The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  Although Franklin had been “religiously educated as a Presbyterian,” he never accepted the Calvinist conviction that faith alone was the source of salvation; indeed, he became convinced that “the most acceptable Service of God was the doing Good to Man.” His respect for the various religions in eighteenth-century America came to depend solely on their contributions to virtue or morality. After concluding in a 1755 newspaper polemic that “a virtuous Heretick shall be saved before a wicked Christian,” Franklin thereafter decided that religion was not a subject worth disputing in public. Although he continued to make contributions to many churches, he never belonged to any of them—a problem for his reputation in the early nineteenth century.36

  BACK TO PHILADELPHIA

  After eighteen months in London, Franklin got tired of the big city and wanted to get back to Philadelphia. Surely it was not because of his pining for Deborah Read—he wrote her only once during the nearly two years he was gone, and then simply to tell her that he was not likely soon to return. In London, he tells us, he had proceeded “by degrees” to forget his engagement to Deborah.37 Perhaps he wished to return because London in the 1720s was experiencing food shortages and more outbreaks of diseases than usual. Or perhaps he had come to realize that he would be a much bigger fish in the relatively small pond of Philadelphia than he was in the huge ocean of London with its hundreds of thousands of people. Or perhaps he sensed that printers in England were losing control of the publishing business, and he would have many more opportunities for advancement back in the colonies.38 At any rate, in 1726, when Philadelphia merchant Thomas Denham offered to pay Franklin’s passage back home and bring him into his business, he jumped at the opportunity.

  Denham’s untimely death soon drove Franklin back into the printing trade, managing the shop of his former boss Samuel Keimer. In addition to training the five workers in the shop, Franklin cast type, engraved, made ink, and acted as warehouseman: “in short,” he recalled, he was “quite a Factotum.”39 The patrons of Keimer’s printing firm soon came to realize that young Franklin the employee was far more competent and presentable than his employer. Not only was Keimer an “odd Fish,” grouchy and “ignorant of common Life,” said Franklin, but he was “slovenly to extream dirtiness.” Consequently, the firm’s patrons, who included Judge William Allen, Samuel Bustill, the secretary of the province, Isaac Pearson, Joseph Cooper, several members of the important Smith family, and members of the assembly, found Franklin a much better companion than they did the owner of the business. “They had me to their Houses, introduc’d me to their Friends, and show’d me much Civility, while he, tho’ the Master, was a little neglected.” One of these patrons, Isaac Decow, the surveyor general, helped to fill Franklin with dreams of what he might become. Decow told the young artisan that he himself had begun humbly, wheeling clay for bricklayers and carrying chains for surveyors, but had “by his Industry acquir’d a good Estate.” Decow predicted that Franklin would soon work his employer out of his business and “make a fortune in it in Philadelphia.”40

  In 1728 Franklin and one of his fellow workers, Hugh Meredith (whose father put up the capital), left Keimer and opened up their own printing business. There were now three printing firms in Philadelphia, which was more than most people thought the town could support.

  Franklin was determined that it would not be his business that would fail. He worked incredibly hard, “and this Industry visible to our Neighbours began to give us Character and Credit.”41 When in 1729 Meredith lost interest in printing and began drinking heavily, Franklin, with the aid of friends, bought him out. At last at age twenty-three, he was sole owner of his own printing firm. But he also had debts.

  MARRIAGE

  At the same time Franklin was thinking about getting married and settling down. Ever since he had returned from London, he recalled, he had come to realize that his frequent “Intrigues with low Women that fell in my Way ... were attended with some Expence & great Inconvenience, besides a continual Risque to my Health.” Marriage would allow free rein to “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth” while removing the expense and the risk. He might have added that bachelors were regarded with a certain amount of suspicion in many of the colonies.

  Since Deborah Read, to whom he had been engaged, had given up on him during his absence in London and married a potter named John Rogers, Franklin never gave her a thought and began courting the daughter of a relative of one of his friends. However, when he asked the young woman’s parents for a dowry of about £100 to pay off his debts, he was turned down. He asked acquaintances about other marital prospects and discovered that “the Business of a Printer being generally thought a poor one, I was not to expect Money with a Wife unless with such a one, as I should not other wise think agreeable.”42

  Only then did Franklin realize that he might have to settle for Deborah Read. Although Deborah was already married, her husband had turned out to be a wastrel and perhaps a bigamist. Consequently, Deborah had left John Rogers and returned to her mother’s house. Rogers in turn ran off to the West Indies, where rumor had it he died, but no one could be sure. Since Pennsylvania law did not allow divorce for desertion, Franklin and Deborah in 1730 decided to avoid legal difficulties by simply setting up housekeeping as husband and wife.

  Franklin’s entering at the age of twenty-four upon a common-law marriage (a much more prevalent practice in the eighteenth century than today) to the loud and lowly and scarcely literate Deborah Read suggests that his social ambitions were still quite limited. The other Founders generally made something of themselves by their marriages. Indeed, most of them tended to think of marriage in dynastic terms, as a means of building alliances and establishing or consolidating their position in society. Washington acquired a considerable estate by marrying the rich young widow Martha Custis. Upon his marriage to the widow Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson received 135 slaves, including the Hemings family, and 11,000 acres of land. Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, a member of one of the most distinguished families of New York. Only John Adams seems not to have worried much about his wife’s dowry, though Abigail Smith’s father was the minister in Weymouth and her mother was a Quincy, a member of a wealthy and important Massachusetts family.

