1. Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
11. Tranquility. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.7
Franklin then set about trying to achieve “moral perfection” by mastering each of these virtues. He noted that people are creatures of habit, which made it quite difficult to change their behavior and adhere to every virtue, but he devised a strategy whereby he would focus on mastering one virtue per week. He presumed that after focusing intensely on adhering to a virtue for a week it would have largely been ingrained into habit, making it easier to sustain thereafter. He listed his virtues in a table next to the days of the week and would note each day when he violated a virtue and would aspire to correct it. His progress in his table assured him that he was becoming more virtuous.
He was already well practiced in frugality and temperance. For example, as a young man of eighteen he had already concluded that money spent on beer was wasted. He recounts an illustrative example in his autobiography:
We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos’d, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor. I endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer. He drank on, however, and had four or five shillings to pay out of his wages every Saturday night for that muddling liquor; an expense I was free from. And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.8
The virtue of sincerity prompted him to refuse all submissions to his paper that he perceived as libelous or abusive. When the writers would plead that freedom of the press demanded he print their submissions, he replied that he would print as many copies as they desired for them to distribute on their own, but he would not spread detractions, noting, “having contracted with my subscribers to furnish them with what might be either useful or entertaining I could not fill their papers with private altercation.”9
The virtue that would turn out to most define Franklin’s character and shape his life was industry. Franklin believed very deeply in the value of hard work, and he also believed that to be seen as industrious was a mark of good character. He thus strove not only to be industrious but to be seen being industrious:
In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary. I drest plainly; I was seen at no places of idle diversion. I never went out a fishing or shooting; a book, indeed, sometimes debauch’d me from my work, but that was seldom, snug, and gave no scandal; and to show that I was not above my business, I sometimes brought home the paper I purchas’d at the stores thro’ the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteem’d an industrious, thriving young man and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom; others proposed supplying me with books, and I went on swimmingly.10
Franklin initially had only twelve virtues on his list, but he added the last—humility—when a Quaker friend informed him that he was generally perceived as proud. Franklin struggled mightily with this last virtue. He disciplined himself to not correct others’ mistakes, and he learned to avoid making dogmatic pronouncements, but he never considered himself to have truly won the battle with pride. As he noted wryly in his autobiography, “In reality, there is, perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”11
In 1727 Franklin, an innate social networker, a gift none of the other breakthrough innovators seemed to possess, created the “Junto,” a club where like-minded young and enterprising workingmen could gather. The word junto is an alteration of the Spanish word for “joined” and began to be used in the seventeenth century to signify a group of people united for a common purpose. Franklin and his friends rented a house where they discussed current events, debated philosophy, and developed self- and civic-improvement programs. When the members devised a method of pooling their books to form a common library, this gave rise to one of the first subscription lending libraries in America. Franklin subsequently used the Junto to launch a voluntary fire brigade, a night watchman corps that would supplement Philadelphia’s police force, and the Pennsylvania Militia (a military force independent of Pennsylvania’s government).
In the 1740s Franklin began to turn his attention toward his scientific curiosity. He had long been an enthusiastic student of nature, having analyzed lunar patterns, weather, and water currents. Having prospered as a printer, he now had enough money to more freely indulge his scientific interests and pursued them with zeal. Despite his having had only two years of formal education, his scientific contributions were remarkable. For example, after pondering the mechanics of heat transfer and convection, he developed wood-burning stoves (initially called Pennsylvania fireplaces but later referred to as Franklin stoves), which could be built into fireplaces and greatly increase the amount of heat produced while reducing smoke and drafts. While he could have patented the stoves and profited from them, he declined to do so. Driven by his ideal to serve God and mankind, he chose to give the designs for the stoves to the public—as he would do with all of his inventions—so that all people could freely benefit from them. As he remarked in his autobiography, “As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”12 As noted in the previous chapter, when his brother John was seriously ill and had trouble urinating, Franklin invented the first urinary catheter used in America. In 1747 he began studying electricity, tinkering with glass tubes to generate static electricity and devising experiments to better understand its properties. He ultimately concluded that the generation of a positive charge was accompanied by the generation of an equal negative charge—giving rise to the principle of conservation of charge and the single-fluid theory of electricity. This was a monumental scientific breakthrough that future scientists described as “of the same fundamental importance to physical science as Newton’s law of conservation of momentum.”13
Franklin’s observation that lightning behaved similarly to electricity led to one
of his most famous experiments—the collection of electrical charge from lightning by means of a kite with a wire protruding from its top—and to one of his most important inventions, the lightning rod for protecting buildings from the destructive effects of lightning. Soon buildings all across the colonies and Europe were being fitted with lightning rods. In recognition of his accomplishment, Franklin was awarded honorary degrees by both Harvard and Yale in 1753 (he would later also receive honorary doctorates from the University of St. Andrews and Oxford).
