The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

(1788, 1791)

As the critic William H. Shurr readily admits, Franklin’s Autobiography “has been judged one of the most important and influential of American books” (435). A central part of the importance of Franklin’s self-narrative lies in its identification of a particularly American character, a self-made man. Further, Franklin’s own large presence as a founding father would naturally give considerable weight to any telling of his own life and his part in the founding of the nation. Ironically, Shurr writes, Franklin’s Autobiography is held up as a model for the genre in general and yet the term autobiography did not come into existence in English until 1797, seven years after Franklin’s death. Even then, the term referred to an “odd, pedantic neologism” (Shurr 435).

The Autobiography contains four parts, the first begun in August 1771, five years before the onset of the American Revolution. The second part was penned 13 years after the Revolution. In the first section, Franklin makes express use of the phrase Dear Son and seems to have addressed his illegitimate son, William, as the intended reader. He opens in the way that a father might write to a son, by recalling family anecdotes and by striking a kind, familiar tone. Franklin writes, “Now imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the circumstances of my life, many of which you are yet unacquainted with, and expecting a week’s uninterrupted leisure in my present country retirement, I sit down to write them to you.” On the basis of these opening remarks, then, part 1 appears to be a written version of the kind of conversation one had with one’s elders. To determine one’s place in the world, one needs to have knowledge of one’s forebears. For William, this kind of family history might prove painful, however, because he was Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate child. In fact, Shurr believes that the opening references to “some sinister accidents” that Franklin desired to change was in fact a direct attack on his son’s illegitimacy” since William’s coat of arms would have to bear “the bar sinister—the heraldic mark of illegitimacy” (444–445). As Franklin himself points out, employing the metaphor of life as a manuscript, there are no possibilities of repetition to eliminate those sins (or errata) that he has committed, such as the siring of a son out of wedlock. Therefore, “the next thing most like living one’s life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible, the putting it down in writing.” Interestingly, it seems as though Franklin considered the telling of his tale, its commitment to paper and thus to posterity, as a means of atonement.

Through notes gathered from an uncle, Franklin becomes acquainted with the family’s longer history, including such details as their residence in the same village, Ecton in Northamptonshire, for 300 years. By tracing his own father’s birth, as contained in the register at Ecton, Franklin figures out his place in the larger family genealogy: “I was the youngest son of the youngest son for five generations back.” In his brief accounts of his paternal grandfather’s four sons, Franklin asks William to forgive him for any errors or missing details because of “this distance from my papers.” William is encouraged to look for these as a source for “many more particulars.” The uncle whom Franklin mentions first is Thomas, a man who “became a considerable man in the county affairs [and] was a chief mover of all public spirited undertakings.” It is this uncle who, Franklin reminds William, “struck you as something extraordinary from its similarity to what you knew of [my life].” By reminding William of the connection that he himself made between his father and his uncle, Franklin is able to seem the humble family historian rather than a braggart who sees in himself echoes of a dynamic ancestor.

To account for the family’s remove to New England, Franklin offers the family anecdote of a Bible concealed in a joint stool, which was then turned upside down and placed upon the knees of the family patriarch, who read from it. Because “conventicles, ” religious meetings or gatherings, were forbidden by law, Franklin’s father, Josiah, along with his first wife and their three children, left for New England in 1682. Franklin was born to Josiah’s second wife, Abiah Folger, in Boston. He describes his mother’s family as belonging to “one of the first settlers of New England, of whom honorable mention is made by Cotton Mather in his Church History.” His maternal grandfather, Peter Folger, was also a poet of “homespun verse of that time and people, ” as well as an outspoken supporter of “liberty of conscience, ” meaning that he supported the religious sects such as the Quakers who were persecuted and ostracized by the Puritan majority. Having read Peter Folger’s poetry, Franklin declares it to contain “a good deal of decent plainness and manly freedom.”

