by Nick Bunker
After Franklin left his workshop, Keimer had moved to better premises and hired new staff. To the chagrin of his printing rival, Andrew Bradford, he had also begun to publish almanacs. It was a field in which the Bradfords had been active for forty years or more, in New York as well as Pennsylvania, selling calendars to farmers who required a diary for the year ahead. There they would find the times of dawn and sunset, the phases of the moon, the dates of sittings of the county courts, and even forecasts of the weather. There were blank pages too, where the farmer could jot down notes of his crops, the prices they fetched on market day, or the number of German laborers he acquired.
In the middle colonies, the leading almanac writer was a sea captain, Titan Leeds, who dabbled in astronomy and claimed to be a meteorologist. His work was published by Andrew Bradford. Each almanac featured a whimsical preface and quaint little poems, culled from English anthologies and intended to amuse the farmer in his evenings away from the plow. The Bradfords thought they had the market cornered; but then, at the end of 1725, Samuel Keimer burst upon the scene. To compete with Leeds, he published an almanac—“an Ephemeris,” as he preferred to call it—authored by Jacob Taylor, a local poet who could also do some mathematics.3
The little book was quintessential Keimer. His almanacs came with extra features such as a Hebrew alphabet, riddles that the readers were asked to solve, and comical verses written by Keimer himself. The rhymes he composed were terribly tasteless, dealing in jokes about sex and diarrhea, and featuring the sort of misogynistic twaddle that was so pervasive at the time. To sell the almanac, he recruited a network of storekeepers from Boston down to Maryland, to each of whom he sent some copies. It was a shrewd thing to do, and it deeply annoyed Andrew Bradford: who was even more upset when Keimer coaxed away Titan Leeds with an offer of more money for his predictions of the rain and snow.
In Philadelphia, Samuel Keimer gave some of his almanacs to Deborah’s mother to sell. And if Sarah Read needed the extra money, it may have been because of her daughter’s appalling choice of husband. In the summer of 1725, in an Anglican wedding at Christ Church, Deborah had married one John Rogers, who made pots. Although he made them very nicely, the potter was “a worthless fellow,” says Franklin in his memoirs, yet another wastrel who borrowed money that he could not repay. The marriage would not endure. Nor would Franklin’s new relationship with Thomas Denham. On arrival home, Franklin had no idea that he would soon be driven back to work for Mr. Keimer; but such was the fate that he would suffer.
A WINTER OF DISTEMPER
A few days after Franklin landed from the Berkshire, there was a flurry of excitement. In a vain attempt to stave off his dismissal, Governor Keith had turned for help to the press, with Keimer as his printer, engaging in a war of words with James Logan. When at last he was fired in the spring of 1726, by which time his debts were almost overwhelming, Sir William had only one card left to play. He stood for election to the General Assembly; and because he was still a popular man, the Keithites took all the seats in Philadelphia. In October, on the opening day of the session, to the sound of cannons from ships in the river, they paraded through the streets in triumph, with Sir William on horseback leading a company of artisans and tradesmen.
Franklin must have been there, somewhere in the crowd, to witness this typically British gesture of a kind that went back to Sir William’s Tory days in the London of Queen Anne. The parade was impressive, but also rather futile. In Pennsylvania, the city and the countryside were at odds in politics, as bitterly divided as they are today. The rural counties controlled the legislature, and they were hostile to Sir William. The months and years that followed would see the slow death of the Keithite party, a process that would be complete by 1729. Gradually there came into being a new political order, led by Franklin’s friend, the lawyer Andrew Hamilton. Beneath his spreading wings, Franklin would prosper in the next decade.
