Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  When you are running a newspaper, and trying to be popular, you cannot make the omelette without cracking eggs. And if your star writer is still in his teens, the outcome is likely to be all the more messy. Even so, this was a cruel form of journalism. It is scarcely surprising that when Benjamin wrote his memoirs he was stricken with what seems to have been another fit of embarrassment. Although he referred to the sketches, he left out the name of Silence Dogood, and so these early writings could not be identified as his. Not until 1868 did a scholar confirm that the Dogood columns were his work.

  As an old man, Franklin tried to make amends to the Mathers, in two letters to Cotton’s son Samuel. Written eleven years apart, in 1773 and 1784, they praised Increase and Cotton for their piety and scholarship. Both letters contained an anecdote about a meeting with the pastor. According to Franklin, as a youth he went to see Cotton Mather, chatted with him in his library, and then turned to leave along a passageway. “Stoop! Stoop!” cried the minister, but even so the youth hit his head on a low-hanging beam. Mather drew a pious moral from the accident. “You are young and have the world before you,” he said. “Stoop as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps.” It was a lesson he took to heart, Franklin claimed: “I often think of it when I see pride mortified, and misfortunes brought upon people by their carrying their heads too high.”5

  A charming little story: but did it really happen in quite the way Franklin described it fifty years or so after the event? He does not tell us what reason he might have had to visit Cotton Mather; the incident does not appear in his memoirs; and it seems that Franklin never mentioned it to anybody else. Perhaps the anecdote was entirely faithful to the facts. Or perhaps—and I think this is more probable—Franklin took a nugget of truth, a fleeting encounter with the Boston pastor, and then developed the tale to create a diplomatic piece of partial make-believe intended to please Samuel Mather by showing what an amiable man his father had been. Nor were these letters the only occasion when the elderly Franklin went out of his way to be charming to the Mathers. In about 1789, while revising his memoirs, Franklin inserted a vague little sentence that looks like another attempt to apologize to the family for the insults the Courant had heaped on Cotton Mather’s shoulders.

  What Franklin wrote was this: that his boyhood reading of Mather’s Bonifacius “perhaps gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life.” Relying on this rather flimsy statement, many scholars have argued that Cotton Mather was the inspiration of Franklin’s career in public service. Maybe: but more likely not. In the 1740s and 1750s, when Franklin was entering politics, helping to create in Pennsylvania a militia and a college, and working on a host of patriotic projects, he wrote a vast amount: pamphlets, columns, memos, and letters in their hundreds. In those that have survived, not once did he refer to Cotton Mather or his books.6

  So Franklin’s statement about Mather’s influence may have been another diplomatic fib, meant perhaps to appeal to readers from New England. As an envoy in Paris, Franklin knew how to tell a gentle fib when a fib was required: that is what ambassadors do. There is one thing of which we can be certain. Whatever Franklin felt about Cotton Mather after the pastor’s death, the Courant was never anything but scathing about him in his lifetime.

  As each issue of the Courant hit the streets, the moment drew nearer when Franklin would have to break out of Boston. You could not write so well, and so satirically, without upsetting powerful people: not only Cotton Mather, but also Josiah’s old comrade in prayer, Judge Sewall, who sat on the governor’s council of advisers. And a terminal breach was all the more likely if the Franklins were determined to get themselves into trouble.

  The two brothers shared the Franklin trait of miffiness. Being the man he was, James had indeed felt envious when at last, toward the end of the Dogood series, his brother revealed that he was the author. As Benjamin grew in prestige with James’s friends, the miffiness increased between the siblings. Bored and frustrated with being an apprentice, Benjamin wanted his freedom. In the meantime, however, he and James made common cause by turning their miffiness outward, in defense of the freedom of the press. Toward the end of 1722, they seized another chance to be outstandingly offensive; and again it had to do with Christianity.

