The following abbreviations are used in the notes.
Adams, Diary and Autobiography
Lyman H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961)
Papers of Adams
Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., The Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977–)
BF
Benjamin Franklin
BF, Autobiography
Leonard Labaree et al., eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964)
Papers of Franklin
Leonard Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–)
Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography
J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds., Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism (New York: Norton, 1986)
Franklin: Writings
J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Benjamin Franklin: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987)
PMHB
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
WMQ
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series
1. Lodge, in Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture,1790–1990 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994), 136; Garry Wills, James Madison (New York: Times Books, 2002), 164.
2. John Adams to William Tudor, 5 June 1817, in American Historical Review 47 (1941–42): 806–7.
3. Brian M. Barbour, ed., Benjamin Franklin: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), introduction.
4. Howells, quoted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 276.
5. Louis B. Wright, “Franklin’s Legacy to the Gilded Age,” Virginia Quarterly Review 22 (1946): 268.
6. Henry D. Gilpin, The Character of Franklin: An Address Delivered Before the Franklin Institute of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1857), 15, 21. (I owe this reference to Barry Schwartz.)
7. Turner, quoted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 274–75.
8. Richard D. Miles, “The American Image of Benjamin Franklin,” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 124–25; Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1889, 713; Carla Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Memory,” New England Quarterly 72 (1999): 424.
9. BF, Poor Richard, 1735, in Papers of Franklin, 2:9.
10. Irene Brouillard of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, quoted in Providence Journal, 15 Aug. 2002.
11. Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Memory,” 426; P. M. Zall, Franklin’s Autobiography: A Model Life (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 16. At the end of the nineteenth century, Paul Leicester Ford, the great bibliographer of Franklin’s works, confronted with massive numbers of editions of The Way to Wealth, gave up after listing 155 titles, saying that it was “simply impossible to find and note all the editions.” Paul Leicester Ford, Franklin Bibliography: A List of Books Written by, or Relating to Benjamin Franklin (Brooklyn, 1889), 55. For a more recent annotated bibliography of works about Franklin between 1721 and 1906, see Melvin H. Buxbaum, Benjamin Franklin,1721–1906: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).
12. Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin” (1870), in Louis J. Budd, ed., Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays (New York: Library of America, 1992), 425–26.
13. Howells, quoted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 275–76.
14 Keats, quoted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 257–58.
15. Joseph Dennie, quoted in Lewis Leary, “Joseph Dennie on Benjamin Franklin: A Note on Early American Literary Criticism,” PMHB 72 (1948): 244.
16.North American Review 21 (Sept. 1818): 289–90.
17. Poe, “The Businessman,” in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1903), 4:260, 265–66, 268. The story is conveniently available in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 258–66. See also J. A. Leo Lemay, “Poe’s ‘The Businessman’: Its Contexts and Satire of Franklin’s Autobiography,” Poe Studies 15 (1982): 29–37.
18. Melville, Israel Potter, in Harrison Hayford, ed., Herman Melville (New York: Library of America, 1984), 479, 486.
19. Hawthorne, “Biographical Stories,” in The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, introduction by George Parsons Lathrop (Boston, 1888), 12:202.
20. Wright, “Franklin’s Legacy to the Gilded Age,” Virginia Quarterly Review 22 (1946): 268–79.
21. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), 52–54.
22. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; reprint, New York: T. Seltzer, 1953), 19–31.
23. Floyd C. Watkins, “Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatz and Young Benjamin Franklin,” New England Quarterly 27 (1954): 249–52.
24. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1925), 174–75, 182. See also J. A. Leo Lemay, “Franklin’s Autobiography and the American Dream,” in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 349–60.
25. BF to William Strahan, 2 June 1750, and BF to Abiah Franklin, 12 April 1750, in Papers of Franklin, 3:479, 475.
26. Carl Becker, “Benjamin Franklin,” Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (New York: Scribner, 1931), 6:596.
27.The Federalist, No. 72. See also Douglass Adair, “Fame and the Founding Fathers,” in Trevor Colbourn, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair (New York: Norton, 1974), 3–26.
28. On Franklin’s strategy of humility, see Paul W. Conner, Poor Richard’s Politicks: Benjamin Franklin and His New American Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 149–69.
29. J. Philip Gleason, “A Scurrilous Colonial Election and Franklin’s Reputation,” WMQ 18 (1961): 76.
30. Jennifer T. Kennedy, “Death Effects: Revisiting the Conceit of Franklin’s Memoir,” Early American Literature 36 (2001): 204. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall have a conveniently selected annotated bibliography of twentieth-century criticism of the Autobiography in their Franklin’s Autobiography, 365–74. Among the many fine studies of the Autobiography, see David Levin, “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: The Puritan Experiment in Life and Art,” Yale Review 53 (1964): 258–75; John William Ward, “Benjamin Franklin: The Making of an American Character,” in his Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Robert F. Sayre, The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); R. Jackson Wilson, Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 21–65; William H. Shurr, “ ‘Now, Gods, Stand Up for Bastards’: Reinterpreting Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,” American Literature 64 (1992): 437–51; and Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). For additional studies of the Autobiography see Seavey’s list, ibid., 244–45.
31. BF, Autobiography, 75–76.
32. J. A. Leo Lemay, “The Theme of Vanity in Franklin’s Autobiography,” in Lemay, ed., Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 372–87.
33. Stanley Brodwin, “Strategies of Humor: The Case of Benjamin Franklin,” Prospects 4 (1979): 121–67.
34. Verner W. Crane, ed., Letters to the Press,1758–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), xxx.
35. J. A. Leo Lemay, The Canon of Benjamin Franklin: New Attributions and Reconsiderations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 135; Bruce Ingham Granger, Benjamin Franklin: An American Man of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964).
36. BF, On Censure and Backbiting, in Franklin: Writings, 192–95.
37. BF, Autobiography, 87–88; J. A. Leo Lemay, “Franklin’s Autobiography and the American Dream,” in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 349–60.
38. BF, On Simplicity, 1732, in Franklin: Writings, 183; BF, Poor Richard, 1743, in Papers of Franklin, 2:370.
39. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 17–18.
40. BF, Poor Richard, 1735, in Papers of Franklin, 2:8.
1. BF, Autobiography, 43.
2. BF, “Will and Codicil,” 23 June 1789. (Franklin documents that are not yet published in the letterpress edition of his papers will be cited with their date.)
3. BF, Autobiography, 53.
4. BF, Autobiography, 58.
5. Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 27; Stephen Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 136.
6. BF, Autobiography, 62.
7. Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: Norton, 1974), 18–29. New England’s literacy rate was among the highest in the Western world.
8. BF, Autobiography, 58.
9. BF, Autobiography, 59.
10. BF, Autobiography, 60. On Franklin’s writing see Bruce Ingham Granger, Benjamin Franklin: An American Man of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964). John Jay recounted a story Franklin had told him about the New Jersey Assembly in 1740. The assembly was engaged in a dispute with the governor and wanted to write a reply to the governor’s message. But the committee assigned the task, “tho they were Men of good understanding and respectable, yet there was not one among them capable of writing a proper answer to the Message.” They asked Franklin, whom one of the committee knew, and when he satisfied them with his writing, they made him their printer. J. A. Leo Lemay, The Canon of Benjamin Franklin,1722–1776: New Attributions and Reconsiderations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 95.
11. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690 to 1940 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 9.
12. Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press,” 193–96. Botein’s articles are by far the most sophisticated work on colonial printers. It is a tragedy that he died prematurely before he could complete his study.
13. BF, Autobiography, 67.
14. [BF], “Silence Dogood, No. 4,” in Papers of Franklin, 1:14. Franklin learned early the advantages of using pseudonyms. “When the Writer conceals himself, he has the Advantage of hearing the Censure both of Friends and Enemies, express’d with more Impartiality.” On Literary Style, 2 Aug. 1733, in Papers of Franklin, 1:328.
15. BF, Autobiography, 68.
16. BF, Autobiography, 68–69.
17. BF, Autobiography, 68–71, 43.
18. BF, Autobiography, 75–76.
19. Susan E. Klepp, “Demography in Early Philadelphia, 1690–1860,” in Susan E. Klepp, ed., The Demographic History of the Philadelphia Region,1600–1860, American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 133 (June 1989), 103–4.
20. On Keimer, see Stephen Bloore, “Samuel Keimer: A Footnote to the Life of Franklin,” PMHB 54 (1930): 255–87.
21. BF, Autobiography, 65.
22. Linda Rees Heaton, “ ‘This Excellent Man’: Littleton Waller Tazewell’s Sketch of Benjamin Waller,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89 (1981): 147–50.
23. Hamilton to Edward Stevens, 11 Nov. 1769, in Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 1:4.
24. BF, Autobiography, 80.
25. William Smith charged in 1764 that without the patronage of Allen and his friends Franklin probably would have remained in his original obscurity. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 74–75.
26. BF, Autobiography, 113.
27. BF, Autobiography, 121.
28. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1985), 24–25; M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 21–25.
29. Liza Picard, Dr. Johnson’s London: Life in London,1740–1770 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000); George Rudé, Hanoverian London,1714–1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 47.
30. BF, Autobiography, 87, 95.
31. BF, Autobiography, 96.
32. BF, Autobiography, 128.
33. BF, Autobiography, 99.
34. BF, Autobiography, 101.
35. BF, Autobiography, 114–15, 145–46.
36. BF to Benjamin Vaughn, 9 Nov. 1779, in Papers of Franklin, 31:59; BF, Poor Richard, 1739, and BF, Dialogue Between Two Presbyterians, 1735, ibid., 2:224, 33. On Franklin’s religious views, see Elizabeth E. Dunn, “From a Bold Youth to a Reflective Sage: A Reevaluation of Benjamin Franklin’s Religion,” PMHB 111 (1987): 501–24; Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenment of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 54–89; and Kerry S. Walters, Benjamin Franklin and His Gods (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
37. BF, Autobiography, 96.
38. Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press,” 130–211; Stephen Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” in Bernard Bailyn and John Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1980), 14.
39. BF, Autobiography, 110.
40. BF, Autobiography, 112–13.
41. BF, Autobiography, 119.
42. BF, Autobiography, 128.
43. Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 23.
