by Nick Bunker
Angry though it was, the strife of Whigs and Tories had one very positive outcome: it left no room for complacency. All the leading English writers—Defoe, the journalist Joseph Addison, the poet Alexander Pope, and his friend Jonathan Swift, to name only the most famous—had to take their stand in these debates. Addison was a Whig, so was Defoe, while Swift and Pope were Tories. And so, paradoxically, the rage of party in Great Britain gave birth to some of the finest prose and poetry in English. Nine weeks away across the Atlantic, their writings found eager readers in the colonies. The young Franklin was among the most enthusiastic.
By virtue of their history, Bostonians were usually Whigs, committed to the House of Hanover, but they had their own agenda too. The people of Boston were always looking for arguments—from whatever source, Whigs or Tories, clerics or philosophers—that they could recycle for use in their political controversies. Whether they wished to uphold authority, in the church or in the state, or to assert their independence from the royal governor or from the likes of Cotton Mather, they found their ammunition in the books that came from England.
By the time Franklin finished his year at the Latin School, this habit was firmly entrenched in Boston. The shelves were groaning with books, at a moment when Franklin was ready to begin reading prose and poetry meant for adults. As he studied the best English authors, he steeped himself in the controversies, religious and political, that energized their work. He also become an expert with the written word. But to set him on the path to fame, Franklin needed more than natural talent. He also had to find people to point him in the right direction. Soon he encountered the mentors he required, the first of whom was a member of his family.
Shortly before the boy’s tenth birthday, his schooling began a new chapter when the Franklins received a visitor from London. Among the immigrants who came to America was his uncle, Benjamin Senior, sailing in on the schooner Nantucket. On October 8, 1715, he stepped ashore in Boston, an old, bewildered man to whom the passing years had been unkind.
*1 Throughout this book, for the sake of consistency dates are always given according to the old Julian calendar, as it was used in Great Britain and America prior to 1752. According to the calendar we employ today, Franklin’s date of birth was January 17.
*2 By about 1620, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “miff” had entered the language to mean a fit of ill humor. By 1700, “miffy” was being used to mean peevish or irritable.
Chapter Five
MR. PEMBERTON’S METHOD
We think of Franklin as the master of the positive. Here was a man who made a brilliant success of his life and believed that if they followed his advice, everyone else could do the same. And yet his finest writing often had to do with failure. He wrote many paragraphs about ruined lives, flawed men and women, and people who simply disappeared one day, leaving a trail of creditors behind them. The first of the many failures he encountered was his uncle Benjamin. At the age of sixty-five, he arrived in America alone: a man almost broken by debt and by bereavement.
Ten years earlier, he had lost his wife, Hannah—“my heart’s desire, mine eyes’ delight”—and then in 1709 his daughter died as well, the eighth of his children to precede him to the grave. Long ago old Benjamin had left a well-paid job and set up on his own in the west end of London, selling dyed silk and printed calico from a shop in a fashionable spot near Drury Lane. By 1710 the business was in trouble; Benjamin Senior could not pay the rent, and so he began to slide toward insolvency.1
“In solitude as left alone, my low dark state I much bewail’d,” he wrote. At last Uncle Benjamin accepted defeat, sold up everything he had, left his precious library with a lawyer, and boarded the ship for New England where he installed himself with the Franklins. Although he had a son in lodgings in the town—Samuel, a cutler, who had followed family tradition and served his time as an apprentice in London—he preferred to squat with Josiah.2
Uncle Benjamin came as a houseguest and stayed four years, trying and failing to find a job, and talking politics incessantly. Here was an English Whig who consoled himself for his hardships by turning the Hebrew psalms into rhyming couplets. When he came to a psalm thanking God for helping the Israelites in battle, the old man added a note in the margin: “King William’s deliverance from Popery and slavery, 1688—and a second deliverance by King George.”
