1. For a description of the writing of the Autobiography, see pages 254–57 and chapter 11 note 5 on page 542.
2. David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.)
1. Autobiography 18; Josiah Franklin to BF, May 26, 1739; editor’s note in Papers 2:229; Tourtellot 12. Franklin provides a footnote in the Autobiography showing how the noun and surname “franklin” was used in fifteenth-century England. Some analysts, as well as his French fans, have pointed out that Franquelin was a common name in the province of Picardie, France, in the fifteenth century, and his ancestors may have come from there. His father, Josiah Franklin, wrote, “Some think we are of a French extract which was formerly called Franks; some of a free line (frank line), a line free from that vassalage which was common to subjects in the days of old; some from a bird of long red legs.” Franklin’s own assessment that his surname came from the class of English freemen called franklins is almost surely the correct explanation, and just as important, it was the one he believed. The Oxford English Dictionary defines franklin as “A class of landowners, of free but not noble birth, and ranking next below the gentry.” It is derived from the Middle English word frankeleyn, meaning a freeman or freeholder. See Chaucer’s “The Franklin’s Tale,” or “The Frankeleyn’s Tale,” www.librarius.com/cantales.htm.
2. Autobiography 20; Josiah Franklin to BF, May 26, 1739. The tale of the Bible and stool is in the letter from Josiah Franklin, but BF writes that he heard it from his uncle Benjamin. For a full genealogy, see Papers 1:xlix. The Signet edition of the Autobiography, based on a version prepared by Max Farrand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), uses a somewhat different phrase: “Our humble family early embraced the Reformation.”
3. As David McCullough does in Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) and Robert Caro in The Path to Power (New York: Knopf, 1982).
4. Autobiography 20; “A short account of the Family of Thomas Franklin of Ecton,” by Benjamin Franklin the elder (uncle of BF), Yale University Library; Benjamin Franklin the Elder’s commonplace book, cited in Papers, vol. 1; Tourtellot 18.
5. BF to David Hume, May 19, 1762.
6. Tourtellot 42.
7. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), www.winthropsociety.org/charity.htm; Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956). See also Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: NYU Press, 1963); Herbert Schneider, The Puritan Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958).
8. Perry Miller, “Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards,” in Major Writers of America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), 84; Tourtellot 41; Cotton Mather, “A Christian at His Calling,” 1701, personal.pitnet.net/primarysources/mather.html; Poor Richard’s, 1736 (drawn from Aesop’s “Hercules and the Wagoner,” ca. 550 B.C., and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government, 1698, among other antecedents).
9. Tourtellot 47–52; Nian Sheng Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah: Life of a Colonial Boston Tallow Chandler, 1657–1745” (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2000) vol. 90, pt. 3.
10. Lemay Internet Doc for 1657–1705; a drawing of the house is in Papers 1:4.
11. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Mark Van Doren and Samuel Sewall, eds., Samuel Sewall’s Diary (New York: Macy-Masius, 1927), 208.
12. Autobiography 24.
13. Autobiography 25, 91.
14. Tourtellot 86; Lopez Private 5–7.
15. Alexander Starbuck, The History of Nantucket (New York: Heritage, 1998), 53, 91, cited in Tourtellot 104.
16. Peter Folger, “A Looking Glass for the Times,” reprinted in Tourtellot 106; Autobiography 23.
17. The genealogy of the Franklin and Folger families is in Papers 1:xlix.
18. Autobiography 23. The Farrand/Signet edition uses the phrase: “that which was not honest could not be truly useful.”
19. BF to Barbeu Dubourg, April 1773; Tourtellot 161.
20. BF to Madame Brillon, Nov. 10, 1779 (known as the bagatelle of The Whistle); Autobiography 107; Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, in Complete Works (Paris: Bossange frères, 1823), 5:222, records it as a lesson learned from his family.
21. Autobiography 24; Lopez Private 7.
22. Benjamin Franklin the elder, “To My Name, 1713,” Paper 1:3–5; BF to JM, July 17, 1771; Parton 32–38; Tourtellot 139–40; Autobiography 20.
23. Autobiography 22; BF to JM, July 17, 1771; Lopez Private, 9.
24. Autobiography 22; Tourtellot 156. Boston Latin School was then generally called the South Grammar School.
25. Temple Writings, 1: 447.
26. Autobiography 25–26.
27. Autobiography 27; Boston Post, Aug. 7, 1940, cited in Papers 1:6–7. No authenticated copies of these two poems are known to have survived. The Franklin Papers 1:6–7 quote a few possible verses that may have been his.
28. Lemay Internet Doc for 1719–20, citing Early Boston Booksellers, by George Emery Littlefield (Boston: Antiquarian Society, 1900), 150–55; Tourtellot 230–32. Franklin incorrectly states that the Courant was the second newspaper in Boston. See Yale Autobiography 67n.
29. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 344. See also E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New York: Free Press, 1979).
30. John Blake, “The Inoculation Controversy in Boston: 1721–1722,” New England Quarterly (1952): 489–506; New England Courant, Aug. 7, 1721, and following, ushistory.org/franklin/courant; Tourtellot 252.
31. Lemay Internet Doc for 1721; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 337.
32. Autobiography 26. Analysis of Franklin’s childhood reading can be found in Parton 1:44–51, 60–72; Ralph Ketcham, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), 8–31; Tourtellot 166.
33. Autobiography 27; BF to Samuel Mather, July 7, 1773, May 12, 1784; John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678, www.ccel.org/b/bunyan/progress/; Plutarch, Parallel Lives, ca. A.D. 100, ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext96/plivs10.txt; Cotton Mather, Bonifacius, also known as Essays to Do Good and An Essay upon the Good, 1710, edweb.sdsu.edu/people/DKitchen/new_655/mather.htm; Tourtellot 187–89.
34. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects, 1697, ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03/esprj10.txt; Tourtellot 185.
35. Autobiography 28.
36. The Spectator, Mar. 13, 1711, harvest.rutgers.edu/projects/spectator/markup.html; Autobiography 29.
37. The Spectator, Mar. 1, 1711; Silence Dogood #1, Apr. 2, 1722; Silence Dogood #2, Apr. 16, 1722; Silence Dogood #3, Apr. 30, 1722; ushistory.org/franklin/courant; Papers 1:8–11. These dates, unlike others, are in the Old Style because they refer to editions of the Courant as dated at the time.
38. Silence Dogood #4, May 14, 1722; The Spectator, Mar. 3, 1711.
39. Autobiography 34; New England Courant, June 18, 25, July 2, 9, 1722. The excerpt is from The London Journal.
40. New England Courant, July 16, 23, 1722.
41. New England Courant, Sept. 14, 1722, Feb. 11, 1723; Autobiography 33. Franklin compresses the chronology by recalling that his name went on top of the paper right after his brother’s release from jail, which was in July 1722; in fact, it occurred after James got into another dispute in January 1723. Oddly, his name remained atop the paper until at least 1726, which was three years after he had run away to Philadelphia. See New England Courant, June 25, 1726, and Yale Autobiography 70n.
42. Autobiography 34–35.
43. Claude-Anne Lopez, an editor of Franklin’s papers at Yale, discovered a scrap of paper on which Franklin, in 1783, jotted down some dates and places designed to pinpoint his itinerary of sixty years earlier. In the Norton edition of the Autobiography, J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall note that the only boat leaving Boston for New York that week was a sloop on September 25. Franklin’s editing of the “naughty girl” passage is noted in the Signet edition, 35. James Franklin’s forlorn ad appears in New England Courant, Sept. 30, 1723.
1. The Way to Health was written by Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) and first published in 1683; Autobiography 29.
2. Autobiography 49.
3. Autobiography 38.
4. Autobiography 79; Jonathan Yardley, review of Edmund Morgan’s Benjamin Franklin, in Washington Post Book World, Sept. 15, 2002, 2.
5. Autobiography 41.
6. Autobiography 52.
7. Autobiography 42. Franklin later politely revised the phrase in his autobiography to read, “stared with astonishment.” Lemay/Zall Autobiography provides a complete look at the original manuscript and all of its revisions. The governors sent to Pennsylvania were sometimes referred to as lieutenant governors.
8. Franklin recounted this tale twice to Mather’s son: BF to Samuel Mather, July 7, 1773, and May 12, 1784.
9. Autobiography 104.
10. Autobiography 48.
11. Autobiography 54.
12. Autobiography 55–58.
13. “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,” 1725, Papers 1:58; Campbell 101–3.
14. Autobiography 70; Campbell 91–135.
15. Autobiography 92; Poor Richard Improved, 1753; Papers 4:406. See also Alfred Owen Aldridge, “The Alleged Puritanism of Benjamin Franklin,” in Lemay Reappraising 370; Aldridge Nature; Campbell 99. For good descriptions of the evolution of Franklin’s religious thought, see Walters; Buxbaum. See also chapter 7 of this book.
16. Autobiography 63.
17. “Plan of Conduct,” 1726, Papers 1:99; Autobiography 183.
18. “Journal of a Voyage,” July 22–Oct. 11, 1726, Papers 1:72–99. The idea that “affability and sociability” were core tenets of the Enlightenment is explained well in Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1991), 215–6.
1. Autobiography 64. For overviews of life in Philadelphia, see Carl Bridenbaugh and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942); E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New York: Free Press, 1979). For a good overview of Franklin’s work as a printer, see C. William Miller, Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Printing 1728–1766 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974).
2. The chronology in the Autobiography is not quite correct. Denham took ill in the spring of 1727 but did not die until July 1728. Lemay/Zall Autobiography 41.
3. Autobiography 69; Brands 87–89; Van Doren 71–73.
4. Autobiography 71–79; Brands 91; Lemay/Zall Autobiography 49. The Quaker history was written by William Sewel. Franklin records that he published forty sheets of folio, which would have been 160 pages, but in fact he produced 178 pages and Keimer the remaining 532 pages.
5. Last Will and Codicil, June 23, 1789, Papers CD 46:u20.
6. Whitfield J. Bell Jr., Patriot Improvers (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999), vol. 1; Autobiography 72–73; “On Conversation,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 15, 1730. Dale Carnegie, in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937; New York: Pocket Books, 1994), draws on Franklin’s rules for conversation. Carnegie’s first two rules for “How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking” are: “The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it” and “Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, ‘You’re wrong.’ ” In his section on “How to Change People without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment,” he instructs: “Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly” and “Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.” Carnegie’s book has sold more than 15 million copies.
7. Autobiography 96; “Rules for a Club for Mutual Improvement,” 1727; “Proposals and Queries to be Asked the Junto,” 1732.
8. BF to Samuel Mather, May 17, 1784; Van Doren 75; Cotton Mather, “Religious Societies,” 1724; Lemay/Zall Autobiography 47n. See also Mitchell Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
9. Autobiography 74; American Weekly Mercury, Jan. 28, 1729 (Shortface and Careful); Papers 1:112; Brands 101; Van Doren 94; Sappenfield 49–55.
10. Busy-Body #1, American Weekly Mercury, Feb. 4, 1729; Sappenfield 51; The Universal Instructor . . . and Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 25, Mar. 13, 1729; Papers 1:115–27.
11. Busy-Body #3, American Weekly Mercury, Feb. 18, 1729; Busy-Body #4, American Weekly Mercury, Feb. 25, 1789; Busy-Body #8, American Weekly Mercury, Mar. 28, 1729. Lemay’s masterly notes in the Library of America’s edition of Franklin’s Writings (p. 1524) describe which parts Franklin wrote and what was withdrawn in Busy-Body #8.
12. “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency,” Apr. 3, 1729; Autobiography 77–78. Franklin draws on William Petty’s 1662 work, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3113/petty/taxes.txt.
13. “The Printer to the Reader,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 2, 1729.
14. “Printer’s Errors,” Pa. Gazette, Mar. 13, 1730.
15. Pa. Gazette, Mar. 19, 1730; Autobiography 75.
16. “Apology for Printers,” Pa. Gazette, June 10, 1731; Clark 49; Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America (1810; Albany: Munsell, 1874), 1: 237.
17. Pa. Gazette, June 17, 24, July 29, 1731, Feb. 15, June 19, July 3, 1732.
18. Pa. Gazette, Oct. 24, 1734; not in the Yale Papers, but later ascribed to the Franklin canon by Lemay, see Lib. of Am. 233–34.
19. Pa. Gazette, Sept. 7, 1732. For an analysis of Franklin’s journalistic treatment of crime and scandal, see Ronald Bosco, “Franklin Working the Crime Beat,” Lemay Reappraising, 78–97.
20. Pa. Gazette, Sept. 12, 1732, Jan. 27, 1730.
21. “Death of a Drunk,” Pa. Gazette, Dec. 7, 1732; “On Drunkenness,” Feb. 1, 1733; “A Meditation on a Quart Mugg,” July 19, 1733; “The Drinker’s Dictionary,” Jan. 13, 1737. In Silence Dogood #12 (Sept. 10, 1722), Franklin had his sassy widow defend moderate drinking and condemn excess, drawing on Richard Steele’s essays in London’s Tatler. See Robert Arnor, “Politics and Temperance,” in Lemay Reappraising, 52–77.
22. Pa. Gazette, Sept. 23, 1731.
23. Autobiography 34, 80, 72; “Anthony Afterwit,” Pa. Gazette, July 10, 1732.
24. Autobiography 64, 81; Faÿ 135; Brands 106–9; Lopez Private, 23–24; BF to Joseph Priestley, Sept. 19, 1772; Poor Richard’s, 1738. The first volume of the Papers 1:1xii in 1959 said Deborah was born in Philadelphia in 1708, but that thinking was revised after Francis James Dallett published a paper the following year called “Dr. Franklin’s In-Laws,” which is cited in Papers 8:139. Dallett’s evidence indicates that Deborah was born in 1705 or 1706, maybe in Philadelphia but more likely in Birmingham, from which she emigrated to Philadelphia with her family in about 1711. See Edward James et al., Notable American Women 1607–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1:663, entry on Deborah Franklin by Leonard Labaree, the initial editor of the Yale Papers. If she did cross the ocean at age 5 or so, it may have caused her lifelong aversion to ever crossing (or even seeing) it again. For a good analysis, see J. A. Leo Lemay, “Recent Franklin Scholarship,” PMHB 76.2 (Apr. 2002): 336.
25. BF to “honoured mother” Abiah Franklin, Apr. 12, 1750; Lemay Internet Doc for 1728; Parton 1:177, 198–99; Randall 43; Skemp William, 4–5, 10; Brands 110, 243; Gentleman’s Magazine (1813), in Papers 3:474n. The Yale editors of Franklin’s papers say in volume 1 (published in 1959) that William was born circa 1731, but by volume 3 (published in 1961) they note the controversy (Papers 3:89n) and suggest that perhaps he was born earlier; however, in their edition of the Autobiography, published in 1964, they reiterate “circa 1731” as the year of his birth.
26. Van Doren 93, 231; Brands 110, 243. See also Charles Hart, “Who Was the Mother of Franklin’s Son?” PMHB (July 1911): 308–14; Paul Leicester Ford, Who Was the Mother of Franklin’s Son? (New York: Century, 1889).
27. Van Doren 91; Lopez Private, 22–23; Clark 41; Roberts letter, Papers 2:370n.; Bell, Patriot Improvers, 1:277–80.
28. Autobiography 92; BF to JM, Jan. 6, 1727; Poor Richard’s, 1733.
29. “Anthony Afterwit,” Pa. Gazette, July 10, 1732; “Celia Single,” Pa. Gazette, July 24, 1732.
30. “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 8, 1730, Lib. of Am. 151. This piece is not included by the Yale editors, but Lemay and others subsequently attributed it to Franklin.
31. Lopez Private, 31–37; BF to James Read, Aug. 17, 1745; “A Scolding Wife,” Pa. Gazette, July 5, 1733.
32. BF to Deborah Franklin, Feb. 19, 1758; “I Sing My Plain Country Joan,” 1742; Francis James Dallett, “Dr. Franklin’s In-Laws,” cited in Papers 8:139; Leonard Labaree, “Deborah Franklin,” in Notable American Women 1607–1950, ed. Edward James et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971), 1:663.
33. Autobiography 112; BF to JM, Jan. 13, 1772; Pa. Gazette, Dec. 23–30, 1736; Van Doren 126; Clark 43; Brands 154–55. Franklin had editorialized in favor of smallpox inoculations in his paper before Francis was born: Pa. Gazette, May 14, 28, 1730, Mar. 4, 1731.
34. “The Death of Infants,” Pa. Gazette, June 20, 1734, ascribed to the Franklin canon by Lemay, Lib. of Am. 228.
