The Book of Philadelphia

By Robert Shackleton

©1918

The Penn Publishing Company

 Philadelphia

 

Chapter IV

 

THE CITY OF FRANKLIN

 

Page 40

 

 

HE idea that Franklin had of going about Europe with George Washington, with the two traveling and sightseeing together, was one of the most fascinating suggestions ever made.

 

That the two great Americans were personal friends is itself a pleasant thing to remember.  And in 1780 peace seemed to be in sight.  Whereupon Franklin wrote Washington, from Europe, saying that when peace should come how happy he would be to meet Washington in Europe and accompany him as he quaintly expressed it, “in visiting some of its ancient and famous kingdoms.”

 

 

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Franklin’s letter, “You would know, and enjoy, what posterity will say of Washington.  For a thousand leagues have nearly the same effect with a thousand years.”  But Washington could not arrange to go, and what would have been the most fascinating travel tour of history was not made.

 

For one reason, such a tour, of two men together, would not have met Washington’s ideas.  A tour, to him, meant a tour with his wife also.  Even during the Revolution Martha was for much or most of the time in camp with him, and even at Valley Forge, her presence adding not only to the happiness of Washington and herself but adding much, also, the good spirits of the officers and soldiers.  But to Benjamin Franklin, the normal rule for travel was to leave his Deborah at home; and Deborah seems not to have objected to the years and years of loneliness that came from Benjamin’s travels and his long periods of residence abroad.  Franklin was a widower at the time he wrote his delightful suggestion to Washington but even if his Deborah had still been alive it would not have occurred to him as either necessary or advisable to have her with him as a traveling companion.

 

 

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another under his arm found that a pretty girl was shyly laughing at him from the doorway of her home; the pretty girl to become in later years his wife Deborah.

 

Her death at the beginning of Revolution explains why she figures in none of the diaries or accounts of Revolutionary days, when Philadelphia was filed with important folk from the various Colonies.  And, poor thing, she seems not to have risen with him, as he mounted; she seems always to have been a little awed by having a husband who had developed into one of the world’s greatest men, and he always treated her with a sort of gentle tolerance, and always with trustfulness.  He left her in charge of the building and furnishing of the fine house that was to be their home in the evening of their days and she attended to many things, and others she rather pathetically wrote him about, and others she left for his decision when he should return.  “It was lucky for me that I had a wife as much disposed to industry and frugality as myself,” he wrote.

 

One finds her in sore tribulation over the adornments of walls, the placing of furniture and the hanging of the pictures, fearing to displace her Benjamin, or to spoil the walls with nail holes in the wrong spots.  And then she died.

 

 

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men are thinking not at all of building on this earth.  He writes in 1786, then 80 years old, of “a good many hands employed” and of making a long room for his library and instruments.  The next year he writes, regarding his own dwelling and two other new houses beside it, that he has been busy with—what a list!—  “bricklayers, carpenters, stone-cutters, copper-smiths, painters, glaziers, lime-burners, timber-merchants, carters and laborers.”

 

This house, representing the ambitions and ideas of his mature life, stood on Market Street (then known as High Street), between Third and Fourth.  It did not, however, face toward Market Street but toward Chestnut; it was built with the idea of being a Chestnut Street house; but the deed given him for the land between his house and Chestnut Street was defective:—and it is odd to find one of the wisest men that ever lived, cheated in a real estate deal, and in his own city!  Access to Chestnut Street being impossible, the approach to the house was by a driveway from Market.  The house was torn down in 1812, but the driveway was retained, and was long known as Franklin Court.  Now Franklin Court has gone, and a narrow alley extends quite through, with the name of Orianna Street.  Where the house stood, in the center of the block, is but a dismal-looking sort of place, with old warehouses and a few ancient little, shabby, dormer-windowed, once while homes, and with nothing to suggest the fine living of the past, or the home of a great man.

 

 

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on what is now Orianna Street, a rude building in which he housed a printing press; not for himself, except as a pastime, but for his grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache.  In the course of years the Aurora newspaper was regularly printed here, and when one Duane was in possession, Bache having turned the press over to him, there arrived one day, looking for work, a young man from Ireland, named James Wilson; not James Wilson, the Signer, who is buried at Christ Church, but one who though a descendant won far greater fame.  And at the press that Franklin had left, in the little printing shop, he had built, there went to work this young Irishman, who shortly afterward married a Scotch-Irish girl who had crossed the ocean on the same ship with him; and a grandson of these two is Woodrow Wilson, President of United States.

