A Benjamin Franklin Reader (2 page)

1706 Born in Boston on January 17 (Jan. 6, 1705, Old Style).

1714 Attends Boston Latin.

1718 Apprenticed to brother James.

1722 Writes Silence Dogood essays.

1723 Runs away to Philadelphia.

1724 Moves to London.

1725 “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain.”

1726 Returns to Philadelphia.

1728 Opens his own print shop.

1729 Writes Busy-Body essays. Buys
Pennsylvania Gazette.

1730 Enters common-law marriage with Deborah Read. William born.

1731 Founds library.

1732 Francis born. Launches Poor Richard’s Almanac.

1733 Moral perfection project.

1735 Controversy over preacher Samuel Hemphill.

1736 Clerk of Pa. Assembly. Francis dies. Forms Union Fire Co.

1737 Made Philadelphia postmaster.

1741 Launches
General Magazine,
which fails. Designs stove.

1743 Sarah (“Sally”) born. Launches American Philosophical Soc.

1745 Collinson sends electricity pamphlets and glass tube.

1746 Summer of electricity experiments.

1747 Writes “Plain Truth.” Organizes militia.

1748 Retires from printing business.

1749 Writes proposal for the Academy (Univ. of Penn.).

1751 Electricity writings published in London. Elected to Pa. Assembly.

1752 Kite and lightning experiment.

1753 Becomes joint postmaster for America.

1754 French and Indian War begins. Albany plan of union.

1757 Leaves for London as agent. Writes “Way to Wealth” and last Poor Richard’s Almanac. Moves in with Mrs. Stevenson on Craven Street.

1758 Visits Ecton to research ancestry with William.

1761 Travels to Flanders and Holland with William.

1762 Returns to Philadelphia. William made royal governor of N.J., marries.

1763 Postal inspection trip from Virginia to New England. French and Indian War ends.

1764 Paxton Boys crisis. Defeated in bitter Assembly election. Returns to London as agent.

1765 Stamp Act passes.

1766 Testifies in Parliament against Stamp Act, which is repealed.

1767 Townshend duties imposed. Travels to France.

1768 Wages press crusade in London on behalf of the colonies.

1769 Second visit to France.

1770 Townshend duties repealed except on tea. Made agent for Massachusetts.

1771 Begins
Autobiography.
Visits Ireland and Scotland.

1773 Writes parodies “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Smaller One” and “Edict of the King of Prussia.” Boston Tea Party.

1775 Returns to Philadelphia. Battles of Lexington and Concord. Elected to Second Continental Congress. Proposes first Articles of Confederation.

1776 William removed as royal governor, imprisoned in Connecticut. Declaration of Independence. Goes to France with Temple and Benny.

1777 Settles in Passy, feted throughout Paris.

1778 Treaties of alliance and commerce with France.

1779 Salons of Madames Brillon and Helvétius. John Paul Jones’s
Bonhomme Richard
defeats the
Serapis.

1781 Appointed (with Adams and others) to negotiate, in Paris, peace with Britain.

1785 Last meeting with William. Returns to Philadelphia.

1787 Constitutional Convention. Elected president of Pa. Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

1790 Dies on April 17 at age 84.

 JOHN ADAMS (1735–1826). Massachusetts patriot, second U.S. president. Worked with Franklin editing Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Arrived in Paris April 1778 to work with Franklin as commissioner.

BENJAMIN “BENNY” FRANKLIN BACHE (1769–1798). Son of Sally and Richard Bache, traveled to Paris with grandfather Franklin and cousin Temple in 1776.

RICHARD BACHE (1737–1811). Struggling merchant who married Franklin’s daughter Sally in 1767. They had seven children who survived infancy: Benjamin, William, Louis, Elizabeth, Deborah, Sarah, and Richard.

ANDREW BRADFORD (1686–1742). Philadelphia printer and publisher of the
American Weekly Mercury,
he became a competitor of Franklin’s and supported the Proprietary elite.

ANNE-LOUISE BOIVIN D’HARDANCOURT BRILLON DE JOUY (1744–1824). Franklin’s neighbor in Passy, Madame Brillon was an accomplished harpsichordist who became one of Franklin’s favorite female friends. Wrote
Marche des Insurgents
to commemorate American victory at Saratoga.

