by Nick Bunker
From the records of His Majesty’s Treasury, a minute from September 1690 referring to Thomas Franklin Jr. as a “gentleman.” Initialed by the Lords of the Treasury, who reported directly to King William III, the entry grants Thomas Junior £60 for his success in collecting the land tax in Northamptonshire.
When he wrote the epitaph for his parents, Franklin described Josiah as “pious and prudent,” a devoted husband to Abiah, the two of them living lives of “constant labour and industry.” These are little more than clichés, too conventional to be relied upon. Fortunately, we have just enough evidence, by way of anecdotes, and details in the Boston archives, to give us a picture of Josiah. Neither bitter nor disappointed, he was a stoical character, resilient and philosophical.
Like his son he had a fine physique. A cheerful, healthy fellow of medium height, Josiah would pick up his net and go fishing for herrings on his few days away from the workshop. He had what Franklin remembered as “a clear, pleasing voice,” and he kept up the Puritan custom of singing psalms in the evening. Like the poet John Milton’s father, who did the same in London, Josiah would accompany the psalms with tunes on his violin.
And of course he was ingenious. Josiah had built up a store of resources—skills with his hands, ideas from books, and his habit of curiosity—that he could draw upon to give his life a meaning. For example: his passion for geography. Somehow Josiah obtained four large maps that hung in the parlor, where his children memorized the names of seas and rivers. They had a family library as well. And although most of the books were dry and theological, they included one title—An Essay Upon Projects, by Daniel Defoe—that kept alive Josiah’s contact with the inventive England of his youth.
It was an odd thing to find in a Boston tenement. A very rare book, published in 1697—long before Defoe became famous as a novelist—the Essay never sold well. A technical book for businesspeople, it emerged from the same climate of ideas that produced Charles Montagu’s financial innovations. Hence it contained clever schemes for banks, insurance companies, a pension fund for widows, and a college for the children of the commercial classes. Sophisticated though its contents were, the essay was one of the first books Benjamin Franklin read as a child.
For the rest of his life, until he wrote his memoirs in the 1770s and 1780s, the language of Defoe would remain a constant feature of Franklin’s journalism and his projects for the betterment of life in America. An author in love with opportunity, Defoe spoke directly to people like the Franklins, whose origins and milieu in London were very similar to his. According to Defoe, lasting achievement had to rest on what he called “the honest basis of ingenuity and improvement.” Those words from Defoe’s essay on projects would become an intrinsic part of Benjamin Franklin’s vocabulary of ambition.15
As a first-generation arrival, in Boston Josiah had to be content to do only modestly well. This could never be said about his youngest son. Early in 1706, when Josiah was approaching forty-nine and his wife was thirty-eight—a couple past their prime, by the standards of the age—Abiah gave birth to a boy who would never be satisfied with second best.
* If Josiah had simply wished to set up on his own as a dyer of silk in a better market than Banbury, he would have had far less hazardous options than a voyage to America. More likely, he would have returned to London or he would have moved to Coventry or Norwich, the leading provincial centers for the English silk trade, where dyers were very welcome.
Part Two
A BOSTON BOY
Chapter Four
HIS HAPPY CHILDHOOD
On the day before the Sabbath the mail came in from the frontier, where the settlers went in fear of murder or abduction by their enemies, the Abenaki and the French. In 1706, Queen Anne’s War with France was at its height. In Europe, things were going splendidly for England, as the Duke of Marlborough swept the army of King Louis from Flanders; but in the town of Boston, the elite were squabbling about how best to take part in the fighting. At noon the snow began to flurry in the streets, and that night it fell heavily. The following morning—Sunday, January 6, according to the old calendar of the first half of the eighteenth century—Abiah Franklin was delivered of a boy. Pastor Willard baptized him on the same day. Such was the custom, for fear that an infant might go to an early grave.*1
Benjamin Franklin was born in a season of animosity in Boston, a place where the people wished to obey their English queen but could not abide the officials she chose to rule over them. Although Josiah kept aloof from party politics—that winter, he was trying a new way to make candles, with rushes from Nantucket—it was never easy to ignore the feuds that beset this angry town. The wilderness lay close at hand, drink and violence were just around the corner, and loyalty to England sat side by side with deep resentment of authority. In January 1706 the town’s loathing had for its object Governor Joseph Dudley. In the past he had antagonized his fellow colonists by supporting King James, and he remained a man who knew how to be unpopular.1
Shortly before Christmas, Dudley had engaged in an affray that captures the heated atmosphere of the Boston where Franklin came into the world. On the road into town, the governor had met two wagon drivers who blocked his path with a cart full of wood. Dudley stepped down from his carriage, struck one of the men with his sword, drew blood, and threw both of them into jail. When Franklin was six days old, the governor’s council held a session filled with anger and recrimination, as Dudley accused Pastor Willard of taking the side of the carriers.
