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Cotton Mather was the pride of New England Puritanism. As a boy he had shown a curious, inquiring mind; he studied science toward a career in medicine. But the pull of religion was too strong, as might have been expected of the grandson of Puritan pillars John Cotton and Richard Mather and the son of Increase Mather, a column of Congregationalism of comparable diameter. Shortly after ordination in 1685, Cotton Mather joined his father at Boston’s Second Church and commenced an astonishingly prolific career as a publicist of Puritanism. Some 450 books and pamphlets poured from his pen during his lifetime; although the majority dealt with religious topics, many revealed a continuing affinity for such secular subjects as natural history and music.
But nothing was truly secular for Cotton Mather. An unchurched neighbor fell from a rooftop and for weeks lay in a coma; Mather remembered having told the man that if he did not get religion soon, God would lay him low. “Coming to himself,” Mather recorded in his diary, “one of the first things he thought on was what I had said unto him, under the sense whereof he quickly went and joined himself unto the South church”—which, perhaps significantly, was not Mather’s church. On another occasion an even more mundane matter prompted musings on man’s place in God’s order. “I was once emptying the cistern of nature, and making water at the wall. At the same time, there came a dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I: ‘What mean and vile things are the children of men, in this mortal state! How much do our natural necessities abase us, and place us in some regard, on the same level with the very dogs!’” Additional reflection inspired a determination to transcend the gutter in which men’s bodies were consigned to live. “My thought proceeded: ‘Yet I will be a more noble creature, and at the very time when my natural necessities debase me into the condition of the beast, my spirit shall (I say, at that very time!) rise and soar and fly up towards the employment of the Angel.’” Never again, Mather vowed, would he answer the call of nature without consciously evoking “some holy, noble divine thought.” Looking back on the matter later, he was happy to report: “And I have done according to this resolution!”
With his Puritan contemporaries, Mather perceived the cosmos as a battleground between good and evil. God led the army of good, whose ranks included those humans his grace had inspired with biblically enlightened reason; Satan spearheaded the legions of evil, which counted unbridled passion and unrelieved ignorance among their principal weapons. To Mather and his fellow Puritans, God was a pervasive and all-but-tangible presence; Satan still more so. “That there is a Devil, is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil,” Mather declared. Not only was Satan real, but he was actively involved in people’s lives. “The Devil, in the prosecution and execution of his wrath upon them, often gets a liberty to make a descent upon the children of men.” And nowhere was this more true than in New England, which the Evil One had had all to himself and his red children—“the Tawnies”—until lately, when the arrival of the Christian Gospel had roused him to terrible anger. “I believe there never was a poor plantation more pursued by the wrath of the Devil than our poor New England.”
Mather rarely indulged in idle scribbling (although weary readers of those 450 titles might have been forgiven for occasionally thinking so); at the time that he inscribed these words, Massachusetts was writhing under what seemed Satan’s latest assault. The Salem witch trials of 1692 convulsed the colony as nothing before or after. No man or woman of consequence doubted that witches existed; Satan, according to the consensus, frequently acted through individuals who entered into demonic pacts with him. The only question was whether the nineteen people executed were actually the demonic agents they were alleged to be by their accusers, principally teenage girls given to an unsettling emotionalism.
Cotton Mather’s attitude toward the accusations and the accused was typical—for him, and for his time and place. “The Devil, exhibiting himself ordinarily as a small black man, has decoyed a fearful knot of proud, froward, ignorant, envious and malicious creatures, to list themselves in his horrid service, by entering their names in a book by him tendered unto them. These witches, whereof above a score have now confessed and shown their deeds, and some are now tormented by the devils, for confessing, have met in hellish rendezvouzes, wherein the confessors do say, they have had their diabolical sacraments, imitating the Baptism and Supper of our Lord.” The witches laid hold of innocent men and women and carried them out of their houses, over trees and hills for miles through the air. “They seize poor people about the country with various and bloody torments; and of those evidently preternatural torments there are some have died…. The people thus afflicted are miserably scratched and bitten so that the marks are most visible to all the world, but the causes utterly invisible; and the same invisible furies do most visibly stick pins into the bodies of the afflicted and scald them and hideously distort and disjoint all their members, besides a thousand other sorts of plagues beyond these of any natural diseases which they give unto them.”
With such awesome evil abroad in the land, Mather could only endorse the action of the Salem court that condemned the witches to death. Indeed, at one hanging he all but tied the noose himself. The condemned man, pleading innocence, recited the Lord’s Prayer in a powerful and moving voice. A wave of sympathy surged through the gathered throng, which reasoned that the devil would never suffer one of his servants to turn coat at the very gate of hell. But Mather stood against the tide, reminding the crowd that the Evil One was never so dangerous as when he took on the trappings of righteousness. The merciful mood passed, and the rope snapped taut.
Yet even Mather began to worry about the nature of some of the evidence accepted by the court. This “spectral evidence” consisted of statements by the accusers that they had seen the fiendish “specters” of the accused performing satanic acts. Mather did not doubt the veracity of many such statements; certainly the devil frequently incited his agents to such acts. But might his catalog of destruction not also include planting false evidence in unwary and weakened minds, thereby engineering the conviction of innocent people—good and upstanding people, people like Mather himself, even? Mather believed that his name ranked high on Satan’s roster of enemies; he constantly ascribed diabolical intervention to the mishaps of his life. The manuscript of a particularly potent sermon disappeared on the eve of delivery; Mather concluded that the devil had stolen it. It turned up afterward; Mather interpreted the return as satanic taunting.
Mather did not deem it beyond the Evil One, in his current ferocious descent upon Massachusetts, to try to bring down a formidable foe like himself by conjuring spectral evidence pointing his way. He suggested that Satan and his fellow fallen angels had “obtained the power to take on them the likeness of harmless people”; he reiterated, “Many innocent, yea, and some virtuous persons are by the Devils in this matter imposed upon.”
It was this fear in Mather, shared among other ministers and magistrates of the district, that eventually brought the witch-hunt to a halt. To accept spectral evidence was to hand enormous power to people who might be the devil’s tools—which was to say, to the devil himself. After worried reconsideration, the court threw out uncorroborated spectral evidence, and after the specters were barred from the court, other evidence evaporated. The hysteria waned; in time some of those at the center of the proceedings regretted their actions. Five years after the fact, Judge Samuel Sewall stood up before his fellows in the congregation at Boston’s South Church and acknowledged the “blame and shame” of his role in the witch trials. He requested the congregation’s forgiveness and their prayers on his behalf for God’s mercy. Cotton Mather did not go so far as a public recanting, but he later conceded, speaking of the man whose death he had guaranteed by his gallows intervention, that he wished he had never encountered “the first letters of his name.”