44. BF, Autobiography, 129.
45. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938), 125. For Franklin’s view that if a tradesman’s wife “does not bring a fortune” to the marriage, at least she “will help to make one,” see BF to Jane Mecom, 21 May 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:216.
46. [BF], “Anthony Afterwit,” “Celia Single,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 and 24 July 1732, in Franklin: Writings, 185–87, 188–90.
47. [BF], “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness,” 8 Oct. 1730, and “Old Mistresses Apologue,” 25 June 1745, in Franklin: Writings, 154, 302.
48. George Roberts to Robert Crafton, 8 Oct. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 11:370–71n.
49. “Extracts from the Diary of Daniel Fisher, 1755,” PMHB 17 (1893): 276; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 60; Sheila Skemp, “Family Partnerships: The Working Wife, Honoring Deborah Franklin,” in Larry Tise, ed., Benjamin Franklin and Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 23.
50. William Speck, Stability and Strife: England,1714–1760 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 37; Steele, quoted in John Barrell, English Literature in History,1730–1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 37; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England,1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 65–66.
51. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:198; Douglass Adair, ed., “The Autobiography of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt, 1732–1763,” WMQ 9 (1952): 361. In the eighteenth century, writes historian Stuart Blumin, “the important hierarchical distinction was the one that set off the several elites from everyone else.” In comparison with the great difference between the gentry and ordinary people, says Blumin, “differences between artisans and laborers were of no real consequence. The effect, needless to say, was to identify middling people much more closely with the bottom of society than with the top.” Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City,1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 33. John Adams grounded the political theory of his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, written in 1787–1788, on this traditional distinction: “The people, in all nations,” he wrote, “are naturally divided into two sorts, the gentlemen and the simplemen, a word which is here chosen to signify the common people.” Defence, in Charles F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams (Boston, 1854), 6:185. For a fuller discussion of this distinction between the gentry and commoners, from which this account is drawn, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 24–42.
52. Adair, ed., “Autobiography of Jarratt,” 361.
53. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:198.
54. James Reid, “The Religion of the Bible and Religion of K[ing] W[illiam] County Compared,” in Richard Beale Davis, ed., The Colonial Virginia Satirist: Mid–Eighteenth Century Commentaries on Politics, Religion, and Society, American Philosophical Society, Transactions, New Ser., 57, Pt. 1 (1967), 56.
55. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:198.
56. Samuel Mather, The Fall of the Mighty Lamented (Boston, 1738), 10; Courtland Canby, “Robert Munford’s The Patriots,” WMQ 6 (1949): 499–500.
57. Jonathan Boucher, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (London, 1797), 233; T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 160.
58. Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton,1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 163, 8; Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Knopf, 1980), 240; Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 69–70; Jack P. Greene, “Society, Ideology, and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Richard M. Jellison, ed., Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York (New York: Norton, 1976), 18–19; Hunter Dickinson Farish, ed., Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1945), 29; Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 164; John K. Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia,1760–1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 18.
59. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), 3–203; Smith, quoted in Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 66; Bushman, King and People, 70.
60. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 41–42.
61. BF to Peter Collinson, 9 May 1753, in Papers of Franklin, 4:481. “The great aim [of the society],” writes historian Paul Langford, “was to become rich enough to be idle.” Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character,1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 38.
62. Langford, Englishness Identified, 31.
63. Derek Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1974), 79–80; Boston Evening Post, 14 Dec. 1761; BF, “On the Labouring Poor” (1768), in Franklin: Writings, 622–23.
64. Aristotle, Politics, VII, ix, 1328b33, trans. T. A. Sinclair, rev. by Trevor J. Saunders (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 415.
65. Harrington, quoted in Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 28; Defoe, quoted in Speck, Stability and Strife, 32; Jackson to BF, 17 June 1755, in Papers of Franklin, 6:77.
66. Venetia Murray, High Society in the Regency Period,1788–1830 (London: Penguin, 1998), 22; H. D. Farish, ed., Journal and Letters of Fithian, 161. For an illuminating discussion of the ancient Roman aristocracy’s attitudes toward work and leisure, see Paul Veyne, “The Roman Empire,” in Paul Veyne, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 117–59. The idea that the aristocracy had leisure while the common people worked, writes Veyne, “persisted from archaic Greece and India down to Benjamin Constant and Charles Maurras” (p. ref). Northern Americans swept away this ancient idea in the aftermath of their revolution.
67. Buffon, quoted in Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic,1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 19–20; Murray, High Society in the Regency Period, 22.
68. Locke, quoted in Harold Nicolson, Good Behaviour: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 194; Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1730); Gaines, quoted in Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” 18n.
69. “Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–1776,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections 71 (1914): 661–66. “By the common people,” wrote John Adams in his Defence of the Constitutions, “we mean laborers, husbandmen, mechanics, and merchants in general, who pursue their occupations and industry without any knowledge in liberal arts or sciences, or in any thing but their own trades or pursuits.” C. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, 6:185.
70. Rudé, Hanoverian London, 37, 56–57.
71. Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 295–322.
72. BF, Autobiography, 117–18.
73. Standing Queries for the Junto, 1732, in Papers of Franklin, 1:255–59.
74. BF, Autobiography, 161–62.
75. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 55–63, 76–77.
76. BF, Observations on Reading History, 9 May 1731, in Papers of Franklin, 1:192–93; BF, Autobiography, 161–63.
77. BF, Autobiography, 163.
78. BF, Autobiography, 143, 130–31.
79. BF, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency (1729), in Papers of Franklin, 1:156, 144.
80. On the Death of his Son, 30 Dec. 1736, in Papers of Franklin, 2:154.
81. BF, Autobiography, 207.
82. BF, Autobiography, 131, 93.
83. BF, Poor Richard, 1741, in Papers of Franklin, 2:296; Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” 18.
84. BF, “Obadiah Plainman,” Franklin: Writings, 275–83.
85. Lemay, Canon of Franklin, 97–103.
86. BF, “Tract Relative to the English School in Philadelphia” [1789].
87. BF, “Idea of an English School,” 1751, in Papers of Franklin, 4:108.
88. Robert Hare to BF, 14 July 1789.
89. BF, “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge,” 1743, in Franklin: Writings, 295–96; BF to Cadwallader Colden, 15 Aug. 1745, in Papers of Franklin, 3:36. See also H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 168; and Van Doren, Franklin, 139.
90. BF, Plain Truth: Or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia and Province of Pennsylvania (1747), in Papers of Franklin, 3:201, and BF, “Anthony Afterwit,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 July 1732, ibid., 1:237.
91. BF, “Blackamore, on Molatto Gentlemen,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 30 Aug. 1733, in Franklin: Writings, 219–20.
92. Daniel Defoe, The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bülbring (London, 1890), 13. For a study of Defoe’s struggle with the question of gentility, see Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
93. BF, Autobiography, 126.
94. Charles Coleman Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 2–3; Van Doren, Franklin, 125–29. Franklin was devastated by the death of little Franky and had the boy’s portrait painted following his death, with Franky’s face probably modeled after Franklin’s own, since the son was thought to resemble his father. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 11.
95. BF, Autobiography, 171.
96. Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” 16–17.
97. BF, “Apology for Printers” (1731), in Franklin: Writings, 172.
98. Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press,” 177, 181–87, 190; Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” 29–32.
99. BF, Autobiography, 164.
100. BF, Poor Richard, 1739, and Poor Richard Improved, 1750, in Papers of Franklin, 2:218, 7:326–50.
101. BF, Autobiography, 172.
102. BF to Strahan, 10 July 1743, 4 July 1744, in Papers of Franklin, 2:338–39, 409.
103. BF, Autobiography, 166, 181; Ralph Frasca, “From Apprentice to Journeyman to Partner: Benjamin Franklin’s Workers and the Growth of the Early American Printing Trade,” PMHB 114 (1990): 229–38.
104. Van Doren, Franklin, 123; Brands, First American, 189; Articles of Agreement with David Hall, 1 Jan. 1748, Account of Money Received from David Hall, 1748–1757, in Papers of Franklin, 3:263; Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 112.
105. Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press,” 167.
106. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 42; Van Doren, Franklin, 188–89, 193.
107. J.-P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America,1788, trans. Mara Soceanu Vamos and Durand Echeverria (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 188n; Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 61–62.
108. In 1775 Franklin told his friends that “Most of the little Property I have, consists of Houses in the Seaport Towns,” which he assumed the British were going to burn. BF to John Sargent, 27 June 1775, and BF to Jonathan Shipley, 7 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:72, 95.
109. Ronald W. Clark, Benjamin Franklin: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1983), 45.
110. BF, Autobiography, 192.
111. BF, Plain Truth (Phila., 1747), in Papers of Franklin, 3:188–204, quotation at 201.
112. Richard Peters to the Proprietors, 29 Nov. 1747, in Papers of Franklin, 3:214–16.
113. David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 130.
114. BF, Observations on Reading History, 9 May 1731, in Papers of Franklin, 1:193; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 2:781–83.
115. From Robert Grace: Lease, 30 Dec. 1745, BF to Colden, 29 Sept. 1748, and Josiah Franklin to BF, 26 May 1739, all in Papers of Franklin, 3:51, 318; 2:29–30n; John F. Ross, “The Character of Poor Richard: Its Sources and Alterations,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 55 (1940): 785–94.
116. BF, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One” (1748), in Franklin: Writings, 320–22.
117. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 4–5, 25–28. Although Sellers dates this portrait no later than 1746, Wayne Craven more recently dates it at 1748, when Feke made a professional visit to Philadelphia. Wayne Craven, “The American and British Portraits of Benjamin Franklin,” in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 249.
118. BF, Autobiography, 125–26, 172.
119. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), 70.
120. BF, Autobiography, 183.
121. BF, Autobiography, 238. In 1748 Franklin had refused to be a candidate for the assembly, but in 1751 after his retirement from business he gladly accepted election to the assembly. See BF to Colden, 29 Sept. 1748, in Papers of Franklin, 3:318.
1. When the Anglican clergyman Samuel Johnson received Franklin’s plans for education reform in 1750 and learned that Franklin had only a tradesman’s education, he was surprised. “Nobody would imagine that the draught you have made for an English education was done by a Tradesman,” Johnson told Franklin in words that could only have warmed the former printer’s heart. “But so it sometimes is, a True Genius will not content itself without entering more or less into almost everything.” Samuel Johnson to BF, Nov. 1750. in Papers of Franklin, 4:74.
