Benjamin Franklin and his runaway slave named King

I was told this story about Ben Franklin, you know the American guy with the string and kite. This was years ago when I travelled over East to the town of Woodbridge and some Black fella was going on about an old relative of his who lived in Woodbridge. I liked the tale and wrote it down as I could remember. I call it, Ben Franklin and his runaway slave named King.

When Benjamin Franklin was a kid he got signed on as an indentured servant to his really brutal older brother who ran a print shop in Boston in the British Colony of Massachusetts. His brother didn’t like Ben, thought him too uppity for his own good. Ben didn’t like his brother either and ran away before his contract was up. He made his way to Philadelphia and got an apprentice job at a print shop. Ben was so good at the work, given his previous work with this brother that soon he was able to set up his own printing service before even completing his apprenticeship.

To me this is an important note of young Ben and pertains to the main point of my story.

Like his brother thought Ben was uppity but unlike what his brother thought it was for his own good. He started printing a newspaper for the booming township of Philadelphia and was had a wild, successful time in Philly as it was starting to be called. He was a man about town before he was legally a man, that Ben. He had a few lady friends and dined most nights of the week not at his own home. He started the first newspaper chain along the East coast of British America. connecting his chain took Ben to all the bustling seaports and as a result a lady produced a child for him, named William.

Ben really loved his son but didn’t know how to raise a boy and run a business so he took on one of his ladies as a common-law wife, Deborah, to raise William, who he officially gave his last name to be William Franklin. To spend a little more time with baby William Ben purchased his first enslaved man named, George to train and assist in the expanding newspaper printing side of the business. Deborah and Ben had another son named Francis who died at four years old from smallpox. They had a daughter named Sally who proved to be a lot like her father with enthusiastic ways.

As his family enlarged the Franklins moved from smaller to larger homes and Ben had to purchase more slaves that he called servants Peter and his wife Jemima to take care of the household. He also purchased Othello, Peter and Jemima’s baby boy so that they could keep him.

Benjamin Franklin, with his kite trick and knack at telling great tales becomes famous and respected and he grooms William to be also be a successful gentleman.

William becomes a naval officer, a war hero and a politician. With his successful career taking off he makes his father so proud that Ben buys King, a light skin boy of eleven for William as a present. The boy likes to play and Ben almost immediately dislikes him for acting like a child.

But Peter, the older enslaved man in the household does like King and encourages King to just be a kid and not to worry about Benjamin Franklin.

With the possibility of war with England starting to emerge, Ben goes to England on an informal diplomatic mission to assess the situation and brings William, with Peter and King.

Now, the story moves into action. Young King boards the ship and goes to sea with wide eyes. He is befriended aboard by the crew and learns knots and splices from men with many accents and languages. He learns songs and hears tales and drinks his first rum with sailors of all colours.

You could say that young King rolls with the roll of the ship and fills with the wind in the sails.

In London Benjamin Franklin and William lease a house and begin touring to enjoy fame and welcome everywhere across England and into Scotland and across the Irish Sea to Ireland. King and Peter remain in London where the boy sees a friendliness unknown in Philadelphia. He plays with kids, eats at their homes learns London. Peter, seeing the boy so happy tells him to run away. King at first just laughs laughs at the suggestion but Peter continues to encourage him to live free and not as a slave and to go East where the Franklins would not be able to find him. King, at thirteen, starts to understand what freedom might mean comparing it to his life in England compared to his life back in America and agrees to run away.

With Peter’s help, King packs what he might need with happy anticipation giggles They pack a violin, some of William’s clothes. a good hat with a silver button and a loop, an old blue frock with a waistcoat, some dirty breeches and stockings. They say goodbye with tears and hugs, knowing that they will never see the other again.

King walks and walks over hills and using little carriage roads to find himself wet and tired when a carriage stops near the sea in Suffolk. A lady gets out and with the aid of her driver carries the young boy with his cocked hat with its loop and silver button into the carriage and they take him home.

During this time Benjamin Franklin is honoured in Scotland and given an Honorary Doctorate at Cambridge with his travelling almost complete and his son happily by his side. Doctor Ben meets with scientists and with Mason and he is found very attractive by many ladies along the way as the toast of many parties. Gout forces them back to London where he finds that King has run away. They put a reward out for the boy’s return though the law states that any enslaved person who sets foot on English soil is automatically free.

King is happy at the lady’s home where Miss Anne teaches him be a christian and to read, write, play his violin and to learn the French horn at their Playford Estate. She shows him Suffolk in the carriage and by horseback. King is like her child as real babies come to her and her husband, Thomas Clarkson. The first is Thomas, Junior who King cares for like a brother, then John comes along and again he has two brothers as time moves along happily and slowly. King teaches young Thomas to climb trees and to fish and tells him those sailors’ tales he learned aboard the ship.

