The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Page 7
Yet he knew that such socializing was often the consequence of gentry condescension. He knew too that no matter how successful and wealthy he had become, he still remained a laborer in the eyes of most of the gentry, and thus one of the common people or “meaner Sort” who had to work for a living as a printer. The gentry knew how to put a mere mechanic, no matter how wealthy or talented, in his place.
In 1740 Franklin came up with the idea of starting a magazine in Philadelphia and offered the job of editing it to John Webbe, a lawyer he knew. But Webbe took the idea to Franklin’s competitor Andrew Bradford, who quickly brought out The American Magazine. (The next year in his Almanack, Poor Richard proclaimed: “If you would keep your Secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.”) A week later Franklin announced that he would publish his own periodical, The General Magazine. At the same time he told the world that he had originated the idea of a magazine and that Webbe had betrayed him. Webbe, the lawyer, using the usual gentry put-down of a mechanic, replied that Franklin had never been expected to participate in the magazine “in any other capacity than that of a meer Printer.”83
This was just the sort of sneer that would have made Franklin both angry and uncomfortable. He naturally preferred to call himself a member of the new emerging middling sort. But when confronted with the dichotomous social division favored by the gentry—“the BETTER SORT of People” set against “the meaner Sort”—he was willing to be lumped with those he considered to constitute the populace, which, he pointed out, “your Demosthenes’ and Ciceroes, your Sidneys and Trenchards never approached ... but with Reverence.” Writing in his newspaper in 1740 as Obadiah Plainman, Franklin let loose some of his resentment at those who used the expression “the BETTER SORT of People.” Such gentlemen, he said with a good deal of scorn, looked upon “the Rest of their Fellow Subjects in the same Government with Contempt, and consequently regard them as Mob and Rabble,” who constituted nothing more than “a stupid Herd, in whom the Light of Reason is extinguished.” In contrast to this arrogant “better Sort,” he said, he was but “a poor ordinary Mechanick of this City, obliged to work hard for the Maintenance of myself, my Wife, and several small Children.”84 Yet, of course, he knew that in reality he was anything but “a poor ordinary Mechanick.” His genteel newspaper opponent Richard Peters, a former clergyman and secretary of the colony’s land office, knew that too. When pressed to defend his use of the “better Sort,” Peters declared that he could think of no better example of such persons than those who were members of the Library Company—to which Franklin, as Obadiah Plainman, had already admitted in the newspaper exchanges to belonging. If “poor ordinary Mechanicks” could be classed as members of “the better Sort,” the gentry’s dichotomous social categories were not working well at all. More so perhaps than anyone in colonial America, Franklin was living in two social worlds simultaneously.85
Franklin’s proposals for education vividly reveal the ambivalence he felt as someone caught between the better and meaner sorts. As early as 1743 he had drawn up plans for an academy in Philadelphia, but it was not until 1749 that he laid them out in a pamphlet, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania. He originally wanted a school dedicated to teaching the English language and not Latin. The school, in other words, was mainly designed for young men with origins similar to his own— tradesmen and mechanics who wished to better themselves. But, as he recalled with some resentment in an unpublished tract written at the end of his life, this plan was foiled by a number of “Persons of Wealth and Learning, whose Subscriptions and Countenance we should need,” and who believed that the school “ought to include the learned Languages.”86 With his original plan for an English academy transformed into a traditional Latin school favoring the sons of the gentry, Franklin had to create a separate English school that he hoped would fulfill his original intentions. “Youth would come out of this School,” he wrote in a piece published in 173-1, “fitted for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except wherein Languages are required; and tho’ unacquainted with any antient or foreign Tongue, they will be Masters of their own, which is of more immediate and general Use.”87 Unfortunately, however, the gentry trustees who were in charge of both schools so discriminated against the English school in favor of the Latin school—paying the Latin head twice as much as the English head, for example, even though he taught fewer students—that the English school eventually dwindled into insignificance. At the end of his life, however, Franklin had some consolation to discover that things had changed. The executor of his estate told him that “public opinion"had now “undergone a revolution,” and was now “undoubtedly in favor of an English Education, in spite of the prejudices of the learned on this subject.”88
Franklin’s attempt to form a philosophical society revealed a similar tension between the different worlds of tradesmen and gentry. In 1743 he published A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America, in which he suggested the formation of a society composed of “Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies,” a kind of intercolonial version of his old Junto. This organization, to be called “The American Philosophical Society" would promote “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniences or Pleasures of life.” He got the society on its feet, but at the outset it was not as active as Franklin had hoped. “The Members of our Society are very idle Gentlemen,” he complained to the New York official and scientist Cadwallader Colden in 1745. “They will take no Pains.”89 Apparently the ambitious middling sorts that had made up his Junto had had more energy and more intellectual curiosity than the gentry.