Josiah Franklin almost certainly heard Samuel Sewall’s confession on that January day in 1697. Josiah was a member of the South Church (also called the Third Church, being the third congregation established in Boston) and a friend of Sewall. Neither the friendship nor the membership was of especially long standing, for Josiah was a comparative newcomer to New England. In old England the Franklin family had lived in Ecton in Northamptonshire for at least three hundred years (where they may have known the forebears of George Washington, whose ancestry also ran to that county). The Franklin family held a farm of thirty acres; in addition the eldest son of each generation inherited and operated the family blacksmith shop. Josiah, being the fourth surviving son of his father Thomas Franklin, inherited neither farm nor smithy, and when the older man retired and went to live with Josiah’s elder brother (Thomas’s second adult son) John in Banbury, Oxfordshire, Josiah accompanied him. John had solved the younger-son problem by taking up dyeing; it was in this occupation that Thomas apprenticed Josiah to him.
Josiah learned the trade well and might have remained a dyer and an Englishman of the Midlands for the rest of his life had not Charles II turned the Church of England in a popish direction Josiah’s dissenting conscience could not abide. Josiah was not a confrontational type, and having acquired a wife—Anne—and three children, he felt the responsibilities of family. But ultimately he determined that England was unsafe for dissent, and he followed the thousands of nonconformists who had decamped to America before him.
He arrived in Boston in 1683. As expected, he found the theology of his new home congenial, and after some asking around and sampling of sermons, he applied to join the South Church. Attaining full membership would take several years, but with eternity at issue he was in no hurry.
The economics of the move were more jarring. Boston was a small town and already had as many dyers as it could support. Consequently Josiah had to find a new occupation. More soundings directed him to the chandler trade: that of making candles and soap. The business was always hard, often hot (although in winter this aspect was not unwelcome), frequently smelly (the primary raw material of both candles and soap was tallow rendered from animal carcasses). But it afforded a regular income to those unafraid to work, and, being labor-intensive, it furnished early employment for as many children as came along. It also brought Josiah into contact with a broad spectrum of the inhabitants of his new home. All but the most slovenly needed soap; only the poorest made do without candles. In time Josiah won a contract to furnish candles for the night watch of the town, a concession that provided both a nice profit and additional access to community leaders.
By all evidence Josiah was a man of solid character, robust intelligence, and natural good judgment. The demands of his business kept him from taking public office, but his neighbors often sought his counsel on matters civic and personal. “I remember well,” Benjamin Franklin recollected later, “his being frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church he belonged to and showed a good deal of respect for his judgment and advice. He was also much consulted by private persons about their affairs when any difficulty occurred, and frequently chosen an arbitrator between contending parties.”
Josiah had additional gifts. Though not tall, he was well built and strong. His hard work agreed with him; until his death at eighty-seven he lost scarcely a day to illness. He wrote in a confident hand and, according to his son, “could draw prettily.” Lacking formal training in music, he cultivated his native musicality himself. “When he played psalm tunes on his violin and sung withal as he sometimes did in an evening after the business of the day was over, it was extremely agreeable to hear.”
It may have been that voice that first attracted Abiah Folger, sitting a few rows from Josiah and Anne in the South Church. Abiah was the daughter of Peter Folger, who had emigrated to Massachusetts in 1635 in the first wave of Puritan refugees from Charles I and Bishop Laud, and on the same ship as the son of Governor John Winthrop. Peter Folger, eighteen years of age on arrival, grew up with the new land, albeit restively. From Boston he went straight upriver to Dedham; at twenty-five he joined an expedition to establish a new settlement on Martha’s Vineyard. He subsequently moved to Nantucket, in part because the Puritan theocracy of Boston sat about as uncomfortably on his shoulders as had the Anglican authoritarianism of Charles and Laud. But he got along barely better with the representatives of Governor Edmund Andros of New York, the colony that claimed jurisdiction over Nantucket. In his position as clerk of the court adjudicating a dispute among settlers of the island, Folger refused to release records that presumably would have supported the position favored by the governor. For his refusal he was arrested and imprisoned—in “a place where never any Englishman was put,” he complained in a petition to Andros, “and where the neighbors’ hogs had layed but the night before, and in a bitter cold frost and deep snow.” While Folger managed to defeat this prosecution, the experience only confirmed his disdain for authority. He became a Baptist; he took the side of local Indians against English encroachment; when the Indians forcibly resisted, he castigated colonial officials in a searing diatribe that he set to verse and sold in pamphlet in the heart of the enemy camp: Boston.
While not in custody, Folger was equally busy at home. He and his wife, Mary, had nine children, of whom Abiah was the last. Despite her father’s distaste for entrenched power, she moved to Boston as a young adult. There she met Josiah and Anne Franklin, who welcomed her into communion with their church. When Anne died in 1689 bearing Josiah’s seventh child, the father—after the practical, if unromantic, fashion of the age—wasted little time mourning her; within six months he was married to Abiah. He was thirty-two; she was ten years younger.
Josiah and Abiah had ten children together. Nine of these ten survived childhood; one—Ebenezer—accidentally slipped under the surface of a soapy washtub at sixteen months and was missed too late to be revived.
Benjamin, who was named for his father’s next-older and favorite brother, was the eighth child of his mother and the fifteenth of his father. He was born on January 6, 1705, by the calendar then in use; this would translate to January 17, 1706, when the calendar was reformed halfway through his life. His birthplace was the small house his parents were leasing on Milk Street just across from the South Church. The convenience of the location, coupled with the fact that the birth occurred early on a Sunday, when the congregation would be in church anyway, prompted Josiah to swaddle the newborn in thick blankets against the January wind and carry him across the street for baptism within hours of the birth.
The father returned the baby to the Milk Street house immediately after the christening; there Ben lived for the next six years, until Josiah purchased a larger dwelling at the corner of Union and Hanover streets. Even the larger house overflowed with all those children. The number actually in residence varied as the older ones came and went; Ben later recollected sitting down at the dinner table with an even dozen of his siblings. Other relatives, including Uncle Benjamin, spent stretches of various length under Josiah’s roof.