 

To add smaller things to great it may be mentioned that it was in this now so dingy Orianna Street that the elder James Gordon Bennett began his printing career.

 

Franklin had what we should even now consider advanced ideas as to fireproofing his home.  “None of the wooden work of one room communicates with the wooden work of any other room; and all the floors, and even the steps of the stairs, are plastered close to the boards, besides the plastering on the laths under the joints.”  And he thinks that as in Paris, it would be still better if the staircases were of stone and the floors tiled, with the roofs either tiled or slated.

 

 

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a matter of fact, Franklin had gradually become rich as well as influential; and a delightful touch as to this is in the story told by himself, of how he and his wife had begun their first gathering of china and silver, which I am now writing.  Franklin says that for a long time their domestic habits were so simple that his breakfast was only bread and milk, eaten out of a two-penny earthen porringer, with a pewter spoon; but that at length, one morning, he found a china bowl and a spoon of silver, and a wife who defiantly explained that she had paid three-and twenty shilling for these articles, thinking that her husband deserved a silver spoon and a china bowl as well as any of his neighbors!  That was the first appearance of silver or china in the Franklin household, but their possessions in these two branches “augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in value.”

 

 

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a “chimney-piece with tabernacle frame,” with ramps and brackets and wainscoting along the stairs, and outside, such things as “two large painhouses with trusses”—supposedly meaning penthouses—and, delightful suggestions, “modilion eaves”! modilions, as all lovers of old-time architecture know, being something quite different from medallions.

 

There were pictures in the house, as well as china and silver, and Mrs. Bache, Franklin’s daughter, wrote him that, during the British occupancy of the city, Major André was among those billeted there and that, on leaving, he took away with him a portrait of Franklin himself!  Major-General Grey, of whose staff André was for a time a member, was likewise billeted at the Franklin home, and it is said that he, too, went off with a portrait, which long afterwards was sent back to the Franklin family by one of the general’s descendants.

 

Mrs. Bache, Franklin’s extremely capable daughter, would nowadays be a leader of the Red Cross.  The Marquis de Chastellux extols her merits and tells of her as being at the head of a body of women who sewed and knitted for the soldiers; she led him into a room and showed him twenty-two hundred shirts, just completed, each with the name upon it of the married or unmarried woman who had made it; this being in the fiercely cold winter of 1780, and the shirts turning out to be of important practical value, keeping the soldiers in condition in the campaigning  that resulted in the capture of Cornwallis.

 

 

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turn, of four consecutive British sovereigns; Franklin exercised for many years of his eight-four a far greater influence than did any of those sovereigns   And no man was ever so associated in so many important ways with any city as was Franklin with Philadelphia.

 

His power began with his printing press.  Throughout his life he relied immensely upon the printed word to gain his ends.  At the same time, no man was ever more successful than he in personal talk and persuasion, whether he was in discussion with a committee of the House of Commons in regard to America, or with a group of Philadelphians regarding some matter of police or fire protection.

 

But his printing press was his chief strength.  It was a might power wielded by a might man.  And where he and the press were located, in those early years when he was reaching toward higher and higher influence was a fascinating question to me: a question which I supposed would be readily answered; and I was amazed to find no answer to it.  Philadelphia had not cared to remember the location of so great a power.

 

His home and his printing press, in the early years of his career, were in the same building, in accordance with the simple Philadelphia custom of the times.

 

 

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although as a matter of fact the picture was made, by the late Otto Bacher, frankly as an ideal picture of an unknown building, for a book published a quarter of a century ago.

 

In his “Autobiography,” Franklin intends to be explicit.  He “found a house to hire, near the market, and took it.”  This seems to have been in 1728.  Previously, he had worked for Keimer, a printer, on Second Street, and also has some dealings with William Bradford, a printer, on Second Street.  But his venture into independence seems to have meant a venture into High Street (now Market).  Books and pamphlets followed each other, from his press, with the address given “at the New Printing Office near the Market,” but without naming the street.  A pamphlet on paper currency, the Psalms of David, the Pennsylvania Gazette, the world-famous Poor Richard’s Almanac—all bear the tantalizing address, meant to describe and not to hide, but which only hides.

