FIVE
BECOMING AN AMERICAN

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ONCE AGAIN

The nearly eight years that Franklin spent in France were the happiest of his life. He did what he had long yearned to do—shape events on a world stage. The French alliance and the peace treaty with Great Britain recognizing American independence were vindications of all that he had believed about the ability of a few men of reason and common sense—indeed, perhaps, as he said, “even one Man of tolerable Abilities”—to make a difference in world affairs.¹ He had always hoped that he could manipulate world events in the way he manipulated chessmen on a board. “Life,” he wrote sometime during his mission in France, “is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain, & competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it.”² The British Empire had come apart because the British officials had not approached the political situation in the 1760s and 1770s with the prudence, foresight, circumspection, caution, and patience that good chess players have. But he and the other American diplomats had known how to approach their tasks as good chess players. As the principal American diplomat abroad he especially had realized that there were points to gain and adversaries to contend with, and he had discreetly brought about good effects by approaching his negotiations with the French and British with his chess-instilled habits in mind. He had demonstrated that reason and prudence could indeed “work great Changes, and accomplish great Affairs among Mankind.”3

That success and that confidence in reason were expressed in the second part of his Autobiography, which he resumed writing in 1784. With the peace treaty signed and the press of business eased, Franklin, still residing in Passy, had more leisure to take up his pen. But he probably would not have resumed writing his Autobiography without some prodding from friends.

Before leaving America for France in the fall of 1776, Franklin had turned over all his papers, including the only copy of the first part of the Autobiography, for safekeeping to Joseph Galloway, his former close friend, whom he made one of his executors. Instead of remaining neutral as Franklin expected, Galloway had fled to the British army in New York in December 1776, at the same time that Franklin arrived in France. Two years later Galloway sailed for England, leaving behind his wife and his estate, neither of which he ever saw again. When Galloway’s wife died in America in 1782, Franklin’s papers, including the Autobiography, apparently came into the hands of Abel James, who was one of her executors.

Sometime late that year or early in 1783, Franklin received a letter from James, who was an old Quaker friend. James had read the fragment of the Autobiography that Franklin had written in 1771, and he now urged Franklin to resume his memoir. This work, James said, “would be useful & entertaining not only to a few, but to millions.” It would have an especially strong influence on America’s youth. Indeed, James told Franklin that he knew of “no Character living nor many of them put together, who has so much in his Power as Thyself to promote a greater Spirit of Industry and early Attention to Business, frugality and Temperance with the American Youth.” Not that the work would not have other uses, but James believed its potential influence on young people was “of such vast Importance” that he knew “nothing that can equal it.” Despite all his enthusiasm, James could scarcely have foreseen just how influential Franklin’s Autobiography would become for young people.

Franklin’s English friend Benjamin Vaughan read and wholeheartedly endorsed James’s letter—even though he had not read a page of the Autobiography, but knew “only the character who lived it.” Franklin had to tell the story of his life for a number of reasons, Vaughan told his friend in a letter written at the end of January 1783. First of all, he wrote, “your life is so remarkable, that if you do not give it, somebody else will certainly give it; and perhaps so as nearly to do as much harm, as your own management of the thing might do good.” Moreover, Franklin’s life would present such a view of America as to invite “settlers of virtuous and manly minds” to migrate there. All that had happened to Franklin, Vaughan said, “is also connected with the detail of the manner and situation of a rising people.” Even the writings of Caesar and Tacitus could not be more revealing of human nature and society. But even more important, said Vaughan, was the opportunity that “your life will give for the forming of future great men; and in conjunction with your Art of Virtue, (which you design to publish) of improving the features of private character, and consequently of aiding all happiness both public and domestic.” These works will “give a noble rule and example of self-education,” especially for youth, in whom “the private and public character is determined.” “But,” said Vaughan, “your Biography will not merely teach self-education, but the education of a wise man.” Human beings have been blundering on in the dark from the beginning of time. “Shew then, Sir, how much is to be done, both to sons and fathers; and invite all wise men to become like yourself; and other men to become wise.” Franklin could show people how it is possible “to be both great and domestic; enviable and good-humoured.” He could especially teach people the “rules of prudence in ordinary affairs.” Franklin’s life, Vaughan told the American, would show people that he was not ashamed of his humble beginnings. He would “prove how little necessary all origin is to happiness, virtue, or greatness.” He could also teach people patience and timing, so “that man should arrange his conduct so as to suit the whole of a life.” James’s letter, said Vaughan, was fine in praising “your frugality, diligence, and temperance,” but James forgot to mention “your modesty, and your disinterestedness.”

Because people will be interested in the sources of the “immense revolution of the present period,” said Vaughan, they will want to know the motivations of the revolutionaries and whether they were virtuous. “As your own character will be the principal one to receive a scrutiny, it is proper (even for its effects upon your vast and rising country, as well as upon England and Europe), that it should stand respectable and eternal.” Franklin’s life could establish the central point of this enlightened age—that men were not born to obscurity and viciousness but through their own efforts could rise and do good work. Vaughan ended his letter by appealing to Franklin to write his life in order to get Americans and Englishmen thinking well of each other again. But not just Americans and Englishmen needed to learn about his life. “Extend your views even further: do not stop at those who speak the English tongue, but after having settled so many points in nature and politics, think of bettering the whole race of men.”4

Franklin could hardly have resisted these exhortations to become an exemplar for a rising people. In 1784 he thus resumed writing his Autobiography—the second part of it, which, like a game of chess, presumes man’s control over his life. Obviously influenced by Vaughan’s letter, Franklin laid out in this section of his memoir his method for achieving happiness. All of the intellectuals in the age of Enlightenment—from Francis Hutcheson to Claude-Adrien Helvétius—were preoccupied with discovering the moral forces in the human world that were comparable to the physical forces in the natural world uncovered by Newton and other scientists. Franklin was no different. In the 1750s he had revealed the workings of electricity in the natural world, but he had longed to make an equally important contribution to the moral or social sciences. He had been thinking about writing a book on the “Art of Virtue” for decades.⁵ But now he realized that he might not have time to write it. So instead he decided to describe in his Autobiography his “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.”⁶

THE PROJECT FOR ACHIEVING MORAL PERFECTION

In his Autobiography Franklin set forth a series of moral injunctions for living a good life, including reading, practicing modesty, and avoiding “Taverns, Games, and Frolicks of any kind.” He praised religion for whatever moral effects it had, but for little else. He believed that simply exhorting people to be good would not be enough; he wanted to present them with the means and manner of obtaining virtue—without relying on organized religion, which Franklin found often tended to divide people from one another rather than inspiring and promoting morality.

He listed thirteen virtues (temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility) with descriptions of each; for example, frugality—“Waste not”; industry—“Lose no time”; chastity—“Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring”; and humility—“Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” These were not utopian virtues, requiring a complete change of heart; instead, they were realistic, down-to-earth virtues, capable of being managed by ordinary people and not just a saintly few.7 By creating an elaborate “Plan for Self-Examination”—a daily checklist for each virtue—Franklin tells us how he worked diligently to eliminate faults and promote his thirteen virtues—all with the aim not only of pleasing God but, more important, of getting along in life. This is the project that D. H. Lawrence and other imaginative writers have so much detested.⁸

Franklin took his project to achieve moral perfection quite seriously, more seriously perhaps than many commentators have admitted. The Enlightenment promise of being able to make oneself over culturally seemed to be exemplified in Franklin’s life. The seriousness with which he took his project to become morally perfect is revealed in the wonderful but complicated anecdote of the speckled ax. He had told the story many times to French friends, and now he incorporated it into this second section of his Autobiography.

In attempting to carry out the elaborate moral injunctions he had set for himself, he said, he had difficulty in ordering his time. In fact, he tells us, he made so little progress and had so many relapses in ordering his life that he was “almost ready to give up the Attempt” and content himself “with a faulty Character in that respect.” At this point he injected the story of the speckled ax.

A man had bought a new ax and now wanted to have the whole surface of his ax as bright as the edge. The smith who had sold him the ax consented to grind it bright for him if the man would turn the wheel. The smith pressed the broad face of the ax hard and heavy against the stone, which made turning it very fatiguing. The man, becoming more and more tired, kept leaving the wheel to see how the grinding was coming. Finally, the exhausted man declared he would take his ax as it was without further grinding. No, said the smith, keep turning and sooner or later we’ll have it bright; as yet, it was still only speckled. “Yes, says the Man; but—I think I like a speckled Ax best.”

This, said Franklin, was the way many people rationalized abandoning their efforts to break bad habits and establish good ones. They gave up the struggle “and concluded that a speckled Ax was best.”

