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Benjamin Franklin, a Path beyond the Thought Like many of the colonists of his generation, Benjamin Franklins character was shaped by pragmatism, rather than by religion or ideology. He was most comfortable pursuing practical, achievable, goals. Indeed, if Morgan is right, Franklins chief goal was to be useful to his contemporaries. In Franklin, Morgan has a truly great subject. A self-educated polymath endowed with formidable charm and genius, Franklin became the leading figure in colonial politics, literature, science, and social reform. Born in 1706 into the modest circumstances of a candle-makers family in the stagnating seaport of Boston, Franklin bolted early from his indenture as apprentice to his brothers newspaper.
With impeccable timing, he moved to Philadelphia, just then becoming the most dynamic seaport city in the colonies. By hard work, formidable abilities, and useful friends, Franklin developed a lucrative newspaper and an almanac that mixed wit and moralist, no easy combination. Above all, Franklin became the first self-made man as celebrity a still powerful and pivotal type in our culture. Once enriched, Franklin gradually retired from business, entrusting his press to a junior partner. Freed from daily commerce, he re-made himself as a public-spirited gentleman. Franklin accumulated wealth to pursue fame, status, and influence all the while doing good deeds for his common neighbors.
During the 1730 s and 1740 s, Franklin helped to found and to lead an array of cultural and philanthropic institutions: the Library Company, the American Philosophical Society, the Philadelphia Academy (which later became the University of Pennsylvania), and a network of volunteer fire companies. Within the British Empire, these institutions rendered Philadelphia third only to London and Edinburgh in intellectual activity. Franklin also conducted scientific experiments, primarily with electricity, demonstrating that it comprised lightning and could be harnessed to electrocute chickens and turkeys. Published in London and Paris, his scientific reports dazzled European intellectuals, making Franklin more famous than any other British colonist. A utilitarian at heart, Franklin also applied science to craft inventions meant to improve common life: a lighting rod to protect buildings and a stove to heat them. Franklin took pleasure, Morgan explains, in making daily life better for himself and everyone around him.
As a public-spirited gentleman and a person that seeks to be useful for society, Franklin plunged into politics, becoming Pennsylvania's pre-eminent politician. By energizing the Pennsylvania assembly, Franklin antagonized Thomas Penn, the colony's English proprietor and the choleric son of the saintly founder William Penn. Determined to preserve his vast landholdings from assembly taxation, Thomas Penn directed his appointed governor to veto tax bills that funded frontier defenses. The assembly sent Franklin to London to lobby Penn. When that failed, Franklin lingered, pressing the imperial bureaucracy to re-possess Pennsylvania as a royal colony with a crown-appointed governor. Foiled a second time, Franklin stayed on to represent the assemblies of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Massachusetts in arguing against the new British program of colonial taxes and stricter regulations.
Frustrated again, Franklin headed back to Philadelphia and arrived in early 1775 ready to assist the armed revolution against British rule. In 1777, he left America for Paris to seek French military assistance. Persistent, tactful, and engaging, Franklin dazzled the French and won the alliance that proved essential to the Americans military victory. Morgan remarks that the experience was a little intoxicating, or would have been for a lesser man.
In 1782 and 1783, Franklin led the American commission that negotiated an extraordinarily favorable peace treaty with the British. In 1785 Franklin returned home in triumph, but not yet to the quiet retirement that he claimed to covet. He won election and re-election as the president of Pennsylvania's executive council (the closest thing to a governor under the states revolutionary constitution). In 1787, he represented his state in the convention that met in Philadelphia to draft a new, more national constitution for the American union. Slowed by age, Franklin played a minimal role in the convention. Retiring from politics, he died in 1790, at the age of eighty-four.
Occasionally, Morgan considers that there might be more to Franklin than his sunny public persona revealed: by now it must be apparent that Franklin is not so easy to know as he sometimes seems to be. After all, Franklin advised, Let all Men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly. Yet Morgan quickly reassures us that Franklin modestly masked only the depths of his commitment to the well-being of others, which ran to the very core of his being: he is so hard to know because it is so hard to distinguish his natural impulses from his principles. But Morgan is not fooled: if Franklin holds something back, he does not deceive us.
And so Morgan cannot easily account for the enemies who found Franklins charms devious and dangerous. Morgans first strategy is to minimize their number and to attribute their spite to politics: true, in the course of a long life, especially after he entered politics, he made enemies and sometimes returned their enmity. But he made far more friends. In fact, the young Franklin made his share of enemies before his mid-life venture into politics. Ambitious and opportunistic, Franklin could turn his charm off as well as on.
His youthful departure from the service of his brother James was abrupt, acrimonious, and illegal. In 1724, Franklin violently quarreled and permanently broke with his closest friend, John Collins, who drank and gambled excessively. The Philadelphia printer Samuel Keimer hired Franklin but soon came to distrust him, provoking a sudden and angry discharge. Franklin went into business with a partner, Hugh Meredith, who provided more capital than ability.
Once their newspaper succeeded, Franklin found new investors and replaced Meredith, who felt betrayed. To sell copies of his new almanac, Franklin predicted in print that his chief rival, the almanac writer Titan Leeds, would soon die. When Leeds protested, Franklin depicted him as an imposter, masking the real mans death: a gambit that amused readers far more than it amused Leeds. Given how prominently these five conflicts appear in even the most laudatory lives of Franklin, their omission by Morgan is especially striking.
