The First American
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ACCLAIM FOR H. W. BRANDS’
The First American
“A vivid portrait of the 18th-century milieu and of the 18th-century man…. [Brands is] a master storyteller.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“A thorough biography of Benjamin Franklin, America’s first Renaissance man…. In graceful, even witty prose … Brands relates the entire, dense-packed life.”
—The Washington Post
“A comprehensive, lively biography…. The largest, most detailed Franklin biography in more than sixty years…. [Brands] is a skilled narrator who believes in making good history accessible to the non-specializing book lover, and the general reader can read this book with sustained enjoyment.”
—The Boston Globe
“Supremely readable…. Deserves unstinting praise…. A fine example of a particular type of historical writing, the presentation of history as narrative…. Brands shows [Franklin] in lively detail at each stage of his life…. An excellent history.”
—The London Free Press
“A rousing, first-rate life of a Founding Father…. Brands is the best sort of popularizer…. [He] adds flesh to a hallowed ghost, and the result is that the reader admires Benjamin Franklin all the more. Superb.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Engaging…. Brands is a skilled biographer…. [He] deftly fills in the contours of Franklin’s extraordinary life.”
—The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)
“A fluid, clear, and nicely paced book…. Enjoyable to read.”
—The Weekly Standard
“Stunning…. Brands, with admirable insight and arresting narrative, constructs a portrait of a complex and influential man … in a highly charged world…. [He] does an excellent job of capturing Franklin’s exuberant versatility as a writer who adopted countless personae … that not only predestined his prominence as a man of letters but also as an agile man of politics.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Stirring and eloquent.”
—The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
“Worthwhile reading on an American worth remembering.”
—BookPage
“A humanizing biography that enhances … the founding fathers’ greatness.”
—Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale)
“Eminently readable…. [Brands] create[s] an absorbing portrait of the 18th-century world that was the backdrop—and the stage—for America’s multidimensional journalist, inventor, diplomat, propagandist, moralist, humorist, and revolutionary.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“A logical choice for anyone who wants to learn about Franklin’s life.”
—The Oregonian
“Informative…. Brands writes in a clear, lively, novelistic style and is especially good at revealing Franklin, the living, breathing, flawed human being.”
—Book
“Highly praised…. A frank account of the remarkable Renaissance man.”
—Gene Shalit, NBC Today
“A delightful mosaic…. Brands gives new life to the mythic hero we thought we already knew.”
—American History
H. W. BRANDS
The First American
H. W. Brands is Distinguished Professor and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair of History at Texas A&M University. He is the author of many books, among them T.R.: The Last Romantic, the critically acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt; The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s; and The Strange Death of American Liberalism. He lives in Austin, Texas.
ALSO BY H. W. BRANDS
The Strange Death of American Liberalism
The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (editor)
Critical Reflections on the Cold War: Linking Rhetoric and History (editor, with Martin J. Medhurst)
The Use of Force after the Cold War (editor)
Beyond Vietnam: The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson (editor)
Masters of Enterprise: Giants of American Business from John Jacob Astor and J. P. Morgan to Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey
What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy
T.R.: The Last Romantic
Since Vietnam: The United States in World Affairs, 1973–1995
The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power
The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s
The United States in the World: A History of American Foreign Policy
Into the Labyrinth: The United States and the Middle East, 1945–1993
The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War
Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines
Inside the Cold War: Loy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire, 1918–1961
India and the United States: The Cold Peace
The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960
Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy
Contents
PROLOGUE: JANUARY 29, 1774
1. BOSTON BEGINNINGS: 1706–23
2. FRIENDS AND OTHER STRANGERS: 1723–24
3. LONDON ONCE: 1724–26
4. AN IMPRINT OF HIS OWN: 1726–30
5. POOR RICHARD: 1730–35
6. CITIZEN: 1735–40
7. ARC OF EMPIRE: 1741–48
8. ELECTRICITY AND FAME: 1748–51
9. A TASTE OF POLITICS: 1751—54
10. JOIN OR DIE: 1754–55
11. THE PEOPLE’S COLONEL: 1755—57
12. A LARGER STAGE: 1757–58
13. IMPERIALIST: 1759–60
14. BRITON: 1760–62
15. RISING IN THE WEST: 1762–64
16. STAMPS AND STATESMANSHIP: 1764–66
17. DUTIES AND PLEASURES: 1766–67
18. REASON AND RIOT: 1768–69
19. THE RIFT WIDENS: 1770–71
20. TO KICK A LITTLE: 1772–73
21. THE COCKPIT: 1774–75
22. REBEL: 1775–76
23. SALVATION IN PARIS: 1776–78
24. BONHOMME RICHARD: 1778–79
25. MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY: 1779–81
26. BLESSED WORK: 1781–82
27. SAVANT: 1783–85
28. HOME: 1785–86
29. SUNRISE AT DUSK: 1786–87
30. TO SLEEP: 1787-90
EPILOGUE: APRIL 17, 1990
SOURCE NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Prologue
January 29, 1774
A lesser man would have been humiliated.
