Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  6. Tryon’s ideal republic: The Way to Health (1683), pp. 70–128. Chapter 14 deals with the evils of flesh eating. His open letter to the Quakers was titled The Planter’s Speech to his Neighbours and Countrymen of Pennsylvania, East & West Jersey (London, 1684).

  7. Plutarch and vegetarianism: Plutarch’s Morals, Translated from the Greek (London, 1691), Vol. 5, pp. 234–49. A copy of this edition of Plutarch was included in a book sale in Boston in October 1719 for which James Franklin printed the catalogue.

  8. Franklin’s knowledge of the work of Samuel and John Clarke can be authenticated as follows. In his autobiography, Franklin says that “some books against Deism fell into my hands: they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle’s lectures.” This specific phrase —“substance of sermons preached at Boyle’s lectures”—appears on the title pages of only three books published in England in the early eighteenth century, each of which was the printed text of lectures given in a series endowed by the pioneer chemist, Sir Robert Boyle. One of these books—Physico-Theology, by William Derham, who gave the Boyle lectures in 1711–12—can be ruled out because it did not refer to the deistical controversy. The other two were Samuel Clarke’s Boyle lectures of 1704, published in 1705 as A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: More Particularly in Answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their Followers, and reprinted in 1716 and 1719; and John Clarke’s An Enquiry Into The Cause and Origin of Evil (given as the Boyle Lectures in 1719, and then published in 1720). Franklin must have read one or the other, or he may have read both. On the Boyle Lectures and the Clarkes: John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion (London, 1976), pp. 103–14.

  9. Shaftesbury’s aesthetic religion: A. O. Aldridge, “Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 41, Part 2 (1951), especially pp. 330–33.

  10. Franklin does not say which of Collins’s works he read, but in the 1730s he owned a copy of the Discourse of Free Thinking (1713), which he mentions in a list in The Pennsylvania Gazette (December 12, 1734) of items he had lent out and wished to have returned. From his conversations with Cabanis it can be shown that his early reading must have focused on this book. In his account of Franklin’s youth, Cabanis gives a brief list of topics—namely, “the divinity of Scripture, revelation, and mysteries”—that Franklin said he had seen discussed by Collins (Cabanis, Notice sur Benjamin Franklin, pp. 228–29). This list precisely matches the contents of Collins’s Discourse. Cabanis also refers to two aphorisms of Sir Francis Bacon that Franklin liked to repeat, and these aphorisms were quoted and discussed by Collins on pp. 104–6 of the same book. For the best scholarly account of Collins’s work and his relationship to Locke and Toland: James O’Higgins SJ, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works (The Hague, 1970), pp. 3–6, 13–15, and Chapter 6 on the Discourse of 1713. Franklin also owned a copy of Collins’s Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1717), which is now at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

  11. “Absurdity”: Collins, Discourse of Free Thinking, pp. 13–18. For an example of Franklin’s use of the word in a similar way, see his Defense of Mr Hemphill’s Observations (Philadelphia, 1735) where it appears six times. “Pious fraud”: Collins, Discourse of Free Thinking, pp. 92–93.

  12. List of heroes: Collins, Discourse of Free Thinking, pp. 125–76.

  13. Fate of Socrates: Ibid., p. 126.

  14. Elisha Cooke Jr.: Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, Vol. 4, 1690–1700 (Cambridge, MA, 1933), pp. 349–56. But for this period of Boston history the work of Perry Miller is still indispensable: principally his beautifully written The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA, 1953), Books 3 and 4.

  15. The Cooke-Mather antagonism: Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1984), pp. 322–29.

  16. Henry Care: There is an excellent modern biography, which places Care in his context and shows how important he was for the future of Anglo-American journalism, in Lois G. Schwoerer, The Ingenious Henry Care, Restoration Publicist (Baltimore, 2001). My quotations come from pp. 29 and 54. Care had a direct connection with New England via his close associate, the printer Benjamin Harris (1647?–1720). The two men stood trial together for libel in London in 1680. In 1686, Harris immigrated to Massachusetts, where he fleetingly produced America’s first newspaper, Publick Occurrences, before returning to England in about 1694. In the early 1700s, Harris published new editions of Care’s English Liberties. In 2000, Keith Arbour produced some fascinating typographical evidence suggesting that James Franklin may have trained as a printer with Benjamin Harris in London. The question is not a trivial one, because if James Franklin did meet Harris, this would be another indication that the Franklins in Boston remained closely in touch with English metropolitan culture throughout Benjamin Franklin’s boyhood. See Keith Arbour, “James Franklin, Apprentice, Artisan, Dissident, and Teacher,” in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94 (September 2000): 366–372; and Lemay 1, pp. 54–55.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE NEW-ENGLAND COURANT

