by Nick Bunker
As an old man in Paris, Benjamin Franklin made it plain to Cabanis that he had found Collins fascinating. The date at which he came across the book cannot be fixed precisely, but a brief allusion in his memoirs suggests that it was soon after he had finished with the Clarkes. In other words, it was in 1721 or so, when he was still less than halfway through his teens. Although this was very, very young for Franklin to be delving so deeply, the books he had read, by John Locke and others, had prepared him to assimilate what Collins had to offer.
Collins’s favorite word was “absurdity.” By that, he meant anything we cannot prove, from the evidence of our senses or with logic and with mathematics. Here he was following the teachings of Locke, but he went far further than Locke had dared to go. For Collins, history amounted to an endless struggle to free the minds of human beings from what he called “the dictates of…crack-brain’d enthusiasts.” By this, he meant mystics, zealots, and the vast majority of clergymen. “Priests are hired,” Collins wrote in the Discourse, “to lead men into mistakes.” Superstition was the source of all evil, he believed. He devoted many pages to the nonsense to which religion gave rise: the stock in trade of self-seeking pastors, men who loved their stipends more dearly than the truth.11
At one point, Collins took issue with the King James translation of the Bible, calling it “a pious fraud.” This, it seems, was the feature of the Discourse that caused most offense. At times, he inserted notes of caution, so that he could pretend that he was only vilifying false images of God, while remaining a Christian of a kind. Few of his readers would agree that Collins was any such thing. In his catalogue of absurdities, he included not only the belief in witchcraft—he was outraged by the idea of witch trials—but also every sacred dogma of the Church. Original sin, hellfire, and the Holy Trinity: none of them survived his test of reason. As for the soul’s immortality, Collins quoted Cicero to raise grave doubts about its likelihood.
If any section of the Discourse came to be a favorite with Franklin, it must have been the closing pages. At the climax of the book, Collins made a list of nineteen enemies of superstition, heroes who epitomized the virtues of free thought. The list began with the boy’s beloved Socrates—“the divinest man that ever appear’d in the heathen world,” said Collins—it included Plutarch, and it ended with John Tillotson. Perhaps it was as well that the archbishop had been dead for nearly twenty years, because he would have been horrified by the use to which Mr. Collins put his sermons.12
“We are to govern ourselves by our natural notions,” Tillotson had said; but Collins wrenched the words from their context, making them part of his tirade against the clergy. On his list, he placed Tillotson next to the infamous Thomas Hobbes, whose name had become a synonym for disbelief in God. Nailing his colors to the mast, Anthony Collins praised Hobbes the philosopher as a “great instance of learning, virtue and free thinking.” This was more or less a confession by Collins that he was an infidel too.
What did Franklin bring away from the Discourse? For one thing, Collins took a wrecker’s ball to his Christian faith, which was already very shaky. One sentence in the book seems to have made an especially deep impression on the boy. In describing the qualities of Socrates, Collins says that he “had the common fate of free-thinkers, to be calumniated in his life-time for an Atheist.” After reading that, Franklin might respond in two different ways.
Either he could embrace the fate of Socrates, and go about the town of Boston causing trouble, teasing his neighbors about their beliefs. This option was the more courageous. It was also the one more likely to end badly, as it had for Socrates, martyred with a dose of hemlock. Alternatively, Franklin might choose to be an entertainer. He could make his freethinking take the form of satire, hiding his radicalism behind a mask of irony. This second course of action was the safer bet, if one could keep the humor flowing.13
In his youth, Franklin switched back and forth between these two strategies, until he discovered which one was more effective in the era of King George I. Soon enough an opportunity arrived for him to display his ingenuity. While he was eating cabbages and musing on philosophy, his brother James had been hard at work, building his business. The moment was approaching when James could apply in America the lessons he had learned in London about the trade of journalism.
