The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (4 page)

The economics of the move were more jarring. Boston was a small town and already had as many dyers as it could support. Consequently Josiah had to find a new occupation. More soundings directed him to the chandler trade: that of making candles and soap. The business was always hard, often hot (although in winter this aspect was not unwelcome), frequently smelly (the primary raw material of both candles and soap was tallow rendered from animal carcasses). But it afforded a regular income to those unafraid to work, and, being labor-intensive, it furnished early employment for as many children as came along. It also brought Josiah into contact with a broad spectrum of the inhabitants of his new home. All but the most slovenly needed soap; only the poorest made do without candles. In time Josiah won a contract to furnish candles for the night watch of the town, a concession that provided both a nice profit and additional access to community leaders.

By all evidence Josiah was a man of solid character, robust intelligence, and natural good judgment. The demands of his business kept him from taking public office, but his neighbors often sought his counsel
on matters civic and personal. “I remember well,” Benjamin Franklin recollected later, “his being frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church he belonged to and showed a good deal of respect for his judgment and advice. He was also much consulted by private persons about their affairs when any difficulty occurred, and frequently chosen an arbitrator between contending parties.”

Josiah had additional gifts. Though not tall, he was well built and strong. His hard work agreed with him; until his death at eighty-seven he lost scarcely a day to illness. He wrote in a confident hand and, according to his son, “could draw prettily.” Lacking formal training in music, he cultivated his native musicality himself. “When he played psalm tunes on his violin and sung withal as he sometimes did in an evening after the business of the day was over, it was extremely agreeable to hear.”

It may have been that voice that first attracted Abiah Folger, sitting a few rows from Josiah and Anne in the South Church. Abiah was the daughter of Peter Folger, who had emigrated to Massachusetts in 1635 in the first wave of Puritan refugees from Charles I and Bishop Laud, and on the same ship as the son of Governor John Winthrop. Peter Folger, eighteen years of age on arrival, grew up with the new land, albeit restively. From Boston he went straight upriver to Dedham; at twenty-five he joined an expedition to establish a new settlement on Martha’s Vineyard. He subsequently moved to Nantucket, in part because the Puritan theocracy of Boston sat about as uncomfortably on his shoulders as had the Anglican authoritarianism of Charles and Laud. But he got along barely better with the representatives of Governor Edmund Andros of New York, the colony that claimed jurisdiction over Nantucket. In his position as clerk of the court adjudicating a dispute among settlers of the island, Folger refused to release records that presumably would have supported the position favored by the governor. For his refusal he was arrested and imprisoned—in “a place where never any Englishman was put,” he complained in a petition to Andros, “and where the neighbors’ hogs had layed but the night before, and in a bitter cold frost and deep snow.” While Folger managed to defeat this prosecution, the experience only confirmed his disdain for authority. He became a Baptist; he took the side of local Indians against English encroachment; when the Indians forcibly resisted, he castigated colonial officials in a searing diatribe that he set to verse and sold in pamphlet in the heart of the enemy camp: Boston.

While not in custody, Folger was equally busy at home. He and his wife, Mary, had nine children, of whom Abiah was the last. Despite her
father’s distaste for entrenched power, she moved to Boston as a young adult. There she met Josiah and Anne Franklin, who welcomed her into communion with their church. When Anne died in 1689 bearing Josiah’s seventh child, the father—after the practical, if unromantic, fashion of the age—wasted little time mourning her; within six months he was married to Abiah. He was thirty-two; she was ten years younger.

Josiah and Abiah
had ten children together. Nine of these ten survived childhood; one—Ebenezer—accidentally slipped under the surface of a soapy washtub at sixteen months and was missed too late to be revived.

Benjamin, who was named for his father’s next-older and favorite brother, was the eighth child of his mother and the fifteenth of his father. He was born on January 6, 1705, by the calendar then in use; this would translate to January 17, 1706, when the calendar was reformed halfway through his life. His birthplace was the small house his parents were leasing on Milk Street just across from the South Church. The convenience of the location, coupled with the fact that the birth occurred early on a Sunday, when the congregation would be in church anyway, prompted Josiah to swaddle the newborn in thick blankets against the January wind and carry him across the street for baptism within hours of the birth.

The father returned the baby to the Milk Street house immediately after the christening; there Ben lived for the next six years, until Josiah purchased a larger dwelling at the corner of Union and Hanover streets. Even the larger house overflowed with all those children. The number actually in residence varied as the older ones came and went; Ben later recollected sitting down at the dinner table with an even dozen of his siblings. Other relatives, including Uncle Benjamin, spent stretches of various length under Josiah’s roof.

As one of the youngest, Ben necessarily learned to get along with others; outnumbered and outweighed by his elder siblings, he relied on wits where force failed. Often insight came after the fact. “When I was a child of seven years old,” he recounted several decades later, “my friends on a holiday filled my little pocket with half-pence. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children, and being charmed with the sound of a whistle that I met by the way, in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my money for it. When I came home, whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing
all the family, my brothers, sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth, put me in mind of what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money, and laughed at me so much for my folly that I cried with vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.” With the wisdom of age, Franklin added, “As I came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met many who gave too much for the whistle.”

