by H. W. Brands
James Franklin preferred bombs of the printed sort; oddly, it was one of his lesser fireworks that triggered the strongest reaction. In June 1722 James printed a faked letter to the editor, in which the writer (that is, James himself) suggested that the authorities were remiss in failing to pursue with adequate vigor pirates who were afflicting the New England coast that season. Of the captain named to head the posse, the Courant said sarcastically, “’tis thought he will sail sometime this month, if wind and weather permit.”
For this disrespect the Massachusetts General Court ordered that James be jailed. Many observers judged the reaction disproportionate to the provocation. A commonly accepted explanation was that ever since the smallpox scuffles, the court had been seeking an excuse to silence the turbulent pressman; this was simply the excuse that fell to hand. In connection with his brother’s arrest, Ben was briefly detained and questioned. But on the reasoning that as an apprentice he was legally required to follow his master’s orders, the magistrates released him.
As a result of James’s imprisonment, Ben found himself the acting publisher and managing editor of the Courant. Josiah Franklin earlier had implicitly acknowledged Ben’s strong-headedness in releasing him from the candle shop; James had encountered some of that same independence of mind in the four years following. Ben’s recent surreptitious success with Silence Dogood had not reduced his opinion of himself; now he was in charge of the whole printing and publishing operation. It was enough to swell the vanity of any sixteen-year-old.
“I made bold to give our rulers some rubs,” he boasted afterward. On behalf of freethinkers everywhere—not to mention James, languishing in jail—Silence Dogood contradicted her Christian name. “Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom,” she quoted from an English paper; “and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man…. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech, a thing terrible to public traitors.” This talk of traitors was strong stuff, but Silence had not finished. “It has been for some time a question with me, whether a commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion or by the openly profane? … Some late thoughts of this nature have inclined me to think that the hypocrite is the most dangerous person of the two, especially if he sustains a post in the government.” The openly profane person deceived no one and thereby limited the damage he could cause; but the godly hypocrite enlisted the unwitting many into his malign service. “They take him for a saint and pass him for one, without considering that they are (as it were) the instruments of public mischief out of conscience, and ruin their country for God’s sake.”
James won his release from jail after a month, following a public apology and a physician’s report that confinement was harming his health. Yet he reconsidered his repentance about the same time he recovered his health, and by the beginning of 1723 the Courant, again under his direction, was taxing the council in language like that which Ben had placed in the mouth of Mrs. Dogood. “Whenever I find a man full of religious cant and pellaver,” the January 14 issue opined, “I presently suspect him of being a knave. Religion is indeed the principal thing, but too much of it is worse than none at all. The world abounds with knaves and villains, but of all knaves, the religious knave is the worst; and villainies acted under the cloak of religion are the most execrable.”
Once more the hammer of authority fell. Declaring that the tendency of the Courant was “to mock religion and bring it into disrespect,” the General Court ordered that “James Franklyn, the printer and publisher thereof, be strictly forbidden by this court to print or publish the New England Courant” unless he submitted each issue of the paper to the censor for prior approval.
Briefly James defied the order, publishing additional provocations; but when the sheriff came round with a warrant for another arrest, he fled his shop and went into hiding. From underground—not far underground, as it happened; the sheriff did not look very hard—he arranged to continue the Courant’s crusade. The court’s order applied to James Franklin; it said nothing about Benjamin Franklin. James told Ben to keep publishing but under his own name. In order to prevent the court from acting against Ben as James’s apprentice, James released Ben from his indenture, signing the back of the original agreement and discharging his brother from all obligations. Ben was to keep the endorsed document handy to show the sheriff and anyone else who doubted that Ben was really his own man.
But in fact Ben was not his own man. As a secret condition of his release from the original indenture, James made his brother sign a new, sub rosa agreement covering the scheduled last years of the apprenticeship. In public Ben was free; in private he remained bound.
Yet he was in charge, which counted for something. The February 11, 1723, issue of the Courant explained that James Franklin had “entirely dropped the undertaking”; this was not quite true, but it grew truer by the week. With each issue the paper lost a little of James’s character and took on more of Ben’s. Where James swung his pen like a broadsword, Ben wielded a rapier. His satire was always light, never ponderous; it usually brought smiles to objective lips and must occasionally have turned up the corners of even Cotton Mather’s mouth. With his own name now on the masthead, Ben refrained from labeling the colony’s notables hypocrites; instead he spoofed their obsession with titles. “Adam was never called Master Adam; we never read of Noah Esquire, Lot Knight and Baronet, nor the Right Honourable Abraham, Viscount Mesopotamia, Baron of Carran. … We never read of the Reverend Moses, nor the Right Reverend Father in God, Aaron, by Divine Providence, Lord Arch-Bishop of Israel.” He got his point across, less dramatically but more effectively than James had.
