Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  In later years, after a conflicted Franklin had developed some taste for finery while still clinging to his admiration for frugality, he wryly recounted a little lapse on Deborah’s part that showed “how luxury will enter families and make a progress, in spite of principle.” One day he arrived at breakfast to find it served in a china bowl with a silver spoon. Deborah had bought them at the “enormous sum” of 23 shillings, with “no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbors.” With a droll mix of pride and disdain, Franklin recalled how, over many years, as their wealth grew, they ended up with china and furnishings worth several hundred pounds.

  When the young Franklin heard that his little sister Jane was planning to marry, he wrote her a letter that reflected his view that a good wife should be frugal and industrious. He had thought about sending her a tea table, he said, but his practical nature got the better of him. “When I considered that the character of a good housewife was far preferable to that of being only a pretty gentlewoman, I concluded to send you a spinning-wheel.” As Poor Richard would soon phrase it in his first almanac: “Many estates are spent in the getting/ Since women for tea forsook spinning and knitting.”28

  The virtue of frugality was also one of young Franklin’s favorite themes in his newspaper writings. In Anthony Afterwit’s letter, after complaining about having to elope with no dowry, he goes on to ridicule his wife for adopting the airs and spending habits of a gentlewoman. First she pays for a fancy mirror, which then requires a nice table under it, then a tea service, and then a clock. Facing mounting debts, Anthony decides to sell these things when his wife leaves town to visit relatives. To replace the fancy furniture, he buys a spinning wheel and some knitting needles. He asks the Gazette to publish the letter so that she will read it before she returns and thus be prepared. “If she can conform to this new scheme of living, we shall be the happiest couple perhaps in the province.” And then, as a reward, he might let her have the nice mirror back.

  Less sexist than most men of his day, Franklin also aimed his barbs at men. Afterwit’s letter was answered two weeks later by one from another Franklin creation, Celia Single. With the delightful gossipy voice of his other female characters, such as Silence Dogood and Alice Addertongue, Single recounts a visit to a friend whose husband is trying to replicate Afterwit’s approach. A raucous argument ensues. “There is neither sin nor shame in knitting a pair of stockings,” the husband says. She replies, “There are poor women enough in town that can knit.” Single finally leaves, “knowing that a man and his wife are apt to quarrel more violently when before strangers than when by themselves.” She later hears that the knitting thread ended up in the fireplace.

  Single (or rather Franklin) goes on to admonish Franklin for publishing more tales of self-indulgent women than men. “If I were disposed to be censorious, I could furnish you with instances enough,” she says, then proceeds to rattle off a long list of men who waste their time playing pool, dice, or checkers and buying fancy clothes. Finally, Franklin has her cleverly poke at his veil of pseudonymity. “There are holes enough to be picked in your coat as well as others; and those who are affronted by the satires you may publish will not consider so much who wrote as who printed.”29

  On a more serious and less modern note, Franklin published, four weeks after he married, “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness.” He began with a paean to marriage, “the surest and most lasting foundation of comfort and love.” However, the folly of some who enter into it often makes it “a state of the most exquisite wretchedness and misery.” He apologized for aiming his advice at women, as men were in fact more faulty, “but the reason is because I esteem them better disposed to receive and practice it.”

  Among his rules: avoid all thoughts of managing your husband, never deceive him or make him uneasy, accept that he “is a man not an angel,” “resolve every morning to be good-natured and cheerful,” remember the word “obey” in your marriage vows, do not dispute with him, and “deny yourself the trivial satisfaction of having your own will.” A woman’s power and happiness, Franklin wrote, “has no other foundation than her husband’s esteem and love.” Therefore, a wife should “share and soothe his cares, and with the utmost diligence conceal his infirmities.” And when it comes to sex: “Let the tenderness of your conjugal love be expressed with such decency, delicacy and prudence as that it may appear plainly and thoroughly distinct from the designing fondness of a harlot.”30

  Franklin’s essays and fictional letters make it clear that he entered into his union with Deborah holding some traditional views on matrimony: wives should be supportive, households should be run frugally and industriously. Fortunately for him, Deborah tended to share those views. In general, she had plain tastes, a willingness to work, and a desire to please her spouse. Of course, as he might have pointed out, the same could be said of him at the time.

  And so they settled into a partnership that was both more and less than a conventional marriage. A tireless collaborator both in the house and at work, Deborah handled most of the accounts and expanded their shop’s inventory to include ointments made by her mother, crown soap made by Franklin’s Boston relatives, coffee, tea, chocolate, saffron, cheese, fish, and various other sundries. She strained her eyes binding books and sewing clothes by candlelight. And though her spelling and choice of words reflected her lack of education—the sexton of the church was noted as the “seck stone” and one customer was called “Mary the Papist”—her copious entries in their shop book are a delightful record of the times.

  Franklin’s affection for her grew from his pride at her industry; many years later, when he was in London arguing before the House of Commons that unfair taxes would lead to boycotts of British manufacturers, he asserted that he had never been prouder than when he was a young tradesman and wore only clothes that had been made by his wife.

