The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  Diplomacy: Franklin in Paris, Couronne par la Liberte” in Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Knopf, 2003), 60-99.

  53. According to Darcy R. Fryer, one of the editors of the Papers of Franklin, the story of the chamber pot adorned with Franklin’s face on the bottom probably originated with Madame Campan, Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette (London, 1823), 1:230-31. Campan wrote that Louis XVI “had a vase de nuit made at Sevres manufactory at the bottom of which, was the medallion [of Franklin] with its fashionable legend, and he sent the utensil to the countess Diana as a new year’s gift.” H-Net/OIEAHC, 11 Dec. 2001.

  54. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:81.

  55. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 61.

  56. BF to Emma Thompson, 8 Feb. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 23:298. Franklin had long thought about the political implications of dress. “Simplicity is the homespun Dress of Honesty, and Chicanery and Craft are the Tinsel Habits and the false Elegance which are worn to cover the Deformity of Vice and Knavery,” he had written in 1732. BF, On Simplicity, 1732, in Writings of Franklin, 181-84. On the political significance of clothing and dress, see Michael Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies: From Home-Spun to Ready-Made,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1553-86.

  57. BF to William Carmichael, 29 July 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 27:176.

  58. Ronald C. Clark, Benjamin Franklin: A Biography (New York: Random House, j983X 34l

  59. BF, “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” (1747), in Papers of Franklin, 3:120-25; Van Doren, Franklin, 721-22; Max Hall, Benjamin Franklin and Polly Baker: The History of a Literary Deception (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, i960).

  60. The famous preface to Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1758, known in different versions as “Father Abraham’s Speech” and The Way to Wealth, was reprinted at least i45 times in seven different languages before the end of the eighteenth century and many times since. BF, Autobiography, i64n.

  61. BF, Poor Richard Improved, 1758, Papers of Franklin, 7:342. Most of the Poor Richard sayings, as Franklin’s persona admitted, were not of his own making. They were gleaned from a variety of sources, ranging from the works of George Herbert and James Howell to the writings of Thomas Fuller, Lord Halifax, and Samuel Richardson. He even borrowed some from Montaigne. He usually modified the borrowed sayings by making them more simple, more concrete, more euphonious, and often more bawdy. See Bruce Ingham Granger, Benjamin Franklin: An American Man of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, i964), 65-75.

  62. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 50.

  63. BF to Robert Livingston, 4 Mar. 1782 in Papers of Franklin, 36:646.

  64. Comte de Vergennes to Marquis de Lafayette, 7 Aug. 1780, in StanleyJ. Idzerda et al., eds., Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776—1790 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 3:130. Actually French views have not much changed. In 2001 the wife of French president Jacques Chirac told her fellow citizens what made her husband a perfect public official. “He is not a money man,” she said. “Money has never been any kind of motivation for him. Never.” International Herald Tribune, 11 Apr. 2002.

  65. BF, Positions to Be Examined, 4 Apr. 1769, BF to Jane Mecom, 30 Dec. 1770, BF, Last Will and Testament, 22 June 1750, and BF to Dumas, 6 Aug. 1781, all in Papers of Franklin, 16:109; 17:315; 3:481; 35:341.

  66. See J. A. Leo Lemay, The Canon of Benjamin Franklin: New Attributions and Reconsiderations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 53, for Franklin’s harsh views on commercial dealings.

  67. Commissioners to Committee of Secret Correspondence, 12 Mar-7 Apr. 1777, in Papers ofFranklin, 23:467.

  68. Commissioners to Committee of Secret Correspondence, 12 Mar-7 Apr. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 23:467. On the lack of guidance from Congress, see Jonathan R. Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat: The French Mission,” American Philosophical Society, Transactions 72 (1982), 68-69.

  69. Van Doren, Franklin, 650.

  70. BF to Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg?, after 2 Oct. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 25:21.

  71. BF to Richard and Sally Bache, 10 May, 1785.

  72. Currey, Code No. 72. Elizabeth M. Nuxoll, one of the editors of the Robert Morris Papers, has suggested that the charges of Franklin’s being a British spy come from these murky circumstances in which the commissioners were secretly trying to manipulate the release of information. H-Net/OIEAHC, 7 Apr. 1999.