35. Franklin writes in the Autobiography (p. 92) that he was “educated as a Presbyterian,” but the Puritan sect in Boston into which he was baptized in fact became what is now called the Congregational Church. Both Presbyterians and Congregationalists generally follow the doctrines of John Calvin. See Yale Autobiography 145n. For more on Jedediah Andrews, see Richard Webster, A History of the Presbyterian Church in America, from Its Origin until the Year 1760 (Philadelphia: J. M. Wilson, 1857), 105–12. For more on Franklin and the Presbyterians, see chapter 5, n. 7.
36. Autobiography 92–94.
37. Deism can be an amorphous concept. Despite his qualms about the consequences of unenhanced deism, Franklin did not shy from the word in labeling his beliefs. I use the word, as he did, to describe the Enlightenment-era philosophy that (1) rejects the belief that faith depends on received or revealed religious doctrines; (2) does not emphasize an intimate or passionate spiritual relationship with God or Christ; (3) believes in a rather impersonal Creator who set in motion the universe and all its laws; (4) holds that reason and the study of nature tells us all we can know about the Creator. See Walters; “Franklin’s Life in Deism,” in Campbell 110–26; Kerry Walters, The American Deists (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992); Buxbaum; A. Owen Aldridge, “Enlightenment and Awakening in Franklin and Edwards,” in Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, ed. Barbara Oberg and Harry Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27–41; Aldridge, “The Alledged Puritanism of Benjamin Franklin,” in Lemay Reappraising, 362–71; Aldridge, Nature; Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia; Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America (New York: Viking, 1973); Donald Meyer, “Franklin’s Religion,” in Critical Essays, ed. Melvin Buxbaum (Boston: Hall, 1987), 147–67; Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Mark Noll, America’s God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
38. “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” Nov. 20, 1728, Papers 1:101.
39. Walters 8, 84–86. Walters’s book is the most direct argument that Franklin was not espousing a literal polytheism. The opposite view is expressed in A. Owen Aldridge’s comprehensive Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God. Read figuratively, Franklin seems to be saying that different denominations and religions each have their own gods: there is the God of the Puritans, who is different from Franklin’s own God, or the God of the Methodists, of the Jews, of the Anabaptists, or, for that matter, of the Hindus, Muslims, and ancient Greeks. These different gods arise because of differing perspectives (producing what Walters calls Franklin’s “theistic perspectivism”). Franklin believed that the idea of a God as Creator and first cause is common to all religions, and thus can be assumed true. But different religions and sects add their own expressions and concepts, none of which we can really know to be true or false, but that lead to the existence of a multiplicity of gods that allow a more personal relationship with their believers. This interpretation comports with Franklin’s comment in his essay that these gods can sometimes disappear as times and cultures evolve. “It may be that after many ages, they are changed and others supply their places.”
40. “On the Providence of God in the Government of the World,” Papers 1:264. The Yale editors posit 1732 as its date. A. Owen Aldridge, Leo Lemay, and others persuasively argue, based on a letter Franklin later wrote about it, that it was actually 1730; BF to Benjamin Vaughan, Nov. 9, 1779. See Aldridge Nature, 34–40; Lemay Internet Doc for 1730. The Library of America edition of Franklin’s writings accepts the 1730 date. Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), 70; John Calvin, Commentaries, “On Paul’s Epistle to the Romans” (1539), www.ccel.org/c/calvin/comment3/comm_vol38/htm/TOC.htm.
41. Walters 98; Campbell 109–11; Aldridge Nature, 25–38; BF to John Franklin, May 1745.
42. “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 22, 1730.
43. BF to Josiah and Abiah Franklin, Apr. 13, 1738. When his beloved sister Jane also conveyed her misgivings about his emphasis on good works rather than prayer, he offered a similar mix of explanation and mild reassurance. “I am so far from thinking that God is not to be worshipped that I have composed and wrote a whole book of devotions for my own use,” he says, and then urges tolerance. “There are some things in your New England doctrines and worship which I do not agree with, but I do not therefore condemn them . . . I would only have you make me the same allowances.” BF to JM, July 28, 1743.
44. Autobiography 94–105, 49; D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1923), 10–16, xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/LAWRENCE/dhlch02.htm.
45. Randy Cohen, “Best Wishes,” New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2002; David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 64; Morgan Franklin, 23; Autobiography 104.
46. Autobiography 94–105, 49; Sappenfield 187–88; Lopez Private, 24; Lopez Cher, 277. The French friend was the scientist Pierre-Georges Cabanis, Complete Works (Paris: Bossange frères, 1825), 2:348.
47. Cotton Mather, “Two Brief Discourses,” 1701; A. Whitney Griswold, “Two Puritans on Prosperity,” 1934, in Sanford 42; Campbell 99, 166–74; Ziff, Puritanism in America, 218; Aldridge, “The Alleged Puritanism of Benjamin Franklin,” in Lemay Reappraising, 370; Lopez Private, 104. Perry Miller notes: “This child of New England Puritanism simply dumped the whole theological preoccupation overboard; but, not the slightest ceasing to be a Puritan, went about his business”; see “Ben Franklin, Jonathan Edwards,” Major Writers of America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), 86. See chapter 4, n. 37 for sources on deism and the Enlightenment.
48. See chapter 18 for details of the Romantic-era view of Franklin.
49. John Updike, “Many Bens,” The New Yorker, Feb. 22, 1988, 115; Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 26.
The strongest argument that Franklin was a pure exemplar of the Enlightenment is in historian Carl Becker’s masterful essay on him in the Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1933), in which he called Franklin “a true child of the Enlightenment, not indeed of the school of Rousseau, but of Defoe and Pope and Swift, of Fontenelle and Montesquieu and Voltaire. He spoke their language, although with a homely accent . . . He accepted without question all the characteristic ideas [of the Enlightenment]: its healthy, clarifying skepticism; its passion for freedom and its humane sympathies; its preoccupation with the world that is evident to the senses; its profound faith in common sense, in the efficacy of Reason for the solution of human problems and the advancement of human welfare.” See also Stuart Sherman, “Franklin and the Age of Enlightenment,” in Sanford.
50. Autobiography 139; Albert Smyth, American Literature (Philadelphia: Eldredge, 1889), 20; BF to Benjamin Vaughan, Nov. 9, 1779; BF to DF, June 4, 1765. For additional words of disgust about metaphysics, see BF to Thomas Hopkinson, Oct. 16, 1746. For a fuller assessment of Franklin’s religious and moral beliefs, see the final chapter of this book. The ideas here draw in part from the following: Campbell 25, 34–36, 137, 165, 169–72, 286; Charles Angoff, Literary History of the American People (New York: Knopf, 1931), 295–310; Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1934), 3–7; Lopez Private, 26; Alan Taylor, “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” The New Republic, Mar. 19, 2001, 39; Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt, 1930), 1:178; David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” The Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. “In its naive simplicity this hardly seems worthy of study as a philosophy,” writes Herbert Schneider, “yet as a moral regime and outline of the art of virtue, it has a clarity and a power that command respect.” Herbert Schneider, The Puritan Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 246.
51. Alan Taylor, “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” 39.
52. Poor Richard’s 1733–58, by Franklin, plus editor’s note in Papers 1:280; Faÿ 159–73; Sappenfield 121–77; Brands 124–31. There was also a real Richard Saunders who appears in the account books as a customer of Franklin’s. Van Doren 107.
53. Pa. Gazette, Dec. 28, 1732.
54. Poor Richard’s, 1733; Autobiography 107.
55. Poor Richard’s, 1734, 1735; Titan Leeds’s American Almanack, 1734; Jonathan Swift, “Predictions for the Ensuing Year by Isaac Bickerstaff, esq.,” 1708, ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext97/bstaf10.txt. Swift’s piece was a parody of an almanac by John Partridge; he predicted Partridge’s death, and then engaged in a running jest similar to the one Franklin perpetrated on Leeds.
56. Poor Richard’s, 1734, 1735, 1740; Papers 2:332n; Sappenfield 143; Brands 126.
57. Poor Richard’s, 1736, 1738, 1739. See also the verses by “Bridget Saunders, my duchess” about lazy men in 1734 (“God in his mercy may do much to save him/But woe to the poor wife whose lot is to have him”), which “Poor Richard” prints as a response to his own 1733 verses about lazy women.
58. Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy, July 1870, www.twainquotes.com/Galaxy/187007e.html; Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me (New York: Random House, 1959), 6.
59. For an exhaustive study of the provenance of “early to bed and early to rise” see Wolfgang Mieder, “Early to Bed and Early to Rise,” in the Web-based journal De Proverbio, www.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/DP,1,1,95/FRANKLIN.html. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1882; Boston: Little, Brown, 2002) in its thirteenth edition (1955) and previous editions attributes the phrase to Franklin but also cites John Clarke’s Proverbs (1639); it drops the reference to Clarke in subsequent editions.
60. The most detailed work on the origins of the maxims is Robert Newcombe, “The Sources of Benjamin Franklin’s Sayings of Poor Richard,” Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1957. See also Papers 1:281–82; Van Doren 112–13; Wright 54; Frances Barbour, A Concordance to the Sayings in Franklin’s Poor Richard (Detroit: Gale Research, 1974). Franklin’s greatest reliance is on Jonathan Swift, James Howell’s Proverbs (1659), and Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia (1732).
61. Philomath (BF), “Talents Requisite in an Almanac Writer,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 20, 1737. “Philomath” was a term used for almanac writers.
62. Poor Richard Improved, 1758.
63. Autobiography 107; Wright 55; Van Doren 197; D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin,” 14; BF to William Strahan, June 2, 1750; Poor Richard’s, 1743.
1. Poor Richard’s, 1744; “Appeal for the Hospital,” Pa. Gazette, Aug. 8, 1751; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835; New York: Doubleday, 1969), 513; “Inside Main Street USA,” New York Times, Aug. 27, 1995; John Van Horne, “Collective Benevolence for the Common Good,” in Lemay Reappraising, 432. The two books that most influenced Franklin to form associations for the public good were Daniel Defoe’s An Essay upon Projects (1697) and Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: Essays to do Good (1710).
2. Autobiography 90–91, 82; Faÿ 149; “The Library Company of Philadelphia,” www.librarycompany.org; Morgan Franklin, 56. The list of first books is in PMHB 300 (1906): 300.
3. “Brave Men at Fires,” Pa. Gazette, Dec. 1, 1733; Autobiography 115; “On Protection of Towns from Fire,” Pa. Gazette, Feb. 4, 1735; notice in Pa. Gazette, Jan. 27, 1743; Van Doren 130; Brands 135–37; Hawke 53.
4. Autobiography 115; Brands 214.
5. Faÿ 137; Pa Gazette, Dec. 30, 1730; Clark 44; Pennsylvania Grand Lodge Web site, www.pagrandlodge.org; Julius Sachse, Benjamin Franklin’s Account with the Lodge of Masons (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger, 1997).
6. Van Doren 134; Faÿ 180; Brands 152–54; BF to Joseph and Abiah Franklin, Apr. 13, 1738; Pa. Gazette, Feb. 7 (dated Feb. 15), 1738.
7. Autobiography 111; “Dialogue Between Two Presbyterians,” Pa. Gazette, Apr. 10, 1735; “Observations on the Proceedings against Mr. Hemphill,” July 1735, Papers 2:37; BF, “A Letter to a Friend in the Country,” Sept. 1735, Papers 2:65; Jonathan Dickinson, “A Vindication of the Reverend Commission of the Synod,” Sept. 1735, and “Remarks Upon the Defense of Rev. Hemphill’s Observations,” Nov. 1735; “A Defense of Mr. Hemphill’s Observations,” Oct. 1735. The pieces by Franklin, along with annotations about the affair and Dickinson’s presumed authorship of the essays attributed to him, are in Papers 2:27–91. Franklin’s fascinating battle over Hemphill has been recounted in many good historical studies, from which this section draws: Bryan LeBeau, “Franklin and the Presbyterians,” Early American Review (summer 1996), earlyamerica.com/review/summer/franklin/; Merton Christensen, “Franklin on the Hemphill Trial: Deism versus Presbyterian Orthodoxy,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1953): 422–40; William Barker, “The Hemphill Case, Benjamin Franklin and Subscription to the Westminster Confession,” American Presbyterians 69 (winter 1991); Aldridge Nature, 86–98; Buxbaum 93–104.
8. Campbell 97; Barbara Oberg and Harry Stout, eds., Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 119; Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), introduction; Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” delivered at Enfield, Conn., July 8, 1741, douglass.speech.nwu.edu/edwa_a45.htm; Jack Hitt, “The Great Divide: It’s Not Left and Right. It’s Meritocrats and Valuecrats,” New York Times Magazine, Dec. 31, 2000, 14.
9. Pa. Gazette, Nov. 15, 1739, May 22, 1740, June 12, 1740; Autobiography 116–20; Buxbaum 93–142; Brands 138–48; Hawke 57. Buxbaum presents an exhaustive analysis of all the items Franklin printed on Whitefield.
10. Frank Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1993): 529–48; Harry Stout, “George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin,” Massachusetts Historical Society 103 (1992):9–23; David Morgan, “A Most Unlikely Friendship,” The Historian 47 (1985): 208–18; Autobiography 118.
11. “Obadiah Plainman,” Pa. Gazette, May 15, 29, 1740, Lib. of Am. 275–83, 1528; American Weekly Mercury, May 22, 1740. The editors of the Yale Papers do not include the Obadiah Plainman letters as Franklin’s. But Leo Lemay convincingly argues that he wrote them, and he included them in the Library of America collection. Likewise, it seems possible that Franklin, as was his wont, stoked the controversy by writing the opposing letters from “Tom Trueman.”
12. “Letter to a Friend in the Country” and “Statement of Editorial Policy,” Pa. Gazette, July 24, 1740; Autobiography 118.
13. “Obituary of Andrew Hamilton,” Pa. Gazette, Aug. 6, 1741; “Half-Hour’s Conversation with a Friend,” Pa. Gazette, Nov. 16, 1733.
14. Sappenfield 86–93; Autobiography 113–14.
15. C. William Miller, Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Printing: A Descriptive Bibliography (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984), 32; James Green, Benjamin Franklin as Publisher and Bookseller, in Lemay Reappraising, 101. Green was a distinguished curator at the Library Company, and his notes on exhibitions of Franklin’s books are useful.
16. Walter Isaacson, “Info Highwayman,” Civilization (Mar. 1995): 48; Autobiography 114.
17. Sappenfield 93–105; Pa. Gazette, Nov. 13, Dec. 11, 1740; American Weekly Mercury, Nov. 20, 27, Dec. 4, 18, 1740; Papers, vol. 2; Frank Mott, A History of American Magazines (New York: Appleton, 1930), 1:8–27.
18. BF to Abiah Franklin, Oct. 16, 1747, Apr. 12, 1750; Lopez Private, 70–79; Autobiography 109; BF to William Strahan, June 2, 1750, Jan. 31, 1757; Clark 62, 139; Mrs. E. D. Gillespie (daughter of Sally Franklin Bache), A Book of Remembrance (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1901), cited in Clark 17; Silence Dogood #5, New England Courant, May 28, 1722; DF to Margaret Strahan, Dec. 24, 1751; “A Petition of the Left Hand,” 1785, in Lib. of Am. 1115 and Papers CD 43:u611.
In addition to half-seriously trying to fix Sally up with Strahan’s son Billy, Franklin hoped his son, William, would marry Polly Stevenson, the daughter of his London landlady; that his grandson William Temple Franklin would marry the son of his Paris lady friend Mme. Brillon; and that Sally’s son Benjamin Bache would marry Polly Stevenson’s daughter. A harsher assessment of Franklin’s treatment of Sally and the education he provided her can be found in an essay by Larry Tise, “Liberty and the Rights of Women,” in the collection he edited, Benjamin Franklin and Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 37–49.
19. Lopez Private, 34; Poor Richard’s, 1735. “Reply to a Piece of Advice,” Pa. Gazette, Mar, 4, 1735, praises marriage and children. The Yale editors of Franklin Papers tentatively attribute it to him, partly because it is signed “A.A.,” initials he often used. Papers 2:21.
20. “Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress,” also known as “Old Mistress Apologue,” June 25, 1745. A description of its publishing history is in Papers 3:27–31, and in the introduction to Larry Tise, Benjamin Franklin and Women.
21. “Speech of Polly Baker,” General Advertiser, Apr. 15, 1747; Sappenfield 64. Franklin revealed his authorship in about 1778 at a dinner with the Abbé Raynal in Paris, where the authenticity of the famous speech was being debated. Franklin told the group, “I am going to set you straight. When I was young and printed a newspaper, it sometimes happened, when I was short of material to fill my sheet, that I amused myself by making up stories, and that of Polly Baker is one of the number.” Papers 3:121–22.