THE ISLAND OF INSANIA
In the March of 1719, as Franklin sold his pirate ballad on the street and Josiah ran for office at the Old South, another election took place in Boston. Victory went to a group of populists, who swept the board in the poll to choose new men to manage the town’s affairs. Led by a physician, Elisha Cooke Jr., the popular party repeated their success two months later. In the ballot for the colony’s House of Representatives, the Cooke-ites won all four seats from Boston.
Until Cooke’s death in 1737, his electoral machine held sway in Massachsetts. Although he was a Harvard man, Dr. Cooke had the common touch; and this—together with his money—was the secret of his success. Cooke wrote well, and he drank heavily. With his dealing in real estate he made himself perhaps the richest resident of Boston. Here was a fellow who knew how to win elections by campaigning hard for popular causes. When the time came, he could also dole out the beer and the tax breaks to those Bostonians who turned out to vote.14
Elisha Cooke made public affairs entertaining. In doing so, he opened the way for James Franklin to launch The New-England Courant. In the atmosphere that Cooke created, the Courant could flourish, at least for a while, filling a need for sharp, irreverent opinion of a kind to dismay the likes of Cotton Mather or Judge Sewall. Moreover, in the New England of the 1720s there were genuine issues that had to be debated. Although his enemies saw Cooke as a drunken demagogue, in fact he had important things to say; and in his better moments, he said them with eloquence and wit.
A forerunner of Samuel Adams, whose father was one of his supporters, Dr. Cooke yearned to take the colony back to the days before the 1680s, when Massachusetts had enjoyed something close to independence. Since this was out of the question, he made do with campaigns against specific grievances inflicted by the British. In the forests of Maine, where Cooke owned tracts of land, the king laid claim to the tallest trees as masts for the Royal Navy. Tyranny, said Dr. Cooke; and even worse, the British were bent on nailing the Americans to a cross of gold. As the currency for payment of taxes, or to settle debts the colonists owed in London, the British insisted on nothing but hard cash: best of all gold sovereigns, or failing that the Spanish silver dollar.
Time and again, the politics of money, banking, inflation, and so forth have loomed very large in the history of America, and for Benjamin Franklin, young or old, they were always a subject he found fascinating. His exposure to the issues had its origins in the New England of the early 1720s, where, after a period of buoyancy, the economy had slumped back into recession. The problem was partly this: in Boston they had too little of the bullion that the British demanded. As a remedy, Cooke wanted to issue paper money, backed either by a new institution, a land bank that could issue mortgages, or by the revenue he could raise from taxes. This was something the royal governor of Massachusetts, Samuel Shute, simply refused to allow.*
Shute had arrived in 1716, only to find that Cooke and his allies could reduce him to impotence. Although the governor had powers of veto, so that he could block any Cooke-ite measures he disliked, he could not be sure of his salary, because the House of Representatives always had the power of the purse. On the frontier another war was looming with the Abenaki, but Shute could not obtain the resources he required: the House refused to vote the money. He wrote a stream of letters home to London, complaining about Elisha Cooke.
In the eyes of some members of the colony’s elite, including Cotton Mather the pastor, it seemed that Cooke the drunkard was leading Massachusetts to disaster. When the British read the governor’s dispatches, surely they would lose their patience with the colony? The king
might impose direct rule, doing away with what the province still possessed by way of autonomy. In print and in private letters, Mather fumed at the doctor and his friends, calling them “idiots and fuddle caps,” who would arouse the wrath of George I. By this time Robinson Crusoe had appeared in London and also made it to America, where readers adored the novel quite as much as did their English cousins. And so, in a clumsy attempt to be witty, Mather wrote a pamphlet to which he gave the title News from Robinson Crusoe’s Island.15
It appeared in the summer of 1720. A few weeks earlier, Governor Shute had outraged the House by blocking their choice of Dr. Cooke as speaker. Mather intervened on the governor’s side, depicting Massachusetts as “the Island of Insania.” The people receive a visit from Crusoe, warning them about the consequences of their folly. It was a heavy-handed joke, and it met with a far funnier rebuke from Elisha Cooke. He wrote his own little piece and called it—what else?—More News from Robinson Crusoe’s Island.
