The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands Read Free Book Online

resistance to the disease. For all his obsession with the supernatural, Mather had maintained his youthful interest in the natural, and he advocated the novel technique of inoculation to combat the contagion.
    James Franklin knew next to nothing of the etiology of smallpox, but he knew he despised Mather for what James judged the eminent minister’s smugness and his inordinate influence over the life of Boston. If Mather advocated inoculation, the Courant must oppose it—and did. The campaign of opposition accomplished no good for the health of the community; nearly 10 percent of the population died before the disease ran its course. In fairness to James, the preponderance of medical knowledge at the time was on his side regarding the inefficacy of inoculation; one of his collaborators in opposition was William Douglass, a physician educated at the best English and continental European universities. But whatever its effects on public health, the anti-inoculation campaign served James’s purpose of shaking the status quo.
    The status quo shook back. Increase Mather publicly denounced the “vile Courant ” and said he “could well remember when the Civil Government would have taken an effectual course to suppress such a cursed libel.” Samuel Mather, Cotton’s son and an apparent beneficiary of inoculation, wrote semianonymously (and that not for long) in the Gazette that the Courant was trying “to vilify and abuse the best men we have”; he warned that “there is a number of us who resolve that if this wickedness be not stopped, we will pluck up our courage and see what we can do inour way to stop it.” Many readers heard the voice of Cotton Mather in an unsigned complaint to the Boston News-Letter decrying the “notorious, scandalous paper called the Courant ” and charging said screed sheet with purveying “nonsense, unmanliness, railery, profaneness, immorality, arrogance, calumnies, lies, contradictions, and what not all tending to quarrels and divisions, and to debauch and corrupt the minds and manners of New England.” Whether or not those precise words were Cotton Mather’s, the sentiments surely were; in his diary Mather wrote of “the wicked printer and his accomplices who every week publish a vile paper to lessen and blacken the ministers of the town, and render their ministry ineffectual.”
    With the battle joined, James Franklin sought allies. At this early stage the list of Courant contributors comprised only James and a few kindred skeptics; to create the illusion of numbers, the publisher-editor and his friends employed the common journalistic tactic of writing under noms de plume—“Abigail Afterwit,” “Timothy Turnstone,” “Harry Meanwell,” “Fanny Mournful” and others. These fictitious personages graced the paper with sharp-penned commentary on issues of the day; not surprisingly they tended to endorse the paper’s editorial views.
    Consequently it was with pleasure that James awoke one morning to discover beneath the door of the print shop a contribution from a genuine outsider. Actually, this contributor was not an outsider at all; it was Ben Franklin, who had observed the genesis of the Courant and its challenge to Mather and the Massachusetts hierarchy but who conspicuously had not been invited to join the undertaking. Because he had not—and because he realized that James might be less than enthusiastic about his younger brother’s participation in the new project—Ben carefully disguised his handwriting and signed the letter “Silence Dogood.” James read the missive with growing delight—which increased the more from his appreciation that the author’s very name tweaked Cotton Mather, whose recently published Silentarius followed his earlier Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good. James shared the Dogood letter with his colleagues; they registered equal approval. James ran it in the April 2, 1722, issue of the Courant.
    Mrs. Dogood introduced herself to Courant patrons