Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  A central theme of Bunyan’s book—and of the passage from Puritanism to Enlightenment, and of Franklin’s life—was contained in its title:progress, the concept that individuals, and humanity in general, move forward and improve based on a steady increase of knowledge and the wisdom that comes from conquering adversity. Christian’s famous opening phrase sets the tone: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world…” Even for the faithful, this progress was not solely the handiwork of the Lord but also the result of a human struggle, by individuals and communities, to triumph over obstacles.

  Likewise, another Franklin favorite—and one must pause to marvel at a 12-year-old with such tastes in leisure pursuits—was Plutarch’s Lives, which is also based on the premise that individual endeavor can change the course of history for the better. Plutarch’s heroes, like Bunyan’s Christian, are honorable men who believe that their personal strivings are intertwined with the progress of humanity. History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

  This outlook clashed with some of the tenets of Calvinism, such as the essential depravity of man and the predestination of his soul, which Franklin would eventually abandon as he edged his way closer to the less daunting deism that became the creed of choice during the Enlightenment. Yet, there were many aspects of Puritanism that made a lasting impression, most notably the practical, sociable, community-oriented aspects of that religion.

  These were expressed eloquently in a work that Franklin often cited as a key influence:Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good, one of the few gentle tracts of the more than four hundred written by Cotton Mather. “If I have been,” Franklin wrote to Cotton Mather’s son almost seventy years later, “a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book.” Franklin’s first pen name, Silence Dogood, paid homage both to the book and to a famous sermon by Mather, “Silentiarius: The Silent Sufferer.”

  Mather’s tract called on members of the community to form voluntary associations to benefit society, and he personally founded a neighborhood improvement group, known as Associated Families, which Benjamin’s father joined. He also urged the creation of Young Men Associated clubs and of Reforming Societies for the Suppression of Disorders, which would seek to improve local laws, provide charity for the poor, and encourage religious behavior.33

  Mather’s ideas were influenced by Daniel Defoe’s An Essay upon Projects, which was another favorite book of Franklin’s. Published in 1697, it proposed for London many of the sort of community projects that Franklin would later launch in Philadelphia: fire insurance associations, voluntary seamen’s societies to create pensions, schemes to provide welfare for the elderly and widows, academies to educate the children of the middle class, and (with just a touch of Defoe humor) institutions to house the mentally retarded paid for by a tax on authors because they happened to get a greater share of intelligence at birth just as the retarded happened to get less.34

  Among Defoe’s most progressive notions was that it was “barbarous” and “inhumane” to deny women equal education and rights, and An Essay upon Projects contains a diatribe against such sexism. Around that time, Franklin and “another bookish lad” named John Collins began engaging each other in debates as an intellectual sport. Their first topic was the education of women, with Collins opposing it. “I took the contrary side,” Franklin recalled, not totally out of conviction but “perhaps a little for dispute sake.”

  As a result of his mock debates with Collins, Franklin began to tailor for himself a persona that was less contentious and confrontational, which made him seem endearing and charming as he grew older—or, to a small but vocal cadre of enemies, manipulative and conniving. Being “disputatious,” he concluded, was “a very bad habit” because contradicting people produced “disgusts and perhaps enmities.” Later in his life he would wryly say of disputing: “Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh.”

  Instead, after stumbling across some rhetoric books that extolled Socrates’ method of building an argument through gentle queries, he “dropped my abrupt contradiction” style of argument and “put on the humbler enquirer” of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert. “I found this method the safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore, I took a delight in it.” Although he later abandoned the more annoying aspects of a Socratic approach, he continued to favor gentle indirection rather than confrontation in making his arguments.35

  Silence Dogood

  Part of his debate with Collins over the education of women was waged by exchanging letters, and his father happened to read them. Though Josiah did not take sides in the dispute (he achieved his own semblance of fairness by providing little formal education to any of his children of either sex), he did criticize his son for his weak and unpersuasive writing style. In reaction, the precocious young teen devised for himself a self-improvement course with the help of a volume of The Spectator that he found.

  The Spectator, a London daily that flourished in 1711–12, featured deft essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele probing the vanities and values of contemporary life. The outlook was humanistic and enlightened, yet light. As Addison put it, “I shall endeavor to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality.”

  As part of his self-improvement course, Franklin read the essays, took brief notes, and laid them aside for a few days. Then he tried to recreate the essay in his own words, after which he compared his composition to the original. Sometimes he would jumble up the notes he took, so that he would have to figure out on his own the best order to build the essay’s argument.

