The First American

by H. W. Brands

  While Franklin’s moral calisthenics reflected a sincere pursuit of virtue, he hardly insisted that virtue be its own reward. On the contrary, whatever the virtuous might earn for themselves in the hereafter (a time and place of which Franklin remained skeptical), they could hope to realize material benefits in the here and now. Of course, to do so, they must take care not to hide their virtue under a bushel basket. “In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman,” he explained, “I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances of the contrary. I dressed plainly; I was seen at no places of idle diversion; I never went out a-fishing or shooting; a book, indeed, sometimes debauched me from my work; but that was seldom, snug, and gave no scandal.” Even after he hired an assistant and took an apprentice—this latter the son of the late Aquila Rose—he continued occasionally to do the most menial tasks himself. “To show that I was not above my business, I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores, through the streets on a wheelbarrow.” (This may have had a second purpose. Paper was expensive in America, and Franklin would not have wanted to take a chance on having suppliers shortchange his apprentice or assistant.)

  Moral credit in the eyes of his fellow Philadelphians mattered a great deal to Franklin, especially in that no sooner had he opened his print shop than he started to think about expanding operations. In one direction expansion led to the establishment of a stationery store, which required a customer base different from that of the print shop per se; in another it carried him back to newspaper publishing. Franklin pursued printing as a craft and a trade, but simply setting others’ words into type left the creative part of him unfulfilled. From the first Silence Dogood letters he had been an author as well as a printer; as soon as the opportunity offered, he would become an author again.

  Yet Franklin was never content to let opportunity find him. Andrew Bradford printed a paper, the American Weekly Mercury—“a paltry thing, wretchedly managed, and no way entertaining,” remarked Franklin, evidently after the expiration of the statute of limitations on his speak-no-evil policy. Equally to the point, despite its deficiencies it turned a profit for its owner. Franklin had no doubt he could do better, in regard to both quality and profitability, and he determined to do so.

  But Franklin sinned against silence, and paid the cost. Keimer’s apprentice George Webb had found a female friend willing to lend him the money to purchase his remaining time; he told Franklin he would like to join the Franklin-Meredith shop. Franklin lacked sufficient present work to take Webb on at once, but to keep him interested let slip that he was going to start a newspaper. Webb, by accident or design, relayed the intelligence to Keimer, who immediately announced that he would be opening a paper. Franklin was short the capital to start a paper at once; he could only watch with annoyance—at Keimer for stealing his idea, at Webb for being the accessory to the theft, at himself for leaving the idea unguarded—as Keimer commenced publication of The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Sciences; and Pennsylvania Gazette.

  Had patience been one of Franklin’s thirteen cardinal virtues, he might simply have waited until he was ready to launch his own paper, then let quality speak for itself. Instead he linked up with Andrew Bradford and wrote for the Mercury in a tone that mocked Keimer’s pretensions at putting out a paper. In this case Franklin hewed to the letter, although not the spirit, of his speak-no-evil policy, by hiding behind the mask of anonymity. His first salvos came from “Martha Careful” and “Caelia Shortface.” In keeping with the Universal Instructor promise of his title, Keimer was essaying to reprint the Chambers Cyclopaedia, starting with A. Perhaps he was not thinking clearly—a recurrent problem with Keimer, as Franklin knew—or perhaps he was thinking very clearly, about how controversy could be employed to sell papers. Whichever was the case, he ran the Chambers article on “Abortion.” Franklin, as Franklin, never evinced excessive delicacy on such matters, but Martha Careful, speaking “in behalf of myself and many good modest women in this city,” warned Keimer “that if he proceed farther to expose the secrets of our sex in that audacious manner … my sister Molly and myself, with some others, are resolved to run the hazard of taking him by the beard, at the next place we meet him, and make an example of him for his immodesty.” Caelia Shortface helpfully sent Andrew Bradford a letter actually addressed to Keimer; Bradford with equal helpfulness printed it. “If thou proceed any further in that scandalous manner,” she said, “we intend very soon to have thy right ear for it.” Mrs. Shortface went on to advise Keimer, “If thou hath nothing else to put in thy Gazette, lay it down.”

  Subsequent articles in Keimer’s paper offered Franklin a less obvious opening; consequently his strategy for undermining his old employer took a different turn. The week after the Careful and Shortface letters appeared, Bradford published another anonymous Franklin piece, this one over the signature “Busy Body.” Here the assault on Keimer was oblique. “Let the fair sex be assured that I shall always treat them and their affairs with the utmost decency and respect,” Busy Body wrote, leaving readers to recall whose paper did not. Perhaps Franklin feared making Bradford, soon to be his rival, look too good; in any event, he leveled criticism at the publisher of the Mercury as well. “I have often observed with concern that your Mercury is not always equally entertaining. The delay of ships expected in, and want of fresh advices from Europe, make it frequently very dull; and I find the freezing our river has the same effect on news as on trade.” Yet journalistic criticism was simply a sideline for Busy Body. Gossip was far more interesting. The author cited the proverb that what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business, then declared, “I, upon mature deliberation, think fit to take nobody’s business wholly into my own hands, and out of zeal for the public good, design to erect myself into a kind of censor morum.” This should afford general, albeit not universally uniform, enjoyment. “As most people delight in censure when they are not the objects of it, if any are offended at my publicly exposing their private vices, I promise they shall have the satisfaction, in a very little time, of seeing their good friends and neighbours in the same circumstances.” A typical closing for first letters to editors declared that if this introduction met general approbation, more letters would follow. Busy Body disdained such ephemeral encouragement in favor of something more substantial. “If you send me a bottle of ink and a quire of paper by the bearer, you may depend on hearing further.”

