by H. W. Brands
While not in custody, Folger was equally busy at home. He and his wife, Mary, had nine children, of whom Abiah was the last. Despite her father’s distaste for entrenched power, she moved to Boston as a young adult. There she met Josiah and Anne Franklin, who welcomed her into communion with their church. When Anne died in 1689 bearing Josiah’s seventh child, the father—after the practical, if unromantic, fashion of the age—wasted little time mourning her; within six months he was married to Abiah. He was thirty-two; she was ten years younger.
Josiah and Abiah had ten children together. Nine of these ten survived childhood; one—Ebenezer—accidentally slipped under the surface of a soapy washtub at sixteen months and was missed too late to be revived.
Benjamin, who was named for his father’s next-older and favorite brother, was the eighth child of his mother and the fifteenth of his father. He was born on January 6, 1705, by the calendar then in use; this would translate to January 17, 1706, when the calendar was reformed halfway through his life. His birthplace was the small house his parents were leasing on Milk Street just across from the South Church. The convenience of the location, coupled with the fact that the birth occurred early on a Sunday, when the congregation would be in church anyway, prompted Josiah to swaddle the newborn in thick blankets against the January wind and carry him across the street for baptism within hours of the birth.
The father returned the baby to the Milk Street house immediately after the christening; there Ben lived for the next six years, until Josiah purchased a larger dwelling at the corner of Union and Hanover streets. Even the larger house overflowed with all those children. The number actually in residence varied as the older ones came and went; Ben later recollected sitting down at the dinner table with an even dozen of his siblings. Other relatives, including Uncle Benjamin, spent stretches of various length under Josiah’s roof.
As one of the youngest, Ben necessarily learned to get along with others; outnumbered and outweighed by his elder siblings, he relied on wits where force failed. Often insight came after the fact. “When I was a child of seven years old,” he recounted several decades later, “my friends on a holiday filled my little pocket with half-pence. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children, and being charmed with the sound of a whistle that I met by the way, in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my money for it. When I came home, whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family, my brothers, sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth, put me in mind of what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money, and laughed at me so much for my folly that I cried with vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.” With the wisdom of age, Franklin added, “As I came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met many who gave too much for the whistle.”
Ben’s facility with the written word manifested itself early. “I do not remember when I could not read,” he said afterward—which in another person might have meant a weak memory but in his case indicated real precociousness. This inclined his father to train him for the ministry, as did the circumstance that Ben was the tenth—the “tithe”—of Josiah’s sons. At eight years Ben was enrolled in the town’s grammar school (which would become the Boston Latin School). He quickly went to the head of his class and was promoted midterm to the next class. But his academic career was cut short when Josiah, reflecting on the expenses of feeding, clothing, housing, and educating his large brood, and reckoning the meager income a minister might command, decided that God would have to be satisfied with the sons of the well-to-do. Josiah briefly enrolled Ben in a school run by one George Brownell, specializing in arithmetic and writing; Ben’s way with words continued to distinguish him, but numbers proved mystifyingly perverse, and the experiment was canceled. At ten, Ben entered the chandler trade, cutting wicks for candles, filling molds, waiting on customers, and running errands about the town.
It was an entrancing town for a boy to run about. Boston may have begun life as a religious refuge for nonconformists, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century it was looking like any number of secular seaports that dotted both shores of the North Atlantic. It was by far the busiest port in English America. More than a thousand ships were registered with Boston’s harbormaster—these in addition to the many more that were registered elsewhere but made Boston a regular stop on the trade routes between the New World and the Old. This merchant armada brought cargoes of silk and spices from the Orient, slaves from West Africa, rum and molasses from the West Indies, manufactured goods from Britain, and foodstuffs and other raw and partially processed materials from elsewhere in North America. Only when the coldest weather encased the harbor in ice did the traffic cease. Scores of wharves lined the waterfront at the eastern edge of the town; the most magnificent of these was the fittingly labeled Long Wharf, which extended from the foot of King Street nearly a quarter mile into the harbor. This remarkable structure contained both a wooden roadway thirty feet wide and a string of warehouses perched on pilings above the waves.
Boston did not merely service ships; it also built them. A dozen shipyards employed hundreds of skilled artisans and unskilled laborers—brawny men with arms as thick as hawsers from sawing oak logs into keels and ribbing for the hulls that would have to withstand the tempests of all the world’s oceans, dextrous men who wove those hawsers and sewed the sails that turned those tempests to propulsion and profit, clever men who adapted standard ship designs to suit the diverse needs of this India trader, that coaster, those lobstermen. Every week or so a new hull would groan down the ways and, amid a stupendous splash and that irrepressible frisson of uncertainty as to whether she would go down to the sea or down to the sea floor, add another bottom to Boston’s navy.