 

When his wife’s mother removed to his home after she became the Widow Read, she continued her business under his roof, as is shown by the advertisement of her specialty, which was an ointment which had cured many, as she declared, and it fact never fails; it being an ointment for the itch; and “gally-pot” (delightful word!) cost two shillings, and there could be “not the least apprehension of danger, even to a sucking infant.

 

 

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moved from the upper end of Highstreet to the New Printing Office near the Market.”  This, in the absence of definite evidence to the contrary, may be taken as sufficient proof that Franklin had located on High Street.  For, had the Widow Read moved from High Street to one of the cross streets she would have said so; she would not have advertised as if she had removed from one location on High Street to another.

 

One day, in the library that Franklin founded, I thought for a moment that I had discovered the desired knowledge; for in a manuscript headed, “Franklin’s Printing Office, No. (now) Market Street—."  a few doors east of Second Street, now numbered ^_____.” There it was tantalizingly ended.  Of course, it adds to the practical certainly of Market Street but omits the precise spot, which was to have been described in the manuscript when the street number should be learned.  So that the man who was sure, more than half a century ago, that it was on Market Street, near Second, and not as so many have supposed, on Second Street, felt a worried necessity to go and look it up—with unsatisfying results.

 

 

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safes containing ancient documents were courteously opened for me, but still I found nothing that could apply to that early printing-house.

 

No fire insurance company was in existence in the early day of his business life, but he founded such a company years before he left these early quarters; he organized the first fire-insurance company of America.  Never was such an organizer, never such a man to be the first to think of a thing, to see its advantages, to start it going.  One wonders what Philadelphia and America would have been without him!

 

I found that, after this company was organized, Franklin took out policies on several houses which he had acquired on Market (High Street), but that there was none on his printing office!  In one house, insured for two hundred pounds, dwelt Daniel Swan, another, insured for one hundred and fifty pounds, was “where E. Haddock dwells,” another was “where Mary Jacob dwells”

 

The explanation seems to be obvious.  To begin with, Franklin rented premises for his work.  That is in his own account.  And as business and prosperity increased he remained at the same place, still a renter; buying now and then a house and lot as investment but continued to rent the combined house and shop where he worked and lived.  Had he owned his place, he would certainly have insured it with his other properties, when insurance companies began, though his initiative, to be organized.

 

 

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east of Second.  Nothing could more have surprised him than the fact that the location could so soon and so completely be forgotten.  Why, it was something that everybody knew!  When the marvelous preacher Whitefield, who spent much of his time in American and in sailing back and forth thirteen times, between England and this continent, in a age when one crossing was no light task, was about to make one of his visits to Philadelphia, he wrote his friend Doctor Franklin as to where he could stay, as he had learned that Benezet, at whose house he had usually stayed, had moved out to Germantown.  Whereupon Franklin responded: “You know my house.  If you can make swift with its scanty accommodations, you will be most heartily welcome.”  To which come Whitefield’s reply, expressing the hope that Franklin made the offer for Christ’s sake; to which the forthright Benjamin answered, “Don’t let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ’s sake, but for your sake.  And Whitefield, no doubt with a chuckle of appreciation, accepted the invitation.

 

 

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would be possible for thirty thousand outdoor hearers to hear that marvelous voice.

 

None knew better that Franklin that, broad though Philadelphia was in religious tolerance, she was not broad in irreligious tolerance; a distinction seldom made.  Franklin was more irreligious than religious, but deemed it best not to insist on the unbelieving features.  He took, the religious test necessary to hold office, and he was associated with Christ Church; and he could genially say, in friendly talk or in letters, that he did not believe in every particle of the Bible as inspired; for example, he could believe that Jael drove a tent pen into the head of Sisera, but not that such an act received the warm approval of the Angel of the Lord.

 

When Whitefield came back for the South with a scheme of raising a great sum for Georgia orphans, Franklin doubted the good policy of the scheme.  Then he went to listen to Whitefield’s public address urging contributions; and with rueful amusement he tells that he had three kinds of money in his pocket, copper and silver and gold, but was determined not to give even a copper, but that Whitefield’s eloquence so moved him that he found himself handing over all the copper, and after a while all the silver, and before the address was concluded even the pieces of gold.

