Authors: Jill Lepore
1.
On Folger, see Babette May Levy, “Life and Work of Peter Folger, An ‘Able Godly Englishman’ ” (MA thesis, Columbia University, 1929), and Florence Bennett Anderson,
A Grandfather for Benjamin Franklin: The True Story of a Nantucket Pioneer and His Mates
(Boston: Meador, 1940). See also Peter Foulger (1618–1690), Folder 34, Folger Family Papers, NHARL.
2.
Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England
(Boston: William White, 1853; rep., New York: AMS Press, 1968), 1:281. Alex L. ter Braake, ed.,
The Posted Letter in Colonial and Revolutionary America
(State College, PA: American Philatelic Research Library, 1975), 13. On letter writing in early New England, see also Katherine A. Grandjean, “Reckoning: The Communications Frontier in Early New England” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008).
3.
Psalm 22:10,
The Whole Booke of Psalmes
(Cambridge, MA, 1640), unpaginated.
4.
Cited in David Hall, “Readers and Writers in Early New England,” in
The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World,
eds. Hugh Amory and David Hall, vol. 1 of
A History of the Book in America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 120. On printing,
literacy, and
education in
Puritan Boston, see also Samuel Eliot Morison,
The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England
(New York: New York University Press, 1956); Robert Middlekauff,
Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth-Century New England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); Jill Lepore, “A Bookish Faith,” in
Perspectives on American Book History,
ed. Scott E. Casper et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 38–45; and E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England,”
American Quarterly
40 (1988): 18–41.
5.
John Cotton’s
Milk for Babes
was printed in London in 1646, the same year as Robert Abbot’s
Milk for Babes; or, A Mother’s Catechism for her Children
. “When children begin to read, let them read the holy Scripture,” urged William Gouge in
Of Domesticall Duties
. “Thus will children sucke in Religion with learning.” William Gouge,
Of Domesticall Duties
(London: George Miller, 1634), 548. Cotton Mather,
The A, B, C of Religion
(Boston: Timothy Green, 1713).
6.
Peter Folger to Governor Andros, March 27, 1677, reprinted in Anderson,
A Grandfather for Benjamin Franklin,
348. On the fluency in
Algonquian of Peter’s son Eleazar, see Anderson,
A Grandfather for Benjamin Franklin
, 138. On Folger’s work as an Indian schoolteacher, see also E. Jennifer Monaghan, “ ‘She Loved to Read in Good Books’: Literacy and the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1643–1725,”
History of Education Quarterly
30 (1990): 493–521.
7.
John Eliot, trans.,
Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God
(Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green, 1663).
8.
Roger Williams,
Key into the Language
(London: Gregory Dexter, 1643), 194. On Gibbs, see Jill Lepore,
The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity
(New York: Knopf, 1998), xx, 39. Peter Folger, “Petition of Peter Foulger about Proceedings at the General Court of Martha’s Vineyard, 1677,”
New York Colonial Manuscripts,
XXIV, 69.
9.
Edward Wharton,
New England’s Present Sufferings Under Their Cruel Neighbouring Indians
(London, 1675), 7; Philip Walker, “Captain Perse & his coragios Company” in
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society
83 (1973): 91; Increase Mather,
An Earnest Exhortation To the Inhabitants of New-England
(Boston: John Foster, 1676), 3; Increase Mather,
A Brief History of the Warr With the Indians
(Boston: John Foster, 1676). And see Lepore,
The Name of War,
30, 43, 104–5, 47, 177.
10.
Levy, “Life and Work of Peter Folger,” 78. And see Folger, “Petition of Peter Foulger,” 64–71.
11.
Peter Folger,
A Looking Glass for the Times
(Boston: James Franklin, 1725), 10, 11. Folger’s poem, like much written in seventeenth-century New England, might have circulated in manuscript. On scribal publication, see David D. Hall,
Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chapter 1.
1.