  73. George III, quoted in Van Doren, Franklin, 573.

  74. Samuel F. Bemis, “British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance,” American Historical Review 29 (1923-1924): 474-95; David Schoenbrun, Triumph in Paris: The Exploits of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat,” 33-42.

  75. BF to Juliana Ritchie, 19 Jan. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 23:211.

  76. It is Franklin’s casual, even sloppy, attitude toward spying and record keeping that convinced Cecil B. Currey that Franklin “—covertly perhaps, tacitly at least, possibly deliberately—cooperated with and protected” a British spy cell operating out of his home in France. Unfortunately, Currey seems to have forgotten what Franklin said about his inability to maintain order in his affairs. Currey, Code No. 72,12.

  77. Claude-Anne Lopez, My Life with Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 61-72.

  78. For a balanced study of Lee, see Louis W. Potts, Arthur Lee: A Virtuous Revolutionary (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).

  79. Morgan, Franklin, 259-60.

  80. Arthur Lee to Committee of Foreign Affairs, 1 June 1778, and Ralph Izard to Henry Laurens, 29 June 1778, in Francis Wharton, ed., The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1889), 2:600-603, 629-31.

  81. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:87. In addition to telling John Adams that Franklin was more to be mistrusted than Deane, Izard told him that “Dr. Franklin was one of the most unprincipled Men upon Earth: that he was a Man of no Veracity, no honor, no Integrity, as great a Villain as ever breathed.” Ibid.

  82. BF to Laurens, 31 Mar. 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 26:203-4. See also BF to James Lovell, 21 Dec. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 25:329-30.

  83. A. Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 12 Sept. 1778, quoted in Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 235.

  84. John Adams thought that Deane’s public denunciation of the Congress in December 1778 was “the most astonishing Measure, the most unexpected and unforeseen Event, that has ever happened, from the Year 1761... to this Moment.” It seemed to threaten the existence of the Confederation and French confidence in America. Since Adams continued to believe that Deane epitomized corruption and treachery, anyone who admired Deane had to be contemptible. To Mercy Otis Warren’s accusation in her 1805 History that “Mr. Adams was not beloved by his Colleague Dr. Franklin,” Adams had a simple retort that he believed to be devastating: “Mr. Deane was beloved by his Colleague Dr. Franklin.” Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 2:348, 353; 4:118.

  85. “Excerpts from the Papers of Dr. Benjamin Rush,” PMBH29 (1905): 27-28.

  86. Arthur Lee, Journal, 25 Oct. 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 25:100, 102.

  87. Paul Wentworth to William Eden, 7 Jan. 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 25:436-38.

  88. “Excerpts from the Papers of Rush,” 27-28.

  89. J. Adams to Thomas McKean, 20 Sept. 1779, in Papers of Adams, 8:162.

  90. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:47, 118-19, 107-8.

  91. BF to Lovell, 22 July 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 27:135.

  92. Richard Bache to BF, 22 Oct. 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 27:599-601.

  93. John Fells Diary, 21 April 1779, in Smith, Letters of Delegates, 12:362. On the congressional controversy over Franklin and the other commissioners, see

  H. James Henderson, “Congressional Factionalism and the Attempt to Recall Benjamin Franklin,” WMQ27 (1970): 246-67, a
nd his Party Politics in the Continental Congress (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 200-206.

  94. Izard to R. H. Lee, 15 Oct. 1780, in Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1931), 5:362n.

  95. BF to Samuel Huntington, 12 Mar.-i2 Apr. 1781, in Papers of Franklin, 34:446.

  96. BF to Robert Morris, 26 July 1781, in Papers of Franklin, 35:311-12.

  97. BF to Huntington, 9 Aug. 1780, in Papers of Franklin, 33:162.

  98. Adams’s wife, Abigail, was even more disgusted with Franklin’s behavior. She thought that Franklin and his grandson Temple, the “old Deceiver” and the “young Cockatrice,” were “wicked unprincipled debauched wretches.” Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 273; Abigail to John Adams, 21 Oct. 1781, in Butterfield, Adams Family Correspondence, 4:230.

  99. A. Lee to James Warren, 8 Apr. 1782, in Smith, Letters of Delegates, 18:441. See also Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat,” 47.