Humiliation was the purpose of the proceeding. It was the outcome eagerly anticipated by the lords of the Privy Council who constituted the official audience, by the members of the House of Commons and other fashionable Londoners who packed the room and hung on the rails of the balcony, by the London press that lived on scandal and milled outside to see how this scandal would unfold, by the throngs that bought the papers, savored the scandals, rioted in favor of their heroes and against their villains, and made politics in the British imperial capital often unpredictable, frequently disreputable, always entertaining. The proceeding today would probably be disreputable. It would certainly be entertaining.
The venue was fitting: the Cockpit. In the reign of Henry VIII, that most sporting of monarchs in a land that loved its bloody games, the building on this site had housed an actual cockpit, where Henry and his friends brought their prize birds and wagered which would tear the others to shreds. The present building had replaced the real cockpit, but this room retained the old name and atmosphere. The victim today was expected to depart with his reputation in tatters, his fortune possibly forfeit, his life co
nceivably at peril.
Nor was that the extent of the stakes. Two days earlier the December packet ship from Boston had arrived with an alarming report from the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. The governor described an organized assault on three British vessels carrying tea of the East India Company. The assailants, townsmen loosely disguised as Indians, had boarded the ships, hauled hundreds of tea casks to deck, smashed them open, and dumped their contents into the harbor—forty-five tons of tea, enough to litter the beaches for miles and depress the company’s profits for years. This rampage was the latest in a series of violent outbursts against the authority of Crown and Parliament; the audience in the Cockpit, and in London beyond, demanded to know what Crown and Parliament intended to do about it.
Alexander Wedderburn was going to tell them. The solicitor general possessed great rhetorical gifts and greater ambition. The former had made him the most feared advocate in the realm; the latter lifted him to his present post when he abandoned his allies in the opposition and embraced the ministry of Lord North. Wedderburn was known to consider the Boston tea riot treason, and if the law courts upheld his interpretation, those behind the riot would be liable to the most severe sanctions, potentially including death. Wedderburn was expected to argue that the man in the Cockpit today was the prime mover behind the outburst in Boston. The crowd quivered with anticipation.
They all knew the man in the pit; indeed, the whole world knew Benjamin Franklin. His work as political agent for several of the American colonies had earned him recognition around London, but his fame far transcended that. He was, quite simply, one of the most illustrious scientists and thinkers on earth. His experiments with electricity, culminating in his capture of lightning from the heavens, had won him universal praise as the modern Prometheus. His mapping of the Gulf Stream saved the time and lives of countless sailors. His ingenious fireplace conserved fuel and warmed homes on both sides of the Atlantic. His contributions to economics, meteorology, music, and psychology expanded the reach of human knowledge and the grip of human power. For his accomplishments the British Royal Society had awarded him its highest prize; foreign societies had done the same. Universities queued to grant him degrees. The ablest minds of the age consulted him on matters large and small. Kings and emperors summoned him to court, where they admired his brilliance and basked in its reflected glory.
Genius is prone to producing envy. Yet it was part of Franklin’s genius that he had produced far less than his share, due to an unusual ability to disarm those disposed to envy. In youth he discovered that he was quicker of mind and more facile of pen than almost everyone he met; he also discovered that a boy of humble birth, no matter how gifted, would block his own way by letting on that he knew how smart he was. He learned to deflect credit for some of his most important innovations. He avoided arguments wherever possible; when important public issues hinged on others’ being convinced of their errors, he often argued anonymously, adopting assumed names, or Socratically, employing the gentle questioning of the Greek master. He became almost as famous for his sense of humor as for his science; laughing, his opponents listened and were persuaded.
Franklin’s self-effacing style succeeded remarkably; at sixty-eight he had almost no personal enemies and comparatively few political enemies for a man of public affairs. But those few included powerful figures. George Grenville, the prime minister responsible for the Stamp Act, the tax bill that triggered all the American troubles, never forgave him for single-handedly demolishing the rationale for the act in a memorable session before the House of Commons. Grenville and his allies lay in wait to exact their revenge on Franklin. Yet he never made a false step.
Until now. A mysterious person had delivered into his hands confidential letters from Governor Hutchinson and other royal officials in Massachusetts addressed to an undersecretary of state in London. These letters cast grave doubt on the bona fides of Hutchinson, for years the bête noire of the Massachusetts assembly. As Massachusetts’s agent, Franklin had forwarded the letters to friends in Boston. Hutchinson’s enemies there got hold of the letters and published them.
The publication provoked an instant uproar. In America the letters were interpreted as part of a British plot to enslave the colonies; the letters fueled the anger that inspired the violence that produced the Boston tea riot. In England the letters provoked charges and countercharges as to who could have been so dishonorable as to steal and publish private correspondence. A duel at swords left one party wounded and both parties aching for further satisfaction; only at this point—to prevent more bloodshed—did Franklin reveal his role in transmitting the letters.
