The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Aware of the difficulty, Franklin led a committee of the Association north to negotiate with Governor George Clinton of New York. At first Clinton refused even to consider letting any guns out of his province. “But at a dinner with his council there was great drinking of Madeira wine,” Franklin recounted, “as the custom of that place then was; he softened by degrees, and said he would lend us six. After a few more bumpers he advanced to ten. And at length he very good-naturedly conceded eighteen.”

  Though Franklin did not believe that God took sides in human quarrels, he was not above an appeal to Providence if such seemed necessary to solidify public opinion behind the defense effort. His activities had won him the confidence of Governor Thomas and the governor’s council, and Franklin proposed to this group a public fast day. During these twenty-four hours the populace would entreat heaven for forgiveness of sins and for assistance in the colony’s hour of need. No such occasion had ever been held in Pennsylvania, but the governor and council thought it a capital idea. Franklin remarked that such events were an annual occurrence in Boston, where he grew up; he would be happy to compose an appropriate proclamation. This he proceeded to do, with as much apparent fervor as ever Cotton Mather invested in a sermon. Speaking through the mouth of the governor and council, he recited past and current perils, and declared, “Unless we humble ourselves before the Lord, and amend our ways, we may be chastised with yet heavier judgments.” The designated day of fasting and prayer—January 7, 1748—would allow all ministers and people of the city “to join with one accord in the most humble and fervent supplications, that Almighty God would mercifully interpose, and still the rage of war among the nations, and put a stop to the effusion of Christian blood; that he would preserve and bless our gracious king, guide his councils, and give him victory over his enemies.”

  Even for Franklin, his performance on behalf of his adopted city during the winter of 1747–48 was a tour de force. James Logan, probably the most respected person in Philadelphia, certainly thought so. “He it was,” Logan wrote to Thomas Penn, son of William Penn and current proprietor of the colony, “that by publishing a small piece in the year 1747 with his further private contrivances, occasioned the raising of ten companies of near one hundred men each in Philadelphia and above one hundred companies in the province and counties…. He it was who set on foot two lotteries for erecting of batteries, purchasing great guns and to dispatch which he went himself to New York … and all this without appearing in any part of it himself, unless in his going to New York himself in company with others of whose going he was the occasion, for he is the principal mover and very soul of the whole.”

  8

  Electricity and Fame

  1748–51

  Thomas Penn read Franklin quite differently than James Logan did. “This Association is founded on a contempt to government,” the proprietor declared, “and cannot end in anything but anarchy and confusion.” Penn understood the implications of recent events, even if others did not. Franklin had shown the people they could act independently of government; Penn asked, “Why should they not act against it?” Franklin’s brainchild amounted to a “military commonwealth”; its creation was “little less than treason.” As to its instigator, “He is a dangerous man and I should be very glad he inhabited any other country, as I believe him of a very uneasy spirit.”

  James Logan knew Franklin as a neighbor, a friend, a fellow philosopher, a political ally; Thomas Penn knew him solely by reputation. Yet, perhaps because he possessed keener intuition, perhaps because he had more to lose, Penn understood Franklin as Logan did not. Franklin was indeed dangerous—dangerous, that is, to the proprietary prerogatives Penn had inherited and was endeavoring to defend. And Franklin was indeed of an uneasy spirit, unwilling to leave well enough alone, insistent on asking whether well might be better, impatient to make it so.

  In certain respects Penn knew Franklin better than Franklin knew himself. Franklin had not set out to undermine authority; he simply wanted to see his city defended. And he had chosen the same devices of voluntarism that had led to the creation of the Junto, the Library Company, the fire brigades, and the Philosophical Society. Yet as Penn recognized, even if Franklin did not, there was an obvious, almost inevitable, progression from acting independently of government to acting against government. Penn was the first defender of the imperial status quo to detect the danger in Franklin’s restless intelligence; he would not be the last.

  If Franklin had wanted to challenge authority, he could readily have exploited the favorable notice the Association’s activities brought his way. He did not lack the time, for at the beginning of 1748 he retired from the printing business. David Hall continued to exceed Franklin’s expectations for a foreman, being no less adept at the business side of his work than at the craft of the printer per se. Isaiah Thomas, a fellow printer who knew both men (and who wrote a comprehensive history of printing in America), said of Hall, “Had he not been connected with Franklin he might have been a formidable rival to him.” Franklin thought so too, and determined to keep Hall from becoming a rival by making him a partner.

  Besides, Franklin had enough money to allow him and Deborah to live quite comfortably. Wealth still failed to impress him; the purpose of money was to purchase one’s freedom to pursue that which was useful and interesting. Accordingly, he decided sometime about midsummer of 1747 to turn the operation of the shop over to Hall, and on the first of January 1748 the agreement was concluded. For eighteen years the two men would be partners, should they both live that long. Franklin would supply the capital equipment and the inventory on hand; Hall would furnish the talent and diligence necessary to direct day-to-day operations. The two men would share expenses and profits equally. The agreement was essentially exclusive, although somewhat more on Hall’s part than Franklin’s. During the eighteen years of the contract, Hall would not engage in the printing business outside the partnership; Franklin was precluded only from practicing it in Philadelphia without Hall’s leave. (This took account of the partnerships Franklin had planted elsewhere.) Hall was allowed to continue “occasional buying and selling in the stationery and bookselling way,” which he did. At the end of the term of agreement, Hall would have the option of purchasing the equipment at its 1748 value less depreciation for wear and tear.