The ocean’s call tantalized every Boston boy of Ben Franklin’s generation. The salt smell permeated the entire town, not least the house on Union Street, which was but a block back from the water. From his doorstep he could see the masts of the Indiamen as they lay beside the Long Wharf; in the mornings before rising he could hear the metal moanings of the anchor chains as the ships in the harbor made ready to run out on the ebb tide. He knew they would visit the most exotic places on earth before returning to Boston two or three or ten years hence; he could imagine the strange and wonderful people who inhabited those exotic locales.
The call of the sea had been too much for Ben’s eldest brother, Josiah. Two years before Ben was born, the younger Josiah had turned his back on the terrestrial world of his father—the world of the chandlery, of the house on Milk Street, of the South Church, of the probing gaze of the Puritan elders—and shipped out on a merchantman bound for the Indies. He never returned. For years his father assumed he would eventually find his way back to Boston, if only for a stopover. But in 1715, when Ben was nine years old, the grim word arrived that Josiah’s vessel had been lost at sea.
Thus it was with worry and fear that the elder Josiah observed his youngest son being drawn to the waterfront. Ben later recorded that he had “a strong inclination for the sea,” which he indulged to the extent a young boy could against his father’s disapproval. “Living near the water, I was much in and about it, learned early to swim well, and to manage boats, and when in a boat or canoe with other boys I was commonly allowed to govern, especially in any case of difficulty.”
The lure of the water—joined to Ben’s emerging mechanical curiosity and inventiveness—prompted an early experiment. One windy day he was flying a kite on the bank of the Mill Pond, an artificial enclosure that had been constructed to trap the high tide and release it through the race of a gristmill. Notwithstanding the wind, the afternoon was warm and the water inviting. Ben tied the kite to a stake in the ground, doffed his clothes, and dove in. The water was pleasantly cool, and he was reluctant to leave it, but he wanted to fly his kite some more. He pondered his dilem
ma until it occurred to him that he need not forgo one diversion for the other. He clambered out of the pond, untied the kite from the stake, and returned to the water. As the buoyancy of the water diminished gravity’s hold on his feet, he felt the kite tugging him forward. He surrendered to the wind’s power, lying on his back and letting the kite pull him clear across the pond—“without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.” Writing from France decades later, he added, “I think it not impossible to cross in this manner from Dover to Calais.” On other occasions the youngster experimented with hand paddles to augment the power of his swimming stroke, and wooden flippers for his feet. Neither innovation was as successful as the sail-kite: the paddles overly fatigued his wrists, while the flippers, being stiff, failed to mimic a fish’s tail sufficiently.
The Mill Pond was the location of at least one adventure that turned out ill. Next to the pond was a salt marsh where Ben and the boys liked to hunt small fish. But their stalking stirred up the mud and clouded the water, frustrating their efforts to capture lunch. To mitigate the murkiness, Ben proposed that they build a jetty extending into the marsh. The only convenient building material consisted of stones recently delivered to a building site nearby. Ben suggested that the gang wait until the masons at the site went home for the evening, at which point the stones might be put to the purpose of improving the fishery. The boys waited, the men departed, and the construction commenced. After several hours and much struggling, the jetty was completed, to the boys’ satisfaction and pride. The foreman of the building crew, arriving next morning, was less admiring. A cursory investigation revealed the whereabouts of the missing stones, from which the foreman deduced the identity of those responsible for their removal. The boys were remanded to their parents’ custody and chastisement; although Ben pleaded the civic usefulness of the construction, Josiah pointed out that the first civic virtue was honesty.
Ben might have added that this transgression was decidedly venial compared to what other lads of the town regularly engaged in. Boston’s boys had long evinced an ebullient streak, especially on Guy Fawkes Day, the November anniversary of the aborted Gunpowder Plot against Parliament in 1605. Clusters of youths from the South End of town would swarm past the Franklin house—which lay not far from Mill Creek, the line of demarcation between the southern and northern neighborhoods—into the North End looking for trouble. More often than not, they found it. When they failed, they could count on discovering it back in their own neighborhood when the northerners repaid the visit. Over time the fun grew more frequent; at the end of the eighteenth century, Edward Reynolds—who happened to be the great-great-grandson of Josiah Franklin’s landlord on Milk Street—explained that “the old feud between the Southenders and Northenders,” which he described as being “as old as the town itself,” was “the occasion of a regular battle every Thursday and Saturday afternoon.” Reynolds added that the clashes were “not infrequently the occasion of very serious injury to wind and limb.” They were also practice in the arts applied against the agents—and then the soldiers—of King George III.
Josiah Franklin was fifty-eight when he brought Ben into the shop, and by this time of his life he was content with the predictability and security his business afforded him and his family. But the candle shop held little appeal for the boy, who found the endless pouring, trimming, cutting, and packing hopelessly dull next to the far more exciting activities happening all over town. His dissatisfaction only increased—indeed, approached something akin to despair—when his elder brother John left the family firm to set himself up independently in Rhode Island, and Josiah gave every indication of commanding Ben to take his place as apprentice and future partner.
