The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Page 31

  59. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), 3-203; Smith, quoted in Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 66; Bushman, King and People, 70.

  60. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 41—42.

  61. BF to Peter Collinson, 9 May 1753, in Papers of Franklin, 4:481. “The great aim [of the society],” writes historian Paul Langford, “was to become rich enough to be idle.” Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 38.

  62. Langford, Englishness Identified, 31.

  63. Derek Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1974), 79-80; Boston Evening Post, 14 Dec. 1761; BF, “On the Labouring Poor” (1768), in Franklin: Writings, 622-23.

  64. Aristotle, Politics, VII, ix, i328b33, trans. T. A. Sinclair, rev. by Trevor J. Saunders (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 415.

  65. Harrington, quoted in Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 28; Defoe, quoted in Speck, Stability and Strife, 32; Jackson to BF, 17 June 1755, in Papers of Franklin, 6:77.

  66. Venetia Murray, High Society in the Regency Period, 1788-1830 (London: Penguin, 1998), 22; H. D. Farish, ed., Journal and Letters of Fithian, 161. For an illuminating discussion of the ancient Roman aristocracy’s attitudes toward work and leisure, see Paul Veyne, “The Roman Empire,” in Paul Veyne, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. i, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, i987), ii7-59. The idea that the aristocracy had leisure while the common people worked, writes Veyne, “persisted from archaic Greece and India down to Benjamin Constant and Charles Maurras” (p. 123). Northern Americans swept away this ancient idea in the aftermath of their revolution.

  67. Buffon, quoted in Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, iyyo-ifioo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 19—20; Murray, High Society in the Regency Period, 22.

  68. Locke, quoted in Harold Nicolson, Good Behaviour: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 194; Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1730); Gaines, quoted in Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” i8n.

  69. “Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections 71 (1914): 661-66. “By the common people,” wrote John Adams in his Defence of the Constitutions, “we mean laborers, husbandmen, mechanics, and merchants in general, who pursue their occupations and industry without any knowledge in liberal arts or sciences, or in any thing but their own trades or pursuits.” C. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, 6:185.

  70. Rude, Hanoverian London, 37, 56—57.

  71. Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: Tradesmen of New York City in the Age ofJefferson (New York: New York University Press, i979), 295-322.

  72. BF, Autobiography, 117—18.

  73. Standing Queries for the Junto, 1732, in Papers of Franklin, 1:255—59.

  74. BF, Autobiography, 161—62.

  75. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 55—63, 76—77.

  76. BF, Observations on Reading History, 9 May 1731, in Papers of Franklin, 1:192—93; BF, Autobiography, 161—63.

  77. BF, Autobiography, 163.

  78. BF, Autobiography, 143, 130—31.

  79. BF, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency (1729), in Papers ofFranklin, i:i56, i44.

  80. On the Death of his Son, 30 Dec. 1736, in Papers of Franklin, 2:154.

  81. BF, Autobiography, 207.

  82. BF, Autobiography, 131, 93.

  83. BF, Poor Richard, 1741, in Papers of Franklin, 2:296; Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” i8.

  84. BF, “Obadiah Plainman,” Franklin: Writings, 275—83.

  85. Lemay, Canon of Franklin, 97—103.

  86. BF, “Tract Relative to the English School in Philadelphia” [1789].

  87. BF, “Idea of an English School,” 1751, in Papers of Franklin, 4:108.

  88. Robert Hare to BF, 14July 1789.

  89. BF, “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge,” 1743, in Franklin: Writings, 295—96; BF to Cadwallader Colden, 15 Aug. 1745, in Papers of Franklin, 3:36. See also H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 168; and Van Doren, Franklin, 139.

  90. BF, Plain Truth: Or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia and Province of Pennsylvania (1747), in Papers of Franklin, 3:201, and BF, “Anthony Afterwit,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 July 1732, ibid., 1:237.

  91. BF, “Blackamore, on Molatto Gentlemen,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 30 Aug. 1733, in Franklin: Writings, 219—20.

  92. Daniel Defoe, The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bulbring (London, 1890), 13. For a study of Defoe’s struggle with the question of gentility, see Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).

  93. BF, Autobiography, 126.

  94. Charles Coleman Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 2-3; Van Doren, Franklin, 125-29. Franklin was devastated by the death of little Franky and had the boy’s portrait painted following his death, with Franky’s face probably modeled after Franklin’s own, since the son was thought to resemble his father. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 11.

  95. BF, Autobiography, 171.

  96. Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” 16-17.

  97. BF, “Apology for Printers” (1731), in Franklin: Writings, 172.

  98. Botein, “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press,” 177, 181-87, 190; Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” 29-32.

  99. BF, Autobiography, 164.

  100. BF, Poor Richard, 1739, and Poor Richard Improved, 1750, in Papers of Franklin, 2:218, 7:326-50.

  101. BF, Autobiography, 172.

  102. BF to Strahan, 10 July 1743, 4 July 1744, in Papers of Franklin, 2:338-39, 409.

  103. BF, Autobiography, 166, 181; Ralph Frasca, “From Apprentice to Journeyman to Partner: Benjamin Franklin’s Workers and the Growth of the Early American Printing Trade,” PMHB114 (1990): 229-38.

