The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  In attempting to carry out the elaborate moral injunctions he had set for himself, he said, he had difficulty in ordering his time. In fact, he tells us, he made so little progress and had so many relapses in ordering his life that he was “almost ready to give up the Attempt” and content himself “with a faulty Character in that respect.” At this point he injected the story of the speckled ax.

  A man had bought a new ax and now wanted to have the whole surface of his ax as bright as the edge. The smith who had sold him the ax consented to grind it bright for him if the man would turn the wheel. The smith pressed the broad face of the ax hard and heavy against the stone, which made turning it very fatiguing. The man, becoming more and more tired, kept leaving the wheel to see how the grinding was coming. Finally, the exhausted man declared he would take his ax as it was without further grinding. No, said the smith, keep turning and sooner or later we’ll have it bright; as yet, it was still only speckled. “Yes, says the Man; but—I think I like a speckled Ax best"

  This, said Franklin, was the way many people rationalized abandoning their efforts to break bad habits and establish good ones. They gave up the struggle “and concluded that a speckled Ax was best."

  It is stories like these that make interpreting Franklin and his Autobiography so difficult. Some otherwise sensitive readers have concluded from this anecdote that Franklin had learned his lesson—that seeking the sort of moral perfection that did violence to human nature was foolish. Indeed, Franklin himself suggests as much when he notes that every now and then he thought his entire project “might be a kind of Foppery in Morals,” which, if it became known, would make him “ridiculous.” He goes on to observe “that a perfect Character might be attended with the Inconvenience of being envied and hated,” and therefore “a benevolent Man should allow a few Faults in himself, to keep his Friends in Countenance.”

  On the face of it such suggestions make Franklin appear to be a reasonable man, someone who counsels good sense and moderation instead of maintaining utopian fantasies of moral perfection. But for Franklin such thinking was only “something that pretended to be Reason,” and not reason itself. With his seemingly sensible suggestions he was not really trying to justify giving up the effort to be morally perfect. The real message of his story is that one has to keep grinding away and not remain satisfied with a speckled ax.

  Although Franklin admits that he had not attained moral perfection in his lifetime but had fallen far short of it, “yet I was by the Endeavour a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been, if I had not attempted it.” In other words, Franklin tells us the delightful story of the speckled ax only to deny its lesson at the end. Any reader, however, is bound to be overwhelmed by the charm of the anecdote and the power of the rationalizations that excuse a less than perfect moral character. Hence, Franklin leaves us with a very morally ambiguous message. Which is why so many different readers can draw so many different lessons from the Autobiography, and indeed, from all of his writings.9

  Franklin wanted his posterity to know, he says, that even at the age of seventy-eight this “little Artifice” of self-examination was the source of the health and felicity of his life. Above all, he owed “to the joint Influence of the whole Mass of the Virtues, even in their imperfect State he was able to acquire them, all that Evenness of Temper, & that Chearfulness in Conversation which makes his Company still sought for, & agreeable even to his younger Acquaintance.”10

  As this boast indicates and as Franklin disarmingly admitted, he never had much success “in acquiring the Reality ” of the virtue of humility, but he “had a good deal with regard to the Appearance of it.” Humility, he said, had not been on his original list of virtues; he had added it only because a friend had told him that he was too proud. Franklin was well aware of his pride and its near relation, vanity. He had begun his Autobiography by admitting the overwhelming power of vanity. “Most People,” he had written in 1771, “dislike Vanity in others whatever Share they have of it themselves.” But Franklin knew better. “I give it fair Quarter whenever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of Good to the Possessor and to others that are within his Sphere of Action.” Now in 1784 at the end of the second part of his Autobiography he was still struggling with the vanity and pride in himself that he could not help feeling and that he knew were the real sources of his benevolence and success in life. Pride, he conceded, was the hardest passion to subdue. “Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself.” Even if he could completely overcome his pride, he would probably then be proud of his humility.11

  A STRANGER IN MY OWN COUNTRY

  After the peace treaty was signed, Franklin reluctantly realized that he ought to end his days in America. But he had come to love France. It was “the civilest Nation upon Earth,” he believed, and the French were “a delightful People to live with.”12 On at least two occasions he expressed a strong desire to settle there for good.13 The first time was when he tried to arrange a marriage between his grandson Temple and the daughter of

  Monsieur and Madame Brillon. To convince the Brillons that their daughter would not be taken away with Temple, Franklin promised not only to secure a diplomatic post in Europe for his grandson but also to remain in France for the rest of his life. The Brillons found reasons to put Franklin off, and the matter was dropped.

