by Nick Bunker
It was high time the colony had not only an official printer but also a newspaper. Franklin moved swiftly when in the summer of 1731 he heard that Governor Johnson was offering a bounty to a qualified printer who would move to Charleston and set up his workshop. Three men answered the call. One was Eleazer Phillips Jr., from Boston; the second was Franklin’s old colleague, the Oxford man George Webb. The third was Franklin’s London-trained journeyman, Thomas Whitmarsh, who had also become a Freemason at St. John’s Lodge.
On September 13 he and Franklin signed up as partners in a six-year deal that would set Whitmarsh up in business in Charleston. As carefully drafted as the Library Company’s constitution, their articles of agreement were more evidence of Franklin’s new maturity and of the benefits of the Junto. It gave him the help and wise counsel of the likes of Joseph Breintnall and the lawyer, Thomas Hopkinson. The deal was this: Franklin would supply the printing press and as much as four hundredweight of lead type. He would also share the cost of the paper and ink and so on. In return Franklin would take one third of the profits. By the end of the month Whitmarsh had landed in Charleston, and in January 1732 he launched The South-Carolina Gazette.15
It was a risky venture for one very stark reason: the appalling death rate in the South. Phillips won the official printing contract, then succumbed to yellow fever in the summer of 1732. Webb disappeared back to England, and then Whitmarsh died in the fall of 1733. But if Franklin could find a successor, the government contract and the Gazette would be his. And here Franklin had another of those strokes of luck that were such a feature of his career. In September 1731 a Frenchman, Louis Timothée, had arrived in Philadelphia to open a language school.
In the Netherlands, where he spent his boyhood, Timothée had trained as a printer and so in 1732 Franklin took him on as a journeyman, specializing in printing in German. That summer they tried to establish a German newspaper, the Philadelphische Zeitung, only to let it expire after two issues when readers failed to materialize. When Whitmarsh died, Timothée changed his name to Lewis Timothy and took his place in Charleston. There he obtained the government contract and The South-Carolina Gazette reappeared in February 1734. He survived only another five years, whereupon his Dutch widow, Elizabeth, became the printer. This sometimes happened in London, where the rules of the Stationers’ Company permitted a woman to take on her dead husband’s trade. And indeed, although she called herself “a poor, afflicted widow,” she proved to be more reliable than Mr. Timothy.
“He was a man of learning and honest,” Franklin recalled in his memoirs, “but ignorant in matters of account,” so that it was hard for Franklin to get his hands on the dividend to which he was entitled. Mrs. Timothy, on the other hand, possessed the estimable virtue of “regularity”: Franklin’s word, as it had been Samuel Palmer’s. Although she had six children to raise she promptly sent his remittance every three months. When the Timothys’ six-year deal expired in 1740, she bought Franklin out. But for many years to come the two Gazettes, in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, went on working together, swapping stories and columns, and she sold Franklin’s books in Charleston. When she retired in 1748, her son Peter took over. And so the connection went on.
As the years passed, Franklin tried to take the same partnership model and apply it elsewhere. He started new printing ventures in New York, Connecticut, and even Antigua, and in 1749 among the German community in Pennsylvania. The results were mixed, because of the human factor. It was hard to find partners who were shrewd businesspeople as well as competent craftsmen. However, at the very least Franklin now had a network through which he could distribute what he printed.
And like his London counterpart Charles Ackers, Franklin built a product range wide and robust enough to keep the cash flowing predictably. One important point is this: that after the early stage when he relied on Grace and Coleman, it seems that Franklin never borrowed to finance his business. It might have been tempting to do so—for example, he might have bought the freehold of his premises on Market Street, and mortgaged it for paper money from the Loan Office—but he resisted the urge. He also had Deborah to help him keep his finances in order. Not only did she bear him a son, Francis Folger Franklin—“little Franky”—born in October 1732, to whom they were both devoted; she also played an essential role in the management of the firm. Deborah did the books and kept track of their debtors as well, never allowing the Franklin firm to run out of working capital. At about this time, Franklin finally repaid the money he owed to the silversmith Mr. Vernon in Newport, including the long arrears of interest.
