by Nick Bunker
It was a fluid, or so he believed, subtle and elastic and distributed everywhere in nature. This was something like Newton’s idea of an electric spirit, but Franklin added an essential refinement. His electrical fluid could pass from one body to another because, as he put it, “common matter is as a kind of sponge” that soaks up electricity. But one thing never changed: the overall quantity of the electric fluid. When electricians performed their displays, they merely collected the fluid and altered its distribution: between, for example, a dangling boy and the finger of a spectator. Add or subtract some electrical fluid from a body, and you would create an imbalance, a plus or a minus, or rather a positive or a negative charge.
And here was the secret of the Leiden jar. Franklin found it in the difference between the positive charge on the outside of the bottle, and the negative charge on the inside. To restore the equilibrium, all you had to do was hold the jar and touch the wire, creating a circuit that equalized the charges. You would give yourself a painful shock, but also help to prove what came to be known as Franklin’s “one fluid” theory of electricity. It was an elegant theory, far simpler than the Abbé Nollet’s “double repercussion,” and it served its purpose.
Of course Franklin’s work was only a beginning. No one had any inkling that there might be particles called electrons that performed the role of Franklin’s fluid. A hundred years had yet to pass until, in Scotland in the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell transformed electrical science into an edifice built entirely from mathematics, opening the way for the physics of the twentieth century. Maxwell’s great system of equations lay far beyond the scope of Franklin’s work. Even so, the American sage had been a scientific revolutionary. Before him, the scientists who studied electricity had tended to depart too swiftly into the realm of speculation, with the result of muddle and confusion. Like Newton, Franklin made things clear.
Other people had suggested that lightning might be a form of electricity, but Franklin was the person who explained why this was so and designed an experiment to prove it. Of all his many writings, the finest was surely this one: Franklin’s essay, composed in 1749, in which he described the electrification of clouds, rising off the sea in hot weather and then discharging their energy by way of thunderstorms. Armed with the essay, his counterparts in France took what Franklin said and made it happen in Paris and the countryside nearby.
In the spring and summer of 1752, they put up metal poles to wait for stormy weather, and with them they drew sparks from the sky. In doing so they confirmed what Franklin had predicted. They showed that he was also correct about something else: that a metal rod, erected next to a building, could protect it from destruction. At that moment the French physicists—not all of them, but most—fell in love with Franklin and he with them. In time, like so many enlightened Americans in centuries to come, he would make Paris his city of choice.
In America meanwhile, Franklin found many other things to do. Fired up with confidence, knowing what he was achieving with electricity, in 1747 he burst into politics in Pennsylvania, no longer an observer, but now a protagonist. Franklin set himself another goal: the defense of his colony. Tired of obstruction by the Quaker politicians, and alarmed by the threat of raids against the towns along the Delaware by French privateers, he organized a militia and wrote a fiery pamphlet—Plain Truth—to justify its creation. Up in New York, his friend Cadwallader Colden drew upon the pamphlet as he urged the citizens to make their own efforts against the king of France.3
Not everyone cared for what Franklin was up to. In the words of Thomas Penn, the owner of his colony, Franklin was “a very uneasy spirit.” Which was true. The evidence was plain to see in Franklin’s hyperactivity. Even when in Paris in his seventies he lingered over breakfast, he was reading, thinking, making plans, and putting them into practice. As we grow older, many of us prefer to live in our memories, and to rest on whatever meager laurels we possess; but Franklin did not. He always wanted to do something more, including the creation of America’s republic.
For every biographer of Franklin, there is a central question that demands an answer. Long after so many of his friends and his family were dead, his career and his ideas continued to develop, so that he evolved into a radical whose views about politics became less conservative the older he grew. Franklin even came to advocate the abolition of slavery, a project that in his youth he would have found unthinkable. So the question is this: What was the source of Franklin’s energy? Why was he so restless and so driven?
