20. Love, Maybe
Ben Franklin loved the ladies. Everybody knows that. In fact, it’s probably one of the top five things that anyone off the street can tell you about this Founding Father.
1. He signed the Declaration of Independence.
2. He helped write the Constitution.
3. He said clever stuff.
4. He flew a kite.
5. He had lots of affairs.
Yet the truth about Ben’s romantic life is actually quite elusive. The historical record—including personal correspondence—teases us with several women who were clearly objects of Ben’s affection at certain points during his long life. But it’s difficult to determine whether they were paramours or just friends.
We know that Ben made a pass at James Ralph’s girlfriend, which was rebuffed. A few years later, Ben fathered an illegitimate child, William. Were there other dalliances, in London or Philadelphia? We would be naïve to deny it. He was in his early twenties, a strapping lad, sowing his wild oats.
What’s more, in the codes of conduct he carefully constructed through the years, he often omitted sexual matters, or at least underplayed them. He had thrown off the Puritan yoke. While he worked at cultivating virtues like honesty and temperance, he was looser in his attitude toward sexual mores. In the 1730s he developed a “project of arriving at moral perfection,” in which he targeted one of twelve virtues each week. (A Quaker friend convinced him to add a thirteenth: humility.) Number twelve on this list was chastity, but see how he defines it: “Rarely use venery [sex] but for health or offspring; never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.”1
This is an ethic observed by many today: responsible, but not religious. There’s no mention of holiness, the body being God’s temple, or a sacred bond between marital partners. The concerns are practical. Overattention to sex can dull you, weaken you, or disgrace you. It can also disgrace those you love.
By the time Ben composed this plan he was married to Deborah. From the letters they exchanged, we gather that he truly appreciated and loved her. And while he was certainly attracted to other women, he did not want to “injure” Deborah’s “peace.” He was also protective of the “reputation” of the women he fancied. As a result, we don’t know what really went on between Franklin and those women. He kept it secret.
Take Catherine Ray. She was twenty-five years his junior, sister to the wife of Ben’s nephew. Ben met her in Boston in 1754, while staying with his brother John. They hit it off, engaging in lengthy conversations, taking walks in the rain, and eventually trading extremely flirtatious letters. Ben destroyed most of her letters, but those that survived, on both sides, reveal a kind of game between the two of them—hot talk but restrained action. Franklin sometimes gave paternal advice and frequently mentioned his wife in positive ways. One biographer said, “From reading their letters, and reading between the lines, one gets the impression that Franklin made a few playful advances that Caty gently deflected, and he seemed to respect her all the more for it.”2 Eventually she married, apparently with Ben’s blessing, and had six kids.
Ben traveled a lot. During the 1750s and 1760s, he spent more time in London—away from Deborah—than he did at home. Would he indulge in a sexual affair “for health” without Deborah finding out? His personal ethic would seem to allow that, as long as there was no injurious scandal.
On his stay in London from 1757 to 1762 with his son William, he rented rooms in a house belonging to Margaret Stevenson, a middle-aged widow. Over the years, she would become close to him, but in a pragmatic way—not unlike the relationship he had back home with Deborah. She kept house, fixed meals, and provided companionship. Among their circle of friends in London, Ben and Margaret were treated as a couple, but we don’t know if there was any romance or sex involved. Margaret’s daughter, known as Polly, was just eighteen when Ben met her, and she became a fast friend. Ben charmed her with his attention and was charmed by her eager mind. After she moved to the country, he wrote often to her, sharing his scientific ideas as well as personal tidbits. He was flirtatious as always, but the circumstances suggest that the relationship was always platonic. She was not so much a stand-in for Catherine Ray as she was for Sally Franklin, Ben’s teenage daughter back home.
The rules changed when Franklin went to Paris in late 1776. Deborah had died a few years earlier. Ben was seventy years old, and yet he was greeted in the French court as an example of American primitivism, a “wild man” from the frontier—and he played the part well, even wearing a fur hat to public functions. He quickly learned that the French appreciated good flirtation, so he obliged them, engaging in torrid correspondence with some of the leading ladies of French society. (When one woman complained that he hadn’t visited her all summer, he reportedly said he was waiting for the nights to grow longer.) Whether he actually engaged in sexual liaisons with them is beside the point. It’s likely that it was all a game, a character he was playing. Any actual sex would run the risk of injuring someone’s reputation—and, beyond that, hurting the chances of America getting much-needed French aid.