  Additional Busy Body letters followed. Some satirized Keimer; others delivered wry observations on relations between the sexes, on the pretensions of the learned, and on assorted other topics intended to engage the lighthearted attention of readers. Franklin wrote four Busy Body letters by himself; he contributed parts of two others; the balance of these two, and the whole of several more, were the work of Franklin friend and fellow Junto member Joseph Breintnall. The letters continued until the early autumn of 1729, at which time—not coincidentally—Franklin and Meredith commenced publishing a paper of their own.

  The paper they published was actually the one Keimer had started but never managed to make profitable. Franklin’s covert campaign against Keimer may have played a part in his paper’s failure, but the greatest responsibility lay with the publisher. Keimer’s chronic inability to stick to business both limited his clientele—Franklin, who later had a look at Keimer’s accounts, reported that the subscription list never topped ninety—and unnerved his creditors, who successfully petitioned the Pennsylvania authorities to have him arrested for debt. This daunted him hardly at all, perhaps because he had been in debtors’ prison in London before emigrating to America; upon his release he determined to move along again, this time to Barbados. On his way to the dock he divested himself of his paper, to Franklin and Meredith. Neither party disclosed the sale price; Franklin called it “a trifle”—which was about what the new owners got for their money: a few score subscribers and a name.

  Of the name they kept only part. Lest they too be dragged down b
y the weight of Keimer’s failure, they jettisoned all but Pennsylvania Gazette from his unwieldy title. Under this name Franklin informed readers on October 2, 1729, that the paper was “now to be carried on by new hands.” He announced the abandonment of Keimer’s design of printing all the articles from the Chambers cyclopedia. “Besides their containing many things abstruse or insignificant to us, it will probably be fifty years before the whole can be gone through in this manner of publication.” Franklin did not think his readers were willing to wait that long. He certainly was not.

  Having dispatched Keimer, he proceeded to give Andrew Bradford the back of his hand: “There are many who have long desired to see a good newspaper in Pennsylvania.” Franklin proposed to fill the need. The task was difficult. “We ask assistance, because we are fully sensible that to publish a good newspaper is not so easy an undertaking as many people imagine it to be”—here Franklin slapped both Bradford and Keimer. “The author of a gazette (in the opinion of the learned) ought to be qualified with an extensive acquaintance with languages, a great easiness and command of writing and relating things cleanly and intelligibly, and in few words; he should be able to speak of war both by land and sea; be well acquainted with geography, with the history of the time, with the several interests of princes and states, the secrets of courts, and the manners and customs of all nations.” As those who saw through Franklin’s cloak of modesty guessed, he judged himself nearer this ideal than anyone else in Philadelphia who might think of putting out a paper. At all of twenty-three years he was probably right. But he demurred from any such claim and instead called upon his readers for help. “It would be well if the writer of these papers could make up among his friends what is wanting in himself.” Help or no, readers could count on the new Gazette to be “as agreeable and useful an entertainment as the nature of the thing will allow.”

  One person to whom Franklin did not look for help in editing the Gazette was his partner, Meredith. With each passing month Meredith discovered further that he was not suited to the literary line. Some of his difficulty may have stemmed from the high standard Franklin set; working beside one of such talents could not have been easy. That Franklin was almost ten years his junior merely made matters worse. Meredith continued to seek solace in drink—again perhaps indulging an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the abstemious Franklin.

  The problem came to a head when Meredith’s father, obviously disappointed at his son’s downward spiral, failed to forward the second installment of the £200 he had pledged toward the initial expenses of the Franklin-Meredith shop. The creditors of the two young men—some of whom may well have lost money on Keimer and were understandably reluctant to be burned again—sued Franklin and Meredith. Unlike Keimer, the two managed to avoid jail, but the suit nonetheless threatened to ruin an enterprise that seemed so promisingly started.

  Amid Franklin’s distress, two of his friends from the Junto came to his aid. Robert Grace, the young gentleman, and William Coleman, the merchant’s clerk, separately offered to advance Franklin the money he needed to satisfy his creditors. But each strongly advised him to sever his relationship with Meredith, who was often seen drunk and gambling, much to the discredit of the partnership.

  These unsolicited offers showed Franklin a way out of both of his problems—the one with his creditors and the other with Meredith. Although he hesitated to force Meredith aside, feeling obliged for the opportunity father and son had brought his way, he determined that if the survival of the business demanded dissolution of the partnership, he would take that step.

