  The Franklins of Boston were poor, numerous, lively and intelligent. There were seventeen children in all, seven by their father’s first wife, who had died after Josiah Franklin brought her from England to America; and ten by his second wife, Abiah, Benjamin’s mother. Benjamin, born on January 6 (January 17, new style), 1706, was the youngest son, though he had two younger sisters, Jane, who was always his favorite, and Lydia. They lived on Milk Street across from the Old South Church until he was six, when they took a larger house on Hanover Street. A blue ball hung over the door, serving to identify the house in lieu of street numbers. In June 1713, a firm of slave traders advertised “three able Negro men and three Negro women ... to be seen at the house of Mr. Josiah Franklin at the Blue Ball.” Josiah kept no slaves himself but had a shed in which he allowed these captives to be housed. Boston was then a busy seaport town, with some 12,000 population, next largest to Philadelphia in the American colonies. Its harbor was filled with sailing vessels; merchant ships from the Barbados or faraway England unloaded their goods at the Long Wharf. Streets were unpaved and unlighted, but there was plenty of activity in the coffeehouses and taverns. The town boasted of at least six book stores. Benjamin could not remember when he learned to read. According to his sister Jane, he was reading the Bible at five and composing verses at seven. The verse writing was inspired by his father’s brother, Uncle Benjamin, a versifier himself, who appeared at varying intervals, usually staying as long as his welcome lasted. At a very young age, Benjamin devoured his father’s religious tracts and sermons, but soon found boring their tirades against infidels and Catholics. Pilgrim’s Progress, in contrast, was an absorbing adventure story, and Plutarch’s Lives opened up a new and exciting world. His official schooling began at eight and lasted just two years. After that he worked in his father’s soap and candle making shop, doing errands, dipping molds, cutting wick for candles. With so many mouths to feed, higher education, such as that offered at nearby Harvard University, was out of reach for any of the Franklin children. To improve their minds, Josiah often invited men of learning to dinner, encouraging them to discuss worthwhile matters. Though his trade was lowly, he was one of the town’s most respected citizens. Leading Bostonians often consulted him about public affairs, or asked him to arbitrate disputes. He was a man of many skills, was handy with tools, played the violin, and sang hymns in a pleasing voice. Benjamin’s love of music began in his childhood. The values of obedience and industry were implanted in all of them. “Seest thou a man diligent in his calling,” Josiah would quote from Solomon, “he shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men.” Nothing then seemed more unlikely than that he, Benjamin Franklin, would ever stand before a king. He was a sturdy, squarely built youngster, with a broad friendly face, light brown hair, and bright mischievous eyes. Among boys of his own age he was the leader—and sometimes led them into scrapes. Once they were fishing for minnows in the salt marsh. Benjamin suggested they build a wharf so as not to get their feet wet. For the purpose, they appropriated a pile of stones belonging to some workmen who were using them to build a house. The wharf was a success but there were repercussions when the men found their stones missing. “Nothing is useful which is not honest,” Josiah told his erring son. As a youth, he learned to handle boats, to swim, to dive, and to perform all manner of water stunts. One day he resolved to try swimming and flying his kite simultaneously. To his delight, he found that if he floated on his back while holding the kite’s string, he was effortlessly drawn across the pond. Another time he carved himself two oval slabs of wood, shaped like a painter’s palette, bored a hole for his thumb, and used them like oars to propel himself along. In this way he could easily outswim his comrades, though his wrists soon tired. He tried similar devices for his feet with less success. For this invention he might be called the first frog man. He had no enthusiasm for cutting candle wicks and often dreamed of going to sea as an older brother had done. Josiah Franklin, sensing his discontent, told him he could take his pick of other trades. In turn, he took his son to watch the work of joiners, bricklayers, turners, and braziers. Young Benjamin admired the way they handled their tools but did not find these trades to his taste either. Wisely, his father did not press him. His brother James had returned from England in 1717 with equipment to set up a printing shop at the corner of Queen Street and Dasset Alley. Since Benjamin liked to read, what would he think