The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  Ultimately, beneath all these strenuous efforts to define gentility was the fundamental classical quality of being free and independent. The liberality for which gentlemen were known connoted freedom—freedom from material want, freedom from the caprice of others, freedom from ignorance, and freedom from having to work with one’s hands. The gentry’s distinctiveness came from being independent in a world of dependencies, learned in a world only partially literate, and leisured in a world of laborers.

  We today have so many diverse forms of work and recreation and so much of our society shares in them that we can scarcely appreciate the significance of the earlier stark separation between a leisured few and a laboring many. In the eighteenth century, labor, as it had been for ages, was still associated with toil and trouble, with pain, and manual productivity did not yet have the superior moral value that it would soon acquire. To be sure, industriousness and hard work were everywhere extolled, and the puritan ethic was widely preached—but only for ordinary people, not for gentlemen. Hard steady work was good for the character of common people: it kept them out of trouble; it lifted them out of idleness and barbarism; and it instilled in them the proper moral values.

  Most people, it was widely assumed, would not work if they did not have to. Franklin certainly thought so: it was conventional wisdom. “It seems certain,” he wrote in 1753, “that the hope of becoming at some time of Life free from the necessity of care and Labour, together with fear of penury, are the mainsprings of most people’s industry.”61 People labored out of necessity, out of poverty, and that necessity and poverty bred the contempt in which laboring people had been held for centuries. Since servants, slaves, and bonded laborers did much of the work of the society, it seemed natural to associate leisure with liberty and toil with bondage.62 A gentleman’s freedom was valued because it was freedom from the necessity to labor, which came from being poor.

  Indeed, only the need of ordinary people to feed themselves, it was thought, kept them busy working. “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower class must be kept poor or they will never be industrious,” declared the English agricultural writer Arthur Young. Only “poverty,” wrote Thomas Hutchinson in 1761, by then the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, “will produce industry and frugality” among the common people. Franklin agreed. Since people were naturally indolent, “giving mankind a dependence on anything for support in age and sickness, besides industry and frugality during youth and health, tends ... to encourage idleness and prodigality, and thereby to promote and increase poverty, the very evil it was intended to cure.”63

  Thus even in the eighteenth century the age-old contempt for those who had to work for a living, those who had occupations, lingered on. In the ideal polity, Aristotle had written thousands of years earlier, “the citizens must not live a mechanical or commercial life. Such a life is not noble, and it militates against virtue.” Not even agricultural workers could be citizens, for men “must have leisure to develop their virtue and for the activities of a citizen.”64 This leisure, or what was best described as not exerting oneself for profit, was supposed to be a prerogative of gentlemen only. Gentlemen, James Harrington had written in the seventeenth century, were those who “live upon their own revenue in plenty, without engagement either to the tilling of their lands or other work for their livelihood.” In the early eighteenth century Daniel Defoe defined “the gentry” as “such who live on estates, and without the mechanism of employment, including the men of letters, such as clergy, lawyers and physicians.” A half century later Franklin’s colleague, Richard Jackson, similarly characterized the gentry as those who “live on their fortunes.”65

  Ideally gentlemen did not work for a living. A gentleman, it was said, was someone “who has no visible means of support.” His income was supposed to come to him indirectly from his wealth—from rents and from interest on bonds or money out on loan—and much of it often did. Although some northern colonists might suggest that gentlemen-farmers ought to set “a laborious example to their Domesticks,” perhaps by taking an occasional turn in the fields, a gentleman’s activity was supposed to be with the mind. Managing one’s landed estate in the way that Cicero and other Roman patricians had managed theirs meant exercising authority— the only activity befitting a truly free man. Therefore, when a planter like George Washington totaled up his accounts or rode through his fields to check on his slaves or even when he occasionally took a hand at some task, he was not considered to be engaged in work.66

  Immense cultural pressure often made gentlemen pretend that their economic affairs were for pleasure or for the good of the community, and not for their subsistence. They saw themselves and, more important, were seen by others as gentlemen who happened to engage in some commercial enterprises. Unlike ordinary people, gentlemen, or the better sort, traditionally were not defined or identified by what they did, but by who they were. They had avocations, not vocations. The great eighteenth-century French naturalist the Comte de Buffon did not like to think of himself as anyone other than “a gentleman amusing myself with natural history.” He did not want to be called a “naturalist,” or even a “great naturalist.” “Naturalists, linkboys, dentists, etc.”—these, said Buffon, were “people who live by their work; a thing ill suited to a gentleman.” The fifth Duke of Devonshire knew exactly his cousin’s status: “He is not a gentleman; he works.”67 Clergymen, doctors, and lawyers were not yet modern professionals, working long hours for a living like common artisans. Their gentry status depended less on their professional skills than on other sources— on family, wealth, or a college education in the liberal arts—and those doctors, lawyers, and clergymen who had none of these were therefore something less than gentlemen: pettifoggers, charlatans, or quacks.

