1 - Liberty and Necessity

Summary

A genius and a rebel, Franklin was, in his own words, “a Leader among the Boys, and sometimes led them into Scrapes”—captaining ships or canoes, and once, stealing the stones workers had gathered to build a home so that he could build his own wharf. This was “an early projecting public Spirit, tho’ not then justly conducted.” He longed to run off to sea, like his brother, and engage in adventures—the subject of his first poems. These adventures, like those of John Bunyan, he discovered through reading, and he spent all of his money on books.

Franklin's singularity led him to reject others’ opinions; his vanity gave him great ambition and thought for his place in the world. Both traits led to his love of disputation. Franklin's father's books of theological dispute, particularly the Boyle Lectures, directed Franklin in his “disputacious Turn.” He writes of himself and his “intimate” friend John Collins: “Very fond we were of argument, and very desirous of confuting one another.” After losing a quarrel with Collins about whether women should be educated, Franklin turned to the art of rhetoric. Franklin claims that the cause was unimportant to him at the time but that he was outmatched by Collins's rhetoric, which, he writes, served the “Advantage of [his] Antagonist.” His pious father advised him to write down his arguments in order to perfect his rhetoric, which initially serviced Franklin's vanity rather than the pursuit of truth. He meticulously imitated the Spectator, which he read “over and over,” to improve his writing, and he built a “Stock of Words” as an arsenal for verbal assaults and recriminations. He worked hard at learning new vocabulary, synonyms, and combinations of them, turning tales into verse in order to practice finding rhyming synonyms—then turning the verses back to prose. Foreshadowing his method for achieving moral perfection, Franklin initiated his own “Method” to correct his faults and make himself a “Master” of words, so that he might be a master in the “Arrangement of Thoughts.” Going beyond the petty world of Collins, Franklin became “extreamly ambitious” to become a great writer—and thinker.