Book of Ages (7 page)

But, for all his Defoe, Franklin didn’t win the argument. Collins, he admitted, “was naturally more eloquent, had a ready Plenty of Words, and sometimes … bore me down more by his Fluency than by the Strength of his Reasons.” They parted without settling the question and continued the debate by letters. “Three or four Letters of a Side had pass’d,” Franklin wrote, “when my Father happen’d to find my Papers, and read them. Without entering into the Discussion, he took occasion to talk to me about the Manner of my Writing, observ’d that tho’ I had the Advantage of my Antagonist in correct
Spelling and pointing (which I ow’d to the Printing House) I fell far short in elegance of Expression, in Method and in Perspicuity.”
¹⁴

Spelling and
pointing (punctuating) were genteel accomplishments; they date to the rise of printing. People used to spell however they pleased, even spelling their own names differently from one day to the next. Then came the printing press, and rules for printers: how to spell, how to point.
More books meant more readers; more readers meant more writers. But only the learned, only the lettered, knew how to spell.

Franklin was a better speller than his friend Collins, and he could point better, too, but Collins proved a better debater. Be more precise, Josiah urged his son. Be plainer. On the question itself, he did not venture an opinion.

While Benny was improving his
writing by arguing about the education
of girls, Jenny was at home, boiling soap and stitching. Quietly, with what time she could find, she did more. She once confided to her brother, “I Read as much as I Dare.”
¹⁵

CHAPTER VIII

S
he never put on pants. Instead, she bled and tied rags between her legs. “Menses,” her doctor
John Perkins wrote in his commonplace book, “begin at 9 or 10 years,” adding, on another page, this warning: “Early Menstruation renders the Uteri Hard & dry; so that they ought not to prompt the early appearance by obscene books, and frequent touchings.”
¹
Beware the bookish girl.

In the summer of 1721, when Jane was nine and Benjamin was fifteen, their brother James began printing a
newspaper, the
New-England Courant
.
²
The first newspaper in the colonies,
Publick Occurrences,
begun
in Boston in 1690, had stopped printing after only one issue. To be successful, a newspaper printer usually had to have earned the favor of the government. The
Boston News-Letter,
“published by authority,” started in 1704. Its printer was also the
postmaster. In 1710, “An Act for establishing a General Post Office of All Her Majesties Dominions” had fixed
postage rates both overseas (one shilling per letter, between
London and America) and between colonial cities (fifteen pence between Boston and Philadelphia).
³
A printer who was also a postmaster had a near monopoly both on news, relayed from the magistrates who had appointed him, and on readers, who came to his print shop to pick up their mail.
⁴

James Franklin was not the postmaster. His
New-England Courant
was the first unlicensed paper in the colonies. It was also, by far, the best.
⁵
The
Courant
contained political essays, opinion, satire, and some word of goings-on. The
Boston News-Letter
contained the shipping news, official government pronouncements, letters from Europe, and whatever news was bland enough to pass the censor.
⁶
James Franklin had a different editorial policy: “I hereby invite all Men, who have Leisure, Inclination and Ability,
to speak their Minds with Freedom, Sense and Moderation, and their Pieces shall be welcome to a Place in my Paper.”
⁷

The
Courant
began printing in August 1721; that October, James Franklin joined
Benjamin Colman’s church, where he worshipped with his uncle Benjamin.
⁸
The next month, James Franklin and Cotton Mather met on the street.

“The Plain Design of your Paper,” Mather told him, “is to Banter and Abuse the Ministers of God, and if you can, to defeat all the good Effects of their Ministry on the Minds of the People.”
⁹

Calling the
Courant
“A Wickedness never parallel’d any where upon the Face of the Earth!” Mather dubbed Jane’s brother and his writers the
Hell-Fire Club.
¹⁰
Increase Mather wrung his hands, too, thinking, perhaps, of how well he had suppressed the writings of heretics like
Peter Folger, only to be plagued by this young shaver: “I can well remember when the Civil Government could have taken an effectual Course to suppress such a
Cursed Libel!
”
¹¹

But Jane’s brother James, so far from backing down, printed essay upon essay about the freedom of the press.
¹²
“To anathematize a Printer for publishing the different Opinions of Men,” he insisted, “is as injudicious as it is wicked.”
¹³
He knew, as his grandfather had known, that there is a time for silence and, as well, a time to speak.