PETER COLLINSON (1694–1768). London merchant and scientist who helped Franklin set up the library and furnished him with electricity tracts and equipment.

FRANCIS DASHWOOD, BARON LE DESPENCER (1708–1781). British politician postmaster who protected and then had to fire his friend Franklin as the deputy postmaster for America. At his country house, Franklin had the pleasure of hearing his hoax “An Edict from the King of Prussia” fool people.

ABIAH FOLGER FRANKLIN (1667–1752), Born on Nantucket, she married Josiah Franklin in 1689 and had ten children, including Benjamin.

DEBORAH READ FRANKLIN (1705?–1774). Franklin’s loyal, common-law wife, she was raised on Market Street in Philadelphia and never left that neighborhood for the rest of her life. She first saw Franklin in October 1723 when he straggled off the boat into Philadelphia. She married John Rogers, who abandoned her. Entered common-law union with Franklin in 1730. Two children: Francis “Franky” who died at age 4 and Sarah “Sally.”

JAMES FRANKLIN (1697–1735). Franklin’s brother and early master, he started the
New-England Courant
in 1721 and was a pioneer in provocative American journalism.

JANE FRANKLIN [MECOM] (1712–1794). Franklin’s youngest sister and favorite sibling.

JOSIAH FRANKLIN (1657–1745). A silk dyer born in Ecton, England, he was the youngest son of a large family and migrated to America in 1683, where he became a candlemaker. Had seven children by his first wife Anne Child and ten (including Benjamin) by his second wife Abiah Folger Franklin.

SARAH “SALLY” FRANKLIN [BACHE] (1743–1808). Loyal only daughter, married Richard Bache in 1767. Served as hostess and homemaker when Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1776 and then 1785.

[WILLIAM] TEMPLE FRANKLIN (c. 1760–1823). Illegitimate son of William Franklin. Grandfather helped to raise and educate him, brought him back to America in 1775, took him to Paris in 1776, retained his loyalty in struggle with the boy’s father. Had his own illegitimate children. Published a haphazard collection of his grandfather’s writings.

WILLIAM FRANKLIN (c. 1730–1813). Illegitimate son raised by Franklin. Accompanied him to England, became a Tory sympathizer, appointed royal governor of New Jersey, remained loyal to the crown and split with his father.

ANNE-CATHERINE DE LIGNIVILLE HELVÉTIUS (1719–1800). Franklin’s close friend in France. Widowed in 1771 from wealthy philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvétius. Franklin proposed marriage, more than half-seriously, in 1780.

LORD HILLSBOROUGH (1718–1793). Wills Hill, the first Marquis of Downshire and the Viscount of Hillsborough, Britain’s colonial secretary from 1768–72 and Franklin’s antagonist.

DAVID HUME (1711–1776). Scottish historian and philosopher, he was (with Locke and Berkeley) one of the greatest British empirical analysts. Franklin befriended him in London and visited him in Edinburgh in 1759 and 1771.

SAMUEL KEIMER (c. 1688–1742). A London printer, he moved to Philadelphia in 1722 and gave Franklin his first job there the following year. Franklin had a stormy relationship with him, became his competitor, and Keimer left for Barbados in 1730.

COTTON MATHER (1663–1728). Prominent Puritan clergyman and famed witch-hunter who succeeded his father Increase Mather as pastor of Boston’s Old North Church. His writings inspired Franklin’s civic projects.

THOMAS PENN (1702–1775). Son of William Penn, he became, in 1746, the primary Proprietor of Pennsylvania, based in London with his brother Richard. He was one of Franklin’s foremost political enemies.

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY (1733–1804). Theologian who turned to science. Met Franklin in 1765. Wrote a history of electricity (1767) that stressed Franklin’s work. Isolated oxygen and other gases.

SIR JOHN PRINGLE (1707–1782). Physician who became Franklin’s close English friend and traveling companion.