2. BF, Autobiography, 196; BF to Cadwallader Colden, 29 Sept. 1748, in Papers of Franklin, 3:318.
3. Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 6.
4. BF to John Pringle, 1 Dec. 1762, in Papers of Franklin, 10:159–60; Morgan, Franklin, 6–9.
5. I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s “Experiments and Observations on Electricity” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941), 48.
6. Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 44–46.
7. BF, Autobiography, 240.
8. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938), 157; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 44.
9. BF to Peter Collinson, 28 July 1747, in Papers of Franklin, 3:158.
10. BF to Collinson, 28 Mar. 1747, in Papers of Franklin, 3:118–19.
11. I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin: Scientist and Statesman (New York: Scribner, 1975), 50; Cohen, Franklin’s Experiments, 64–65, 72–73.
12. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 45; BF to Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg and Thomas-François Dalibard, c. 25 May 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:210–13.
13. For a recent book that claims that Franklin never performed his kite experiment but told the story as a hoax, see Tom Tucker, Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). Most historians probably would agree with Walter Isaacson that Tucker’s argument is unpersuasive. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 534.
14. Cohen very much doubts Franklin’s account in his Autobiography that some of his findings were “laughed at by connoisseurs” in the Royal Society. But to believe that obviously fit Franklin’s mood when he wrote his Autobiography. Cohen, Franklin’s Experiments, 80.
15. Collinson to BF, 27 Sept. 1752, in Papers of Franklin, 4:358.
16. BF to Jared Eliot, 12 Apr. 1753, 12 Sept. 1751, in Papers of Franklin, 4:466–67, 194.
17. Cohen, Franklin: Scientist and Statesman, 65.
18. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 47.
19. BF, Autobiography, 209.
20. Van Doren, Franklin, 170; BF to Collinson, 5 Nov. 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 7:11.
21. Stiles to BF, 26 Feb. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:175. In 1773 Franklin was appointed a foreign associate of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, a special honor. The next American appointment did not come until nearly a century later, with the selection of Louis Agassiz. Cohen, Franklin’s Experiments, 117.
22. BF to John Lining, 18 Mar. 1755, in Papers of Franklin, 5:526–27.
23. BF to Colden, 11 Oct. 1750, in Papers of Franklin, 4:68.
24. BF, Autobiography, 196.
25. BF, Autobiography, 197.
26. For a tough-minded account of Franklin’s involvement in Pennsylvania politics, see William S. Hanna, Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964).
27. Thomas Penn to Richard Peters, 30 Mar., 9 June 1748, in Papers of Franklin, 3:186n.
28. BF, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” 1751, in Franklin: Writings, 367–74.
29. Conyers Read, “The English Elements in Benjamin Franklin,” PMHB 64 (1940): 314.
30. BF, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” 374. When the pamphlet was reprinted in 1760 and 1761, these references to the Palatine Boors were omitted, but they were certainly remembered by Franklin’s political enemies in 1764. Papers of Franklin, 4:234n.
31. BF to James Parker, 20 Mar. 1751, in Papers of Franklin, 4:117–20. It is this statement by Franklin that has led to the invoking of the so-called Indian influence thesis, which misled some Americans in the 1980s and 1990s. Since Franklin was present at the Albany Congress, the Second Continental Congress, and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he was in a position, it was said, to present the model of the Iroquois union to his colleagues, and thus the Indians should be given their due in helping to create the Constitution. The theory is built on the assumption that the colonists had no previous experience with confederations and unions and needed the Iroquois to tell them about dividing political power. Yet the colonists’ history from the beginning had been all about the parceling of power upward, from the counties and towns to the colonial governments, and from the colonial governments to confederations, such as the New England Confederation of 1643. For the debate over the Indians’ presumed influence on the American Constitution and its refutation, see the succinct summary in Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of1754 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 6–8, and the articles cited there.
32. BF to Parker, 20 Mar. 1751, in Papers of Franklin, 4:117–20.
33. On the Albany Congress, see the excellent study by Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire.
34. BF, Autobiography, 210.
35. BF to James Alexander and Colden, 8 June 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:335–38.
36. BF to Colden, 14 July 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:392.
37. BF, The Albany Plan of Union, 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:374–92, quotation at 390.
38. BF to Collinson, 29 Dec. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:454.
39. Theodore Draper, A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution (New York: Times Books, 1996), 26–48.
40. Alison Gilbert Olson, “The British Government and Colonial Union,” WMQ 17 (1960): 31.
41. BF, Autobiography, 210.
42. BF to Colden, 29 Sept. 1748, in Papers of Franklin, 3:319.
43. BF to William Franklin, 14 Oct. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:438.
44. BF to William Shirley, 3 Dec. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:443.
45. The letters to Shirley of 3 and 22 December have not survived in manuscript form; they are known solely from their publication in the London Chronicle in 1766. The letter of December 4 we have only in the hand of an unknown copyist but signed by Franklin and endorsed by him, “Copy of a Letter to Gov. Shirley.” It also bears the notation “To P Collinson,” which is in Collinson’s own hand. The editors of volume 5 of the Papers of Franklin speculated that this was the version furnished to Strahan, who published this letter and the others in the London Chronicle. I owe this information to Ellen Cohn, current editor in chief of the Papers of Franklin.
46. BF to Shirley, 4 Dec. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:443. William Blackstone, the great summarizer of eighteenth-century English law, did in fact consider the American colonies to be conquered countries. Because the English common law had no way of accounting for the acquisition of land except through descent or conquest, the legal status of the colonies remained problematic. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1765), 1:104–5. (I owe this reference to Craig Yirush.)
47. BF to Shirley, 22 Dec. 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:449–50; BF, Autobiography, 253.
48. BF, Autobiography, 213.
49. BF, Autobiography, 240.
50. BF, Autobiography, 238–39.
51. Richard Peters to Penn, 29 Apr., 1 June 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 7:73.
52. William Peters to Penn, 4 Jan. 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 6:409; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 65.
53. Colden to Collinson, 5 Nov. 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 7:13n; BF to Collinson, 5 Nov. 1756, ibid., 7:13–15.
54. BF to George Whitefield, 2 July 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 6:468.
55. BF, A Plan for Settling Two Western Colonies, 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:459–60.
56. BF to Whitefield, 2 July 1756, in Papers of Franklin, 6:468–69.
57. BF to William Parsons, 22 Feb. 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:136.
58. On the colonial agents in London during the era of the American Revolution, see Michael G. Kammen, A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968).
59. BF to Joseph Galloway, 11 April 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:179. On the relationship between Franklin and Galloway, see Benjamin H. Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway: A Political Partnership (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).
60. “Extracts from the Diary of Daniel Fisher, 1755,” PMHB 17 (1893): 276; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 60, 61, 69, 165.
61. Poor Richard Improved, 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 7:326–50.
62. Patrick Sullivan, “Benjamin Franklin, the Inveterate (and Crafty) Public Instructor: Instruction on Two Levels in ‘The Way to Wealth,’ ” Early American Literature 21 (1986–1987): 248–59.
63. George Rudé, Hanoverian London,1714–1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 55; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 31.
64. The tall narrow Georgian house at 36 Craven Street still stands in the heart of London and is being restored for tourists and others to visit in 2005. During the restoration more than twelve hundred pieces of human bones from the eighteenth century were discovered in a pit in the basement. The most plausible explanation for the bones is that William Hewson, who married Polly Stevenson in 1770, operated an anatomy school in the house during the early 1770s. Hewson was a student of John and William Hunter who were the great anatomists of the day. To make room for Hewson’s school, Franklin and Mary Stevenson sought other lodging on Craven Street. After Hewson died of blood poisoning in 1774 at age thirty-four, leaving Polly with two young sons and an unborn daughter, Franklin and Polly’s mother moved back to 36 Craven Street. Manchester Guardian Weekly, 27 Aug. 2003, p. 21. (I owe this citation to Brendon McConville.) See also www.rsa.org.uk/franklin/no36/bones.html.
65. BF to Deborah Franklin, Jan. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 7:369; Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 56–57.
66. Adam Sisman, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (London: Penguin, 2000), 138.
67. BF to Deborah Franklin, 6 Sept. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 8:134.
68. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 55, 58–60.
69. BF to Joseph Galloway, 7 Apr. 1759, in Papers of Franklin, 8:310; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 89.
70. BF to Deborah Franklin, 21 Jan. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 7:364.
71. BF to Deborah Franklin, 10 June 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 8:93; BF, Autobiography, 129; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 82–83; Paul W. Conner, Poor Richard’s Politicks: Benjamin Franklin and His New American Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 215; The Craven Street Gazette, Sept. 1770, in Papers of Franklin, 17:220–26.
72. Strahan to Deborah Franklin, 13 Dec. 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:297.
73. Hugh Roberts to BF, 15 May 1760, in Papers of Franklin, 9:113.
74. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 89.
75. BF, London Chronicle, 9 May 1759, in Papers of Franklin, 8:342.
76. BF to Lord Kames, 3 Jan. 1760, in Papers of Franklin, 9:6–7.
77. BF, The Interest of Great Britain Considered (1760), in Papers of Franklin, 9:59–100, quotation at 90.
78. BF to William Franklin, 22 Mar. 1775, and Journal of Negotiations in London, in Papers of Franklin, 21:546–47.
79. BF to Isaac Norris, 14 Jan. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 7:361–62.
80. BF to Norris, 16 Sept. 1758, 19 Jan. 1759, in Papers of Franklin, 8:157, 236. Later, in June 1760, the Board of Trade criticized the weakness of the proprietary governor in dealing with the Pennsylvania Assembly. Such weakness, the Board declared, was bound to exist “while the Prerogatives of Royalty are placed in the feeble hands of Individuals, and the Authority of the Crown is to be exercised, without the Powers of the Crown to support it.” This could be read as a desire to make the colony royal, and Isaac Norris in Pennsylvania certainly read it that way. Board of Trade: Report on Pennsylvania Laws, 24 June 1760, ibid., 9:173. On these efforts to royalize Pennsylvania, see James H. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics,1764–1770: The Movement for Royal Government and Its Consequences (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).
