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Benjamin Franklin






(1706–1790)

I began to suspect that this Doctrine, tho’ it might be true, was not very useful. (The Autobiography)

Benjamin Franklin, in the words of his biographer Carl Van Doren, was a “harmonious human multitude.” As Van Doren’s assessment suggests, Franklin’s life and work are at once difficult and simple to summarize. On the one hand, his multitude of contributions to the worlds of printing, journalism, literature, science, and politics defy brief summary. On the other hand, these many accomplishments were in harmony with one another, sharing a common theme of human progress through human initiative. More than any other American, Franklin personifi ed the age of Enlightenment, a time when humans were growing more aware of their world and inventing ways to control it for their benefit.

His Enlightenment perspective shines through his literature, which includes some of the most important works to appear in America in the 18th century. Over more than six decades, he produced an enormous and varied body of work, including the best-selling Poor Richard’s Almanack, literary hoaxes such as “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly” and “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker, ” satires such as “An Edict by the King of Prussia, ” humorous sketches such as “The Ephemera” and “The Elysian Fields, ” and informational pieces such as “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, ” as well as countless news articles, letters, scientific reports, and proposals related to civic affairs. His masterpiece, The Autobiography, is one of the classic books of American literature.

Although he eventually would be strongly associated with Philadelphia, Franklin began his life in Boston, where he was born on January 17, 1706. He entered a large family, which included his father, Josiah Franklin, and his mother, Abiah Folger Franklin, as well as 11 siblings. His father, who made soap and sold candles for a living, hoped that his youngest son would enter a religious profession and sent him to grammar school when he was eight years old. His father changed his mind, however, and moved Benjamin to George Brownell’s English school during the 1715–16 academic year. When he was 10 years old, Benjamin left school for good after only two years and went to work in his father’s shop. The work, however, did not agree with him, and his father set out to help his son choose a different trade. Finally, at the age of 12, he became an apprentice in his brother James Franklin’s print shop, where he would work for several years. When he was not setting type or doing other work in the shop, young Franklin was reading, sometimes deep into the night. He took a special interest in the witty, satirical essays he found in a popular English periodical, the Spectator. In an effort to improve his own writing, he sometimes read the essays, noted the basic ideas in the sentences, and then attempted to rewrite them in his own words. In 1722, when he was 16 years old, he wrote a series of satirical essays under the pseudonym Silence Dogood and secretly slipped them under the door of his brother’s shop. These essays made their way into his brother’s newspaper, the New-England Courant, and were among Franklin’s first published works.

The two brothers’ relationship was a tense one, however, and Benjamin decided to break his indenture. In 1723, when he was 17, he left his job and family in Boston, going by boat first to New York and then to Philadelphia, where he landed with a handful of change and no connections. His entry into Philadelphia would become one of the most famous episodes in his autobiography. “I was in my working Dress, my best Cloaths being to come round by Sea, ” Franklin wrote. “I was dirty from my Journey; my Pockets were stuff’d out with Shirts & Stockings; I knew no Soul nor where to look for Lodging. I was fatigu’d with Travelling, Rowing, & Want of Rest. I was very hungry, and my whole Stock of Cash consisted of a Dutch Dollar, and about a shilling in Copper.”

From such humble origins, Franklin perhaps had little reason to think that he would become famous and wealthy. He was, however, a man of means. Over the next several years, as he worked for various businesses in Philadelphia and England, he studied human nature and mastered the means of achieving success. When, for example, he refused to pay a fee he found unfair—and consequently found his work sabotaged—he changed his mind and paid the fee, “convinc’d of the Folly of being on ill Terms with those one is to live with continually.” In short, Franklin was a model of practicality, a theme nicely summed up in his evaluation of deism, a religious philosophy he had adopted as an adolescent: “I began to suspect that this Doctrine tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.”

