The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Before long, Ben began to appreciate the advantages of his new line of work. His appetite for reading had always grown with the eating; of late he had devoured Pilgrim’s Progress and other works by Bunyan, Burton’s Historical Collections, Plutarch’s Lives, Defoe’s Essay on Projects, and various of Cotton Mather’s preachments. Now that he was thrown into regular contact with the most literate element in a highly literate society, he discovered that an even wider array of literature fell open to him. As apprentice to a printer, he daily dealt with apprentices to the town’s booksellers; he formed an alliance with one in particular, who allowed him to borrow books from his master’s collection to read after hours. “Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning lest it should be missed or wanted.” One of James’s customers, Matthew Adams, remarked this inquisitive lad and gave him direct access to the Adams family library, an impressive if quirky collection.

  James did not object to his younger brother’s campaign of self-improvement, so long as it did not diminish his productivity in the press room, which it did not. “In a little time I made great proficiency in the business, and became a useful hand to my brother,” Ben wrote, quite believably. Indeed, James soon found a way to capitalize on the boy’s literary bent. A common entertainment in those days consisted of poems struck off on the occasion of important or otherwise noteworthy events. Ben had been reading verses from the Adams library, and he determined to have a try at the genre. An early effort memorialized the sad drowning of the keeper of a local lighthouse, his wife and daughter, and a friend and a slave. Beyond the basic human appeal of a story of the untimely death of loved ones, especially including a sweet and innocent young girl, the tragedy had special resonance in a society that lived by the sea—and consequently too often died by the sea. Whether or not Ben comprehended all the facets of his tale, he knocked out a piece called “The Lighthouse Tragedy,” which he and James quickly printed up. A much older, more sophisticated Franklin called it “wretched stuff, in the Grubstreet ballad style,” but had to admit that it “sold wonderfully.” He added frankly, “This flattered my vanity.”

  The plaudits and the profits inspired another venture into verse, a ballad commemorating the recent killing of the notorious pirate Edward Teach, commonly called Blackbeard.

  Will you hear of a bloody battle,

  Lately fought upon the seas,

  It will make your ears to rattle,

  And your admiration cease.

  Have you heard of Teach the Rover

  And his knavery on the main,

  How of gold he was a lover,

  How he loved all ill-got gain.

  There were several more stanzas, climaxing on the quarterdeck:

  Teach and Maynard on the quarter,

  Fought it out most manfully;

  Maynard’s sword did cut him shorter,

  Losing his head he there did die.

  Perhaps because this poem lacked the romantic-tragic element, it sold less well than Ben’s first. (Closer comparison is impossible, as the first does not survive). Josiah had frowned on his son’s poetic efforts, ridiculing them and warning that verse-makers were generally beggars, but as long as the lighthouse tale belied the warning, Ben ignored the criticism. Yet now the ridicule stung more sharply and the warning rang louder, and the boy abandoned balladic Grub Street for more respectable precincts of prose.

  By a matter of luck and untutored good taste, his guides to those precincts turned out to be some of the finest prose stylists of the day. Previously Ben had honed his argumentative skills on a friend of similarly bookish bent. On one occasion Ben and this John Collins disputed the prudence and appropriateness of educating girls beyond basic literacy. Ben, who took the affirmative, believed he had the better of the argument on merits but conceded that Collins was the more persuasive presenter. Ben hoped to gain an advantage by shifting ground from the spoken word to the written, but here again he discovered that his arguments lacked the eloquence and power of his opponent’s. Josiah, who happened across some of Ben’s papers, concurred, pointing out particular deficiencies in style and approach.

  Frustrated and now somewhat embarrassed, Ben determined to remedy the situation. He had recently encountered an early issue of The Spectator, the London journal soon to be famous for the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Ben read this number front to back, then back to front and all over again. Entranced by the authors’ ease of exposition, he adopted the Spectator’s style as a model for his own. He devised elaborate exercises to absorb the principles that underlay its phrases. He would read passages, then try to recapitulate them from memory. On the reasoning that poetry demands a larger vocabulary than prose—a given meaning must also fit the pattern of rhyme and meter—he reworked the Spectator essays into verse, and subsequently back into prose again. He took notes on the essays, then deliberately scrambled the notes before attempting to reconstruct the original order, the better to appreciate the art of rhetorical organization. He shunned sleep, sitting up late with his quill pen and a sheaf of papers salvaged from the printing shop’s scrap pile, then rising early to fit in a few more exercises before James entered the shop and the real work of the day commenced. He exploited James’s relative unconcern at the state of his younger brother’s soul to steal Sundays from the South Church and its sacred texts for the print shop and his secular volumes. Josiah, missing his youngest son at services, disapproved but declined to intervene between master and apprentice; perhaps he already recognized that Ben’s zeal for the word of man would forever outstrip his zeal for the word of God. The former sentiment was a powerful motivator; referring to his efforts to make himself a writer, Ben admitted afterward, “I was extremely ambitious.”

