by H. W. Brands
Franklin reported progress, but less than he would have liked. The charter membership included John Bartram as botanist; the disagreeable but ingenious Thomas Godfrey as mathematician; Thomas Bond, a medical doctor trained in Britain and France, as physician; his brother Phineas Bond as natural-philosopher-at-large; Samuel Rhoads, a master carpenter active in local politics, as mechanician; William Parsons, original member of the Junto, lately librarian of the Library Company, and currently surveyor general of Pennsylvania, as geographer; William Coleman, who underwrote Franklin’s escape from his partnership with Hugh Meredith, as treasurer; and Thomas Hopkinson, a director of the Library Company and former city councilman, as president. Franklin served as secretary. Several meetings took place during the first half of 1744, and out-of-town members were added to the group. But most lacked Franklin’s energy, to his frustration and annoyance. “The members of our Society here are very idle gentlemen,” he complained to Colden. “They will take no pains.”
Franklin did not guess when he floated the idea of the Philosophical Society that its establishment would mark a turning point in his life. What he envisioned was a more sophisticated and geographically inclusive version of the Junto: a discussion group that brought together inquiring minds from across the continent rather than across the city. What he got was a network of kindred spirits that spurred him to better and more original work than he knew he had in him. The expansion of Franklin’s universe continued; his world came to include the best minds in America. And those minds came to recognize the preeminence of his.
With the letter to Colden in which he lamented the idleness of his fellow philosophers in Philadelphia, Franklin enclosed speculations on the flow of fluids throughout the human body. He granted that his ideas suffered from lack of opportunity for personal experimentation; he knew only what he had read and could infer therefrom. Yet he hoped to remedy the deficiency. He described an apparatus he had devised to test a hypothesis in hydrodynamics that had direct bearing on the flow of fluids through the human skin. “You shall know the success,” he promised Colden.
In fact the experiment proved inconclusive. Franklin was disappointed but not discouraged. “I intend to try a farther experiment, of which I shall give you an account,” he assured Colden.
Meanwhile the two men communicated on other topics. Franklin puzzled over Colden’s comments on “fluxions,” the infinitesimals devised by Newton as the basis for calculus and the physical theories that grew out of it; Franklin wished for a stronger background in mathematics and promised himself to acquire it. He shared some of Colden’s reservations about current thinking in mechanical dynamics, including a theory of inertia that seemed to imply that a very small force could not move very large objects. Franklin countered this with a thought experiment. “Suppose two globes each equal to the sun and to one another, exactly equipoised in Jove’s balance. Suppose no friction in the center of motion in the beam or elsewhere. If a mosquito then were to light on one of them, would he not give a motion to them both, causing one to descend and the other to rise?”
A more immediately practical problem motivated another letter to Colden. For centuries it had been noted that voyages from the Americas to England took less time than voyages in the opposite direction. Prevailing winds accounted for part of the discrepancy, but not all of it. Franklin wondered whether the rotation of the earth was involved. A ship at the equator was carried eastward by the earth’s rotation faster—in an absolute, although not a longitudinal, sense—than a ship in the latitude of Philadelphia, which in turn was carried faster than a ship at the latitude of London. Was some residue of the rotational speed responsible for the more rapid transit from southeast to northwest, compared to the reverse? “I have not time to explain my self farther, the post waiting,” Franklin wrote to Colden, “but believe I have said enough for you to comprehend my meaning.” (Although he later would realize that the effect was more complicated than he supposed here, Franklin was definitely onto something, as the French mathematician Coriolis, after whom the effect was named, would make explicit a century later.)
Neither devoted capitalist nor pure intellectual, Franklin was not a strict scientist either. He accepted the unscientific and irrational for what it was—an inescapable aspect of human nature, and not necessarily ignoble for that. He could give a dozen reasons for restraining human passion but was not in the least surprised that it defied restraint. As a young man he had failed to restrain his own passions, irrational though they were; he fully expected that young men—and not a few older men, as well as women of various ages—would continue to succumb. Such was life; a person would be a fool to deny it.
Franklin was no fool, and no prude. In the summer of 1745 he wrote a letter—or perhaps an essay in the form of a letter—to “My dear Friend,” an unnamed young man. The subject of this letter was so shocking to the sensibility of the several generations that followed Franklin’s that the piece was effectively suppressed for nearly two centuries. Yet Franklin considered it matter-of-factly, as though it were a topic as fit for reflection and inquiry as any other.
The question was, what sort of mistress was best for an unmarried young man? Franklin prefaced his remarks by declaring that marriage was the proper condition for man. If Deborah had read this passage, she would have been touched:
It is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness…. It is the man and woman united that make the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility and acute discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the world. A single man has not nearly the value he would have in that state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors. If you get a prudent, healthy wife, your industry in your profession, with her good economy, will be a fortune sufficient.
Yet Franklin would not have been writing were his correspondent—whoever he was—likely to be swayed by such rational arguments. Male youth would sow its oats, whatever Franklin might say.
