Benjamin Franklin | Page 5

EARLY YEARS
It is a lamentable matter for any writer to find himself compelled to
sketch, however briefly, the early years of Benjamin Franklin. That
autobiography, in which the story of those years is so inimitably told,
by its vividness, its simplicity, even by its straightforward vanity, and
by the quaint charm of its old-fashioned but well-nigh faultless style,
stands among the few masterpieces of English prose. It ought to have
served for the perpetual protection of its subject as a copyright more
sacred than any which rests upon mere statutory law. Such, however,
has not been the case, and the narrative has been rehearsed over and
over again till the American who is not familiar with it is indeed a
curiosity. Yet no one of the subsequent narrators has justified his
undertaking. Therefore because the tale has been told so often, and
once has been told so well, and also in order that the stone which it is
my lot to cast upon a cairn made up of so many failures may at least be
only a small pebble, I shall get forward as speedily as possible to that
point in Franklin's career where his important public services begin, at
the same time commending every reader to turn again for further
refreshment of his knowledge to those pages which might well have
aroused the envy of Fielding and Defoe.
Franklin came from typical English stock. For three hundred years,
perhaps for many centuries more, his ancestors lived on a small
freehold at Ecton in Northamptonshire, and so far back as record or
tradition ran the eldest son in each generation had been bred a
blacksmith. But after the strange British fashion there was intertwined
with this singular fixedness of ideas a stubborn independence in
thinking, courageously exercised in times of peril. The Franklins were
among the early Protestants, and held their faith unshaken by the terrors
of the reign of Bloody Mary. By the end of Charles the Second's time
they were non-conformists and attendants on conventicles; and about

1682 Josiah Franklin, seeking the peaceful exercise of his creed,
migrated to Boston, Massachusetts. His first wife bore him seven
children, and died. Not satisfied, he took in second nuptials Abiah
Folger, "daughter of Peter Folger, one of the first settlers of New
England, of whom honorable mention is made by Cotton Mather," and
justly, since in those dark days he was an active philanthropist towards
the Indians, and an opponent of religious persecution.[1] This lady
outdid her predecessor, contributing no less than ten children to expand
the family circle. The eighth of this second brood was named Benjamin,
in memory of his father's favorite brother. He was born in a house on
Milk Street, opposite the Old South Church, January 6, old style, 17,
new style, 1706. Mr. Parton says that probably Benjamin "derived from
his mother the fashion of his body and the cast of his countenance.
There are lineal descendants of Peter Folger who strikingly resemble
Franklin in these particulars; one of whom, a banker of New Orleans,
looks like a portrait of Dr. Franklin stepped out of its frame."[2] A
more important inheritance was that of the humane and liberal traits of
his mother's father.
[Note 1: Parton's Life of Franklin, i. 27.]
[Note 2: Ibid. i. 31.]
In that young, scrambling village in the new country, where all material,
human or otherwise, was roughly and promptly utilized, the
unproductive period of boyhood was cut very short. Franklin's father
speedily resolved to devote him, "as the tithe of his sons, to the service
of the church," and so sent him to the grammar school. A droller misfit
than Franklin in an orthodox New England pulpit of that era can hardly
be imagined; but since he was only seven years old when his father
endeavored to arrange his life's career, a misappreciation of his
fitnesses was not surprising. The boy himself had the natural hankering
of children bred in a seaboard town for the life of a sailor. It is amusing
to fancy the discussions between this babe of seven years and his father,
concerning his occupation in life. Certainly the babe had not altogether
the worst of it, for when he was eight years old his father definitively
gave up the notion of making him a preacher of the Gospel. At the ripe

age of ten he was taken from school, and set to assist his father in the
trade of tallow-chandler and soap-boiler. But dipping wicks and
pouring grease pleased him hardly better than reconciling infant
damnation and a red-hot hell with the loveliness of Christianity. The
lad remained discontented. His chief taste seemed to be for reading, and
great were the ingenuity and the self-sacrifice whereby he secured
books and leisure to read them. The resultant