Biography
James Franklin was the Boston printer who founded The New-England Courant in August 1721, the first newspaper in the American colonies published without the authorities' licence and the first to make a habit of mocking them. In June 1722 the Courant printed a note suggesting that the colonial government was in no hurry to chase a pirate vessel then working the New England coast. The Massachusetts General Court took the piece as a scandalous libel and ordered Franklin jailed; he refused to identify the author and was held roughly four weeks, coming out in early July. His sixteen-year-old apprentice and brother, Benjamin Franklin, brought the paper out in his absence — the same year Benjamin had been slipping the Silence Dogood letters under the print-shop door. Franklin defended himself by citing Chapter 29 of Magna Carta, arguing that no free man could be imprisoned by the magistrates without the lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land. In January 1723 the General Court forbade him to publish the Courant unless each issue was first submitted for official approval; rather than submit, the paper reappeared under Benjamin's name, and the apprenticeship indentures were secretly cancelled to make the arrangement look lawful — the device that let Benjamin run away to Philadelphia that autumn. James Franklin moved to Newport in 1727 and in 1732 founded the Rhode Island Gazette, the colony's first newspaper. Born in Boston on February 4, 1697, he died in Newport on February 4, 1735, on his thirty-eighth birthday.