The scope for rebellion by a twelve-year-old boy was limited. But there was always the threat of running off to sea—a real threat even for one as young as Ben, considering the demand of the shipping trade for cabin boys. Josiah had lost his namesake this way, and he could hardly bear the thought of losing his youngest son similarly. Consequently, in a strange way Ben gained an advantage over his father in this early contest of wills. Josiah abandoned the notion of making a chandler out of the boy and began taking him around the town to observe the other craftsmen at work, in the hope that some honest calling less dangerous than the sea would satisfy his taste for novelty and excitement.
Although no single craft commended itself above all others, cutlery appeared promising. Ben had shown some cleverness with his hands and with tools; making and repairing knives might put that cleverness to use. Moreover, his cousin Samuel—Uncle Benjamin’s boy—who had been a cutler in London, had recently relocated to Boston; Ben could apprentice with him. And so Ben was sent to live and work with Samuel on a trial basis. But Samuel demanded a maintenance fee Josiah judged excessive, not least in light of the fact that Josiah had been maintaining Samuel’s father for years with no remuneration. The cutlery apprenticeship collapsed.
Josiah then consulted a son of his own. James Franklin, nine years Ben’s elder, had recently returned from London, where he had learned the printer’s trade. He had established a shop on Queen Street, just three blocks from Josiah’s house; there he was attempting to find a niche among the town’s four other printers. The business began slowly, but in an era when printing provided the only feasible means of reproducing the written word on any but the most limited scale, and in a community devoted to the study of the Scriptures, an activity that required and indeed produced nearly universal literacy among adult males and substantial literacy among females, James had reason to anticipate success. He believed that from a small start printing sermons and broadsides—those all-purpose posters conveying information on everything from politics to the price of peas—he might graduate to books and other more profitable assignments. He needed a helper. Ben could serve as well as any other.
In fact Ben served very well. Printing turned out to be ideally suited to his peculiar combination of manual and intellectual dexterity. The physical process of printing was straightforward, if somewhat involved. The printer set the handwritten text in type, placing the cast-metal letters (imported, during this period, from England) in rows that would yield the lines of printed text. These lines were held in place by rectangular frames corresponding to the printed pages; typically four pages were set and framed at once. The letters were inked, paper was laid over them and pressed against them, and the sheet of four pages was hung or laid aside to dry. As many sheets were pressed as copies the customer ordered. After the last impressions were made and had dried, the sheets were cut into their separate pages, which were collated and bound.
The mental aspect of the craft was no less significant than the physical. Printers doubled as editors, proofreading their patrons’ prose (and their own typesetting) and suggesting improvements in style. In some instances they served as coauthors or ghostwriters, filling gaps in imagination or knowledge. In addition, the printing trade shared certain activities with all businesses: accounting, marketing, inventory control, customer relations.
From the beginning Ben showed himself adept at both the physical and mental aspects of printing. His fingers flitted from type rack to frame, plucking the letters he needed and slipping them into their places. He had inherited a good set of shoulders from Josiah; as he matured, and as he continued to swim at every opportunity, these grew strong enough to sling around the heavy sets of lead type and to operate the manual presses for hours at a time. His facility with language eased the chores of editing and proofing; his early-acquired and always-widening reading habits attuned his ear to felicitous phrasing and his eye to orthodox orthography. His failure at arithmetic proved to have been Mr. Brownell’s doing more than his own; a subsequent self-study course yielded rapid progress to a mastery more than adequate for any tradesman.
It did not take James long to appreciate what Ben could bring to the printing business. He soon struck an agreement with Josiah that Ben would serve as his apprentice. The term—nine years—was longer than
that of most apprenticeships, but printing required greater skill and longer training than most trades. In other respects the apprenticeship fit the custom of the day, which was summarized in a typical indenture document:
The said Apprentice his Master faithfully shall or will serve, his secrets keep, his lawful commands everywhere gladly do…. The goods of his said Master he shall not waste, nor the same without license of him to any give or lend. Hurt to his said Master he shall not do, cause, nor procure to be done…. Taverns, inns, or alehouses he shall not haunt. At cards, dice, tables or any other unlawful game he shall not play. Matrimony he shall not contract; nor from the service of his said Master day or night absent himself; but in all things as an honest and faithful apprentice shall and will demean and behave himself towards his said Master and all his during said term.
Beyond this boilerplate, James agreed to pay Ben the wages of a journeyman printer during the final year of his indenture.
Although Ben deemed printing preferable to cutlery, and certainly to chandlery, and while he could see that printing was something he might be good at, he had reservations about the apprenticeship. Nine years looked an eternity to a twelve-year-old, and, as he recalled later, he “still had a hankering for the sea.” But this hankering simply intensified Josiah’s determination to seal the arrangement, and through a combination of cajolery and threat—legally, a father did not require his son’s approval for an apprenticeship—he induced Ben to sign the indenture papers.
