Chapter One - The Tenth Son

CHAPTER ONE

The Tenth Son

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WAS born in a rented house on Milk Street in Boston in 1706, during a snowstorm. That’s not foreshadowing. That’s just what it was like to be the tenth son of a soap maker. Ten sons, seventeen children in total. His father, Josiah, made candles for a living, boiled tallow, prayed hard, and raised his children to do the same. There was no throne waiting for Benjamin. No inheritance. No expectations beyond obedience and survival.

But even as a kid, Franklin didn’t play the role he was given.

He read everything. He questioned everything. He was the one poking holes in logic, rolling his eyes at sermons, and asking why grown-ups stopped asking “why.” His brain didn’t want stability. It wanted more. More knowledge, more experience, more leverage. He wasn’t trying to fit in. He was trying to get out.

And school didn’t help.

Josiah sent him to school for barely two years, hoping he’d become a minister. But Benjamin didn’t want God. He wanted ideas. He wanted words. And when the money ran out, he took the books with him. He read whatever he could find: science, philosophy, satire, and anything that helped him write sharper or think faster.

At twelve, he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer. That’s where the story really begins, because printing was more than just a trade. It was power.

In colonial Boston, there were no influencers, television, or social media. The people who controlled the press controlled the narrative. James ran The New-England Courant, one of the few independent newspapers in the colonies. It was bold, anti-authoritarian, satirical, and often in trouble with the government.

Benjamin wanted in.

He couldn’t publish under his own name (he was just a kid), so he invented a fake persona: Silence Dogood, a sharp-tongued widow with strong opinions and a better voice than most grown men in Boston. He slipped the letters under the shop door at night. James printed them, not knowing who was writing them. The readers loved her.

Eventually, James found out. And he was pissed.

Franklin had outshined him in his own shop.

The apprenticeship turned bitter. Franklin took beatings, blame, and notes. And at seventeen, he did something colonial boys weren’t supposed to do.

He ran away.

He left Boston, his family, and the life he was expected to live.

And he walked straight into his future.

That penniless, dirty, and lonely walk ended in Philadelphia. He was soaked, starving, carrying three loaves of bread under his arms, and looking like a fool. A girl on the street noticed him and laughed. He’d end up spending his life with her.

Her name was Deborah.

He was seventeen.

America hadn’t been born yet, but Benjamin Franklin had.

And he wasn’t going anywhere.