81. Robert Middlekauff sees Franklin’s attempt to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony as the “surprising” action of an “irrational” man. Franklin was normally “a generous and calm spirit,” writes Middlekauff, “but in this case his feeling about Penn overcame all his usual standards of conduct, skewed his vision, and set him on a course that he abandoned only after years of reckless behavior.” Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 55–114, quotation at 107. Edmund S. Morgan likewise finds Franklin’s confidence that he could get the British government to cancel all the powers of the proprietors “a mystery.” Morgan writes that in Franklin’s two years at home, from November 1762 to November 1764, he was afflicted “with a prolonged fit of political blindness. . . . He made mistakes,” says Morgan, “mistakes that make us wonder if we have made mistakes in our attempts to understand him.” Morgan, Franklin, 120, 129. I think we have indeed made mistakes in our attempts to understand Franklin. Once we accept the fact that Franklin in these years was a fervent royalist who very much wanted to participate in the grandeur of the British Empire—which was, after all, a royal empire—much of the surprise, confusion, and mystery about his behavior in the early 1760s falls away. Pennsylvania was no longer as important to him as the empire.
82. William D. Liddle, “ ‘A Patriot King, or None’: Lord Bolingbroke and the American Renunciation of George III,” Journal of American History 45 (1979): 951. In assessing Franklin’s views of the imperial relationship, it is important that we do not mingle his statements of the early 1760s with those later in the decade or in the early 1770s.
83. BF to Deborah Franklin, 14 Sept. 1761, in Papers of Franklin, 9:356.
84. BF to Strahan, 8 Aug., 19 Dec. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:320, 407–8.
85. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 144–46; BF to Thomas Becket, 17 Dec. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:395n; Shelia L. Skemp, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 40, 302. John Adams tells the story of Franklin’s pride in his ability to influence the British government. When someone expressed some doubt about the extent of that influence, Franklin, according to Adams’s autobiography, “broke out into a Passion and swore, contrary to his usual reserve, ‘that he had an Influence with the Ministry and was intimate with Lord Bute.’ ” Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:150–51.
86. R. C. Simmons, “Colonial Patronage: Two Letters from William Franklin to the Earl of Bute, 1762,” WMQ 59 (2002): 123–34.
87. Thomas Bridges to Jared Ingersoll, 30 Sept. 1762, in Papers of Franklin, 10:146–47n. John Adams always assumed that Franklin had to have had some considerable influence with Lord Bute in order for his son to be appointed governor of New Jersey. “Without the Supposition of some kind of Backstairs Intrigues,” said Adams, “it is difficult to account of that mortification of the pride, affront to the dignity and Insult to the Morals of America, the Elevation to the Government of New Jersey of a base born Brat.” Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:150–51.
88. BF to Strahan, 12 Feb. 1745, in Papers of Franklin, 3:13–14.
89. BF, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749), in Papers of Franklin, 3:400.
90. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 89–92.
91. BF to Collinson, 9 May 1753, and BF to Galloway, 17 Feb. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 4:486; 7:375.
92. BF to Mary Stevenson, 25 Mar. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:232.
93. BF to Richard Jackson, 8 Mar. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:210.
94. BF to Ingersoll, 11 Dec. 1762, in Papers of Franklin, 10:174–76.
95. BF to Galloway, 9 Jan. 1760, and BF to Strahan, 23 Aug. 1762, in Papers of Franklin, 9:17; 10:149.
96. BF to Jackson, 8 Mar. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:210.
97. BF to Strahan, 8 Aug. 1763, and BF to Deborah Franklin, 18 June 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:320, 291.
98. BF to John Fothergill, 14 Mar. 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:101–5.
99. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 125–27; BF, Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation of Our Public Affairs (1764), in Papers of Franklin, 11:154–57, 171.
100. David L. Jacobson, “John Dickinson’s Fight Against Royal Government 1764,” WMQ 19 (1962), 71–77.
101. Editorial note, Papers of Franklin, 11:195n.
102. Philip J. Gleason, “A Scurrilous Colonial Election and Franklin’s Reputation,” WMQ 18 (1961), 68–84.
103. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 180–82.
104. BF to Strahan, 1 Sept. 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:332.
105. BF, Remarks on a Late Protest Against the Appointment of Mr. Franklin an Agent for This Province, 5 Nov. 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:431–33.
106. Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968); Hanna, Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics, 171.
107. Martin Howard Jr. to BF, 16 Nov. 1764, and Samuel Johnson to BF, Nov.? 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:459–60, 477–78.
108. Gleason, “A Scurrilous Colonial Election,” 84.
1. BF to Richard Jackson, 11 Feb. 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:76.
2. BF to Jackson, 16 Jan. 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:19–20.
3. BF to Peter Collinson, 30 Apr. 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:182.
4. BF to David Hall, 14 Feb. 1765, in Papers of Franklin, 12:65–67.
5. BF, Scheme for Supplying the Colonies with a Paper Currency (1768), in Papers of Franklin, 12:55.
6. BF to Joseph Galloway, 11 Oct. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:449.
7. BF to Charles Thomson, 11 July 1765, in Papers of Franklin, 12:208.
8. The best account of the Stamp Act crisis is Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
9. James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 140.
10.New York Mercury, 21 Oct. 1765, in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 94.
11. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:260. In 1765, Hutchinson was fifty-four and Franklin was fifty-nine. For an elegant and sympathetic study of Hutchinson, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).
12. Thomas Hutchinson to BF, 27 Oct., 18 Nov. 1765, in Papers of Franklin, 12:339–40, 380–81.
13. Richard Penn Jr., quoted in Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 206.
14. Bailyn, Hutchinson, 62.
15. John Hughes to BF, 8–17 Sept. 1765, in Papers of Franklin, 12:264–66.
16. Hall to BF, 6 Sept. 1765, in Papers of Franklin, 12:259.
17. Benjamin Rush to Ebenezeer Hazard, 5 Nov. 1765, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:18; Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 129.
18. BF to Hughes, 9 Aug. 1765, Hall to BF, 6 Sept. 1765, James Parker to BF, 14 June 1765, and Peter Timothy to BF, 3 Sept. 1768, all in Papers of Franklin, 12:234–35, 255–59, 174–76; 15:200–201; Stephen Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 212–14; Stephen Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” in Bernard Bailyn and John Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1980), 24–29.
19. BF to Hughes, 9 Aug. 1765, in Papers of Franklin, 12:234–35.
20. BF to Collinson, 28 May 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:330a.
21. As Stephen Conway has pointed out, Halifax’s opinion was extreme. Although Grenville himself seems to have regarded the colonists as separate from the British nation, apologists for the Stamp Act necessarily had to assume that the Americans were part of the same British community under Parliament; otherwise, they would have no way of explaining why the colonists should contribute taxes to the realm. Stephen Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783,” WMQ 59 (2002): 83–84.
22. T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84 (1997): 29–32; Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners,” 69. On the development of British and English identities in the eighteenth century, see Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History,1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England,1715–1785 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation,1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World,1600–1800 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character,1650–1850 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000); Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
23. James Otis, A Vindication of the British Colonies . . . , in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution,1750–1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1:568; Hutchinson to BF, 1 Jan. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:3.
24. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism,” 29–32.
25. BF, Invectives Against the Americans, 1765, in Franklin: Writings, 563.
26. Maynard Mack, “The Muse of Satire,” in Richard C. Boys, ed., Studies in the Literature of the Augustan Age: Essays Collected in Honor of Arthur Ellicott Case (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 218–31.
27. BF, “Pacifus,” 23 Jan. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:55–57.
28. Hutchinson to BF, 1 Jan. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:3. Franklin’s August 1765 letter is lost; we know of it and his question from Hutchinson’s reply.
29. On the letters to Shirley, see note 45, p. ref; and Papers of Franklin, 5:441–47, 449–51, 455–56.
30. BF to unknown correspondent, 6 Jan. 1766, and BF to Lord Kames, 25 Feb. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 13:23; 14:65.
31. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 14, 111.
32. BF to Kames, 25 Feb. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:64.
33. BF to William Franklin, 9 Nov. 1765, in Papers of Franklin, 12:363–64.
34. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character,1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 212, 319.
35. BF, Examination Before the Committee of the Whole of the House of Commons, 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:136, 137, 158, 137.
36. Thomson to BF, 20 May 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:279.
37. BF to Joseph Fox, 24 Feb. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:168.
38. On the sovereignty of Parliament, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 200–202, 216–17; and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic,1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 347–49.
39. BF to Hall, 24 Feb. 1766, and BF to Fox, 24 Feb. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:170, 168.
40. BF to Jane Mecom, 1 Mar. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:188. This display of optimism is not to deny Franklin’s often pessimistic view of human nature, which he especially expressed when he felt he had been wronged. See Ronald A. Bosco, “ ‘He That Best Understands the World, Least Likes It’: The Dark Side of Benjamin Franklin,” PMHB 111 (1987): 525–54.
41. BF, Examination Before the House of Commons, in Papers of Franklin, 13:153.
42. BF, Marginalia in Protests of the Lords Against Repeal of the Stamp Act, 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:212–20.
43. BF to Kames, 25 Feb. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:68.
44. On the colonists’ anticipation of the commonwealth theory of the British Empire, see Randolph Adams, Political Ideas of the American Revolution: Britannic-American Contributions to the Problem of Imperial Organization,1765to1775 (Durham, N.C.: Trinity College Press, 1922). Apparently Wilson also reached his position in the late 1760s, even though he did not publish his views until 1774.
45. BF to William Franklin, 13 Mar. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:75–76.
46. BF to Thomas Crowley, for the London Public Advertiser, 21 Oct. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:241.
47. BF, Marginalia in Protests of the Lords, 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:225.
48. BF to Mary Stevenson, 14 Sept. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:253.
49. BF to unknown correspondent, 28 Nov. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:272–73.
50. Bailyn, Hutchinson, 233. See also David Morgan, The Devious Dr. Franklin: Benjamin Franklin’s Years in London (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996).
51. BF, Autobiography, 60.
52. Charles Coleman Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 328–30.
53. Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” 30–31.
54. BF to Hall, 14 Sept. 1765, and BF to William Franklin, 25 Nov., 29 Dec. 1767, all in Papers of Franklin, 12:268; 14:326, 349.
55. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 94–159; Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” WMQ 39 (1982): 401–41.
56. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 151; Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style,” 417; Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British North America” (1774), in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:125.
57. George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964), 55–57.
58. Pauline Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,” WMQ 20 (1963), 373–95; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain,1765–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 163–69.
59. BF to William Franklin, 16 Apr., 5 Oct. 1768, BF to Galloway, 14 May 1768, and BF, On the New Office of the Secretary of State for America, 21 Jan. 1768, all in Papers of Franklin, 15:98–99, 127–28, 224, 19.
60. BF, On the New Office of the Secretary of State, BF to Cadwallader Evans, 26 Feb. 1768, and BF, On Railing and Reviling, 6 Jan. 1768, all in Papers of Franklin, 15:19, 52, 14. On the pride and arrogance of the British government and the steady alienation of Franklin’s affections toward the empire in the late 1760s and early 1770s, see Jack P. Greene, Understanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 18–47, 247–84.
61. “Benevolus” (BF), On the Propriety of Taxing America, London Chronicle, 9–11 Apr. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:114.
62. BF, “American Discontents,” London Chronicle, 5–7 Jan. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:12.
63. BF to Samuel Cooper, 8 June 1770, 27 Apr. 1769, in Papers of Franklin, 17:163; 16:118.
64. BF to Kames, 25 Feb. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:69.
65. BF to William Franklin, 1 Oct. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:224–27.
66. Deborah Franklin to BF, 3 Nov., 6 Oct. 1765, 21–22 Jan. 1768, and 20–25 Apr. 1767, all in Papers of Franklin, 12:354, 294; 15:23; 14:136.
67. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 155.
68. Deborah Franklin to BF, 3 July 1767, 21–22 Jan. 1768, 1 May 1771, 30 June 1772, and BF to Deborah Franklin, 14 July 1772, 1 Sept. 1773, all in Papers of Franklin, 14:207; 15:24; 18:91; 19:192, 207; 20:383; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 120–21, 134–36, 164–73. Lopez and Herbert’s book, to which I am much indebted, is a fair and balanced account of Franklin’s relationship with his family.
69. BF to William Franklin, 9 Jan. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:16.
70. BF to Jane Mecom, 30 Dec. 1770, in Papers of Franklin, 17:314.
71. BF to William Franklin, 2 July 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:159, 162, 160.
72. BF to William Franklin, 2 July 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:161, 162, 164.
73. BF to William Franklin, 2 July 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:163.
74. See Peter Marshall, “Lord Hillsborough, Samuel Wharton and the Ohio Grant, 1769–1775,” English Historical Review 80 (1965), 717–39.
75. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986), 29–36, 49–57, 64–65.
76. BF to Thomson, 18 Mar. 1770, and BF to Cooper, 8 June 1770, in Papers of Franklin, 17:112, 164.
77. BF, Account of His Audience with Hillsborough, 16 Jan. 1771, in Papers of Franklin, 18:12–16.
78. BF to Cooper, 5 Feb. 1771, in Papers of Franklin, 18:24–25.
79. William Strahan to William Franklin, 3 Apr. 1771, in Papers of Franklin, 18:65.
80. James Campbell, Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 178.
81. BF to Sarah Franklin Bache, 29 Jan. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:46.
82. Notes, in Franklin: Writings, 1557; J. A. Leo Lemay, “Benjamin Franklin,” in Everett Emerson, ed., Major Writers of Early American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 238–39; Melvin H. Buxbaum, Benjamin Franklin and the Zealous Presbyterians (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 225; Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 17. Because literary scholars are anxious to show Franklin as an artist in complete control of his materials, many of them tend to see all four parts of the Autobiography as a unified whole, directed at the same general reader. I am more inclined to agree with William H. Shurr’s argument that the first part addressed to Franklin’s son is distinctive. Shurr, “ ‘Now, Gods, Stand Up for Bastards’: Reinterpreting Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,” American Literature 64 (1992): 435–51. See also Hugh J. Dawson, “Franklin’s Memoirs in 1784: The Design of the Autobiography, Parts I and II,” Early American Literature 12 (1977–1978): 286–93; Hugh J. Dawson, “Fathers and Sons: Franklin’s ‘Memoirs’ as Myth and Metaphor,” Early American Literature 14 (1979–1980): 269–92; and Christopher Looby, “ ‘The Affairs of the Revolution Occasion’d the Interruption’: Writing, Revolution, Deferral, and Conciliation in Franklin’s Autobiography,” American Quarterly 38 (1986): 72–96.
83. BF to Abiah Franklin, 12 Apr. 1750, and BF to Strahan, 2 June 1750, in Papers of Franklin, 3:475, 479.
84. BF to William Franklin, 30 Jan. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:50.
85. BF to William Franklin, 30 Jan. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:48.
86. BF to Galloway, 22 Aug. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:275.
87. BF to William Franklin, 19–22 Aug. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:259.
88. The editors of Franklin’s Papers say that in the Hutchinson affair Franklin “crossed, without recognizing it, a personal Rubicon. The days of his usefulness in London were numbered.” Papers of Franklin, 19:xxxii.
89. The Hutchinson Letters, 1768–1769, in Papers of Franklin, 20:550; Bailyn, Hutchinson, 227.
90. Tract Relative to the Affair of Hutchinson’s Letters, Feb. 1774?, Papers of Franklin, 21:419. Most people at the time thought that John Temple was the person who had passed Whately’s correspondence on to Franklin. Bailyn believes that it was Thomas Pownall who gave Franklin the letters. But the editors of the Papers suggest John Temple and William Strahan, as well as Pownall, as possibilities. Bailyn, Hutchinson, 225, 231–35; Papers of Franklin, 19:403–7.
91. The editors of Franklin’s Papers believe that his sending of these letters to the radicals in Massachusetts “was probably the most controversial act of his career.” Papers of Franklin, 19:401.
92. BF to Thomas Cushing, 2 Dec. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:411–13.
93. BF to Cushing, 2 Dec. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:411–12. Bailyn thinks that these words “must be either the most naïve or the most cynical that Franklin ever uttered.” Bailyn, Hutchinson, 237. Perhaps they are both. Since Franklin was still so emotionally committed to the empire that he had come to believe that almost anything, even the sacrifice of one’s honor, justified trying to save it, his words may be more naïve than cynical. At the same time, he seems to have sincerely believed that his former friend Hutchinson had become so duplicitous and so detested by the people of Massachusetts that he deserved to have his reputation destroyed for the sake of the empire. See BF to William Franklin, 6 Oct. 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:437, 439.
94. BF to Cushing, 2 Dec. 1772, 3 Jan. 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 19:409–13; 20:7–10.
95. If fixing blame on local officials in order to absolve the English ministry was indeed Franklin’s motivation, then the editors of his Papers believe that “his miscalculation was spectacular, and does small credit to his acumen.” Papers of Franklin, 19:408.
96. BF to William Franklin, Mar. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:552.
97. BF, Last Will and Testament, 22 June 1750, and BF to John Winthrop, 25 July 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 3:481; 20:330.
98. BF to Cushing, 2 Dec. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:411; Bailyn, Hutchinson, 223. Bailyn has the fullest account of Franklin’s involvement in the affair of the Hutchinson letters.
99. BF to Lord Dartmouth, 21 Aug. 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:373.
100. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 121–22.
101. BF, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” 11 Sept. 1773, and BF, “An Edict by the King of Prussia,” 22 Sept. 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:389–99, 413–18.
102. BF, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” BF to William Franklin, 6 Oct. 1773, and BF to Mecom, 1 Nov. 1773, all in Papers of Franklin, 20:393, 436–39, 457–58.
103. London General Evening Post, 11 Jan. 1774, in Verner W. Crane, ed., Letters to the Press,1758–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), 239.
104. BF, Extract of a Letter from London, 19 Feb. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:112.
105. The Final Hearing Before the Privy Council, 29 Jan. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:60, 47, 48–49.
106. The Final Hearing Before the Privy Council, 29 Jan. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:70.
107. BF to Galloway, 18 Feb. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:109–10.
108.European Magazine (London) 3 (March 1783), quoted in P. M. Zall, ed., Ben Franklin Laughing: Anecdotes from Original Sources by and About Benjamin Franklin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 77.
109. BF to Galloway, 12 Oct. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:334.
110. BF to Galloway, 12 Oct. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:334.
111. BF to Timothy, 7 Sept. 1774, BF to Mecom, 28 July, 26 Sept. 1774, BF to William Franklin, 1 Aug. 1774, and BF to Jonathan Shipley, 28 Sept. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:291, 265, 317–18, 266, 321.
112. BF to Shipley, 28 Sept. 1774, BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., 28 Sept. 1774, and BF to Cushing, 3 Sept., 6 Oct. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:280, 322, 323, 327.
113. BF to William Franklin: Journal of Negotiations in London, 22 March 1775, and BF to Thomson, 5 Feb. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:579, 581, 478.
114. BF to William Franklin: Journal of Negotiations in London, 22 March 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:583.
115. BF to William Franklin: Journal of Negotiations in London, 22 March 1775, BF, Proposed Memorial to Lord Dartmouth, March 1775, and BF to Galloway, 25 Feb. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:583, 526, 598, 509; BF to Strahan, 19 Aug. 1784. In May 1774 Franklin published a bitterly satiric account in the London press suggesting that the commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in America and five battalions march up and down the continent and castrate all American males. The essay was undoubtedly stimulated by the British general’s remark, which he recalled in his 1784 letter to Strahan. Crane, Letters to the Press, 262–64.
116. BF to David Hartley, 3 Oct. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:217.
117. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 196.
118. Samuel Johnson, Tyranny No Taxation (1775), in Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 444.
1. H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 494.
2. In 1769 William had considered bringing his illegitimate son Temple to America under the guise of “the Son of a poor Relation, for whom I stood God Father and intended to bring up as my own.” Apparently William’s wife did not know about the existence of Temple until Franklin showed up with him in America in 1775. William Franklin to BF, 2 Jan. 1769, in Papers of Franklin, 16:5; Sheila L. Skemp, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 179.
3. Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 197, 201.
4. John Adams to Mrs. Mercy Warren, 8 Aug. 1807, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections., 5th ser., 4 (1878): 431.
