OneA NEW MAN
ON DECEMBER 11, 1740, as the first snow of winter fell in the city of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin released the most thrilling issue of his newspaper in months. It was days like this that printers relished, when they had a story to turn heads and ignite conversation. But for Franklin, the printer and proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, this excitement was tempered by anxiety. Because for all the drama of his front-page story, he knew that tucked away inside the paper was something far more explosive.
That December Franklin was a month shy of his thirty-fifth birthday. He was an instantly recognizable figure in the raucous streets around his Market Street print shop. He stood at a modestly tall five feet nine inches, had golden brown hair, deep-set hazel eyes, and, although often hesitant or reticent in conversation, he was decisive in action. As he flitted between Market Street and the Pennsylvania State House, where he oversaw political proceedings as Clerk of the Assembly, he gave off a faint air of prosperity. He wore a silk-lined coat in the winter months, along with Holland shirts that ruffled at the sleeves. These flashes of affluence, conspicuous enough in a colonial society that was highly alert to such details, still fell short of true refinement. To study Franklin more closely was to see he was a working man. He was bull-necked. His chest and shoulders were powerful from years of heaving type cases and working the press. Although he was now edging into middle age, people could still just about glimpse the athletic boy who, long before he was known for anything else, was known for his skill as a swimmer in the turbulent waters of Boston Harbor.
That childhood in Boston was now almost two decades behind him. He was born in 1706, the youngest son of a tallow chandler, Josiah Franklin, and his second wife, Abiah. His youth was spent within the confines of the family—working first as his father’s assistant, later as his brother’s apprentice—in the austere culture of Puritan New England. Few of Franklin’s contemporaries in Philadelphia knew much of this. Like so many in the boisterous young city, he had simply appeared one day in 1723 at the riverside, unkempt, disoriented, and, as he later remembered, with no more than “a Dutch dollar and about a Shilling in Copper” to his name.1
Seventeen years later, many of those who had seen Franklin enter Philadelphia for the first time—a scene he would later brilliantly recount in his Autobiography—had vanished from the streets, carried away by the transience of life in the colonies. But while scores had died, failed, or left to start anew, Franklin had prospered. His talent and drive marked him out from the start. He forged friendships with most of the ingenious figures of the city, like the book-loving Joseph Breintnall and the self-taught mathematician Thomas Godfrey. Soon after his arrival no less a man than Pennsylvania’s governor, Sir William Keith, took notice of him. It was he who encouraged Franklin to cross the Atlantic to London for what turned out to be a formative eighteen-month stay in 1725–26. Apart from this one interlude, however, Philadelphia had always remained his home. By 1740, seventeen years after his arrival, he was established as a prominent citizen in the boisterous, expanding, and fiercely competitive city, thickly enmeshed in its business and politics.
Anchoring Franklin to the center of the city’s everyday life was his newspaper. He released the Gazette on Thursdays, beneath the tagline “Containing the freshest Advices Foreign and Domestick.” That week he had got hold of a delicious front-page story for his readers. It was told in a series of letters that had been written four months earlier in the Irish town of Nenagh. They described a horseback pursuit across rural Ireland. The chase had begun when a notorious band of robbers, the Kellymount Gang, “well mounted and armed,” had been seen crossing from County Kilkenny into Tipperary. Catching the scent, twelve “young and stout Fellows” had vowed to run them to ground. “Never was there a Pursuit so vigorously carried on for the Time,” one letter affirmed. The hunt had extended over a vast region, from the meadows of Queen’s County to the banks of the Shannon. It included two white-knuckle shootouts, one up a “black Mountain” near a hill called Devil’s Bit.2 Coming mere months after the highwayman, Richard “Dick” Turpin, had been executed at York, this was enthralling copy. For Philadelphia’s sizeable community of Irish immigrants, in particular, it was a cocktail of adventure and nostalgia that could hardly be bettered.
Newspaper stories like these acted like portals. They were mechanisms that temporarily carried readers away from their isolated position on the fringes of the Empire, back to the Old World where they could, for a moment, feel the damp Irish breeze on their cheeks. This was something new and exciting. For all human history the bounds of life had been narrow. Life had been experienced in the parish and, when necessary, explained in the church. Newspapers altered this. With their rise, a kind of vicarious experience had emerged. A reader in Philadelphia could pick up a newspaper and find themselves a fly on a wall inside the court of George II, or aboard a fighting frigate in the Channel, or gazing at the gallows in an English county town.