  But Deborah was not merely a submissive or meek partner to the man she often addressed (as he did her) as “my dear child” and whom she sometimes publicly called “Pappy.” She had a fierce temper, which Franklin invariably defended. “Don’t you know that all wives are in the right?” he asked a nephew who was having a dispute with Deborah. Soon after their marriage, he wrote a piece called “A Scolding Wife,” in which he defended assertive women by saying they tended to be “active in the business of the family, special good housewives, and very careful of their husband’s interests.”31

  The only extant painting of Deborah makes her appear to be a sensible and determined women, plump and plain but not unattractive. In a letter he wrote her years later from London, he described a mug he was sending and compared it to her: “I fell in love with it at first sight, for I thought it looked like a fat, jolly dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on, good natured and lovely, and just put me in mind of—somebody.”

  It was a relationship that did not inspire great romantic verse, but it did produce an endearing ballad that he put into the mouth of Poor Richard. In it, Franklin paid tribute to “My Plain Country Joan” and blessed the day he made her his own. Among the lyrics:

  Not a word of her shape, or her face, or her eyes,

  Of flames or of darts shall you hear:

  Though I beauty admire, ’tis virtue I prize,

  Which fades not in seventy years…

  In peace and good order my household she guides,

  Right careful to save what I gain;

  Yet cheerfully spends, and smiles on the friends

  I’ve the pleasure to entertain…

  The best have some faults, and so has my Joan,

  But then they’re exceedingly small,

  And now, I’m used to ’em, they’re so like my own.

  I can scarcely feel them at all.

  Over the years, Franklin would outgrow Deborah in many ways. Though they shared values, he was far more worldly and intellectual than she was, or ever wanted to
be. There is some evidence that she may have been born in Birmingham and brought to America as a young child, but during her adult life she seems never to have spent a night away from Philadelphia, and she lived most of her life on Market Street within two blocks of the house where she was raised.

  Franklin, on the other hand, loved to travel, and although he would, in later years, occasionally express some hope that she would accompany him, he knew that she was not so inclined. He seemed to sense that she would not be socially comfortable in his new realms. So, in this regard, they respected each other’s independence, perhaps to a fault. For fifteen of the last seventeen years of Deborah’s life, Franklin would be away, including when she died. Nevertheless, their mutual affection, respect, and loyalty—and their sense of partnership—would endure.32

  Francis

  Two years into their marriage, in October 1732, Deborah gave birth to a son. Francis Folger Franklin, known as Franky, was doted on by both parents: he had his portrait painted when still a baby, and his father advertised for a tutor to teach both his children when Francis was 2 and William about 4. For the rest of his life, Franklin would marvel at the memory of how precocious, curious, and special Franky was.

  These were, alas, destined to be only sorrowful memories. In one of the few searing tragedies of Franklin’s life, Franky died of smallpox just after his fourth birthday. On his grave, Franklin chose a simple epitaph: “The delight of all who knew him.”

  The bitter irony was that Franklin had become a fervent advocate of smallpox vaccinations after they had been ridiculed in the New England Courant when Franklin worked there for his brother. In the years preceding Franky’s birth, he had editorialized in the Pennsylvania Gazette in support of inoculations and published statistics showing how effective they were. In 1730, for example, he wrote an account of a Boston epidemic in which most people who had been vaccinated were spared.

  He had planned to inoculate Franky, but he had delayed doing so because the boy had been ill with the flux. In a sad announcement that appeared in his paper a week after the boy’s death, Franklin denied rumors that he died from being vaccinated. “I do hereby sincerely declare that he was not inoculated, but received the distemper in the common way of infection.” He went on to declare his belief that inoculation was “a safe and beneficial practice.”

  The memory of Franky was one of the few things ever to cause Franklin painful reflections. When his sister Jane wrote to him in London years later with happy news about his grandsons, Franklin responded that it “brings often afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky, though now dead thirty-six years, whom I have seldom since seen equaled in everything, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh.”33

  Adding to the poignancy, Franklin had written for his paper, while Franky was still alive, an unusually deep rumination on “The Death of Infants,” which was occasioned by the death of a neighbor’s child. Drawing on his observations of the tiny Franky, he described the magical beauty of babies: “What curious joints and hinges on which limbs are moved to and fro! What an inconceivable variety of nerves, veins, arteries, fibers, and little invisible parts are found in every member!…What endless contrivances to secure life, to nourish nature, and to propagate the same to future animals!” How could it be, Franklin then asked, that “a good and merciful Creator should produce myriads of such exquisite machines to no other end or purpose but to be deposited in the dark chambers of the grave” before they were old enough to know good from evil or to serve their fellow man and their God? The answer, he admitted, was “beyond our mortal ken” to understand. “When nature gave us tears, she gave us leave to weep.”34

  Defining his God

  When we last took Franklin’s spiritual pulse in London, he had written his ill-conceived “Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity,” which attacked the idea of free will and much of Calvinist theology, and then he had repudiated the pamphlet as an embarrassing “erratum.” That left him in a religious quandary. He no longer believed in the received dogmas of his Puritan upbringing, which taught that man could achieve salvation only through God’s grace rather than through good works. But he was uncomfortable embracing a simple and unenhanced version of deism, the Enlightenment-era creed that reason and the study of nature (instead of divine revelation) tell us all we can know about our Creator. The deists he knew, including his younger self, had turned out to be squirrelly in their morals.