  LEAVING HOME

  By the autumn of that year, Governor Shute had almost washed his hands of the tiresome citizens of Massachusetts. “I must assure your lordships,” he wrote home, “that the people here pay little or no deference to any opinion or orders that I receive.” When the Abenaki attacked a frontier post, Mr. Shute made his declaration of war, only to find that Dr. Cooke and the House of Representatives insisted on meddling with every detail of the campaign. Meanwhile the press were annoying too, upsetting not only the governor but also the House. The time had arrived for the Franklins to be taught a lesson.7

  In June, the News-Letter and the Gazette had offended Elisha Cooke and his colleagues by printing election results without their permission, and by making some small errors in the process. The editors were summoned before the House and made to say sorry. Not to be outdone, five days later James Franklin ran a brief story in the Courant implying that the authorities had been too slow to send a ship to sea to chase away some pirates. On June 12, the Suffolk County sheriff arrested James and put him in jail. The orders came from Sewall and the governor’s council, but with the approval of Elisha Cooke.

  For a month while James was in prison, permitted on grounds of poor health to pace about in the yard, he left the Courant to be put out by Benjamin. He too had been hauled up before the councilors, who demanded to know who had written the story. Despite James’s bullying, Franklin sided with his brother, told them nothing, and was sent away with a warning. He went back to the printing shop filled with resentment at the way James had been treated. The incident only made the brothers still more audacious.

  For one thing, they felt emboldened by a matter of detail: that Dr. Cooke and the House had intervened to save the Courant from a punishment worse than jail. According to Sewall and the governor’s council, the newspaper made a point of insulting the government, the churches, and Harvard College. Or as they put it, the Courant tended “to fill the readers’ minds with vanity, to the dishonour of God and disservice of good men.” That being so, they wanted it placed under strict censorship: but the House refused to do any such thing. All they wanted from James was an apology.

  The council’s empty threat must have been deeply gratifying to James Franklin, and all the more so because of the pompous language in which it was expressed. He knew that his role models in the London press, Mr. Mist and the others, only saw their circulation jump each time they were arrested. And soon enough, in September in New Haven, an incident occurred that gave him a perfect opportunity to be still more controversial.

  This time it was a scandal at Yale, and something far more serious than a routine tiff among the faculty. From about 1714, heretical ideas had begun to circulate among the ministers who taught at the college. They studied the same modern authors—Locke, Bayle, Shaftesbury, and Tillotson—that the teenage Franklin read in Boston. While he lost his faith, at Yale the clergy did something almost as atrocious. Led by the principal, Timothy Cutler, seven ministers publicly left the Congregational Church, proclaiming their intention to become Anglicans. Worse still, they meant to go to London to be ordained again, and this time by an English bishop.

  The affair came to be known as the Yale Apostasy. When the Courant broke the story, in the issue with Mrs. Dogood’s ramble in the dark, the pastors of Boston were appalled. A century on from the Mayflower, it seemed that perhaps, after so much struggle, the Puritan mission to America was doomed. At the Old North, the Mathers led a day of prayer and fasting; but by now Increase Mather was eighty-three, so frail that his voice could barely be heard. The worst of it was that the traitors from Yale had made it plain that—in th
eir opinion—the Puritan chapels were not really churches at all, but merely voluntary gatherings, with nothing by way of law or tradition to support their claims to holiness. So all their ministers were counterfeit, including the Mathers, because they had never been anointed by an Anglican. This was deeply insulting.

  For the Courant, it was another story that would run. On October 8, in the last of the Dogood letters, Franklin struck a rather lofty, dismissive attitude toward Cutler and the renegades—“there are too many blind zealots among every denomination of Christian,” he wrote, with all the gravitas of a youth not seventeen—before ending the piece with two long passages from Addison. For the next three months, the Yale affair became an obsession with the Courant, as Gardner and the Franklin brothers came at the subject from all angles. Veering back and forth between opposing points of view—pro and con the Cutlerites, the Anglicans, or the meeting houses—they extracted the maximum by way of entertainment.