As for the product: at the very end of 1732 Franklin entered the battle of the almanacs. Since 1729 he had been printing two almanacs—by his Junto friend Thomas Godfey, and by another astronomer, John Jerman—but the enterprising Andrew Bradford stole the contracts from under Franklin’s nose. Instead of accepting defeat, Franklin decided to write one of his own. And so Poor Richard’s Almanack was born.
Working at high speed, Franklin slung the first edition together in such a hurry that he transposed the two months of September and October, and had to reissue the almanac early in 1733. To begin with, Poor Richard was little different from its predecessors, with their calendars of forthcoming events—sessions of the county courts, Quaker meetings, and the birthdays of Britain’s royal family—and their predictions of the weather. Like them he pillaged his material, little poems and proverbs and jokes and even the name “Poor Richard,” from English collections from the previous century. His preface for the 1733 edition was built around a rather unoriginal hoax, a forecast of the death of his almanac rival, Titan Leeds. It was a device that Franklin borrowed from Swift, who twenty-five years earlier had done something similar in London.
As he worked under pressure, Franklin revived his old technique of inventing a fictitious author. Not Silence Dogood, with her faculty for double entendres, but Poor Richard, a henpecked husband as well as an astrologer. He and Mrs. Saunders—her name was Bridget—could be made to play out their domestic dramas in a soap opera unfolding in each year’s edition. And in this first issue of his almanac, Franklin conjured up Poor Richard so vividly that he was there to stay.
“The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife, good woman, is I tell her excessive proud,” Poor Richard tells us. “She cannot bear, she says, to sit spinning in her shift of tow while I do nothing but gaze at the stars; and had threatened more than once to burn all my books and rattling traps, as she calls my instruments, if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family.”
This was not the kind of thing that Franklin really wanted to be writing. As a Freemason, a friend of Logan, and a founder of the Library Company—that entity so high-minded in its taste—he would have preferred to be more erudite. But he had a market to serve. As the years went by, and the Quaker colony grew wealthier, so Franklin gradually refined the content of Poor Richard, so that by the 1740s he was filling it with extracts from the poets he treasured, James Thomson and Alexander Pope. But in the early days he stuck to the vernacular.
In Poor Richard Franklin gave his readers what they were used to and words that fitted their situation, proverbs familiar from the old country. “Scraps from the table of wisdom” was the phrase he used in the issue for 1739; and by “wisdom” he meant the traditional philosophy of farmers accustomed to worrying about a bad harvest that might wreck their lives. The Pennsylvania farmer could never be sure of what lay in store: cattle disease, smallpox, a hurricane, or a blizzard, or deception by a swindler from the town. And so it was best to be cautious, risk-averse, and sober. And that was the message of the almanac.
“When ’tis fair be sure to take your greatcoat with you,” says Poor Richard in 1734. “He that sells upon trust, loses many friends and also wants money,” he writes in 1735. In 1736: “There’s many witty men whose brains can’t feed their bellies”; and then “There are thr
ee faithful friends: an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.” Extravagance should be avoided; so should strong drink; and it was always best to be wary. “To whom thy secret thou dost tell, to him thy freedom thou dost sell,” we are told by Poor Richard; and most of all we should be suspicious of a fancy exterior or shows of emotion. “Full of courtesy, full of craft,” he says. “Onions can make even heirs and widows weep.” The world that Poor Richard inhabits is a world fraught with risk and danger, where it is best not to expect too much, and where the most a human being can do is to be self-controlled and to carry on working. As he put it in 1735: “The thrifty maxim of the wary is to save all the money they can touch.”