  The second time Franklin declared he would remain in France was when he proposed marriage to Anne-Catherine Helvétius, the widow of the philosopher. Madame Helvétius was over sixty but still lively and attractive. But, more important, she maintained a spirited salon in Auteuil, next to Passy, that was celebrated for its wit and irreverence. Franklin, like many others, was smitten with her. “I see that statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets, and men of learning of all sort are drawn around you, and seem as willing to attach themselves to as straws about a fine piece of amber,” he once told her. “We find in your sweet society, that charming benevolence, that amiable attention to oblige, that disposition to please and be pleased, which we do not always find in the society of one another. It springs from you; it has its influence on us all; and in your company we are not only pleased with you, but better pleased with one another and with ourselves.”14 It may have been Madame Helvétius who inspired Franklin’s famous compliment, the kind of bon mot that any eighteenth-century French aristocratic woman would have prized. When one of these French ladies reproached the doctor for putting off a visit she had expected, Franklin, taken aback, supposedly replied, “Madame, I am waiting until the nights are longer.”15

  Franklin was so admiring of Madame Helvétius that he wanted everyone to meet her. When he introduced John Adams’s wife, Abigail, to her, however, the puritanical lady from Massachusetts was not at all impressed; in fact, she was disgusted, as she was with Paris in general. Madame Helvétius was much too bold and loose for Mrs. Adams’s taste, bawling out her greetings, throwing her arms about her dinner partners’ chairs, sprawling on a settee, “where she shew more than her feet.”16 John Adams agreed with his wife about the dissolute behavior he observed in the Helvétius household. “Oh Mores,” he said. “What Absurdities, Inconsistencies, Distractions and Horrors would these Manners introduce into our Republican Governments in America: No kind of Republican Government can ever exist with such national manners as these. Cavete Americani.”17

  Franklin shared none of this kind of straitlaced American reaction to French manners. He understood the French and was charmed by them, and especially by Madame Helvétius and the warm and bantering cheekiness of her household. He repeatedly proposed to her, but always with a certain playful detachment so their pride would not be endangered. His French friends, however, thought he was quite serious and blamed Madame Helvétius for letting him go. If Madame Helvétius had accepted him, the most expert authority on Franklin’s female relations believes, the good doctor would never have re
turned to America.18

  One can hardly blame him for wanting to stay in Europe. He was an old man, and, as John Adams noted, Frenchwomen had “an unaccountable passion for old age.”19 Franklin had spent all but three and a half years out of the previous twenty-seven years abroad, the last eight years in France. “I am here among a People that love and respect me, a most amiable Nation to live with,” he wrote in 1784, “and perhaps I may conclude to die among them; for my Friends in America are dying off one after another, and I have been so long abroad that I should now be almost a Stranger in my own Country”—a phrase that he had used repeatedly over the previous decade or so when he thought about returning to America.20 Indeed, all his most cherished friends were in Europe, not America; and his former close American confidants—Joseph Galloway and his own son William—had become loyalists, and he would have nothing to do with them. But even more important, his intimate connection with France and the symbolic importance he had had for France as an American—the very things that had helped make possible French aid to America—were now being turned against him by his fellow Americans.

  By 1783 some of his countrymen had come to believe that he was more loyal to France than to America. He seemed entirely too close to the French, hobnobbing with members of the French aristocracy and spending much too much time with Frenchwomen in their salons. He even received from Louis XVI the gift of a small box containing the king’s portrait. Edmund Randolph later declared that Franklin’s accepting this gift was what led the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to insert in the Constitution the clause prohibiting officials of the United States from accepting presents or emoluments from foreign princes or states. The members of the Convention, said Randolph at the Virginia ratifying convention, had wanted to avoid in the future any possibility of foreign princes’ corrupting America’s ambassadors, in the manner in which some Americans in the early 1780s thought Franklin had been corrupted.21

  In May 1783, Samuel Cooper, a clergyman friend in Boston, wrote Franklin that a party in America, based on information coming from John Adams, was casting doubt on his patriotism. Word was spreading, said Cooper, that Franklin was not to be trusted and that “it was entirely owing to the Firmness, Sagacity and Disinterestedness of M. Adams, with whom Mr. Jay united,” that prevented American interests from being sacrificed to those of France.22 These reports hurt Franklin deeply After the final peace treaty was signed in September 1783, he sent a letter to all his fellow commissioners poignantly denying such charges. He knew he did not have long to live, he said, but he did not want to go to his grave with the world thinking that he had less “Zeal and Faithfulness” to America than any of his colleagues. He was not willing to “suffer an accusation, which falls little short of Treason to my Country, to pass without Notice.”23 He asked each of his fellow commissioners to certify his contribution to the peace negotiations in order, he said, to destroy the effects of these accusations. That the aged diplomat should have been reduced to such a humiliating request says a great deal about how differently France and America had come to view the great Dr. Franklin.

  Still, with the letters from James and Vaughan and the writing of the second part of his Autobiography, he now knew that his destiny was linked to America. He had come to realize that the “Revolution” that he had “hardly expected I should live to see” and that he had done so much to bring to success had become “an important Event for the Advantage of Mankind in general.”24

  But the Continental Congress still had not answered his request to be recalled, leaving him uncertain about what to do. “During my long Absence from America,” he told the secretary of the Congress Charles Thomson in May 1784, “my Friends are continually diminishing by Death, and my Inducement to return in Proportion.”25 Not only were his close friends in America dying off, but he also knew he had acquired many enemies in their place. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Franklin wanted his grandson Temple, who had been the secretary of the peace commission, to deliver the treaty to Congress. Instead, that honor went to a protege of Adams who had not been involved in the peace negotiations at all. Since Franklin thought of Temple “as a Son who makes up to me my Loss by the Estrangement of his Father,” he next asked Congress to name his twenty-four-year-old grandson secretary of the new commission designed to sign commercial treaties with the European nations. He even hoped that Temple might be named his successor to France. Or perhaps his grandson could be appointed American minister to Sweden. But Congress was now in the hands of his enemies and the outlook was not promising. Richard Henry Lee had become president of Congress. As Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, dryly noted of Lee, “He is no friend to us, or our connections.”26

