The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (39 page)

Franklin found Collinson’s response encouraging. “I am pleased to hear that my electrical experiments were acceptable to the Society,” he declared. Franklin hardly lacked confidence in fields he knew well, but he was the first to acknowledge his novice standing in electricity. Moreover, as one who had been attempting to establish a network of scientific communication in America, he appreciated the importance of word of mouth (or word of post) in keeping up with the latest discoveries. Philadelphia might be the hub of British North America, but it remained an ocean away from the scientific mainstream. Franklin could not help worrying that his best experiments were simply recapitulating work done in Europe, work he had not heard of yet.

But the approbation of the Royal Society, the most distinguished scientific body of its day (rivaled only by the French Academy of Sciences), gave Franklin every reason to carry on. In April 1749 he reported the creation of “what we called an Electrical Battery,” a lead-and-glass arrangement that, once charged, could store electricity for use at will, as well as a “self-moving wheel,” a primitive electric motor. In this and subsequent letters to Collinson, which he now knew were being read by an audience of experts, Franklin adopted a more formal tone than in his previous communications, numbering his paragraphs and leaving out most personal intelligence. But in his final sentences here he could not resist reporting how the electricians of Philadelphia proposed to conclude their current round of experiments:

Chagrinned a little that we have hitherto been able to discover nothing in this way of use to mankind, and the hot weather coming on, when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, ’tis proposed to put an end to them for this season somewhat humourously in a party of pleasure on the banks of the Schuylkill (where spirits are at the same time to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river). A turkey is to be killed for our dinners by the electrical shock, and roasted by the electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle, when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, France and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers under the discharge of guns from the electrical battery. [A note explained that “an electrified bumper is a small thin glass tumbler, near filled with water and electrified. This when brought to the lips gives a shock, if the party be close shaved and does not breathe on the liquor.”]

Collinson duly delivered this letter to the Royal Society, where it was read aloud at the end of 1749 and assigned for critique to William Watson, a distinguished member and a recent winner of the society’s Copley Medal for his electrical work. Joseph Priestley, who would become a renowned scientist in his own right, and a historian of electricity, characterized Watson as “the most interested and active person in the kingdom in every thing relating to electricity.” When Watson reported back to the society, he described Franklin’s work as “new and very curious” and conceded that he felt himself “not quite master of part of this gentleman’s reasoning.” He did question certain of Franklin’s conclusions and made a few recommendations regarding how such questions might be resolved, yet he was particularly intrigued to know the outcome of one experiment projected in Franklin’s letter but not completed at the time of writing. In the indirect reportage of the society’s secretary, “Mr. Watson would further recommend to our worthy brother Mr. Collinson, in writing to his correspondent Mr. Franklin, to desire to know his success in attempting to kill a turkey by the electrical strokes.”

Franklin’s
triumphs in electricity marked the latest installment in a career of self-education that ran back to his eleventh year, when Josiah had pulled him out of school and into the candle shop. In light of the success he had achieved, and was still achieving, Franklin might have been thought an advocate of this method of schooling—or nonschooling. Teach children to read, provide them access to books (as through a library), and thereafter let them teach themselves.

In fact, Franklin’s efforts to educate himself made him an enthusiast of formal education. Like many self-educated people, he was aware of the gaps in his education. He had filled most of them, better than they would have been filled in school. But it had required a great deal of work,
more than ought to have been necessary. And it required a sense of discipline, a devotion to learning, and a knack for absorbing information that were not given equally to all. Though he deliberately downplayed it, Franklin understood his own exceptionality; unlike many self-made men, he did not set his own experience as a standard for others.

For some time Franklin pondered how to improve the educational opportunities available to the youth of Philadelphia. In 1743 he went so far as to draft a proposal for an academy, to be headed by Richard Peters, a scholar and Anglican clergyman who at the time happened to be underemployed. Peters approved the idea in principle but had higher ambitions for himself—as it turned out, in the service of the Penn family—and declined Franklin’s offer.

The excitements of the war delayed further consideration of the academy, but in August 1749 Franklin announced he would soon offer a plan to educate the youth of Philadelphia, “free from the extraordinary expence and hazard in sending them abroad for that purpose.” To whet the public appetite for his plan, he reprinted a letter by the younger Pliny extolling education rooted in one’s homeland, received under the watchful and loving gaze of one’s parents. In this letter Pliny proposed a subscription to establish an academy. “You can undertake nothing that will be more advantageous to your children, nor more acceptable to your country,” the great Roman asserted. “They will, by this means, receive their education where they receive their birth, and be accustomed, from their infancy, to inhabit and affect their native soil.”

Having enlisted Pliny on his side, Franklin proceeded to line up several other outstanding men of letters. In October he produced a pamphlet citing Milton, Locke, Francis Hutcheson, Obadiah Walker, and the current chaplain to the Prince of Wales on the benefits accruing to both individuals and society upon the appropriate education of youth and on the optimal method of that education. Franklin noted the common complaint that the present generation did not measure up to the generations that had gone before. He did not deny it, but rather explained it: “The best capacities require cultivation, it being truly with them, as with the best ground, which unless well tilled and sowed with profitable seed, produces only ranker weeds.”

