One (declared Benjamin) was called The Lighthouse Tragedy, and contained an account of the drowning of Captain Worthilake, with his two daughters: the other was a sailor's song, on the taking of Teach (or Blackbeard) the pirate. They were wretched stuff, in the Grub-street-ballad style; and when they were printed he sent me about the town to sell them. The first sold wonderfully, the event being recent, having made a great noise. This flattered my vanity; but my father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances, and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars.
The importance of these two pieces consists in the fact that they were "the first with which Franklin's name can be identified as either author or printer," according to Dr. William J. Campbell, who adds that "no copy is known to exist, nor is the exact title of either of them known." This was true in 1918, when Dr. Campbell's admirable catalogue of The Collection of Franklin Imprints in the Museum of the Curtis Publishing Company was issued, and it is unfortunately still true today [1935]. If they were at all like similar productions of both earlier and later date, they were broadsides—single sheets that were distributed like handbills, the main difference being that they commanded a price. They would command a fantastic price today, together or singly, and their eventual discovery is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. A copy of one—or copies of both—may be tucked away in some forgotten contemporary theological compendium which has not been opened for a century.
The disappearance of these broadsides is regrettable on many counts, not least of which is the fact that even if Benjamin had never accomplished anything else, he could at least claim credit for sponsoring perhaps the most textually interesting productions of his brother's press. James Franklin was a skilled printer—London trained, and "no slovenly self-taught colonial," in Paul Leicester Ford's phrase—and James was not, of course, in any degree responsible for the dullness of the copy that was brought to his shop. A brief glance at a few of his imprints of this period is of interest mainly because of the certainty that Benjamin worked on many of them.
The product of James Franklin's press (says Ford in The Many-Sided Franklin, New York, 1899) is a dreary lot of "gone-nothing-ness." A few of the New England sermons of the day; Stoddard's Treatise on Conversion; Stone's Short Catechism; A Prefatory Letter about Psalmody, in defense of church singing, which many Puritans still held to be unholy; an allegory styled The Isle of Man, or, Legal Proceedings in Manshire Against Sin; Care's English Liberties; sundry pamphlets on the local politics of the moment, such as A Letter from One in the Country to his Friend in Boston, News from the Moon, A Friendly Check from a Kind Relation to the Chief Cannonneer, and A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country; two or three tractates on inoculation, and one aimed half at the Boston clergy and half at the fair sex, entitled Hooped Petticoats Arraigned by the Light of Nature and the Law of God, were the chief output of the new printer during the years his brother served him.
In the summer of 1721, James Franklin established a newspaper, The New England Courant. Two years earlier he had been engaged to print the Boston Gazette, but with the transfer of its management a few months later the contract had gone elsewhere. The Courant was a new departure even for the novelty that was American journalism—so extensive and violent a departure, indeed, that in the following year the authorities sentenced the printer-proprietor to a month's imprisonment for his insolence. The punishment did not improve him; free again, he pressed the thorn of the Courant deeper into the flesh of his persecutors, with the consequence that he was soon forbidden "to print or publish" either the Courant "or any other pamphlet or paper of the like nature" unless it were first submitted to the secretary of the province.
There were two apparent ways out of the dilemma, and one was as eminently unsatisfactory as the other. The first was to quit printing and publishing. The second was to submit to the censorship. James hit upon a more ingenious solution. He turned the Courant over to sixteen-year-old Benjamin. Benjamin's indentures as apprentice to James had five years to run, and in order to forestall any objection on the part of the authorities that an apprentice was not competent to manage the paper, the indentures were ostentatiously canceled and a new document drawn up as a private and confidential (but none the less binding) memorandum which in theory was no one's affair save James's and Benjamin's. The half-sheet issue of the Courant for February 4-11, 1723, identified it as "printed and sold by Benjamin Franklin in Queen Street, where Advertisements are taken in." Benjamin Franklin's name thus first appeared in an imprint. It remained on the tail-board of the Courant until the paper's discontinuance in 1726, long after Benjamin had left Boston.
The gratifying tableau of two stalwart brothers battling loyally side by side for freedom of the press, however, was not the whole picture. James and Benjamin had differences, and Benjamin later admitted that he himself was "perhaps ... too saucy and provoking," and that James, despite "the blows his passion too often urged him to bestow upon me," was "otherwise not an ill-natur'd man." Benjamin, at all events, decided to take advantage of the freedom accorded him by the cancellation of his indentures, which act he later conceded to have been "not fair" and "one of the first errata of my life." James spread the tidings of this perfidy throughout Boston, and every local printing establishment thereupon became a closed shop to Benjamin Franklin.
If James assumed that Benjamin would thus be forced to return to his own shop, he reckoned without his Benjamin. For not long thereafter, with the connivance of a friend, John Collins, Benjamin was smuggled aboard a New York-bound sloop, and three days later, thanks to a fair wind, he was in a city which was not yet a metropolis judged even by easy colonial standards. He called on "old Mr. William Bradford" (aged sixty), who had nothing to offer, but who suggested that his son Andrew, then flourishing (after a fashion) in Philadelphia, might have a position for him, since Andrew's "principal hand," Aquila Rose, had just died.
Franklin set out by water by way of Perth Amboy. It is interesting to note, in view of the dispute regarding the earliest New Jersey imprint ... that the trip from New York to the New Jersey port took thirty hours. All in good time he reached Philadelphia.