What was wrong with Benjamin Franklin? Philadelphia’s eligible young women refused his courtship overtures in 1728, 1729, and early 1730. His failure makes no sense. The evidence suggests that he did not court above his artisan ‘‘class.’’ No gossip at the time or later and no correspondence mention Franklin’s courtships. Had he expressed interest in one of Philadelphia’s fashionable young ladies—like a daughter of James Logan, Andrew Hamilton, Governor Patrick Gordon, or a Pemberton or Norris, records of his presumption would probably exist in the voluminous papers of the Logan, Norris, or Pemberton families—or in the backbiting comments...

Members of the Republic of Letters—that eighteenth-century unorganized international circle of learned persons who constituted the writers and thinkers of Western countries—wrote often on ethics, virtue, and religion. How to conduct one’s life? The question began with manners, a major subject of such popular writings as theSpectatorandTatleressays, but the question involved attitudes, beliefs, and actions. These, too, were subjects of popular essays. Literati like Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, and Montesquieu in France; Lord Shaftesbury, Bernard de Mandeville, and Jonathan Swift in England; Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Lord Kames in Scotland; and numerous others wrote...

In 1725 and 1726, Franklin read about Masonic meetings in the London papers. He probably met John Theophilus Desagulier, a founder of English Freemasonry, through a fellow Bostonian, Isaac Greenwood, who was Desagulier’s assistant as experimenter at the Royal Society. When a group of Pennsylvanians started a Masonic lodge in 1730, Franklin evidently thought he would like to join, but he was not asked. He thereupon gently coerced the members into electing him. After spotting a piece ridiculing Masonry in the LondonDaily Journalof 15 August 1730, he revised and reprinted it in thePennsylvania Gazetteon 8 December....

Franklin spent more time and care on the Library Company than any other civic project. He founded it, attended its meetings faithfully as a director from 1731 to 1757, acted as the librarian in 1733 and 1734, served as the secretary from 1746 to 1757, became its book agent in London from 1757 to 1762, served again as a director from 1762 to 1764 and again as its London book agent from 1765 to 1775. No other project involved so much of his time and energy for so long, and no project pleased him more to write about in the...

Between 1731 and 1736 Franklin wrote more than twenty essays (not discussed in other chapters) on such varied subjects as consumerism, vanity, writing, shopkeeping, and dramdrinking.¹ The ‘‘Casuist’’ series began in thePennsylvania Gazetteon 9 December 1729. By 25 January 1731/2, it had become an inquiry into moral complexity. Franklin abandoned that approach (which probably interested him more than his readers) on 26 June 1732 when he took up a topic now common to tabloid journalism: adultery. He wrote a follow-up piece on 3 July but decided that it was too risqué and suppressed it. About the same time...

In 1732, Andrew Bradford’sAmerican Weekly Mercurywas still Philadelphia’s dominant newspaper, partly because Bradford as postmaster was thought to have better information and distribution than the upstart Franklin, and partly because theMercuryhad been the first and only Philadelphia newspaper until three years before. But Franklin and theGazettewere gaining customers, and Bradford and theMercurywere losing them. Thus Bradford resented Franklin. Bradford also was unhappy with Andrew Hamilton, for the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives had replaced him with Franklin as printer of the assembly’sVotes and Proceedingsand other official printings. Consequently,...

Almanacs were the staple product of a colonial printer. They sold more than all other books and pamphlets combined. Along with such job printings as handbills and forms, they provided the livelihood of most colonial printers. Families with few possessions often owned a Bible and a current almanac. The one printed piece that people purchased annually served eighteenth-century families as a calendar and date book. Sheet almanacs (printed on a single sheet of paper) sold for one pence retail and were little more than the briefest calendars. The larger almanacs (more expensive and thus, to a printer, more profitable) sold...

Franklin’s love for and use of proverbs was partially a deliberate literary and political statement, identifying himself with the common man. He frequently used them in other writings besidesPoor Richard.¹ His informal and often colloquial prose and his use of proverbs were among the reasons that some later would-be aristocratic Americans scorned him.² But his prose style, as I pointed out in concluding the discussion of Franklin as a journalist (Volume 1, Chapter 18), became characteristic of American journalism and American literature. Franklin knew the eighteenth-century theories concerning writing and agreed with Joseph Addison in preferring a simple style,...

Franklin’s editorials, news reporting, and even many reprinted items in thePennsylvania Gazettereveal his political positions. Eighteenth-century society was more hierarchical than today’s, but Franklin was more egalitarian than most citizens of his society. Further, in his Americanism, he was nearly sui generis. Though some scholars have thought that he was not involved in Pennsylvania politics before being elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1751 and others that he at first identified with the Proprietary (or Prerogative) Party,¹ in fact, he primarily and frequently sided with the Popular or Quaker Party throughout his career as a printer in Philadelphia...

Franklin’s writings in the Hemphill controversy were among his errors as a young man. He foolishly opposed public opinion. Later, in a letter of 13 December 1757, when giving reasons against satirizing religion, he wrote, “He that spits against the Wind, spits in his own Face.” He may well have had in mind his writings defending Hemphill. The Hemphill affair was the first heresy trial in American Presbyterian history.¹ The Reverend Samuel Hemphill came to Philadelphia in 1734 from Ireland and became an assistant to the Reverend Jedediah Andrews, minister of Philadelphia’s Presbyterian church. Franklin thought Hemphill gave “excellent Discourses”...

