As was typical, Franklin sought a pragmatic resolution in his Junto talk, which he called “On the Providence of God in the Government of the World.” He began by apologizing to “my intimate pot companions” for being rather “unqualified” to speak on spiritual matters. His study of nature, he said, convinced him that God created the universe and was infinitely wise, good, and powerful. He then explored four possibilities: (1) God predetermined and predestined everything that happens, eliminating all possibility of free will; (2) He left things to proceed according to natural laws and the free will of His creatures, and never interferes; (3) He predestined some things and left some things to free will, but still never interferes; (4) “He sometimes interferes by His particular providence and sets aside the effects which would otherwise have been produced by any of the above causes.”40
Franklin ended up settling on the fourth option, but not because he could prove it; instead, it resulted from a process of elimination and a sense of which belief would be most useful for people to hold. Any of the first three options would mean that God is not infinitely powerful or good or wise. “We are then necessarily driven into the fourth supposition,” he wrote. He admitted that many find it contradictory to believe both that God is infinitely powerful and that men have free will (it was the conundrum that stymied him in the London dissertation he wrote and then renounced). But if God is indeed all powerful, Franklin reasoned, he surely is able to find a way to give the creatures he made in his image some of his free will.
Franklin’s conclusion had, as might be expected, practical consequences: people should love God and “pray to Him for His favor and protection.” He did not, however, stray too far from deism; he placed little faith in the use of prayers for specific personal requests or miracles. In an irreverent letter he later wrote to his brother John, he calculated that 45 million prayers were offered in all of New England seeking victory over a fortified French garrison in Canada. “If you do not succeed, I fear I shall have but an indifferent opinion of Presbyterian prayers in such cases as long as I live. Indeed, in attacking strong towns I should have more dependence on works than on faith.”
Above all, Franklin’s beliefs were driven by pragmatism. The final sentence of his Junto talk stressed that it was socially useful for people to believe in the version of divine providence and free will that he proposed: “This religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our own minds, and render us benevolent, useful and beneficial to others.”41
Not all of Franklin’s religious musings were this earnest. Around the time of his Junto paper, he wrote for his newspaper a tale called “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly,” which was a delightful parody of Puritan mystical beliefs clashing with scientific experimentation. The accused witches were to be subjected to two tests: weighed on a scale against the Bible, and tossed in the river with hands and feet bound to see if they floated. They agree to submit to these tests—on the condition that two of the accusers take the same test. With colorful details of all the ridiculous pomp, Franklin described the process. The accused and accusers all succeed in outweighing the Bible. But both of the accused and one of the accusers fail to sink in the river, thus indicating that they are witches. The more intelligent spectators conclude from this that most people naturally float. The others are not so sure, and they resolve to wait until summer when the experiment could be tried with the subjects unclothed.42
Franklin’s freethinking unnerved his family. When his parents wrote of their concern over his “erroneous opinions,” Franklin replied with a letter that spelled out a religious philosophy, based on tolerance and utility, that would last his life. It would be vain, he wrote, for any person to insist that “all the doctrines he holds are true and all he rejects are false.” The same could be said of the opinions of different religions as well. They should be evaluated, the young pragmatist said, by their utility: “I think opinions should be judged by their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are dangerous, which I hope is the case with me.” He had little use for the doctrinal distinctions his mother worried about. “I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. And the Scripture assures me that at the last day we shall not be examined by what we thought, but what we did…that we did good to our fellow creatures. See Matth 26.” His parents, a bit more versed in the Scripture, probably caught that he meant Matthew 25. They did, nonetheless, eventually stop worrying about his heresies.43
The Moral Perfection Project
Franklin’s historical reputation has been largely shaped, for disciples and detractors alike, by his account in his autobiography of the famous project he launched to attain “moral perfection.” This rather odd endeavor, which involved sequentially practicing a list of virtues, seems at once so earnest and mechanical that one cannot help either admiring him or ridiculing him. As the novelist D. H. Lawrence later sneered, “He made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a gray nag in a paddock.”
So it’s important to note the hints of irony and self-deprecation in his droll recollection, written when he was 79, of what he wryly dubbed “the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” His account has touches of the amused-by-his-younger-self tone to be found in the diverting little tales he wrote in France at the same time that he was writing this part of his autobiography. Yet it should also be noted that, as a young man, he seemed to approach his moral perfection program with an endearing sincerity, and even as an old man seemed proud of its worthiness.
