Background
James Franklin was born on February 4, 1696 in Boston, the son of Josiah Franklin, a chandler and businessman from Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, and Abiah Folger Franklin, who came from a family of Nantucket Puritans.
James Franklin was born on February 4, 1696 in Boston, the son of Josiah Franklin, a chandler and businessman from Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, and Abiah Folger Franklin, who came from a family of Nantucket Puritans.
Franklin learned the printer’s trade in England.
After learning the printer’s trade in England James Franklin returned home in March 1717, bringing with him a press, type, and other supplies. Among the sundries, it transpired later, were some brisk new ideas about journalism.
At first business was slow, but in December 1719 he was employed by William Brooker to print the Boston Gazette. After issuing forty numbers Brooker disposed of the Gazette to the new postmaster, Philip Musgrave, who took the printing from Franklin and gave it to Samuel Kneeland. Piqued and out of pocket, Franklin took a risky revenge by launching a third paper in a community that gave but scant support to two.
On Monday, August 7, 1721, the New England Courant made its first appearance and soon set all Boston by the ears. Increase Mather, after reading a few numbers, publicly stopped his subscription, but Franklin twitted him on sending his grandson in private to buy the paper at the higher price charged for single copies. Cotton Mather was appalled: “A wickedness never paralleled any where upon the Face of the Earth !” he ejaculated in his diary.
What particularly enraged the Mathers were the jeers of the paper at the experiments in inoculating for the smallpox.
Actually the Courant was a novelty in that it was literary in tone and inclined to be disrespectful of official dignity, whether civil or ecclesiastical. Having only restricted access to what little news there was, Franklin made his paper a homespun, Yankee imitation of Addison and Steele’s Spectator, gathered about him a group of young wits, including William Douglass, as contributors, and gave Boston the liveliest secular reading it had yet perused.
Of the contributors the most brilliant was James’s brother Benjamin, who has given his account of the enterprise in the Autobiography. James himself wrote some prose and doggerel verse for the Courant.
For a while the paper enjoyed a precarious immunity from interference because of the wrangle for control of the press between Governor Shute and the Assembly.
Trouble was finally precipitated by an oblique reference to official dawdling about the pirates on the coast; James served a month in jail for his contumely in the issue of June 11, 1722. During his brother’s absence Benjamin carried on the paper with superior impudence. For rude remarks about church members on January 14, 1723, James was forbidden by the court “to print or publish the New England Courant, or any other pamphlet or paper of the like nature except it be first supervised by the Secretary of the Province. ”
Thereafter the Courant appeared in Benjamin’s name, even though on September 30, 1723, James had to advertise for a “likely lad for an Apprentice” - the best apprentice in the New World having recently absconded. Sometime in 1726 Franklin abandoned his paper and removed to the more congenial climate of Rhode Island.
Settling at Newport, he brought with him the first press to be used in that colony, printed a pamphlet there in 1727, an edition of Berkeley’s Alciphron in 1730, and as public printer, part of an edition of the laws of Rhode Island in 1731.
He also printed linens, calicoes, and silks, and in September 1732 started the Rhode Island Gazette. His widow, daughters, and son James carried on the business after his death.
James Franklin married Ann Smith on his 26th birthday in 1723.
1655–1744 chandler, businessman
1667–1752
1708–1738
unknown–1778
1726–1754
1728–1730
1696–1763
1701–1703
1706–1790
Boston printer and publisher
