Young ben franklin in boston

In a nostalgic letter to the Rev. Samuel Mather, Benjamin Franklin describes the trips he made back to Boston in the sixty years after he left for Philadelphia in "I long much to see again my native place, and once hoped to lay my bones there.

Benjamin franklin wiki

Cotton Mather who once had been among Franklin's bitterest political foes , both through his writings, "if I have been, as you seem to think, a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to [Cotton Mather's Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good ]," and through Cotton Mather's personal admonishment to young Franklin to " Stoop as you go through the world" to avoid the "thumps" caused by carrying one's head too high.

Many years later, in his celebrated Autobiography , Franklin described his childhood along the Boston waterfront in relatively idyllic terms, but as one of seventeen children of a tallow merchant and cloth dyer, by the time he was twelve he had left school for ever and become an apprentice to his older brother, James, the printer and publisher of an early Boston newspaper, The New-England Courant.

The "Couranteers," as the contributors to James Franklin's paper came to be known, started something new in America--a lively journal without ties to the Massachusetts colonial government that published attacks on Boston's political and religious establishment. Their satirical attacks grew so strong that James Franklin was imprisoned and later forbidden to publish without prior censorship.

He went into hiding, but The New-England Courant continued to appear with teenage Ben Franklin as its putative editor. In this heady atmosphere, sixteen-year-old Ben Franklin was inspired to make his own first efforts as a journalist. As he recollected it, "even though he was still a boy," he secretly contributed a series of essays to the Courant that were supposedly written by a minister's widow named Silence Dogood.

In spite of his early success as a satirist and social critic, young Ben Franklin grew restless under the strict control and abuse of his brother and master James. In September of , when Ben was just seventeen years old, he ran away from his apprenticeship--first to New York, and then on to everlasting fame in Philadelphia. As his letter to Samuel Mather makes clear, however, it was not without fond recollections of his youth in Boston.