22. “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge,” May 14, 1743, Papers 2:378; The Beginnings of the APS (Philadelphia: APS Proceedings, 1944), 277–89; Edward C. Carter III, One Grand Pursuit (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1993); American Philosophical Society, www.amphilsoc.org.
Franklin had a love for writing very detailed charters, rules, and procedures for organizations. Among the groups he did this for were the Junto, Masonic lodge, fire company, police patrol, American Philosophical Society, Pennsylvania militia, Academy, postal service, and society for the abolition of slavery. This penchant also helped him draw up the Albany plan for union, the discipline regulations for the colonial army, and the first proposed articles of confederation.
23. Autobiography 121–23; “Plain Truth,” Nov. 17, 1747; “Form of Association,” Nov. 24, 1747; Papers 3:187, with historical notes. See chapter 4 for the issue of whether William was 16 or perhaps a bit older.
24. Autobiography 123; Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, Nov. 29, 1747, Papers 3:214; Penn to Peters, Mar. 30, June 9, 1748, Papers 3:186; “The Necessity of Self Defense,” Pa. Gazette, Dec. 29, 1747 (in Lib. of Am. but not Yale papers); Brands 179–88; Wright 77–81; Hawke 75–80.
25. Wright 52; Van Doren 122; Autobiography 120, 92; “Articles of Agreement with David Hall,” Jan. 1, 1748; Brands 188, 380; Clark 62; BF to Abiah Franklin, Apr. 12, 1750; BF to Cadwallader Colden, Sept. 29, 1748; Poor Richard’s, 1744.
The year he retired, Franklin wrote and published an essay called “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” in which he restated much of the philosophy of Poor Richard and the Autobiography: “The way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, Industry and Frugality; i.e., waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both.” Papers 3:304.
26. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1991), 77, 85–86, 199. I tend to disagree with Wood’s thesis to the extent that he portrays Franklin as a man of aristocratic aspirations whose leatherapron image was mainly affected after his social ambitions were dashed. The evidence in favor of giving more weight than Wood does to the view of Franklin as a proud member of the middle class is, I hope, detailed throughout this book. Even during the period right after his retirement, which Wood says was the prime period of his “aristocratic” aspirations, Franklin’s politics remained rather populist and his civic endeavors had a common touch. Nevertheless, Wood provides an interesting assessment that merits consideration as a counterpoint to the approach taken by other historians. And because Wood contends that Franklin’s aristocratic attitude was manifest primarily during the period from 1748 to the late 1760s (plus when he advocated at the Constitutional Convention that officeholders serve without pay), his thesis can be given weight without entirely rejecting the view that for most of his life Franklin was, as he claimed, a proud part of “we, the middling people.” Wood also uses a somewhat broader definition of aristocracy than others do; he includes in it not only titled nobility and hereditary classes but also wealthy commoners who hold themselves out to be gentlemen. Wood’s thesis reminds us, correctly I think, that one of Franklin’s goals, beginning with his creation of the lending library, was to help members of the middling class take on some of the qualities of the enlightened gentry. (It should also be noted that the classical definition of aristocracy denoted a system of rule by the best, rather than a hereditary class system of social hierarchy and titles based on birth, which is what the term came to mean in England by Franklin’s time.)
27. Wayne Craven, “The British and American Portraits of Benjamin Franklin,” in Lemay Reappraising, 249; Charles Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); Poor Richard’s, 1748.
1. Dudley Herschbach, “Dr. Franklin’s Scientific Amusements,” Harvard Magazine (Nov. 1995): 36, and in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Oct. 1994): 23. Herschbach, the Baird Professor of Science at Harvard, won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1958.
The most important academic studies on Franklin’s science were done by the eminent scientific historian Harvard’s I. Bernard Cohen. These include Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Science and the Founding Fathers (New York: Norton, 1995), and Franklin and Newton (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956). Also useful are Charles Tanford, Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989); Nathan Goodman, ed., The Ingenious Dr. Franklin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), which is a collection of Franklin’s scientific letters and essays; J. L. Heilbron, “Franklin as an Enlightened Natural Philosopher,” and Heinz Otto Sibum, “The Bookkeeper of Nature,” in Lemay Reappraising.
2. “Magic Squares,” BF to Peter Collinson, 1750; BF to PS, Sept. 20, 1761; Cohen 159–71; Brands 630. Cohen dates the heat experiments of Franklin and Breintnall from 1729 to 1737 based on letters and Junto notes, and traces the theories back to Newton and Boyle, accounts of which Franklin had read.
3. “An Account of the New Invented Pennsylvania Fire-Places,” 1744, Papers 2:419–46 (with historical notes by the paper’s editors); Autobiography 128; Lemay Reappraising, 201–3; letter to the Boston Evening Post, Sept. 8, 1746, first rediscovered and noted in Lemay Internet Doc for 1746; Brands 167; Samuel Edgerton Jr., “The Franklin Stove,” in Cohen 199–211. Edgerton, an art historian at the University of Pennsylvania, shows that the stove was not as practical or popular as other historians assume.
4. BF to John Franklin, Dec. 8, 1752; “Origin of Northeast Storms,” BF to Jared Eliot, Feb. 13, 1750; BF to Jared Eliot, July 16, 1747; BF to Alexander Small, May 12, 1760; John Cox, The Storm Watchers (New York: Wiley, 2002), 5–7.
5. Cohen 40–65; BF to Collinson, Mar. 28, 1747; Autobiography 164; Bowen 47–49. Cohen provides detailed evidence on the dates of Dr. Spencer’s lectures, their content, Collinson’s gift, and the errors Franklin made in later recalling the chronology.
6. BF to Collinson, May 25, July 28, 1747, Apr. 29, 1749; Cohen 22–26; I. Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 303; Clark 71. J. L. Heilbrun and Heinz Otto Sibum, in Lemay’s Reappraising, 196–242, emphasize the “bookkeeping” nature of Franklin’s theories.
7. BF to Collinson, Apr. 29, 1749, Feb. 4, 1750; Brands 199; Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York: Holt, 1997), 294.
8. BF to John Lining, Mar. 18, 1755; BF to Collinson, Mar. 2, 1750; BF to John Winthrop, July 2, 1768; Hawke 86–88; Cohen 121; Van Doren 156–70; Brands 198–202. Andrew White, “History of Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,” www.human-nature.com/reason/white/chap11.html. Among those, in addition to Newton, who had already noted the similarities between electrical sparks and lightning were Francis Hauksbee, Samuel Wall, John Freke, Johann Heinrich Winkler, and Franklin’s antagonist the Abbé Nollet; see Clark 79–80. None, however, had proposed serious experiments to assess the hypothesis.
9. BF to John Mitchell, Apr. 29, 1749.
10. BF to Collinson, July 29, Mar. 2, 1750.
11. The Gentleman’s Magazine, Jan., May 1750; Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America, by Mr. Benjamin Franklin (London: 1750, 1756, and subsequent editions); Abbé Guillaume Mazéas to Stephen Hales, May 20, 1752, Papers 4:315 and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1751–52); Autobiography 165–67; Clark 3–5, 83; Cohen 70–72.
12. “The Kite Experiment,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 19, 1752; Papers 4:360–65 has a footnote explaining historical issues; Pa. Gazette, Aug. 27, Oct. 19, 1752; Cohen 68–77; Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity (1767), www.ushistory.org/franklin/kite/index.htm; Hawke 103–6.
13. Cohen 66–109; Van Doren 164; Tom Tucker, Bolt of Fate (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). Tucker charges that “It’s possible that . . . Franklin dreamed up his own kite claim” and that it was all a “hoax” akin to his literary ones. His book does not address the detailed evidence I. Bernard Cohen cites on this question and is, I think, unpersuasive. Franklin’s kite description is in no ways similar to his literary hoaxes, and if untrue would have been an outright lie rather than a hoax. Tucker also makes the odd allegation that Franklin’s description of his sentry box experiment was a death threat to the president of London’s Royal Society. He also charges that Franklin may have been lying when he publicly reported in 1752 that two lightning rods had been erected on public buildings in Philadelphia that summer (a report that was published in the Royal Society’s journal and would, it seems, have been challenged at the time if it were false). The comprehensive analysis by Cohen, a professor of the history of science who is the foremost authority on Franklin’s electricity work, addresses fully and more convincingly the issues surrounding Franklin’s sentry box, kite, and lightning rods. Other articles about whether Franklin flew the kite that summer include Abbott L. Rotch, “Did Franklin Fly His Electrical Kite before He Invented the Lighting Rod?” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, 1907; Alexander McAdie, “The Date of Franklin’s Kite Experiment,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, 1925.
14. Cohen 66–109; Van Doren 165–70. Van Doren says that the possibility that Franklin fabricated or embellished his kite experiment would be “quite out of keeping with his record in science, in which he elsewhere appears always truthful and unpretending.”
15. BF to Collinson, Sept. 1753; BF to DF, June 10, 1758; Dudley Herschbach, “Ben Franklin’s Scientific Amusements,” Harvard Magazine (Nov. 1995): 44; BF to Cadwallader Colden, Apr. 12, 1753; BF to Royal Society, May 29, 1754.
16. BF to Collinson, July 29, 1750; Van Doren 171; J. J. Thompson, Recollections and Reflections (London: Bell, 1939), 252; BF to Cadwallader Colden, Oct. 11, 1750; Turgot epigram, 1781: Eripuit cœlo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis.
1. “On the Need for an Academy,” Pa. Gazette, Aug. 24, 1749; “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,” Oct. 1749; BF to Cadwallader Colden, Nov. 1749; Constitutions of the Publick Academy, Nov. 13, 1749; Autobiography 121, 129–31; Van Doren 193; University of Pennsylvania history, www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/genlhistory/brief.html. (The school was originally called the Academy of Philadelphia, then the College of Philadelphia, then in 1779 it was taken over by the state and became the University of the State of Pennsylvania, and finally in 1791 it was named the University of Pennsylvania.)
2. “Appeal for the Hospital,” Pa. Gazette, Aug. 8, 1751; Autobiography 134.
3. BF to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753; Stuart Sherman, “Franklin and the Age of Enlightenment,” in Sanford 75. See also chapter 4, n. 49.
For more on Franklin’s political thought, see Paul Conner, Poor Richard’s Politicks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), and Francis Jennings, Benjamin Franklin: Politician (New York: Norton, 1996).
4. “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” 1751, Papers 4:225; Conner 69–87; Hawke 95.
5. “Felons and Rattlesnakes,” Pa. Gazette, May 9, 1751.
6. “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” 1751; BF to Abiah Franklin, Apr. 12, 1750; John Van Horne, “Collective Benevolence,” in Lemay Reappraising, 433–36; Lopez Private, 291–302.
7. BF to John Waring, Dec. 17, 1763.
8. BF to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753.
9. Autobiography 131.
10. Autobiography 132.
11. Autobiography 132; Report of the Treaty of Carlisle, Nov. 1, 1753; Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, Nov. 15, 1753.
12. Autobiography 140; BF to Collinson, May 21, 1751; John Franklin to BF, Nov. 26, 1753; “Procedures for Postmasters,” 1753, Papers 5:162–77; post office finances, Aug. 10, 1753, Papers 5:18; Wright 85; Hawke 114; Brands 243–45; Clark 100; Lopez Private, 53.
13. BF to James Parker, Mar. 20, 1751; Pa. Gazette, May 9, 1754.
14. “Commission to Treat With the Indians,” Pa. Assembly, May 13, 1754, Papers 5:275; “Short Hints towards a Scheme for Uniting the Northern Colonies,” in BF to James Alexander and Cadwallader Colden, June 8, 1754, Papers 5:335.
15. BF to Peter Collinson, July 29, 1754; BF to Cadwallader Colden, July 14, 1754; “Plan of Proposed Union,” July 10, 1754; Autobiography 141–42; BF to William Shirley, Dec. 4, 22, 1754.
For overviews: Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Robert Newbold, The Albany Congress and Plan of Union (New York: Vantage, 1955), 95–105; Morgan Franklin, 83–90; Hawke 116–23; Brands 234–40; Wright 89–94. The most colorful popular account is in Catherine Drinker Bowen, The Most Dangerous Man in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 91–162.
There is a scholarly dispute on how to apportion credit for the final plan between Franklin and Hutchinson. In a letter years later, Hutchinson referred to it as his plan, but in a history book he wrote that “the plan for a general union was projected by Benjamin Franklin.” Indeed, the final plan was very similar in structure and phrasing to the “Short Hints” paper that Franklin prepared before arriving at Albany. See Papers 5:335; Wright 92. For a pro-Hutchinson view, see Lawrence Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1936–69), 5:126–38.
16. BF to John Franklin, Mar. 16, 1755; BF to Catherine Ray, Mar. 4, Mar.–Apr., Sept. 11, Oct. 16, 1755; Catherine Ray to BF, June 28, 1755. (She signed her name “Caty,” but Franklin tended to address her as “Katy” or “Katie.”)
17. The best analysis is in Lopez Private, 55–57, and Lopez Life, 25–29. The quote from Lopez is from the former book, but it is repeated in similar form in the latter. See also William Roelker, Benjamin Franklin and Catherine Ray Greene (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1949). Also worth noting is J. A. Leo Lemay’s astute analysis in PMHB 126:2 (Apr. 2002): 336: “Biographers who read Franklin’s flirtations as serious attempts to have sexual affairs seem to me to be either unsophisticated about human psychology or as prudish as John Adams in Paris.”
18. BF to Catherine Ray, Mar. 2, 1789.
19. Autobiography 143–47; Hawke 124–62; BF to Peters, Sept. 17, 1754; BF to Collinson, Aug. 25, 1755.
20. Autobiography 151–52, 148–51; “Advertisement for Wagons,” Apr. 26, 1755; Papers 6:19. (It is misdated in the Autobiography.)
21. BF to Peter Collinson, June 26, 1755; Autobiography 144; Robert Hunter Morris to Thomas Penn, June 16, 1755.
22. Autobiography 154–56; Assembly reply to Governor Morris, Aug. 8, 19, Nov. 11, 1755.
23. Autobiography 156; Brands 262; Pa. Gazette, Dec. 18, 1755; BF to James Read, Nov. 2, 1755; BF to Richard Partridge, Nov. 27, 1755.
24. BF to DF, Jan. 25, 1756; Autobiography 160–62; Brands 267–69; J. Bennett Nolan, General Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), 62.
25. Autobiography 162–63; Brands 270–71; BF to Collinson, Nov. 5, 1756.
26. BF to George Whitefield, July 2, 1756; BF to DF, Mar. 25, 1756; Autobiography 169; Assembly reply, by BF, Oct. 29, 1756; Assembly appointment of Franklin, Jan. 29, Feb. 3, 1757, Papers 7:109; Wright 105; Thomas Penn to Richard Peters, May 14, 1757.
1. BF to William Brownrigg, Nov. 7, 1773; “Everything is soothed by oil,” Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–79) wrote in his work Natural History, book 2, section 234. He was, in addition to being a scientist and senator, a commander of the Roman imperial fleet near Naples, and was killed at an eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
2. BF to DF, July 17, 1757; Autobiography 175–77.
3. Lopez Private, 86.
4. The Craven Street house where Franklin spent most of his time, now number 36, still exists, and in 2003 work began on converting it into a small museum. The plan is to have each of the tiny rooms feature a different aspect of his stay in London: his diplomacy, science, social life, and writings. The house, which has a nineteenth-century brick façade but is otherwise structurally similar to the way it was in Franklin’s time, is a few hundred yards from Charing Cross station and Trafalgar Square. www.thersa.org/franklin/default.html; www.rsa.org.uk/projects/project_closeup.asp?id=1001; www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/wrt/Siteview/project.html.
5. BF to PS May 4, 1759, and undated 1759, May 1, Sept. 13, 1760.
6. BF to PS, Sept. 13, 1759, May 1, June 11 (includes the “prudent moderation” excerpt), Sept. 13, and undated Nov., 1760; PS to BF, June 23, 1760, undated Aug., and Sept. 16, 1760. See also their letters throughout 1761–62.
7. BF to PS, Jan. 27, 1783; Wright 110; Clark 140; Lopez Private, 83; Randall 123.
8. William Strahan to DF, Dec. 13, 1757.
9. BF to DF, Jan. 14, Feb. 19, June 10, 1758; Lopez Private, 80; Clark 142–43, 147.
10. BF to DF, Nov. 22, Dec. 3, 1757, June 10, 1758, June 27, 1760; Lopez Private, 172.
11. Verner Crane, “The Club of Honest Whigs,” William and Mary Quarterly 23 (1966): 210; Leonard Labaree, “Benjamin Franklin’s British Friendships,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 108 (1964): 423; Clark 142; Brands 279; Morgan Devious, 15; Hawke 163.
