Benjamin Franklin as a man of letters

Prefatory Note

My thanks are due to Dr. Samuel Green, of the Massachusetts Historical Society ; to Mr. Theodore Dwight, of the Library of the Department of State at Washington ; to Mr, Hildeburn, of the Philadelphia Athenseum ; and especially to Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston Public Library, and Mr. F. D. Stone, of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, for the help so kindly given me when gathering the material for this Life of Franklin.

JOHN BACH McMASTER.

Philadelphia,

October, 1887.

Chapter I. 1706-1723

Birth and early training. The newspapers and literature of New England. The Dogood Papers. The departure of Pranklin from Boston 1-35

Chapter II. 1723-1729

Franklin reaches Philadelphia ; is employed by Keimer ; goes to London ; writes a pamphlet, " Liberty and Necessity " ; comes back to Philadelphia ; opens a printing office; writes "The Busybody," and a pamphlet on " Paper Money " 36-64

Chapter III. 1729-1748

Buys Keimer's " Universal Instructor in all the Arts and Sciences," and establishes the " Pennsylvania Gazette " ; notable contributions ; his " Parables " and " Biblical Paraphrases " 65-95

Publishes " Poor Richard '* ; Father Abraham's Speech ; quarrels with Bradford ; publishes the General Magazine 96-135

VUl CONTENTS.

Chapter V. 1743-1756

Franklin becomes interested in politics; his pamphlet " Plain Truth " ; his " Proposals relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania" ; founds the University of Pennsylvania; sells the printing house and the newspaper ; begins to study electricity ; his scientific papers ; the Albany Plan of Union ; "Dialogue between X, Y, Z ; " is sent to London by the Assembly of Pennsylvania 136-167

Chapter VI. 1756-1764

Political writings while in London ; the pretended chapter " On the Meanes of disposing the Enemie to Peace " ; returns to Pennsylvania ; massacre of the Indians ; Franklin's " Narrative of the Massacre " ; the Paxton raid ; Franklin lampooned ; his " Cool Thoughts " ; his " Preface to a Speech " ; is lampooned by the Proprietary Party ; is defeated at the election for Assemblymen ; is sent to England with the Address to the King ; the Proprietary Party protest ; Franklin writes " Remarks on a Protest " 168-188

CHAPTER VIL

1764-1776.

Reaches London ; conduct regarding the Stamp Act ; haa Hughes made stamp collector ; is lampooned for this ; his writings for the London newspapers ; " Rules for reducing a Great Empire to a Small One." " An Edict of the King of Prussia." Visits France. First English edition of his works ; Dubourg translates it into French. The Hutchinson Letters. Abused before the Privy Council. Delivers the Declaration of Rights, and returns to Philadelphia ; is elected to Congress . 189^217

CONTENTS. IX

Chapter VIII. 1776-1790

Is sent to France. Eeception at Nantes ; at Paris ; by the French people. His popularity. "Writes "A Comparison of Great Britain and America" ; '* A Catechism relative to the English National Debt " ; " A Dialogue between Britain, France, Spain, Holland, Saxony, and America." His way of life at Passy. The privateers. Madame Helvetius. Madame Brillon. " The Bagatelles." His mission ended. Returns to Philadelphia. "Writes " The Retort Courteous " ; " Remarks on Sending Felons to America '' ; " Likeness of the Anti-Federalists to the Jews." His anti-slavery writings. " Martin's Account of his Consulship." His death. . 218-250

Chapter IX

The Autobiography. Loss of the manuscript of the first part. The manuscript recovered and continued. Copies sent to England and France. Publication of the first part at Paris. Translation of this into English. Temple Franklin begins to edit the papers. Dr. Price's edition with Steuben's "Life." Temple Franklin accused of selling the papers. He finally publishes a part. Loss of the unpublished papers. Their singular recovery. Bought by Mr. Stevens, and then by the Government of the United States. Mr. Bigelow recovers the original manuscript of the Autobiography. Changes made by Temple Franklin in the text. Its popularity. The collected works. Franklin's place in literature. Characteristics of his style ; his versatility ; his philosophy. His letters. His greatness . . 251-282

AS A MAN OF LETTERS.