Following an emerging formula, which appealed to a readership that was hyper-sensitized to news from the Old World, Franklin prioritized the best British and European stories by placing them at the start of his four-page paper. The later parts were reserved for domestic news, notices of runaways, inventories of newly arrived ships, and advertisements for land sales. It was in this section of the newspaper, on December 11, 1740, that Franklin inserted a piece that, in an understated way, eclipsed his lead story. It was written by Franklin himself. His eight hundred words were crowded into a single column in small type. “THE Public has been entertain’d for these three Weeks past,” it began, “with angry Papers, written expressly against me, and publish’d in the Mercury.”
The two first I utterly neglected, as believing that both the Facts therein stated, and the extraordinary Reasonings upon them, might be safely enough left to themselves, without any Animadversion; and I have the Satisfaction to find, that the Event has answered my Expectation: But the last, my Friends think ’tis necessary I should take some Notice of … 3
For those who knew Franklin, this was curious from the start. Throughout his career he had established a reputation for reserve. New acquaintances were often perplexed by this, finding him a difficult person to read. Unforthcoming in private, Franklin had taken equal care not to embroil himself in public disputes. However much enflamed by injustice, he had come to the conviction that forbearance was almost always the best way. It was an ethos that Franklin not only adhered to himself, it was one he propagated over and again to readers of his bestselling Poor Richard’s Almanack:
He that lieth down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas.
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It is better to take many injuries, than to give one.
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None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing.4
But for a few weeks at the end of 1740, Franklin was provoked out of this pose. For all its charms, Franklin knew that Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love,” was a ruthless place. It was a place, as Franklin decided, where even the ant must occasionally take a stand.
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BY 1740, THIRTEEN BRITISH colonies existed along a narrow, continuous strip on the eastern coast of the North American continent. Their establishment had been the work of the previous century. Beginning as nothing more than vulnerable beachheads, held by a determined few, each of the colonies had gradually broken free from their enclave origins. By the 1740s they stretched several hundred miles inland. In this time, justified by the charters that they carried from the King of England, the settlers had built towns and roads, and established farms, all the time pushing farther and farther into lands that for tens of thousands of years had been home to the Indigenous American peoples. Few were troubled by this. Instead, more than a century after the first wooden houses were constructed at Jamestown in Virginia, the settlers retained a romantic sense of mission. This was a sensation that was equally felt by the preachers of Boston, the merchants of New York, and the planters of Virginia.
Regional stereotypes such as these were well established by the 1740s. But behind them lay thirteen complex colonial worlds that operated in their own distinct ways, with their own particular hopes and concerns. They were all united, however, by the bond they continued to share with Great Britain. This was a foundational relationship that was both structural and emotional. It was often described, then as now, in terms of a mother and her children. It is an appealing image but it is one that needs to be qualified. If Britain was the mother, then she was something of an erratic one. Often distracted by her own domestic cares and more interested in financial growth than anything else, she had never quite got around to defining the limit of her children’s freedom.
While the colonies were indulged to some extent—being nourished by British trade and held together by a framework of English law—they were generally left alone to deal with their own problems. The colonists broadly liked this dynamic. It allowed them to grow without too much intrusion from London, while at the same time they knew that if any great problem appeared they could send petitions across the Atlantic to the king. These, however, rarely elicited a quick reply. The news took anywhere between one and two months to travel between America and Britain and, thanks to the prevailing winds, it usually took even longer to come back. Even when a petition arrived in Westminster it was rarely dealt with quickly. By the 1740s there was really only one word that made the British establishment, either at St. James’s or in the Palace of Westminster, sit up and think hard about America. That word was “France.”
This was the second vital aspect of the colonial dynamic. For as much as the colonies cherished their founding bond with Great Britain, they shared a distrust of the ancient enemy. The French, as everyone well knew, had their own designs on the North American continent. And while the British colonies had been growing on the Atlantic coast, far away, inside the boundless interior, the French had been making charts, building forts, and striking treaties with peoples like the Odawa or the Abenaki. The anxiety the colonists felt in 1740 could be understood by simply glancing at a map. Surrounding the British colonial strip to its north and west lay an enormous territory known simply as New France. In recent years, apprehensions concerning this had become muddled up with something else. The 1730s had been filled with territorial and trade squabbles with the other great European power, Spain. There had been differences concerning the newest and southernmost of the colonies, Georgia, and there had been confrontations in the Caribbean. These spats had ripened into formal war in 1739, and due to the Pacte de Famille between King Philip V of Spain and his Bourbon nephew, Louis XV of France, escalation was feared. To those who lived in British America, it seemed as if the long-anticipated contest for supremacy on the continent was soon to begin.
