Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

  64. Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 370–400; John Adams to Robert Livingston, May 25, 1783, James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Feb. 11, 1783, Jefferson to Madison, Feb. 14, 1783, all quoted in Middlekauff 200–201.

  65. WF to BF, July 22, 1784.

  66. BF to WF, Aug. 16, 1784.

  67. BF to TF, Oct. 2, 1784; Lopez Private, 258.

  68. BF to PS, Mar. 19, Aug. 15, 1784.

  69. Lopez Private, 272.

  70. PS to BF, Oct. 25, 1784; PS to Barbara Hewson, Jan. 25, 1785; Lopez Private, 269.

  71. BF to PS, July 4, 1785; BF to JM, July 13, 1785; BF to David Hartley, July 5, 1785.

  72. Vergennes to François Barbé de Marbois, May 10, 1785; BF to John Jay, Sept. 21, 1785.

  73. Lopez Cher, 137–39; Lopez Private, 275; Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson(New York: Norton, 1974), 425.

  74. Franklin trip journal, July 13–28, 1785, Papers CD 43:310.

  75. WF to SF, Aug. 1, 1785; Temple Writings, 2:165. In a letter to John Jay, Sept. 21, 1785, he describes how Shipley and others visited him in Southampton, but does not mention William.

  Chapter 16

  1. “Maritime Observations,” BF to David Le Roy, Aug. 1785, Papers CD 41:384.

  2. “Causes and Cure of Smoky Chimneys,” BF to Jan Ingenhousz, Aug. 28, 1785; “Description of a New Stove,” by BF, Aug. 1785, Papers CD 43:380.

  3. BF journal, Sept. 14, 1785, unpublished, Papers CD 43:310; BF to John Jay, Sept. 21, 1785.

  4. BF to Jonathan Shipley, Feb. 24, 1786.

  5. BF to Polly Stevenson, May 6, 1786.

  6. Manasseh Cutler, diary excerpt of July 13, 1787, in Smyth Writings, 10:478.

  7. BF to Louis-Guillaume le Veillard, Apr. 15, 1787; BF to Ferdinand Grand, Apr. 22, 1787.

  8. BF to JM, Sept. 21, 1786; Manasseh Cutler, diary excerpt of July 13, 1787, in Smyth Writings, 10:478. When he died, the 4,276 volumes in his library were valued at just over £184. See “An inventory and appraisement of the goods and chattels of the estate of Benjamin Franklin,” Bache papers, Castle Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

  9. BF to JM, Sept. 20, 1787; BF to Professor Landriani, Oct. 14, 1787.

  10. BF to James Woodmason, July 25, 1780, in which he discusses with the London stationer the “new-invented art of copying” and orders three rudimentary machines from him for delivery to Passy. The machines from Woodmason came from Watt’s factory, and the stationer insisted that Franklin pay in advance before they were ordered. In a letter of Nov. 1, 1780, he tells Franklin he is sending three new machines and provides instructions for how to use the ink; Papers CD 33:579. See also Copying machine history, http://www.inc.com/articles/it/computers_ networks/peripherals/2000.html.

  11. “Description of An Instrument for Taking Down Books from High Shelves,” Jan. 1786, Papers CD 43:873; Lib. of Am. 1116.

  12. BF to Catherine (Kitty) Shipley, May 2, 1786; Lib. of Am. 1118.

  13. BF to David Hartley, Oct. 27, 1785.

  14. BF to Jonathan Williams, Feb. 16, 1786; to Jonathan Shipley, Feb. 24, 1786; Brands 661.

  15. BF to William Cocke, Aug. 12, 1786.

  16. BF to Thomas Jefferson, Apr. 19, 1787.

  17. www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/constitution/confath.html.

  Much of the following relies on Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937) and, in particular, Madison’s Journals. There are many editions of this masterful narrative. Among the most convenient are the searchable versions on the Web, including www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/ debates/debcont.htm, and www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_000.htm.

