Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

All his life he would be giving aid—jobs, partnerships, loans, gifts and, less welcome, advice—to his family, his in-laws, his nieces, nephews, friends, and children of friends. The assistance was sometimes unappreciated and seldom rewarded. It played havoc with virtue number four, Frugality. Nor, as he had omitted the virtue of generosity from his list, did he ever give himself any good marks for such services.

Sorrow struck him personally on November 21, 1736, when Francis Folger, a grave and sweet-faced lad of four, died of smallpox. In the midst of his terrible grief, Franklin refuted a false rumor. It was not true, he wrote in the _Gazette_, that his boy had died as the result of smallpox inoculation. Had he been inoculated, his life might have been spared. He felt it important that his readers should know that he considered inoculation “a safe and beneficial practice.”

The year of his son’s death, he was appointed clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and the following year he was made postmaster of Philadelphia. These were his first official positions, and there was pay and prestige attached to both. What matter if the Assembly sessions were so tedious he worked out mathematical puzzles to keep himself awake, and that his home on High Street now housed the city post office in addition to the Franklins, various relatives of both of them for varying lengths of times, servants, apprentices, and on occasion journeymen who had no other lodgings.

He had six of these workmen now, including a Swede and a German, which made it possible to print in those languages. They were all kept busy. He was public printer for Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland. Besides the _Almanack_ and the _Gazette_, a number of books were coming off the High Street presses: Cato’s _Moral Distichs; The Constitution of the Free-Masons_, the first Masonic book printed in America; Cadwallader Colden’s _An Explication of the First Causes of Motion in Matter_; and Richardson’s _Pamela_, the first novel printed in America.

Their stationer’s shop now sold books as well as an astounding range of miscellany: goose quills, chocolate, cordials, cheese, codfish, compasses, scarlet broadcloth, four-wheeled chaises, Seneca rattlesnake root with directions on how to use it for pleurisy, ointments and salves for the “itch” and other ailments, made by the Widow Read, Debby’s mother, and fine green Crown soap, unique in the colonies, produced by Franklin’s brothers John and Peter who had learned the secret of its composition from their father.

In all this hustle and bustle, Franklin reigned as instigator and executor. He was a little heavier, his brown hair somewhat thinner, his face more mature, and his manner more calm and assured, but in his eyes was the same merriment of the Boston youth. Around the house and shop, he dressed in working clothes, red flannel shirt, leather breeches, and his old leather apron.

For meetings of the Masons or for dinners with prominent Philadelphians who were now demanding his company, he had more elegant attire. On such occasions he might wear his best black cloth breeches, velvet jacket, a Holland shirt with ruffles at the wrist and neck, calfskin shoes, high-quality worsted stockings, and a fashionable wig.

Debby never accompanied him to such affairs, nor would she have been comfortable if she had done so. The years of their marriage had put a wider social and intellectual gap between them. While Franklin had cultivated his mental powers and learned to speak as an equal to anyone, she was the same Debby he had married, grown older and plumper. Her voice was still rough, her language uncouth, her manners hearty, and her taste in clothes flamboyant. He never tried to change her. He appreciated her loyalty, her industry, her warm heart, and asked for nothing more. “My plain Country Joan,” he called her in a ballad he wrote and sang for the members of the Junto:

Of their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate,
I sing my plain Country Joan,
These twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life,
Blest day that I made her my own.

As for Debby, had anyone told her that her husband would one day be among the most famous men in the world, she would have laughed in his face. Not her “Pappy”—as she always called him. Not that he wasn’t the best of husbands, a good provider, and really handy at doing things around the house.

She must have clapped her hands in delight at the stove he set up in their common room in 1740. Houses then were mostly heated by fireplaces. Large or small, they had in common that one was scorched on approaching the fire too closely and chilled at the far side of the room. It was impossible for a woman to sit by the window to sew on a winter day. Her fingers would be too stiff with cold to hold a needle. It was taken for granted that everyone had colds during the winter months, especially the women, who of necessity were indoors more than the men. There was the problem of smoke too. With the usual fireplace, most of the smoke came into the room instead of going up the chimney, blackening curtains and spreading soot everywhere.

Franklin’s Pennsylvania Fireplace, later called the Franklin Stove, was made of cast iron, could be taken apart and moved easily from room to room. It spread no smoke and, most amazingly, heated the entire room an almost equal temperature.

Debby’s sole complaint about her husband had to do with the way he spoiled his son William. Ever since the death of little Franky, he humored the boy to excess. William had a string of private schoolmasters—one of them decamped with Franklin’s wardrobe when William was nine. He had his own pony, like the sons of the rich. Whatever the boy wanted, he managed to wangle from his indulgent father. “The greatest villain on earth,” Debby once called this clever lad. The two of them never did get along.

Even William had to take second place after their first and only daughter, Sarah, was born in 1743. Sarah would bring to her father joy and comfort to modify the pain caused by his son.

He was busy that year with a new project. In May he issued a circular letter headed “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in North America,” which be mailed to men of learning throughout the colonies. Now that the first drudgery of settling was over, he wrote, the time had come “to cultivate the finer arts and improve the common stock.”

