The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (5 page)

The Mill Pond was the location of at least one adventure that turned out ill. Next to the pond was a salt marsh where Ben and the boys liked to hunt small fish. But their stalking stirred up the mud and clouded the water, frustrating their efforts to capture lunch. To mitigate the murkiness, Ben proposed that they build a jetty extending into the marsh. The only convenient building material consisted of stones recently delivered to a building site nearby. Ben suggested that the gang wait until the masons at the site went home for the evening, at which point the stones might be put to the purpose of improving the fishery. The boys waited, the men departed, and the construction commenced. After several hours and much struggling, the jetty was completed, to the boys’ satisfaction and pride. The foreman of the building crew, arriving next morning, was less admiring. A cursory investigation revealed the whereabouts of the missing stones, from which the foreman deduced the identity of those responsible for their removal. The boys were remanded to their parents’ custody and chastisement; although Ben pleaded the civic usefulness of the construction, Josiah pointed out that the first civic virtue was honesty.

Ben might have added that this transgression was decidedly venial compared to what other lads of the town regularly engaged in. Boston’s boys had long evinced an ebullient streak, especially on Guy Fawkes Day, the November anniversary of the aborted Gunpowder Plot against Parliament in 1605. Clusters of youths from the South End of town would swarm past the Franklin house—which lay not far from Mill Creek, the line of demarcation between the southern and northern neighborhoods—into the North End looking for trouble. More often than not, they found it. When they failed, they could count on discovering it back in their own neighborhood when the northerners repaid the visit. Over time the fun grew more frequent; at the end of the eighteenth century, Edward Reynolds—who happened to be the great-great-grandson of Josiah Franklin’s landlord on Milk Street—explained that “the old feud between the Southenders and Northenders,” which he described as being “as old as the town itself,” was “the occasion of a regular battle every Thursday and Saturday afternoon.” Reynolds added that the clashes were “not infrequently the occasion of very serious injury to wind and limb.” They were also practice in the arts applied against the agents—and then the soldiers—of King George III.

Josiah Franklin
was fifty-eight when he brought Ben into the shop, and by this time of his life he was content with the predictability and security his business afforded him and his family. But the candle shop held little appeal for the boy, who found the endless pouring, trimming, cutting, and packing hopelessly dull next to the far more exciting activities happening all over town. His dissatisfaction only increased—indeed, approached something akin to despair—when his elder brother John left the family firm to set himself up independently in Rhode Island, and Josiah gave every indication of commanding Ben to take his place as apprentice and future partner.

The scope for rebellion by a twelve-year-old boy was limited. But there was always the threat of running off to sea—a real threat even for one as young as Ben, considering the demand of the shipping trade for cabin boys. Josiah had lost his namesake this way, and he could hardly bear the thought of losing his youngest son similarly. Consequently, in a strange way Ben gained an advantage over his father in this early contest of wills. Josiah abandoned the notion of making a chandler out of the boy and began taking him around the town to observe the other craftsmen at
work, in the hope that some honest calling less dangerous than the sea would satisfy his taste for novelty and excitement.

Although no single craft commended itself above all others, cutlery appeared promising. Ben had shown some cleverness with his hands and with tools; making and repairing knives might put that cleverness to use. Moreover, his cousin Samuel—Uncle Benjamin’s boy—who had been a cutler in London, had recently relocated to Boston; Ben could apprentice with him. And so Ben was sent to live and work with Samuel on a trial basis. But Samuel demanded a maintenance fee Josiah judged excessive, not least in light of the fact that Josiah had been maintaining Samuel’s father for years with no remuneration. The cutlery apprenticeship collapsed.

Josiah then consulted a son of his own. James Franklin, nine years Ben’s elder, had recently returned from London, where he had learned the printer’s trade. He had established a shop on Queen Street, just three blocks from Josiah’s house; there he was attempting to find a niche among the town’s four other printers. The business began slowly, but in an era when printing provided the only feasible means of reproducing the written word on any but the most limited scale, and in a community devoted to the study of the Scriptures, an activity that required and indeed produced nearly universal literacy among adult males and substantial literacy among females, James had reason to anticipate success. He believed that from a small start printing sermons and broadsides—those all-purpose posters conveying information on everything from politics to the price of peas—he might graduate to books and other more profitable assignments. He needed a helper. Ben could serve as well as any other.

In fact Ben served very well. Printing turned out to be ideally suited to his peculiar combination of manual and intellectual dexterity. The physical process of printing was straightforward, if somewhat involved. The printer set the handwritten text in type, placing the cast-metal letters (imported, during this period, from England) in rows that would yield the lines of printed text. These lines were held in place by rectangular frames corresponding to the printed pages; typically four pages were set and framed at once. The letters were inked, paper was laid over them and pressed against them, and the sheet of four pages was hung or laid aside to dry. As many sheets were pressed as copies the customer ordered. After the last impressions were made and had dried, the sheets were cut into their separate pages, which were collated and bound.

