Book of Ages (3 page)

He began with his
genealogy, of which he was abundantly fond. “This obscure Family of ours,” he called it.
¹⁵
He had read their short and simple annals. He had collected what he could: his grandfather’s poems, his uncle’s recipes.
Mix the soot Exceeding well with Linseed oyle, and then boyle it over a gentle fire, until you find it thick
. He asked his father about the family name.

In Middle English, a frankeleyn is a free man, an owner of land but not of title: neither a serf nor a peasant but not a nobleman, either. There’s a frankeleyn in
The Canterbury Tales.
He is unlettered and unschooled, but when he tells his tale, he proves a man of truth, a man who “lernyd never rethorik” and speaks “bare and pleyn.” There are frank men in Shakespeare. Lear has a “franke heart” and Henry V urges his ministers to speak “with franke and with uncurbed plainnesse.”
¹⁶
Undisguised, ignorant of the arts of rhetoric, guileless,
uncurbed:
by the sixteenth century, to be frank meant to be sincere.

Jane and Benjamin Franklin’s father knew none of this. “As to the original of our name,” he told his son, “there is various opinions.” Maybe it meant “free,” the way to “frank” a letter meant that you didn’t have to pay for postage. “Our circumstances,” Josiah explained, “have been such as that it hath hardly been worth while to concern ourselves much about these things, any farther than to tickle the fancy a little.”
¹⁷

This, however, is exactly what tickled Benjamin Franklin’s fancy. His ancestors’ poverty and obscurity only made his own rise the more extraordinary: the rougher they, the smoother he. His admirers felt the same way.
In 1853,
Thomas Carlyle got his hands on an ancient
Ecton tithe book; a friend had bought it for him, having found it while rummaging through a bookstall in
London. “A strange old brown
ms.,
which never thought of travelling out of its native parish,” Carlyle wrote, holding in his hands a record of the doings of Benjamin Franklin’s forebears: a treasure, the
wealth of ages. It contained, he wrote, “the very
stamp
(as it were) of their black knuckles, of their hobnailed shoes.”
Thomas Francklin and his sons were listed in its pages. “Here they are, their forge-hammers yet going; renting so many ‘yard-lands’ of Northamptonshire Church-soil, keeping so many sheep &c &c.,” Carlyle wrote, “little conscious that one of the Demigods was about to proceed out of them.” From hobnailed shoes to a demigod in five generations. Carlyle sent the tithe book to
Boston, to
Edward Everett, an American statesman, orator, and former president of Harvard. Everett had the book bound, “as if it were a very
Iliad.
”
¹⁸

Benjamin Franklin’s epic, his
Iliad,
the story of his great expectations, started in that churchyard
in Ecton, on the mossy face of a gravestone, on the musty pages of a parish register, in the fiery fury of a
blacksmith’s forge, where men who walked from one place to another hammered iron into shoes for the horses of men who rode.

In
England,
titles and wealth went to the eldest son: he, alone, was entitled. A franklin had no title; he had only his freedom but, still, the eldest son could expect to inherit the estate—he was entitled, at least, to that. Younger sons scrambled. And therein, Franklin thought, lay true nobility. As Poor Richard put it,
Many a Man would have been worse, if his Estate had been better.
¹⁹

“I am the youngest Son of the youngest Son of the youngest Son of the youngest son for five Generations,” Franklin wrote, after he read the entries in that Ecton parish register, “whereby I find that had there originally been any Estate in the Family none could have stood a worse Chance for it.”
²⁰

Who could have had a worse start?

CHAPTER III

B
enjamin Franklin was his father’s youngest son, but he wasn’t his youngest child. Josiah Franklin’s youngest child—the youngest child of the youngest child of the youngest child of the youngest child, for five generations—was a girl.

Her story starts not with her great-great-grandfather, minding the forge in
Ecton, but with her mother’s mother, scrubbing and mending. In 1635, a young Englishwoman named Mary Morrill wished to go to the New World. Having no property but herself, she sold her labor to pay her way. Sailing across the ocean, she met a Norfolk man named
Peter Folger. He was making a pilgrimage of faith.

They landed in
Boston, a harbor and haven among rocky coasts and stony meadows and mountains steeped with thickets of pine.
Puritans hoped that in this, their New England, even the savages in the very wilderness would speak Scripture. The
seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony pictured a bare Indian, with Acts 16:9 issuing out of his mouth: “come over and help us.”