  The partnership started splendidly and thrived with the passing years. “Mr. Hall continues well, and goes on perfectly to my satisfaction,” Franklin wrote William Strahan, Hall’s old employer, two years into the arrangement. Through the mid-1750s Franklin realized more than £650 per year, on average, from what his investment and Hall’s efforts produced. At a time when a royal governor might earn £1,000 per year, this hardly made Franklin the richest man in America—or even Philadelphia, America’s richest city. But it filled all his and Deborah’s material desires. More to the point, it bought him time to pursue those other interests that always enticed him more than the getting of money.

  Franklin celebrated retirement by moving his home from Market Street to the quieter environs of Sassafras Street (also called Race Street, according to Philadelphians’ confusing habit of naming certain streets twice). The neighborhood of the market had suited a diligent tradesman who wished, as any diligent tradesman should, to keep an eye on the business; but Franklin’s new condition as silent partner called for a modest distancing from the hurly-burly. He was entering a more contemplative existence; quiet was what he sought.

  In the early autumn of the first year of his retirement, he reported his state to Cadwallader Colden. “I am settling my old accounts and hope soon to be quite a master of my own time, and no longer (as the song has it) at every one’s call but my own.” The future held only the pleasantest prospect. “I am in a fair way of having no other tasks than such as I shall like to give my self, and of enjoying what I look upon as a great happiness, leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large with such ingenious and worthy men as are pleased to honour me with their friendshi
p or acquaintance, on such points as may produce something for the common benefit of mankind, uninterrupted by the little cares and fatigues of business.”

  For a time, events—both those within his control and those beyond—followed Franklin’s script. The most important of either category was the war with France and Spain, which drew to a close in 1748. If Franklin’s efforts in forming the Association had proven more critical to the security of Pennsylvania, perhaps Thomas Penn would have taken less umbrage; but as things happened, the battery below Philadelphia was barely completed, and the militia had hardly started drilling seriously, before hints of peace began wafting across the Atlantic. The hints gained substance during the summer of 1748, and in October the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle officially concluded nearly a decade of conflict.

  Franklin later would say that there was never a good war or a bad peace, but in the aftermath of King George’s War he would have had an argument, certainly in New England. Most disappointing—indeed infuriating—was the British restoration of Louisbourg to France. The Americans who captured the fortress, and the much larger number that fought vicariously, could hardly be expected to appreciate that in exchange for Cape Breton Island the British regained Madras in India, lost to the French at an earlier point of this global struggle. Nor did the Americans value the subtle shifts in European power the war produced. As they saw it, they had proved their superiority at arms to British regulars, only to be played fools by the British Crown. If someone had set a spark to this mixture of British arrogance and American resentment, it would have exploded.

  Franklin was busy making sparks, but literally rather than figuratively. The return of peace, following his retirement from business, allowed him to indulge his interests, of which the most interesting—to himself and presently to others—was electricity.

  It was a stroke of either luck or genius that Franklin latched on to electricity when he did. Arguing for luck was his chance encounter with the subject; for genius, that he quickly appreciated that here was a field where an amateur from the provinces could do work rivaling the bestequipped institutions of Europe. At the mid-mark of the eighteenth century, the science of electricity was in its infancy; indeed, “science” was scarcely the name. Electrical phenomena were still encountered as often in the parlor and on stage as in the laboratory. Traveling “electricians” amazed audiences with demonstrations of this mysterious force. A standard trick involved suspending a boy from the ceiling with numerous silken cords, rubbing his feet with a glass tube, and drawing “electric fire”—that is, sparks—from his face and hands. The court electrician to Louis XV, the Abbé Nollet, once delighted an audience by arranging an electrical discharge through 180 soldiers of the guard who jerked to attention with an alacrity and a simultaneity unachievable by the most demanding drill sergeant. The French king, perhaps indulging an anticlericalism he could not own in public, laughed even louder when Nollet talked seven hundred monks into joining hands along short lengths of iron wire; Nollet connected the clerics to a condenser, which sent them leaping toward their Maker with a shriek.

  But no one knew what accounted for such effects, and even the factual basis on which a theory of electricity might be erected was confused and contradictory. The field cried out for an investigator with the time and curiosity to pursue assorted leads down dead ends and live, with the manual dexterity and financial resources to fabricate or purchase necessary apparatus, with the personal connections to keep abreast of others’ work, and with the literary facility to disseminate his own results in a timely and persuasive manner.

