The Compleated Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1757-1790)
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123 Franklin added this footnote: “Inflammable air puts me in mind of a little jocular paper I wrote some years since in ridicule of a prize question given out by a certain academy on this side of the water.” The paper was a bagatelle on “farting” that Franklin wrote around 1780 “To the Royal Academy of Brussels.” It ends “And I cannot but conclude that.... the figures inscrib’d in it, are, all together, scarcely worth a FART - HING.” See PBF 32:396-400.
124 A height measurement: a toise is approximately equal to 6.4 feet.
125 Countess d’Houdetot helped orchestrate a celebration in honor of Franklin in April 1781, at Sannois, her husband’s country estate.
126 The famous Puritan minister Cotton Mather.
127 Rapport Secret sur le Mesmerisme (Secret Report on Mesmerism), dated August 11, 1784, was signed by Franklin, Lavoisier, Guillotin, Le Roy, and five others.
128 This gift, a picture of Louis XVI surrounded by 48 diamonds, was so outlandish that it eventually led Congress to pass a law prohibiting American officials from taking gifts for personal use. In his last will, Franklin bequeathed the diamond miniature to his daughter, Sally, on condition that she not remove the diamonds under any circumstances. However, she and her husband soon sold the diamonds to pay for a trip to Europe. See Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin (New York: Norton, 1975), 306-07.
129 Franklin had a longtime interest in phonetic spelling reform, and even wrote a pamphlet (unfinished) on the subject, A Scheme for a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of Spelling (published in 1779). See PBF 15:173-78, 216-20.
130 Catherine Shipley and her sister Georgiana, daughters of Jonathan Shipley, were longtime correspondents of Franklin.
131 Frankland never became a state; it became part of Tennessee.
132 Federal and state governments passed legal tender laws requiring individuals and businesses to accept government-issued paper money for debts and payment of goods and services. During times of inflation, such as the American Revolutionary War, citizens were reluctant to accept currency unbacked by gold or silver.
133 Franklin’s amendment did not carry.
134 Franklin’s compromise was previously proposed by other delegates, especially from Connecticut (the Connecticut Compromise).
135 William Bollan, agent to England for the colony of Massachusetts, 1745-62.
136 See Judges chapter 4, especially verses 18-24.
137 John Franklin, brother of Benjamin Franklin. This letter was published in The Massachusetts Magazine (1789), 100. It was also reprinted on April 17, 1790, the evening of Franklin’s death, in The Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser. PBF 6:407n.
138 H. L. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 646.
139 An entire book has been written on Franklin’s long list of enemies. See Robert Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (University of California Press, 1996).
140 PBF 25:420, “Sir Philip Gibbes: Minutes of a Conversation with Franklin,” January 5, 1778.
141 PBF 44:7599, BF to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, April 15, 1787.
142 Benjamin Franklin: “Hints for the Members of the Pennsylvania Convention,” November 3, 1789.
143 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, 1964), 146.
144 PBF 6:406-07, BF to Elizabeth Hubbart, February 22, 1756.
145 For the public reaction to Franklin’s death, see Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2004), 230-35.
146 See the classic essay, “Fiat Money Inflation in France,” by Andrew Dickson White (Caxton Printers, 1974).
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Skousen
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