Franklin began his quest around the time he ended his unsatisfactory visits to Presbyterian services and started spelling out his own religious creed. The endeavor was typically pragmatic. It contained no abstract philosophizing nor any reference to religious doctrines. As he later noted with pride, it was not merely an exhortation to be virtuous, it was also a practical guide on how to achieve that goal.
First he made a list of twelve virtues he thought desirable, and to each he appended a short definition:
Temperance: Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; (i.e., waste nothing).
Industry: Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
A Quaker friend “kindly” informed him that he had left something off: Franklin was often guilty of “pride,” the friend said, citing many examples, and could be “overbearing and rather insolent.” So Franklin added “humility” to be the thirteenth virtue on his list. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”44
The descriptions, such as the notably lenient one for chastity, were rather revealing. So too was the endeavor itself. It was also, in its passion for self-improvement through diligent resolve, enchantingly American.
Franklin’s focus was on traits that could help him succeed in this world, instead of ones that would exalt his soul for the hereafter. “Franklin celebrated a characteristically bourgeois se
t of virtues,” writes social theorist David Brooks. “These are not heroic virtues. They don’t fire the imagination or arouse the passions like the aristocratic love of honor. They are not particularly spiritual virtues. But they are practical and they are democratic.”
The set of virtues was also, as Edmund Morgan and others have pointed out, somewhat selfish. It did not include benevolence or charity, for example. But in fairness, we must remember that this was a young tradesman’s plan for self-improvement, not a full-blown statement of his morality. Benevolence was and would continue to be a motivating ideal for him, and charity, as Morgan notes, “was actually the guiding principle of Franklin’s life.” The fundamental tenet of his morality, he repeatedly declared, was “The most acceptable service to God is doing good to man.”45
Mastering all of these thirteen virtues at once was “a task of more difficulty than I had imagined,” Franklin recalled. The problem was that “while my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another.” So he decided to tackle them like a person who, “having a garden to weed, does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength, but works on one of the beds at a time.”
On the pages of a little notebook, he made a chart with seven red columns for the days of the week and thirteen rows labeled with his virtues. Infractions were marked with a black spot. The first week he focused on temperance, trying to keep that line clear while not worrying about the other lines. With that virtue strengthened, he could turn his attention to the next one, silence, hoping that the temperance line would stay clear as well. In the course of the year, he would complete the thirteen-week cycle four times.
“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined,” he dryly noted. In fact, his notebook became filled with holes as he erased the marks in order to reuse the pages. So he transferred his charts to ivory tablets that could be more easily wiped clean.
His greatest difficulty was with the virtue of order. He was a sloppy man, and he eventually decided that he was so busy and had such a good memory that he didn’t need to be too orderly. He likened himself to the hurried man who goes to have his ax polished but after a while loses patience and declares, “I think I like a speckled ax best.” In addition, as he recounted with amusement, he developed another convenient rationalization: “Something that pretended to be reason was every now and then suggesting to me that such extreme nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in morals, which if it were known would make me ridiculous; that a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated.”
Humility was also a problem. “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it,” he wrote, echoing what he had said about how he had acquired the appearance of industry by carting his own paper through the streets of Philadelphia. “There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride; disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself.” This battle against pride would challenge—and amuse—him for the rest of his life. “You will see it perhaps often in this history. For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I would probably be proud of my humility.”
Indeed, he would always indulge a bit of pride in discussing his moral perfection project. Fifty years later, as he flirted with the ladies of France, he would pull out the old ivory slates and show off his virtues, causing one French friend to exult at touching “this precious booklet.”46
Enlightenment Creed
This plan for pursuing virtue, combined with the religious outlook that he had simultaneously been formulating, laid the foundation for a lifelong creed. It was based on pragmatic humanism and a belief in a benevolent but distant deity who was best served by being benevolent to others. Franklin’s ideas never ripened into a profound moral or religious philosophy. He focused on understanding virtue rather than God’s grace, and he based his creed on rational utility rather than religious faith.
His outlook contained some vestiges of his Puritan upbringing, most notably an inclination toward frugality, lack of pretense, and a belief that God appreciates those who are industrious. But he detached these concepts from Puritan orthodoxy about the salvation of the elect and from other tenets that he did not consider useful in improving earthly conduct. His life shows, the Yale scholar A. Whitney Griswold has noted, “what Puritan habits detached from Puritan beliefs were capable of achieving.”