Although Josiah shared his brother’s politics, the old man soon became a burden and the miffiness became extreme. The brothers fell out; and in 1719, when Samuel married and set up a household of his own, Uncle Benjamin went to join him. But these had been four of the most important years of his nephew’s life. As he sat composing verses in the corner, the old man was a constant reminder that across the sea there was a city called London, where there were books to be authored and adventures to be had.
In his memoirs, Franklin awarded his uncle his highest accolade: “he was an ingenious man,” he recalled. From England, Benjamin Senior had sent the boy a little poem, warning him against becoming a soldier—the military life was “a dangerous trade…the nurse of vice,” he wrote—and in Boston he offered more of what he thought of as wise counsel. He taught the boy his form of shorthand, so that he too could take down sermons. Franklin did not practice and he soon forgot the technique, but his uncle’s form of verbal ingenuity left a permanent impression. A man in love with words, Benjamin Senior strove to be a communicator, and he conveyed this aspiration to his nephew.
In London the old man had never ceased to go to chapel, and the Presbyterians he heard were some of the finest preachers in the city. While the deists were at odds with the theologians, a small revolution was occurring in evangelism, as the ministers Uncle Benjamin admired looked for new ways to spread their message in the capital. Once again, it was Daniel Defoe who captured what was happening and made it available to the widest audience. In 1715, a few years before he wrote Robinson Crusoe, he brought out The Family Instructor. A self-help book for Christian tradesmen and their wives, it had a preface written by one of Benjamin Senior’s friends in the clergy, a celebrity preacher by the name of Samuel Wright.
The book soon became a best-seller. Franklin admired it immensely, and he mentioned it in his memoirs even though by the 1770s it had long since become an outmoded relic of the past. What Franklin liked about it was its literary quality. Full of lively dialogue, The Family Instructor consisted of everyday stories from London, each one a domestic drama intended to teach a lesson about vice and virtue, or temperance and chastity, or about the duties of masters and servants to each other. Moralistic though it was, the book was also moving and enjoyable because, in the words of the preface by Mr. Wright, “the substance of each narrative is real…not ill contriv’d to take hold of the hearts of those who are loose and ignorant.”3
It would be hard to think of anything more Franklinesque. Edifying parables, written in direct and vivid language—it was the kind of thing Franklin tried to achieve in his journalism, in The Way to Wealth, and in his memoirs. It was a style of writing to which Benjamin Senior could introduce him. But if Franklin was going to be a scientist as well as a writer, he would need a clear, logical mind. And neither Defoe, nor Wright, nor Benjamin Senior could think with the clarity Franklin would display in his work with physics.
It must have helped that somebody taught him chess. At some point in his boyhood, Franklin learned to play the game—in later life it became an obsession, and he played it very well—but he never tells us who gave him the lessons or when they occurred. But Franklin did have a teacher of logic; or at any rate, a teacher who rammed home the message that a thinker needed to be clear and precise. The teacher in question was Ebenezer Pemberton, the eccentric pastor of the Old South Meeting House.
When Samuel Willard passed away in 1707, Pemberton stepped up to occupy the pulpit, and so his sermons were the first that Franklin heard. Ebenezer was an odd man indeed, who would sometimes appear in th
e pulpit wearing a blond wig. Prone to fits of anger, he once flew into a rage with his most eminent parishioner, Judge Sewall, almost wrecking their relationship. His rival Cotton Mather detested Mr. Pemberton, calling him a man “of a strangely choleric and envious temper.” But others disagreed. In a clergyman who died too young, they saw the vestiges of greatness.
Above all they praised him for his intellect. When Ebenezer Pemberton preached, he put his points across not with windy rhetoric but with relentless chains of inference, so that he sounded more like a lawyer than a man of God. “He was a master of logic and oratory,” said his best friend, Benjamin Colman, the pastor at the new, more liberal, and swiftly growing church in Brattle Square, who gave his funeral sermon. Mr. Pemberton, he recalled, always made his case for the Gospel with “perspicuity, distinctness and exactness of method.”4
Today, his homilies make for tedious reading, but at the time they broke new ground in Boston as models of accessibility. We know exactly what Pemberton said and how he spoke, because one of his parishioners took notes, and some of his sermons appeared in print in Boston and London. Never pedantic or obscure, Ebenezer Pemberton avoided the academic vices of speaking in jargon or piling up citations for the sake of appearing to be learned. Everything had to be clear and lucid, so that his listeners could follow each step as his argument developed.
