by Nick Bunker
THE WHISTLE AND THE WHARF
In his later years Benjamin Franklin gave two accounts of his childhood. One is very famous, contained in his autobiography, while the other is familiar only to Franklin connoisseurs. In his memoirs he touches briefly on Abiah, praising his mother for her “excellent constitution.” He notes the fact that she fed all her children from the breast, which might or might not be significant, in Freudian terms. Franklin also quotes Abiah’s epitaph, in which he called her “discreet and virtuous.” Then he hurries on to more masculine topics, as though too embarrassed to linger on a subject as sentimental as a mother’s love. But in private—although this was very rare—Franklin could be more open about Abiah.
In France in 1779 he befriended a medical student, Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis. In their long conversations, which Cabanis turned into a portrait of his mentor, Franklin dwelled on his earliest memories of Boston. All of them were happy. “He lacked for nothing in his childhood,” wrote Cabanis: a comment that gives the lie to any notion that Franklin was reared in poverty. In the few childhood anecdotes preserved in his letters, Franklin refers to the games he enjoyed as a boy, blowing bubbles with soap suds out of a tobacco pipe, or keeping six pigeons as pets in a box nailed to the wall of the house. But he never said much about his mother: except to Cabanis.5
It seems that he trusted the young French biologist more than he did any American of his period. Franklin bared his soul to Cabanis, as he did to almost no one else. After their meetings in Paris, the Frenchman came away convinced that Abiah was the principal source of the virtues that her son displayed. “It seems that his mother was a woman full of wisdom,” he wrote. One story seemed to sum up her qualities better than any other.
At about the time the family left Milk Street, there was a fair in Boston, held on a public holiday. To mark the occasion his parents filled Benjamin’s pocket with halfpennies. On the way to the fair he met a boy making wonderful sounds with a whistle. Benjamin handed over all his coins, took the whistle, and hurried home, where he ran about the house, “blowing hard enough to break the windows.” His brothers and sisters laughed at the little boy when he told them how much he had given for his new toy. Benjamin burst into tears.
Mrs. Franklin gently pointed out that if he had been more careful and paid a fair price, he would have had money to spare for a drum, or a little cart to pull along. Benjamin—he was six years old, or thereabouts—stood there deep in thought. “My friend,” said Abiah, “when you buy a whistle, you should always know what it’s going to cost. Here’s my advice: every time you really want a thing, say to yourself first of all: how much is the whistle worth?” Franklin told Cabanis that he never forgot his mother’s wise maxim. At moments of passion—or “violent désir,” as the Frenchman put it, as a Frenchman would—Franklin would pause, and ask himself what price he might have to pay for the loss of self-control.
It was a lesson in the elements of prudence, just right for a boy who would go into business. At first, however, Josiah hoped to educate Benjamin to be a minister. By the time he was five the boy was reading the Bible. Soon he was deep into Bunyan, and not just Pilgrim’s Progress, but Bunyan’s collected works, books written out of the religious strife of Josiah’s England. At seven he was composing his own little poems, which Josiah sent back to Uncle Benjamin in London. Since the Franklins had always tried to make friends with clergymen, it was natural enough to think of preparing the boy for Harvard and a clerical career. So in 1714, when he was eight, Benjamin went to the Boston Latin School to be drilled in the basics of English and Latin grammar. He rose straight to the top of his class.
And then Josiah Franklin had second thoughts. Harvard was expensive. The college also produced too many graduates—twenty or so, in an average year—for the churches of New England to digest. So in 1715 he took the boy out of the grammar school and sent him to a private academy, run by George Brownell, who taught practical subjects to boys and girls. It was a “writing school”: a place to perfect a boy’s calligraphy and spelling, and learn how to write model letters, do sums, and keep accounts. At Ecton, scrivening had been one of the talents of Josiah’s brother Thomas. And so Benjamin had to learn the trade. The one thing he did not master was the arithmetic—an odd little failing in a boy so clever. It was one he would later have to correct.