Despite all his gentlemanly activities—his philanthropic ventures and his practical projects for self-education in the art of virtue— Franklin still saw himself as a printer and businessman and not a gentleman in these early Philadelphia years. But if he was not a gentleman, he was obviously not a commoner either. Instead, he had become the principal spokesman for the growing numbers of artisans, shopkeepers, and other middling sorts in Philadelphia who were his main supporters in all of his civic endeavors. He identified completely with these middling people: “Our Families and little Fortunes,” he said, were “as dear to us as any Great Man’s can be to him.” And he was not at all embarrassed to call himself publicly “an honest Tradesman.”90
“THE MOLATTO GENTLEMAN”
Although he was constantly mingling with gentlemen, he did not yet think of turning himself into one; that is, he had not yet imagined himself having all the qualities that would allow him to retire from his business and shed his leather apron entirely. However wealthy an artisan he might become, and Franklin’s income was growing rapidly, this young printer well knew that entering into the status of a gentleman was not a simple matter, and he was not at all sure that he even wanted to try.
There were many people, he wrote in an anonymous newspaper piece in 1733, who, “by their Industry or good Fortune, from mean Beginnings find themselves in Circumstances a little more easy.” Many of these people were immediately seized by “an Ambition... to become Gentlefolks." But it was “no easy Thing for a Clown or a Labourer, on a sudden to hit in all respects, the natural and easy Manner of those who have been genteely educated: And ’tis the Curse of Imitation, that it almost always either under-does or over-does.”
Franklin’s newspaper persona—“an ordinary Mechanick” who prays that “I may always have the Grace to know my self and my Station”— went on to describe the problems faced by the newly wealthy artisan trying to pass as a gentleman. “The true Gentleman, who is well known to be such, can take a Walk, or drink a Glass, and converse freely, if there be occasion, with honest Men of any Degree below him, without degrading or fearing to degrade himself in the least.” In other words, a true gentleman, confident of his status, could condescend with ease. The parvenu was not able to act in this easy manner. Whenever Franklin’s p
ersona witnessed such a person acting “mighty cautious” in company with those who appear to be his inferiors, he knew that that person was “some new Gentleman, or rather half Gentleman, or Mungrel, an unnatural Compound of Earth and Brass like the Feet of Nebuchadnezzar’s Image.”
The same was true of women who did not know how to act with their supposed inferiors. If Franklin’s artisan persona found “some young Woman Mistress of a new fine furnished House, treating me with a kind of Superiority, a distant sort of Freedom, and high Manner of Condescension that might become a Governor’s Lady, I cannot help imagining her to be some poor Girl that is but lately married.” Or if she acted in a “very haughty and imperious” manner, “I conclude that ’tis not long since she was somebody’s Servant Maid.”
These kinds of upstarts had the respect of neither the gentry nor the commoners. “They are the Ridicule and Contempt of both sides.” A “lumpish stupid” artisan who “kept to his natural Sphere” may not have been envied by his fellow artisans, but “none of us despis’d him.” Yet when he got “a little Money, the Case is exceedingly alter’d.”