In 1728, Franklin and an associate, Hugh Meredith, started a printing house of their own in Philadelphia. Meredith would leave the business within a few years, but Franklin’s printing establishment eventually became the most successful in the colonies. Over the next two decades, the firm published 432 broadsides, pamphlets, and books, including The Psalms of David (1729), antislavery pamphlets by John Woolman and other Quakers, and JONATHAN EDWARDS’s Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1742). In 1744, he reprinted Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, thus becoming the first printer to publish a novel in the colonies. A translation of Cicero’s Cato Major, which Franklin published the same year, has been called “the most beautiful example of the colonial printer’s art” (Green 270). Franklin also became a force in colonial printing, supporting a number of other printers, influencing others’ practices and principles, and making signifi cant improvements in the printing press (Green 271; Tebbel 104). He retired from printing in 1748 when he was 41, but he would long identify himself with the trade. Years later, writing his autobiography, he sometimes slipped into the language of printing, referring to mistakes he made during his life as errata, the printer’s term for errors in a published document.

Even while he was becoming the leading printer of colonial America, he also was becoming one of its leading journalists. In 1729, a year after he and Meredith went into business, Franklin began publishing a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he had bought from his former employer, Samuel Keimer. In an age when more than half of newspapers failed within two years, Franklin’s Gazette not only survived, but succeeded brilliantly (Emery and Emery 51). Calling it “the best newspaper in the American colonies, ” journalism historians Edwin and Michael Emery note that the Pennsylvania Gazette “had the largest circulation, most pages, highest advertising revenue, most literate columns, and liveliest comment of any paper in the area” (Emery and Emery 44). Much of this success may have grown out of Franklin’s own journalistic instincts. As a reporter, he wrote cogent “straight” news stories on crimes, acts of nature, and other subjects. He also had what the journalism historian Frank Luther Mott has called “a lively news sense for the unusual and interesting, ” and his paper sometimes featured what modern journalists call “brights”—quirky stories intended to entertain readers. On October 16, 1729, he reported: “And sometime last Week, we are informed, that one Piles a Fidler, with his Wife, were overset in a Canoo near Newtown Creek. The good Man, ’tis said, prudently secur’d his Fiddle, and let his Wife go to the Bottom.”

Franklin and journalism were a good match. “Journalism, ” his biographer Esmond Wright explains, “was, in Franklin’s day, the career before all others that offered opportunity to enterprise and imagination” (18). Franklin’s career as a printer and a journalist provided him with a venue for both his ambitious sense of enterprise and his lively imagination.

In the Gazette, he published scores of his own essays and sketches on a wide range of topics, including health care, defense, business, drinking, religion, marriage, and virtue, often using a pen name, such as Anthony Afterwit or Obadiah Plainman. Some of these writings, such as “Apology for Printers” (1731) and “On Protection of Towns from Fires” (1735), were serious discussions of civic affairs. Others—such as “The Art of Saying Little in Much” (1736), which features a parody of legal prose, and “The Drinker’s Dictionary” (1737) — were lighter fare. He also published writings, including “Essay on Paper-Currency, Proposing a New Method for Fixing Its Value” (1741), in his General Magazine. He occasionally published writings in other periodicals as well. Before acquiring the Gazette, he published a string of satirical essays, known as the Busy-Body series, in the American Mercury. His most famous sketch from this time, “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker, ” appeared in a London periodical, the General Advertiser, in 1747. From his press issued his greatest commercial success, Poor Richard’s Almanack, later known as Poor Richard Improved, which appeared annually from 1732 until 1758. A compilation of information on astronomy, weather, and other matters, along with clever and amusing aphorisms, this book became one of the period’s best sellers.