  For good analysis of Franklin’s role at the convention, see William Carr, The Oldest Delegate (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990); Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Public (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Clinton Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention (New York: Macmillan, 1966); Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966); Richard Morris, The Forging of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

  18. The oft-told story of Franklin arriving at the convention in a sedan chair is described most vividly in Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia, 34. See also Smyth Writings, 10:477; Brands 674; Van Doren 741. The careful scholar J. A. Leo Lemay writes that no evidence exists that Franklin was carried in a sedan chair to any meeting of the convention. See Lemay, “Recent Franklin Scholarship, with a Note on Franklin’s Sedan Chair,” PMHB 76:2 (Apr. 2002): 339–40. In fact, however, there is an unpublished letter written by his daughter, Sally, to his grandson Temple during the convention in which she reports: “Your Grand Father was just getting into his Chair to go to convention when I told him I had received your letter” (SB to TF, undated in 1787, Papers CD 45:u350). We know that Franklin was feeling poorly at the outset of the convention, though not throughout it, and also that he owned a sedan chair. The list of items in his estate (“An inventory and appraisement of the goods and chattels of the estate of Benjamin Franklin,” Bache papers, Castle Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia) lists a “Sedan Chair” valued at £20, and it is also listed as part of the items sold from Franklin’s house on May 25, 1792, two years after his death ( Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, May 21, 1792, copy in the American Philosophical Society, also reprinted in PMHB 23 [1899]: 123). We also know that a friend requested permission to borrow “his sedan chair” in 1788 (Mrs. Powel to BF, unpublished, June 16, 1788, Papers CD 45:558). Thus, I think it is reasonable to believe the reports that he was carried in the chair to the convention that first day, May 28. However, Lemay makes the good point that it is unlikely that he regularly used the sedan chair to get to the convention. As Franklin wrote to his sister in September, “The daily exercise of going and returning from the state house has done me good” (BF to JM, Sept. 20, 1787, Papers CD, 45:u167). One friend wrote in late 1786, “Except for the stone, which prevents his using exercise except in walking in the house up and down stairs and sometime to the state-house, [he] still retains his health, spirits and memory” (Samuel Vaughan to Richard Price, Nov. 4, 1786, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 21.17 [May 1903]: 355).

  19. Benjamin Rush to Richard Price, June 2, 1787, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 21.17 (May 1903): 361. For Pierce’s speech, see Farrand’s Records of the Convention, 3:91; Franklin speeches, June 30, June 11, Madison’s journal; Morris, The Forging of the Union, 272.

  20. Bowen 18.

  21. Madison journal, May 31, 1787.

  22. Madison journal, June 11, 1787.

  23. Madison journal, June 28, 1787.

  24. “Motion For Prayers,” by BF, June 28, 1787; Madison’s journal, Farrand, 1:452; Papers CD 45:u77; Smyth Writings, 9:600.

  25. Madison journal, June 30, 1787.

  26. Manasseh Cutler journal, July 13, 1787, in Smyth Writings, 10:478; “Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania,” Nov. 3, 1789, Smyth Writings, 10:57.

  27. Madison journal, July 26, 20, June 5, 1787.

  28. Madison journal, Aug. 7, 10, 1787.

  29. Madison journal, June 2, 1787; BF to Benjamin Strahan, Feb. 16, Aug. 19, 1784; Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1991), 199. See also chapter 5 n. 25; McCullough 400.

  30. Farrand’s Records of Convention, 3:85; Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1:398.

  31. BF to la Rochefoucauld, Oct. 22, 1788; BF to Pierre Du Pont de Nemours, June 9, 1788.

  32. Franklin closing speech, Sept. 17, 1787, Papers CD 45:ul61. There are a few versions of this speech, including a draft version, a copy, and Madison’s notes, each with minor variations. The one quoted here is that used by the Yale editors of Franklin’s papers.

  33. Farrand’s Records of Convention, 3:85; see memory.loc.gov/ammem/ amlaw/lwfr.html.

  34. Barbara Oberg, �
��Plain, Insinuating, Persuasive,” in Lemay Reappraising,176, 189; Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention, 234.

  35. Roger Rosenblatt, Where We Stand (New York: Harcourt, 2002), 70, citing Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). The only major founding document Franklin did not sign was the Articles of Confederation, as he was then in France. Roger Sherman signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, as well as the Declaration of 1774, but he did not sign either of the treaties.

  36. BF to JM, Nov. 4, 1787, Aug. 3, 1789.

  37. BF to Noah Webster, Dec. 26, 1789.

  38. BF to Benjamin Vaughan, Oct. 24, 1788; see also BF to Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard, Oct. 24, 1788.