It is stories like these that make interpreting Franklin and his Autobiography so difficult. Some otherwise sensitive readers have concluded from this anecdote that Franklin had learned his lesson—that seeking the sort of moral perfection that did violence to human nature was foolish. Indeed, Franklin himself suggests as much when he notes that every now and then he thought his entire project “might be a kind of Foppery in Morals,” which, if it became known, would make him “ridiculous.” He goes on to observe “that a perfect Character might be attended with the Inconvenience of being envied and hated,” and therefore “a benevolent Man should allow a few Faults in himself, to keep his Friends in Countenance.”

On the face of it such suggestions make Franklin appear to be a reasonable man, someone who counsels good sense and moderation instead of maintaining utopian fantasies of moral perfection. But for Franklin such thinking was only “something that pretended to be Reason,” and not reason itself. With his seemingly sensible suggestions he was not really trying to justify giving up the effort to be morally perfect. The real message of his story is that one has to keep grinding away and not remain satisfied with a speckled ax.

Although Franklin admits that he had not attained moral perfection in his lifetime but had fallen far short of it, “yet I was by the Endeavour a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been, if I had not attempted it.” In other words, Franklin tells us the delightful story of the speckled ax only to deny its lesson at the end. Any reader, however, is bound to be overwhelmed by the charm of the anecdote and the power of the rationalizations that excuse a less than perfect moral character. Hence, Franklin leaves us with a very morally ambiguous message. Which is why so many different readers can draw so many different lessons from the Autobiography, and indeed, from all of his writings.9

Franklin wanted his posterity to know, he says, that even at the age of seventy-eight this “little Artifice” of self-examination was the source of the health and felicity of his life. Above all, he owed “to the joint Influence of the whole Mass of the Virtues, even in their imperfect State he was able to acquire them, all that Evenness of Temper, & that Chearfulness in Conversation which makes his Company still sought for, & agreeable even to his younger Acquaintance.”10

As this boast indicates and as Franklin disarmingly admitted, he never had much success “in acquiring the Reality ” of the virtue of humility, but he “had a good deal with regard to the Appearance of it.” Humility, he said, had not been on his original list of virtues; he had added it only because a friend had told him that he was too proud. Franklin was well aware of his pride and its near relation, vanity. He had begun his Autobiography by admitting the overwhelming power of vanity. “Most People,” he had written in 1771, “dislike Vanity in others whatever Share they have of it themselves.” But Franklin knew better. “I give it fair Quarter whenever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of Good to the Possessor and to others that are within his Sphere of Action.” Now in 1784 at the end of the second part of his Autobiography he was still struggling with the vanity and pride in himself that he could not help feeling and that he knew were the real sources of his benevolence and success in life. Pride, he conceded, was the hardest passion to subdue. “Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself.” Even if he could completely overcome his pride, he would probably then be proud of his humility.¹¹

A STRANGER IN MY OWN COUNTRY

After the peace treaty was signed, Franklin reluctantly realized that he ought to end his days in America. But he had come to love France. It was “the civilest Nation upon Earth,” he believed, and the French were “a delightful People to live with.”¹² On at least two occasions he expressed a strong desire to settle there for good.¹³ The first time was when he tried to arrange a marriage between his grandson Temple and the daughter of Monsieur and Madame Brillon. To convince the Brillons that their daughter would not be taken away with Temple, Franklin promised not only to secure a diplomatic post in Europe for his grandson but also to remain in France for the rest of his life. The Brillons found reasons to put Franklin off, and the matter was dropped.

The second time Franklin declared he would remain in France was when he proposed marriage to Anne-Catherine Helvétius, the widow of the philosopher. Madame Helvétius was over sixty but still lively and attractive. But, more important, she maintained a spirited salon in Auteuil, next to Passy, that was celebrated for its wit and irreverence. Franklin, like many others, was smitten with her. “I see that statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets, and men of learning of all sort are drawn around you, and seem as willing to attach themselves to as straws about a fine piece of amber,” he once told her. “We find in your sweet society, that charming benevolence, that amiable attention to oblige, that disposition to please and be pleased, which we do not always find in the society of one another. It springs from you; it has its influence on us all; and in your company we are not only pleased with you, but better pleased with one another and with ourselves.”14 It may have been Madame Helvétius who inspired Franklin’s famous compliment, the kind of bon mot that any eighteenth-century French aristocratic woman would have prized. When one of these French ladies reproached the doctor for putting off a visit she had expected, Franklin, taken aback, supposedly replied, “Madame, I am waiting until the nights are longer.”¹⁵

Franklin was so admiring of Madame Helvétius that he wanted everyone to meet her. When he introduced John Adams’s wife, Abigail, to her, however, the puritanical lady from Massachusetts was not at all impressed; in fact, she was disgusted, as she was with Paris in general. Madame Helvétius was much too bold and loose for Mrs. Adams’s taste, bawling out her greetings, throwing her arms about her dinner partners’ chairs, sprawling on a settee, “where she shew more than her feet.”¹⁶ John Adams agreed with his wife about the dissolute behavior he observed in the Helvétius household. “Oh Mores,” he said. “What Absurdities, Inconsistencies, Distractions and Horrors would these Manners introduce into our Republican Governments in America: No kind of Republican Government can ever exist with such national manners as these. Cavete Americani.”¹⁷

Franklin shared none of this kind of straitlaced American reaction to French manners. He understood the French and was charmed by them, and especially by Madame Helvétius and the warm and bantering cheekiness of her household. He repeatedly proposed to her, but always with a certain playful detachment so their pride would not be endangered. His French friends, however, thought he was quite serious and blamed Madame Helvétius for letting him go. If Madame Helvétius had accepted him, the most expert authority on Franklin’s female relations believes, the good doctor would never have returned to America.18

One can hardly blame him for wanting to stay in Europe. He was an old man, and, as John Adams noted, Frenchwomen had “an unaccountable passion for old age.”¹⁹ Franklin had spent all but three and a half years out of the previous twenty-seven years abroad, the last eight years in France. “I am here among a People that love and respect me, a most amiable Nation to live with,” he wrote in 1784, “and perhaps I may conclude to die among them; for my Friends in America are dying off one after another, and I have been so long abroad that I should now be almost a Stranger in my own Country”—a phrase that he had used repeatedly over the previous decade or so when he thought about returning to America.²⁰ Indeed, all his most cherished friends were in Europe, not America; and his former close American confidants—Joseph Galloway and his own son William—had become loyalists, and he would have nothing to do with them. But even more important, his intimate connection with France and the symbolic importance he had had for France as an American—the very things that had helped make possible French aid to America—were now being turned against him by his fellow Americans.

By 1783 some of his countrymen had come to believe that he was more loyal to France than to America. He seemed entirely too close to the French, hobnobbing with members of the French aristocracy and spending much too much time with Frenchwomen in their salons. He even received from Louis XVI the gift of a small box containing the king’s portrait. Edmund Randolph later declared that Franklin’s accepting this gift was what led the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to insert in the Constitution the clause prohibiting officials of the United States from accepting presents or emoluments from foreign princes or states. The members of the Convention, said Randolph at the Virginia ratifying convention, had wanted to avoid in the future any possibility of foreign princes’ corrupting America’s ambassadors, in the manner in which some Americans in the early 1780s thought Franklin had been corrupted.21

In May 1783, Samuel Cooper, a clergyman friend in Boston, wrote Franklin that a party in America, based on information coming from John Adams, was casting doubt on his patriotism. Word was spreading, said Cooper, that Franklin was not to be trusted and that “it was entirely owing to the Firmness, Sagacity and Disinterestedness of M. Adams, with whom Mr. Jay united,” that prevented American interests from being sacrificed to those of France.²² These reports hurt Franklin deeply. After the final peace treaty was signed in September 1783, he sent a letter to all his fellow commissioners poignantly denying such charges. He knew he did not have long to live, he said, but he did not want to go to his grave with the world thinking that he had less “Zeal and Faithfulness” to America than any of his colleagues. He was not willing to “suffer an accusation, which falls little short of Treason to my Country, to pass without Notice.”²³ He asked each of his fellow commissioners to certify his contribution to the peace negotiations in order, he said, to destroy the effects of these accusations. That the aged diplomat should have been reduced to such a humiliating request says a great deal about how differently France and America had come to view the great Dr. Franklin.