Much of Ben’s current reputation as a philanderer comes from that period. It was a character he cultivated, like the dozens of phony characters he adopted in print. John Adams, the prim congressman from Puritan territory, didn’t get it. When he visited Paris to check up on Ben, he was appalled. His outrage probably fortified Ben’s image as a party animal. In his seventies, Ben probably didn’t mind being charged with such virility.
Biographer Walter Isaacson issued a helpful analysis of Ben’s relationships with those of both genders. “Franklin only occasionally forged intimate bonds with his male friends, who tended to be either intellectual companions or jovial club colleagues. But he relished being with women, and he formed deep and lasting relationships with many. For him, such relationships were not a sport or trifling amusement, despite how they might appear, but a pleasure to be savored and respected. Throughout his life, Franklin would lose many male friends, but he never lost a female one.”3 He maintained a correspondence with Caty Ray all his life (though it became less flirtatious after her marriage), and Polly Stevenson was at his deathbed.
Curious George
For George Whitefield, it was quite the opposite. He had good relationships with men and some contentious ones, but he seemed clueless about women. Passionate about God’s work, he had little desire for anything, or anyone, else.
Until he fell in love.
The Delamotte family was a jewel in the crown of the young Methodist movement. Mr. Delamotte was a local magistrate, living in the town of Blendon with his wife and several grown children. Son William was a Cambridge scholar. Son Charles was assisting John Wesley in Georgia. And one of his daughters was named Elizabeth, a.k.a. Betsy or Betty. In late 1737 and early 1738, Charles Wesley talked at length with various Delamottes about spiritual matters, as he described in his journal. On November 5, 1737, Charles wrote, “I met and turned back with Betty to hear Mr. Whitefield preach, not with the persuasive words of man’s wisdom, but with the demonstration of the Spirit and with power. The churches will not contain the multitudes that throng to hear him.”4
This was the year that George was waiting to leave for Georgia, the year his preaching first catapulted him to fame. The journal entry is notable not only for the positive and prescient things Charles said about his old Oxford pal, but also for the fact that he was accompanied by Elizabeth (Betty) Delamotte, who would later steal George’s heart.
A year and a half later, in the spring of 1739, Whitefield was back in England after his own trip to Georgia (where he connected with Charles Delamotte). As he resumed his preaching ministry in England, he spent a great deal of time in Blendon, sometimes speaking to crowds in the Delamottes’ backyard, and sometimes just relaxing with that family. In his own journal he referred to it as his “sweet retreat.” That fall, from Philadelphia, George sent the Delamotte parents a letter of gratitude, in which he particularly mentioned their happy marriage: “It hath often given me pleasure to see in what harmony you seem to live. . . . Surely, thought I, these are a happy pair. These I trust are help-meets for each other.”5
Clearly George liked this family, and he found a nourishing Christian fellowship in their home. His journal entries about his times in Blendon were almost giddy with good feeling. He was praising God for all the Delamottes—but perhaps especially for daughter Elizabeth. Historian Harry Stout astutely observed the “enthusiasm and vigor” displayed in Whitefield’s journal entries after George stayed with the Delamottes. Though George “never specifically identified these enraptured feelings with Elizabeth,” Stout suggested that George was falling in love without recognizing it.6
It makes sense. Being “in love” would be an uncomfortable feeling for George, who had dedicated his passion to the Lord alone. He had carefully eliminated distractions from his life—not only extraneous activities like card playing and theater, but sometimes more necessary things like friendship and even food. Feelings of attraction for this recent convert might lead him away from his true calling. His attention to Elizabeth might sap his already flagging energy. She might become an idol to him, a temptation. She might seem like an angel of light at this point, but wasn’t that the way temptation worked?
He would have to be very careful about this business of love.
Over the following year George acted like a lovesick schoolboy afraid to admit his true feelings—telling his friends matter-of-factly that it might be time for him to find a wife, writing letters to Elizabeth’s parents and brothers that he hoped she’d see, even writing an overly spiritual epistle to her, exhorting her to stand firm in the faith. “There is nothing I dread more than having my heart drawn away by earthly objects,” he wrote from Savannah in this letter to her, dated February 1, 1740. Whether she understood or not, she was the “earthly object” he was talking about. “For alas, what room can there be for GOD, when a rival hath taken possession of the heart?” It was a generic bit of exhortation, but he was also referring to his own heart, and she was the “rival.” In closing, he briefly let his emotions be seen. “My heart is now full. Writing quickens me. I could almost drop a tear, and wish myself, for a moment or two, in England. But hush, nature.”7
If this was a courtship, he was successfully squeezing it dry of any passion. He actually scolded himself for wanting to be with her. The apostle Paul wrote about the struggle between the “natural man” and the spiritual man (1 Corinthians 2:14–15; see also Romans 7). This was the war George was waging as he shushed the longings of his own romantic nature.
