5. The City of Brotherly Love
Philadelphia is still Ben Franklin’s city. You can cross the Benjamin Franklin Bridge from Jersey, exit the expressway onto the Franklin Parkway, and visit the Franklin Institute (the local science museum). Stay in the Franklin Residences on Chestnut and take a tour of the Franklin Mint, or perhaps you’d rather see a game at Franklin Field (at the University of Pennsylvania, which Ben sort of founded). Head back to Old City and tour the newly renovated Franklin Museum on the site where he lived and worked. Walk along those streets—Market, Chestnut, Walnut—and you’re likely to pass the locations of several outfits he had a hand in: the post office, a branch of the Free Library, the American Philosophical Association. You’ll even pass the Benjamin Franklin Beer Distributors.
Stroll through the courtyard behind Independence Hall, where Ben did some of his best work. You might actually see a Ben Franklin impersonator walking beside you, with the classic spectacles, pudgy face, white hair, and balding pate. At Fourth and Arch you can see his final resting place, shared with his wife, father-in-law, daughter, and son-in-law. Across the street is a fire company, established by, well, you can probably guess.
William Penn founded this town, but Ben Franklin made it. Penn laid out its streets, but Franklin knit them together. Penn christened the city with its Greek name, meaning “brotherly love,” but Franklin loved it like a brother—even more so.
Philadelphia was also sort of a base of operations for George Whitefield. This preacher was always on the move, so it’s hard to think of any American site as his home (except possibly the orphanage he founded in Georgia). Yet Whitefield preached repeatedly to huge crowds in Philadelphia, and he kept coming back to the city. This was where most of his literature was printed (by Franklin), and this was where citizens constructed a building for his converts—a project Franklin helped to fund and manage. (This became the institution that became the University of Pennsylvania.)
The City of Brotherly Love was a good fit for Whitefield. At the time of his first visit, it was the second-largest city in the colonies, and before his last visit it surpassed Boston as the largest. It was also more centrally located than Boston or New York. For the promotion-conscious Whitefield, there was no better place to make a splash. Word of his preaching would travel fast, north and south. In fact, Franklin eventually set up a network of printers throughout the colonies to publish and distribute Whitefield’s sermons and journals even more efficiently.
After a brief trip to Georgia in 1738, setting up his orphanage, Whitefield felt called to conduct a preaching tour of the colonies. So in 1739 he headed straight for Philadelphia, like an arrow shot into the heart of America. He couldn’t wait to get there. When the boat entered the Delaware Bay and docked temporarily at Lewes, George got out and rode north on horseback (later meeting his shipmates in the city), greeting well-wishers along the way and preaching to them.
Ripe for the Picking
Philadelphia was ripe for Whitefield’s message. William Penn had founded the city in 1682 on the concept of religious tolerance. A Quaker, Penn had been jailed in England for his non-Anglican faith. In America, he was determined to set up a haven for all sorts of believers. The colonial constitution Penn drew up explicitly guaranteed freedom of religion. As a result, the Philadelphia area had several different denominations well represented. Quakers remained plentiful, but there was a strong group of Presbyterians in town, as well as some Baptists and a growing number of German immigrants with Mennonite, Moravian, or Lutheran backgrounds. And of course there was Christ Church, the Anglican house of worship on Second Street, just north of Market. It’s still there today.
Whitefield himself was nearly as religiously diverse as the city. Ordained an Anglican, he was part of the brand-new Methodist movement, but he had adopted Calvinist theology, which put him closer to the Presbyterians. Yet his message wasn’t about any of those sects—just about Jesus. He invited people from every religious persuasion to make a personal connection with Christ. His indifference to denominations played very well in tolerant Philadelphia.
And for a few days in 1739, it was very clearly Whitefield’s city. An estimated six thousand people came to hear him the first night he preached in Philadelphia—at a time when the metropolitan area had maybe thirteen thousand people.1 To get that percentage of the area’s residents to attend any event today, you’d need fifty stadiums. And there were a couple thousand more the next night. Whitefield preached Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from the courthouse steps to growing crowds, and then a few times on Sunday. In a nine-day span, he visited the sick and imprisoned, entertained visitors in his lodging, met with church leaders, dined with William Penn’s heir, and prayed with troubled individuals. Then he took his preaching up to New York City and back again, through New Jersey and the northern suburbs of Philadelphia. Whenever he lifted his voice in this area, he drew a crowd. And this went on at regular intervals over forty years, as he kept coming back to the City of Brotherly Love.
Whitefield’s ministry made a deep impact on the lives of Philadelphians. “It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants,” Franklin wrote. “From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious; so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing Psalms sung in different families of every street.”2
“Blessed be God, for the great work begun in these parts,” Whitefield journaled as he left the city in late November 1739. He went on to quote a Bible verse from Revelation addressed to believers in an ancient city also known as Philadelphia: “Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.”3
On one of George’s trips to Philadelphia, probably an early one, Ben conducted an experiment of sorts. He had doubts about reports from England that Whitefield had preached to twenty-five thousand people in an open field. Was it even possible for a man’s voice to carry that far, to be heard by so many? As Ben’s scientific mind began whirring away, he decided to test it out. George was preaching from the top steps of the courthouse, which then stood in the middle of Market Street, on the west side of Second. Ben began walking through the crowd, away from the preacher, toward the Delaware River. How far could he get before he would lose the sound of George’s voice? He got as far as Front Street, a full city block away. Then, computing the number of people who could fit in that area (and apparently they were jam-packed), he did the math and ascertained that in fact thirty thousand people could stand within earshot of this powerful preacher.
