Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  Not all historians speak kindly about Franklin and Washington, but few modern scholars question their preeminence among the founders. “Of those patriots who made independence possible, none mattered more than Franklin, and only Washington mattered as much,” H. W. Brands observed in 2000.5 That same year, Joseph Ellis, in his acclaimed book on the revolutionary generation Founding Brothers, put Franklin and Washington atop his short list of leaders who stepped forward at the national level to promote the cause of independence when doing so was still perilous and hailed them as the new republic’s two most influential political figures.6 Garry Wills expressed much the same view in 2002, as did Gordon Wood in 2004.7 Writing of Franklin, Wood concluded, “His critical diplomacy in the Revolution makes him second only to Washington.”8

  Such assessments are not new. “The History of our Revolution will be one continued Lye from one End to the other,” Vice President John Adams famously complained in 1790. “The Essence of the Whole will be that Dr Franklins electrical Rod, Smote the Earth and out Spring General Washington That Franklin electrified him with his Rod—and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy Negotiations Legislation and War. These underscored Lines contain the whole Fable Plot and Catastrophy.”9

  Perhaps because they are remembered so differently, however, except in Adams’s rant and Christy’s painting, the two are not generally portrayed together. This clouds our understanding of both men. They worked shoulder to shoulder on the patriot cause, and not only at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Indeed, they came to the Convention as longtime friends.

  RESIDING IN TWO COLONIES that then asserted overlapping claims to the western frontier, the remarkable relationship between Pennsylvania’s Franklin and Virginia’s Washington began three decades before the Convention, when each led their respective colonies’ militia during the French and Indian War. By then Franklin was fifty, and one of the most widely known and respected persons in the Western world. Washington was then less than half Franklin’s age but already held a regional reputation for military prowess. Neither man was born to power or influence; both had earned it.

  In 1756, Pennsylvania and Virginia were two of England’s most prosperous and populous American colonies. They had overlapping claims to western lands on the Ohio frontier, where the French and Indian War began and was initially fought. Those early battles went badly for the English side. That these two colonies turned to Franklin and Washington in desperate times speaks to the standing that they had gained long before the American Revolution made them into national heroes and global icons of democracy and freedom.

  During the 1750s, Franklin’s international reputation rested on his scientific achievements in electricity, but he was best known locally as a printer, writer, civic reformer, postmaster, and pragmatic political leader. Given his humble origins, this represented a stunning achievement for the time and remains a lasting testament to his genius.

  Born the fifteenth of seventeen children (ten of whom were alive at the time) to a working-class family in Puritan Boston on January 17, 1706, Franklin was the youngest son of his father’s second wife. Bookish and inquisitive, he was apprenticed at age twelve to his older brother James, a local printer whose products soon included an independent weekly newspaper, the New-England Courant. The younger Franklin quickly displayed a seemingly inexhaustible capability for hard work and, in large part self-taught by reading the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, an acquired facility to write wry, instructional, and satirical prose. Without telling his brother, Franklin began contributing letters to the newspaper under the female pseudonym Silence Dogood. “I am an Enemy to Vice, and a Friend to Vertue,” he had her observe. “I am courteous and affable, good humour’d (unless I am first provok’d,) and handsome, and sometimes witty.” Being “a mortal Enemy to arbitrary Government and unlimited Power,” she added, “I am naturally very jealous for the Rights and Liberties of my Country; and . . . never intend to wrap my Talent in a Napkin.”10 This was Franklin. Only sixteen, he knew himself well and could express it from another’s viewpoint.

  Having mastered the printer’s trade by age seventeen, in 1723 Franklin fled what he saw as an unduly oppressive apprenticeship to his brother and the stifling religiosity of Boston for New York. Finding no work there, he went on to the burgeoning Quaker community of Philadelphia, a place of relative religious tolerance, political freedom, and economic opportunity, where he heard that a printer’s assistant was needed. Arriving with little money and nothing to recommend him for employment beyond his talent for setting type, Franklin found part-time work with the town’s newly established second printer, Samuel Keimer.

  Neither of Philadelphia’s two printers was qualified for their trade, Franklin soon concluded, while he impressed others with his skill and work ethic—so much so that the colony’s governor offered to set him up in his own shop. Only after arriving in London to select the needed equipment did Franklin learn that the governor’s credit was no good. He worked for eighteen months in various English print shops before returning to Philadelphia with a Quaker merchant who offered him work as a salesclerk. When the merchant died after only a few months, Franklin found himself back working for Keimer before teaming with a coworker to open their own print shop and then buying out his partner to have a shop of his own. Our “industry visible to our Neighbors began to give us Character and Credit,” Franklin said of the partnership, and it proved even truer when he worked alone.11 “I took care not only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appearances to the contrary,” he wrote of his early days as a sole proprietor, “and, to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow.”12 This proved the way to wealth in Quaker Philadelphia. Soon Franklin dominated the regional printing trade and began branching out to related businesses.

