Josiah Franklin [TRUSTED]

In 1683, Josiah emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, a haven for Puritans. He arrived with his first wife, Anne Child, and their three children. The decision to emigrate was not merely economic; it was an act of ideological preservation. As historian Perry Miller noted, the Great Migration’s second wave, to which Josiah belonged, was driven by a desire to perfect a Reformed commonwealth. Josiah’s subsequent life in Boston—his choice of trade, his church affiliation, and his child-rearing methods—was a direct extension of this Dissenter logic.

Josiah Franklin was a devout member of the Old South Church (Third Church of Boston), led by the influential Puritan divine Samuel Willard. However, his nonconformity did not translate into dogmatism. The Autobiography notes that Josiah, despite his piety, "had a strong constitution, was of a middle stature, well-set, and very strong." More importantly, Benjamin records that his father “attended public worship most constantly” but also “used to read to the family every evening, out of some book of devotion, as a part of the evening’s exercise.” josiah franklin

Unlike his more famous son, Josiah did not work with lightning or printing presses; he worked with fat, ash, and wicks. The tallow chandler’s trade was unglamorous, essential, and revealing. It required practical chemistry (saponification), supply chain management (importing rags and tallow), and customer relations. Josiah’s workshop on Milk Street was not merely a place of labor but a theater of early education. In 1683, Josiah emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, a

Josiah Franklin was neither a Founding Father nor a published philosopher. He was a candlemaker who outlived two wives and saw only one of his seventeen children achieve international fame. Yet to dismiss him as merely the father of a genius is to misunderstand the ecology of early American achievement. Josiah’s migration as a Dissenter, his workshop pedagogy, his Socratic table talk, and his ethic of useful virtue provided the raw material for the American Enlightenment’s most iconic mind. In studying Josiah Franklin, we do not diminish Benjamin’s originality; rather, we see that originality was nurtured in a specific, deliberate, and nonconformist domestic crucible. The modest patriarch, it turns out, was the first and most effective printer of his son’s character. As historian Perry Miller noted, the Great Migration’s

Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography , recalls his father’s method of dining-table instruction: "At his table he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the minds of his children. By this means he turned our attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the conduct of life." Josiah employed the Socratic method—posing provocative questions and dissecting arguments—decades before it became a hallmark of the Scottish Enlightenment in America. Furthermore, Josiah exposed young Benjamin to various trades (cutlery, joinery, bricklaying) to diagnose his inclinations. This empirical approach to child-rearing—testing hypotheses about his son’s nature through direct observation—was a form of applied Baconian science. The tallow shop, therefore, was a laboratory of practical reason.

Crucially, Josiah provided Benjamin with a copy of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and later, the "Discourses" of the rational Dissenter John Locke. Josiah’s library, though modest, contained works that balanced Puritan piety with emerging natural philosophy. He encouraged debate but disciplined sophistry. When Benjamin wrote a ballad on a local tragedy and sold it on the streets, Josiah criticized not the act of writing but the "low" subject matter, arguing that poetry should be "correct and useful." This fusion of moral seriousness with utilitarian aesthetics became the backbone of Benjamin’s later civic projects (e.g., the Junto, the Library Company).