At sixteen, King takes the name John and through the sea tales gains a yearning for the sea.

He is boat repair work and is adept at caulking and through that get a job with the local pilots on the River Deben. At eighteen John King enlists in the Royal Navy and waves goodbye to young Thomas and the baby John, and cries at the last sight of Miss Anne, the boys and Reverend Clarkson.

John King plays the violin as they sail against the French blockading Spanish ports and as a sailor battles ashore and frolics in those captured Spanish ports. He rises in rank but is wounded in his back and leg fighting hand to hand against the French. He is sent back to London and rests in a hospital at Greenwich. He contacts his old friends that he played with in London. But, when he

returns to Playford with gifts, his tears run on Miss Anne’s grave. John King leaves a letter addressed to Miss Anne with Thomas and John and the new baby, Anne.

John King is a first mate on HMS Endeavour, blockading the Americans at the Chesapeake Bay, then crews a captured Baltimore Clipper prize to Southampton and gets a percentage of her selling. There,he meets Anne the blacksmith’s daughter and they fall in love. John King and Anne move to Liverpool with pilot work for him and they are happy. But, luck is not good for King as he suffers Anne tortured dying of smallpox in his arms and tears out his heart.

Anne’s passing was the end of the world and his head cannot rise to see the sky in Liverpool with his eyes only on memory of her and drunken gutters. With no care King drinks his rags to dirt on his course without any port as a destination. King is pulled from the black waters by a stranger named Henry, a sailor, who takes him aboard an outbound ship. John King breathes again aboard the little trading brig, Whistler, and what he breathes is sea air.

John King again rolls with the long swell and smiles as broadly as his horizon.The still young King tilts his head upward again, as he and Henry frolic their wages away in Santo Domingo.

The two friends join the Royal Navy in Jamaica and are put aboard a small cutter as King becomes first mate and Henry is boatswain on the little Bermuda Sloop, Punch. John King plays his violin and befriends the Captain, Black Jack (John) Perkins, a mulatto like himself and the first Black officer in the Royal Navy.

The three sailors spree and frolic in Les Cayes, Saint Domingue and are arrested by French as spies as Haiti’s enslaved revolt is beginning. King and Henry escape to Punch and to a patrolling 26-gun frigate who press for Captain Jack Punch. King returns to Les Cayes threatening the authorities with a formal letter stating that the frigate will destroy the town of Les Cayes if Captain Jack Punch Perkins is not returned. John King comes back aboard the Punch with Captain John (Black Jack) Perkins and the whole crew shows their asses to the French. John King in the Punch goes on to capture hundreds of American prize vessels but his friend Henry is killed in a battle.

King retires from the Royal Navy at the end of the Haitian Revolution with a heavy chest of prize money, books, momentos and his violin. Out of curiosity he returns to Philadelphia and finds out that Dr Benjamin Franklin had gone into a deep depression because of his son, William leaving his side for the side of the English King. Franklin is now an abolitionist and has freed his slaves.George still works for him but is paid. He tells King that Peter, Jemima and Othello ran off to Nova Scotia and then on to Africa.

John King returns to Liverpool with a heart full of his beautiful Anne but he keeps the rum bottle full and never drinks in the town of his misery. Eventually he returns to Playford and listens to Thomas and not so little Anne about their father’s strong participation in the abolition of slavery.

John King applauds that their brother, now Lieutenant John Clarkson of the Royal Navy taking former enslaved families to Africa from Nova Scotia.

John King reads the letter he gave to Thomas intended for Miss Anne and reads this part over: Though time has separated us your teachings have not and the search and findings of freedoms with my eyes not always on our Lord God has left me a man content and not bothered by the machinations of any class as we are all children of the same God.

Thank you for those words, Dear Miss Anne. Bless your wondrous spirit that every day now fills my heart.

John King sees a long ago tear blotching the ink between any and class with a small smile.

Worn away is the name on a stone marker near the entrance to the River Deben. You can barely even see the stone itself so covered around by yellow flowers shimmering in any breeze and the rolling of grasses at an horizon that never ends.

Note:

Thomas Clarkson founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and brought Wilburforce into the Society. Thomas is buried at St Mary’s Church, Playford, Suffolk

John Clarkson, after the Revolutionary War, was assigned to work with the freed enslaved who fought for the British and were sent to Nova Scotia, British Canada. Clarkson took 1200 of them to Sierra Leone, Africa and became their first Governor. Later, he started the first bank in Woodbridge and is buried at St Mary’s Church, Woodbridge, Suffolk

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