He also made studies of population growth over this period that led to his 1755 publication of a paper titled “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” a profound and fundamental work on population growth and resource economics that greatly influenced Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, although Malthus and Franklin came to different conclusions about the implications of growth.14 Malthus’s famous 1798 work, “An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society,” warns that unless actively curtailed, a human population tends to grow until it exceeds the resources available to support it. When food production or other aspects of well-being were increased, the population would grow and diminish per capita production, potentially to the point of catastrophe. Mankind, he argued, tended to not have the discipline to use excess resources to increase the standard of living; instead, its population would grow until people began to suffer famine or other destruction—a view that became known as the “Malthusian trap.” Franklin, on the other hand, had a more optimistic view on population growth. He saw land in America as an underused resource. He argued that England should actively seek to increase its population in America because that would result in growing the wealth and power of England. When Franklin published this essay, he had not anticipated the American colonies seeking independence from the rule—and taxation—of England.
Franklin believed that industrious youths would be better served by a practical nonsectarian education than by the elite colleges of the time (Harvard, Yale, William & Mary, Princeton), so in 1751 he founded an academy that would become the University of Pennsylvania. In the same year he accepted a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, determining that a political position would enable him to do more good in the world. One of his first projects was to create street sweeping and lighting systems. In keeping with a lifelong tendency to immerse himself in every minute detail of his projects, he even designed new lamps that would vent the smoke and thereby stay clean and bright longer.
It is worth taking a moment here to note that the vast majority of Franklin’s innovations—including the public lending library, the volunteer fire brigade, the nonsectarian university, and street sweeping and lighting systems—did not profit him directly (at least not more so than they profited the general public). Although he was a shrewd and practical businessman who strove to be financially successful in his printing business and later in his political roles, it is also clear that financial gain was not his primary motive, and he invested considerable effort and expense in the more idealistic quest of improving social welfare.
By 1753, when the British had appointed him to the post of Deputy Postmaster for the colonies, Franklin was becoming increasingly embroiled in politics. He felt strongly that the colonies of America should be unified into a nation. In 1754 he published his famous cartoon of a snake cut into parts with the phrase “Join or die” to illustrate his argument that the colonies needed to unite if they were to stop the French advance in America. Although the French colonies were vastly outnumbered by the British colonies, the French had allied with the Native Americans in an effort to try to seize control of the land west of the Appalachians. Franklin, who was initially a loyalist to the Crown, envisioned America as a nation that would remain part of the British Empire, its citizens enjoying all of the rights and liberties of those in England. However, he would eventually realize that the government in England had no intention of enabling the American colonies to achieve that kind of parity. In fact, the English actively suppressed development of manufacturing capabilities in America to forestall its economic independence. Franklin would ultimately be forced to choose between loyalty to England and pursuing what he thought would be best for the people of America.
It was a difficult and uncertain period. The British wanted to control the colonies and tax them, the French wanted to seize more swaths of American territory, the Native Americans wanted more restraint in the expansion of the colonies and better terms for their concessions, and the colonies themselves were not inclined to cooperate as a union. On top of this, although Franklin had considerable influence in the Pennsylvania Assembly, he was increasingly at odds with the Penn family, the Pennsylvania “proprietors” who had a charter from the Crown to govern Pennsylvania. As his battles with the Penns became more frequent and more heated, he frequently lost his carefully crafted temperament of calm and tolerance.