As one of the youngest, Ben necessarily learned to get along with others; outnumbered and outweighed by his elder siblings, he relied on wits where force failed. Often insight came after the fact. “When I was a child of seven years old,” he recounted several decades later, “my friends on a holiday filled my little pocket with half-pence. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children, and being charmed with the sound of a whistle that I met by the way, in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my money for it. When I came home, whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family, my brothers, sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth, put me in mind of what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money, and laughed at me so much for my folly that I cried with vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.” With the wisdom of age, Franklin added, “As I came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met many who gave too much for the whistle.”
Ben’s facility with the written word manifested itself early. “I do not remember when I could not read,” he said afterward—which in another person might have meant a weak memory but in his case indicated real precociousness. This inclined his father to train him for the ministry, as did the circumstance that Ben was the tenth—the “tithe”—of Josiah’s sons. At eight years Ben was enrolled in the town’s grammar school (which would become the Boston Latin School). He quickly went to the head of his class and was promoted midterm to the next class. But his academic career was cut short when Josiah, reflecting on the expenses of feeding, clothing, housing, and educating his large brood, and reckoning the meager income a minister might command, decided that God would have to be satisfied with the sons of the well-to-do. Josiah briefly enrolled Ben in a school run by one George Brownell, specializing in arithmetic and writing; Ben’s way with words continued to distinguish him, but numbers proved mystifyingly perverse, and the experiment was canceled. At ten, Ben entered the chandler trade, cutting wicks for candles, filling molds, waiting on customers, and running errands about the town.
It was an entrancing town for a boy to run about. Boston may have begun life as a religious refuge for nonconformists, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century it was looking like any number of secular seaports that dotted both shores of the North Atlantic. It was by far the busiest port in English America. More than a thousand ships were registered with Boston’s harbormaster—these in addition to the many more that were registered elsewhere but made Boston a regular stop on the trade routes between the New World and the Old. This merchant armada brought cargoes of silk and spices from the Orient, slaves from West Africa, rum and molasses from the West Indies, manufactured goods from Britain, and foodstuffs and other raw and partially processed materials from elsewhere in North America. Only when the coldest weather encased the harbor in ice did the traffic cease. Scores of wharves lined the waterfront at the eastern edge of the town; the most magnificent of these was the fittingly labeled Long Wharf, which extended from the foot of King Street nearly a quarter mile into the harbor. This remarkable structure contained both a wooden roadway thirty feet wide and a string of warehouses perched on pilings above the waves.
Boston did not merely service ships; it also built them. A dozen shipyards employed hundreds of skilled artisans and unskilled laborers—brawny men with arms as thick as hawsers from sawing oak logs into keels and ribbing for the hulls that would have to withstand the tempests of all the world’s oceans, dextrous men who wove those hawsers and sewed the sails that turned those tempests to propulsion and profit, clever men who adapted standard ship designs to suit the diverse needs of this India trader, that coaster, those lobstermen. Every week or so a new hull would groan down the ways and, amid a stupendous splash and that irrepressible frisson of uncertainty as to whether she would go down to the sea or down to the sea floor, add another bottom to Boston’s navy.
The ocean’s call tantalized every Boston boy of Ben Franklin’s generation. The salt smell permeated the entire town, not least the house on Union Street, which was but a block back from the water. From his doorstep he could see the masts of the Indiamen as they lay beside the Long Wharf; in the mornings before rising he could hear the metal moanings of the anchor chains as the ships in the harbor made ready to run out on the ebb tide. He knew they would visit the most exotic places on earth before returning to Boston two or three or ten years hence; he could imagine the strange and wonderful people who inhabited those exotic locales.
The call of the sea had been too much for Ben’s eldest brother, Josiah. Two years before Ben was born, the younger Josiah had turned his back on the terrestrial world of his father—the world of the chandlery, of the house on Milk Street, of the South Church, of the probing gaze of the Puritan elders—and shipped out on a merchantman bound for the Indies. He never returned. For years his father assumed he would eventually find his way back to Boston, if only for a stopover. But in 1715, when Ben was nine years old, the grim word arrived that Josiah’s vessel had been lost at sea.
Thus it was with worry and fear that the elder Josiah observed his youngest son being drawn to the waterfront. Ben later recorded that he had “a strong inclination for the sea,” which he indulged to the extent a young boy could against his father’s disapproval. “Living near the water, I was much in and about it, learned early to swim well, and to manage boats, and when in a boat or canoe with other boys I was commonly allowed to govern, especially in any case of difficulty.”
The lure of the water—joined to Ben’s emerging mechanical curiosity and inventiveness—prompted an early experiment. One windy day he was flying a kite on the bank of the Mill Pond, an artificial enclosure that had been constructed to trap the high tide and release it through the race of a gristmill. Notwithstanding the wind, the afternoon was warm and the water inviting. Ben tied the kite to a stake in the ground, doffed his clothes, and dove in. The water was pleasantly cool, and he was reluctant to leave it, but he wanted to fly his kite some more. He pondered his dilemma until it occurred to him that he need not forgo one diversion for the other. He clambered out of the pond, untied the kite from the stake, and returned to the water. As the buoyancy of the water diminished gravity’s hold on his feet, he felt the kite tugging him forward. He surrendered to the wind’s power, lying on his back and letting the kite pull him clear across the pond—“without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.” Writing from France decades later, he added, “I think it not impossible to cross in this manner from Dover to Calais.” On other occasions the youngster experimented with hand paddles to augment the power of his swimming stroke, and wooden flippers for his feet. Neither innovation was as successful as the sail-kite: the paddles overly fatigued his wrists, while the flippers, being stiff, failed to mimic a fish’s tail sufficiently.
The Mill Pond was the location of at least one adventure that turned out ill. Next to the pond was a salt marsh where Ben and the boys liked to hunt small fish. But their stalking stirred up the mud and clouded the water, frustrating their efforts to capture lunch. To mitigate the murkiness, Ben proposed that they build a jetty extending into the marsh. The only convenient building material consisted of stones recently delivered to a building site nearby. Ben suggested that the gang wait until the masons at the site went home for the evening, at which point the stones might be put to the purpose of improving the fishery. The boys waited, the men departed, and the construction commenced. After several hours and much struggling, the jetty was completed, to the boys’ satisfaction and pride. The foreman of the building crew, arriving next morning, was less admiring. A cursory investigation revealed the whereabouts of the missing stones, from which the foreman deduced the identity of those responsible for their removal. The boys were remanded to their parents’ custody and chastisement; although Ben pleaded the civic usefulness of the construction, Josiah pointed out that the first civic virtue was honesty.
