The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (8 page)

“I had another advantage in it,” Ben remarked of his new regimen. “My brother and the rest going from the printing house to their meals, I remained there alone, and dispatching presently my light repast (which often was no more than a biscuit or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart from the pastry-cook’s, and a glass of water) had the rest of the time till their return for study, in which I made the greater progress from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.”

By the evidence of his recurrent arguments with James (“I was frequently chid for my singularity”), Ben made little effort to disguise the feeling of moral superiority his discovery of vegetarianism afforded him; together with the intellectual superiority he felt after the triumph of Silence Dogood, he must have seemed insufferable to his older brother. He himself admitted as much after the fact. “Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking.”

Wherever the demerits lay, Ben decided that his situation with James had grown intolerable—and this conclusion, along with the other reasons, cautioned him against unnecessary affront to the ministerial-magisterial axis of Boston. Several months after his seventeenth birthday he determined to break his indenture to James. This would be illegal; his second contract with James bound him for three years more. But because this contract was secret, Ben reasoned, James would have difficulty enforcing it. Ben could deny its existence; for James to affirm it in any court of law would reveal the sham by which he had evaded the General Court’s
cease-and-desist order and open him to contempt charges. By now James had come out of hiding but had posted a sizable bond for good behavior; Ben reckoned that the bond money was his own guarantee of James’s silence on the indenture issue.

It seemed a sound plan, but Ben could not place too much trust in it. James had friends who disliked the censorious ways of the Mather clique as much as he did; already one grand jury had refused to indict him on contempt charges. It was conceivable that opinion’s wheel would turn and James would be hailed as a free-speech hero. Such circumstances might embolden him to press his indenture claim against Ben. From Ben’s perspective the safest course appeared to be to make no more enemies than necessary.

James guessed what his brother was thinking, and even before Ben began inquiring around town for other printing work, James preempted him by pledging his fellow printers to eschew his brother’s services. He also enlisted Josiah, who, while sympathetic to his youngest boy on minor points within the framework of the indenture pact, sided with James on the moral and civic necessity of preserving the framework as a whole.

Consequently Ben saw no recourse but flight—which recommended itself on other grounds as well. To a curious boy, Boston had been an exciting place; to an independent-minded young man, it was starting to stifle. The Mathers did not say such threatening things about Ben as about James, but it was clear they and their supporters had doubts about the younger Franklin too. Reports of his inquiring and skeptical mind were circulating. “My indiscreet disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horror by good people, as an infidel or atheist.” Ben added that he had become “obnoxious to the governing party.” Now might be a good time to leave, before the clerics and judges came after him as they had come after James. “It was likely I might if I stayed soon bring myself into scrapes.”

So he plotted his flight. Selling some of his books to raise money for ship passage to New York, he sent his friend John Collins to tell the captain that he needed to board the boat secretly because he had got a girl pregnant and was being pressed to marry her. The captain, evidently a man of the world, understood. He pocketed Ben’s money and found something to examine at the opposite rail of the ship while Ben slipped aboard. On an outgoing tide and a fair September wind, Ben Franklin fled the town of his birth and youth, carrying only the few shillings in his pocket and all the self-assurance of his nearly eighteen years.

2
Friends and Other Strangers
1723–24

Only later, with age and distance, would Franklin learn to appreciate the more admirable aspects of Cotton Mather’s character and thinking. Now, upon leaving Boston, he landed in a city established by a contemporary of Mather’s, but a man whose view of the proper relation between ministers and magistrates could hardly have been more different from Mather’s—or more congenial to Franklin, both then and during the rest of Franklin’s life.

William Penn first ran afoul of religious authority at about the same age as Franklin (and at about the same time as Josiah Franklin, then still in England). Attending university in Oxford, Penn fell under the sway of the Quaker Thomas Loe, and when Charles II restored strict enforcement of Anglican orthodoxy, Penn resisted. Whether he was thrown out of Oxford or departed of his own disgust at what now seemed to him “a den of hellish ignorance and debauchery” was perhaps a fine point; in either case he left. His father, the formidable Admiral Sir William Penn, was not any more pleased than the boy’s tutors at his strange beliefs; he greeted the lad with blows, turned him out of the house, and threatened to disown him. (Paternal displeasure aside, Sir William may simply have been a difficult man to get along with; his neighbor and navy colleague Samuel Pepys had to put up with him for professional reasons but declared in his diary, “I hate him with all my heart.” On the other hand, it may have been Pepys who was the difficult one. Although he did not disdain his neighbor’s invitations to dinner, he complained confidentially that Mrs. Penn’s cooking “stank like the very Devil.”)

The threat of disownment triggered a temporary lapse from Quaker conscience; young William reconciled with his father and went off to the Continent for a holiday at the court of Louis XIV. He did not stay long and by 1667 was securely back within the fold of his English Friends. He published a series of tracts contending for freedom of conscience; he preached the same doctrine before crowds large and small. In 1670 he was arrested for unlawful address to an unruly assembly. At the trial he argued eloquently that a man’s mind and soul must remain beyond the reach of the magistrate; the jury voted to acquit—whereupon the judge ordered the jury arrested. (The latter arrests were subsequently overturned in a case that became a landmark in the evolution of the common law.)