All too soon, it was time for Benjamin to earn his keep. At ten he left Mr. Brownell’s school and became his father’s assistant. He made soap and candles, cut wicks, filled molds, served customers, and ran errands. He hated the work but stuck at it for two years, while Abiah intervened on Benjamin’s side to negotiate periods of relaxation. To build up his physique, he told Cabanis, “she let him play freely…in winter in the snow and ice, and in summer on the seashore and in the water.”
Play was essential, and he was allowed to have plenty of it. As a boy Franklin would mess about in boats and canoes and swim for hours, eat prodigiously, and then go swimming again, growing faster and stronger all the time. In his teens he made fins and flippers—the fins like a painter’s palette, ten inches long—to pull himself along more rapidly. The weight of the fins made his wrists ache with fatigue. Even this was excellent training. Whatever kind of artisan he became, he would need hefty forearms to drive a saw or carry heavy loads.
All of this took place close to his front door. Across Hanover Street to the north there were two taverns, the Green Dragon and the Star, but just beyond the smell of ale and rum there lay a saltwater lagoon, the Mill Pond. Twice a day, at high tide in the Charles River, water flowed over floodgates into the pond, before draining away through the wheels of a flour mill and into a creek that led down to the harbor, a short walk from the Franklin house. As is the way in Boston, the pond was emptied long ago, and the land has been reclaimed. Today the site of the pond is dominated by railroad tracks, a hotel or two, and the concrete box of a stadium where the Bruins play ice hockey. The Mill Pond was Franklin’s playground as well, and the location for his first experiments.6
Besides his pigeons and his bubble pipe, he also had a paper kite. On the Mill Pond he devised a creative way to play with it. While he swam, he tied the kite to a stick thrust into the bank. One day it occurred to Franklin that if he floated on his back, holding the stick, and the wind was in the right direction, the kite would pull him across the pond while he gazed up at the clouds. And so it did: this was, he recalled, a “singular mode of swimming.” Abiah’s response is not recorded. Franklin told Cabanis that occasionally she urged him not to waste so much time in the water, but she did so without any threat of punishment. Benjamin was fit and strong. That was the important thing, for a mother who had lost two of his brothers.
It seems that his father punished the boy only once, and it happened because of another escapade by the lagoon. The pond spilled over into a salt marsh beneath the heights of Beacon Hill. As Boston grew, people with money began to build stone houses on the hill and by the marsh. One day, some workmen left a heap of stones near the pond, close to a spot where Franklin and his friends liked to fish for minnows.
“By much trampling we had made it a quagmire,” he remembered. And so, in the spirit of Daniel Defoe, the young Benjamin undertook a project to improve the fishery. At this period wharves were starting to appear along the banks of the pond, built of crisscrossed timber laid in the mud, where in the twenty-first century archaeologists would find their remains. Franklin went one better. He decided to build a wharf from masonry. In the evening, when the workmen had gone home, he organized his friends to fetch away their heap of stones, and make a jetty where they could stand to cast their nets and lines. When the workmen turned up the following morning, to find that their materials had vanished, suspicion soon fell on Benjamin Franklin. “Several of us were corrected by our fathers,” he wrote in his memoirs. “And tho’ I pleaded the usefulness of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not honest.”
Here was ano
ther lesson in elementary ethics. It was only one of many. Beneath the Blue Ball, Josiah and Abiah did their best to fill their home with the language of faith, honesty, and virtue. Franklin recalled how his father would invite friends and neighbors round for supper, and then begin a conversation on “some ingenious or useful topic, which might tend to improve the minds of his children.” The food would lie forgotten as they listened to edifying parables about the meaning of goodness, justice, and prudence. According to Franklin, this was how he came to be a plain, frugal man of simple tastes, paying little heed to the dishes that he ate.
Boston in 1722, when Benjamin Franklin was sixteen, with his playground the Mill Pond and—beneath it—the stream that ran down into the harbor close to the Franklin house at Hanover and Union Streets.