To some extent Ben’s oblique style reflected a rhetorical technique he had picked up from his reading. Xenophon and other authors had introduced him to the Socratic method of argument by inquiry; Ben quickly divined that this would be more effective than the confrontational approach he had been accustomed to use against the likes of John Collins. “I was charmed with it,” he said of the indirect method, “adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradiction, and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter.” Applied to assorted questions philosophical, theological, and political, the new approach exceeded his fondest expectations. “I took a delight in it, practised it continually and grew very artful and expert in drawing people even of superior knowledge into concessions the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither my self nor my cause always deserved.”
But to some extent Ben’s decision to deescalate the Courant’s confrontation with council and court reflected tactical matters touching his personal standing vis-à-vis James. At twelve Ben had been willing, if grudgingly, to accept the terms of his apprenticeship to James; a boy with neither skills nor capital could hardly make his way in the world alone. But at seventeen his circumstances were decidedly different. Although technically not even a journeyman printer, he was as proficient in the craft as many masters. He was at least as clever a writer as James—as James himself had implicitly admitted by the praise he lavished on Silence Dogood before discovering, as he eventually did, who the widow was, when his praise suddenly ceased. Yet James’s colleagues continued to applaud Ben after he dropped his veil of Silence, which irritated James the more. “He thought, probably with reason, that it tended to make me too vain.” When the two brothers took their differences to their father, the old man sided with his younger son—because “I was either generally in the right, or else a better pleader.” This made James all the angrier; in his anger he frequently beat Ben, who took this physical form of insult “extremely amiss.” (He added, parenthetically, from amid the American challenge to British colonial rule during the early 1770s: “I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that
has stuck to me through my whole life.”)
Ben had little doubt he could manage on his own by now. Better than most apprentices, he knew how much it cost to support himself. James was unmarried and for this reason did not keep house himself but boarded with another family. He paid that family for meals; when he took Ben on as apprentice, he paid them for Ben’s board too. After Ben happened upon a book extolling the virtues of vegetarianism, the boy decided to try it. This occasioned some inconvenience with his hosts and provoked additional upbraiding from James. So Ben, after calculating the cost of beef and pork as compared to potatoes and rice, offered to board himself for half the amount James was paying their hosts. James agreed, freeing Ben to discover that even this half was twice what it really cost to feed himself. The balance he spent on books.
“I had another advantage in it,” Ben remarked of his new regimen. “My brother and the rest going from the printing house to their meals, I remained there alone, and dispatching presently my light repast (which often was no more than a biscuit or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart from the pastry-cook’s, and a glass of water) had the rest of the time till their return for study, in which I made the greater progress from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.”
By the evidence of his recurrent arguments with James (“I was frequently chid for my singularity”), Ben made little effort to disguise the feeling of moral superiority his discovery of vegetarianism afforded him; together with the intellectual superiority he felt after the triumph of Silence Dogood, he must have seemed insufferable to his older brother. He himself admitted as much after the fact. “Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking.”
Wherever the demerits lay, Ben decided that his situation with James had grown intolerable—and this conclusion, along with the other reasons, cautioned him against unnecessary affront to the ministerial-magisterial axis of Boston. Several months after his seventeenth birthday he determined to break his indenture to James. This would be illegal; his second contract with James bound him for three years more. But because this contract was secret, Ben reasoned, James would have difficulty enforcing it. Ben could deny its existence; for James to affirm it in any court of law would reveal the sham by which he had evaded the General Court’s cease-and-desist order and open him to contempt charges. By now James had come out of hiding but had posted a sizable bond for good behavior; Ben reckoned that the bond money was his own guarantee of James’s silence on the indenture issue.
It seemed a sound plan, but Ben could not place too much trust in it. James had friends who disliked the censorious ways of the Mather clique as much as he did; already one grand jury had refused to indict him on contempt charges. It was conceivable that opinion’s wheel would turn and James would be hailed as a free-speech hero. Such circumstances might embolden him to press his indenture claim against Ben. From Ben’s perspective the safest course appeared to be to make no more enemies than necessary.
James guessed what his brother was thinking, and even before Ben began inquiring around town for other printing work, James preempted him by pledging his fellow printers to eschew his brother’s services. He also enlisted Josiah, who, while sympathetic to his youngest boy on minor points within the framework of the indenture pact, sided with James on the moral and civic necessity of preserving the framework as a whole.
Consequently Ben saw no recourse but flight—which recommended itself on other grounds as well. To a curious boy, Boston had been an exciting place; to an independent-minded young man, it was starting to stifle. The Mathers did not say such threatening things about Ben as about James, but it was clear they and their supporters had doubts about the younger Franklin too. Reports of his inquiring and skeptical mind were circulating. “My indiscreet disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horror by good people, as an infidel or atheist.” Ben added that he had become “obnoxious to the governing party.” Now might be a good time to leave, before the clerics and judges came after him as they had come after James. “It was likely I might if I stayed soon bring myself into scrapes.”