Still, with the letters from James and Vaughan and the writing of the second part of his Autobiography, he now knew that his destiny was linked to America. He had come to realize that the “Revolution” that he had “hardly expected I should live to see” and that he had done so much to bring to success had become “an important Event for the Advantage of Mankind in general.”²⁴

But the Continental Congress still had not answered his request to be recalled, leaving him uncertain about what to do. “During my long Absence from America,” he told the secretary of the Congress Charles Thomson in May 1784, “my Friends are continually diminishing by Death, and my Inducement to return in Proportion.”²⁵ Not only were his close friends in America dying off, but he also knew he had acquired many enemies in their place. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Franklin wanted his grandson Temple, who had been the secretary of the peace commission, to deliver the treaty to Congress. Instead, that honor went to a protégé of Adams who had not been involved in the peace negotiations at all. Since Franklin thought of Temple “as a Son who makes up to me my Loss by the Estrangement of his Father,” he next asked Congress to name his twenty-four-year-old grandson secretary of the new commission designed to sign commercial treaties with the European nations. He even hoped that Temple might be named his successor to France. Or perhaps his grandson could be appointed American minister to Sweden. But Congress was now in the hands of his enemies and the outlook was not promising. Richard Henry Lee had become president of Congress. As Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, dryly noted of Lee, “He is no friend to us, or our connections.”26

Franklin’s enemies in Congress now saw that they could get at Franklin through his grandson. Not only did Temple have “no Prospect of promotion,” but, wrote a gloating Elbridge Gerry to John Adams, Franklin’s grandson “has been actually superseded” by the appointment of Colonel David Humphreys, a protégé of Washington, as secretary of the new commission. Once he saw these congressional actions, said Gerry, Franklin “will have no Reason to Suppose that his Conduct is much approved.” Indeed, said Gerry, Congress had ceased being “reserved . . . with respect to the Doctor.” Franklin had become so useless that “it has become a matter of Indifference to Us, whether We employ him or the Count de Vergennes to negotiate our Concerns at the Court of Versailles.”²⁷

Rumors now abounded in both America and Britain that Franklin and his loyalist son William had been in collusion all along—each taking a side in order to protect the family regardless of who won the war. In November 1784 a New Yorker friend of William Franklin warned Temple not to get too close to his grandfather, for the old man’s “Influence” in America was “very small.” Even the reputation of the Marquis de Lafayette had been injured by his attempts to keep Franklin in France during the peace negotiations. These efforts by Lafayette “led People to suspect that he meant only to retain a Man that was perfectly subservient to his Court.” Although this friend of William Franklin certainly exaggerated the weakness of Franklin’s influence among his countrymen, he was not entirely wrong. Franklin in 1784 was not the important Founder he would later become. This cynical New Yorker knew what the Revolution meant and had some parting words of advice for Temple: “Make friends of every American, for in Republican Governments, you have many to please.”28

Finally, in May 1785, Franklin received word from Congress that his mission was over and that he could return to America. Thomas Jefferson had arrived and was named American minister to France. Unlike Adams, Jefferson got along splendidly with Franklin. For Jefferson, Franklin was “the ornament of our country, and I may say, of the world.”²⁹ He liked to tell the French that he could never be Franklin’s replacement as minister. He might succeed Dr. Franklin, but nobody could replace him.

Franklin’s reputation in Europe was extraordinary. A professor in Prague called him the Solon, the Socrates, and the Seneca of the present day. Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville called him “the ornament of the New World” and “a leader of modern philosophy.” Another European dubbed him “the Cato of his age.” From England, Erasmus Darwin (another great inventor and polymath and the grandfather of Charles Darwin) addressed him as “the greatest Statesman of the present, or perhaps of any century,” who single-handedly had spread liberty among his countrymen and “deliver’d them from the house of bondage, and the scourge of oppression.” From Florence, from Switzerland, from France, from all over Europe he was hailed as a great politician and scientist and the first man of the universe.³⁰

Franklin knew that he was respected abroad, but he remained uncertain about his reputation in his own country. Jefferson too was uncertain of how his fellow Americans would regard the returning Franklin. Writing from Paris in 1785, Jefferson knew that Franklin was “infinitely esteemed” in Europe. But he was very anxious that his fellow Americans might not know just how much Europeans esteemed Franklin and thus might not treat him properly. Jefferson, who was always acutely sensitive to what liberal Europeans thought of America, more than once warned James Monroe, an influential member of the Congress, that “Europe fixes an attentive eye on your reception of Doctr. Franklin.” The way Americans receive Franklin, Jefferson told his fellow Virginian, “will weigh in Europe as an evidence of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of America with their revolution.”³¹

THE RETURN TO PHILADELPHIA

Franklin arrived home in Philadelphia on September 14, 1785, and was met by cheering crowds and ringing bells—an “affectionate Welcome” that he claimed “was far beyond my Expectations.”32 With a population of fewer than forty thousand people, Philadelphia was no Paris or London, but it was booming and had become not only the largest city in America but its commercial and cultural center as well. Philadelphia had the only bank and the only library in the country that was open to the public—the Library Company, which Franklin had helped to found. The city also was the center of medical education in the nation and contained the most well-known scientific society in the country, the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin had also founded. Franklin’s spirit was still present, for the city had just formed a society for the promotion of agriculture, and it was taking the lead in humanitarian reforms of various sorts. The city’s artisans were organizing as never before and were demonstrating more political strength than they had had in Franklin’s day.

Franklin no sooner landed than Charles Willson Peale, a Philadelphia artist of many talents, painted his portrait (see page ref), which Peale displayed in a gallery of Revolutionary heroes. It was one of the most accurate portrayals done of Franklin as an old man, complete with the new bifocal spectacles he had invented. Peale issued mezzotint prints based on his portrait, and Franklin’s face was soon spread about the city. Peale attempted another portrait in 1789; but Franklin was too ill to sit, and Peale had to base his new picture on his original of 1785.

Philadelphia may have become the cultural and commercial center of the new nation, but it was still plagued by factional politics. Franklin, in fact, arrived in the middle of an election campaign between the two rudimentary parties that had emerged in Pennsylvania since 1776. On one side were the Constitutionalists, dominated by artisans and Scotch-Irish western farmers who supported the radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, which Franklin had helped to draft. On the other side were the Republicans, dominated by Anglicans and wealthy merchants and professionals who wanted to change the state’s constitution by introducing a governor and an upper house and to bring the constitution more into line with those of the other states. In hopes of bringing unity to the state, both parties nominated Franklin for the executive council (a group of twelve that served as the executive in place of a governor). Franklin admitted that he “had not sufficient Firmness to refuse their Support.”33 Following his election, the council and assembly then elected him president of the council.

Franklin, by Charles Willson Peale, 1785

Thus, only a few weeks after his arrival he had become the head of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It all had happened so fast that he scarcely had time to think about what he had done. At seventy-nine he was old, tired, and suffering from gout as well as bladder or kidney stones, and yet he had gotten himself into a “Business more troublesome than that I have lately quitted.”³⁴ George Washington, who had conspicuously retired from all public business in 1783, thought Franklin was out of his mind to accept any political office. But Franklin had heard so many stories of how suspicious many Americans had been of him that the enthusiastic reception in Pennsylvania had gone to his head. He knew he ought to quit public life and enjoy some of the well-earned rest that he had yearned for in France, but his desire to be thought well of was too strong. Accepting the office of president of Pennsylvania seemed to vindicate his virtue.

He accepted reelection to the office twice more, in 1786 and 1787 (with no dissenting vote except his own); and he perhaps avoided a fourth term only because the Pennsylvania Constitution prohibited it. Whatever his status might have been with some of the rest of the American people, most of the citizens of Pennsylvania, except for a fashionable few, revered him.35 “This universal and unbounded confidence of a whole People,” he told his sister after his third election to the presidency, “flatters my Vanity much more than a Peerage could do.”³⁶

This emotional need to be elected to office in order to boost his morale was sad. Franklin had devoted much of his life to serving the American public, and yet some members of that public still seemed to doubt him. Despite praise from individual Americans and the naming of a renegade state in western North Carolina after him (later part of Tennessee), he was still uncertain about his reputation in his own country. Indeed, he found himself in the embarrassing position of having to write friends to find out what his fellow Americans really thought of him. He knew there were “Calumnies propagated” against him, “which appeared all to emanate from the Brantry Focus,” that is, the Adamses of Braintree, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, he also knew that at his age, and considering who he was and what he had done, he should not be so concerned with what people thought of him. “You see,” he admitted, “that old as I am, I am not yet grown insensible, with respect to Reputation.”³⁷

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

In March 1787 the Pennsylvania Assembly appointed Franklin to the state’s delegation to the Convention that was to meet in Philadelphia in May to revise the Articles of Confederation. Although Franklin was confident that America was growing and prospering even under the Confederation, he realized that America’s experiment in republicanism was on trial and that the Convention was designed to prove that free government could sustain itself. Even before the Convention met, Franklin organized the Society for Political Enquiries, which met weekly in Franklin’s home seeking to study political science as the American Philosophical Society studied natural science.