  Nearly six feet tall with an athletic build that became paunchy with age, Franklin was a strong swimmer and able equestrian who believed in the benefits of vigorous exercise and fresh air. On his return voyage from England, for example, he worked out by swimming around the ship as it sailed at sea, and, at age seventy, he infuriated a traveling companion by insisting on sleeping with the window open. On both health and moral grounds, Franklin experimented with a vegetarian diet during his youth and repeatedly returned to one in later years for his health, but gave up strict adherence after seeing small fish in the gut of a large, freshly caught cod being filleted for dinner. “If you eat one another, I don’t see why I mayn’t eat you,” he reasoned. “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.”13

  While not doubting the existence of God but convinced that acts mattered more than beliefs, Franklin rejected the Christian doctrine of salvation by grace and with it faith in the divinity of Christ. “Morality or Virtue is the End, Faith only a Means to obtain that End: And if the End be obtained, it is no matter by what Means,” he wrote in 1735.14 Fundamentally pragmatic in thought, word, and deed, Franklin soon added, “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden but it is forbidden because it’s hurtful.”15 Regarding the Bible, he concluded, “Tho’ certain Actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them; yet probably those Actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own Natures, all the Circumstances of thing considered.”16 Although not necessarily their creed, apparently this was good enough for the people of Philadelphia. Among them he prospered.

  For the next two decades, to 1747, Franklin was consumed by business and local civic affairs. As a printer, he published a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and an annual almanac, Poor Richard’s. Filled with witty commentary and practical advice, the Gazette became the colony’s leading paper and Poor Richard’s (written under the pseudonym Richard Saunders) gained a wide readership. “The Way to Wealth,
if you desire it, . . . depends chiefly on two Words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY; i.e. Waste neither Time nor Money, but make the best Use of both,” Franklin advised fellow tradesmen.17 He practiced what he preached. Integrating forward and backward from the printing business, he owned or had an interest in some two dozen print shops in other colonies and almost as many paper mills, championed the issuance of paper money that he subsequently was paid to print, won the contract to print legislative documents for Pennsylvania, became its postmaster to facilitate delivery of his newspaper, and served as clerk of its assembly to gain a leg up in getting the news. By the 1740s, Franklin was serving as comptroller of the post office for British North America and in the next decade became its joint deputy postmaster general.

  In 1730, Franklin married the frugal and hardworking Deborah Read, who promptly took in and reared his son, William, by a premarital affair. They had two children together, Francis and Sarah, but the first died at age four from smallpox. “It is the Man and Woman united that make the compleat human Being,” Franklin later noted. “If you get a prudent healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.”18 He would trust his own way to wealth without marrying into money and (with his own industry and his wife’s economy) became one of the richest American colonists living north of the Mason-Dixon Line.19 Yet wealth was never his chief goal in life. “The Years roll round, and the last will come,” Franklin wrote to his mother, “when I would rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich.”20

  Accordingly, even as his businesses expanded, Franklin threw himself into local civic affairs. An inveterate joiner with a gift for drawing in others, he founded a self-improvement club for up-and-coming tradesmen called the Junto, a secular subscription library, a firefighting brigade, an academy that grew into the University of Pennsylvania, an intercolonial philosophical society, and (in 1747, during King George’s War against France and its Native American allies) a ten-thousand-man volunteer militia to defend Pennsylvania when its pacifist Quaker leaders would not. Franklin deeply believed in the power of collective action guided by reason. In 1731, he joined the nascent modern Freemason movement, which then served as something of an Enlightenment era alternative to organized religion by supplying fellowship, secret ritual, and a shared moral code for its members. Rising quickly through the ranks, Franklin, much like Washington twenty years later in Virginia, soon became a leader of his colony’s Freemasons—a status that linked him for life with fellow Masons in America and Europe.

  HAVING ACHIEVED FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE, Franklin “retired” in 1748 at age forty-two to a life of public service even as his established businesses and investments continued to generate substantial income. Some sixty years earlier, King Charles II had given William Penn a royal charter to establish a propriety colony for Penn’s pacifist Quaker sect and others on a broad stretch of land running from the Delaware River west for five degrees of longitude and north to south from New York to Maryland. As Penn peacefully secured the land from its Native inhabitants by purchases and resold it to European settlers at a handsome profit, the colony flourished.

  After Penn’s death in 1718, however, tensions developed between his descendants, the colony’s successor proprietors (who lived in London, appointed the resident governor, retained vast landholdings in the colony on which they paid no taxes, and drifted from the Quaker faith), and the colonists represented by their Quaker-controlled local assembly. Franklin stepped into the midst of this dispute on the side of his fellow colonists when they elected him as a Philadelphia city councilor in 1748 and a member of the colonial assembly three years later. “I conceiv’d my becoming a Member would enlarge my Power of doing Good,” he later wrote, and he threw himself into that task by pushing proposals to improve city streets and public safety.21

  While these activities enhanced his local reputation, Franklin gained international renown through science. Open-minded and curious, he could see fundamental relationships in nature that eluded others. By comparing the times when storms hit various places, for example, Franklin was first to realize that so-called nor’easters, which featured fierce winds from the north, actually moved from south to north. Expanding on this observation, he advanced the idea that weather moved in predicable patterns that could be forecast. Likewise, Franklin deduced from the relative speeds of transatlantic crossings at various latitudes and directions that currents circulated within oceans—another first. By separating the smoke from the hot air generated in woodstoves and using the radiant power of metal heated by circulating the hot air, he designed a fireplace insert that, while not perfect, pointed the way toward future advances in indoor heating. Ultimately, he made his name by revolutionizing the scientific understanding of electricity.