There speaks a settler by the Delaware, afraid that if the planters in Jamaica run short of credit from London he will be unable to sell his grain. But it would not do to think that what was printed by Franklin in the Almanack was actually his opinion. Poor Richard was an old curmudgeon, pessimistic and frustrated, a man who distrusted everyone around him. Although Franklin could sometimes sound like a cynic—having seen so much of human frailty and met his share of cheats and villains, he was bound to be occasionally—at heart he remained the Crusoe of the colonies, with an inner core of confident resilience. Poor Richard was just a guise he assumed as a way to sell the almanac to farmers. We can hear the authentic voice of Franklin not in the usual gloom of Poor Richard but in the most famous line from the series: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”16
Although this maxim was not entirely Franklin’s creation but something he improved upon from an English original, the optimistic message was definitely his. Pennsylvania was growing fast, and health and wealth and wisdom were attainable, or so it seemed to Franklin; and although the money had yet to roll into his wallet, he had not lost his zeal for self-improvement. He had begun to study languages, teaching himself to read French, Italian, and Spanish, and then returning to the Latin he had begun to learn in his year at the grammar school in Boston. Meanwhile the city around him was improving too.
Although the streets were poorly paved, the sidewalks were slippery, and there were too many house fires, and too many drunks—all subjects that Franklin tackled in the Gazette—Philadelphia was on a roll. At the western end of the town, its affluence and its ambition found a symbol in an ambitious new project, the brainchild of Andrew Hamilton. As part of the paper money deal of 1729, it was decided to allocate some funds to the erection of a new State House. The assembly appointed a building committee. As such committees do, they spent three years squabbling about the cost and the architecture. At last they chose Speaker Hamilton’s preferred design, which slowly evolved until in the 1750s they had the edifice we know today as Independence Hall.17
As the brickwork gradually rose toward the sky, so Franklin continued his ascent toward gentility. He was on a roll of his own: but not without the occasional mistake. Having become so close to Andrew Hamilton, he could not help but be drawn into political controversies. And when that occurred, Franklin was as capable as any other human being of making himself look foolish.
* Born in 1709, Thomas Hopkinson is a neglected figure in Franklin biographies, but he had an exceptionally interesting background. His uncle and benefactor Matthew Hopkinson not only owned a portfolio of property in the newly built Soho and Piccadilly areas of the West End of London; he was also a founding director in 1717 of the Westminster Fire Office, one of the earliest British insurance companies. Thomas Hopkinson’s presence in the Junto is significant for two reasons. First, it shows us that although the Junto began as a club mainly for artisans, it soon drew in gentlemen with a higher social status; and second, Hopkinson gave Franklin another channel through which to keep up with developments in London.
Chapter Fifteen
THE DEVIL’S INSTRUMENT
In the early years of his Gazette, Franklin had printed one of his most eloquent pieces of prose, his Apology for Printers of 1731. A witty but forthright defense of the freedom of the press, it set out his view that an editor had a right—almost a duty—to print all manner of opinions, provided they were free from mere spite or deliberate falsehood. “I shall not burn my press and melt my letters,” he wrote, as he stood up for a profession whose task it was to serve the truth, even at the risk of upsetting the readership. Opinion was a fact of life, he pointed out. Human beings differed in their views as much as they did in their faces, and so the printer or the journalist was in the business of diversity.1
He was “educated in the belief,” Franklin said, “that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally 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.” These were fine words, written at a time when Franklin was being accused of offending public morals. It was a trivial matter, arising from a piece of schoolboy humor. Asked to print a poster to advertise the sailing of a ship for Barbados, either Franklin or the skipper had added a witticism at the bottom: “No sea-hens nor black gowns will be admitted on any terms.”
A sea-hen was slang for a prostitute, while a black gown meant a minister. Pious folk took offense, threatening to boycott The Pennsylvania Gazette on account of what they took to be Franklin’s contempt for religion and the clergy. He might simply have apologized and promised not to make the same kind of joke again, but that would have been a foolish thing to do, giving too many hostages to fortune. Instead he stood his ground, denying that he harbored any malice of the kind. “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody,” Franklin wrote, “there would be very little printed.”