  100. BF to R. Livingston, 22July 1783; and BF to Morris, 25 Dec. 1783. See also Lopez, My Life with Franklin, 176.

  101. BF to Morris, 7 Mar. 1783.

  102. Morris to BF, 28 Sept. 1782.

  103. BF to Samuel Cooper, 26 Dec. 1782.

  104. On Vergennes and his support for the American war, see Orville T Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, iyifi-iySy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 397-98; and Munro Price, Preserving the Monarchy: The Comte de Vergennes, iyy^—iy^y (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66, 236, 240. On Franklin’s relationship with Vergennes, see Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat,” 67-68.

  105. BF to Richard and Sarah Bache, 27July 1783.

  106. BF, Information to Those Who Would Remove to America (1784), in Franklin: Writings,

  975-83.

  107. R. D. Harris, “French Finances and the American War, 1777-1783,” Journal of Modern History 48 (1976): 236, 241. Jonathan R. Dull writes that French financial aid added up to some 40 million livres, which he says was equivalent to about $80 million in 1980s purchasing power. Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat,” 11. Dull rightly concludes, “The French support for the Revolution was Franklin’s work.” Ibid., 50.

  108. BF to R. Livingston, 5 Dec. 1782, and BF to Morris, 23 Dec. 1782.

  109. BF to John Jay, 2 Oct. 1780, in Papers of Franklin, 33:356.

  110. BF to Committee of Foreign Affairs, 26 May 1779, in Papers of Franklin, 29:555.

  111. BF to Vergennes, 17 Dec. 1782, 25 Jan. 1783.

  CHAPTER 5: BECOMING AN AMERICAN

  1. BF, Autobiography, 163.

  2. BF, “The Morals of Chess” (1779), in Papers of Franklin, 29:754.

  3. BF, Autobiography, 163.

  4. BF, Autobiography, 133—40.

  5. See BF to Lord Kames, 3 May 1760, in Papers of Franklin, 9:104.

  6. BF, Autobiography, 148.

  7. Franklin’s Art of Virtue was not at all based on the puritan tradition. Franklin, as Norman Fiering points out, had little or no interest in the inward states of

  people, but instead had an essentially behaviorist approach to morality. See Fiering, “Benjamin Franklin and the Way to Virtue,” American Quarterly 30 (1978): 199-223. On the down-to-earth character of Franklin’s Art of Virtue, see also Ralph Lerner, Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 3-18.

  8. BF, Autobiography, 148-57.

  9. BF, Autobiography, 155-57; R. Jackson Wilson, Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 40-41.

  10. BF, Autobiography, 148-57.

  11. BF, Autobiography, 159, 44, 160.

  12. BF to Elizabeth Partridge, 11 Oct. 1779, in Papers of Franklin, 30:514.

  13. Claude-Anne Lopez, My Life with Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 174.

  14. BF to Anne-Catherine de Ligniville Helvétius, Oct. 1778?, in Papers of Franklin, 27:670-71.

  15. Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 259; Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938), 647.

  16. Abigail Adams to Lucy Cranch, 5 Sept. 1784, in Richard Alan Ryerson et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I993) 5:436-37.

  17. Adams, Autobiography and Diary, 4:59.

  18. Lopez, My Life with Franklin, 174; Lopez, Mon Cher Papa, 264-71.

  19. Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 192.

  20. BF to William Franklin, 16 Aug. 1784. See also BF to Deborah Franklin, 6 Apr., i Sept. 1773, and BF to Samuel Cooper, 27 Oct. 1779, all in Papers of Franklin, 20:145, 383; 30:598.

  21. Debate in the Virginia Convention, 17 June 1788, in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 3:327.

  22. Cooper to BF, 5 May 1783.

  23. BF to Henry Laurens, John Adams, and John Jay, 10 Sept. 1783.

  24. BF to Charles Thomson, 13 May 1784, and BF to Richard Price, 16 Aug. 1784.

  25. BF to Thomson, 13 May 1784.

  26. BF to Jonathan Shipley, 22 Aug. 1784, and Richard Bache to William Temple Franklin, 14 Dec. 1784. See also Lopez, My Life with Franklin, 179-80.

  27. Elbridge Gerry to Adams, 16 June 1784, in Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to the Congress, 1774—1789 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976- ), 2I:686.