 

 

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shortly after the close of our Revolution the English ambassador, responding to the toast of “Great Britain,” likened his nation to the sun, shedding beneficial rays upon the world.  Franklin, following him was to respond to the “United States”; but, he said, his own nation was still young, her career was to come; so, instead, he would give as a toast, “George Washington,—the Joshua who successfully commanded the sun to stand still.”

 

While the Revolution was in progress he wrote to his friend Priestley—the same Priestley, distinguished as philosopher and scientist, who later, in the 1790’s, disappointed in England, came to America and made his home far up in the Susquehanna valley, in a region still distant and lonely even after all these decades;—he wrote to Priestley:

 

“Tell our dear good friend, Mr. Price, who sometimes has his doubts and despondencies about our firmness, that America is determined and unanimous; a very few Tories and placemen excepted, who will probably soon export themselves.  Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a head; and at Bunker’s Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill.  During the same time sixty thousand children have been born in America.  From this data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole country.”

 

 

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simple, kindly unpretentious man.  Manasseh Cutler, of Connecticut, and shortly to be of Ohio, went to see Franklin, armed with letters of introduction.  He felt the same, as he afterwards wrote, as if about to be presented to some European monarch, and was prepared to let the conversation consist of merely answering such questions as the great Franklin should choose to ask.  Imagine then, his surprise, at finding a man of unaffected simplicity, friendly and cordial, seated in his garden, on a grass plat, under a very large mulberry tree, a low-voiced man in plain Quaker dress, white-haired and partly bald.  Tea was serviced beneath the mulberry tree, by Mrs. Bache, to Franklin and Cutler and several friends, and as it grew dark they all went into the house and the intelligent Cutler was pleased with the chance of thus seeing the largest and finest private library in America.

 

Cutler’s reference to Franklin’s Quaker dress brings to mind an advertisement which was inserted in a Philadelphia paper, half a century before this; precisely forty-nine years before if one desires exactness.  For Franklin’s clothes had been stolen, and he advertised for them describing the garments as “Broadcloth breeches lined with leather, sagathee coat lined with silk, and fine homespun linen shirts.”

 

 

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has been elected, and says, with pardonable pride; “Of seventy-four members in Council and Assembly, who voted by ballot, there was in Council and Assembly, who voted by ballot, there was in my first election but one negative, beside my own; and in the second, after a year’s service, only my own.”

 

His energy, his spirit, were unconquerable.  One cold day in a village in Normandy I saw a happy father walking beside a smiling nurse, carrying his first-born child to a church to be baptized; and I was told that the child was but three or four hours old; and I thought I could understand how it was that the Normans had made themselves world rulers and it also came to me that here likewise lay an explanation of the tireless endurance of that world conqueror of thought, Benjamin Franklin, for on a January day in bleak Boston he had been carried to the Old South Church to be baptized only four hours after his birth.

 

Franklin founded the still-existent American Philosophical Society, he invented the Franklin stove, he founded the still-existent Pennsylvania Hospital, he was the first to utilize electricity, he as the leader in matter of street paving, fire protection, matters many and important.  Into everything that he created he breathed the breath of life.

 

 

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self in the forefront and manager and controller.  Yet everybody knew that he was.

 

One of his foundations was that of the noble Library Company of Philadelphia.  It came about through Franklin and his friends lending each other their books, and his seeing what would be the importance and benefit of an organized system.  And so, in 1731, he organized a formal library.  Its first books came in 1732 from England.  Between 1731 and 1742 eighty-five men signed the articles of incorporation, and those of present-day Philadelphia who can possess ownership of one of the early shares by descent are proud indeed.

 

The library began its existence on Pewter Platter Alley, a name long since “improved” to Church Street.  Franklin’s enthusiasm was contagious.  Books came freely in.  James Logan willed his own large library, a valuable and precious collection, to the organization.  Over in England, one day, while Benjamin West was painting a portrait of one Samuel Preston, who owned many bookish treasures, the painter looked around and said, “What do you intend to do with all your books?”  Preston did not know; he had no children.  “Then send the books to the Philadelphia Library,” said West; and Preston did!

