At first it might appear that Franklin had overplayed his hand, but in the list of objections to his pursuit of their daughter, the hefty dowry was not among her parents’ grievances. Mrs. Godfrey later explained that, after talking to a local printer named Andrew Bradford, the young woman’s parents were “informed the printing business was not a profitable one.” This Mr. Bradford helped them see that expensive materials such as metal type broke down often in the printing business and had to be replaced from across the Atlantic, in England. Two previous printers in Philadelphia had been forced to close their doors, and Mr. Bradford was sure that Mr. Franklin would “soon follow them.”
After making a few more attempts to meet eligible women and getting nowhere, Franklin had to admit two things: first, “the business of a printer [is] generally thought a poor one,” and second, “I was not to expect money with a wife, unless with such a one as I should not otherwise think agreeable.” This is the Colonial way of saying, Printing is a dead-end job and the only marriage proposal I’m likely to secure is one founded on cooperative desperation.
In the meantime, Franklin nursed his sorrows in the bosoms of paid escorts. “I hurried frequently into intrigues with low women . . . which were attended with some expense,” and a “continual risk to my health . . . though by great good luck I escaped it.” It’s true that no matter how bad life gets you down, everything’s worse with chlamydia.
Benjamin Franklin’s conclusions in 1729 were probably a bit on the pessimistic side. Within a year or so of his failed engagement, he reunited with Deborah Read, a former sweetheart. Deborah was “good and faithful,” but more importantly, she worked hard and efficiently alongside Franklin in his printing endeavors over the next thirty-four years (and at less risk of him contracting chlamydia. From her, anyway).
Though he couldn’t have known it at twenty-three, young Benjamin stood on the precipice of something truly great. Over the next twenty years he would build a printing empire that extended all over the colonies. His actions would help transform the printing press on this continent into a juggernaut of political discourse and social reform. His almanacs would become a foundational symbol of the American experience, and his newspapers a vehicle for fanning the flames of revolution. Also, they would make him a lot of money—like, an ungodly amount of money. The kind of money that lets you retire at age forty-two and spend the next several decades sipping champagne with Parisian debutantes.
The obstacles to Benjamin Franklin’s success were many. To create his empire, he had to follow the money, pinpointing the most lucrative opportunities and devising plans to undermine his competitors. By far the biggest name on his list was Andrew “the In-Law-Whisperer” Bradford. Two men enter Philadelphia. One man leaves alive. (That is a bit dramatic. Both men eventually died in Philadelphia, but “two men enter, one man retires and moves on to a life of public service” didn’t have quite the same ring to it.)
FRANKLIN’S INTRODUCTION to the world of printing began when he was twelve years old. Born to a Boston candle maker, young Benjamin soon found that spending all day cutting wicks and filling molds was not to his liking. Josiah Franklin, shocked that his preteen would rather be swimming at the beach than chandling tallow or boiling soap, pressured the boy into signing a nine-year contract of indentured servitude to his older son, James.
Just the year before, James had returned from England with presses and types and everything a printer needed to start a newspaper. You might think that young Benjamin would be forever grateful to James for rescuing him from the monotony of candles and setting him up as an intern in the exciting and lucrative world of newspapering. In fact, Benjamin hated James when they were working together; he was a servant, not an intern; and apprenticing at a printing house was neither profitable nor remotely pleasant.
Not only were apprentices required to work long hours, six days a week with no pay, but they also had to swear an oath of personal virtue to their masters. This meant no gambling, no drinking, and absolutely no fornicating. Without the holy trinity of things young men do between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, it’s not surprising that the intern pool was somewhat shallow. Given the generally poor reputation surrounding the trade itself, one historian explains, “printers were often ‘obliged to take the lowest people’ for apprentices and journeymen, because no family ‘of substance would ever put their sons to such an art.’”
(Side note: Indentured contracts were printed in pairs, on a single sheet of paper, then cut down the middle to produce two copies. The middle cut was serrated, thereby creating a unique edge of indentations used to verify that the contract of the apprentice matched the contract of his master. Hence, the “indentured” part of indentured servitude. See, history is fun. Not for them, but, you know, for us.)
The life of an indentured servant was not exactly glamorous. Nor did it command much respect. Here is an actual ad placed in a newspaper after one apprentice at the Maryland Gazette went missing: “[He is] very thick, stoops much, and has a down look; he is a little pock-pitted, has a scar on one of his temples, is much addicted to liquor, very talkative when drunk and remarkably stupid.”
Bosses were always having to correct their apprentices. This was not a problem for James Franklin. “Though a brother, [James] considered himself as my master . . . I thought he demeaned me too much . . . [he] was passionate and had often beaten me, which I took extremely amiss.”