On arrival home, he and Denham set to work to build their business. An account book of Denham’s survives, and it shows that he was very much the coming man, commercially astute and a trustworthy fellow. His shipowning clients were people of substance, merchants from England making regular voyages across the Atlantic. As for Denham’s retail customers, they included the Quaker elite, with among them his friend Clement Plumstead, three times mayor of Philadelphia and a close ally of Andrew Hamilton. Meeting people such as this, and selling them candles, soap, and calico, Franklin made excellent contacts for the future, men and women whose confidence he would secure.4
He was in the mood to be sober and diligent. On board the Berkshire, Franklin had drawn up a personal creed, the first of several, a plan of conduct intended to ensure that he never went the way of Ralph or Collins. Although the plan owed nothing to religion—Franklin merely said that he wanted to live “like a rational creature,” with no mention of God—it certainly smacked of remorse and a yearning to repent. “It is necessary,” Franklin told himself, “for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe.”
Since his only debts were to Denham and Vernon, neither of whom was clamoring to be repaid, perhaps he was being too hard on himself; or perhaps worse sins weighed on his conscience. In future, he promised, he would always be truthful and sincere, make no promises he did not mean to keep, and speak no ill of anyone. He would also work very hard: as if he had ever done anything else! As though he were Hogarth’s good apprentice, Franklin took a vow “to apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind…by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty.”
It was an odd little document, coming as it did from someone who—as far as we know—had never been prone to idleness or telling lies. Had there been other errors, besides those to which he admits in his autobiography? As it stands, the plan of conduct seems to hint at episodes of naughtiness that Franklin would never wish to disclose, even in a posthumous narrative. If so, it serves as another reminder that in his memoirs Franklin gives us only a fraction of himself. He tells us only what he thinks we ought to know. Indeed his account of his early life can sometimes resemble an eighteenth-century mansion where beyond the grand salon and the public rooms, there are many more intimate chambers kept firmly under lock and key.
A few months later, on his twenty-first birthday, Franklin wrote something equally strange: a brief, uninformative letter to his sister Jane in Boston. She was just fourteen, but soon to be married. Painfully polite, written in the style of Addison, the letter accompanied a gift of a spinning wheel: “which I hope you will accept as a small token of my sincere love and affection.” He says precisely nothing about himself, his voyage home from London, or his other adventures. This is the only letter between Franklin and his family that survives from the 1720s. The rest of their correspondence has disappeared. Why that should be so, we cannot say, but we can harbor our suspicions: it may be that Franklin destroyed it all himself.
He wrote that letter to Jane in January 1727. The winter was unusually severe in Philadelphia: “snow on the ground, and the frost so violent,” wrote another of Mr. Denham’s clients, “that the ink freezes in the pen.” With the cold came disease. A fever swept through the town, its most striking feature being a yellow tint to the skin, like an attack of jaundice, followed by weeks of fatigue. At the beginning of February, Franklin and Denham both fell ill. Franklin called it “a distemper,” which he thought was pleurisy. Despite his strength he came close to death. His recovery was slow and dogged by feelings of depression; and when he was himself again, he would have sad news to hear from Boston.5
His uncle Benjamin was dead at the age of seventy-six. He had begun to fade away in the summer of 1725, fainting twice on Sabbath days. There was a year or so of failing health—dropsy and more fainting—until at last he died in the March of 1727, taken perhaps by the same disease that struck his nephew. Like his dying mother lon
g ago at Ecton, the old man consoled himself with the psalms, making a list of verses that seemed to fit his case. “It is good for me that I have been afflicted”: that was one. A notice appeared in the press, calling Benjamin Senior “a rare & exemplary Christian.” With him there vanished rare memories of a distant age. No casual reader could have guessed that here was a man who had witnessed the Great Fire of London.6
Meanwhile Thomas Denham died his own lingering death. Not until the summer of 1728 did he pass away. Toward the end, he forgave the debt of £10 that Franklin owed him for the voyage, but while Denham lay ill the store had ceased to be viable, and Franklin had been left redundant. His seagoing brother-in-law, Robert Holmes, stopped by in Philadelphia and advised him to go back to being a printer. Wise counsel: not least because Keimer was hovering around, eager to hire the young man to run his press, so as to leave himself free to sell ink and sealing wax over the counter.