 

 

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Franklin was not only a creator of organizations and corporations that still live; he was also a seer and a prophet, a man of vision.  Before a single cabin was erected where the great city of Cleveland now stands, when there was no road but an Indian trail, and while the mouth of the Cuyahoga was but a sandbar, Franklin, from his study of conditions, pointed out the site of the future Cleveland as the place at which an important city was to arise.

 

The crumpled face of Franklin, a face like a finely crumpled mask, was one that could literally mask his thoughts when he did not care to have them known.  And one matter of which he was absolutely reticent was that of the identity of the mother of his son, William Franklin.

 

His “Autobiography,” one of the few great autobiographies of the world, written largely in “the sweet retreat of Twyford,” in England, where he was the guest of the beloved Bishop Shipley of St. Asaph, in the bishop’s home—which I remember a mellow building of Georgian brick with its front charmingly covered with ivy and roses, at the edge of a prettily sedate village—does not give any intimation in regard to this mystery of his life.

 

Even had the “Autobiography,” been published in full, as written, it is not likely that any hint would have been found.  But any possibility of this sort was done away with by the grandson, William Temple Franklin, to whose care by will, had committed the MS. for publication.

 

 

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father, William Temple Franklin was William’s son, and he postponed publication of the “Autobiography,” for years, and it is understood to have eliminated large sections, on account of pressure from certain people who did not wish revelations made, and he was certainly in receipt of large sums of unexplainable money from English sources.  The thought is hopelessly tantalizing, of what precious chapters were destroyed, of how much of fascinating interest was thus lost to the world.

 

The romance which early began between the youthful Benjamin Franklin and Deborah Read was broken by temporary estrangement and by Benjamin’s absence on a tentative trip to England.  On his return, he seems then or shortly afterwards to have been the possessor of the unexplained William; and Deborah herself had meanwhile been having and unhappy matrimonial experiment; and the two, deciding to let bygones be bygones married, and continued their comfortable union into old age; Deborah accepting the mysterious William as a member of the household.

 

 

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shortly before his first journey abroad, so there was nothing surprising in his having made friends and attract special attention in England.

 

In various ways one sees indications of some strong but hidden English influence.  His son William was entered at the English Inns of Court before leaving this country.  When William received his appointment as Governor of New Jersey, it was not looked upon so much as an effort to win Franklin to the English as an appointment made on the personal account of the son.  And although Franklin himself was content to marry a young woman of low degree, from a society standpoint, he aimed high for William, and looked for an alliance for him with a relative of Governor Keith, and was angry with Keith for not accepting the suggestion; which doubtless explains, at least in part, the bitterness which Franklin felt toward Keith, as expressed in his story of their relations in the “Autobiography.”  And William Franklin took the English side in the Revolution in spite of his father’s urgent appeals; he knew something, at least, of his birth, and deemed himself an Englishman.

 

 

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his father, in England, which failed to heal the gap between the two which had come with war.  One is justified in wondering in regard to such a mystery concerning such a man as Benjamin Franklin.

 

Chaucer, in his “Franklin’s Tale,” has described a man, a prosperous man and so hospitable a man that “it snowed in his house of meat and drink”; or to quote good old Chaucer more literally, his Franklin was “so gret a househalder” that it “snewed in his hous of mete and drynk.”

 

In spite of Franklin’s remarkable association with Philadelphia, and the importance of his ideas and impetus behind them, one always associates him also with England and France.  He was the first American Citizen of the World.  Even now no Philadelphia home is properly set up if it does not possess a copy of the picture of “Franklin at the French Court”; a rather stilted matter, painted perhaps a half century after both Franklin and the French Court had vanished.

 

 

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ful cry of the aristocrats and the lantern—the lantern, literally the lantern, in front of many a house, to which the aristocrats were dragged for death:

 

 

When Franklin died, the National Assembly of France, on the motion of Mirabeau, seconded by Rochefoucauld and Lafayette, went into mourning for three days.

 

When Jefferson went to represent the United States at Paris, Vergennes said to him, cordially: “So you replace Dr. Franklin?” To which came the instant reply: “No; no one could replace him; I only succeed him.

 

 

[Franklin’s Grave]

 

Chapter V

 

Chapter III

 

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