Chapter I. 1706-1723

The story of the life of Benjamin Franklin begins at a time when Queen Anne still ruled the colonies ; when the colonies were but ten in number, and when the population of the ten did not sum up to four hundred thousand souls ; at a time when witches were plentiful in New England ; when foxes troubled the farmers of Lynn ; when wolves and panthers abounded in Connecticut ; when pirates infested the Atlantic coast ; when there was no such thing as a stage-coach in the land ; when there were but three colleges and one newspaper in the whole of British North America ; when no printing-press existed south of Philadelphia ; when New York was still defended by a high stockade; and when Ann Pollard, the first white woman that ever set foot on the soil of Boston, was still enjoying a bale old age.

On the January morning, 1706, when Franklin received his name in the Old South Church at Boston, the French bad not founded the city of Mobile nor the city of New Orleans, nor begun the construction of that great chain of forts which stretched across our country from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf. Philip Jones had not marked out the streets of Baltimore ; the proprietors of Carolina had not surrendered their charter, and the colony was still governed on the absurd plan of Locke; Delaware was still the property of William Penn ; the founder of Georgia was a lad of eighteen. Of the few places that deserved to be called towns, the largest was Boston. Yet the area of Boston was less than one square mile, and the population did not equal ten thousand souls. The chief features of the place were three hills, since greatly cut down ; three coves, long since filled up ; the patch of common, where the cows fed at large ; and the famous Neck. Across the Neck was a barrier, the gate of which was closed each night at nine, and never opened on the Sabbath. Behind the barrier was a maze of narrow streets, lined with buildings most of which have long since disappeared. On the site of the Old South Church stood a wooden

PARENTS OF BENJAMIN. 3

meeting-house, pulled down in 1729. Near bywere the pillory and the stocks, and just over the way on Milk Street was the humble dwelling of Josiah Franklin and Abiah Folger his wife.

Josiah was an Englishman, a dissenter, and a dyer ; came to Boston in 1685, and, finding no use for his trade, abandoned it and became a tallow-chandler instead. Abiah Folger was his second wife. The first wife brought him seven children. Abiah brought him ten, and of her ten children Benjamin was the youngest son. This name was given him in honor of an uncle on the day of his birth, which, by the records of the Old South Church, must have been the sixth of January (Old Style), 1706.

Those were the days of compulsory education and compulsory thrift, the days when it was the duty of the selectmen to see that every Boston boy could read and write the English tongue, had some knowledge of the capital laws, knew by heart some orthodox catechism, and was brought up to do some honest work. Benjamin began his education at home ; was sent when he was eight to the Latin School, and soon after to that of George Brownell, a pedagogue famed for his skill in arithmetic and the use of the quill. To this school he went regularly till the master ceased to teach boys to make pot-hooks and loops, and began to teach women to make new-fashioned purses and to paint on glass, to do feather-work and filigree and embroider a new way, to put Turkey work on handkerchiefs, flowers on muslin, and cover their short aprons with rich brocade ; till he turned dressmaker and barber, made gowns and furbelowed scarfs, and cut gentlewomen's hair in the newest fashion.

When this change took place Benjamin was ten. His schooling then ended, and for two years he cut wicks, molded candles, tended shop, ran on errands, and talked much of going to sea. The parents had intended to breed him to the church, and an uncle graciously promised to leave him a bundle of sermons taken down from time to time in short-hand.^ But even this could not move him. Benjamin remained steadfast; and Josiah, alarmed at this fondness for ships and sailors, determined to bind him to some trade that should keep him on shore.