  On his return to Philadelphia, Franklin showed little interest in organized religion and even less in attending Sunday services. Still, he continued to hold some basic religious beliefs, among them “the existence of the Deity” and that “the most acceptable service of God was doing good to man.” He was tolerant toward all sects, particularly those that worked to make the world a better place, and he made sure “to avoid all discourse that might tend to lessen the good opinion another might have of his own religion.” Because he believed that churches were useful to the community, he paid his annual subscription to support the town’s Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Jedediah Andrews.35

  One day, Andrews prevailed on him to sample his Sunday sermons, which Franklin did for five weeks. Unfortunately, he found them “uninteresting and unedifying since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us good Presbyterians than good citizens.” On his final visit, the reading from the Scripture (Philippians 4:8) related to virtue. It was a topic dear to Franklin’s heart, and he hoped that Andrews would expound on the concept in his sermon. Instead, the minister focused only on dogma and doctrine, without offering any practical thoughts about virtue. Franklin was “disgusted,” and he reverted to spending his Sundays reading and writing on his own.36

  Franklin began to clarify his religious beliefs through a series of essays and letters. In them, he adopted a creed that would last the rest of his life: a virtuous, morally fortified, and pragmatic version of deism. Unlike most pure deists, he concluded that it was useful (and thus probably correct) to believe that a faith in God should inform our daily actions; but like other deists, his faith was devoid of sectarian dogma, burning spirituality, deep soul-searching, or a personal relationship to Christ.37

  The first of these religious essays was a paper “for my own private use,” written in November 1728, entitled “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion.” Unlike his London dissertation, which was clogged with convoluted imitations of analytic philosophy, it was elegant and sparse. He began with a simple affirmation: “I believe there is one Supreme most perfect being.”38

  It was an important statement, because some mushier deists shied even from going that far. As Diderot once quipped, a deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist. Franklin lived very long, and despite the suspicions of John Adams and others that he was a closet atheist, he repeatedly and indeed increasingly asserted his belief in a supreme God.

  In the deist tradition, Franklin’s Supreme Being was somewhat distant and uninvolved in our daily travails. “I imagine it great vanity in me to suppose that the Supremely Perfect does in the least regard such an inconsiderable nothing as man,” he wrote. He added his belief that this “Infinite Father” was far above wanting our praise or prayers.

  There is in all humans, however, a desire and a deeply felt duty to worship a more intimate God, Franklin surmised. Therefore, he wrote, the Supreme Being causes there to be lesser and more personal gods for mortal men to worship. Franklin thus has it both ways: combining the deist concept of God as a distant First Cause with the belief of other religions that worship a God who is directly involved in people’s lives. The result is a Supreme Being that can be manifest in various ways, depending on the needs of different worshipers.

  Some commentators, most notably A. Owen Aldridge, read this literally as Franklin’s embracing some sort of polytheism, with a bevy of lesser gods overseeing various realms and planets. Occasionally throughout his life, Franklin would refer to “the gods,” but these later referen
ces are quite casual and colloquial, and Franklin seems to be speaking more figuratively than literally in his 1728 paper. As Kerry Walters writes in Benjamin Franklin and His Gods, “It is an error to presume they point to a literal polytheism. Such a conclusion is as philosophically bizarre as it is textually unwarranted.” (Given the difficulties Franklin sometimes seems to have in believing in one God, it seems unlikely he could find himself believing in many.)39

  Franklin went on to outline how he viewed and worshiped his own personal God. This involved offering suitable prayers, and Franklin produced a whole liturgy that he had composed. It also required acting virtuously, and Franklin engaged in a moral calculus that was very pragmatic and even somewhat utilitarian: “I believe He is pleased and delights in the happiness of those He has created; and since without virtue man can have no happiness in this world, I firmly believe He delights to see me virtuous.”

  In a paper he subsequently read to his friends in the Junto, Franklin elaborated his religious beliefs by exploring the issue of “divine providence,” the extent to which God gets involved in worldly matters. The Puritans believed in a detailed and intimate involvement, called “special providence,” and regularly prayed to God for very specific intercessions. As Calvin himself put it, “Supposing that He remains tranquilly in heaven without caring for the world outrageously deprives God of all effective power.” Most deists, on the other hand, believed in a “general providence,” in which God expresses his will through the laws of nature he set in motion instead of by micro-managing our daily lives.