Down in the pews at the Old South, Franklin began to understand the meaning of “method,” a word that would become another of his favorites. He also encountered a form of Christianity more generous than the older, more rigid doctrines of Calvinism with which pastors like the Mathers were still obsessed. At Harvard, Pemberton had been a hard-reading man, up through the night at his studies. By the time of his death, when he was forty-five, he had amassed a library of a thousand books. However, the remarkable thing about his collection was not so much its size as its open-mindedness. As well as reading deeply, Pemberton had read very widely, in science and politics as well as in theology. Nothing less would have satisfied his flock.5
By this point in the history of Boston, people expected more from a minister than tirades against depravity. In the 1710s, a pastor could not hope to keep his audience merely by invoking the grim old Jehovah of the past. Although Pemberton knew his Calvinist theology—he owned all the usual manuals, and it seems that he still believed in predestination—he had to offer something more than hellfire. And so in his sermons God underwent a change of heart, gradually becoming a benign creator who offered salvation as broadly as he could; and in this new, more accommodating deity, Pemberton found his answer to the puzzles of the age.
He knew about Toland, he owned a volume of Bayle’s dictionary, and he had studied the deistical controversy. But most of all Pemberton admired a new religious party in England, who had come to be known as the “latitudinarians,” or more simply the “latitude men.” The name said it all about the views they held. Although they were Anglican ministers, duty bound to uphold the king’s Book of Common Prayer, they hoped to find a middle ground with dissenters, by giving everyone some latitude to differ about the finer points of doctrine.
Long ago at Ecton in the 1660s, when the Franklins were wrestling with their consciences, the local squire Sir Henry Yelverton had enlisted the intellectual support of the latitude party as he tried to persuade his neighbors to enter the Anglican fold. Eager to prevent any more strife about religion, Sir Henry urged his friends to read the elegant prose of the party’s leader, John Tillotson, a rising young star of the Church of England. As the years went by, Tillotson drew ever closer to the Whigs, for whom he acted as a sort of house theologian. After the Glorious Revolution, when it fell to King William to select a new Archbishop of Canterbury, of course he gave the job to the trusty Mr. Tillotson the Whig.
Today the name of Tillotson has almost been forgotten; but in the eighteenth century, people of letters, including Ebenezer Pemberton, revered his latitudinarian sermons as masterpieces of the English language. In Boston, Pemberton studied them closely and he passed them on to his congregation, with among them the Franklins. “I am of the old opinion,” John Tillotson once wrote, “that moderation is a virtue”: by which he meant that instead of going to extremes, Christians should focus on the things they had in common. Surely they could all agree that God meant to be merciful, a benign creator who wished to see his children being good and kind, loving one another and living happy lives. His benevolence was obvious, in the orderly cosmos that God had made. Provided everyone accepted that, said the Whig archbishop, matters of detail could be safely put aside, and only madmen or fanatics would be left unredeemed.6
From a portrait by Peter Lely, this is John Tillotson, the Anglican “latitude man” who served as Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1690s. His sermons were regarded in the eighteenth century as models of English prose, and read and admired by Benjamin Franklin.
In a homily that found many readers, Tillotson had said that the law of God “requires nothing of us, but what is recommended to us by our reason.” At the Old South, as Pemberton preached on the book of Isaiah he quoted the archbishop almost verbatim. Drawing up a list of the virtues every human being should display—justice, self-denial, temperance, and charity—Ebenezer made the very same point: that even if they were not commanded by the Gospel, our reason would tell us that they marked out the path to happiness.7
Many years later, and far more famously, Franklin would say precisely the same thing. It was an optimistic creed, ideal for people who hungered for advancement; and if the ideas of the latitude men were pushed just a little further, they could be made to sanctify all kinds of material success. When Pemberton died and his friend Mr. Colman gave his eulogy, he set out the same Tillotsonian agenda: a creed that could be followed by Anglicans and Puritans alike. If we are sober, diligent, and self-controlled, in any walk of life, we are doing what God demands. He gave us minds and bodies so that we could set them to good use. Or as Benjamin Colman put it, “we were made for diligence…he that gave us being, gives us business.”