Accepting this, Franklin advised the young gent on the sort of mistress he should choose. “In all your amours, you should prefer old women to young ones,” he said. He granted that this flew against inclination; consequently, on the premise that passion need not entirely banish practicality, he adduced eight reasons in favor of mature mistresses:
Because as they have more knowledge of the world and their minds are better stored with observations, their conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreeable.
Because when women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their influence over men, they supply the diminution of beauty by an augmentation of utility. They learn to do 1000 services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old woman who is not a good woman.
Because there is no hazard of children, which irregularly produced may be attended with much inconvenience.
Because through more experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an intrigue to prevent suspicion. The commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the affair should happen to be known, considerate people might be rather inclined to excuse an old woman who would kindly take care of a young man, form his manners by her good counsels, and prevent his ruining his health and fortune among mercenary prostitutes.
Because in every animal that walks upright, the deficiency of the fluids that fill the muscles appears first in the highest part. The face grows lank and wrinkled, then the neck, then the breast and arms, the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever. So that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all cats are grey, the pleasure of corporal enjoyment with an old woman is at least equal, and fre
quently superior, every knack being by practice capable of improvement.
Because the sin is less. The debauching a virgin may be her ruin, and make her for life unhappy.
Because the compunction is less. The having made a young girl miserable may give you frequent bitter reflections, none of which can attend making an old woman happy.
8thly and lastly. They are so grateful!!
Perhaps Debbie did read this; if so, she must have had mixed feelings. At thirty-seven her face was starting to sag, her neck and arms to lose their tone. Yet here her husband was singing praise to the woman she was becoming—unless he was singing praise to some other older woman. How did he know that all women looked alike from the girdle down? It sounded as though he had done a survey. Was he complimenting her in declaring that the “knack” of lovemaking improved with practice? Or someone else? And who, precisely, was “so grateful” for an illicit liaison?
The other women in Franklin’s life would occasion international comment, but there is little evidence of wandering at this stage in his life. On the contrary, he made much of his affection for Debbie. Franklin spent many, perhaps most, evenings in various taverns, meeting with members of the Junto and other associates. The distaste for alcohol he evinced in England had worn off; while never a lush, he hoisted a pint with his friends quite freely. As the tongues loosened, they often broke into song, to which Franklin contributed with voice and pen. One of his ditties he entitled “The Antediluvians Were All Very Sober”:
The Antediluvians were all very sober,
For they had no wine, and they brewed no October [an autumn ale];
All wicked, bad livers, on mischief still thinking,
For there can’t be good living where isn’t good drinking.
’Twas honest old Noah first planted the vine,
And mended his morals by drinking its wine.
He justly the drinking of water decried,
For he knew that all mankind, by drinking it, died.
From this piece of history plainly we find
That water’s good neither for body or mind;
That virtue and safety in wine-bibbing’s found,
While all that drink water deserve to be drowned.
The choristers often selected songs that spoke of relations between the sexes; frequently these extolled the virtues of women to whom the songs’ narrators were not married. One of Franklin’s friends remarked on the dearth of drinking music that made married life appear attractive. Franklin responded with another composition—the lyrics, anyway, for as with most such inventions, these were set to a tune the taverners already knew. The song praised his domestic existence with Debbie, who was discreetly rechristened as “My Plain Country Joan”:
Of their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate;
I sing my plain country Joan.
Now twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life;
Blest day that I made her my own.
Not a word of her face, her shape or her eyes,
Of flames or of darts shall you hear.
Though I beauty admire, ’tis virtue I prize,
That fades not in seventy years….
Some faults we have all, and so may my Joan
But then they’re exceedingly small.
And now I’m used to ’em, they’re just like my own,
I scarcely can see ’em at all.
After 1743 Franklin had even more to be thankful to Debbie about. In the late summer of that year she gave birth to a daughter, named Sarah for her maternal grandmother. Eleven years after Franky’s birth, seven years after his death, and almost certainly long past the time when she had despaired of having any children to survive her—and any children of her own to offset the presence of Benjamin’s bastard William—Debbie delighted in little Sally. She insisted that the child be baptized at Christ Church, up Market Street past the market and around the corner on Fifth (next to the burial ground where young Franky lay). She did not have to insist that Sally be inoculated against smallpox; her husband’s still-sore conscience made certain that his daughter would not suffer the fate of his second son. “Sally was inoculated April 18 [1746], being Friday at 10 o’clock in the morning,” he noted to himself, as if to confirm in writing that he had done for Sally what he should have done for Franky.
Sally proved a true Franklin. “Your granddaughter is the greatest lover of her book and school of any child I ever knew,” he wrote his mother just after Sally’s fourth birthday. Precocity persisted through the next three years. “Sally grows a fine girl, and is extremely industrious with her needle, and delights in her book,” he informed Abiah after Sally turned seven. “She is of a most affectionate temper, and perfectly dutiful and obliging, to her parents and to all. Perhaps I flatter my self too much; but I have hopes that she will prove an ingenious, sensible, notable, and worthy woman.”
