Book of Ages (4 page)

A
biah Folger met her husband on a boat. In 1689, when she was twenty-one, she took a skiff from Nantucket to Falmouth and, from there, sailed to
Boston. All of her brothers had stayed on the islands. Three of her sisters had married Nantucket men. But two had proved more venturesome. Bathsheba had married
Joseph Pope of Salem, and Dorcas had married a man from Charlestown.
¹
It was on her way to visit Dorcas that Abiah met a thirty-two-year-old widower.

Benjamin Franklin once described the man his mother met on that boat this way: “He was ingenious, could draw prettily, was skill’d a little in Music and had a clear pleasing Voice, so that when he play’d Psalm Tunes on his Violin and sung withal as he some times did in an Evening after the Business of the Day was over, it was extremely agreeable to hear. He had a mechanical Genius too, and on occasion was very handy in the Use of other Tradesmen’s Tools. But his great Excellence lay in a sound Understanding, and solid Judgment.”
²
Artistic, musical, mechanical, and wise, a poor man but a good man: a franklin.

Josiah Franklin, formerly of Ecton, late of Banbury, had landed in Boston in 1683, after eight weeks on the ocean, with a wife, Ann, and three children, Elizabeth, five; Samuel, two; and Hannah, a baby. He had joined the Old South Meeting House, whose pastor,
Samuel Willard, had seen his last church, in the town of Groton, burned to the ground by Indians. Government, he preached, is “God’s Ordinance.”
³

Josiah held prayer meetings at his house. “I was mov’d last night at Mr. Josiah Franklin’s,” his neighbor
Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary. “I got Brother Franklin to set the Tune, which he did very well.”
⁴
He had a beautiful voice.

He had settled in a crooked, noisy city of ten thousand souls, ruled by the king of kings. In the winter it was dark and it was cold, colder than anyone raised in
England had ever known. He dyed, but, more often, he made
candles, to light the night. He made soap. He tinkered. His family grew. In 1689, his wife died after being brought to bed for the seventh time. Then he, a widower with five young children—two of their children had died in infancy—sailed to Cape Cod to buy mutton fat from a sheep farmer, to make tallow for candles. On the boat ride home, he met the venturesome daughter of a dissident.

When Abiah Folger moved from Nantucket to Boston to become Josiah Franklin’s wife, she brought with her a root of mint from her mother’s garden and planted it in the yard of her husband’s house.
⁵
“Let no changes change you,” Peter Folger told his children.
⁶
Five months after the wedding, she was pregnant.

“All things within this fading world hath end,” the Boston poet
Anne Bradstreet wrote in “
Before the Birth of one of her Children.”
⁷
Men waged wars, but for women each birth was another battle. No woman dared imagine herself spared, not by grace, not by wealth; pain was her portion. Even if she survived
childbirth, she could scarcely expect that her child would.
⁸
Queen Anne, who ascended to the throne in 1702, was pregnant seventeen times. Six of her pregnancies ended in miscarriage, six in stillbirth. One son and daughter, the little prince and princess of Denmark and Norway, died the day they were born. Anne Sophia, not yet one, was carried away by smallpox, along with her sister Mary, not yet two. William reached ten, only to be taken. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men: none could save the queen’s children.

Abiah Folger Franklin fared far better than her queen. In 1703, when no one was looking, one of her toddlers fell into a tub. “
Ebenezer Franklin of the South Church, a male-Infant of 16 months old, was drown’d in a Tub of Suds,”
Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary.
⁹
And Thomas, not yet three, died in 1706. But in 1712, when Abiah was pregnant again, she had given birth to nine children and seven had survived.

Her tenth would be her last.

“She suckled all her 10 Children” is nearly all that
Benjamin Franklin ever wrote about his mother.
¹⁰
She stitched, prayed, read, butchered,
cooked, washed, scrubbed, tended her garden, boiled soap, and dipped candles, and, on the darkest day of her life, she fished one of her sons, slippery as an eel, out of a tub of suds.
¹¹
But it was the suckling that Franklin remembered: his mother, with a baby at her breast.

To suck was to live. “My Wife set up and he sucked the right Breast bravely, that had the best nipple,” Sewall wrote in his diary, with pride and relief, after the birth of his first child. “You will
Suckle your Infant your Self
if you can; Be not such an
Ostrich
as to Decline it,”
Increase Mather’s son Cotton preached from his pulpit at Boston’s North Church.
¹²
Through the second summer was wisest. That meant mothers weaned their infants at somewhere between a year and sixteen months, sending them away to bleat under someone else’s roof. Or they went on a “weaning journey” and left their children at home. Or they rubbed mustard or wormwood on their nipples, and everyone stayed put: at so bitter a breast, babies pouted and puckered and spat.
¹³

A mother’s last child she nursed the longest, to stave off getting another. “It may be my dear wife may now leave off bearing,” Sewall prayed, after his wife, Hannah, gave birth for the fourteenth time, at the age of forty-four. Then she marked what she hoped would be her retirement by hosting a feast for the seventeen women who had attended her during her lyings-in. They ate meat to give thanks, and to pray that her trials were over.
¹⁴

The Sewalls’ trials had been severe. In Salem in 1692,
Samuel Sewall had served as judge on a court that had sent twenty people to death, accused of
witchcraft by frantic, twitchy young girls (including
Bathsheba Pope, Abiah’s niece). After that, four of Sewall’s children died in five years. He blamed himself: he had sent innocents to their deaths; now God was taking his innocents, as punishment. From the altar at Old South, Sewall begged the pardon of God and men, the Franklins sitting, watchfully, in their pew.
¹⁵
But there could be no bargain with so hard a god. Of Samuel and
Hannah Sewall’s fourteen children, only five survived.

