Part 2

As Benjamin basked in this heady tribute, the governor and Colonel French launched into ways and means of setting him up in the printing business. All that was needed was capital. Would not Benjamin’s father provide the necessary backing? It was very unlikely, Benjamin commented.

“I will tell you what I will do,” said the governor. “I will write to your father myself to tell him how much faith I have in your ability.”

Dazzled, Benjamin agreed to make a trip home to deliver the governor’s letter personally.

He took a leave of absence a few weeks later, telling Keimer only that he was visiting his family. A year before he had quit Boston, a near penniless runaway. He returned in triumph, wearing a new suit, carrying a watch, and jingling some five pounds of sterling in his pocket. His mother and father were overjoyed to see him, and his sisters crowded around him delightedly.

He could not resist going to the printing shop of his brother James. No doubt he strutted somewhat and bragged about his success. He showed the admiring workmen his silver money, a novelty in Boston where paper money was used, and handed each a piece of eight to buy a drink. Only James refused to be impressed. He grew increasingly glum during Benjamin’s visit. Later he said Benjamin had gone out of his way to insult him and he would never forgive him.

That night Benjamin showed his father the letter from Sir William Keith. Josiah Franklin was pleased as any parent that such an important personage had taken an interest in his son but did not approve of Keith’s proposal. In his opinion Benjamin was too young to have the responsibility of his own shop, he wrote in his politely worded reply.

“I see your father is a prudent man,” Keith said later in Philadelphia when Benjamin came to make his report. He added that he had found there was a great difference in persons and that discretion did not always accompany years. Since Josiah Franklin did not recognize his son’s unusual abilities, he, the governor, would sponsor him.

He had Benjamin regularly to his fine house for dinner the next weeks. Gradually he unfolded his plan. Benjamin must take his savings and go to England. There he could pick out for himself his own press, type fonts, paper, and whatever else he needed for a printing shop. The governor would provide him with letters of introduction and letters of credit to cover everything.

Who could have refused such a splendid opportunity? Toward the end of 1724, after quitting his employment with Keimer, Benjamin set sail for his first visit to the Old World. There had been a touching farewell to Deborah Read, to whom he promised to write often. James Ralph, his poet friend, went with him, having decided to try his fortune in England. Since the governor was busy with pressing affairs, Colonel French saw him off. He did not have the letters Keith had promised, but assured Benjamin they were safe in the captain’s mailbag.

He had a pleasant trip and made one good friend—an elderly Quaker merchant named Thomas Denham. Not until they reached the English Channel did the ship captain sort out his mail. That was when Benjamin learned that there were no letters of credit, no letters of introduction, nothing at all from Governor Keith. He was stranded in London, with only twelve pounds to his name.

In his bewilderment, he confided his plight to Denham.

“There is not the least probability that he wrote any letters for you,” the Quaker told him. “No one who knows the governor would depend on him. As for his giving you any letters of credit—that is a sad joke. He has no credit to give.”

“But why?” Benjamin asked. “Why would he play such a trick on me?”

“Do not think too harshly of him,” Denham said charitably. “Keith wants to please everyone. Having little to give, he gives expectations.”

It was a bitter lesson.

He stayed in London nearly eighteen months. It turned out to be as easy for him to find a job here as in Philadelphia. Part of the time he worked for a printer named Palmer and after that for a Mr. Watt. Under the tutelage of experienced workmen, he perfected his printing skills. He also attempted to improve his colleagues by urging them to drink water instead of beer for breakfast. The “Water American,” they dubbed him, but a few of them followed his advice.

Not that he was a prude. London had much to offer a young man who was curious and alert and full of fun. There were operas in French or Italian, plays by William Shakespeare at the Drury Lane Theatre, scientific lectures, and the lure of dance halls. He wrote a pamphlet called “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,” which brought him some acclaim among London’s young intellectuals. He presented an American curiosity, a purse of stone asbestos, to Sir Hans Sloane, secretary of the Royal Society, and almost met Sir Isaac Newton. James Ralph borrowed money from him and then split up with him without paying him back, in a quarrel over a pretty milliner. He sent off one letter to Deborah Read, but never got around to writing another.