For this purpose, he proposed formation of an organization whose members, through meetings or by correspondence, would exchange information on all new scientific discoveries or inventions, and he offered his own services as secretary “till they shall be provided with one more capable.” From this letter grew the American Philosophical Society, which came into being the following year. (The words “philosophical” and “scientific” were then used as synonyms.) Its activities were parallel to those of the famous Royal Society in London.

One of Franklin’s first contributions to the new society was a paper on his “Pennsylvania Fireplace,” which he and Debby had been enjoying several years, including diagrams and instructions on how to install it. He refused to patent his invention: “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.”

Also in 1743 he printed his “Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,” a pamphlet suggesting an academy of learning to match Yale, Harvard, and William and Mary College at Williamsburg. He launched this plan not as his own but as coming from some “public-spirited gentlemen,” a tactical approach he had figured out to be more effective than using his own name.

The academy, he wrote, should be “not far from a river, having a garden, orchard, meadow, and a field or two.” It should have a library. The students—youths from eight to sixteen—should “diet together plainly, temperately, and frugally.” They should be trained in running, leaping, wrestling, and swimming.

Subjects studied should be “those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental.” All should be taught to “write a fair hand” and to learn drawing, “a universal language, understood by all nations.” They should learn grammar, with Addison, Pope, and Cato’s _Letters_ as models. He stressed the importance of elocution: “pronouncing properly, distinctly, emphatically.” The curriculum should include mathematics, astronomy, history, geography, ancient customs, morality, but not Latin and Greek, unless a student had “an ardent desire to learn them.”

Franklin’s ideal and surprisingly modern academy was also to teach practical matters: invention, manufactures, trade, mechanics, “that art by which weak men perform such wonders ...,” planting and grafting. There should be “now and then excursions made to the neighboring plantations of the best farmers, their methods observed and reasoned upon for the information of youth.”

This “Proposal” was the genesis of the University of Pennsylvania, which in six years’ time—1749—became a reality. (Franklin was elected first president, a post he held seven years.)

Philadelphia had as yet no regular police force. Its dark and narrow streets were in theory guarded by the local citizens, appointed in rotation by the ward constables. Often citizens preferred to pay the six shillings required to hire a substitute, money which might be dissipated in drink, leaving streets unguarded, or to pay the very ruffians against whom protection was needed. To abolish such abuses, Franklin persuaded his Junto members to campaign for a paid police force, which was voted a few years later.

Also through the Junto, he called public attention to Philadelphia’s fire hazards and means of avoiding them. From this effort came the Union Fire Company, the first organized firemen in the colonies. Subsequently, he was responsible for the first fire insurance company in the colonies.

Since 1739, England had been at war with Spain, and in 1744, war with France erupted. The struggle involved the colonies when, in July 1747, French and Spanish privateers plundered two plantations on the Delaware River, a little below New Castle. There were rumors of a French plan to sack Philadelphia. The city had no defenses. The Quaker-dominated Assembly had refused to vote money for war purposes.

Seeing danger threaten, Franklin published “Plain Truth,” a pamphlet which succeeded in convincing even the Quakers of the need for preparedness. Under his leadership, Pennsylvania’s first volunteer militia, with some 10,000 members, was formed. He was offered the post of colonel in the Philadelphia branch. He declined, preferring to serve as a common soldier. William, now sixteen, was also in service, not in the militia but in a company raised by the British for a campaign against French Canada.

In 1748, France, Spain and England settled their difficulties temporarily in the peace treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. For the time being, the colonies were free from danger of invasion or attack. At last the Franklin family could return to normal life.

He was forty-two and by the standards of the time a rich man. Since his income was sufficient for his needs, he made up his mind to retire. A fellow printer named David Hall took over the management of his printing shop. Franklin moved to a quiet part of town, at Race and Second streets, and bought a 300-acre farm in Burlington, New Jersey, where he could practice the art of a gentleman farmer.

It was time, he believed, to devote the remaining years of his life to his friends, to his writing, to the pursuit of learning. Particularly a branch of learning that had occupied his attention on and off for the past several years—the study of electricity.

5
THE THUNDER GIANT

A few years before his retirement, Franklin, on a visit to Boston, attended a display of electrical tricks given by a Dr. Adam Spencer of Scotland. There is no record of the nature of these “electrical tricks.” Franklin commented later that Dr. Spencer was no expert and that they were imperfectly performed. Since he had never seen anything of the sort before, he was “surpris’d and pleased.”

That sparks could be produced by friction had been known since ancient times. Little more was known about electricity until, in the first part of the eighteenth century, a young Frenchman, Charles François du Fay, identified two different types of electricity: _vitreous_, produced by rubbing glass with silk; _resinous_, produced by rubbing resin with wool or fur. Such frictional electricity was brief-lived. Sparks flashed and were gone, and that was the end of it.

Was there any way in which electric charges could be preserved from the rapid decay which they underwent in the air? Around 1747 two scientists were working independently on this problem—E. C. von Kleist of Pomerania and Pieter van Musschenbroek of the University of Leyden. Within a few months of each other, they had found a method of storing electricity in a container. The Leyden jar, this container was named. It was the first electrical condenser.