As Franklin plunges into politics, and his enemies proliferate, Morgan explains them away as vicious or crazy. Thomas Penn declared: He is a dangerous Man and I should be very Glad he inhabited any other Country, as I believe him of a very uneasy Spirit. After one especially contentious interview, Penn denounced Franklin for vile misrepresentation and refused any further contact, while Franklin ranted and raged. But Morgan sees the bright side: His anger even adds a little spice to a personality that would be almost too lovable without it.
Franklin also alienated prominent crown ministers, principally Lord Hillsborough, the secretary of state for the colonies. By reading only Franklins side of their dispute, Morgan casts Hillsborough as a prime example of the heedless aristocrat whom British politics could drop into positions of authority. True enough, Hillsborough was a stickler for imperial authority, but he was also a dedicated, efficient, and principled administrator. During the Revolution, Franklin reaped a new set of American rivals, who did not consider him a paragon of virtue. From 1777 to 1778, Congress saddled Franklin in Paris with two fellow commissioners, one the notoriously corrupt Silas Deane, whom Franklin defended, and the other the congenitally suspicious Arthur Lee, whom Franklin despised. Franklin abruptly dismissed Lees suspicions that their secretary, Edward Bancroft, was a British spy.
In fact, Bancroft was indeed on the British payroll. Sometimes paranoids do have enemies. Morgan does not mention Bancroft, the better to share Franklins insistence that Lee was simply insane. In 1778, Congress replaced Lee with John Adams, who soon shared most of Lees suspicions and added a few of his own. Adams regarded Franklin as lazy, dissipated, devious, and too accommodating to French interests. Adams also blamed Franklin for the many disputes in the American delegation: Franklins cunning will be to divide us.
To this end, he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will intrigue, he will maneuver. Siding with Franklin, Morgan dismisses Adams ravings as paranoid delusions of persecution and treachery. To vindicate Franklin, Morgan contradicts the celebration of Adams in David Mccullough's recent biography. In the recent spate of popular biographies of Founders, readers find one placed on a pedestal at the expense of foolish others. Morgans basic premise that Franklin was a lovable, ingenuous, and talented man with lots of friends cannot illuminate Franklins many political misjudgments, which reveal a man too proud of his subtlety and too sure of his superiority. Especially frequent during his stint in London as a colonial agent, Franklins mistakes exacerbated the imperial crisis that he longed to alleviate.
Franklin foolishly and stubbornly worked to make Pennsylvania a royal colony, despite abundant evidence that the crown had no interest in challenging Thomas Penn, and that the empire would prove a more powerful and demanding master than the proprietor. Underestimating colonial resentment of the Stamp Tax, Franklin secured an appointment as tax collector in Pennsylvania for a friend, who soon rued the day when mob intimidation compelled his resignation. To relieve the violent crisis provoked by that tax, Franklin pitched to British authorities a specious distinction between internal taxes (such as the Stamp Tax), which Americans would never accept, and external taxes (such as customs duties), which they long had accepted. In fact, they opposed both.
Consequently, Franklins facile distinction enabled Parliament to lift one crisis by repealing the Stamp Tax, only to substitute another by levying increased duties on colonial imports. Morgan clearly reveals these missteps, but he treats each as an exception to the rule of Franklins superior insight, failing thereby to recognize the damning picture that emerges as the exceptions accumulate. In 1773, Franklin alienated most of the British elite by procuring stolen letters, which he promptly sent to the radical leaders in Massachusetts. The letters revealed that the colony's royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, had urged tighter British restrictions on American liberties. Incredibly, Franklin believed that the letters would relieve the imperial crisis by persuading Americans that they should blame only Hutchinson in particular and not the British administration in general for the tensions. Franklin expected his correspondent to show the letters only to trusted associates and to keep them out of the press by all means.
Instead, Franklins friends published the letters, creating an uproar in Massachusetts against Hutchinson and in Britain against Franklin. By dealing in purloined letters, Franklin violated the code of honor expected of gentlemen. The royal Privy Council summoned Franklin to a hearing at which the acerbic prosecutor Alexander Wedderburn subjected him to an hour of diatribe, to the great applause and amusement of the Lords and a gallery of spectators. The government then summarily dismissed Franklin from his office as deputy postmaster general for the colonies. With some cause, British officials considered Franklin a cunning intriguer who sowed misunderstandings, but they mistook his miscalculations for a conscious and cunning plot to destroy the empire which in fact he wanted to save (on colonial terms). To absolve Franklin, Morgan blames the British; his Franklin spent year after year trying to patch up the empire, trying to undo the mistakes of a heedless ministry, trying to guide colonial protests in constructive ways, trying to interpret them constructively to an uncomprehending English public.
True enough, Franklin tried to do all those things; but he was too confident in his powers of reason and manipulation, and so he made mistakes that deepened the mistrust shared by Britons and Americans, hastening a civil war between kindred peoples. Franklins tragedy is that no one had better appreciated the potential of the united empire, and no one had been better situated to speak frankly to both peoples, to clarify their dispute before it proved fatal to thousands. Bibliography: Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.
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