  1. The epidemic: Amalie M. Kass, “Boston’s Historic Smallpox Epidemic,” in Massachusetts Historical Review 14 (2012), pp. 1–51. Monthly burial numbers for Boston: Boston Gazette, No. 121, March 12–19, 1722. Shute’s clash with the House of Representatives: Colonial State Papers (America and West Indies), 1720–1721 (London, 1933), pp. 329–30 and pp. 371–74. Political context: G. B. Warden’s Boston: 1689–1776 (New York, 1970), Chapter 5.

  2. Attack on Cotton Mather: Kass, “Boston’s Historic Smallpox Epidemic,” pp. 28–29.

  3. Among the many academic articles about the Dogood letters, one of the most illuminating is George F. Horner, “Franklin’s Dogood Papers Re-examined,” in Studies in Philology 37, no. 3 (July 1940), pp. 501−23, which explores their social and economic context in Boston. Equally excellent is James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (Newcastle, DE, 2006), pp. 3–8. Once again one must also return to Perry Miller, in chapter 24 of his The New England Mind: From Colony to Province.

  4. For a discussion of Moll Flanders that brings out more of the affinities between Franklin and Defoe, especially in their writing about women and families: Backscheider, Daniel Defoe, pp. 505–10.

  5. Franklin to Samuel Mather, July 7, 1773, and May 12, 1784, BFP 20, pp. 286–88, and BFP 42, pp. 236–37.

  6. Unlike many American scholars, I do not believe that Cotton Mather—or indeed the orthodox New England Calvinism to which he adhered—had any significant or lasting influence on Benjamin Franklin. The first point to make is this: that we cannot be precisely sure what Josiah and Abiah Franklin believed about the finer points of divinity or what they conveyed to the boy. They might not have been Matherites at all. From correspondence that passed between them and their youngest son in 1738 (BFP 2, pp. 202−4), when Mr. and Mrs. Franklin were worried by reports of Benjamin’s unorthodox opinions, it is clear that Josiah and Abiah were staunch Bible Christians with generally Calvinist views and a firm faith in the Holy Trinity. But that does not mean that they had to agree with Cotton Mather about all the details of his creed: for example, they did not have to subscribe to Mather’s doctrine of Double Predestination. The underlying issue here is that Josiah Franklin and his brother Benjamin Senior were not New England Puritans at all. The two men were London Presbyterians, and their religious education occurred in England, not in Massachusetts. By the time Josiah Franklin left for America in the 1680s, as an adult of twenty-five, some Presbyterian ministers in London—including the most famous, Richard Baxter—had already abandoned the most rigid forms of Calvinist dogma, while retaining to the full the Puritan concern with Bible reading and personal piety. And when Benjamin Senior arrived in Boston from London in 1715, the theological situation in England was still more complicated and nuanced. We do not know for certain which side—or sides—the
old man took in the many religious debates under way in the empire’s capital. But one thing we can say for sure: that when Benjamin Franklin had his own printing firm in Philadelphia, he took next to no interest in the work of the Mathers. While his firm was publishing between 1728 and 1766, it reprinted only one of the Mather family’s vast array of books: a set of sermons by Increase Mather titled Soul Saving Gospel Truths, which Franklin produced in 1743. And in the catalogue of Franklin’s library published in 2006 by Edwin Wolf and Kevin J. Hayes, we find listed only three works by Cotton Mather: Franklin’s boyhood copy of Bonifacius; the Magnalia Christi Americana of 1702, his history of New England, which seems to have been there primarily because it describes Franklin’s grandfather, Peter Folger; and a brief tract from 1700, in which Mather writes an open letter to nonconformists in England. There is nothing else.

  7. Shute’s dispatch of October 29, 1722, in Colonial State Papers (American), 1722–3 (London, 1934), pp. 157–58.

  8. Issue 76 and John Toland: The relevant passage on p. 58 of Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1695−6), containing language very similar to the closing section of the principal item in Courant No. 76, is this: “The natural man, that is he that gives the swing to his appetites, counts divine things mere folly, calls religion a feverish dream of superstitious heads, or a politick trick invented by statesmen to awe the credulous vulgar.” Action against the Courant: Worthington C. Ford, ed., Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1722–3 (Boston, 1923), pp. 205 and 208–9.