In one experiment Musschenbroek suspended a glass phial of water from a gun barrel by a wire which went down through a cork in the phial a few inches into the water. The gun barrel, hanging on a silk rope, had a metallic fringe inserted into the barrel which touched an electrically charged glass globe. A friend who was watching him, a man named Cunaeus, happened to grasp the phial with one hand and the wire with another. Immediately he felt a strange and startling sensation—reportedly the first manmade electric shock in history.

Musschenbroek repeated what Cunaeus had done, this time using a small glass bowl as his “Leyden jar.” “I would not take a second shock for the King of France,” he said.

Van Kleist in Pomerania produced the same effect. He lined the inside and outside of his Leyden jar with silver foil, charged the inner coat heavily, connected it with the outer foil by a wire which he held in his hand—and felt a violent shock run into his arm and chest.

A Leyden jar could take any number of forms. Even a wine bottle would serve. The type used most frequently during the next few years was a glass tube, some two and a half feet long, and just big enough around so that a man might grasp it easily in his hand. The advantage of this size and shape was that it could most conveniently be electrified, which was then done by hand, by rubbing the glass with a cloth or buckskin. This simple device gave impetus to research on electricity throughout Europe. It also provided a new form of entertainment.

Performers went from town to town with their Leyden jars, giving spectators the thrill of receiving electric shocks, and extolling the marvels of “electrical fire.” Louis XV of France invited his guests to watch a novel spectacle arranged by his court philosopher, Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet. The King’s Guard in full uniform lined up before the throne, holding hands. The first one was instructed to grasp the wire or chain connected to the Leyden jar. They all jumped convulsively into the air as an electric current passed through them.

In Italy some scientists tried to cure paralysis by electric shock, claiming moderate success. In May 1748, for instance, Jean-François Calgagnia, thirty-five years old, was given an electric shock from a simple cylinder-type Leyden jar. Since the age of twelve, his left arm had been so paralyzed he could not lift his hand to his head. After the first electrical treatment he at once raised his arm and touched his face. There is no record as to whether the cure was permanent.

After Franklin became aware of this phenomenon, he was agog to try experiments on his own. He wrote of his interest to a London friend, Peter Collinson, a Quaker merchant and member of the Royal Society. Collinson promptly sent him a glass tube, along with suggestions as to how it might be used for electrical experiments. This was all Franklin needed to get started.

He was not trained in scientific matters as were many of his European contemporaries. He was unfamiliar with scientific jargon, and could only write about what he was doing in everyday language. But he had those qualities that are innate in any scientist, with or without a university degree—an inquiring mind, patience, and persistence.

His experiments, beginning with the winter of 1746, covered a wide range. He melted brass and steel needles by electricity, magnetized needles, fired dry gunpowder by an electric spark. He stripped the gilding from a book, and he electrified a small metallic crown above an engraving of the King of England—so that whoever touched the crown received a shock!

His home was soon so crowded with curious visitors trooping up and down the stairs, he could hardly get any work done. He solved the problem by having a glass blower make tubes similar to his, passing them out to friends so they could make their own experiments.

Several of the Junto members worked closely with him. At first they electrified the tube, as was still done in Europe, by vigorously rubbing one side of it with a piece of buckskin. One of the club members, a Silversmith named Philip Synge, devised a sort of grindstone, which revolved the tube as one turned a handle. To charge the tube with electricity, all that was needed was to hold the buckskin against the glass as it revolved, a vast saving in physical labor.

Another invention of Franklin and his associates was the first storage battery. For electrical plates they used eleven window glass panes about six by eight inches in size, covered with sheets of lead, and hung on silk cords by means of hooks of lead wire. They found it as easy to charge this “battery” with frictional electricity as to charge a single pane of glass.

Among his disciples was an unemployed Baptist minister named Ebenezer Kinnersley. Franklin suggested he might both serve science and earn his living if he held electrical demonstrations. Kinnersley’s first announcement of a lecture, held in Newport, described “electrical fire” as having “an appearance like fishes swimming in the air,” claiming this fire would “live in water, a river not being sufficient to quench the smallest spark of it.” He promised his audience such wonders as “electrified money, which scarce anybody will take when offered ... a curious machine acting by means of electric fire, and playing a variety of tunes on eight musical bells ... the force of the electric spark, making a fair hole through a quire of paper....”

Kinnersley lectured in the colonies and the West Indies and was hugely successful. Neither he nor any of the other collaborators could rival Franklin’s own achievements.

Early in 1747, he gave the names of positive and negative (or plus and minus) to the two types of electricity, to replace the unwieldy terms, resinous and vitreous. Positive and negative electricity became part of the scientific vocabulary. He was the first to refer to the _conductivity_ of certain substances. Electricity passed easily through metals and water; they were _conductive_. Glass and wood were _nonconductive_, unless they were wet. He also noted that pointed metal rods were wonderfully effective “in drawing off and throwing off the electrical fire.”

After he retired in 1748, he spent much more time on electricity. To Peter Collinson in London he wrote, “I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done.” He kept Collinson informed in detail of his experiments, not because he thought he had the final word but in the hope that his experiments might possibly prove helpful to English scientists.

It was to Collinson he described an electrical party to be held on the banks of the Schuylkill River in the spring of 1749: “A turkey is to be killed for our dinner 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, Holland, France, and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers, under the discharge of guns from an electrical battery.”

