When he was 15 years old, working as an apprentice in his brother's newspaper, Benjamin Franklin and his brother took issue with the ethics of the Boston City Council on a matter involving conflicts of interest. Fearing the wrath of the council, his brother would not publish these views in his paper.

Soon, a series of anonymous letters critical of the City Council's actions began appearing daily under the door of the paper's office when Ben and his brother opened for business each morning. The paper published these “letters to the editor.”

After receiving a few of these letters under the door, Ben's brother began to suspect who the author was; so he laid a trap and caught Ben at dawn as he was slipping another letter under the door jam.

However, the main charges already had been published; feeling libeled, the council had Ben's brother arrested. They demanded that he name the source of the critical letters. He refused to implicate his younger brother as the author of the letters, and he remained in jail for several months as Ben continued to publish the paper.

Broken in health and spirit after his imprisonment in an 18th century jail, Ben's brother finally was released, but he harbored resentment toward Ben as the cause of his misfortune. Soon afterwards, young Ben ran off to begin a new career in publishing in Philadelphia.

The rest of Ben's story is history, and there was one final chapter written at the end of his life.

The ordeal from powerful men taking legal action against a publisher to suppress criticism from “letters to the editor” became the impetus for Franklin's insisting that Freedom of the Press be the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America listed in the Bill of Rights, first among the many freedoms we enjoy as citizens of the United States of America.

Frank Cawood
Peachtree City

[Editor's note: Frank Cawood is a stockholder in The Citizen's parent company.]

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