He could not have missed observing the squalor of the slums and the contrasting elegance of the great lords with their postilions and liveried coachmen. That no such vast difference existed between rich and poor in America may have struck him, but he drew no moral lesson. He was not yet a crusader and his heart was set on having as good a time as his means allowed.

On occasion he went swimming in the Thames with a co-worker named Wygate, and once on an excursion to Chelsea he dazzled Wygate and his other companions with a display of the water exercises which he had invented in his childhood. A certain Sir William Wyndham, a friend of the great Jonathan Swift, heard of his prowess and invited him to teach swimming to his sons. About the same time, Wygate proposed that the two of them travel through Europe, earning their way as journeymen printers.

Both suggestions tempted Benjamin but he rejected them. His Quaker friend Thomas Denham had offered him a position in his Philadelphia importing company. Denham had made one fortune as a merchant and was set on making another. With the crying need of America’s growing population for goods from abroad, there was no reason why he should not succeed. The salary was less than Franklin earned as a printer, but there would be handsome commissions, travel to foreign lands, and, so he believed, an assured future.

He set sail on July 23, 1726, on the _Berkshire_. It was October 11 before they reached Philadelphia. Franklin, now twenty, kept a journal on this long voyage. He had time to think, to observe nature, to philosophize.

An eclipse of the sun and one of the moon were notable events of the trip, duly recorded in his journal. The passengers fished for dolphins. He noted their glorious appearance in the water, their bodies “of a bright green, mixed with a silver colour, and their tails of a shining golden yellow,” and wondered at the “vulgar error of the painters, who always represent this fish monstrously crooked and deformed.”

From the Gulf Stream he fished out several branches of gulfweed and spent long hours studying a growth which he called “vegetable animals,” resembling shellfish and yet seeming part of the weed. Noting a small crab of the same yellowish color as the weed, he deduced—erroneously but with logic—that the crab came from the “vegetable animals” as a butterfly comes from a cocoon.

The idiosyncrasies of his fellow passengers also came under his scrutiny. From watching the men play drafts he concluded that “if two persons equal in judgment play for a considerable sum, he that loves money will lose; his anxiety for the success of the game confounds him.”

One of the passengers was caught cheating and would not pay a fine. The others refused to eat, drink or talk with him. The cheat soon paid up. “Man is a sociable being,” young Franklin wrote in his journal, “and it is, for aught I know, one of the worst of punishments to be excluded from society.”

He discovered that there was nothing like a contrary wind to bring out the worst in mankind: “... we grow sullen, silent, and reserved, and fret at each other upon every little occasion.” At the sight of a ship from Dublin bound from New York, on the contrary, he commented: “There is something strangely cheering to the spirits in the meeting of a ship at sea ... after we had been long separated and excommunicated as it were from the rest of mankind.”

Interesting as the trip was, there was no moment equal to that when one of the mess cried “Land! Land!” In less than an hour they perceived the tufts of trees. “I could not discern it so soon as the rest; my eyes were dimmed with the suffusion of two small drops of joy.”

He had set out to conquer Philadelphia three years before and had not succeeded. Now he was to have another try.

3 THE BIRTH OF POOR RICHARD

Deborah Read was married. This bit of news which greeted his return came as a shock, though he had only himself to blame. A luscious young woman like Debby could hardly be expected to nourish her affection on one letter in a year and a half.

He had, it seemed to him, three major causes for self-reproach in his past: the grief he had caused his parents by running away from Boston; the wrong he had done his brother James; and his long neglect of Debby. He resolved that henceforth his life would be conducted differently.