Ben might have added that this transgression was decidedly venial compared to what other lads of the town regularly engaged in. Boston’s boys had long evinced an ebullient streak, especially on Guy Fawkes Day, the November anniversary of the aborted Gunpowder Plot against Parliament in 1605. Clusters of youths from the South End of town would swarm past the Franklin house—which lay not far from Mill Creek, the line of demarcation between the southern and northern neighborhoods—into the North End looking for trouble. More often than not, they found it. When they failed, they could count on discovering it back in their own neighborhood when the northerners repaid the visit. Over time the fun grew more frequent; at the end of the eighteenth century, Edward Reynolds—who happened to be the great-great-grandson of Josiah Franklin’s landlord on Milk Street—explained that “the old feud between the Southenders and Northenders,” which he described as being “as old as the town itself,” was “the occasion of a regular battle every Thursday and Saturday afternoon.” Reynolds added that the clashes were “not infrequently the occasion of very serious injury to wind and limb.” They were also practice in the arts applied against the agents—and then the soldiers—of King George III.
Josiah Franklin was fifty-eight when he brought Ben into the shop, and by this time of his life he was content with the predictability and security his business afforded him and his family. But the candle shop held little appeal for the boy, who found the endless pouring, trimming, cutting, and packing hopelessly dull next to the far more exciting activities happening all over town. His dissatisfaction only increased—indeed, approached something akin to despair—when his elder brother John left the family firm to set himself up independently in Rhode Island, and Josiah gave every indication of commanding Ben to take his place as apprentice and future partner.
The scope for rebellion by a twelve-year-old boy was limited. But there was always the threat of running off to sea—a real threat even for one as young as Ben, considering the demand of the shipping trade for cabin boys. Josiah had lost his namesake this way, and he could hardly bear the thought of losing his youngest son similarly. Consequently, in a strange way Ben gained an advantage over his father in this early contest of wills. Josiah abandoned the notion of making a chandler out of the boy and began taking him around the town to observe the other craftsmen at work, in the hope that some honest calling less dangerous than the sea would satisfy his taste for novelty and excitement.
Although no single craft commended itself above all others, cutlery appeared promising. Ben had shown some cleverness with his hands and with tools; making and repairing knives might put that cleverness to use. Moreover, his cousin Samuel—Uncle Benjamin’s boy—who had been a cutler in London, had recently relocated to Boston; Ben could apprentice with him. And so Ben was sent to live and work with Samuel on a trial basis. But Samuel demanded a maintenance fee Josiah judged excessive, not least in light of the fact that Josiah had been maintaining Samuel’s father for years with no remuneration. The cutlery apprenticeship collapsed.
Josiah then consulted a son of his own. James Franklin, nine years Ben’s elder, had recently returned from London, where he had learned the printer’s trade. He had established a shop on Queen Street, just three blocks from Josiah’s house; there he was attempting to find a niche among the town’s four other printers. The business began slowly, but in an era when printing provided the only feasible means of reproducing the written word on any but the most limited scale, and in a community devoted to the study of the Scriptures, an activity that required and indeed produced nearly universal literacy among adult males and substantial literacy among females, James had reason to anticipate success. He believed that from a small start printing sermons and broadsides—those all-purpose posters conveying information on everything from politics to the price of peas—he might graduate to books and other more profitable assignments. He needed a helper. Ben could serve as well as any other.
In fact Ben served very well. Printing turned out to be ideally suited to his peculiar combination of manual and intellectual dexterity. The physical process of printing was straightforward, if somewhat involved. The printer set the handwritten text in type, placing the cast-metal letters (imported, during this period, from England) in rows that would yield the lines of printed text. These lines were held in place by rectangular frames corresponding to the printed pages; typically four pages were set and framed at once. The letters were inked, paper was laid over them and pressed against them, and the sheet of four pages was hung or laid aside to dry. As many sheets were pressed as copies the customer ordered. After the last impressions were made and had dried, the sheets were cut into their separate pages, which were collated and bound.
The mental aspect of the craft was no less significant than the physical. Printers doubled as editors, proofreading their patrons’ prose (and their own typesetting) and suggesting improvements in style. In some instances they served as coauthors or ghostwriters, filling gaps in imagination or knowledge. In addition, the printing trade shared certain activities with all businesses: accounting, marketing, inventory control, customer relations.
From the beginning Ben showed himself adept at both the physical and mental aspects of printing. His fingers flitted from type rack to frame, plucking the letters he needed and slipping them into their places. He had inherited a good set of shoulders from Josiah; as he matured, and as he continued to swim at every opportunity, these grew strong enough to sling around the heavy sets of lead type and to operate the manual presses for hours at a time. His facility with language eased the chores of editing and proofing; his early-acquired and always-widening reading habits attuned his ear to felicitous phrasing and his eye to orthodox orthography. His failure at arithmetic proved to have been Mr. Brownell’s doing more than his own; a subsequent self-study course yielded rapid progress to a mastery more than adequate for any tradesman.
It did not take James long to appreciate what Ben could bring to the printing business. He soon struck an agreement with Josiah that Ben would serve as his apprentice. The term—nine years—was longer than that of most apprenticeships, but printing required greater skill and longer training than most trades. In other respects the apprenticeship fit the custom of the day, which was summarized in a typical indenture document:
The said Apprentice his Master faithfully shall or will serve, his secrets keep, his lawful commands everywhere gladly do…. The goods of his said Master he shall not waste, nor the same without license of him to any give or lend. Hurt to his said Master he shall not do, cause, nor procure to be done…. Taverns, inns, or alehouses he shall not haunt. At cards, dice, tables or any other unlawful game he shall not play. Matrimony he shall not contract; nor from the service of his said Master day or night absent himself; but in all things as an honest and faithful apprentice shall and will demean and behave himself towards his said Master and all his during said term.
Beyond this boilerplate, James agreed to pay Ben the wages of a journeyman printer during the final year of his indenture.
