Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (4 page)

The plan for young Benjamin was to have him study for the ministry, Josiah’s tenth son anointed as his tithe to the Lord. Uncle Benjamin was strongly supportive; among the many benefits of this plan was that it gave him something to do with his stash of secondhand sermons. For decades, he had scouted out the best preachers and transcribed their words in a neat shorthand of his own device. His nephew later noted with wry amusement that he “proposed to give me all his shorthand volumes, I suppose as a stock to set up with.”

To prepare him for Harvard, Josiah sent his son, at age 8, to Boston Latin School, where Cotton Mather had studied and his son Samuel was then enrolled. Even though he was among the least privileged students, Franklin excelled in his first year, rising from the middle of the class to the very top, and then was jumped a grade ahead. Despite this success, Josiah abruptly changed his mind about sending him to Harvard. “My father,” Franklin wrote, “burdened with a numerous family, was unable without inconvenience to support the expense of a college education.”

This economic explanation is unsatisfying. The family was well-off enough, and there were fewer Franklin children being supported at home (only Benjamin and his two younger sisters) than had been the case for many years. There was no tuition at the Latin School, and as the top of his class he would easily have won a scholarship to Harvard. Of the forty-three students who entered the college when Franklin would have, only seven were from wealthy families; ten were sons of tradesmen, and four were orphans. The university at that time spent approximately 11 percent of its budget for financial aid, more than it does today.
²⁴

Most likely there was another factor. Josiah came to believe, no doubt correctly, that his youngest son was not suited for the clergy. Benjamin was skeptical, puckish, curious, irreverent, the type of person who would get a lifelong chuckle out of his uncle’s notion that it would be useful for a new preacher to start his career with a cache of used sermons. Anecdotes about his youthful intellect and impish nature abound, but there are none that show him as pious or faithful.

Just the opposite. A tale related by his grandson, but not included in the autobiography, shows Franklin to be cheeky not only about religion but also about the wordiness in worship that was a hallmark of Puritan faith. “Dr. Franklin, when a child, found the long graces used by his father before and after meals very tedious,” his grandson reported. “One day after the winter’s provisions had been salted—‘I think, Father,’ said Benjamin, ‘if you were to say Grace over the whole cask—once for all—it would be a vast saving of time.’ ”
²⁵

So Benjamin was enrolled for a year at a writing and arithmetic academy two blocks away run by a mild but businesslike master named George Brownell. Franklin excelled in writing but failed math, a scholastic deficit he never fully remedied and that, combined with his lack of academic training in the field, would eventually condemn him to be merely the most ingenious scientist of his era rather than transcending into the pantheon of truly profound theorists such as Newton.

What would have happened if Franklin had, in fact, received a formal academic education and gone to Harvard? Some historians such as Arthur Tourtellot argue that he would have been stripped of his “spontaneity,” “intuitive” literary style, “zest,” “freshness,” and the “unclutteredness” of his mind. And indeed, Harvard has been known to do that and worse to some of its charges.

But the evidence that Franklin would have so suffered is weak and does not do justice either to him or to Harvard. Given his skeptical turn of mind and allergy to authority, it is unlikely that Franklin would have become, as planned, a minister. Of the thirty-nine who were in what would have been his class, fewer than half eventually joined the clergy. His rebellious nature may even have been enhanced rather than repressed; the college administrators were at the time wrestling mightily with the excessive partying, eating, and drinking that was infecting the campus.

One aspect of Franklin’s genius was the variety of his interests, from science to government to diplomacy to journalism, all of them approached from a very practical rather than theoretical angle. Had he gone to Harvard, this diversity in outlook need not have been lost, for the college under the liberal John Leverett was no longer under the firm control of the Puritan clergy. By the 1720s it offered famous courses in physics, geography, logic, and ethics as well as the classics and theology, and a telescope atop Massachusetts Hall made it a center for astronomy. Fortunately, Franklin acquired something that was perhaps just as enlightening as a Harvard education: the training and experiences of a publisher, printer, and newspaperman.

At age 10, with but two years of schooling, Franklin went to work full time in his father’s candle and soap shop, replacing his older brother John, who had served his term as an apprentice and left to set up his own business in Rhode Island. It was not pleasant work—skimming rendered tallow from boiling cauldrons of fat was particularly noxious, and cutting wicks and filling molds was quite mindless—and Franklin made clear his distaste for it. More ominously, he expressed his “strong inclination for the sea,” even though his brother Josiah Jr. had recently been lost to its depths.

Fearing that his son would “break loose and go to sea,” Josiah took him on long walks through Boston to see other craftsmen, so that he could “observe my inclination and endeavor to fix it on some trade that would keep me on land.” This instilled in Franklin a lifelong appreciation for craftsmen and tradesmen. His passing familiarity with an array of crafts also helped make him an accomplished tinkerer, which served him in good stead as an inventor.

Josiah eventually concluded that Benjamin would be best as a cutler, making knives and grinding blades. So he was, at least for a few days, apprenticed to Uncle Benjamin’s son Samuel. But Samuel demanded an apprenticeship fee that struck Josiah as unreasonable, especially given the history of both hospitality and aggravation that existed between him and the elder Benjamin.
²⁶

Instead, almost by default rather than design, young Benjamin ended up apprenticed in 1718, at age 12, to his brother James, 21, who had recently returned from training in England to set up as a printer. At first, the willful young Benjamin balked at signing the indenture papers; he was a little older than usual for starting an apprenticeship, and his brother demanded a nine-year term instead of the typical seven years. Eventually, Benjamin signed on, though he was not destined to stay indentured until he was 21.