Like a man of sense, the father tried to find the lad's bent, took him on long walks about town, went among the bricklayers and the

1 One of the sermons taken down in this way is yet extant. The title is, " A Discourse on Forgiveness. In Three Sermons from Matt. vi. 15. By Nathaniel Vincent. Taken down in short-hand by one of his hearers. Boston, J. Franklin, 1722." The remarks " To the Reader " are signed B. F., and this B. F. was undoubtedly Benjamin Franklin the elder.

LIBRARY OF JOSIAH. 5

joiners, the tanners and the cutlers, watched him closely, and decided that he should become a maker of knives. Benjamin was now sent to a cousin who had learned the trade in London. But a fee was asked. Josiah was vexed, and the boy was soon home and in the shop.

There he fell to reading. As to the character of the books that made the library of Josiah Franklin, neither his wijl, inventory, nor account afford much information. From the inventory it appears that he died possessed of two large bibles, a concordance, " Willard's Body of Divinity," and " a parcel of small books." But we gather from the autobiography of Benjamin that the collection of books that lay upon the shelves was, with a few exceptions, such as no boy of our time thinks of reading ; such as cannot be found even in the libraries of students uncovered with dust; such as are rarely seen in the catalogues of book auctions, and never come into the hands of bookbinders to be reclothed. There were, Mather's "Essay to do Good," and Defoe's "Essay on Projects," Platarch's ''Lives," the only readable book in the collection, and a pile of thumbed and dog-eared pamphlets on polemical theology such as any true son of the dissenting church might read ; such as those in which Increase Mather and Solomon Stoddart discussed the grave questions, Can baptized persons destitute of religion come to the table of the Lord ? Is it lawful to wear long hair ? At what time of evening does the Sabbath begin ? Is it lawful for men to set their dwelling-houses at such a distance from the place of public worship that they and their families cannot well attend it? Uninviting as this literature may seem, Franklin read it with pleasure, for he was by nature a debater and a disputatious man. Indeed, there is much reason to believe that he was himself the author of an eight-page tract ridiculing some of Stoddart's remarks, and called " Hooped Petticoats Arraigned and Condemned by the Light of Nature and the Law of God."

These books finished, he determined to get more. Borrow he could not. He knew no bookseller, and a circulating library did not exist anywhere in America. In a room in the Town Hall at Boston were gathered a few volumes which, in old wills, old letters, and the diaries of prominent men, is called the " Public Library." But there is not any reason to suppose that one of the books could have been carried home by a tallow-chandler's son, or treated of any subject less serious than religion. In the whole town there was not, in all likelihood, a solitary copy of any of the works of one of that glorious band of writers who made the

LITERATURE OF THE TIME. 7

literature of the reign of Queen Anne so famous. The first catalogue of Harvard Librarywas printed in 1723, yet there is not in it the title of any of the works of Addison, of any of the satires of Swift, of any of the poems of Pope, of any of the writings of Bolingbroke or Dryden, Steele, Prior, or Young. The earliest copy of Shakespeare brought to America was of the edition of 1709. No copy was ever advertised for sale till 1722. Even such books as Harvard did own, it was seriously urged, should, after the manner of the Bodleian Library, be chained to the desk.

Nor did the boy fare much better when, with the few halfpence he had saved, he went among the booksellers to buy. The steam printing-press has, in our time, placed within reach of the poorest ofiice-boy the most delightful works of poetry and travel, of history and biography, of essay and fiction, the languages of ten civilized nations can afford. When Franklin began to read, a printing-press was a " raree show." Neither in New Hampshire, nor Rhode Island, nor New Jersey, nor Delaware had such a thing been seen. He was three years old before a type was set in Connecticut. He was twenty when the first press reached Maryland. He was twenty-three before one was permanently set up in Virginia, and another year passed by before a printer appeared in the Carolinas. In the four colonies where there were printers, the press was busy in the cause of the church. Between the j&rst of January, 1706, and the first of January, 1718, all the publications known to have been printed in America number at least five hundred and fifty. Of these but eighty-four are not on religious topics, and of the eighty-four, forty-nine are almanacs. "The Origin of the Whalebone Petticoat;" " The Simple Cobbler of Agawam in America ; " John Williams's " Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion," an Indian story, which for a time was more sought after than Mather's " Treacle fetched out of a Viper ; " Mary Rowlandson's " Captivity among the Indians," and " Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War," were the only approaches made in all these years to what would now be called light literature.