Late in life, Franklin met a man named Pope, from Boston, and sent a letter to Jane by way of him: “His name is Pope, and he tells me his Family is originally from Salem, where I remember we formerly had an Aunt Pope. I heard her spoken of when I was a Child, but do not recollect having ever seen her. Do you know whether she left any Children? For if she did the Bearer is probably our Relation.” BF to JFM, April 12, 1788. JFM replied on May 5, 1788, but her reply is lost.
2.
BF,
Autobiography,
7. The best account of Josiah Franklin is Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah.”
3.
Samuel Willard,
The Character of a Good Ruler
(Boston: Benjamin Harris, 1694), 8, 13.
4.
M. Halsey Thomas, ed.,
The Diary of Samuel Sewall
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), September 7, 1708, at 1:603, and December 17, 1717, at 2:874.
5.
Anderson,
A Grandfather for Benjamin Franklin,
155.
6.
Peter Folger to Joseph Pratt, Nantucket, March 6, 1678, in Peter Foulger (1618–1690), Folder 34, Folger Family Papers, Nantucket Historical Association Research Library; also printed in Anderson,
A Grandfather for Benjamin Franklin,
386.
7.
Anne Bradstreet,
Several Poems, Compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of Delight
(Boston: John Foster, 1678), 239.
8.
On average, an eighteenth-century white woman could expect to become pregnant between five and ten times, to give birth to between five and seven live children. Mary Beth Norton,
Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 72.
9.
Genealogical information about Josiah Franklin’s descendants can be found in
PBF,
1:lvi–lxii. Thomas, ed.,
The Diary of Samuel Sewall,
February 6, 1703, at 1:482.
10.
BF,
Autobiography,
8.
11.
On the nature of women’s work in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century New England, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
Good Wives: Images and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750
(1982; New York: Vintage, 1991), especially part 1; and Norton,
Liberty’s Daughters,
chapter 1.
12.
Thomas, ed.,
The Diary of Samuel Sewall,
April 7, 1677, at 1:41. Cotton Mather,
Elizabeth in Her Holy Retirement
(Boston: B. Green, 1710), 35.
13.
James Axtell,
The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 87. Norton,
Liberty’s Daughters
, 91–92. Ulrich,
Good Wives,
138–44.
14.
Thomas, ed.,
The Diary of Samuel Sewall,
January 6, 1702, and January 16, 1702, at 1:450. And see also Judith Walzer Leavitt,
Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812
(New York: Knopf, 1990).
15.
“Sensible of the reiterated strokes of
God upon himself and family,” he said, he desired to acknowledge the wrong he had done, “to take the Blame and Shame of it, Asking pardon of Men, And especially desiring prayers that God, who has an Unlimited Authority, would pardon that Sin and all other his Sins.” On Sewall’s regret of his part in the
witchcraft trials, and its relation to his grief over the deaths
of several of his children, see Thomas, ed.,
The Diary of Samuel Sewall,
January 14, 1697, at 1:397; and Judith S. Graham,
Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 43–46.
16.
Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah,” 52.
17.
“Jane daughter of Josiah Franklin and Abiah his Wife” is recorded as March 27, 1712, in
Boston Births from A.D. 1700 to A.D. 1800
(Boston: Rockwell & Churchill, 1894), 82. She would have been baptized at Old South, as were her brothers and sisters. The
baptisms of eight of Abiah and Josiah’s ten children appear in the church’s record book: John (1690), Peter (1692), Mary (1694), James (1697), Sarah (1699), Ebenezer (1701), Thomas (1703), and Benjamin (1706). But after the page on which Benjamin’s baptism is recorded, there follow several blank pages, and the records don’t begin again until 1715. Jane’s baptismal record is therefore missing, as is that of her sister Lydia, who was born on August 8, 1708. Both Jane and Lydia were, however, surely baptized at Old South. Benjamin Franklin’s baptismal record, dated January 6, 1706, reads, “Benjamin, of Josiah & Abiah Franklin.” In a later hand, the entry is marked with an
X,
to which is added this notation: “The celebrated Benj. Franklin.” Bound volume of Baptismal Records, Old South Church Records, Box 7, Congregational Library, Boston.