12. Strahan to DF, Dec. 13, 1757; BF to DF, Nov. 27, 1757.
13. Wright 114–15, 216–17.
14. Thomas Penn to Richard Peters, May 14, 1757.
15. Autobiography 177–79.
16. Autobiography 178.
17. Autobiography 179; “Heads of Complaint,” BF to the Penns, Aug. 20, 1757; answer to “Heads of Complaint” by Ferdinand John Paris, Nov. 28, 1758, Papers 8:184; Cecil Currey, Road to Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1968), 35.
18. “Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges,” Oct. 28, 1701, www.constitution.org/bcp/penncharpriv.htm; BF to Isaac Norris, Jan. 14, 1758; Clark 144; Middlekauff 65–66; Brands 301.
19. Thomas Penn to Richard Peters, July 5, 1758; BF to Joseph Galloway, Feb. 17, 1758; Brands 302; Wright 117.
20. WF to the Printer of the Citizen, from the Pennsylvania Coffee-house in London, Sept. 16, 1757.
21. BF to DF, June 10, 1758; Skemp William,30–31.
22. Lopez Private, 61–69; Skemp William, 24–26, 37; Randall 102–15; WF to Elizabeth Graeme, Feb. 26, Apr. 7, Dec. 9, 1757; WF to Margaret Abercrombie, Oct. 24, 1758. The True Conduct of Persons of Quality was written by Nicolas Rémond des Cours and translated from the French and published in London in 1694.
23. BF to Abiah Franklin, Apr. 12, 1750; WF to BF, Sept. 3, 1758.
24. BF to DF, Sept. 6, 1758, Aug. 29, 1759.
25. Dr. Thomas Bray, “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Among the Negroes in the Colonies,” docsouth.dsi.internet2.edu/church/pierre/pierre.html; BF to John Lining, Apr. 14, 1757, June 17, 1758; BF to Cadwallader Colden, Feb. 25, 1763.
26. BF to DF, Sept. 6, 1758.
27. Answer to Heads of Complaint by Ferdinand John Paris, Nov. 28, 1758; Thomas and Richard Penn to the Assembly, Nov. 28, 1758; BF to Isaac Norris, Jan. 19, 1759. See Papers 8:178–86; Middlekauff 68–70; Hawke 173; Morgan Devious, 38.
28. Morgan Franklin, 102, 130; Gordon Wood, “Wise Men,” New York Review, Sept. 26, 2002, 44. In this review of Morgan’s book, Wood argues that Franklin’s actions can be readily explained by his loyalty to the Crown, and he faults Morgan for being blinded by hindsight when he accuses Franklin of blindness. “His account of Franklin seems at times subtly infused with what historians call ‘whiggism,’ the anachronistic foreshortening that makes the past an anticipation of the future,” Wood writes. On balance, I feel that Franklin’s anger at the Proprietors did, in fact, cause him to lose his perspective at a time when others, both supporters and foes of the Penns, were able to see more clearly that there was not enough support on either side of the ocean to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony and that the fundamental problem was the general attitude among British leaders that the colonies ought to be economically and politically submissive.
29. BF to the Privy Council, Sept. 20, 1758; Hawke 176.
30. BF to Thomas Leech, May 13, 1758; Hawke 169, 177; Papers 8:60.
31. Autobiography 180; Report of the Board of Trade, June 24, 1760, in Papers 9:125–73; Privy Council order, Sept. 2, 1760; Morgan Devious, 56–57; Middlekauff 73.
32. Brands 305–6; “A Parable on Brotherly Love,” 1755, Papers 6:124; BF to Lord Kames, May 3, 1760.
33. BF to David Hume, May 19, 1762.
34. BF to David Hume, Sept. 27, 1760; David Hume to BF, May 10, 1762.
35. BF to Lord Kames, Jan. 3, 1760; Brands 287; St. Andrew’s citation, Oct. 1, 1759, Papers 8:277.
36. BF to DF, Mar. 5, 1760.
37. Temple Franklin’s tombstone refers to his birthdate as Feb. 22, 1762, but family correspondence indicates that he was born in February 1760. Lopez Private, 93; Van Doren 290.
38. BF to Jared Ingersoll, Dec. 11, 1762; WF to SF, Oct. 10, 1761.
39. “Humorous Reasons for Restoring Canada,” London Chronicle, Dec. 27, 1759; “The Interest of Great Britain Considered,” Apr. 1760, Papers 9:59–100; Jack Greene, “Pride, Prejudice and Jealousy,” in Lemay Reappraising, 125.
40. BF to William Strahan, Aug. 23, 1762.
41. Aldridge French, 169, from Pierre Cabanis, Complete Works (Paris: Bossange frères, 1825), 5:222.
42. Temple Franklin, “Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin,” 1:75; Randall 180; Skemp William, 38; Brands 328; BF to JM, Nov. 25, 1752; BF to PS, Aug. 11, 1762.
43. BF to John Pringle, Dec. 1, 1762.
1. Skemp William, 48; Thomas Penn to James Hamilton, Sept. 1762; Clark 170.
2. BF to Benjamin Waller, Aug. 1, 1763.
3. BF to Lord Bessborough, Oct. 1761; Lopez Private, 100; BF to DF, June 16, 1763.
4. BF to PS, June 10, 1763; Lopez Private, 100.
5. Hawke 202; BF to JM, June 19, 1763; BF to Catherine Ray Greene, Aug. 1, 1763; BF to William Strahan, Aug. 8, 1763.
6. Lopez Private, 114; WF to William Strahan, Apr. 25, 1763; BF to William Strahan, Dec. 19, 1763.
7. BF to Peter Collinson, Dec. 19, 1763; “A Narrative of the Late Massacres, in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province, by Persons Unknown,” Jan. 1764; Van Doren 307; Hawke 208; Brands 352.
There is an interesting historical dispute over Franklin’s sympathies for the Indians and prejudice toward the frontier Presbyterians and ethnic Germans. Buxbaum 185–219 is among those who play up Franklin’s prejudice toward Presbyterians and take him to task for making the Indians seem “human beings not essentially different from Englishmen.” Brooke Hindle, in “The March of the Paxton Boys,” William and Mary Quarterly (Oct. 1946), takes a similar approach. They are opposed by Francis Jennings in Benjamin Franklin: Politician (New York: Norton, 1996), 158–59. He calls Buxbaum “learnedly confused” and accuses Hindle of “absolute ignorance” and of making “bigoted asinine” comments.
8. BF to John Fothergill, Mar. 14, 1764; BF to Richard Jackson, Feb. 11, 1764; Hawke 208.
9. BF to Lord Kames, June 2, 1765; John Penn to Thomas Penn, May 5, 1764; BF to John Fothergill, Mar. 14, 1764; Hawke 211; Brands 356; Van Doren 311.
10. Assembly reply to the governor, Mar. 24, 1764.
11. Van Doren 314; Buxbaum 192; Cecil Currey, Road to Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1968), 58.
12. Resolutions of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Mar. 24, 1764; “Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation of Our Public Affairs,” Apr. 12, 1764; BF to Richard Jackson, Mar. 14, 29, Sept. 1, 1764; BF to William Strahan, Mar. 30, 1764; J. Philip Gleason, “A Scurrilous Election and Franklin’s Reputation,” William and Mary Quarterly (Oct. 1961); Brands 357; Van Doren 313; Morgan Devious, 80–83. The anti-Franklin pamphlets are in Papers 11:381.
13. Hawke 225; Brands 358; Van Doren 316; Buxbaum 12; “Remarks on a Late Protest,” Nov. 5, 1764.
14. BF to Richard Jackson, May 1, 1764; BF to SF, Nov. 8, 1764; Hawke 222–26.
1. BF to PS, Dec. 12, 1764.
2. BF to DF, Dec. 27, 1764, Feb. 9, 14, 1765. For good overviews on Franklin’s mission, see Middlekauff; Morgan Devious; Cecil Currey, Road to Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1968); Theodore Draper, The Struggle for Power (New York: Times Books, 1996); Edmund Morgan and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
3. BF to PS, July 20, 1768; PS to BF, Sept. 26, 1768; Noah Webster to BF, May 24, 1786; BF to Webster, June 18, 1786; Van Doren 426; Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language: With Notes, Historical and Critical, to Which Is Added, by Way of Appendix, an Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling, with Dr. Franklin’s Arguments on That Subject (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789), edweb.sdsu.edu/people/DKitchen/new_655/webster_language.htm.
4. Lopez Private, 152; WF to BF, Jan. 2, 1769; PS to Barbara Hewson, Oct. 4, 1774; PS to BF, Sept. 5, 1776.
5. Cadwalader Evans to BF, Mar. 15, 1765; John Penn to Thomas Penn, Mar. 16, 1765; Morgan Devious, 94.
6. BF to Joseph Galloway, Oct. 11, 1766; Morgan Devious, 102. Morgan and Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 89–91; Brands 360–63; Van Doren 320.
7. BF to John Hughes, Aug. 9, 1765; Morgan Devious, 106; Thomas Penn to William Allen, July 13, 1765.
8. BF to Charles Thomson, July 11, 1765; Morgan Devious, 105; Charles Thomson to BF, Sept. 24, 1765; John Hughes to BF, Sept. 17, 1765.
9. David Hall to BF, Sept. 6, 1765; Morgan Devious, 106; Wright 188.
10. Samuel Wharton to BF, Oct. 13, 1765; John Hughes to BF, Sept. 12, 1765; DF to BF, Sept. 22, 1765; Morgan Devious, 107; BF to DF, Nov. 9, 1765; Brands 368.
11. Patrick Henry to the Virginia House of Delegates, May 30, 1765; BF to John Hughes, Aug. 9, 1765; Thomas Hutchinson to BF, Nov. 18, 1765; Brands 368.
12. BF to Pennsylvania Assembly committee, Apr. 12, 1766; Thomas Penn to John Penn, Nov. 30, 1765.
13. BF to David Hall, Nov. 9, 1765; BF to Joseph Galloway, Oct. 11, 1766; John Fothergill to James Pemberton, Feb. 27, 1766; “Defense of Indian Corn and a Reply,” The Gazetteer, Jan. 2, 15, 1766.
14. Public Advertiser, May 22, 1765, Jan. 2, 1766.
15. William Warner, “Enlightened Anonymity,” University of California Santa Barbara, lecture, Mar. 8, 2002, dc-mrg.english.ucsb.edu/conference/2002/documents/william_warner_anon.html.
16. BF to JM, Mar. 1, 1766; BF to WF, Nov. 9, 1765; Brands 373; Hawke 235–37.
17. BF to unknown recipient, Jan. 6, 1766; see also BF to Cadwalader Evans, May 1766; Wright 187; Van Doren 333.
18. Testimony to the House of Commons, Feb. 13, 1766, Papers 13:129–62; Brands 374–76; Van Doren 336–52.
19. William Strahan to David Hall, May 10, 1766; Joseph Galloway to BF, May 23, June 7, 1766; Charles Thomson to BF, May 20, 1766; Van Doren 353; Clark 195; Hawke 242.
20. BF to DF, Apr. 6, 1766.
21. DF to BF, Feb. 10, Oct. 8, 13, 1765; BF to DF, June 4, 1765; Lopez Private, 126.
22. David Hall to BF, Jan. 27, 1767; BF to Hall, Apr. 14, 1767.
23. BF to DF, June 22, 1767.
24. Lopez Private, 134, citing E. D. Gillespie, A Book of Remembrance (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1901), 25.
25. DF to BF, Apr. 25, 1767; BF to DF, May 23, June 22, 1767; Brands 390; Hawke 255.
26. WF to BF, May 1767; RB to BF, May 21, 1767; Brands 391.
27. BF to RB, Aug. 5, 1767; BF to DF, Aug. 5, 1767.
28. MS to DF, Sept. 18, 1767; Lopez Private, 139.
29. BF to DF, Aug. 28, 1767; BF to PS, Sept. 14, 1767.
30. BF to PS, Aug. 28, 1767; Van Doren 367–69.
31. BF to DF, Nov. 2, 17, 1767; BF to PS, Oct. 9, 1767; Brands 395–96; Van Doren 368; Hawke 258.
32. JM to BF, Dec. 1, 1767; BF to JM, Feb. 21, 1768.
33. BF to RB, Aug. 13, 1768; BF to DF, Aug. 9, 1768; Lopez Private, 141.
34. BF to DF, Jan. 26, 1769; Thomas Bond to BF, June 7, 1769; DF to BF, Nov. 27, 1769; Van Doren 404; Lopez Private, 143; Brands 456.
35. PS to BF, Sept. 1, 1769; BF to PS, Sept. 2, 1769, May 31, 1770; Lopez Private, 154.
36. “Craven Street Gazette,” Sept. 22–25, 1770, in Papers 17:220–26.
37. BF to Barbeu Dubourg, July 28, 1768; Lopez Private, 27.
38. BF to MS, Nov. 3, 1772, misdated 1767 in Papers.
39. “A Friend to Both Countries,” London Chronicle, Apr. 9, 1767; “Benevolous,” London Chronicle, Apr. 11, 1767; Brands 386; Hawke 252; Cecil Currey, Road to Revolution, 222.
40. “Causes of the American Discontents before 1768,” London Chronicle, Jan. 7, 1768. Although it was anonymous, Franklin indicated his authorship by using as an epigram a line he had used in his 1760 piece on “The Interest of Great Britain Considered”: “The waves never rise but when the winds blow.” With his interest in waves, both scientific and political, he enjoyed this metaphor.
41. “Preface to Letters from a Farmer,” by N.N. (BF), May 8, 1768, Papers 15:110; BF to WF, Mar. 13, 1768.
42. BF to Joseph Galloway, Jan. 9, 1768; BF to WF, Jan. 9, 1768; BF to unknown recipient, Nov. 28, 1768; Lib. of Am. 839; Clark 211.
43. BF to Joseph Galloway, July 2, Dec. 13, 1768; BF to WF, July 2, 1768; Hawke 263, 268; Brands 408.
44. To Thomas Crowley, by “Francis Lynn” (BF), Public Advertiser, Oct. 21, 1768; “On Civil War,” signed N.N. (BF), Public Advertiser, Aug. 25, 1768; “Queries,” by “NMCNPCH” (BF), London Chronicle, Aug. 18, 1768; “On Absentee Governors,” by Twilight (BF), Public Advertiser, Aug. 27, 1768.
45. “An American” (BF) to the Gazetteer, Jan. 17, 1769; “A Lion’s Whelp,” Public Advertiser, Jan. 2, 1770.
46. BF to William Strahan, Nov. 29, 1769.
47. BF to Charles Thomson, Mar. 18, 1770; BF to Samuel Cooper, June 8, 1770.
48. Franklin’s account of audience with Hillsborough, Jan. 16, 1771, Papers 18:9; Hawke 290; Brands 431–34.
49. BF to Samuel Cooper, Feb. 5, June 10, 1771; Strahan to WF, Apr. 3, 1771; BF to Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence, May 15, 1771; Hawke 294–95; Van Doren 387–88.
50. BF to Thomas Cushing, June 10, 1771; Arthur Lee to Sam Adams, June 10, 1771, in Richard Henry Lee, The Life of Arthur Lee (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1829); Samuel Cooper to BF, Aug. 25, 1771; Brands 437–38.
1. BF to William Brownrigg, Nov. 7, 1773; Charles Tanford, Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 29; Van Doren 419.
2. Jonathan Williams (BF’s nephew), “Journal of a Tour Through Northern England,” May 28, 1771, Papers 18:113; BF to Thomas Cushing, June 10, 1771; BF to DF, June 5, 1771; Hawke 295; Brands 438.
3. BF to Jonathan Shipley, June 24, 1771.
4. BF to JM, July 17, 1771; BF to Samuel Franklin, July 19, 1771.
5. John Updike, “Many Bens,” New Yorker, Feb. 22, 1988, 112; Charles Angoff, A Literary History of the American People (New York: Knopf, 1931); Van Doren 415.
Lemay/Zall Autobiography provides a complete look at the original manuscript and all of its revisions. The edition produced by Leonard Labaree and the other editors of the Franklin Papers at Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964) is authoritative, filled with useful annotations, and has an introduction that gives a good history of the manuscript. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiographical Writings (1945; New York: Viking, 2002), 208–11, and Van Doren’s biography of Franklin, 414–15, describe Franklin’s process of writing. Also valuable are various articles by J. A. Leo Lemay: “The Theme of Vanity in Franklin’s Autobiography,” in Lemay Reappraising, 372, and “Franklin and the Autobiography,” Eighteenth Century Studies (1968): 200. For good analyses of the manuscript, which is available at the Huntington Library, see P. M. Zall, “The Manuscript of Franklin’s Autobiography,” Huntington Library Quarterly 39 (1976); P. M. Zall, “A Portrait of the Autobiographer as an Old Artificer,” in The Oldest Revolutionary, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 53. The Norton Critical edition (New York: Norton, 1968), which was edited by Lemay and Zall, contains a bibliography of scholarly articles as well as excerpts of criticism. See also Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988); Henry Steele Commager, introduction to the Modern Library edition (New York: Random House, 1944); Daniel Aaron, introduction to the Library of America edition (New York: Vintage, 1990).