Although Ben deemed printing preferable to cutlery, and certainly to chandlery, and while he could see that printing was something he might be good at, he had reservations about the apprenticeship. Nine years looked an eternity to a twelve-year-old, and, as he recalled later, he “still had a hankering for the sea.” But this hankering simply intensified Josiah’s determination to seal the arrangement, and through a combination of cajolery and threat—legally, a father did not require his son’s approval for an apprenticeship—he induced Ben to sign the indenture papers.
Before long, Ben began to appreciate the advantages of his new line of work. His appetite for reading had always grown with the eating; of late he had devoured Pilgrim’s Progress and other works by Bunyan, Burton’s Historical Collections, Plutarch’s Lives, Defoe’s Essay on Projects, and various of Cotton Mather’s preachments. Now that he was thrown into regular contact with the most literate element in a highly literate society, he discovered that an even wider array of literature fell open to him. As apprentice to a printer, he daily dealt with apprentices to the town’s booksellers; he formed an alliance with one in particular, who allowed him to borrow books from his master’s collection to read after hours. “Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning lest it should be missed or wanted.” One of James’s customers, Matthew Adams, remarked this inquisitive lad and gave him direct access to the Adams family library, an impressive if quirky collection.
James did not object to his younger brother’s campaign of self-improvement, so long as it did not diminish his productivity in the press room, which it did not. “In a little time I made great proficiency in the business, and became a useful hand to my brother,” Ben wrote, quite believably. Indeed, James soon found a way to capitalize on the boy’s literary bent. A common entertainment in those days consisted of poems struck off on the occasion of important or otherwise noteworthy events. Ben had been reading verses from the Adams library, and he determined to have a try at the genre. An early effort memorialized the sad drowning of the keeper of a local lighthouse, his wife and daughter, and a friend and a slave. Beyond the basic human appeal of a story of the untimely death of loved ones, especially including a sweet and innocent young girl, the tragedy had special resonance in a society that lived by the sea—and consequently too often died by the sea. Whether or not Ben comprehended all the facets of his tale, he knocked out a piece called “The Lighthouse Tragedy,” which he and James quickly printed up. A much older, more sophisticated Franklin called it “wretched stuff, in the Grubstreet ballad style,” but had to admit that it “sold wonderfully.” He added frankly, “This flattered my vanity.”
The plaudits and the profits inspired another venture into verse, a ballad commemorating the recent killing of the notorious pirate Edward Teach, commonly called Blackbeard.
Will you hear of a bloody battle,
Lately fought upon the seas,
It will make your ears to rattle,
And your admiration cease.
Have you heard of Teach the Rover
And his knavery on the main,
How of gold he was a lover,
How he loved all ill-got gain.
There were several more stanzas, climaxing on the quarterdeck:
Teach and Maynard on the quarter,
Fought it out most manfully;
Maynard’s sword did cut him shorter,
Losing his head he there did die.
Perhaps because this poem lacked the romantic-tragic element, it sold less well than Ben’s first. (Closer comparison is impossible, as the first does not survive). Josiah had frowned on his son’s poetic efforts, ridiculing them and warning that verse-makers were generally beggars, but as long as the lighthouse tale belied the warning, Ben ignored the criticism. Yet now the ridicule stung more sharply and the warning rang louder, and the boy abandoned balladic Grub Street for more respectable precincts of prose.
By a matter of luck and untutored good taste, his guides to those precincts turned out to be some of the finest prose stylists of the day. Previously Ben had honed his argumentative skills on a friend of similarly bookish bent. On one occasion Ben and this John Collins disputed the prudence and appropriateness of educating girls beyond basic literacy. Ben, who took the affirmative, believed he had the better of the argument on merits but conceded that Collins was the more persuasive presenter. Ben hoped to gain an advantage by shifting ground from the spoken word to the written, but here again he discovered that his arguments lacked the eloquence and power of his opponent’s. Josiah, who happened across some of Ben’s papers, concurred, pointing out particular deficiencies in style and approach.
Frustrated and now somewhat embarrassed, Ben determined to remedy the situation. He had recently encountered an early issue of The Spectator, the London journal soon to be famous for the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Ben read this number front to back, then back to front and all over again. Entranced by the authors’ ease of exposition, he adopted the Spectator’s style as a model for his own. He devised elaborate exercises to absorb the principles that underlay its phrases. He would read passages, then try to recapitulate them from memory. On the reasoning that poetry demands a larger vocabulary than prose—a given meaning must also fit the pattern of rhyme and meter—he reworked the Spectator essays into verse, and subsequently back into prose again. He took notes on the essays, then deliberately scrambled the notes before attempting to reconstruct the original order, the better to appreciate the art of rhetorical organization. He shunned sleep, sitting up late with his quill pen and a sheaf of papers salvaged from the printing shop’s scrap pile, then rising early to fit in a few more exercises before James entered the shop and the real work of the day commenced. He exploited James’s relative unconcern at the state of his younger brother’s soul to steal Sundays from the South Church and its sacred texts for the print shop and his secular volumes. Josiah, missing his youngest son at services, disapproved but declined to intervene between master and apprentice; perhaps he already recognized that Ben’s zeal for the word of man would forever outstrip his zeal for the word of God. The former sentiment was a powerful motivator; referring to his efforts to make himself a writer, Ben admitted afterward, “I was extremely ambitious.”
He had a chance to gratify that ambition, and to measure his literary advancement, after James began publishing the New England Courant in 1721. During the previous two years James had been the printer—but not the publisher—of the Boston Gazette, which, like other papers of that era, was something of an adjunct to and perquisite of the office of the Boston postmaster. Postmasters had first knowledge of most of the news that came in—by post frequently—from the outside world; this news could be recycled in one’s own paper. Moreover, a postmaster could exploit his command of the outgoing mails to arrange distribution of his paper in preference to—or to the exclusion of—competitors’ publications.
But because the postmastership was a public office, postmasters’ papers (including the Gazette) tended to tread lightly on issues relating to government. The Gazette boasted that it was published “by authority”; it read as though it were published by the authorities. James Franklin thought Boston deserved better, and after his printing contract with the Gazette ran out, he determined to start his own paper. This one would be lively, opinionated, and not averse to challenging the establishment.
No one so represented the establishment as Cotton Mather; James’s new paper, the New England Courant, announced its birth with a scathing attack on Mather. The occasion of the attack was an epidemic of smallpox, the first in nearly two decades—which hiatus was a primary cause of the virulence of this outbreak, in that an unexposed generation had little or no resistance to the disease. For all his obsession with the supernatural, Mather had maintained his youthful interest in the natural, and he advocated the novel technique of inoculation to combat the contagion.
