ABSTRACT
When Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, in 1831, the horse and buggy still ruled, but rail lines were already being built out from Boston and would soon change the world Americans lived in. Daniel Webster was the political hero of New England. William Lloyd Garrison had just published the first issue of the Liberator. Soon afterward, the battle over slavery that would mark the next three and a half decades of American history would begin (and shape Franklin Sanborn’s life). New England, as much of America, was still mostly an agricultural society dotted with towns and villages and only a few major cities. Sanborn’s early life was one of privilege, learning, and precociousness. Perhaps befitting his Yankee heritage of homogeneity and small property holding, he would hold that the New Hampshire of his youth represented a “golden age of democracy,” which he would later write a book about. 1 Sanborn came from a long-settled family; six previous generations resided in the small town of Hampton Falls. In his obituary in the Springfield Republican, his ancestry was traced back to a Reverend Bachiler, who took over the land around Hampton from Native Americans in 1638 and founded the town. His ancestry on his maternal side was said to have included Daniel Webster and John Whittier. 2