5. As Adams recalled in his Autobiography, Franklin “often and indeed always appeared to me to have a personal Animosity and very severe Resentment against the King. In all his conversations and in all his Writings, when he could naturally and sometimes when could not, he mentioned the King with great Asperity.” Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:150.
6. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 23 July 1775, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1:253.
7. Joseph Hewes to Samuel Johnson, 13 Feb. 1776, in Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to the Congress,1774–1789 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–), 3:247. Franklin even stopped wearing a wig when he arrived in America. Despite a scalp irritation, in London he would never have dared to go out in public without a wig; but in America this symbol of hierarchy was not the fashionable necessity it was in England. Charles Coleman Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 97.
8. Arthur Lee to Samuel Adams, 10 June 1771, in R. H. Lee, Life of Arthur Lee (Boston, 1829), 1:216–18.
9. William Goddard to Isaiah Thomas, 15 Apr. 1811, quoted in Ralph Frasca, “From Apprentice to Journeyman to Partner: Benjamin Franklin’s Workers and the Growth of the Early American Printing Trade,” PMHB 114 (1990): 245n.
10. William Bradford to James Madison, 2 June 1775, and Madison to Bradford, 19 June 1775, in William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 1:149, 151–52. That Franklin was a British spy may seem improbable to us, but at least one modern historian, Cecil B. Currey, in his Code No.72: Benjamin Franklin, Patriot or Spy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), has suggested the possibility of Franklin’s being a British spy while serving as envoy to France.
11. BF to William Strahan, 3 Oct. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:219. (I owe this citation to Konstantin Dierks.)
12. Proposals and Queries to Be Asked the Junto, 1732, in Franklin: Writings, 209.
13. BF to Strahan, 5 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:85. David Freeman Hawke, in Franklin (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 353–54, says that Franklin’s July 5 letter to Strahan was widely published in America and Europe, but there is no evidence for this. Yet it seems evident to me that Franklin wrote this letter for local effect and showed it to friends and members of Congress in Philadelphia. There was no other reason for his writing such an overwrought and impassioned letter to one of his oldest British friends, especially since his other letters to English friends at this time express none of this exaggerated personal enmity. Moreover, the fact that two days later, on July 7, Franklin wrote a letter to Strahan, now lost, that presumably was as friendly as ever reinforces the idea that Franklin designed the July 5 letter to thwart rumors of his being a spy.
14. Bradford to Madison, 18 July 1775, in Hutchinson, Papers of Madison, 1:158.
15. BF to Strahan, 3 Oct. 1775, and BF to Jan Ingenhouse, 12 Feb.–6 Mar. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 22:219; 23:310.
16. BF to Strahan, 3 Oct. 1775, and BF to John Sargent, 27 June 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:218, 72.
17. BF to Sargent, 27 June 1775, BF to David Hartley, 12 Sept. 1775, BF to Jonathan Shipley, 13 Sept. 1775, and BF to Strahan, 3 Oct. 1775, all in Papers of Franklin, 22:72, 196, 199–201, 218.
18. BF to Hartley, 3 Oct. 1775, and BF to Lord Kames, 3 Jan. 1760, in Papers of Franklin, 22:217; 9:7.
19. BF to Shipley, 7 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:94.
20. BF to Shipley, 7 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:95–98.
21. BF to Charles Dumas, 2 May 1782.
22. BF to William Franklin, 2 Feb., 7 May 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:75, 211–12; Skemp, William Franklin, 181.
23. Strahan to BF, 14 July 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 27:97.
24. BF to William Franklin, 16 Aug. 1784.
25. BF, Will Codicil, 23 June 1789; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 278–79, 305.
26. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 3:77; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 247.
27. Pennsylvania State Constitution (1776), Section 36, in Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation,1763–1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution (New York: Norton, 1967), 343.
28. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic,1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 233.
29. Adams, Notes for an Oration at Braintree, 1772, in Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 2:57–60.
30. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 236, 568–87.
31. BF to Lord Howe, 20 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:519–21.
32. Adams, Autobiography and Diary, 3:418–19.
33. Lord Howe’s Conference with the Committee of Congress, 11 Sept. 1776, in Papers of Franklin, 22:601–5.
34. BF, Sketch of Propositions for a Peace [after 26 Sept. and before 25 Oct. 1776], in Papers of Franklin, 22:630–32.
35. Currey, Code No.72, 77–78; Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 321–22.
36. Rockingham, quoted in Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938), 573.
37. Thomas Penn to Richard Peters, 14 May 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:111.
38. BF to William Franklin, 19–22 Aug. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:259.
39. Rockingham, quoted in Van Doren, Franklin, 573.
40. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 26. Aldridge’s book is the best work on the French adoration of Franklin, and my account is much indebted to it.
41. BF to Mary Stevenson, 14 Sept. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:254–55.
42. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 29.
43. Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 27n.
44. Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 18.
45. For a full discussion of this debate over the New World as a human habitat, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: A History of a Polemic,1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).
46. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), 172; Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 8–57.
47. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 61, 66.
48. Van Doren, Franklin, 576; Brands, First American, 528.
49. BF to Sarah Franklin Bache, 3 June 1779, in Papers of Franklin, 29:613.
50. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 96–139; Ellen G. Miles, “The French Portraits of Benjamin Franklin,” in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 272–89.
51. BF to Thomas Diggs, 25 June 1780, in Papers of Franklin, 32:590.
52. Van Doren, Franklin, 632. On the many images of Franklin in France, see Bernard Bailyn’s illustrated essay, “Realism and Idealism in American Diplomacy: Franklin in Paris, Couronné par la Liberté,” in Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Knopf, 2003), 60–99.
53. According to Darcy R. Fryer, one of the editors of the Papers of Franklin, the story of the chamber pot adorned with Franklin’s face on the bottom probably originated with Madame Campan, Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette (London, 1823), 1:230–31. Campan wrote that Louis XVI “had a vase de nuit made at Sevres manufactory at the bottom of which, was the medallion [of Franklin] with its fashionable legend, and he sent the utensil to the countess Diana as a new year’s gift.” H-Net/OIEAHC, 11 Dec. 2001.
54. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:81.
55. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 61.
56. BF to Emma Thompson, 8 Feb. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 23:298. Franklin had long thought about the political implications of dress. “Simplicity is the home-spun Dress of Honesty, and Chicanery and Craft are the Tinsel Habits and the false Elegance which are worn to cover the Deformity of Vice and Knavery,” he had written in 1732. BF, On Simplicity, 1732, in Writings of Franklin, 181–84. On the political significance of clothing and dress, see Michael Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies: From Home-Spun to Ready-Made,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1553–86.
57. BF to William Carmichael, 29 July 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 27:176.
58. Ronald C. Clark, Benjamin Franklin: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1983), 341.
59. BF, “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” (1747), in Papers of Franklin, 3:120–25; Van Doren, Franklin, 721–22; Max Hall, Benjamin Franklin and Polly Baker: The History of a Literary Deception (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).
60. The famous preface to Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1758, known in different versions as “Father Abraham’s Speech” and The Way to Wealth, was reprinted at least 145 times in seven different languages before the end of the eighteenth century and many times since. BF, Autobiography, 164n.
61. BF, Poor Richard Improved, 1758, Papers of Franklin, 7:342. Most of the Poor Richard sayings, as Franklin’s persona admitted, were not of his own making. They were gleaned from a variety of sources, ranging from the works of George Herbert and James Howell to the writings of Thomas Fuller, Lord Halifax, and Samuel Richardson. He even borrowed some from Montaigne. He usually modified the borrowed sayings by making them more simple, more concrete, more euphonious, and often more bawdy. See Bruce Ingham Granger, Benjamin Franklin: An American Man of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964), 65–75.
62. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 50.
63. BF to Robert Livingston, 4 Mar. 1782 in Papers of Franklin, 36:646.
64. Comte de Vergennes to Marquis de Lafayette, 7 Aug. 1780, in Stanley J. Idzerda et al., eds., Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers,1776–1790 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 3:130. Actually French views have not much changed. In 2001 the wife of French president Jacques Chirac told her fellow citizens what made her husband a perfect public official. “He is not a money man,” she said. “Money has never been any kind of motivation for him. Never.” International Herald Tribune, 11 Apr. 2002.
65. BF, Positions to Be Examined, 4 Apr. 1769, BF to Jane Mecom, 30 Dec. 1770, BF, Last Will and Testament, 22 June 1750, and BF to Dumas, 6 Aug. 1781, all in Papers of Franklin, 16:109; 17:315; 3:481; 35:341.
66. See J. A. Leo Lemay, The Canon of Benjamin Franklin: New Attributions and Reconsiderations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 53, for Franklin’s harsh views on commercial dealings.
67. Commissioners to Committee of Secret Correspondence, 12 Mar.–7 Apr. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 23:467.
68. Commissioners to Committee of Secret Correspondence, 12 Mar.–7 Apr. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 23:467. On the lack of guidance from Congress, see Jonathan R. Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat: The French Mission,” American Philosophical Society, Transactions 72 (1982), 68–69.
69. Van Doren, Franklin, 650.
70. BF to Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg?, after 2 Oct. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 25:21.
71. BF to Richard and Sally Bache, 10 May, 1785.
72. Currey, Code No.72. Elizabeth M. Nuxoll, one of the editors of the Robert Morris Papers, has suggested that the charges of Franklin’s being a British spy come from these murky circumstances in which the commissioners were secretly trying to manipulate the release of information. H-Net/OIEAHC, 7 Apr. 1999.
73. George III, quoted in Van Doren, Franklin, 573.
74. Samuel F. Bemis, “British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance,” American Historical Review 29 (1923–1924): 474–95; David Schoenbrun, Triumph in Paris: The Exploits of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat,” 33–42.
75. BF to Juliana Ritchie, 19 Jan. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 23:211.
76. It is Franklin’s casual, even sloppy, attitude toward spying and record keeping that convinced Cecil B. Currey that Franklin “—covertly perhaps, tacitly at least, possibly deliberately—cooperated with and protected” a British spy cell operating out of his home in France. Unfortunately, Currey seems to have forgotten what Franklin said about his inability to maintain order in his affairs. Currey, Code No.72, 12.