Again, these were words that Franklin would echo in his own writings. By the time he was eleven, it seems that these opinions had come to be shared by at least two members of his family. Mr. Pemberton died in February 1717, and two weeks later Colman gave his sermon of commemoration. In April, Uncle Benjamin left the Old South and joined Mr. Colman’s congregation at Brattle Square. In July, he was followed to the same meeting house by his nephew James Franklin, the third son of Josiah and Abiah.
Times had changed again, and the Franklins were moving with them. With the Atlantic at peace and trade beginning to flourish, the family were coming to inhabit a new world where commerce might loom larger than the words of scripture. In this new situation, the teachings of Tillotson and Colman made the very best of sense. Worldly, loose, and flexible, their kind of Christianity did not require heroic feats of prayer and Bible reading. Instead, their disciples could simply be diligent at their trade: a message that must have appealed to the young James Franklin, who was just embarking on his business career.
Early in 1718, the family passed another milestone, when James turned twenty-one, celebrating the occasion by setting sail for England. A printer by profession, he was off to London to buy the equipment he needed to start his own firm. As yet, although Americans could make a printing press, their paper mills were few, and the colonies had no mines of lead to supply the quantities of type—as much as half a ton—that each machine required.
Just as old Thomas Franklin had financed his sons’ apprenticeships, so Josiah found the money for James to buy his apparatus. A press and the kit to go with it would have cost at least £100 in sterling, or about £200 in Boston’s depreciated currency. The scanty records that survive suggest that in 1718 Josiah signed an IOU for something close to that sum. He also gave his son his first assistant. When James came home later that year, he took on the bookish young Benjamin as his own apprentice.8
HIS BROTHER JAMES
If we know too little about Abiah, we also know much less than we would like about James Franklin. Born in 1697, he must have had some schooling, because he proved to be a competent writer, with a flair for poetry as well as prose. It seems that he was also close to Benjamin Senior. Not only did they both attend the church at Brattle Square: James also learned his uncle’s craft of printing calicoes and linen. As for his trade, he probably acquired it in the workshop of the Boston printer Bartholomew Green, the man who turned out the News-Letter every week. Green was a member, alongside Josiah, of the private prayer meeting linked to the Old South. But even the source of James’s training cannot be known for sure.
And so, for lack of information, James has come to be seen as something of a thug: the irate, resentful older brother, who bullied and beat the young Benjamin when he became a rival, and ended up by driving him out of Massachusetts. But Franklin himself was never quite sure about the rights and wrongs of the affair—“perhaps I was too saucy and provoking,” he conceded in his memoirs—and there is another way to tell James’s story.
He was another ingenious young man, brave and innovative. Purely as a newspaperman, James Franklin had perhaps more audacity than his brother. He was also more original. What he lacked was staying power, and the young Benjamin’s deeper intellect. His master stroke was this: James took an English model—the outspoken, combative, and entertaining newspapers printed in London—and he brought the concept to the colonies. Founded in Boston in 1721, his weekly journal, The New-England Courant, is rightly remembered as the most distinguished landmark of early journalism in America.
On arriving back in Boston with his printing press, in the spring or early summer of 1718, to begin with James had to play it safe. He started as a jobbing printer, taking on routine assignments for which Mr. Green lacked the time. The first books James is known to have produced were as dull as tedious could be: a sermon, and a catalogue for the sale of a clergyman’s library, commissioned in August by the bookseller Samuel Gerrish. A close friend of Judge Sewall, Mr. Gerrish belonged to the private prayer meeting that Josiah attended. A few doors away from the Old South the judge and his friends would come to his bookstore to sip their coffee and do business.