  He had a chance to gratify that ambition, and to measure his literary advancement, after James began publishing the New England Courant in 1721. During the previous two years James had been the printer—but not the publisher—of the Boston Gazette, which, like other papers of that era, was something of an adjunct to and perquisite of the office of the Boston postmaster. Postmasters had first knowledge of most of the news that came in—by post frequently—from the outside world; this news could be recycled in one’s own paper. Moreover, a postmaster could exploit his command of the outgoing mails to arrange distribution of his paper in preference to—or to the exclusion of—competitors’ publications.

  But because the postmastership was a public office, postmasters’ papers (including the Gazette) tended to tread lightly on issues relating to government. The Gazette boasted that it was published “by authority”; it read as though it were published by the authorities. James Franklin thought Boston deserved better, and after his printing contract with the Gazette ran out, he determined to start his own paper. This one would be lively, opinionated, and not averse to challenging the establishment.

  No one so represented the establishment as Cotton Mather; James’s new paper, the New England Courant, announced its birth with a scathing attack on Mather. The occasion of the attack was an epidemic of smallpox, the first in nearly two decades—which hiatus was a primary cause of the virulence of this outbreak, in that an unexposed generation had little or no resistance to the disease. For all his obsession with the supernatural, Mather had maintained his youthful interest in the natural, and he advocated the novel technique of inoculation to combat the contagion.

  James Franklin knew next to nothing of the etiology of smallpox, but he knew he despised Mather for what James judged the eminent minister’s smugness and his inordinate influence over the life of Boston. If Mather advocated inoculation, the Courant must oppose it—and did. The campaign of opposition accomplished no good for the health of the community; nearly 10 percent of the population died before the disease ran its course. In fairness to James, the preponderance of medical knowledge at the time was on his side regarding the inefficacy of inoculation; one of his collaborators in oppositi
on was William Douglass, a physician educated at the best English and continental European universities. But whatever its effects on public health, the anti-inoculation campaign served James’s purpose of shaking the status quo.

  The status quo shook back. Increase Mather publicly denounced the “vile Courant” and said he “could well remember when the Civil Government would have taken an effectual course to suppress such a cursed libel.” Samuel Mather, Cotton’s son and an apparent beneficiary of inoculation, wrote semianonymously (and that not for long) in the Gazette that the Courant was trying “to vilify and abuse the best men we have”; he warned that “there is a number of us who resolve that if this wickedness be not stopped, we will pluck up our courage and see what we can do in our way to stop it.” Many readers heard the voice of Cotton Mather in an unsigned complaint to the Boston News-Letter decrying the “notorious, scandalous paper called the Courant” and charging said screed sheet with purveying “nonsense, unmanliness, railery, profaneness, immorality, arrogance, calumnies, lies, contradictions, and what not all tending to quarrels and divisions, and to debauch and corrupt the minds and manners of New England.” Whether or not those precise words were Cotton Mather’s, the sentiments surely were; in his diary Mather wrote of “the wicked printer and his accomplices who every week publish a vile paper to lessen and blacken the ministers of the town, and render their ministry ineffectual.”

  With the battle joined, James Franklin sought allies. At this early stage the list of Courant contributors comprised only James and a few kindred skeptics; to create the illusion of numbers, the publisher-editor and his friends employed the common journalistic tactic of writing under noms de plume—“Abigail Afterwit,” “Timothy Turnstone,” “Harry Meanwell,” “Fanny Mournful” and others. These fictitious personages graced the paper with sharp-penned commentary on issues of the day; not surprisingly they tended to endorse the paper’s editorial views.

  Consequently it was with pleasure that James awoke one morning to discover beneath the door of the print shop a contribution from a genuine outsider. Actually, this contributor was not an outsider at all; it was Ben Franklin, who had observed the genesis of the Courant and its challenge to Mather and the Massachusetts hierarchy but who conspicuously had not been invited to join the undertaking. Because he had not—and because he realized that James might be less than enthusiastic about his younger brother’s participation in the new project—Ben carefully disguised his handwriting and signed the letter “Silence Dogood.” James read the missive with growing delight—which increased the more from his appreciation that the author’s very name tweaked Cotton Mather, whose recently published Silentarius followed his earlier Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good. James shared the Dogood letter with his colleagues; they registered equal approval. James ran it in the April 2, 1722, issue of the Courant.

  Mrs. Dogood introduced herself to Courant patrons by chaffing them for the contemporary unwillingness “either to commend or dispraise what they read until they are in some measure informed who or what the author of it is, whether he be poor or rich, old or young, a scholar or a leather apron man.” She (or Ben Franklin, rather) proceeded to mock this timidity by fabricating a fanciful background for herself. She had, she said, been born at sea en route from the old England to New England. But the joy surrounding her birth had turned to sorrow almost at once when a huge wave swept across the deck of the vessel and carried her celebrating father to his watery doom. It was a misfortune, Silence said, “which though I was not then capable of knowing, I shall never be able to forget.”