  104. Van Doren, Franklin, 123; Brands, First American, 189; Articles of Agreement with David Hall, 1 Jan. 1748, Account of Money Received from David Hall, 1748-1757, in Papers of Franklin, 3:263; Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 112.

  105. Botein, “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press,” 167.

  106. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 42; Van Doren, Franklin, 188-89, 193.

  107. J.-P Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, iySS, trans. Mara Soceanu Vamos and Durand Echeverria (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), i88n; Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 61-62.

  108. In 1775 Franklin told his friends that “Most of the little Property I have, consists of Houses in the Seaport Towns,” which he assumed the British were going to burn. BF to John Sargent, 27 June 1775, and BF to Jonathan Shipley, 7 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:72, 95.

  109. Ronald W. Clark, Benjamin Franklin: A Biography (New York: Random House, (1983), 45.

  110. BF, Autobiography, 192.

  111. BF, Plain Truth (Phila., 1747), in Papers of Franklin, 3:188-204, quotation at 201.

  112. Richard Peters to the Proprietors, 29 Nov. 1747, in Papers of Franklin, 3:214-16.

  113. David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 130.

  114. BF, Observations on Reading History, 9 May 1731, in Papers of Franklin, 1:193; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 2:781-83.

  115. From Robert Grace: Lea
se, 30 Dec. 1745, BF to Colden, 29 Sept. 1748, and Josiah Franklin to BF, 26 May 1739, all in Papers of Franklin, 3:51, 318; 2:29-30^ John F Ross, “The Character of Poor Richard: Its Sources and Alterations,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 55 (1940): 785-94.

  116. BF, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One” (1748), in Franklin: Writings, 320-22.

  117. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 4-5, 25-28. Although Sellers dates this portrait no later than 1746, Wayne Craven more recently dates it at 1748, when Feke made a professional visit to Philadelphia. Wayne Craven, “The American and British Portraits of Benjamin Franklin,” in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 249.

  118. BF, Autobiography, 125-26, 172.

  119. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), 70.

  120. BF, Autobiography, 183.

  121. BF, Autobiography 238. In 1748 Franklin had refused to be a candidate for the assembly, but in 1751 after his retirement from business he gladly accepted election to the assembly. See BF to Colden, 29 Sept. 1748, in Papers of Franklin, 3:318.

  CHAPTER 2: BECOMING A BRITISH IMPERIALIST

  1. When the Anglican clergyman Samuel Johnson received Franklin’s plans for education reform in 1750 and learned that Franklin had only a tradesman’s education, he was surprised. “Nobody would imagine that the draught you have made for an English education was done by a Tradesman,” Johnson told Franklin in words that could only have warmed the former printer’s heart. “But so it sometimes is, a True Genius will not content itself without entering more or less into almost everything.” Samuel Johnson to BF, Nov. 1750. in Papers of Franklin, 4:74.

  2. BF, Autobiography, 196; BF to Cadwallader Colden, 29 Sept. 1748, in Papers of Franklin, 3:318.

  3. Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 6.

  4. BF to John Pringle, 1 Dec. 1762, in Papers of Franklin, 10:159-60; Morgan, Franklin,

  5. I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s “Experiments and Observations on Electricity”(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941), 48.

  6. Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 44-46.

  7. BF, Autobiography, 240.

  8. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938), 157; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 44.

  9. BF to Peter Collinson, 28 July 1747, in Papers of Franklin, 3:158.

  10. BF to Collinson, 28 Mar. 1747, in Papers of Franklin, 3:118-19.

  11. I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin: Scientist and Statesman (New York: Scribner, 1975), 50; Cohen, Franklin’s Experiments, 64-65, 72-73.

  12. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 45; BF to Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg and Thomas-Fran^ois Dalibard, c. 25 May 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:210-13.

  13. For a recent book that claims that Franklin never performed his kite experiment but told the story as a hoax, see Tom Tucker, Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). Most historians probably would agree with Walter Isaacson that Tucker’s argument is unpersuasive. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 534.

  14. Cohen very much doubts Franklin’s account in his Autobiography that some of his findings were “laughed at by connoisseurs” in the Royal Society. But to believe that obviously fit Franklin’s mood when he wrote his Autobiography. Cohen, Franklin’s Experiments, 80.

  15. Collinson to BF, 27 Sept. 1752, in Papers of Franklin, 4:358.

  16. BF to Jared Eliot, 12 Apr. 1753, 12 Sept. 1751, in Papers of Franklin, 4:466-67, 194.

  17. Cohen, Franklin: Scientist and Statesman, 65.

  18. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 47.

  19. BF, Autobiography, 209.

  20. Van Doren, Franklin, 170; BF to Collinson, 5 Nov. 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 7:11.

  21. Stiles to BF, 26 Feb. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:175. In 1773 Franklin was appointed a foreign associate of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, a special honor. The next American appointment did not come until nearly a century later, with the selection of Louis Agassiz. Cohen, Franklin’s Experiments, 117.