James Franklin knew next to nothing of the etiology of smallpox, but he knew he despised Mather for what James judged the eminent minister’s smugness and his inordinate influence over the life of Boston. If Mather advocated inoculation, the Courant must oppose it—and did. The campaign of opposition accomplished no good for the health of the community; nearly 10 percent of the population died before the disease ran its course. In fairness to James, the preponderance of medical knowledge at the time was on his side regarding the inefficacy of inoculation; one of his collaborators in opposition was William Douglass, a physician educated at the best English and continental European universities. But whatever its effects on public health, the anti-inoculation campaign served James’s purpose of shaking the status quo.
The status quo shook back. Increase Mather publicly denounced the “vile Courant” and said he “could well remember when the Civil Government would have taken an effectual course to suppress such a cursed libel.” Samuel Mather, Cotton’s son and an apparent beneficiary of inoculation, wrote semianonymously (and that not for long) in the Gazette that the Courant was trying “to vilify and abuse the best men we have”; he warned that “there is a number of us who resolve that if this wickedness be not stopped, we will pluck up our courage and see what we can do in our way to stop it.” Many readers heard the voice of Cotton Mather in an unsigned complaint to the Boston News-Letter decrying the “notorious, scandalous paper called the Courant” and charging said screed sheet with purveying “nonsense, unmanliness, railery, profaneness, immorality, arrogance, calumnies, lies, contradictions, and what not all tending to quarrels and divisions, and to debauch and corrupt the minds and manners of New England.” Whether or not those precise words were Cotton Mather’s, the sentiments surely were; in his diary Mather wrote of “the wicked printer and his accomplices who every week publish a vile paper to lessen and blacken the ministers of the town, and render their ministry ineffectual.”
With the battle joined, James Franklin sought allies. At this early stage the list of Courant contributors comprised only James and a few kindred skeptics; to create the illusion of numbers, the publisher-editor and his friends employed the common journalistic tactic of writing under noms de plume—“Abigail Afterwit,” “Timothy Turnstone,” “Harry Meanwell,” “Fanny Mournful” and others. These fictitious personages graced the paper with sharp-penned commentary on issues of the day; not surprisingly they tended to endorse the paper’s editorial views.
Consequently it was with pleasure that James awoke one morning to discover beneath the door of the print shop a contribution from a genuine outsider. Actually, this contributor was not an outsider at all; it was Ben Franklin, who had observed the genesis of the Courant and its challenge to Mather and the Massachusetts hierarchy but who conspicuously had not been invited to join the undertaking. Because he had not—and because he realized that James might be less than enthusiastic about his younger brother’s participation in the new project—Ben carefully disguised his handwriting and signed the letter “Silence Dogood.” James read the missive with growing delight—which increased the more from his appreciation that the author’s very name tweaked Cotton Mather, whose recently published Silentarius followed his earlier Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good. James shared the Dogood letter with his colleagues; they registered equal approval. James ran it in the April 2, 1722, issue of the Courant.
Mrs. Dogood introduced herself to Courant patrons by chaffing them for the contemporary unwillingness “either to commend or dispraise what they read until they are in some measure informed who or what the author of it is, whether he be poor or rich, old or young, a scholar or a leather apron man.” She (or Ben Franklin, rather) proceeded to mock this timidity by fabricating a fanciful background for herself. She had, she said, been born at sea en route from the old England to New England. But the joy surrounding her birth had turned to sorrow almost at once when a huge wave swept across the deck of the vessel and carried her celebrating father to his watery doom. It was a misfortune, Silence said, “which though I was not then capable of knowing, I shall never be able to forget.”
The death of her father had made an indigent of her mother, with the result that the infant Silence was placed in foster care outside Boston, where she passed her childhood “in vanity and idleness” until being bound over to a country minister, “a pious good-natured young man and a bachelor.” This godly fellow instructed the girl in all that was necessary for the female sex to learn—“needlework, writing, arithmetic, & c.” (Had James known of Ben’s earlier defense of education for girls, he might have guessed the identity of Silence Dogood at this point.) Because she displayed a head for books, the minister allowed her the run of his library, “which though it was but small, yet it was well chose to inform the understanding rightly and enable the mind to frame great and noble ideas.” This bucolic idyll was interrupted briefly by the news that her poor mother had died—“leaving me as it were by my self, having no relation on earth within my knowledge”—but soon enough it resumed. “I passed away the time with a mixture of profit and pleasure, having no affliction but what was imaginary and created in my own fancy; as nothing is more common with us women than to be grieving for nothing when we have nothing else to grieve for.”
Almost certainly none of the readers of the Courant guessed that this ironically knowing voice belonged to a sixteen-year-old boy; neither did James, who inserted after Silence Dogood’s first epistle an invitation for more. Any such additional missives could be delivered to the printing house or to the candle shop of Josiah Franklin. “No questions shall be asked of the bearer.”
Ben later said he felt “exquisite pleasure” at the approbation this first effort in journalism elicited; he took particular satisfaction from listening to James and the others guess who the anonymous author might be. “None were named but men of some character among us for learning and ingenuity.” During the next six months Ben continued his correspondence, delivering fifteen Dogood letters in all.
His topics ranged from love to learning to lamenting the death of dear ones. As in the first letter, insight and irony were evenly matched. Silence related how, to her astonishment, her ministerial benefactor presently essayed to woo her. “There is certainly scarce any part of a man’s life in which he appears more silly and ridiculous than when he makes his first onset in courtship.” (As Ben was of an age, if not an economic condition, to consider courtship, the reader who knows the identity of Silence Dogood discerns a certain dawning in him of the difficulties of the endeavor.) But gratitude inclined Silence to accept his suit, leading to wedlock and “the height of conjugal love and mutual endearments,” not to mention “two likely girls and a boy.” Tragically, her husband was carried off by illness almost as suddenly as her father had been swept away by the ocean, and Silence was left to look after herself and her offspring. Yet, as she assured readers, especially the men among them: “I could be easily persuaded to marry again…. I am courteous and affable, good humoured (unless I am first provoked) and handsome, and sometimes witty.”