In time the crisis subsided, to become a stalemate, in which Dr. Cooke and his followers blocked most of what Shute wished to do, while in London the authorities had too much else to occupy their minds to bother with a clash with a colony so remote. But while it lasted, the fracas between Cooke, Mather, and the governor helped create the market James Franklin required for The New-England Courant. In Boston, the people he wanted as his readers were eager to have a newspaper that engaged in this type of affray, but with a lighter, still more entertaining touch.
While Mather and Cooke were at each other’s throats, James had begun to diversify his business, but only slowly so. A new publication—The Boston Gazette—had recently appeared on the scene to compete with the News-Letter. For seven months, until he lost the contract in August of 1720, James Franklin printed the Gazette; but although this must have been commercially worthwhile, the paper broke little new ground. It was mostly the same old stuff, of the kind the News-Letter contained: endless diplomatic news from Europe, lists of ship arrivals and departures, and advertisements for hardware, molasses, and African slaves.
In amongst the verbiage, however, there were brief reports about a financial crisis in London. By the end of November, Bostonians knew that at last, after a summer of rampant speculation in its stock, the South Sea Company stood upon the brink of ruin. With a grandiose scheme, first to take over Britain’s National Debt, and then to pay a rich dividend from its trading in the tropics, the company had drawn in the greedy and the gullible. The scheme was absurd and the promoters dishonest. Soon enough the South Sea Bubble burst, threatening to bring down the banking system. As the markets fell, and stories spread of misconduct in high places, the Whig administration seemed likely to collapse. With a general election drawing near in England, this left Mr. Shute as the lamest of lame ducks. Appointed by the Whigs, the governor could not expect to retain his post.
In Boston, which relied so heavily on credit from London, 1721 seemed likely to be a year of deeper economic hardship and yet more political controversy. For the Franklins, the situation could not have been more helpful. They had a talent for being in the right place at the right moment—the Franklins were a family that made its own luck—and now the time arrived for James to seize the publishing initiative.
With Cooke and Mather still in the news, the paper money question now more relevant than ever, and with the fate of the Massachusetts charter still hanging in the air, he would have no shortage of material. James Franklin began the new year with a burst of activity to replace the business he had lost from the Gazette. In 1719, he had printed only eight books and pamphlets, and in 1720 only five. In 1721, James printed more than twenty, some for booksellers and some his own commissions from the author. It was a risky way of doing business, but the books were highly topical. Plunging into economics, James Franklin published three pamphlets in defense of paper money, written by an ally of the Cooke-ites, Dr. John Wise, a pastor and a forceful writer, and an old foe of the Mathers. Calling himself “a freeborn Englishman,” Wise spoke the political language that the Franklins knew so well from the London of the Whigs.
To make his own position clear, James revived a minor English classic, reprinting a user’s manual of Whiggery with the title of English Liberties. Written in 1682 by Henry Care, a pioneer of London journalism, it was partly a simplified legal textbook, defending trial by jury and the like, but it also contained a brief history of England with Magna Carta as the central episode. For Benjamin Franklin, the book would become another constant companion. It amounted to a source book of ideas that he would draw upon until the 1770s, when Americans replaced it with better treatises of their own. In Philadelphia, Franklin sold English Liberties from his store, finding readers among local politicians who needed a digest of principles.
When James Franklin invoked the ghost of Henry Care, he also made a statement about the kind of journalism he intended to pursue. Another prolific writer, Care had been known in his heyday as “ingenious Harry,” a comedian as well as a political commentator. “Everything is big with jest,” he once wrote, “if we have but the wit to find it out.” By the time he died in 1688 he had established in England the image of the journalist as maverick: courageous, funny, and inventive, and unafraid to go to jail for libel.16
Care’s work had been the inspiration not only for Defoe, but also—with a delay of thirty years—for the combative weekly journals that James had seen in London. In response to the South Sea crisis, the English weeklies revived the legacy of Henry Care and went on a crusade against the government, with Nathaniel Mist in the front rank of satire. Some of the most outspoken writers were a team of radical Whigs on The London Journal who opposed the men in power and produced a series, Cato’s Letters, that came to be immensely popular in the colonies: and especially with the Franklin brothers, who would raid them for copy.