  He turned some of the essays into poetry, which helped him (so he thought) expand his vocabulary by forcing him to search for words that had similar meanings but different rhythms and sounds. These, too, he turned back into essays after a few days, comparing them to see where he had diverged from the original. When he found his own version wanting, he would correct it. “But I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that in certain particulars of small import I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think that I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.”36

  More than making himself merely “tolerable” as a writer, he became the most popular writer in colonial America. His self-taught style, as befitting a protégé of Addison and Steele, featured a fun and conversational prose that was lacking in poetic flourish but powerful in its directness.

  Thus was born Silence Dogood. James Franklin’s Courant, which was modeled on The Spectator, featured sassy pseudonymous essays, and his print shop attracted a congregation of clever young contributors who liked to hang around and praise each other’s prose. Benjamin was eager to become part of the crowd, but he knew that James, already jealous of his upstart young brother, was unlikely to encourage him. “Hearing their conversations, and their accounts of the approbation their papers were received with, I was excited to try my hand among them.”

  So one night, Franklin, disguising his handwriting, wrote an essay and slipped it under the printing house door. The cadre of Couranteers who gathered the next day lauded the anonymous submission, and Franklin had the “exquisite pleasure” of listening as they decided to feature it on the front page of the issue out the next Monday, April 2, 1722.

  The literary character Franklin invented was a triumph of imagination. Silence Dogood was a slightly prudish widowed woman from a rural area, created by a spunky unmarried Boston teenager who had never spent a night outside of the city. Despite the uneven quality of the essays, Franklin’s ability to speak convincingly as a woman was remarkable, and it showed both his creativity and his appreciation for the female mind.

  The echoe
s of Addison are apparent from the outset. In Addison’s first Spectator essay, he wrote, “I have observed that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure ’til he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.” Franklin likewise began by justifying an autobiographical introduction from his fictitious narrator: “It is observed, that the generality of people, nowadays, are unwilling either to commend or dis-praise 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.”

  One reason the Silence Dogood essays are so historically notable is that they were among the first examples of what would become a quintessential American genre of humor: the wry, homespun mix of folksy tales and pointed observations that was perfected by such Franklin descendants as Mark Twain and Will Rogers. For example, in the second of the essays, Silence Dogood tells how the minister to whom she was apprenticed decided to make her his wife: “Having made several unsuccessful fruitless attempts on the more topping sort of our sex, and being tired with making troublesome journeys and visits to no purpose, he began unexpectedly to cast a loving eye upon me…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.”

  Franklin’s portrayal of Mrs. Dogood exhibits a literary dexterity that was quite subtle for a 16-year-old boy. “I could easily be persuaded to marry again,” he had her declare. “I am courteous and affable, good humored (unless I am first provoked) and handsome, and sometimes witty.” The flick of the word “sometimes” is particularly deft. In describing her beliefs and biases, Franklin had Mrs. Dogood assert an attitude that would, with his encouragement, become part of the emerging American character: “I am…a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly. I have likewise a natural inclination to observe and reprove the faults of others, at which I have an excellent faculty.” It was as good a description of the real Benjamin Franklin—and, indeed, of a typical American—as is likely to be found anywhere.37

  Of the fourteen Dogood essays that Franklin wrote between April and October 1722, the one that stands out both as journalism and self-revelation is his attack on the college he never got to attend. Most of the classmates he had bested at Boston Latin had just entered Harvard, and Franklin could not refrain from lampooning them and their institution. The form he used was an allegorical narrative cast as a dream. In doing so, he drew on, and perhaps was mildly parodying, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, also an allegorical journey set as a dream. Addison had used the form somewhat clumsily in an issue of The Spectator that Franklin read, which recounted the dream of a banker about an allegorical virgin named Public Credit.38

  In the essay, Mrs. Dogood recounts falling asleep under an apple tree while she mulls over whether to send her son to Harvard. As she journeys in her dream toward this temple of learning, she makes a discovery about those who send sons there: “Most of them consulted their own purses instead of their children’s capacities: so that I observed a great many, yea, the most part of those who were traveling thither were little better than Dunces and Blockheads.” The gate of the temple, she finds, is guarded by “two sturdy porters named Riches and Poverty,” and only those who meet the approval of the former could get in. Most of the students are content to dally with the figures called Idleness and Ignorance. “They 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 thence they return, after abundance of trouble and charge, as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.”

