A Companion to Benjamin Franklin

David Waldstreicher

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405199964
• eBook ISBN: 9781444342130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

This companion provides a comprehensive survey of the life, work and legacy of Benjamin Franklin - the oldest, most distinctive, and multifaceted of the founders.

• Includes contributions from across a range of academic disciplines
• Combines traditional and cutting-edge scholarship, from accomplished and emerging experts in the field
• Pays special attention to the American Revolution, the Enlightenment, journalism, colonial American society, and themes of race, class, and gender
• Places Franklin in the context of recent work in political theory, American Studies, American literature, material culture studies, popular culture, and international relations

Part I

BIOGRAPHY

Chapter One

FRANKLIN’S BOSTON YEARS, 1706–1723

Nian-Sheng Huang

Few Bostonians noticed the birth of Benjamin Franklin on a wintry Sunday in 1706, which has become one of the most memorialized events in history. The future printer, publisher, writer, inventor, scientist, patriot, and diplomat of international renown was the son of Abiah (Folger) and Josiah Franklin, a tallow chandler in town. The infant was baptized the same day on January 6 (Old Style; January 17, New Style) at the Old South Church, right across from the family’s small tenement house in Milk Street. A growing urban center itself, colonial Boston played a crucial role in shaping the formative years of this young boy, whose energy, prodigy, ambition, and rebellion would soon make him someone to reckon with in this orthodox Puritan community. Franklin’s Autobiography describes many major events in his childhood, the information of which modern scholars continue to rely on (unless otherwise indicated, many quotes in this chapter also came directly from part one of that book). Yet they differ in emphases. Whereas biographers from Carl Van Doren, Esmond Wright and H.W. Brands to Walter Isaacson chronicled this period, Arthur B. Tourtellot remains the one who has focused on the young Franklin in Boston. Through extensive studies of Franklin’s writings in the New-England Courant and other contemporary publications, Perry Miller and J.A. Leo Lemay demonstrate not only how society has shaped Franklin, but also how he has fought against tradition and orthodoxy by searching for a novel voice of personal expressions at a very young age.

1.1 Parents

The Franklins came from Ecton, a hamlet only a few miles outside Northampton in England, where the family had a small estate and a blacksmith shop. Born in 1657, Josiah Franklin was the youngest son of Jane White and Thomas Franklin 2nd. Their oldest son, Thomas 3rd, inherited the family estate but mistreated the father who, in 1666, moved to stay with his second son John at Banbury in the neighboring Oxfordshire. A gentle and agreeable person, John also took Josiah, then about nine years old, as apprentice in his dyeing business. Within ten years Josiah finished his apprenticeship, married Anne Child of Ecton in 1677, and had their first child Elizabeth the next year. Things then turned sour, however. Shortly after Anne gave birth to a son Samuel in 1681, Josiah’s father passed away. Brother John, now thirty-nine, was finally getting married and so was another brother Benjamin, who returned to Banbury from London where his business had not gone well. All three brothers were dyers, raising their families, and trying to make it in the same town, which also had other dyers. As the youngest, Josiah wanted no competition and decided to leave. Along with Anne, five-year-old Elizabeth, two-year-old Samuel, and the infant Hannah, he left Banbury for Boston in New England in the summer of 1683.

At that time Massachusetts law (in 1651, 1662, and 1672) forbade “men or women of mean condition” to imitate the fashion of the upper class by wearing silk. A provincial town of under ten thousand souls, Boston did not have a rich clientele large enough to support newly arrived dyers until an influx of royal officials later that decade when Massachusetts became a crown colony. Not the least would it favor those dyers who were unable to establish a calender house for a heavy press to scour woolens, silk, and other delicate material. Struggling to survive but limited by resources, Josiah Franklin decided to adapt. His versatility, mechanical dexterity, and a strong personal determination, all of which were a trademark of the Franklins, helped in this transition. He tried several different businesses and finally settled as a soap boiler and candle maker, a profession he kept for the rest of his life.