Not long after James Franklin started printing the
Courant,
and hired his brother Benjamin as his apprentice, another of Josiah’s children left home. In 1722, Sarah Franklin married James Davenport, a baker and tavernkeeper. Of Josiah’s seventeen children, only Lydia and Jane were still at the Blue Ball.
¹⁴

At the print shop, Benny set the type and printed and delivered the
Courant,
but what he wanted to do was write. “Being still a Boy, and suspecting that my Brother would object to printing any Thing of mine in his Paper if he knew it to be mine,” he later wrote, “I contriv’d to disguise my Hand, and writing an anonymous Paper I put it in at Night under the Door of the Printing-House.”
¹⁵

He gave himself a pen name: “I am courteous and affable, good humour’d (unless I am first provok’d,) and handsome, and sometimes witty, but always, Sir, Your Friend and Humble Servant, SILENCE DOGOOD.”
¹⁶
This was another sneaky assault on Cotton Mather. “Silence Dogood” mocked both Mather’s
Essays to Do Good
—a book Franklin had found in his father’s
library—and his 1721
sermon
Silentiarius,
an elegy on “holy silence” that Mather had delivered at the funeral of his daughter, who’d died, along with her baby, in childbirth. “It must be our study,” a grieving Mather had preached, “To
hold our peace
when we have
sad things
befalling of us.”
¹⁷
Silence Dogood did not counsel silence; she counseled outrage.

She introduced herself by way of remarks about the art of
biography:

A young widow with three children, Mrs. Dogood had benefited from an unusual upbringing. After her father’s death, her mother, too poor to keep her, had apprenticed her to a minister, not unlike
Benjamin Colman, with liberal views about female education. “He endeavour’d that I might be instructed in all that Knowledge and Learning which is necessary for our Sex, and deny’d me no Accomplishment that could possibly be attained in a Country Place; such as all Sorts of Needle-Work, Writing, Arithmetick, &c. and observing that I took a more than ordinary Delight in reading ingenious Books, he gave me the free Use of his Library, which tho’ it was but small, yet it was well chose, to inform the Understanding rightly, and enable the Mind to frame great and noble Ideas.” She spent much of her childhood “with the best of Company,
Books
.”
¹⁸

When Jane Franklin was ten years old and her brother was sixteen, he broke out upon the literary stage disguised as a woman whose girlhood had been spent reading books, and who refused to keep quiet. As the
sharp-tongued Widow Dogood, he took the trouble to offer “a few gentle Reproofs on those who deserve them,” including Harvard students.
¹⁹
Curious about “the Education of Children,” Mrs. Dogood spent an afternoon in Cambridge, which led her to reflect upon “the extream Folly of those Parents, who, blind to their Childrens Dulness, and insensible of the Solidity of their Skulls, because they think their Purses can afford it, will needs send them to the Temple of Learning, where, for want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquir’d at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.”
²⁰

This was dangerous. So was much else that James Franklin printed. In the summer of 1722, James Franklin was arrested after he suggested in the pages of his newspaper that the Massachusetts government had been negligent in its efforts to capture a pirate ship.
²¹
While his brother was in jail, Benjamin Franklin printed, on the pages of the
Courant,
remarks about the
freedom of speech.
²²

Meanwhile, he kept up his do-gooding disguise. Mrs. Dogood wrote about meeting a man who charged, “
That tho’ I wrote in the Character of a Woman, he knew me to be a Man
.” This the widow denied. And then, suddenly, she fell silent.
²³
But the battle between the
Courant
and the clergy raged on. In January 1723, after James printed a piece titled “Essay on Hypocrites,” mocking Cotton Mather, the
Massachusetts Council appointed a committee to investigate. “The Tendency of the said Paper,” it reported, “is to mock
Religion, and bring it into Contempt, that the Holy Scriptures are therefore profanely abused, that the Reverend and faithful Ministers of the Gospel are injuriously Reflected on, His Majesty’s Government affronted, and the Peace and good Order of his Majesty’s Subjects of this Province disturbed.”
²⁴
James Franklin was ordered to stop printing the
Courant.

He first considered defying that order by changing the newspaper’s name but decided, instead, to change the name of its printer. (He had been ordered to stop printing the
Courant
. No one had said that someone
else
couldn’t print it.) He changed the name on the masthead to Benjamin Franklin. This introduced a complication. Franklin’s apprenticeship was supposed to last until his twenty-first birthday—the day he would come of age—but, because an apprentice couldn’t be the paper’s printer, his brother
had to cancel his indenture. Still, James had no intention of losing his apprentice: he drew up a secret contract, for the same term.
²⁵

At this Benjamin bridled. In the end, he decided to run away. Later, when he told the story of his life, he made James out to be a tyrant. But he also admitted that it might have been his fault: “Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking.”
²⁶

He booked a berth on a ship headed to New York, having told the ship’s captain that he was running away because he “had got a naughty Girl with Child.” He paid for his passage with books.
²⁷