1.
BF, “Petition of the Left Hand,” 1785, in
PBF,
unpublished. The essay is not a recollection but a satire, in which the left hand rails at the right.
2.
There is little scholarship on siblings in early America, but see C. Dallett Hemphill, “Sibling Relations in Early American Childhoods: A Cross-Cultural Analysis,” in
Children in Colonial America,
ed. James Marten (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 77–89. Hemphill mentions Franklin’s relationships with James and with Jane, in passing. And, for a provocative study of siblings in Victorian Britain, see Leonore Davidoff,
Thicker Than Water: Siblings and Their Relations
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
3.
JFM to BF, August 16, 1787.
4.
BF to JFM, August 3, 1789.
5.
JFM to BF, August 29, 1789.
6.
Women often nursed to prevent
pregnancy. One colonial woman wrote of her thirty-nine-year-old daughter, who had just survived
childbirth, “This might possibly be the last trial of this sort, if she could suckle her baby for two years to come.” Quoted in Paula A. Treckel, “
Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality in Colonial America,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
20 (1989): 38.
7.
Acrostic from Benjamin Franklin the Elder in
PBF,
1:4–5.
8.
BF,
Poor Richard’s Almanack … 1739,
in
PBF,
2:217.
9.
Cotton Mather,
A Family Well-Ordered
(Boston: B. Green, 1699), 3. William Gouge,
Of Domesticall Duties
(London: John Haviland, 1622), 17. See also Edmund S. Morgan,
The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England
(New York: Harper and Row, 1966); John Demos,
A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); and Helena M. Wall,
Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
10.
Ezra Stiles met JFM on September 28, 1779, and recorded the conversation in his diary.
The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles,
ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York: Scribners, 1901), 2:375–76.
11.
J. A. Leo Lemay,
The Life of Benjamin Franklin
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006–08), 1:57.
12.
Hugh Amory, “Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1636–1713,” in
The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World,
ed. Hugh Amory and David Hall, vol. 1 of
A History of the Book in America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 83–116. Cotton Mather,
Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1724
(Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1911), 548.
13.
BF,
Autobiography,
9. “Inventory of Josiah Franklin’s Estate,” October 24, 1752,
Suffolk Probate Records
47:437–38; reprinted in Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah,” 127–28.
14.
“Breeching Little Frank,” in
Childhood in America,
ed. Paul S. Fass and Mary Ann Mason (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 82. On the hanging sleeve, see Alice Morse Earle,
Child Life in Colonial Days
(Williamstown, MA: Corner House, 1989), 43–44. On the persistence of breeching and its consequences, see Davidoff,
Thicker Than Water,
65–67.
15.
BF, “The Whistle,” November 10, 1779,
PBF,
31:74.
16.
BF,
Autobiography,
10. On the verses BF wrote at the age of seven, see Van Doren,
Letters,
27.
17.
PBF,
1:5. On the boxing and throwing Collins into the Charles, see Lemay
, Life of BF,
1:210. On Collins as BF’s best friend, see Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:253.
18.
BF,
Autobiography,
6. On Franklin’s schooling, see Tourtellot,
Benjamin Franklin,
chapters 7 and 8.
19.
JFM to BF, November 8, 1766. BF to JFM, September 16, 1758. BF,
Poor Richard’s Almanack
…
1736
,
PBF,
2:137.
20.
Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:42.
21.
BF,
Autobiography,
5. LeMay,
Life of BF,
1:43.
22.
Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:94.
23.
BF,
Autobiography,
6. BF,
Poor Richard’s Almanack … 1753,
in
PBF,
4:406.
24.
Benjamin Colman,
Early Piety again Inculcated
(Boston: S. Kneeland, 1720), 33.
25.
BF,
Autobiography,
9.
26.
BF the Elder says the Blue Ball is “the place where this briefe account was writen on the 1.2. 3. Of July 1717.” BF the Elder, “Short Account,” 106–8, 111, 113.