Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (3 page)

A trusted and paternalistic figure, Josiah rose within Boston’s Puritan/civic hierarchy. In 1697, he was tapped to become a tithing-man, the name for the moral marshals whose job it was to enforce attendance and attention at Sunday services and to keep an eye out for “nightwalkers, tipplers, Sabbath breakers…or whatever else tending toward debauchery, irreligion, profaneness and atheism.” Six years later, he was made a constable, one of eleven people who helped oversee the tithingmen. Although the posts were unpaid, Josiah practiced the art, which his son would perfect, of marrying public virtue with private profit: he made money by selling candles to the night watchmen he oversaw.
¹¹

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin gives a lapidary description of his father:

This description was perhaps overly generous. It is contained, after all, in an autobiography designed in part to instill filial respect in Benjamin’s own son. As we shall see, Josiah, wise though he undoubtedly was, had limited horizons. He tended to dampen his son’s educational, professional, and even poetic aspirations.

Josiah’s most prominent trait was captured in a phrase, deeply Puritan in its fealty to both industriousness and egalitarianism, that would be inscribed on his tombstone by his son: “Diligence in thy calling.” It came from Josiah’s favorite piece of Solomonic wisdom (Proverbs 22:29), a passage that he would quote often to his son: “Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before Kings.” As Franklin would recall when he was 78, with the wry mixture of light vanity and amused self-awareness that pervades his autobiography, “I from thence considered industry as a means of obtaining wealth and distinction, which encouraged me, though I did not think that I should ever literally stand before kings, which, however, has since happened; for I have stood before five, and even had the honor of sitting down with one, the King of Denmark, to dinner.”
¹³

As Josiah prospered, his family grew; he would have seventeen children over a period of thirty-four years. Such fecundity was common among the robust and lusty Puritans: the Rev. Samuel Willard, pastor of the South Church, had twenty children; the famous theologian Cotton Mather had fifteen. Children tended to be a resource rather than a burden. They helped around the house and shop by handling most of the menial chores.
¹⁴

To the three children who accompanied them from England, Josiah and Anne Franklin quickly added two more, both of whom lived to adulthood: Josiah Jr., born in 1685, and Anne Jr., born in1687. Then, however, death struck brutally. Three times over the next eighteen months, Josiah made the procession across Milk Street to the South Church burial grounds: first in 1688 for a newborn son who died after five days; then in 1689 for his wife, Anne, who died a week after delivering another son; then for that son who died after another week. (One-quarter of all Boston newborns at the time died within a week.)

It was not unusual for men in colonial New England to outlive two or three wives. Of the first eighteen women who came to Massachusetts in 1628, for example, fourteen died within a year. Nor was it considered callous for a bereaved husband to remarry quickly. In fact, as in the case of Josiah, it was often considered an economic necessity. At the age of 31, he had five children to raise, a trade to tend, and a shop to keep. He needed a robust new wife, and he needed her quickly.

Like the Franklins, the Folger (originally Foulgier) family was rebellious but also practical, and they shared the same mix of religious and economic restlessness. Descended from reformist Flemish Protestants who had fled to England in the sixteenth century, the Folgers were among the first wave of emigrants to depart for Massachusetts when Charles I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, began cracking down on the Puritans. The family of John Folger, including his 18-year-old son Peter, sailed for Boston in 1635, when the town was a mere five years old.

On the voyage over, Peter met a young servant girl named Mary Morrill, who was indentured to one of the Puritan ministers aboard. After their arrival, Peter was able to buy her freedom for £20 and take her as his wife.

Having found religious and personal freedom, the Folgers were restless for economic opportunities. From Boston they moved to a new settlement up the river called Dedham, then to Watertown, and finally to Nantucket Island, where Peter became the schoolmaster. Most of the inhabitants were Indians, and he learned their language, taught them English, and attempted (with great success) to convert them to Christianity. Rebellious in nature, he underwent his own conversion and became a Baptist, which meant that the faithful Indians whom he had led to Christianity now had to follow him through a ritual that required total immersion.

Displaying the robust resistance to authority that ran in both the Folger and Franklin families, Peter was the sort of rebel destined to transform colonial America. As clerk of the court on Nantucket, he was at one point jailed for disobeying the local magistrate during a struggle between the island’s wealthy shareholders and its growing middle class of shopkeepers and artisans.
¹⁵

He also wrote a near-seditious pamphlet, in verse, sympathizing with the Indians during what became known as King Philip’s War in1676. The war, he declared, was the result of God’s anger at the intolerance of the Puritan ministers in Boston. His passion overpowered his poetic talents: “Let Magistrates and Ministers /consider what they do; / Let them repeal those evil laws, / and break those bonds in two.” Later, his grandson Benjamin Franklin would pronounce that the poem was “written with manly freedom and a pleasing simplicity.”
¹⁶

Peter and Mary Folger had ten children, the youngest of whom, Abiah, was born in 1667. When she was 21 and still unmarried, she moved to Boston to live with an older sister and her husband, who were members of the South Church. Although raised as a Baptist, Abiah joined the congregation shortly after her arrival. By July 1689, when the well-respected tallow chandler Josiah Franklin went there to bury his wife, Abiah was a faithful parishioner.
¹⁷

Less than five months later, on November 25, 1689, they were married. Both were the youngest children in a large brood. Together they would live to unusually ripe ages—he to 87, she to 84. And their longevity was among the many traits they would bequeath to their famous youngest son, who himself would live to be 84. “He was a pious and prudent man, she a discreet and virtuous woman,” Benjamin would later inscribe on their tombstone.