Printing was behind him now, or so he thought. Under Thomas Denham he set himself to learning the intricacies of merchandising. He lived with Denham; their relationship was that of father and son. It lasted only a few months. In February 1727, the good Quaker fell ill and did not recover. His executors took over his store, and Franklin was out of a job.

Swallowing his pride, he went back to Samuel Keimer. To his surprise his former employer welcomed him with open arms and even gave him a raise. He soon found out why. Keimer had hired half a dozen men at very low pay. The trouble was they knew nothing about printing. He needed Franklin to teach them their trade.

Obligingly, Franklin went to great pains to show the men everything he knew himself. He did considerably more than he was paid to do. When types wore out, instead of sending an order to England for more, he devised a copper mold to cast new type, the first time this had been done in America. He made their ink, and he started a sideline of engraving. All the techniques he had learned from the London experts, he now put to use.

Knowing Keimer, he did not expect gratitude nor did he get it. As business improved and as the workmen mastered their trade, the employer grew increasingly uncivil and quarrelsome. He complained that he was paying Franklin too much and nagged him incessantly. Matters soon came to a climax. One day Franklin heard a loud noise outside the shop and dashed to the window to see what was happening. He never did find out.

Keimer was standing in the street below and, on seeing Franklin’s face at the window, he bawled him out in such violent and insulting terms that everyone in the neighborhood could hear. No job was worth that much. Franklin took his hat and walked out, never to come back.

That night a fellow journeyman named Hugh Meredith came to see him. Meredith, who had been a farmer and taken up printing only recently, was fed up with Keimer. He proposed that the two of them should go into partnership as soon as his period of service was up a few months hence. His father admired Franklin and was willing to finance them. Mr. Meredith senior soon confirmed the offer, privately telling Franklin he felt he would be a good influence on his son, who drank too much.

During the next months Franklin did odd jobs and, in his spare time, organized a club called the Junto. There were twelve members in all, including Hugh and two other printers, a shoemaker, a joiner, a scrivener, and others in modest trades. “The Leather Apron Club,” the town’s wealthier citizens nicknamed the Junto, because of the humble working class background of its membership.

The Junto met each Friday. Franklin provided them with a list of “queries” to be discussed. “Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?” Already he was beginning to think in terms of civil rights. “Do you know of any deserving young beginner lately set up whom it lies in the power of the Junto any way to encourage?” He knew from personal experience how much it meant to a young man to have friends to give him support and advice. “Which is best: to make a friend of a wise and good man that is poor or of a rich man that is neither wise nor good?” His brief tussle with earning a living had convinced him that wisdom was preferable to riches.

“Whence comes the dew that stands on the outside of a tankard that has cold water in it in the summertime?” The latter was one of many scientific “queries” he suggested to the Junto, in line with his own curiosity about the mysteries of life.

To improve themselves, to cultivate ethical virtues, to lend a hand to their neighbors—all were included in the Junto’s lofty aims. They composed essays on various subjects. If a member read something of interest in “history, morality, Poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts,” he shared his new knowledge with his fellow members.

They were not always serious. Sometimes they met for outdoor sports. They held banquets, composed and sang songs, made jokes, told stories, often had riotous times together. The friendships they formed were firm, lasting as long as they lived.

Occasionally Franklin caught sight of Sir William Keith on the street, The former governor would look uncomfortable and slink away. His fortune had deteriorated. Before very long, he fled to England, leaving his wife and daughter penniless; he died in a London debtors’ prison.

In the spring of 1728, when Franklin was twenty-two, he and Hugh Meredith were ready to open their own printing shop in a house on High Street. Their first customer was a farmer who gave them five shillings to print an advertisement. No sum ever loomed so large.

Customers were few and far between those first months. It was not due to Franklin’s partner that they survived at all. He was rarely sober enough to do a day’s labor. His father had been optimistic in hoping that Franklin could change him. Eventually Hugh admitted that he would never make a printer.

