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A Woman Who Never Was

A FEW YEARS LATER, IN 1747, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ENTERED THE field of excessively creative journalism. Previously, he had been creative in other ways. The most ethical and erudite of early American publishers, Franklin wanted his Pennsylvania Gazette “to expand the very definition of [news]. He wanted to report on ‘Algebra, or the Doctrine of Equations . . . Analyticks, or the Resolutions of Problems . . . Architecture . . . Chronology, or the Doctrine of Time . . . Mechanicks . . . Mineralogy . . . Opticks . . . Perspective, or the Projection of Points, Lines, Planes . . . [and] Pneuumaticks, or the Consideration of the Air, its Weight, Density, Pressure, Elasticity, &c.’” The Gazette told of the latest developments in meteorology, for instance that “the material cause of thunder, lightning, and earthquakes is one and the same.” It reviewed the most recently published books from abroad. It did not just publish stories on government; it analyzed the ideas behind various forms and proposals for change. And it did not just publish stories on religion; it contrasted a belief in the Almighty with superstition, “a Monster which has introduced more Misery into the World, than all our natural Evils put together.” More than anything else, Franklin said, he wanted to encourage his readers “to join the rationalists of the eighteenth century in pursuit of knowledge and exercise of reason.” It was an ambitious list of goals for an eighteenth-century periodical, just as it would be for a periodical of our own century.

But on one occasion, Franklin expanded the definition of news in yet another direction, going even further astray than Johnson. Whereas the latter put his own words into the mouths of real people, Franklin actually invented a person to do the speaking. He did so, however, for reasons entirely different from Johnson’s. He was not bored, not shy about being seen in public, not dismissive of those on whom he reported and determined to make them sound more learned. He invented his person because he believed the ruse would serve the public good, better making a point by fictional means than could have been done by the restrictiveness of fact.

Actually, it was not the first time Franklin had done something like this. As a sixteen-year-old apprentice to his older brother James on the New England Courant, Franklin found himself longing to write rather than simply set type and clean up the shop after the day’s work. But he knew his brother would never accept a submission from him. The two did not get along well; in fact, their relationship was so bad, Franklin said, that on occasion James would beat him. So Franklin, a mere boy of sixteen, began writing letters to the editor of the Courant under the pseudonym of Silence Dogood, ostensibly a sixty-year-old widow. And indeed, he managed to sound like a much older person of the opposing gender. “A raging passion for immoderate gain,” he wrote in one of his missives, “had made men universally and intensely hard-hearted; they were everywhere devouring one another.” Just as few teenagers sound like this today, so did few in times past.

The Silence Dogood letters were a big hit with readers. Sales of the Courant increased when Silence appeared. But she appeared only eleven times. At that point, it seemed to Franklin, James was beginning to suspect Mrs. Dogood’s true identity, and prudence, as well as the author’s physical safety, called for him to put her to rest. He was sorry to see her go, but she was not worth another thrashing.

It is the second lady to emerge from Franklin’s imagination, however, who concerns us here. Franklin was now in his early forties and found himself becoming more and more upset about the decisions of the Pennsylvania judiciary in cases involving children born out of wedlock. As in the judicial systems of most other colonies at the time, Pennsylvania’s judges severely punished the mother while paying virtually no attention to the father, whose name was seldom even mentioned in court proceedings.

Despite having sired a child without benefit of marriage himself as a young man, Franklin found this attitude intolerable. He might have been the beneficiary of the era’s judicial hypocrisy, but that did not change the fact that the courts were ruling unfairly, and in his view, men as well as women ought to be punished equally, ought to bear the burden equally, ought to demand reform equally. For his part, Franklin acknowledged his illegitimate son openly.

And so he was moved to write “The Trial of Miss Polly Baker,” a charming woman with golden locks and an eye-catching figure, who employed herself as a prostitute in Connecticut. One night, Miss Baker, falling victim to one of the hazards of the profession, conceived a child. And then, later, another. And then a third, a fourth—eventually a fifth. Five illegitimate children from the loins of one wanton woman and the seeds of five different men, none of which she could call husband! As had been the case four times previously, Miss Baker was arrested and put on trial for such defiantly antisocial—or overly social—behavior.

