At this point in his life, Franklin was a well-known diplomat in Paris, having sailed there at the age of seventy. He settled outside Paris in the suburb of Passy, where he surrounded himself with "fellow commissioners, deputies, spies, intellectuals, courtiers, and flirtatious female admirers."" Franklin's landlord was Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont, a wealthy merchant who was sympathetic to the American cause. Franklin's presence in Paris salon culture became legendary-or infamous. Franklin liked to play the role of norm-breaker. He shocked his compatriots and enjoyed positioning himself in contrast to their supposed narrow-mindedness. One such notable example is Franklin's association with the Chevalier D'Eon, a controversial figure in late-eighteenth-century England and France who confounded a fascinated public that debated whether D'Eon were a man or a woman.13 A French diplomat, D'Eon had lived first as a man but later lived as a woman.
Most often Franklin's conduct with salon women captured the imagination of his friends and critics. Franklin's own colleagues comment on his conduct in France, some ambiguously. John Jay writes to Franklin in 1780, "I believe there is no man of your age in Europe so much a favourite with the ladies."14 Less ambiguously, as we have seen, neither John nor Abigail Adams could find positive things to say about Franklin and his interactions with women in Paris. Abigail sharply criticized the women whom he associated with for being, as one scholar explains, too full of "warmth and naturalness." 15
Early Memory of a Controversial Founder
Schoolbooks in the nineteenth century created a hero from Franklin but only by narrowly focusing on his economic life. "Next to Washington," argues scholar Ruth Miller Elson, the greatest individual depicted" in schoolbooks was Franklin. The two "appear in these books more than anyone else." Elson argues that his fame was not for his connection to the European world or his "cosmopolitanism" but rather for serving as the model for the "self-made man." 16 Biographical stories that focus on the self-made man were enormously popular in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Franklin's Autobiography, first published in English in 1793, was a foundational text for this genre, capturing his rise from humble beginnings to international fame and extraordinary wealth.17 If told in the right manner, his life story, with its message of the financial rewards for developing the self, perfectly illustrates the American Dream.
Franklin's Autobiography famously includes a passage in which he describes taking a wheelbarrow through the streets to deliver his paper to his publishing house. Franklin did this work himself, though he could afford to hire someone to handle the manual labor. As he explains to the reader of his account, "In order to secure my Credit and Character as a Tradesman, I took care not only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the Contrary... to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas'd at the Stores, thro' the Streets on a Wheelbarrow."" Although the Autobiography has been used to argue that Franklin created his own image for his readers (and the public), all of his writings collectively produce the Franklin who was once rejected and now is adored. Even his seemingly private letters, which appear to shed light on a personal hidden-from-the-public aspect of his life, should be viewed as public and part of his self-promoted Franklin image. We know of his affairs because he wanted us to know. His sexuality was part of his identity and part of his story of success that he wanted to share. Indeed, all the Founders self-styled their sexual selves for us with their keen sense of history, some to a greater degree than others.
Franklin's death in 1790 did not bring about an apotheosis of reputation, as was the case for other Founders. It is hard for us to imagine today-given contemporary adulation for Franklin-but his memory generated some ambivalence. In his own lifetime, Franklin was adored in Europe, but Americans were less enthused, despite his fame and respect. When he died, for example, the U.S.Senate would not endorse the House's resolution in honor of Franklin." For some, the scandals that swirled around Franklin in his own lifetime became justification for characterizing him as a man of relaxed morals and thus worthy of censure by Victorian Americans.20
In his Autobiography, Franklin first details (albeit tersely) aspects of his life that for many Victorians would be troubling. First published in France in 1791, it was then published in England and America beginning in the early nineteenth century and continues to be widely republished and read to this day.
Describing his life from birth through middle age, the account includes several single-sentence declarations regarding personal relationships. Nearly every aspect of his life that gives his earliest biographers pause comes from his own hand. Franklin portrays himself as a man who feels little embarrassment about what some would find to be immoral. For example, Franklin explains that as a young man, he found himself wanting to leave the troubled apprenticeship he held under his brother. He eventually ran away to Boston, lying to secure a place on the ship. Franklin reveals the false story, at once confessing and engaging in a type of boasting. It is difficult to imagine George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Adams allowing a friend to convince a ship's captain that he had "gotten a `naughty girl' pregnant and had, therefore, to slip away."" In his Autobiography, Franklin does not hide the fact that he and his wife, Deborah, were unable to legally marry, although, as we have seen, at least as early as the 1764 Pennsylvania election, it was an open secret that his son William was born out of wedlock.
Immediately after his death, a 1790 London publication entitled Memoirs of the Late Dr. Franklin includes the following introduction and discussion of "infidelities," especially those that took place when he lived in Paris as an American diplomat: "In private life this philosopher was not exempted from the little imperfections and weaknesses of human nature: irregular in his addresses to the Cyprian goddess, the legal partner of his bed complained of infidelities. It is well known, he had mistresses plenty; and there are several living testimonies of his licentious amours."22 The account circulated at a time when there was serious concern about the unfolding of the French Revolution and a developing anti-French ethos.23 The association of immorality with Parisian culture then would bolster that sentiment and could equally target Franklin's own character. In 1791, one of the nation's first magazines, American Museum, published in Philadelphia, Franklin's hometown, includes a jocular tale about Franklin and his relationships with French women, pokes fun at his age, and raises the specter of sexual intimacy outside wedlock.