CATHERINE RAY [GREENE] (1731–1794). Met Franklin on his 1754 trip to New England and became his first major young female flirtation. Married in 1758 William Greene, who became governor of Rhode Island, but remained a friend of Franklin. (She signed her name “Caty,” but Franklin tended to address her as “Katy” or “Katie.”)

JONATHAN SHIPLEY, BISHOP OF ST. ASAPH (1714–1788). Anglican bishop at whose house Twyford, near Winchester, Franklin began his autobiography.

MARGARET STEVENSON (1706–1783). Franklin’s landlady on Craven Street, off the Strand, and occasional companion in London.

MARY “POLLY” STEVENSON [HEWSON] (1739–1795). Mrs. Stevenson’s daughter, longtime flirtatious young friend and intellectual companion to Franklin. Married in 1770 to medical researcher William Hewson. Widowed in 1774, visited Franklin in Paris in 1785, moved to Philadelphia in 1786 to be at his deathbed.

WILLIAM STRAHAN (1715–1785). London printer who became Franklin’s close friend via letters before even meeting him in person. Franklin wrote but did not send a famous “you are my enemy” letter to him during the Revolution, but they actually remained friends.

BENJAMIN VAUGHAN (1751–1835). Franklin’s close friend in London, he compiled many of Franklin’s papers and helped to negotiate with him the final peace treaties with Britain.

CHARLES GRAVIER, COMTE DE VERGENNES (1717–1787). French foreign minister, 1774–1787, with whom Franklin negotiated an alliance.

When he was a young teenager working as an apprentice at his brother’s printing shop in Boston, Benjamin Franklin, America’s original apostle of self improvement, devised a wonderful little method to teach himself how to be a powerful and persuasive writer. He would read the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in
The Spectator,
the irreverent London daily that flourished in 1711–12, take notes, jumble them up, set them aside, and then return to them a few days later to see how well he could replicate the original. Sometimes he would even turn the notes into poetry, which helped him expand his vocabulary by forcing him to search for words with the right rhythm or rhyme, before trying to recreate what Addison and Steele had written.

When he found his own version wanting, he would correct it. “But I sometimes had the pleasure,” he recalled, “of fancying that in certain particulars of small import I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think that I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.”

More than making himself merely “tolerable,” he became the most popular writer in colonial America. He may also have been, as the great literary historian Carl Van Doren has flatly declared, “the best writer in America” during his lifetime. (The closest rival for that title would probably be the preacher Jonathan Edwards, author of such vivid sermons as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” who was certainly more intense and literary, though far less felicitous and amusing.) Franklin’s self-taught style, as befitting a protégé of Addison and Steele, featured a direct and conversational prose, which was lacking in poetic flourish but was powerful in its directness and humor.

Franklin’s father had originally intended to send the last of his sons to Harvard to study for the ministry, but observing his cheeky impertinence, especially about matters of religion, he decided that it would be a waste of money. Instead, he decided to apprentice the young boy at age 12 to his older brother James, who had learned the print trade in London and returned to Boston to open up shop and start the first feisty and independent newspaper in the colonies.

The print trade was a natural calling for young Franklin. “From a child I was fond of reading,” he recalled, “and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.” Indeed, books were the most important formative influence in his life, and he was lucky to grow up in Boston where libraries had been carefully nurtured since the Arabella brought fifty volumes along with the town’s first settlers in 1630.

Franklin was able to sneak books from the other apprentices who worked for booksellers, as long as he returned the volumes clean. “Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.”

His favorite was John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress,
the saga of the tenacious quest by a man named Christian to reach the Celestial City, which was published in 1678 and quickly became popular among the Puritans and other dissenters who settled Boston. As important as its religious message, at least for Franklin, was the refreshingly clean and sparse prose style it offered in an age when writing had become clotted by the richness of the Restoration. “Honest John was the first that I know of,” Franklin correctly noted, “who mixed narration and dialogue, a method of writing very engaging to the reader.”

A central theme of Bunyan’s book—and of the passage from Puritanism to Enlightenment, and of Franklin’s life—was contained in its title: progress, the concept that individuals, and mankind in general, move forward and improve based on a steady increase of knowledge and the wisdom that comes from conquering adversity. Christian’s famous opening phrase sets the tone: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world…” Even for the faithful, this progress was not solely the handiwork of the Lord but also the result of a human struggle, by individuals and by communities, to triumph over obstacles.