After giving birth to seven children in twelve years, Anne Franklin did not survive the transatlantic migration for long and died in July 1689. In November the Reverend Samuel Willard, pastor of the Old South Church, officiated Josiah’s marriage to Abiah Folger, daughter of Mary (Morrill) and Peter Folger of Nantucket. Both Abiah and Josiah later became church members and were married for more than fifty years. Fellow parishioner Samuel Sewall, in his diaries, recorded praying with them at least ten times. Josiah died in Boston in 1745 at the age of 88, and Abiah in 1752 at 85. The couple had ten children. Although never as pious as his parents, Benjamin Franklin’s childhood resembled that of his father’s – both were the youngest son in the family, both were apprenticed to their older brother, both were hard-working, ingenious, multi-talented, gregarious, and public-spirited, and yet both were forced to leave and seek a new life somewhere else away from their birthplace.

1.2 Childhood and Education

The boy, who could read at the age of four or five, seemed to have promise which no loving parents would miss. They had planned to send this tenth son to serve in the ministry, and in 1714 enrolled him at the South Grammar School, which was a necessary step to prepare him for the college entrance exam. A college degree, not to mention the ability to read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, was of course the first prerequisite for becoming a clergyman. Within a year, however, reality set in that the limited incomes from the father’s trade would never be enough to feed his large family and at the same time to support his son through the grammar school, let alone a college. The boy was then withdrawn and transferred to a private writing school headed by Mr. George Brownell. Although the boy enjoyed the classes and performed reasonably well except for arithmetic, family circumstances once again resulted in his second withdrawal when he was only ten. Unlike many children from substantial families, therefore, Franklin’s formal schooling ended in two years and his subsequent education was largely self-taught.

Such a serious setback must have been disappointing for anyone who had dreams to rise from an artisan background to a member of the educated community. Yet the boy did not dwell on self-pity. If he had experienced any melancholy, it was quickly replaced by a kind of upbeat self-determination which would sustain much of his adult life. If his aversion to privileges later led to a commitment to egalitarianism, the harsh realities of social divide and modest family circumstances also forced him to cultivate self-reliance, to overcome career obstacles by his own effort, to bite the tongue and not to complain about those misfortunes falling on him.

He began to develop his life-long habit of learning from commonsense wisdom, from avid reading, from personal trials and mistakes, and from close observations of human experiences. He noticed his mother’s excellent dyeing skills. He learned a shorthand from his uncle Benjamin the Elder, whose interest in poetry once aroused his curiosity. He admired his father who played the violin and could “draw prettily,” besides being a singer, a carpenter, and a public servant. His father’s two big maps on the wall first attracted him to geography. So did the father’s comments on public discourse make him realize the need to improve his own writing style. Like the father, the son relished proverbs and homely sayings. Some typified his taste, such as “Seest thou a Man diligent in his Calling, he shall stand before Kings,” while others mocked those professionals whose formal training had produced no upright men, such as “God heals, and the Doctor takes the Fees” or “A countryman between 2 Lawyers, is like a fish between two cats.” Simple but profound, some still would captivate his whole career, such as “The noblest question in the world is, What Good may I do in it?”

One thing the boy did regret was that father possessed few books beyond devout polemics. The gap was somewhat compensated later when he was able to borrow books from the tanner friend Matthew Adams. Brother James’s library also helped, which consisted of works from Pliny’s Natural History, Aristotle’s Politics, and Herman Moll’s Geography to an eight-volume set of The Spectator. The boy’s perusal of books on diverse topics opened his mind to literature, history, ethics, and the natural sciences. For a while, at sixteen, Thomas Tryon’s Way to Health converted him to a vegetarian. He enjoyed John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Daniel Defoe’s Essay Upon Projects, and Cotton Mather’s Essays to Do Good. The last two in particular had given him such a “Turn of Thinking” that he attributed his life-long commitment to public service to his early reading of them.

