Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  Only one body of men dared to defend Boylston: the clergymen, led by the Mathers and Benjamin Colman. All his life, Cotton Mather had studied science and astronomy but also spoken of the Christian duty to “do good”—he had written a treatise, Bonifacius, on that very subject—and in the practice of inoculation he found an excellent example. On the last day of July the Gazette ran an open letter from the pastors in which they came to Boylston’s rescue. He was a “good Genius,” they said. Inoculation was safe, a conclusion reached by “men of piety and learning after serious thought.” With that turn of phrase, Cotton Mather and his friends exposed their weakest flank: their arrogant reliance on their rank and title.

  In the wake of the South Sea Bubble, authority was under siege on both sides of the Atlantic. In this climate of disrespect, no one could hope to win an argument, whatever it concerned, merely by affirming that something must be true because a learned minister from Oxford or from Harvard said it was so. Especially when the voters were against them. Two days later Boston went to the polls. Again they sent Elisha Cooke and his allies to the House of Representatives, where Dr. Cooke would be the Speaker.

  And then on Monday, August 7, at threepence a copy, at last The New-England Courant entered the fray. Sold from James’s store or home delivered by young Benjamin, it was just two sides of a sheet of paper, but it promised to be all things to all people. As the masthead put it, the Courant would be a “Jack of all Trades.”

  THE COMPASS OF TRUTH

  To begin with there was nothing courageous about the Courant. At first James Franklin merely swam with the tide, flowing as it was in favor of Dr. Cooke and the anti-inoculators. As it happens, Dr. Douglass was a neighbor of the Franklins, living across the street at the Green Dragon. The Franklins had their own doctor, who had failed to relieve Uncle Benjamin from a chronic dose of eczema; but James also knew the conceited Scot, doubtless as a customer for books. In the first issue of the Courant, Douglass wrote a column sneering at the pastors, calling them “profoundly ignorant.”

  This set the tone for the first three weeks of James’s paper. Its pages were filled with satirical abuse, aimed at Boylston and his allies, attacks that became more personal as each issue went by. By now the schools were closed for fear of contagion, and the death rate was increasing rapidly. There were fifty burials in August and more than 130 in September. In a Boston where people met warily in the streets, watching each other for the first signs of fever, the Courant played upon the fear that hung over the waterfront. It was only human to look for somebody to blame. So the Courant made a scapegoat out of Boylston and the ministers, for spreading what the paper called “the artificial pox.”

  What did Benjamin Franklin make of all this? Fifty years later, when he came to write his memoirs, although he told the story of the Courant he did not mention the smallpox controversy. By then, Franklin had long been a convert to inoculation. His silence implies that he felt uncomfortable about the memory of his and James’s role in the affair. Certainly, Franklin was fully involved. The only reason we know who wrote each article is that he kept a personal file of the Courant. He marked each issue with the authors’ names, suggesting that he set them up in type himself. But he was still only fifteen; and his brother James had a temper. It was commonplace for masters to beat apprentices. James often used his fists on his brother; and frequently Josiah had to intervene. So whatever Franklin thought about the Courant’s campaign against inoculation, he had little choice but to lend a hand.

  As the weeks went by, the campaign became so abusive that readers began to fall away. In the fourth issue James had to climb down a little, with a column by a clergyman from Boston’s only Anglican church, King’s Chapel: it was anti-inoculation, but politely so. Beneath it, James printed some verses of his own, mourning “the loss of youth” and putting the epidemic down to vengeance by the Lord for the sins of the people. Indeed the poem was so pious that it reads ironically, as though really James was making fun of that kind of theology.

  The truth was surely this: James Franklin did not care one way or the other about the rights and wrongs of the smallpox debate. It was merely a fertile source of copy. In launching the Courant, it seems that he had two goals in mind: not to get rich—if that had been his aim, he would have gone into real estate—but to make a splash. First and foremost, he wanted the Courant to be a metropolitan paper, like the London weeklies, with the same variety of content, writing as good as Defoe’s, and a circulation that extended way beyond Boston, as far as Long Island Sound and up into New Hampshire.

  Of course James Franklin had his own opinions. They were very clear, from the many clues he left in the pages of his paper. The authors his brother knew—Addison, Defoe, the English deists, and John Tillotson—had made their mark on James as well. Time and again, their names or long quotations from their writings popped up in the Courant. It was James’s way of saying what he wanted to be: a cool, modern man of wit and style, who had been to London and risen above the prejudice and bigotry of Boston.

  If the Franklins were artisans, they could be gentlemen too: this was the point he intended to put across. In London, if you wished to be genteel you were supposed to be broad-minded. And so James—like The Spectator—tried not to be pigeonholed as a creature of party politics. “Let impartiality be your constant motto, and truth be the compass by which you steer,” said the Courant on November 20, and much of the time his paper fulfilled that ideal.

  Loosely aligned though he was with Cooke, James Franklin did not wish to be the doctor’s megaphone. And so he never made personal attacks on the royal governor. James also steered clear of the paper money question, and the wrangling about the Maine lumber trade: tedious subjects, long since done to death. Instead, it was religion that kept coming back as the Courant’s favorite topic. Not that James held any strong views about God. It was simply that by making fun of ministers and dogma, he could show what a sophisticated gentleman he was. And it made his readers laugh.

