Ben Franklin Declared His Independence from his Inheritance of Nasty Superstitions and Became an Enlightenment Man

A Fourth of July revisiting of a Founding Father’s family connection to the Salem Witch Trials

Ruslan Lytvyn, Shutterstock, The UnPopulist illustration

In 1692, Salem, Mass. was in the throes of its infamous witch trials. In courtroom scenes which seem so inexplicably absurd to us, human beings were sent to the gallows on the basis of “spectral evidence”—invisible proof of alleged witchcraft that only the accusers, mostly young girls, could see or experience. Many would collapse into screaming fits in front of the judges, alleging that they were being tormented in that very moment by the bewildered defendants. But not all such accusers were impressionable children, as it’s often remembered. One was a woman around the age of 40.

Bathsua Pope, sometimes referred to by her maiden name of Folger, lived with her husband and mother-in-law at a sawmill in Salem. When the mill suffered some kind of mechanical breakdown in 1692, it was attributed to supposed dealings with the devil. Pope was among the accusers, ultimately providing “evidence” that helped send at least three people to the hangman’s noose. One of the accused was Martha Corey, whose husband, Giles, became the hysteria’s most memorable victim when he refused to enter a plea and so was crushed to death with rocks. Aside from being older than most of the accusers, Pope was a fairly unremarkable figure in the whole bloody melodrama. She doesn’t feature prominently in most histories.

Within a few years, the backlash to Salem became a cause célèbre in Massachusetts. It was the last time people were officially executed in colonial America for alleged supernatural crimes. In part, this was thanks to a new medium (no pun intended) coming into form on the fringes of the British empire. America’s first newspaper, with the unwieldy name Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was printed in Boston in 1690 before being promptly shut down by the royal authorities.

But the idea couldn’t be suppressed for long, and by the early 18th century, mass consumption newspapers were all the rage in a colony that almost certainly had the highest literacy rate of anywhere in the world at the time. Treatises and pamphlets were also published, denouncing both the theological and legal errors of the witch trials. Official exonerations and compensation to the victims was passed by the colonial assembly in 1711.

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Rededicating Ourselves to the Principles of the Ongoing American Revolution

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In the meantime, in 1706, Pope’s younger sister, Abiah, gave birth to a son. Pope died in 1726, three years after her restless teenage nephew left Boston to seek work as a typesetter in Philadelphia, betting his future on the burgeoning industry of the printing press.

As far as we can tell, he never mentioned her. The historical record has no trace of Pope’s own thoughts about what she had done. But when he was growing up nearby, the two undoubtedly interacted. Perhaps they gathered for a thanksgiving meal, or crossed paths at weddings in the extended family. The woman who had participated in actions scarcely distinguishable from human sacrifice, and her nephew, the boy whose name would echo through the ages as a harbinger of modernity: Benjamin Franklin.

The Spark of Progress

Those who lived in the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries would become used to seeing massive changes in society and technology over the course of a single lifespan. But Benjamin Franklin, whose life stretched from 1706 to 1790, was perhaps one of the first people who experienced something recognizable as substantial moral and material progress. And he not only witnessed it, but in numerous ways helped bring it about.

The very concept of progress was something novel to Franklin’s era, one of the heady ideas swirling about in the intellectual effervescence of the Enlightenment. For most of history, change was something to be feared. When scraping out a subsistence existence, anything that can upset the apple cart was likelier to kill you than improve your lot in life. The charge of “innovation” had been leveled not as a compliment but as a damning accusation from ancient Rome to the Reformation-era wars of religion.

Franklin’s apprenticeship in Philadelphia placed him at the heart of an information revolution. Cheap pamphlets turned taverns into debating halls and stitched the colonies into a republic of letters long before they became a republic of laws. Superstition thrives in darkness; movable type flooded the room with daylight. Where his aunt’s generation saw devils, Franklin saw the power of reason.

