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  And then, in 1683, Josiah Franklin left Ecton and Banbury behind to cross an ocean in search of a more bookish faith.

  · · ·

  In 1758, when Jane Franklin’s brother Benjamin walked through the Ecton churchyard, squinting at stones, he wasn’t looking for Janes. He was looking for Franklins. At last he found one:

  Here lyeth

  the Body of

  Thos. Franklin11

  This Thomas Franklin was their uncle, another of Josiah’s brothers. Bred a blacksmith, “being ingenious, and encourag’d in Learning,” he “became a considerable Man in the County Affairs.” He was wise.12

  In Ecton, Benjamin Franklin found the very ancestors he was looking for: they were poor; they were obscure; they were honest; they were ingenious. They were franklins.

  He turned this story over in his mind, round and round, like wood on a lathe, year after year. And then, on folio sheets folded into quarters, he put it down on paper, in the form of a letter to his son. It is the most famous thing ever written by the most famous American who had ever lived. It begins,

  Dear Son,

  I have ever had a Pleasure in obtaining any little Anecdotes of my Ancestors. You may remember the Enquiries I made among the Remains of my Relations when you were with me in England; and the Journey I took for that purpose.

  He had gone to Ecton to learn about the lives of his forefathers. “Now, imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the Circumstances of my Life,” he explained, “I sit down to write them for you.”13

  He never called what he was writing an “autobiography”; that word had not yet been coined. Sometimes he called it a history, sometimes a memoir, sometimes a relation, and sometimes an account. He wasn’t quite sure what it was. It certainly wasn’t the chronicle of a king. The yere of our Lord 1537 was a prince born to king Harry th’eight. It was, instead, the story of a poor boy who learns to read and comes to know as much of politics as a prince. This story was new.

  He labored over it; he was a quick writer with a ready wit and tart opinions, but it took Benjamin Franklin eighteen years to write what he did of the story of his life, and he never finished it. It ends in 1758, on the eve of his visit to Ecton.

  He never explained why he didn’t finish, but he did explain why he started: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World, and having gone so far thro’ Life with a considerable Share of Felicity, the conducing Means I made use of, which, with the Blessing of God, so well succeeded, my Posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own Situations, and therefore fit to be imitated.”14 My story will tell you how I got here, that you might follow me. It wil teache you to live, and learne you to die.

  He began with his genealogy, of which he was abundantly fond. “This obscure Family of ours,” he called it.15 He had read their short and simple annals. He had collected what he could: his grandfather’s poems, his uncle’s recipes. Mix the soot Exceeding well with Linseed oyle, and then boyle it over a gentle fire, until you find it thick. He asked his father about the family name.

  In Middle English, a frankeleyn is a free man, an owner of land but not of title: neither a serf nor a peasant but not a nobleman, either. There’s a frankeleyn in The Canterbury Tales. He is unlettered and unschooled, but when he tells his tale, he proves a man of truth, a man who “lernyd never rethorik” and speaks “bare and pleyn.” There are frank men in Shakespeare. Lear has a “franke heart” and Henry V urges his ministers to speak “with franke and with uncurbed plainnesse.”16 Undisguised, ignorant of the arts of rhetoric, guileless, uncurbed: by the sixteenth century, to be frank meant to be sincere.

  Jane and Benjamin Franklin’s father knew none of this. “As to the original of our name,” he told his son, “there is various opinions.” Maybe it meant “free,” the way to “frank” a letter meant that you didn’t have to pay for postage. “Our circumstances,” Josiah explained, “have been such as that it hath hardly been worth while to concern ourselves much about these things, any farther than to tickle the fancy a little.”17

