The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Not surprisingly, public intoxication was common. “We continued drinking like horses, as the vulgar phrase is,” wrote one diarist, “and singing till many of us were very drunk, and then we went to dancing and pulling of wigs, caps, and hats; and thus we continued in this frantic manner, behaving more like mad people than they that profess the name of Christians. Whether this is inconsistent to the wise saying of Solomon let anyone judge, ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and he that is deceived thereby is not wise.”

  Often the sots found their way to the theater, where they behaved no better. Crowded into the galleries and the pit, they made ribald jokes at the expense of the actors and, purchasing apples and oranges from the barker-women strolling the aisles between acts, hurled the fruit onto the stage. Alexander Pope, who was busy editing Shakespeare during Franklin’s London stay, decried the presence of the rabble:

  The many-headed monster of the pit,

  A senseless, worthless, and unhonour’d crowd,

  Who, to disturb their betters mighty proud,

  Clatt’ring their sticks before ten lines are spoke,

  Call for the farce, the bear, and the black-joke.

  Franklin frequented the theater and London’s various other diversions, initially in the company of James Ralph. In his own words, he “spent with Ralph a good deal of my earnings in going to plays and other places of amusement.” The velveted prostitutes were beyond his means, but he evidently engaged in what he afterward characterized vaguely as “foolish intrigues with low women.” (Even this characterization struck him, on second thought, as too concrete: having written it in the first draft of his autobiography, he proceeded to cross it out. That it referred specifically to prostitutes may be gleaned from the rest of the deleted description of his encounters with these “low women”: “which from the expence were rather more prejudicial to me than to them.”) If he visited the bear-baiting dens, it was probably as an onlooker rather than a player; neither then nor later did he manifest a gambling streak. As curious as the next person, he certainly saw prisoners in the pillory and convicts swinging from the scaffold. He retained all his fingers, a fact that attested either to his diffidence in the public pot or his dexterity.

  The English affinity for alcohol he encountered on the streets, in the theaters, and especially in the workplace. Upon discovering the emptiness of Governor Keith’s promises, Franklin sought employment in the printing trade. Because London supported far more printers than all the American colonies together, there was no lack of work, and he soon accepted an offer from a man named Palmer, who had a shop in Bartholomew’s Close. There he remained for nearly a year, making a strong and favorable impression on his employer. Yet Palmer was unable to provide Franklin sufficient opportunity for advancement, and he left to take up with another printer, one who did a larger business.

  This second house employed more than fifty men, allowing the proprietor, one Watts, to practice the sort of specialization that would be one hallmark of the industrial revolution, about to begin. Certain men specialized in press work, others in composing, still others in collating, binding, and so on. Franklin’s skills were sufficiently obvious that he had his choice of specialties; he initially chose the pressroom as a means of getting the physical exercise he was accustomed to as an everyday aspect of the work of print-shop employees in the less diversified colonial trade.

  Partly on account of his youth, partly because of his well-muscled shoulders and back, partly because he sought out the heavy lifting where others did just the opposite, Franklin soon gained a reputation for strength. He typically carried two sets of heavy lead type, one in each hand, running up and down the stairs of Watts’s shop, where the other pressmen carried one at a time. Making this feat all the more remarkable in English eyes was that the young American accomplished it without the fortifying aid of the beer the others considered essential to their work. Franklin’s partner at the press drank a pint of beer before breakfast, a pint with breakfast, a pint at midmorning, a pint with the midday meal, a pint in the afternoon, and a pint at day’s end.

  Franklin later described this as “a detestable custom”; whether or not he thought it so at the time, he avoided it, on grounds of expense if nothing else. He rejected the argument that hard work required strong beer, saying that this was silly, that the food value of the beer could be no greater than the barley that went into it. And this food value could be obtained far more cheaply by eating bread, washed down with water. He pointed to himself as proof.

  Franklin’s fellows in the pressroom could not deny that bread and water worked for him, but they declined to hazard their own health repeating his experiment. For some of them the resistance to change doubtless reflected what they took to be the positive side effects of perpetual semi-inebriation. To a certain extent the resistance revealed an unconscious wisdom that was greater than Franklin’s uninformed theorizing. Both Boston and Philadelphia were much smaller than London and had far fewer problems with public sanitation. Franklin had no idea of the risk he was taking drinking plain London water; those who refused to join him had a better idea, even if it was uneducated and informed by custom rather than science. (No one in London who valued health would have drunk out of the Thames the way Franklin drank out of the Delaware on his first day in Philadelphia.) By the evidence of his long and relatively infection-free life, Franklin had an immune system superior to most of what nature or society could throw in his face; despite the warnings of the other pressmen he thrived on his bread and water. They were not all so blessed; it was probably just as well they stuck to their beer.