On May 16, 1787, Franklin, as he explained to an English correspondent, hosted a dinner for “what the French call une assemblée des notables, a convention composed of some of the principal people from the several states of our confederation.”38 On May 25 this Constitutional Convention, this assembly of notables, finally had a quorum and began meeting officially. Franklin, described by one observer at the time as “a short, fat, trunched old man, in a plain Quaker dress, bald pate, and short white locks,” was the oldest member in attendance. As the oldest he was supposed to nominate George Washington as president of the Convention, but heavy rain kept him home.³⁹ Instead, the Pennsylvania delegation as a whole nominated Washington, which, James Madison noted, was an act of “particular grace, as Doctor Franklin alone could have been thought of as a competitor.”⁴⁰

Although most of the delegates did not know Franklin personally, they did know him by reputation—as, in the words of William Pierce of Georgia, “the greatest philosopher of the age.” Whatever Franklin’s reputation as a philosopher, his claim to be a politician, Pierce thought, would have to wait for posterity to judge. Franklin was certainly unimpressive in public council. “He is no Speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention.” Nevertheless, said Pierce, he was “a most extraordinary Man,” who “tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard.”⁴¹

Franklin did not often speak in the Convention, and when he did have more than a few words to say, he wrote out his speeches and had them read for him, since it was painful for him to stand. Most of his efforts were designed to conciliate and bring the delegates together, but he did make one important proposal concerning an issue that was dear to his heart. On June 2, he moved that all members of the executive branch in the new government should serve without pay.

He had long believed that there were “two Passions which have a powerful Influence in the Affairs of Men . . . Ambition and Avarice; the Love of Power and the Love of Money.” Each separately was a forceful spur to action, but when united in the minds of some men they had the most violent effects. “Place before the Eyes of such Men a Post of Honour, that shall at the same time be a place of Profit, and they will move Heaven and Earth to obtain it.”42 The result had always been continual struggles between factions and the eventual destruction of all virtue. Franklin’s evidence for his views was England. For many years he had believed, as he never tired of telling his English friends or anyone else who would listen, that “the Root of the Evil” in England’s politics lay “in the enormous Salaries, Emoluments, and Patronage” of its “Great Offices.”⁴³ Although Americans may now start out with moderate salaries for their rulers, pressures would arise to increase them, and eventually, he feared, America would end up as a monarchy. There was, he said, “a natural Inclination in Mankind to kingly Government.”

If some thought his idea that all executive officials serve without salary was too utopian, he offered the examples of sheriffs, judges, and the arbiters in Quaker meetings who served without pay. “In all Cases of public Service, the less the Profit the greater the Honour.” His final example was Washington, who as commander in chief had served eight years without salary. He was sure there were enough men of public spirit in America who would do the same in civil offices. (During his mission to France, Franklin had been on salary, although he had a hard time extracting it from the Congress.) Although his motion was seconded, it was tabled and never taken up again. “It was treated with great respect,” Madison noted, “but rather for the author of it than from any conviction of its expediency or practicability.”⁴⁴

Franklin’s proposal was classically republican, presuming, as it did, that civic life demanded virtue and self-sacrifice from its citizens. But this classically republican proposal was inevitably aristocratic and patrician in implication—one that would have confined the executive branch of the national government to wealthy gentlemen like Washington and himself who were rich enough to be able to devote themselves to public service. The proposal had grown out of his own experience, his own life, his own understanding of himself. Four decades earlier he as a wealthy tradesman had retired from business to dedicate his leisured life to philosophy and public service. In the future, could not others do the same? Only through such virtue and self-sacrifice could the pride, vanity, and desire for self-aggrandizement of ambitious individuals be prevented from destroying the state. He knew the power of his own pride and ambition and he knew how he had diverted that power into benevolence and good works. He had long believed in this aristocratic and classical notion of public service and had written it into the otherwise democratic Pennsylvania Constitution in 1776. It was as central to his life as anything he believed in. In a codicil to his will written a year before his death he once again stated his deeply held conviction that “in a democratical state there ought to be no offices of profit.”45

But Franklin was no defender of a traditional aristocracy; indeed, he had a deep dislike of aristocratic pretensions, sharpened by the ways some Philadelphians had snubbed him since his return to America in 1785. Given his background, Franklin could have little interest in aristocratic claims of blood. His criticism of the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization of retired Continental army officers created in 1783, was as strong as anyone’s in America. He believed in honors and distinctions, but not in their being passed on to heirs. “For Honour worthily obtain’d, as that for Example of our Officers,” he told his daughter in 1784, “is in its Nature a personal Thing, and incommunicable to any but those who had some Share in obtaining it. . . . Let the Distinction die with those who have merited it.”⁴⁶

In 1789 plans were being laid for the meeting of a Pennsylvania state constitutional convention to revise the much criticized radical constitution of 1776. All sorts of proposals for reform, including creating a single independent governor and a two-house legislature, were flying about the press, and Franklin responded to one of these. In his remarks, which were never published, he laid out his political thinking with remarkable clarity, demonstrating once and for all that in the context of traditional eighteenth-century assumptions of politics he was an enthusiastic democrat.

In his ardent defense of the 1776 document, which he had helped create, he opposed a single executive magistrate and any lengthening of the executive’s one-year term. Anything longer would put Pennsylvanians on the slippery slope toward monarchy, or at least a monarchy for life, like that of Poland. But it was the constitutional reformers’ desire to replace the unicameral legislature with a bicameral one, including an upper house or senate, that really provoked him and led to a series of angry and sprawling queries and protests. Wouldn’t the two houses fight with each other and cause expensive delays and promote factions among the people? Didn’t we Pennsylvanians learn a lesson from the mischief caused by the aristocratic proprietary council that acted as an upper house in the colony? he asked. Why couldn’t the wisdom that was supposed to exist in the upper house exist just as well in a single body? Haven’t we seen neighboring states torn apart by contention, their governments paralyzed by splits between the two houses of their legislatures? Has our single-house legislature committed any major errors that it hasn’t remedied by itself? A two-house legislature was like a two-headed snake trying to reach a brook for a drink, he said; it had to pass through a hedge but was blocked by a twig. One head wanted to go right, the other left, and consequently “before the Decision was completed, the poor Snake died of thirst.”

What really angered Franklin was the suggestion in the press that the proposed senate should represent property, with separate property qualifications both for the senators and for those who would vote for them; part of this suggestion resembled the highly regarded constitution of Massachusetts, whose senate was also designed to represent property. Although Franklin did not mention it, he well knew that his 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution contrasted in almost every particular with the conservative Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which had been largely written by none other than his nemesis John Adams. Franklin could not imagine having a legislative body representing a minority in the state attempting to balance and control the other legislative body chosen by the majority. “Why is this Power of Control, contrary to the Spirit of all Democracies, to be vested in a Minority, instead of a Majority?” Why is property to be represented at all? he asked.

“Private property,” he declared, in a rousing expression of the most radical republican thinking of the day, “is a Creature of Society and is subject to the Calls of that Society whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing.” Civil society was not a mercantile company composed of richer and poorer stockholders; it was a community in which every member had an equal right to life and liberty. Franklin had no desire to give the wealthy any special legal privileges. Suggestions for an upper house for Pennsylvania that would represent the property of the state, he wrote, expressed “a Disposition among some of our People to commence an Aristocracy, by giving the Rich a Predominancy in Government, a Choice peculiar to themselves in one half of the Legislature.” To have wealthy officials serving in the executive branch without pay did not mean that such rich men should dominate the popular representative legislature.47

Given Franklin’s passionate commitment to a unicameral legislature, it is remarkable that in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 he contributed as he did to the making of the so-called Connecticut compromise, which allowed for equal representation of the states in an upper house of the national legislature. But Franklin’s role in the Convention was generally limited by his age and health. Much of the time he seemed bewildered by the rapidity of the exchanges and the contentiousness of the debates. He was surprised by the extent of division in the Convention and continued to look for ways to bring people together. He had come to realize that “when you assemble a number of men, to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.” This appreciation of diversity and clashing self-interestedness in America was new; he had not talked like this in 1776.