His foes seized the chance to destroy him. Since that session in Commons eight years before, he had become the symbol and spokesman in London of American resistance to the sovereignty of Parliament; on his head would be visited all the wrath and resentment that had been building in that proud institution from the time of the Stamp Act to the tea riot. Alexander Wedderburn sharpened his tongue and moved in for the kill.
None present at the Cockpit on January 29, 1774, could afterward recall the like of the hearing that day. The solicitor general outdid himself. For an hour he hurled invective at Franklin, branding him a liar, a thief, the instigator of the insurrection in Massachusetts, an outcast from the company of all honest men, an ingrate whose attack on Hutchinson betrayed nothing less than a desire to seize the governor’s office for himself. So slanderous was Wedderburn’s diatribe that no London paper would print it. But the audience reveled in it, hooting and applauding each sally, each bilious bon mot. Not even the lords of the Privy Council attempted to disguise their delight at Wedderburn’s astonishing attack. Almost to a man and a woman, the spectators that day concluded that Franklin’s reputation would never recover. Ignominy, if not prison or worse, was his future now.
Franklin stood silent throughout his ordeal. Even at his advanced age he was a large man, taller than most people would have guessed. His shoulders had lost some of their youthful breadth, for it had been decades since he hoisted the heavy sets of lead type that were the printer’s daily burden, and longer since he had swum for exercise; but still they conveyed an impression of strength. His stoutness had increased with the years; cloaked today in a brown, knee-length coat of Manchester velvet, it connoted gravity. He eschewed the wigs that decorated nearly every head present, male and female; his thin gray hair fell over and behind his ears to his shoulders. His face had never been expressive; today it was a mask. Not the slightest frown or grimace greeted the diatribes rained down upon him. When instructed to submit to questions, he silently refused—a refusal that seemed to seal his humiliation.
But he was not humiliated; he was outraged. The mask concealed not mortification but anger. Who did these people—this bought solicitor, these smug lords, the corrupt ministers that made the proceeding possible—who did they think they were? Who did they think he was?
It was the question of the hour; generalized, it was the question on which hung the fate of the British empire. Who were these Americans? To the British they were Britons, albeit of a turbulent sort. The Americans might live across the ocean, but the colonies they inhabited had been planted by Britain and were defended by Britain; therefore to the government of Britain—preeminently, to the British Parliament—the Americans must submit, like any other Britons. To the Americans, the question was more complicated. Nearly all Americans considered themselves Britons, but Britons of a different kind than lived in London or the Midlands or Scotland. Possessing their own assemblies—their own parliaments—the Americans believed they answered to the British Crown but not to the British Parliament. At its core the struggle between the American colonies and the British government was a contest between these competing definitions of American identity. Put simply, were the Americans truly Britons, or were they something else?
Franklin came to the questioning with decades of experience. For his whole life he had been asking himself who—or what—he
was. As a boy he had been a Bostonian. Yet the theocratic orthodoxy of Boston’s Puritans eventually became more than he could stand, and, linked to the legal and familial orthodoxy of an apprenticeship to an overbearing elder brother, it drove him away. He broke his apprenticeship, defied law and family, and fled Boston.
He landed in Philadelphia, a comparative haven for freethinkers like himself. During the next forty years he earned an honorable name and substantial wealth as the publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack, and the originator of numerous public improvements in his adopted home. By all evidence he was the model Philadelphian.
Yet gradually Philadelphia, like Boston before it, began to chafe. The political framework that had suited Pennsylvania at its founding—the charter granted by Charles II to William Penn and his heirs—hindered the growth of the province at maturity. For his first two decades in Philadelphia, Franklin scarcely noticed politics; but the wars that accompanied colonial life during the eighteenth century enforced attention. And they drove home the anachronistic nature of rule by a single family. Initially he battled the Penns from Philadelphia; when that failed, he carried the fight to England as the agent of the Pennsylvania assembly.
Yet there was more than politics in his departure. Like Boston before it, Philadelphia had become too small for him. The budding genius of his Boston youth had blossomed in the tolerant atmosphere of Philadelphia; but Philadelphia, and finally even all of America, afforded insufficient scope for the talents he discovered in himself and the world discovered in him. Kindred scientific spirits were few in America; kindred intellectual gifts still fewer.
Britain at first seemed everything Franklin desired. Electricians and others who had admired him from afar found him even more admirable in person. His admirers became his friends; his friends became his sponsors, introducing him to influential figures throughout the country. His journeys across England and Scotland turned into triumphal processions. The best houses opened their doors to him; cities and towns made him an honorary citizen. The Royal Society embraced him and provided a venue through which he communicated with the most learned and ingenious men of Britain and Europe—the Scotsman Hume, the Irishman Burke, the German Kant, the Italian Beccaria, the Frenchman Condorcet. London was soon his spiritual home. It would have been his actual and permanent home if he had succeeded in persuading his wife, Deborah, to leave Philadelphia. As it was, despite her refusal, he took up semipermanent residence in London, in Craven Street.