The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (43 page)

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; 2:29-30^ 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.

CHAPTER 2: BECOMING A BRITISH IMPERIALIST

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,

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-Fran^ois 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:i86n.

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 (i940): 3i4.

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 i764.
Papers ofFranklin,
4:234n.

31.   BF to James Parker, 20 Mar. i75i, in
Papers of Franklin,
4:ii7-20. 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 i787, 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 of 1754
(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 ofEmpire.

34.   BF,
Autobiography,
210.

35.   BF to James Alexander and Colden, 8 June i754, in
Papers ofFranklin,
5:335-38.

36.   BF to Colden, i4 July i754, in
Papers ofFranklin,
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
⁽
I9
^6o)
: 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 ofFranklin.

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 Black-stone,
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., i 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:i3n; 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 Rude,
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.