Even at twenty-five, he was experienced enough with journalism to know that a fuss such as this soon blows over. Irritated readers who canceled their subscription to a newspaper soon found that they could not do without it. And so he replied with his refusal to be told what he could or could not publish. However, in the process Franklin made a promise that he did not always keep. He never printed anything, he claimed, that “might countenance vice, or promote immorality,” or “do real injury to any person.” The first half of this statement was true, since he mostly did his best to keep smutty stuff out of the Gazette, but not the second. From time to time, Franklin could be quite as partisan and vitriolic as any other journalist in the eighteenth century.
And especially on behalf of his patron. At election time in the fall of 1733, Bradford and the Mercury mounted a long, damaging campaign of insult and innuendo against Speaker Hamilton, calling him “an ambitious, selfish and designing man,” and accusing him of using his influence over the electors and his fellow assemblymen to create “a monopoly of power.” As these words were printed in September, Franklin was away on a business trip—this was when he gave Deborah a power of attorney over his affairs—during which he went back to Boston for the first time in ten years. He returned home to Philadelphia to find that Bradford’s onslaught had hit home and Hamilton had lost the speakership.2
His ally Jeremiah Langhorne took his place, and Franklin held on to his post as the assembly’s printer. Even so he had to rally to Hamilton’s defense. In his absence, the Gazette had done the best it could, branding the Mercury “the unhappy birth of a sickly brain,” but Franklin could do better. In November, he produced a rejoinder, titled “A Half-Hour’s Conversation with a Friend,” which amounted to an interview with Hamilton. Written with Franklin’s usual flair, it dealt in mockery of Hamilton’s opponents and ended with an appeal to the working people of Pennsylvania—“the bricklayer, the carpenter, the shipwright”—whom he portrayed as Andrew Hamilton’s constituency.3
Hamilton survived, to come storming back as Speaker in the autumn of 1734, but Franklin was clearly now a party man, with his colors nailed to Hamilton’s mast. He had all the more reason to cling to his patron because Hamilton was reaching the peak of his career. At the end of the year, Governor Gordon fell serio
usly ill, leaving him and Logan in almost complete control of the colony’s affairs. Beyond its borders Mr. Hamilton was also a man to be reckoned with, the finest trial lawyer in the colonies, and he was about to achieve his finest victory, by securing the acquittal of John Peter Zenger, publisher of The New-York Weekly Journal, who had been charged with seditious libel. It was a landmark case, in which Hamilton stood up for the printer, the people, and their civil liberties against New York’s royal governor. But although he must have seemed to be impregnable, the Speaker had some flaws in his armor, which Andrew Bradford did his best to expose.
Despite Franklin’s efforts, the Mercury never surrendered in the war of words. For months Bradford kept up his anti-Hamilton campaign, far into 1734, and in subsequent years he came back again, hinting at corruption on the Speaker’s part. No proof of that has come to light, but Hamilton had an Achilles’ heel of another kind. Although he was a Presbyterian, everyone knew how unholy Andrew Hamilton could be; and so Bradford published a sly little poem, likening him to Spinoza, the infamous Dutch atheist, one of many items implying that Hamilton was an unbeliever.4
The stage was set for another battle with the pen, with Franklin once again on Hamilton’s side. It took place in the spring of 1735, and this time it concerned religion: specifically, the Presbyterian Church. At that moment, Franklin had recently suffered a bereavement: the loss of the founder of The New-England Courant. In February, his brother James died in Newport at only thirty-eight, leaving his business to his widow, Anne. Brushing this aside, or so it seems, Franklin dived into a religious controversy in Philadelphia in which he did not hesitate to slander his opponents. We can call it the Hemphill affair, from the name of the Irish clergyman, Samuel Hemphill, whose dubious career enlisted Franklin’s support.