Ben’s facility with the written word manifested itself early. “I do not remember when I could not read,” he said afterward—which in another person might have meant a weak memory but in his case indicated real precociousness. This inclined his father to train him for the ministry, as did the circumstance that Ben was the tenth—the “tithe”—of Josiah’s sons. At eight years Ben was enrolled in the town’s grammar school (which would become the Boston Latin School). He quickly went to the head of his class and was promoted midterm to the next class. But his academic career was cut short when Josiah, reflecting on the expenses of feeding, clothing, housing, and educating his large brood, and reckoning the meager income a minister might command, decided that God would have to be satisfied with the sons of the well-to-do. Josiah briefly enrolled Ben in a school run by one George Brownell, specializing in arithmetic and writing; Ben’s way with words continued to distinguish him, but numbers proved mystifyingly perverse, and the experiment was canceled. At ten, Ben entered the chandler trade, cutting wicks for candles, filling molds, waiting on customers, and running errands about the town.

It was
an entrancing town for a boy to run about. Boston may have begun life as a religious refuge for nonconformists, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century it was looking like any number of secular seaports that dotted both shores of the North Atlantic. It was by far the busiest port in English America. More than a thousand ships were registered with Boston’s harbormaster—these in addition to the many more that were registered elsewhere but made Boston a regular stop on the trade routes between the New World and the Old. This merchant armada brought cargoes of silk and spices from the Orient, slaves from West Africa, rum and molasses from the West Indies, manufactured goods from Britain, and foodstuffs and other raw and partially processed materials from elsewhere in North America. Only when the coldest
weather encased the harbor in ice did the traffic cease. Scores of wharves lined the waterfront at the eastern edge of the town; the most magnificent of these was the fittingly labeled Long Wharf, which extended from the foot of King Street nearly a quarter mile into the harbor. This remarkable structure contained both a wooden roadway thirty feet wide and a string of warehouses perched on pilings above the waves.

Boston did not merely service ships; it also built them. A dozen shipyards employed hundreds of skilled artisans and unskilled laborers—brawny men with arms as thick as hawsers from sawing oak logs into keels and ribbing for the hulls that would have to withstand the tempests of all the world’s oceans, dextrous men who wove those hawsers and sewed the sails that turned those tempests to propulsion and profit, clever men who adapted standard ship designs to suit the diverse needs of this India trader, that coaster, those lobstermen. Every week or so a new hull would groan down the ways and, amid a stupendous splash and that irrepressible frisson of uncertainty as to whether she would go down to the sea or down to the sea floor, add another bottom to Boston’s navy.

The ocean’s call tantalized every Boston boy of Ben Franklin’s generation. The salt smell permeated the entire town, not least the house on Union Street, which was but a block back from the water. From his doorstep he could see the masts of the Indiamen as they lay beside the Long Wharf; in the mornings before rising he could hear the metal moanings of the anchor chains as the ships in the harbor made ready to run out on the ebb tide. He knew they would visit the most exotic places on earth before returning to Boston two or three or ten years hence; he could imagine the strange and wonderful people who inhabited those exotic locales.

The call of the sea had been too much for Ben’s eldest brother, Josiah. Two years before Ben was born, the younger Josiah had turned his back on the terrestrial world of his father—the world of the chandlery, of the house on Milk Street, of the South Church, of the probing gaze of the Puritan elders—and shipped out on a merchantman bound for the Indies. He never returned. For years his father assumed he would eventually find his way back to Boston, if only for a stopover. But in 1715, when Ben was nine years old, the grim word arrived that Josiah’s vessel had been lost at sea.

Thus it was with worry and fear that the elder Josiah observed his youngest son being drawn to the waterfront. Ben later recorded that he had “a strong inclination for the sea,” which he indulged to the extent a young boy could against his father’s disapproval. “Living near the water, I was much in and about it, learned early to swim well, and to manage
boats, and when in a boat or canoe with other boys I was commonly allowed to govern, especially in any case of difficulty.”

The lure of the water—joined to Ben’s emerging mechanical curiosity and inventiveness—prompted an early experiment. One windy day he was flying a kite on the bank of the Mill Pond, an artificial enclosure that had been constructed to trap the high tide and release it through the race of a gristmill. Notwithstanding the wind, the afternoon was warm and the water inviting. Ben tied the kite to a stake in the ground, doffed his clothes, and dove in. The water was pleasantly cool, and he was reluctant to leave it, but he wanted to fly his kite some more. He pondered his dilemma until it occurred to him that he need not forgo one diversion for the other. He clambered out of the pond, untied the kite from the stake, and returned to the water. As the buoyancy of the water diminished gravity’s hold on his feet, he felt the kite tugging him forward. He surrendered to the wind’s power, lying on his back and letting the kite pull him clear across the pond—“without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.” Writing from France decades later, he added, “I think it not impossible to cross in this manner from Dover to Calais.” On other occasions the youngster experimented with hand paddles to augment the power of his swimming stroke, and wooden flippers for his feet. Neither innovation was as successful as the sail-kite: the paddles overly fatigued his wrists, while the flippers, being stiff, failed to mimic a fish’s tail sufficiently.