The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (3 page)

He sailed for home—his real home—still burning with anger and disgust, and immediately took a place at the head of the opposition to British rule. Once the most loyal of Britons, now he became the most radical of Americans, demanding independence and driving the rebellion to a genuine revolution. He helped draft the Declaration of Independence; when that manifesto of American identity won the approval of the Continental Congress, he helped organize the government of the new republic. He guided American diplomatic efforts and sent secret American agents to Europe. Traveling to Paris himself, he negotiated the treaty with Britain’s nemesis, France, that gave the revolution its first real hope of success. From Paris he directed the American war effort abroad, securing the gifts and loans that kept American soldiers in the field and managing the system of alliances that finally delivered America’s freedom. In the eyes of much of Europe, Franklin
was
America, and the enormous respect accorded Franklin extrapolated to the American cause.
Of those patriots who made independence possible, none mattered more than Franklin, and only Washington mattered as much. Washington won the battle of Yorktown, but Franklin won the European support that allowed Washington his victory.

At war’s end, Franklin artfully headed negotiation of the peace settlement that guaranteed America’s future by doubling the American domain and tying the interests of the European powers to America’s continued success. Returning in triumph to Philadelphia, he was elected president of Pennsylvania, and in that capacity hosted the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Throughout the convention he offered sage advice, keeping the delegates at their tasks when attention wandered, proposing the essential compromises that made the final consensus possible. As the sun set on his own life, he had the unparalleled pleasure of watching it rise on the life of the new American nation.

Franklin’s story is the story of a man—an exceedingly gifted man and a most engaging one. It is also the story of the birth of America—an America this man discovered in himself, then helped create in the world at large.

1
Boston Beginnings
1706–23

Cotton Mather was the pride of New England Puritanism. As a boy he had shown a curious, inquiring mind; he studied science toward a career in medicine. But the pull of religion was too strong, as might have been expected of the grandson of Puritan pillars John Cotton and Richard Mather and the son of Increase Mather, a column of Congregationalism of comparable diameter. Shortly after ordination in 1685, Cotton Mather joined his father at Boston’s Second Church and commenced an astonishingly prolific career as a publicist of Puritanism. Some 450 books and pamphlets poured from his pen during his lifetime; although the majority dealt with religious topics, many revealed a continuing affinity for such secular subjects as natural history and music.

But nothing was truly secular for Cotton Mather. An unchurched neighbor fell from a rooftop and for weeks lay in a coma; Mather remembered having told the man that if he did not get religion soon, God would lay him low. “Coming to himself,” Mather recorded in his diary, “one of the first things he thought on was what I had said unto him, under the sense whereof he quickly went and joined himself unto the South church”—which, perhaps significantly, was
not
Mather’s church. On another occasion an even more mundane matter prompted musings on man’s place in God’s order. “I was once emptying the cistern of nature, and making water at the wall. At the same time, there came a dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I: ‘What mean and vile things are the children of men, in this mortal state! How much do our natural necessities abase us, and place us in some regard, on the same level with the very dogs!’” Additional reflection inspired a determination to transcend the gutter in which men’s bodies were consigned to live. “My thought proceeded: ‘Yet I will be a more noble creature, and at the very time when my natural necessities debase me into the condition of the beast, my spirit shall (I say, at that very time!) rise and soar and fly up towards the employment of the Angel.’” Never again, Mather vowed, would he answer the call of nature without consciously evoking “some holy, noble divine thought.” Looking back on the matter later, he was happy to report: “And I have done according to this resolution!”

With his Puritan contemporaries, Mather perceived the cosmos as a battleground between good and evil. God led the army of good, whose ranks included those humans his grace had inspired with biblically enlightened reason; Satan spearheaded the legions of evil, which counted unbridled passion and unrelieved ignorance among their principal weapons. To Mather and his fellow Puritans, God was a pervasive and all-but-tangible presence; Satan still more so. “That there is a Devil, is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil,” Mather declared. Not only was Satan real, but he was actively involved in people’s lives. “The Devil, in the prosecution and execution of his wrath upon them, often gets a liberty to make a descent upon the children of men.” And nowhere was this more true than in New England, which the Evil One had had all to himself and his red children—“the Tawnies”—until lately, when the arrival of the Christian Gospel had roused him to terrible anger. “I believe there never was a poor plantation more pursued by the wrath of the Devil than our poor New England.”

Mather rarely indulged in idle scribbling (although weary readers of those 450 titles might have been forgiven for occasionally thinking so); at
the time that he inscribed these words, Massachusetts was writhing under what seemed Satan’s latest assault. The Salem witch trials of 1692 convulsed the colony as nothing before or after. No man or woman of consequence doubted that witches existed; Satan, according to the consensus, frequently acted through individuals who entered into demonic pacts with him. The only question was whether the nineteen people executed were actually the demonic agents they were alleged to be by their accusers, principally teenage girls given to an unsettling emotionalism.

