The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

  Papers of Adams Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., The Papers ofJohn Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977- )

  BF Benjamin Franklin

  BF, Autobiography Leonard Labaree et al., eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964)

  Papers of Franklin Leonard Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959- )

  Lemay and Zall, eds.,

  Franklin’s Autobiography

  J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds., Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism (New York: Norton, 1986)

  Franklin: Writings J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Benjamin Franklin: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987)

  PMHB Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

  WMQ William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Lodge, in Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, iypo-ififio (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994), 136; Garry Wills, James Madison (New York: Times Books, 2002), 164.

  2. John Adams to William Tudor, 5 June 1817, in American Historical Review 47 (1941-42): 806-7.

  3. Brian M. Barbour, ed., Benjamin Franklin: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), introduction.

  4. Howells, quoted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 276.

  5. Louis B. Wright, “Franklin’s Legacy to the Gilded Age,” Virginia Quarterly Review 22 (1946): 268.

  6. Henry D. Gilpin, The Character of Franklin: An Address Delivered Before the Franklin Institute of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1857), J5, 21. (I owe this reference to Barry Schwartz.)

  7. Turner, quoted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 274-75.

  8. Richard D. Miles, “The American Image of Benjamin Franklin,” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 124-25; Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1889, 713; Carla Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Memory,” New England Quarterly 72 (1999): 424.

  9. BF, Poor Richard, 1735, in Papers of Franklin, 2:9.

  10. Irene Brouillard of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, quoted in Providence Journal, 15 Aug. 2002.

  11. Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Memory,” 426; P. M. Zall, Franklin’s Autobiography: A Model Life (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 16. At the end of the nineteenth century, Paul Leicester Ford, the great bibliographer of Franklin’s works, confronted with massive numbers of editions of The Way to Wealth, gave up after listing 155 titles, saying that it was “simply impossible to find and note all the editions.” Paul Leicester Ford, Franklin Bibliography: A List of Books Written by, or Relating to Benjamin Franklin (Brooklyn, 1889), 55. For a more recent annotated bibliography of works about Franklin between 1721 and 1906, see Melvin H. Buxbaum, Benjamin Franklin, 1721-ipofr A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).

  12. Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin” (1870), in Louis J. Budd, ed., Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays (New York: Library of America, 1992), 425-26.

  13. Howells, quoted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 275-76.

  14. Keats, quoted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 257-58.

  15. Joseph Dennie, quoted in Lewis Leary, “Joseph Dennie on Benjamin Franklin: A Note on Early American Literary Criticism,” PMHB 72 (1948): 244.

  16. North American Review 21 (Sept. 1818): 289-90.

  17. Poe, “The Businessman,” in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1903), 4:260, 265-66, 268. The story is conveniently available in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 258-66. See also J. A. Leo Lemay, “Poe’s ‘The Businessman’: Its Contexts and Satire of Franklin’s Autobiography,” Poe Studies 15 (1982): 29-37.

  18. Melville, Israel Potter, in Harrison Hayford, ed., Herman Melville (New York: Library of America, 1984), 479, 486.

  19. Hawthorne, “Biographical Stories,” in The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, introduction by George Parsons Lathrop (Boston, 1888), 12:202.

  20. Wright, “Franklin’s Legacy to the Gilded Age,” Virginia Quarterly Review 22(194 6): 268-79.

  21. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), 52-54.

  22. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; reprint, New York: T Seltzer, 1953), 19-31.

  23. Floyd C. Watkins, “Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatz and Young Benjamin Franklin,” New England Quarterly 27 (1954): 249-52.

  24. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1925), 174-75, 182. See also J. A. Leo Lemay, “Franklin’s Autobiography and the American Dream,” in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 349-60.

  25. BF to William Strahan, 2 June 1750, and BF to Abiah Franklin, 12 April 1750, in Papers ofFranklin, 3:479, 475.

  26. Carl Becker, “Benjamin Franklin,” Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (New York: Scribner, 1931), 6:596.

  27. The Federalist, No. 72. See also Douglass Adair, “Fame and the Founding Fathers,” in Trevor Colbourn, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair (New York: Norton, i974), 3-26.

  28. On Franklin’s strategy of humility, see Paul W. Conner, Poor Richard’s Politicks: Benjamin Franklin and His New American Order (New York: Oxford University Press, i965), i49-69.

