The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  ALSO BY GORDON S. WOOD

  The Creation of the American Republic, 1776—1787

  The Radicalism of the American Revolution

  The American Revolution: A History

  THE PENGUIN PRESS a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Hudson Street New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © Gordon Wood,

  All rights reserved

  Illustration credits appear on pp. 285-86.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wood, Gordon S.

  The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin / Gordon S. Wood.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

  MSR ISBN 0-7865-4787-1

  AEB ISBN 0-7865-4788-X

  DESIGNED BY MARYSARAH QUINN

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  First edition (electronic): February 2003

  Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  TO CHRISTOPHER, ELIZABETH, AND AMY

  PREFACE

  “OF MAKING MANY BOOKS there is no end,” and with the upcoming tricentennial celebration of Benjamin Franklin’s birth in 2006, this seems to be especially true of Franklin biographies. But this book is not meant to be a traditional biography of Franklin. It does not contain every event in his long life, nor does it deal with all of his multitudinous relationships and writings. Instead, it is a relatively selective study, focusing on specific aspects of this extraordinary man’s life that reveal a Benjamin Franklin who is different in important ways from the Franklin of our inherited common understanding.

  First of all, the book attempts to penetrate beneath the many images and representations of Franklin that have accumulated over the past two hundred years and recover the historic Franklin who did not know the kind of massively symbolic folk hero he would become. At the same time it hopes to make clear how and why Franklin acquired these various images and symbols. It tries to place Franklin’s incredible life in its eighteenth-century context and explain why he retired from business and became a gentleman, why he came to admire the British Empire and sought to become its architect, why he began writing his Autobiography when he did, and why he belatedly joined the American Revolution, and joined it with a vengeance. It seeks to clarify the personal meaning the Revolution had for him and to describe his extraordinary achievements as America’s envoy to France—achievements that were never fully appreciated by many of his countrymen at the time. It attempts also to account for the way in which the French came to see Franklin as the symbol of America even before his fellow Americans did. Indeed, without understanding Franklin’s intimate connection with France we will never make sense of the remarkable degree of hostility Franklin faced in the last years of his life from members of Congress and other influential Americans. Even after his death in 1790 the hostility continued, especially as Franklin emerged as the representative American, as the hardworking self-made businessman, for hundreds of thousands of middling Americans in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

  This early-nineteenth-century image of Franklin was not the image of Franklin known to people in his own lifetime; it was a product of the turbulent capitalism of the age of Jackson, the age so brilliantly depicted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America. And it is that popular image that seems to have the most resonance even today. Despite the continuing power of Franklin’s symbolic significance as the entrepreneurial American, however, the historic Franklin of the eighteenth century was never destined to be that symbol. Franklin was not even destined to be an American. How he became one is the theme of this book.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK HAS BEEN in my mind for many years. I first became interested in writing about Franklin when I reviewed several volumes of his papers in the early 1970s. I let my thoughts about this extraordinary character stew for a decade. Then in 1983 the late William B. Cohen, chair of the Department of History of Indiana University, invited me to present a lecture on Franklin as part of Indiana University’s bicentennial celebration of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War against Britain. This invitation forced me to put some of my thoughts about Franklin on paper. So I am grateful to Professor Cohen and Indiana University for the invitation that got me started on this book. Franklin next became an important figure in my book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and the several paragraphs devoted to him there anticipate some of what is in this study. Indeed, what happened to Franklin and Franklin’s image between the middle of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century seems to me to demonstrate vividly the radical social and cultural changes that the American Revolution brought about.

  Much of the book was written when I was a fellow at the Institute for United States Studies in London in the winter and spring of 2002, and I want to thank the institute and its staff for their hospitality. For their editorial expertise I am grateful to my wife, Louise, and my daughter Elizabeth, and my friends Lesley Herrmann and Barbara Oberg. I am especially indebted to Ellen Cohn, who is currently the editor in chief of the Franklin Papers, not only for her careful reading of the manuscript, which saved me from many errors, but also for her making available to me a CD-ROM of the Franklin Papers, which includes those papers not yet published in the magnificent letterpress edition of Yale University Press. I am grateful too to my agent, Andrew Wylie, for all his support. My thanks also to Sophie Fels at The Penguin Press for her considerable and always cheerful aid in preparing the manuscript. My final thanks go to my editor at The Penguin Press, Scott Moyers, who is every author’s dream of what an editor ought to be. He could not have been more helpful, and I am very grateful to him.

