Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson Read Free Book Online Page A

the paper.
    He boasts in his autobiography that “I had the management of the paper, and I made bold to give our rulers some rubs in it, which my brother took very kindly, while others began to consider me in an unfavorable light as a young genius that had a turn for libeling and satire.” In fact, other than a letter to the readers written from prison by James, nothing in Benjamin’s three issues directly challenged the civil authorities. The closest he came was having Mrs. Dogood quote in full an essay from an English newspaper that defended free speech. “Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom,” it declared, “and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.” 39
    The “rubs” that Franklin remembered came a week after his brother’s return from prison. Writing as Silence Dogood, he unleashed a piercing attack on the civil authorities, perhaps the most biting of his entire career. The question that Mrs. Dogood posed was “Whether a Commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion or by the openly profane?”
    Unsurprisingly, Franklin’s Mrs. Dogood argued that “some late thoughts of this nature have inclined me to think that the hypocrite is the most dangerous person of the two, especially if he sustains a post in the government.” The piece attacked the link between the church and the state, which was the very foundation of the Puritan commonwealth. Governor Thomas Dudley, who moved from the ministry to the law, is cited (though not by name) as an example: “The most dangerous hypocrite in a Commonwealth is one who leaves the gospel for the sake of the law. A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.” 40
    By the fall of 1722, Franklin was running short of ideas for Silence Dogood. Worse yet, his brother was beginning to suspect the provenance of the pieces. In her thirteenth submission, Silence Dogood noted that she had overheard a conversation one night in which a gentleman had said, “Though I wrote in the character of a woman, he knew me to be a man; but, continued he, he has more need of endeavoring a reformation in himself than spending his wit in satirizing others.” The next Dogood would be Franklin’s last. When he revealed Mrs. Dogood’s true identity, it raised his stature among the Couranteers but “did not quite please” James. “He thought, probably with reason, that it tended to make me too vain.”
    Silence Dogood had been able to get away with an attack on hypocrisy and religion, but when James penned a similar piece in January 1723, he landed in trouble yet again. “Of all knaves,” he wrote, “the religious knave is the worst.” Religion was important, he wrote, but, using words that would describe the lifelong attitude of his younger brother, he added, “too much of it is worse than none at all.” The local authorities, noting “that the tendency of the said paper is to mock religion,” promptly passed a resolution that required James to submit each issue to the authorities for approval before publication. James defied the order with relish.
    The General Court responded by forbidding James Franklin from publishing the Courant. At a secret meeting in his shop, it was decided that the best way around the order was to continue to print the paper, but without James as its publisher. On Monday, February 11, 1723, there appeared atop the Courant the masthead: “Printed and sold by Benjamin Franklin.”
    Benjamin’s Courant was more cautious than that of his brother. An editorial in his first issue denounced publications that were “hateful” and “malicious,” and it declared that henceforth the Courant would be “designed purely for the diversion and merriment of the reader” and to “entertain the town with the most comical and diverting incidents of human life.” The master of the paper, the editorial declared, would be the