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

Roman god Janus, who could look two ways at once. 41
    The next few issues, however, hardly lived up to that billing. Most articles were slightly stale dispatches containing foreign news or old speeches. There was only one essay that was clearly written by Franklin, a wry musing on the folly of titles such as Viscount and Master. (His aversion to hereditary and aristocratic titles would be a theme throughout his life.) After a few weeks, James returned to the helm of the Courant, in fact if not officially, and he resumed treating Benjamin as an apprentice, subject to occasional beatings, rather than as a brother and fellow writer. Such treatment “demeaned me too much,” Franklin recalled, and he became eager to move on. He had an urge for independence that he would help to make a hallmark of the American character.
The Runaway
    Franklin managed his escape by taking advantage of a ruse his brother had contrived. When James had pretended to turn over the Courant to Benjamin, he signed an official discharge of his apprenticeship to make the transfer seem legitimate. But he then made Benjamin sign a new apprentice agreement that would be kept secret. A few months later, Benjamin decided to run away. He assumed, correctly, that his brother would realize that it was unwise to try to enforce the secret indenture.
    Benjamin Franklin left behind a brother whose paper would slowly fail and whose reputation would eventually be reduced to a tarnished historical footnote. James was doomed by his brother’s sharp pen to be remembered “for the blows his passion too often urged him to bestow upon me.” Indeed, his significance in Franklin’s life is described in a brusque footnote in the Autobiography, written during Franklin’s time as a colonial agent fighting British rule: “I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life.”
    James deserved better. If Franklin learned an “aversion to arbitrary power” from him, it was not merely because of his alleged tyrannical style but because he had set an example by challenging, with bravery and spunk, Boston’s ruling elite. James was the first great fighter for an independent press in America, and he was the most important journalistic influence on his younger brother.
    He was also an important literary influence. Silence Dogood may have been, in Benjamin’s mind, modeled on Addison and Steele, but in fact she more closely resembled, in her down-home vernacular and common-touch perceptions, Abigail Afterwit, Jack Dulman, and the other pseudonymous characters that had been created for the Courant by James.
    Benjamin’s break with his brother was fortunate for his career. As great as it was to be raised in Boston, it would likely have become a constricting town for a free-spirited deist who had not attended Harvard. “I had already made myself a little obnoxious to the governing party,” he later wrote, “and it was likely I might if I stayed soon bring myself into scrapes.” His mockery of religion meant that he was pointed to on the streets “with horror by good people as an infidel or atheist.” All in all, it was a good time for him to leave both his brother and Boston behind. 42
    It was a tradition among American pioneers, when their communities became too confining, to strike out for the frontier. But Franklin was a different type of American rebel. The wilderness did not beckon. Instead, he was enticed by the new commercial centers, New York and Philadelphia, that offered the chance to become a self-made success. John Winthrop may have led his Puritan band on an errand into the wilderness; Franklin, on the other hand, was part of a new breed leading an errand into the Market streets.
    Afraid that his brother would try to detain him, Franklin had a friend secretly book him passage on a sloop for New York using the cover story that it was for a boy who needed