  Franklin’s arguments did not fail completely of effect. His employer Watts, having decided that as literate a fellow as Franklin was wasted slinging type sets and swinging the handles on the presses, decreed that Franklin must come upstairs to the composing room. Franklin did so, only to be greeted by the request, which soon became a demand, that he contribute five shillings to the common beer fund of the compositors. He refused on the dual ground that he did not drink the beer and that he had already paid below. His new fellows nominally accepted his refusal, not least since it was supported by Watts. But they engaged in constant mischief upon Franklin’s work, inserting errors into pages he had already proofed, misplacing his letters, and generally making his life trying and unproductive. When he complained, as a man they denied knowledge of his misfortunes, beyond attributing it to the “chapel ghost,” a mysterious being that haunted those not fully admitted to the local congregation, or “chapel,” of compositors. And sure enough, as soon as Franklin gave in—“convinced of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with continually,” his older self said—and paid up, the appeased spirit ceased its vexing.

  Yet no sooner was Franklin admitted to full membership in the chapel than he began preaching heterodoxy. He convinced some of his colleagues to join him in swearing off beer (at least at work) and replacing it with hot-water gruel supplied by an inn nearby. (That the gruel was boiled may well have been significant in the success of Franklin’s experiment.) Not only did this save most of the money the men had been spending on beer, it left them clearheaded for their work (a more critical matter for compositors than for the pressmen). Between the muddle of the beer and its expense, those who resisted Franklin’s teaching often fell into debt, with several of them agreeing to pay him interest on money borrowed toward their brew. Thus he gained the twinned benefit of his prudence and their folly, and on Saturday nights collected not only his own wages but substantial portions of theirs. This evidence of his prudence, combined with his reliability (unlike his beer-drinking colleagues he never required a “St. Monday” holiday) and his facility at composition, prompted Watts to put him on the most important printing tasks, which carried a better piece-rate. “I went on now very agreeably,” Franklin remarked.

  The impression Franklin made extended beyond the community of printers. At his first job, with Palmer, he received the assignment of setting the type for a n
ew edition of William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated. In the dawning Enlightenment, when enthusiasm for Newton was undermining reverence for revelation, Wollaston essayed to defend orthodoxy with the weapons of the skeptics. Nature, far from contradicting the essential teachings of received religion, in fact confirmed them, he said. An ungospeled savage, merely attuned to the natural order, would arrive at a moral code that differed in no fundamental from the code promulgated in the most learned pulpit.

  Franklin, weighing Wollaston’s argument while he weighed the letters in which he set the book, judged that it failed at certain points. Not every nineteen-year-old would have felt moved to join such a metaphysical dispute, but Franklin by now clearly did not consider himself an ordinary nineteen-year-old. He wrote and printed an essay—A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain—correcting Wollaston.

  Franklin approached his subject syllogistically, after the fashion of philosophers since Aristotle. God was reckoned to be “all wise, all good, all powerful.” “If He is all powerful, there can be nothing either existing or acting in the universe against or without his consent; and what He consents to must be good, because He is good; therefore evil doth not exist.” Franklin did not deny the existence of pain and suffering in the world, but rather than interpreting these as evil, he deemed them essentially figments of the human imagination. In a passage that reflected both his reading and his experience, Franklin dismissed the notion of happiness detached from unhappiness:

  It is owing to their ignorance of the nature of pleasure and pain that the ancient heathens believed the idle fable of their Elysium, that state of uninterrupted ease and happiness. The thing is entirely impossible in nature! Are not the pleasures of the spring made such by the disagreeableness of the winter? Is not the pleasure of fair weather owing to the unpleasantness of foul? Certainly. Were it then always spring, were the fields always green and flourishing, and the weather constantly serene and fair, the pleasure would pall and die upon our hands; it would cease to be pleasure to us, when it is not ushered in by uneasiness.

  Franklin went on to say something more striking. Not only were pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, indissolubly connected to each other, they were equally allocated among men. “Since pain naturally and infallibly produces a pleasure in proportion to it, every individual creature must, in any state of life, have an equal quantity of each.” From this it followed that no one was happier or unhappier than anyone else. “The monarch is not more happy than the slave, nor the beggar more miserable than Croesus.” More striking still, in the calculus of pleasure and pain the monarch and the slave were both on an equal footing with a rock. “Suppose A, B, and C, three distinct beings; A and B animate, capable of pleasure and pain, C an inanimate piece of matter, insensible of either. A receives ten degrees of pain, which are necessarily succeeded by ten degrees of pleasure; B receives fifteen of pain, and the consequent equal number of pleasure; C all the while lies unconcerned, and as he has not suffered the former, has no right to the latter. What can be more equal and just than this?”

  To the obvious objection that the most cursory glance at human society showed some people to be happy while others were unhappy, Franklin rejoined that appearances deceived. “When we see riches, grandeur and a cheerful countenance, we easily imagine happiness accompanies them, when oftentimes ’tis quite otherwise; nor is a constantly sorrowful look, attended with continual complaints, an infallible indication of unhappiness.”

  Having disposed of happiness and unhappiness, Franklin attacked the notion of the immortality of the soul. He identified the soul with consciousness and the ability to treat ideas absorbed by the senses (“The soul is a mere power or faculty of contemplating on and comparing those ideas”), and then argued that when consciousness ended, the soul ceased to exist. Perhaps the soul in some way attached itself to a new body and new ideas. “But that will in no way concern us who are now living, for the identity will be lost; it is no longer that same self but a new being.”