  GORDON S. WOOD

  Providence, Rhode Island

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  List of Illustrations

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  Becoming a Gentleman

  CHAPTER 2

  Becoming a British Imperialist

  CHAPTER 3

  Becoming a Patriot

  CHAPTER 4

  Becoming a Diplomat

  CHAPTER 5

  Becoming an American

  Notes

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Franklin’s birthplace on Milk Street, Boston, across from the Old South Church

  Franklin, portrait of a new gentleman, by Robert Feke, 1748

  Franklin’s house on Craven Street, London

  Franklin, by Benjamin Wilson, c. 1759

  Franklin, mezzotint by James McArdell, 1761

  Franklin, by Mason Chamberlain, 1762

  Franklin, mezzotint by Edward Fisher, 1763

  Deborah Franklin, by Benjamin Wilson, c. 1759

  Franklin, by David Martin, 1766

  Franklin, porcelain medallion by Josiah Wedgwood, 1778

  William F
ranklin, by Mather Brown, c. 1790

  Franklin as a Frenchman, engraving by Francois Martinet, 1773

  The Oath of the Horatii, by Jacques-Louis David, 1785

  Franklin, engraving by Augustin de Saint-Aubin, 1777, after a drawing by Charles-Nicholas Cochin

  To the Genius of Franklin, etching by Marguerite Gérard, after a design by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1778

  Franklin, porcelain medallion, Sévres ware, 1778

  Franklin, French school, c. 1783

  Franklin, bust by Jean-Jacques Caffiéri, 1777

  Franklin, bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1778

  Franklin, by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, 1778

  Franklin, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1777

  Franklin, by J. F. de L’Hospital, 1778

  Treaty of Paris, unfinished, by Benjamin West, 1783

  Franklin, by Charles Willson Peale, 1785

  Pat Lyon at the Forge, by John Neagle, 1826

  INTRODUCTION

  THE FOLKSY FOUNDER

  Benjamin Franklin has a special place in the hearts and minds of Americans. He is, of course, one of the most preeminent of the Founders, those heroic men from the era of wigs and knee breeches. Men as diverse as Henry Cabot Lodge and Garry Wills have ranked him along with Washington as the greatest of the Founders.1 Of these heroic men of the eighteenth century, Franklin seems to have a unique appeal. He seems the most accessible, the most democratic, and the most folksy of the Founders. His many portraits suggest an affable genial old man with spectacles and a twinkle in his eye ready to tell us a humorous story. He seems to be the one we would most like to spend an evening with. Ordinary people can identify with him in ways they cannot with the other Founders. Stern and thin-lipped George Washington, especially as portrayed by Gilbert Stuart, is too august and awesome to be approachable. Although Thomas Jefferson has democratic credentials, he is much too aristocratic and reserved for most people to relate to; besides, he was a slaveholder who failed to free most of his slaves. John Adams seems human enough, but he is too cranky and idiosyncratic to be in any way the kind of American hero ordinary folk can get close to. James Madison is much too shy and intellectual, and Alexander Hamilton is much too arrogant and hot tempered: neither of them makes a congenial popular idol. No, of all these great men of the eighteenth century, it is Franklin who seems to have the most common touch and who seems to symbolize better than any other Founder the plain democracy of ordinary folk.

  Indeed, perhaps no person in American history has taken on such emblematic and imaginative significance for Americans as has Franklin. We may not agree with his enemy John Adams that Franklin combined “practical cunning” with “theoretick Ignorance,” but we may well share Adams’s belief that he is “one of the most curious Characters in History.”2 Franklin has become, in the view of literary historian Perry Miller, one of the most “massively symbolic” figures in American history.3

  Scholars today tend not to believe anymore in the notion of an American character, but if there is such a thing, then Franklin exemplifies it. In 1888 William Dean Howells called Franklin “the most modern, the most American, of his contemporaries,” and many other commentators have agreed.4 He seems to have embodied much of what most Americans have valued throughout their history. His “homely aphorisms and observations,” one historian has written, “have influenced more Americans than the learned wisdom of all the formal philosophers put together.”5 Although Franklin was naturally talented, declared one nineteenth-century admirer, he achieved his success by character and conduct that were “within the reach of every human being.” All of his teachings entered into the “everyday manners and affairs” of people; they “pointed out the causes which may promote good and ill fortune in ordinary life.” That was what made him such a democratic hero.6

