Read Online The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands - Free Book Online
Book: The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands
Read Free Book Online
Authors: H. W. Brands
Ads: Link
moral and civic necessity of preserving the framework as a whole.
Consequently Ben saw no recourse but flight—which recommended itself on other grounds as well. To a curious boy, Boston had been an exciting place; to an independent-minded young man, it was starting to stifle. The Mathers did not say such threatening things about Ben as about James, but it was clear they and their supporters had doubts about the younger Franklin too. Reports of his inquiring and skeptical mind were circulating. “My indiscreet disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horror by good people, as an infidel or atheist.” Ben added that he had become “obnoxious to the governing party.” Now might be a good time to leave, before the clerics and judges came after him as they had come after James. “It was likely I might if I stayed soon bring myself into scrapes.”
So he plotted his flight. Selling some of his books to raise money for ship passage to New York, he sent his friend John Collins to tell the captain that he needed to board the boat secretly because he had got a girl pregnant and was being pressed to marry her. The captain, evidently a man of the world, understood. He pocketed Ben’s money and found something to examine at the opposite rail of the ship while Ben slipped aboard. On an outgoing tide and a fair September wind, Ben Franklin fled the town of his birth and youth, carrying only the few shillings in his pocket and all the self-assurance of his nearly eighteen years.
2
Friends and Other Strangers
1723–24
Only later, with age and distance, would Franklin learn to appreciate the more admirable aspects of Cotton Mather’s character and thinking. Now, upon leaving Boston, he landed in a city established by a contemporary of Mather’s, but a man whose view of the proper relation between ministers and magistrates could hardly have been more different from Mather’s—or more congenial to Franklin, both then and during the rest of Franklin’s life.
William Penn first ran afoul of religious authority at about the same age as Franklin (and at about the same time as Josiah Franklin, then still in England). Attending university in Oxford, Penn fell under the sway of the Quaker Thomas Loe, and when Charles II restored strict enforcement of Anglican orthodoxy, Penn resisted. Whether he was thrown out of Oxford or departed of his own disgust at what now seemed to him “a den of hellish ignorance and debauchery” was perhaps a fine point; in either case he left. His father, the formidable Admiral Sir William Penn, was not any more pleased than the boy’s tutors at his strange beliefs; he greeted the lad with blows, turned him out of the house, and threatened to disown him. (Paternal displeasure aside, Sir William may simply have been a difficult man to get along with; his neighbor and navy colleague Samuel Pepys had to put up with him for professional reasons but declared in his diary, “I hate him with all my heart.” On the other hand, it may have been Pepys who was the difficult one. Although he did not disdain his neighbor’s invitations to dinner, he complained confidentially that Mrs. Penn’s cooking “stank like the very Devil.”)
The threat of disownment triggered a temporary lapse from Quaker conscience; young William reconciled with his father and went off to the Continent for a holiday at the court of Louis XIV. He did not stay long and by 1667 was securely back within the fold of his English Friends. He published a series of tracts contending for freedom of conscience; he preached the same doctrine before crowds large and small. In 1670 he was arrested for unlawful address to an unruly assembly. At the trial he argued eloquently that a man’s mind and soul must remain beyond the reach of the magistrate; the jury voted to acquit—whereupon the judge ordered the jury arrested. (The latter arrests were subsequently overturned in a case that became a landmark in the evolution of the
Consequently Ben saw no recourse but flight—which recommended itself on other grounds as well. To a curious boy, Boston had been an exciting place; to an independent-minded young man, it was starting to stifle. The Mathers did not say such threatening things about Ben as about James, but it was clear they and their supporters had doubts about the younger Franklin too. Reports of his inquiring and skeptical mind were circulating. “My indiscreet disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horror by good people, as an infidel or atheist.” Ben added that he had become “obnoxious to the governing party.” Now might be a good time to leave, before the clerics and judges came after him as they had come after James. “It was likely I might if I stayed soon bring myself into scrapes.”
So he plotted his flight. Selling some of his books to raise money for ship passage to New York, he sent his friend John Collins to tell the captain that he needed to board the boat secretly because he had got a girl pregnant and was being pressed to marry her. The captain, evidently a man of the world, understood. He pocketed Ben’s money and found something to examine at the opposite rail of the ship while Ben slipped aboard. On an outgoing tide and a fair September wind, Ben Franklin fled the town of his birth and youth, carrying only the few shillings in his pocket and all the self-assurance of his nearly eighteen years.
2
Friends and Other Strangers
1723–24
Only later, with age and distance, would Franklin learn to appreciate the more admirable aspects of Cotton Mather’s character and thinking. Now, upon leaving Boston, he landed in a city established by a contemporary of Mather’s, but a man whose view of the proper relation between ministers and magistrates could hardly have been more different from Mather’s—or more congenial to Franklin, both then and during the rest of Franklin’s life.
William Penn first ran afoul of religious authority at about the same age as Franklin (and at about the same time as Josiah Franklin, then still in England). Attending university in Oxford, Penn fell under the sway of the Quaker Thomas Loe, and when Charles II restored strict enforcement of Anglican orthodoxy, Penn resisted. Whether he was thrown out of Oxford or departed of his own disgust at what now seemed to him “a den of hellish ignorance and debauchery” was perhaps a fine point; in either case he left. His father, the formidable Admiral Sir William Penn, was not any more pleased than the boy’s tutors at his strange beliefs; he greeted the lad with blows, turned him out of the house, and threatened to disown him. (Paternal displeasure aside, Sir William may simply have been a difficult man to get along with; his neighbor and navy colleague Samuel Pepys had to put up with him for professional reasons but declared in his diary, “I hate him with all my heart.” On the other hand, it may have been Pepys who was the difficult one. Although he did not disdain his neighbor’s invitations to dinner, he complained confidentially that Mrs. Penn’s cooking “stank like the very Devil.”)
The threat of disownment triggered a temporary lapse from Quaker conscience; young William reconciled with his father and went off to the Continent for a holiday at the court of Louis XIV. He did not stay long and by 1667 was securely back within the fold of his English Friends. He published a series of tracts contending for freedom of conscience; he preached the same doctrine before crowds large and small. In 1670 he was arrested for unlawful address to an unruly assembly. At the trial he argued eloquently that a man’s mind and soul must remain beyond the reach of the magistrate; the jury voted to acquit—whereupon the judge ordered the jury arrested. (The latter arrests were subsequently overturned in a case that became a landmark in the evolution of the
Similar Books