Given such ancestors, it is no wonder that Franklin would grow to attain such eminence in his life. Anecdotes of his early childhood, such as being promoted three grades within one year or having an “early readiness in learning to read, ” all fit not only with the image readers have today of this extraordinary figure, but also within the general character of his ancestors, both maternal and paternal. Ironically, Franklin’s close resemblance to the defi ant and intelligent nature of his ancestors also functioned to remove him from his immediate family, first from his position as an assistant in his father’s shop as a “Tallow Chandler and Sope-Boiler, ” and later in his reluctant and brief role as apprentice to his brother James’s press. When he was 12 years old, Franklin was apprenticed to James for a period of nine years, to end when he reached the age of 21. Happily, Franklin writes, the position afforded him access to books and a tradesman named Matthew Adams who gave Franklin access to his library. His father discouraged Franklin from his early inclinations to be a poet, “telling him verse makers were generally beggars, ” and thus he looked to prose writing as “a principal means of advancement.” He began copying editions of the British humorous newspaper the Spectator, in order to increase his vocabulary, work on the structure of his arguments, and perfect his use of language in the same way that a poet might. The significance of language in Franklin’s life is not to be underestimated since it was an essential part of his personality. It thus is in keeping with his public image of himself that he would provide a detailed account of honing his linguistic skills, including his anonymous contributions to his brother’s newspaper and his victories at verbal sparrings.

Had Franklin’s life followed this model, where he remained dutifully in apprenticeship to his brother James, we might not have the fully realized image of the American character that Franklin brings to life in his Autobiography. His own quiet rebellion against his family and their limitations on his freedom would resonate years later with the American Revolution, in which the colonies would be cast as the rebellious children of Mother England. Franklin disguised himself and left for New York. Tellingly, the disguise Franklin and his friend John Collins devise for him contains the very mark of moral corruption that would later prove to be true: “my being a young acquaintance of [Collins’s] that had got a naughty girl with child, whose friends would compel me to marry her.” From New York, Franklin soon made his way to Philadelphia. He notes his account of his travels to William: “I have been the more particular in this description of my journey, and shall be so of my first entry into that city, that you may in your mind compare such unlikely beginnings with the figure I have since made there.” He wishes William to gauge his current success from his poor, unlikely beginnings in Philadelphia. Shurr considers this aspect of part 1—Franklin’s “need [for] his son’s approval and even admiration”—to have political resonance since William Franklin was then the governor of New Jersey and had such high political standing that he was invited into Westminster Abbey to attend the coronation of George III while the father was forced to stand outdoors in a temporary booth (441). William was a royalist, and in 1771 when Franklin penned this first section of the Autobiography, he may have been seeking out insurance in the form of his son against any possible punishment for his own disloyal and rebellious behavior against the Crown (Shurr 441).

Franklin’s awareness of how others might perceive him remains a central theme in his autobiography. He explains to William near the close of part 1: “In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances of the contrary. I dressed plainly; I was seen in no places of idle diversion; I never went out fishing or shooting... and to show that I was not above my business, I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores through the streets on a wheelbarrow.” Although some critics, including Lemay, Shurr, and Looby, like to argue that part 1 is radically different from the subsequent parts, and that the whole does not adhere as a unified book, perhaps the preceding quotation serves as a point of continuity across all four parts. For Looby, “Scholars and critics have labored diligently to process the text into coherence, to produce the requisite unity that is the goal of much literary criticism; but in doing so they have obscured, I would argue, what are among the text’s most meaningful features” (85). Looby interprets the fractures and contradictions of Franklin’s Autobiography as proof of the infl uence that the revolution held over Franklin, especially because he purposely does not mention it in any of the Autobiography ’s four parts. Given that part 1 was written in 1771, years before the revolution, it naturally makes sense that Franklin could not have written about an event that had yet to transpire. Instead, the first part follows traditional models by retelling events from family lore and from his own childhood. Franklin was assiduously invested in promoting a public image for himself. Keeping this tendency for self-promotion in mind, the reader can easily make the leap to part 2, which has been described as “an explanation of Franklin’s bookkeeping method for attaining perfection through practice of the virtues” (Shurr 437).

Thirteen years after the Revolutionary War, Franklin returned to his Autobiography and began writing part 2. Unlike the politically uncertain Franklin of part 1, the Franklin of part 2 had emerged triumphant from the war. Another central distinction between the two parts involves its intended reader. All references to William, whom he had publicly disinherited and disowned by this time, are noticeably absent (Shurr 437). Instead, the Autobiography is opened up to a larger readership, an audience of “American youth, ” as one of his friends imagined it in a letter included at the end of part 1. To transition from a letter intended for his son to a larger endeavor intended for the edifi cation of the next generation, Franklin includes letters from two of his friends: Abel James and Benjamin Vaughan. James writes quite directly of the singularity of Franklin’s character: “I know of no character living nor many of them put together, who has so much in his power as thyself to promote a greater spirit of industry and early attention to business, frugality, and temperance with the American youth.” In Vaughan’s letter, he describes Franklin’s letter as a “noble rule and example of self-education.” Vaughan extends this characterization of Franklin’s writing to the general population: “Your biography will not merely teach self-education but the education of a wise man.” Thus, James imagines Franklin’s task as the education of the masses by a wise and sage man, his friend, Franklin.