  Picking up on the proposals of Mather and Defoe for voluntary civic associations, Franklin devoted two of his Silence Dogood essays to the topic of relief for single women. For widows like herself, Mrs. Dogood proposes an insurance scheme funded by subscriptions from married couples. The next essay extended the idea to spinsters. A “friendly society” would be formed that would guarantee £500 “in ready cash” to any member who reaches age 30 and is still not married. The money, Mrs. Dogood notes, would come with a condition: “No woman, who after claiming and receiving, has had the good fortune to marry, shall entertain any company [by praising] her husband above the space of one hour at a time upon pain of returning one half the money into the office for the first offense, and upon the second offense to return the remainder.” In these essays, Franklin was being gently satirical rather than fully serious. But his interest in civic associations would later find more earnest expression, as we shall see, when he became established as a young tradesman in Philadelphia.

  Franklin’s vanity was further fed during that summer of 1722, when his brother was jailed for three weeks—without trial—by Massachusetts authorities for the “high affront” of questioning their competence in pursuing pirates. For three issues, Benjamin got to put out the paper.

  He boasts in his autobiography that “I had the management of the paper, and I made bold to give our rulers some rubs in it, which my brother took very kindly, while others began to consider me in an unfavorable light as a young genius that had a turn for libeling and satire.” In fact, other than a letter to the readers written from prison by James, nothing in Benjamin’s three issues directly challenged the civil authorities. The closest he came was having Mrs. Dogood quote in full an essay from an English newspaper that defended free speech. “Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom,” it declared, “and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.”39

  The “rubs” that Franklin remembered came a week after his brother’s return from prison. Writing as Silence Dogood, he unleashed a piercing attack on the civil authorities, perhaps the most biting of his entire career. The question that Mrs. Dogood posed was “Whether a Commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion or by the openly profane?”

  Unsurprisingly, Franklin’s Mrs. Dogood argued that “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 piece attacked the link between the church and the state, which was the very foundation of the Puritan commonwealth. Governor Thomas Dudley, who moved from the ministry to the law, is cited (though not by name) as an example: “The most dangerous hypocrite in a Commonwealth is one who leaves the gospel for the sake of the law. A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.”40

  By the fall of 1722, Franklin was running short of ideas for Silence Dogood. Worse yet, his brother was beginning to suspect the provenance of the pieces. In her thirteenth submission, Silence Dogood noted that she had overheard a conversation one night in which a gentleman had said, “Though I wrote in the character of a woman, he knew me to be a man; but, continued he, he has more need of endeavoring a reformation in himself than spending his wit in satirizing others.” The next Dogood would be Franklin’s last. When he revealed Mrs. Dogood’s true identity, it raised his stature among the Couranteers but “did not quite please” James. “He thought, probably with reason, that it tended to make me too vain.”

  Silence Dogood had been able to get away with an attack on hypocrisy and religion, but when James penned a similar piece in January 1723, he landed in trouble yet again. “Of all knaves,” he wrote, “the religious knave is the worst.” Religion was important, he wrote, but, using words that would describe the lifelong attitude of his younger brother, he added, “too much of it is worse than none at all.” The local authorities, noting “that the tendency of the said paper is to mock religion,” promptly passed a resolution that required James to submit each issue to the authorities for approval before publication. James defie
d the order with relish.

  The General Court responded by forbidding James Franklin from publishing the Courant. At a secret meeting in his shop, it was decided that the best way around the order was to continue to print the paper, but without James as its publisher. On Monday, February 11, 1723, there appeared atop the Courant the masthead: “Printed and sold by Benjamin Franklin.”

  Benjamin’s Courant was more cautious than that of his brother. An editorial in his first issue denounced publications that were “hateful” and “malicious,” and it declared that henceforth the Courant would be “designed purely for the diversion and merriment of the reader” and to “entertain the town with the most comical and diverting incidents of human life.” The master of the paper, the editorial declared, would be the Roman god Janus, who could look two ways at once.41

  The next few issues, however, hardly lived up to that billing. Most articles were slightly stale dispatches containing foreign news or old speeches. There was only one essay that was clearly written by Franklin, a wry musing on the folly of titles such as Viscount and Master. (His aversion to hereditary and aristocratic titles would be a theme throughout his life.) After a few weeks, James returned to the helm of the Courant, in fact if not officially, and he resumed treating Benjamin as an apprentice, subject to occasional beatings, rather than as a brother and fellow writer. Such treatment “demeaned me too much,” Franklin recalled, and he became eager to move on. He had an urge for independence that he would help to make a hallmark of the American character.

  The Runaway

  Franklin managed his escape by taking advantage of a ruse his brother had contrived. When James had pretended to turn over the Courant to Benjamin, he signed an official discharge of his apprenticeship to make the transfer seem legitimate. But he then made Benjamin sign a new apprentice agreement that would be kept secret. A few months later, Benjamin decided to run away. He assumed, correctly, that his brother would realize that it was unwise to try to enforce the secret indenture.