It seems to me that the answer is as follows. Although he did not disclose it to the full in his memoirs, Franklin knew that in England his family had been far more than simple country folk. Lifting themselves up from Ecton, where they had met people of science, the Franklins had gone on to be Londoners as well, where they acquired the knowledge and the adventurous attitudes that came with life in a metropolis. Their skills were high, with the hands as well as with the intellect. It was only because of accidents of death and infertility, and because they owned too little land, that the Franklins did not become a successful dynasty in the mother country.
They were also very mobile people, living in many different places, and this was important too. Never tied to one location, the Franklins had to be flexible, ready to cut themselves loose from their roots when the need arose. They knew that while roots have their benefits, mostly they have to be severed if life and ideas are to move on. Another thing the Franklins knew was this: that however ingenious they might be, they were still social inferiors in England. So they were again in Boston on their first arrival, where their problem was even worse: because Josiah had lost his hard-won status as a dyer of silk and a citizen of London.
Boston could not satisfy all their needs; but when he set foot in Philadelphia, the runaway Benjamin Franklin found a far more friendly environment. It was a town where he could fulfill the aspirations that his family had developed in their native land. With its ironmasters, its merchants, its literary people, and its open frontier, the Quaker province offered him the terrain on which he could deploy his talents. As time went by, Franklin took the many things that Pennsylvania offered—the freedom of the Quakers, the skills of the Germans, the learning of James Logan, and the patronage of Andrew Hamilton—and from these elements he created his future. Blending them together with the ideas he acquired in London and from books, and also with his heritage of craftsmanship, Franklin became a master of the printing trade and journalism: and then a scientific genius. He also achieved the social rank and esteem that his family had always striven to acquire.
Close behind him all the time there lay the specters of failure and premature death. Smallpox, yellow fever, drink, and syphilis, and debt: there were so many risks a young man had to run. Franklin saw them everywhere. Having known the dangerous London of Hogarth, having met so many people whose lives disintegrated, and having mourned so many early deaths, Franklin was all the more a driven man. In the years of his maturity, he knew that in his youth ruin, disgrace, or the graveyard might have been his destiny too. Hence the need to fill each day with the quest for knowledge and achievement. Twenty-four hours: the only space a human being has in which to be ingenious.
Acknowledgments
For an author, the publication of a book should be a happy moment, but in the case of Young Benjamin Franklin it comes with sadness as well. I was not far advanced in the research and the writing when in the late summer of 2015, I received the news of the death of the renowned Carol Brown Janeway—linguist, raconteur, and devotee of Schubert—my editor at Knopf. It was Carol who commissioned not only Young Benjamin Franklin but also my two previous books. Her colleague Andrew Miller became my new editor, gracefully shepherding me through the editorial process, but Carol’s passing left us mourning the loss of someone whose like will not be seen again. A Scot by birth, with an Edinburgh accent untamed by her forty-five years in Manhattan, Carol would have been delighted to see Franklin’s cultural
debts to her country explored in the closing sections of this book.
Once again, I have to thank above all my patient, wise, and perceptive wife, Sue, without whom none of my books could have been written. My thanks also go to my tireless and unflappable agent, Bill Hamilton, and his colleagues at A. M. Heath; my oldest New York friends, Steven Margulis, M.D., and Sherida Paulsen, former chair of the city’s Landmark Commission, and their sons, Isaac and Noah Margulis; and the staffs of all the many libraries and archive collections referred to in the notes. In particular, I wish to mention the Cambridge University Library with its superb resources in American history and the history of science; Jim Green at the Library Company of Philadelphia; Karie Diethorn, chief curator at Independence National Historic Park, Philadelphia; Hugh Alexander at the National Archives at Kew, England; Kimberly Toney Pelkey at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts; Carenza Black at the Northamptonshire Archives; Maia Sheridan of the St. Andrews University Library in Scotland; and the teams at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Mercer Museum not far away in Doylestown, and the Winterthur Museum and Library in Delaware.