Morrill went to Salem as servant to a minister; Folger settled near Boston and worked as a weaver, miller, and shoemaker. He pocketed every penny.
¹
Harvard College was founded in 1636. Three years later, Boston opened a post office, the first in the colonies: “all letters which are brought from beyond the seas, or are to bee sent thitherm are to bee brought unto.”
²
New England would be a paper commonwealth. Paper flocks of paper birds would fly across the ocean. In 1639, a printing press—the first in the New World—was carried east to west over the three thousand miles of blue water, rowed up the river to Cambridge, and wheeled into a stout building
in Harvard’s yard, a pastureland where pigs rutted and cows lowed and the smell of hops wafted out of the brew house.

For this, their new England, there would be new books. The press’s first imprint was a book of
psalms, “faithfully translated into English metre.” In the King James, the Twenty-second Psalm, ripe with carnal beauty, reads, “I was cast upon thee from the wombe: thou art my God from my mother’s belly.”
Puritans sang their own song: “Unto thee from the tender-womb committed been have I: yea thou hast been my mighty-God from my mother’s belly.”
³
Their womb was more tender, their god mightier: the word was their faith.

To read was to be ruled. A 1642 Massachusetts law required that all children acquire the “ability to read & understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of this country.”
⁴
The
Bible nourished every new-weaned babe. “Whome shall he teach knowledge?” asked the twenty-eighth chapter of Isaiah: “them that are weaned from the milke,
and
drawen from the breasts.” The press at Cambridge printed, in 1656, a catechism:
Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in either England, Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments
.
⁵
The good book gave suck, its words like milk.

It took Peter Folger nine years to save the £20 he needed to pay Mary Morrill’s debt and buy her freedom, but it was the best money, he said, he ever spent. They were married in 1644. They moved first to Martha’s Vineyard and then to
Nantucket, where, in 1648, their first son was born. Folger served as surveyor and schoolmaster, teaching not only English children but also
Algonquians. On the islands, he said, “Noe English Man but myselfe could speak scarse a Word of Indian.”
⁶

In the colonies, it was illegal to print a Bible translated into English; the Crown held the copyright. But no law prevented a man from
printing the word of God in another language. In 1663, the press in Cambridge issued
Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God,
a translation made by John Eliot, minister of Roxbury, and his Algonquian interpreters, Indian students at Harvard. Then came Indian psalters, Indian catechisms, Indian primers, and
Nashauanittue Meninnunk wutch Mukkiesog:
spiritual milk for Indian babes.
⁷

In 1665, one of Peter Folger’s students,
John Gibbs, spoke the name of Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem with whom the pilgrims of Plymouth had shared a thanksgiving in 1621. “The naming of their dead
Sachims
is
one ground of their
warres,”
Roger Williams had once explained. Massasoit’s son
Metacom went to Nantucket to kill Gibbs. Folger calmed him. He said, “I have ever bin able to keep Peace upon the Island.”
⁸

Peter and Mary Folger’s ninth and last child, Abiah, was born in 1667. By then, Folger had become a dissident in a land of
dissenters.

The war he’d helped avert finally came in 1675, a war so bloody the land was said to look like “a burdensome, and menstruous Cloth.” The fighting, one Boston poet thought, was the Indians’ only chance to be “found in print,” writing “in blud not ink.” More than half the towns in
New England were laid waste. The Indians besieged the devout in their meetinghouses. They burned their
Bibles. They mocked their psalms. The press at Cambridge had printed one thousand copies of
Up-Biblum God;
by the end of the war, there was hardly a page left.

“Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us,” Boston minister
Increase Mather asked, “when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?”

History alone promised redemption. In 1676, Mather published
A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians
. From the pulpits and the
printing presses, ministers cited Exodus 17:14: “And the Lord said unto Moses, write this for a memoriall in a booke.”
⁹

Peter Folger remonstrated. Seven months into the war, he refused to hand over a deed book needed to settle a land dispute. Found guilty of contempt of court, he was fined £20. This he refused to pay. “All of my Estate, if my Debts were payd, will not amount to halfe so much,” he insisted. There being no prison on Nantucket, he was locked in a pen “where the Neighbors Hogs had layd but the night before, and in a bitter cold Frost and deepe Snow.” He slept on a board; he pleaded for hay to better his bed. He stayed there for a year and a half, believing there to be no saner place than prison for a man of peace in time of war.

“The Mercy of some of these Men is Cruelty itself,” he wrote. “It were better for us and the Indians also, that we had no Liberty.”
¹⁰

From his pigsty, he wrote a poem of protest. He called it “A Looking-Glass for the Times.” He would hold, before his enemies, a mirror. For the slaughter, he blamed the colony’s “College Men”—Harvard men:

Still, it would always be an error to

Abiah was ten years old then. Every week, she visited her father in that hog shed. She watched him write a poem that he knew no one would print but that, he said, was still worth writing:

But, sometimes,

She listened to her father’s lessons. Speak up, he told her. Speak up.

CHAPTER IV