  29. J. Philip Gleason, “A Scurrilous Colonial Election and Franklin’s Reputation,” WMQ i8 (i96i): 76.

  30. Jennifer T Kennedy, “Death Effects: Revisiting the Conceit of Franklin’s Memoir,” Early American Literature 36 (200i): 204. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall have a conveniently selected annotated bibliography of twentieth-century criticism of the Autobiography in their Franklin’s Autobiography, 365-74. Among the many fine studies of the Autobiography, see David Levin, “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: The Puritan Experiment in Life and Art,” Yale Review 53 (1964): 258-75; John William Ward, “Benjamin Franklin: The Making of an American Character,” in his Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Robert F Sayre, The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); R.Jackson Wilson, Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 21-65; William H. Shurr, “ ‘Now, Gods, Stand Up for Bastards’: Reinterpreting Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography’’ American Literature 64 (1992): 437-51; and Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). For additional studies of the Autobiography see Seavey’s list, ibid., 244-45.

  31. BF, Autobiography, 75—76.

  32. J. A. Leo Lemay, “The Theme of Vanity in Franklin’s Autobiography,” in Lemay, ed., Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 372-87.

  33. Stanley Brodwin, “Strategies of Humor: The Case of Benjamin Franklin,” Prospects 4 (1979): 121-67.

  34. Verner W. Crane, ed., Letters to the Press, 175—1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), xxx.

  35. J. A. Leo Lemay, The Canon of Benjamin Franklin: New Attributions and Reconsiderations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 135; Bruce Ingham Granger, Benjamin Franklin: An American Man of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964).

  36. BF, On Censure and Backbiting, in Franklin: Writings, 192-95.

  37. BF, Autobiography, 87-88; J. A. Leo Lemay, “Franklin’s Autobiography and the American Dream,” in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 349-60.

  38. BF, On Simplicity, 1732, in Franklin: Writings, 183; BF, Poor Richard, 1743, in Papers of Franklin, 2:370.

  39. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 17-18.

  40. BF, Poor Richard, 1735, in Papers o
f Franklin, 2:8.

  CHAPTER I: BECOMING A GENTLEMAN

  1. BF, Autobiography, 43.

  2. BF, “Will and Codicil,” 23 June 1789. (Franklin documents that are not yet published in the letterpress edition of his papers will be cited with their date.)

  3. BF, Autobiography, 53.

  4. BF, Autobiography, 58.

  5. Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 27; Stephen Botein, “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 136.

  6. BF, Autobiography, 62.

  7. Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: Norton, 1974), 18-29. New England’s literacy rate was among the highest in the Western world.

  8. BF, Autobiography, 58.

  9. BF, Autobiography, 59.

  10. BF, Autobiography, 60. On Franklin’s writing see Bruce Ingham Granger, Benjamin Franklin: An American Man of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964). John Jay recounted a story Franklin had told him about the New Jersey Assembly in 1740. The assembly was engaged in a dispute with the governor and wanted to write a reply to the governor’s message. But the committee assigned the task, “tho they were Men of good understanding and respectable, yet there was not one among them capable of writing a proper answer to the Message.” They asked Franklin, whom one of the committee knew, and when he satisfied them with his writing, they made him their printer. J. A. Leo Lemay, The Canon of Benjamin Franklin, 1722—1776: New Attributions and Reconsiderations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 95.

  11. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 2jo Years, i6fio to ifi^o (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 9.

  12. Botein, “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press,” 193-96. Botein’s articles are by far the most sophisticated work on colonial printers. It is a tragedy that he died prematurely before he could complete his study.

  13. BF, Autobiography, 67.

  14. [BF], “Silence Dogood, No. 4,” in Papers of Franklin, 1:14. Franklin learned early the advantages of using pseudonyms. “When the Writer conceals himself, he has the Advantage of hearing the Censure both of Friends and Enemies, express’d with more Impartiality.” On Literary Style, 2 Aug. 1733, in Papers of Franklin, 1:328.

  15. BF, Autobiography, 68.

  16. BF, Autobiography, 68—69.

  17. BF, Autobiography, 68—71, 43.

  18. BF, Autobiography, 75—76.

  19. Susan E. Klepp, “Demography in Early Philadelphia, 1690—1860,” in Susan E. Klepp, ed., The Demographic History of the Philadelphia Region, 1600-1S60, American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 133 (June 1989), 103—4.

  20. On Keimer, see Stephen Bloore, “Samuel Keimer: A Footnote to the Life of Franklin,” PMHB 54 (1930): 255—87.

  21. BF, Autobiography, 65.

  22. Linda Rees Heaton, “‘This Excellent Man’: Littleton Waller Tazewell’s Sketch of Benjamin Waller,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89 (1981): 147—50.