77. Claude-Anne Lopez, My Life with Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 61–72.
78. For a balanced study of Lee, see Louis W. Potts, Arthur Lee: A Virtuous Revolutionary (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
79. Morgan, Franklin, 259–60.
80. Arthur Lee to Committee of Foreign Affairs, 1 June 1778, and Ralph Izard to Henry Laurens, 29 June 1778, in Francis Wharton, ed., The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1889), 2:600–603, 629–31.
81. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:87. In addition to telling John Adams that Franklin was more to be mistrusted than Deane, Izard told him that “Dr. Franklin was one of the most unprincipled Men upon Earth: that he was a Man of no Veracity, no honor, no Integrity, as great a Villain as ever breathed.” Ibid.
82. BF to Laurens, 31 Mar. 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 26:203–4. See also BF to James Lovell, 21 Dec. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 25:329–30.
83. A. Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 12 Sept. 1778, quoted in Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 235.
84. John Adams thought that Deane’s public denunciation of the Congress in December 1778 was “the most astonishing Measure, the most unexpected and unforeseen Event, that has ever happened, from the Year 1761 . . . to this Moment.” It seemed to threaten the existence of the Confederation and French confidence in America. Since Adams continued to believe that Deane epitomized corruption and treachery, anyone who admired Deane had to be contemptible. To Mercy Otis Warren’s accusation in her 1805 History that “Mr. Adams was not beloved by his Colleague Dr. Franklin,” Adams had a simple retort that he believed to be devastating: “Mr. Deane was beloved by his Colleague Dr. Franklin.” Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 2:348, 353; 4:118.
85. “Excerpts from the Papers of Dr. Benjamin Rush,” PMBH 29 (1905): 27–28.
86. Arthur Lee, Journal, 25 Oct. 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 25:100, 102.
87. Paul Wentworth to William Eden, 7 Jan. 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 25:436–38.
88. “Excerpts from the Papers of Rush,” 27–28.
89. J. Adams to Thomas McKean, 20 Sept. 1779, in Papers of Adams, 8:162.
90. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:47, 118–19, 107–8.
91. BF to Lovell, 22 July 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 27:135.
92. Richard Bache to BF, 22 Oct. 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 27:599–601.
93. John Fells Diary, 21 April 1779, in Smith, Letters of Delegates, 12:362. On the congressional controversy over Franklin and the other commissioners, see H. James Henderson, “Congressional Factionalism and the Attempt to Recall Benjamin Franklin,” WMQ 27 (1970): 246–67, and his Party Politics in the Continental Congress (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 200–206.
94. Izard to R. H. Lee, 15 Oct. 1780, in Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1931), 5:362n.
95. BF to Samuel Huntington, 12 Mar.–12 Apr. 1781, in Papers of Franklin, 34:446.
96. BF to Robert Morris, 26 July 1781, in Papers of Franklin, 35:311–12.
97. BF to Huntington, 9 Aug. 1780, in Papers of Franklin, 33:162.
98. Adams’s wife, Abigail, was even more disgusted with Franklin’s behavior. She thought that Franklin and his grandson Temple, the “old Deceiver” and the “young Cockatrice,” were “wicked unprincipled debauched wretches.” Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 273; Abigail to John Adams, 21 Oct. 1781, in Butterfield, Adams Family Correspondence, 4:230.
99. A. Lee to James Warren, 8 Apr. 1782, in Smith, Letters of Delegates, 18:441. See also Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat,” 47.
100. BF to R. Livingston, 22 July 1783; and BF to Morris, 25 Dec. 1783. See also Lopez, My Life with Franklin, 176.
101. BF to Morris, 7 Mar. 1783.
102. Morris to BF, 28 Sept. 1782.
103. BF to Samuel Cooper, 26 Dec. 1782.
104. On Vergennes and his support for the American war, see Orville T. Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution,1719–1787 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 397–98; and Munro Price, Preserving the Monarchy: The Comte de Vergennes,1774–1787 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66, 236, 240. On Franklin’s relationship with Vergennes, see Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat,” 67–68.
105. BF to Richard and Sarah Bache, 27 July 1783.
106. BF, Information to Those Who Would Remove to America (1784), in Franklin: Writings, 975–83.
107. R. D. Harris, “French Finances and the American War, 1777–1783,” Journal of Modern History 48 (1976): 236, 241. Jonathan R. Dull writes that French financial aid added up to some 40 million livres, which he says was equivalent to about $80 million in 1980s purchasing power. Dull, “Franklin the Diplomat,” 11. Dull rightly concludes, “The French support for the Revolution was Franklin’s work.” Ibid., 50.
108. BF to R. Livingston, 5 Dec. 1782, and BF to Morris, 23 Dec. 1782.
109. BF to John Jay, 2 Oct. 1780, in Papers of Franklin, 33:356.
110. BF to Committee of Foreign Affairs, 26 May 1779, in Papers of Franklin, 29:555.
111. BF to Vergennes, 17 Dec. 1782, 25 Jan. 1783.
1. BF, Autobiography, 163.
2. BF, “The Morals of Chess” (1779), in Papers of Franklin, 29:754.
3. BF, Autobiography, 163.
4. BF, Autobiography, 133–40.
5. See BF to Lord Kames, 3 May 1760, in Papers of Franklin, 9:104.
6. BF, Autobiography, 148.
7. Franklin’s Art of Virtue was not at all based on the puritan tradition. Franklin, as Norman Fiering points out, had little or no interest in the inward states of people, but instead had an essentially behaviorist approach to morality. See Fiering, “Benjamin Franklin and the Way to Virtue,” American Quarterly 30 (1978): 199–223. On the down-to-earth character of Franklin’s Art of Virtue, see also Ralph Lerner, Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 3–18.
8. BF, Autobiography, 148–57.
9. BF, Autobiography, 155–57; R. Jackson Wilson, Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 40–41.
10. BF, Autobiography, 148–57.
11. BF, Autobiography, 159, 44, 160.
12. BF to Elizabeth Partridge, 11 Oct. 1779, in Papers of Franklin, 30:514.
13. Claude-Anne Lopez, My Life with Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 174.
14. BF to Anne-Catherine de Ligniville Helvétius, Oct. 1778?, in Papers of Franklin, 27:670–71.
15. Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 259; Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938), 647.
16. Abigail Adams to Lucy Cranch, 5 Sept. 1784, in Richard Alan Ryerson et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5:436–37.
17. Adams, Autobiography and Diary, 4:59.
18. Lopez, My Life with Franklin, 174; Lopez, Mon Cher Papa, 264–71.
19. Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 192.
20. BF to William Franklin, 16 Aug. 1784. See also BF to Deborah Franklin, 6 Apr., 1 Sept. 1773, and BF to Samuel Cooper, 27 Oct. 1779, all in Papers of Franklin, 20:145, 383; 30:598.
21. Debate in the Virginia Convention, 17 June 1788, in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 3:327.
22. Cooper to BF, 5 May 1783.
23. BF to Henry Laurens, John Adams, and John Jay, 10 Sept. 1783.
24. BF to Charles Thomson, 13 May 1784, and BF to Richard Price, 16 Aug. 1784.
25. BF to Thomson, 13 May 1784.
26. BF to Jonathan Shipley, 22 Aug. 1784, and Richard Bache to William Temple Franklin, 14 Dec. 1784. See also Lopez, My Life with Franklin, 179–80.
27. Elbridge Gerry to Adams, 16 June 1784, in Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to the Congress,1774–1789 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–), 21:686.
28. F.H. to William Temple Franklin, 1 Nov. 1784.
29. Thomas Jefferson to Ferdinand Grand, 23 Apr. 1790, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 16:369.
30. François Steinsky to BF, 17 June 1789; J. Thiriot to BF, 1 July 1784; Erasmus Darwin to BF, 29 May 1787; Marquis de Condorcet to BF, 20 Aug. 1784;——Thomas to BF, 20 Sept. 1787;——Taillefert to BF, 18 Feb. 1788; Pierre Ox to BF, 6 Sept. 1784; J.-P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America,1788, trans. Mara Soceanu Vamos and Durand Echeverria (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 184.
31. Jefferson to James Monroe, 5 July, 28 Aug. 1785, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, 8:262, 446.
32. BF to John and Sarah Jay, 21 Sept. 1785.
33. BF to Thomas Paine, 27 Sept. 1785.
34. BF to Paine, 27 Sept. 1785.
35. On the Philadelphia aristocrats’ reaction to Franklin, see Keith Arbour, “Benjamin Franklin as Weird Sister: William Cobbett and Philadelphia’s Fears of Democracy,” in Doren Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg, eds., Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 179–80.
36. BF to Jane Mecom, 4 Nov. 1787.
37. BF to Jonathan Williams, 16 Feb. 1786. When he wrote in 1787 to his former colleague John Jay, secretary for foreign affairs in the Confederation, to recommend someone as vice consul in Bordeaux, he first had to wonder whether “my Recommendation might have any weight.” Such was his sense of his position in American politics. BF to Jay, 10 Nov. 1787.
38. BF to Thomas Jordan, 18 May 1787.
39. William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler, Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LLD (Cincinnati, 1888), 1:267–68; 2:363.
40. Madison, 25 May 1787, in Farrand, Records of the Convention, 1:4.
41. Pierce, in Farrand, Records of the Convention, 3:91.
42. BF, Speech in the Convention on the Subject of Salaries, 2 June 1787, in Franklin: Writings, 1131.
43. BF to William Strahan, 16 Feb., 19 Aug. 1784. See also BF to Joseph Galloway, 12 Oct. 1774, 25 Feb. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:333–34, 509; BF to Shipley, 17 Mar. 1783, BF to Laurens, 12 Feb. 1784, BF to George Whately, 23 May 1785, and BF to John Wright, 4 Nov. 1789.
44. BF, Speech on Salaries, in Franklin: Writings, 1134; Madison, 2 June 1787, in Farrand, Records of the Convention, 1:85.
45. BF, Last Will and Testament, 23 June 1789.
46. BF to Sarah Bache, 26 Jan. 1784. Despite Franklin’s opposition to the Society of the Cincinnati, the State Society of Pennsylvania in July 1789 unanimously elected him to an honorary membership in the organization. We have no record of Franklin’s response to this election. (I owe this information to Ellen McCallister Clark, librarian of the Society of the Cincinnati in Washington, D.C.)