The Province of Pennsylvania was situated in the middle of these British American colonies, tucked away from the Atlantic coast behind New Jersey. There was something special about this place. Founded on the basis of a charter that had been granted on March 4, 1681, sixty years on it remained, along with Delaware and Maryland, one of the few proprietary colonies,* and it retained the utopian aura of its founder. William Penn was a remarkable figure. Described by one historian as being a mix of “courtier and sectarian; saint, schemer, and scholar,”5 he was the wealthy son of an English admiral who had the vision of creating “a free Colony for all mankind.”6 Penn’s project was a response to the religious strife that had riven English society in the seventeenth century. A convert to the new Quaker sect, he had seen at first hand the need for a place where a person’s freedom of conscience was guaranteed. When Charles II had given him lands in the New World in lieu of debts owed to his father, Penn set about establishing a society where no one was to be injured on religious grounds and where everyone was welcome so long as they believed in one Christian God.
Penn named this experimental colony “Pennsylvania,” or Penn’s Wooded Country, and he had decided that “a green country town” was to lie at its heart.7 He engaged an English surveyor called Thomas Holme to realize this vision. Having crossed the Atlantic, Holme had started work in 1683. It was at precisely this time that Isaac Newton was beginning his Principia Mathematica, three thousand miles away at Trinity College in Cambridge. Newton’s masterpiece and Holme’s Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia were entirely different works, but they were both expressions of the same emerging culture. They conformed to a central tenet of Enlightenment thinking: that order was Nature’s first law. Holme’s streets were not haphazard. They did not twist and turn outward from a cathedral or a castle. Instead he designed a grid of intersecting streets that slotted into an area, two miles by one, between two rivers. A few avenues and a central square were Holme’s only flourishes. Philadelphia’s allure was not only its tolerance; it was also its regularity. In the coffee houses of London, this “green country town” was soon being talked of as a beacon of rationalism: an enlightened settlement in a land filled with space and promise.
Set beside the broad Delaware, roughly eighty miles upstream from the Atlantic Ocean, and opening out onto fine, fertile lands, Philadelphia’s potential was easy to see. Letters back to Europe spoke of charming creeks, vast apple orchards, and the huge pigs that roamed the nearby woodlands, fattening themselves on fallen peaches. Whether this was propaganda or not, by 1740 people knew at any rate that Philadelphia now ranked among the largest settlements in the colonies. Where seventy years before the Lenape had hunted deer in woodlands and panthers were to be found prowling among whortleberry bushes, there now stood civic buildings and churches. A Quaker aristocracy controlled the politics and mercantile affairs of the town, whose inhabitants, owing to Penn’s insistence on religious tolerance, also included Anglicans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Catholics. While many, like Franklin, had family ties to England, there were others with links to Scotland, Ireland, and Sweden, and, especially in what was called the “back country,” there were communities from Germany and Holland. More elusive in the archives, but visible everywhere, were slaves of African origin. They had formed part of Philadelphia’s social fabric since its earliest years and, by 1740, comprised around a tenth of its population.8
Any of these people could be found in 1740 milling together on Holme’s little network of streets. While by European standards Philadelphia remained a modest size—its population of ten thousand was still only around half of that of Bristol—its handsome, brick-built State House, under construction since 1732, and elegant Christ Church added touches of refinement. Commerce was brisk too. Situated at the center of British America, on the post road that ran for a thousand miles between Boston and Charleston, it was a natural hub. Outside Franklin’s printing shop on Market Street flowed a constant stream of traffic. There were rowdy parties of sailors with their broad trousers, scarlet waistcoats, and pigtails, Quakers in their beaver hats, gentlemen with swords hanging at their sides, hawkers, maids, and stevedores, hauling goods from the riverside to the open-air stalls of the bustling Jersey Market.