There followed a typical New England quarrel about the rule of law, the powers of the governor, and the independence of the judiciary. Ten months later, to Dudley’s dismay, the judges acquitted the defendants, and one of Willard’s friends added his powerful voice to the chorus of disapproval of the governor. At the Second Church in Boston, the pulpit belonged to the Puritan eminence of New England, Increase Mather, who shared it with his son Cotton. They had many reasons to loathe Joseph Dudley. Not only was the governor a friend to Anglicans; the Mathers also disagreed with his risky strategy of all-out attacks against the French in Canada. And so that fall Cotton Mather composed a pamphlet bewailing what he called “the deplorable state of New England.” Under Dudley, he wrote, the colony had become “the very scene of…all that’s miserable.”2
Perhaps the pastor’s rhetoric was overdone; but by nature Bostonians were voluble, and their language was often extreme. By this time the town’s seven thousand inhabitants could walk on streets paved with cobblestones, buy a weekly paper, The Boston News-Letter, and take their pick of eighty taverns in which to read it with their rum. They could worship in any one of six churches. Fine new houses were going up, built not with wood but with brick. Each year the shipwrights launched dozens of ships. If the colonies had a metropolis, this was it; but although the local economy was growing, misery was all too visible as well. Prices were rising because of the war. Taxes were increasing too, and when Benjamin Franklin was four years old a shortage of bread caused riots in the streets.
In the background there lay tensions that would persist in Boston for as long as it remained a colonial town. On one side there stood the popular party, always looking back to the old Bay Colony charter of 1629, which had given Massachusetts something close to independence. Ranged against them was a mercantile elite, allied with Governor Dudley, who preferred the new charter granted by King William. Although it made the governor a royal appointee, it left some elements of democracy—town meetings, elected juries, and the colony’s House of Representatives—and these became the battleground for party strife. In the middle were the clergy—Harvard men like the Mathers, who wanted law and order, but not at the price of diluting their Puritan creed—and also people like Josiah Franklin.
All Josiah looked for was peace and quiet, in which to make his living and to keep his conscience clear. Again he took after his late brother John in Banbury. Benjamin Franklin remembered how his fat
her strove to be an honest broker, hoping to pacify his neighbors when they came to him for help in settling their disputes. As Franklin put it in his memoirs, Josiah “was also much consulted by private persons about their affairs, when any difficulty occurred, and frequently chosen an arbitrator between contending parties.” It may have helped that Josiah did not drink hard liquor.
Three times Josiah served as a tithing man; in 1700, he was a clerk of the market, making sure that traders gave good measure and took away their trash; and two years later he was chosen as a constable. He became a supplier to the town, selling candles to the almshouse and to the artillerymen who guarded the harbor. At last there came a moment when Josiah could feel that he commanded the kind of respect his father and his brothers had enjoyed in England. It occurred in 1708, on the 9th of September, twenty-five years after he landed in America. That evening, the tenement in Milk Street hosted a prayer meeting attended by a few of the town’s most powerful men.
They listened to a biblical text read by no less a dignitary than Samuel Sewall, landowner, merchant, and luminary of the Old South. A close friend of Mr. Willard and the Mathers, Sewall had been among the justices who hanged the Salem witches. In 1697, stricken with remorse, he made an apology in church. Nine years later, he was one of the judges who freed the wagon drivers accused of assaulting the governor. Here was a pious man, endlessly self-critical, whose approval spoke volumes about the esteem that the Franklin family had won at last in Boston. When he recorded the prayer meeting in his diary, Sewall awarded his friend the same polite honorific that Thomas the blacksmith had been given at Ecton: the judge called his host “Mister Josiah Franklin.”
Josiah had passed another milestone, and he did so at a time when Massachusetts had many reasons to be optimistic. In the year of Franklin’s birth, Parliament in London had made the laws to ensure that when the queen expired, her successor would be a Protestant, the Elector George of Hanover; and to keep the Scots within the British fold, they also passed the Act of Union, making England and Scotland a united kingdom. In celebration, the people of Boston changed the names of two of their principal streets to Hanover and Union. And then, four weeks after Josiah’s prayer meeting, news arrived of another military triumph.
Josiah Franklin’s friend and fellow member of the Old South Meeting House, the Boston merchant, politician, and philanthropist Judge Samuel Sewall (1652–1730), painted by Nathaniel Emmons, 1728.
At the battle of Oudenaarde, the Duke of Marlborough had crushed the French again. Cotton Mather preached a sermon thanking God for victory, and although the war still had five years to run, the Protestant side seemed to be assured of success. For decades the Franklins had lived their lives beneath the long shadow that Louis XIV cast over the Atlantic. As at last the shadow lifted, Josiah entered a new, more comfortable phase of his career.
His eldest daughter was already launched in life, married to the master of a ship; Samuel, his eldest son, was out in the world in the old family trade as a smith; and Josiah Junior, the first Franklin born in Boston, had run away to sea. As one by one the children found their feet and left the tenement, so Josiah’s finances improved. Blessed with the friendship of Judge Sewall, he could borrow money from people who could see that his credit was good. Early in 1712, he took out a mortgage from another member of the prayer meeting. At Banbury his brother had owned his own home, and now at last Josiah could leave Milk Street and do the same.