For Christmas dinner that year, he started to electrocute another turkey, but inadvertently gave himself the shock intended for the fowl: “The company present ... say that the flash was very great and the crack as loud as a pistol.... I neither saw the one nor heard the other.... I then felt ... a universal blow throughout my whole body from head to foot.... That part of my hand and fingers which held the chain was left white, as though the blood had been driven out, and remained so eight or ten minutes after, feeling like dead flesh; and I had a numbness in my arms and the back of my neck which continued till the next morning but wore off.”

He was apologetic rather than frightened by the near catastrophe, comparing himself to the Irishman “who, being about to steal powder, made a hole in the cask with a hot iron.”

This was soon after he had come to the conclusion that what he now called “electrical fluid” had much in common with lightning—that indeed they might be one and the same thing. He was not the first to propose this theory but no one before him had been able to suggest how it might be tested.

Thunder and lightning had mystified humanity since the beginning of recorded history. The Greeks had held that thunderbolts were launched by the god Jupiter. (One Greek philosopher, Empedocles, thought that lightning was caused by the rays of the sun striking the clouds.) Hunters of primitive tribes prayed to the god of lightning, who was a killer, as they wished to be. Certain medicine men were said to be endowed with the gift of summoning lightning at will.

Since biblical days, lightning was assumed to be an act of heavenly vengeance, but no one could explain the paradox that it struck church steeples more frequently than other buildings. In medieval times, people believed that ringing church bells would keep lightning away, a belief that survived the death of countless unfortunate bell ringers.

About 1718, an English scientist, Jonathan Edwards, suggested that thunder and lightning might be produced by a “mighty fermentation, that is some way promoted by the cool moisture, and perhaps attraction of the clouds.” There had been very few other attempts to give a scientific explanation of the phenomenon, and even in Franklin’s time many preachers considered lightning a manifestation of the Divine Will.

“Electrical fluid” and lightning had in common, Franklin wrote in his notes on November 7, 1749, that they both gave light, had a crooked direction and swift motion, and were conducted by metals. Both melted metals and could destroy animals. Since they were similar in so many respects, would it not follow that lightning, like “electrical fluid” would be attracted by pointed rods? “Let the experiment be made.”

By May 1750, he was sure enough of his hypothesis that he elaborated to Peter Collinson the advantages to humanity of what later were called lightning rods:

I am of the opinion that houses, ships, and even towers and churches
may be effectually secured from the strokes of lightning ... if,
instead of the round balls of wood or metal which are commonly placed
on tops of weathercocks, vanes, or masts, there should be a rod of
iron eight or ten feet in length, sharpened gradually to a point like
a needle ... the electric fire would, I think, be drawn out of a cloud
silently, before it could come near enough to strike....

Did he guess that he was on the verge of the most momentous discovery of the century—one which would assure his name a place among the immortals? It is fairly certain he was more interested in solving a perplexing problem than in immortality. Possibly he took it for granted that European scientists were already three steps ahead of him.

By July he had prepared a manuscript describing all his exciting experiments of the past two years, and including specific instructions for setting up a lightning rod on a tower or steeple, even to the necessary feature of a grounding wire. “Let the experiment be made,” he had said. He did not make it himself, not then. For one thing, he was waiting for a spire to be erected on the top of Christ Church, from which he wished to make his first try of drawing lightning from the skies. Also, in spite of his alleged retirement, his days were becoming increasingly filled with public duties.

He still had the Gazette and _Poor Richard’s Almanack_ to publish and edit. Beginning in 1748, he served on the City Council. Since 1749 he was Grand Master of the Masons. In 1751 he was made an alderman and a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, where previously he had served as clerk.

In 1750, an American Philosophical Society member, Dr. Thomas Bond, came to him for help in starting a hospital for the sick and the insane. Hitherto those who could not pay for medical care had no choice but the prison or the almshouse. The need was urgent but Dr. Bond had failed to arouse interest in his project.

“Those whom I ask to subscribe,” he confided to Franklin, “often ask me whether I have consulted you and what you think of it. When I tell them I have not, they don’t subscribe.”

Franklin knew promotion methods as Dr. Bond did not, and began by calling a meeting of citizens. Under his impetus the list of subscribers grew, though not until May 1755 was the cornerstone of the Pennsylvania Hospital laid on Eighth Street between Spruce and Pine. Nearly thirty years later, when Dr. Benjamin Rush joined the staff, the “lunatics” at Pennsylvania Hospital received the first intelligent care available in America and, with few exceptions, in the world.

Franklin was also busy during this period in the formation of America’s first insurance company (stemming from a meeting of Philadelphia businessmen in 1752), and was taking the lead in organizing an expedition in search of a Northwest Passage, under Captain Charles Swaine, America’s first voyage of Arctic exploration.

In the category of pleasure were the infrequent periods he spent on his Burlington farm, where he raised corn, red clover, herd grass and oats, recording with scientific precision the effects of frost and the results obtained from different types of soil. He was one of the earliest Americans to think of agriculture as a science. He never could persuade his farmer neighbors to follow his example. They held that the ways of their forefathers were inevitably the best.