  Before long it did, and Franklin acted. He broached the subject by asking Hugh Meredith if he—Franklin—were the cause of Hugh’s father’s failing to furnish the rest of the money. Would his father advance the money to Hugh alone? If so, Franklin would bow out of the partnership.

  Franklin may have been merely polite in making this gesture; he knew that the elder Meredith was not so blind as to think Franklin was the problem with the partnership. Yet even in the unlikely event the Merediths accepted Franklin’s resignation, Franklin would emerge in better condition than he was currently in. He would be free of Hugh Meredith and would be able to take up one or both of the offers of funding he had received. He had dispatched Keimer as a competitor; if necessary he could dispatch Meredith.

  Meredith did not accept Franklin’s offer. Instead he tendered his own resignation. Sadder but wiser, he said he saw now that the printing trade was not for him. He had been bred a farmer, and a farmer he should be. Some friends were going to North Carolina, where land was plentiful and cheap; he wanted to go with them. If Franklin would assume the debts of the partnership, reimburse his father the £100 he had supplied already, pay some small personal debts of Meredith himself, and give him thirty pounds and a new saddle, the business would be his.

  Franklin accepted at once. He reckoned he would be responsible for the debts to the merchants and to Meredith’s father in any event, so long as the business continued. Consequently the price of the purchase came to a saddle plus £30 and change. This he got from the two friends who had offered him loans; in addition he borrowed enough from them to satisfy his creditors and to pay back Meredith’s father.

  The document of the partnership’s dissolution was dated July 14, 1730. Although Meredith’s name remained on the Gazette for some time longer, out of inertia as much as anything else, on that date the twenty-four-year-old Franklin gained his professional independence.

  5

  Poor Richard

  1730–35

  Two months later Franklin gained independence of another sort—even if many persons taking the same step have interpreted it as just the opposite. In September 1730 Ben Franklin married. Love’s pathways are rarely straight; in the case of Franklin and Deborah Read they were more crooked than usual. He lost her once by his distraction and neglect while he was in London. Tired of waiting, she married another, a potter named John Rogers. Rogers was a competent ceramicist but rather loose with promises to pay—and, as rumors that

  succeeded the wedding suggested, loose with other promises as well. Someone heard from someone else who knew secondhand that Rogers already had a wife, abandoned in England. Needless to say, this upset Debbie considerably. Rogers must have been a charming fellow to cause both Debbie and the vigilant Sarah to overlook his lack of references; almost certainly heartache accompanied the embarrassment Debbie felt at falling for someone so unworthy. Beyond the bigamy, his free spending threatened them both with debts that could not be paid. Debbie, disgusted, left him and returned to her mother’s house, where she refused to have anything to do with men or most women either.

  Not surprisingly, it was with mixed feelings that she subsequently learned that he had left Philadelphia for the West Indies. No one knew when he would return, or whether. Was he doing to her what he had done to his first wife? (Was that other woman even the first?) His creditors wanted to know, even if Debbie, who wished him good riddance, did not.

  Yet the uncertainty of his whereabouts, combined with the importunities of his creditors, left Debbie in a more tenuous position than ever. If Rogers indeed still had a wife in England, then Debbie would have no difficulty getting her marriage annulled, freeing her from his debts and likewise liberating her to enter another marriage, should the occasion arise. But no one knew where this said first wife lived, and Debbie and Sarah certainly lacked the resources to conduct an investigation to confirm her existence. If the first wife did not exist, Debbie was stuck with Rogers, for Pennsylvania law did not allow divorce for mere desertion. The situation grew only more complicated when unconfirmable reports arrived from the Caribbean that Rogers had died. With no body or death certificate, Debbie would have to wait years for legal release from a union that may have been illegal from the start.

  Franklin carried some of Debbie’s misfortune upon his own conscience. At least so he said in his autobiography, written four decades after the fact. “I considered my giddiness and inconstancy when in Lon
don as in a great degree the cause of her unhappiness.” This was the noble pose for the world-famous man; it was also rather self-centered. As noted, such guilt as Franklin felt about Debbie at the time of which he spoke was slow to surface. This is hardly surprising in a young man with much on his mind, however poorly it matched the persona the older Franklin projected back onto his past.

  Whatever portion guilt played in his thinking, Franklin decided to resume his courtship of Debbie. His primary reasons were far from romantic. A journeyman printer might sow wild oats with little care for the opinion of others, and Franklin, by his own admission and by subsequent undeniable evidence, had continued to do so upon his return from London. “That hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way.” But a man of business, one who hoped to win the approval of the respectable element of Philadelphia, could hardly continue such illicit liaisons. Besides, money was tight and time tighter in the new business, and these liaisons “were attended with some expence and great inconvenience”—not to mention “a continual risque to my health by a distemper which of all things I dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it.” Unwilling to press his luck further, or to offend propriety any longer, Franklin determined to wed.