“I was bred a farmer, Benjamin. ’Twas folly for me to come to town and apprentice myself to learn a new trade.”

They talked the matter over and came to an agreement. Franklin would pay back Hugh’s father the hundred pounds he had advanced for their printing equipment, pay Hugh’s personal debts and give him thirty pounds and a new saddle. Two of his Junto friends loaned him the money he needed. Hugh took off for his farm, leaving Franklin, at twenty-three, the sole owner of the printing shop.

The common people of Pennsylvania at this time were pleading for paper money, such as was used in Massachusetts and other colonies, but the wealthier citizens opposed it. Franklin, siding with the people, wrote a pamphlet on “The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency,” which he printed himself, and which swayed the Pennsylvania Assembly to pass a bill to issue such paper currency. For his contribution, Franklin was awarded the contract to print the money.

Soon afterward, Philadelphia’s most esteemed lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, arranged for him to print the laws and votes of the government. Business was beginning to prosper.

With all orders he took infinite pains. He kept his equipment in excellent shape, cleaning the type himself. He used very white paper and very black inks and sometimes made decorative woodcuts to illustrate advertisements. He hired a workman and took an apprentice, but outworked them both, staying in the shop from dawn to near midnight.

His rival, Andrew Bradford, printed an address from the Pennsylvania Assembly to the governor in a slipshod manner. Franklin reprinted the same address elegantly, sending a copy to every Assembly member. The next year he was voted official printer for the Assembly. He started a stationer’s shop to sell paper, booklets, and miscellaneous items. Perhaps to impress the citizens of Philadelphia with his industry, he carted his supplies from the wharf in a wheelbarrow, wearing his leather apron.

Philadelphia boasted only one newspaper, a dreary and conservative sheet which Bradford published. Franklin talked over with his friends his own desire to start a livelier paper. One of them betrayed him to Keimer, his other rival, who promptly put out a newspaper with the ambitious title, _The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Science, and Pennsylvania Gazette_.

That poor illiterate Keimer running a paper? It lasted only until September 1729 when Keimer, head over heels in debt, sold it to Franklin for a pittance and departed to the Barbados, never to return. The _Pennsylvania Gazette_, as he called it, became Franklin’s newspaper to run as he wished.

That winter he performed his first scientific experiment, designed to find out if the heat of the sun was absorbed more readily by colored objects than by white ones. The experiment was so simple any child could do it; the wonder was no one had thought of it before. He took some tailor’s samples—small squares of cloth in black, blue, green, purple, red, yellow, and white—and laid them out on the snow a bright sunny morning. In a few hours, the black square, which the sun had warmed most, had sunk low into the snow; the dark blue was almost as low; the other colors had sunk less deeply; while the white sample remained on the surface of the snow.

Franklin thought in terms of the practical value of this discovery: white clothes would be more suitable than black ones in a hot climate; summer hats should be white to repel the heat and prevent sunstroke; fruit walls, if painted black, could absorb enough of the sun’s heat to stay warm at night, thereby helping to preserve the fruit from frost.

A glazier’s family named Godfrey had been sharing his High Street house. He was lonely when they moved. Even his close friends of the Junto could not ease his longing to have a family of his own.

On occasion he visited the Read family. Deborah’s marriage had turned out tragically. Her husband, a good workman but irresponsible, had, like Keimer, taken off to the West Indies to escape debts. Even worse, it turned out that he had a wife still living in England. Debby, who had come home to live with her mother, was so pale and sad Franklin was filled with pity for her. Perhaps first out of a desire to do good, Franklin did his best to cheer her up, and it pleased him no end to see the color gradually come back to her cheeks as her normally high spirits returned. No woman had ever appealed to him more than she. In time she responded to his affection. They were married on September 1, 1730.