About two months later came the oddest proposal you’ll ever see. He wrote it April 4, 1740, on shipboard between Georgia and Philadelphia, in the midst of his grand tour of America. First he wrote to her parents: “It hath been therefore much impressed upon my heart, that I should marry, in order to have a help meet for me in the work whereunto our dear Lord Jesus hath called me.” He asks “whether you think your daughter, Miss Elizabeth, is a proper person to engage in such an undertaking?”
Even here he tried to strip all emotion from the matter. “If I know anything of my own heart, I am free from that foolish passion, which the world calls LOVE.” And yet it’s clear he was still wresthng with deep feelings. “After strong crying and tears at the throne of grace for direction, and after unspeakable troubles with my own heart, I write this.”8
He enclosed a letter for Elizabeth as well, which said, in part:
Do you think you could undergo the fatigues that must necessarily attend being joined to one who is every day liable to be called out to suffer for the sake of Jesus Christ? . . . Can you undertake to help a husband in the charge of a family, consisting perhaps of a hundred persons [the orphanage]? Can you bear the inclemencies of the air both as to cold and heat in a foreign climate? Can you, when you have an husband, be as though you had none, and willingly part with him, even for a long season, when his Lord and master shall call him forth to preach the gospel, and command him to leave you behind?
After these and other challenges, he got to the point: “I have great reason to believe it is the divine will that I should alter my condition, and have often thought you [were] the person appointed for me.”
To his credit, George realized this was not a very good love letter. “The passionate expressions which carnal courtiers use, I think, ought to be avoided by those that would marry in the Lord.” He realized that Elizabeth might not be ready for the challenge of life with an itinerant preacher, and he invited her to be honest in her response.9
These letters were launched toward England in early April. It routinely took two months to get a letter across the ocean and another two months to get a response—sometimes much longer. In a letter dated June 26, George shared with his old colleague William Seward, who was now back in England, some second thoughts about Elizabeth Delamotte. George had received a message indicating that she was “in a seeking state only”—that is, she hadn’t fully committed to Christ but was still examining her options. “Surely that will not do,” George told his friend. “I would have one that is full of faith and the Holy Ghost. Just now I have been weeping, and much carried out in prayer before the Lord. . . . I want a gracious woman that is dead to everything but Jesus, and is qualified to govern children, and direct persons of her own sex. Such a one would help, and not retard me in my dear Lord’s work.”
Was he regretting the proposal? Was he afraid that his desire for Elizabeth had run ahead of his desire to serve God, or did he simply fear rejection and guard his heart by undermining her first? In any case, he told Seward he was still trusting God in this matter and had received assurances “that he will not permit me to fall by the hands of a woman.”10
George didn’t know, or maybe was just beginning to find out, that the Delamotte family was in the process of rejecting Methodism in favor of a Moravian group. Charles Wesley wrote in his journal about a painful visit on June 10, 1740, to these old friends in Blendon. “They could hardly force themselves to be barely civil.” When he returned the next day, “Betty” and her mother asked him not to come back.11
This situation might have contributed to Elizabeth’s “seeking state only” status. It also seems that she was seeking a husband elsewhere. The following March, she married a member of her new religious society.12
We’re not sure when George received any of this news. It’s possible that he got a reply from the Delamottes in August or later, rejecting his proposal. This would coincide with a time of physical sickness that might have been brought on by this emotional jolt. “God has been pleased to bring me low, for some time, by inward weakness, and faintness of spirits,” he wrote at the time. “The Lord is purging me, that I may bring forth more fruit.”13
The Good Wife
These personal events all contributed to George’s emotional state when he launched his New England tour in the fall of 1740. Was he depressed about Elizabeth’s rejection, or her parents’ defection? Was he in denial, still holding out hope that Elizabeth would come back to the Lord, and to him? Was he despairing about ever finding a suitable wife? Whatever his inner feelings, he pushed them aside in order to focus on the work ahead of him. But those feelings crept back into his heart that October, when George stayed with Jonathan and Sarah Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts.