  22. BF to John Lining, 18 Mar. 1755, in Papers of Franklin, 5:526-27.

  23. BF to Colden, 11 Oct. 1750, in Papers of Franklin, 4:68.

  24. BF, Autobiography, 196.

  25. BF, Autobiography, 197.

  26. For a tough-minded account of Franklin’s involvement in Pennsylvania politics, see William S. Hanna, Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964).

  27. Thomas Penn to Richard Peters, 30 Mar., 9 June 1748, in Papers of Franklin, 3:i86n.

  28. BF, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” 1751, in Franklin: Writings, 367-74.

  29. Conyers Read, “The English Elements in Benjamin Franklin,” PMHB 64 (i940): 3i4.

  30. BF, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” 374. When the pamphlet was reprinted in 1760 and 1761, these references to the Palatine Boors were omitted, but they were certainly remembered by Franklin’s political enemies in i764. Papers ofFranklin, 4:234n.

  31. BF to James Parker, 20 Mar. i75i, in Papers of Franklin, 4:ii7-20. It is this statement by Franklin that has led to the invoking of the so-called Indian influence thesis, which misled some Americans in the 1980s and 1990s. Since Franklin was present at the Albany Congress, the Second Continental Congress, and the Constitutional Convention of i787, he was in a position, it was said, to present the model of the Iroquois union to his colleagues, and thus the Indians should be given their due in helping to create the Constitution. The theory is built on the assumption that the colonists had no previous experience with confederations and unions and needed the Iroquois to tell them about dividing political power. Yet the colonists’ history from the beginning had been all about the parceling of power upward, from the counties and towns to the colonial governments, and from the colonial governments to confederations, such as the New England Confederation of 1643. For the debate over the Indians’ presumed influence on the American Constitution and its refutation, see the succinct summary in Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 6-8, and the articles cited there.

  32. BF to Parker, 20 Mar. 1751, in Papers of Franklin, 4:117-20.

  33. On the Albany Congress, see the excellent study by Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads ofEmpire.

  34. BF, Autobiography, 210.

  35. BF to James Alexander and Colden, 8 June i754, in Papers ofFranklin, 5:335-38.

  36. BF to Colden, i4 July i754, in Papers ofFranklin, 5:392.

  37. BF, The Albany Plan of Union, 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:374-92, quotation at 390.

  38. BF to Collinson, 29 Dec. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:454.

  39. Theodore Draper, A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution (New York: Times Books, 1996), 26-48.

  40. Alison Gilbert Olson, “The British Government and Colonial Union,” WMQ_ 17 (I96o): 31.

  41. BF, Autobiography, 210.

  42. BF to Colden, 29 Sept. 1748, in Papers of Franklin, 3:319.

  43. BF to William Franklin, 14 Oct. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:438.

  44. BF to William Shirley, 3 Dec. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:443.

  45. The letters to Shirley of 3 and 22 December have not survived in manuscript form; they are known solely from their publication in the London Chronicle in 1766. The letter of December 4 we have only in the hand of an unknown copyist but signed by Franklin and endorsed by him, “Copy of a Letter to Gov. Shirley.” It also bears the notation “To P Collinson,” which is in Collinson’s own hand. The editors of volume 5 of the Papers of Franklin speculated that this
was the version furnished to Strahan, who published this letter and the others in the London Chronicle. I owe this information to Ellen Cohn, current editor in chief of the Papers ofFranklin.

  46. BF to Shirley, 4 Dec. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:443. William Blackstone, the great summarizer of eighteenth-century English law, did in fact consider the American colonies to be conquered countries. Because the English common law had no way of accounting for the acquisition of land except through descent or conquest, the legal status of the colonies remained problematic. William Black-stone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1765), 1:104-5. (I owe this reference to Craig Yirush.)

  47. BF to Shirley, 22 Dec. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:449-50; BF, Autobiography, 253.

  48. BF, Autobiography, 213.

  49. BF, Autobiography, 240.

  50. BF, Autobiography, 238-39.

  51. Richard Peters to Penn, 29 Apr., i June 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 7:73.

  52. William Peters to Penn, 4 Jan. 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 6:409; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 65.

  53. Colden to Collinson, 5 Nov. 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 7:i3n; BF to Collinson, 5 Nov. 1756, ibid., 7:13-15.

  54. BF to George Whitefield, 2 July 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 6:468.

  55. BF, A Plan for Settling Two Western Colonies, 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:459-60.

  56. BF to Whitefield, 2 July 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 6:468-69.

  57. BF to William Parsons, 22 Feb. 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:136.

  58. On the colonial agents in London during the era of the American Revolution, see Michael G. Kammen, A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968).

  59. BF to Joseph Galloway, 11 April 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:179. On the relationship between Franklin and Galloway, see Benjamin H. Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway: A Political Partnership (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).

  60. “Extracts from the Diary of Daniel Fisher, 1755,” PMHB 17 (1893): 276; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 60, 61, 69, 165.