Without Experience of Men or Knowledge of Books, or even common Wit, the vain Fool thrusts himself into Conversation with People of the best Sense and the most polite. All his Absurdities, which were scarcely taken Notice of among us, stand evident among them, and afford them continual Matter of Diversion. At the same time, we below cannot help considering him as a Monkey that climbs a Tree, the higher he goes, the more he shows his Arse.
There were many kinds of “Molattoes" in the world, Franklin concluded—in race, in religion, in politics, in love. “But of all sorts of Molattoes, none appear to me so monstrously ridiculous as the Molatto Gentleman.”91
Since Franklin did not want to appear ridiculous, he was not about to act the gentleman unless he was fully prepared to assume the rank and the rank was fully prepared to accept him. Like Daniel Defoe, who was wrestling with some of the same problems of tradesmen trying to become gentlemen, Franklin knew only too well the nature of the society he lived in. Since Defoe had written that a gentleman was someone “whose Ancestors have at least for some time been rais’d above the Class of Mechanicks,” Franklin knew it would not be easy for him to hoist himself up in one generation.92
Besides, he had the example of the failure of David Harry, who had taken over Samuel Keimer’s print shop, to make him cautious. Earlier Franklin had actually proposed a partnership with Harry, which Harry, said Franklin, “fortunately for me, rejected with Scorn.” Harry, observed Franklin, messed up his life by trying to become a gentleman without having the wherewithal to bring it off. “He was very proud, dress’d like a Gentleman, liv’d expensively, took much diversion and Pleasure abroad, ran in debt, and neglected his Business, upon which all Business left him.”93
Franklin knew better.
FRANKLIN’S WEALTH
If he was not yet one of “the better sort,” as a printer and tradesman Franklin had prospered beyond what anyone could have expected and become wealthier than most of the so-called gentlefolk. Contemporaries never described Franklin in any great detail, and we have no portraits of Franklin during this period of his late twenties and thirties. But we can imagine that he was a fairly tall man, a shade under six feet and well built, perhaps already tending toward that corpulence that was for the eighteenth century a mark of prosperity. He had brown hair, a head that was large in proportion to his body, and a mild and pleasant countenance. He still worked in his printing firm, no doubt more as an editor, writer, and manager of his journeymen and apprentices and his other businesses than as someone who wore a leather apron and set type.
Despite his growing wealth, the several houses on lower Market Street that he rented at various times were modest and unpretentious. Home was still the place where he worked. Attached to his home was a shop where his wife and mother-in-law sold books and stationery and a wide variety of other goods, including soap, cheese from Rhode Island, and bohea tea. Franklin seems to have also acted as agent for the sale of the unexpired indentures of servants and a few slaves. Although apprentices, journeymen, servants, and some relatives, including his mother-in-law, often lodged in the house, Franklin’s immediate family was small. In 1732 Deborah had given birth to a baby boy, Francis, called Franky, who died of smallpox at the age of four, a loss that Franklin never got over. In 1743 the Franklins had a second child, a baby girl, Sarah, called Sally With them lived Franklin’s illegitimate teenage son, William, whom his father increasingly indulged.94
Despite all of his unpretentiousness he could not help making money, a great deal of it. He had a natural genius for business. Not only did he run his printing business successfully, but he never stopped looking out for new opportunities. In 1736 he was appointed clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, which, he said, gave him “a better Opportunity of keeping up an Interest among the Members.” This interest paid off when he became the official printer for the assembly, securing for him the “Business of Printing the Votes, Laws, Paper Money, and other occasional Jobbs for the Public that on the whole were very profitable.”95 Eventually he became the public printer for Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland as well.
Unlike printers in London, who had enough business to specialize exclusively in printing, printers in the colonies always lacked sufficient work to support themselves, and they were generally driven to expand into related fields.96 Franklin was especially adept at adding on new businesses to his printing firm. In 1729 he started a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, which became the leading paper in the colony. With all of his government contracts, mostly from the patronage of the colony’s legislature, it was important for Franklin’s newspaper not to offend people in authority. Therefore he continually voiced the conventional wisdom that he was a mere mechanic, impartially delivering the various views of other people to his readers.
