The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (6 page)

Perhaps because this poem lacked the romantic-tragic element, it sold less well than Ben’s first. (Closer comparison is impossible, as the first does not survive). Josiah had frowned on his son’s poetic efforts, ridiculing them and warning that verse-makers were generally beggars, but as long as the lighthouse tale belied the warning, Ben ignored the criticism. Yet now the ridicule stung more sharply and the warning rang louder, and the boy abandoned balladic Grub Street for more respectable precincts of prose.

By a matter
of luck and untutored good taste, his guides to those precincts turned out to be some of the finest prose stylists of the day. Previously Ben had honed his argumentative skills on a friend of similarly bookish bent. On one occasion Ben and this John Collins disputed the prudence and appropriateness of educating girls beyond basic literacy. Ben, who took the affirmative, believed he had the better of the
argument on merits but conceded that Collins was the more persuasive presenter. Ben hoped to gain an advantage by shifting ground from the spoken word to the written, but here again he discovered that his arguments lacked the eloquence and power of his opponent’s. Josiah, who happened across some of Ben’s papers, concurred, pointing out particular deficiencies in style and approach.

Frustrated and now somewhat embarrassed, Ben determined to remedy the situation. He had recently encountered an early issue of
The Spectator,
the London journal soon to be famous for the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Ben read this number front to back, then back to front and all over again. Entranced by the authors’ ease of exposition, he adopted the
Spectator
’s style as a model for his own. He devised elaborate exercises to absorb the principles that underlay its phrases. He would read passages, then try to recapitulate them from memory. On the reasoning that poetry demands a larger vocabulary than prose—a given meaning must also fit the pattern of rhyme and meter—he reworked the
Spectator
essays into verse, and subsequently back into prose again. He took notes on the essays, then deliberately scrambled the notes before attempting to reconstruct the original order, the better to appreciate the art of rhetorical organization. He shunned sleep, sitting up late with his quill pen and a sheaf of papers salvaged from the printing shop’s scrap pile, then rising early to fit in a few more exercises before James entered the shop and the real work of the day commenced. He exploited James’s relative unconcern at the state of his younger brother’s soul to steal Sundays from the South Church and its sacred texts for the print shop and his secular volumes. Josiah, missing his youngest son at services, disapproved but declined to intervene between master and apprentice; perhaps he already recognized that Ben’s zeal for the word of man would forever outstrip his zeal for the word of God. The former sentiment was a powerful motivator; referring to his efforts to make himself a writer, Ben admitted afterward, “I was extremely ambitious.”

He had a chance to gratify that ambition, and to measure his literary advancement, after James began publishing the
New England Courant
in 1721. During the previous two years James had been the printer—but not the publisher—of the
Boston Gazette,
which, like other papers of that era, was something of an adjunct to and perquisite of the office of the Boston postmaster. Postmasters had first knowledge of most of the news that came in—by post frequently—from the outside world; this news could be recycled in one’s own paper. Moreover, a postmaster
could exploit his command of the outgoing mails to arrange distribution of his paper in preference to—or to the exclusion of—competitors’ publications.

But because the postmastership was a public office, postmasters’ papers (including the
Gazette)
tended to tread lightly on issues relating to government. The
Gazette
boasted that it was published “by authority”; it read as though it were published by the authorities. James Franklin thought Boston deserved better, and after his printing contract with the
Gazette
ran out, he determined to start his own paper. This one would be lively, opinionated, and not averse to challenging the establishment.

No one so represented the establishment as Cotton Mather; James’s new paper, the
New England Courant,
announced its birth with a scathing attack on Mather. The occasion of the attack was an epidemic of smallpox, the first in nearly two decades—which hiatus was a primary cause of the virulence of this outbreak, in that an unexposed generation had little or no resistance to the disease. For all his obsession with the supernatural, Mather had maintained his youthful interest in the natural, and he advocated the novel technique of inoculation to combat the contagion.

James Franklin knew next to nothing of the etiology of smallpox, but he knew he despised Mather for what James judged the eminent minister’s smugness and his inordinate influence over the life of Boston. If Mather advocated inoculation, the
Courant
must oppose it—and did. The campaign of opposition accomplished no good for the health of the community; nearly 10 percent of the population died before the disease ran its course. In fairness to James, the preponderance of medical knowledge at the time was on his side regarding the inefficacy of inoculation; one of his collaborators in opposition was William Douglass, a physician educated at the best English and continental European universities. But whatever its effects on public health, the anti-inoculation campaign served James’s purpose of shaking the status quo.