Aptly enough for a Whig, Josiah Franklin bought a corner property on Union and Hanover. In a letter written very late in his life to his sister Jane Mecom, one of Abiah’s daughters, Benjamin the scientist remembered their new home as “a lowly dwelling.” Even so the plot was big enough for a wooden house, a workshop, and extra space that could be let to tenants. The Blue Ball came with the family and hung above the premises.
In his autobiography, when Benjamin Franklin referred to himself as the youngest son of a youngest son he wrote of this as though it was a handicap; but in reality, the date and circumstances of his birth were more favorable than he cared to say. Although he was born in wartime, he had the good fortune to live out most of his early life in an age of international peace. In the spring of 1713, when he was seven, the war drew to an end with the Treaty of Utrecht. Two years later, King Louis XIV died at last; and when the despot vanished from the scene, the British and their navy were free to turn their attention to the scourge of piracy. Other than that—and by the end of the 1720s, the pirates had been cleared from the ocean—the guns fell silent in the North Atlantic.
For almost thirty years, a system of treaties preserved the balance of power between Great Britain and France. Many points of rivalry remained—in the Baltic, in India, and on the Abenaki frontier—but until the 1740s neither country felt obliged to fight the other. Far to the south, the British in the West Indies kept up a long cold war with Spain, as each nation vied for the profits of a slave economy. But even there no genuine hostilities occurred until 1739. By the time the Caribbean became a battleground, Benjamin Franklin was already thirty-three.
For the making of the affable sage, these long years of peace were essential. To acquire his training with words and ideas, Franklin needed a society where vigorous debate was a habit; but he also had to make a living. For that he required a stable economy where trade could flow uninterrupted. In the America of his early life, both conditions were fulfilled. Although Boston remained a troubled place, beset by inflation, and riven by party quarrels, no terminal crisis took place. There was just enough conflict to make for colorful journalism, but not so much as would wreck the prosperity everyone wanted to see.
And so Franklin came to adulthood in an era of equilibrium. In the absence of war, people and ideas could pass freely over the ocean, enriching the atmosphere of the towns along the coast. For the Franklins, crossing the Atlantic became almost routine. The family ceased to be landlocked yeomen from middle England. Instead they underwent a maritime rebirth. By the time Franklin was seven years old, his brother Peter, born to Abiah in 1692, had followed Josiah Junior to sea. Both young men shipped back to London, where in the twilight years of Queen Anne they were entertained as guests by their uncle Benjamin.
The Franklins had always been adventurous; and after Utrecht they became even more so, as immigrants came flowing in to diversify the culture of the colonies, creating new relationships across the sea. Among the children of Josiah and Abiah was a daughter Mary, who reached the age of twenty-two in 1716, when she married an Irish mariner. He was Robert Holmes, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Donegal who had found a parish on Martha’s Vineyard. Two years later Holmes became a pioneer of the Irish diaspora, when he skippered one of the first shiploads of settlers to sail from Ulster to America. The dark side of the boom in Atlantic commerce lay in the slave trade, which prospered as never before now that the ocean was safer to travel. The Franklins were among the Bostonians who played their part, sharing in the money to be made from human bondage.3
Although Judge Sewall hated slavery—he called it “man-stealing: an atrocious crime”—his friend Josiah clearly had no qualms about the business. In the August of 1713, the Franklin name appeared for the first time in an American newspaper, when Josiah advertised the sale of five Africans from the sign of the Blue Ball. Here was yet another aspect of life in Boston, and one that would leave a stain on the career of Benjamin Franklin. In colonial America the press and slavery were deeply intertwined. Every paper ran advertisements for slave sales, or offered rewards for runaways; and so Franklin would carry the smell of the trade on his hands for as long as he remained a publisher. Eventually—it has to be said that it took a very long time—Franklin would come to see that Judge Sewall was correct. In his youth and early manhood, he and his father took it for granted that Africans could be the objects of a callous transaction on the street. As yet, the evils of slavery did not trouble the conscience of the average Whig.
In
the house at Hanover and Union, Benjamin Franklin grew up in an environment of the kind the government denied to slaves. He had two parents legally married and members of a church. He lived in a town that gave him the freedom to explore and to learn, with a mother and father who had nothing to fear from their neighbors. In his fifties, secure and happy, with his older children leaving home, Josiah could offer the boy more attention than he might have done when he was still establishing his business.4
From his father, Franklin acquired the ingenuity of a literate English craftsman; from his brothers and from Boston, the yearning for travel and the sea; but it was his mother who educated his feelings. By the time he was born, Abiah Franklin had raised so many children that she knew what she was doing when she had another. She had lost one son in a terrible accident: Ebenezer, at sixteen months, drowned in 1703 in a vat of soap and water. Precisely what she felt by way of grief or guilt, we will never know. And then she lost another boy, a Thomas, who died an infant three years later, as Benjamin might so easily have done.
Somehow Abiah survived the pain, and her youngest son would be the beneficiary. We know so little about Abiah that we cannot give a full account of the way she raised the boy, but we can at least be confident of this. It appears that she did everything a parent should, giving him the right combination of attachment and liberty, now and then a touch of discipline, but mostly the time and the space for him to play creatively. This is more or less what Franklin said himself, on the few occasions when he is known to have shared any secrets of their relationship.
