The First American
Page 91
Franklin’s legacy in science was no less distinguished than in civic affairs. The electrical revolution he helped unleash, and for which he provided a lexicon, in time transformed the world, magnifying muscle and mind, knitting a net of information that encompassed the globe. His work in demography inspired economists and practitioners of allied social sciences. His conjectures on meteorology, geology, and oceanography, while not uniformly accurate, challenged others to correct his mistakes.
Franklin’s literary legacy was equally impressive. His autobiography became a landmark of American letters, and indeed one of the great lives in the English language. Poor Richard grew only more famous after his author’s death, causing most Americans to forget that any other almanackers ever existed. Franklin’s bagatelles, satires, hoaxes and correspondence made him a model for commentary that always had a point but was never pedantic.
In letters, science, and commitment to the common weal, Franklin was the first—in the sense of foremost—American of his generation. Considering the length and breadth of his multiple legacies, he was probably the first American of any generation. Yet he was the first American in another sense as well. Sooner than almost anyone else, certainly sooner than anyone equally placed to act on the insight, Franklin realized that he and his fellow Americans were no longer Britons but a breed apart—a people not suited to rule by others but compelled to rule themselves. He did not initially welcome the knowledge, which contradicted his hopes for America within the British empire. But once convinced, he acted decisively on the knowledge, and did more than almost anyone else to give this new people—these Americans—a government of their own. In the Continental Congress at the start of the Revolution, in Paris during the war and the peace negotiations, at the Constitutional Convention back home in Philadelphia, he served his new country with unsurpassed energy, devotion, and skill.
At his death the millions he had touched stopped to acknowledge his preeminence and profess their gratitude. Twenty thousand Philadelphians—nearly half the city—turned out for the funeral. In the House of Representatives, James Madison offered a motion for official mourning, which passed unanimously. France took the news of Franklin’s passing even harder. “He has returned to the bosom of the Divinity, the genius who freed America and shed torrents of light upon Europe,” Mirabeau told the tearful National Assembly, which likewise voted to don black. Felix Vicq d’Azyr, a personal friend of Franklin’s and secretary of the French Royal Society of Medicine, summarized the Atlantic gloom: “A man is dead, and two worlds are in mourning.”
They mourned one who came as close as any to realizing the full potential of the human spirit. To genius he joined a passion for virtue. His genius distinguished him from others, yet it also connected him to others, for he sought knowledge not for its own sake but for humanity’s. His passion for virtue reflected not hope of heaven but faith in his fellow mortals. It afforded the foundation for his greatest accomplishments, and for the glorious achievement he shared with others of his revolutionary generation.
At the precocious age of twenty-two Franklin wrote what became one of the most famous epitaphs in that lapidary genre:
The Body of
B. Franklin,
Printer;
Like the Cover of an old Book,
Its contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms,
But the Work shall not be wholly lost,
For it will, as he believed, appear once more,
In a new & more perfect Edition,
Corrected and amended
By the Author.
When the time came, however, he preferred something simpler. In his will he directed that only “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin 1790” adorn the headstone he shared with his dear country Joan.
A life as full as Franklin’s could not be captured in a phrase—or a volume. Yet if a few words had to suffice, a few words that summarized his legacy to the America he played such a central role in creating—and that, not incidentally, illustrated his wry, aphoristic style—they were those he uttered upon leaving the final session of the Constitutional Convention. A matron of Philadelphia demanded to know, after four months’ secrecy, what he and the other delegates had produced.
“A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.”
Source Notes
The primary source for any life of Benjamin Franklin is Franklin himself: his correspondence and published writings. Several editions of Franklin’s papers exist; by far the best (and a model of scholarly editing) is The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, published by Yale University Press, starting in 1959. The original editor was Leonard W. Labaree; the current editor is Barbara B. Oberg. The most recent volumes in this series carry Franklin’s story to 1781. In the present book, citations of Franklin up to 1781 are drawn almost exclusively from this edition, and are typically cited by date alone. Other editions of Franklin papers, for the years after 1781, that have been used extensively here are by Smyth and Bigelow (see full information below). As a general rule, where the date of a document locates it unambiguously, the date alone has been given. In other cases, volume and page numbers are furnished.
Franklin’s original manuscripts lie in scores of collections scattered about America and Europe. The most important of these collections are located at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and at the Library of Congress in Washington. The vast majority of substantive letters by Franklin in these collections have been published in one or more of the printed editions of Franklin papers. Where such is the case, citations in the present book are to a printed version, for reasons of accessibility. In the rare exceptional cases, the archives are cited.
One of Franklin’s published works that requires special mention is his justly famous Autobiography. Numerous editions exist; the one cited here is also edited by Leonard W. Labaree and published by Yale University Press, in 1964. It is abbreviated below as ABF.