You could pace that out yourself. There’s no courthouse there anymore, but you could stand at Whitefield’s preaching spot on Market at Second (not for long, though—there’s always traffic). You could walk to Front Street, as Ben did. You could imagine that street thronged by Philadelphians and visitors eager to hear a life-changing message—or maybe just eager to see what all the fuss was about. You could let your mind drift back to a time when this city belonged to both the printer and the preacher.
Yet there’s no Whitefield Pizza Palace there. No bridge with George’s name on it. No Whitefield impersonators giving sermons on street corners. There’s a statue of him at the University of Pennsylvania, but most of the students who walk past probably don’t know who it is.4 Philadelphia is now, and always will be, Ben’s town.
On October 6, 1723, Benjamin Franklin walked into Philadelphia as a stranger. In his autobiography, he fondly recounted stepping into the city for the first time. The seventeen-year-old runaway cut a less-than-impressive figure. “I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuffed out with shirts and stockings . . . I was fatigued with travelling, rowing and want of rest. I was very hungry, and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper.”5
The boat put in at Market Street Wharf, and the hungry boy found a bakery just a block away, on Second. Asking for a “three-penny loaf,” a type of bread common in Boston, he received three huge “puffy rolls,” so he walked the streets of Philadelphia “with a roll under each arm, and eating the other.”6 Continuing on Market up to Fourth Street, he passed the house belonging to John Read, whose daughter Deborah was standing by the door and saw him. She later became Ben’s wife.
This is a detail that gives historians pause, for it seems too convenient that Deborah sees him walking past the house in his first hour in town. Ben doesn’t remark on the oddness of the coincidence; he just notes that she “thought I made as I certainly did a most awkward ridiculous appearance.”7
But maybe it’s not as far-fetched as it first seems. It’s no surprise that Ben passed the Read house—Market Street was Philadelphia’s main drag then as now. And is it all that unusual that a young woman might be looking out her door as people passed—or that she might remember a strapping young man with shirts in his pockets and bread under his arms, especially when he came to lodge in her home a few days later?
Ben Franklin has proven himself capable of spinning a yarn, and maybe that’s what he was doing with his “first day in Philadelphia” story. But he was also recalling the events nearly half a century later, and it’s possible that the details morphed in his memory. Additionally, appearance was very important to him. In this case, he emphasized the oddness of his look and manner as he first entered his city and compared it to the far more respectable presence he had later. Maybe he exaggerated some things for effect, but maybe it really happened that way.
Ben walked past the Read House, turned left on Fourth, walked south one block to Chestnut, and turned back toward the river. At some point he moved down one more block to Walnut, ending up at the wharf again, where he gave his extra bread to a woman and child who had been on the boat with him. Then he headed back into town.
It was Sunday. Ben noticed well-dressed men and women walking along Market Street, and he followed them to the Quaker Meeting House at Second Street. He took a seat and, “after looking round a while and hearing nothing said,” he fell asleep.8 There’s a joke here: Quakers are known for their silence. Often there’s no particular preacher at their meetings. They wait for the Spirit to move someone to speak, and sometimes they wait a long time.
So the elderly Ben painted himself as an ignorant kid, intruding on a service he knew nothing about, and falling asleep. Wryly he noted that this was the first house in Philadelphia he ever slept in. Then he set out to look for the second—lodging for the night. He was about to enter one inn when a concerned Quaker stopped him on the street and warned him that it was a disreputable place. The Quaker redirected Ben a few blocks south to the Crooked Billet, where he got food and a bed before seeking a job with the local printer the next morning.
Walk of Fame
If you ever get to Philadelphia, you could take this walking tour yourself. The Quaker Meeting House has moved and the Crooked Billet is gone, but those streets are still there and pocked with history. You might find a certain thrill from walking the old grid. A great deal of history happened within an area about six blocks square, and Ben Franklin was involved in most of it. You could cross the streets he crossed, turn the corners that he turned, look out on the Delaware River just as he did. You could go on the same three-block “commute” that Ben took each day when he met with the Continental Congress at Independence Hall. If you let your mind drift back in history a bit, it might just give you goose bumps.
Maybe Ben felt the same way about this area. Maybe that’s why he wrote about it with such care. The history hadn’t even been fully written yet. When he wrote this first part of his autobiography in 1771, the Liberty Bell was just another bell. But he had poured his life into that city. He knew every inch of that grid intimately. On those streets he had sold papers, conducted experiments, held business meetings, rallied troops, and listened to a preacher from England stirring the hearts of thousands.
What’s more, as he wrote this early part of his autobiography Ben was across the ocean, representing Pennsylvania’s interests in London. He had been away from Philadelphia for nearly seven years. So why wouldn’t he take delight in the details of his first foray into Philadelphia all that time ago?
But it’s more than a trip down memory lane; it’s also a success story. He explains to his main reader, his son, that he’s being especially “particular” in his description of “my first entry into that city, that you may in your mind compare such unlikely beginnings with the figure I have since made there.”9
So Franklin uses all his literary skill to show himself as a Boston bumpkin, clueless at a bakery, looking idiotic when his future wife sees him, and falling asleep in church. It’s the “before” picture.
He liked to quote a Bible verse his father taught him, Proverbs 22:29: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings” (KJV). Ben felt he was living proof of this promise. A lifetime of self-improvement made a huge difference, crafting an impressive “after” picture. The city that first baffled him eventually counted on him to “stand before kings” on its behalf.