  39. BF to Benjamin Vaughan, June 3, Nov. 2, 1798; BF to Elizabeth Partridge, Nov. 25, 1788.

  40. BF to Catherine Ray Greene, Mar. 2, 1789; BF to George Washington, Sept. 18, 1789.

  41. BF to Jean Baptiste Le Roy, Nov. 13, 1789; BF to Louis-Guillaume le Veillard, Oct. 24, 1788.

  42. “An Address to the Public,” Nov. 9, 1789, Smyth Writings, 10:66. Mason quote is in Farrand’s Records of the Convention, 2:370.

  43. Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, Petition to Congress, by BF, Feb. 12, 1790.

  44. “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade,” BF to Federal Gazette, Mar. 23, 1790.

  45. See chapter 11; BF to Richard Price, Mar. 18, 1785.

  46. BF to William Strahan, Aug. 19, 1784.

  47. BF to unknown recipient, July 3, 1786, Smyth Writings, 9:520; the same letter, dated Dec. 13, 1757, Papers 7:293; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, first fully published in 1794, www.ushistory.org/paine/; libertyonline.hypermall.com/Paine/ AOR-Frame.html.

  The Yale editors of the Franklin Papers note, “Both the date and the addressee of this letter have been subjects of much difference of opinion. Each of the three surviving manuscript versions bears a different date line. That on the draft, in Franklin’s hand, has been heavily scratched out, probably long after the letter was written, by someone other than Franklin.” That draft, now at the Library of Congress, has a note by Franklin calling it “Rough of letter dissuading———from publishing his piece.” Jared Sparks, one of the earliest editors and biographers, deciphered the blacked-out line as “Phila., July 3, 1786,” and he published it as addressed to Thomas Paine (Sparks 10:281). Sparks writes, “When a skeptical writer, who is supposed to have been Thomas Paine, showed him in manuscript a work written against religion, he urged him earnestly not to publish it, but to burn it; objecting to his arguments as fallacious, and to his principles as poisoned with the seeds of vice, without tending to any imaginable good.” John Bigelow in The Works of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Putnam’s, 1904) and Smyth Writings, 9:520, also use that date. For a contrary assessment written by a student of Sparks’s, see Mon-cure Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (New York: Putnam’s, 1892), vii–viii.

  The Yale editors (Papers 7:293n, published in 1963) called that dating “plausible” but give six other possible years, ranging from 1751 to 1787. They tentatively use the 1757 date based on a transcription in French that appears to have been written and dated by the clerk Franklin used while living in Passy. In their note, however, they say, “The editors have not been able to identify any particular ‘infidel’ who might have sent Franklin a manuscript in 1757, nor have they located any particular tract which might be evidence that his advice against publication was disregarded.” The Yale editors, when I asked them in 2002, said that they remain uncertain about the date. In a letter to me commenting on some draft sections of this book, Dec. 2, 2002, Edmund Morgan wrote, “Your suggestion that it was written in 1786 to Paine makes more sense to me than the reasons offered by the former editors for placing it in 1757.”

  My belief that the 1786 date is likely and that it was sent to Paine is based on the following. As early as 1776, Paine had expressed his “contempt” for the Bible and told John Adams, “I have some thoughts of publishing my thoughts on religion, but I believe it will be best to postpone it to the latter part of my life” (John Keane, Tom Paine [Boston: Little, Brown, 1995], 390). By 1786, Paine was writing frequently to Franklin (Sept. 23, Dec. 31, 1785, Mar. 31, June 6, 14, 1786) and even using the courtyard in front of Franklin’s house to display a bridge design Paine had made. In The Age of Reason, Paine favorably mentions Franklin five times (“The Proverbs which are said to be of Solomon’s…[are] not more wise and economical than those of the American Franklin”). He echoes the more general aspects of Franklin’s deist creed by saying that he believes in God and that the “moral duty of man” is to practice God’s beneficence “toward each other.” But he also engages in many heretical attacks on organized religion that would have elicited Franklin’s cautious response. He says that churches “appear to me to be no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.” He also says that “the theory of what is called the Christian church sprung out of the tale of heathen mythology” and decries Christian theology for its “absurdity.” And he begins his book by indicating that he had considered publishing his thoughts earlier but was dissuaded: “It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion. I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration had reserved it to a more advanced period of life.”

  48. Archives of Congregation Mikveh Israel, Apr. 30, 1788 (Franklin’s gift is one of the three largest of forty-four, and he is on top of the subscriber list), www.mikvehisrael.org/gifs/frank2.jpg ; BF to John Calder, Aug. 21, 1784.