  This, however, is exactly what tickled Benjamin Franklin’s fancy. His ancestors’ poverty and obscurity only made his own rise the more extraordinary: the rougher they, the smoother he. His admirers felt the same way. In 1853, Thomas Carlyle got his hands on an ancient Ecton tithe book; a friend had bought it for him, having found it while rummaging through a bookstall in London. “A strange old brown ms., which never thought of travelling out of its native parish,” Carlyle wrote, holding in his hands a record of the doings of Benjamin Franklin’s forebears: a treasure, the wealth of ages. It contained, he wrote, “the very stamp (as it were) of their black knuckles, of their hobnailed shoes.” Thomas Francklin and his sons were listed in its pages. “Here they are, their forge-hammers yet going; renting so many ‘yard-lands’ of Northamptonshire Church-soil, keeping so many sheep &c &c.,” Carlyle wrote, “little conscious that one of the Demigods was about to proceed out of them.” From hobnailed shoes to a demigod in five generations. Carlyle sent the tithe book to Boston, to Edward Everett, an American statesman, orator, and former president of Harvard. Everett had the book bound, “as if it were a very Iliad.”18

  Benjamin Franklin’s epic, his Iliad, the story of his great expectations, started in that churchyard in Ecton, on the mossy face of a gravestone, on the musty pages of a parish register, in the fiery fury of a blacksmith’s forge, where men who walked from one place to another hammered iron into shoes for the horses of men who rode.

  In England, titles and wealth went to the eldest son: he, alone, was entitled. A franklin had no title; he had only his freedom but, still, the eldest son could expect to inherit the estate—he was entitled, at least, to that. Younger sons scrambled. And therein, Franklin thought, lay true nobility. As Poor Richard put it, Many a Man would have been worse, if his Estate had been better.19

  “I am the youngest Son of the youngest Son of the youngest Son of the youngest son for five Generations,” Franklin wrote, after he read the entries in that Ecton parish register, “whereby I find that had there originally been any Estate in the Family none could have stood a worse Chance for it.”20

  Who could have had a worse start?

  CHAPTER III

  The Tender Wombe

  Benjamin Franklin was his father’s youngest son, but he wasn’t his youngest child. Josiah Franklin’s youngest child—the youngest child of the youngest child of the youngest child of the youngest child, for five generations—was a girl.

  Her story starts not with her great-great-grandfather, minding the forge in Ecton, but with her mother’s mother, scrubbing and mending. In 1635, a young Englishwoman named Mary Morrill wished to go to the New World. Having no property but herself, she sold her labor to pay her way. Sailing across the ocean, she met a Norfolk man named Peter Folger. He was making a pilgrimage of faith.

  They landed in Boston, a harbor and haven among rocky coasts and stony meadows and mountains steeped with thickets of pine. Puritans hoped that in this, their New England, even the savages in the very wilderness would speak Scripture. The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony pictured a bare Indian, with Acts 16:9 issuing out of his mouth: “come over and help us.”

  Morrill went to Salem as servant to a minister; Folger settled near Boston and worked as a weaver, miller, and shoemaker. He pocketed every penny.1 Harvard College was founded in 1636. Three years later, Boston opened a post office, the first in the colonies: “all letters which are brought from beyond the seas, or are to bee sent thitherm are to bee brought unto.”2 New England would be a paper commonwealth. Paper flocks of paper birds would fly across the ocean. In 1639, a printing press—the first in the New World—was carried east to west over the three thousand miles of blue water, rowed up the river to Cambridge, and wheeled into a stout building in Harvard’s yard, a pastureland where pigs rutted and cows lowed and the smell of hops
wafted out of the brew house.

  For this, their new England, there would be new books. The press’s first imprint was a book of psalms, “faithfully translated into English metre.” In the King James, the Twenty-second Psalm, ripe with carnal beauty, reads, “I was cast upon thee from the wombe: thou art my God from my mother’s belly.” Puritans sang their own song: “Unto thee from the tender-womb committed been have I: yea thou hast been my mighty-God from my mother’s belly.”3 Their womb was more tender, their god mightier: the word was their faith.

