Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Africa.
    Just before James Franklin’s Courant made its debut in 1721, the HMS Seahorse arrived from the West Indies carrying what would become a new wave of smallpox. Within months, nine hundred of Boston’s ten thousand inhabitants would be dead. Mather, trained as a physician before becoming a preacher, sent a letter to the ten practicing doctors in Boston (only one of whom had a medical degree) summarizing his knowledge of the African inoculation and urging that they adopt the practice. (Mather had evolved quite far from the superstitions that had led him to support Salem’s witch hunts.)
    Most of the doctors rejected the notion, and (with little justification other than a desire to prick at the pretensions of the preachers) so did James Franklin’s new newspaper. The first issue of the Courant (August 7, 1721) contained an essay by a young friend of James’s, John Checkley, a sassy Oxford-educated Anglican. He singled out for his sally the Puritan clergy, who “by teaching and practicing what’s Orthodox, pray hard against sickness, yet preach up the Pox!” The issue also carried a diatribe by the town’s only physician who actually had a medical degree, Dr. William Douglass, who dismissed inoculation as “the practice of Greek old women” and called Mather and his fellow ministerial proponents “six gentlemen of piety and learning profoundly ignorant of the matter.” It was the first example, and a robust one at that, of a newspaper attacking the ruling establishment in America. 30
    Increase Mather, the family’s aging patriarch, thundered, “I cannot but pity poor Franklin, who though but a young man, it may be speedily he must appear before the judgment seat of God.” Cotton Mather, his son, wrote a letter to a rival paper denouncing the “notorious, scandalous paper called the Courant, full-freighted with nonsense, unmanliness, railery,” and comparing its contributors to the Hell-Fire Club, a well-known clique of dapper young heretics in London. Cotton’s cousin, a preacher named Thomas Walter, weighed in by writing a scathing piece entitled “The Anti- Courant.”
    Knowing full well that this public spat would sell papers, and eager to profit from both sides of an argument, James Franklin quite happily took on the job of publishing and selling Thomas Walter’s rebuttal. However, the escalating personal nature of the controversy began to unsettle him. After a few weeks, he announced in an editor’s note that he had banned Checkley from his paper for letting the feud get too vindictive. Henceforth, he promised, the Courant would aim to be “innocently diverting” and would publish opinions on either side of the inoculation controversy as long as they were “free from malicious reflections.” 31
    Benjamin Franklin managed to stay out of his brother’s smallpox battle with the Mather family, and he never mentioned it in his autobiography or letters, a striking omission that suggests that he was not proud of the side the paper chose. He later became a fervent advocate of inoculation, painfully and poignantly espousing the cause right after his 4-year-old son, Francis, died of the pox in 1736. And he would, both as an aspiring boy of letters and as a striver who sought the patronage of influential elders, end up becoming Cotton Mather’s admirer and, a few years later, his acquaintance.
Books
    The print trade was a natural calling for Franklin. “From a child I was fond of reading,” he recalled, “and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.” Indeed, books were the most important formative influence in his life, and he was lucky to grow up in Boston, where libraries had been carefully nurtured since the Arabella brought fifty volumes along with the town’s first settlers in1630. By the time Franklin was born, Cotton Mather had built a private library of almost three thousand volumes rich in classical and scientific as well as theological works. This