Such hopes led Franklin lightheartedly to consider a match between Sally and William Strahan, the son of Franklin’s English correspondent, and increasingly his friend, of the same name. The idea appealed to William’s father, offering the two fathers an excuse to share details of the development of their children. “I am glad to hear so good a character of my son-in-law,” Franklin replied to one of Strahan’s letters, written when young William was ten and Sally seven. “Please to acquaint him that his spouse grows finely, and will probably have an agreeable person. That with the best natural disposition in the world, she discovers daily the seeds and tokens of industry and economy, and in short, of every female virtue, which her parents will endeavour to cultivate for him.” Talk of a dowry or other such arrangement was premature, but Franklin broached the subject obliquely, which was to say morally: “If the success [of his and Debbie’s parenting efforts] answers their fond wishes and expectations, she will, in the true sense of the word, be worth a great deal of money, and consequently a great fortune.”
Sally’s arrival added a life to Franklin’s universe; his father’s death subtracted one. Josiah Franklin died in January 1745 at the age of eighty-seven. “By an entire dependence on his redeemer and a constant course of the strictest piety and virtue,” the Boston Weekly News-Letter noted on his passing, “he was enabled to die, as he lived, with cheerfulness and peace.” What Josiah in his last years thought of his youngest son is impossible to ascertain; the father was as frugal with his emotions as with his money. He must have been proud of Benjamin’s worldly accomplishments, but he likely worried at Ben’s lack of that piety Josiah’s obituarist applauded in him. Father and son had never been close, and they were not close at the end. Needless to say, by the time Ben heard of the death, it was too late to travel to Boston for the funeral. Yet the death goes unremarked in Franklin’s surviving correspondence. Although he must have written condolences to Abiah, the closest thing to an extant expression of feeling appears in a letter to his sister Jane, who lived near their father and mother. “Dear Sister, I love you tenderly for your care of our father in his sickness,” he said.
From Philadelphia it was often easy to forget there was a war going on in the north and on the western frontier. After its enthusiastic commencement, the Louisbourg expedition settled down to a difficult siege. The summer soldiers from New England could not help being impressed—indeed awed—by the “Gibraltar of the New World,” with its thirty-foot-high stone walls; the 250 cannon protruding from the apertures in the ramparts; the curtain-wall that ran three-quarters of a mile across the neck of land that contained the town, anchored at one end in the harbor and buried at the other in the surf; the island battery commanding the harbor, positioned to blast any ships that slipped through the reefs jutting like the tines of a giant fork from the bottom, ready to rake the hulls of intruders ignorant of their exact position; the “Grand Battery” located a mile from the town, covering the entire harbor from mouth to head, eager to deliver a deadly crossfire against enemy forces.
Yet God was watching over the attackers, as their preachers had promised. At least so it seemed by t
he evidence of the first engagements. The French defenders fell for a feint that allowed the landing party to establish a beachhead with but minor casualties. Two days later Providence smiled again, persuading the French, who could see they were badly outnumbered, to consolidate their forces in the town itself. They abandoned the Grand Battery, spiking the guns there but unaccountably failing to blow up the magazine and destroy the structure. As it turned out, their spiking operation failed as well: the clever New Englanders had brought along blacksmiths and special tools, and dislodged the spikes from the powder holes of the guns. These they trained upon the walls of Louisbourg proper.
William Pepperell was no waster of human life; neither was Peter Warren, the commander of the squadron of the Royal Navy recently arrived to reinforce the Americans. “To prevent the effusion of Christian blood,” as they put it, they called upon the French commander to surrender. The messenger sent to deliver the proposed terms was duly blindfolded at the gate of the town and conducted to the headquarters of Governor Louis du Chambon. The governor disdained these untested, untrained attackers, even if they had him cornered; equally to the point, he hoped for the arrival of a French naval squadron that would raise the siege. “The King of France, our King,” he answered, having turned the blindfolded envoy around and sent him back out the west gate, “has given us the responsibility of defending this city; we cannot, except after the most vigorous attack, consider a similar proposition. The only reply we make to this demand is from the mouths of our cannon.”
The Anglophone artillery spoke louder. The Americans heated their iron balls to glowing before firing them over the walls, where they set many of the wood-frame houses ablaze. Reports of the approach of several hundred French and Indian soldiers received credibility from the actual sighting of a French warship; together these developments caused Pepperell to escalate the siege into a direct assault. To secure his flank he ordered an attack on the island battery. The first such attack fizzled when the attackers bolstered their courage excessively with rum and arrived at the beach too drunk to make the crossing. A second landing, launched at night, clandestinely secured a beachhead on the island, but one hero spoiled the surprise by leading his comrades in a rousing cheer, which alerted the French sentries and triggered a near-massacre of the landing party.