  23. Hamilton to Edward Stevens, 11 Nov. 1769, in Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 1:4.

  24. BF, Autobiography, 80.

  25. William Smith charged in 1764 that without the patronage of Allen and his friends Franklin probably would have remained in his original obscurity.

  Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 74-75.

  26. BF, Autobiography, 113.

  27. BF, Autobiography, 121.

  28. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1985), 24-25; M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 21-25.

  29. Liza Picard, Dr. Johnson’s London: Life in London, 174.0-1770 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000); George Rude, Hanoverian London, 1714-1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 47.

  30. BF, Autobiography, 87, 95.

  31. BF, Autobiography, 96.

  32. BF, Autobiography, 128.

  33. BF, Autobiography, 99.

  34. BF, Autobiography, 101.

  35. BF, Autobiography, 114—15, 145-46.

  36. BF to Benjamin Vaughn, 9 Nov. 1779, in Papers of Franklin, 31:59; BF, Poor Richard, 1739, and BF, Dialogue Between Two Presbyterians, 1735, ibid., 2:224, 33. On Franklin’s religious views, see Elizabeth E. Dunn, “From a Bold Youth to a Reflective Sage: A Reevaluation of Benjamin Franklin’s Religion,” PMHB 111 (1987): 501—24; Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenment of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 54—89; and Kerry S. Walters, Benjamin Franklin and His Gods (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

  37. BF, Autobiography, 96.

  38. Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press,” 130—211; Stephen Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” in Bernard Bailyn and John Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1980), 14.

  39. BF, Autobiography, 110.

  40. BF, Autobiography, 112—13.

  41. BF, Autobiography, 119.

  42. BF, Autobiography, 128.

  43. Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 23.

  44. BF, Autobiography, 129.

  45. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938), 125. For Franklin’s view that if a tradesman’s wife “does not bring a fortune” to the marriage, at least she “will help to make one,” see BF to Jane Mecom, 21 May 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:216.

  46. [BF], “Anthony Afterwit,” “Celia Single,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 and 24 July 1732, in Franklin: Writings, 185-87, 188-90.

  47. [BF], “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness,” 8 Oct. 1730, and “Old Mistresses Apologue,” 25June 1745, in Franklin: Writings, 154, 302.

  48. George Roberts to Robert Crafton, 8 Oct. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 11:370—7m.

  49. “Extracts from the Diary of Daniel Fisher, 1755,” PMHB17 (1893): 276; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 60; Sheila Skemp, “Family Partnerships: The Working Wife, Honoring Deborah Franklin,” in Larry Tise, ed., Benjamin Franklin and Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 23.

  50. William Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714—1760 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 37; Steele, quoted in John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730-1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 37; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727—1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 65—66.

  51. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:198; Douglass Adair, ed., “The Autobiography of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt, 1732—1763,” WMQ9 (1952): 361. In the eighteenth century, writes historian Stuart Blumin, “the important hierarchical distinction was the one that set off the several elites from everyone else.” In comparison with the great difference between the gentry and ordinary people, says Blumin, “differences between artisans and laborers were of no real consequence. The effect, needless to say, was to identify middling people much more closely with the bottom of society than with the top.” Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City 1760—1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 33. John Adams grounded the political theory of his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, written in 1787—1788, on this traditional distinction: “The people, in all nations,” he wrote, “are naturally divided into two sorts, the gentlemen and the simplemen, a word which is here chosen to signify the common people.” Defence, in Charles F Adams, ed., Wor
ks of John Adams (Boston, 1854), 6:185. For a fuller discussion of this distinction between the gentry and commoners, from which this account is drawn, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 24—42.

  52. Adair, ed., “Autobiography of Jarratt,” 361.

  53. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:198.

  54. James Reid, “The Religion of the Bible and Religion of K[ing] W[illiam] County Compared,” in Richard Beale Davis, ed., The Colonial Virginia Satirist: Mid—Eighteenth Century Commentaries on Politics, Religion, and Society, American Philosophical Society, Transactions, New Ser., 57, Pt. 1 (1967), 56.

  55. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:198.

  56. Samuel Mather, The Fall of the Mighty Lamented (Boston, 1738), 10; Courtland Canby, “Robert Munford’s The Patriots” WMQ6 (1949): 499—500.

  57. Jonathan Boucher, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (London, 1797), 233; T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 160.

  58. Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 163, 8; Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Knopf, 1980), 240; Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 69-70; Jack P. Greene, “Society, Ideology, and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Richard M. Jellison, ed., Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York (New York: Norton, 1976), 18-19; Hunter Dickinson Farish, ed., Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1945), 29; Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 164; John K. Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760-1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 18.