The status quo shook back. Increase Mather publicly denounced the “vile
Courant
” and said he “could well remember when the Civil Government would have taken an effectual course to suppress such a cursed libel.” Samuel Mather, Cotton’s son and an apparent beneficiary of inoculation, wrote semianonymously (and that not for long) in the
Gazette
that the
Courant
was trying “to vilify and abuse the best men we have”; he warned that “there is a number of us who resolve that if this wickedness be not stopped, we will pluck up our courage and see what we can do in
our way to stop it.” Many readers heard the voice of Cotton Mather in an unsigned complaint to the
Boston News-Letter
decrying the “notorious, scandalous paper called the
Courant
” and charging said screed sheet with purveying “nonsense, unmanliness, railery, profaneness, immorality, arrogance, calumnies, lies, contradictions, and what not all tending to quarrels and divisions, and to debauch and corrupt the minds and manners of New England.” Whether or not those precise words were Cotton Mather’s, the sentiments surely were; in his diary Mather wrote of “the wicked printer and his accomplices who every week publish a vile paper to lessen and blacken the ministers of the town, and render their ministry ineffectual.”

With the
battle joined, James Franklin sought allies. At this early stage the list of
Courant
contributors comprised only James and a few kindred skeptics; to create the illusion of numbers, the publisher-editor and his friends employed the common journalistic tactic of writing under noms de plume—“Abigail Afterwit,” “Timothy Turnstone,” “Harry Meanwell,” “Fanny Mournful” and others. These fictitious personages graced the paper with sharp-penned commentary on issues of the day; not surprisingly they tended to endorse the paper’s editorial views.

Consequently it was with pleasure that James awoke one morning to discover beneath the door of the print shop a contribution from a genuine outsider. Actually, this contributor was not an outsider at all; it was Ben Franklin, who had observed the genesis of the
Courant
and its challenge to Mather and the Massachusetts hierarchy but who conspicuously had not been invited to join the undertaking. Because he had not—and because he realized that James might be less than enthusiastic about his younger brother’s participation in the new project—Ben carefully disguised his handwriting and signed the letter “Silence Dogood.” James read the missive with growing delight—which increased the more from his appreciation that the author’s very name tweaked Cotton Mather, whose recently published
Silentarius
followed his earlier
Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good.
James shared the Dogood letter with his colleagues; they registered equal approval. James ran it in the April 2, 1722, issue of the Courant.

Mrs. Dogood introduced herself to
Courant
patrons by chaffing them for the contemporary unwillingness “either to commend or dispraise
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.” She (or Ben Franklin, rather) proceeded to mock this timidity by fabricating a fanciful background for herself. She had, she said, been born at sea en route from the old England to New England. But the joy surrounding her birth had turned to sorrow almost at once when a huge wave swept across the deck of the vessel and carried her celebrating father to his watery doom. It was a misfortune, Silence said, “which though I was not then capable of knowing, I shall never be able to forget.”

The death of her father had made an indigent of her mother, with the result that the infant Silence was placed in foster care outside Boston, where she passed her childhood “in vanity and idleness” until being bound over to a country minister, “a pious good-natured young man and a bachelor.” This godly fellow instructed the girl in all that was necessary for the female sex to learn—“needlework, writing, arithmetic, & c.” (Had James known of Ben’s earlier defense of education for girls, he might have guessed the identity of Silence Dogood at this point.) Because she displayed a head for books, the minister allowed her the run of his library, “which though it was but small, yet it was well chose to inform the understanding rightly and enable the mind to frame great and noble ideas.” This bucolic idyll was interrupted briefly by the news that her poor mother had died—“leaving me as it were by my self, having no relation on earth within my knowledge”—but soon enough it resumed. “I passed away the time with a mixture of profit and pleasure, having no affliction but what was imaginary and created in my own fancy; as nothing is more common with us women than to be grieving for nothing when we have nothing else to grieve for.”

Almost certainly none of the readers of the
Courant
guessed that this ironically knowing voice belonged to a sixteen-year-old boy; neither did James, who inserted after Silence Dogood’s first epistle an invitation for more. Any such additional missives could be delivered to the printing house or to the candle shop of Josiah Franklin. “No questions shall be asked of the bearer.”

Ben later said he felt “exquisite pleasure” at the approbation this first effort in journalism elicited; he took particular satisfaction from listening to James and the others guess who the anonymous author might be. “None were named but men of some character among us for learning and ingenuity.” During the next six months Ben continued his correspondence, delivering fifteen Dogood letters in all.

His topics ranged from love to learning to lamenting the death of dear ones. As in the first letter, insight and irony were evenly matched. Silence related how, to her astonishment, her ministerial benefactor presently essayed to woo her. “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.” (As Ben was of an age, if not an economic condition, to consider courtship, the reader who knows the identity of Silence Dogood discerns a certain dawning in him of the difficulties of the endeavor.) But gratitude inclined Silence to accept his suit, leading to wedlock and “the height of conjugal love and mutual endearments,” not to mention “two likely girls and a boy.” Tragically, her husband was carried off by illness almost as suddenly as her father had been swept away by the ocean, and Silence was left to look after herself and her offspring. Yet, as she assured readers, especially the men among them: “I could be easily persuaded to marry again…. I am courteous and affable, good humoured (unless I am first provoked) and handsome, and sometimes witty.”