Over the next twelve years, Josiah and Abiah Franklin had six children: John (born 1690), Peter (1692), Mary (1694), James (1697), Sarah (1699), and Ebenezer (1701). Along with those from Josiah’s first marriage, that made eleven children, all still unmarried, crammed into the tiny Milk Street house that also contained the tallow, soap, and candle equipment.

It might seem impossible to keep a watchful eye on so large a brood in such circumstances, and the Franklin tale provides tragic evidence that this was so. When he was a toddler of 16 months, Ebenezer drowned in a tub of his father’s suds. Later that year, in 1703, the Franklins had another son, but he also died as a child.

So even though their next son, Benjamin, would spend his youth in a house with ten older siblings, the youngest of them would be seven years his senior. And he would have two younger sisters, Lydia (born1708) and Jane (1712), looking up to him.

Benjamin Franklin was born and baptized on the same day, a Sunday, January 17, 1706.
^*
Boston was by then 76 years old, no longer a Puritan outpost but a thriving commercial center filled with preachers, merchants, seamen, and prostitutes. It had more than a thousand homes, a thousand ships registered at its harbor, and seven thousand inhabitants, a figure that was doubling every twenty years.

As a kid growing up along the Charles River, Franklin was, he recalled, “generally the leader among the boys.” One of their favorite gathering places was a salt marsh near the river’s mouth, which had become a quagmire due to their constant trampling. Under Franklin’s lead, the friends built themselves a wharf with stones intended for the construction of a house nearby. “In the evening when the workmen were gone home, I assembled a number of my playfellows, and we worked diligently like so many emmets, sometimes two or three to a stone, until we brought them all to make our little wharf.” The next morning, he and the other culprits were caught and punished.

Franklin recounted the tale in his autobiography to illustrate, he said, his father’s maxim “that nothing was useful which was not honest.”
¹⁸
Yet, like many of Franklin’s attempts at self-deprecation, the anecdote seems less designed to show how bad a boy he was than how good a leader he was. Throughout his life, he took palpable pride in his ability to organize cooperative endeavors and public-spirited projects.

Franklin’s childhood days playing along the Charles River also instilled a lifelong love for swimming. Once he had learned and taught his playmates, he tinkered with ways to make himself go faster. The size of people’s hands and feet, he realized, limited how much water they could push and thus their propelling power. So he made two oval palettes, with holes for his thumbs, and (as he explained in a letter to a friend) “I also fitted to the soles of my feet a kind of sandals.” With these paddles and flippers, he could speed through the water.

Kites, as he would later famously show, could also be useful. Sending one aloft, he stripped, waded into a pond, floated on his back, and let it pull him. “Having then engaged another boy to carry my clothes round the pond,” he recalled, “I began to cross the pond with my kite, which carried me quite over without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.”
¹⁹

One childhood incident that he did not include in his autobiography, though he would recount it more than seventy years later for the amusement of his friends in Paris, occurred when he encountered a boy blowing a whistle. Enchanted by the device, he gave up all the coins in his pocket for it. His siblings proceeded to ridicule him, saying he had paid four times what it was worth. “I cried with vexation,” Franklin recalled, “and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.” Frugality became for him not only a virtue but also a pleasure. “Industry and frugality,” he wrote in describing the theme of Poor Richard’s almanacs, are “the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue.”
²⁰

When Benjamin was 6, his family moved from the tiny two-room house on Milk Street, where fourteen children had been raised, to a larger home and shop in the heart of town, on Hanover and Union Streets. His mother was 45, and that year (1712) she gave birth to the last of her children, Jane, who was to become Benjamin’s favorite sibling and lifelong correspondent.

Josiah Franklin’s new house, coupled with the dwindling number of children still living with him, allowed him to entertain interesting guests for dinner. “At his table,” Benjamin recalled, “he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse which might tend to improve the minds of his children.”

The conversations were so engrossing, Franklin claims in his autobiography, that he took “little or no notice” of what was served for dinner. This training instilled in him a “perfect inattention” to food for the rest of his life, a trait he deemed “a great convenience,” albeit one that seems belied by the number of recipes of American and French culinary delights among his papers.
²¹

The new home also allowed the Franklins to accommodate Josiah’s brother Benjamin, who emigrated from England in 1715 when he was 65 and his namesake was 9. Like Josiah, the elder Benjamin found the New World inhospitable to his craft of silk dyeing, but unlike Josiah, he did not have the drive to learn a new trade. So he sat around the Franklin house writing bad poetry (including a 124-quatrain autobiography) and a useful family history, attending and transcribing sermons, amusing his nephew, and gradually getting on his brother’s nerves.
²²

Uncle Benjamin stayed with the Franklins for four years, easily outlasting his welcome with his brother, if not with his nephew. Finally, he moved in with his own son Samuel, a cutler who had also immigrated to Boston. Years later, the younger Benjamin would write to his sister Jane and humorously recount the “disputes and misunderstandings” that grew between their father and uncle. The lesson his father drew was that visits from distant relatives “could not well be short enough for them to part good friends.” In Poor Richard’s almanac, Franklin would later put it more pithily: “Fish and guests stink after three days.”
²³