The defendant turned out to be “as sassy a lass as she was prolific.” Facing a panel of judges, she said:

This is the fifth time, gentlemen, that I have been dragged before your court on the same account; twice I have paid heavy fines, and twice have been brought to public punishment . . . I cannot conceive (may it please your honors) what the nature of my offence is. I have brought five fine children into the world, at the risk of my life; I have maintained them well by my own industry, without burdening the township, and would have done it better, had it not been for the heavy charges and fines I have paid.

Can it be a crime (in the nature of things I mean) to add to the number of the king’s subjects, in a new country that really wants people? I own it, I should think it a praise-worthy, rather than a punishable action. I have debauched no other woman’s husband, nor enticed any youth; these things I was never charged with, nor has any one the least complaint against me, unless, perhaps, the minister, or justice, because I have had children without being married, by which they have missed a wedding fee.

But she was not just doing her duty to the Crown, Miss Baker explained; she was also serving a higher master:

What must poor young women do, whom custom have forbid to solicit the men, and who cannot force themselves upon husbands, when the laws take no care to provide them any; and yet severely punish them if they do their duty without them; the duty of the first and great command of nature, and of nature’s god, increase and multiply. A duty, from the steady performance of which, nothing has been able to deter me; but for its sake I have hazarded the loss of the public esteem, and have frequently endured public disgrace and punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble opinion, instead of a whipping, to have a statue erected in my memory.

Whereupon, according to Franklin, Miss Baker took her seat and waited for the judges to leave the room to deliberate.

It did not take long. After but a few minutes, the judges returned, resumed their places behind the bench, and announced their verdict: innocent on all charges. In fact, Franklin reported, so moved was one judge by the defendant’s testimony that a few days later he asked Miss Baker to marry him. She accepted, and presumably the two of them went off blissfully—and legally—to provide even more subjects for the king.

The story of Polly Baker’s trial first appeared not in Franklin’s own paper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, but in a journal in London. From there it spread to other papers across the Continent and eventually made its way back to the American colonies, where it was one of the most talked-about, and chuckled-over, tales of the time.

In all likelihood, Franklin did not expect people to take the story seriously. Instead, he believed that he was “teaching a lesson, as did the Bible with its parables and such authors as Chaucer and Boccaccio with their tales of travelers and lovers and others. It was not the facts that were important in such writing, but the moral; it was not the truth as niggling minds defined it, but Truth in the larger sense, as the cosmos recognized it.”

 

 

Did Franklin teach a lesson? It is impossible to say but tantalizing to speculate. Certainly people talked about Polly Baker and the issue of the male contribution to her state in the aftermath of the trial, but there is no way of knowing how much. Just as certainly no new laws were passed, no new judicial behavior adopted. Few newspapers wrote about women like Polly Baker after Franklin created the original; it was not the kind of topic deemed suitable for journalism at the time.

But as the modern phrase has it, consciousness was certainly raised, however little, however gradually. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne would have worn an A for her behavior regardless of what had happened to Miss Baker more than a century earlier, but would her lover, Reverend Dimmesdale, have suffered such an excruciating fate? Would God have given him “this burning torture to bear upon my breast”? Would He have brought him “to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people”? The notion is not preposterous. After all, Franklin was the first to discuss the subject publicly, and surely the conversations became more frequent over the years. By the time Hawthorne took pen to paper in 1850, he might have been reacting to something he had heard that was a distant predecessor of Polly Baker’s tale.

At present, there remains more social opprobrium attached to unwed mothers than to unwed fathers. But the latter are catching up, and the laws have already done so, demanding that those who have children, whether married or not, whether male or not, bear at least the financial responsibility for the young one’s upbringing.

Again, Franklin was the first to insist to a large audience that such a responsibility was nothing more than the justice that by definition accompanies humanity.

 

 

It would be thirty years before Benjamin Franklin finally admitted that Miss Polly Baker, whose story had fascinated so many people over that period, had never drawn a mortal breath. And it’s a good thing she hadn’t; if she had been the actual living, breathing, procreating creature that so many people suspected, the king might have had more subjects by this time than he had grain to feed them.