of being a printer—a trade that deals with pamphlets, books, everything made with words? The idea appealed to Benjamin, though he balked when he learned he would be apprenticed to his brother until he was twenty. His father insisted; the apprenticeship, legal as a slave contract, would assure him against losing a second son to the dangerous sea. When Benjamin finally signed the papers which bound him to his brother’s service, he was twelve years old. Everyone agreed he was exceptionally bright for his age. James Franklin was one of Boston’s young intellectuals, belonging to what the pious Cotton Mather called the “Hell Fire Club,” made up of clever young men like himself. He had reason to be pleased with how quickly his little brother mastered the techniques of a printer’s trade. As Benjamin’s skill began to surpass his own, his attitude changed to resentment and jealousy. He found excuses to scold Benjamin, and sometimes gave him blows. The shop handled pamphlets and advertisements and such odd jobs. As a sideline they printed patterns on linen, calico, and silk “in good figures, very lively and durable colours.” In the second year of Benjamin’s apprenticeship, their fortunes improved with a substantial contract to print the Boston Gazette for 40 weeks. The Gazette was one of Boston’s two newspapers, both insufferably dull. When his contract came to an end, James decided to publish his own newspaper. His friends scoffed, saying that America had no need of still another newspaper! The first issue of James Franklin’s New England Courant appeared August 7, 1721, during a smallpox epidemic—and was devoted to opposing the new “doubtful and dangerous practice” of smallpox inoculation. There is no evidence that young Benjamin took any stand—either for or against—in the controversy. The great advantage of working for his brother was that he had access to books. Several apprentices to booksellers with whom he made friends obligingly “loaned” him volumes from their masters’ shelves. So they could be returned early in the morning before they were missed, he often sat up all night reading. There was also a tradesman named Matthew Adams with his own library, who took a fancy to Benjamin and let him borrow what he chose. From reading he turned his hand to writing, composing a ballad called The Lighthouse Tragedy, the account of the drowning of a ship’s captain and his two daughters. James saw possibilities in this effort, printed it for Benjamin, then sent him out on the streets to sell it. (The story of young Benjamin Franklin hawking his ballads on the streets of Boston would much later bring tears to the eyes of his aristocratic French friends.) The Lighthouse Tragedy was wonderfully popular, but his second ballad, a sailor’s song about a pirate, was such a dismal failure that he allowed his father to discourage him from trying others. “Verse-makers are usually beggars,” Josiah Franklin had commented. Prose was Benjamin’s next effort. His inspiration was a volume of the London Spectator, with essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, leading prose stylists of the eighteenth century. He made notes on their subject matter, laid the notes aside a few days, tried to reconstruct the original. He changed the essays into verse, endeavored to put them back to prose. Thus he strove to correct his own writing faults, on occasion having the thrill of finding he had in a phrase or expression improved the original. Both reading and writing were done on his own time, before the shop opened in the morning, at night, and on Sundays when his conscience let him miss church. And still there were never enough hours in the day for all the learning he sought. When he was sixteen he came under the influence of a book by a man named Tryon, who preached on the evils of eating “fish or flesh.” He had been taking his dinners with James and the workmen at a boardinghouse run by a Mrs. Peabody. Would his brother agree to giving him half what he paid Mrs. Peabody and let him buy his own dinner? Benjamin proposed. James jumped at such a bargain. Henceforth the young apprentice dined on dried raisins and bread instead of roasts and legs of mutton. He even had money left over for books, and two extra hours in the empty shop to peruse them as he ate. One of the volumes he purchased at this time influenced him even more than Tryon and his vegetarianism. This was Xenophon’s Memorabilia, which told of Socrates and his philosophy. Hitherto when Benjamin had an opinion, he stated it, as so many do, unequivocally as a fact. It had been a mystery to him why people so often took offense and set to arguing the opposite side of the question. Instead of saying outright what he had in mind, Socrates asked questions—and indirectly led people to his own opinion. From that time on, Benjamin used rarely such words as “certainly” or “undoubtedly,” but