  All the time, James tried to push back the boundaries. In his first few issues, he gave space to a writer who could be labeled a subversive. John Checkley kept a store, selling medicine, books, and tobacco, and in his spare time he enjoyed making fun of Puritans. An Anglican who worshipped at King’s Chapel, he had refused to swear allegiance to the king: which meant that Checkley was what the British called a “non-juror.” In other words, he was more or less a Jacobite, like Nathaniel Mist in London. In Boston, that was quite enough to put him beyond the pale of respectability.

  Soon enough, Checkley was fired from the Courant, but the fact that he had been there at all was bad enough in the eyes of the orthodox. James Franklin had to try to get the balance right: to be polemical, but not to be shrill; to be satirical, but not just sarcastic; and to make the Courant entertaining, not only for mechanics and gentlemen, but also for ladies and mechanics’ wives. He turned for help to his club of companions, of whom the cleverest was Nathaniel Gardner.

  Gardner was a tanner, like his friend Matthew Adams, who had given young Benjamin the run of his library. That autumn, as the smallpox continued—in October, more than four hundred people died—so Nathaniel came to the fore in the Courant. He was another fine writer, steeped in Defoe and Addison. Gardner was especially good at writing parodies of hellfire sermons given by the pastors.

  In the autumn, they relaunched the Courant, to escape from the crude invective of the first four issues. They gave themselves a name—“a most generous club of Honest Wags”—and issued a declaration of their principles. Their mission? To provide “nothing but what is innocently diverting,” even when they wrote about inoculation. The Courant would contain “a full and methodical account of foreign and domestic affairs,” and something amusing in every edition. “Give us but the hint,” wrote Nathaniel Gardner, “and we will furnish you with a charmingly various as well as copious supply.”

  Of course, wit and varie
ty were more easily promised than achieved. When there was nothing else to write about, inoculation kept recurring as a theme. Often the Courant had to rely on long extracts from the English weeklies, especially The London Journal, the voice of Mr. Cato and the radical Whigs. Time and again, the writers of the Courant plagiarized the British authors they loved.

  In November a storm blew up that might have sunk the Courant before it was five months old. With the smallpox controversy still raging, Mather chanced to meet James Franklin in the street. “The plain design of your paper,” said the pastor, “is to banter and abuse the ministers of God.” A fair point; and then, within forty-eight hours of their encounter, under cover of night someone tossed a makeshift hand grenade through Mr. Mather’s window.

  The fuse went out, but attached to the bomb was a note: “COTTON MATHER, You dog, Damn you; I’ll inoculate you with this.” At this awkward moment, when he might have been accused of complicity in the crime, James kept his nerve and did not apologize for something for which he was not responsible. Instead he printed a full report of the outrage, and advertised the governor’s reward for the name of the culprit. In the next issue, he set Gardner to work with another parody of Mather’s learned style.2

  In the fall the Courant had begun to hit its stride. At its best, it was bright and lively, with a blend of satire, crime, and human interest—a horrid murder in Rhode Island, or a man who castrated himself in Connecticut—together with tabloid items from the English papers. Much of the content was trivial, but it was never boring. And in amongst the jokes James had a serious purpose: to open a window for his readers, to let in the sunlight and fresh air, and to expose hypocrisy and deceit. As Gardner put it in the Courant: the paper existed “to promote enquiries after truth, quicken and rouse the slothful, and animate and inspire the dull.”

  Among the readers it aroused, the one we remember was Benjamin Franklin. He listened with mounting excitement as James and his friends preened themselves on the paper’s success. Soon it occurred to the boy that he could compose columns as sparkling as Gardner’s. Starting in the fall of 1721, the Courant had been running a series on The Spectator’s old theme of the battle of the sexes, featuring a cast of jilted bachelors, cuckolds, henpecked husbands, and “boisterous wives” with names like Fanny Mournful. Having worked so hard to master Addison’s style, and having seen so much miffiness in his family, surely he could do as well, or better, with some ventriloquism of his own?

  There was just one obstacle to overcome. If James was a bully, he was unlikely to welcome his brother as a rival with the pen. So the boy had to bide his time. His moment arrived in the spring of 1722, when Benjamin had just turned sixteen. The Courant needed new material. At last the epidemic was over, and the quarrels about inoculation had faded away. Despite the threat of war with the Abenaki, in Boston for the moment all was quiet. During the winter, James had once again copied his London models, Mr. Mist and the others, by pursuing a crude vendetta against a publishing rival: the town’s postmaster, who edited The Boston Gazette. But this was another well of inspiration fast running dry.

  And then one morning, when the printers unlocked the workshop, they found on the floor a paper, unsigned and written in a hand that had been artfully disguised. It was a brilliant comic sketch. Gardner and the others praised it to the skies, trying to guess who the author might be. Their new star writer had arrived.