As Franklin’s writings on money and fi re prevention suggest, Franklin was heavily involved in the civic life of his community at this time. In 1727, he formed a group of Philadelphia men, many of them also tradesmen, who could benefi t themselves and their community through conversations. Members of this group, called the Junto or the Leather Apron Club, gathered on Fridays and discussed matters of business and society. In “Rules for a Club Formerly Established in Philadelphia, ” written around 1732, Franklin lists some of the questions for discussion, including “4. Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means? ” and “15. Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people? ” Franklin’s Junto nicely demonstrates one of the central tenets of his Enlightenment perspective—that is, that humans can greatly improve themselves and their world through collaboration. “The Junto, ” his biographer Leo Lemay notes, “served as the incubation chamber for several public projects” (338). One of these projects was the first subscription library in the colonies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731. In these early decades of his life, Franklin also played important roles, partly through his writing, in the formation of a fire department, a night watch, a hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania.

As were many young men, Franklin was carving out his identity as a public person at the same time that he was facing momentous developments in his personal life. In 1730, he entered into a common law marriage with Deborah Read Rogers, whose first husband had abandoned her. In his autobiography, written years later, Franklin recalled that his future wife had witnessed his humble entry into Philadelphia as a boy of 17 and must have found him a “ridiculous” sight. Together with Franklin’s illegitimate son, William, born to another woman around 1729, the couple lived in a house on Market Street in Philadelphia. In 1732, Deborah gave birth to their first child, Francis. They would lose this son to smallpox in 1736. They had one other child, Sarah, or “Sally, ” born in 1743. Franklin’s marriage to Deborah would last until her death in 1774, although they spent many years apart, as she never accompanied him to England, where he lived from 1757 to 1762 and from 1764 to 1775.

In 1748, at the age of 41, Franklin retired from printing. For two decades—from the establishment of his partnership with Meredith in 1728 to his transfer of the business to a new partner, David Hall—his press had provided him with publicity for his writings, a voice in civic affairs, and support for his growing family. Now it was about to give him something else: freedom. Thanks to the success of his printing business, Franklin was now a wealthy man and did not need to devote time to making a living. As Franklin explained years later in his autobiography, his retirement gave him the leisure to pursue his interest in science.

As Philip Dray notes in Stealing God’s Thunder, Franklin had a “life-long fascination” with science. Good Enlightenment thinker that he was, he continually observed the workings of nature and, in some cases, developed ways of controlling it. Even before his retirement, he had found time to invent, in 1741, the Pennsylvania fi replace, or Franklin stove, which could heat a room effi ciently while restricting smoke from entering it; two years later, he made an important discovery concerning the movement of storms in the Northeast. Around this same time, he became fascinated with the study of electricity, then still a novelty. People knew it existed and observed it, even using it to perform tricks, but no one completely understood it. Franklin, as did Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet and other contemporaries in France and England, began developing experiments with Leyden jars and other equipment to study this magical phenomenon. He reported on his work in Experiments and Observations on Electricity, published in 1751.

In 1752, in what would become the most celebrated incident in his life, he set out to test his hypothesis that lightning was a form of electricity. With the help of his son, William, he flew a kite equipped with a pointed piece of wire in stormy weather and felt a shock when he put his hand in range of a key attached to the string. His hypothesis validated, Franklin continued studying electricity and eventually invented a device that would change the world. Almost comically simple, yet revolutionary in its effects, the lightning rod provided Franklin’s contemporaries with a means of preventing the fi res often caused by lightning strikes. Perhaps even more signifi cant was the psychological effect of the invention; as Dray points out, Franklin had unveiled one of nature’s greatest enigmas and most threatening forces (82). His work in electricity made Franklin, already a mover and shaker in Philadelphia, an international celebrity. He received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society of London in 1753 and became, as the historian Gordon Wood notes, “the most famous American in the world” (66).