At the end of June 1787, he made the extraordinary proposal that the Convention from then on open its sessions with prayer. He had concluded that the confusion and divisions that he had witnessed in the Convention were “a melancholy Proof of the Imperfection of the Human Understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own want of political Wisdom, since we have been running all about in Search of it.” Since the delegates were “groping, as it were, in the dark to find Political Truth,” Franklin asked, why not apply “to the Father of Lights to illuminate our Understandings?” Such prayers had helped Americans during the struggle leading up to independence. Everyone engaged in the Revolution, he said, “must have observed frequent Instances of a superintending Providence in our Favour.”

After some discussion, this proposal, like his earlier one concerning salaries, was allowed to die. Someone later claimed that Alexander Hamilton had declared that the delegates did not need the aid of any foreign powers.

Franklin had never fully believed that reason was all that was needed to accomplish great deeds in public life; but as a result of his experience in the Convention, he now seemed less confident than ever in reason. He had come to believe, he told the Convention, that “God governs in the Affairs of Men” and that an empire could not be built out of “little, partial, local Interests” without God’s aid.

At any rate, a year later, in June 1788, he had abandoned his earlier view that all life resembled a game of chess. The Convention’s forming of a new government had been anything but a game of chess. “The players of our game are so many,” he told a French correspondent,

their ideas so different, their prejudices so strong and so various, and their particular interests independent of the general, seeming so opposite, that not a move can be made that is not contested; the numerous objections confound the understanding; the wisest must agree to some unreasonable things, that reasonable ones of more consequence may be obtained; and thus chance has its share in many of the determinations so that the play is more like tric-trac with a box of dice.48

FRANKLIN’S STRUGGLE WITH CONGRESS

Perhaps his heightened sense that events had spun out of his control and were in the hands of God or Providence flowed from his nasty experience with the Confederation Congress, which still contained many of his enemies. Indeed, the Congress’s extraordinary treatment of him at the end of his life revealed just how ambiguous a figure he was to his fellow Americans. Other than being told by Jefferson and others that Franklin was “infinitely esteemed” in Europe, many of his countrymen did not know what to make of him.⁴⁹ Temple realized that his grandfather’s “Reputation is great throughout Europe,” but, as he ruefully noted, this “Circumstance” was “possibly of no Consequence” in America.⁵⁰

What exactly had Franklin done for the country? He had not spearheaded the Revolutionary movement like John Adams. He had not led armies like Washington. He had not written a great document like Jefferson. His great diplomatic achievements as minister to France were actually denounced by his enemies and unappreciated by most of his countrymen. Compared with the fates of the other Founders his was singular. None of the other great men of the Revolution ever had to endure the kind of mortification Franklin experienced at the hands of the national government.

After he had returned to America, he asked Congress to settle what it owed him and sent his grandson Temple to New York to meet with Congress. Franklin still hoped that Congress might offer a diplomatic post to the young man. Since Congress had refused to supply him with a secretary in France, he explained, he had been forced to employ his grandson as secretary; and the young man had thereby sacrificed an opportunity to study law. Franklin said that he was not alone in his opinion of Temple’s talents. “Three of my Colleagues, without the smallest Solicitation from me, chose him Secretary of the Commission for Treaties.” But Congress took no notice of his grandson. “This was the only Favour I ask’d of them,” Franklin said with as much resentment as he ever expressed; “and the only Answer I receiv’d was a Resolution superseding him and appointing Col. Humphreys in his place,” a man, he complained, who had no diplomatic experience and did not even speak French.51

Not only did Congress ignore his grandson, but it also said that it could not settle his accounts until it received more information from France. As Franklin in 1788 complained with barely suppressed anger in a letter meant for Cyrus Griffin, the president of the Congress, the Congress had had his accounts for the past three years and had done nothing with them. But this had not stopped members of Congress from spreading rumors about him. Indeed, “reports have for some time past been circulated here, and propagated in the News-Papers, that I am greatly indebted to the United States for large Sums that had been put into my Hands, and that I avoid a Settlement.” This, said Franklin, made “it necessary for me to request earnestly” that Congress examine the accounts “without farther Delay” and let him know if something was not right so that he could explain the matter and bring these accounts to a close.⁵²

He asked his friend Charles Thomson to present this letter to Griffin, “as you must be better acquainted with Persons and Circumstances than I am.”⁵³ Such a request itself suggests Franklin’s problematic standing in the United States in 1788. Would Washington, who was Franklin’s only rival for international renown in the 1780s, or would any of the Revolutionary leaders, for that matter, ever have had to ask someone else to approach the president of Congress on their behalf? Because of the way Congress had treated his request to appoint his grandson to a diplomatic post, Franklin was now well aware of where he stood with that body. He had, he said, “flatter’d myself vainly that the Congress would be pleas’d with the Opportunity I gave them of showing that Mark of their Approbation of my Services. But,” he added pathetically, “I suppose that present Members hardly know me or that I have perform’d any.”54

In the letter that he finally wrote to Thomson, Franklin released all of the anger he had suppressed in his letter to President Griffin. Indeed, although he assured Thomson that he would not have lessened his “Zeal for the Cause” even if he had foreseen “such unkind Treatment from Congress, as their refusing me their Thanks,” he must have come close to wondering whether he had chosen the right side in 1776.

He knew that republics were notoriously ungrateful, but he had not expected the United States to treat him so meanly. It was “customary in Europe,” he told Thomson, “to make some liberal Provision for Ministers when they return home from foreign Service, during which their Absence is necessarily injurious to their private Affairs.” He had hoped that the members of Congress might have done something for him. “At least” they might “have been kind enough to have shewn their Approbation of my Conduct by a Grant of some Tract of Land in their Western Country, which might have been of some Use and some Honour to my Posterity.”

In case Congress had forgotten, he included with his letter a “Sketch of the Services of B. Franklin to the United States.” In this sketch he described in the third person all he had done for the country—from his opposition to the Stamp Act to his encouragement of the Revolution and his missions abroad. He emphasized how many offices along with their salaries he had lost in service to the country and how much he had contributed to the cause out of his own pocket. He also stressed how difficult his service had been. When he was sent to Canada in 1776 he was “upwards of 70 Years of Age.” It was winter and the weather was cold; he passed the Lakes “while they were yet not free from Ice,” and “He suffer’d in his Health by the Hardships of this Journey, lodging in the Woods, &c, in so inclement a Season.” When Congress sent him to France, it gave him no advance on his expenses in the way the colony of Pennsylvania had done earlier. He “was badly accommodated in a miserable Vessel, improper for those northern Seas which was nearly founder’d in going and actually founder’d in her Return. In this Voyage he was so badly fed, that on his Arrival he had scarce Strength to stand.” During his mission to France he took on “extra Services” that Congress may not have been aware of, and he listed them—consul, judge of admiralty, merchant, and treasurer for the United States abroad. All this time “Mr. F. could make no Journey for Exercise and Health as had been annually his Custom, and the Confinement brought on a Malady that is likely to afflict him while he lives.” In short, he said, he never worked so hard in his life as he did during those eight years in France. And now he was at an age when “a Man has some Right to expect Repose.”55

It was humiliating—that he should have been reduced to listing his services to the country in this self-pitying way. Once his services were known he could not believe that Congress would not do something for him. After all, it had paid Arthur Lee and John Jay for their service abroad. But then again, he reflected, as his anger began to mount, the rewards given to the American ministers were “trifling” compared with the compensation that Louis XVI had granted to France’s minister in America upon his return from abroad.

“How different is what has happened to me!” he exclaimed, his anger palpable. When he returned from England in 1775 he had been given the office of postmaster general—understandably, for he had “some kind of Right” to the office, having transformed the colonial post office into a revenue-producing business. When he was sent to France in 1776 he had left the office in the hands of his son-in-law, Richard Bache, who was to act as his deputy. “But soon after my Departure it was taken from me and given to Mr. Hazard.”