It may have been at his farm that he made his experiment on ants. Some ants had found their way into an earthen pot of molasses. He shook out all but one and hung the pot by a string to a nail in the ceiling. When the ant had dined to its satisfaction, it climbed up the string and down the wall to the floor. Half an hour later, he noted a swarm of ants retracing its course back to the pot—exactly as though their comrade had verbally informed them where to go for a good meal.

There were few mysteries of nature on which at one time or another Franklin did not direct his attention. More often than not, he wrote his speculations in long and entertaining and gracefully phrased letters to his friends, men and women alike.

If he was not impatient to learn what Peter Collinson thought of his proposed lightning rods, it was simply that he had no time for impatience. The truth was that Collinson had found his paper fascinating and had even read it to the Royal Society. As the Society members remained skeptical and unimpressed, in 1751 he arranged for it to be printed in a pamphlet—“Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia, in America.” Dr. John Fothergill, a London physician, wrote the preface. The pamphlet was translated into French the next year, creating immediate excitement.

Three French scientists, the naturalist Count Georges Louis Buffon, Thomas François d’Alibard, and another named de Lor, resolved to carry out the experiment on drawing lightning from the skies, which Franklin had outlined.

It was d’Alibard who succeeded first. At Marly, outside of Paris, he set up a pointed iron rod forty feet long, not on a church steeple as Franklin had recommended, but simply on a square plank with legs made of three wine bottles to insulate it from the ground. During a thunderstorm, on May 10, 1752, a crash of thunder was followed by a crackling sound—and sparks flew out from the rod. Here then was absolute proof that Franklin was right. Lightning and electricity were identical.

De Lor repeated the experiment in Paris eight days later. Louis XV, King of France, was so moved that he sent congratulations to the Royal Society, to be relayed to Messieurs Franklin and Peter Collinson. The first successful experiment in London was made by John Canton. Soon it was being repeated throughout Europe. The name of Benjamin Franklin was on everyone’s tongue.

No news of all this had yet been brought on the slow sailing ships when, in June 1752, Franklin decided not to wait for the completion of the Christ Church spire for his experiment. He had another scheme. Why not try to draw electricity from the skies with a kite?

“Make a small cross of two light strips of cedar, the arms so long as to reach to the four corners of a large thin silk handkerchief when extended; tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross.” Thus he later described the body of this world famous kite. Like ordinary kites, it had a tail, loop, and string. At the top of the vertical cedar strip, he fastened a sharp pointed wire about a foot long. At the end of the string he tied a silk ribbon. He fastened a small key at the juncture of silk and twine.

With this child’s plaything, he and his tall full-grown son, William, took off across the fields one threatening summer day. They let the wind raise the kite into the air and they waited. Even before it began raining, Franklin observed some loose threads from the hempen string standing erect. He pressed his knuckle to the key—and an electric spark shot out. There were more sparks when the thunderstorm began. After the string was wet, the “electric fire” was “copious.”

He must have grinned triumphantly at William, and perhaps said casually, “Well, Billy, we’ve done it.”

There is no evidence that he realized his experiment might be dangerous, even deadly.

The first account of the “Electrical Kite” appeared five months later in the October 19, 1752, issue of the _Gazette_. _Poor Richard’s Almanack_ for 1753 contained complete instructions on how to build a lightning rod. He had already put one up on his own chimney. It had small bells which chimed when clouds containing electricity passed by. The bells rang in his house for years.

News of his triumphs abroad were now flooding in. The praise of the French king, he wrote a friend, made him feel like the girl “who was observed to grow suddenly proud, and none could guess the reason, till it came to be known that she had got on a new pair of garters.” The Royal Society, making up for lost time, published an account of his kite in _Transactions_, their official paper, and in November 1753, gave him the Copley gold medal for “his curious experiments and observations on electricity.” They conservatively held off making him a member of the Society until May 29, 1756. At home, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary College in turn gave him honorary degrees of master of arts.

While these and other tributes were being heaped on him, he was launching into a new profession—that of military expert and officer.

6
A BRIEF MILITARY CAREER

In 1753, trouble was brewing once more between Great Britain and France, with the colonists caught in the middle. While English subjects in America were as yet confined to a narrow strip along the Atlantic, France held Canada and the St. Lawrence Valley to the north; New Orleans and the great Louisiana territory in the south. By right of early explorations, the French also claimed the rich Ohio Valley region and were building forts along the Ohio and Allegheny rivers. The British considered these forts an intrusion on _their_ territory.

As the situation grew more tense, both British and French courted the favor of the Indians. In Pennsylvania this would have been easier had the policy of William Penn been followed; he had gone further than any other white man in establishing friendly Indian relations. Unfortunately, much of his work had been undone by his son Thomas, in the episode known as the Walking Purchase.

To make room for his immigrants, William Penn had once purchased a tract of land from the Indians to extend “as far as a man could walk in three days.” In 1683, he had leisurely walked out a day and a half of this purchase, some twenty-five miles. In 1737, fifty years later, Thomas Penn decided to take up the rest of the Walking Purchase. He hired three athletes to do the walking for him. In a day and a half, they managed to cover eighty-six miles. The Indians had never forgiven this underhanded trick.

It was partially to undo this bad feeling that in September 1753 Franklin and several other commissioners were sent by Governor James Hamilton to Carlisle, some 125 miles west of Philadelphia, to meet with chiefs of the Delaware and Shawnee Indians and the Six Nations (the name given to the united Iroquois tribes).