  To read was to be ruled. A 1642 Massachusetts law required that all children acquire the “ability to read & understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of this country.”4 The Bible nourished every new-weaned babe. “Whome shall he teach knowledge?” asked the twenty-eighth chapter of Isaiah: “them that are weaned from the milke, and drawen from the breasts.” The press at Cambridge printed, in 1656, a catechism: Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in either England, Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments.5 The good book gave suck, its words like milk.

  It took Peter Folger nine years to save the £20 he needed to pay Mary Morrill’s debt and buy her freedom, but it was the best money, he said, he ever spent. They were married in 1644. They moved first to Martha’s Vineyard and then to Nantucket, where, in 1648, their first son was born. Folger served as surveyor and schoolmaster, teaching not only English children but also Algonquians. On the islands, he said, “Noe English Man but myselfe could speak scarse a Word of Indian.”6

  In the colonies, it was illegal to print a Bible translated into English; the Crown held the copyright. But no law prevented a man from printing the word of God in another language. In 1663, the press in Cambridge issued Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, a translation made by John Eliot, minister of Roxbury, and his Algonquian interpreters, Indian students at Harvard. Then came Indian psalters, Indian catechisms, Indian primers, and Nashauanittue Meninnunk wutch Mukkiesog: spiritual milk for Indian babes.7

  In 1665, one of Peter Folger’s students, John Gibbs, spoke the name of Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem with whom the pilgrims of Plymouth had shared a thanksgiving in 1621. “The naming of their dead Sachims is one ground of their warres,” Roger Williams had once explained. Massasoit’s son Metacom went to Nantucket to kill Gibbs. Folger calmed him. He said, “I have ever bin able to keep Peace upon the Island.”8

  Peter and Mary Folger’s ninth and last child, Abiah, was born in 1667. By then, Folger had become a dissident in a land of dissenters.

  The war he’d helped avert finally came in 1675, a war so bloody the land was said to look like “a burdensome, and menstruous Cloth.” The fighting, one Boston poet thought, was the Indians’ only chance to be “found in print,” writing “in blud not ink.” More than half the towns in New England were laid waste. The Indians besieged the devout in their meetinghouses. They burned their Bibles. They mocked their psalms. The press at Cambridge had printed one thousand copies of Up-Biblum God; by the end of the war, there was hardly a page left.

  “Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us,” Boston minister Increase Mather asked, “when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?”

  History alone promised redemption. In 1676, Mather published A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians. From the pulpits and the printing presses, ministers cited Exodus 17:14: “And the Lord said unto Moses, write this for a memoriall in a booke.”9

  Peter Folger remonstrated. Seven months into the war, he refused to hand over a deed book needed to settle a land dispute. Found guilty of contempt of court, he was fined £20. This he refused to pay. “All of my Estate, if my Debts were payd, will not amount to halfe so much,” he insisted. There being no prison on Nantucket, he was locked in a pen “where the Neighbors Hogs had layd but the night before, and in a bitter cold Frost and deepe Snow.” He slept on a board; he pleaded for hay to better his bed. He stayed there for a year and a half, believing there to be no saner place than prison for a man of peace in time of war.

  “The Mercy of some of these Men is Cruelty itself,” he wrote. “It were better for us and the Indians also, that we had no Liberty.”10

  From his pigsty, he wrote a poem of protest. He called it “A Looking-Glass for the Times.” He would hold, before his enemies, a mirror. For the slaughter, he blamed the colony’s “College Men”—Harvard men:

  I would not have you for to think

  that I am such a Fool,

  To write against Learning, as such,

  or to cry down a School.

  Still, it would always be an error to

  count School Learning best.

  Abiah was ten years old then. Every week, she visited her father in that hog shed. She watched him write a poem that he knew no one would print but that, he said, was still worth writing:

  ’Tis true, there are some times indeed

  of Silence to the Meek;

  But, sometimes,

  there is a time to speak.11

  She listened to her father’s lessons. Speak up, he told her. Speak up.

  CHAPTER IV

  A Tub of Suds

  Abiah 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