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Liberalism Once Saved The World—It Can Do So Again

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The spread of newspapers did more than record events; it created a feedback loop of criticism and correction. Bad ideas didn’t just linger as if they were sacred scriptures—they were answered, revised, or discarded in the flood of public discourse. That iterative churn laid the groundwork for modern science, modern politics, and the modern habit of expecting tomorrow to be better than today. It is no coincidence the first lightning rod and the first colonial political cartoon share the same author.

By mid-century, Franklin’s printing house was issuing newspapers, essays, and his famously witty almanacs. Each sheet of paper was a small act of rebellion against inherited authority, announcing that ordinary readers could weigh evidence and reach conclusions without a priest or a magistrate whispering cues. Where Salem had demanded faith in invisible afflictions, Franklin demanded proof—and supplied it, most famously with a key, kite, and a thundercloud.

Self-Evident Truths and the Modern Mind

Many years after the massacre at Salem, but when it was still within the outer reaches of living memory, Franklin gathered with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to review the latter’s draft of one of the most monumental documents of all time.

“We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable…” Jefferson had written. On this “original rough draft” of the Declaration, now on display at the Library of Congress, Jefferson’s delicate cursive is aggressively crossed out by heavy lines. Ever the wordsmith, Franklin (to whom the change is usually attributed) insisted this talk of sacrality should be jettisoned. Something more modern, more rational, more secular was instead laid as the cornerstone of the new republic: self-evident. There would be no spectral evidence offered here.

We are used to reflecting, and rightly so, on all the many ways that the Revolutionary generation did not live up to its noble creeds. While witch trials might have been left in the past by 1776, the horrors of chattel slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, and the subjugation of women were all still practiced. Franklin’s own attitudes varied even as one of the more progressive figures on the scene; he was one of the earliest abolitionists, to his credit, but also peddled anti-immigration tropes foreshadowing later waves of nativism. Radical as he was, he’d hardly pass for woke.

But it’s also worth appreciating just how much of a quantum leap Franklin and his contemporaries made from what had come before—and not that long before. We do not speak of the Founders as medieval figures, lost in the stagnant barbarism of ignorance and superstition. We condemn their sins largely in their own terms, often in language they first articulated and ideas they implanted into our historical consciousness. They were early modern figures, but they were undeniably modern, grappling with concepts which continue to shape our very sense of morality to this day.

Franklin’s life offered a parable in miniature of that modern mindset. At 30, he organized America’s first volunteer fire department. At 39, he attended the famous Great Awakening revivals of George Whitefield, not for religious fervor but to conduct experiments about sound and the human voice. At 48, he proposed the first plan for a union of the American colonies. At 74, he brokered peace in Paris. At 81, he participated in the constitutional convention. He assumed problems could be solved and progress could be made because he’d spent a lifetime doing so.

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A Liberalism Without Apology or Fear...

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And in an age of electronic wonders, we owe substantial debt to the man who demonstrated how the seemingly inexplicable forces of electricity were not magic but laws of nature. How lightning, long seen as the paradigmatic example of the unpredictable caprice of divine will, could in fact be tamed and made safe with a simple metal rod diverting its bolts safely into the ground. We could understand it, and shape it to our ends, by the same laws of nature from which flowed individual rights and liberal government—products of reason, of our ability to perceive self-evident truths, and to build on them a better world.

As we approach a quarter millennium since Franklin’s memorable line-edits of the Declaration of Independence, we face our own moral panics and arbitrary oppressions. Communities torn apart by fear and accusations, the heat of protest and suppression, a mockery being made of due process of law, and a gloomy sense of foreboding in which the entire project of Enlightenment liberalism can feel lost. So many of the charges once levied against King George III are now ominously echoed in the rampant misconduct of our own head of state, from having “sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people” to “quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” to “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.”

But still, we are not doomed to dark times any more than Franklin was consigned to live out his life in the world of witch trials and theocracy. Progress is possible. Freedom can advance. Our ideas about how to treat each other justly can improve. It’s worth pondering: In 20, or 50, or 80 years, what will we look back on in the same way Franklin might have thought of Salem? And what will we have done to put those errors on the same ash heap of history?

© The UnPopulist, 2025

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