Franklin Read Free

wanting his son to be labeled illegitimate, and with marriage to the boy’s mother impossible, on September 1, 1730, Franklin accepted Deborah as his wife and brought his son into their household.
    There was no public wedding ceremony, since drawing attention to the union would put Deborah at risk. “Our mutual affection was revived, but there were now great objections to our union,” Franklin wrote. Under Pennsylvania law, she could be branded a felon by marrying Benjamin while still legally bound to her first husband. The penalty would have been severe: Thirty-nine lashes at the public whipping post and a life of hard labor in prison. Benjamin and Deborah joined instead into a common-law marriage. There was another benefit to this arrangement: Benjamin would not incur the debts run up by the potter.
    Deborah did her best to accept William as her own. She worked hard for Franklin, who recalled “how she assisted me cheerfully in my business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing old linen rags for the papermakers, etc., etc.” He recalled that in those days, he had been “clothed from head to foot in woolen and linen of my wife’s manufacture.” Deborah was Benjamin’s bookkeeper and ran the shop attached to his printing office, where he sold books and stationery.
    Franklin was grateful to Deborah and demonstrated it by writing her a love song. One night, at the Junto, he and his friends were discussing the number of love songs written to mistresses, but no one could name one song written in praise of a wife. The next day, Franklin gave this song to one friend and asked him to sing it at the next Junto meeting.
    Of their Chloes and Phillises poets may prate I sing my plain country Joan
    These twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life; Blest day that I made her my own.
    Not a word of her face, or her shape, or her eyes
    Or of flames or of darts you shall hear;
    Tho’ I beauty admire ‘tis virtue I prize
    That fades not in seventy year.
    Some faults have we all, and so has my Joan
    But then they’re exceedingly small;
    And now I’m grown us’d to ‘em, so like my own I scarcely can see ‘em at all.”
    Although they were not poor, the Franklins lived frugally. Benjamin noted that his breakfasts for a long time consisted of only bread and milk, “no tea,” which was served on cheap pottery with a pewter spoon. Deborah thought her husband was worthy of more and surprised him with a gift one morning, which she had scrimped and saved for in secret. “Being called one morning to breakfast, I found it in a china bowl with a spoon of silver. They . . . had cost her the enormous sum of three and twenty shillings, for which she had no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbors.”
    Two years into his marriage, with his paper thriving, Franklin launched a more successful publication - Poor Richard’s Almanack. Every publisher in the colonies tried to produce an almanac; it was an ideal way to use dead time when the presses were idle, and if the book became popular, it could be profitable.
    The almanac’s success depended on the appeal of the “philomath” - the astrologer who did the writing and predicting. Franklin realized most people read an almanac for amusement and didn’t believe anyone could predict the weather and other events accurately a year ahead. So Franklin created a philomath named Richard Saunders, who wrote a comical introduction to the first edition. Poor Richard explained he only had taken to writing because his wife was sick of watching him gaze at the stars and had ordered him to make money or she was going to burn his books and instruments.
    A philomath named Titan Leeds wrote an almanac that served as Franklin’s competition. Poor Richard explained he would have written almanacs long ago, but he