Because I try to spend as much time as possible on location, so to speak, I also need temporary landlords, people to unlock English parish churches, and guides to colonial sites in the United States. My peerless genealogical friend Sandra Hewlett helped me track down the locations of ironworks in Pennsylvania; but I am also grateful to Laura Keim, the ingenious curator of James Logan’s house at Stenton, and her partner, the architectural historian Stephen Hague; Walter Ferme and Mike Eruzione in Boston; Michael Zuzu in Philadelphia; Joy Bond and Linda Richards, the churchwardens at St. Mary Magdalene, Ecton; Tim Allebone, churchwarden of St. Peter and St. Paul, Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire; and the Reverend Alistair So and his Episcopalian congregation at All Hallows, South River, Maryland, especially Bridget Blake and Joan Placido, who accompanied me in my quest for traces left by Alistair’s distant predecessor, the electrical Dr. Archibald Spencer. I came to love Philadelphia during my many weeks of work there, and so I offer my thanks to a host of anonymous citizens who helped me enter into the life of the town—people in bus lines or at Whole Foods Market, the attendants at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Avis car rental staff at the airport—and also to a chance acquaintance from the world of politics, Frank Rizzo Jr., son of one of Philadelphia’s more controversial mayors.
I also owe a special debt of gratitude to three distinguished Franklin scholars—Jonathan Dull, Robert P. Frankel Jr., and David Waldstreicher—for reading the text in close to its final form, offering valuable suggestions, and saving me from errors, and to Gordon S. Wood. At Knopf, besides Andrew Miller, I wish to thank the wonderful Zakiya Harris, Kim Thornton Ingenito, and Victoria Pearson, and their production and design colleagues Kelly Blair, Michael Collica, and Roméo Enriquez.
The dedicatee of this book, Henry Chapman Mercer—architect, scholar, and collector—possessed the very qualities of variety and ingenuity that Benjamin Franklin admired. In a twenty-first century when people seem to think that strident opinion counts for everything, H. C. Mercer’s museum of patient American craftsmanship serves as a reminder that there is more to life than angry words.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
AAS: American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA
APS: American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia
AWM: American Weekly Mercury, Philadelphia
BFP 1-42: Leonard W. Labaree, William B. Willcox, Claude A. Lopez, Barbara B. Oberg, Ellen R. Cohn, et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Yale edition, New Haven, 1959–2017), primarily: Vol. 1 (1706–1734), Vol. 2 (1735–1744), and Vol. 3 (1745–1750).
BFSA (1717): Benjamin Franklin Senior, A Short Account of the Family of Thomas Franklin of Ecton in Northampton Shire, June 21st 1717, printed in Nian-Sheng Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah: Life of a Boston Tallow Chandler, 1657–1745,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 90, No. 3 (2000).
BFSCPB 1&2: Commonplace Book of Benjamin Franklin Sr., ca. 1725, two manuscript volumes at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, Mss. Octavo Vols. F
BL: British Library, London
CCP 1, 2, and 3: The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, Vol. 1 (1711–1729), Vol. 2 (1730–1742), and Vol. 3 (1743–1747) (New-York Historical Society, 1917–1920).
CJB: Edmund and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734–1777 (Gainesville, FL, 1992).
HSP: Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Lemay 1,2, and 3: J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 2006–9), Vol. 1, Journalist, 1706–1730; Vol. 2, Printer and Publisher, 1730–1747; Vol. 3, Soldier, Scientist and Politician, 1748–1757.
LLP 2 and 3: Craig W. Horle et al., eds., Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary, Vol. 2 (1710–56) (Philadelphia, 1997); and Vol. 3 (1757–75) (Philadelphia, 2005).
LMA: London Metropolitan Archives
MHS: Massachusetts Historical Society
NAK: National Archives, Kew, England
Northants RO: Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton, England
ODNB: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
PCC: Prerogative Court of Canterbury
PG: Pennsylvania Gazette, Philadelphia
PMHB: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
RoySoc: Archives of the Royal Society, London, England
WMQ: William and Mary Quarterly
PROLOGUE: THE ENIGMATIC SEER
1. Rodin: Quoted in C. H. Hart and E. Biddle, Memoirs of the Life and Works of J. A. Houdon (Philadelphia, 1911), pp. 108–9.