At about this time Penn’s father died. The admiral had learned to accept his son’s sincerity if not his beliefs, and he left young William a sizable fortune. This included an annuity of £1,500 and, more portentously for English and American history, a claim of £16,000 upon the impecunious Charles for loans outstanding. The younger Penn was in and out of prison during this period—for declining to doff his hat in court, for further unauthorized preaching, for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. When he was not behind bars, he spent extended periods in Europe disseminating Quaker ideas and values. In court, in prison, and on the Continent, he sharpened his arguments for religious toleration,
and when a Quaker friend who had an interest in what would become the colony of New Jersey ran into financial trouble and needed rescue, Penn took the opportunity to draft a set of “concessions and agreements” for the venture, guaranteeing to settlers the most sweeping religious liberty anywhere in England’s empire. Unfortunately for freedom of conscience in New Jersey, the concessions never went into effect, being swallowed up in some further commercial restructuring of the colony.

Disappointed but determined to try again, Penn pressed Charles to redeem his debt to him by granting him a large tract of land west of New Jersey. Charles consented, and after some haggling Penn became the proprietor of what may have been the largest single piece of real estate ever legally held by someone other than a monarch. Penn wanted to call the well-forested territory “Sylvania,” but Charles insisted on honoring the admiral—not the son—by prefixing “Penn.” Both parties were happy to portray the transaction as a case of balancing the royal books, but both understood that there was more involved. Speaking of himself and his fellow Friends, Penn observed, “The government was anxious to be rid of us at so cheap a price.”

As proprietor of Pennsylvania, Penn enjoyed sweeping powers subject only to the constraints of the common law, applicable Parliamentary measures such as the navigation acts, and the sensitivities of imperial politics. This left a great deal of latitude in all his longitude. He immediately prescribed the closest thing to democracy within the empire, allowing the election of a representative council based on broad manhood suffrage. Not surprisingly, in light of his convictions—both the theological kind and those handed down by the courts—he guaranteed freedom of religion. Equally predictably, in light of the pacifism of the Quakers, he called for amicable relations with the Indian tribes that occupied his new possessions.

In the autumn
of 1682, just several months before Josiah Franklin left England for Boston, Penn traveled to America for the first time. He wished to see the forests and streams he had heard so much about; he also wanted to walk the streets—notional though they yet were—of the “large town or city” he had directed be laid out on the west bank of the Delaware River. Philadelphia—the name was a neoclassical rendering of “brotherly love”—was the first planned city in America and
among the first in the world; its plan reflected Penn’s desire to mitigate the ills attached to Old World cities. The great plague and fire of the 1660s still seared the memories of Londoners; Penn would combat these egregious civic afflictions by making Philadelphia airy and open, “a green country town, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.” The main streets would be one hundred feet across—wider than anything in London—and the lesser avenues fifty feet, all arranged in a regular, rectangular grid. Lots would be large—half an acre or an acre—with room enough for gardens and orchards to surround houses set well back from the street. Four squares of several acres each and a central square of ten acres would guarantee additional open space to the city’s inhabitants. Unlike Boston, New York, and other colonial towns, Philadelphia would have no walls or fortifications; Penn’s enlightened Indian policy would provide all the protection necessary.

Reality on the American frontier did not immediately match Penn’s vision. Early inhabitants dug dwellings out of the steep banks of the Delaware River, living alternately amid the mud and dust of wet seasons and dry. Pigs, goats, chickens, dogs, and the occasional cow ran loose through the streets of the town, feeding on, in some cases, and contributing to, in all cases, the garbage and filth that made the summer air excruciatingly pungent. Front Street was a standing cesspool.

But time softened the rough edges, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century the town was starting to approach Penn’s blueprint. The inhabitants numbered somewhat more than two thousand, and they gave evidence of having been busy. A recent arrival from Sweden declared, “If anyone were to see Philadelphia who had not been there, he would be astonished beyond measure that it was founded less than twenty years ago…. All the houses are built of brick, three or four hundred of them, and in every house a shop, so that whatever one wants at any time he can have, for money.”

Money, however, was a problem. Philadelphia—like Boston, New York, and other North American cities—suffered from the chronic affliction of colonial commerce: a lack of money. The early eighteenth century was the heyday of mercantilism in British imperial thought and practice; according to the mercantilists, the measure of imperial power was ready cash (to build navies, outfit privateers, and pay mercenaries, besides less martial purposes). The function of colonies was to foster a favorable trade balance, which would funnel cash—most liquidly (or solidly, rather) in the form of gold and silver—into the treasury of
the monarch, and into the pockets of his inhabitants in the metropolis (from whom it could be extracted when necessity arose). The maturity of the English economy relative to that of the American colonies, augmented by the navigation (that is, trade) laws passed by Parliament during the seventeenth century, ensured that money would flow into England with ease, in payment for high-value manufactured goods, and flow out, in payment for low-value raw materials, with difficulty. The result was a perennial shortfall of cash among colonial merchants and their customers.