While we might expect George to rave about the intelligence or piety of the great Jonathan Edwards, it was Sarah who dazzled him. “A sweeter couple I have not yet seen. . . . Mrs. Edwards is adorned with a meek and quiet spirit; she talked solidly of the things of God, and seemed to be such a helpmeet for her husband, that she caused me to renew those prayers, which, for some months, I have put up to God, that He would be pleased to send me a daughter of Abraham to be my wife.”14
The “daughter of Abraham” he wanted would be one who was justified by faith, as Abraham was (Romans 4:16–22), and as George was. Whitefield also liked the story of God leading Abraham’s servant to find a wife for Isaac (Genesis 24). Wouldn’t that be nice? Courtship was problematic and full of distractions. Why couldn’t he just let someone else find the right woman for him?
Essentially, that’s what happened. The following year, as George was back in the British Isles, his friend Howell Harris, the Welsh field preacher, suggested that he consider marrying Elizabeth James, an affluent widow about ten years older than George. If the proposal to Miss Delamotte was odd, this was odder still. It seems that Harris and James were fond of each other, but Harris had the same ambivalence about love that Whitefield had. He feared that romantic passion might distract from his ministry. So Harris handed Elizabeth James over to George. She wasn’t happy to be treated this way (“If you were my own father you had no right of disposing me against my will,” she complained to Harris15), but after a four-day courtship, she agreed to become Mrs. Whitefield. They married November 14, 1741, with Howell Harris giving the bride away. During the following week, staying in Elizabeth’s home, George preached twice a day, as usual. Married or not, his ministry would go on, unimpeded.
George got what he wanted: a passionless marriage. He wrote to his American colleague Gilbert Tennent, “About eleven weeks ago I married, in the fear of God, one who was a widow, of about thirty-six years of age, and has been a housekeeper for many years; neither rich in fortune, nor beautiful as to her person, but, I believe, a true child of God, and would not, I think, attempt to hinder me in his work for the world. In that respect, I am just the same as before marriage.”16
The Birth of Romance
That might trouble some modern readers accustomed to romance, a honeymoon, and wedded bliss. But the world of 1741 was different. The idea of romance in marriage was just beginning to gain traction, but it hadn’t arrived yet. Both Whitefield and Franklin came out of cultures where marriages were generally practical in nature, often arranged by parents and/or approved by the community. George was looking for a “helpmeet,” in the language of the King James Version, someone who could help him in fitting (meet) ways. He needed a housekeeper, a surrogate mother for orphans, someone who wouldn’t distract him from preaching duties. The Franklin marriage wasn’t much different. Ben boasted about Deborah’s “industry and frugality . . . She assisted me cheerfully in my business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing old linen rags for the papermakers, etc., etc.”17 He was a romantic, to be sure, but he found romance in his flirtatious games with Catherine Ray and others. Apparently he saw little connection between romance and marriage.
The ironic thing about George’s lack of marital romance is that he himself was ushering in a sort of Romantic Age for religion. He was promoting a kind of “falling in love” with Jesus. Without that feeling, there was little evidence that anyone really had a relationship with Christ, as he saw it. Generations of churchgoers had been trudging along in their “arranged marriages” with the Lord, without any passion. It was quite revolutionary to suggest that passion was important—in either religion or in marriage.
Though he himself seemed blissfully unaware of this, there was a certain seduction going on when George preached. This was not lost on Boston pastor Charles Chauncy, a strong opponent of both George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. Chauncy wrote a scathing condemnation of the 1740 Whitefield revival.
“Wherever he went he generally moved the passions, especially of the younger people, and the females among them; the effect whereof was, a great talk about religion, together with a disposition to be perpetually hearing sermons, to neglect of all other business,” Chauncy wrote.18 It was true: the twenty-five-year-old Whitefield was quite popular among young people. Even Jonathan Edwards noted his effect on the youth in his town. And throughout his ministry critics charged George with using his versatile voice to excite women.
Chauncy went on to describe how “Mr. Whitefield’s doctrine of inward feelings” caused such havoc that people “cried out, fell down, swooned away, and, to all appearance, were like persons in fits. . . . Scores in a congregation would be in such circumstances at a time; nay some hundreds in some places. . . . If this has its intended effect upon one or two weak women, the shrieks catch from one to another, till a great part of the congregation is affected.”19
George Whitefield was Elvis. His dramatic phrasing and movement touched the hearts of his hearers. His preaching was a sensory experience that left women shrieking and swooning. Critics assumed that this was all show, that Whitefield and his copycats manufactured these emotional experiences. Of course George insisted that these were manifestations of the surprising work of God, drawing people to himself.
Still, there’s a remarkable contradiction here. This man, who excited passions on two continents, scoured his own soul to remove passion, even from his own marriage. This eighteenth-century rock star, who taught millions to fall in love with Jesus, fought against his own falling in love.