It is unlikely that in any other part of the world a grown and prospering businessman would have resolved to make himself more virtuous, with all the diligence of a schoolboy attacking a problem in arithmetic. His act was typically American. The colonies were young and growing and pliable, not old and set in their ways like the European nations. Young countries, like young people, harbor the seeds of idealism, yearnings for greatness, deep-rooted desires to be better in any or every sphere of activity than their predecessors or contemporaries. The youthful spirit that was part and parcel of America remained with Benjamin Franklin to the end of his days.
He was always trying to enlarge his mental horizons. For that aim he taught himself French, Italian, Spanish, and German, not yet dreaming that he would ever have practical use for these languages. He was at the same time widening his business activities, starting a branch of his printing shop in Charleston, South Carolina, on a partnership arrangement. It was the first of many branches.
In 1733, after an absence of ten years, he went back to Boston to see his family. His parents were well but there were some sad changes. Four of his sisters and one of his brothers had died. Jane, his beautiful young sister, closer to him than anyone else in the family, had been married for six years to a saddler named Edward Mecom, and had two boys, but her husband was in poor health and her children were also sickly. Tragedy had cast its first shadow over her. She would in the years to come lose her husband and twelve children, two of them dying insane, as the result of some unknown inherited sickness.
James was living in Newport, and on his way back to Philadelphia, Franklin paid this older brother a visit. Their reunion was cordial and old differences were ignored if not forgotten. James too was sick and knew that death was not far away. His former apprentice promised to take care of James’ son and teach him the printing business. When James died two years later, Franklin sent the boy to school for five years and then took him into his home as an apprentice, thus making James “ample amends for the service I had depriv’d him of by leaving him so early.”
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.