The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  THE REACTION TO FRANKLIN’S DEATH

  Inevitably, the French reacted to Franklin’s death with greater emotion than did his fellow Americans—no doubt in part because the French were in the beginning stages of their own revolution and needed Franklin more than ever as a symbol of the new order. On June 11, 1790, amid a discussion in the French National Assembly of whether titles of nobility ought to be abolished, the great orator the Comte de Mirabeau rose to announce that “Franklin estmort."He called upon the assembly to honor “this mighty genius” who was most responsible for spreading the rights of man throughout the world. Franklin, he said, was a philosopher “who was able to conquer both thunderbolts and tyrants.” The assembly, electrified by Mirabeau’s speech, decreed three days of national mourning for Franklin.

  The French at once recognized the extraordinary significance of this gesture, the first of its kind by the National Assembly. By speaking for the entire nation and usurping a right that hitherto had belonged to the king, the assembly had become, said one French journal, “the representative assembly of the human race, the Areopagus of the universe.” Bursting with enlightened enthusiasm, Brissot de Warville declared that the National Assembly’s declaration of national mourning for Franklin was an act of utter sublimity unmatched by any political body in Europe.

  That summer the National Assembly sent a message to the President and Congress of the United States expressing France’s gratitude to Franklin, “the Nestor of America,” for his contributions to liberty and the rights of man. Although Franklin was a foreigner, the National Assembly declared, the French people regarded him, as they regarded all great men, as one of the “fathers of universal humanity.” His name “will be immortal in the records of Freedom and Philosophy,” and his loss will be felt by all parts of humanity, but especially by the French, who were taking their “first steps towards liberty.” The National Assembly hoped that it and the American Congress would march together in affection and understanding down the road toward freedom and happiness.

  For months French aristocrats and philosophes delivered eulogy after eulogy in praise of the simple philosopher of humanity who had taught them so much about liberty and the foolishness of vain titles and hereditary distinctions. As late as 1792 the French linked the names and busts of Franklin, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Mirabeau as promoters of liberty and equality.71 No other foreigner ever received such tributes from France as did Franklin. French mourning amounted to what one historian has called “a republican apotheosis of Franklin.”72

  This expression of French affection and adulation for Franklin contrasted sharply with what happened in America. To be sure, Franklin’s death aroused crowds of ordinary mourners in Philadelphia, and under James Madison’s leadership the House of Representatives adopted a moving tribute to Franklin on April 22, 1790, and urged its members to wear badges of mourning for a month. But the next day, when Senator Charles Carroll proposed that the Senate adopt a similar tribute to Franklin, several senators leaped to their feet in opposition even before the proposal could be seconded. Senator Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut urged that the proposal be withdrawn since it was sure to be defeated. Consequently, the Senate did nothing.

  The Senate’s behavior was extraordinary but explicable. The president of the Senate, Vice President John Adams, had long been jealous of Franklin, and of Washington too for that matter. On April 4, two weeks before Franklin’s death, Adams spilled out to Benjamin Rush his accumulated resentment of the ill-deserved adulation that other Revolutionary leaders were receiving, seemingly at his expense. “The history of our Revolution,” he told Rush with biting sarcasm, “will be one continued Lye from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical Rod, smote the Earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod—and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislatures and War.”73

  Inevitably then, Adams, as president of the Senate, was in no mood to honor Franklin. Several senators, namely Richard Henry Lee and Ralph Izard, inveterate enemies of Franklin, shared Adams’s hostility. But other senators, such as Rufus King and William Samuel Johnson, who were not longtime enemies of Franklin, nonetheless also opposed endorsing the House’s tribute. Their opposition to honoring Franklin had more to do with their dislike of the disorder of the emerging French Revolution, with which they now identified Franklin.

  For a decade French philosophes had vigorously criticized the American constitutions for slavishly imitating the English constitution in their bicameral legislatures and separation of powers. Since Franklin himself had favored a unicameral legislature and a weak executive, he came to represent in the eyes of the Federalist opponents of the French Revolution all of the democratic turbulence that they feared for America. So that when the Senate early in 1791 received several communications from France honoring Franklin, including the tribute from the National Assembly, it treated these French tributes with what Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania called astonishing “coldness and apathy.” What will the French think, Maclay wrote in his diary, when they find out that “we cold as Clay, care not a fig about them, Franklin or Freedom”?74

  For months Americans paid not a word of public tribute to Franklin. Although the American Philosophical Society decided two days after

  Franklin’s funeral to eulogize its founder and former president, it delayed its eulogy for almost a year. The two vice presidents of the society, the scientist David Rittenhouse and the Anglican priest William Smith, received an equal number of the members’ votes to deliver the eulogy; and consequently for months nothing was done. When the French tributes arrived and were opened early in 1791, however, the delay became embarrassing. Smith was finally selected as the eulogist, and the occasion became far more important and public than had originally been intended; in fact, it became as close to an official eulogy of Franklin as the nation ever managed.