Despite his brother’s abuse, young Benjamin felt the pull of the ink and quill. He wanted to write for his brother’s paper, The New-England Courant, but he knew that James and his fellow newspapermen would never take him seriously (to be fair to them, he was only sixteen). To subvert this, Franklin altered his handwriting and took on the guise of a widow pseudonymously named Silence Dogood. Every two weeks or so, Franklin/Dogood would slip an op-ed under the door of his brother’s print shop. Totally unaware of the real author, James and his associates seemed only too delighted to publish Widow Dogood’s letters. “They read it, commented on it in my hearing, and I had the exquisite pleasure, of finding it met with their approbation,” Franklin would recall. Just a spoonful of tricking your boss as an insightful middle-aged woman with three kids makes the workplace beatings go down.
It wasn’t just the printers who were fooled by Silence Dogood. She became well liked enough in Boston that several men reportedly wrote into the paper offering to, let’s say, rectify her widow status. You can’t blame them. Dogood was an insufferable tease. “[Widowhood] is a state I never much admired,” wrote a sixteen-year-old boy somewhere by himself in a darkened room, “and I am apt to fancy that I could be easily persuaded to marry again, provided I was sure of a[n] . . . agreeable companion.” That is how Benjamin Franklin, in 1722, catfished the entire city of Boston.
When James found out who was behind the Dogood letters, he was not pleased. It was one of the final breaking points between the brothers that led to Benjamin fleeing the city, presumably ahead of a mob of randy male readers of the New-England Courant.
At the height of Benjamin’s Widow Dogood period, James got himself into a bit of hot water with the Massachusetts Assembly. In the June 1722 edition of his paper, he published an anonymous article criticizing how slowly the assemblymen had been dealing with piracy. The illicit hijacking of citizens’ goods might not have moved the Assembly, but call them mean names in public and, by God, they will drop everything and make you pay. Failing to uncover the identity of the article’s author quickly enough, the now thoroughly motivated Assembly arrested and jailed James as the proprietor of the offending newspaper.
In an age when partisan networks and celebrity pundits enjoy the freedom to ignore facts and flout journalistic integrity pretty much at their own discretion, we sometimes forget that, at its birth, the American press was a loyal and subservient arm of the government. Its purpose was solely to inform the public of their leaders’ actions, not to challenge or question those leaders. In fact, doing so was often illegal. The idea of a fre
e press wasn’t even considered a virtue at the time. William Berkeley, a seventeenth-century colonial governor of Virginia, infamously remarked, “I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall never have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them . . . God keep us from both!”
What happened to James Franklin in 1722 was the norm, not the exception, in the American colonies. Yet printing was legitimately needed for official documents, announcements, currency, dispersing laws, and the like. So how does a government (or a modern billionaire oligarchy, for that matter) keep its watchdog muzzled, leashed, and sedated?
Cash—and threats. But mostly cash.
Follow the money: the greatest leverage Colonial leaders had over their local presses was government printing contracts. As much as 90 percent of all printing in the colonies at this time fell under these types of contracts, and in many areas the printers worked exclusively at the invitation and with the blessing of their regional governments. This would be like a presidential administration today making it illegal for anyone besides a single hand-picked network to air press releases, addresses, and governmental news. Competition for contracts like these tends to carry the subtext Please pick us. We swear we’ll print whatever the hell you want.
This afforded colonial governments immense control over any information released to the public. Publish an article critical of your Assembly or governor, and your contract gets revoked. If you didn’t have a contract (see: James Franklin), then you could be arrested and prosecuted for “seditious libel.”
Some of the first rumblings of what we now recognize as freedom of the press emerged from conflicts over these government contracts. Here’s a typical scenario: The Pennsylvania Assembly awards its contract to Printer A. Printer B is like, Shit, what am I supposed to print now? The answer: anything you can to survive. In 1685, William Bradford (father of Andrew “the In-Law Whisperer”) was chastised by Philadelphia magistrates for publishing an attack on the Quakers. Bradford shot back, saying you really couldn’t blame him; there was so little to print in 1685 that he had to take work wherever he could find it. In another tussle with the government just a couple of years later, Bradford was told, “You know the laws, and they are against printing, and you shall print nothing without allowance.”
When publishing his newspapers in Philadelphia decades later, Benjamin Franklin echoed this economic motivation for a free press. By operating a press that was open to everyone, you had substantially more clients and a more stable base of readers. High ideals and a sense of protected rights eventually merged with the pursuit of wealth, birthing our freedom of the press—which is a pretty good description of America’s birth as well.
James Franklin was imprisoned for a month at the pleasure of the Massachusetts Assembly. When he was released, he was ordered to refrain from printing the New-England Courant. To get around this, he bequeathed the paper to Benjamin—or, at least that’s what he wanted the Assembly to think. Nullifying the original indenture, James made a show of publicly releasing his younger brother from apprenticeship and turning the entire business over to him. Privately, however, Benjamin was only a front. In fact, James strong-armed his younger brother into signing a new and secret contract to operate the Courant, essentially indenturing Benjamin to himself as both the apprentice and the master of the same newspaper.