Franklin had never been so far inland before nor had he any previous dealings with the original Americans. He was impressed with the ceremonial exchange of gifts and greetings which preceded the actual conference. These “savages” of whom he had heard such disparaging things had customs very different from those of the white man, but “savage justice,” as he was to write later, had as much to recommend it as “civilized justice.”

The grievances presented by the chiefs after the conference began he found reasonable. They wanted, from the white man, fewer trading posts and more honest traders. They wanted to be sold less rum, which was ruinous to the braves, and more gunpowder, which they needed for hunting. The commissioners promised to do their best and, as they had been authorized to do, offered the Indians protection from the French, in return for their loyalty. Unfortunately, neither colonies nor British were in a position to guarantee such protection.

Franklin returned from Carlisle to learn that he had been appointed deputy postmaster, with William Hunter of Williamsburg, of all the North American provinces. He had the prestige of being an officer of the Crown though the pay was nominal—only 600 pounds a year divided between him and Hunter should the service make a profit—and the work was considerable, for Hunter was ill and could give little help.

He could and did provide his family with jobs. William, his son, became postmaster of Philadelphia, Franklin’s former job. William later turned this post over to a relative of Debby’s who in due time was succeeded by Franklin’s brother Peter. He appointed another brother, John, postmaster of Boston. At John’s death his widow succeeded him, thought to be the first American woman to hold a public office.

Not only his family but all of America profited by Franklin’s appointment. Horseback riders carried mail in colonial America. Delivery was slow, irregular and costly. Franklin acted as an efficiency expert. He increased mail deliveries from Philadelphia to New York from once a week to three times a week during the warmer six months of the year and he made sure his riders did the route twice a week in the winter except in the worst weather. In time he visited all the post offices of the colonies, studied their local problems, surveyed roads, ferries, and fords. He started America’s first Dead Letter Office, and gave patrons other services they had never had before. By the time he had held the post eight years, not only could he and Hunter collect their full salaries but there was a surplus for the London office, the first time it had ever profited from its American branch.

Late in 1753, Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia sent young Major George Washington on a journey to the French Fort Le Boeuf (now Erie, Pennsylvania) to order the French to evacuate. They chose to ignore the warning.

Franklin attended another conference with the Six Nations, held at Albany, New York, in June 1754, attended by commissioners from seven colonies. In regard to Indian relations, the Albany conference was no more successful than the one at Carlisle. Afterward the Indians claimed they had been persuaded to deed a tract of land whose boundaries they had not grasped and that the deed was irregular since, contrary to the Six Nations’ custom, it gave away land of tribes whose representatives had not signed the deed.

Thus the two meetings had the opposite effect of what had been hoped. They succeeded only in antagonizing the Indians. Many of them decided to support the French, as the lesser of the two white evils.

It is most unlikely that Franklin suspected any wrong being perpetrated on the Indians. During the Albany conference he presented to his fellow commissioners a plan which had its inspiration from Six Nations. If the Iroquois tribes could work together harmoniously, why should the American colonies, allegedly civilized, always be quarreling? Accordingly, he proposed they form a confederacy under a single president-general appointed by the Crown.

The commissioners approved wholeheartedly but that was as far as he got. When his plan was presented to the assemblies of the various colonies, it was rejected as being too dictatorial. The Crown opposed it as being too democratic. In a final effort to make his point he published in the _Gazette_ America’s first cartoon, a drawing of a snake chopped in eight pieces, each marked with the initials of different colonies. “Join or Die” read the caption. But he was several years in advance of the times.

Even while the Albany conference was under way, seven hundred French soldiers and Indians forced the surrender of Fort Necessity, a small barricade fifty miles from Wills Creek, held by George Washington, now a colonel, and a scant 400 men. The nine-year French and Indian Wars were unofficially under way.

In December, six months later, General Edward Braddock landed in Virginia with two regiments of British regulars. They had come to take the French Fort Duquesne, located on the forks of the Ohio (where Pittsburgh now stands). The Pennsylvania Assembly sent Franklin to meet the general at Frederickstown and offer his services as postmaster. Franklin with his son William spent several days with Braddock. He found the general a master of European military strategy but more than a little arrogant.

“After taking Fort Duquesne,” Braddock announced one night at dinner, “I will proceed to Niagara; and, having taken that, to Frontenac, if the season will allow time; and I suppose it will, for Duquesne can hardly detain me above three or four days.”

In his mind, Franklin pictured the long line of Braddock’s army marching along a narrow road cut through thick woods and bushes, and he was uneasy. He was sure, he told the general, that there would be scant resistance at Duquesne, if he arrived there. The danger would be Indian ambush on the way.

Braddock smiled patronizingly. “These savages may, indeed, be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.”

Franklin did not press his doubts. It would have been improper for him to argue with a military man about his own profession. Braddock was only too glad to let Franklin hunt up some transport wagons for him. This he did by distributing circulars through Lancaster, York and Cumberland counties. Within two weeks Pennsylvania farmers had come through with the loan of 150 wagons and 259 horses. Of the 1,000 pounds due the owners in payment, Braddock paid 800 and Franklin advanced the extra 200 pounds on his own. Since the farmers knew and trusted him, he, rather than Braddock, gave them his bond for the full cost.

