The Secret History of the Jersey Devil: How Quakers, Hucksters, and Benjamin Franklin Created a Monster

Abstract

Accounts produced by Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer of monstrous births contributed to the colonial culture out of which the Jersey Devil emerged, as did stories about evil spirits familiar to Lenape Indians who once inhabited the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. The creature made its first consolidated appearance as the Leeds Devil, the cursed offspring of a fictitious Mother Leeds that escaped up the chimney after birth. In their meticulous analysis of this process, the authors Brian Regal and Frank J. Esposito locate the true source of the creature in the calumny heaped on the almanac writer Daniel Leeds, who was castigated as a murdering devil during the Quaker pamphlet wars at the turn of the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin picked up the vitriolic language used by both Leeds and his enemies and used it to satirize the astrological prophecies in the Leeds Almanac, which was the main competitor of his own almanac. After Daniel's son Titan inherited responsibility for the publication, Franklin speculated on the date of Titan's forthcoming death as predicted by astrological calculation in the Leeds Almanac. When Titan died in 1838, Franklin kept the fun going with stories about Titan's ghost.