Other Franklins rose in the nautical trades. Benjamin’s full brother, Peter, was master of a ship out of Newport in his youth and apparently remained a family expert on maritime concerns. In February 1765, Peter would write that he had not looked for Benjamin’s letters from London because, “Being Aquaintd with Sea affairs,” he knew that the packet service could not guarantee correspondence to Philadelphia in that stormy season. Franklin also had several maritime in-laws, including a brother-in-law who was master of a sloop and a nephew by marriage who was a ship’s captain and based in Newport. Seafaring was dangerous, however, and at least two family members were lost at sea, presumed drowned. This was the fate of Josiah Franklin and of Benjamin’s nephew, John, another sailor. On a genealogical chart Franklin constructed in 1758, he would carefully note both of these losses, as well as tiny Ebenezer’s demise in a tub at home. It is no wonder that he became an ardent swimmer early in life.18
Between the ages of ten and twelve, Franklin was keen on everything about the sea. “Living near the Water,” he confessed, “I was much in and about it, learnt early to swim well, and to manage Boats.” He might have been especially attracted to the military aspect of seafaring. (This attraction had caused his uncle to warn his four-year-old nephew, “Beleeve me Ben. It is a Dangerous Trade.”) A naval career was a classic way for a man to make his name and fortune. News of Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713) would have reminded Bostonians of the exploits of naval commanders. 19
Seafaring held additional allure because mariners maintained a particularly rich tradition of trade customs and secrets. Because they were isolated from the rest of society, sailors (like monks) may have belonged to one of the more exclusive crafts in early modern Europe. Many features of shipboard life reinforced this sense of exclusivity. For instance, all seafarers endured a ritual humiliation when they crossed the equator for the first time—sailors, including officers, had to pay a fee (often in the form of alcoholic drink) or be dunked overboard or soaked on deck. Even on land, sailors looked distinctive, with their rocking gait, sunburned skin, outlandish clothing, and, eventually, tattoos. They sounded odd, as well. Their unusual diction and vocabulary resulted in speech that—deliberately—baffled outsiders. Consequently, sailors could fascinate a boy such as Benjamin Franklin yet simultaneously appall his father.20
Franklin’s swimming and boating alarmed his father, who suspected that his son meant to “break away” and somehow “get to Sea.” Josiah Franklin expressed “Vexation” that his namesake had already run off in this manner. But his earlier failure might have taught him a more subtle kind of parenting. He escorted his younger son to different workshops in Boston, nudging the twelve-year-old Benjamin toward a safer, land-based trade. Together, they visited “Joiners, Bricklayers, Turners, Braziers,” and others. Josiah won the battle of wills, and Benjamin realized that some land trades were in fact quite interesting. “It has ever since been a Pleasure to me to see good Workmen handle their Tools,” Franklin noted later in life.21
IN THE END, Benjamin chose printing, which offered a unique blend of manual and mental labor. The job required considerable physical stamina and manual dexterity. A printer arranged “characters” or “sorts” of lead type into lines guided by a composing stick, fit the lines into a square form, inked the type, levered down the “press” that compacted the inked type against a sheet of paper, hung the printed sheets to dry, and then folded and sewed the pages together. (Binding was done to order.) In bigger printshops, these tasks were divided among specialized workers. Printers’ bodies announced their trade and sometimes their specialities within it. A pressman, for instance, had a crooked walk, the result of building up muscles on one side of the body. And all printers tended to be ink-stained, particularly on their hands. Some printers even ate ink, believing it warded off the devil.22
But printers also worked with their heads. They had to be able to read the language or languages in which they set type—and they had to read them upside down and backward, the way the pieces of type lay in the press. We still use the expression out of sorts, a reminder of how irritating it was for a printer to run out of a crucial character at a crucial point. Good compositors were hyperliterate, able to scan words, sentences, and paragraphs in order to prevent error. Not surprisingly, printers were connoisseurs of verbal wit, economy, and force. (They were known to improve authors whose texts they found wanting.) They also were critical aesthetes of the printed page; a good printer would automatically recognize a book’s typeface and feel the quality of its paper even before the words began to register.23
