Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (17 page)

Franklin’s competition with Bradford had one interesting aspect that might seem unusual but was, then as now, somewhat common. Even as they competed against each other in some areas, like modern media barons they cooperated in others. For example, in 1733, even as they were bitter opponents in the Hamilton election, they formed a joint venture to share the risk of publishing an expensive Psalm book. At Bradford’s suggestion, Franklin handled the printing, Bradford supplied the paper, they split the costs, and each got half of the five hundred copies that were made.
¹⁵

In his competition with Bradford, Franklin had one big disadvantage. Bradford was the postmaster of Philadelphia, and he used that position to deny Franklin the right, at least officially, to send his
Gazette
through the mail. Their ensuing struggle over the issue of open carriage was an early example of the tension that often still exists between those who create content and those who control distribution systems.

At one point, Franklin got Col. Alexander Spotswood, the postmaster for the colonies, to order Bradford to run an open system that would carry rival papers. But Bradford continued to make it difficult for Franklin’s papers to get carriage, forcing Franklin to bribe the postal riders. Franklin worried not only about the expense but also about the public perception. Because Bradford controlled the Philadelphia post, Franklin wrote, “it was imagined he had better opportunities of obtaining news, [and] his paper was thought a better distributor of advertisements than mine.”

Franklin was able to wrest the Philadelphia postmastership away when it was discovered that Bradford had been sloppy in his bookkeeping. Colonel Spotswood, with Franklin’s encouragement, withdrew Bradford’s commission in 1737 and offered the job to Franklin. “I accepted it readily,” Franklin noted, “and found it of great advantage, for 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.” Bradford’s paper declined accordingly.

Instead of retaliating, Franklin allowed Bradford’s
Mercury
to be carried through the mails along with the
Gazette
and others—at least initially. In his autobiography, Franklin congratulated himself for being so open. In fact, however, that policy lasted just two years. Because Bradford never settled the accounts from his tenure as Philadelphia postmaster, Spotswood sent Franklin an order to “commence suit against him” and “no longer suffer to be carried by the Post any of his newspapers.”

Bradford had to resort to Franklin’s old habit of bribing the postal riders to deliver his papers unofficially. Franklin knew this and tolerated it, just as Bradford had earlier tolerated it for Franklin. But even this partial indulgence by Franklin was not to last.
¹⁶

In 1740, he and Bradford became involved in a race to start the first general-interest magazine in America. Franklin came up with the idea, but once again he was betrayed by a confidant, just as happened when he first planned to launch a newspaper. As a wiser Poor Richard would pointedly proclaim in his 1741 almanac, “If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.”

This time the turncoat was a lawyer named John Webbe, who had contributed essays to the
Gazette
and had been chosen by Franklin to file the suit against Bradford that Colonel Spotswood ordered. Franklin described the magazine to Webbe and offered him the job of editor. But Webbe took the idea to Bradford and struck a better deal. On November 6, 1740, Bradford announced plans for
The American Magazine.
One week later, Franklin published his own plans for
The General Magazine.

In his announcement, Franklin denounced Webbe’s betrayal. “This Magazine…was long since projected,” he wrote. “It would not, indeed, have been published quite so soon, were it not that a Person, to whom the scheme was communicated in confidence, has thought fit to advertise it in the last
Mercury
…and reap the Advantage of it wholly to himself.” The ensuing spat led Franklin to ban completely Bradford’s paper from the mails. It also turned the question of postal access into a public issue.

Webbe responded in the
Mercury
the next week with a sharp counterattack of his own. He particularly objected to one of Franklin’s less endearing traits: his clever and often sly way of implying allegations rather than saying them outright. Franklin’s indirection, “like the slyness of a pickpocket,” was more “dastardly” than the audacity of a “direct liar,” Webbe wrote. “The strokes being oblique and indirect, a man cannot so easily defend himself against them.” Franklin liked to believe that his method of using indirect insinuation was less offensive than confrontational argument, but it sometimes led to even greater enmity and a reputation for crafty deceit.

Franklin did not respond. With an exquisite sense of how to goad Webbe and Bradford, he merely reprinted his original notice in his next issue of the
Gazette,
including the same allegation of Webbe’s duplicity. This led Webbe to publish another screed in the
Mercury.
Once again, Franklin showed infuriating restraint: he did not respond, but again reprinted his original notice and allegation.

Webbe escalated the dispute in the December 4
Mercury
with an allegation guaranteed to draw a response from Franklin. “Since my first letter,” Webbe wrote, Franklin had “taken upon him to deprive the
Mercury
of the benefit of the Post.” Franklin replied the following week with a somewhat disingenuous explanation. It had been a year, he said, since Bradford’s
Mercury
had been barred free use of the mails. This had nothing to do with the dispute over the magazines. Instead, it was at the direct order of Colonel Spotswood. To prove his point, Franklin printed Spotswood’s letter. He said that Bradford and Webbe knew this to be the case, Webbe in particular, as he had been the lawyer Franklin retained to file the suit.

Webbe replied by laying out the history of the postal practices. Yes, he conceded, Spotswood had ordered Franklin to stop carrying Bradford’s paper. But, as Franklin well knew, the riders had continued to carry it unofficially. Moreover, Webbe charged, Franklin himself had confided to people that he permitted this arrangement because it helped assure that Bradford would take care not to print anything too harmful to Franklin. “He had declared,” wrote Webbe, “that as he favored Mr. Bradford by permitting the Postman to distribute his Papers, he had him therefore under his thumb.”

The public debate over postal practices quieted down as each side raced to put out its magazine. In the end, Bradford and Webbe won by three days. Their
American Magazine
came off the press February 13, 1741, and Franklin’s
General Magazine
appeared on the 16th.

