My father and stepmother, Irwin and Julanne Isaacson, also read and edited my manuscript. They are, along with my late mother, Betsy Isaacson, the smartest people I have ever known.
Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Cathy, and daughter, Betsy. Cathy read through what I wrote with enormous care and was invaluable in sharpening the themes and spotting some problems. But that is merely a tiny fraction of what she did as my partner in this book and in life. As for Betsy, after a bit of prodding, she faithfully plowed through some of the manuscript. Parts of it she admitted were interesting (as befitting a 12-year-old, she liked the section on ballooning) and other parts (like that on the Constitutional Convention) she declared boring, which I guess was a help, especially to readers who were thus treated to shortened versions of a few of these sections. They both make everything not only possible but worthwhile.
None of these people, of course, deserve blame for any errors or lapses that I have undoubtedly made. In a May 23, 1785, letter to his friend George Whatley, Franklin said about his life, “I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping however that the errata of the last may be corrected.” I feel the same of this book.
Sources and
Abbreviations
Except where otherwise noted, Franklin’s writings cited are in the Franklin Papers edited at Yale (see below) and the CD-ROM by the Packard Humanities Institute.
In using Internet addresses, please note that the periods, commas, hyphens, and semicolons used below to separate entries should not be included as part of a URL.
Abbreviations Used in Source Notes
People
BF = Benjamin Franklin
DF = Deborah Franklin, wife
JM = Jane Franklin Mecom, sister
MS = Margaret Stevenson, London landlady
PS = Mary “Polly” Stevenson [Hewson], landlady’s daughter
RB = Richard Bache, son-in-law
SF = Sarah “Sally” Franklin [Bache], daughter
TF = [William] Temple Franklin, grandson
WF = William Franklin, son
Franklin’s Writings
Autobiography = The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
For the reader’s convenience, page citations refer to the most commonly available edition, the Signet Classic paperback (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001), which is primarily based on a version prepared by Max Farrand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).
There are more than 150 editions of this classic. The one that best shows his revisions is the “Genetic Text” edited by J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), which is also to be found in the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Lemay and Zall (New York: Norton, 1986), referred to in the notes below as the Lemay/Zall Autobiography and Norton Autobiography, respectively. The authoritative edition produced by Leonard Labaree and the other editors of the Franklin Papers at Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), referred to below as the Yale Autobiography, is based directly on Franklin’s handwritten manuscript and includes useful annotations and a history of various versions.
Searchable electronic versions of the autobiography can be found on the Internet at ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/index.htm ; cedarcottage.com/eBooks/ benfrank.rtf ; earlyamerica.com/lives/franklin/index.html ; odur.let.rug.nl/˜usa/B/ bfranklin/frank.htm ; etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Fra2Aut.html ; eserver.org/books/franklin/.
Lib. of Am. = Benjamin Franklin Writings
with notes by J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987). This 1,560-page volume has an authoritative collection of Franklin’s most important writings along with source notes and annotations. It includes important revisions to the Franklin canon by Lemay that update the work of the Yale editors of Franklin’s papers. A searchable electronic version of much of the text is on the Internet at www.historycarper.com/resources/twobf1/contents.htm.
Pa. Gazette = The Pennsylvania Gazette
Searchable electronic versions are on the Internet at www.accessible.com/ about.htm ; etext.lib.virginia.edu/pengazet.html ; www.historycarper.com/re sources/ twobf2/pg29-30.htm.
Papers = The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
(New Haven: Yale, 1959–). This definitive and extraordinary series of annotated volumes, produced at Yale in conjunction with the American Philosophical Society, was begun under Leonard Labaree. Recent members of the distinguished team of editors include Ellen Cohn, Judith Adkins, Jonathan Dull, Karen Duval, Leslie Lindenauer, Claude-Anne Lopez, Barbara Oberg, Kate Ohno, and Michael Sletcher. By 2003, the team had reached volume 37, which goes through August1782. All correspondence and writings cited below, unless otherwise noted, refer to versions in the Papers. See: www.yale.edu/franklinpapers.
Papers CD = CD-ROM of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin
prepared by the Packard Humanities Institute in cooperation with the Yale editors. These include all of Franklin’s known writings, including material from 1783 to 1790 that has not yet been published. It is searchable by phrase, correspondent, and chronology, but it does not include the valuable annotations by the Yale editors. I am grateful to David Packard and his staff for giving me a version of the CD-ROM before its release.