Printing was an exacting trade, but it was safer than seamanship. By making his son a printer, Josiah Franklin saved him from a harsh life and possible death at sea—and thus saved him for us. Yet Benjamin could not get maritime adventure out of his head. He was apprenticed to his older brother, James, in 1718 and shortly thereafter wrote a pair of ballads, his first published works. These ballads told in verse the story of a shipwreck (yet more drowning) and the exploits of Edward Teach, alias Blackbeard, the pirate. Sensing a possible profit, James Franklin printed these “Grubstreet” verses, and Benjamin hawked them around Boston. He would later remember that although the ballads were “wretched Stuff,” one of them “sold wonderfully.” Again, his father worried. Benjamin recalled him “telling me Verse-makers were generally Beggars; so I escap’d being a Poet.” Yet Franklin’s rudimentary schooling was beginning to pay off. Ever after, he followed the pattern he had set as a twelve-year-old ballad-seller: write something you know readers will want, and if you can, charge them for it.24
Ink, paper, imagination—Franklin did not see the world by going to sea but instead by entering the infinite worlds that the printed page can present. In his brother’s printshop, Benjamin learned three ways to engage with printed material: to physically produce it, to read it, and to write it. Between the ages of twelve and sixteen, he tackled all three. Later, in his autobiography, he produced a dense account of this five-year period. Except when he slept, Franklin seemed never to be without some reminder of the written or printed word. His inky fingers laid out type, turned pages of books, and pushed a quill over paper.
Franklin wanted not only to write but also to improve his writing. He took as his models the essays in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator (1711–1712). Although that London journal had lasted less than two years, it had become one of the most influential pieces of prose writing in the English-speaking world. Franklin used the essays in the third volume of the Spectator as lessons. He tore them apart and then rewrote them—in both prose and verse—in order to learn “Method in the Arrangement of Thoughts.”25
James Franklin kept a bound set of the Spectator in his printing office, and the journal gave his younger brother a crash course in eighteenth-century social theory. The journal’s very title, Spectator, showed that to see and to be seen were new social goals. Humans were social animals, Addison and Steele assumed, creatures endowed with language and sympathies that compelled them to create social networks and institutions. Conversation or even debate was essential to social life. The Spectator was part of an explosion of popular publications, including journals and newspapers, that brought general readers into the conversation. The journal reviewed nearly everything that was being printed or discussed—plays, essays, gossip, foreign news, the sciences. From this, Franklin would learn that the sciences were part of public culture, which any cultivated person should be able to discuss.26
Indeed, Addison and Steele endorsed an even bigger claim: the sciences were the hallmark of modern knowledge. The claim was a bit unfair to people in the Middle Ages, but it was part of a long campaign to portray the eighteenth century as an improved era. No one yet used the term Enlightenment, but people in the eighteenth century did talk about themselves as being enlightened, able to see things in a new and better light. In this highly partisan interpretation of history, they argued that natural science trumped the medieval forms of learning that had failed t
o explain nature. Locked up in monasteries, medieval knowledge had been bookish, authoritarian, and disengaged with the world; modern knowledge examined vivid nature rather than arid texts, was sociable, and was engaged with the larger debates and events of the age. As Addison wrote, “I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses.”27
Addison and Steele also made the standard patriotic claim that their nation had been the first to become enlightened. Modern science had an English pedigree. The Spectator extolled Francis Bacon, from the previous century, as “one of the most extensive and improved Genius’s we have had any Instance of in our own Nation,” a pioneer who “began to strike out new Tracks of Science.” “The Excellent Mr. [Robert] Boyle” then “filled up those Plans and Out-Lines of Science” in his “Pursuit of Nature.” Next came Isaac Newton, still alive when Addison and Steele praised him and “such a Genius” that he seemed almost “like one of another Species!” “The vast Machine, we inhabit, lies open to him,” and “he seems not unacquainted with the general Laws that govern it.” “Pursuit of Nature,” nature’s “general Laws,” “Genius”—the Spectator taught Franklin that the sciences were essential to knowledge and a route to fame.28