While the stream of faces was ever changing, Franklin’s New Printing Office remained a constant feature of this lower stretch of Market Street. It was here, aged twenty-two, in 1728, that he had first set up his press. By 1740 his business had developed substantially. It was now something that is best imagined as an upstairs-downstairs operation. While Benjamin oversaw the printing upstairs, on the ground floor his wife Deborah stewarded a general store. Often marginalized in the Franklin story, Debby’s contribution to the family’s success was substantial. She kept the accounts, served customers, and, with each passing year, enhanced the range of stock for sale. A trip to Franklin’s on Market Street meant more than a chance to buy a Gazette or stationery, like quills, paper, and inkstands. Visitors could also pick up tea leaves and goose feathers; luxuries such as chocolate; watches and telescopes; and Franklin specialities like the family’s very own Crown Soap.
While paying for any of these, customers could hear the creaks and groans of the press. More often than not these were signs that a fresh issue of the Gazette, produced weekly since Franklin had taken control of the title in 1729, was on the way. But in the autumn months it might also have been the sound of the bestselling Poor Richard’s Almanack going into print. One of Franklin’s chief ambitions in his early days in business had been to successfully enter the almanac market. It was here that the best and surest money was to be made. Almanacs were pocket-sized, cheaply bound, and filled with practical details for everyday use, like the phases of the moon, calculations of the tides, or prognostications of the weather. Simply written and practical, they were hugely popular. For many of the working people in colonial America—farmers, builders, smiths, and sailors—an almanac was the only kind of book they owned apart from a Bible.
After several aborted attempts, Franklin had launched Poor Richard’s Almanack at Christmas 1732. In many respects it was a conventional performance, with its content structured around the months of the year and enlivened with little verses and predictions. But a clever ploy made it stand out. As a young boy in Boston, Franklin had been besotted with the daring and creativity of writers like Jonathan Swift, Richard Steele, and Joseph Addison. From all of these Franklin borrowed elements to create a persona that was irresistible to his readers. “Richard Saunders” introduced himself in the debut Almanack as a humble country man, who passed his nights gazing up at the stars and toying with his philosophical instruments, which his long-suffering wife Bridget derided as his “rattling-traps.”9 Once he had divined his predictions for the next year, Saunders, or so the pretence went, then transmitted them to Franklin in Market Street for printing.
Polite and gentle, Richard Saunders was an easy man to like. But what Philadelphians loved most about him was his dark humor. In his first tenderly written preface, Saunders casually predicted the sudden death of his chief rival in the almanac trade, a man named Titan Leeds. “He dies,” Saunders wrote, “by my Calculation made at his Request, on Oct. 17, 1733, 3 ho., 29m., P.M., at the very instant of the of and .”10 Such audacity was unprecedented in the colonial almanac trade, and it elicited the expected response from Titan Leeds, who declared himself at the first opportunity to be very much alive. In response, he attacked this Richard Saunders as “a false predicter, an ignorant, a conceited scribbler, a fool, and a lyar.”11 With everything going perfectly to plan, Franklin seized his opportunity to twist the knife one more time. He replied:
Mr Leeds was too well bred to use any man so indecently and so scurrilously, and moreover his esteem and affection for me was extraordinary: so that it is to be feared that pamphlet may be only a contrivance of somebody or other, who hopes, perhaps, to sell two or three years’ Almanacks still, by the sole force and virtue of Mr Leeds’ name.12
What Franklin knew, but most of his readers did not, was that this whole episode was an almost perfect replication of an infamous hoax perpetrated by Jonathan Swift in London a generation before. Franklin, though, could hardly have expected it to go as well as it did. Saunders’s temerity thrilled readers so much that the first number of Poor Richard’s sold out instantly. Its readership had continued to expand ever since, so that by 1740 it was selling a remarkable ten thousand copies a year right across the colonies, from the windswept north to the sunny south.
This success had provided Franklin with an unexpected opportunity. His initial aim was to make money out of the title, but seeing the extent of its reach, he had begun to sense other possibilities. With the colonies still so young and lacking a unified identity, Franklin realized that Poor Richard’s provided him with a platform which he could use to spread his ideas about how an “American life”—which Franklin thought of as a life of the colonists’ own making, constructed inside the safety of their own property—might be lived. “I consider’d it as a proper Vehicle,” he reflected, “for conveying Instruction among the common People, who bought scarce any other Books.”13 Franklin disseminated this “instruction” through pithy, often funny maxims that he sprinkled throughout the pages.
Copyright © 2023 by Peter Moore