Through the nineteenth century, Franklin's reputation was, therefore, not without controversy, as his personal life placed him at odds with nineteenth-century moral teachings.24 At the end of the nineteenth century, when Massachusetts Senator George F.Hoar was given a list of names for the National Hall of Fame, he crossed out Franklin's name, explaining, "Dr. Franklin's conduct of life was that of a man on a low plane. He was without idealism, without lofty principle, and one side of his character gross and immoral.... [His letter] on the question of keeping a mistress, which, making allowance for the manners of the time, and all allowance for the fact that he might have been partly in jest, is an abominable and wicked letter; and all his relation to women, and to the family life were of that character."25 As Franklin scholar Larry Tise argues, "Franklin[,] for his deeds in life and for the despicable words... [that] emanated from his pen, was a morally condemned man."26
Some criticized Franklin specifically for being a womanizer. In 1869 and through the 1870s, the famed suffragist and women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave speeches that included sharp derision toward Franklin, especially as a reaction to any developing adoration of him as an icon of American manhood, because she saw in Franklin's story a hero at "the expense of women's marital freedom." In her speech "Home Life," she mentions that Franklin abandoned his wife in Philadelphia, had illegitimate children, disowned one of his sons, and had questionable morals in general. "The less said of Franklin's private character," she says, "the better."27
Recognizing the animosity directed at Franklin's sexual morality,
many biographers take a tack that Franklin does not: They attempt to sanitize his life. Of Franklin's essays and aphorisms that were deemed unsuitable for Victorian audiences, early biographers often omit the more salacious ones in favor of others that espouse nineteenth-century middle-class virtues.
The essay "Choice of a Mistress," which escaped censorship in the colonial publishing world, took friendly fire in nineteenth-century America. William Temple Franklin inherited his famous grandfather's papers, and in 1817-1818 he published Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin. The essay "Choice of a Mistress," as he explains, "cannot be published under the rules of modern taste, and, in fact, Franklin himself speaks of it as having `too much grossierete' to be borne by polite letters. I shall, however, give as much of the letter on the choice of a mistress as is proper to publish": He cuts out the fifth, sixth, and eighth reasons entirely.28 Even at the end of the century, the intact piece was still being left out of accounts. According to Franklin scholar Tise, Secretary of State Thomas F.Bayard, who eventually archived the essay, would not allow it to be included in any publications between 1885-1889 "because of what he considered its indecency.""
Some of these accounts, then, render Franklin a model American man, according to the period's prevailing views. Parson Weems, for example, believes that Franklin's writings are sufficiently virtuous to serve the purposes of his early-nineteenth-century morality. In his early biography of Franklin, Weems includes some of Franklin's writing about sex and marriage, such as "On Early Marriages." "Young bachelors," writes Weems, "would do well to read it once a month .1130
But by the end of the century, as sex became increasingly seen as a marker of liberal character in contrast to Victorian hypocrisies, biographers would more often highlight the aspects of his Autobiography that previous writers would avoid. In 1897, Benjamin Morse published Benjamin Franklin, which takes its cues from his Autobiography and outlines the marriage to Deborah Read, stating that Franklin "hardly knew what he was wedding, a maid, a widow, or another man's wife.""
Neither Franklin nor his son ever revealed the identity of the woman who conceived William, and it has remained a centuries-long mystery. One late-nineteenth-century author quips, "An early contribution of his own to the domestic menage was his illegitimate son, William, born soon after his wedding, of a mother of whom no record or tradition remains. It was an unconventional wedding gift to bring home to a bride."32 In 1887, one biographer writes that Franklin became "the father of an illegitimate son. The name of the mother most happily is not known; but as the law of bastardy was then rigidly enforced against the woman and not against the man, she was, in all likelihood, one of that throng who received their lashes in the marketplace and filled the records of council with prayers for the remission of fines .1133
In the late nineteenth century, biographers also reference the autobiography entry where Franklin mentions making sexual advances toward the girlfriend of his friend Ralph. "Worst of all," writes John Stevens Cabot Abbott, "we regret to say that he commenced treating her with such familiarity, that she, still faithful to Ralph, repulsed him indignantly." Abbott in a footnote also includes the exact passage and wording from Franklin and notes how Franklin felt about this: "Franklin does not conceal these foibles, as he regarded them, these sins as Christianity pronounces them. He declares this simply to have been another of the great errors of his youth."34 In a chapter entitled "Mental and Moral Conflicts," Abbott also draws on Franklin's own words to describe his "intrigues with low women." Biographers would have had an easier time glossing over this detail if Franklin had not written of it: "With his remarkable honesty of mind, in strains which we are constrained, though with regret to record, he writes." Abbott also references passages from Parton's biography, quoting him as referring to "his illegitimate son William Franklin, who became Governor of New Jersey. If laws were as easily executed as enacted, Benjamin Franklin would have received, upon this occasion, twenty-one lashings at the public whipping-post of Philadelphia."35
Abbott also notes the complications surrounding the marital status of Franklin's wife, Read: "And at length he proposed that, regardless of all the risks, they should be married. It seems that he had announced to her very distinctly that he had a living child, and very honorably he had decided that that child of dishonor was to be taken home and trained as his own." And he continues, unromantically, "These were sad nuptials. The worldweary wife knew not but that she had another husband still living, and a stigma, indelible, rested upon Franklin." But he also refers to a marriage that never took place: "The marriage took place on the first of September, 1730. ... The child was taken home and reared with all possible tenderness and care."36 Not all biographers were as explicit in their references to Franklin's own admissions. Frank Strong in 1898 includes no mention of the famous "intrigues with low women" passage, instead only euphemistically noting that he had led a somewhat "dissipated" life while in London.37 Strong also mentions the date of his marriage and says little to nothing about women in France.
