In 1718, at age 12, Franklin began The Work
that would define the rest of his life.
He signed a 9-year apprenticeship,
legally indenturing himself
to his older brother James,
who had opened a printing shop in Boston.
In 1721, his brother James decided to publish his own weekly newspaper, "The New-England Courant."
From its inception, the paper courted controversy. Its first issue attacked Cotton Mather, Boston's pre-eminent preacher and The Colony’s strict and severe moral authority.
Mather called the newspaper wicked,
filled with immorality, and lies.
“What James Franklin does is he creates the first real independent newspaper in America.
His paper, in Boston, is, quote,
"Not published by Authority."
All the others,
you were given
a Stamp of Authority.
On April 2, 1722, an essay appeared over the name of Silence Dogood, who claimed to be a widowed woman from the countryside, and who had lots of homespun wisdom and sharp social critiques to share. It was an immediate hit.
No one, including James Franklin, had any idea that the real author was a teenage boy, James's 16-year-old brother Benjamin, who had secretly slipped the essay under the door.
More of Silence Dogood's articles began to appear. She offered irreverent advice on funeral eulogies, advocated fiercely for women's education, and in one dispatch poked fun at Harvard and the wealthy parents who dreamed of sending their children to the elite institution :
Most of them consulted their own Purses instead of their Childrens Capacities.
At Harvard They learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely... and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.
In the summer of 1722, James was jailed for 3 weeks without trial for questioning the competence of Cotton Mather and the colony's other leaders.
Quoting from an article he had read in a London newspaper,
Benjamin, as Silence Dogood, came to his brother's defense.
Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.
When James was released from jail and resumed putting out his newspaper, Benjamin confessed publicly that he, in fact, was writing Silence Dogood's essays.
Many cheered him for his artfulness, but James was jealous. They would argue and it sometimes came to blows.
I fancy his harsh and tyrannical "Treatment" of me, might be a means of impressing me with that "Aversion" to arbitrary "Power" that has stuck to me "thro'" my whole "Life".
Franklin decided to run away, even if it meant breaking his legal obligation to his brother. After selling some of his books to pay for his passage, he slipped out of town on a ship heading south, convincing the captain to keep quiet under the false pretense that he had gotten a girl pregnant and needed to leave. He was 17 years old.
11 days later, on October 6, 1723, Franklin arrived at the Market Street wharf on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love founded by William Penn, a Quaker for whom the colony of Pennsylvania was named. With 6,000 residents, Philadelphia was now America's third-largest city after Boston and New York. It was a thriving outpost of the British Empire... its streets filled with both newcomers and Native peoples, including the Lenape, on whose land the city now stood. People are coming from all sorts of backgrounds. There's Anglicans, there's Jews, there's slaves, freed slaves. There's the Germans coming in and the Presbyterians and the Native Americans who were there. And, unlike Puritan Boston, where you have to follow the theocratic maxims of the Mather family, people in Philadelphia have a certain tolerance. Colonial Philadelphia had a different vibe, a different flavor. Growing commerce, saloons and taverns, a sort of hospitable place, but also a place in which people could find themselves and create themselves. Franklin landing in Philadelphia at this moment was perfect for him, in terms of timing. He didn't have to be someone who came from great wealth in order to find opportunity. He's just a kid. He's run away from his apprenticeship, so, he's scared, probably, that they're going to track him down. He's not sure what comes next. "I was dirty from my journey," Franklin wrote, "and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued and very hungry." It was a Sunday, and he saw a crowd of well-dressed people heading into a church. They were Quakers about to attend their weekly service, marked by sitting in silence together. I sat down among them, and after looking round awhile and hearing nothing said, I fell fast asleep, and continued so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to rouse me. Walking up Market Street, he passed a house and exchanged glances with a 15-year-old girl standing in the doorway, who, he was sure, "thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward, ridiculous appearance." He went to work at one of the city's print shops and eventually began