Franklin proposed the establishment of an “Academy for the education of youth.” The academy would be situated in a house in or near the town (“if not in the town, not many miles from it; the situation high and dry, and if it may be, nor far from a river, having a garden, orchard, meadow, and a field or two”). A rector, “a man of good understanding, good
morals, diligent and patient, learned in the languages and sciences, and a correct pure speaker and writer of the English tongue,” would oversee the students, who would be taught a wide variety of subjects. “It would be well if they could be taught
every thing
that is useful, and
every thing
that is ornamental. But art is long, and their time is short. It is therefore proposed that they learn those things that are likely to be
most useful
and
most ornamental.”

Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric, grammar, literature, history, drawing, handwriting, accounting, geography, morality, logic, natural history, mechanics, and gardening would be suitable subjects for study. Nor should the body be forgotten. “To keep them in health, and to strengthen and render active their bodies,” the young scholars should be “frequently exercised in running, leaping, wrestling, and swimming.” (On his favorite subject of swimming, Franklin quoted Locke quoting the Romans:
“Nec literas didicit nec natare,”
which, applied to some good-for-nothing soul, meant that he had learned neither to read nor to swim. In an age when surprisingly few persons learned to swim, Franklin added that swimmers freed themselves from the “slavish terrors many of those feel who cannot swim, when they are obliged to be on the water even in crossing a ferry.”) In the same vein, the young scholars at the academy should dine together, “plainly, temperately, and frugally.”

Franklin’s proposal met with general approval, as measured by the nearly £2,000 in subscriptions it elicited within the first two months. A constitution for “the Public Academy in the City of Philadelphia” was drawn up by Franklin and Tench Francis, the attorney general of Pennsylvania. The subscribers selected a board of trustees, with Franklin as board president. In that position he oversaw negotiations leading to the acquisition and conversion of the great hall that had been built for George Whitefield a decade earlier but which had fallen into disrepair with the subsequent decline of religious fervor. Renovating the building required a year; the academy opened at the beginning of 1751.

“Our Academy flourishes beyond expectation,” Franklin wrote a friend that fall. “We have now above 100 scholars, and the number daily increasing. We have excellent masters at present; and as we give pretty good salaries, I hope we shall always be able to procure such.”

At the
outset of his planning for the academy Franklin hoped his own son would benefit from it. But the delay in establishing the school,
and Billy’s insistence on leaving home, rendered his attendance impossible. At some point, however, he would have to resume his education.

Franklin had blessed Billy’s enlistment as a soldier, but only in preference to his shipping out on a privateer. One campaign might be good for the lad: get him out of the house, let him see something of the world. But as a career option it had serious drawbacks. Colonials in the army were disdained by the socially connected Englishmen who decided promotions. And, of course, a young man might get killed. Franklin had lost one son; he did not want to lose his only other.

Consequently, it was with some dismay that Franklin saw his son take to soldiering with gusto. Six months under military discipline only increased its attractions. “Billy is so fond of military life that he will by no means hear of leaving the army,” Franklin wrote his brother John. The winter of 1746–47 had been such as to discourage most would-be heroes; the projected invasion of Canada never took place, mired in bureaucratic bungling that stranded the soldiers in Albany, where they suffered from bitter weather, wretched rations, and miserable quarters. The ranks dwindled with each passing week as the part-timers deserted and went home.

William Franklin went home, too, in May 1747, but not as a deserter. Instead he was now a captain, charged with tracking down and capturing deserters thought to be in Philadelphia. He carried out his duty with an ardor that astonished his father—and dismayed him the more. When he learned that William was heading back to Albany, Franklin sent Cadwallader Colden a letter: “My son, who will wait upon you with this, is returning to the army, his military inclinations (which I hoped would have been cooled with the last winter) continuing as warm as ever.” For the moment Franklin resigned himself to William’s wishes and sought to help him make his way. He sent to London for some maps that would have military use and asked Colden to do what he could for the boy in Albany, should the forces be stationed there again.

The end of the war terminated, for the time at least, William’s martial ambitions. Franklin wrote to London to cancel the map order; he explained to William Strahan, “It was intended for my son, who was then in the army, and seemed bent on a military life; but as peace cuts off his prospect of advancement in that way, he will apply himself to other business.” The nature of that other business remained to be determined. William joined an expedition to the Ohio Valley to negotiate with the Indians there; upon the journey he kept a log and noted the bright prospects for the region and for those who would claim its lush lands.

William had never shown any more interest in his father’s trade than Franklin had shown in
his
father’s; this apparently inherited filial aversion was part of what prompted Franklin to turn the printing shop over to David Hall. William manifested somewhat more inclination toward a legal career. Despite Richard Saunders’s repeated jabs at lawyers, Franklin considered the law an honorable enough calling—far preferable to the military. He arranged for William to read law in Philadelphia and asked Strahan to put William’s name down for study at one of the Inns of Court in London.