After he returned to Philadelphia, he persuaded the Assembly to donate twenty parcels for the regiment officers, each containing six pounds of sugar, a pound of tea, six pounds of coffee, six pounds of chocolate, as well as biscuit, cheese, butter, wine, cured hams. He sent along other supplies for the soldiers, advancing 1,000 pounds more of his own money to cover the costs. Barely had he been reimbursed for his expenses thus far, when the disastrous news broke.

Braddock’s army—some 1,400 British regulars and 700 colonial militiamen—was ambushed by a force of French, Canadians, and Indians on July 9, 1755, when they were within seven miles of Fort Duquesne. Terrified at the shooting from this invisible enemy, the regulars panicked. Nearly a thousand were killed or wounded, including most of the officers. George Washington, who was serving as Braddock’s aide, stayed to fight a valiant rear guard action. Braddock was mortally wounded, dying four days later.

At the start of the fray, the drivers took one horse from each team and raced off, leaving wagons, food parcels and provisions to the attackers. Since Franklin had given bond, the wagon owners soon appeared, demanding recompense for their losses—a total of some 20,000 pounds. He faced ruin until October when the new British commander-in-chief, Governor Shirley, authorized government payment of the debt.

In the midst of that summer’s harassment and disaster, there was one pleasant interlude. On a trip to visit Rhode Island post offices, Franklin met a delightful young lady named Catherine Ray. Middle-aged and tending to stoutness as he was, she lavished affection on him, not as a suitor but as someone to whom she could confide her innermost thoughts. Though he saw Catherine only infrequently after that meeting, she later married a worthy young man named William Greene by whom she had six children—she and Franklin wrote each other lengthy and intimate letters as long as they lived. Until he met her, apart from Debby, his friendships had all been with men. Beginning with Catherine, he had many women friends, who found in him a rare understanding of their qualities of mind and spirit.

The defeat of Braddock taught the colonists that the British military was not as invincible as they had been led to believe. Many more Indians joined the French, deciding they were most likely to win. In the summer of 1755, Indian raiders were attacking isolated farms less than 100 miles from Philadelphia. It was obvious that once again Pennsylvania must provide its own defense.

A bill to vote 60,000 pounds for the militia was presented to the Pennsylvania Assembly. At first the Quakers opposed it, but with great tact Franklin won from them a concession that even though they bore no arms themselves they would not object if others did so. There was still more dissension on the subject of taxes. Franklin and many others believed that the taxes should be raised from all the landholders in the province. The lawyer for “the proprietors” claimed that the Penn family should be exempt from such taxes, as they always had been. He was supported by the conservatives in the Assembly and by Governor Robert Hunter Morris, who owed his appointment to the Penns.

Eventually the Penns compromised by offering 5,000 pounds toward the militia as a gift. The question as to whether or not their vast lands should be taxed remained unsettled, to trouble the future. Thomas Penn, who was living in London, was duly informed that Benjamin Franklin was a crafty man who could bend the Assembly to his will.

On November 24, 1755, a Shawnee war party burned down the Moravian village of Gnadenhuetten, 75 miles from Philadelphia, killing all the inhabitants except a few who escaped into the forests. The crime was the more appalling since the Moravians were as opposed to violence as the Quakers. They were a gentle, devout people who had befriended the Indians. The next day the Assembly appointed Franklin to head a committee of seven to manage the funds for the defense. More responsibilities on his shoulders, more decisions to make, arguments to settle, hotheads to calm down.

“All the world claims the privilege of troubling my Pappy,” wailed Deborah to a clerk named Daniel Fisher whom Franklin had just hired.

A few weeks later Franklin set out on horseback with 50 cavalrymen to recruit volunteers, and check on defenses in outlying districts—a strenuous assignment for a man nearly fifty and sedentary in his habits. William served as his aide. Theoretically, James Hamilton, a former governor, was in charge, but after a few days he quietly yielded the leadership to Franklin.

Their first stop was Bethlehem, the chief Moravian settlement. Franklin had expected them to be as opposed to military defense as the Quakers. On the contrary, they were determined to avoid a tragedy such as that at Gnadenhuetten, had built a stockade around their principal buildings, brought in arms from New York, and were even arming their women with small paving stones to throw out the windows should any marauding Indians approach.

“General Franklin,” the Moravians insisted on calling the head of the Philadelphia expedition.

They rode on to Easton next, to find a town in a state of panic and disorder with no discipline at all. Refugees filled the houses. Food was almost gone. There was drinking and rioting. Franklin organized a guard, put sentries on the principal street, set up a patrol, had bushes outside of town cleared away to avert their use as ambush, and enlisted some two hundred men into the provincial militia.

They visited other towns, arriving at the ruins of Gnadenhuetten in the bitter cold of January. After the mournful chore of burying the dead, the men set to building a stockade—felling pines, placing them firmly in the ground side by side. Franklin, with his passion for collecting facts, noted that it took six men six minutes to fell a pine of 14-inch diameter, and he observed that his men were more cheerful on the days they worked than when, because of rain or snow, they had to sit idle.