renting a room at the house he had passed that first morning. The girl he had seen was his landlord's daughter... Deborah Read. They struck up a romance, and by the fall of 1724 were talking of marriage. Meanwhile, patrons of the print shop had noticed Franklin's skill and diligence. One of them, Pennsylvania's governor William Keith, offered what seemed to be the opportunity of a lifetime. He would send Franklin to London with letters of introduction and credit to purchase the equipment needed to start his own print shop in Philadelphia. Marriage to Deborah would have to wait. Benjamin was bound for England. The great center of England is the city of London and parts adjacent. All that vast mass of buildings, and how much farther it may spread, who knows? New squares and new streets rising up every day to such a prodigy of buildings that nothing in the world does, or ever did, equal it, except old Rome. Daniel Defoe. With more than 600,000 residents, 100 times the size of Philadelphia, London was the teeming hub of an empire that considered its far-flung colonists with mild disdain. They viewed Americans as backwards suppliers of raw materials and as purchasers of manufactured goods only England could provide. Coming out of the Provinces, he found a greater world. In England, he was young and impressionable and able to make his way into that huge metropolis of London from nothing but his ability. Upon his arrival, Franklin learned too late that Governor Keith had a reputation for unreliability. There were no letters of credit or introduction. Once more, he would have to fend for himself. For a year and a half, he made the most of it. London had more print shops than all of the American colonies combined, and he quickly found work, impressing his employers with his strength and his sobriety. Unlike all the other workers, he did not drink a pint of beer 6 different times during the workday. I drank only "Water"; the other "Workmen" "wonder'd" to see from this that the "Water-American", as they "call'd" me, was stronger than themselves. He spent his free time poring through books, especially Enlightenment treatises by Isaac Newton, René Descartes, John Locke, and other philosophers who argued that truths were to be found through the study of how things work in the natural world. The Enlightenment. It's a commitment to reason and science. It's a belief that every problem can be solved and that every institution can be reformed, that life on Earth is perfectible, at least up to a point, and maybe altogether. In London, Franklin also seemed to have forgotten Deborah and indulged in what he called "foolish intrigues with low women." He wrote her only one letter. In his absence, Deborah married someone else. But when a Quaker merchant offered Franklin a job as a clerk selling merchandise in a general store back in Philadelphia and then dangled a potential partnership, he headed home. During the 12-week voyage, Franklin wrote out a plan for future conduct, with 4 basic rules: be "extremely frugal," "endeavour to speak the truth in every instance," "apply myself industriously to whatever business I take," and "speak ill of no man whatever." In Philadelphia, he threw himself into his new job, becoming, he said, an "expert at selling." But that winter, his employer took ill and died. Franklin decided to return to his old trade as a printer. In 1728, he opened his own shop on Market Street with a partner whose father underwrote the initial expenses. He had devised a foundry for casting type, saving the cost of sending to England for replacements, and won a contract to print the authorized history of the Quakers. When his new partner took to drinking, Franklin found other backers to buy him out and continued as sole proprietor.
In his drive to succeed, he often worked until 11 at night
and was back at his shop before dawn.
I took care not only to be in "Reality" "Industrious" and frugal,
but to avoid all "Appearances of the Contrary".
He made sure people noticed, and his business increased.
He was a writer. You know, writers invent.
He might be his own best invention.
Franklin is so relentless in learning how to do things,
learning how to do things correctly in a certain way,
how to write, how to dress, how to speak
to different kinds of people.
It's sort of impossible to know what was there
before he did all that and invented himself.
With 11 other up-and-coming tradesmen,
Franklin formed a club that met each Friday evening
to socialise and forge business connections.
But they also discussed current events and
politely debated a variety of topics...
What is wisdom? What defines good writing?
Did importing indentured and enslaved servants
help or hurt the colonial economy?
The official name of the group
was the Leather Apron Club.
Informally, they called themselves the Junto,
from the Latin for "joined together."
