The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (28 page)

The twenty-five charter members included Franklin and friends from the Junto and Library Company, also merchants, city and provincial officials, and various other persons hoping to protect their property from fire. Significantly—and perhaps realistically—the members pledged to protect their own houses, not those of nonmembers. Accordingly, many of those nonmembers formed companies of their own, until much of the city fell under the protection of one company or another. Franklin’s company devoted the fines it collected to purchasing equipment; in 1743 it bought a fire engine like those he had seen in London.

Franklin took as much pride in encouraging the creation of the Philadelphia fire companies as in nearly anything else he did. Writing late in life, after he had visited every city in America and many of those in Europe, he said, “I question whether there is a city in the world better provided with the means of putting a stop to beginning conflagrations; and in fact since those institutions, the city has never lost by fire more than one or two houses at a time.” By then Franklin was a world-renowned scientific and political figure, feted for taming lightning and tyrants; that such a mundane improvement as fire prevention gave him such pleasure reflected his solid grounding in the affairs of ordinary life.

Another
contribution to civic betterment began as an undiluted expression of self-interest. Although Franklin’s
Gazette
was the livelier paper, Bradford’s
Mercury
benefited from its publisher’s second job as postmaster. Not only did this give Bradford first view of news from beyond the city, but his assured circulation via the mail attracted advertisers, who—then as later—supplied a crucial portion of any paper’s revenues.
As if this double advantage were not enough, Bradford forbade his carriers from delivering the
Gazette.

Franklin resented this last measure as pushing competition too far; consequently he felt no compunction about bribing the carriers to disobey their boss and tuck copies of the
Gazette
beneath their saddlebags. For a time he and Bradford engaged in a game of cat and mouse. Eventually, however, the cat got snarled in his own ball of yarn, as Bradford hopelessly tangled the post-office accounts. Bradford’s boss, the postmaster general for America, demanded his resignation. The postmaster general offered the job to Franklin, who accepted readily.

The position paid little directly, and in fact left Franklin liable for the debts of his customers. In those days of uncertain delivery, recipients rather than senders paid the postage on letters. Or did
not
pay: Franklin kept hundreds of customers on credit. Meanwhile
he
had to pay the colonial post office for the charges incurred. Collecting from such a crowd was a headache; more than a few ran years behind.

Franklin had no idea when he took the job in 1737 what he was getting into—in particular, how the post office would pull him into American and then imperial politics. All he knew then was that the job would boost his newspaper business, which it soon did. “Though the salary was small, it facilitated the correspondence that improved my newspaper, increased the number demanded, as well as the advertisements to be inserted, so that it came to afford me a very considerable income.”

As postmaster
, Franklin was among the first to hear of a tempest sweeping across the Atlantic from England, a tempest about to turn much of American life upside down. At the eye of the storm was the most charismatic man Franklin ever met—perhaps the most charismatic man to speak the English language during Franklin’s lifetime. It was said of George Whitefield that he could reduce listeners to tears merely by uttering the word “Mesopotamia.” Charles Wesley wrote of their first meeting, “I saw, I loved, and clasped him to my heart.” An eyewitness described “the awe, the silence, the attention” with which audiences listened to Whitefield. “Many thought,
He spoke as never a man spoke,
before him. So charmed were people with his manner of address, that they shut up their shops, forgot their secular business, and laid aside their schemes for the world.” Another observer was moved to meter:

See! See! He comes, the heav’nly Sound
Flows from his charming Tongue;
Rebellious Men are seiz’d with Fear
With deep Conviction stung.

The object of these effusions was a young man, a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday when Franklin met him in 1739. He was “graceful and well-proportioned,” in the opinion of one who knew him: “his stature rather above middle size. His complexion was very fair. His eyes were of a dark blue colour, and small, but sprightly. He had a squint in one of them, occasioned either by ignorance or the carelessness of the nurse who attended him in the measles, when he was about four years old.” This observer, a Whitefield partisan, took pains to characterize his countenance as “manly”; this may have been a reaction against those who found his features delicate, even effeminate. Whitefield himself was sensitive on this score. Recalling a school play in which he was cast as a girl, he declared, “The remembrance of this has often covered me with confusion of face, and I hope will do so, even to the end of my life.”

By his own account, perhaps magnified for effect, Whitefield spent a dissolute boyhood and youth. He lied, talked dirty, stole from his mother, and indulged in “abominable secret sin.” Yet salvation, of a secular sort, beckoned when he learned of the possibility of attending university at Oxford as a servitor, a student who worked to earn his way. “Will you go to Oxford, George?” his mother implored. He would.

Yet Oxford initially attempted to corrupt him. His classmates habitually engaged in an “excess of riot” and encouraged him to come along. By now at least aware of the evil nature of such a life, Whitefield prayed for the strength to resist temptation.

God answered his prayers by leading him to the brothers Wesley, John and Charles, who had formed a small group devoted to piety, prayer, and an ascetic “method” of living. These “Methodists” were the butt of ridicule of most of Whitefield’s classmates, and at first he attempted to keep his connection secret. But, driven by a deep conviction that he was unworthy of salvation, he soon became more methodical—indeed fanatical—than the Wesleys. He fasted for days at a time and deprived himself of everything that gave him pleasure, thinking that somehow this mortification of the flesh would save him. Yet the more he strove, the more convinced he grew of his sinfulness.