Among the four hundred and sixty-six books of a religious tone, by far the best was " Pilgrim's Progress," printed at Boston in 1681 and reprinted in 1706. A copy of this was Benjamin's first purchase; was read, reread, and sold, and, with the money and a few more pence he had saved, forty volumes of Burton's "Historical Collections" were secured. The bent of his mind was now unmistakable. He stood in no danger of going to sea ; he did

COTTON MATHER, 9

not need his uncle's sermons ; lie would never be content to mold candles nor grind knives. For the lad who could deny himself the few treats afforded by a Puritan town, save his coppers and lay them out on such books as were then to be had at Boston, there seemed to be but one career, the career of a man of letters.

No such man had then appeared in the colonies. The greatest American then living was unquestionably Cotton Mather. Yet he is in no sense deserving to be called a man of letters. His pen, indeed, was never idle. Four hundred and twenty- three of his productions are still extant, yet our literature would have suffered no loss if every one of them had perished. Everything that he left is of value, but the value is of that kind which belongs to a bit of the Charter Oak ; to a sword worn by Miles Standish ; to an uncomfortable chair in which Governor Bradford sat; or to a broken plate used by the Pilgrims on their voyage to Plymouth. To hurry through a volume and write a sermon was, with Mather, a morning's work. To preach seventy sermons in public, forty more in private, publish fourteen pamphlets, keep thirty vigils and sixty fasts, and still have time for persecuting witches, was nothing unusual for him to do in a year. The habit of starving the body to purify the soul he adopted when a lad of fourteen, and in the fifty-two years that remained to him his fasts were more than four hundred and fifty. Sometimes they numbered ten a week. Often they lasted three days. On all such occasions he would lie face downward on his study-floor, fasting, weeping, praying, calling on the name of God. By the time he was forty, even such mortification was not enough for him, and he began to keep vigils ; then he would leave his bed at the dead of night, fall prostrate on the floor of his library, and spend the hours of darkness " wrestling with God " and getting " unutterable communications from Heaven." The simplest act of life was to Mather an occasion for religious meditation. When he mended his fire he remembered that godliness should flame up within him. When he washed his hands he recalled that a pure heart was also required of the citizen of Zion. When he pared his nails he reflected on the duty of putting away all superfluity of naughtiness. If a tall man passed him on the street he would exclaim, ''Lord, give that man high attainments in Christianity." When he saw a lame man he would say, " Lord, help him to walk uprightly." In early life Mather stuttered and stammered, and spoke with difliculty. Thinking himself unfit to serve the Lord, he began to fit himself

THE FIRST NEWSPAPER. 11

to serve man, and studied medicine. But an old schoolmaster cured him of stuttering; he began to preach, and is now remembered for the support he gave to inoculation, to the witchcraft delusion of 1692, and to the censorship of the press James Franklin and his apprentice Benjamin did so much to destroy.

It was in 1718, when he had just turned twelve, that Benjamin was bound to his brother, who a year later began to print the second newspaper in America. Not many years ago the historian of the town of Salem, while rummaging among the records of the Colonial State Paper Office at London, brought to light a small four-page sheet entitled " Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick." The date was Thursday, September 25, 1690 ; the size of each page was seven inches by eleven, and one of the four was blank. The purpose of "Publick Occurrences" was praiseworthy. He wished, the printer declared, to do " something towards the curing, or at least the charming, of the spirit of lying;" and he should, he promised, put forth an issue once each month, unless a "glut of occurrences" required it oftener. Four days later the General Court decided that " Publick Occurrences " was a pamphlet, that it contained reflections of a high nature, that it was printed contrary to law, and that henceforth nothing should come from the press till a license had first been obtained. None was ever issued for the offending pamphlet, and, save that at London, no copy of it has since been seen.