During his intense period of reading, Franklin for the first time confronted philosophy and “became a real Doubter” of religion. Not yet sixteen, he read John Locke’s germinal Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), with its shattering contention that humans knew what they did not from innate ideas God had planted within them but because of their sensory experience and their capacity to reason about the experience. Revealed religion and faith were the obvious targets of this profoundly skeptical work. Franklin’s exposure to the work is our first evidence that he was questioning the piety of his puritan forebears and the Christian knowledge taught at places such as Harvard College.29
Around the same time, Franklin read some of the lectures that natural philosopher Robert Boyle had endowed in order to combat irreligion. (Perhaps Franklin’s father knew his son was absorbing dangerous philosophies and gave him the Boyle lectures as antidote.) Boyle, a man of science, worried that his contemporaries were turning away from religion. The lectures given in his name decried deism, a doctrine that challenged the orthodox view of God as all-powerful and all-intervening. Boyle would have been dismayed at their impact on the young Bostonian. “They wrought an Effect on me,” Franklin later remembered, “quite contrary to what was intended by them: For the Arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the Refutations.” He became “a thorough Deist.” He believed that divine power was remote and that humans could understand its effects through sense and reason. For him, God was demoted and humans promoted.30
As he educated himself, Franklin also remedied his early failure to master numbers. He found that he could do arithmetic “with great Ease” and moved on to geometry, a field that took him back to the sea. In his day, geometry was a practical skill left mostly to craftspeople who needed to measure space in order to construct buildings or to divide land for planting. It was essential to sailors because it allowed them to navigate ships.31
Nautical texts had multiplied just in time for Franklin to begin to consult them. Navigation was no longer the exclusive province of mariners. Instead, it was of interest to the state and to the individuals in state employ. When the English empire had expanded in the late seventeenth century, navigational knowledge had become part of its official apparatus—a means to control the high seas. And the navy needed more skilled men. So in 1677, it instituted an examination for the rank of lieutenant. A successful candidate had to certify that he had spent at least three years at sea as a midshipman and prove that he had learned the crafts of navigation and gunnery. Books on mathematics, geometry, and navigation allowed highborn men to claim the skills of sailors. Some ordinary seamen, or “tarpaulins,” could also study these books and advance into the officer ranks. Such reforms established the navy as a state-controlled profession, even as they eroded the internally based craft ethic of seamanship.32
The British state also took advantage of ordinary sailors’ reduced status. In wartime, for example, any man who had any nautical skill could be forcibly “impressed” into naval service. To be sure, many people respected sailors for their experience at sea. And they remained fairly literate as a group. But sailors’ swearing, rough speech, and defiantly plebian culture distanced them from the gentility of officers and land folk. They were becoming mere hands, unthinking workers who were commanded by others. For this reason, they would always be a good test of Franklin’s respect—or lack of respect—for working people.33
Franklin learned about navigation from two late seventeenth-century authors, John Seller and Samuel Sturmy, who wrote in the wake of the navy’s post-1660 reforms. Unfortunately, Franklin did not state the titles of the works he consulted. One of Sturmy’s works, The Mariner’s Magazine, must serve as a possible and representative example of what he read. Sturmy defended ordinary sailors from the scorn of the learned and proclaimed that navigation was “more necessary for the well being and honour of our Nation, than any other Art or Science Mathematical, which is more carefully kept in the Universities.” But, he contended, maritime knowledge should be available to the public. At the start of the book, an admirer offered an acrostic that used Sturmy’s first and last names to celebrate the publication of mariners’ secrets. It began:S-ome men, when they this MAGAZINE shall spy,
A-nd note the Author, presently will cry,
M-any such Captains will undo the Trade:
U-nlock these Secrets, all are Captains made.