Poor Richard’s = Poor Richard’s: An Almanack
by Benjamin Franklin. Many versions are available, and quotations are cited by year in the notes below. Searchable electronic versions can be found on the Internet at www.sage-advice.com/Benjamin_Franklin.htm ; www.ku.edu/carrie/stacks/au thors.franklin.html ; itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/franklin.htm ; and www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/52-fra.html.
Silence Dogood = The Silence Dogood essays
The complete editions of the New England Courant, including these essays, are at ushistory.org/franklin/courant.
Smyth Writings = The Writings of Benjamin Franklin
edited by Albert Henry Smyth, first published in 1907 (New York: Macmillan, 1905–7; reprinted New York: Haskell House, 1970). Until the Yale editions, this 10-volume work had been a definitive collection of Franklin’s papers.
Sparks = The Works of Benjamin Franklin and the Life of Benjamin Franklin
by Jared Sparks (Boston: Tappan, Whittemore and Mason, 1840). Sparks was a Harvard history professor and president who published a 10-volume collection of Franklin’s papers and a biography in 1836–40; www.ushistory.org/franklin/ biography/index.htm.
Temple Writings = Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin
by [William] Temple Franklin, 3 volumes (London: Henry Colburn, 1818).
Other Frequently Cited Sources
Adams Diary = The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams
edited by L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).
Adams Letters = Adams Family Correspondence
edited by L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963–73).
Aldridge French= Franklin and His French Contemporaries
by Alfred Owen Aldridge (New York: NYU Press, 1957).
Aldridge Nature= Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God
by Alfred Owen Aldridge (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967).
Alsop = Yankees at the Court
by Susan Mary Alsop (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982).
Bowen = The Most Dangerous Man in America
by Catherine Drinker Bowen (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).
Brands = The First American
by H. W. Brands (New York: Doubleday, 2000).
Buxbaum = Benjamin Franklin and the Zealous Presbyterians
by Melvin Buxbaum (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975).
Campbell = Recovering Benjamin Franklin
by James Campbell (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).
Clark = Benjamin Franklin
by Ronald W. Clark (New York: Random House, 1983).
Cohen = Benjamin Franklin’s Science
by I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Faÿ = Franklin: The Apostle of Modern Man
by Bernard Faÿ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929).
Fleming = The Man Who Dared the Lightning
by Thomas Fleming (New York: Morrow, 1971).
Hawke = Franklin
by David Freeman Hawke (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
Jefferson Papers = Papers of Thomas Jefferson
edited by Julian Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–).
Lemay Internet Doc= “Benjamin Franklin: A Documentary History”
by J. A. Leo Lemay, University of Delaware, www.english.udel.edu/lemay/ franklin.
Lemay Reappraising= Reappraising Benjamin Franklin
edited by J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993).
Lopez Cher= Mon Cher Papa
by Claude-Anne Lopez (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).
Lopez Life= My Life with Benjamin Franklin
by Claude-Anne Lopez (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
Lopez Private= The Private Franklin
by Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia Herbert (New York: Norton, 1975).
McCullough = John Adams
by David McCullough (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
Middlekauff = Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies
by Robert Middlekauff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Morgan Franklin= Benjamin Franklin
by Edmund S. Morgan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
Morgan Devious= The Devious Dr. Franklin: Benjamin Franklin’s Years in London
by David Morgan (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996).
Parton = Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
by James Parton, 2 volumes (New York: Mason Brothers, 1865).
PMHB = Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Randall = A Little Revenge
by Willard Sterne Randall (New York: William Morrow, 1984).
Sanford = Benjamin Franklin and the American Character
edited by Charles Sanford (Boston: Heath, 1955).
Sappenfield = A Sweet Instruction: Franklin’s Journalism as a Literary Apprenticeship
by James Sappenfield (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973).
Schoenbrun = Triumph in Paris
by David Schoenbrun (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
Skemp William= William Franklin
by Sheila Skemp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Skemp Benjamin= Benjamin and William Franklin
by Sheila Skemp (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994).
Smith = Franklin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened Republic
by Jeffery A. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Stourzh = Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy
by Gerald Stourzh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).