None of the merchants in the town wanted Franklin as a clerk. So at some point in the middle of 1727, reluctantly he went back to printing: not the fine craftsmanship that he had known in London, alongside men at the top of their trade, but Keimer’s colonial workshop, still poorly equipped, where his colleagues were raw and poorly paid. They were the epitome of Pennsylvania: five restless men, from all corners of the British Isles, each one having come to Keimer by his own erratic path. It was up to Franklin to lick them into shape, but some of them would simply never learn the craft.
There was Hugh Meredith—already thirty, honest, well-read, but also a drinker—one of four sons of an Anglican farmer who had tagged along with the Quakers who left the Welsh hills for America. Out in Chester County the Merediths had found their niche, with a few hundred acres close to the new iron workings. They were comfortably off, with neighbors who included Mordecai Lincoln, the ancestor of Abraham; but for some reason Hugh preferred the town. There, to his father’s dismay, he took to the alehouse. At Keimer’s, he was supposed to work the press, while the books were to be bound by Stephen Potts. He was another farming man, but lazy.
Of course there had to be a wild Irishman, John by name. A bondservant, purchased by Keimer from a sea captain, he had four years left to run of his indentures. He was always looking for a chance to run away, which he soon did. They also had a dogsbody, David Harry, about eighteen years old and hired as an apprentice; but the cream of the bunch was George Webb, highly educated and picked by Keimer to be a compositor. He had a very curious tale to tell.
Still in his teens, Webb claimed to come from the English town of Gloucester, where at his grammar school he had shone as an actor and a poet. From there—or so he said—Webb had gone to Oxford University, where he spent a tedious year, before dumping his academic gown in a hedge and running away to London for a life on the stage. There he had suffered the same fate as James Ralph. Unable to find a place in the theater, he ran out of money, pawned what he had, and wandered the streets with an empty stomach, until he was recruited by a trafficker in laborers bound for America. Webb signed himself away as an indentured servant and duly arrived in Philadelphia, where he was bought by Samuel Keimer.
It was a remarkable story, repeated by Franklin in his memoirs with a touch of skepticism. He had little time for George Webb, who later betrayed him in business. Although the young Englishman was clever and charming, Franklin dismissed him as a good-for-nothing, idle and thoughtless. But the fact was that Webb really had gone to Oxford, Balliol College no less, and he was indeed the son of a landowner from Gloucestershire, Captain Obadiah Webb, who had a string of estates near Bristol. And far from being a hopeless scallywag, he published a book of his own poetry in 1731, made his way home to England via South Carolina, trained as a lawyer, and eventually came into his inheritance.7
Which was something Franklin never had, in financial terms. What he did have was a range of talents whose combination was unique in Philadelphia. For example, at St. Bartholomew’s in London he had seen the type foundry run on the lower floor by Thomas James. And so at Keimer’s workshop he was able to cut new letters and fashion a set of iron molds, relatively crude by British standards—molds of this kind were very hard to make—but still good enough to produce the characters they needed. Franklin also turned his hand to Hogarth’s trade of engraving.
Soon the quality of their output improved by leaps and bounds. When Keimer brought out a book titled A Collection of One Hundred Notable Things, Adapted for the Service and Delight of Young Persons, it was evidently Franklin’s handiwork. The title page was elegant, as beautifully set as a London book, with shapely italics, and the subject matter was utterly Franklinesque. The book was intended, so it said, for “the propagation of virtue and of knowledge in these parts.” Inside, item No. 56 was an advertisement for his new printed typeface, saying that “by the help of some ingenious persons”—Franklin, in other words—Mr. Keimer had the use of “a mould, by which he can cast printing letters, of any form, shape, character, or size.” The type would be ideal, they said, for printing paper money, in distinctive lettering “almost impossible to be counterfeited.”