E-nvy thus, Devil-like, would keep men blind,
L-et Noble Sons of Art be free and kind.34
Geometry, a how-to guide. John Seller, Practical Navigation . . . (1680). JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY.
Franklin might have learned more from Sturmy (and Seller) about the controversy over publicizing trade secrets than he did about navigation. (He later confessed that he “never proceeded far” in the “Science” of geometry.) The issue was certainly relevant to his own craft: printers were the very tradespeople who published secrets.35
Printers were contradictory creatures. They had their own trade secrets, but their business was to make things public by printing and circulating them. They revered words yet were often irreverent toward authors and authorities. Indeed, they used words to challenge authority. James Franklin seemed to encourage a general irreverence in his younger brother. Once Benjamin was apprenticed, he confessed his lack of “Attendance on publick Worship.” He could not bear to forego time for reading—and he read books that challenged religious doctrine. Josiah Franklin may have regretted putting one impressionable son in the hands of another who was determined to challenge Boston’s religious establishment.36
James Franklin was hell-bent on defiance. At one time or another, his paper, The New-England Courant, mocked everyone, from ministers to magistrates, who held power in Boston. James had his reasons. His paper was Boston’s third newspaper, so it needed to stand out to attract readers. And as it was the only Boston paper printed without the approval of the government, James had a free hand.37
In the spring of 1721, three years into Benjamin’s apprenticeship, James outdid himself. An opportunity to stir up controversy arrived in the form of a ship from the West Indies. The Seahorse reintroduced smallpox to Boston and set off an epidemic. Within nine months, 6,000 people out of Boston’s population of 10,500 had suffered or were recovering from the disease, and 900 had died.
Cotton Mather proposed a solution. Mather was a newly designated Fellow of the Royal Society of London, England’s first learned organization devoted to natural science. He recalled an essay on inoculation published in the society’s Philosophical Transactions. Inoculation was practiced in the Near East; pus from smallpox sores was inserted under the skin of a healthy person,
who then (usually) suffered a mild case of the disease but gained future resistance to it. Mather had also asked his West African slave Onesimus if he had suffered smallpox. Onesimus gave an interesting answer—yes and no—meaning he had been inoculated. Citing the Philosophical Transactions and Onesimus, the minister pled inoculation’s case. Zabdiel Boylston, who had been trained in medicine by his father and by another local doctor, began to perform it on others, including Mather’s son. It was a gamble. Inoculation sometimes produced a form of smallpox as virulent as the naturally occurring kind. Some inoculated people died, and some (including Boylston’s son) suffered horrendously before they recovered.
William Douglass, the colony’s only university-trained doctor, was enraged. He believed that when they intervened in medical affairs, men such as Mather and Boylston ignorantly meddled in matters of life and death. Who were they to stick pus in people who might never have caught smallpox anyway? James Franklin was not much interested in whether inoculation worked, but he thought that a controversy over it would interest readers as the epidemic raged around them. And so, he was eager to print Douglass’s denunciations of Mather and Boylston.
What followed was a debate over knowledge. Nonphysicians, Douglass maintained in the Courant’s first issue, should not promote dangerous medical therapies. Inoculation was “the Practice of Greek old Women” and “not in the least vouched or recommended (being meerly published, in the Philosophick Transactions by way of Amusement).” By equating Mather and Boylston with old foreign women who lacked formal training, Douglass was trumpeting his own medical knowledge. By contrast, he suggested, the Reverend Mather (university educated but not in medicine), the slave Onesimus, and Boylston (merely apprenticed to doctors) were all unqualified. Douglass even questioned whether the Royal Society, established as an alternative to the universities, promulgated any useful knowledge.38
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