  If temporal happiness was an illusion, and eternal happiness an impossibility, why should anyone strive for anything? Merely to avoid pain. The soul of an infant did not achieve consciousness (“it is as if it were not”) until it felt pain.

  Thus is the machine set on work; this is life. We are first moved by pain, and the whole succeeding course of our lives is but one continued series of action with a view to be freed from it. As fast as we have excluded one uneasiness another appears; otherwise the motion would cease. If a continual weight is not applied, the clock will stop. And as soon as the avenues of uneasiness to the soul are choked up or cut off, we are dead, we think and act no more.

  Like most such attempts to prove the unprovable, Franklin’s effort revealed more about the author than about the subject. Indeed, it revealed more about the author than he cared to have revealed. Although his employer, Palmer, was impressed by the ingenuity of Franklin’s argumentation, he decried Franklin’s conclusions as abominable. This reaction prompted Franklin to reconsider. In his autobiography he characterized various mistakes of his life as “errata”; regarding this episode he asserted, “My printing this pamphlet was another erratum.” Long before then he had burned all but the few copies already delivered to friends.

  It was meaningful that Franklin said his printing the pamphlet, rather than the reasoning of the pamphlet, was the erratum. The pamphlet was a tour de force of logic, another indication of the emerging genius of the author. Some of its premises were open to question—which simply indicated that the genius was self-taught and lacked some life experience and the judgment it brings. But the reasoning placed Franklin on par with men much older than himself and more versed in the argumentative arts.

  In time he would recant his conclusions about the nonexistence of evil and futility of striving for happiness. But at the moment what bothered him was the bad impression his essay made. A young man alone in the world, dependent on the goodwill of others, could not afford the stigma of gross unorthodoxy, however grossly unorthodox his beliefs might be. A reader of the Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity could readily conclude that if the author were not already an atheist, he would be soon. God was less a real presence in this tract than a rhetorical device. In many ways London in the 1720s was more tolerant than Philadelphia, which in turn was more tolerant than Boston. But London’s tolerance had its limits, and Franklin was in no position to push them.

  Others were, however, and they found much to praise in Franklin’s pamphlet. A surgeon named William Lyons, who in his spare time practiced philosophy, read Franklin’s essay and at once demanded to meet this brilliant young fellow. On doing so, he escorted Franklin to his favorite alehouse and introduced the lad to his circle of intellectual friends. Among these was Bernard Mandeville—“a most facetious entertaining companion,” in Franklin’s words—who had written The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits. This work outraged moralists and made Mandeville a minor hero among those who liked to tweak conventional conscience; not surprisingly, its author saw in Franklin a kindred spirit who might carry the fight forward. Another member of the circle was Henry Pemberton, a friend of Isaac Newton. Pemberton delighted Franklin by promising to introduce him to the great scientist; he disappointed Franklin by failing to fulfill his promise.

  Even as he gained a reputation as a philosophical wunderkind, Franklin made friends by his other gifts. One of his printing colleagues at Watts’s was a young man named Wygate, a lover of knowledge after Franklin’s heart and a bit of a linguist as well. But certain practical arts escaped him, including the art of swimming. He engaged Franklin to teach him and another friend. The pupils were apt and in a short time exhibited remarkable proficiency. Word spread of Franklin’s skill as a teacher and his prowess in the water; one day, returning by boat from Chelsea, several acquaintances insisted that Franklin demonstrate. He stripped, dove into the water, and put on a bravura performance. He showed off various strokes and positions, behavin
g, to all appearances, as though he had been born in the water. Matching the speed of the boat, he covered more than three miles before taking his watery bow.

  After this feat word spread still farther about the talented American. A Sir William Wyndham sent for Franklin and offered a handsome fee for teaching his two sons, about to embark on a long journey, to swim. Franklin was flattered and said yes in principle, but a scheduling conflict prevented the lessons from actually taking place. Despite this disappointment, Franklin inferred that if he so wished, he might make a fair living introducing the sons of the gentry to water sports.

  Meanwhile Franklin showed a knack for ingratiating himself to the fairer sex—or rather, considering his failure with James Ralph’s lover, to that segment of the sex that had once been fairer but now was less so. After leaving Palmer’s print shop for Watts’s, Franklin moved to a more convenient residence in Duke Street. His landlady was an elderly widow who reduced his rent on account of his being a strong young man whose presence might ward off intruders. She soon became smitten with Franklin. For his part, he found her delightful. She knew “1000 anecdotes as far back as the times of Charles the Second,” he explained. “She was lame in her knees with the gout, and therefore seldom stirred out of her room, so sometimes wanted company; and hers was so highly amusing to me that I was sure to spend an evening with her whenever she desired it.” The two would split an anchovy for dinner, laid out on a piece of bread with butter; they would wash this down with a shared pint of ale. As Franklin gradually formed a plan to return to Philadelphia, he desired to save money for his passage; he told her of cheaper lodgings he knew where he would have to pay but two shillings per week. She would not hear of his leaving, and reduced his rent from three shillings six pence to one shilling six. He stayed.