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Authors: Matt Braun
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the new bridge so much—“it is Really a charming Place”—that she described it for him. “As you Aproach to it it is a Beautiful Sight with a Litle Vildg at the other End the Buldings all New the Prospect on Each Side is Delight full.” The day of Harvard’s commencement, she told him, so many people crossed the river that the toll gatherers took in five hundred dollars. And then, musing on another crop of Harvard graduates, Jane Mecom ventured an opinion, something she didn’t often do, about what it meant to have been deprived of an education, an opinion—a revolutionary opinion—about inequality. She had been reading a book by the Englishman Richard Price. “Dr Price,” she reported,“thinks Thousands of Boyles Clarks and Newtons have Probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in Ignorance and meanness, merely for want of being Placed in favourable Situations, and Injoying Proper Advantages.” Thousands of Isaac Newtons were out there, living and dying in poverty, ignorance, and obscurity. The chances for escape weren’t good. “Very few we know,” she reminded her brother, “is able to beat thro all Impedements and Arive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding.” 2
Her brother didn’t need reminding. Every letter his sister wrote to him contained this truth. Benjamin Franklin carried his family in his blood and his sister on his back. He must have thought about this a great deal. He began his autobiography by explaining why he was taking the trouble to write the story of his life: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred, to a State of Affluence & 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, 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, & therefore fit to be imitated.” 3 He wrote, in other words, to answer the question with which everyone he met must have pestered him: How, for God’s sake, how on earth, Dr. Franklin, pray, tell me, did you, the tenth son of a second-rate chandler, manage to escape from poverty and obscurity?
In the world into which Franklin and his sister were born, very few beat through. Of their father’s seventeen children, Benjamin was the only one. That world was changing. Massachusetts had already abolished slavery. In 1789, Boston, for the first time, mandated the education of girls. 4 Franklin’s escape, America’s birth, an age of revolutions, made possiblea new world, a world of fewer obstacles. Franklin liked to think of his life as the story of America, and in a way, he was right. He never finished his autobiography. And maybe that’s because he knew that, since he had made his life into an allegory for America, it could have no ending. The Revolution is the story of America because it is a story of beginning.
The day after George Pataki came to Boston was Patriot’s Day, which has been a Massachusetts state holiday since 1969. The nineteenth of April was also the day of the Boston Marathon, and, for a long time, it was the day of the Red Sox home opener. There was also an annual reenactment of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but it started at dawn, and, in my house, we had never once managed to get out of bed fast enough to make it there in time. We shambled, and breakfasted, and then biked from Cambridge to Lexington along the Minuteman Bicycle Path. By the time we got there,the battle was over, but costumed reenactors were still wandering around, waiting for the parade to start. Late but undefeated, we bought, from a street vendor on Massachusetts Avenue, a small arsenal of cheap wooden muskets and, recruiting some other sleepy-headed colonials, waged our own battle on the green. The redcoats, leaning against a stand of trees, gave every appearance of being undaunted by our assault. Bloody lobsterbacks.
Her brother didn’t need reminding. Every letter his sister wrote to him contained this truth. Benjamin Franklin carried his family in his blood and his sister on his back. He must have thought about this a great deal. He began his autobiography by explaining why he was taking the trouble to write the story of his life: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred, to a State of Affluence & 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, 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, & therefore fit to be imitated.” 3 He wrote, in other words, to answer the question with which everyone he met must have pestered him: How, for God’s sake, how on earth, Dr. Franklin, pray, tell me, did you, the tenth son of a second-rate chandler, manage to escape from poverty and obscurity?
In the world into which Franklin and his sister were born, very few beat through. Of their father’s seventeen children, Benjamin was the only one. That world was changing. Massachusetts had already abolished slavery. In 1789, Boston, for the first time, mandated the education of girls. 4 Franklin’s escape, America’s birth, an age of revolutions, made possiblea new world, a world of fewer obstacles. Franklin liked to think of his life as the story of America, and in a way, he was right. He never finished his autobiography. And maybe that’s because he knew that, since he had made his life into an allegory for America, it could have no ending. The Revolution is the story of America because it is a story of beginning.
The day after George Pataki came to Boston was Patriot’s Day, which has been a Massachusetts state holiday since 1969. The nineteenth of April was also the day of the Boston Marathon, and, for a long time, it was the day of the Red Sox home opener. There was also an annual reenactment of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but it started at dawn, and, in my house, we had never once managed to get out of bed fast enough to make it there in time. We shambled, and breakfasted, and then biked from Cambridge to Lexington along the Minuteman Bicycle Path. By the time we got there,the battle was over, but costumed reenactors were still wandering around, waiting for the parade to start. Late but undefeated, we bought, from a street vendor on Massachusetts Avenue, a small arsenal of cheap wooden muskets and, recruiting some other sleepy-headed colonials, waged our own battle on the green. The redcoats, leaning against a stand of trees, gave every appearance of being undaunted by our assault. Bloody lobsterbacks.
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