expressed his own ideas with seeming diffidence and modesty. Rather than saying, “This is so,” he substituted, “In my opinion, this might be so.” He retained this habit of speech the rest of his life. Outwardly more humble, he was inwardly gaining self-confidence. It seemed to him that the things which James and his literary friends wrote for the Courant were no better than he could do himself, but he was too smart to risk asking his brother to let him have an opportunity to try. One morning a letter was slipped under the door of the shop before any of the staff arrived. It was signed by a “Mrs. Silence Dogood.” Mrs. Dogood claimed to have been born on a ship bringing her parents from London to New England. Her father, so she said, was standing on the deck rejoicing at her birth when “a merciless wave” carried him to his death. In America, as soon as she was old enough, her hard-pressed mother had apprenticed her to a young country parson, whom the young girl later married. Now she was a widow with three children. James printed Mrs. Dogood’s first letter, as well as subsequent ones in which she expressed herself, wittily and clearly, on such varied subjects as the folly of fashionable dress, the character of the so-called weaker sex, the ill effects of liquor, the inferior quality of New England poetry, the need of insurance for widows and old maids, the hypocrisy of certain “pretenders to religion,” and the uselessness of sending dullards to Harvard simply because their fathers could afford to pay their way. Not until her column had become the most controversial and the most popular in the paper, did James Franklin learn that his apprentice-brother was Mrs. Dogood’s creator. In the meantime James was having his own troubles. Because of an editorial attack by one of his contributors on the Massachusetts governor, James was summoned before the City Council, sent to jail for a month, and released only when he agreed to make an abject apology. The City Council then forbade him to print or publish the Courant. In desperation, James and his friends hit on the scheme of making Benjamin, in name only, the Courant publisher. So it would be legal, James burned his brother’s apprenticeship papers, although privately a new set was drawn up. “Mrs. Dogood” added her voice to the indignation aroused at James Franklin’s persecution. From the London Journal, she quoted an article: “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as public liberty without Freedom of Speech.” (Capitalization of nouns was then held part of elegant writing, a practice which Benjamin Franklin always followed carefully.) He had a freer hand now and composed many articles for the Courant. At seventeen, he was without doubt the best writer in Boston, with a mind inferior to none. It is small wonder that his brother felt it his moral duty to exert his authority over him. There were arguments. There were more blows on the part of James. Benjamin, by his own admission, was “perhaps ... too saucy and provoking.” One day he told his brother he was quitting. A runaway apprentice was subject to the same penalties as a runaway slave, but Benjamin’s case was slightly different. James could not make public the secret apprenticeship papers without getting himself in trouble. He took out his fury by visiting other Boston printing shops to warn them not to employ his arrogant younger brother. Benjamin resolved to go to New York. His only confidant was a young friend named Collins. Collins persuaded the captain of a New York sloop to give him passage, telling a fantastic yarn about Benjamin being pursued by a young woman who wanted to marry him. The captain would not have carried a runaway apprentice but goodnaturedly agreed to help the young “ne’er-do-well” elude the female sex. New York, where Benjamin arrived after a three-day journey, had only 7,000 inhabitants but was suffused with an atmosphere of luxury unknown in Boston. Streets, paved with cobblestones, were filled with elegantly attired English officials and wealthy businessmen. Houses were mostly of brick with stairstep roofs in the Dutch style. Though the English had captured it from the Netherlands in 1674, Dutch customs still prevailed. Benjamin called at once on William Bradford, New York’s only printer. Bradford told him he needed no help—privately he thought the Boston youth unstable—but advised him to go to Philadelphia and see his son, Andrew Bradford, also a printer. He could guarantee nothing but at least there was no harm trying. In history, William Bradford, a worthy man in his own way, has two indirect claims to fame. One was that a former apprentice of his named Peter Zenger braved official censure and served a prison sentence for the principle of freedom of the press. The other—that he refused a job to Benjamin Franklin. |
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