He was also far less inward-looking than Cotton Mather or other Puritans. Indeed, he poked fun at professions of faith that served little worldly purpose. As A. Owen Aldridge writes, “The Puritans were known for their constant introspection, fretting about sins, real or imaginary, and agonizing about the uncertainty of their salvation. Absolutely none of this soul-searching appears in Franklin. One can scrutinize his work from first page to last without finding a single note of spiritual anxiety.”47
Likewise, he had little use for the sentimental subjectivity of the Romantic era, with its emphasis on the emotional and inspirational, that began rising in Europe and then America during the later part of his life. As a result, he would be criticized by such Romantic exemplars as Keats, Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Melville.48
Instead, he fit squarely into the tradition—indeed, was the first great American exemplar—of the Enlightenment and its Age of Reason. That movement, which rose in Europe in the late seventeenth century, was defined by an emphasis on reason and observable experience, a mistrust of religious orthodoxy and traditional authority, and an optimism about education and progress. To this mix, Franklin added elements of his own pragmatism. He was able (as novelist John Updike and historian Henry Steele Commager, among others, have noted) to appreciate the energies inherent in Puritanism and to liberate them from rigid dogma so they could flower in the freethinking atmosphere of the Enlightenment.49
In his writings about religion over the next five decades, Franklin rarely displayed much fervor. This is largely because he felt it was futile to wrestle with theological questions about which he had no empirical evidence and thus no rational basis for forming an opinion. Thunderbolts from heaven were, for him, something to be captured by a kite string and studied.
As a result, he was a prophet of tolerance. Focusing on doctrinal disputes was divisive, he felt, and trying to ascertain divine certainties was beyond our mortal ken. Nor did he think that such endeavors were socially useful. The purpose of religion should be to make men better and to improve society, and any sect or creed that did so was fine with him. Describing his moral improvement project in his autobiography, he wrote, “There was in it no mark of any of the distinguishing tenets of any particular sect. I had purposely avoided them; for, being fully persuaded of the utility and excellency of my method, and that it might be serviceable to people in all religions, and intending some time or other to publish it, I would not have any thing in it that should prejudice any one, of any sect, against it.”
This simplicity of Franklin’s creed meant that it was sneered at by sophisticates and disqualified from inclusion in the canon of profound philosophy. Albert Smyth, who compiled volumes of Franklin’s papers in the nineteenth century, proclaimed, “His philosophy never got beyond the homely maxims of worldly prudence.” But Franklin freely admitted that his religious and moral views were not based on profound analysis or metaphysical thinking. As he declared to a friend later in life, “The great uncertainty I found in metaphysical reasonings disgusted me, and I quitted that kind of reading and study for others more satisfactory.”
What he found more satisfactory—more than metaphysics or poetry or exalted romantic sentiments—was looking at things in a pragmatic and practical way. Did they have beneficial consequences? For him, there was a connection between civic virtue and religious virtue, between se
rving his fellow man and honoring God. He was un-ashamed by the simplicity of this creed, as he explained in a sweet letter to his wife. “God is very good to us,” he wrote. “Let us…show our sense of His goodness to us by continuing to do good to our fellow creatures.”50
Poor Richard and the way to Wealth
Poor Richard’s Almanack, which Franklin began publishing at the end of 1732, combined the two goals of his doing-well-by-doing-good philosophy: the making of money and the promotion of virtue. It became, in the course of its twenty-five-year run, America’s first great humor classic. The fictional Poor Richard Saunders and his nagging wife, Bridget (like their predecessors Silence Dogood, Anthony Afterwit, and Alice Addertongue), helped to define what would become a dominant tradition in American folk humor: the naïvely wicked wit and homespun wisdom of down-home characters who seem to be charmingly innocent but are sharply pointed about the pretensions of the elite and the follies of everyday life. Poor Richard and other such characters “appear as disarming plain folk, the better to convey wicked insights,” notes historian Alan Taylor. “A long line of humorists—from Davy Crockett and Mark Twain to Garrison Keillor—still rework the prototypes created by Franklin.”51
Almanacs were a sweet source of annual revenue for a printer, easily outselling even the Bible (because they had to be bought anew each year). Six were being published in Philadelphia at the time, two of which were printed by Franklin: Thomas Godfrey’s and John Jerman’s. But after falling out with Godfrey over his failed matchmaking and losing Jerman to his rival Andrew Bradford, Franklin found himself in the fall of 1732 with no almanac to help make his press profitable.
So he hastily assembled his own. In format and style, it was like other almanacs, most notably that of Titan Leeds, who was publishing, as his father had before him, Philadelphia’s most popular version. The name Poor Richard, a slight oxymoron pun, echoed that of Poor Robin’s Almanack, which had been published by Franklin’s brother James. And Richard Saunders happened to be the real name of a noted almanac writer in England in the late seventeenth century.52