“OF MAKING MANY BOOKS there is no end,” and with the upcoming tricentennial celebration of Benjamin Franklin’s birth in 2006, this seems to be especially true of Franklin biographies. But this book is not meant to be a traditional biography of Franklin. It does not contain every event in his long life, nor does it deal with all of his multitudinous relationships and writings. Instead, it is a relatively selective study, focusing on specific aspects of this extraordinary man’s life that reveal a Benjamin Franklin who is different in important ways from the Franklin of our inherited common understanding.
First of all, the book attempts to penetrate beneath the many images and representations of Franklin that have accumulated over the past two hundred years and recover the historic Franklin who did not know the kind of massively symbolic folk hero he would become. At the same time it hopes to make clear how and why Franklin acquired these various images and symbols. It tries to place Franklin’s incredible life in its eighteenth-century context and explain why he retired from business and became a gentleman, why he came to admire the British Empire and sought to become its architect, why he began writing his Autobiography when he did, and why he belatedly joined the American Revolution, and joined it with a vengeance. It seeks to clarify the personal meaning the Revolution had for him and to describe his extraordinary achievements as America’s envoy to France—achievements that were never fully appreciated by many of his countrymen at the time. It attempts also to account for the way in which the French came to see Franklin as the symbol of America even before his fellow Americans did. Indeed, without understanding Franklin’s intimate connection with France we will never make sense of the remarkable degree of hostility Franklin faced in the last years of his life from members of Congress and other influential Americans. Even after his death in 1790 the hostility continued, especially as Franklin emerged as the representative American, as the hardworking self-made businessman, for hundreds of thousands of middling Americans in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
This early-nineteenth-century image of Franklin was not the image of Franklin known to people in his own lifetime; it was a product of the turbulent capitalism of the age of Jackson, the age so brilliantly depicted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America. And it is that popular image that seems to have the most resonance even today. Despite the continuing power of Franklin’s symbolic significance as the entrepreneurial American, however, the historic Franklin of the eighteenth century was never destined to be that symbol. Franklin was not even destined to be an American. How he became one is the theme of this book.