The mental aspect of the craft was no less significant than the physical. Printers doubled as editors, proofreading their patrons’ prose (and
their own typesetting) and suggesting improvements in style. In some instances they served as coauthors or ghostwriters, filling gaps in imagination or knowledge. In addition, the printing trade shared certain activities with all businesses: accounting, marketing, inventory control, customer relations.

From the beginning Ben showed himself adept at both the physical and mental aspects of printing. His fingers flitted from type rack to frame, plucking the letters he needed and slipping them into their places. He had inherited a good set of shoulders from Josiah; as he matured, and as he continued to swim at every opportunity, these grew strong enough to sling around the heavy sets of lead type and to operate the manual presses for hours at a time. His facility with language eased the chores of editing and proofing; his early-acquired and always-widening reading habits attuned his ear to felicitous phrasing and his eye to orthodox orthography. His failure at arithmetic proved to have been Mr. Brownell’s doing more than his own; a subsequent self-study course yielded rapid progress to a mastery more than adequate for any tradesman.

It did not take James long to appreciate what Ben could bring to the printing business. He soon struck an agreement with Josiah that Ben would serve as his apprentice. The term—nine years—was longer than that of most apprenticeships, but printing required greater skill and longer training than most trades. In other respects the apprenticeship fit the custom of the day, which was summarized in a typical indenture document:

The said Apprentice his Master faithfully shall or will serve, his secrets keep, his lawful commands everywhere gladly do…. The goods of his said Master he shall not waste, nor the same without license of him to any give or lend. Hurt to his said Master he shall not do, cause, nor procure to be done…. Taverns, inns, or alehouses he shall not haunt. At cards, dice, tables or any other unlawful game he shall not play. Matrimony he shall not contract; nor from the service of his said Master day or night absent himself; but in all things as an honest and faithful apprentice shall and will demean and behave himself towards his said Master and all his during said term.

Beyond this boilerplate, James agreed to pay Ben the wages of a journeyman printer during the final year of his indenture.

Although Ben deemed printing preferable to cutlery, and certainly to chandlery, and while he could see that printing was something he might
be good at, he had reservations about the apprenticeship. Nine years looked an eternity to a twelve-year-old, and, as he recalled later, he “still had a hankering for the sea.” But this hankering simply intensified Josiah’s determination to seal the arrangement, and through a combination of cajolery and threat—legally, a father did not require his son’s approval for an apprenticeship—he induced Ben to sign the indenture papers.

Before long
, Ben began to appreciate the advantages of his new line of work. His appetite for reading had always grown with the eating; of late he had devoured
Pilgrim’s Progress
and other works by Bunyan, Burton’s
Historical Collections,
Plutarch’s
Lives,
Defoe’s
Essay on Projects, and
various of Cotton Mather’s preachments. Now that he was thrown into regular contact with the most literate element in a highly literate society, he discovered that an even wider array of literature fell open to him. As apprentice to a printer, he daily dealt with apprentices to the town’s booksellers; he formed an alliance with one in particular, who allowed him to borrow books from his master’s collection to read after hours. “Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning lest it should be missed or wanted.” One of James’s customers, Matthew Adams, remarked this inquisitive lad and gave him direct access to the Adams family library, an impressive if quirky collection.

James did not object to his younger brother’s campaign of self-improvement, so long as it did not diminish his productivity in the press room, which it did not. “In a little time I made great proficiency in the business, and became a useful hand to my brother,” Ben wrote, quite believably. Indeed, James soon found a way to capitalize on the boy’s literary bent. A common entertainment in those days consisted of poems struck off on the occasion of important or otherwise noteworthy events. Ben had been reading verses from the Adams library, and he determined to have a try at the genre. An early effort memorialized the sad drowning of the keeper of a local lighthouse, his wife and daughter, and a friend and a slave. Beyond the basic human appeal of a story of the untimely death of loved ones, especially including a sweet and innocent young girl, the tragedy had special resonance in a society that lived by the sea—and consequently too often died by the sea. Whether or not Ben comprehended all the facets of his tale, he knocked out a piece called “The Lighthouse Tragedy,” which he and James quickly printed up. A much
older, more sophisticated Franklin called it “wretched stuff, in the Grubstreet ballad style,” but had to admit that it “sold wonderfully.” He added frankly, “This flattered my vanity.”

The plaudits and the profits inspired another venture into verse, a ballad commemorating the recent killing of the notorious pirate Edward Teach, commonly called Blackbeard.

Will you hear of a bloody battle,
Lately fought upon the seas,
It will make your ears to rattle,
And your admiration cease.
Have you heard of Teach the Rover
And his knavery on the main,
How of gold he was a lover,
How he loved all ill-got gain.

There were several more stanzas, climaxing on the quarterdeck:

Teach and Maynard on the quarter,
Fought it out most manfully;
Maynard’s sword did cut him shorter,
Losing his head he there did die.