The memoir written by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) had been published by Franklin’s friend Horace Walpole in 1764, seven years before Franklin began his own work. Gilbert Burnet was a great English clergyman and historian who described the revolution of 1688 in his History of My Own Time, a copy of which was owned by Franklin’s Library Company.
6. BF to Anna Shipley, Aug. 13, 1771; BF to Georgiana Shipley, Sept. 26, 1772; BF to DF, Aug. 14, 1771; Van Doren 416–17.
7. BF to Thomas Cushing, Jan. 13, 1772; BF to Joshua Babcock, Jan. 13, 1772; Brands 440.
8. BF to Thomas Cushing, Jan. 13, 1772; BF to WF, Jan. 30, 1772.
9. J. Bennett Nolan, Benjamin Franklin in Scotland and Ireland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956). This small book is a detailed and well-researched account of Franklin’s activities on these trips. There is some disagreement about whether Adam Smith showed Franklin chapters of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, but one of Smith’s relatives said this was the case.
10. PS to BF, Oct. 31, 1771; SF to RB, Dec. 2, 1771; RB to DF, Dec. 3, 1771; Mary Bache to BF, Dec. 3, 1771, Feb. 5, 1772; Lopez Private, 143–44.
11. BF to DF, Jan. 28, 1772; BF to SF, Jan. 29, 1772; Lopez Private, 146; RB to BF, Apr. 6, 1773; Van Doren 392; Brands 455.
12. BF to DF, Oct. 3, 1770; BF to PS, Nov. 25, 1771; BF to DF, Feb. 2, 1773; Brands 456; Van Doren 404, 411.
13. BF to William Brownrigg, Nov. 7, 1773; Stanford 78–80; C. H. Giles, “Franklin’s Teaspoon of Oil,” Chemistry & Industry (1961): 1616–34; Stephen Thompson, “How Small Is a Molecule?” SHiPS News, Jan. 1994, www1.umn.edu/ships/words/avogadro.htm; “Measuring Molecules: The Pond on Clapham Common,” www.rosepetruck.chem.brown.edu/Chem10-01/Lab3/Chem10_lab3.htm.
14. BF to Benjamin Rush, July 14, 1773.
15. BF to WF, Aug. 19, 1772.
16. BF to Cadwalader Evans, Feb. 20, 1768.
17. BF to John Pringle, May 10, 1768.
18. BF to Peter Franklin, May 7, 1760.
19. BF to Giambatista Beccaria, July 13, 1762; www.gigmasters.com/armonica/index.asp.
20. Franklin to Collinson, May 9, 1753.
21. Medius (BF), “On the Labouring Poor,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, Apr. 1768.
22. Campbell 236.
23. “A Conversation on Slavery,” Public Advertiser, Jan. 30, 1770.
24. Lopez Private, 292–98; Gary Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly (Apr. 1973): 225–56. Lopez and Herbert say that one out of five families owned slaves, which is wrong; however, it is true that slaves accounted for roughly one-fifth of the population in 1790, which is not quite the same thing. According to the 1790 census, the first conducted in America, the country had a population of 3,893,874, of which 694,207 were slaves. There were 410,636 families, of which 47,664 owned slaves. In 1750, it is estimated there were 1.2 million people in the thirteen colonies, of which 236,000 were slaves. See fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/; www.eh.net/encyclopedia/wahl.slavery.us.php; Stanley Engerman and Eugene Genovese, Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
25. Anthony Benezet to BF, Apr. 27, 1772; BF to Anthony Benezet, Aug. 22, 1772; BF to Benjamin Rush, July 14, 1773; “The Somerset Case and the Slave Trade,” London Chronicle, June 20, 1772; Lopez Private, 299.
26. BF to WF, Jan. 30, Aug. 19, 1772.
27. BF to WF, Aug. 17, 1772, July 14, 1773; BF to Joseph Galloway, Apr. 6, 1773; Van Doren 394–98.
28. BF to Thomas Cushing, Dec. 2, 1772; BF, Tract Relative to the Affair of the Hutchinson Letters, 1774, Papers 21:414. An excellent account of the affair is in Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 221–49. See also Brands 452; Van Doren 461; Wright 224.
29. BF to Thomas Cushing, Mar. 9, May 6, 1773.
30. “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” Public Advertiser, Sept. 11, 1773.
31. “An Edict by the King of Prussia,” Public Advertiser, Sept. 23, 1773.
32. Baron Le Despencer, “Franklin’s Contributions to an Abridged Version of a Book of Common Prayer,” Aug. 5, 1773, Dashwood Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Papers 20:343; “A New Version of the Lord’s Prayer,” Papers 15:299; BF to WF, Oct. 6, 1773. Sir Francis Dashwood became Lord Le Despencer in 1763.
33. BF to Joseph Galloway, Nov. 3, 1773; BF to Thomas Cushing, Feb. 2, 1774.
34. BF to Thomas Cushing, July 25, 1773; BF to London Chronicle, Dec. 25, 1773, Papers 20:531; BF, Tract Relative to the Affair of the Hutchinson Letters, 1774, Papers 21:414; Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, 255.
35. BF to Thomas Cushing, Feb. 15, 1774; BF to Thomas Walpole, Jan. 12, 1774; Van Doren 462–63.
36. The record of hearings and the speech by Wedderburn, Jan. 29, 1774, are in Papers 21:37. There are numerous reconstructions, notably, Fleming 248–50; Hawke 324–27; Brands 470–74; Van Doren 462–76.
37. BF to Thomas Cushing, Feb. 15, 1774; BF to WF, Feb. 2, 1774; BF to JM, Feb. 17, 1774.
38. BF to Jan Ingenhousz, Mar. 18, 1774; “A Tract Relative to the Hutchinson Letters,” 1774, Papers 21:414; Hawke 327; Van Doren 477.
39. Homo Trium Literarum (A Man of Letters, BF), “The Reply,” Public Advertiser, Feb. 16, 1774; Boston Gazette, Apr. 25, 1774; Brands 477–78.
40. Public Advertiser, Apr. 15, May 21, 1774.
41. BF to RB, Feb. 17, 1774; Hawke 329; BF to JM, Sept. 26, 1774.
42. WF to BF, May 3, 1774; WF to Lord Dartmouth, May 31, 1774; Lord Dartmouth to WF, July 6, 1774; Randall 282–84.
43. BF to WF, June 30, May 7, 1774. The May 7 letter is dated 1775, and many authors accept that it was written then, which was just a couple of days after Franklin’s arrival back in America. In fact, it seems to be misdated, as the Yale editors have concluded. On May 7, 1775, a Sunday, he did not write any other letters, but on May 7, 1774, he was busily engaged in correspondence. The letter fits into the pattern of letters he was writing at that time.
44. BF to undisclosed recipient, July 27, 1774; BF to Thomas Cushing, Mar. 22, 1774; WF to BF, July 5, 1774; BF to WF, Sept. 7, Oct. 12, 1774.
45. BF to DF, Sept. 10, 1774; WF to BF, Dec. 24, 1774.
46. “Journal of the Negotiations in London,” BF to WF, Mar. 22, 1775, in Papers 21:540; Sparks, ch. 8.
47. Morgan Devious, 241.
48. This section is drawn from Franklin’s Mar. 22, 1775, journal (cited above) of negotiations and the notes he inserted into it, Papers 21:540. Also, BF to Charles Thomson, Feb. 5, Mar. 13, 1775; BF to Thomas Cushing, Jan. 28, 1775; BF to Joseph Galloway, Feb. 5, 25, 1775; Thomas Walpole to BF, Mar. 16, 1775; Van Doren 495–523.
49. BF to Charles Thomson, Feb. 5, 1775.
50. Van Doren 521, citing J. T. Rutt, ed., The Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley (1817; New York: Thoemmes Press, 1999), 1:227.
1. “Benjamin Franklin and the Gulf Stream,” podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/kids/history.html.
2. BF to TF, June 13, 1775; Brands 499.
3. Adams Diary 2:127; William Rachel, ed., Papers of James Madison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 1:149; Lopez Private, 200; Van Doren 530; Hawke 351; Brands 499.
4. BF to Joseph Galloway, Feb. 25, May 8, 1775; Van Doren 527; Peter Hutchinson, ed., The Diary of Thomas Hutchinson (1884; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 2:237.
5. WF to William Strahan, May 7, 1775. There is some uncertainty about when the Franklins first reunited. Some assume it was within days of Benjamin Franklin’s return, though I find no evidence for this. See Hawke 292, and Clark 273. Sheila Skemp, in two books about William Franklin, concludes that William remained in New Jersey until the end of the May 15–16 legislative session and traveled to Pennsylvania for the first time shortly thereafter. See Skemp William, 167, 173; Skemp Benjamin, 127. Brands 524 accepts that chronology. Also, see ch. 11 n. 43 regarding the May 7 letter from Benjamin to William Franklin that some authors (notably Hawke 349), though not the Yale editors, date as being written in 1775, just after Franklin’s arrival.
6. Peter Hutchinson, The Diary of Thomas Hutchinson, 2: 237; Hawke 349; Skemp William, 173–79; Fleming 292; Lopez Private, 199. See also Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).
7. BF to William Strahan, unsent, July 5, 1775; BF to Strahan, July 7, 1775, quoted by Strahan to BF, Sept. 6, 1775.
8. William Strahan to BF, July 5, Sept. 6, Oct. 4, 1775; BF to Strahan, Oct. 3, 1775; Lopez Private, 198; Clark 276–77.
9. BF to Jonathan Shipley, July 7, 1775.
10. BF to Joseph Priestley, July 7, 1775.
11. “Intended Vindication and Offer from Congress to Parliament,” July 1775, in Smyth Writings, 412–20 and Papers 22:112; Proposed preamble, before Mar. 23, 1776, Papers 22:388.
12. Adams to Abigail Adams, July 23, 1775; Brands 500; Hawke 354.
13. “Proposed Articles of Confederation,” July 21, 1775, Papers 22:120; www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/contcong/07-21-75.htm; Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England, May 19, 1643, religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/colonies_of_ne_1643.html.
14. WF to BF, Aug. 14, Sept. 6, 1775; Lopez Private, 202; Skemp William, 181.
15. BF to MS, July 17, 1775; Lopez Private, 201; Dorothea Blount to BF, Apr. 19, 1775.
16. BF to Joseph Priestley, July 7, 1775; BF to Charles Lee, Feb. 11, 1776; Van Doren 532–36.
17. BF to David Hartley, Oct. 3, 1775; BF to Joseph Priestley, July 7, Oct. 3, 1775.
18. Minutes of Conference with General Washington, Oct. 18–24, 1775, in Papers 22:224.
19. BF to RB, Oct. 19, 1775.
20. Abigail to John Adams, Nov. 5, 1775, Adams Letters, 1:320; Van Doren 537.
21. Lopez Private, 204; JM to Catherine Ray Greene, Nov. 24, 1775.
22. JM to Catherine Ray Greene, Nov. 24, 1775; Elizabeth Franklin to TF, Nov. 9, 1775.
23. “The Rattle-Snake as a Symbol of America,” by An American Guesser (BF), Pa. Journal, Dec. 27, 1775; www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-ratt.html.
24. WF to TF, Mar. 14, June 3, 1776; WF to Lord Germain, Mar. 28, 1776; BF to Josiah Quincy, Apr. 15, 1776.
25. Franklin’s Journal in Passy, Oct. 4, 1778; BF to Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase, May 27, 1776; Allan Everest, ed., The Journal of Charles Carroll (1776; New York: Champlain–Upper Hudson Bicentennial Commission, 1976), 50; BF to John Hancock, May 1, 8, 1776; BF to George Washington, June 21, 1776; Brands 506–8; Van Doren 542–46; Clark 281–84.
26. BF to RB, Sept. 30, 1774; Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Feb. 14, 1776, www.bartleby.com/133/.
27. WF to TF, June 25, 1776; Skemp William, 206–15.
28. The literature on the writing of the Declaration of Independence is voluminous. This section draws from Pauline Maier, American Scripture (New York: Knopf, 1997); Garry Wills, Inventing America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978); and Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Random House, 1922; Vintage paperback, 1970). See also McCullough, 119–36; Adams Diary 2:392, 512–15; Jefferson to James Madison, Aug. 30, 1823, in Jefferson Papers 10:267–69; drafts and revisions of the Declaration of Independence, www.walika.com/sr/drafting.htm. See also n. 34 below.
29. Adams Diary 3:336, 2:512–15; Jefferson Papers 1:299; Maier 100; “Thomas Jefferson’s Recollection,” www.walika.com/sr/jeff-tells.htm.
30. Maier, American Scripture, 38.
31. Sparks, ch. 9 n. 62; Preamble to a Congressional Resolution, Papers 22:322. The document in Sparks’s work is more complete than the one in the Franklin papers.
32. Becker, The Declaration of Independence, 24–25; Adams Diary 2:512; Jefferson Papers 7:304.
33. Jefferson to BF, June 21, 1776.
34. The “original rough draught” of the Declaration shows the evolution of the text from the initial “fair copy” draft by Thomas Jefferson to the final text adopted by Congress. It can be viewed at the Library of Congress and on the Internet at www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trt001.html and www.lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/declara4.html. See also odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1776-1800/independence/doitj.htm and www.walika.com/sr/drafting.htm.
I am grateful to Gerhard Gawalt, the historian of the Library of Congress, for personally showing me the “original rough draft” and sharing his knowledge about each of the edit changes. I am also grateful to James Billington, Librarian of Congress, and Mark Roosa, the director of preservation, who arranged the presentation. Dr. Gawalt has edited and written a preface to an updated version of a useful illustrated book showing the various drafts: Julian Boyd, The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text (1945; Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1999).
35. Franklin’s alterations are noted in Becker, The Declaration of Independence, 142; Van Doren 550; Maier, American Scripture, 136. See also Wills, Inventing America, 181 and passim. Wills does not discuss Franklin’s role in changing Jefferson’s words to “self-evident,” but he does discuss the definition used by Locke. Wills also gives a fascinating analysis of the influences of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers.
36. Maier, American Scripture, appendix C, 236–40, shows all of the revisions made by Congress. Garry Wills argues that the changes made did not improve the document as much as other scholars have contended; Wills, Inventing America, 307 and passim.
37. Thomas Jefferson to Robert Walsh, Dec. 4, 1818, Jefferson Papers 18:169.
38. Sparks 1:408, ch. 9.
39. Franklin speech of July 31, 1776, in Adams Diary 2:245; Van Doren 557–58.
40. Smyth Writings, 10:57; Papers CD 46:u344 has the speech reused in his Nov. 3, 1789, remarks on the Pennsylvania Constitution. For a description of Franklin’s design of the Great Seal, see James Hutson, Sara Day, and Jaroslav Pelikan, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1998), 50–52; Jefferson Papers, LCMS-27748, 181–82.
41. Richard Howe to BF, written June 20, sent July 12, 1776.
42. BF to Lord Howe, July 30, 1776.
43. Howe’s remarks in Papers 22:518; Richard Howe to BF, Aug. 16, 1776.
44. Adams Diary 3:418.
45. Many accounts were written of the Staten Island summit: the notes of Henry Strachey (Howe’s secretary) in the New York Public Library and reprinted elsewhere; report to Congress of the committee to confer with Lord Howe, in Smyth Writings, 6:465 and elsewhere; Adams Diary 3:79, 3:418–22; Papers 22:518–20; Howe’s report to Lord Germain, Sept. 20, 1776, in the London Public Records Office and reprinted in Documents of the American Revolution (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981); John Adams to Abigail Adams, Sept. 14, 1776, in Adams Letters 2:124. See also Parton 2:148; Van Doren 558–62; Clark 287–91; Brands 518–19; McCullough 156–58.
46. Alsop 30–31.
47. BF to Benjamin Rush, Sept. 27, 1776.
48. “Sketch of Propositions for Peace,” written sometime between Sept. 26 and Oct. 25, 1776, Papers 22:630; Smyth Writings, 454; Cecil Currey, Code Number 72 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 73; Van Doren 553.
49. Currey Code Number 72, 77–78; Edward Hale Sr. and Edward Hale Jr., Franklin in France (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888), 1:67.