But his anger over losing the patronage of the post office reminded him of other irritations with the Congress concerning postal matters. Even the much hated British had not treated him as shabbily as the Congress had. When the British had taken away his position as deputy postmaster of North America in 1774, they had at least left him the privilege of not having to pay postage for his letters. That was the custom when a postmaster was displaced for any reason except malfeasance in office. By contrast, what did Congress do? “In America I have ever since had the Postage demanded of me, which since my Return from France has amounted to above £50 much of it occasion’d by having acted as Minister there.”56

Franklin made these complaints privately to Thomson as a friend. Although he wanted Thomson to present his letter to the president of the Congress, along with some sense of Franklin’s services to the United States, he declared he would never complain publicly about Congress’s behavior.⁵⁷ For he knew “something of the Nature of such changeable Assemblies.” With the constant turnover of membership, these assemblies could never keep track of the services provided by their agents abroad; not only did they never feel obliged for these services, they even forgot that their agents had rendered them. He knew too from bitter experience the effect “artful and reiterated malevolent Insinuations of one or two envious and malicious Persons may have on the Mind of Members, even of the most equitable, candid, and honourable dispositions.” He was deeply hurt and angry. He realized his “Reproach thrown at Republicks, that they are apt to be ungrateful,” may have gone too far. If so, then he “would pass these reflections into oblivion.”⁵⁸

In the end the American republic showed no gratitude whatsoever. All of Franklin’s appeals to Congress to help his grandson or to straighten out his accounts came to nothing. Congress did not bother to acknowledge any of his requests or even to read his description of his services.⁵⁹

In this mood in 1788 he resumed the writing of his Autobiography. He began this third part with a statement that he would have to rely largely on his memory, since many of his papers had been lost in the war. But he did have one document, “accidentally preserved,” that he claimed he had written in 1731. This document stressed the inevitability of parties and the prevalence of self-interest in public affairs. He had thought his “united Party for Virtue” might be the best answer to the confusion and selfishness of the world. This party for virtue ought to have some sort of creed containing the essentials of all religions. These essentials included the belief that there was “one God” who “governs the World by his Providence”; that the way to serve God was to do good to man; that “the Soul is immortal”; and “that God would certainly reward Virtue and punish Vice either here or hereafter.”⁶⁰

In the rest of the Autobiography Franklin continued with a recital of his accomplishments in philanthropic and public affairs. The third section carried the narrative of his life up to his arrival in England in July 1757. The brief fourth section, which stops in 1758, was probably written in the winter of 1789–1790 and described only his negotiations with the proprietors as the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly. These final two sections deal largely with the external events of Franklin’s life; he revealed little of his inner life—his anger and his disappointments. At the end he was determined to show his readers only the extent of his good work on behalf of America and the number of his civic accomplishments. If Congress did not appreciate them, then maybe posterity would.

FRANKLIN AND SLAVERY

Although his body was failing, his mind and his curiosity and his benevolence were as active as ever. He thought about various reforms, including insuring farmers against natural disasters, lessening the brutality of criminal punishments, and the possibilities of eliminating privateering in wartime. But the humanitarian issue that preoccupied him most was slavery.

While we today can scarcely conceive of one person holding another in bondage, most early-eighteenth-century white Americans, living in a hierarchical society composed of ranks of dependency and unfreedom, accepted black slavery as a matter of course. Franklin was no exception. He had run advertisements for slaves in his newspaper, and he himself owned slaves for more than thirty years. His early questioning of slavery in 1751 was based solely on its effects on white society: with slaves “the white Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a living by Industry.”61 During his post office tours in the 1760s he saw a number of schools for blacks and developed “a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained. Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of White Children.”⁶²

But, like many other Americans, he did not begin seriously to question the existence of slavery until the early 1770s. Through the influence of his Quaker friend Alexander Benezet and the writings of British abolitionists, he began to hope that “the Friends to Liberty and Humanity will get the better of a Practice that has so long disgrac’d our Nation and Religion.”63 In France these early antislavery views were further stimulated by enlightened philosophes, especially the Marquis de Condorcet.⁶⁴ By the 1780s he was willing to lend his name to the abolitionist movement in Pennsylvania. In 1775 the Philadelphia Quakers had founded the first abolitionist group in North America, which came to be called the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Under the influence of this society, Pennsylvania became the first state to pass legislation providing for the gradual elimination of slavery. But more had to be done, as Franklin realized when he became the society’s president in 1787.

In a statement in November 1789 signed by Franklin, the society declared that slavery was “such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.” It was foolish, the statement said, to expect the freed slave, “who has long been treated as a brute animal,” to behave as an ordinary citizen. Emancipated black people needed help in assimilating into free society. Therefore, it was the responsibility of the abolitionist organization not merely to work for the eradication of slavery but also “to instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employments suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances, and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life.”⁶⁵ Though tired and in considerable pain from his kidney or bladder stones, the eighty-four-year-old Franklin had lost none of his zest for improving the lives of his fellow Pennsylvanians.

A few months later, in February 1790, Franklin signed a memorial to the new federal Congress requesting the abolition of slavery in the United States. This was a very different Franklin from the earlier pragmatic Franklin. No longer was he the tactful conciliator looking for the practical compromise between very diverse opinions. With his antislavery petition he was eager to provoke. Surely knowing what Congress’s response would be, he must have enjoyed sticking the issue to the heir of a body that had so long ignored and humiliated him, especially since Senators Richard Henry Lee and Ralph Izard, who had been his special tormentors, were Southern slaveholders. Since the new Congress had been created to secure “the blessings of Liberty to the People of the United States,” these blessings, the petition read, ought to be administered “without distinction of colour to all descriptions of people.” After all, said the petition, “Mankind are all formed by the same Almighty Being, alike the objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness.”66

As much as these views seem commonsensical to us today, they were not so in Franklin’s day. The petition predictably outraged many in the Congress and the country, and Franklin and the Quakers were viciously attacked. Congressman James Jackson of Georgia was especially vociferous in defending slavery in the House of Representatives. The Bible and nature justified slavery, said Jackson. If the slaves were freed, who would tend the fields of the South? Who else could do the work in a hot climate? Who would indemnify the masters? Abolitionists like Franklin, declared Jackson, were threats to the social order and ought to be ignored. The congressional committee to which the petition had been sent reported on March 5 that Congress had no authority to interfere in the internal affairs of the states.⁶⁷

Franklin saw his opportunity when he read Jackson’s speech, and he made the most of it with the literary technique he knew best—a hoax. This, his final hoax, appeared in the Federal Gazette on March 25, 1790, under the signature of “Historicus.” It purported to reprint a speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim to the Divan, or council, of Algiers defending the time-honored custom of enslaving white Christians captured by Barbary pirates. Franklin took Jackson’s arguments and placed them in the mouth of this Muslim apologist for enslaving Christians. The Koran justified slavery, the Muslim leader said, and by every calculation it is necessary. “If we cease our Cruises against the Christians, how shall we be furnished with the Commodities their Countries produce, and which are so necessary for us? If we forbear to make Slaves of their People, who in this hot climate are to cultivate our Lands?” Besides, these white infidels were “brought into a Land where the Sun of Islamism gives forth its Light and shines in full Splendor,” and thus these poor benighted slaves had an opportunity of becoming “acquainted with the true Doctrine and thereby saving their immortal Souls.” After many such arguments, the conclusion was the same one that Jackson had made to Franklin’s petition to free the African slaves: “Let us hear no more of this detestable Proposition, the Manumission of Christian Slaves.” Just as Congress had decided, after some huffing and puffing about the injustice of slavery, so too did Franklin have his Muslim Divan behave: “The Divan came to this Resolution,” he wrote, that “ ‘The Doctrine, that Plundering and Enslaving the Christians is unjust, is at best problematical; but that it is the Interest of this State to continue the Practice, is clear; therefore let the Petition be rejected.’ ”68

FRANKLIN’S DEATH

During that same month of March 1790, Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, wrote Franklin to ask about his religious views. Franklin said that it was the first time anyone had questioned him about the subject. He did not want to take Stiles’s curiosity amiss, and he tried to answer him as succinctly as possible. He said that he believed “in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we can render to him, is doing Good to his other Children. That the Soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this.” Franklin went on to say that he (like Jefferson) believed Jesus’s “System of Morals and his Religion as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see.” He also expressed his doubts of Jesus’s divinity, but did not want to argue the matter. Practical to the end, he saw no harm in people’s believing in Christ’s divinity since that belief would likely make his doctrines more respected and observed. Knowing that his own views might not be well received by his countrymen, he asked Stiles to keep them confidential.

Early in April, Franklin developed a fever and some sort of lung ailment that made breathing difficult. He had been in pain for some time and was taking opium for relief. With him at the end were his daughter, Sally, her husband, and Franklin’s two grandsons, together with Mrs. Stevenson’s daughter Polly, who had succumbed to Franklin’s appeals and had immigrated to Philadelphia with her family. At one point Sally told her father that she hoped he would recover and live many more years. He replied, “I hope not.” He died on April 17, 1790. He was eighty-four.