Theirs was not the most romantic attachment in the world, but it endured. “She proved a good and faithful helpmate,” he wrote some years later in his _Autobiography_, “... we throve together, and have ever mutually endeavor’d to make each other happy.” Indeed Debby proved the ideal wife for an ambitious young man. She helped him in his printing orders, by folding and stitching pamphlets or purchasing old linen rags for the paper makers, and she ran their stationer’s shop. Since he preached the need of economy, she obligingly served him plain and simple fare and contented herself with the cheapest furniture. Nor did she complain when he went every Friday night to the meetings of the Junto.

The little club had now hired a hall for its weekly gatherings. As there was no good bookshop in Philadelphia, the members pooled their own books and loaned them to each other. This practice of communal sharing gave them so much pleasure that, at Franklin’s suggestion, they commenced a public library. Every subscriber, Junto member or not, paid a sum down to buy books from England, and there was an annual contribution for additional purchases. America’s earliest lending library had come into being, the first of many civic benefits which Franklin initiated over the years.

A rival organization to the Junto was the newly established Philadelphia branch of the Masons, mostly well-to-do citizens. The aim of Freemasonry was “to promote Friendship, mutual Assistance, and Good Fellowship.” Franklin succeeded in becoming a member by a rather sly trick, a note in the _Gazette_ claiming knowledge of the “Masonic mysteries.” Since these “mysteries” were supposed to be highly secret, the members were so alarmed they invited the _Gazette’s_ editor and publisher to join their ranks. For many years he was a leader in Masonic affairs.

He had wanted to be a Mason, but no one could persuade him to join any church or denomination. That there was one God who made all things and that the soul was immortal, he believed firmly. He held that “the most acceptable service to God is doing good to man.” Since all religious sects, in theory, preached the same, he never did see a reason to favor one of them above others.

Within a year or so of its inception, the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ had the largest circulation of any paper in America. Profiting from the lessons he had learned while working for his brother James, he stressed human interest stories and local news. He ran an article on the harsh treatment of a ship captain to the Palatine immigrants. He published stories on robberies and murders, was not above poking fun at the stodgy official reports which filled the pages of Andrew Bradford’s paper, and he took up the cudgel for the freedom of the press.

Most popular of all were his “Letters from the Readers,” many of which he undoubtedly wrote himself. Thus “Anthony Afterwit” complained that his wife, who wished to play the grand lady, was ruining him. “Celia Single” scolded the _Gazette_ editor for being partial to men. “Alice Addertongue,” another contributor, announced the opening of her shop to sell “calumnies, slanders and other feminine wares.” He ran advertisements, sometimes for runaway slaves (it would be some years before he crystallized his thinking on the evil of slavery), sometimes for a wife pleading to her husband to come home. He slipped in jokes as a good cook adds seasoning, and he refused to let the paper be used for personal quarrels.

In 1732, three years after launching the _Gazette_, he was ready for a new publishing venture, his celebrated _Poor Richard’s Almanack_. There were other almanacs published in the colonies; almanacs in fact sold almost as well as Bibles. Soon _Poor Richard_ eclipsed them all.

Like the others, it noted holidays, changes of season, dates of fairs, gave weather information, advised the best day to gather grapes or to sow seeds. Interspersed with such data were proverbs, verses, witticisms and epigrams, some original but a great many adapted from sayings of great writers of the past, trimmed to suit an American audience:

Light purse, heavy heart. A rich rogue is like a fat hog, who never does good till dead as a log. Eat to live, and not live to eat. Nothing more like a fool, than a drunken man. To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals. None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing. Observe all men; thyself most. Half the truth is often a great lie. Lost time is never found again. Little strokes, fell great oaks. Nothing but money is sweeter than honey. Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults. Love your neighbor; yet don’t pull down your hedge. Don’t throw stones at your neighbors’, if your own windows are glass. The cat in gloves catches no mice. To err is human, to repent divine; to persist devilish. A brother may not be a friend, but a friend will always be a brother.

And, a tribute to Debby: “He that has not got a wife, is not yet a complete man.”