The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  62. BF to John Waring, 17 Dec. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:396.

  63. BF to Benjamin Rush, 14 July 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:314.

  64. Lopez, My Life with Franklin, 196-205.

  65. BF, An Address to the Public (1789) in Franklin: Writings, 1154-55.

  66. Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 301. President Washington was sure that the petition against slavery would go nowhere in Congress. It was “not only an illjudged piece of business,” he told an in-law back in Virginia, “but occasioned a great waste of time.... The memorial of the Quakers (and a very mal-apropos one it was) has at length been put to sleep, and will scarcely awake before the year 1808,” the year Congress gained the constitutional authority to deal with the slave trade. Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 276.

  67. 1st Cong., 2nd Session, Annals of Congress, ed. Joseph Gales (Washington, D.C., 1834), 2::lV)7-l2o5, hh-^ 1474.

  68. BF, Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade (1790) in Franklin: Writings, 1157-60.

  69. Arbour, “Franklin as Weird Sister,” 179-98.

  70. Franklin had been thinking about this bequest for a number of years. See BF to Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour, 18 Nov. 1785. Even into the second decade of the nineteenth century, said Benjamin Rush, it was “scarcely safe to mention Dr. Franklin’s name with respect in some companies in our city.” Rush to Adams, 6 Aug. 1811, in John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1S0J-1S1S (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1980), 184.

  71. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 212-38; Gilbert Chinard, “The Apotheosis of Benjamin Franklin, Paris, 1790-1791,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 99 (1955): 457, 461. See also Kenneth N. McKee, “The Popularity of the ‘American’ on the French Stage During the Revolution,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 83 (1940): 479-91.

  72. Julian P. Boyd, “The Death of Franklin: The Politics of Mourning in France and the United States,” in Boyd et al., Papers of Jefferson, 19:81.

  73. Adams to Rush, 4 April 1790, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 2:1207.

  74. The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit, vol. 9 of Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 341, 369-70; Boyd, “Death of Franklin,” 19:81-90.

  75. Robert Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 103.

  76. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 234.

  77. William Smith, “Eulogium on Benjamin Franklin, L.L.D., Delivered on March 1,1791,” in The Works of William Smith, D.D., Late Provost of the College and Academy of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1803), 1:43-92; Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, iypo-ififio (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994), 28-29. In 1802 when Smith came to publish his collected works he added to his eulogy a poem written by the loyalist Jonathan Odell. After celebrating Franklin’s scientific achievements, the poem ends with several devastating stanzas:

  Oh! Had he been wise to pursue,The path which his talents design’d What a tribute of praise had been due To the teacher and friend of mankind!But to covet political fame,Was, in Him, a degrading ambition;A spark which from Lucifer came,Enkindled the blaze of sedition.Let candor, then, write on his urn-Here lies the renowned inventor,Whose flame to the skies ought to burn,But, inverted, descends to the center!

  Smith, like Franklin’s other enemies, thought that this poem was “beautifully ... descriptive of the character of Dr. Franklin”: Franklin may have been a great scientist, but he had been a terrible politician. Smith, “Eulogium on Franklin,” 1:92.

  78. Otto, quoted in Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 234.

  79. Cobbett, quoted in David A. Wilson, ed., William Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America: Pamphlets on Republicanism and Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 40. On Cobbett’s campaign against Franklin in the 1790s, see Arbour, “Franklin as Weird Sister,” 179-98.

  80. Joseph Dennie, The Port Folio 1 (14 Feb. 1801): 53-54, conveniently reprinted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 249-53. See also Lewis Leary, “Joseph Dennie on Benjamin Franklin: A Note on Early American Literary Criticism,” PMHB 72 (1948): 240-46.

  81. Rufus King, quoted by an English correspondent, in Richard D. Miles, “The American Image of Benjamin Franklin,” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 120.

  82. For a survey of some of the different images of Franklin in the generation following his death, see William C. Kashatus III, “Hero and Hypocrite: The American Images of Benjamin Franklin, 1785-1828,” Valley Forge Journal 5 (1990): 69-87.

  83. BF, Autobiography, 27.

  84. See Paul Leicester Ford, Franklin Bibliography: A List of Books Written by, or Relating to Benjamin Franklin (Brooklyn, 1889).