  Franklin’s marriage was very different from that of the other Founders. It was sudden and seemingly without great advantage. Only two months after telling his sister that he was definitely not planning to get married, Franklin unexpectedly changed his mind.43 We are not sure why. Franklin tells us in his Autobiography that marrying Deborah Read eased his conscience over his earlier treatment of her, but we have no evidence of his guilt except his later recollection of it. If he felt guilty over his earlier treatment of her, how much more guilty he must have felt over his later treatment of her; but we have no evidence of that either. No doubt, as he recalled, the couple “throve together,” but the marriage scarcely helped Franklin socially.44 She may in fact have become something of an embarrassment to him. Certainly the Philadelphia gentry, when they began mingling with Franklin, never included his wife in invitations to their homes. Deborah did, however, help him economically; she was as shrewd and as frugal as he was, and she never ceased working to bring money into the household.45

  In newspaper essays written shortly after his marriage Franklin expressed his dislike of tradesmen’s wives who aspired to become gentlewomen. Such wives shunned work, refused to knit their husbands’ stockings, bought extravagant goods, and lived beyond their means.46 Franklin knew that Deborah would never behave in this way. Indeed, in his “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness,” written at the time of his marriage, he advised a prospective wife to “have a due Regard to [her husband’s] Income and Circumstances in all your Expenses and Desires.” But, most important, the wife was to “Read frequently with due Attention the Matrimonial Service; and take care in doing so, not to overlook the Word obey.” His experience with Deborah eventually proved that such wives did not have to bring dowries
to their artisan husbands. As he later pointed out to a prospective tradesman contemplating marriage, “If you get a prudent healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.”47

  There may have been other reasons for Franklin to marry Deborah. Franklin almost immediately took into his home an illegitimate son born to him and another woman, a son whom his new wife had to raise. Under the circumstances Deborah may have been the only woman in Philadelphia who would have put up with this added responsibility, and she did so only reluctantly. (After three centuries the identity of the mother of the illegitimate son, whom Franklin named William, remains a mystery. Franklin apparently made some small provision for the mother who, as the son of one of Franklin’s close friends later said, “being none of the most agreeable of Women,” was neither noticed nor acknowledged by Franklin or William.)48

  Franklin indeed ought to have been grateful to Deborah for taking on the burden of bringing up some other woman’s child. Deborah never liked the boy and, according to a visiting Virginian who lived in the Franklin household for a short time in 1755, often treated the then twenty-four-year-old William with unusual coldness. To the visitor’s consternation, she called William “the greatest Villain upon Earth,” denounced him in foul and vulgar language, and kept trying to put him down in front of their guest. She apparently never said any such thing in front of her husband, however, for Franklin adored his son.49

  Franklin’s marriage to Deborah seemed to confirm his status as a commoner. As a printer who had to work for a living and with a wife like Deborah, he was a long way from being regarded as a gentleman.

  GENTLEMEN AND COMMONERS

  Many people in the eighteenth-century English-speaking world, especially those in the topmost ranks, still tended to divide the society into only two parts, a tiny elite of gentlemen on the top dominating the bulk of commoners on the bottom. A gentleman was someone quite different from ordinary folk—even in the colonies, which lacked the extremes of English society, with its great opulent aristocrats set against the most appalling poverty. “The title of a gentleman,” wrote one early-eighteenth-century observer, “is commonly given in England to all that distinguish themselves from the common sort of people, by a good garb, genteel air, or good education, wealth or learning.” Although the numbers trying to enter the rank of gentleman were increasing, becoming a gentleman was still not easy, especially as the bar of politeness and refinement kept being raised. “A finished Gentleman,” wrote the English essayist Richard Steele, someone whose writings Franklin knew well, “is perhaps the most uncommon of all the great Characters in Life.”50

  This separation between gentlemen and commoners, which John Adams called “the most ancient and universal of all Divisions of People,” overwhelmed all other divisions in colonial culture, even that between free and enslaved that we today find so horribly conspicuous. Although the eighteenth century was becoming increasingly confused over precisely who ought to constitute the categories of gentlemen and ordinary people, many were still sure that in all societies some were patricians and most were plebeians, some were officers and most were common soldiers, some were “the better sort” and most were not. The awareness of the “difference between gentle and simple,” recalled the Anglican minister Devereux Jarratt of his humble youth in colonial Virginia, was “universal among all of my rank and age.”51

  Since this distinction has lost almost all of its older meaning (Jarratt himself lived to see “a vast alteration, in this respect”), it takes an act of imagination to recapture the immense importance of the difference between gentleman and commoner in the eighteenth century.52 Common soldiers captured in war were imprisoned; captured officers, however, could be released “on parole,” after giving their word to their fellow gentleman officers that they would not flee the area or return to their troops. Southern squires entered their churches as a body and took their pews only after their families and the ordinary people had been seated. The courts of Massachusetts debated endlessly over whether or not particular plaintiffs and defendants were properly identified as gentlemen, for, as John Adams noted, it was important in law that writs “not call Esquires Labourers, and Labourers Esquires.”53 Inevitably, the law treated gentlemen and commoners differently. Although English colonial law was presumably equal for all, the criminal punishments were not: gentlemen, unlike commoners, did not have their ears cropped or their bodies flogged.