  People had experienced static electric sparks from time immemorial but no one systematically investigated them until the seventeenth century. These early experimenters found that they could generate an electric charge by rubbing various objects, such as a glass rod or amber stone, and collect it in a glass bottle lined and coated with metal foil, called a Leyden jar for where it was developed. Two types of electricity seemed to exist, depending on the type of substance rubbed to create it. Parlor games involving electrical shocks and charges gained popularity in Europe during the 1700s and passed to America by 1747, when Franklin’s subscription library acquired equipment for performing electrical experiments from its London agent, the wealthy science devotee Peter Collinson.

  Armed with this equipment and unencumbered by preconceived notions about the nature of electricity, Franklin conducted a series of brilliantly designed and easily explained experiments involving people on insulating wax blocks passing and receiving charges. From these experiments, he induced that there is only one type of electricity, that rubbing does not create it but rather causes it to flow, and that positive and negative charges result from a relative surplus or deficit of this universal “Electrical fluid.”22 Here was science fitting the British model decreed by Francis Bacon, and a first step toward both the modern physics of energy conservation and the transforming technology of electrical circuits, all flowing from a colonial tradesman with little formal education. The London stage could not have told a more compelling story and, in 1751, when Collinson published in a small book letters from Franklin describing his discoveries, it quickly went through multiple European editions. “He found electricity a curiosity,” Franklin biographer Carl Van Doran concluded, “and left it a science.”23

  Following up on his initial insights, Franklin devised an experiment to test the supposition that lightning was a static electric discharge. That test involved drawing a charge down from storm clouds by a pointed metal conductor—he used a sharp wire extended from a kite—and channeling it into a Leyden jar where its properties could be compared with those of a standard static electric charge. They proved the same. Franklin also improved on the Leyden jar to create the first electric battery and, always looking for useful application of his discoveries, developed the lightning rod to protect structures by drawing off atmospheric electricity and carrying it safely to earth through a grounding wire.

  To Franklin, the neutral balance of electricity on earth, and its tendency to find equilibrium, testified to divine design in nature. The ability of people to use their reason to improve on natural processes, such as through a lightning rod, gave humans a distinct role and purpose in making the world better. In his Autobiography, when Franklin proposed the ideal prayer, it was for “that Wisdom that discovers my truest Interests” rather than for any particular blessing to miraculously happen.24 Franklin’s God acted through people. And for his discoveries in electricity, the greatest philosopher of the day, Immanuel Kant, hailed Franklin as a “new Prometheus”—a living demigod—who snatched fire from the heavens and gave it to humanity.25

  When the French and Indian War broke out between English settlers and French and their Native allies on the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier in 1754, fright
ened Pennsylvanians inevitably turned to Franklin for leadership. Equally inevitably, he provided it. This threw him together with Washington, his Virginia counterpart.

  AS A MEMBER OF VIRGINIA’S LANDED GENTRY, George Washington was born with higher social status than Franklin at a time and place where such things mattered. And yet, all factors considered, his prospects were hardly greater. Although Franklin’s father was poorer than Washington’s, he was a respected member of his colony’s established church, which created opportunities for his sons. Had Franklin been more pious, he would likely have gone to Harvard College on a scholarship—many young men like him did.26 John Adams springs to mind. Even as it was, Franklin learned to read and, prior to his apprenticeship, received more formal education than Washington ever got. Several of his brothers prospered. That required ability and hard work, which Franklin supplied in large doses. Washington did so as well, with similar results. In colonial America, a new world of opportunities were open to the likes of Franklin and Washington.

  Like Franklin’s father, Josiah, Washington’s father moved to Britain’s American colonies from England—but the similarities end there. Josiah was a Puritan and left England after the Puritans ultimately lost the nation’s religious civil war with the restoration of the Anglican monarchy in 1660 under the Catholic-leaning but hedonistic-living Charles II. Josiah naturally headed for the narrowly sectarian Puritan haven of Massachusetts. In contrast, Washington’s father, Augustine, whose widowed mother had moved her young children back from Virginia to England with her second husband, returned around 1718 to claim his inheritance from his father’s side. Fleeing England during the initial Puritan takeover that displaced his family, in 1656 Augustine’s paternal grandfather had washed up in the loosely secular Anglican haven of Virginia. Once there, he began accumulating property on the frontier, including the plantation later named Mount Vernon, often by questionable means. The Natives, George Washington later wrote, called him “Caunotaucarius (in English) the Town taker.”27 Augustine’s father continued the process of land acquisition and married well, providing substantial property for Augustine to reclaim when he reached maturity. He augmented it further.