  Franklin’s enemies in Congress now saw that they could get at Franklin through his grandson. Not only did Temple have “no Prospect of promotion,” but, wrote a gloating Elbridge Gerry to John Adams, Franklin’s grandson “has been actually superseded” by the appointment of Colonel David Humphreys, a protege of Washington, as secretary of the new commission. Once he saw these congressional actions, said Gerry, Franklin “will have no Reason to Suppose that his Conduct is much approved.” Indeed, said Gerry, Congress had ceased being “reserved ... with respect to the Doctor.” Franklin had become so useless that “it has become a matter of Indifference to Us, whether We employ him or the Count de Vergennes to negotiate our Concerns at the Court of Versailles.”27

  Rumors now abounded in both America and Britain that Franklin and his loyalist son William had been in collusion all along—each taking a side in order to protect the family regardless of who won the war. In November 1784 a New Yorker friend of William Franklin warned Temple not to get too close to his grandfather, for the old man’s “Influence” in America was “very small.” Even the reputation of the Marquis de Lafayette had been injured by his attempts to keep Franklin in France during the peace negotiations. These efforts by Lafayette “led People to suspect that he meant only to retain a Man that was perfectly subservient to his Court.” Although this friend of William Franklin certainly exaggerated the weakness of Franklin’s influence among his countrymen, he was not entirely wrong. Franklin in 1784 was not the important Founder he would later become. This cynical New Yorker knew what the Revolution meant and had some parting words of advice for Temple: “Make friends of every American, for in Republican Governments, you have many to please.”28

  Finally, in May 1785, Franklin received word from Congress that his mission was over and that he could return to America. Thomas Jefferson had arrived and was named American minister to France. Unlike Adams, Jefferson got along splendidly with Franklin. For Jefferson, Franklin was “the ornament of our country, and I may say, of the world.”29 He liked to tell the French that he could never be Franklin’s replacement as minister. He might succeed Dr. Franklin, but nobody could replace him.

  Franklin’s reputation in Europe was extraordinary. A professor in Prague called him the Solon, the Socrates, and the Seneca of the present day. Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville called him “the ornament of the New World” and “a leader of modern philosophy.” Another European dubbed him “the Cato of his age.” From England, Erasmus Darwin (another great inventor and polymath and the grandfather of Charles Darwin) addressed him as “the greatest Statesman of the present, or perhaps of any century,” who single-handedly had spread liberty among his countrymen and “deliver’d them from the house of bondage, and the scourge of oppression.” From Florence, from Switzerland, from France, from all over Europe he was hailed as a great politician and scientist and the first man of the universe.30

  Franklin knew that he was respected abroad, but he remained uncertain about his reputation in his own country. Jefferson too was uncertain of how his fellow Americans would regard the returning Franklin. Writing from Paris in 1785, Jefferson knew that Franklin was “infinitely esteemed” in Europe. But he was very anxious that his fellow Americans might not know just how much Europeans esteemed Franklin and thus might not treat him properly.
Jefferson, who was always acutely sensitive to what liberal Europeans thought of America, more than once warned James Monroe, an influential member of the Congress, that “Europe fixes an attentive eye on your reception of Doctr. Franklin.” The way Americans receive Franklin, Jefferson told his fellow Virginian, “will weigh in Europe as an evidence of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of America with their revolution.”31

  THE RETURN TO PHILADELPHIA

  Franklin arrived home in Philadelphia on September 14, 1785, and was met by cheering crowds and ringing bells—an “affectionate Welcome” that he claimed “was far beyond my Expectations.”32 With a population of fewer than forty thousand people, Philadelphia was no Paris or London, but it was booming and had become not only the largest city in America but its commercial and cultural center as well. Philadelphia had the only bank and the only library in the country that was open to the public—the Library Company, which Franklin had helped to found. The city also was the center of medical education in the nation and contained the most well-known scientific society in the country, the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin had also founded. Franklin’s spirit was still present, for the city had just formed a society for the promotion of agriculture, and it was taking the lead in humanitarian reforms of various sorts. The city’s artisans were organizing as never before and were demonstrating more political strength than they had had in Franklin’s day

  Franklin no sooner landed than Charles Willson Peale, a Philadelphia artist of many talents, painted his portrait (see page 214), which Peale displayed in a gallery of Revolutionary heroes. It was one of the most accurate portrayals done of Franklin as an old man, complete with the new bifocal spectacles he had invented. Peale issued mezzotint prints based on his portrait, and Franklin’s face was soon spread about the city. Peale attempted another portrait in 1789; but Franklin was too ill to sit, and Peale had to base his new picture on his original of 1785.