  Smith had long been one of Franklin’s enemies. In fact, back in 1764 he had accused Franklin of being an “inflammatory and virulent man,” with a “foul” mouth and “crafty” and “wicked” spirit.75 Thus, it is not surprising that his eulogy, delivered in Philadelphia on March 1, 1791, before an audience of dignitaries from the city, state, and nation, was what one literary historian has called “a half-hearted, colorless piece ... an artificial, uninspired, rhetorical exercise.”76

  Smith began by confessing that he was perhaps not the best person to be presenting the eulogy, the truth of which statement he proceeded to demonstrate. He first linked Franklin with two other patriots who had recently died, William Livingston, governor of New Jersey, and James Bowdoin, governor of Massachusetts—as if Franklin’s stature was no different from theirs. He next apologized for Franklin’s “low beginnings” and quickly passed over them. Smith admitted that he had a hard time describing Franklin’s participation in Pennsylvania politics since he himself was “too much an actor in the scene to be fit for the discussion of it.” Smith then summed up Franklin’s contributions to the Revolution in a single short paragraph, declaring they were “too well known to need further mention.”

  Throughout the eulogy Smith emphasized that Franklin was “ignorant of his own strength” implying at times that Franklin did not know what he was doing. Smith did spend some time praising Franklin’s electrical experiments, emphasizing Franklin’s “caution and modesty” in communicating his findings in the form of guesses. “But,” said Smith, “no man ever made bolder or happier guesses, either in philosophy or politics." It was true, Smith conceded, that Franklin never troubled himself with using mathematics to prove his speculations, but most of the time he guessed right. Smith quoted a letter of Jefferson’s describing the fame Franklin enjoyed abroad, which he used to sum up Franklin’s role as diplomat during the Revolution. Aside from listing a half dozen of Franklin’s inventions and experiments, Smith did not have very much to say about what Franklin actually had contributed to America and the world. Even what
little backhanded praise Smith could manage may have been a strain. When Smith’s daughter asked him whether he believed one tenth of what he had said about “old Ben Lightning Rod,” he only roared with laughter.77

  In contrast to this single homage paid Franklin, Washington received hundreds of eulogies at his death a decade later. Even someone like James Bowdoin received at least a dozen funeral tributes. The relatively weak American response to Franklin’s death was remarkable, and it shocked the French minister in America, Louis Otto. He reported home that “the memory of Dr. Franklin has been infinitely more honored in France than in America.”78

  Indeed, the more France honored Franklin, the more Franklin’s image suffered, at least in the eyes of those Americans opposed to the French Revolution. The Federalists in the 1790s, believing that the Republican party’s opposition to their leadership was fomented by the French Revolution, saw in Franklin a symbol of much of what they feared and hated. The fact that the Federalists’ principal vilifier in the press was Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache, the intemperate editor of the Philadelphia General Advertiser (later called the Aurora), only added to their dislike of Franklin.

  Bache, called “Lightning-Rod Junior” by the Federalists, was notorious for his scurrilous attacks on President Washington and the Federalists. And inevitably the Federalists replied to this scurrility by assaulting Bache’s grandfather for being, in the words of William Cobbett, the fiery immigrant from England, “a whore-master, a hypocrite, and an infidel.”79 Joseph Dennie, the arch-Federalist editor of the Anglophilic Port Folio, dismissed Franklin as “one of our first Jacobins, the first to lay his head in the lap of French harlotry; and prostrate the christianity and honour of his country to the deism and democracies of Paris.”80 It became conventional

  Federalist wisdom that Franklin had been “a dishonest, tricking, hypocritical character” who had championed French infidelity and fanaticism.81

  THE CELEBRATION OF WORK

  At the same time, however, the publication of Franklin’s Autobiography and some of his other writings in the 1790s began to create a quite different image of Franklin, at least among those who did not share the Federalists’ view of the world. With the emergence of all sorts of middling people into unprecedented prominence in the northern Republican party, the image of Franklin became a political football, to be kicked about and used and abused in the decade’s turbulent politics.82

  In his will Franklin had bequeathed all his papers to Temple Franklin, who planned to publish the complete life along with his grandfather’s other works. Temple was surprised, however, to learn of the publication in 1791 of a French translation of the first part of his grandfather’s memoir.83 Although Temple tried to prevent an English version of the French edition, two English translations appeared in London in 1795. One of these translations was combined with a short life of Franklin written by Henry Stuber, which had originally appeared serially in Philadelphia in the Universal Asylum, and Columbia Magazine beginning with the May 1790 issue. Between 1794 and 1800 this collection was reprinted at least fourteen times in the United States.84 Franklin’s Way to Wealth also began to be frequently reprinted. Although Temple did not bring out his own edition of Franklin’s papers until 1817-1818, many Americans were already very familiar with the early life of Franklin.