  For instance, they pointed out that if Cutler was correct, all the weddings he and his comrades had conducted must be null and void. Hence the husbands and wives were entitled to divorce, and their children were technically bastards. Sarcastically written, in a style similar to Mrs. Dogood’s, the piece may well have been Franklin’s. Even after Cutler left for England, the Courant would not let the matter drop. Instead of making fun of Yale, they went back to sneering at Harvard. With each issue, the Courant became more barbed and more daring, until—early in 1723—at last they went too far.

  Late in December, with Mr. Shute still squabbling with Cooke and the House of Representatives, the politics of Massachusetts took an ugly turn. Someone fired a gun through the governor’s window. The bullet missed, and perhaps the shot was an accident, but it brought matters to a head. Shute had been planning a long vacation at home, to consult his superiors and—perhaps—to urge them to revoke the colony’s charter. Without warning, he sailed for London on New Year’s Day, in the frigate that had brought the smallpox, leaving his province in disarray. It was “a cloudy and tempestuous time,” Judge Sewall wrote in his diary. The Courant made it even more vexatious, when on January 14 they printed issue 76, their most scurrilous assault upon religion.

  Probably by Gardner, it read more like a blasphemous item by one of the London deists, Toland or Anthony Collins. The writer posed as a Christian, claiming to be offended by people he called “hypocritical zealots.” When they paraded their holiness in public—keeping the Sabbath, saying their prayers, and quoting from the Bible—it was all just subterfuge, to help them cheat their neighbors out of money. Few people in Boston could have read the column without a sharp intake of breath, so outspoken were the things the writer said. “Whenever I find a man full of religious cant and palaver,” the author wrote, “I presently suspect him to be a knave.”

  Whom did he mean? Judge Sewall, and his circle of friends? The Mathers, and their congregation? Or simply every pious tradesman or his wife, people like Josiah or Abiah? There was worse to come. The writer rounded off the piece with a few lines that might have put an English journalist in prison. “Religion itself suffers extremely by the dishonest practices of those who profess it,” he wrote. “Their cheating tricks have a tendency to harden such as are disaffected to religion in their infidelity and strengthen their prejudices against it. Why, say they, such and such zealous religious men, they will lie, cheat and defraud, for all their high profession; and so they presently conclude, that Religion itself is nothing but a cunningly devised fable, a trick of state, invented to keep mankind in awe.”

  The last nineteen words—from “Religion” to “awe”—were modeled on a passage by John Toland. Calling religion “a trick of state” put the Courant in the worst of company, with atheists and libertines. In the same issue, at last the Courant came out firmly against the governor, warning its readers that Shute would destroy the liberties of Massachusetts. Perhaps this was a political maneuver by James Franklin, an attempt to ally himself more closely with Elisha Cooke; but if it was, it proved to be a failure.8

  Judge Sewall and the council were furious. Within hours of the paper’s appearance on the streets, again they demanded the right to censor the Courant. And this time—although by only the narrowest of margins, when the matter came to a vote—the House of Representatives agreed. Jointly they condemned the Courant, calling it profane, a journal intended “to mock religion, and bring it into contempt.” On January 16, they banned James Franklin from publishing this or any other newspaper, except under strict supervision.

  To which James could give only one reply. He ignored the ban. The following Monday he published issue 77; and then he left town for a place of refuge sixty miles away. Just three weeks after Benjamin turned seventeen, once again he was left in charge, but facing the threat of closure if the Courant continued in his brother’s name.

  What should he do? Like their role models in the London press, Henry Care or Nathanuel Mist, young Benjamin carried on regardless. On the 28th, in defiance of the law, he put out Courant No. 78, with a front page filled with a rousing defense of the paper. The writer was certainly brave, because he finished with a gibe at Speaker Cooke. In Boston, he wrote, there was something called “the Canvas Club” made up of “men of power and influence,” who would try to crush anyone who spoke up against them. That had to mean Elisha Cooke and his friends, with their smoke-filled rooms and their political machine.9

  Could the Courant be any more insolent? They could. With Benjamin at the helm, and James still on the run, the Courant went still further in No. 79. At the top of the page, he quoted from Henry Care’s English Liberties, calling his brother’s prosecution nothing but an act of tyranny. Beneath it, he ran a fictional story about a judge in Anglo-Saxon England who had gone to the gallows for unjustly hanging someone by the name of “Frankling.” Ponderous the wit might be, but the message was very plain.