Or so he claimed in 1771, when he started to write his memoirs; but as so often with Benjamin Franklin, the truth about his eating habits and his education is more complicated than he liked to make out. Although he could be austere when he had to be, he had a taste for luxury as well, as anyone can see who reads an account of his years in France. The Franklin who devoured the best cuisine that Paris had to offer was scarcely indifferent to food. Nor was he a child who simply listened to his parents and believed the moral lessons he was given.
In starting these conversations over supper, Josiah was treading on another piece of slippery ground. At the age of five, Benjamin had dreamed of being a soldier. Much later, bored with soap and candle wax, he talked about copying his brothers and running off to sea. In the meantime, he found another way to be rebellious. The Franklins, he recalled at the end of his life, were “always subject to being a little miffy.”*2 As a child his miffiness took the form of a sharp tongue and a talent for mockery. According to a story that Franklin left out of his memoirs, he once made fun of Josiah’s habit of saying a long grace before a meal. As they were salting fish for the winter, Benjamin suggested that they bless the whole barrel, since it would be “a vast saving of time.”7
Franklin was hugely precocious. And when Josiah encouraged ethical discussion around the dinner table, he was inviting his son to be provocative at a point in history when debates about morality and God were moving in new and hazardous directions. Things had changed since the days when as a child at Ecton Josiah learned his faith from a Gospel text painted on the cottage wall. In his memoirs, Franklin tells us that as a boy in Boston he too was “religiously educated as a Presbyterian.” That being so, he learned the language of Calvinism: a string of words that he lists for us—Eternal Decrees, Election, and Reprobation—that were supposed to encapsulate the Presbyterian creed. By 1715, when Franklin left the Latin School, the meaning of these phrases had come to be fiercely contested. It was no longer clear that a Presbyterian had to accept all the notions that lay behind them.
At one time—in the middle of the 1640s—everyone who claimed to be a Presbyterian would have also been a Calvinist, a believer in the doctrine of Double Predestination. It was a harsh and divisive idea. Even before God created the world—or so an orthodox Calvinist would say—he had assigned in advance every human soul to one of two groups, the Elect or the Damned. From this point of view, the Christian life consisted of no more than a long, painful endeavor to discover whether one was either saved for Heaven, or predestined to the flames of Hell. In the Boston of Franklin’s boyhood, this kind of Calvinism still wielded a powerful influence, upheld by pastors such as Mr. Willard or Cotton Mather; but here and in England, it underwent a process of erosion.
After the Glorious Revolution, the Toleration Act had given English dissenters of the Franklin kind a degree of religious freedom. The new law was meant to be a modest compromise, leaving intact the power of the Church of England. However, there were people who took it to mean that they could think as they wished and worship as they wanted: or perhaps not worship at all. To the horror of most of the clergy—dissenters and Anglicans alike—the 1690s witnessed the start of four decades of intense debate in England about the basic tenets of the Christian faith. Transmitted to the colonies, the arguments advanced on either side supplied the raw material for Franklin’s schooling in ideas.
In England, the Presbyterians came to be divided, between those who clung to Calvinism in its old form and those who harbored doubts about Predestination, that concept so severe and so alarming. They also had to cope with something else: scandalous writers who dealt heresy. In London in 1695, an Irishman called John Toland brought out a book, Christianity Not Mysterious, in which he attacked conventional religion with a vitriol rarely seen before. In the Dutch Republic, Toland had steeped himself in the ideas of one of the era’s most radical thinkers: an exiled French Huguenot, Pierre Bayle, whose books would become some of Franklin’s favorite reading.