Silence satirized the state of higher education in Boston, lampooning Harvard College—the alma mater of Cotton Mather, among other establishment influentials—as a snobbish ivory tower where students “learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely and enter a room genteelly (which might as well be acquired at a dancing school) and from whence they return, after abundance of trouble and charge, as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and conceited.” She chided men for being as foolish as the women they criticized for idleness and folly: “Are not the men to blame for their folly in maintaining us in idleness?” She scoffed at women for silliness equal to men’s—how else to explain hoop petticoats, those “monstrous topsy-turvy mortar pieces” that looked more like “engines of war” than ornaments of the fair sex. Having experienced multiple deaths in her family, she offered a formula for eulogizing departed loved ones, pointing out that tears were the easier to elicit the more unexpected and violent the demise. “It will be best if he went away suddenly, being killed, drowned, or froze to death.” The address in such a case ought to include a litany of melancholy expressions such as “dreadful, deadly, cruel cold death, unhappy fate, weeping eyes.” An experienced speaker would wring the maximal lachrymation from an audience, but in a pinch anyone could deliver the doleful sentiments. “Put them into the empty skull of some young Harvard (but in case you have ne’er a one at hand, you may use your own).” Rhymes were nice: “power, flower; quiver, shiver; grieve us, leave us.” A concluding flourish was the mark of a really distinguished graveside encomium. “If you can procure a scrap of Latin to put at the end, it will garnish it mightily.”
Had they come from the pen of a mature writer, the Dogood letters would deserve to be considered a delightful example of social satire. Coming as they did from the pen of a mere youth, they reveal emerging genius. Some of what Franklin wrote he might have experienced indirectly; some he extrapolated from his reading; much he must simply have imagined. But the tone is uniformly confident and true to the character he created. Silence is irreverent and full of herself, yet she brings most readers—the proud and powerful excepted—into the realm of her sympathy. They laugh when she laughs, and laugh at whom she laughs at. She is one of the more memorable minor characters of American literature, and all the more memorable for being the creation of a sixteen-year-old boy.
Silence Dogood’s early offerings afforded distraction from the controversies that continued to roil the town. A visitor to Boston had limned the environs and their inhabitants: “The houses in some parts join as in London—the buildings, like their women, being neat and handsome. And their streets, like the hearts of the male inhabitants, are paved with pebble.”
Many of those pebbled hearts agreed with James Franklin that the public pietism of the Mathers and their ecclesiastical allies had grown intolerable. One anticlerical militant, perhaps still sore from the witch trials, went so far as to throw a bomb into Cotton Mather’s house. The explosive device failed to detonate, leaving the target to intone, “This night there stood by me the angel of the God, whose I am and whom I serve.” The failure also allowed Mather to read the appended message: “COTTON MATHER, You Dog, Damn You: I’ll inoculate you with this, with a Pox to you.”
James Franklin preferred bombs of the printed sort; oddly, it was one of his lesser fireworks that triggered the strongest reaction. In June 1722 James printed a faked letter to the editor, in which the writer (that is, James himself) suggested that the authorities were remiss in failing to pursue with adequate vigor pirates who were afflicting the New England coast that season. Of the captain named to head the posse, the Courant said sarcastically, “’tis thought he will sail sometime this month, if wind and weather permit.”
For this disrespect the Massachusetts General Court ordered that James be jailed. Many observers judged the reaction disproportionate to the provocation. A commonly accepted explanation was that ever since the smallpox scuffles, the court had been seeking an excuse to silence the turbulent pressman; this was simply the excuse that fell to hand. In connection with his brother’s arrest, Ben was briefly detained and questioned. But on the reasoning that as an apprentice he was legally required to follow his master’s orders, the magistrates released him.
As a result of James’s imprisonment, Ben found himself the acting publisher and managing editor of the Courant. Josiah Franklin earlier had implicitly acknowledged Ben’s strong-headedness in releasing him from the candle shop; James had encountered some of that same independence of mind in the four years following. Ben’s recent surreptitious success with Silence Dogood had not reduced his opinion of himself; now he was in charge of the whole printing and publishing operation. It was enough to swell the vanity of any sixteen-year-old.
“I made bold to give our rulers some rubs,” he boasted afterward. On behalf of freethinkers everywhere—not to mention James, languishing in jail—Silence Dogood contradicted her Christian name. “Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom,” she quoted from an English paper; “and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man…. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech, a thing terrible to public traitors.” This talk of traitors was strong stuff, but Silence had not finished. “It has been for some time a question with me, whether a commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion or by the openly profane? … Some late thoughts of this nature have inclined me to think that the hypocrite is the most dangerous person of the two, especially if he sustains a post in the government.” The openly profane person deceived no one and thereby limited the damage he could cause; but the godly hypocrite enlisted the unwitting many into his malign service. “They take him for a saint and pass him for one, without considering that they are (as it were) the instruments of public mischief out of conscience, and ruin their country for God’s sake.”
James won his release from jail after a month, following a public apology and a physician’s report that confinement was harming his health. Yet he reconsidered his repentance about the same time he recovered his health, and by the beginning of 1723 the Courant, again under his direction, was taxing the council in language like that which Ben had placed in the mouth of Mrs. Dogood. “Whenever I find a man full of religious cant and pellaver,” the January 14 issue opined, “I presently suspect him of being a knave. Religion is indeed the principal thing, but too much of it is worse than none at all. The world abounds with knaves and villains, but of all knaves, the religious knave is the worst; and villainies acted under the cloak of religion are the most execrable.”
Once more the hammer of authority fell. Declaring that the tendency of the Courant was “to mock religion and bring it into disrespect,” the General Court ordered that “James Franklyn, the printer and publisher thereof, be strictly forbidden by this court to print or publish the New England Courant” unless he submitted each issue of the paper to the censor for prior approval.
Briefly James defied the order, publishing additional provocations; but when the sheriff came round with a warrant for another arrest, he fled his shop and went into hiding. From underground—not far underground, as it happened; the sheriff did not look very hard—he arranged to continue the Courant’s crusade. The court’s order applied to James Franklin; it said nothing about Benjamin Franklin. James told Ben to keep publishing but under his own name. In order to prevent the court from acting against Ben as James’s apprentice, James released Ben from his indenture, signing the back of the original agreement and discharging his brother from all obligations. Ben was to keep the endorsed document handy to show the sheriff and anyone else who doubted that Ben was really his own man.
But in fact Ben was not his own man. As a secret condition of his release from the original indenture, James made his brother sign a new, sub rosa agreement covering the scheduled last years of the apprenticeship. In public Ben was free; in private he remained bound.