  Without understanding the age-old belief, as John Locke had expressed it, that “trade is wholly inconsistent with a gentleman’s calling,” we will never be able to fully comprehend Franklin’s career or his reputation following his death. Dr. Johnson defined the word “mechanic” as “mean, servile; of mean occupation.” Such mechanics or artisans were supposed to know their place. So in 1753 when printer Hugh Gaines attempted to defend himself in writing against opponents of his New-York Mercury, he was forced to apologize for his boldness. He was wrong, he said, “to appear in print in any other Manner, than what merely pertains to the Station in Life in which I am placed.”68 In the eighteenth century artisans and mechanics—shoemakers, coopers, silversmiths, printers—all those who worked for a living, especially with their hands, no matter how wealthy, no matter how many employees they managed, could never legitimately claim the status of gentleman. Even a great painter with noble aspirations like John Singleton Copley was socially stigmatized because he worked with his hands. Copley painted the portraits of dozens of distinguished colonial gentlemen, and he knew what his patrons thought of his art. For them, Copley said bitterly in 1767, painting was “no more than any other useful trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a Carpenter tailor or shoemaker.”69

  THE MIDDLING SORTS

  By the first third of the eighteenth century this dichotomous social structure was changing, and changing rapidly. The astonishing growth of commerce, trade, and manufacturing in the English-speaking world was creating hosts of new people who could not easily be fitted into either of the two basic social categories. Commercial farmers, master artisans, traders, shopkeepers, petty merchants—ambitious “middling” men, as they were increasingly called—were acquiring not only wealth but some learning and some awareness of the world and were eager to distance themselves from the “vulgar herd” of ordinary people. Already there were thinkers like Daniel Defoe who were trying to explain and justify these emerging middling people, including the “working trades, who labour hard but feel no want.”70 These were people who more and more prided themselves on their industriousness and frugality and their separation from the common idleness and dissipation of the gentry above them and the poor beneath them. These were the beginni
ngs of what would become the shopkeepers, traders, clerks, and businessmen of the new middle class of the nineteenth century.71

  This was the incipient middling world that Franklin entered in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and no one epitomized it in all of its aspirations and ambitions better than he did. Almost immediately after returning to Philadelphia in 1726, he revealed his interest in intellectual and literary activities in the city. In effect, he began acquiring some of the attributes of a gentleman while still remaining one of the common working people. In 1727 he organized a group of artisans who met weekly for learned conversation—a printer, several clerks, a glazier, two surveyors, a shoemaker, a cabinetmaker, and subsequently “a young Gentleman of some Fortune,” named Robert Grace, who did not have to work for a living.72 Calling themselves first the Leather Apron, then the Junto (perhaps because they had admitted a gentleman, and the mechanics’ title was no longer applicable), they aimed at self-improvement and doing good for the society.

  Not that they ignored their businesses and the making of money. At their meetings they asked themselves such questions as “Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?” or “Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate.?”73 It was this kind of aspiring and prosperous middling man that was beginning to challenge the hierarchical network of privilege and patronage that dominated eighteenth-century society, and in the process blurring the traditionally sharp social division between gentlemen and commoners.

  Already Franklin’s field of vision extended far beyond the boundaries of Philadelphia, and even of Pennsylvania. In 1731 he toyed with the idea of forming a United Party for Virtue that would organize “the Virtuous and good Men of all Nations into a regular Body, to be govern’d by suitable good and wise Rules, which good and wise Men may probably be more unanimous in their Obedience to, than common People are to common Laws.”74 In that same year he discovered just the organization he was looking for: Freemasonry.

  FREEMASONRY

  Although the origins of Masonry supposedly went back centuries, it was only in 1717 in England that it had become the modern secret fraternity that expressed Enlightenment values. The institution, which worked to blur the distinction between gentlemen and commoners, was made for someone like Franklin. Although fewer than one in ten of its members in Philadelphia were artisans, Masonry became a means by which those men—usually the most ambitious and wealthy artisans—could mingle with members of the upper social ranks without themselves formally becoming gentlemen. (Maybe for that reason many of the gentry elite did not take their own membership as seriously as they might otherwise have.) Most of the Masonic artisans tended to belong to those crafts, like printing, that involved close association with gentlemen or large amounts of capital, and because of the high fees involved in membership they tended to be fairly well off. Since Masonry emphasized benevolence and sociability, all those members of the brotherhood who were still working artisans and tradesmen could believe that they were nevertheless participating in the world of genteel politeness and thus were separated from the vulgar and barbaric lower orders beneath them. For such men Masonry became a kind of halfway house to gentility. Although the brothers wore aprons, a reminder of the organization’s artisanal roots, their aprons were not the leather ones of common craftsmen but instead were made of soft white lambskin, befitting their quasi-genteel status.75