50. Elizabeth Franklin to SF, July 12, 1776; Elizabeth Franklin to TF, July 16, 1776.
51. BF to TF, Sept. 19, 1776; Elizabeth Franklin to BF, Aug. 6, 1776; Skemp William, 217.
52. BF to TF, Sept. 19, 22, 1776; TF to BF, Sept. 21, 1776.
53. BF to TF, Sept. 28, 1776; WF to Elizabeth Franklin, Nov. 25, 1776.
54. BF to RB, June 2, 1779.
1. Franklin’s Passy journal, Oct. 4, 1778; BF to SF, May 10, 1785; BF to John Hancock, Dec. 8, 1776. He was writing to Hancock in his capacity as president of Congress.
Franklin’s social life in Paris has, not surprisingly, inspired many books. The most delightful include Lopez Cher; Aldridge French; Alsop; Schoenbrun. An older work of some value is Edward Hale Sr. and Edward Hale Jr., Franklin in France (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888). It was also the subject of a musical, Ben Franklin in Paris, by Mark Sandrich Jr. and Sidney Michaels, which premiered Oct. 27, 1964, and ran for 215 performances.
2. BF to SF, June 3, 1779; Aldridge French, 43; Van Doren 632. The tale of the chamber pot given by the king to Comtesse Diane de Polignac comes from the memoirs of Madame Henriette de Campan, the lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette. It is well enough known that it was told by the French ambassador at a ceremony in the Benjamin Franklin room of the U.S. State Department; see: www.info-france-usa.org/news/statmnts/1998/amba0910.asp. However, Claude-Anne Lopez tells me, “It comes from a very unreliable source, a snobbish sourpuss, and my guess is that it’s not true.” That said, Lopez included it without qualification in her own book, Lopez Cher, 184.
3. The Boston Patriot, May 15, 1811, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856) 1:660; Lopez Cher, 13; Wright 270.
4. Aldridge French, 23, 66, 115, 43, 61; Voltaire, “Letters on England” (1733), www.literatureproject.com/letters-Voltaire; Van Doren 570; Abbé Flamarens to Mémoires Secret, Jan. 17, 1777.
5. BF to Emma Thompson, Feb. 8, 1777; BF to PS, Aug. 28, 1767.
6. BF to Josiah Quincy, Apr. 22, 1779; BF to Elizabeth Partridge, Oct. 11, 1776.
7. BF to MS, Jan. 25, 1779; Alsop 76–94; Lopez Cher, 123–36; Aldridge French, 196–99. Temple’s letter is from Randall 455, citing TF to SF, Nov. 25, 1777. The quote from Madame Chaumont is from Adams Diary 4:64. I am grateful to Professor Thomas Schaeper of St. Bonaventure University for his help and his delightful, though hard to find, biography of Franklin’s landlord, France and America in the Revolutionary Era: The Life of Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont, 1725–1803 (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn, 1995).
8. Arthur Lee to Richard Lee, Sept. 12, 1778; BF to Congress, Dec. 7, 1780; Charles Isham, The Silas Deane Papers (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1890). For more on the Silas Deane papers in the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford and a biographical sketch, see www.chs.org/library/ead/htm_faids/deans1789.htm#OB1.3.
9. BF to Arthur Lee, Apr. 3 (unsent), 4, 1778; Van Doren 598.
10. “Petition of the Letter Z,” 1778, Papers 28:517.
11. “Instructions to Silas Deane,” Mar. 2, 1776, from Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence, signed by BF and others and apparently written by BF, Papers 22:369; Sidney Edelstein, “Notes on the Wet-Processing Industry: The Dual Life of Edward Bancroft,” American Dyestuff Reporter (Oct. 25, 1954).
12. “Engagement of Dr. Edwards to correspond with P. Wentworth and Lord Stormont, and the means of conducting that correspondence,” Dec. 13, 1776, British Library, London, Auckland Papers, additional manuscripts 34,413 (hereafter cited as Auckland Papers, Add Mss); Edward Bancroft memo to the Marquis of Camarthen, Sept. 17, 1784, Foreign Office papers, 4:3, Public Records Office, London.
Some of the material is available in Material Relating to the American Revolution from the Auckland Papers (Yorkshire, England: EP Microform, 1974) and in Benjamin Stevens, ed., Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America, 1773–1783 (25 volumes published in 1898, copies in the Franklin collection in Yale’s Sterling Library). Please note the acknowledgment to Susan Ann Bennett, who provided research help in London finding and transcribing some of the documents cited in this section.
I am also grateful to the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence for providing the declassified paper by John Vaillancourt, “Edward Bancroft (@Edwd.Edwards) Estimable Spy,” Studies in Intelligence (winter 1961): A53–A67. See also Lewis Einstein, Divided Loyalties (Boston: Ayer, 1933), 3–48; Cecil Currey, Code Number 72 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972); Samuel Bemis, “The British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance,” American Historical Review 29.3 (Apr. 1924). There is also a historical novel, fun but heavily fictionalized, on Bancroft: Arthur Mullin, Spy: America’s First Double Agent, Dr. Edward Bancroft (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1987).
Currey argues that Franklin’s loyalties (and Deane’s) were also suspect. It’s an interesting and fact-filled book, but I think its analysis is unconvincing. Jonathan Dull, in Franklin the Diplomat (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1982), 1:72, 36, and passim, convincingly argues that Franklin was oblivious to Bancroft’s dealings and that Deane was involved in stock speculating but not in spying with Bancroft.
13. Auckland papers, Add Mss 34413, f330 and 402; 46490, f64; 34413, f405–7; Paul Wentworth to the Earl of Suffolk (the minister in charge of the northern department), quoting a secret letter from “Dr. Edwards,” Sept. 19, 1777, in the Stevens Facsimiles at Yale noted above.
14. Silas Deane to Robert Morris for Congress, Mar. 16, 1777; Isham, The Silas Deane Papers, 2:24.
15. Arthur Lee to BF and John Adams, Feb. 7, 1779; Auckland Papers, Add Mss, 46490, f52 and f57.
16. Juliana Ritchie to BF, Jan. 12, 1777; BF to Juliana Ritchie, Jan. 19, 1777.
17. Alsop 20.
18. Dull, Franklin the Diplomat, 1:72, 9; Alsop 35–40, from Henri Doniol, History of the Participation of France in the Establishment of the United States (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1866), 1:244.
The best overviews of Franklin’s diplomacy in France, in addition to Dull’s book cited above, include Jonathan Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Jonathan Dull, The French Navy and American Independence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Richard Morris, The Peacemakers (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (New York: Appleton, 1935); Stourzh; Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert, eds., Diplomacy and Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981). For original documents, see Francis Wharton, ed., Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1889). See also Orville Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).
19. Vergennes, Dec. 28, 1776, in Papers 23:113n; Vergennes to the Marquis de Noailles, Jan. 10, 1777, in Clark 306.
20. BF to Vergennes, Jan. 5, 1777; Doniol, History of the Participation of France, 1:20; Stourzh 137.
21. Bernard Bailyn, Realism and Idealism in American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Institute of Advanced Studies, 1994), 13, reprinted in Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew (New York: Knopf, 2003).
22. BF to Committee of Secret Correspondence, Apr. 9, 1777; BF to Samuel Cooper, May 1, 1777; Brands 532; Stourzh 3. For a contemporary discussion of “hard power” versus “soft power,” see Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). The “city upon a hill” image comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:14: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.” It was used by John Winthrop in the sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” that he preached on Mar. 22, 1630, on the Arabella while heading to America. Ronald Reagan used the image throughout his political career, most notably as the title of a Jan. 25, 1974, speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee, in his first 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, in a 1980 debate with John Anderson, in his 1984 speech to the Republican Convention, and in his 1989 farewell speech.
23. “The Sale of the Hessians,” Feb. 18, 1777, Lib. of Am. 917; Papers 23:480; Van Doren 577. I am grateful to Claude-Anne Lopez for pointing out to me the weak French pun.
24. Alsop 77; New Jersey Gazette, Oct. 2, 1777, quoted in Clark 325.
25. William Parsons to BF, Aug. 4, 1778; Mrs. Parsons to BF, Aug. 12, 17, Oct. 2, Nov. 2, 1778; BF to Mrs. Parsons, Aug. 12, 1778; BF to George Washington, Mar. 29, Sept. 4, 1777; Washington to BF, Aug. 17, 1777; “Model of a Letter of Recommendation,” by BF, Apr. 2, 1777; Van Doren 578; Clark 335. In the Sept. 4, 1777, letter to Washington, Franklin refers to Baron von Steuben as Baron de Steuben and inflates his rank from captain to lieutenant general. The spy Bancroft reported back to London that they had “received a resolve of Congress directing all their ministers” to discourage French mercenaries unless they spoke English, which “may enable us to cut short the solicitation with which we have for a long time almost been persecuted to death by thousands of officers wanting employment in America”; Edward Bancroft to Paul Wentworth, June 1777, Auckland papers, Add MSS 46490, f64.
26. Arthur Lee’s journal, Nov. 27, 1777, in Richard Lee, Life of Arthur Lee (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1829), 1:354; Hale and Hale, Benjamin Franklin in France, 1:159; Papers 25:234n.
27. Franklin statement, Dec. 4, 1777; BF to Vergennes, Dec. 4, 1777; Lee, Life of Arthur Lee, 1:357; Alsop 93–94; Doniol, History of the Participation of France, 2:625. See also Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution, 89. Dull argues that for months the French had been planning to enter the war against Britain in early 1778 once their naval rearmament program permitted; the American victory at Saratoga, he contends, was not a major factor. Others dispute this view. See Claude Van Tyne, “Influences Which Determined the French Government to Make Their Treaty with America,” American Historical Review 21 (1915–16): 528, cited by Dull.
28. Alsop 103; Cecil Currey, Code Number 72 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 175–92. Currey devotes an entire chapter to the Wentworth meeting. It seems somewhat overdrawn in its assessment of Franklin’s duplicity, but it is carefully annotated and researched. See also James Perkins, France and the American Revolution (New York: Franklin, 1970), 203–4.
29. Paul Wentworth to William Eden, Dec. 25, 1777, Jan. 7, 1778; Van Doren 592; Currey, Code Number 72, 186; Dull, Franklin the Diplomat, 29.
30. BF to Thomas Cushing, for Congress, Feb. 27, 1778.
31. R. M. Bache, “Franklin’s Ceremonial Coat,” PMHB 23 (1899); 444–52, quote is on 450.
32. Edward Bancroft to Paul Wentworth, as deciphered, Jan. 22, 28, 1778, Auckland Papers, Add Mss 46491, f1 and f1b; Edward Bancroft memo to the Marquis of Camarthen, Sept. 17, 1784, Foreign Office papers 4:3, Public Records Office, London; Edward Bancroft to Thomas Walpole, under cover to Mr. White, with two pages of invisible ink, Nov. 3, 1777, Auckland Papers, Add Mss 34414, f.304; Edward Bancroft note, unsigned and undated, sent to Samuel Wharton, with two pages of white ink, November 1777, Auckland Papers, Add Mss 34414, f.306; Samuel Wharton letters to Edward Bancroft, 1778, Auckland Papers, Add Mss 321, ff6–35; Silas Deane’s accounts with Edward Bancroft, Feb, 1778, Aug. 1779, the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, series 4, folder 9.12.
Jonathan Dull discusses Bancroft’s stock manipulations in Franklin the Diplomat, 33–36, and notes that Silas Deane, although in his opinion not a spy, was also able to make money by speculating with Wharton on Bancroft’s inside information. Also in on the scheme was Thomas Walpole, the wealthy and well-connected London banker who had tried with Franklin to win a land grant in Ohio. Deane died of poisoning in 1789 as he was preparing to sail from London to Canada, and some have speculated that he was murdered by Bancroft, an expert in poisons.
33. Lopez Cher, 179–83; Alsop 108–10; Van Doren 595; Clark 341.
34. Van Doren 593; Edmund Morgan, The Birth of the Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 83; Gordon Wood, “Not So Poor Richard,” The New York Review of Books, June 6, 1996; Samuel Cooper to BF, May 14, 1778. See also Samuel Cooper to BF, July 1, 1778, in which the Boston clergyman describes how the treaty thwarted England’s attempts to lure Congress into a reconciliation and how information sent by Franklin and Adams about a British convoy of eleven warships would be passed along, presumably to warn French admiral d’Estaing.
1. Edward Bancroft, “most secret extracts,” Apr. 2, 16, 1778, British Library, Auckland papers, Add MSS 34413, f405–7; Middlekauff 171; McCullough 197, 204, 208, 239. Middlekauff’s chapter on Adams in his book, pp. 171–202, is a vivid look at the vagaries of their relationship. McCullough, 210–15, provides an authoritative assessment of their feelings about each other, with some deference to Adams.
2. Adams to James Lovell, Feb. 20, 1779, Adams Letters 4:118–19; Middlekauff 189.
3. Lopez Private, 237; Lopez Cher, 9. The quote is from Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Complete Works (Paris: Bossange frères, 1825), 2:267.
4. Brands 547–48; Adams Diary 2:391, 4:69.
5. BF to Robert Livingston, July 22, 1783.
6. Diderot, editor, Encyclopédie, www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc/; Alsop 13; Harold Nicolson, The Age of Reason (London: Constable, 1960), 268.
7. Most accounts say, I think mistakenly, that it was Temple who received the benediction. Smith 60, 187 traces the mystery and convincingly concludes that the “boy” was actually his younger grandson Benny, who was 7 at the time, rather than Temple, who was about 18. Aldridge French, 10, says it was Temple, but in his later writings, including Voltaire and the Century of Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 399, he revises his opinion. Claude-Anne Lopez tells me that Temple used a wax seal with the phrase “God and Liberty,” which leads her to believe it may have been Temple. See also Voltaire to the Abbé Gaultier, Feb. 21, 1778, in The Works of Voltaire (Paris: Didot, 1829), 1:290; Hutchinson Diary and Letters 2:276. The newspaper quoted is Les Mémoires Secret, Feb. 22, 1778, in Aldridge French, 10.
8. Aldridge French, 12; Adams Diary 3:147; Van Doren 606.
9. Lopez Life, 148–57; Van Doren 655–56; Lemay Reappraising, 145.
10. Lopez Cher, 34, 29. As one of the Yale editors, Lopez’s specialty was analyzing Franklin’s papers from his period in France. Her translations, astute assessments, and personal discussions with me informed this chapter.
11. Madame Brillon to BF, July 30, 1777.
12. Madame Brillon to BF, Mar. 7, 1778; BF to Madame Brillon, Mar. 10, 1778.
13. Madame Brillon to BF, May 3, 8, 1779; Lopez Cher, 40, 61–62; Adams Letters 4:46; Brands 552.
14. BF to Madame Brillon, July 27, 1778. Lib. of Am. uses a version dated 1782, and some sources have the final article worded differently. The version I have used is from the Yale Papers and the American Philosophical Society; Papers 27:164.
15. Madame Brillon to BF, Mar. 16, 17, 18, Apr. 26, June 9, July 27, Sept. 13, 17, 1778; BF to Madame Brillon, July 27, Sept. 1, 15, 1778.
16. Madame Brillon to BF, Sept. 13, 1778; BF to Madame Brillon, Sept. 15, 1778; Lopez Cher, 29–121.
17. “The Ephemera,” Sept. 20, 1778, Lib. of Am. 922; A. Owen Aldridge, “Sources for Franklin’s Ephemera,” New England Quarterly 27 (1954): 388.
18. BF to Madame Brillon, Nov. 29, 1777; Madame Brillon to BF, Nov. 30, 1777 (the chess game partner was their neighbor Louis-Guillaume le Veillard); Papers 25:204, 25:218); Madame Brillon to BF, Dec. 10, 15, 20, 1778; BF to Madame Brillon, Dec. 11?, 1778.
19. Lopez Cher, 243–48. Lopez draws on Antoine Guillois, Le Salon de Madame Helvétius (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1894). Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’Esprit (Paris, 1758; English translation, Essays on the Mind, London, 1759); it was publicly burned in Paris but also one of the most widely read books of its time. See gallica.bnf.fr/Fonds_textes/T0088614.htm; www.aei.ca/~anbou/mhelv.html.
20. Aldridge French, 162; Gilbert Chinard, “Abbé Lefebvre de la Roche’s Recollections of Benjamin Franklin,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1950).
21. BF to Madame Helvétius, Oct. 31, 1778.
22. Aldridge French, 165; Adams Papers 2:55.
23. BF to Madame Helvétius, through Cabanis, Sept. 19, 1779. It is possible that Poupon was a cat, but we know she had a dog and this is more likely.
24. “The Flies,” Papers 34:220; Lib. of Am., 991 (the date of this piece is unknown and in dispute); Lopez Cher, 260. See also Lopez Cher, 371n.32 arguing that some biographers “overdramatize” Franklin’s proposal to Madame Helvétius whereas others discount it too much.
25. “The Elysian Fields,” Dec. 7, 1778, Lib. of Am. 924.