Yet he was in charge, which counted for something. The February 11, 1723, issue of the Courant explained that James Franklin had “entirely dropped the undertaking”; this was not quite true, but it grew truer by the week. With each issue the paper lost a little of James’s character and took on more of Ben’s. Where James swung his pen like a broadsword, Ben wielded a rapier. His satire was always light, never ponderous; it usually brought smiles to objective lips and must occasionally have turned up the corners of even Cotton Mather’s mouth. With his own name now on the masthead, Ben refrained from labeling the colony’s notables hypocrites; instead he spoofed their obsession with titles. “Adam was never called Master Adam; we never read of Noah Esquire, Lot Knightand Baronet, nor the Right Honourable Abraham, Viscount Mesopotamia, Baron of Carran. … We never read of the Reverend Moses, nor the Right Reverend Father in God, Aaron, by Divine Providence, Lord Arch-Bishop of Israel.” He got his point across, less dramatically but more effectively than James had.
To some extent Ben’s oblique style reflected a rhetorical technique he had picked up from his reading. Xenophon and other authors had introduced him to the Socratic method of argument by inquiry; Ben quickly divined that this would be more effective than the confrontational approach he had been accustomed to use against the likes of John Collins. “I was charmed with it,” he said of the indirect method, “adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradiction, and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter.” Applied to assorted questions philosophical, theological, and political, the new approach exceeded his fondest expectations. “I took a delight in it, practised it continually and grew very artful and expert in drawing people even of superior knowledge into concessions the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither my self nor my cause always deserved.”
But to some extent Ben’s decision to deescalate the Courant’s confrontation with council and court reflected tactical matters touching his personal standing vis-à-vis James. At twelve Ben had been willing, if grudgingly, to accept the terms of his apprenticeship to James; a boy with neither skills nor capital could hardly make his way in the world alone. But at seventeen his circumstances were decidedly different. Although technically not even a journeyman printer, he was as proficient in the craft as many masters. He was at least as clever a writer as James—as James himself had implicitly admitted by the praise he lavished on Silence Dogood before discovering, as he eventually did, who the widow was, when his praise suddenly ceased. Yet James’s colleagues continued to applaud Ben after he dropped his veil of Silence, which irritated James the more. “He thought, probably with reason, that it tended to make me too vain.” When the two brothers took their differences to their father, the old man sided with his younger son—because “I was either generally in the right, or else a better pleader.” This made James all the angrier; in his anger he frequently beat Ben, who took this physical form of insult “extremely amiss.” (He added, parenthetically, from amid the American challenge to British colonial rule during the early 1770s: “I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life.”)
Ben had little doubt he could manage on his own by now. Better than most apprentices, he knew how much it cost to support himself. James was unmarried and for this reason did not keep house himself but boarded with another family. He paid that family for meals; when he took Ben on as apprentice, he paid them for Ben’s board too. After Ben happened upon a book extolling the virtues of vegetarianism, the boy decided to try it. This occasioned some inconvenience with his hosts and provoked additional upbraiding from James. So Ben, after calculating the cost of beef and pork as compared to potatoes and rice, offered to board himself for half the amount James was paying their hosts. James agreed, freeing Ben to discover that even this half was twice what it really cost to feed himself. The balance he spent on books.
“I had another advantage in it,” Ben remarked of his new regimen. “My brother and the rest going from the printing house to their meals, I remained there alone, and dispatching presently my light repast (which often was no more than a biscuit or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart from the pastry-cook’s, and a glass of water) had the rest of the time till their return for study, in which I made the greater progress from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.”
By the evidence of his recurrent arguments with James (“I was frequently chid for my singularity”), Ben made little effort to disguise the feeling of moral superiority his discovery of vegetarianism afforded him; together with the intellectual superiority he felt after the triumph of Silence Dogood, he must have seemed insufferable to his older brother. He himself admitted as much after the fact. “Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking.”
Wherever the demerits lay, Ben decided that his situation with James had grown intolerable—and this conclusion, along with the other reasons, cautioned him against unnecessary affront to the ministerial-magisterial axis of Boston. Several months after his seventeenth birthday he determined to break his indenture to James. This would be illegal; his second contract with James bound him for three years more. But because this contract was secret, Ben reasoned, James would have difficulty enforcing it. Ben could deny its existence; for James to affirm it in any court of law would reveal the sham by which he had evaded the General Court’s cease-and-desist order and open him to contempt charges. By now James had come out of hiding but had posted a sizable bond for good behavior; Ben reckoned that the bond money was his own guarantee of James’s silence on the indenture issue.
It seemed a sound plan, but Ben could not place too much trust in it. James had friends who disliked the censorious ways of the Mather clique as much as he did; already one grand jury had refused to indict him on contempt charges. It was conceivable that opinion’s wheel would turn and James would be hailed as a free-speech hero. Such circumstances might embolden him to press his indenture claim against Ben. From Ben’s perspective the safest course appeared to be to make no more enemies than necessary.
James guessed what his brother was thinking, and even before Ben began inquiring around town for other printing work, James preempted him by pledging his fellow printers to eschew his brother’s services. He also enlisted Josiah, who, while sympathetic to his youngest boy on minor points within the framework of the indenture pact, sided with James on the moral and civic necessity of preserving the framework as a whole.
Consequently Ben saw no recourse but flight—which recommended itself on other grounds as well. To a curious boy, Boston had been an exciting place; to an independent-minded young man, it was starting to stifle. The Mathers did not say such threatening things about Ben as about James, but it was clear they and their supporters had doubts about the younger Franklin too. Reports of his inquiring and skeptical mind were circulating. “My indiscreet disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horror by good people, as an infidel or atheist.” Ben added that he had become “obnoxious to the governing party.” Now might be a good time to leave, before the clerics and judges came after him as they had come after James. “It was likely I might if I stayed soon bring myself into scrapes.”
So he plotted his flight. Selling some of his books to raise money for ship passage to New York, he sent his friend John Collins to tell the captain that he needed to board the boat secretly because he had got a girl pregnant and was being pressed to marry her. The captain, evidently a man of the world, understood. He pocketed Ben’s money and found something to examine at the opposite rail of the ship while Ben slipped aboard. On an outgoing tide and a fair September wind, Ben Franklin fled the town of his birth and youth, carrying only the few shillings in his pocket and all the self-assurance of his nearly eighteen years.