“We hold that reason is the only foundation of all certitude,” John Toland wrote, echoing the words of Monsieur Bayle. Toland was a deist: or in other words, he believed that the universe probably had a Creator, but not the Christian God of the Bible. As his influence spread in London, so Toland set in motion a debate—“the deistical controversy”—that would rack the brains of intellectuals, including Benjamin Franklin, until the 1730s. Only then did Franklin lose interest in metaphysics, and turn his mind in more fruitful directions—eventually, to electricity.8
DEISTS, WHIGS, AND TORIES
“Deistical notions grow epidemical,” wrote Cotton Mather in 1712. Or so the pastor feared, as he heard reports that even in New England people had their doubts about the truths of Scripture. A few months earlier, outraged by the works of Bayle and Toland and their kind, the most eminent clergymen in England had said much the same thing. Assembled at Canterbury, the Anglican clerics condemned what they called “the late excessive growth of infidelity,” and the disrespect they encountered from freethinkers and libertines.9
Whether Anglicans or Matherites, the ministers tended to overstate the problem. The Christian faith still reigned supreme, with a powerful arsenal of concepts and authority; and indeed in America an evangelical revival lay only two decades around the corner. But that was not the way the men of God saw their situation. In the years when Franklin was growing up, the ministers felt insulted and beleaguered. As they fought back against what they saw as defamation of the Gospel, so the clergy became reactionaries, inviting ridicule, which—when the moment came—someone as acute as Franklin would be only too happy to provide.
If the deists so upset a pastor like Cotton Mather, it was partly because they refused to be pinned down. “Deist” could be taken to mean many things: so many that often the epithet was just another word for atheism. A deist accepted that God was probably a necessary being, because if the universe was governed by physical laws, then it must have a creator of some kind. Beyond that, however, the deist could not be specific; because it was impossible to show that this creator had to be the Jehovah who revealed himself to Moses. Worse still, deists would claim to uphold Christian ethics, while keeping their most radical ideas hidden in a mist of double meanings. And few deists were more evasive than Pierre Bayle, a scholar who knew how to bury an alarming notion deep in the undergrowth of footnotes. Even today experts cannot agree whether or not he denied the existence of God.
In 1697, Bayle had begun to publish his masterpiece, the Historical and Critical Dictionary. A vast compendium of learning, in time it became a fixture of Franklin’s bedside table. In the 1730s and 1740s, he sold copies from his store in Philadelphia, and twenty years after that he liked to have Bayle close at hand. Against the dogma of belief, Bayle rallied the forces of scholarship, exposing inconsistencies and errors in the text of the Bible. Like Toland, he appealed to reason as the test of truth. Bayle looked for answers to ancient questions: Why does God allow calamities and evil? If he gives human beings a leaning to be sinful, how can it be just to condemn them to hell? Bayle worried away at the issues, until his readers saw revealed what they took to be the flaws in Christian
logic.
Among his disciples, Pierre Bayle counted not only John Toland, but also the young Lord Shaftesbury, grandson of the Whig conspirator. With the help of allies such as these, Bayle’s ideas became common currency in London. On both sides of the Atlantic, they opened up divisions in the ranks of the clergy who knew that they had to defend their faith but could not agree how best to do so.10
Should they cling to old certainties, and condemn anybody who deviated from them? Or should they reach out to their opponents, and try to find common ground where everyone could agree? This was never easy. By the time Queen Anne died in 1714, in England the Presbyterian ministers were deeply divided and confused. So were the Anglicans. Even the essential doctrine of the Holy Trinity had come to be a matter for dispute. In Boston meanwhile, Cotton Mather and his friends feared that a tidal wave of blasphemy would soon come hurtling in from Europe.
It was all the harder to build a consensus at a time when arguments about religion were thoroughly political. In theory, it was possible to hold deistical ideas and yet remain conservative in every other way. But the politics of England were so deeply polarized that every debate about God also became a party fight. From the left, the Whigs and their constituents, including the dissenters, applauded the new king from Germany, who filled his government with Whigs. On the right were the Tories, pledged to defend the Anglican Church, who pointed out that George I had only a dubious claim to be the monarch. Each party accused the other of heresy or worse. The Tories alleged that the Whigs were deists, whose ideas would undermine the sacred basis of morality. From the other side, the Whigs—insofar as they agreed with each other, which was seldom, since they were divided into factions—would tend to brand the Tories as closet Jacobites, secretly in league with the Church of Rome.