Johnny Tremain

Summary

Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse. Johnny lords it over the younger apprentices Dove and Dusty and expects to marry Lapham's granddaughter Cilla and inherit the business. His only treasure is a silver cup bearing the crest of the wealthy Lyte family, left by his dead mother. When John Hancock orders a silver sugar basin, Johnny works on the Sabbath to finish it, and Dove spitefully hands him a cracked crucible. Molten silver burns his right hand; the old midwife Gran' Hopper treats it, but it heals with the thumb grown to the palm, and his trade is finished. Bitter and idle, Johnny scorns unskilled work. He befriends Rab Silsbee, a calm, strong young man who works in his uncle Lorne's print shop, publisher of the Whig newspaper the Boston Observer. When Johnny shows the cup to the merchant Jonathan Lyte and claims kinship, Lyte accuses him of stealing it and has him jailed; Rab finds him a lawyer, Josiah Quincy, Cilla testifies, and Johnny is acquitted. He becomes the Observer's delivery rider on the spirited horse Goblin and is drawn into the circle of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Dr. Joseph Warren and James Otis. He carries messages for the Sons of Liberty and helps dump the tea into the harbor on 16 December 1773. After the Port Act closes Boston and General Gage's troops occupy the town, Johnny gathers intelligence among British officers, uses Dove, now a stable boy for Colonel Smith, as an unwitting source, and helps a homesick British private called Pumpkin desert in exchange for his musket; Pumpkin is caught and shot. At a last meeting of the Observers, James Otis speaks of fighting so that every man may stand up. On 18 April 1775 Johnny learns of the British march, and Revere and William Dawes ride out. Lavinia Lyte tells him that his mother really was a Lyte, so he has a claim on the family's property, before she sails for England with Cilla's sister Isannah. Crossing to Lexington, Johnny finds Rab mortally wounded; Rab gives him his musket and dies. Dr. Warren examines Johnny's hand and offers to cut the scar so that he can fire a gun, and the book ends with Johnny ready to serve. Houghton Mifflin published the novel in 1943 with illustrations by Lynd Ward.

Top Lessons

• Pride before a fall

  Johnny begins as the cleverest boy in the shop and the cruelest to the others. Mr. Lapham's warning from Leviticus goes unheeded, and his Sabbath work for Hancock ends in the burn that ruins his hand. Forbes makes the injury the start of his education rather than the end of his life.

• Finding a calling after loss

  Johnny cannot be a silversmith, but he becomes a fine rider, reader, messenger and observer. Forbes shows that a person's worth does not depend on one skill, and that the gifts left after a loss can serve a larger cause.

• Why men fight

  At the last Observers' meeting Otis argues that the cause is not taxes alone but the dignity of every person to stand up. The book sets this hope beside its costs: Pumpkin's execution, Rab's death and the divided Lapham and Lyte households.

• Friendship with an enemy's servant

  Johnny has every reason to hate Dove, yet when they meet again he chooses patience over revenge and keeps him close as a source of news from the British stables. The book shows a boy learning to see even people he dislikes as more than their faults.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Johnny's burn is at the heart of the book. A deep burn of the palm treated only with a midwife's poultices heals with the thumb drawn against the palm, a description consistent with a scar contracture; the novel's ending, in which Dr. Joseph Warren proposes to cut the scar so that the thumb can move, imagines an eighteenth-century surgical release without anesthesia. Forbes treats the disability as a source of shame, anger and self-pity that Johnny must overcome, and his recovery of purpose precedes any repair of the hand. Warren was a real Boston physician, active in the 1764 smallpox inoculation campaign and a leader of the Whig cause, who was killed at Bunker Hill in June 1775, after the novel ends. The book also shows Rab's fatal wound at Lexington, the execution of Pumpkin, and the historical James Otis, whose mental decline after a 1769 head injury appears in the novel through the other characters' fear that he is mad; any modern diagnosis would be speculative.

• Chapter 2

  The cracked crucible, the burn, and Gran' Hopper's treatment, after which the thumb heals fused to the palm.

• Chapter 3

  Johnny's shame at his hand, his rejection by employers and his hidden despair.

• Chapter 8

  James Otis appears at the Observers' meeting, feared as unbalanced yet lucid in his speech.

• Chapter 12

  Rab dies of his Lexington wound; Dr. Warren examines Johnny's hand and offers to cut the scar.