Some nineteenth-century accounts also repeat from Franklin's account the lie that secured his passage on a boat out of Boston. Thus, one account reads, "Collins made an agreement for him with the captain of a sloop, bound for New York, to take him on board, saying that he was a young man of his acquaintance who had got into trouble with a girl of bad reputation, and who her parents insisted should marry her; in consequence of which, he could neither make his appearance in public, nor come down to his vessel except privately."38
Franklin as a Sexual Modern
In part because he championed what would become viewed as the American Dream, Franklin is also the Founding Father who enjoys the longest association with American modernity. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1887 calls him the "first great American."39 One year later, novelist William Dean Howells refers to him as "the most modern, the most American, of his contemporaries."40 In the early twentieth century, Phillips Russell published his biography of Franklin, subtitled The First Civilized American.41
By the turn of the twentieth century, the emphasis on Franklin as a modern American relied on not only his economic self but also the depiction of his intimate life. Russell captures the idea of Franklin as a middle-class American ahead of his time in a Puritanical past. According to Russell, he was the first "civilized" American because "at an American period eminent for narrowness, superstition, and bleak beliefs he was mirthful, generous, open-minded, learned, tolerant, and humor-loving." His "most marked characteristic" was "gusto for living."42 Franklin has also held great appeal for his down-to-earth sensibility and middle-class ease of manner. One modern biographer emphasizes that Franklin's life could "show us how many-sided our human nature is." Explains one such account, "if we imagine a circumference which shall express humanity, we can place within it no one man who will reach out to approach it and to touch it at so many points as will Franklin."43
Many turn-of-the-century writers like to position themselves as modern in sharp contrast to their Victorian ancestors. As one explains, "his humble origin, his slow rise, his indelicate jokes, and his illegitimate children,-there were not a few people who cherished a most relentless antipathy towards him which neither his philanthropy nor his philosophic and scientific mind could soften." Franklin's negative reputation was beginning to shift at the time of that writing, and the author takes the opportunity to trace the negative sentiments. Thus, he continues, "This bitter feeling against the `old rogue,' as they called him, still survives among some of the descendants of the people of his time, and fifty or sixty years ago there were virtuous old ladies living in Philadelphia who would flame into indignation at the mention of his name."44
Although biographers differ in their approaches to his nonmarital sexuality, virtually all of them agree on discussion of his relationship with his wife, Read, which is always noted, even through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Biographers generally approach Franklin's marriage to Read as illustrative of his broader
character trait of pragmatism. For some authors, this meant providing an outlet for his sexual desires-and coupling that with his need for a helpmeet. In a chapter on Franklin's marriage in Carl Van Doren's early-twentieth-century definitive biography, he describes Franklin as "strongly built, rounded like a swimmer or a wrestler... [and] restless with vitality." "As in London," he continues, "the chief impulse he could or did not regulate was sexual.... He went to women hungrily, secretly, and briefly." Marriage to Read, he concludes, brought sensible relief to Franklin: "The most unreasonable of Franklin's impulses had now been quieted by this most reasonable of marriages. And he was free to turn his whole mind and will to work."45
But beyond the topic of his wife, approaches to Franklin's life differ. In the early twentieth century, many accounts gloss over details that are present in some nineteenth-century accounts. Journalist and writer Paul Elmer More in 1900, for example, makes no mention of the story of the lie Franklin told to be allowed on board a boat that was sailing to Boston. Similarly, author E.Lawrence Dudley in 1915 includes no mention of the story.4G One year later, Frank Woodworth Pine's account also omits the story, and Pine does not include it in his edition of Franklin's autobiography-in effect, erasing it from Franklin lore.47
More also presents Franklin's famous list of thirteen virtues to guide one's life, which include frugality, industry, moderation, and the like. He deletes Franklin's description of virtue twelve, Chastity: "Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation"; More abbreviates the entry to "Chastity," followed by ellipses.4S
Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) Page 14