Franklin’s contributions to science and technology continued long after his triumph in electricity. In 1761, he invented a musical instrument called the armonica, which became a sensation in Europe; both Mozart and Beethoven composed music for it. In 1768, he mapped the Gulf Stream, and, in 1784, he invented bifocals. Believing that inventions should serve one’s fellow humans, Franklin refused to secure patents on any of his inventions and thus forfeited untold income from his ideas. In a way that almost seems scripted, Franklin’s successes in printing and science contributed to his successes in yet another field, politics, to which he would devote much of his time and energy in the third major phase of his adult life. In 1751, he won election to the Pennsylvania Assembly, where he would serve until 1764. As joint deputy postmaster for the colonies from 1753 until 1774, he introduced important developments in the postal system, including home delivery and improved efficiency (Isaacson 157). In 1754, he proposed the Albany Plan of Union, an early plan for uniting the English colonies in North America.

His greatest political triumphs, however, lay ahead. In the 1760s, Franklin watched the growth of tensions between England and its American colonies. As Gordon Wood has shown in The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Franklin, who loved England, initially played the role of peacemaker, trying to resolve the tensions and prevent a break. Nevertheless, he found fault with England’s government of the colonies and, in 1773, aired his grievances in two of his best-known satires, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” and “Edict by the King of Prussia.” These sketches, which were frequently reprinted, helped to create a rift between Franklin and England, which removed him from his offi ce as deputy postmaster in 1774 (Lebaree 390). The onetime peacemaker was now, in Wood’s words, “a passionate patriot, more passionate in fact than nearly all the other patriot leaders” (Wood 151). In 1775, he represented Pennsylvania in the Second Continental Congress; the following year, he collaborated with THOMAS JEFFERSON and others on the Declaration of Independence. Later that year, Congress sent him to France to seek assistance in the war effort. There, the fame Franklin had achieved as a writer and a scientist worked to his advantage. As Wood has noted, Franklin, by helping to secure an alliance with France in 1778, helped the colonies win a war they otherwise might have lost (196). Although he helped the colonies win the war, Franklin suffered a painful loss of his own. In siding with the Loyalists, William Franklin alienated his father, and their once-close relationship dissolved. They would never effect a complete reconciliation.

Before the break, however, Franklin’s relationship with his only living son had helped to inspire his greatest literary achievement. In 1771, he began writing his autobiography, which he addressed to William. At separate stages over the next two decades, Franklin continued his life story, which would become a classic of American literature. He died before fi nishing it, writing the last installment in 1790. In this last stage of his life, he wrote other important works, as well. To entertain some of his French friends, he wrote a series of brief, witty sketches, which he called bagatelles. Two of the best known of these works are “The Ephemera” (1778) and “The Elysian Fields” (1778).

In 1785, after nine years in France, Franklin returned to what was now, thanks largely to his efforts, an independent nation, the United States of America. He helped to shape what that nation would become, serving as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Two years later, he wrote the first remonstrance against slavery to be addressed to Congress. By this time, however, he was suffering from poor health, plagued by both gout and kidney stones. Finally, on April 17, 1790, he died at his home in Philadelphia at the age of 84.

He left a legacy of diverse, yet harmonious accomplishments, held together by a common thread. In the aphorisms of Poor Richard and the lessons of his autobiography, in his invention of the Franklin stove and the lightning rod, in his establishment of the Junto and the Library Company, and in other words and actions, we see a commitment to the principles of the Enlightenment. His pragmatism, furthermore, has become a touchstone of American values—for better or worse. Although some have celebrated Franklin and his accomplishments, others have found him opportunistic, materialistic, even simplistic. D. H. Lawrence, for example, complained that Franklin oversimplified human psychology: “Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, ”

Lawrence declares in Studies in Classic American Literature, “and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden” (52). Detractors aside, Franklin remains one of the most successful and diverse men in American history. He was indisputably the country’s greatest printer, as well as one of its most successful journalists. In the field of science, he made important contributions to the study of electricity. As a founding father, he was instrumental in the cause of independence. Throughout these various careers, he wrote, producing an astounding number of news articles, essays, satires, sketches, hoaxes, proposals, observations, reports, aphorisms, bagatelles, and letters, as well as an autobiography that has become a classic of world literature. Indeed, Franklin’s literature may be his most enduring legacy. More than two centuries after his death, his words continue to enlighten.


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