  28. FH. to William Temple Franklin, i Nov. 1784.

  29. Thomas Jefferson to Ferdinand Grand, 23 Apr. 1790, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 16:369.

  30. Francois Steinsky to BF, 17June 1789; J. Thiriot to BF, 1 July 1784; Erasmus Darwin to BF, 29 May 1787; Marquis de Condorcet to BF, 20 Aug. 1784; - Thomas to BF, 20 Sept. 1787;-Taillefert to BF, 18 Feb. 1788; Pierre Ox to BF,

  6 Sept. 1784; 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), 184.

  31. Jefferson to James Monroe, 5 July, 28 Aug. 1785, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, 8:262, 446.

  32. BF to John and Sarah Jay, 21 Sept. 1785.

  33. BF to Thomas Paine, 27 Sept. 1785.

  34. BF to Paine, 27 Sept. 1785.

  35. On the Philadelphia aristocrats’ reaction to Franklin, see Keith Arbour, “Benjamin Franklin as Weird Sister: William Cobbett and Philadelphia’s Fears of Democracy,” in Doren Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg, eds., Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 179-80.

  36. BF to Jane Mecom, 4 Nov. 1787.

  37. BF to Jonathan Williams, 16 Feb. 1786. When he wrote in 1787 to his former colleague John Jay, secretary for foreign affairs in the Confederation, to recommend someone as vice consul in Bordeaux, he first had to wonder whether “my Recommendation might have any weight.” Such was his sense of his position in American politics. BF to Jay, 10 Nov. 1787.

  38. BF to Thomas Jordan, 18 May 1787.

  39. William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler, Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LLD (Cincinnati, 1888), 1:267-68; 2:363.

  40. Madison, 25 May 1787, in Farrand, Records of the Convention, 1:4.

  41. Pierce, in Farrand, Records of the Convention, 3:91.

  42. BF, Speech in the Convention on the Subject of Salaries, 2 June 1787, in Franklin: Writings, 1131.

  43. BF to William Strahan, 16 Feb., 19 Aug. 1784. See also BF to Joseph Galloway, 12 Oct. 1774, 25 Feb. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:333-34, 509; BF to Shipley, 17 Mar. 1783, BF to Laurens, 12 Feb. 1784, BF to George Whately, 23 May 1785, and BF to John Wright, 4 Nov. 1789.

  44. BF, Speech on Salaries, in Franklin: Writings, 1134; Madi
son, 2 June 1787, in Farrand, Records of the Convention, 1:85.

  45. BF, Last Will and Testament, 23 June 1789.

  46. BF to Sarah Bache, 26Jan. 1784. Despite Franklin’s opposition to the Society of the Cincinnati, the State Society of Pennsylvania in July 1789 unanimously elected him to an honorary membership in the organization. We have no record of Franklin’s response to this election. (I owe this information to Ellen

  McCallister Clark, librarian of the Society of the Cincinnati in Washington, D.C.)

  47. BF, Queries and Remarks on Hints for the Members of the Philadelphia Convention, 1789.

  48. Franklin to Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours, 9June 1788.

  49. Jefferson to Monroe, 5 July 1785, in Boyd, Papers of Jefferson, 8:262.

  50. William Temple Franklin, Sketch of William Temple Franklin’s Services to the United States of America, 23 May 1789.

  51. BF to Thomson, 29 Dec. 1788. In earlier notes for this letter to Thomson, Franklin said that he was “sorry and asham’d that I asked any Favour of Congress” for his grandson. “It was the first time I ever ask’d Promotion for myself or any of my Family.” And he vowed it “shall be the Last.” Notes for BF to Thomson [1788?].

  52. BF to Cyrus Griffin, 29 Nov. 1788.

  53. BF to Thomson, 29 Dec. 1788.

  54. Notes for BF to Thomson [1788.?].

  55. BF, Sketch of Services of B. Franklin to the United States, 29 Dec. 1788.

  56. BF to Thomson, 29 Dec. 1788.

  57. As early as 1785 Franklin had complained to Jefferson of being “extremely wounded” by Congress’s treatment of his requests. “He expected,” said Jefferson, “something to be done as a reward for his own service.” Jefferson, however, thought that Franklin’s pride would make him “preserve a determined silence in the future.” Jefferson to Monroe, 5 July 1785, in Boyd, Papers of Jefferson, 8:262.

  58. BF to Thomson, 29 Dec. 1788.

  59. Journals of the Continental Congress, iyy^-iySfi (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1937), 34:6o3n.

  60. BF, Autobiography, 161—62.

  61. BF, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751), in Papers of Franklin, 4:231.