Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Read Online Free
Author: Walter Isaacson
Tags: United States, General, Historical, History, Biography & Autobiography, Azizex666, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
the Puritan ministers aboard. After their arrival, Peter was able to buy her freedom for £20 and take her as his wife.
Having found religious and personal freedom, the Folgers were restless for economic opportunities. From Boston they moved to a new settlement up the river called Dedham, then to Watertown, and finally to Nantucket Island, where Peter became the schoolmaster. Most of the inhabitants were Indians, and he learned their language, taught them English, and attempted (with great success) to convert them to Christianity. Rebellious in nature, he underwent his own conversion and became a Baptist, which meant that the faithful Indians whom he had led to Christianity now had to follow him through a ritual that required total immersion.
Displaying the robust resistance to authority that ran in both the Folger and Franklin families, Peter was the sort of rebel destined to transform colonial America. As clerk of the court on Nantucket, he was at one point jailed for disobeying the local magistrate during a struggle between the island’s wealthy shareholders and its growing middle class of shopkeepers and artisans. 15
He also wrote a near-seditious pamphlet, in verse, sympathizing with the Indians during what became known as King Philip’s War in1676. The war, he declared, was the result of God’s anger at the intolerance of the Puritan ministers in Boston. His passion overpowered his poetic talents: “Let Magistrates and Ministers /consider what they do; / Let them repeal those evil laws, / and break those bonds in two.” Later, his grandson Benjamin Franklin would pronounce that the poem was “written with manly freedom and a pleasing simplicity.” 16
Peter and Mary Folger had ten children, the youngest of whom, Abiah, was born in 1667. When she was 21 and still unmarried, she moved to Boston to live with an older sister and her husband, who were members of the South Church. Although raised as a Baptist, Abiah joined the congregation shortly after her arrival. By July 1689, when the well-respected tallow chandler Josiah Franklin went there to bury his wife, Abiah was a faithful parishioner. 17
Less than five months later, on November 25, 1689, they were married. Both were the youngest children in a large brood. Together they would live to unusually ripe ages—he to 87, she to 84. And their longevity was among the many traits they would bequeath to their famous youngest son, who himself would live to be 84. “He was a pious and prudent man, she a discreet and virtuous woman,” Benjamin would later inscribe on their tombstone.
Over the next twelve years, Josiah and Abiah Franklin had six children: John (born 1690), Peter (1692), Mary (1694), James (1697), Sarah (1699), and Ebenezer (1701). Along with those from Josiah’s first marriage, that made eleven children, all still unmarried, crammed into the tiny Milk Street house that also contained the tallow, soap, and candle equipment.
It might seem impossible to keep a watchful eye on so large a brood in such circumstances, and the Franklin tale provides tragic evidence that this was so. When he was a toddler of 16 months, Ebenezer drowned in a tub of his father’s suds. Later that year, in 1703, the Franklins had another son, but he also died as a child.
So even though their next son, Benjamin, would spend his youth in a house with ten older siblings, the youngest of them would be seven years his senior. And he would have two younger sisters, Lydia (born1708) and Jane (1712), looking up to him.
A Spunky Lad
Benjamin Franklin was born and baptized on the same day, a Sunday, January 17, 1706. * Boston was by then 76 years old, no longer a Puritan outpost but a thriving commercial center filled with preachers, merchants, seamen, and prostitutes. It had more than a thousand homes, a thousand ships registered at its harbor, and seven thousand inhabitants, a figure that was doubling every twenty years.
As a kid growing up along the Charles River, Franklin was,
Having found religious and personal freedom, the Folgers were restless for economic opportunities. From Boston they moved to a new settlement up the river called Dedham, then to Watertown, and finally to Nantucket Island, where Peter became the schoolmaster. Most of the inhabitants were Indians, and he learned their language, taught them English, and attempted (with great success) to convert them to Christianity. Rebellious in nature, he underwent his own conversion and became a Baptist, which meant that the faithful Indians whom he had led to Christianity now had to follow him through a ritual that required total immersion.
Displaying the robust resistance to authority that ran in both the Folger and Franklin families, Peter was the sort of rebel destined to transform colonial America. As clerk of the court on Nantucket, he was at one point jailed for disobeying the local magistrate during a struggle between the island’s wealthy shareholders and its growing middle class of shopkeepers and artisans. 15
He also wrote a near-seditious pamphlet, in verse, sympathizing with the Indians during what became known as King Philip’s War in1676. The war, he declared, was the result of God’s anger at the intolerance of the Puritan ministers in Boston. His passion overpowered his poetic talents: “Let Magistrates and Ministers /consider what they do; / Let them repeal those evil laws, / and break those bonds in two.” Later, his grandson Benjamin Franklin would pronounce that the poem was “written with manly freedom and a pleasing simplicity.” 16
Peter and Mary Folger had ten children, the youngest of whom, Abiah, was born in 1667. When she was 21 and still unmarried, she moved to Boston to live with an older sister and her husband, who were members of the South Church. Although raised as a Baptist, Abiah joined the congregation shortly after her arrival. By July 1689, when the well-respected tallow chandler Josiah Franklin went there to bury his wife, Abiah was a faithful parishioner. 17
Less than five months later, on November 25, 1689, they were married. Both were the youngest children in a large brood. Together they would live to unusually ripe ages—he to 87, she to 84. And their longevity was among the many traits they would bequeath to their famous youngest son, who himself would live to be 84. “He was a pious and prudent man, she a discreet and virtuous woman,” Benjamin would later inscribe on their tombstone.
Over the next twelve years, Josiah and Abiah Franklin had six children: John (born 1690), Peter (1692), Mary (1694), James (1697), Sarah (1699), and Ebenezer (1701). Along with those from Josiah’s first marriage, that made eleven children, all still unmarried, crammed into the tiny Milk Street house that also contained the tallow, soap, and candle equipment.
It might seem impossible to keep a watchful eye on so large a brood in such circumstances, and the Franklin tale provides tragic evidence that this was so. When he was a toddler of 16 months, Ebenezer drowned in a tub of his father’s suds. Later that year, in 1703, the Franklins had another son, but he also died as a child.
So even though their next son, Benjamin, would spend his youth in a house with ten older siblings, the youngest of them would be seven years his senior. And he would have two younger sisters, Lydia (born1708) and Jane (1712), looking up to him.
A Spunky Lad
Benjamin Franklin was born and baptized on the same day, a Sunday, January 17, 1706. * Boston was by then 76 years old, no longer a Puritan outpost but a thriving commercial center filled with preachers, merchants, seamen, and prostitutes. It had more than a thousand homes, a thousand ships registered at its harbor, and seven thousand inhabitants, a figure that was doubling every twenty years.
As a kid growing up along the Charles River, Franklin was,
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