"Publick Occurrences" is commonly believed to have been the first newspaper in our country. It might more truly be called the first magazine, for it was, as the General Court declared, a pamphlet. The true newspaper did not appear for fourteen years, and was then begun by the Boston postmaster. The duties of his place were far from exacting. If he opened his office on Monday of each week from seven to twelve for the distribution of letters the riders brought in, and again from two to seven for the reception of letters the riders were to take out, colfected postage once a quarter, made a list of letters not called for, and higgled with ship-captains for distributing letters they ought to have lodged with him, he did all he was required to do.

To John Campbell, however, these duties were not enough, and to them he added those of a gatherer of news. He visited every stranger that came to town, boarded every ship that entered the bay, collected what scraps of news he could, and wrote them out in a fair hand for the public good. Copies of his " News Letter '*

''BOSTON NEWS LETTER.'' 13

passed from hand to hand at the Coffee House, found their way to the neighboring towns, and went out in the mail to the goyernors of the New England colonies. As time passed, the glut of occurrences steadily increased ; his work grew daily more in favor ; and he was at last compelled to lay down the pen, betake himself to type, and become the founder of the American newspaper. Monday, the seventeenth of April, 1704, was a white day in the annals of Boston, and as the printer struck off the first copy of the first number of the " Boston News Letter," Chief Justice Sewell, who stood by, seized the paper and bore it, damp from the press, to the President of Harvard College. Some extracts from the " Flying Post " concerning the Pretender, the text of a sermon licensed to be printed, notices of a couple of arrivals, of a couple of deaths, of the appointment of an admiralty judge and deputy, and a call for business, is all it contains.

During fifteen years the " News Letter " had no rival. But in 1719 Campbell lost the post-office, refused in revenge to have his newspapers carried by the riders, and the new postmaster at once established the " Boston Gazette," and gave the matter to James Franklin to print. While engaged in setting type and mixing ink in his brother's office, Benjamin began to write. His first attempts were two ballads in doggerel verse, treating of subjects which at that time filled the popular mind. The keeper of the Boston light had been drowned in a storm. A pirate renowned along the whole coast had been killed.

There is not now living a man who has ever beheld such a rover out of the China seas. Early in the eighteenth century the black flag had been seen by scores of captains who went in and out of the colonial ports. From the West Indies, from New Providence, from the sounds and inlets of the Virginia coast, from Cape Fear River, from Pamlico Sound, from the very shores of Massachusetts, freebooter after freebooter sallied forth to plunder and destroy. When Captain Kidd died in 1700, Quelch succeeded him, and long found shelter in the bays and harbors of New England. In one of them, on a return from a prosperous coasting trip, the people surprised him, and hanged him with six companions on the banks of Charles River, June 80, 1704. The event is memorable as it became the occasion of the first piece of newspaper reporting in America. In the crowd that stood about the gallows-tree that day in June was John Campbell, who, in the next number of the " News Letter," described the scene, " the exhortation to the mal-

TREATMENT OF PIRATES. 15

efactors," and the prayer put up for the culprits' repose, " as nearly," says he, " as it could be taken down in writing in a great crowd."

From the moment such a character fell into the clutches of the law he became the victim of the most terrible religious enginery the colony could produce. His trial was speedy. His conviction was sure. His sentence w^as imposed by the judge in a long sermon after a long prayer, and he was, on the Sunday or the Thursday before execution, brought to the meeting-house loaded with chains, and placed in the front seats, to be reprobated and held up by name to the whole congregation behind him. The day of his death was a gala day. The entire town marched in procession behind his coffin to the foot of the Common, to Boston Neck, or to Broughton's Hill on the Charles River, where stood the gallows, from one end of which floated a huge black flag adorned with a figure of Death holding a dart in one hand and an hour-glass in the other. There, after just such prayers and exhortations as Campbell has described, the pirate would be left swinging in his chains.