  Although the aristocratic Federalists described Franklin as a French-loving radical whose writings had sought “to degrade literature to the level of vulgar capacities ...by the vile alloy of provincial idioms and colloquial barbarism,” many middling Americans—tradesmen, artisans, farmers, proto-businessmen of all sorts—found in these popular writings a middling hero they could relate to.85 As early as Independence Day 1795, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of New York, composed of both masters and journeymen, toasted “the memory of our late brother mechanic, Benjamin Franklin: May his bright example convince mankind that in this land of freedom and equality, talents joined to frugality and virtue, may justly aspire to the first offices of government.”86 Everywhere master mechanics and journeymen alike began naming their associations and societies after Franklin and turning the former craftsman into a symbol of their cause. Printers especially were eager to use Franklin to justify their enhanced status as something other than mechanics. They wanted the world to know that they were a “profession” whose higher branches were “not mechanical, nor bounded by rules, but... soar to improvements ... valuable to science and humanity.”87

  The cause of these artisans was the cause of working and middling people throughout America. For too long, they said, “tradesmen, mechanics, and the industrious classes of society” had considered “themselves of TOO LITTLE CONSEQUENCE to the body politic.”88 But now, in the aftermath of a Revolution dedicated to liberty and equality, they said, things were to be different. These laboring people began organizing themselves in Democratic-Republican societies, and eventually they came to make up the body and soul of the northern part of the Republican party. Throughout their extraordinary speeches and writings of these years, these middling sorts vented their pent-up egalitarian anger at all those leisured aristocratic gentry who had scorned them because they had had to work for a living. For a half century following the Revolution these ordinary men stripped the northern Federalist gentry of their aristocratic pretensions, charged them at every turn with being idle drones, and relentlessly undermined their traditional role as rulers. In their celebration of productive labor, these middling working people came to dominate nineteenth-century northern American culture and society to a degree not duplicated elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

  In the 1790s, when Jeffersonian Republicans such as Abraham Clark, Matthew Lyon, and William Manning described themselves as members of “the industrious part of the community,” they meant all those, wage earners and employers alike, who lived by their labor. In other words, Franklin, as a wealthy printer and entrepreneur before he retired from business in 1748 and became a gentleman, would have been regarded as one of these laborers. Against them, artisans and farmers charged, were all those Federalist gentry who were “not... under the necessity of getting their bread by industry,” which included “the merchant, phisition, lawyer & divine, the philosipher and school master, the Juditial & Executive Officers, & many others.” Such gentlemen, they said, lived off “the labour of the honest farmers and mechanics”; their “idleness” rested on “other men’s toil.”89

  So successful was this assault on the Federalist gentry, so overwhelming was the victory of these middling sorts in their celebration of labor, that by the early nineteenth century, in the northern parts of America at least, almost everyone had to claim to be a laborer. Even the aristocratic slaveholding planter George Washington now had to be described as a productive worker. Washington’s popular biographer Parson Mason Weems (the inventor of the cherry tree myth) knew instinctively that he had to celebrate the great man as someone who worked as diligently as an ordinary mechanic. Of course, in a classical sense Washington had never worked a day in his life; he had been a farmer like Cicero who exercised authority over his plantation but had not actually labored on it. But for Weems and other spokesmen for the middling workers, exercising authority now became identified with labor and was praised as labor. Indeed, Weems wrote, “of all the virtues that adorned the life of this great man, there is none more worthy of our imitation than his admirable INDUSTRY.” Washington “displayed the power of industry more signally” than any man in history. Rising early and working hard all day were the sources of his wealth and success. He was “on horseback by the time the sun was up,” and he never let up; “of all that ever lived, Washington was the most rigidly observant of those hours of business which were necessary to the successful management of his vast concerns.... Neither himself nor any about him were allowed to eat the bread of idleness,” idleness being for Weems “the worst of crimes.”

  Speaking to the new rising generation of entrepreneurs, businessmen, and others eager to get ahead, Weem
s was anxious to destroy the “notion, from the land of lies,” which had “taken too deep root among some, that ‘labour is a low-lived thing, fit for none but poor people and slaves! and that dress and pleasure are the only accomplishments for a gentleman!’” He urged all the young men who might be reading his book, “though humble thy birth, low thy fortune, and few thy friends, still think of Washington, and HOPE.”90

  Yet for these middling people who were eager to celebrate the dignity of working for a living, it was Franklin, the onetime printer, who became the Founding Father most easily transformed into a workingman’s symbol.91 Indeed, no one became more of a hero to all those laboring people than Franklin. High-toned Federalists could only shake their heads in disgust at all those vulgar sorts who had come to believe “that there was no other road to the temple of Riches, except that which run through—Dr. Franklin’s works.”92 Everywhere, but in the northern states especially, speakers, writers, and publicists sought to encourage young men of lowly backgrounds to work hard and raise themselves up as Franklin had. They reached out beyond the cities to ordinary people in country towns and villages and followed Franklin’s example in creating libraries, schools, almanacs, and printed matter of all sorts for broader and deeper levels of the working population. In 1802 teacher and smalltime entrepreneur Silas Felton joined with thirteen other men in Marlborough, Massachusetts, to found a Society of Social Enquirers and urged others to follow this example. “Doct. Franklin relates, in his life,” Felton pointed out, “that he received a considerable part of his information in this way.”93