Franklin was not alone in his aloofness from religious services in Boston, where interest in spiritual matters did decline before the Great Awakening. He was, however, never insensitive to those good morals that anyone could demonstrate. Cotton Mather’s promotion of “doing good” was one example, and his warning the young Franklin “to stoop” to avoid a head-on collision was another. From his father he learned that “nothing was useful which was not honest.” From his siblings he learned the cost of his blind passion for a whistle. He would continue to learn many more similar lessons in the years to come from a series of errata, indiscretion, ignorance, and inexperience he later enumerated in the Autobiography. Unlike erudite writers who tended to quote classical texts by famed authorities, he was willing to share those twists and turns he had learned from his personal experiences. Whereas some critics believe that he was too earthy and self-righteous, if not downright pretentious, his habit of sharing intimate lessons must be viewed in the context of the way he had grown up and of the emphasis he had placed on how to gain knowledge not only from textbooks and classrooms but also from close observations of day-to-day activities. Thus he preferred expressions such as “God helps them that help themselves” or “‘Tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright.” This habit would become so proverbial that on the last day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, delegates would hear him haranguing, at the age of eighty-one, that “the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own Judgment and to pay more Respect to the judgment of others” (Lemay, 1987: 1139).

1.3 Apprenticeship

Contemporary Bostonians saw crown officials wearing scarlet, wealthy men riding carriages, gentlewomen going to country estates to pick and eat cherries, and households of good fortune celebrating at the pomp of Harvard’s commencement at Cambridge. The Franklins could not afford any of those luxuries. They toiled hard to make ends meet. Worse still, the smelly, hot, and extremely tedious work of a tallow chandler and soap boiler bored the boy within days. Clearly, cutting wicks, filling the mold, attending shop, and running errands would never enchant him. Even though the father was content with the trade, he quickly saw that his prodigious son was unhappy and restless. Concerned, he took the boy to visit several businesses in the hope that one of them might be to his liking, but this did not happen. The father finally decided to bind Benjamin as an apprentice to the older son James, whom he had recently helped to set up a printing shop in Queen Street.

An indenture between two kin was commonplace those days. Once bound to his own brother, the father did not see anything wrong this time. The boy, however, had an ambition as big as anyone else’s. He used to have a fancy for the sea, which the father firmly disallowed – he had already lost a son going to the sea. Franklin stood out for a while and was only prevailed to sign the indentures after persuasion. Now at twelve years old, he had to serve for nine long years until twenty-one, which must have seemed eternal to this strong-minded and unfettered adolescent at the moment. The initial doubt and resistance dissipated soon after he gained great proficiency in the two basic skills of the business – typesetting and press work. He started to like the new trade, which demanded strength as well as intelligence. For one thing, he now had access to the shop’s book collection. For another, he gradually became acquainted with several book sellers, stationers, and bookish customers, who took note of his interest and kindly lent books for him to read. Most of all, a wide variety of products such as sheets, broadsides, tracts, pamphlets, chapbooks, small volumes, and newspapers passed through his hand daily and he was tempted to explore whether he might write something for the printing press. Would that be ideal – a situation allowing him to combine his literary interest in reading and composition with dreary labor? Captivated by the prospect, he took steps to embrace the world of writing and print, which he thoroughly enjoyed through the rest of his life.

Franklin’s expanding skills at the press, increasing knowledge of the printing business, and a growing ambition of becoming a writer boosted his ego and gradually altered his attitude toward James. Reluctant to enter the indentures in the first place, the printer’s devil now gained confidence to see James as his equal, not his master. Nine years older than Franklin, James would view things differently. Perhaps feeling the threat that the junior brother might indeed be his competitor instead of his servant, he insisted on his authority as the boss. When sometimes he felt his apprentice too saucy and provocative, he was willing to use the fist to subdue him, which only led to more complaints and resentment.

The sibling crossfires caught the father in the middle. Franklin used to think that being the youngest and smartest boy in the family, he was father’s favorite, which was probably true until this point. Now that the father had borrowed several hundred pounds to finance James’s business, he was deeply in debt and wanted to see harmony rather than domestic quarrels that rocked the boat. Franklin sensed that father began to side with James on more occasions than before. Instinctively he felt the grip of both father and brother falling on him, a type of constraint and control he had never been comfortable with since his toddler days.

