Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (16 page)

It was a typical Franklin effort at persuasion: clever, indirect, and using fabricated characters to make his point. But when the synod unanimously censured and suspended Hemphill, Franklin shed his usual velvet gloves and, as he put it, “became his zealous partisan.” He published an anonymous pamphlet (and, unlike his newspaper dialogue, made sure that the pamphlet remained anonymous) filled with uncharacteristic anger. Not only did he offer detailed theological rebuttals to each of the synod’s charges, but he accused its members of “malice and envy.”

Hemphill’s accusers responded with their own pamphlet, which prompted Franklin to write another, even more vitriolic anonymous response that hurled phrases like “bigotry and prejudice” and “pious fraud.” In a subsequent poem, he labeled Hemphill’s critics “Rev. Asses.”

It was a rare violation by Franklin of his Junto rule of avoiding direct contradiction or argumentation, one that was all the more odd because in the past he had cheerily forsaken any claim to care much about doctrinal disputes. His resentment of the entrenched, pious clerical establishment seemed to get the better of his temper.

Franklin’s defense became more difficult when Hemphill was exposed as having plagiarized many of his sermons. Nevertheless, Franklin still stuck by him, explaining later that “I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture, though the latter was the practice of our common teachers.” In the end, Hemphill left town and Franklin quit the Presbyterian congregation for good.
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The Hemphill affair occurred just as an emotional tide of revivalism, known as the Great Awakening, began sweeping America. Fervent Protestant traditionalists, most notably Jonathan Edwards, were whipping congregants into spiritual frenzies and convulsive conversions with tales of fire and brimstone. As Edwards told his congregation in the most famous of his “terror” sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the only thing that kept them from eternal damnation was the inexplicable grace of “the God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over fire.”

Nothing could have been further from Franklin’s theology. Indeed, Edwards and Franklin, the two preeminent Americans of their generation, can be viewed, Carl Van Doren noted, as “symbols of the hostile movements that strove for the mastery of their age.” Edwards and the Great Awakeners sought to recommit America to the anguished spirituality of Puritanism, whereas Franklin sought to bring it into an Enlightenment era that exalted tolerance, individual merit, civic virtue, good deeds, and rationality.
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Thus, it might seem surprising, indeed somewhat odd, that Franklin became enthralled by George Whitefield, the most popular of the Great Awakening’s roving preachers, who arrived in Philadelphia in1739. The English evangelist had been an unhappy soul at Pembroke College, Oxford, and then had a “new birth” into Methodism and later Calvinism. He was doctrinally pure in his insistence that salvation came only through God’s grace, but he was nevertheless deeply involved in charitable work, and his year-long tour through America was to raise money for an orphanage in Georgia. He raised more money than any other cleric of his time for philanthropies, which included schools, libraries, and almshouses across Europe and America. So perhaps it was not so surprising that Franklin took a liking to him though never embraced his theology.

Whitefield’s nightly outdoor revival meetings in Philadelphia (by then America’s largest town, with a population of thirteen thousand) drew huge crowds, and Franklin, sensing a great story, covered him lavishly in the
Pennsylvania Gazette.
“On Thursday,” he reported, “the Rev. Mr. Whitefield began to preach from the Court House gallery in this city, about six at night, to nearly 6,000 people before him in the street, who stood in an awful silence to hear him.” The crowds grew throughout his week-long visit, and Whitefield returned to the city three more times during his year-long American crusade.

Franklin was awed. He published accounts of Whitefield’s appearances in forty-five weekly issues of his
Gazette,
and eight times he turned over his entire front page to reprints of the sermons. Franklin recounted in his autobiography, with a wryness born only after years of detachment, the enthusiasm that infected him at the time:

Franklin was also impressed with the transforming effect that Whitefield had on Philadelphia’s citizenry. “Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons,” he reported in the
Gazette.
“Religion is become the subject of most conversation. No books are in request but those of piety.”
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The financial implications of that last observation were not lost on Franklin. He met with Whitefield and arranged a deal to be the primary publisher of his sermons and journals, which no doubt added to his zeal to publicize him. After Whitefield’s first visit, Franklin ran an advertisement soliciting orders for a series of Whitefield’s sermons at two shillings a volume. A few months later, he ran a notice that he had received so many orders that those “who have paid or who bring the money in their hands will have the preference.”

Thousands were sold, which helped to make Franklin rich and Whitefield famous. Franklin also published ten editions of Whitefield’s journals, each five times more expensive than his almanac, and enlisted a sales force of eleven printers he knew throughout the colonies to make them bestsellers. His sister-in-law Anne Franklin of Newport took a shipment of 250. During 1739–41, more than half the books that Franklin printed were by or about Whitefield.

Some historians have consequently concluded that Franklin’s passion for Whitefield was merely pecuniary. But that is too simplistic. As was often the case, Franklin was able to weave together seamlessly his financial interests with his civic desires and personal enthusiasms. He had a companionable personality, and he was genuinely attracted by Whitefield’s mesmerizing charisma and charitable bent. He invited Whitefield to stay at his home, and when the preacher praised the invitation as being “for Christ’s sake,” Franklin corrected him: “Don’t let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ’s sake, but for your sake.”

