Free The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood

against opponents of his New-York Mercury, he was forced to apologize for his boldness. He was wrong, he said, “to appear in print in any other Manner, than what merely pertains to the Station in Life in which I am placed.” 68 In the eighteenth century artisans and mechanics—shoemakers, coopers, silversmiths, printers—all those who worked for a living, especially with their hands, no matter how wealthy, no matter how many employees they managed, could never legitimately claim the status of gentleman. Even a great painter with noble aspirations like John Singleton Copley was socially stigmatized because he worked with his hands. Copley painted the portraits of dozens of distinguished colonial gentlemen, and he knew what his patrons thought of his art. For them, Copley said bitterly in 1767, painting was “no more than any other useful trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a Carpenter tailor or shoemaker.” 69
    THE MIDDLING SORTS
    By the first third of the eighteenth century this dichotomous social structure was changing, and changing rapidly. The astonishing growth of commerce, trade, and manufacturing in the English-speaking world was creating hosts of new people who could not easily be fitted into either of the two basic social categories. Commercial farmers, master artisans, traders, shopkeepers, petty merchants—ambitious “middling” men, as they were increasingly called—were acquiring not only wealth but some learning and some awareness of the world and were eager to distance themselves from the “vulgar herd” of ordinary people. Already there were thinkers like Daniel Defoe who were trying to explain and justify these emerging middling people, including the “working trades, who labour hard but feel no want.” 70 These were people who more and more prided themselves on their industriousness and frugality and their separation from the common idleness and dissipation of the gentry above them and the poor beneath them. These were the beginnings of what would become the shopkeepers, traders, clerks, and businessmen of the new middle class of the nineteenth century. 71
    This was the incipient middling world that Franklin entered in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and no one epitomized it in all of its aspirations and ambitions better than he did. Almost immediately after returning to Philadelphia in 1726, he revealed his interest in intellectual and literary activities in the city. In effect, he began acquiring some of the attributes of a gentleman while still remaining one of the common working people. In 1727 he organized a group of artisans who met weekly for learned conversation—a printer, several clerks, a glazier, two surveyors, a shoemaker, a cabinetmaker, and subsequently “a young Gentleman of some Fortune,” named Robert Grace, who did not have to work for a living. 72 Calling themselves first the Leather Apron, then the Junto (perhaps because they had admitted a gentleman, and the mechanics’ title was no longer applicable), they aimed at self-improvement and doing good for the society.
    Not that they ignored their businesses and the making of money. At their meetings they asked themselves such questions as “Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?” or “Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate.?” 73 It was this kind of aspiring and prosperous middling man that was beginning to challenge the hierarchical network of privilege and patronage that dominated eighteenth-century society, and in the process blurring the traditionally sharp social division between gentlemen and commoners.
    Already Franklin’s field of vision extended far beyond the boundaries of Philadelphia, and even of Pennsylvania. In 1731 he toyed with the idea of forming a United Party for Virtue that would organize “the Virtuous and good Men of all Nations into a regular Body, to be govern’d by suitable good and wise