Franklin remembered this as a “very flimsy scheme,” and it didn’t take long before he’d had enough. Normally, indentured servants don’t get to walk away from a job just because it doesn’t pay money, or your coworkers beat you, or your boss calls you pock-pitted and remarkably stupid. But as the fake head of a newspaper, Benjamin had all the freedom in the world to kick open the front door and wave good-bye with his middle fingers raised high. Any attempts to enforce his indenture would have resulted in said indenture becoming public—something James could ill afford if he wanted to steer clear of Boston prison cells.
Besides, Benjamin had learned enough of the trade during his time with the Courant that he could easily find employment at another printing house. He didn’t count on his brother going behind his back and bad-mouthing him to every printer in Boston. But, screw Boston; he could always go to New York. His father tried to prevent him from leaving, but Franklin arranged with the captain of a New York sloop to smuggle him out of the city. His cover story was that he’d “got a naughty girl with child, whose friends would compel me to marry her.”
Finding no work for a printer in New York, Franklin eventually made his way to Philadelphia, where he became the employee of one Samuel Keimer, a failed printer from London. One of only two printers in the city (the other was Franklin’s soon-to-be In-Law Whisperer), Keimer’s shop was an unmitigated disaster. His press was “shattered,” his font was “small [and] worn-out,” and he seemed wholly ignorant of how to print something effectively on paper.
Still, at least he paid, and in silver sterling no less. Keimer had come to Philadelphia when the city was populous enough to sustain a second printer operating without government contracts. Because he had to find paying gigs outside of Lady Columbia’s handouts, as a source of potential income, he looked to people who wanted to be in power but who weren’t. By economic necessity, printers without government contracts opened their presses to partisan politics. The existence of more than one printer in a Colonial city was another important step in the birth of the American free press.
After setting Keimer’s press in order, saving up a little of that sweet silver, and making friends with the governor of Pennsylvania, seventeen-year-old Benjamin boarded a vessel back to Boston. But this wasn’t some tail-between-the-legs, middle-of-the-night homecoming. It was a midday ticker tape parade. He was carrying a letter from Governor William Keith detailing the governor’s proposal to patronize the young Franklin’s new printing shop, pending his father’s approval. After seven months working hard in Philadelphia, Benny had stacks in his pocket and he was itchin’ to make it rain.
“I went to see [James] at his printing-house: I was better dressed than ever while in his service, having a genteel new suit from head to foot, a watch, and my pockets lined with near five pounds sterling in silver. He received me not very frankly, looked me all over, and turned to his work again.”
Walking up to James’s employees, Benjamin continued his victory lap. “One of them asking what kind of money we had [in Philadelphia], I produced a handful of silver and spread it before them . . . Then I took an opportunity of letting them see my watch; and lastly, (my brother still grum and sullen) I gave them a piece of eight to drink, and took my leave.” Spread your bling on the table, buy a round of beers, then pop and lock your way out the door.
Years later, James was still smarting from this scene. Asked by their mother why the two couldn’t reconcile, Benjamin later wrote that “he said I had insulted him in such a manner before his people that he could never forget or forgive it.” Because that’s how eighteenth-century ballers do it, son.
Josiah Franklin rejected the Pennsylvania governor’s proposal to set up Benjamin with his own shop. While generally impressed that his son had accomplished so much in the few months he’d been away, Josiah felt that the boy, at seventeen, was too young to be entrusted with his own business. (Embarrassing his older brother in his own shop probably didn’t help, either.) Upon receiving Josiah’s refusal back in Philadelphia, Governor Keith vehemently disagreed.
“There [is a] great difference in persons,” the governor replied to Benjamin; “and discretion [does] not always accompany years, nor [is] youth always without it.” And since Josiah was unwilling to aid in the establishment of his son’s printing shop, “I will do it myself,” said Keith.
Starting a business costs money, a lot of money. But the governor was enthusiastic, and eager to accommodate. After Franklin submitted a proposed inventory that amounted to about one hundred pounds sterling, Governor Keith suggested that the you
ng printer travel personally to England to “choose the types, and see that everything was good of the kind.” Franklin agreed, and Keith told him that he’d write up a letter of credit and send it with him on the next ship to London.
Now, discretion may not always accompany years, as Keith observed, but Franklin was either too young or too inexperienced to realize what most Americans instinctively know today: never trust a politician. Don’t do it. Saying whatever his constituency wants to hear is pretty much what makes a politician a politician.
Upon his arrival in England, one of Franklin’s friends let him in on Governor Keith’s “character.” “[He] told me there was not the least probability that [Keith] had written any letters for me; that no one, who knew him, had the smallest dependence on him; and he laughed at the notion of the governor’s giving me a letter of credit, having, as he said, no credit to give.”
Politicians! The embarrassment Franklin must have felt at trusting one would have been surpassed only by the galling realization that sometimes fathers are right and you are wrong.
Stranded in London without money or prospects, Franklin found work as an apprentice in the printing shop of one Samuel Palmer. Over the next year, he worked as a pressman and a compositor, rising through the ranks and demonstrating to his English counterparts that Americans are hardworking, technically capable, and insufferably dry.
“My companion at the press,” wrote Franklin, “drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.”
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