  When Franklin encountered his first electrical demonstration, he had no idea he fit the job description as well as anyone alive. By his own recollection, in 1746 in Boston he met a “Dr. Spence,” who put on an electric show Franklin found fascinating, if somewhat bumbling. In fact this Spence was probably Archibald Spencer, a native of Scotland who was between jobs as a male midwife and an Anglican clergyman, and the year was 1743. During the next few years Franklin queried Peter Collinson, the Library Company’s agent in London and a man with wide scientific interests and acquaintances, regarding this intriguing subject. Collinson obliged by sending over a glass tube of the sort the electricians employed to create their effects, along with assorted remarks on the current state of the electrical art. “I eagerly seized the opportunity of repeating what I had seen at Boston,” Franklin recalled, “and by much practice acquired great readiness in performing those also which we had an account of from England, adding a number of new ones.”

  Soon electricity became his passion. “I was never before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done,” he told Collinson in March 1747. “For what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my friends and acquaintances, who, from the novelty of the thing, come continually in crowds to see them, I have, during some months past, had little leisure for any thing else.” It was just at this time that Franklin began negotiating with David Hall about taking over operation of the printing business; if a single influence can be said to have persuaded Franklin to doff his printer’s apron, it was his desire to don the cloak of the electrician.

  From this point forward, Franklin reported regularly to Collinson on the progress of experiments conducted by himself and his friends. In one of his first letters he supplied a novel terminology that became standard in analyzing electrical phenomena. Describing a particular apparatus, consisting of bodies labeled A and B, he wrote: “We say B (and other bodies alike circumstanced) are electrised positively; A negatively. Or rather B is electrised plus and A minus.” He also recounted certain improvements in apparatus, for example the substitution of lead granules for water inside the glass vials used to generate electricity (“We find granulated lead better to fill the vial with than water, being easily warmed, and keeping the vial warm and dry in damp air”). He described an electric spider: a mannequin of cork and linen made to jump realistically when charged—“appearing perfectly alive to persons unacquainted.” At a time when other electricians spoke of two different kinds of electricity—vitreous and resinous—Franklin unified the field by positing a single sort and explaining the opposite properties in terms of a surfeit or a deficit (that is, positive condition or negative) of this single electricity, with uncharged objects being in balance.

  In his early enthusiasm Franklin occasionally conjectured more than he could prove. After additional experimentation caused him to question one of the assertions of his letters, he wrote Collinson expressing his new reservations. “I have observed a phenomenon or two that I cannot at present account for on the principles laid down in those letters, and am therefore become a little diffident of my hypothesis, and ashamed that I have expressed myself in so positive a manner.” He proceeded to muse on the scientific enterprise. “In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves obliged to destroy! If there is no other use discovered of electricity, this, however, is something considerable, that it may help to make a vain man humble.” He went on to request that Collinson not show his letters to others, or if he must, that he conceal the author’s name.

  Collinson had no intention of keeping Franklin’s results confidential. Although a natural historian of some note—he debunked the common notion that swallows hibernated in the mud of streambeds—he in fact served science better as a communicator of other people’s findings. He corresponded fruitfully with John Bartram, Franklin’s botanist friend, and it was Collinson who brought Franklin to the attention of Britain’s electrical experts. In April 1748 he wrote Franklin, regarding his earlier letters, “I have imparted them to the Royal Society, to whom they are very acceptable.”

  Franklin found Collinson’s response encouraging. “I am pleased to hear that my electrical experiments were acceptable to the Society,” he declared. Franklin hardly lacked confidence in fields he knew well, but he was the first to acknowledge his novice standing in electricity. Moreo
ver, as one who had been attempting to establish a network of scientific communication in America, he appreciated the importance of word of mouth (or word of post) in keeping up with the latest discoveries. Philadelphia might be the hub of British North America, but it remained an ocean away from the scientific mainstream. Franklin could not help worrying that his best experiments were simply recapitulating work done in Europe, work he had not heard of yet.

  But the approbation of the Royal Society, the most distinguished scientific body of its day (rivaled only by the French Academy of Sciences), gave Franklin every reason to carry on. In April 1749 he reported the creation of “what we called an Electrical Battery,” a lead-and-glass arrangement that, once charged, could store electricity for use at will, as well as a “self-moving wheel,” a primitive electric motor. In this and subsequent letters to Collinson, which he now knew were being read by an audience of experts, Franklin adopted a more formal tone than in his previous communications, numbering his paragraphs and leaving out most personal intelligence. But in his final sentences here he could not resist reporting how the electricians of Philadelphia proposed to conclude their current round of experiments:

  Chagrinned a little that we have hitherto been able to discover nothing in this way of use to mankind, and the hot weather coming on, when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, ’tis proposed to put an end to them for this season somewhat humourously in a party of pleasure on the banks of the Schuylkill (where spirits are at the same time to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river). A turkey is to be killed for our dinners by the electrical shock, and roasted by the electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle, when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, France and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers under the discharge of guns from the electrical battery. [A note explained that “an electrified bumper is a small thin glass tumbler, near filled with water and electrified. This when brought to the lips gives a shock, if the party be close shaved and does not breathe on the liquor.”]