During his time in London, James saw how Grub Street balladeers would churn out odes and hawk them in the coffeehouses. So he promptly put Benjamin to work not only pushing type but also producing poetry. With encouragement from his uncle, young Franklin wrote two works based on news stories, both dealing with the sea: one about a family killed in a boating accident, and the other about the killing of the pirate known as Blackbeard. They were, as Franklin recalled, “wretched stuff,” but they sold well, which “flattered my vanity.”
²⁷

Herman Melville would one day write that Franklin was “everything but a poet.” His father, no romantic, in fact preferred it that way, and he put an end to Benjamin’s versifying. “My father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars; so I escaped being a poet, most probably a very bad one.”

When Franklin began his apprenticeship, Boston had only one newspaper:
The Boston News-Letter,
which had been launched in 1704 by a successful printer named John Campbell, who was also the town’s postmaster. Then, as today, there was an advantage in the media business to controlling both content and distribution. Campbell was able to join forces with a network of fellow postmasters running from New Hampshire to Virginia. His books and papers were sent along the route for free—unlike those of other printers—and the postmasters in his network would send him a steady stream of news items. In addition, because he held an official position he could proclaim that his paper was “published by authority,” an important certification at a time when the press did not pride itself on independence.

The link between being the postmaster and a newspaper publisher was so natural that when Campbell lost the former job, his successor as postmaster, William Brooker, assumed that he would also take over the newspaper. Campbell, however, kept hold of it, which prompted Brooker to launch, in December 1719, a rival:
The Boston Gazette.
He hired James Franklin, the cheapest of the town’s printers, to produce it for him.

But after two years, James lost the contract to print the
Gazette,
and he did something quite audacious. He launched what was then the only truly independent newspaper in the colonies and the first with literary aspirations. His weekly
New England Courant
would very explicitly
not
be “published by authority.”
²⁸

The
Courant
would be remembered by history mainly because it contained the first published prose of Benjamin Franklin. And James would become known for being the harsh and jealous master described in his brother’s autobiography. In fairness, however, the
Courant
ought to be remembered on its own as America’s first fiercely independent newspaper, a bold, antiestablishment journal that helped to create the nation’s tradition of an irreverent press. “It was the first open effort to defy the norm,” literary historian Perry Miller has written.
²⁹

Defying authority in Boston at that time meant defying the Mathers and the role of the Puritan clergy in secular life, a cause James took up on the first page of his paper’s first edition. Unfortunately, the battle he chose was over inoculation for smallpox, and he happened to pick the wrong side.

Smallpox epidemics had devastated Massachusetts at regular intervals in the ninety years since its founding. A 1677 outbreak wiped out seven hundred people, 12 percent of the population. During the epidemic of 1702, during which three of his children were stricken but survived, Cotton Mather began studying the disease. A few years later, he was introduced to the practice of inoculation by his black slave, who had undergone the procedure in Africa and showed Mather his scar. Mather checked with other blacks in Boston and found that inoculation was a standard practice in parts of Africa.

Just before James Franklin’s
Courant
made its debut in 1721, the HMS
Seahorse
arrived from the West Indies carrying what would become a new wave of smallpox. Within months, nine hundred of Boston’s ten thousand inhabitants would be dead. Mather, trained as a physician before becoming a preacher, sent a letter to the ten practicing doctors in Boston (only one of whom had a medical degree) summarizing his knowledge of the African inoculation and urging that they adopt the practice. (Mather had evolved quite far from the superstitions that had led him to support Salem’s witch hunts.)

Most of the doctors rejected the notion, and (with little justification other than a desire to prick at the pretensions of the preachers) so did James Franklin’s new newspaper. The first issue of the
Courant
(August 7, 1721) contained an essay by a young friend of James’s, John Checkley, a sassy Oxford-educated Anglican. He singled out for his sally the Puritan clergy, who “by teaching and practicing what’s Orthodox, pray hard against sickness, yet preach up the Pox!” The issue also carried a diatribe by the town’s only physician who actually had a medical degree, Dr. William Douglass, who dismissed inoculation as “the practice of Greek old women” and called Mather and his fellow ministerial proponents “six gentlemen of piety and learning profoundly ignorant of the matter.” It was the first example, and a robust one at that, of a newspaper attacking the ruling establishment in America.
³⁰

Increase Mather, the family’s aging patriarch, thundered, “I cannot but pity poor Franklin, who though but a young man, it may be speedily he must appear before the judgment seat of God.” Cotton Mather, his son, wrote a letter to a rival paper denouncing the “notorious, scandalous paper called the
Courant,
full-freighted with nonsense, unmanliness, railery,” and comparing its contributors to the Hell-Fire Club, a well-known clique of dapper young heretics in London. Cotton’s cousin, a preacher named Thomas Walter, weighed in by writing a scathing piece entitled “The Anti-
Courant.”

Knowing full well that this public spat would sell papers, and eager to profit from both sides of an argument, James Franklin quite happily took on the job of publishing and selling Thomas Walter’s rebuttal. However, the escalating personal nature of the controversy began to unsettle him. After a few weeks, he announced in an editor’s note that he had banned Checkley from his paper for letting the feud get too vindictive. Henceforth, he promised, the
Courant
would aim to be “innocently diverting” and would publish opinions on either side of the inoculation controversy as long as they were “free from malicious reflections.”
³¹

Benjamin Franklin managed to stay out of his brother’s smallpox battle with the Mather family, and he never mentioned it in his autobiography or letters, a striking omission that suggests that he was not proud of the side the paper chose. He later became a fervent advocate of inoculation, painfully and poignantly espousing the cause right after his 4-year-old son, Francis, died of the pox in 1736. And he would, both as an aspiring boy of letters and as a striver who sought the patronage of influential elders, end up becoming Cotton Mather’s admirer and, a few years later, his acquaintance.