Though his major writings and scientific achievements were yet to come, the essential Franklin emerged in these years of early adulthood—a person of great self-discipline, a shrewd businessman, an extraordinarily hard worker, a brilliant man of letters, a doer of good, and a civic-minded citizen. He was also proud and sometimes rash; moreover, he could be a subtle and fierce enemy.

In a common-law marriage, Franklin took Deborah Read Rogers to wife on 1 June 1730. Since her former husband was rumored to have a wife in England, and since he had absconded in December 1727 owing money, the...

Franklin loved and identified with Deborah. Their great tragedy was the death of their son Francis at age four in 1736. Deborah, like Franklin, was approximately thirty years old at the time. Since they had only one child in their first six years of marriage, it seemed unlikely that the couple would have another. The thought must have been an unhappy one: they were both from large families, and they had probably expected to have several children. But as the years passed and Deborah progressed through her early and middle thirties without a second child, they probably resigned themselves to...

Franklin entered Pennsylvania politics when he advocated a paper currency in the suppressed Busy-Body No. 8 and again when he published a pamphlet titledThe Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currencyin 1729 (Volume 1, Chapters 16 and 17). Despite being appointed printer to the assembly in 1730, Franklin continued to take political positions that were sometimes unpopular with each party. He defended Andrew Hamilton in 1733 with “A Half-Hour’s Conversation with a Friend” (1:333–38), thereby irritating both the Proprietary Party and elements of the Quaker Party. He urged on 6 March 1733/4 that a Pennsylvania militia be...

Most urban colonial houses were made of wood and were heated during the winter by brick fireplaces. Every colonial city had occasional fires, all of which were potentially disastrous. At the cry of “Fire! Fire!” citizens rushed from bed to help fight the inferno. Thieves and crooks as well as honest citizens turned out; criminals often looted burning buildings. But most people tried to help, bringing their own buckets to the fires, manning pumps, trying to save the goods of threatened or burning households, and sometimes performing heroic feats. Franklin, like almost all able-bodied city dwellers, fought fires. He knew...

Despite initiating several civic projects and fulfilling numerous responsibilities, Franklin devoted most of his time from 1736 through 1747 to earning a living. He was primarily a printer and publisher, but peripheral aspects of printing and shopkeeping developed into major businesses. The small retail shop accompanying most printing presses developed into a profitable retail store. The few common books sold by most printers were constantly augmented until Franklin’s shop became an important new and secondhand bookstore. The necessity for constant quantities of paper motivated Franklin to become the most important wholesale paper merchant in the colonies. And the newspaper editor’s...

Franklin was the most civic-minded colonial American. All his life he lived in cities (though the largest ones in colonial America would be considered small towns today) and cared about their healthiness, safety, and beauty. His major projects are well-known: the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), the Union Fire Company (1736), the Academy and College of Philadelphia (1748), the Philadelphia Contributionship for Insuring Homes from Loss by Fire (1751), and, with Dr. Thomas Bond, the Pennsylvania Hospital (1751). They were all successful and, transformed, all exist today. The first two have been discussed above, and the others will appear in...

The most famous minister of the mid-eighteenth century and the most famous scientist of the day became frequent collaborators and good friends. George Whitefield and Franklin came together at first through reciprocal business interests and later joined together and attempted to help one another in their efforts to do good. It was a successful collaboration. Whitefield could be considered the first media sensation of the modern world, and Franklin, as publisher of thePennsylvania Gazette,helped make him so. Whitefield gave Franklin his sermons and journals to print (these became Franklin’s most successful large book imprints); Franklin celebrated Whitefield’s orphanage,...

Natural philosophy (the eighteenth-century name for science) gradually replaced theology and moral philosophy as the primary subject of Franklin’s writings and intellectual life.¹ But just as those subjects remained crucial to him throughout the second half of his life, so natural philosophy was vital to his intellectual life during his first forty-two years. He read the major influential scientific works of his day (though he probably did not have sufficient mathematics for Sir Isaac Newton’sPrincipia), took the scientific courses offered by the itinerant lecturers such as Isaac Greenwood and Dr. Archibald Spencer, shared the interests of the major American...

That science and technology constitute not a national but an international world is true today, but in the eighteenth century, the primary constituency of the Third Realm (i.e. the existence of an international order in addition to the state and the church) was the entire world of learning, especially literature. The leading members of the Republic of Letters were such writers as Milton, Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, and, after 1752, Franklin.¹ They were well-known not only in their own countries but throughout the Western world. Most members of the Republic of Letters were identified with either literature or science, but Franklin...

When the Pennsylvania Assembly elected Franklin its clerk in 1736, he achieved a position as a member of the Pennsylvania establishment. He owed the place to his friend Andrew Hamilton, Speaker of the assembly, but Franklin was recognized as an up-and-coming Philadelphian. As printer to the legislature (1730), founder of the Library Company (1731), grand master of the Masons (1734), and founder of the Union Fire Company (1736), Franklin was becoming Philadelphia’s indispensable citizen. As clerk of the assembly, he took the assembly’s minutes, and as the printer for the assembly, he published them. The clerk’s job helped him maintain...