  Unlike the other great Founders, Franklin began as an artisan, a lowly printer who became the architect of his own fortune. He is the prototype of the self-made man, and his life is the classic American success story— the story of a man rising from the most obscure of origins to wealth and international preeminence. Franklin, the author of The Way to Wealth, has stood for American social mobility—the capacity of ordinary people to make it to the top through frugality and industry and to flourish. The unforgettable images of Franklin that he himself helped to create—the youth of seventeen with loaves of bread under his arms, the scientist flying a kite to capture lightning in a storm, the fervent moralist outlining his resolves that once followed will lead to success—have passed into American mythology and folklore. If any single figure could symbolize all of America, it was Franklin. Not surprisingly, he became for historian Frederick Jackson Turner and many subsequent biographers and panegyrists “the first great American.”7

  He was the nation itself, declared the Atlantic Monthly in 1889, “the personification of an optimistic shrewdness, a large, healthy nature, as of a young people gathering its strength and feeling its broadening power.” He has represented everything Americans like about themselves—their levelheadedness, common sense, pragmatism, ingenuity, and get-up-and-go. Because of his inventions of the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, and other useful instruments, he has been identified with the happiness and prosperity of common people in the here and now. He was the one, as an 1833 history of the United States put it, “who has made our dwellings comfortable within, and protected them from the lightning of heaven.” He spoke to common people, to “that rank of people who have no opportunity for study,” as the Columbian Class Book declared in 1827. He was, as one admirer wrote in 1864, “a genuine product of American soil.”8 Millions of people have quoted and tried to live their lives by his Poor Richard sayings and proverbs, such as “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.”9 Those who wanted to know the way to wealth read Franklin. He has stood for industry, frugality, thrift, and every materialistic virtue that Americans have valued.

  During the nineteenth century Franklin became not only an icon that ordinary people could emulate but also the most important mythical figure used to assimilate foreigners to American values. Franklin came to represent the America of innovation and enterprise, of moneymaking and getting ahead. He was everything that immigrants thought America was about. America, even into our own time, as one twenty-first-century immigrant put it, has remained “a land of opportunity, and one [where] if you worked hard you could get ahead.”10 No one has stood for that promise of getting ahead better than Franklin. Schools in the nineteenth century began using his Autobiography to teach moral lessons to students. Many people seemed to know his writings as well as they knew the Bible. It is not surprising that the book Davy Crockett had with him when he died at the Alamo was not the Bible but Franklin’s Autobiography"11

  DEBUNKING FRANKLIN

  So overwhelming did Franklin’s image of the boy who worked hard and made it become in the nineteenth century that humorists like Mark Twain could scarcely avoid mocking it. Franklin’s example, said Twain in 1870, had become a burden for every American youngster. The great man, said Twain, had “early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages. His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys forever—boys who might otherwise have been happy ... With a malevolence which is without parallel in history,” wrote Twain, “he would work all day and then sit up nights and let on to be studying algebra by the light of the smouldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them.”12

  As Twain’s sardonic humor suggests, Franklin has had many detractors. And most of them have been much more genuinely critical than Twain. Indeed, the criticism that Franklin has aroused over the past two centuries has been as extraordinary as the praise. Franklin may be the most folksy and popular figure among the Founding Fathers, yet at the same time he is also the one who has provoked the most derision.


  Of course, from the beginning of professional history-writing at the end of the nineteenth century, historians have been busy trying to strip away the many myths and legends that have grown up around all the Founding Fathers in order to get at the human beings presumably hidden from view. Indeed, during modern times this sort of historical debunking of the Founders has become something of a cottage industry. But the criticism leveled at Franklin has been different. Historians did not have to rip away a mantle of godlike dignity and loftiness from Franklin, as they had to do with the other Founders, in order to recover the hidden human being; Franklin already seemed human enough. Indeed, it was his Poor Richard ordinariness that made him vulnerable to criticism. As William Dean Howells noted, Franklin came down to the end of the nineteenth century “with more reality than any of his contemporaries.” Although this “by no means hurt him in the popular regard,” it certainly did not help his reputation with many intellectuals.13 Precisely because of his massive identification with middling and materialistic America, he became the Founder whom many critics most liked to mock. As John Keats pointed out as early as 1818, there was nothing sublime about Franklin, or about Americans in general, for that matter.14

  Like Franklin, Thomas Jefferson has often been identified with America, and thus he too has come in for some hard knocks, especially over the past generation, mostly for his hypocrisy, his ideological rigidity, and his unwillingness to free his slaves. But as intense as this criticism of Jefferson has been, it is not quite comparable to the ridicule and condemnation that Franklin has suffered over the past two centuries. Jefferson has never been accused of lacking elegance or of being a lackey of capitalism.