Part 2 is entitled “Continuation of the Account of My Life Begun at Passy 1784, ” and yet critics note the difference in tone, intended readership, and subject matter. He briefly recounts the creation of the public library, which was originally called a “subscription library, ” and notes how it was expedient for him to create the pretense that “a number of friends” had arrived at this idea rather than he alone. Franklin displays his humility by willingly forgoing the opportunity to “raise one’s reputation in the smallest degree above that of one’s neighbors” and instead granting others a share in authorship. Similarly, it is at his wife’s insistence that “her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbors” that china and plate made their first appearance in the Franklin household. In both instances, Franklin is the beneficiary of the good opinion of others, even when he must suppress his own role as inventor of the public library in order to solicit subscriptions.

Perhaps one of the most enduring and influential aspects of Franklin’s autobiography is the topic that constitutes most of part 2: what Franklin himself described as the “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” The topic of self-improvement is, not surprisingly, introduced through Franklin’s brief treatment of his own religious beliefs and practices. While he states that he “never doubted... the existence of the Deity that made the world and governed it by his providence, ” he “seldom attended any public worship.” He pays his annual subscription for the salary of the “only Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia, ” but found the sermons “to me very dry, uninteresting, unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced.” Rather, Franklin insists, the aim of the ministers was more “to make us Presbyterians than good citizens.” He sees the two goals—religious and secular—as at odds with one another and he would rather follow the latter than the former.

Franklin lists 13 precepts that he has met with in his reading. Not surprisingly, for a figure like Franklin who has dedicated his life to language, he finds moral lessons in his daily reading material. The critic Christopher Looby believes that “because Franklin claims a representative status for himself, presenting his life as an allegory of American national experience, it is also an account of the nation’s self-constitution in language” (73). In other words, the way in which Franklin declares and presents himself on the page becomes a model for future Americans to write of their own life stories. The 13 precepts are, in order, temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. As Franklin reasons, “Temperance first as it tends to produce that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremitting attraction to ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations.”

It is a methodical, logical manner Franklin devises in which to approach the moral and philosophical issue of self-improvement. To fulfi ll his third precept for “order, ” Franklin imposes on himself a “scheme on employment for twenty-four hours of a natural day.” The social aspects of his life, which he attributes to the distinction between a worker or “journey-man printer” and himself, “a master who must mix with the world, ” cause this rigid schedule to give him “the most trouble.” He reconciles the attempts made with the less-than-perfect results by likening the process to a man who finds shining an ax an arduous process and who learns to appreciate a speckled ax. The “speckled ax” symbolizes an awareness of one’s own mortality and thus of one’s limitations, as well as a celebration of the achievements one can make in a striving for perfection. Franklin states it best: “Though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was by the endeavor a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been, if I had not attempted it.”

When Franklin returns to the Autobiography, to begin part 3, it is 1788, two years before his death. (The very brief part 4 was apparently left unfinished.) His attention turns, at it naturally would at such an advanced age, to ensuring that his contributions will be lasting and remembered. He mentions the Franklin stove, which he invented in 1742, and his refusal to accept a patent on it because “weenjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, [and] we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.” Although it is true that Franklin is technically writing about the benefits his open stove have had for others, it is not unreasonable to assume that his statement about the far-reaching benefits of one’s inventions was a hopeful wish for his own long-lasting fame. It certainly has proven true that readers and writers for several hundred years since his death in 1790 continue to marvel at this politician, scientist, and generally dynamic figure of the early American years.

Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford

September 6. These troubles being blown over, and now all being compact together in one ship [the Mayflower ], they put to sea again with a prosperous wind, which continued divers days together, which was some encouragement unto them; yet, according to the usual manner, many were afflicted with sea sickness. And I may not omit here a special work of God’s providence. There was a proud and very profane young man, one of the seamen, of a lusty, able body, which made him the more haughty; he would always be condemning the poor people in their sickness, and cursing them daily with grievous execrations, and did not let to tell them that he hoped to help to cast half of them overboard before they came to their journey’s end, and to make merry with what they had; and if he were by any gently reproved, he would curse and swear most bitterly. But it pleased God before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the first that was thrown overboard. Thus his curses light on his own head, and it was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.