26. Turgot to Pierre du Pont de Nemours, June 24, 1780, in Lopez Cher, 170.
27. BF to Thomas Bond, Mar. 16, 1780.
28. Aldridge French, 183. For a good assessment, see Richard Amacher, Franklin’s Wit and Folly: The Bagatelles (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953).
29. Poem from Madame Brillon to BF, Oct., 1780, translation in Lopez Cher, 78; “Dialogue with the Gout,” Oct. 22, 1780.
30. Madame Brillon to BF, Nov. 18, 26, 1780; Lopez Cher, 79–81; Aldridge French, 166.
31. Lopez Cher, 25–26.
32. “Conte,” dated Dec. 1778 in Papers 28:308 and early 1779 by Lemay in Lib. of Am. 938; Aldridge French, 173; Lopez Cher, 90.
33. Abbé Flamarens, Jan. 15, 1777, in Aldridge French, 61.
34. “The Morals of Chess,” June 28, 1779; Papers 29:750–56 also includes the Junto notes he made in 1732. See also Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg to BF, July 3, 1779, which mentions a “refutation” of Franklin’s points.
35. Aldridge French, 197; Jefferson Papers 18:168.
36. “An Economical Project,” Journal of Paris, Apr. 26, 1784; Poor Richard’s, 1735. See also http://www.standardtime.com ; http://www.energy.ca.gov/daylightsaving.html ; http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving.
37. Aldridge French, 178
38. “To the Royal Academy of ***,” May 19, 1780, or after, Lib. of Am. 952. See also, Carl Japsky, ed., Fart Proudly (Columbus, Ohio: Enthea Press, 1990).
39. BF to the Abbé Morellet, ca. July 5, 1779.
40. SF to BF, Jan. 17, 1779; BF to SF, June 3, 1779. General Howe had been replaced by Sir Henry Clinton, who evacuated his British troops from Philadelphia in May 1778 to concentrate on the defense of New York. General Washington tried and failed to stop the British in a battle in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and Clinton’s troops safely ensconced themselves in New York.
41. SB to BF, Sept. 14, 1779; BF to SB, Mar. 16, 1780. See the poignant chapter “No Watch for Benny, No Feathers for Sally,” in Lopez Private, 215–32.
42. SF to BF, Jan. 17, Sept. 25, 1779, Sept. 8, 1780; BF to SF, June 3, 1779.
43. RB to BF, July 28, 1780; SF to BF, Sept. 9, 1780; BF to RB and SF, Oct. 4, 1780.
44. BF to SF, June 3, 1779.
45. BF to Benjamin Bache, Aug. 19, 1779, Apr. 16, 1781. For a well-researched and insightful assessment of their relationship, see Smith, in particular 67–70, 77–82. Also Lopez Private, 221–30.
46. BF to Benjamin Bache, Jan. 25, 1782. See also May 3, 30, Aug. 19, 1779, July 18, 1780. Gabriel Louis de Marignac to BF, Nov. 20, 1781.
47. Catherine Cramer to BF, May 15, 1781; RB to BF, July 22, 1780.
48. BF to Benjamin Bache, Sept. 25, 1780; SB to BF, Jan. 14, 1781.
49. Benjamin Bache to BF, Jan. 30, 1783; BF to Benjamin Bache, May 2, 1783; BF to Johonnot, Jan. 26, 1782.
50. BF to the Brillons, Apr. 20, Oct. 30, 1781; Madame Brillon to BF, Apr. 20, Oct. 20, 1781; Lopez Cher, 91–101.
1. BF to James Lovell (for Congress), July 22, 1778; Richard Bache to BF, Oct. 22, 1778; Van Doren 609.
2. BF to John Adams, Apr. 3, 24, May 10, June 5, 1779; John Adams to BF, Apr. 13, 29, May 14, 17, 1779; Middlekauff 190–92; McCullough 210–14; Schoenbrun 229.
3. RB to BF, Oct. 8, 22, 1778; BF to RB, June 2, 1779; BF to SF, June 3, 1779.
4. BF to Lafayette, Mar. 22, Oct. 1, 1779; Lafayette to BF, July 12, 1779; Lafayette to TF, Sept. 7, 1779. See also Harlowe Giles Unger, Lafayette (New York: Wiley, 2002).
5. BF to Lafayette, Mar. 22, 1779; BF to John Paul Jones, May 27, June 1, 10, 1778. See also Evan Thomas, John Paul Jones (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Evan Thomas graciously provided an early copy of his manuscript, which helped inform this section, and he read and helped to correct this section.
6. Samuel Eliot Morison, John Paul Jones (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1959), 156 and passim. Alsop 176 also says that “all the world knew of the love affair between the dashing officer and Madame de Chaumont.” But Evan Thomas in his biography points out that there is no concrete evidence of this.
7. John Paul Jones to BF, Mar. 6, 1779; BF to Jones, Mar. 14, 1779.
8. BF to John Paul Jones, Apr. 27, 1779; Jones to BF, May 1, 1779.
9. John Paul Jones to BF, May 26, Oct. 3, 1779; BF to Jones, Oct. 15, 1779. As Evan Thomas points out, it is very unclear whether Jones actually uttered his famous “I have not yet begun to fight.”
10. Vergennes to Adams, Feb. 15, 1780; McCullough 232.
11. BF to George Washington, Mar. 5, 1780.
12. BF to David Hartley, Feb. 2, 1780.
13. For Franklin’s use of the phrase “no bad peace or good war,” see BF to Jonathan Shipley, June 10, 1782; BF to Joseph Banks, July 27, 1783; BF to Josiah Quincy, Sept. 11, 1783; BF to Rodolphe-Ferdinand Grand, Mar. 5, 1786.
14. BF to Arthur Lee, Mar. 21, 1777; Stourzh 160; BF to Robert Livingston, Mar. 4, 1782.
15. John Adams to Congress, Apr. 18, 1780, Adams Letters 3:151; Vergennes to John Adams, July 29, 1780, Adams Letters 3:243; McCullough 241.
16. Vergennes to BF, July 31, 1780; BF to Vergennes, Aug. 3, 1780; BF to Samuel Huntington (for Congress), Aug. 9, 1780. Adams was still rehashing this disagreement decades later in an article in the Boston Patriot, May 15, 1811; see Stourzh 159.
17. BF to John Adams, Oct. 2, 1780, Feb. 22, 1781. Adams replied with a gloomy camaraderie, saying he had accepted some bills “relying on your virtues and graces of Faith and Hope.” John Adams to BF, Apr. 10, 1781.
18. Washington to BF, Oct. 9, 1780; BF to Vergennes, Feb. 13, 1781.
19. For currency conversion data see page 507. See also: Thomas Schaeper, France and America in the Revolutionary Era (Providence: Bergham Books, 1995), 348; John McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2001); Economic History Services, http://eh.net/hmit/; Inflation Conversion Factors, www.orst.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/cf166502.pdf.
20. Ralph Izard to Richard Lee, Oct. 15, 1780; Vergennes to la Luzerne, Feb. 19, 1781; Stourzh 153; BF to Samuel Huntington (for Congress), Mar. 12, 1781.
21. Vergennes to la Luzerne, Dec. 4, 1780; Stourzh 167.
22. Stourzh 168; BF to Samuel Huntington (for Congress), Sept. 13, 1781.
23. BF to William Carmichael, Aug. 24, 1781; BF to John Adams, Oct. 12, 1781.
24. BF to Robert Morris, Mar. 7, 1782.
25. Madame Brillon to BF, Jan. 20, Feb. 1, 1782; BF to Shelburne, Mar. 22, Apr. 18, 1782; BF to Vergennes, Apr. 15, 1782. See also BF to WF, Sept. 12, 27, Oct. 11, 1766, June 13, Aug. 28, 1767, for discussions of Franklin’s early meetings with Shelburne.
26. “Journal of Peace Negotiations,” May 9–July 1, 1782, Papers CD 37:191. This forty-page journal is a detailed description of all the talks and meetings Franklin had up until an attack of the gout caused him to quit keeping the journal on July 1. The following narrative is drawn from this journal as well as the letters he included in it.
Much of this information is also based on the forthcoming volume 37 of the Franklin Papers, due to be published in late 2003, which covers March 16–September 15, 1782. It adds notes and assessments about Franklin’s writings, which were already available on the Papers CD and elsewhere. I am grateful to the Yale editors for letting me read the manuscript in the fall of 2002. The editors also provided access to the drafts of volumes 38 and 39, due out in 2004, which cover the conclusion of the negotiations.
27. “Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle,” a hoax by BF, Mar. 12, 1782. The Yale editors provide a detailed assessment of this document for the forthcoming volume 37 of the Papers. Among the people he sent it to was James Hutton, an English friend, who replied, “That article in the Boston paper must be romance, all of it invention, cruel forgery I hope and believe. Bales of scalps!!! Neither the King nor his old ministers . . . are capable of such atrocities.” Nevertheless, at least one London magazine (Public Advertiser, Sept. 27, 1782) reprinted parts of it as true. BF to James Hutton, July 7, 1782; James Hutton to BF, July 23, 1782, Papers 37:443, 37:503.
28. “Journal of Peace Negotiations”; Shelburne to BF, Apr. 28, 1782; Charles Fox to BF, May 1, 1782.
29. Richard Morris, The Peacemakers (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 274, points out that Grenville and Oswald did not report Franklin’s strong refusals to consider a separate peace, but instead reported back hints that he might be open to it.
30. BF to John Adams, June 2, 1782.
31. “Journal of Peace Negotiations”; BF to Shelburne, Apr. 18, May 10, 13, 1782; Shelburne to BF, Apr. 28, 1782; BF to Charles James Fox, May 10, 1782; BF to John Adams, Apr. 20, May 2, 8, 1782; BF to Henry Laurens, Apr. 20, 1782.
32. BF to Robert Livingston, June 25, 29, 1782; BF to Richard Oswald, June 25, 1782. Franklin’s journal ends July 1.
33. Richard Oswald to Lord Shelburne, July 10, 1782; BF to Richard Oswald, July 12, 1782; BF to Vergennes, July 24, 1782.
34. Lord Shelburne to Richard Oswald, July 27, 1782; Wright 314.
35. John Jay to Robert Livingston, Sept. 18, Nov. 17, 1782; Stourzh 178; BF to Lafayette, Sept. 17, 1782.
36. Vergennes to la Luzerne, Dec. 19, 1782; McCullough 280.
37. Middlekauff 197; Herbert Klinghoffer, “Matthew Ridley’s Diary during the Peace Negotiations of 1782,” William and Mary Quarterly 20.1 (January 1963): 123; John Adams to Edmund Jennings, July 20, 1782, in McCullough 276; Adams Letters 3:38; Wright 315.
38. John Adams to BF, Sept. 13, 1783; McCullough 277; Wright 316; Stourzh 177; BF to Robert Livingston, July 22, 1783.
39. BF to John Jay, Sept. 10, 1783; John Adams to BF, Sept. 13, 1783; McCullough 282.
40. Samuel Cooper to BF, July 15, 1782; Robert Livingston to BF, June 23, 1782; BF to Richard Oswald, July 28, 1782; Fleming 455.
41. Benjamin Vaughan to Lord Shelburne, July 31, Dec. 10, 1782.
42. “Apologue,” Nov. 1782, Lib. of Am. 967; Smyth Writings, 8:650.
43. Adams Diaries 3:37; Middlekauff 198; Klinghoffer, “Matthew Ridley’s Diary,” 132.
44. Vergennes to la Luzerne, Dec. 19, 1782; Vergennes to BF, Dec. 15, 1782.
45. BF to Vergennes, Dec. 17, 1782; Stourzh 178. The dispute, it so happens, hardly remained a secret: Edward Bancroft, still a spy, promptly sent the letter to the British ministers.
46. Vergennes to la Luzerne, Dec. 19, 1782. A few months later, when Foreign Secretary Robert Livingston asked him about the French objections, Franklin replied, “I do not see, however, that they have much reason to complain of that Transaction. Nothing was stipulated to their Prejudice, and none of the Stipulations were to have Force, but by a subsequent Act of their own . . . I long since satisfied Count de Vergennes about it here. We did what appeared to all of us best at the Time, and, if we have done wrong, the Congress will do right, after hearing us, to censure us.” Franklin told Livingston he felt that the French advice on fishing rights was merely designed to assure that a deal was made. Adams felt the French were making the suggestions because they did not want America to succeed in getting the fishing rights. It is in this letter that Franklin chides Adams for his lack of gratitude toward France and calls him “in some things completely out of his senses.” BF to Robert Livingston, July 22, 1783.
47. Van Doren 696–97.
48. BF to PS, Jan. 27, 1783; BF to Joseph Banks, July 27, 1783.
49. BF to Benjamin Bache, June 23, 1783; Robert Pigott to BF, June 27, 1783; Smith 79.
50. Dorcas Montgomery to SB, July 23, 1783; BF to PS, Sept. 7, 1783; BF to SF, July 27, 1783; Benjamin Bache to RB and SF, Oct. 30, 1783; Smith 80–82.
51. BF to PS, 1782, Jan. 8, Sept. 7, 1783; PS to BF, Sept. 28, 1783.
52. BF to PS, Dec. 26, 1783; BF to RB, Nov. 11, 1783; Van Doren 709.
53. BF to Robert Livingston, July 22, 1783; Lopez Cher, 314.
54. BF to Joseph Banks, Aug. 30, Nov. 21, Dec. 1, 1783. A vivid account of the ballooning race and craze is in Lopez Cher, 215–22, which cites Gaston Tissandier, Histoire des ballons et des aéronautes célèbres, 1783–1800 (Paris: Launette, 1887). See also Lopez Private, 267; www.ballooning.org/ballooning/timeline.html ; www.balloonzone.com/history.html.
55. Joseph Banks to BF, Nov. 7, 1783; BF to Joseph Banks, Nov. 21, 1783; BF to Jan Ingenhousz, Jan. 16, 1784; Lopez Cher, 222, contains Franklin’s parody letter.
56. BF to SF, Jan. 26, 1784.
57. “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” Feb. 1784; Lib. of Am. 975; Morgan Franklin, 297. In a letter to me commenting on some draft sections of this book, Edmund Morgan noted: Franklin’s “description is mainly accurate but at the same time a statement of what he values in the country and hopes to see perpetuated or magnified” (Dec. 2, 2002).
58. BF to Benjamin Vaughan, July 26, 1784.
59. BF to Robert Morris, Dec. 25, 1783; BF to Benjamin Vaughan, Mar. 14, 1785.
60. BF to Strahan, Jan. 24, 1780, Feb. 16, Aug. 19, 1784.
61. Lopez Cher, 277–79; Pierre Cabanis, Complete Works (Paris: Bossange frères, 1825), 2:348.
62. BF to George Whatley, Aug. 21, 1784, May 23, 1785.
63. BF to TF, Aug. 25, 1784. There are many books and articles on Mesmer. The best, as it relates to Franklin, is the chapter in Lopez Life, 114–26. See also Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); Lopez Cher, 163–73; Van Doren 713–14.
64. Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 370–400; John Adams to Robert Livingston, May 25, 1783, James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Feb. 11, 1783, Jefferson to Madison, Feb. 14, 1783, all quoted in Middlekauff 200–201.
65. WF to BF, July 22, 1784.
66. BF to WF, Aug. 16, 1784.
67. BF to TF, Oct. 2, 1784; Lopez Private, 258.
68. BF to PS, Mar. 19, Aug. 15, 1784.
69. Lopez Private, 272.
70. PS to BF, Oct. 25, 1784; PS to Barbara Hewson, Jan. 25, 1785; Lopez Private, 269.
71. BF to PS, July 4, 1785; BF to JM, July 13, 1785; BF to David Hartley, July 5, 1785.
72. Vergennes to François Barbé de Marbois, May 10, 1785; BF to John Jay, Sept. 21, 1785.
73. Lopez Cher, 137–39; Lopez Private, 275; Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Norton, 1974), 425.
74. Franklin trip journal, July 13–28, 1785, Papers CD 43:310.
75. WF to SF, Aug. 1, 1785; Temple Writings, 2:165. In a letter to John Jay, Sept. 21, 1785, he describes how Shipley and others visited him in Southampton, but does not mention William.
1. “Maritime Observations,” BF to David Le Roy, Aug. 1785, Papers CD 41:384.
2. “Causes and Cure of Smoky Chimneys,” BF to Jan Ingenhousz, Aug. 28, 1785; “Description of a New Stove,” by BF, Aug. 1785, Papers CD 43:380.