And so six months went by, with Franklin finding Keimer ever more irritating, with his bad manners and his deceitfulness. Franklin began to see that he was being used. Once he had trained up Meredith and the others, Keimer could do without him and his skills. And indeed, as time went on, Keimer became still more unpleasant, as though he wished to drive Franklin away.
It was at this frustrating moment, in the autumn of 1727, as though to keep alive his happy memories of London, that Franklin became the founder of his famous Junto. Meeting in a tavern on a Friday night, it was to be what he called “a club for mutual improvement,” open only to friends he deemed to be ingenious. Every member would have to come up with “queries,” meaning questions about science, morality, and politics, for the others to discuss. Every three months, each one would also have to write an essay and read it aloud, to be debated by his companions.
Wherein consists the happiness of a rational creature?—that was the sort of question they would pose; but they dealt in practicalities as well. Although metaphysics had their place at the Junto, Franklin also meant his club to be a school for what he called “mechanic arts,” of the kind his family had always pursued. It was never Franklin’s aim to be a narrow specialist. In the eighteenth century it was thought that a gentleman had a duty to be broad-minded—“variety,” that should be his watchword—and no one was more various than Franklin. He wanted to put together the wisdom of Socrates, the science of Newton, the practical talents of craftsmen, and the eloquence of English writers whom he admired. He hoped to make people understand that science, engineering, philosophy, and wit were simply four sides of the same ingenious square.
Eventually—but not until the 1770s, when at last he lost patience with the British—Franklin would come to believe that this union of talents could only occur in a democratic republic, cut loose from the empire. Only in a free America would it be truly recognized that virtue, invention, and the arts depended on each other. This idea of Franklin’s found its first embodiment in the Junto.
A CLUB FOR INGENUITY
Among the few papers that survive from Franklin’s early manhood, one of the most revealing is a set of notes about the Junto. Jotted down by a fellow member, Nicholas Scull, a surveyor who kept the Indian Head, the tavern where they assembled, at first sight the notes are merely a list of their names and the money they owed for their drinks. It seems that to begin with the Junto had only ten members, though soon they went up to twelve. Four of them came from Keimer’s workshop: Franklin himself, Meredith, Potts, and Webb. Among the rest the oldest was Scull, who was forty. The most eminent was a scrivener, Joseph Breintnall, from a Quaker family who had been close to Thomas Denham. The striking thing about the list is this: that Scull only called two of them “Mister.” One of the two was Benjamin Franklin.8
Because the Junto was his idea, bec
ause he was so fine a craftsman, and because he was so clever with words, Franklin stood out as an obvious leader. Although he was one of the youngest, with no land to his name and with no family in Philadelphia, even so his fellow members looked up to him as Mr. Franklin: the title his grandfather and his uncle had acquired at Ecton, by means of their ingenuity, and the one Josiah had earned in Boston. Now it was Franklin’s as well: not in the eyes of the authorities, perhaps, but in the opinion of the people who counted most to him. And seeing that he had no wealth and no lineage, that could only be because they saw Franklin as he was: someone very good at everything he did.
Since his boyhood by the Mill Pond, he had loved what Defoe had called “projects.” The Junto was perhaps the most enjoyable, a gathering of professional men and artisans who almost without exception went on to leave their mark on Philadelphia. At the Junto, Franklin made the two dearest friends of his maturity, men about whom we know all too little. One was Robert Grace, the orphaned son of a planter from Barbados who had left him a portfolio of property in Philadelphia. Born in 1709, and raised in the town by his grandparents, the grandfather being a sea captain who also dealt in iron, Grace was to become an ironmaster himself. The other was a Quaker carpenter’s son, William Coleman, who later served as town clerk. When he joined the Junto in the late 1720s, Coleman was a merchant’s clerk and bookkeeper, and Franklin would remember him for having “the coolest, clearest head, the best heart, and the exactest morals of almost any man I ever met with.” He was the other member referred to as “Mr.” by Scull. But because they died quite young, both Grace and Coleman have been almost entirely forgotten.9