2. Franklin’s appearance and his “handsome leg”: Emmanuel de Croy-Solre, Duc de Croy, Journal inédit, 1718–1784 (Paris, 1907), Vol. 5, p. 295; and Charles Coleman Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven, 1962), pp. 2–4. For an account of his gravitas, see Mercy Otis Warren’s description of Franklin’s “dignity of deportment” when she met him in Massachusetts in October 1775, in Papers of John Adams, Vol. 3 (May 1775–January 1776), (Cambridge, MA, 1979), p. 279. Calling him “this venerable person,” Ms. Warren says she was “pleased to observe the affability and politeness of the gentleman, happily united with the virtues of the patriot.” However, the finest descriptions of Franklin as he was in Paris can be found in Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York, 2005), especially on pp. 36–53.
3. Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 2002), p. 44.
4. The Houdon bust: Jack Hinton, Melissa Meigham, and Andrew Lins, Encountering Genius: Houdon’s Portraits of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 2011), pp. 17–18 and 30–37.
5. Rodin on Franklin: See note 1. Franklin’s self-control: Jonathan R. Dull, “Franklin Furioso, 1775–1790,” in David Waldstreicher, ed., A Companion to Benjamin Franklin (Oxford, 2011), pp. 65 and 78–79; or for a different perspective, Jerry Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked (Lawrence, KS, 2005), pp. 222–23 and 314–17.
CHAPTER ONE: HIS INGENIOUS KIN
1. Survey of Houghton Magna, ca. 1604, in Tresham Papers, BL Add. Ms. 39,829, fol. 68. For a beautifully written account of the Nene valley in the early modern period: John Morton, The Natural History of Northamptonshire (London, 1712), pp. 19–24.
2. The family memoir by Benjamin Franklin Sr., dated June 21, 1717, and referred to below as BFSA (1717), is reprinted in Nian-Sheng Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah: Life of a Boston Tallow Chandler, 1657–1745,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 90, no. 3 (2000): 106–13. The original document is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Among the errors it co
ntains is a statement by Benjamin Senior that Henry Franklin was his great-grandfather and that he was an attorney. Archival material relating to Houghton Magna makes it clear that the Henry Franklin in question was actually Benjamin Senior’s grandfather, and that he was certainly not a lawyer. Wherever possible I have tried to authenticate details in BFSA (1717) by checking them against contemporary records. One thing that cannot be verified is Benjamin Franklin’s statement that his family had lived at Ecton for three hundred years, because the parish register only begins in 1559.
3. Henry Franklin and Michael Jones at Houghton Magna: Chancery lawsuit (1605–6), Baude et al. v. Tyndall, Franklin and Jones, at NAK C2/JasI/B18/20. The Franklin and Jones families, Henry’s marriage, and his social status as a husbandman: Ecton Parish Register, transcript at Northants RO, Ecton 114P/202. In English villages in 1600 or so, laboring men with no land at all or only a very small holding ranked at the bottom of the social scale; skilled craftsmen or husbandmen like the Franklins, occupying about twenty to thirty acres, came next above them; one step higher stood yeoman farmers, with (say) thirty to fifty acres of land; and above them were large yeoman farmers and members of the gentry. To be securely classed as gentlefolk a family needed at least five hundred acres. See Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 31–36. It is impossible to say precisely how much land Henry Franklin occupied at Ecton. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin tells us that the family owned “about 30 acres,” which checks out well against the surviving records from the village: see note 17 on the size of the family holding in the 1640s. However, Franklin was referring only to the freehold property they owned outright; husbandmen often rented extra land as leasehold tenants, and indeed Henry’s son Thomas Franklin Sr. did just that.