  85. Dennie, The Port Folio, in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 252.

  86. Thomas Earle and Charles Congdon, eds., Annals of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York, from 1783-1800 (New York, 1882), 32. (I owe this citation to Nathaniel Frank.) Even the older Masonic organizations that had been dominated by gentry were now completely taken over by middling sorts who celebrated distinctions based on merit alone. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 86, 109-33.

  87. Stephen Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” in Bernard Bailyn and John Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1980), 53, 57.

  88. George Warner, Means for the Preservation of Political Liberty: An Oration Delivered in the New Dutch Church, on the Fourth of July, iypy... (New York, 1797), 13-14.

  89. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 279-83; Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 264-322.

  90. Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 203-21.

  91. Weems, Washington, 203-14.

  92. Dennie, The Port Folio, in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 250. Dennie promised to write more on Franklin as the symbol of the getting and saving of money, but he came to realize “that every penurious parent, who prescribes, as horn-book lesson, to his son, that scoundrel maxim a penny saved is a penny got, would cry—shame!” He thus thought better of confronting too directly Franklin’s emerging image as the hardworking entrepreneur in an increasingly democratic and capitalistic society. “The world, quoth Prudence, will not bear it; ’tis a penny-getting pound hoarding world—I yielded; and shelter myself in my garret against that mob of misers and worldlings I see gathering to hoot me.” Dennie, quoted in Leary, “Dennie on Franklin,” 244.

  93. David Jaffee, “The Village Enlightenment in New England,” WMQ47 (1990): 345; Rena L. Vassar, ed., “The Life or Biography of Silas Felton, Written by Himself,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 69 (1959): 129.

  94. Jaffee, “Village Enlightenment,” 328, 345, 329.

  95. Huang, Franklin in American Thought, 47.

  96. Henry P. Rosemont, “Benjamin Franklin and the Philadelphia Typographical Strikers of 1786,” Labor History 22 (1981): 427-28; Huang, Franklin in American Thought, 81-88. On the Franklin Institute established in 1824, see Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute, 1824—1865 (Baltimore: J
ohns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

  97. Thomas Mercein, “On the Opening of the Apprentices’ Library in 1820,” in Paul A. Gilje and Howard B. Rock, eds., Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 53.

  98. M. L. Weems, The Life of Benjamin Franklin; with Many Choice Anecdotes and Admirable Sayings of This Great Man, Never Before Published by Any of His Biographers (Philadelphia, 1829), 23.

  99. Weems, Life of Franklin, 49, 65-66, 220-31, 236-38; Carla Mulford, “Franklin and Myths of Nationhood,” in A. Robert Lee and W. M. Verhoeven, eds., Making America/Making American Literature (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), 50-55.

  100. Mellon, quoted in Huang, Franklin in American Thought, 46; Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 15-16. See also Louis Wright, “Franklin’s Legacy to the Gilded Age,” Virginia Quarterly Review 22 (1946): 268-79.

  101. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 342.

  102. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), lvi.

  103. The Narrative of Patrick Lyon, Who Suffered Three Months Severe Imprisonment in Philadelphia Gaol... (Philadelphia, 1799); William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834; reprint, New York: Dover, 1969), 2:375; “Liberty on the Anvil, 1701-2001,” The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, www.HSP.org; Ron Avery, “America’s First Bank Robbery,” www.USHistory.org; Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor; and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 179-203, 241; and Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, i88o-ifi]j (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10-12, 15-16.

  104. For an elaboration of this theme of the changing attitude toward labor, see Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 36-38, 277, 284-86, 337, 355.

  105. In less than a half century following the Declaration of Independence, writes Joyce Appleby, Americans moved “from the end of traditional society—‘the world we have lost’—to the social framework we are still living with.” Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8.

  106. Joyce Appleby, ed., Recollections of the Early Republic: Selected Autobiographies (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 10, 183, 167; Mulford, “Franklin and Myths,” 44.

  107. Carla Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Cultural Memory,” New England Quarterly 72 (1999): 415-43.

  108. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 550-51.

  109. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 620n.

  110. BF to Richard Bache, 11 Nov. 1784. This, of course, is the same advice Franklin had given Benny’s father, Richard Bache, a decade earlier when he himself had failed to gain an office in the British government. See p. 138.