The father had his reasons to keep a balance between the two brothers. He had taken some considerable risk to help set up James’s printing shop. The Franklins had produced no printers in the past. Nor was it definitively recorded where and when James had undergone standard training in the business. While acquiring the press, types, and other equipment was a considerable investment, more costly than many practical trades, success was far from guaranteed. In 1718 Boston had five printers – Bartholomew Green, John Allen, Thomas Fleet, Thomas Crump, and Samuel Kneeland. Fleet was from London. Green and Kneeland were well connected to the powerhouse of printers in the colony – they descended from Samuel Green, the second printer in Massachusetts. Although the town had developed a print culture and book trade more advanced than any other colonial center by that time, the scope of their operations remained small and limited. No one knew whether or not the local population and market demand would be large enough to support another self-proclaimed printer from the obscure family of a tallow chandler.

Since the eldest son in the family, John, had already followed the father’s footsteps to become a candle maker and soap boiler, the younger ones (except for Peter who also became a candle maker) had to branch out to find their own professions. James was indeed struggling to survive in the new business for the first few years. Fortunately, both father and Uncle Benjamin the Elder were trained dyers, whose knowledge and experience helped him to add printing cloth to his business. He put this advertisement in the Boston Gazette in 1719 that “the Printer hereby Prints Linens, Callicoes, Silks, &c. in good Figures, very lively and durable Colours, and without the offensive Smell which commonly attends the Linens Printed here.” Apparently, his special skill and technique enabled him to establish a fine reputation in this line of service. When a year later a person in Charlestown began to forge similar products by adopting his name, James was understandably outraged. He immediately published a notice which demanded an end of the practice or threatened to bring the transgressor to the court of justice.

1.4 Journalistic Debut

In fact, working for James turned out to be a blessing. According to Lemay, America’s first newspaperman was not Franklin but his brother James who “made the New-England Courant the first literary, lively, entertaining, humorous, and proto-nationalistic American newspaper” (Lemay, 2006a: 109). The first writing in print which showed Franklin’s literary talent took place in his brother’s shop where he wrote a ballad called The Lighthouse Tragedy toward the end of 1718 (Leonard, 1999). Franklin clearly recalled that it was James who had encouraged him to write the ballad, which “sold wonderfully.” Still, Franklin was indebted to his brother more than he explicitly stated in the Autobiography. Or as Lemay has pointed out, Franklin “learned about the printing business, running a newspaper, drumming up interest in the paper, and literary techniques from his older brother,” and “learned the arts of publicity and of controversy from his brother,” and that he “also imbibed his older brother’s radical Whig ideology as well as his resentment of the assumption of superiority by ministers and the civil authorities” (Lemay, 2006a: 142). Working for his brother particularly suited Franklin’s literary ambition, which was further stimulated by a group of friends and visitors to the shop who desired to use James’s newspaper to vent their sentiments.

Two other newspapers already existed at that time, the Boston News-Letter and the Boston Gazette, which refused to publish anything critical to the established authorities, civil or religious. The Courant meant to be different as its title suggested. Whereas most colonial publishers printed official proceedings and copied oversea news from imported newspapers, the Courant sought those who could offer their individual opinions with a literary flair. It therefore attracted writers and contributors of a contrarian bent. From August 1721 to May 1722, within the first ten months of the establishment of the New-England Courant, at least fourteen people supported James’s business by contributing ninety-four pieces of letters, essays, notes, and poems to the publication, and about a half of them contributed repeatedly. The most prolific of this group was Nathaniel Gardner, who wrote no fewer than thirty-two times for the Courant. He was a tanner and a partner of Matthew A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Biography
• Part II: Franklin and Eighteenth-Century America
• Part III: Franklin the Writer and Thinker
• Part IV: Franklin and the Categories of Inquiry
• Bibliography
• Index