Likewise, another Franklin favorite—and one must pause to marvel at a twelve-year-old with such tastes in leisure pursuits—was Plutarch’s
Lives,
which is also based on the premise that individual endeavor can change the course of history for the better. Plutarch’s heroes, like Bunyan’s Christian, are honorable men who believe that their personal strivings are intertwined with the progress of mankind. History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

His writing style, as well as his belief in the power of the written word to encourage useful civic endeavors, was also influenced by two books he borrowed from his father’s little library shelf: Daniel Defoe’s
Essay on Projects
and Cotton Mather’s
Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good.
Throughout his life as an author and publisher, he believed that writing should primarily be judged by its practical effects and usefulness. He had little use for the ethereal artistic and sublime poetic aspirations of the Romantic period that was beginning to flower near the end of his life. Instead, he was an avatar of the Enlightenment, with its belief in reason, practicality, direct prose and earthly enquiry. To that he added the wit he found in Addison, Steele, Defoe and later Jonathan Swift.

His first significant published writings came when he was only sixteen and he invented the pseudonym Silence Dogood to get himself published in his brother’s paper. (His jealous brother would not have printed them if he had known the true author.) Like many other witty writers of the Enlightenment, he was partial to pseudonyms and hoaxes, and he wrote his last such piece, a purported speech by a member of the divan of Algiers defending the enslavement of Christians, on his deathbed at eighty-four.

After running away from his apprenticeship in Boston at 17, Franklin settled in Philadelphia, where he soon launched his own print shop and newspaper. He perfected various tricks of the trade to build circulation: gossip, sex, crime and humor. But he also used his pen to encourage worthy civic endeavors and, later, to push his political views. His Poor Richard’s almanacs combined humor and his penchant for self-improvement to become far and away the best-selling books of the era. And he used his talent to create a great media empire that included franchised print shops and newspapers throughout the colonies and then a distribution system, the colonial postal service, that tied them all together and helped give an advantage to his own content.

His output was wondrously diverse and prolific. He wrote pointed tales and humorous hoaxes, amusing essays, letters both chatty and sophisticated, scientific treatises, detailed charters for civic associations, political tracts, plans for uniting the colonies, propaganda pieces supporting the American cause in Britain and then France, and bagatelles to his French female friends. All together his writings fill what will be forty-two volumes, each averaging about seven hundred pages, of which thirty-seven have already been published by the masterly editors of his papers at Yale University.

In this book, I have assembled some of his most revealing, amusing and significant works. I tried to pick those that gave the best insight into Franklin’s personality and into his influence on the American character. I also chose a few of them, I must admit, simply because I found them delightful, and I want to convey what a fun (although complex) person Franklin was.

I have presented the pieces chronologically, for the most part, because they thus provide an insight into the evolution of his own life and thinking. To put them in context, they are accompanied by short introductions or explanations that draw from the biography I wrote,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.
One exception to the chronological order is the
Autobiography.
He wrote it in four installments, beginning in 1771 and ending in 1789 a year before his death, and I have included it all as one coherent narrative, as he intended, at the end of this volume.

Franklin’s writings likewise flow together to give a narrative of both his own pilgrim’s progress and that of the new nation he helped to shape. He was the greatest inventor of his time, but the most interesting thing that he invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America’s first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.

Partly it was a matter of image. As a young printer in Philadelphia, he carted rolls of paper through the streets to give the appearance of being industrious. As an old diplomat in France, he wore a fur cap to portray the role of backwoods sage. In between, he created an image for himself as a simple yet striving tradesman, assiduously honing the virtues—diligence, frugality, honesty—of a good shopkeeper and beneficent member of his community.

But the image he created was rooted in truth. Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class, Franklin was, at least for most of his life, more comfortable with artisans and thinkers than with the established elite, and he was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary aristocracy. Throughout his life he would refer to himself, first and foremost, as a printer and writer. And it was through these crafts that he was able to influence, more than any of the other Founders, the character and personality of the American nation.