At 21, Franklin was its youngest member,
but unquestionably its driving force.
Franklin believed that the virtues and values
of a working middle class were going to be the backbone
of American society. The artisans, the shopkeepers,
the people who put on leather aprons early in the morning
to help serve the public.
The Junto moved its meeting place from a local tavern
to a rented house, and at Franklin's suggestion,
each member brought some books that
the other members could read.
Eventually, they broadened the idea
into the Library Company of Philadelphia,
America's first subscription library open to the public,
who paid small dues for the chance to
borrow books imported from Europe.
And, every year, more and more books
would be collected and extend knowledge.
What was so important about the Library Company
was that it wasn't just for wealthy, elite men.
This "Library" afforded me the "Means of Improvement"
by constant "Study", for which I set apart an "Hour" or two each "Day";
and thus "repair'd" in some "Degree" the "Loss of the Learned Education" my "Father" once intended for me.
He always looked around wherever he was and said,
"What needs to be done? "What's missing?
What are the things that a community ought to have?"
He had read enough to know that there was more elsewhere and he wanted to make those good things happen to the community of Philadelphia.
Self-reliance, which Franklin loved, and
community engagement may seem like they oppose each other.
But as Franklin repeatedly said,
The Good that We can Do together
surpasses The Good We can Do alone.
Over the coming years, Franklin and his Junto would turn to other civic projects to improve life in Philadelphia. Under their guidance, the city formed volunteer fire companies. They advocated for a police force paid by a property tax. And at one Junto meeting, Franklin raised the idea of starting a college. When the Public Academy of Philadelphia finally opened in 1751, Franklin would be elected president of the board. It was the first non-sectarian college in America and would later become the University of Pennsylvania.
Expanding on the Junto model, he proposed and organised the American Philosophical Society, whose members would be scientists and intellectuals from throughout the colonies, who could share ideas and scholarly papers by mail if they could not come to meetings in person. It would become the colonies' first learned society. And to build a new hospital, he devised a plan that matched private donations with public funds, giving people, he said, "an additional motive to give, since every man's donation would be doubled."
He always believed that if you
just get a few good and interested men -
always Men - on any civic problem,
you can solve it.
Ben Franklin is, I think, emblematic of what America wanted to be, should be, could be. The things that he spoke of, the things that he wrote about, often missing are other people. Women, people of color, in particular, enslaved men and women, never had the opportunities that a Ben Franklin had. Franklin's print shop was thriving. Pennsylvania's colonial legislature awarded him the contract to print its paper currency. When he learned that South Carolina was looking for a printer, he dispatched one of his employees to open a shop in Charleston. And on October 2, 1729, he began publishing his own newspaper, "The Pennsylvania Gazette." He filled its pages with reports from other newspapers in America and England, along with crime stories, notices of fires and deaths, a moral advice column, funny tales he concocted that flirted with sexual innuendo, and letters from readers, including some he wrote himself, under tongue-in-cheek pseudonyms like Anthony Afterwit and Alice Addertongue. "If you would make your paper a vehicle of scandal," Addertongue advised in one letter, "you would double the number of your subscribers." The "Gazette" caught on.
Ben Franklin understood The Power of the printing press.
He understood that those who controlled words,
those who are able to disseminate information, um,
had a certain amount of Power.
He could be the arbiter of what was seen as important.
The idea, first, was to engage people, to entertain people.
Franklin understood that if you could get people to laugh with you, you're halfway to getting them to agree with you.
He also welcomed essays espousing opinions of all kinds.
If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
He said in the end you have to bear some responsibility for the type of ideas that you put forward. And if they're really odious, if they're really harmful, you have to curate them out. If you made a mistake, you could, as they always did in those days, add an errata page.
And you could fix anything with that errata page.”
Local merchants advertised their goods in the "Gazette;" tradesmen advertised their services. Franklin also published notices offering rewards for runaway indentured servants, like he had once been, and slaves for sale.