In 1712, Abiah was forty-four. The children of Josiah’s first wife were grown. Elizabeth was thirty-three, and married. Samuel had become a blacksmith; he was thirty, married, and a father. Hannah had already been married, widowed, and married again. Josiah Jr., twenty-six, had run away to sea. Only the youngest, Anne, twenty-five, was still at home; before the year’s end, she would be married, too. Of Abiah’s own children, John, a tallow chandler and soap boiler like his father, was about to come of age:
he was nearly twenty-one. Peter was nineteen, Mary seventeen, James fourteen, Sarah twelve, Benjamin six, and Lydia three.

Josiah then bought the only house he would ever own. It cost him £320; he paid £70, ready money, and mortgaged the rest. It was a rickety, wooden two-story on Union Street, nearly next door to the Green Dragon Tavern. By the front door, he hung from an arm of iron his shop sign: a wooden ball, twelve inches in diameter, painted blue.
¹⁶

Inside the house known as the Blue Ball, there were four rooms: two up and two down, separated by a chimney and narrow stairs. Upstairs was not so much two small rooms as one biggish one, a place to sleep and to store things, with the chimney in the middle. Downstairs, a chamber and a hall.

In the hall, Josiah hung four maps and boiled his soap and dipped his candles and kept his books.

In the chamber, Abiah gave birth for the last time, on the twenty-seventh of March, one thousand seven hundred and twelve.
¹⁷
Josiah named the baby after the Nine Days’ Queen, whose throne was a prison. He named her after his mother, who raised him in a house where the word of God was inked on the very walls.

He named her Jane.

CHAPTER V

T
he two eyes of man do not more resemble, nor are capable of being upon better terms with each other, than my sister and myself,” Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “were it not for the partiality of our parents, who make the most injurious distinctions between us.”
¹
Between brothers and sisters, likeness is hidden by difference.
²

We “had sildom any contention among us,” Jane once wrote her brother, looking back at their childhood. “All was Harmony.”
³

He remembered it differently.

“I think our Family were always subject to being a little Miffy,” he remarked.
⁴

She took his hint.

“You Introduce your Reproof of my Miffy temper so Politely,” she wrote back slyly, “won cant aVoid wishing to have conquered it as you have.”
⁵

He was the last of their father’s sons; she was the last of his daughters. Of Josiah’s ten sons, four died young and one ran away to sea. After Ebenezer drowned, no one in that house could have reached into a tub of suds without thinking of that little boy. But of his seven daughters, Josiah had lost not one; he had more daughters than he knew what to do with.

Abiah might have thought of them otherwise. Jenny was her last. Maybe she nursed her last a little longer and hugged her a little tighter. Maybe she kept her a little closer.
⁶

When Jenny was born, Benny had just turned six. Their uncle Benjamin, a dyer who fancied himself a poet, sent his namesake an acrostic (with
I,
as was common, doing service for
J
):

Let thy Child’s first Lesson be Obedience,
Poor Richard says,
and the second may be what thou wilt
.
⁸
“Families are the Nurseries of all Societies,”
Cotton Mather preached. “A family is a little Church, and a little Common-wealth,” wrote another minister. “It is as a schoole wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned.”
⁹

The first lesson of childhood was submission. The second was reading.

He “read his
Bible at five years old,” Jane said about her brother. As a child, she said, he “studied incessantly” and was “addicted to all kinds of reading.”
¹⁰
Save
London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, Boston had, for
bookshops, no rivals.
¹¹
Cotton Mather’s
library held seven thousand volumes: “Seldome any
new Book
of Consequence finds the way from beyond-Sea, to these Parts of
America,
but I bestow the Perusal upon it,” Mather boasted.
¹²
But the books belonging to a poor chandler were few. Benjamin Franklin wasn’t far wrong when he remembered, “My Father’s little Library consisted chiefly of Books in polemic Divinity,” regretting “that at a time when I had such a Thirst for Knowledge, more proper Books had not fallen in my Way.” Josiah Franklin’s library was scanty and narrow. An inventory taken of the
Blue Ball counted only the Reverend Willard’s
Complete Body of
Divinity,
a collection of 250 sermons, “2 large Bibles,” “1 Concordance,” and “A Parcell of small Books.”
¹³
Sermons, many; Bibles, large; books, small.