47. BF, Queries and Remarks on Hints for the Members of the Philadelphia Convention, 1789.
48. Franklin to Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours, 9 June 1788.
49. Jefferson to Monroe, 5 July 1785, in Boyd, Papers of Jefferson, 8:262.
50. William Temple Franklin, Sketch of William Temple Franklin’s Services to the United States of America, 23 May 1789.
51. BF to Thomson, 29 Dec. 1788. In earlier notes for this letter to Thomson, Franklin said that he was “sorry and asham’d that I asked any Favour of Congress” for his grandson. “It was the first time I ever ask’d Promotion for myself or any of my Family.” And he vowed it “shall be the Last.” Notes for BF to Thomson [1788?].
52. BF to Cyrus Griffin, 29 Nov. 1788.
53. BF to Thomson, 29 Dec. 1788.
54. Notes for BF to Thomson [1788?].
55. BF, Sketch of Services of B. Franklin to the United States, 29 Dec. 1788.
56. BF to Thomson, 29 Dec. 1788.
57. As early as 1785 Franklin had complained to Jefferson of being “extremely wounded” by Congress’s treatment of his requests. “He expected,” said Jefferson, “something to be done as a reward for his own service.” Jefferson, however, thought that Franklin’s pride would make him “preserve a determined silence in the future.” Jefferson to Monroe, 5 July 1785, in Boyd, Papers of Jefferson, 8:262.
58. BF to Thomson, 29 Dec. 1788.
59.Journals of the Continental Congress,1774–1789 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1937), 34:603n.
60. BF, Autobiography, 161–62.
61. BF, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751), in Papers of Franklin, 4:231.
62. BF to John Waring, 17 Dec. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:396.
63. BF to Benjamin Rush, 14 July 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:314.
64. Lopez, My Life with Franklin, 196–205.
65. BF, An Address to the Public (1789) in Franklin: Writings, 1154–55.
66. Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 301. President Washington was sure that the petition against slavery would go nowhere in Congress. It was “not only an illjudged piece of business,” he told an in-law back in Virginia, “but occasioned a great waste of time. . . . The memorial of the Quakers (and a very mal-apropos one it was) has at length been put to sleep, and will scarcely awake before the year 1808,” the year Congress gained the constitutional authority to deal with the slave trade. Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 276.
67. 1st Cong., 2nd Session, Annals of Congress, ed. Joseph Gales (Washington, D.C., 1834), 2:1197–1205, 1414–15, 1474.
68. BF, Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade (1790) in Franklin: Writings, 1157–60.
69. Arbour, “Franklin as Weird Sister,” 179–98.
70. Franklin had been thinking about this bequest for a number of years. See BF to Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour, 18 Nov. 1785. Even into the second decade of the nineteenth century, said Benjamin Rush, it was “scarcely safe to mention Dr. Franklin’s name with respect in some companies in our city.” Rush to Adams, 6 Aug. 1811, in John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush,1805–1818 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1980), 184.
71. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 212–38; Gilbert Chinard, “The Apotheosis of Benjamin Franklin, Paris, 1790–1791,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 99 (1955): 457, 461. See also Kenneth N. McKee, “The Popularity of the ‘American’ on the French Stage During the Revolution,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 83 (1940): 479–91.
72. Julian P. Boyd, “The Death of Franklin: The Politics of Mourning in France and the United States,” in Boyd et al., Papers of Jefferson, 19:81.
73. Adams to Rush, 4 April 1790, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 2:1207.
74.The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit, vol. 9 of Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 341, 369–70; Boyd, “Death of Franklin,” 19:81–90.
75. Robert Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 103.
76. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 234.
77. William Smith, “Eulogium on Benjamin Franklin, L.L.D., Delivered on March 1, 1791,” in The Works of William Smith, D. D., Late Provost of the College and Academy of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1803), 1:43–92; Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture,1790–1990 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994), 28–29. In 1802 when Smith came to publish his collected works he added to his eulogy a poem written by the loyalist Jonathan Odell. After celebrating Franklin’s scientific achievements, the poem ends with several devastating stanzas:
Oh! Had he been wise to pursue,
The path which his talents design’d
What a tribute of praise had been due
To the teacher and friend of mankind!
But to covet political fame,
Was, in Him, a degrading ambition;
A spark which from Lucifer came,
Enkindled the blaze of sedition.
Let candor, then, write on his urn–
Here lies the renowned inventor,
Whose flame to the skies ought to burn,
But, inverted, descends to the center!
Smith, like Franklin’s other enemies, thought that this poem was “beautifully . . . descriptive of the character of Dr. Franklin”: Franklin may have been a great scientist, but he had been a terrible politician. Smith, “Eulogium on Franklin,” 1:92.
78. Otto, quoted in Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 234.
79. Cobbett, quoted in David A. Wilson, ed., William Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America: Pamphlets on Republicanism and Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 40. On Cobbett’s campaign against Franklin in the 1790s, see Arbour, “Franklin as Weird Sister,” 179–98.
80. Joseph Dennie, The Port Folio 1 (14 Feb. 1801): 53–54, conveniently reprinted in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 249–53. See also Lewis Leary, “Joseph Dennie on Benjamin Franklin: A Note on Early American Literary Criticism,” PMHB 72 (1948): 240–46.
81. Rufus King, quoted by an English correspondent, in Richard D. Miles, “The American Image of Benjamin Franklin,” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 120.
82. For a survey of some of the different images of Franklin in the generation following his death, see William C. Kashatus III, “Hero and Hypocrite: The American Images of Benjamin Franklin, 1785–1828,” Valley Forge Journal 5 (1990): 69–87.
83. BF, Autobiography, 27.
84. See Paul Leicester Ford, Franklin Bibliography: A List of Books Written by, or Relating to Benjamin Franklin (Brooklyn, 1889).
85. Dennie, The Port Folio, in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 252.
86. Thomas Earle and Charles Congdon, eds., Annals of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York, from1785–1800 (New York, 1882), 32. (I owe this citation to Nathaniel Frank.) Even the older Masonic organizations that had been dominated by gentry were now completely taken over by middling sorts who celebrated distinctions based on merit alone. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order,1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 86, 109–33.
87. Stephen Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” in Bernard Bailyn and John Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1980), 53, 57.
88. George Warner, Means for the Preservation of Political Liberty: An Oration Delivered in the New Dutch Church, on the Fourth of July, 1797 . . . (New York, 1797), 13–14.
89. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 279–83; Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 264–322.
90. Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 203–21.
91. Weems, Washington, 203–14.
92. Dennie, The Port Folio, in Lemay and Zall, eds., Franklin’s Autobiography, 250. Dennie promised to write more on Franklin as the symbol of the getting and saving of money, but he came to realize “that every penurious parent, who prescribes, as horn-book lesson, to his son, that scoundrel maxim a penny saved is a penny got, would cry—shame!” He thus thought better of confronting too directly Franklin’s emerging image as the hardworking entrepreneur in an increasingly democratic and capitalistic society. “The world, quoth Prudence, will not bear it; ’tis a penny-getting pound hoarding world—I yielded; and shelter myself in my garret against that mob of misers and worldlings I see gathering to hoot me.” Dennie, quoted in Leary, “Dennie on Franklin,” 244.
93. David Jaffee, “The Village Enlightenment in New England,” WMQ 47 (1990): 345; Rena L. Vassar, ed., “The Life or Biography of Silas Felton, Written by Himself,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 69 (1959): 129.
94. Jaffee, “Village Enlightenment,” 328, 345, 329.
95. Huang, Franklin in American Thought, 47.
96. Henry P. Rosemont, “Benjamin Franklin and the Philadelphia Typographical Strikers of 1786,” Labor History 22 (1981): 427–28; Huang, Franklin in American Thought, 81–88. On the Franklin Institute established in 1824, see Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute,1824–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
97. Thomas Mercein, “On the Opening of the Apprentices’ Library in 1820,” in Paul A. Gilje and Howard B. Rock, eds., Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 53.
98. M. L. Weems, The Life of Benjamin Franklin; with Many Choice Anecdotes and Admirable Sayings of This Great Man, Never Before Published by Any of His Biographers (Philadelphia, 1829), 23.
99. Weems, Life of Franklin, 49, 65–66, 220–31, 236–38; Carla Mulford, “Franklin and Myths of Nationhood,” in A. Robert Lee and W. M. Verhoeven, eds., Making America/Making American Literature (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), 50–55.
100. Mellon, quoted in Huang, Franklin in American Thought, 46; Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 15–16. See also Louis Wright, “Franklin’s Legacy to the Gilded Age,” Virginia Quarterly Review 22 (1946): 268–79.
101. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 342.
102. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), lvi.
103.The Narrative of Patrick Lyon, Who Suffered Three Months Severe Imprisonment in Philadelphia Gaol . . . (Philadelphia, 1799); William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834; reprint, New York: Dover, 1969), 2:375; “Liberty on the Anvil, 1701–2001,” The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, www.HSP.org; Ron Avery, “America’s First Bank Robbery,” www.USHistory.org; Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 179–203, 241; and Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic,1880–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10–12, 15–16.
104. For an elaboration of this theme of the changing attitude toward labor, see Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 36–38, 277, 284–86, 337, 355.
105. In less than a half century following the Declaration of Independence, writes Joyce Appleby, Americans moved “from the end of traditional society—‘the world we have lost’—to the social framework we are still living with.” Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8.
106. Joyce Appleby, ed., Recollections of the Early Republic: Selected Autobiographies (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 10, 183, 167; Mulford, “Franklin and Myths,” 44.
107. Carla Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Cultural Memory,” New England Quarterly 72 (1999): 415–43.
108. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 550–51.
109. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 620n.
110. BF to Richard Bache, 11 Nov. 1784. This, of course, is the same advice Franklin had given Benny’s father, Richard Bache, a decade earlier when he himself had failed to gain an office in the British government. See p. ref.
111. Ronald W. Clark, Benjamin Franklin: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1983), 46; BF to Mathon de la Cour, 18 Nov. 1785.
112. Rosemont, “Franklin and the Philadelphia Typographical Strikers,” 398–429.
113. BF to Catherine Ray Greene, 2 Mar. 1789; BF to Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 24 Oct. 1788. For two superb studies of printers and publishers in the early republic, see Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001).