The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (8 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 beginnings of what would become the shopkeepers, traders, clerks, and businessmen of the new middle class of the nineteenth century.
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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.
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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.?”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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