  9. By the 1720s, the political usage of the word “canvass” to mean “solicit a vote in an election” was firmly established in the English language. The first example recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1681.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE CRUSOE OF THE DELAWARE

  1. Among the many echoes of Robinson Crusoe in Franklin’s autobiography, consider the following passages. Early in the book, Defoe describes Crusoe’s time in a small boat after his ship was wrecked off the coast of Norfolk in England: “While we were in this condition, the men yet labouring at the oar to bring the boat near the shore, we could see, when our boat mounting the waves we were able to see the shore, a great many people running along the shore to assist us when we should come near, but we made slow way toward the shore, nor were we able to reach the shore, till we were past the lighthouse at Winterton.” In his account of his attempt to land on the beach in Brooklyn, Franklin writes this: “When we drew near to the island [the Brooklyn end of Long Island] we found it was a place where there could be no landing, there being a great surf…so we dropped anchor and swung around toward the shore. Some people came down to the water edge and hallow’d to us, as we did to them. But the wind was high and the surf so loud, that we could not hear as to understand each other.”

  2. Over two days in the spring of 2015 I retraced Franklin’s journey across New Jersey, chiefly by car but also on foot where possible, using the topographical maps published by the U.S. Geological Survey. For his route, see Lemay 1, pp. 221–23. For evidence about the landscape and the settlements in the area as they were in 1723: W. Woodford Clayton, History of Union and Middlesex Counties (Philadelphia, 1882), pp. 822–24 and 852–53; Wheaton J. Lane, From Indian Trail to Iron Horse: Travel and Transportation in New Jersey, 1620–1860 (Princeton, 1939), pp.17–18, 36, and 42–43; and Peter O. Wacker, Land and People: A Cultural Geography of Pre-industrial New Jersey (New Brunswick, NJ, 1975), pp. 48 and 88–89.

  3. Quaker farmers in the Crosswicks area: E. M. Woodward and J. F. Hageman, History of Burlington and Mercer Counties, NJ (Philadelphia, 1883), pp. 275–77, 286–89, and 352–56. This source mentions the Quaker meeting house, erected in 1706.

  4. Bordentown and Dr. Browne: Woodward and Hageman, History of Burlington and Mercer Counties, NJ, pp. 452–61; PG, May 26, 1737; and Browne’s will, in Calendar of New Jersey Wills (Somerville, NJ, 1918), Vol. 2, p. 68.

  5. Descriptions of Pennsylvania in the 1720s: Quotations from Donald F. Durnbaugh, “Two Early Letters from Germantown,” in PMHB 84, no. 2 (April 1960): 219–33. For the political economy of Pennsylvania at the time of Franklin’s arrival, the sources I have found most useful are the closing chapters of Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726 (Princeton, 1968); Joseph E. Illick, Colonial Pennsylvania (New York, 1976), pp. 107–12; Alan Tully, William Penn’s Legacy (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 53–57 and passim; and also the immensely valuable biographical dictionary, Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1997), edited by Craig E. Horle and others and referred to below as LLP 2. For an official account of Pennsylvania by the governor, see the September 8, 1721, Board of Trade report on the state of the colonies, in Colonial State Papers (American and West Indies), 1720–1721 (London, 1933), pp. 418–21.

  6. Dispute following William Penn’s death: Charles P. Keith, Chronicles of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1917), Vol. 2, pp. 633–37.

  7. The Crooked Billet, and other locations visited by Franklin on reaching Philadelphia: Hannah Benner Roach, “Benjamin Franklin Slept Here,” in PMHB 84, no. 2 (April 1960): 127–30.

  8. Sauer’s account of Pennsylvania in 1724: in Durnbaugh, “Two Early Letters from Germantown,” p. 230. Sauer’s origins: Donald F. Durnbaugh, “Christopher Sauer, Pennsylvania German Printer,” in PMHB 82, no. 3 (July 1958): 316–23.

  9. Keimer, his origins, and the Camisards: Samuel Keimer, A Brand Pluck’d From The Burning (London, 1718), pp. 2–9; Stephen Bloore, “Samuel Keimer,” in PMHB 3, no. 4 (1930); and Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth Century England (Berkeley, 1980).

  10. Keimer, The London Post, and Defoe: Backscheider, Daniel Defoe, pp. 376–78.

  11. The best account of Mrs. Franklin is Jennifer Reed Fry’s “ ‘Extraordinary Freedom and Great Humility’: A Reinterpretation of Deborah Franklin,” in PMHB 127, no. 2 (April 2003), pp. 167-196.

  12. In 1997, the Franklin scholar Professor Leo Lemay began a project to transcribe and annotate the Franklin account books, for which later writers owe him a debt of gratitude. In the form of searchable PDF files, the complete transcriptions can be found on the University of Delaware Library website at http://udspace.udel.edu/​handle/​19716/​2354.

  13. Franklin to Deborah, September 6, 1758, BFP 7, pp. 138–46, with a family tree. Franklin’s cousin: Benjamin Tyler (1700?–1760), whose will, proved on February 17, 1761, is at the Lichfield Diocesan Registry Office (LDRO). It shows that Tyler’s closest friend was Peter Capper, a brass and copper merchant who was also a founding investor in the Birmingham Canal in 1768. Capper was a business associate of Matthew Boulton, the most famous Birmingham manufacturer of the eighteenth century, who financed the steam engines designed by James Watt.

  14. On Deborah Read’s family history, the only reliable published source is Francis J. Dallett, “Doctor Franklin’s In-Laws,” in Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine 21 (1960): 297–302. Unfortunately, the surviving records from seventeenth-century Birmingham are far from satisfactory. However, from what remains it appears that Deborah’s forebears had connections with the area’s earliest industrialists. The key figure is her great-grandfather Abraham Cash, a shoemaker. At LDRO Cash’s will, proved October 1, 1707, shows as one of his executors Samuel Banner, a leading Birmingham ironmaster. Abraham’s granddaughter Anne Cash married into the Weston family, who belonged to a consortium that in 1694 won a contract to supply the army with muskets: W. H. B. Court, The Rise of the Midland Industries, 1600–1838 (Oxford, 1938), pp. 142–43. Birmingham ca. 1700: Marie Rowlands, “Society and Industry in the West Midlands at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in Midland History 4 (1977): 49–60; and M. J. Wise, “Birmingham and Its Trade Relations in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 2 (1949–50): 53–79. Joseph White’s trade as a whitesmith: his and Deborah Cash’s marriage license, July 2
5, 1673, also at Lichfield.

  15. Caleb Cash in Philadelphia: manuscript notes in the Cash/Leacock family Bible, at APS, ref 220.52 B471.

  16. Thomas Rutter, Samuel Nutt, and the early iron and steel industry in Pennsylvania: The best brief introductions are the essay “Legislators, the Assembly and the Iron Industry, 1715–1775,” in Craig Horle, ed., Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, Vol. 3, 1757–1775 (House of Representatives of Pennsylvania, 2005), pp. 32–40; and A. C. Bining, Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century (Harrisburg, PA, 1938). The library of the Historical Society of Pennsylania (HSP) contains a wealth of relevant material. For Rutter and Nutt, see the typescript paper by Daniel A. Graham, “Thomas Rutter I (ca. 1660–1730) of Germantown, PA and the Birth of the Pennsylvania Iron Industry” (1996). On William Penn’s attempt to persuade the Quaker ironmasters of the English West Midlands to invest in his colony: see M. W. Flinn, Men of Iron: The Crowleys in the Early Iron Industry (Edinburgh, 1962), pp. 114–15. The Quaker merchants from Pennsylvania who visited the Birmingham area included William Penn’s agent in the colony, James Logan, who hoped (in vain) to marry into the Crowley family, the most successful English ironmasters of the period; and Penn’s close and wealthy friend, Isaac Norris Sr. (1671–1735), who was in England from 1706 to 1708. I think it is possible that John and Sarah Read traveled to America with Norris on his return journey, since the Reads certainly knew the Norrises well. When Isaac Norris’s daughter—also a Deborah—died in 1767, Mrs. Franklin recalled that they had played together as small children. As she wrote to her husband: “She was one of my first play maites and I raly loved her” (quoted in Reed Fry, “ ‘Extraordinary Freedom and Great Humility’: A Reinterpretation of Deborah Franklin”). If I am correct, then we can fix 1708 as the date of Deborah Read Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia, meaning that she was born in England.