Benjamin Franklin's Business Mentors: The Philadelphia Quaker Merchants

Abstract

A MONG THE FIGURES which people the pages of Benjamin Franklin's account of his early years in Philadelphia, one of the most shadowy is the benevolent Quaker merchant Thomas Denham, who came to Franklin's rescue in London in I726 and gave him employment in his store after their return to Philadelphia. Little is known of Denham beyond the few sentences which Franklin devoted to him in his Autobiography.' Yet the economic philosophy of the man who gave Franklin his first training in business should not pass unnoticed in any account of the Boston-born Philadelphian in whom sociologists have seen the classic embodiment of the spirit of modern capitalism.2 Although we cannot identify the actual economic ideas of Thomas Denham, we can reconstruct the pattern of economic thinking which was characteristic of the eighteenth-century mercantile Quakers as a group. The purpose of this paper is therefore to outline the salient features of the Quaker economic philosophy under whose influence Franklin became the prototype of the modern American businessman.