Tourtellot = Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius, the Boston Years
by Arthur Tourtellot (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977).
Van Doren = Benjamin Franklin
by Carl Van Doren (New York: Viking, 1938). The page numbers are the same in the Penguin USA paperback edition, 1991 and subsequent reprints.
Walters = Benjamin Franklin and His Gods
by Kerry S. Walters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Wright = Franklin of Philadelphia
by Esmond Wright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Notes
Chapter 1
1. For a description of the writing of the Autobiography, see pages 254–57 and chapter 11 note 5 on page 542.
2. David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.)
Chapter 2
1. Autobiography 18; Josiah Franklin to BF, May 26, 1739; editor’s note in Papers 2:229; Tourtellot 12. Franklin provides a footnote in the Autobiography showing how the noun and surname “franklin” was used in fifteenth-century England. Some analysts, as well as his French fans, have pointed out that Franquelin was a common name in the province of Picardie, France, in the fifteenth century, and his ancestors may have come from there. His father, Josiah Franklin, wrote, “Some think we are of a French extract which was formerly called Franks; some of a free line (frank line), a line free from that vassalage which was common to subjects in the days of old; some from a bird of long red legs.” Franklin’s own assessment that his surname came from the class of English freemen called franklins is almost surely the correct explanation, and just as important, it was the one he believed. The Oxford English Dictionary defines franklin as “A class of landowners, of free but not noble birth, and ranking next below the gentry.” It is derived from the Middle English word frankeleyn, meaning a freeman or freeholder. See Chaucer’s “The Franklin’s Tale,” or “The Frankeleyn’s Tale,” www.librarius.com/ cantales.htm.
2. Autobiography 20; Josiah Franklin to BF, May 26, 1739. The tale of the Bible and stool is in the letter from Josiah Franklin, but BF writes that he heard it from his uncle Benjamin. For a full genealogy, see Papers 1:xlix. The Signet edition of the Autobiography, based on a version prepared by Max Farrand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), uses a somewhat different phrase: “Our humble family early embraced the Reformation.”
3. As David McCullough does in Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) and Robert Caro in The Path to Power (New York: Knopf, 1982).
4. Autobiography 20; “A short account of the Family of Thomas Franklin of Ecton,” by Benjamin Franklin the elder (uncle of BF), Yale University Library; Benjamin Franklin the Elder’s commonplace book, cited in Papers, vol. 1; Tourtellot 18.
5. BF to David Hume, May 19, 1762.
6. Tourtellot 42.
7. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), www.winthrop society.org/charity.htm ; Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard Univ
ersity Press, 1956). See also Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: NYU Press, 1963); Herbert Schneider, The Puritan Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958).
8. Perry Miller, “Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards,” in Major Writers of America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), 84; Tourtellot 41; Cotton Mather, “A Christian at His Calling,” 1701, personal.pitnet.net/primarysources/mather.html; Poor Richard’s, 1736 (drawn from Aesop’s “Hercules and the Wagoner,” ca. 550 B.C., and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government, 1698, among other antecedents).
9. Tourtellot 47–52; Nian Sheng Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah: Life of a Colonial Boston Tallow Chandler, 1657–1745” (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2000) vol. 90, pt. 3.
10. Lemay Internet Doc for 1657–1705; a drawing of the house is in Papers 1:4.
11. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Mark Van Doren and Samuel Sewall, eds., Samuel Sewall’s Diary (New York: Macy-Masius, 1927), 208.
12. Autobiography 24.
13. Autobiography 25, 91.
14. Tourtellot 86; Lopez Private 5–7.
15. Alexander Starbuck, The History of Nantucket (New York: Heritage, 1998), 53, 91, cited in Tourtellot 104.
16. Peter Folger, “A Looking Glass for the Times,” reprinted in Tourtellot 106; Autobiography 23.
17. The genealogy of the Franklin and Folger families is in Papers 1:xlix.
18. Autobiography 23. The Farrand/Signet edition uses the phrase: “that which was not honest could not be truly useful.”
19. BF to Barbeu Dubourg, April 1773; Tourtellot 161.
20. BF to Madame Brillon, Nov. 10, 1779 (known as the bagatelle of The Whistle); Autobiography 107; Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, in Complete Works(Paris: Bossange frères, 1823), 5:222, records it as a lesson learned from his family.
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