Cotton Mather’s attitude toward the accusations and the accused was typical—for him, and for his time and place. “The Devil, exhibiting himself ordinarily as a small black man, has decoyed a fearful knot of proud, froward, ignorant, envious and malicious creatures, to list themselves in his horrid service, by entering their names in a book by him tendered unto them. These witches, whereof above a score have now confessed and shown their deeds, and some are now tormented by the devils, for confessing, have met in hellish rendezvouzes, wherein the confessors do say, they have had their diabolical sacraments, imitating the Baptism and Supper of our Lord.” The witches laid hold of innocent men and women and carried them out of their houses, over trees and hills for miles through the air. “They seize poor people about the country with various and bloody torments; and of those evidently preternatural torments there are some have died…. The people thus afflicted are miserably scratched and bitten so that the marks are most visible to all the world, but the causes utterly invisible; and the same invisible furies do most visibly stick pins into the bodies of the afflicted and scald them and hideously distort and disjoint all their members, besides a thousand other sorts of plagues beyond these of any natural diseases which they give unto them.”

With such awesome evil abroad in the land, Mather could only endorse the action of the Salem court that condemned the witches to death. Indeed, at one hanging he all but tied the noose himself. The condemned man, pleading innocence, recited the Lord’s Prayer in a powerful and moving voice. A wave of sympathy surged through the gathered throng, which reasoned that the devil would never suffer one of his servants to turn coat at the very gate of hell. But Mather stood against the tide, reminding the crowd that the Evil One was never so dangerous as when he took on the trappings of righteousness. The merciful mood passed, and the rope snapped taut.

Yet even Mather began to worry about the nature of some of the evidence accepted by the court. This “spectral evidence” consisted of statements by the accusers that they had seen the fiendish “specters” of
the accused performing satanic acts. Mather did not doubt the veracity of many such statements; certainly the devil frequently incited his agents to such acts. But might his catalog of destruction not also include planting false evidence in unwary and weakened minds, thereby engineering the conviction of innocent people—good and upstanding people, people like Mather himself, even? Mather believed that his name ranked high on Satan’s roster of enemies; he constantly ascribed diabolical intervention to the mishaps of his life. The manuscript of a particularly potent sermon disappeared on the eve of delivery; Mather concluded that the devil had stolen it. It turned up afterward; Mather interpreted the return as satanic taunting.

Mather did not deem it beyond the Evil One, in his current ferocious descent upon Massachusetts, to try to bring down a formidable foe like himself by conjuring spectral evidence pointing his way. He suggested that Satan and his fellow fallen angels had “obtained the power to take on them the likeness of harmless people”; he reiterated, “Many innocent, yea, and some virtuous persons are by the Devils in this matter imposed upon.”

It was this fear in Mather, shared among other ministers and magistrates of the district, that eventually brought the witch-hunt to a halt. To accept spectral evidence was to hand enormous power to people who might be the devil’s tools—which was to say, to the devil himself. After worried reconsideration, the court threw out uncorroborated spectral evidence, and after the specters were barred from the court, other evidence evaporated. The hysteria waned; in time some of those at the center of the proceedings regretted their actions. Five years after the fact, Judge Samuel Sewall stood up before his fellows in the congregation at Boston’s South Church and acknowledged the “blame and shame” of his role in the witch trials. He requested the congregation’s forgiveness and their prayers on his behalf for God’s mercy. Cotton Mather did not go so far as a public recanting, but he later conceded, speaking of the man whose death he had guaranteed by his gallows intervention, that he wished he had never encountered “the first letters of his name.”

Josiah Franklin
almost certainly heard Samuel Sewall’s confession on that January day in 1697. Josiah was a member of the South Church (also called the Third Church, being the third congregation established in Boston) and a friend of Sewall. Neither the friendship nor the membership was of especially long standing, for Josiah was a comparative
newcomer to New England. In old England the Franklin family had lived in Ecton in Northamptonshire for at least three hundred years (where they may have known the forebears of George Washington, whose ancestry also ran to that county). The Franklin family held a farm of thirty acres; in addition the eldest son of each generation inherited and operated the family blacksmith shop. Josiah, being the fourth surviving son of his father Thomas Franklin, inherited neither farm nor smithy, and when the older man retired and went to live with Josiah’s elder brother (Thomas’s second adult son) John in Banbury, Oxfordshire, Josiah accompanied him. John had solved the younger-son problem by taking up dyeing; it was in this occupation that Thomas apprenticed Josiah to him.

Josiah learned the trade well and might have remained a dyer and an Englishman of the Midlands for the rest of his life had not Charles II turned the Church of England in a popish direction Josiah’s dissenting conscience could not abide. Josiah was not a confrontational type, and having acquired a wife—Anne—and three children, he felt the responsibilities of family. But ultimately he determined that England was unsafe for dissent, and he followed the thousands of nonconformists who had decamped to America before him.

He arrived in Boston in 1683. As expected, he found the theology of his new home congenial, and after some asking around and sampling of sermons, he applied to join the South Church. Attaining full membership would take several years, but with eternity at issue he was in no hurry.