Their articles traveled to New England, where the British papers arrived in the spring of 1721 with the full story of the Bubble and its aftermath. In Boston, where James and his printing press were now so well established, with a store, a clientele, and friends who were eager to write, the time had come at last to launch a colonial equivalent. If James aspired to be the Cato or the Mist of Massachusetts, all he needed was a story that would run and run: a story as engrossing for his readers as Robinson Crusoe or the South Sea Bubble had been for their counterparts in London.
The story James required was about to break. There had been a pestilence in Spain and France, a sickness so fearful that the British had begun to close their harbors. In April the disease arrived in Massachusetts, carried in on a ship of the Royal Navy. Governor Shute declared an epidemic. It was smallpox; and while for many it brought death or disfigurement, there were some people, including the Franklins, for whom affliction spelled opportunity. The Courant was about to be born.
* By coincidence, the governor was the nephew of the earlier Samuel Shute, the Whig who in the 1680s led the London company of dyers to which Josiah Franklin had belonged.
Part Three
THE BREAKOUT
Chapter Seven
THE NEW-ENGLAND COURANT
By the middle of 1721 the governor was in despair, and in Boston the people were counting their dead. At the end of July they reckoned up the total: eighteen already, and each week the burials became more frequent. Out at Cambridge, Mr. Shute dissolved the House of Representatives. Time and again, Elisha Cooke and his party—“a few designing persons,” as the governor described them—had stood in his way, as he did his best for the public good. This time they had gone too far, when they blocked his plan to crack down on the smuggling of French silk, which he believed carried the taint of infection.1
In Boston, the onset of the smallpox led to yet another feud in a town addicted to dispute. Once again Cotton Mather was in the thick of it. Eight years earlier the minister had lost his wife and three of his children to an epidemic of measles; and so he had scanned the scientific lit
erature in search of a means of protecting the town from disease. In 1716 he came across the practice of inoculation, used by doctors in Turkey and described in a paper from the Royal Society in London. Take a person with smallpox, and from the pustules on their skin remove some fluid. If the pus were conveyed to the blood of a healthy individual, the outcome would be a mild fever, followed by immunity.
When the smallpox arrived in Boston in April, Mather urged his medical friends to use the new technique. Two blocks from the Franklin house, there lived a surgeon and apothecary named Zabdiel Boylston, expert at speedily cutting a malignant breast from a woman. Late in June, he began to inoculate, with some success, starting with his son and two African slaves. He found himself an object of hatred in the streets.
The Puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663–1728): tireless preacher, prolific writer on history, science, and much else, and pastor of Boston’s Second Church. Frequently the object of satire in The New-England Courant, Mather cast a long shadow in Boston. From a painting by Peter Pelham, ca. 1728.
Undeterred by threats of a lynching, Boylston stood his ground and carried on inoculating. On July 17 he placed a notice in The Boston Gazette, where it ran beneath an account of the political crisis in London. His intention: to defend a procedure that came, as he put it, “well recommended from gentlemen of figure and learning.” With that the smallpox controversy began: a matter of insults, animosity, and even violence, that would last the length of the epidemic and draw to a close only the following spring.
The notice aroused the wrath of Dr. Cooke. He summoned Boylston to a public hearing on July 21, to be vilified by his rivals, the physicians of Boston. Cooke and his friends ordered the surgeon to cease the inoculations, and then they took to the press to slander him in print. They called him rash and negligent, and accused him of spreading the infection. The author was a Scotsman, William Douglass, the only medic in Boston who had qualified at a British university. Of this he was inordinately proud. A doctor who met him in the 1740s called Douglass “the most complete snarler I ever knew.”