  The death of her father had made an indigent of her mother, with the result that the infant Silence was placed in foster care outside Boston, where she passed her childhood “in vanity and idleness” until being bound over to a country minister, “a pious good-natured young man and a bachelor.” This godly fellow instructed the girl in all that was necessary for the female sex to learn—“needlework, writing, arithmetic, & c.” (Had James known of Ben’s earlier defense of education for girls, he might have guessed the identity of Silence Dogood at this point.) Because she displayed a head for books, the minister allowed her the run of his library, “which though it was but small, yet it was well chose to inform the understanding rightly and enable the mind to frame great and noble ideas.” This bucolic idyll was interrupted briefly by the news that her poor mother had died—“leaving me as it were by my self, having no relation on earth within my knowledge”—but soon enough it resumed. “I passed away the time with a mixture of profit and pleasure, having no affliction but what was imaginary and created in my own fancy; as nothing is more common with us women than to be grieving for nothing when we have nothing else to grieve for.”

  Almost certainly none of the readers of the Courant guessed that this ironically knowing voice belonged to a sixteen-year-old boy; neither did James, who inserted after Silence Dogood’s first epistle an invitation for more. Any such additional missives could be delivered to the printing house or to the candle shop of Josiah Franklin. “No questions shall be asked of the bearer.”

  Ben later said he felt “exquisite pleasure” at the approbation this first effort in journalism elicited; he took particular satisfaction from listening to James and the others guess who the anonymous author might be. “None were named but men of some character among us for learning and ingenuity.” During the next six months Ben continued his correspondence, delivering fifteen Dogood letters in all.

  His topics ranged from love to learning to lamenting the death of dear ones. As in the first letter, insight and irony were evenly matched. Silence related how, to her astonishment, her ministerial benefactor presently essayed to woo her. “There is certainly scarce any part of a man’s life in which he appears more silly and ridiculous than when he makes his first onset in courtship.” (As Ben was of an age, if not an economic condition, to consider courtship, the reader who knows the identity of Silence Dogood discerns a certain dawning in him of the difficulties of the endeavor.) But gratitude inclined Silence to accept his suit, leading to wedlock and “the height of conjugal love and mutual endearments,” not to mention “two likely girls and a boy.” Tragically, her husband was carried off by illness almost as suddenly as her father had been swept away by the ocean, and Silence was left to look after herself and her offspring. Yet, as she assured readers, especially the men among them: “I could be easily persuaded to marry again…. I am courteous and affable, good humoured (unless I am first provoked) and handsome, and sometimes witty.”

  Silence satirized the state of higher education in Boston, lampooning Harvard College—the alma mater of Cotton Mather, among other establishment influentials—as a snobbish ivory tower where students “learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely and enter a room genteelly (which might as well be acquired at a dancing school) and from whence they return, after abundance of trouble and charge, as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and conceited.” She chided men for being as foolish as the women they criticized for idleness and folly: “Are not the men to blame for their folly in maintaining us in idleness?” She scoffed at women for silliness equal to men’s—how else to explain hoop petticoats, those “monstrous topsy-turvy mortar pieces” that looked more like “engines of war” than ornaments of the fair sex. Having experienced multiple deaths in her family, she offered a formula for eulogizing departed loved ones, pointing out that tears were the easier to elicit the more unexpected and violent the demise. “It will be best if he went away suddenly, being killed, drowned, or froze to death.” The address in such a case ought to include a litany of melancholy expressions such as “dreadful, deadly, cruel cold death, unhappy fate, weeping eyes.” An experienced speaker would wring the maximal lachrymation from an audience, but in a pinch anyone could deliver the doleful sentiments. “Put them into the empty skull of some young Harvard (but in case you have ne’er a one at hand, you may use your own).” Rhymes were nice: “power, flower; quiver, shiver; grieve us, leave us.” A concludi
ng flourish was the mark of a really distinguished graveside encomium. “If you can procure a scrap of Latin to put at the end, it will garnish it mightily.”

  Had they come from the pen of a mature writer, the Dogood letters would deserve to be considered a delightful example of social satire. Coming as they did from the pen of a mere youth, they reveal emerging genius. Some of what Franklin wrote he might have experienced indirectly; some he extrapolated from his reading; much he must simply have imagined. But the tone is uniformly confident and true to the character he created. Silence is irreverent and full of herself, yet she brings most readers—the proud and powerful excepted—into the realm of her sympathy. They laugh when she laughs, and laugh at whom she laughs at. She is one of the more memorable minor characters of American literature, and all the more memorable for being the creation of a sixteen-year-old boy.

  Silence Dogood’s early offerings afforded distraction from the controversies that continued to roil the town. A visitor to Boston had limned the environs and their inhabitants: “The houses in some parts join as in London—the buildings, like their women, being neat and handsome. And their streets, like the hearts of the male inhabitants, are paved with pebble.”

  Many of those pebbled hearts agreed with James Franklin that the public pietism of the Mathers and their ecclesiastical allies had grown intolerable. One anticlerical militant, perhaps still sore from the witch trials, went so far as to throw a bomb into Cotton Mather’s house. The explosive device failed to detonate, leaving the target to intone, “This night there stood by me the angel of the God, whose I am and whom I serve.” The failure also allowed Mather to read the appended message: “COTTON MATHER, You Dog, Damn You: I’ll inoculate you with this, with a Pox to you.”