The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (19 page)

Almost before they had set up their press and sorted their types, the partners greeted their first customer. Franklin’s reputation was abroad in the city, and when a stranger to town inquired on the street where he might find a printer, an acquaintance of Franklin’s directed him to the new shop. Expressing a sentiment repeated by many other successful entrepreneurs, Franklin remembered, “This countryman’s five shillings being our first fruits, and coming so seasonably, gave me more pleasure than any crown I have since earned.”

Other friends and acquaintances sent more business Franklin’s way. Joseph Breintnall, a well-connected Quaker merchant, scrivener (that is, copyist), conversationalist, and occasional poet, procured for Franklin
and Meredith the printing of forty sheets (comprising 160 pages) of the authorized history of the Quakers. Franklin devoted particular diligence to this job, as Keimer had the contract for the balance of the book, and a certain spirit of competition entered into the work. Franklin resolved to print a sheet a day, beyond the smaller jobs that walked through the door. Quite often this required working till nearly midnight; in at least one instance, when a slip reduced two set pages to ruin, he worked well into the next morning.

Besides the benefit of finishing the job on schedule, Franklin appreciated the positive impression he was making on the sober and hardworking Quakers. “This industry visible to our neighbors began to give us character and credit,” he remembered. Many of the merchants, who gathered for refreshment and the exchange of business intelligence at the Every-Night Club, wondered at Franklin and Meredith’s boldness in beginning their business when Philadelphia already had two printers and was hardly clamoring for a third. Those without personal knowledge of Franklin asserted that the new enterprise must surely fail. Yet individuals who observed Franklin at work argued a contrary view. Patrick Baird, a surgeon who passed Franklin’s shop regularly, explained that Franklin’s devotion to work excelled anything he had ever seen. The earliest risers found Franklin at his frame before dawn; the latest revelers saw him there after everyone else had retired.

Unfortunately, even as Franklin was earning credibility for the new partnership, Hugh Meredith was squandering it. Perhaps Franklin became distracted by the effort required to meet his quota of four pages of Quaker history per day and had less time to devote to the cure of Meredith’s character; perhaps Meredith listened less to Franklin’s advice now that he was a partner rather than a subordinate. Whatever the cause, Meredith resumed his alcoholic habits and soon proved a burden and an embarrassment. Franklin’s friends advised him to dissolve the partnership. Franklin demurred, partly from a feeling of responsibility to Meredith and his father, who had made this venture possible, and partly from a lack of funds to buy out his partner.

Franklin may well have reflected—thinking back on his experiences with John Collins and James Ralph—that his choice of associates was not always the best. He doubtless weighed various devices for ending his relationship with Meredith. In the meantime he redoubled his efforts in the shop, both to make up for what Meredith was not doing and to make clear to those merchants at the Every-Night Club which member of the partnership was doing all the work.

Yet business
hardly filled Franklin’s world, even in these difficult early days. Always the improver, in the autumn of 1727 he organized a club of inquirers into matters moral, political, and scientific. Many years later Franklin told Samuel Mather, Cotton’s son, that Cotton Mather’s
Essays to Do Good
provided the model for the Junto, as Franklin’s clique called itself. If so, Franklin borrowed the model but left the content back in Boston, for rather than the stern religiosity that informed Mather’s intellectual world, a skeptical secularism marked the proceedings of the Junto. New members were required to answer four questions: whether they had any disrespect for current members (a negative answer was anticipated); whether they loved mankind in general, regardless of religion or profession (yes); whether anyone ought to be harmed in his person, property, or reputation, merely on account of his opinions or way of worship (no); and whether they loved and pursued truth for truth’s sake and would impartially impart what they found of it to others (yes). Topics of discussion included why fog formed on the outside of a tankard of cold water in the summer, whether the importation of servants advanced the wealth of America, how far temperance in diet ought to be taken, and in what consisted human happiness.

The group met on Friday evenings, first at a tavern, later at a house hired for the purpose. To guide discussions, Franklin formulated a set of queries. Had members encountered any citizen failing in his business, and if so, what was the cause? Conversely, were certain citizens thriving, and why? Had any citizen accomplished a particularly praiseworthy feat? How might it be emulated? Were there any egregious errors that ought to be avoided? Had members met any persons suffering from the ill effects of intemperance or passion? Any persons benefiting from the virtuous opposites of those vices? Was anyone departing on a voyage, and might such person transport a message or material item for someone staying home? Had any strangers arrived in town, and had they been welcomed? Were there any young tradesmen who might be encouraged by the Junto’s patronage? Were there any worthy citizens to whom one Junto member might be introduced by another?

The group also cultivated the literary arts. Common readings were assigned; these provided the grist for debate. By turns the members raised particular issues of morals, philosophy, and civic life. Every three
months each member was required to read an essay of his own composition on a subject of his choosing. Other members would critique the content and form of expression. In order to maintain a constructive atmosphere, the rule Franklin had established for himself—to avoid overly assertive or directly contradictory expressions, in favor of suggestions, hypotheses, and polite questions—was eventually applied to the group as a whole. Failure to follow the rule resulted in small but embarrassing fines.