He wrote in his famous “Apology for Printers” (1731) that, as a printer, he was just like any other artisan—a blacksmith, a shoemaker, or a carpenter—an ordinary tradesman, just trying to make a living. Printers “chearfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute.... Being thus continually employ’d in serving all Parties,” he wrote, “Printers naturally acquire a vast Unconcernedness as to the right or wrong Opinions contain’d in what they print; regarding it only as the Matter of their daily labour.”97 This neutral and impartial conception of his role as a printer may have significantly affected his political behavior later on when he was in London as an agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly.98
Most important for Franklin’s income was his launching of an almanac. He considered an almanac “a proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People, who bought scarce any other Books.” By featuring both Poor Richard’s essays and proverbs in the almanac, he “endeavour’d to make it both entertaining and useful.” His almanac soon “came to be in such Demand,” recalled Franklin, “that I reape’d considerable Profit from it, vending annually near ten Thousand.”99 In fact, it became the most successful almanac in all of colonial America. Franklin’s persona Poor Richard noted that his almanac’s printer—who, of course, was also Franklin—was making most of the profit, but “I do not grudge it him; he is a Man I have a great Regard for, and I wish his Profit ten times greater than it is.” (Poor Richard even blamed his printer for the errata in the almanacs.)100
In 1737 Franklin became postmaster of Philadelphia. “Tho’ the salary was small,” he said, “it facilitated the Correspondence that improv’d my Newspaper, encreas’d the Number demanded, as well as the Advertisements to be inserted, so that it came to afford me a very considerable Income.”101 In addition to his store, which brought in a good income, Franklin began as early as 1731 to set up or sponsor printing shops in other colonies, usually by entering into partnerships with younger men who were often his own journeymen—such as Thomas Whitmarsh in South Carolina and James Parker in New York. He supplied presses
and type and other materials, and in return took one third of the profits of his partner’s printing shop for the duration of the contract, which was usually for six years. By 1743 he owned three printing firms in three different colonies and was thinking of opening more.102 Before he was done he had partnerships and other working arrangements with over two dozen individuals all over the colonies, from New England to Antigua.103 He was more than a craftsman; he was an entrepreneur, and an extremely successful one.
We do not know a great deal about his business activities or his income. But we do know that he became a very wealthy man, perhaps one of the richest colonists in the northern parts of the North American continent. His print-shop partnership with David Hall, established in 1748, in itself brought in well over £600 a year on average for him alone, a considerable sum when we realize that Washington’s Mount Vernon was earning only £300 a year in the early 1770s. 104 Between 1756 and 1765 more than £250 annually came to the partnership from work for the government, and this doesn’t include the money Franklin and Hall made from printing the colony’s paper currency.105 Some have estimated that Franklin’s total income eventually reached nearly £2000 a year, twice the salary of Pennsylvania’s governor and ten times the salary of the rector of Franklin’s proposed academy. 106 When we realize that manufacturers in England made about £40 a year and lawyers about £200 a year, we know that Franklin was very well off indeed. Not only did he have his partnerships and his shares in a number of printing businesses in other colonies, but he also established at least eighteen paper mills at one time or another; in fact, he may have been the largest paper dealer in the English-speaking world.107 He also owned a good deal of rental property in Philadelphia and in many coastal towns.108 He was a substantial creditor, practically a banker, with a great amount of money out on loan, some loans as small as two shillings and others as large as £200.109 And throughout much of his life he was deeply involved in land speculation. The fact that in the mid-1740s he refused to acquire exclusive patent rights to his immensely popular and profitable stove on the grounds that his invention offered him “an Opportunity to serve others” suggests that he was already rich enough to begin thinking like a public-spirited gentleman.110