  49. BF to Ezra Stiles, Mar. 9, 1790.

  50. BF to Thomas Jefferson, Apr. 8, 1790.

  51. Reports of Dr. John Jones and Benjamin Rush, in Sparks and elsewhere; Pa. Gazette, Apr. 21, 1790; Benjamin Bache to Margaret Markoe, May 2, 1790.

  52. Epitaph, 1728; this is the version Temple Franklin published. See Papers CD 41:u539. Franklin also produced slightly edited versions, including one that ends “Corrected and amended/By the author” (Papers 1:109a).

  53. Last will and testament, plus codicil, June 23, 1789, Papers CD 46:u20.

  Chapter 17

  1. Last will and testament, plus codicil, June 23, 1789, Papers CD 46:u20; Skemp William, 275. The will and codicil are at www.sln.fi.edu/franklin/family/ lastwill.html.

  2. WF to TF, July 3, 1789; Skemp William, 275; Lopez Private, 309. A full and authorized English edition of Franklin’s autobiography was not published until 1868.

  3. The two great books on Benjamin Bache and his paper are Jeffery A. Smith, Franklin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Richard Rosenfeld, American Aurora (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). See also Bernard Faÿ, The Two Franklins (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933).

  4. Patricia Nealon, “Ben Franklin Trust to Go to State, City,” Boston Globe, Dec. 7, 1993, A22; Clark DeLeon, “Divvying Up Ben,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 7, 1993, B2; Tom Ferrick Jr., “Ben Franklin’s Gift Keeps Giving,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 27, 2002, B1; Tour de Sol Web site, www.nesea.org/transportation/ tour ; The Franklin Gazette, printed by the Friends of Franklin Inc., www.benfranklin2006.org (spring 2002); Philadelphia Academies Annual Report 2001 and Web site, www.academiesinc.org. Web sites on Franklin’s bequest include www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/2000-01/lastpage.html ; www.cs.app state.edu/˜sjg/class/1010/wc/finance/benfranklin.html ; www.lehighvalleyfounda tion.org/support.html#BenFranklin.

  Chapter 18

  1. The Nation, July 9, 1868, reprinted in Norton Autobiography 270. See also Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790–1990 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994).

  2. The Provost Smith papers, Pennsylvania Gazette, Apr. 1997, www.upenn.edu/gazette/0497/.

  3. John Adams, Boston Patriot, May 15, 1811.

  4. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 347
; John Adams to TF, May 5, 1817; Francis, Lord Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review 8 (1806), in Norton Autobiography 253. Jeffrey was reviewing an earlier unauthorized edition of the writings and autobiography.

  5. Robert Spiller, “Franklin and the Art of Being Human,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100.4 (Aug. 1956): 304.

  6. John Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, Oct. 31, 1818; Leigh Hunt, Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1850), 1:130–32; both reprinted in Norton Autobiography 257, 266.

  7. Herman Melville, Israel Potter (1855; New York: Library of America, 1985), chapter 8, http://www.melville.org/hmisrael.htm ; Autobiography 45.

  8. Emerson’s Journals 1:375, quoted in Campbell 35; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Works, 12:189, cited in Yale Autobiography 13.

  9. David Brooks, “Among the Bourgeoisophobes,” The Weekly Standard, Apr. 15, 2002.

  10. Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy, July 1870.

  11. Jim Powell, “How Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography inspired all kinds of people to help themselves,” www.libertystory.net/LSCONNFRAN.htm.

  12. Frederick Jackson Turner, essay in The Dial, May 1887; William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s, Apr. 1888; reprinted in Norton Autobiography.

  13. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published (in German) in 1904 and revised in 1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 1930), 52–53; Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age, originally published in 1915 as an essay (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1934); William Carlos Williams, In the Grain (New York: New Directions, 1925), 153; Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, first published in 1922, chapter 16, section 3, see www.bartleby.com/162/16.html.

  14. D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin,” Studies in Classic American Literature(New York: Viking, 1923), 10–16, xroads.virginia.edu/˜HYPER/LAWRENCE/ dhlch02.htm ; Cervantes, Don Quixote, part 2, chapter 33; Aesop, “The Milkmaid and the Pail.” Franklin did cite the maxim “Honesty is the best policy” in a letter to Edward Bridgen, Oct. 2, 1779, but it was part of a list of maxims that could be on coins, and he did not claim it as his own.