Next in turn came Bellamy, the terror of every New England sailor till in 1717 he was wrecked on Cape Cod, where such of his crew as did not perish in the sea were hanged.

When George I. came to the throne New Providence was a nest of pirates, and thither a ship of war was sent to drive them out. Two sought refuge in Cape Fear River, a third took up his abode among the people of Pamlico Sound. There, protected by the governor, dreaded by the people, he squandered in riot and debauchery his ill-gotten wealth. When all was gone, Theach went back to his roving life, gathered a crew, procured a ship, cleared her as a merchantman, and was again a pirate chief. In a few weeks he was home with a rich cargo in a fine French ship. He swore the vessel had been picked up at sea. But the people knew better, sent Governor Spottiswoode word, and a man-of-war soon appeared in Pamlico Sound. Theach descried her one evening in November, 1718, and the next morning a running fight took place through the sounds and inlets of that singular coast. Discipline prevailed ; the pirate was boarded, and as Theach, covered with wounds and surrounded by the dead, stepped back match in hand to fire a pistol, he fainted and fell upon the deck.

The Christian name of Theach was John ; but among the wretches who manned his guns and furled his sails, and the captains who fled in terror from his flag, he passed by the name of Blackbeard. He was a boy's ideal of a pirate

" blackbeard:' 17

chief. His brow was low ; his eyes were small ; his huge, shaggy beard, black as a coal, hung far down upon his breast. Over his shoulders were three braces of pistols ; in battle, lighted matches stuck out from under his hat and protruded from behind his ears. In his fits of rage he became a demon. But his hours of good-nature were more to be feared than his moments of fury. Sometimes he would amuse the boon-companions of his crew by shooting out the light of his cabin ; sometimes he would send balls whizzing past the ears or through the hair of those who sat with him at table. To mimic the Devil was a favorite sport, and on one occasion, to give greater reality to his impersonation, the hatches were battened down and the crew half stifled with the fumes of sulphur. The death of such a character in a hand-tohand conflict on the deck of his own ship was as fine a subject for song as a writer of ballads could desire. The street ballad was then and long remained the chief source of popular information. If a great victory were won on land or sea ; if a murder were committed ; if a noted criminal were hanged ; if a highwayman were caught ; if a ship were wrecked ; if a good man died ; if a sailor came back from the Spanish main with some strange tale of adventure, a ballad-monger was sure to put the details into doggerel rhyme, and the event became fixed in the mind of the people. The influence of such verses was great and lasting, the demand for them was incessant, and the printer who could furnish a steady supply was sure of a rich return. Thomas Fleet is said to have made no small part of his fortune by the sale of ballads his press struck off. James Franklin, with a like purpose in view, bade his apprentice turn his knack of rhyming to some use, suggested the themes, and when the ballads were printed sent Benjamin forth to hawk them in the street. That upon the drowning of the lightkeeper and his family sold prodigiously, for the event was recent and the man well known ; yet not a line of it remains.

From the manufacture of ballad poetry Benjamin was saved by his father, who told him plainly that all poets were beggars, and that he would do well to turn his time and talents to better use. The advice was taken, and Benjamin went on with his reading. An intense longing for books possessed him. When he had secured one, he read and reread it till he obtained another, and to get others he shrewdly gained the friendship of some booksellers' apprentices and persuaded them, in his behalf, to commit temporary theft. Urged on by him, night after night they purloined from their

READS THE SPECTATOR. 19

masters' shelves such books as he wanted, and left them with him to read. Some were perused at leisure ; some that could not long be spared were taken after the shutters were up in the evening and returned in the morning before the shutters were down. Then he would sit up till the dawn was soon to break, reading by the light of a farthing candle made in his father's shop.

Everything that he read at this time of life influenced him strongly. A wretched book on vegetable diet came into his hands, and he at once began to live on rice, potatoes, and hastypudding. He read Xenophon's " Memorabilia," and ever after used the Socratic method of dispute ; he read Shaftesbury and Collins, and became a skeptic ; he read a volume of Addison, and gained a delightful style.