Supplies were running low when provisions arrived from Philadelphia, including roast beef, veal, and apples from Deborah. To reassure her, he wrote that he was sleeping on a featherbed under warm blankets. The truth was that, like his men, he slept on the floor of a hut with only one thin blanket. The stockade, finished at last, was 450 feet in circumference, 12 feet high, and had two mounted swivel guns but no cannon.

They were aware of the danger lurking in the dense forest. On a patrol, Franklin found the remains of Indian watches. For their fires they dug holes about three feet deep. The prints in weeds and grass showed they had lain in a circle around the fire holes, letting their feet hang over to keep warm. At a short distance, neither flame, sparks, nor smoke could be seen. But the Indians, not then nor later, risked an attack.

Franklin’s militia did no fighting but they turned defenseless regions into defensive ones. They had built two more stockades at Fort Norris and Fort Allen, when Franklin was called back to Philadelphia early in February for a special Assembly meeting. To have a good bed again seemed so strange, he hardly slept all night long.

On his return he was appointed a militia colonel. Following his first review of his regiment, the men accompanied him to his house and saluted him with several rounds of fire, incidentally breaking some glass tubes of his electrical apparatus. The following day when he set off for Virginia on post office business, 20 officers and some 30 grenadiers escorted him to the ferry, the grenadiers riding with drawn swords in a ceremony reserved for persons of great distinction. When Thomas Penn in England learned of this tribute, he was furious. No grenadiers had ever drawn their swords for him.

As for Governor Morris, he suavely suggested that Franklin and his command should try to take Fort Duquesne, which Braddock had failed to take, promising him a general’s commission. Franklin firmly declined. He had no illusions about his military ability and likely suspected Morris of wishing to be rid of him. (Fort Duquesne was eventually captured in 1758, in an expedition led by British Brigadier General Forbes; George Washington hoisted the British flag over the fort’s ruins.)

In August 1756, following a declaration of war on the Delaware, the new governor, William Denny, offered large bounties for “the scalp of every male Indian enemy above the age of twelve years,” and smaller bounties for “female Indian prisoners and youths under eight.” Franklin, like the majority of the Assembly members, was outraged at this barbarity, and disgusted with the conduct of the proprietors and their representatives. Early in 1757, a vote was passed to send Franklin to England, as official agent of Pennsylvania, there to present to Parliament and the King a petition of grievances against the Penns.

Debby would not go with him. She was frightened to death of the sea. He did take William, who was radiant at seeing England. By April they were in New York, ready to catch their ship. Packets for England were in charge of Lord Loudon, the new commander-in-chief, an amiable person with all the time in the world to listen to complaints, indulge in long conversations, and to write endless notes. Not until he had finished this mysterious correspondence, would he permit the fleet to depart. For more than two months, Franklin and his son waited, restless and impatient and helpless.

There was plenty of time to puzzle about the errors of the British. Why they should send to the colonies an arrogant man like General Braddock, a dawdler like Loudon, governors like the dishonest Sir William Keith, or Morris and Denny, who were far more interested in protecting the rich proprietors than in the welfare of the colonists. But then the reason for Franklin’s voyage was to correct such mistakes. He had no doubt that the King and the mighty Parliament would be glad to listen to him.

7
THE BATTLE WITH THE PENNS

During the voyage to England, Franklin wrote a preface for his 1758 _Almanack_. In the form of a letter from “Poor Richard” to his “Courteous Reader,” it told of a sermon on frugality and industry, which Poor Richard had heard in the market place by “a plain clean old man with white locks” called Father Abraham. He was most flattered to find that Father Abraham was quoting him, Poor Richard, at every other breath.

As Poor Richard says: Many words won’t fill a bushel.... God helps
them that help themselves.... The sleeping fox catches no poultry....
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and
wise.... For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the
horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost....

As Poor Richard says: Many a little makes a mickle.... Fools make
feasts, and wise men eat them.... Pride that dines on vanity, sups on
contempt.... ’Tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright.... If you
will not hear reason, she’ll surely rap your knuckles...

All the nuggets of wise counsel which he had dropped in his _Almanack_ in the twenty-five years of its existence, Franklin gathered for Father Abraham’s speech. Omitted were the racy ballads, verses, broad humor and jokes which had made the _Almanack_ a potpourri where every man could find something to his taste. Only at the end was a touch of Franklin’s sly wit. Following Father Abraham’s sermon, Poor Richard watched disconsolately as the village folk dispersed to spend their hard-earned money as foolishly as ever on the marketplace wares. The only one to take the sermon to heart was Poor Richard himself who had come to buy material for a new coat but left, “resolved to wear my old one a little longer.”

Father Abraham’s speech was later published under the title of “The Way to Wealth.” It was reprinted in many editions and translated in many languages, and it won the author almost as much fame as his discoveries in electricity.

Peter Collinson met Franklin and his son in London, where they arrived on July 26, 1757, taking them to his home. No doubt he and Franklin discussed electricity until very late, with William only half listening and more or less bored. The next day, a printer named William Strahan, with whom Franklin had corresponded some fourteen years but never met, called on him.

“I never saw a man who was, in every respect, so perfectly agreeable to me,” Strahan wrote Deborah Franklin of this meeting, adding that William was “one of the prettiest young gentlemen I ever knew from America.”

Deborah likely scowled. It was just like that artful lad to ingratiate himself so quickly.