The word
magazine,
as then used, tended to mean a collection drawn from newspapers and other places. The contents of Franklin’s, patterned after London’s ten-year-old
Gentleman’s Magazine,
were surprisingly dry: official proclamations, reports on government proceedings, discussion of paper currency issues, some smatterings of poetry, and a report about Whitefield’s orphanage.

The formula failed. Bradford’s magazine folded in three months, Franklin’s in six. No memorable writing from Franklin came out of this process, except a poem he wrote parodying in Irish dialect one of the advertisements in Bradford’s magazine. But the competition to launch the magazine did kindle Franklin’s interest in the power of the postal system.
¹⁷

In 1743, eleven years after the birth of their short-lived son, Franky, the Franklins had a baby girl. Named Sarah after Deborah’s mother, and called Sally, she delighted and charmed both of her parents. When she was 4, Franklin wrote his mother that “your granddaughter is the greatest lover of her book and school of any child I ever knew.” Two years later, he provided a similar report: “Sally grows a fine girl, and is extremely industrious with her needle and delights in her books. She is of most affectionate temper, and perfectly dutiful and obliging, to her parents and to all. Perhaps I flatter myself too much, but I have hopes that she will prove an ingenious, sensible, notable and worthy woman.”

Franklin half-seriously pushed the notion that his young daughter might someday marry the son of William Strahan, a London printer who was one of his English correspondents. (In this he was not sexist: he also tried to fix up his son, William, and later his two grandsons with children of his English and French friends, all to no avail.) His descriptions of Sally in his letters to Strahan reveal both his affection for her and the traits he looked for in a daughter. “She discovers daily the seeds and tokens of industry and economy, and in short, of every female virtue,” he wrote when she was 7. Six years later, he wrote, “Sally is indeed a very good girl, affectionate, dutiful, and industrious, has one of the best hearts, and though not a wit, is for one of her years by no means deficient in understanding.”

In one of his childhood debates with John Collins, Franklin had argued in favor of giving girls as well as boys an education, a case he reiterated as Silence Dogood. He practiced these preachings to some degree with Sally, with a predictable emphasis on practical subjects. He made sure she was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. At her request, he got her French lessons, though her interest soon waned. He also insisted that she learn accounting; when a publishing partner he had in Charleston died and his wife had to take over the business, it reinforced in Franklin the practical view that girls should be taught accounting “as likely to be of more use to them and their children in case of widowhood than either music or dancing.”

When Sally was only 8, Franklin imported from England a large shipment of books for her. The idea was that she would be in charge of selling them at his print shop, but presumably she might also learn something from them herself. Included in the order were three dozen manuals from the Winchester School, four dictionaries, and two dozen copies of a collection of “tales and fables with prudential maxims.”

For the most part, however, Franklin urged Sally to perfect her domestic skills. One day, after watching as she tried unsuccessfully to sew a buttonhole, he arranged for his tailor to come give her lessons. She never got the formal academic training that he provided William. And when he drew up plans to establish an academy in Philadelphia, Sally was 6, but he made no provision for it to educate girls.
¹⁸

With only one daughter (and an illegitimate stepson), Deborah’s was an unusually small brood for a robust woman in colonial days; she was one of seven children, Franklin’s father had seventeen in his two marriages, and the average family at the time had about eight. Franklin wrote glowingly of children and had Poor Richard sing praises to the look of a pregnant woman. In satires such as “Polly Baker” and serious essays such as “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” he extolled the benefits of fecundity. So the Franklins’ paucity of children does not appear to reflect a deliberate decision; instead, it indicated either that they lacked abundant intimacy or found conceiving not always easy, or a combination of both. Whatever the cause, it would eventually give Franklin more leeway to retire from his business early to pursue scientific endeavors and far-flung diplomatic journeys. It also, perhaps, contributed to his lifelong practice of befriending younger people—women in particular—and forging relationships with them as if they were his children.
¹⁹

Franklin’s attitudes toward women can be characterized as somewhat enlightened in the context of his time, but only somewhat. What is clear, however, is that he genuinely liked women, enjoyed their company and conversation, and was able to take them seriously as well as flirt with them. During Sally’s early childhood, he wrote two famous essays that, in different ways, amusingly combined his lenient attitude toward unmarried sex with his appreciative attitude toward women.

“Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress,” written in 1745, is now quite famous, but it was suppressed by Franklin’s grandson and other compilers of his papers throughout the nineteenth century as being too indecent to print. Franklin began the little essay by extolling marriage as being “the proper remedy” for sexual urges. But, if his reader “will not take this counsel” and yet still finds “sex inevitable,” he advised that “in all your amours you should prefer old women to young ones.”

Franklin then provided a saucy list of eight reasons: because they have more knowledge, they make better conversation; as they lose their looks, they learn a thousand useful services “to maintain their influence over men”; “there is no hazard of children”; they are more discreet; they age from the head down, so even after their face grows wrinkled their lower bodies stay firm, “so that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old one from a young one”; it is less sinful to debauch an older woman than a virgin; there is less guilt, because the older woman will be made happy whereas the younger one will be made miserable. Finally, Franklin produces the cheeky kicker to the piece: “Lastly, they are so grateful!!”
²⁰

“The Speech of Polly Baker” is a tale of sex and woe told from a woman’s point of view, a literary device often used by Franklin with a dexterity that displayed his ability to appreciate the other sex. It purports to recount the speech of a young woman on trial for having a fifth illegitimate child. First published in London, it was then frequently reprinted in England and America without people’s realizing that it was fiction. Thirty years would pass before Franklin revealed that he had written it as a hoax.