His will, drawn up in 1788, was odd. Instead of leaving the bulk of his four-thousand-book library to the Library Company, as the directors expected, Franklin left only a single multivolume work. Most of the rest of his books he left to his grandsons and a cousin. To the Philadelphia Hospital he left over £5000 in old debts that he had been unable to collect—a bequest that the hospital’s gentry patrons eventually turned down.69 Perhaps tired of the social snubbing he was getting from some genteel Philadelphians, he became in the end increasingly interested in young artisans. In a lengthy codicil drawn up in 1789 he left £1000 each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia in hopes of having other young men emulate his life. The cities were to use these funds as the source of loans for young journeyman mechanics setting themselves up in business. (At the present time these funds amount to millions of dollars.) By making these grants Franklin seemed to foresee something of the role he was to play in America following his death.⁷⁰

THE REACTION TO FRANKLIN’S DEATH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For months Americans paid not a word of public tribute to Franklin. Although the American Philosophical Society decided two days after Franklin’s funeral to eulogize its founder and former president, it delayed its eulogy for almost a year. The two vice presidents of the society, the scientist David Rittenhouse and the Anglican priest William Smith, received an equal number of the members’ votes to deliver the eulogy; and consequently for months nothing was done. When the French tributes arrived and were opened early in 1791, however, the delay became embarrassing. Smith was finally selected as the eulogist, and the occasion became far more important and public than had originally been intended; in fact, it became as close to an official eulogy of Franklin as the nation ever managed.

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

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

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

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

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

Bache, called “Lightning-Rod Junior” by the Federalists, was notorious for his scurrilous attacks on President Washington and the Federalists. And inevitably the Federalists replied to this scurrility by assaulting Bache’s grandfather for being, in the words of William Cobbett, the fiery immigrant from England, “a whore-master, a hypocrite, and an infidel.”⁷⁹ Joseph Dennie, the arch-Federalist editor of the Anglophilic Port Folio, dismissed Franklin as “one of our first Jacobins, the first to lay his head in the lap of French harlotry; and prostrate the christianity and honour of his country to the deism and democracies of Paris.”⁸⁰ It became conventional Federalist wisdom that Franklin had been “a dishonest, tricking, hypocritical character” who had championed French infidelity and fanaticism.81

THE CELEBRATION OF WORK

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

In his will Franklin had bequeathed all his papers to Temple Franklin, who planned to publish the complete life along with his grandfather’s other works. Temple was surprised, however, to learn of the publication in 1791 of a French translation of the first part of his grandfather’s memoir.⁸³ Although Temple tried to prevent an English version of the French edition, two English translations appeared in London in 1793. One of these translations was combined with a short life of Franklin written by Henry Stuber, which had originally appeared serially in Philadelphia in the Universal Asylum, and Columbia Magazine beginning with the May 1790 issue. Between 1794 and 1800 this collection was reprinted at least fourteen times in the United States.⁸⁴ Franklin’s Way to Wealth also began to be frequently reprinted. Although Temple did not bring out his own edition of Franklin’s papers until 1817-1818, many Americans were already very familiar with the early life of Franklin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

BECOMING THE SELF-MADE BUSINESSMAN

It was this image of the hardworking and bookish Franklin that captivated most middling folk. Everywhere village publicists encouraged ordinary people to read all the books within their reach, as Franklin had. Almanacmaker Robert Thomas of Sterling, Massachusetts, thought that winter was a good time for farmers to catch up on their reading. “The life of Dr. Franklin,” he said, “I would recommend for the amusement of winter evenings.”⁹⁴ Northern working people found in Franklin a means of both releasing their resentments and fulfilling their aspirations. In Boston and Philadelphia hundreds of artisans from dozens of different crafts took advantage of Franklin’s bequest to better themselves.⁹⁵ They sponsored Franklin Lectures, issued numerous broadsides containing Franklin’s “Maxims and Precepts for Conduct in Life and the Just Attainment of Success in Business,” and published and republished account after account of Franklin’s life.96 It was not Franklin the scientist and diplomat they emulated but the young man who through industry and frugality had risen from obscurity to fame and fortune. “Who can tell,” asked the president of the Mechanics Society of New York in 1820 of an audience of young artisans, “how many Franklins may be among you?”⁹⁷

Between 1794 and 1828, twenty-two editions of Franklin’s Autobiography were published. After 1798 editors began adding the Poor Richard essays, and especially The Way to Wealth, to editions of the Autobiography. Since it was young men who needed the inspiration of Franklin, writers and editors began aiming their works specifically at young readers.

Parson Weems, who had made so much money with his fanciful life of Washington in 1800, was bound to do something with Franklin. He began by publishing extracts from Franklin’s The Way to Wealth and his Autobiography. And then in 1818 he created his own fictitious life of Franklin, which may have become more popular in the early nineteenth century than Franklin’s actual Autobiography. Weems was eager to use Franklin as a moral example for wayward youth.

O you time-wasting, brain-starving young men, who can never be at ease unless you have a cigar or a plug of tobacco in your mouths, go on with your puffing and champing—go on with your filthy smoking, and your still more filthy spitting, keeping the cleanly house-wives in constant terror for their nicely waxed floors, and their shining carpets—go on I say; but remember, it was not in this way that our little Ben became the GREAT DR. FRANKLIN.⁹⁸

Franklin’s life, wrote Weems, had essential lessons for the young. Sometimes, he said, young men were laughed at for their “oddities”—their poverty, their awkwardness, or their habit of reading. “Yet if, like Franklin, they will but stick to the main chance, i.e. BUSINESS AND EDUCATION, they will assuredly, like him, overcome at last, and render themselves the admiration of those who once despised them.”

But it was not enough that Weems’s Franklin was a model of entrepreneurial ambition and hard work. Since Weems was writing for ordinary people, and ordinary people in the early republic were deeply religious, he had to turn Franklin into a “true” Christian who “not only had religion, but had it in an eminent degree.” Although Franklin might have neglected religion when he was young and did not attend church very often, he was, said Weems, always sincerely devoted to the teachings of Christ. Indeed, all his “extraordinary benevolence and useful life were imbibed, even unconsciously from the Gospel.” According to Weems, Franklin gained comfort during his final illness by gazing at a picture of Christ on the cross. If Franklin was to be a hero to middling nineteenth-century Americans, he had to become a good Christian.99

Since Franklin’s life, whether in bits and pieces of the Autobiography or in versions like that of Weems, was available everywhere, it could not help but inspire the dreams of countless individuals in the early republic. Indeed, some ambitious men actually attributed their rise to reading Franklin. In 1811 sixteen-year-old James Harper left his father’s farm on Long Island for New York City after reading Franklin’s life. Eventually he founded one of the most successful publishing firms in the country and became mayor of New York. When he had his portrait painted, he had the artist insert a profile of Franklin in it.

The experience of Thomas Mellon, the founder of the great banking fortune, was similar. In 1828 fourteen-year-old Mellon had thought he would remain a farmer like his father on their modest farm outside of Pittsburgh. But reading Franklin’s Autobiography and Poor Richard’s sayings became “the turning point” of his life. “For so poor and friendless a boy to be able to become a merchant or a professional man had before seemed an impossibility; but here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame.” He “wondered if I might do something in the same line by similar means.” He read Franklin’s words over and over and began to apply himself in school as he never had before. When Mellon finally founded his bank, he placed Franklin’s statue in front of it as a tribute to his inspiration. Near the end of his life he bought a thousand copies of Franklin’s Autobiography and distributed them to young men who came seeking his advice. Franklin had come to epitomize the new and radical notion of the “self-made man.”¹⁰⁰

Prior to the early nineteenth century, social mobility generally had not been something to be proud of, as indicated by the pejorative terms—“upstarts,” “arrivistes,” “parvenus”—used to disparage those participants unable to hide the lowliness of their origins. But now mobile individuals began boasting of their humble beginnings. They had made it, they said, on their own, without family influence, without patronage, and without having gone to Harvard or Princeton or any college at all. A man was now praised for having “no relations or friends, but what his money made for him”; he was “the architect of his own fortune.”101

Sensitive to the charge of vanity, Franklin in his Autobiography had played down the suggestion that he was the architect of his own fortune. He had written simply that he had “emerged from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World.” His grandson Temple, however, in his edition of Franklin’s Memoirs, first published in 1817–1818, wanted to emphasize the great man’s self-made character. So his edition read: “From the poverty and obscurity in which I was born, . . . I have raised myself to a state of affluence and some degree of celebrity in the world.” “Raised myself”! That was quite a difference. As Temple’s edition of the Autobiography was regarded as the standard text for the next half century, it was not surprising that Franklin should have emerged for businessmen everywhere as the perfect model of the self-made man.¹⁰²

By the early nineteenth century many of these successful businessmen no longer felt the need, as Franklin had, to shed their leather aprons in order to acquire respectability. They were proud of being self-made men, and sometimes they even flaunted their lowly origins. Philadelphia manufacturer Patrick Lyon (1779–1829) began his career as a humble blacksmith and had actually been falsely imprisoned in the Walnut Street jail for three months for bank robbery. But after being released from prison and winning a civil compensation suit, he eventually became a successful businessman who in 1826, like Franklin three quarters of a century earlier, wanted his portrait painted. But unlike Franklin, who had wanted to display the ruffled silk of his new status as a gentleman, Lyon told the artist, John Neagle, that he had no desire to be “represented in the picture as a gentleman.” He wanted to be painted as he once was, “at work at my anvil, with my sleeves rolled up and a leather apron on,” with the Walnut Street Gaol in the background.