For clarity and readability, most archaisms have been silently modernized. Franklin capitalized many more nouns than modern writers do; these have usually been rendered lowercase. Franklin wrote British English; where British usage and spellings persist at the start of the twenty-first century, these have generally been retained.
In the notes below, references are given only for direct quotations. The works cited include many, but by no means all, of the most important sources consulted for this book. Considerations of space preclude any effort to present a comprehensive bibliography of materials relating to Franklin’s life, let alone his times. The interested reader is referred to Melvin H. Buxbaum, Benjamin Franklin: A Reference Guide (2 volumes: Boston, 1983–88). J. A. Leo Lemay, Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective (Newark, Del., 1993), comprises papers by Franklin scholars; the references nicely complement those in the Buxbaum volumes.
ABBREVIATIONS
Individuals
BF: Benjamin Franklin
DF: Deborah Read Franklin
WF: William Franklin
Archives and Published Works
ABF: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn., 1964).
Adams Papers: The Adams Papers, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, Mass., 1961—)
AHR: American Historical Review.
APS: Benjamin Franklin Collection, American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia).
Bagatelles: Franklin’s Wit and Folly: The Bagatelles, ed. Richard E. Amacher (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953).
Bigelow: The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow (New York, 1904).
DAR: Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783 (Colonial Office Series), ed. K. G. Davies (Shannon, Ireland, 1972–1981).
Facsimiles: Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America, 1773–1783, ed. B. F. Stevens (London, 1889–98).
Giunta: The Emerging Nation: A Documentary History of the Foreign Relations of the United States under the Articles of Confederatio
n, 1780–1789, ed. Mary A. Giunta et al. (Washington, D.C., 1996).
HSP: Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). Lafayette Letters: Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, ed. Stanley J. Idzerda (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979).
LC: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Liberty of Congress (Washington, D.C.).
Lemay: Benjamin Franklin: Writings, selected and annotated by J. A. Leo Lemay (New York, 1987).
Letters of Rush: Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton, N.J., 1951).
Memoirs: Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. William Temple Franklin (London, 1833).
NEQ: The New England Quarterly.
Papers of Jefferson: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J., 1950–).
Papers of Madison: The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (Charlottesville, Va., 1962–91).
Papers of Washington: The Papers of George Washington, ed. W. W. Abbot (Charlottesville, Va., 1983–).
PBF: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–).
PG: Pennsylvania Gazette.
PMHB: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.
PR: Poor Richard [year]: An Almanack for the Year of Christ [year]. (All the pertinent issues can be found in PBF, under last part of the previous year.)
Records of Convention: The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Far-rand (New Haven, Conn., 1923).
Smyth: The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth (New York, 1905–7).
Sparks: The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston, 1840).
WMQ: William and Mary Quarterly (3rd. series).
Writings of Jefferson: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C., 1903–4).
Writings of Madison: James Madison: Writings, ed. Jack N. Rakove (New York, 1999).
Writings of Washington: The Writings of George Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, D.C., 1931–44).
Yale: Benjamin Franklin Collection, Yale University (New Haven, Conn.).
1. BOSTON BEGINNINGS: 1706–23
10 “Coming to himself … this resolution”: Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (Boston, 1911–12), 1:12, 357.
10–12 “That there is … imposed upon”: The Wonders of the Invisible World (1893), reproduced in The Witchcraft Delusion in New England, ed. Samuel G. Drake (Roxbury, Mass., 1866), 1:55, 61, 94–95, 102–6.
12 “blame and shame”: The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. M. Halsey Thomas (New York, 1973), 1:367.
12 “the first letters”: Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), 198.
14 “I remember well”: ABF, 54–55.
14 “a place where”: Arthur Bernon Tourtellot, Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius: The Boston Years (Garden City, N.Y., 1977), 105.
15 “When I was a child”: Bagatelles, 45.
16–18 “I do not remember … difficulty”: ABF, 53–54.
18 “without the least fatigue”: to Barbeu-Dubourg, undated, Smyth, 5:542–45.
19 “the old feud”: Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 29.
21 “The said Apprentice”: John Clyde Oswald, A History of Printing (New York, 1928), 355.
22–23 “still had a hankering … vanity”: ABF, 58–60.
23 “Will you hear”: in Thomas C. Leonard, “Recovering ‘Wretched Stuff’ and the Franklins’ Synergy,” NEQ 72:3 (Sept. 1999), 445–47. Although the editors of PBF were skeptical that this is in fact Franklin’s poem, Leonard’s textual and contextual reasoning is persuasive.
24 “I was extremely”: ABF, 62.
25 “vile Courant”: Samuel G. Drake, The History and Antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), 564.
25 “to vilify”: Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1984), 357.
26 “notorious”: Tourtellot, The Boston Years, 258.
26 “the wicked printer”: Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:663.
26–27 “either to commend … else to grieve for”: PBF, 1:9–10.