Franklin’s mates in the Junto were a diverse crew united chiefly by an inquiring spirit and a devotion to self-improvement. Joseph Breintnall, the merchant and scrivener, was substantially older than Franklin; outside his work he loved poetry and natural history. Thomas Godfrey, the glazier, was also a mathematician and inventor; he devised an improvement on the quadrant then commonly in use. Nicholas Scull and William Parsons might have employed Godfrey’s quadrant, for each became surveyor general of the colony. Otherwise Scull was a bibliophile, Parsons a cobbler and astrologer. William Maugridge was a cabinetmaker, William Coleman a merchant’s clerk. Robert Grace was a gentleman, which meant that, unlike the others, he did not have to work for a living. Hugh Meredith, Franklin’s partner, was also a Junto member, as were Stephen Potts and George Webb, his former protégés at Keimer’s.

However much the Junto drew on the interests and talents of its membership, it clearly was Franklin’s creation. His was the initiative that started it, his the spirit that informed it. Franklin took pains not to dominate the discussions; those fines for unseemly self-assertion were reminders to him as much as to the others. Yet if any group ever reflected the philosophical outlook and social sensibilities of one of its members, the Junto reflected Franklin’s. This was all the more remarkable—and perhaps the plainest testament to his emerging leadership skills—in that he was nearly the youngest member of the group, with no claim to primacy but intellectual and moral force. Lacking wealth or other sources of conventional influence, Franklin led by example.

The more
metaphysical of the Junto’s discussions drew Franklin back to the issues he had examined in his
Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity.
At that time the harsh reaction of his employer Palmer had caused him to question the practicality of his conclusions, if not their veracity;
yet the more he thought about it, the more difficulty he had separating truth from practicality. Franklin was an original and independent thinker, but he never flouted conventional opinion for the thrill of the flouting—as his brother James did, for example. Having made his youthful statement of rebellion by fleeing Boston, Franklin felt no compulsion to redundancy.

Temperamentally, Franklin was a skeptic rather than a rebel. Indeed, his skepticism made him suspicious of many rebels, who were often as zealous in their quest for change as the most ardent defenders of the status quo were in their defense of what was. His skepticism was probably congenital; such central traits of personality typically are. When it surfaced during his teens, at a time when his reading was rapidly expanding his intellectual horizons, it made him increasingly dubious of biblical revelation. Why should God speak to one insignificant desert tribe, to the exclusion of the vast majority of the human race? Yet unwilling—and in those pre-Darwinian days intellectually unable—to dispense with divinity entirely, Franklin gravitated toward the mechanistic approach of deism. One book written against deism by the chemist Robert Boyle in fact pushed Franklin further in a deistic direction. “The arguments of the deists which were quoted to be refuted,” he wrote, “appeared to me much stronger than the refutations.”

Franklin’s skeptical soul, however, was not really attuned to theology; it resonated less to first causes than to secondary effects. And the effects of deism struck him as unsettling. Deism, he said in his autobiography, had “perverted” his former friends John Collins and James Ralph and had contributed to his abandonment of his betrothal to Deborah Read, in favor of his “foolish intrigues with low women.” (This infidelity “at times gave me great trouble,” he said, though he did nothing then to rectify it.) In any event, the more he reflected on deism, the less it appealed to him. “I began to suspect that this doctrine, though it might be true, was not very useful.” Reflecting further, he guessed that his dismissal of right and wrong in his
Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity
had been too clever, which was to say not clever at all. Truth, sincerity, integrity, and other virtues did indeed exist; they were what made human happiness possible—and the fact that human happiness
was
possible was something anyone not blinded by his own rhetorical virtuosity could see. Franklin remained too much the skeptic to return to revelation as understood by the Cotton Mathers of the world, but now he conceded that if what passed for revelation revealed little about God, it might reveal much
about man. “I entertained an opinion, that though certain actions might not be bad
because
they were forbidden by it, or good
because
it commanded them, yet probably those actions might be forbidden
because
they were bad for us, or commanded
because
they were beneficial to us.”

This inversion of moral cause and effect came as an epiphany to Franklin. It allowed him to reconcile his skepticism with his practicality. A man had to conform his conduct to prevailing mores if he wished to get ahead; he did
not
have to conform his convictions to the prevailing theology. With a sigh of relief almost audible from a distance of nearly three centuries, Franklin codified his new thinking in what he called his “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” dated November 20, 1728. Borrowing from Cato, he declared, “I hold: If there is a Power above us (and that there is all nature cries aloud, through all her works), He must delight in virtue, and that which He delights in must be happy.” As the deists did, Franklin measured the immensity of the universe against the minusculity of the earth and the inhabitants thereof, and concluded from this that it was “great vanity in me to suppose that the Supremely Perfect does in the least regard such an inconsiderable nothing as man.” Moreover, this Supremely Perfect had absolutely no need to be worshipped by humans; He was infinitely above such sentiments or actions. Yet if worship filled no divine purpose, it did serve a human need. “I think it seems required of me, and my duty as a man, to pay divine regards to
something.”