  With Franklin’s affable nature and his obsession with benevolence, not to mention his rapidly growing wealth, he was naturally attracted to the organization. He joined the St. John’s Lodge of Free Masons, the earliest known lodge in America. It satisfied his growing desire to dominate affairs. Knowing that only a “few in Public Affairs act from a meer View of the Good of their Country, whatever they may pretend,” he wanted to be one of those few. He still thought that his projected United Party for Virtue, which the Masonic society resembled, could contain artisans and tradesmen like him. He thought one of the functions of his proposed party was to have its members give “their Advice Assistance and Support to each other in promoting one another’s Interest, Business and Advancement in Life.”76

  Freemasonry more than fulfilled Franklin’s Enlightenment dreams of establishing a party for virtue, and he became an enthusiastic and hardworking member of the fraternity. Two years after he joined St. John’s Lodge in Philadelphia, he drafted its bylaws and became its warden. A year later, in 1734, he printed the Constitutions of the Free-Masons, the first Masonic book in America. A month later he became master of St. John’s Lodge. Eventually he became the grand master of all the lodges in the colony of Pennsylvania. No organization could have been more congenial to Franklin, and although he seldom mentioned the organization in his correspondence, he remained a Mason throughout his life. Not only was Masonry dedicated to the promotion of virtue throughout the world, but this Enlightenment fraternity gave Franklin contacts and connections that helped him in his business.

  CIVIC AFFAIRS

  Franklin, as he said in his Autobiography, “always thought that one Man of tolerable Abilities may work great Changes, and Accomplish great Affairs among Mankind, if he first forms a good Plan and ... makes the Execution of that same Plan his sole Study and Business.”77 To the young Franklin it made no difference whether this man of tolerable abilities was an artisan or not. He had set out from the beginning to demonstrate that middling sorts of craftsmen, tradesmen, and shopkeepers like himself could fulfill this Enlightenment hope in Philadelphia.

  In 1731 Franklin and the other members of the Junto organized a subscription lending library, the Library Company, which would enable subscribers to have access to many more books than they otherwise would. Although he was the originator of the library, he soon came to realize that people were suspicious of a mere printer soliciting money and objected to his raising his reputation above that of his neighbors. Consequently, he decided to remain in the background and pass off his library as “a Scheme of a Number of Friends.” By his willingness to deny himself credit, his “Affair went on more smoothly," a lesson he applied when he came to promote subsequent ventures. As he later said, with some excusable exaggeration, the Library Company became “the Mother of all the North American Subscription Libraries now so numerous.... These Libraries had improv’d the general Conversation of the Americans, [and] made the common Tradesmen & Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries.”78

  This was just one part of his civic activity. In 1729 he wrote a pamphlet promoting the printing of paper money, which was a boon for “every industrious Tradesman” and all those who bought and sold goods. (It was also a boon to those printers like Franklin who received government contracts to print the paper money.) With a sufficient supply of paper currency, wrote Franklin, “Business will be carried on more freely, and Trade be universally enlivened by it.” Although he tried to assure gentlemen-creditors and others who lived on fixed incomes that they should not fear such paper currency, he knew that these leisured gentlemen were not the real source of prosperity in the society. It was the “Labouring and Handicrafts Men" who were “the chief Strength and Support of a People.”79

  But Franklin was not just interested in creating wealth in the community. No civic project was too large or too small for his interest. Because of the ever present danger of fire, he advised people on how to carry hot coals from one room to another, how to keep chimneys safe, how to organize fire companies for the city, and how to insure themselves against the damages of fire. He worked hard to promote inoculation against smallpox in the face of strong opposition, taking the position of the Mathers, which his brother James’s paper had opposed in 1721.80 To make the city streets safe he proposed organized night watchmen to be supported by taxes. To earn support for a hospital to be open free of charge to the poor of the city he concocted the idea of matching grants and persuaded the Pennsylvania General Assembly to put up £2000 if the same amount could be raised privately. To deal with smoky chim
neys and poor indoor heating he invented his Pennsylvania stove. Almost single-handedly he made life notably more comfortable for his fellow citizens and helped to create a civic society for the middling inhabitants of Philadelphia. Individually, these were small matters perhaps, but they were all designed to add to the sum of human happiness—which after all was what the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was all about. “Human Felicity,” Franklin noted, “is produc’d not so much by great Pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day.”81

  FRANKLIN’S AWKWARD MIDDLING STATUS

  With all his success Franklin found himself caught between two worlds, between that of aspiring artisans and tradesmen and that of wealthy gentlemen, with whom he mingled constantly. Because he came to believe that “common Tradesmen and Farmers” in America were “as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries,” he thought commoners in America often expected to pass as gentlemen more easily than elsewhere. He had discovered earlier in his life that an ordinary person with the right sponsorship could be admitted to the society of gentlemen. When he and James Ralph had boarded their ship to sail to England in 1724, they “were forc’d to take up with a Berth in the Steerage,” since “none on board knowing us, [we] were considered as ordinary Persons.” But when Colonel John French, justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, later came on board, recognized the eighteen-year-old Franklin, and paid him “great Respect,” he was “more taken Notice of,” and he and Ralph were immediately invited “by the other Gentlemen to come into the Cabin.”82