  Reaching into the past, to the politics of London in the age of Charles II, Franklin took his stand with the Whigs of yesteryear. Again he turned to Henry Care for ammunition. The remainder of issue 79 was a long, insulting letter to a dignitary—unnamed, but almost certainly Judge Sewall—accusing him of flouting the sacred principles of Magna Carta.

  This sort of thing could not continue. Sooner or later the sheriff was bound to arrive to enforce the ban, at least within the line of Suffolk County. So in February, when James came back to Boston to turn himself in, the Franklin brothers and their friends held a council of war in the printing shop. One suggestion was this: to evade the ban by changing the name of the Courant. Legally, this could not work. Anyway James objected: presumably, because his circulation was doing well, and his business might suffer if it seemed that the Courant had been neutered.

  The better option was to make Benjamin the publisher. Even this might leave them in breach of the law. Because Benjamin was still an apprentice, with three years left to run of his term of service, James was responsible for everything he did. So they hit upon another ploy. James would end the apprenticeship by signing the back of his brother’s indentures, and if the authorities tried to censor the Courant Benjamin would show them the document. Secretly, however, he signed another set of articles, binding himself to James until 1726, when he would reach the age of twenty.

  With that accomplished, the next issue of the Courant hit the streets on February 11, with the words “printed and sold by Benjamin Franklin” in large type along the bottom. The following day, James surrendered to the sheriff, bringing along two friends—not his father Josiah, who must by now have been utterly distraught at the way his sons were behaving—and they posted his bond for bail.

  For the next four months, while James waited for his case to come to trial, the Courant came out under Benjamin Franklin’s name. Gradually, the passion ebbed away from the paper. The tone became more moderate. Not so the rivalry between the brothers. They quarreled again. Benjamin knew that their relationship was reachi
ng its end. In later life, again he felt the nag of conscience about his rift with James, just as he had about his insults to the Mathers, worrying—as he put it in his memoirs—that he had been “too saucy and provoking” to his brother.

  Perhaps he was: but he had to make his exit. He was a marked man in Boston, where he had offended all the people in power. In his autobiography, Franklin says that he “made himself a little obnoxious to the governing party”: a phrase that can only mean Dr. Cooke. It must have been issue 78 that did the damage. Worse than that, he was seen as the architect of the paper’s onslaught on religion. And so he became an adolescent copy of the Socrates whose life he had hoped to emulate. Suffering the fate of the philosopher, he was pointed at with horror in the streets. People called him an infidel, or even—and this was almost unspeakable—an outright atheist.

  It was time to go. In May, a grand jury dismissed the charges against James Franklin, and so the Courant could continue, less angry, less political, but still funny and sometimes obscene. Benjamin tried to find a job with another printer—there were four more in Boston—but James had been around to see them, and persuaded them not to hire his brother. Since Benjamin had James’s signature releasing him from his apprenticeship, he could make a run for it without being pursued, or so he thought; but first he had to get aboard a ship. Josiah and James had kissed and made up, which meant that his parents were unlikely to help. His old debating friend John Collins came to his rescue. Collins arranged his passage with a Dutch skipper bound for New York, telling him a tale that Benjamin had made a girl pregnant and was trying to escape a shotgun wedding.

  To pay his fare, Franklin sold a portion of his library. On or about the 25th of September 1723, in a week of heavy rain, with his chest full of clothes and the rest of his books he slipped aboard the Dutchman’s sloop, the Speedwell. The wind was in their favor. The Courant came out again the following Monday, with an off-color sketch about the most intimate parts of a woman’s body. By then the young Franklin had put three hundred miles between himself and Boston.