Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Read Online Free PDF

years. Eventually, Benjamin signed on, though he was not destined to stay indentured until he was 21.
    During his time in London, James saw how Grub Street balladeers would churn out odes and hawk them in the coffeehouses. So he promptly put Benjamin to work not only pushing type but also producing poetry. With encouragement from his uncle, young Franklin wrote two works based on news stories, both dealing with the sea: one about a family killed in a boating accident, and the other about the killing of the pirate known as Blackbeard. They were, as Franklin recalled, “wretched stuff,” but they sold well, which “flattered my vanity.” 27
    Herman Melville would one day write that Franklin was “everything but a poet.” His father, no romantic, in fact preferred it that way, and he put an end to Benjamin’s versifying. “My father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars; so I escaped being a poet, most probably a very bad one.”
    When Franklin began his apprenticeship, Boston had only one newspaper: The Boston News-Letter, which had been launched in 1704 by a successful printer named John Campbell, who was also the town’s postmaster. Then, as today, there was an advantage in the media business to controlling both content and distribution. Campbell was able to join forces with a network of fellow postmasters running from New Hampshire to Virginia. His books and papers were sent along the route for free—unlike those of other printers—and the postmasters in his network would send him a steady stream of news items. In addition, because he held an official position he could proclaim that his paper was “published by authority,” an important certification at a time when the press did not pride itself on independence.
    The link between being the postmaster and a newspaper publisher was so natural that when Campbell lost the former job, his successor as postmaster, William Brooker, assumed that he would also take over the newspaper. Campbell, however, kept hold of it, which prompted Brooker to launch, in December 1719, a rival: The Boston Gazette. He hired James Franklin, the cheapest of the town’s printers, to produce it for him.
    But after two years, James lost the contract to print the Gazette, and he did something quite audacious. He launched what was then the only truly independent newspaper in the colonies and the first with literary aspirations. His weekly New England Courant would very explicitly not be “published by authority.” 28
    The Courant would be remembered by history mainly because it contained the first published prose of Benjamin Franklin. And James would become known for being the harsh and jealous master described in his brother’s autobiography. In fairness, however, the Courant ought to be remembered on its own as America’s first fiercely independent newspaper, a bold, antiestablishment journal that helped to create the nation’s tradition of an irreverent press. “It was the first open effort to defy the norm,” literary historian Perry Miller has written. 29
    Defying authority in Boston at that time meant defying the Mathers and the role of the Puritan clergy in secular life, a cause James took up on the first page of his paper’s first edition. Unfortunately, the battle he chose was over inoculation for smallpox, and he happened to pick the wrong side.
    Smallpox epidemics had devastated Massachusetts at regular intervals in the ninety years since its founding. A 1677 outbreak wiped out seven hundred people, 12 percent of the population. During the epidemic of 1702, during which three of his children were stricken but survived, Cotton Mather began studying the disease. A few years later, he was introduced to the practice of inoculation by his black slave, who had undergone the procedure in Africa and showed Mather his scar. Mather checked with other blacks in Boston and found that inoculation was a standard practice in parts