  SILENCE DOGOOD

  “The venomous itch of scribbling is hereditary,” the Courant had said in January. Meant as another insult to Cotton Mather and his father, the comment was an apt description of the Franklins too. The anonymous item was Benjamin’s work. Like James’s columns it carried a sharp edge of satire aimed at the pious heart of Boston. More pieces of the same kind—ironic, facetious, and just the right length—soon appeared on the doormat in the same clandestine way. The first one was printed in the Courant of April 2.

  Unaware that his brother was the author, James began to publish the sketches as a series running every fortnight until October. There were fourteen in all. Written with flawless grammar and syntax, and with diction almost as wide as Addison’s, they were polite in their style but often very impolite in their content. That was the point. Purporting to be letters to the editor, they carried the fake byline of a clever, very nubile widow lady in her twenties, her name being Silence Dogood.

  Although her husband had been a country clergyman, and although she claimed to be “an enemy to vice, and a friend to virtue,” somehow she had acquired a talent for the double entendre, extending to jokes about erections.* That was another big part of the fun. All his life Franklin loved hoaxes. Although sometimes the sketches made a political point, they were really one long charade, an exercise in literary cross-dressing, written by a youth with many things on his mind, with sex among the uppermost.3

  All the vices of Boston were exposed. Drunkenness, always the curse of the town; hypocrisy, likewise; and the dark underworld of the waterfront. The best of the series came toward the end, on September 24, when Silence described a moonlight stroll. Out she goes, for a break from her books and her prayers, into a night-town filled with immorality. In the very first sketch, Franklin had dropped a hint that her mother was another kind of lady of the night—she was “put to hard shifts for a living”—and here the innuendo reappears.

  On the street, Silence runs into some drunken ramblers, speaking in “a confusion of tongues,” who accuse her of being a female of bad character: why else would a single woman be out so late? Next she encounters a gaggle of seamen, arm in arm with their harlots, spouting the jargon of the sea and staggering toward the Common for some fornication on the grass. Full of rum, Jack and Betty fall over, leaving Mrs. Dogood to reflect on the benefits conferred by prostitutes. Night walkers are agents of charity, she writes, who minister to “the health and satisfaction of those who have been fatigued with business.”

  In this, the last but one of the sketches, Franklin took his teenage fascination with sex, worked it over in the style of Addison, and added firsthand observation of what occurred by night in a seaport filled with whores and mariners and widows left destitute by husbands lost at sea. In Boston the Common served as a brothel in the open air. No other writer dared capture the town’s underside in this way. In London that year, Defoe brought out his novel about a young woman alone in the city, “put to hard shifts” of petty crime and adultery and something close to prostitution. We cannot say exactly when Franklin read Moll Flanders, but in later life he knew and admired the book. In the Dogood letters he covered the same territory: another sign of just how precocious he was.4

  Up to a point, the letters resembled Gardner’s columns, reading like another homage to The Spectator, but they had something else that was very new. Hidden just a little way beneath the surface, there lay the author’s boyhood and his own obsessions. From behind the mask of Mrs. Dogood, he explored issues of his own that had nothing much to do with Puritan guilt. Being Franklin’s other self, Silence had many things in common with the boy.

  She too was a Whig, calling herself “a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power.” Indeed one sketch was just a long quotation from the series, Cato’s Letters, that had run in The London Journal. Like Franklin, she had been apprenticed to a trade. In her teens, like him she had spent much of her time alone, “reading ingenious books.” And her fictional father and mother had sailed as immigrants from England, like Josiah and Anne Franklin forty years before. In Silence’s case, the male parent met an untimely end on the ship, lost overboard at the moment of her birth, leaving his widow penniless in a new continent.

  Something made Franklin wish to write about the lives of newcomers to the colonies, arriving without friends or a career, just as Josiah had done. He also wanted to write about how it felt to be excluded. Franklin was the tallow chandler’s son who had been denied a place at college. That was something he always resented; a
nd so Harvard appeared in the fourth of the Dogood letters, as a target of satire for its vanity. Rich parents sent their sons to college, said Mrs. Dogood, only to have them come home “as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and conceited.” From one point of view, the Harvard sketch was no more than a clever pastiche of a piece by Addison, in which The Spectator made fun of the Bank of England. From another, it was a cry from the heart by a gifted boy shut out of academia.

  Because the sketches were brief and meant to be read just once, then cast aside, and because the author was still so young, none of his themes was fully explored. Franklin merely played with them, showing off his cleverness while revealing something of his adolescent self. But there was one thing no one could fail to notice. By running the series, the Courant insulted Cotton Mather again, and with the worst possible taste. The title alluded to the pastor’s tract, Bonifacius, with its message that we should all “do good.” With that, they were making fun of the minister. As for “Silence,” that was nothing better than a snide little joke with which they were mocking the afflicted.

  The previous September, Mather had lost not only his beloved daughter Abigail to a fever, which may have been the smallpox, but also her daughter, a newborn girl. Over their coffin he preached a sermon in praise of patience in the face of tragedy. The sermon was published late in 1721 as Silentarius, or The Silent Sufferer. And that was how Mrs. Dogood came to be called “Silence,” in a vicious allusion to the pastor’s grief. It was a way for the Courant to hit Dr. Mather where it was most painful.