3. BF journal, Sept. 14, 1785, unpublished, Papers CD 43:310; BF to John Jay, Sept. 21, 1785.
4. BF to Jonathan Shipley, Feb. 24, 1786.
5. BF to Polly Stevenson, May 6, 1786.
6. Manasseh Cutler, diary excerpt of July 13, 1787, in Smyth Writings, 10:478.
7. BF to Louis-Guillaume le Veillard, Apr. 15, 1787; BF to Ferdinand Grand, Apr. 22, 1787.
8. BF to JM, Sept. 21, 1786; Manasseh Cutler, diary excerpt of July 13, 1787, in Smyth Writings, 10:478. When he died, the 4,276 volumes in his library were valued at just over £184. See “An inventory and appraisement of the goods and chattels of the estate of Benjamin Franklin,” Bache papers, Castle Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.
9. BF to JM, Sept. 20, 1787; BF to Professor Landriani, Oct. 14, 1787.
10. BF to James Woodmason, July 25, 1780, in which he discusses with the London stationer the “new-invented art of copying” and orders three rudimentary machines from him for delivery to Passy. The machines from Woodmason came from Watt’s factory, and the stationer insisted that Franklin pay in advance before they were ordered. In a letter of Nov. 1, 1780, he tells Franklin he is sending three new machines and provides instructions for how to use the ink; Papers CD 33:579. See also Copying machine history, http://www.inc.com/articles/it/computers_networks/peripherals/2000.html.
11. “Description of An Instrument for Taking Down Books from High Shelves,” Jan. 1786, Papers CD 43:873; Lib. of Am. 1116.
12. BF to Catherine (Kitty) Shipley, May 2, 1786; Lib. of Am. 1118.
13. BF to David Hartley, Oct. 27, 1785.
14. BF to Jonathan Williams, Feb. 16, 1786; to Jonathan Shipley, Feb. 24, 1786; Brands 661.
15. BF to William Cocke, Aug. 12, 1786.
16. BF to Thomas Jefferson, Apr. 19, 1787.
17. www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/constitution/confath.html.
Much of the following relies on Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937) and, in particular, Madison’s Journals. There are many editions of this masterful narrative. Among the most convenient are the searchable versions on the Web, including www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/debates/debcont.htm, and www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_000.htm.
For good analysis of Franklin’s role at the convention, see William Carr, The Oldest Delegate (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990); Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Public (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Clinton Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention (New York: Macmillan, 1966); Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966); Richard Morris, The Forging of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
18. The oft-told story of Franklin arriving at the convention in a sedan chair is described most vividly in Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia, 34. See also Smyth Writings, 10:477; Brands 674; Van Doren 741. The careful scholar J. A. Leo Lemay writes that no evidence exists that Franklin was carried in a sedan chair to any meeting of the convention. See Lemay, “Recent Franklin Scholarship, with a Note on Franklin’s Sedan Chair,” PMHB 76:2 (Apr. 2002): 339–40. In fact, however, there is an unpublished letter written by his daughter, Sally, to his grandson Temple during the convention in which she reports: “Your Grand Father was just getting into his Chair to go to convention when I told him I had received your letter” (SB to TF, undated in 1787, Papers CD 45:u350). We know that Franklin was feeling poorly at the outset of the convention, though not throughout it, and also that he owned a sedan chair. The list of items in his estate (“An inventory and appraisement of the goods and chattels of the estate of Benjamin Franklin,” Bache papers, Castle Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia) lists a “Sedan Chair” valued at £20, and it is also listed as part of the items sold from Franklin’s house on May 25, 1792, two years after his death (Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, May 21, 1792, copy in the American Philosophical Society, also reprinted in PMHB 23 [1899]: 123). We also know that a friend requested permission to borrow “his sedan chair” in 1788 (Mrs. Powel to BF, unpublished, June 16, 1788, Papers CD 45:558). Thus, I think it is reasonable to believe the reports that he was carried in the chair to the convention that first day, May 28. However, Lemay makes the good point that it is unlikely that he regularly used the sedan chair to get to the convention. As Franklin wrote to his sister in September, “The daily exercise of going and returning from the state house has done me good” (BF to JM, Sept. 20, 1787, Papers CD, 45:u167). One friend wrote in late 1786, “Except for the stone, which prevents his using exercise except in walking in the house up and down stairs and sometime to the state-house, [he] still retains his health, spirits and memory” (Samuel Vaughan to Richard Price, Nov. 4, 1786, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 21.17 [May 1903]: 355).
19. Benjamin Rush to Richard Price, June 2, 1787, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 21.17 (May 1903): 361. For Pierce’s speech, see Farrand’s Records of the Convention, 3:91; Franklin speeches, June 30, June 11, Madison’s journal; Morris, The Forging of the Union, 272.
20. Bowen 18.
21. Madison journal, May 31, 1787.
22. Madison journal, June 11, 1787.
23. Madison journal, June 28, 1787.
24. “Motion For Prayers,” by BF, June 28, 1787; Madison’s journal, Farrand, 1:452; Papers CD 45:u77; Smyth Writings, 9:600.
25. Madison journal, June 30, 1787.
26. Manasseh Cutler journal, July 13, 1787, in Smyth Writings, 10:478; “Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania,” Nov. 3, 1789, Smyth Writings, 10:57.
27. Madison journal, July 26, 20, June 5, 1787.
28. Madison journal, Aug. 7, 10, 1787.
29. Madison journal, June 2, 1787; BF to Benjamin Strahan, Feb. 16, Aug. 19, 1784; Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1991), 199. See also chapter 5 n. 25; McCullough 400.
30. Farrand’s Records of Convention, 3:85; Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1:398.
31. BF to la Rochefoucauld, Oct. 22, 1788; BF to Pierre Du Pont de Nemours, June 9, 1788.
32. Franklin closing speech, Sept. 17, 1787, Papers CD 45:ul61. There are a few versions of this speech, including a draft version, a copy, and Madison’s notes, each with minor variations. The one quoted here is that used by the Yale editors of Franklin’s papers.
33. Farrand’s Records of Convention, 3:85; see memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwfr.html.
34. Barbara Oberg, “Plain, Insinuating, Persuasive,” in Lemay Reappraising, 176, 189; Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention, 234.
35. Roger Rosenblatt, Where We Stand (New York: Harcourt, 2002), 70, citing Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). The only major founding document Franklin did not sign was the Articles of Confederation, as he was then in France. Roger Sherman signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, as well as the Declaration of 1774, but he did not sign either of the treaties.
36. BF to JM, Nov. 4, 1787, Aug. 3, 1789.
37. BF to Noah Webster, Dec. 26, 1789.
38. BF to Benjamin Vaughan, Oct. 24, 1788; see also BF to Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard, Oct. 24, 1788.
39. BF to Benjamin Vaughan, June 3, Nov. 2, 1798; BF to Elizabeth Partridge, Nov. 25, 1788.
40. BF to Catherine Ray Greene, Mar. 2, 1789; BF to George Washington, Sept. 18, 1789.
41. BF to Jean Baptiste Le Roy, Nov. 13, 1789; BF to Louis-Guillaume le Veillard, Oct. 24, 1788.
42. “An Address to the Public,” Nov. 9, 1789, Smyth Writings, 10:66. Mason quote is in Farrand’s Records of the Convention, 2:370.
43. Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, Petition to Congress, by BF, Feb. 12, 1790.
44. “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade,” BF to Federal Gazette, Mar. 23, 1790.
45. See chapter 11; BF to Richard Price, Mar. 18, 1785.
46. BF to William Strahan, Aug. 19, 1784.
47. BF to unknown recipient, July 3, 1786, Smyth Writings, 9:520; the same letter, dated Dec. 13, 1757, Papers 7:293; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, first fully published in 1794, www.ushistory.org/paine/; libertyonline.hypermall.com/Paine/AOR-Frame.html.
The Yale editors of the Franklin Papers note, “Both the date and the addressee of this letter have been subjects of much difference of opinion. Each of the three surviving manuscript versions bears a different date line. That on the draft, in Franklin’s hand, has been heavily scratched out, probably long after the letter was written, by someone other than Franklin.” That draft, now at the Library of Congress, has a note by Franklin calling it “Rough of letter dissuading———from publishing his piece.” Jared Sparks, one of the earliest editors and biographers, deciphered the blacked-out line as “Phila., July 3, 1786,” and he published it as addressed to Thomas Paine (Sparks 10:281). Sparks writes, “When a skeptical writer, who is supposed to have been Thomas Paine, showed him in manuscript a work written against religion, he urged him earnestly not to publish it, but to burn it; objecting to his arguments as fallacious, and to his principles as poisoned with the seeds of vice, without tending to any imaginable good.” John Bigelow in The Works of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Putnam’s, 1904) and Smyth Writings, 9:520, also use that date. For a contrary assessment written by a student of Sparks’s, see Moncure Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (New York: Putnam’s, 1892), vii–viii.
The Yale editors (Papers 7:293n, published in 1963) called that dating “plausible” but give six other possible years, ranging from 1751 to 1787. They tentatively use the 1757 date based on a transcription in French that appears to have been written and dated by the clerk Franklin used while living in Passy. In their note, however, they say, “The editors have not been able to identify any particular ‘infidel’ who might have sent Franklin a manuscript in 1757, nor have they located any particular tract which might be evidence that his advice against publication was disregarded.” The Yale editors, when I asked them in 2002, said that they remain uncertain about the date. In a letter to me commenting on some draft sections of this book, Dec. 2, 2002, Edmund Morgan wrote, “Your suggestion that it was written in 1786 to Paine makes more sense to me than the reasons offered by the former editors for placing it in 1757.”
My belief that the 1786 date is likely and that it was sent to Paine is based on the following. As early as 1776, Paine had expressed his “contempt” for the Bible and told John Adams, “I have some thoughts of publishing my thoughts on religion, but I believe it will be best to postpone it to the latter part of my life” (John Keane, Tom Paine [Boston: Little, Brown, 1995], 390). By 1786, Paine was writing frequently to Franklin (Sept. 23, Dec. 31, 1785, Mar. 31, June 6, 14, 1786) and even using the courtyard in front of Franklin’s house to display a bridge design Paine had made. In The Age of Reason, Paine favorably mentions Franklin five times (“The Proverbs which are said to be of Solomon’s . . . [are] not more wise and economical than those of the American Franklin”). He echoes the more general aspects of Franklin’s deist creed by saying that he believes in God and that the “moral duty of man” is to practice God’s beneficence “toward each other.” But he also engages in many heretical attacks on organized religion that would have elicited Franklin’s cautious response. He says that churches “appear to me to be no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.” He also says that “the theory of what is called the Christian church sprung out of the tale of heathen mythology” and decries Christian theology for its “absurdity.” And he begins his book by indicating that he had considered publishing his thoughts earlier but was dissuaded: “It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion. I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration had reserved it to a more advanced period of life.”
48. Archives of Congregation Mikveh Israel, Apr. 30, 1788 (Franklin’s gift is one of the three largest of forty-four, and he is on top of the subscriber list), www.mikvehisrael.org/gifs/frank2.jpg ; BF to John Calder, Aug. 21, 1784.
49. BF to Ezra Stiles, Mar. 9, 1790.
50. BF to Thomas Jefferson, Apr. 8, 1790.
51. Reports of Dr. John Jones and Benjamin Rush, in Sparks and elsewhere; Pa. Gazette, Apr. 21, 1790; Benjamin Bache to Margaret Markoe, May 2, 1790.
52. Epitaph, 1728; this is the version Temple Franklin published. See Papers CD 41:u539. Franklin also produced slightly edited versions, including one that ends “Corrected and amended/By the author” (Papers 1:109a).
53. Last will and testament, plus codicil, June 23, 1789, Papers CD 46:u20.
1. Last will and testament, plus codicil, June 23, 1789, Papers CD 46:u20; Skemp William, 275. The will and codicil are at www.sln.fi.edu/franklin/family/lastwill.html.
2. WF to TF, July 3, 1789; Skemp William, 275; Lopez Private, 309. A full and authorized English edition of Franklin’s autobiography was not published until 1868.
3. The two great books on Benjamin Bache and his paper are Jeffery A. Smith, Franklin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Richard Rosenfeld, American Aurora (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). See also Bernard Faÿ, The Two Franklins (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933).
4. Patricia Nealon, “Ben Franklin Trust to Go to State, City,” Boston Globe, Dec. 7, 1993, A22; Clark DeLeon, “Divvying Up Ben,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 7, 1993, B2; Tom Ferrick Jr., “Ben Franklin’s Gift Keeps Giving,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 27, 2002, B1; Tour de Sol Web site, www.nesea.org/transportation/tour ; The Franklin Gazette, printed by the Friends of Franklin Inc., www.benfranklin2006.org (spring 2002); Philadelphia Academies Annual Report 2001 and Web site, www.academiesinc.org. Web sites on Franklin’s bequest include www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/2000-01/lastpage.html ; www.cs.appstate.edu/~sjg/class/1010/wc/finance/benfranklin.html; www.lehighvalleyfoundation.org/support.html#BenFranklin.
1. The Nation, July 9, 1868, reprinted in Norton Autobiography 270. See also Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790–1990 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994).
2. The Provost Smith papers, Pennsylvania Gazette, Apr. 1997, www.upenn.edu/gazette/0497/.
3. John Adams, Boston Patriot, May 15, 1811.
4. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 347; John Adams to TF, May 5, 1817; Francis, Lord Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review 8 (1806), in Norton Autobiography 253. Jeffrey was reviewing an earlier unauthorized edition of the writings and autobiography.
5. Robert Spiller, “Franklin and the Art of Being Human,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100.4 (Aug. 1956): 304.
6. John Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, Oct. 31, 1818; Leigh Hunt, Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1850), 1:130–32; both reprinted in Norton Autobiography 257, 266.
7. Herman Melville, Israel Potter (1855; New York: Library of America, 1985), chapter 8, http://www.melville.org/hmisrael.htm ; Autobiography 45.
8. Emerson’s Journals 1:375, quoted in Campbell 35; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Works, 12:189, cited in Yale Autobiography 13.
9. David Brooks, “Among the Bourgeoisophobes,” The Weekly Standard, Apr. 15, 2002.
10. Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy, July 1870.
11. Jim Powell, “How Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography inspired all kinds of people to help themselves,” www.libertystory.net/LSCONNFRAN.htm.
12. Frederick Jackson Turner, essay in The Dial, May 1887; William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s, Apr. 1888; reprinted in Norton Autobiography.
13. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published (in German) in 1904 and revised in 1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 1930), 52–53; Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age, originally published in 1915 as an essay (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1934); William Carlos Williams, In the Grain (New York: New Directions, 1925), 153; Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, first published in 1922, chapter 16, section 3, see www.bartleby.com/162/16.html.
14. D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin,” Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1923), 10–16, xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/LAWRENCE/dhlch02.htm ; Cervantes, Don Quixote, part 2, chapter 33; Aesop, “The Milkmaid and the Pail.” Franklin did cite the maxim “Honesty is the best policy” in a letter to Edward Bridgen, Oct. 2, 1779, but it was part of a list of maxims that could be on coins, and he did not claim it as his own.
15. Charles Angoff, A Literary History of the American People (New York: Knopf, 1931), 296–308.
16. Herbert Schneider, The Puritan Mind (New York: Henry Holt, 1930); Van Doren 782; I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), 73.
17. For more on Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937; New York: Pocket Books, 1994), see ch. 4 n. 6, above; E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 55.
18. FranklinCovey Web site, www.franklincovey.com ; Grady McAllister, “An Unhurried Look at Time Management,” vasthead.com/Time/tm_papl.html. Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster, In Search of America (New York: Hyperion, 2002), chapter 3, reports on an interesting class discussion by Baylor professor Blaine McCormick about Franklin as the founding father of business books.
19. Brands 715; Morgan Franklin, 314.
20. Alan Taylor, “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” The New Republic, Mar. 19, 2001, 39. The play 1776, by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone, opened at Broadway’s 46th Street Theater on Mar. 16, 1969, ran for 1,217 performances, and was made into a film in 1972; Howard Da Silva played Franklin on both stage and screen. Ben Franklin in Paris, by Mark Sandrich Jr. and Sidney Michaels, opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater on Oct. 27, 1964, and ran for 215 performances with Robert Preston playing Franklin.
21. David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” The Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 32, 35.
22. BF to JM, July 17, 1771.
23. Taylor, “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” 39.
24. Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt, 1930), 1:178.
25. Taylor, “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” 39.
26. Poor Richard’s, 1750; BF to Louis Le Veillard, Mar. 6, 1786; Autobiography 107 (all use the “empty sack” line).
27. Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” 35.
28. Autobiography 139.
29. Angoff, A Literary History of the American People, 306; Garry Wills, Under God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 380.
30. Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 26; John Updike, “Many Bens,” New Yorker, Feb. 22, 1988, 115.
31. David Hume to BF, May 10, 1762; Campbell 356.