27 No questions”: ibid., 11.
27 “exquisite pleasure”: ABF, 68.
28–29 “There is certainly … garnish it mightily”: PBF, 1:11–12, 17, 19, 22, 26.
29 “The houses”: Carl Seaburg, Boston Observed (Boston, 1971), 82.
29 “This night”: Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:658.
29 “’tis thought”: PBF, 1:27.
30 “I made bold”: ABF, 69.
30 “Without freedom”: PBF, 1:27, 30.
31 “Whenever I find … Courant”: Tourtellot, The Boston Years, 423–25.
31 “entirely dropped”: PBF, 1:48.
31 “Adam was never”: ibid., 1:52.
32–34 “I was charmed … scrapes”: ABF, 63–71.
2. FRIENDS AND OTHER STRANGERS: 1723–24
36–37 “a den … cheap a price”: Harry Emerson Wildes, William Penn (New York, 1974), 12, 22, 27, 119.
37–38 “large town … for money”: Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn, “The Founding,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York, 1982), 1, 14.
40 “I recollected”: ABF, 87–88.
42 “I was thoroughly”: ibid., 73.
43 “I saw”: ibid., 124.
44–50 “most awkward … pig poisoned”: ibid., 76–80.
51 “The reason”: Dunn and Dunn, “Founding,” 31.
52–53 “most affable … grum and sullen”: ABF, 81–82.
54 “Stoop”: to Samuel Mather, May 12, 1784, Smyth.
56–58 “He suspected … his promise”: ABF, 88–92.
3. LONDON ONCE: 1724–26
61–62 “I was satisfied … Riddlesden”: ABF, 93–94.
62 “a person”: biographical note on William Vanhaesdonck Riddlesden, ABF, 296.
62 “I have lately”: ibid., 94.
64 “Presuming on … a burden”: ABF, 99.
65 “Oh, the miserable”: Thomas Burke, The Streets of London through the Centuries (London, 1943), 39–40.
66 “No city in the world”: Daniel Defoe, A Tour thro’ London about the Year 1725, Being Letter V and Parts of Letter VI of A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’ (1724–26; rpt. New York, 1969), 48.
66 “As we stumbled”: Burke, Streets of London, 64.
67 “No person”: editorial note in Defoe, Tour thro’ London, 25.
67 “This is to give”: Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1903), 440.
67–68 “Last Wednesday … not wise”: ibid., 238–42.
68 “The many-headed”: ibid., 427.
69 “spent with Ralph”: ABF, 96.
69 “foolish intrigues”: ibid., 115.
70–71 “a detestable custom … very agreeably”: ibid., 100–1.
72 A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain: PBF, 1:58–71.
74–76 “My printing … to see it”: ABF, 96–105.
76–81 “This Gravesend … Thank God!”: journal of voyage, PBF, 1:72–99.
4. AN IMPRINT OF HIS OWN: 1726–30
83–84 “expert at selling … do over again”: ABF, 107.
85 “I had almost determined”: to Jane Franklin, Jan. 6, 1727.
88–95 “a very civil … beneficial to us”: ABF, 112–19.
95 “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion”: PBF, 1:101–9.
96 “Those who write”: “Plan of Conduct”: ibid., 1:99–100.
97–98 “1. Temperance … Jesus and Socrates”: ABF, 149–50.
99–100 “Something that pretended … by the endeavour”: ibid., 156.
100 “In order to secure”: ibid., 125–26.
101 “a paltry thing”: ibid., 119.
101–2 “in behalf of myself … lay it down”: Martha Careful and Caelia Shortface [Letters], Am
erican Weekly Mercury, Jan. 28, 1729, PBF, 1:112–13.
102 “Let the fair sex … on hearing further”: Busy Body [Letter], American Weekly Mercury, Feb. 4, 1729, ibid., 1:114–16.
103 “a trifle”: ABF, 120.
103–4 “now to be carried … will allow”: PG, Oct. 2, 1729, PBF, 1:157–59.
5. POOR RICHARD: 1730–35
107–8 “I considered … escaped it”: ABF, 128.
109 “He knew little”: ibid., 117.
111 “’tis generally known”: Sheila L. Skemp, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York, 1990), 4.
111 “Barbara”: Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938), 91.
112 “I therefore put”: ABF, 143.
113 “civil gentlemen”: PBF, 1:250–52.
115 “Apology for Printers”: ibid., 1:194–99.
118–21 “A considerable quantity … whole province”: PG, various issues 1731–1734.
122 “As to the abilities … Almanack”: Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York: 1977), xiv–7.
124 “Wit, learning, order”: Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), 23.
125 “Just published for 1733”: PG, Dec. 28, 1732, PBF, 1:280.
125–26 “Courteous Reader … R. Saunders”: PR, 1733.
126–27 “false prediction … performances are dead”: The American Almanack for the Year of Christian Account, 1734.