  In the southern parts of colonial America the distinction between gentleman and commoner was there practically from birth: “Before a boy knows his right hand from his left, can discern black from white, good from evil, or knows who made him, or how he exists,” wrote one Virginian, “he is a Gentleman.” And as a gentleman, “it would derogate greatly from his character, to learn a trade; or to put his hand to any servile employment.”54 Although the precise nature of a gentleman might have been in more doubt in the northern colonies, even there the distinction was very real. As late as 1761 the young attorney John Adams at least thought he knew when someone was not a gentleman, “neither by Birth, Education, Office, Reputation, or Employment,” nor by “Thought, Word, or Deed.” A person who springs “from ordinary Parents,” who “can scarcely write his Name,” whose “Business is Boating,” who “never had any Commissions”—to call such a person a gentleman was “an arrant Prostitution of the Title.”55

  For most people the principal means of distinction between the gentry and commoners was still “Birth and Parentage.” Many colonists continued to believe that all men were created unequal. God, it was said, had been “pleas’d to constitute a Difference in Families.” Although most children were of “low Degree or of Common Derivation, Some are Sons and Daughters of the Mighty: they are more honorably descended, and have greater Relations than others.”56 The word “gentry” was after all associated with birth, derived from the Latin gens, or stock. English and colonial writers such as Henry Fielding and Robert Munford, even when poking fun at the false pretensions of the aristocracy, had to have—for the harmony of their stories and the comfort of their genteel audiences—their apparently plebeian heroes or heroines turn out to be secretly the offspring of gentlemen.

  In addition to genealogy, wealth was important in distinguishing a gentleman, for “in vulgar reckoning a mean condition bespeaks a mean man.” But more and more in the eighteenth century these traditional sources of gentry status—birth and wealth—were surrounded and squeezed by other measures of distinction—artificial, man-made criteria having to do with manners, taste, and character. “No man,” it was increasingly said, “deserves the appellation a Gentleman until he has done something to merit it.”57

  Gentlemen walked and talked in certain ways and held in contempt those who did not. They ate with silver knives and forks while many common people still ate with their hands. Gentlemen prided themselves on their classical learning, and in their privately circulated verse and in their public polemics they took great pains to display their knowledge. They took up dancing and fencing, for both “contribute greatly to a graceful Carriage.” “A Gentleman,” they were told, “should know how to appear in an Assembly [in] Public to Advantage, and to defend himself if attacked.” Young aspiring gentlemen were urged by their parents to study poetry and to learn to play musical instruments. Unlike common people, gentlemen wore wigs or powdered their hair, believing that “nothing [was] a finer ornament to a young gentleman than a good head of hair well order’d and set forth,” especially when appearing “before persons of rank and distinction.” They dressed distinctively and fashionably. In contrast to the plain shirts, leather aprons, and buckskin breeches of ordinary men, they wore lace ruffles, silk stockings, and other finery. They sought to build elaborate houses and to have their portraits painted. Little gratified the gentry’s hearts more than to have a “coach and six,” or at least a “chariot and four,” to have servants decked out in “fine liveries,” to have a reputation for entertaining liberally, to be noticed.58 />
  But central to these cultural attributes of gentility was “politeness,” which had a far broader and richer significance for the eighteenth century than it does for us. It meant not simply good manners and refinement but being genial and sociable, possessing the capacity to relate to other human beings easily and naturally. It was what most obviously separated the genteel few from the vulgar and barbaric mass of the population.

  “Politeness,” said the Reverend William Smith in 1752, “is the Bond of social life,—the ornament of human nature.” By “softening... our natural roughness,” politeness developed in men “a certain Easiness of Behavior,” which, said Smith, was the main “Characteristic of the Gentleman.” Gentlemen were admired for their “real humility, condescension, courteousness, affability, and great good manners to all the world.”59

  Only a hierarchical society that knew its distinctions well could have placed so much value on a gentleman’s capacity for condescension—that voluntary humiliation, that willing descent from superiority to equal terms with inferiors. For us today condescension is a pejorative term, suggesting snobbery or haughtiness. But for the eighteenth century it was a positive and complimentary term, something that gentlemen aspired to possess and commoners valued in those above them. Rufus Putnam, a young Massachusetts enlisted man serving with the provincial forces attached to the British army in northern New York during the Seven Years War, was especially taken with the ability of one British officer to condescend. The officer frequently came among his men, said Putnam, “and his manner was so easy and fermiller, that you loost all that constraint or diffidence we feele when addressed by our Superiours, whose manners are forbidding.”60