  111. Ronald W. Clark, Benjamin Franklin: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1983), 46; BF to Mathon de la Cour, 18 Nov. 1785.

  112. Rosemont, “Franklin and the Philadelphia Typographical Strikers,” 398-429.

  113. BF to Catherine Ray Greene, 2 Mar. 1789; BF to Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 24 Oct. 1788. For two superb studies of printers and publishers in the early republic, see Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001).

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Page

  18

  Courtesy of The Bostonian Society/Old State House.

  58

  Courtesy of the Harvard University Portrait Collection, bequest of Dr. John Collins Warren, 1856. Photographed by Katya Kallsen. © 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  86

  Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

  87, left

  White House Historical Association (White House Collection 1981.)

  87, right

  National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.

  88, left

  Philadelphia Museum of Art: gift of Mr. and Mrs. Wharton Sinkler.

  88, right

  Philadelphia Museum of Art: purchased.

  89

  Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

  126

  Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Maria McKean Allen and Phebe Warren Downes through the bequest of their mother, Elizabeth Wharton McKean.

  141

  Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop. Photographed by Photographic Services. © 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  161

  Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library.

  173

  Franklin Collection, Yale University Library.

  175

  The Louvre. Photograph courtesy Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

  176, upper left

  Philadelphia Museum of Art: gift of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr, 1946.

  176, upper right

  Philadelphia Museum of Art: gift of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr, 1946.

  176, lower left

  Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

  176, lower right

  The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

  178, upper left

  RSA, London.

  178, upper right

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of John Bard, 1872 (72.6). Photograph all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  178, lower left

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Friedsam Collection, bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931 (32.100.132). Photograph all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  178, lower right

  Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

  179

  Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Art Collection, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

  199

  Courtesy Winterthur Museum.

  214

  Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadephia. Bequest of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr., Collection).

  242

  John Neagle, American, 1796-1865; Pat Lyon at the Forge, 1826-27; oil on canvas, 238.12 x 172.72 cm (9354 x 68 in.); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Henry H. and Zoe Oliver Sherman Fund, 1975.806. Photograph © 2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  INDEX

  Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

  as jealous of Franklin and Washington, 232 marriage of, 33, 90

  abolitionism, 227—28

  and Massachusetts Constitution of 1780,

  Act of Union (1707), 116

  193,219

  Adams, Abigail, 33, 90, 208, 277n98

  missions to France of, 192—96

  Adams, John

  in negotiations with Howe, 167—68

  autobiography, 14

  and Pennsylvania constitution, 165, 166

  commonwealth theory of the empire, 123

  protégé delivering Treaty of Paris to Congress,

  on Deane, 276n84

  211

  declines to be commissioner to France, 169

  as wearing his heart on his sleeve, 16

  Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, 166

  in West’s Treaty of Paris, 199

  as difficult to identify with, 1

  Adams, Samuel, 137, 155, 156, 189, 193

  on William Franklin, 95, 263n87

  Addison, Joseph, 19—20

  on Franklin an
d Voltaire meeting, 180

  “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an

  on Franklin as curious character, 2

  Old One” (Franklin), 57

  Franklin as older than, 11

  Albany Plan of Union, 10, 72-78, 110, 154

  on Franklin at Second Continental Congress,

  Alexander, James, 74

  154

  Allen, William, 27, 31, 72, 101, 251n25

  on Franklin on loyalists, 163

  American colonies. See North American colonies

  and Franklin’s ability to influence British

  American Magazine, The, 46

  government, 263n84, 264n87

  American Philosophical Society, 48-49, 72, 213,

  Franklin’s patriotism questioned by, 210, 215

  232-33

  on Franklin’s Revolutionary fervor, 154—55,

  American Revolution

  271n5

  British peace offerings in 1776 rebuffed,

  on Franklin’s theory of colds, 167—68

  166-68

  on Frenchwomen and Franklin, 209

  Declaration of Independence, 164, 167, 169

  on gentlemen and commoners, 35, 36, 253n51,

  early military difficulties, 184

  255n69

  education of leaders of, 18

  on Anne-Catherine Helvetius, 208

  Franklin as oldest of leaders, 11

  on Hutchinson, 110