So he plotted his flight. Selling some of his books to raise money for ship passage to New York, he sent his friend John Collins to tell the captain that he needed to board the boat secretly because he had got a girl pregnant and was being pressed to marry her. The captain, evidently a man of the world, understood. He pocketed Ben’s money and found something to examine at the opposite rail of the ship while Ben slipped aboard. On an outgoing tide and a fair September wind, Ben Franklin fled the town of his birth and youth, carrying only the few shillings in his pocket and all the self-assurance of his nearly eighteen years.
2
Friends and Other Strangers
1723–24
Only later, with age and distance, would Franklin learn to appreciate the more admirable aspects of Cotton Mather’s character and thinking. Now, upon leaving Boston, he landed in a city established by a contemporary of Mather’s, but a man whose view of the proper relation between ministers and magistrates could hardly have been more different from Mather’s—or more congenial to Franklin, both then and during the rest of Franklin’s life.
William Penn first ran afoul of religious authority at about the same age as Franklin (and at about the same time as Josiah Franklin, then still in England). Attending university in Oxford, Penn fell under the sway of the Quaker Thomas Loe, and when Charles II restored strict enforcement of Anglican orthodoxy, Penn resisted. Whether he was thrown out of Oxford or departed of his own disgust at what now seemed to him “a den of hellish ignorance and debauchery” was perhaps a fine point; in either case he left. His father, the formidable Admiral Sir William Penn, was not any more pleased than the boy’s tutors at his strange beliefs; he greeted the lad with blows, turned him out of the house, and threatened to disown him. (Paternal displeasure aside, Sir William may simply have been a difficult man to get along with; his neighbor and navy colleague Samuel Pepys had to put up with him for professional reasons but declared in his diary, “I hate him with all my heart.” On the other hand, it may have been Pepys who was the difficult one. Although he did not disdain his neighbor’s invitations to dinner, he complained confidentially that Mrs. Penn’s cooking “stank like the very Devil.”)
The threat of disownment triggered a temporary lapse from Quaker conscience; young William reconciled with his father and went off to the Continent for a holiday at the court of Louis XIV. He did not stay long and by 1667 was securely back within the fold of his English Friends. He published a series of tracts contending for freedom of conscience; he preached the same doctrine before crowds large and small. In 1670 he was arrested for unlawful address to an unruly assembly. At the trial he argued eloquently that a man’s mind and soul must remain beyond the reach of the magistrate; the jury voted to acquit—whereupon the judge ordered the jury arrested. (The latter arrests were subsequently overturned in a case that became a landmark in the evolution of the common law.)
At about this time Penn’s father died. The admiral had learned to accept his son’s sincerity if not his beliefs, and he left young William a sizable fortune. This included an annuity of £1,500 and, more portentously for English and American history, a claim of £16,000 upon the impecunious Charles for loans outstanding. The younger Penn was in and out of prison during this period—for declining to doff his hat in court, for further unauthorized preaching, for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. When he was not behind bars, he spent extended periods in Europe disseminating Quaker ideas and values. In court, in prison, and on the Continent, he sharpened his arguments for religious toleration, and when a Quaker friend who had an interest in what would become the colony of New Jersey ran into financial trouble and needed rescue, Penn took the opportunity to draft a set of “concessions and agreements” for the venture, guaranteeing to settlers the most sweeping religious liberty anywhere in England’s empire. Unfortunately for freedom of co
nscience in New Jersey, the concessions never went into effect, being swallowed up in some further commercial restructuring of the colony.
Disappointed but determined to try again, Penn pressed Charles to redeem his debt to him by granting him a large tract of land west of New Jersey. Charles consented, and after some haggling Penn became the proprietor of what may have been the largest single piece of real estate ever legally held by someone other than a monarch. Penn wanted to call the well-forested territory “Sylvania,” but Charles insisted on honoring the admiral—not the son—by prefixing “Penn.” Both parties were happy to portray the transaction as a case of balancing the royal books, but both understood that there was more involved. Speaking of himself and his fellow Friends, Penn observed, “The government was anxious to be rid of us at so cheap a price.”
As proprietor of Pennsylvania, Penn enjoyed sweeping powers subject only to the constraints of the common law, applicable Parliamentary measures such as the navigation acts, and the sensitivities of imperial politics. This left a great deal of latitude in all his longitude. He immediately prescribed the closest thing to democracy within the empire, allowing the election of a representative council based on broad manhood suffrage. Not surprisingly, in light of his convictions—both the theological kind and those handed down by the courts—he guaranteed freedom of religion. Equally predictably, in light of the pacifism of the Quakers, he called for amicable relations with the Indian tribes that occupied his new possessions.