Pat Lyon at the Forge was an immediate popular success. When hung in the academies of New York and Philadelphia, Lyon’s portrait, “looking

Pat Lyon at the Forge, by John Neagle,1826

delightfully cheek by jowl” with the conventional genteel portraits, instantly reminded people, as one reviewer pointed out, “of the equality of mankind in everything but mind.”103 The difference between Lyon’s portrait in 1826 and that of Franklin in 1748 (see page ref) is a measure of how radically the American Revolution had changed American society and culture. Aristotle must have turned in his grave—thousands of years of aristocratic contempt for trading and working for money shattered in just a few decades.¹⁰⁴

In the generation following the Revolution thousands upon thousands of young men responded to the many appeals to make their own way in the world and took advantage of the multitudes of commercial opportunities opening up, especially in the northern states of America. Indeed, this first generation to come of age after the Revolution may have been the most important single cohort in American history. For not only did this generation create American capitalism but it also created a powerful conception of American identity—the America of enterprising, innovative, and equality-loving people—a conception so powerful in fact that it has lasted even into our own time.105

Many of these northern entrepreneurs—and nearly all of them were from the North—sought to imitate Franklin not only by making money and prospering but also by setting down in hundreds upon hundreds of memoirs the stories of their struggles and their achievements. Some of the memoirists were explicit in invoking Franklin’s life as their model, but others simply portrayed events in ways that were remarkably similar to Franklin’s depictions in his Autobiography. When John Ball, the tenth of ten children, found that his older brother, like Franklin’s older brother, “claimed the right to direct the work [on their Vermont farm] in a way that to me was not always satisfactory,” he became “determined to leave home” just as Franklin had. Ball eventually became a state legislator in Michigan and the architect of the state’s public school system. In his memoir Chauncey Jerome described his arrival in New Haven in 1812 as a nineteen-year-old: “I wandered about the streets early one morning with a bundle of clothes and some bread and cheese in my hands.” He recalled scarcely imagining then that he would become a prosperous clockmaker in the city, “or that I should ever be its Mayor.” It was as if these successful men had to have begun their lives just as Franklin had, even to the point of duplicating his particular experiences.¹⁰⁶

THE MYTH OF AMERICAN NATIONHOOD

The men who wrote these memoirs were successful businessmen who were proud of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. And cumulatively the stories they told, along with the numerous editions of Franklin’s Autobiography, had an inordinate influence on America’s understanding of itself. Out of these repeated messages of striving and success not only did ordinary northern white men acquire a heightened appreciation of their work and their worth; they were also able to construct an enduring sense of American nationhood—a sense of America as the land of enterprise and opportunity, as the place where anybody who works hard can make it, as the nation of free and scrambling moneymaking individuals pursuing happiness. This myth of American identity created during the several decades following the Revolution became so powerful that succeeding generations were scarcely able to question it.107

Among the peoples of the world only Americans of the early republic, as their great observer Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out, celebrated work as “the necessary, natural, and honest condition of all men.” What most astonished Tocqueville was that Americans thought not only that work itself was “honorable,” but that “work specifically to gain money” was “honorable.” By contrast, European society not only possessed proportionally fewer middling people than America, but was still dominated by aristocrats who scorned working for profit. When they served the state, said Tocqueville, these European aristocrats claimed to do so without interested motives. “Their salary is a detail to which sometimes they give a little thought and to which they pretend to give none.” But in democratic America serving the public without salary, as Washington and Franklin had, was no longer possible. “As the desire for prosperity is universal, fortunes are middling and ephemeral, and everyone needs to increase his resources or create fresh ones for his children,” said Tocqueville; “all see quite clearly that it is profit which, if not wholly then at least partially, prompts them to work.”

With everyone working for pay, everyone became alike. Even “servants do not feel degraded because they work,” Tocqueville wrote, “for everyone around them is working. There is nothing humiliating about the idea of receiving a salary, for the President of the United States works for a salary.” And Franklin, the Founder who wanted all members of the federal executive to serve without pay, nevertheless now became the special hero of all these middling men who prized the fact that everyone worked for a living.¹⁰⁸

Of course, as Tocqueville explained, the “Americans” he described were those “who live in the parts of the country where there is no slavery. It is they alone who provide a complete picture of a democratic society.”109 It was the northern working people of 1830 who created America’s dominant sense of nationhood, not the cavalier South.

At the time of the Revolution in 1776, Virginia had thought itself to be the undisputed leader of the nation, with good reason. It was by far the most populous state, with a population of well over 600,000 people, 40 percent of whom were black slaves. It was over twice the size of its nearest competitor, Pennsylvania. It supplied much of the Revolutionary leadership and dominated the Constitutional Convention with its Virginia plan. In 1776 it had the strongest claim to the bulk of the western territory comprising most of the present-day Midwest. It is not surprising that four of the first five presidents and the longest-serving chief justice of the United States should have been Virginians. But by 1830 Virginia’s day in the sun had passed, its population outstripped by both New York and Pennsylvania. Its economy had become largely engaged in the export of slaves to the burgeoning regions of the Deep South.

Virginia and the South always claimed that they had remained closer to the eighteenth-century beginnings of the nation, and they were right. It was the North that had changed and changed dramatically. Because northern Americans came to celebrate work so emphatically—with Franklin as their most representative figure—the leisured slaveholding aristocracy of Virginia and the rest of the South became a bewildered and beleaguered minority out of touch with the enterprise and egalitarianism that had come to dominate the country. As long as work had been held in contempt, as it had for millennia, slavery could never have been wholeheartedly condemned. But to a society that came to honor work as fully as the North did, a leisured aristocracy and the institution of slavery that supported it had to become abominations.

This dynamic, democratic, and enterprising world that Tocqueville described created the modern image of Franklin as the bourgeois moralist obsessed with the making of money and getting ahead. Although this image was the one that D. H. Lawrence and other imaginative writers have so much scorned, Franklin might not have been unhappy to learn that this powerful entrepreneurial symbol would be the way most people in the world would come to know him.

In some ways his career had come full circle. Near the end of his life he glimpsed that some people were coming to see him once again as the tradesman printer who had made it, and he seemed to welcome this view of himself. After seeing his grandson Temple rebuffed by Congress, he decided that his other grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache (called Benny by Franklin), would not suffer the same fate. He told his son-in-law, Benny’s father, that he was “determined to give him a Trade [as a printer] that he may have something to depend on, and not to be oblig’d to ask Favours or Offices of any body.”110

As he had always done when he wanted to boost himself in moments of lagging self-esteem, he took pride in the fact that he had been a successful tradesman and printer who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. In fact, he liked to startle French aristocrats by showing them how he could set type, and he bragged about his decision to leave money to two American cities for the encouragement of “young beginners in business.”¹¹¹ In 1786 he backed the Philadelphia journeymen printers in their strike over wage cuts, and the journeymen responded by drinking toasts in celebration of his eighty-first birthday.¹¹² In 1788 he participated in the founding of the Franklin Society in Philadelphia, an organization designed to support printers with credit and insurance. The year before his death, he lamented that he was “too old to follow printing again my self, but loving the business,” he had thrown all his energies into training his grandson in the trade. He now looked forward to his Autobiography’s being read by future generations, realizing that the early parts of it would have the most significance for young readers—“as exemplifying strongly the Effects of prudent and imprudent Conduct in the Commencement of a life of business.”¹¹³

It is the image of the hardworking self-made businessman that has most endured. Franklin was one of the greatest of the Founders; indeed, his crucial diplomacy in the Revolution makes him second only to Washington in importance. But that importance is not what we most remember about Franklin. It is instead the symbolic Franklin of the bumptious capitalism of the early republic—the man who personifies the American dream—who stays with us. And as long as America is seen as the land of opportunity, where you can get ahead if you work hard, this image of Franklin will likely be the one that continues to dominate American culture.