England’s 1765 move to levy the “Stamp Act” tax on every newspaper, book, legal document, and deck of cards in the colonies set in motion a sequence of events that would eventually unite the colonies, but not as loyal members of the British Empire as Franklin had initially hoped. The tension among the colonists, the proprietors, and England increased over the next decade, fueled by multiple skirmishes over taxes and import duties. Franklin’s role in arguing for the rights and liberties of the colonies increasingly put him at odds with leaders in England and with his son William, who, as a British loyalist, served as a royal governor in New Jersey. Franklin would ultimately choose loyalty to his ideals of a free and egalitarian America over any loyalty to his son, irrevocably severing their relationship.
On one occasion, while Franklin was living in England as an agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly, he was ordered to appear before the Privy Council, where British Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn accused him of being the “prime conductor” in stirring up agitation against the British government by illegally obtaining and releasing inflammatory letters from Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson filled with advice on how to subdue the Americans by restricting their liberties. Wedderburn spent a full hour launching an abusive attack upon Franklin in front of a jeering crowd of England’s elite. However, Franklin stood stoic and silent. The proceeding led to him losing his postmaster position and facing threat of arrest. He had become a target for England’s increasing anxiety about American rebellion, and most people expected that he would quickly leave England. But he did not leave, nor did he retire from public life. Instead, he continued to write biting satires that offered a critical look at how England was managing the relationship with America. He accrued many enemies during this time who mocked or slandered him in the press, sometimes accusing him of devious or lecherous behavior. But Franklin faced these difficulties with resolve; knowing that he was pursuing his duty to serve God and mankind gave him a moral high ground that helped make him resilient to such public attacks.
As the Revolutionary War unfolded, Franklin’s extraordinary skills as a strategic thinker and diplomat became apparent to all. He realized that France could be persuaded to help America win independence from England, so he adroitly wooed the leaders and people of France in a way that appealed to both their idealism and pragmatism.15 Franklin’s portrayal of America as a virtuous young country battling against tyranny won the hearts of the people and leaders of France; Franklin’s promises that a French-American alliance would benefit French trade at the expense of Britain won their minds and pocketbooks. Franklin became so esteemed in France that as his coach passed through the palace gates at Versailles, crowds gathered and shouted “Vive Franklin!”16 With France’s monetary support he was able to fund munitions to fight England on the battlefield, and with France’s political support he was able to induce England to acknowledge America’s independence.
During interludes in which he was not busy with politics, Franklin again turned to his scientific inquiries. His capacity for observation and deduction was remarkable, leading him to be the first to argue for such t
hings as colds being transmitted from person to person (rather than from cold air), lead being poisonous, and ships being able to travel faster in deep water.17 As a player of the violin, harp, and guitar, he had a great enthusiasm for music and in 1761 invented a musical instrument called a glass armonica.18 In 1784, frustrated that he had to switch between different pairs of eyeglasses for reading versus seeing at distance, he invented bifocal glasses.19
Throughout his life Franklin would be guided and fueled by his ideals of egalitarianism, tolerance, industriousness, temperance, and charity. To know a problem existed was sufficient motivation for him to attempt to solve it, even if solving it did not contribute to his personal interests. Franklin’s somewhat complicated relationship with slavery illustrates this point. For example, in 1787 he still owned slaves, but he recognized that egalitarianism must apply to all people. He became the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, but he did not actually support immediate abolition because he feared that turning all the slaves out into society without education or employment would spell disaster. He believed that abolition was a process that would take time and needed to be well thought out. Thus in 1789, the year before his death, he drew up a detailed charter called “Plan for Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks, 1789.” The plan called for committees that would advise freed slaves and help them obtain education and employment. When Franklin died, in 1790, his will indicated that his slaves were to be freed (rather than inherited by his family, as was the custom of the time).
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