comes into power again in any department respecting America, I must refuse to accept of any thing that may seem to put me in his power, because I apprehend a breach between the two countries; and that refusal will give offence.”

For this reason a person must not place excessive store in the future. “A turn of a die may make a great difference in our affairs. We may either be promoted, or discarded; one or the other seems likely soon to be the case, but ’tis hard to divine which.”

As a
young tradesman in America, Franklin had made much of the virtues of industry and frugality. Industry allowed the tradesman to employ each moment gainfully, frugality to husband the gains of industry.
Even the appearance of these virtues was important, for it won customers to the man so diligent in his craft and thrifty with his resources.

As a mature politician and philosopher, Franklin had less use for such bourgeois values. The governing classes in England were the leisured and comfortable classes, and a man who wished to make headway among them needed to fit in. Excessive industry was cause for suspicion, while frugality reflected poorly on one’s accomplishments. The philosopher, of course, required leisure to think and read and write, and pleasant circumstances conduced to such intellectual endeavors.

Franklin never lived extravagantly, but the longer he stayed in London, the more attached he became to London’s standards of living. His comfortable Craven Street apartment, his servants, his private coach, his annual travels, his socializing at clubs—all contributed to a life he learned to enjoy considerably.

Yet enough of those early values survived that when he discovered an indulgence that gave pleasure while costing nothing, or while allowing time for productive work, he took double delight. A French admirer had written with news of a novel method for treating smallpox, one that involved cold baths. Franklin answered that he had long heard cold baths touted as a tonic, but considered the shock to the system too violent.

I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise early almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. This practice is not in the least painful, but on the contrary, agreeable; and if I return to bed afterwards, before I dress myself, as sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night’s rest, of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined.

Air baths were free; another indulgence actually saved money—and trouble. “I reckon it among my felicities,” Franklin told his Scottish friend Kames, “that I can set my own razor and shave myself perfectly well, in which I have a daily pleasure, and avoid the uneasiness one is otherwise obliged to suffer sometimes from dull razors and the dirty fingers or bad breath of a slovenly barber.”

The naked philosopher pondered matters large and small, among them why shaving himself was such a pleasure. Franklin and Kames had
been comparing notes on true happiness; Franklin summarized for them both: “I have long been of an opinion similar to that you express, and think happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.”

Happiness was the subject of another correspondence. A young man asked Franklin’s views on marriage—in particular, whether youth or age was more likely to contract connubial bliss. “From the matches that have fallen under my observation,” Franklin replied, “I am rather inclined to think that early ones stand the best chance for happiness. The tempers and habits of young people are not yet become so stiff and uncomplying as when more advanced in life, they form more easily to each other, and thence many occasions of disgust are removed.” To be sure, youth lacked experience. But this might be remedied by the advice of relatives and friends. Perhaps recalling his own oat-sowing days, he asserted that despite occasional reasons to delay entrance into the married state, it was best not to tarry. “In general, when Nature has rendered our bodies fit for it, the presumption is in Nature’s favour, that she has not judged amiss in making us desire it.”

Still other correspondence concerned a more literal plunge. “I cannot be of opinion with you that ’tis too late in life for you to learn to swim,” he wrote an acquaintance who had accepted employment entailing frequent boat travel but feared for his life because he had never learned to swim. In a long letter that conjoined the physics of floating bodies, the psychology of desensitization to fear, and the pedagogy of new tricks to old dogs, Franklin laid out a concise program for basic drown-proofing. Yet this should be but the first step—for anyone. “Learn fairly to swim, as I wish all men were taught to do in their youth. They would, on many occurrences, be the safer for that skill, and on many more the happier, as freer from painful apprehensions of danger, to say nothing of the enjoyment in so delightful and wholesome an exercise.”

A public-health issue of a different sort involved a mysterious medley of complaints from people in diverse locations and occupations. In his years as a practicing printer, Franklin had sometimes warmed his type pieces during cold weather to make them easier to handle, but at the end of days when he had done so he often noted a curious pain and stiffness in his hands. Inquiry of veteran typesetters revealed instances where regular practice of this kind had deprived persons of the use of their hands permanently. Something in the lead type, released upon heating, seemed toxic.

Franklin filed away this information, and learned to set cold type. He may or may not have recalled it in 1745 when he printed an article for Thomas Cadwalader entitled
Essay on the West India Dry Gripes;
but it certainly came to mind when he and John Pringle traveled to France the first time. The pair toured a hospital devoted to patients afflicted with the “dry belly ache,” a gastrointestinal disorder associated with various occupations. Analyzing the list of patients, Franklin concluded that what the jobs had in common was chronic exposure to lead.

Not long back in London, Franklin received a letter from Cadwalader Evans, apparently a relative of Thomas Cadwalader. Evans noted that the symptoms of the dry gripes of the West Indies were similar to the symptoms of the dry bellyache of the British North American colonies and Britain. He also noted that although the climate and lifestyle of the British West Indies approximated that of the French West Indies, the latter exhibited nothing like the incidence of the malady in the former. Evans suggested a reason: while the inhabitants of the French Indies drank wine, the people of the British Indies drank rum—as did many people in the North American colonies and Britain. Rum, unlike wine, was distilled, and often the stills used a worm—or coil—made of lead.

Franklin replied that something similar had been observed in New England, and indeed the local authorities there had outlawed the use of lead in stills. He went on to say of the dry gripes, “I have long been of opinion that that distemper proceeds always from a metallic cause only, observing that it affects among tradesmen those that use lead, however different their trades, as glazers, type-founders, plumbers, potters, white lead-makers and painters.”

The epidemiology and etiology of lead poisoning were ongoing interests for Franklin; likewise other of his scientific studies. He helped coordinate what amounted to an international effort to calculate the distance from the earth to the sun, an effort that involved observing the transit of Venus across the sun’s face from different spots on earth and measuring the parallax. His electrical investigations took practical form when he advised the custodians of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on how to preserve Christopher Wren’s masterwork from lightning bolts. A venture by William Franklin into farming prompted his father to delve into the latest thinking on scientific agriculture. The possibility of starting a British silk industry propelled him into the natural history of the silkworm and the mulberry tree.

He devised a new phonetic alphabet to regularize English spelling.
Polly Stevenson was his experimental subject in this endeavor. “Diir Pali,” he wrote her—in a note that then introduced six invented letters (irreproducible without Franklin’s special fonts) and numerous redefinitions of use and pronunciation. He conceded that convincing anyone else to employ the new alphabet would be difficult. But it was worth trying. English spelling was already so far from pronunciation as to make literacy difficult for native speakers, nearly impossible for foreigners. “If we go on as we have done a few centuries longer,” he said (in translation), “our words will gradually cease to express sounds; they will only stand for things, as the written words do in the Chinese language.”