In addition, despite their theological differences, Franklin was attracted to Whitefield because he was shaking up the local establishment. Franklin’s long-standing disdain for the religious elite led him to enjoy the discomfort and schisms caused by the intrusion of wildly popular itinerant preachers onto their turf. The tolerant Franklin was pleased that Whitefield’s supporters had erected, with Franklin’s financial support, a large new hall that, among other uses, could provide a pulpit to anyone of any belief, “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”
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Franklin’s populist delight at the discomfort of the elite was evident in the way he stoked up a controversy about a letter sent to the
Gazette
by some of the town’s gentry, who wrote that Whitefield had not “met with great success among the better sort of people.” The next week, using the pen name “Obadiah Plainman,” Franklin ridiculed the use of the phrase “the better sort of people” and its implication that Whitefield’s supporters were “the meaner sort, the mob or the rabble.” Mr. Plainman said that he and his friends were proud to call themselves part of the rabble, but they hated it when people who styled themselves “better sort” used such terms and implied that common folks were “a stupid herd.”

A haughty-sounding gentleman named Tom Trueman (or perhaps, given the name, Franklin pretending to be such a gentleman) wrote the next week to William Bradford’s more upscale newspaper to deny that such offense was intended and to accuse Mr. Plainman of fancying himself a leader of the town’s common folks. Franklin, again replying as Mr. Plainman, said he was merely “a poor ordinary” craftsman who, after his labors, “instead of going to the alehouse, I amuse myself with the books of the Library Company.” As such, he rankled at those who proclaimed themselves to be of the better sort and “look on the rest of their fellow subjects with contempt.” Though he was rising in the world in a way that would have allowed him, if he were so inclined, to put on aristocratic airs, Franklin was still allergic to snobbery and proud to be a Plainman defending the middling people.
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By the fall of 1740, Franklin showed signs of cooling slightly toward Whitefield, though not toward the profits that came from publishing him. The preacher’s efforts to make him a “new born” believer in Calvinist orthodoxy wore thin, and valuable patrons among the Philadelphia gentry began to denounce the
Gazette
’s ardent flackery. In response to such criticism, Franklin printed an editorial denying (unconvincingly) any bias and restating his philosophy, first propounded in his 1731 “Apology for Printers,” that “when truth has fair play, it will always prevail over falsehood.” But he also included in the issue a letter from a preacher who criticized Whitefield’s “enthusiastic ravings,” and he subsequently published two pamphlets harshly attacking Whitefield as well as one giving Whitefield’s response. The letters in Franklin’s
Gazette,
90 percent of which had been favorable to Whitefield in the first nine months of 1740, tipped mostly negative beginning in September, though the pieces written by Franklin remained positive.

Albeit with less ardor, Franklin continued to support Whitefield over the ensuing years, and they maintained an affectionate correspondence until the preacher’s death in 1770. In his autobiography, written after Whitefield died, Franklin added a dose of ironic detachment to his warm recollections. He recounted one sermon he attended where, rather than being moved by Whitefield’s words, Franklin spent the time calculating how far his voice carried. And as for Whitefield’s effect on his spiritual life, Franklin wryly recalled, “He used, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard.”
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As Franklin’s publishing business grew, his competition with the town’s other printer, Andrew Bradford, intensified. Throughout the early 1730s, they had poked fun at errors in each other’s papers and sparred over such matters as the death of the aspiring young Freemason and the preachings of Samuel Hemphill. There was a political and social basis to the rivalry. The well-born Bradford and his
American Weekly Mercury
were aligned with Pennsylvania’s “Proprietary faction,” which supported the Penn family and their appointed governors. The leather-aproned Franklin and his
Pennsylvania Gazette
were more antiestablishment and tended to support the rights of the elected Assembly.

Their politics clashed during the 1733 reelection campaign of the Assembly’s speaker, Andrew Hamilton, an anti-Proprietary leader who had helped Franklin wrest the government printing job from Bradford. Franklin admired Hamilton’s antiaristocratic populism. “He was no friend to power,” Franklin wrote. “He was the poor man’s friend.” Bradford, on the other hand, printed fervent attacks on Hamilton. Among them was an essay “On Infidelity,” which was aimed at Hamilton but designed to wound Franklin as well. Another accused Hamilton of insulting the Penn family and abusing his power as head of the loan office.

Franklin came to Hamilton’s defense with a dignified yet damning rebuttal. Cast as an account of a “Half-Hour’s Conversation” with Hamilton, the piece skewered Bradford for sins ranging from malapropism (using “contemptibly” when he meant “contemptuously”) to hiding behind the cloak of anonymity (“seeing it was commonly agreed to be wrote by nobody, he thought nobody should regard it”). Hamilton comes across as a polite Junto visitor with a touch of Poor Richard. “Throw enough dirt,” he laments, “and some will stick.”
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Hamilton won reelection, and in 1736 he got Franklin chosen as the clerk of the Assembly. Again, public service and private profit were combined. The clerkship, Franklin freely admitted, “gave me a better opportunity of keeping up an interest among the members, which secured to me the business of printing the votes, laws, paper money, and other occasional jobs for the public, that, on the whole, were very profitable.”

It also taught him a useful trick for seducing opponents. After one rich and well-bred member spoke against him, Franklin decided to win him over: