He also wrote a near-seditious pamphlet, in verse, sympathizing with the Indians during what became known as King Philip’s War in1676. The war, he declared, was the result of God’s anger at the intolerance of the Puritan ministers in Boston. His passion overpowered his poetic talents: “Let Magistrates and Ministers /consider what they do; / Let them repeal those evil laws, / and break those bonds in two.” Later, his grandson Benjamin Franklin would pronounce that the poem was “written with manly freedom and a pleasing simplicity.”16
Peter and Mary Folger had ten children, the youngest of whom, Abiah, was born in 1667. When she was 21 and still unmarried, she moved to Boston to live with an older sister and her husband, who were members of the South Church. Although raised as a Baptist, Abiah joined the congregation shortly after her arrival. By July 1689, when the well-respected tallow chandler Josiah Franklin went there to bury his wife, Abiah was a faithful parishioner.17
Less than five months later, on November 25, 1689, they were married. Both were the youngest children in a large brood. Together they would live to unusually ripe ages—he to 87, she to 84. And their longevity was among the many traits they would bequeath to their famous youngest son, who himself would live to be 84. “He was a pious and prudent man, she a discreet and virtuous woman,” Benjamin would later inscribe on their tombstone.
Over the next twelve years, Josiah and Abiah Franklin had six children: John (born 1690), Peter (1692), Mary (1694), James (1697), Sarah (1699), and Ebenezer (1701). Along with those from Josiah’s first marriage, that made eleven children, all still unmarried, crammed into the tiny Milk Street house that also contained the tallow, soap, and candle equipment.
It might seem impossible to keep a watchful eye on so large a brood in such circumstances, and the Franklin tale provides tragic evidence that this was so. When he was a toddler of 16 months, Ebenezer drowned in a tub of his father’s suds. Later that year, in 1703, the Franklins had another son, but he also died as a child.
So even though their next son, Benjamin, would spend his youth in a house with ten older siblings, the youngest of them would be seven years his senior. And he would have two younger sisters, Lydia (born1708) and Jane (1712), looking up to him.
A Spunky Lad
Benjamin Franklin was born and baptized on the same day, a Sunday, January 17, 1706.* Boston was by then 76 years old, no longer a Puritan outpost but a thriving commercial center filled with preachers, merchants, seamen, and prostitutes. It had more than a thousand homes, a thousand ships registered at its harbor, and seven thousand inhabitants, a figure that was doubling every twenty years.
As a kid growing up along the Charles River, Franklin was, he recalled, “generally the leader among the boys.” One of their favorite gathering places was a salt marsh near the river’s mouth, which had become a quagmire due to their constant trampling. Under Franklin’s lead, the friends built themselves a wharf with stones intended for the construction of a house nearby. “In the evening when the workmen were gone home, I assembled a number of my playfellows, and we worked diligently like so many emmets, sometimes two or three to a stone, until we brought them all to make our little wharf.” The next morning, he and the other culprits were caught and punished.
Franklin recounted the tale in his autobiography to illustrate, he said, his father’s maxim “that nothing was useful which was not honest.”18 Yet, like many of Franklin’s attempts at self-deprecation, the anecdote seems less designed to show how bad a boy he was than how good a leader he was. Throughout his life, he took palpable pride in his ability to organize cooperative endeavors and public-spirited projects.
Franklin’s childhood days playing along the Charles River also instilled a lifelong love for swimming. Once he had learned and taught his playmates, he tinkered with ways to make himself go faster. The size of people’s hands and feet, he realized, limited how much water they could push and thus their propelling power. So he made two oval palettes, with holes for his thumbs, and (as he explained in a letter to a friend) “I also fitted to the soles of my feet a kind of sandals.” With these paddles and flippers, he could speed through the water.
Kites, as he would later famously show, could also be useful. Sending one aloft, he stripped, waded into a pond, floated on his back, and let it pull him. “Having then engaged another boy to carry my clothes round the pond,” he recalled, “I began to cross the pond with my kite, which carried me quite over without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.”19
One childhood incident that he did not include in his autobiography, though he would recount it more than seventy years later for the amusement of his friends in Paris, occurred when he encountered a boy blowing a whistle. Enchanted by the device, he gave up all the coins in his pocket for it. His siblings proceeded to ridicule him, saying he had paid four times what it was worth. “I cried with vexation,” Franklin recalled, “and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.” Frugality became for him not only a virtue but also a pleasure. “Industry and frugality,” he wrote in describing the theme of Poor Richard’s almanacs, are “the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue.”20
When Benjamin was 6, his family moved from the tiny two-room house on Milk Street, where fourteen children had been raised, to a larger home and shop in the heart of town, on Hanover and Union Streets. His mother was 45, and that year (1712) she gave birth to the last of her children, Jane, who was to become Benjamin’s favorite sibling and lifelong correspondent.
Josiah Franklin’s new house, coupled with the dwindling number of children still living with him, allowed him to entertain interesting guests for dinner. “At his table,” Benjamin recalled, “he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse which might tend to improve the minds of his children.”
The conversations were so engrossing, Franklin claims in his autobiography, that he took “little or no notice” of what was served for dinner. This training instilled in him a “perfect inattention” to food for the rest of his life, a trait he deemed “a great convenience,” albeit one that seems belied by the number of recipes of American and French culinary delights among his papers.21
The new home also allowed the Franklins to accommodate Josiah’s brother Benjamin, who emigrated from England in 1715 when he was 65 and his namesake was 9. Like Josiah, the elder Benjamin found the New World inhospitable to his craft of silk dyeing, but unlike Josiah, he did not have the drive to learn a new trade. So he sat around the Franklin house writing bad poetry (including a 124-quatrain autobiography) and a useful family history, attending and transcribing sermons, amusing his nephew, and gradually getting on his brother’s nerves.22
Uncle Benjamin stayed with the Franklins for four years, easily outlasting his welcome with his brother, if not with his nephew. Finally, he moved in with his own son Samuel, a cutler who had also immigrated to Boston. Years later, the younger Benjamin would write to his sister Jane and humorously recount the “disputes and misunderstandings” that grew between their father and uncle. The lesson his father drew was that visits from distant relatives “could not well be short enough for them to part good friends.” In Poor Richard’s almanac, Franklin would later put it more pithily: “Fish and guests stink after three days.”23
Education
The plan for young Benjamin was to have him study for the ministry, Josiah’s tenth son anointed as his tithe to the Lord. Uncle Benjamin was strongly supportive; among the many benefits of this plan was that it gave him something to do with his stash of secondhand sermons. For decades, he had scouted out the best preachers and transcribed their words in a neat shorthand of his own device. His nephew later noted with wry amusement that he “proposed to give me all his shorthand volumes, I suppose as a stock to set up with.”
To prepare him for Harvard, Josiah sent his son, at age 8, to Boston Latin School, where Cotton
Mather had studied and his son Samuel was then enrolled. Even though he was among the least privileged students, Franklin excelled in his first year, rising from the middle of the class to the very top, and then was jumped a grade ahead. Despite this success, Josiah abruptly changed his mind about sending him to Harvard. “My father,” Franklin wrote, “burdened with a numerous family, was unable without inconvenience to support the expense of a college education.”
This economic explanation is unsatisfying. The family was well-off enough, and there were fewer Franklin children being supported at home (only Benjamin and his two younger sisters) than had been the case for many years. There was no tuition at the Latin School, and as the top of his class he would easily have won a scholarship to Harvard. Of the forty-three students who entered the college when Franklin would have, only seven were from wealthy families; ten were sons of tradesmen, and four were orphans. The university at that time spent approximately 11 percent of its budget for financial aid, more than it does today.24
Most likely there was another factor. Josiah came to believe, no doubt correctly, that his youngest son was not suited for the clergy. Benjamin was skeptical, puckish, curious, irreverent, the type of person who would get a lifelong chuckle out of his uncle’s notion that it would be useful for a new preacher to start his career with a cache of used sermons. Anecdotes about his youthful intellect and impish nature abound, but there are none that show him as pious or faithful.
Just the opposite. A tale related by his grandson, but not included in the autobiography, shows Franklin to be cheeky not only about religion but also about the wordiness in worship that was a hallmark of Puritan faith. “Dr. Franklin, when a child, found the long graces used by his father before and after meals very tedious,” his grandson reported. “One day after the winter’s provisions had been salted—‘I think, Father,’ said Benjamin, ‘if you were to say Grace over the whole cask—once for all—it would be a vast saving of time.’ ”25
So Benjamin was enrolled for a year at a writing and arithmetic academy two blocks away run by a mild but businesslike master named George Brownell. Franklin excelled in writing but failed math, a scholastic deficit he never fully remedied and that, combined with his lack of academic training in the field, would eventually condemn him to be merely the most ingenious scientist of his era rather than transcending into the pantheon of truly profound theorists such as Newton.
What would have happened if Franklin had, in fact, received a formal academic education and gone to Harvard? Some historians such as Arthur Tourtellot argue that he would have been stripped of his “spontaneity,” “intuitive” literary style, “zest,” “freshness,” and the “unclutteredness” of his mind. And indeed, Harvard has been known to do that and worse to some of its charges.
But the evidence that Franklin would have so suffered is weak and does not do justice either to him or to Harvard. Given his skeptical turn of mind and allergy to authority, it is unlikely that Franklin would have become, as planned, a minister. Of the thirty-nine who were in what would have been his class, fewer than half eventually joined the clergy. His rebellious nature may even have been enhanced rather than repressed; the college administrators were at the time wrestling mightily with the excessive partying, eating, and drinking that was infecting the campus.
One aspect of Franklin’s genius was the variety of his interests, from science to government to diplomacy to journalism, all of them approached from a very practical rather than theoretical angle. Had he gone to Harvard, this diversity in outlook need not have been lost, for the college under the liberal John Leverett was no longer under the firm control of the Puritan clergy. By the 1720s it offered famous courses in physics, geography, logic, and ethics as well as the classics and theology, and a telescope atop Massachusetts Hall made it a center for astronomy. Fortunately, Franklin acquired something that was perhaps just as enlightening as a Harvard education: the training and experiences of a publisher, printer, and newspaperman.
Apprentice
At age 10, with but two years of schooling, Franklin went to work full time in his father’s candle and soap shop, replacing his older brother John, who had served his term as an apprentice and left to set up his own business in Rhode Island. It was not pleasant work—skimming rendered tallow from boiling cauldrons of fat was particularly noxious, and cutting wicks and filling molds was quite mindless—and Franklin made clear his distaste for it. More ominously, he expressed his “strong inclination for the sea,” even though his brother Josiah Jr. had recently been lost to its depths.
Fearing that his son would “break loose and go to sea,” Josiah took him on long walks through Boston to see other craftsmen, so that he could “observe my inclination and endeavor to fix it on some trade that would keep me on land.” This instilled in Franklin a lifelong appreciation for craftsmen and tradesmen. His passing familiarity with an array of crafts also helped make him an accomplished tinkerer, which served him in good stead as an inventor.
Josiah eventually concluded that Benjamin would be best as a cutler, making knives and grinding blades. So he was, at least for a few days, apprenticed to Uncle Benjamin’s son Samuel. But Samuel demanded an apprenticeship fee that struck Josiah as unreasonable, especially given the history of both hospitality and aggravation that existed between him and the elder Benjamin.26
Instead, almost by default rather than design, young Benjamin ended up apprenticed in 1718, at age 12, to his brother James, 21, who had recently returned from training in England to set up as a printer. At first, the willful young Benjamin balked at signing the indenture papers; he was a little older than usual for starting an apprenticeship, and his brother demanded a nine-year term instead of the typical seven years. Eventually, Benjamin signed on, though he was not destined to stay indentured until he was 21.
During his time in London, James saw how Grub Street balladeers would churn out odes and hawk them in the coffeehouses. So he promptly put Benjamin to work not only pushing type but also producing poetry. With encouragement from his uncle, young Franklin wrote two works based on news stories, both dealing with the sea: one about a family killed in a boating accident, and the other about the killing of the pirate known as Blackbeard. They were, as Franklin recalled, “wretched stuff,” but they sold well, which “flattered my vanity.”27
Herman Melville would one day write that Franklin was “everything but a poet.” His father, no romantic, in fact preferred it that way, and he put an end to Benjamin’s versifying. “My father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars; so I escaped being a poet, most probably a very bad one.”
When Franklin began his apprenticeship, Boston had only one newspaper:The Boston News-Letter, which had been launched in 1704 by a successful printer named John Campbell, who was also the town’s postmaster. Then, as today, there was an advantage in the media business to controlling both content and distribution. Campbell was able to join forces with a network of fellow postmasters running from New Hampshire to Virginia. His books and papers were sent along the route for free—unlike those of other printers—and the postmasters in his network would send him a steady stream of news items. In addition, because he held an official position he could proclaim that his paper was “published by authority,” an important certification at a time when the press did not pride itself on independence.
The link between being the postmaster and a newspaper publisher was so natural that when Campbell lost the former job, his successor as postmaster, William Brooker, assumed that he would also take over the newspaper. Campbell, however, kept hold of it, which prompted Brooker to launch, in December 1719, a rival:The Boston Gazette. He hired James Franklin, the cheapest of the town’s printers, to produce it for him.
But after two years, James lost the contract to print the Gazette, and he did something quite audacious. He launched what was then the only truly independent newspaper in the colonies and the first with literary aspirations. His weekly
New England Courant would very explicitly not be “published by authority.”28
The Courant would be remembered by history mainly because it contained the first published prose of Benjamin Franklin. And James would become known for being the harsh and jealous master described in his brother’s autobiography. In fairness, however, the Courant ought to be remembered on its own as America’s first fiercely independent newspaper, a bold, antiestablishment journal that helped to create the nation’s tradition of an irreverent press. “It was the first open effort to defy the norm,” literary historian Perry Miller has written.29
Defying authority in Boston at that time meant defying the Mathers and the role of the Puritan clergy in secular life, a cause James took up on the first page of his paper’s first edition. Unfortunately, the battle he chose was over inoculation for smallpox, and he happened to pick the wrong side.
Smallpox epidemics had devastated Massachusetts at regular intervals in the ninety years since its founding. A 1677 outbreak wiped out seven hundred people, 12 percent of the population. During the epidemic of 1702, during which three of his children were stricken but survived, Cotton Mather began studying the disease. A few years later, he was introduced to the practice of inoculation by his black slave, who had undergone the procedure in Africa and showed Mather his scar. Mather checked with other blacks in Boston and found that inoculation was a standard practice in parts of Africa.
Just before James Franklin’s Courant made its debut in 1721, the HMS Seahorse arrived from the West Indies carrying what would become a new wave of smallpox. Within months, nine hundred of Boston’s ten thousand inhabitants would be dead. Mather, trained as a physician before becoming a preacher, sent a letter to the ten practicing doctors in Boston (only one of whom had a medical degree) summarizing his knowledge of the African inoculation and urging that they adopt the practice. (Mather had evolved quite far from the superstitions that had led him to support Salem’s witch hunts.)
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