One day revelation came to him in the form of a desperate woman.
For some time Whitefield had been carrying the message of the gospel to prisoners in the local jail; this woman was the wife of one of the prisoners. Distraught at her inability to support her children with her husband behind bars, she had attempted to escape their hungry cries by the sole expedient she knew: to hurl herself into the river and drown. The chance intervention of a passerby had prevented her from carrying out her plan; now she turned to the only one she could think of who might help her, the one who had visited her husband in jail. Whitefield comforted her as best he could at the moment, and told her to meet him at the jail that afternoon. She did so. He read to the woman and her husband from the Gospel of John, and suddenly, as he later described it, “God visited them both by his free grace.” The woman was “powerfully quickened from above”; the man, trembling and crying out, “I am upon the brink of hell!” likewise felt the powerful rush of salvation. “From this time forward, both of them grew in grace.”

Having now witnessed this instantaneous rebirth through grace, Whitefield longed to experience it himself. He mortified the flesh more than ever, increasing his fasts, taking long walks on cold mornings till his fingers turned black from the frost. His health began to fail and his body to break down.

One day, perceiving an uncommon drought and disagreeable clamminess in my mouth, and using things to allay my thirst, but in vain, it was suggested to me that when Jesus Christ cried out, “I thirst,” His sufferings were near at an end. Upon which I cast myself down on the bed, crying out, “I thirst! I thirst!” Soon after this, I found and felt in myself that I was delivered from the burden that had so heavily oppressed me. The spirit of mourning was taken from me, and I knew what it was truly to rejoice in God my Saviour…. Now did the Spirit of God take possession of my soul, and, as I humbly hope, seal me unto the day of redemption.

Having felt for himself what he soon took to calling “the new birth,” Whitefield set to sharing the experience with others. In 1736 he was ordained at Gloucester; he shortly began preaching the message of the new birth. Despite his inexperience and his youth (he was only twenty-one), he vowed to speak the truth as it had been revealed to him. “I shall displease some, being determined to speak against their assemblies,” he confided to a friend on the eve of his inaugural sermon. “But I must tell them the truth, or otherwise I shall not be a faithful minister of Christ.”

The “boy parson,” as he was dubbed, made a sensation from the start—a matter not lost on the parson himself. “I preached at Bishopsgate Church, the largeness of which, and the congregation together, at first a little dazed me,” he wrote, regarding his initial appearance in London. But God saw him through. “My mind was calmed, and I was enabled to preach with power. The effect was immediate and visible to all; for as I went up the stairs almost all seemed to sneer at me on account of my youth; but they soon grew serious and exceedingly attentive, and, after I came down, showed me great tokens of respect, blessed me as I passed along, and made great enquiry who I was.”

The clergy did not all bless Whitefield. Some were simply jealous of his oratorical brilliance; others questioned the orthodoxy of his message. Consequently, few men of the cloth—although many of the laity—lamented the news that he intended to take his message to America, to pursue his ministry among the debtors and other poor of James Oglethorpe’s new colony in Georgia. The Wesleys had already gone; Whitefield would follow.

His first American mission lasted four months. He generated as much excitement in Georgia as he had at home. “Mr. Whitefield’s auditors increase daily,” wrote one who saw him in Savannah. “And the place of worship is far too small to contain the people who seek his doctrine.” That doctrine was the doctrine of the new birth; Whitefield called on his hearers to cast aside their sinful ways and take God directly into their lives.

He returned to England to even more popular acclaim than before, and even more clerical disapproval. One by one the churches closed their pulpits to him. Yet the people demanded to hear him, so he began preaching in the open fields. His first outdoor sermon was heard by some two hundred coal miners on a hill near Bristol. Within weeks the crowds numbered twenty thousand. What even Whitefield at first characterized as the “mad trick” of preaching in the fields became the centerpiece of his ministry. “Blessed be God that I have now broken the ice!” he recorded after the Bristol performance. “I believe I never was more acceptable to my Master than when I was standing to teach those hearers in the open fields. Some may censure me; but if I thus pleased me, I should not be the servant of Christ.”

While Whitefield
was learning to antagonize established religion in England on the way to his sermon on the mount, Franklin was
engaged in a similar dispute in Philadelphia. Not since Boston had he attended church regularly, although he judged the institution of religion conducive to civic welfare and, accordingly, contributed to its upkeep. The object of his subscription was the Presbyterian congregation in Philadelphia, which, encompassing a congeries of dissenters from both the Church of England and the Society of Friends—Congregationalists, Baptists, English Nonconformists, in addition to Presbyterians—was the closest thing Franklin could call to a church of his own. The pastor of the Presbyterians since before Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia was Jedediah Andrews, an able organizer and energetic proselytizer. Andrews engaged in a running contest with an Anglican minister, Thomas Clayton, to capture the loyalty, or at least the attendance, of those souls not irretrievably lost to Quakerism. Andrews had observed the emergence of Franklin as one of the city’s leading citizens, and he determined to bring him into his fold. From either his own persuasive skills or some lingering sense in Franklin that he ought to attend church, Andrews got Franklin to agree to come to service for five successive Sundays. If Franklin remained disinclined to join the church after that time, presumably Andrews would bother him no more.