Benjamin Franklin

Franklin came from typical English stock. For three hundred years, perhaps for many centuries more, his ancestors lived on a small freehold at Ecton in Northamptonshire, and so far back as record or tradition ran the eldest son in each generation had been bred a blacksmith. But after the strange British fashion there was intertwined with this singular fixedness of ideas a stubborn independence in thinking, courageously exercised in times of peril. The Franklins were among the early Protestants, and held their faith unshaken by the terrors of the reign of Bloody Mary. By the end of Charles the Second's time they were non-conformists and attendants on conventicles; and about 1682 Josiah Franklin, seeking the peaceful exercise of his creed, migrated to Boston, Massachusetts. His first wife bore him seven children, and died. Not satisfied, he took in second nuptials Abiah Folger, "daughter of Peter Folger, one of the first settlers of New England, of whom honorable mention is made by Cotton Mather," and justly, since in those dark days he was an active philanthropist towards the Indians, and an opponent of religious persecution. This lady outdid her predecessor, contributing no less than ten children to expand the family circle. The eighth of this second brood was named Benjamin, in memory of his father's favorite brother. He was born in a house on Milk Street, opposite the Old South Church, January 6, old style, 17, new style, 1706. Mr. Parton says that probably Benjamin "derived from his mother the fashion of his body and the cast of his countenance. There are lineal descendants of Peter Folger who strikingly resemble Franklin in these particulars; one of whom, a banker of New Orleans, looks like a portrait of Dr. Franklin stepped out of its frame." A more important inheritance was that of the humane and liberal traits of his mother's father.