The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
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60. BF, On the New Office of the Secretary of State, BF to Cadwallader Evans, 26 Feb. 1768, and BF, On Railing and Reviling, 6 Jan. 1768, all in Papers of Franklin, 15:19, 52, 14. On the pride and arrogance of the British government and the steady alienation of Franklin’s affections toward the empire in the late 1760s and early 1770s, see Jack P. Greene, Understanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 18-47, 247-84.
61. “Benevolus” (BF), On the Propriety of Taxing America, London Chronicle, 9—11 Apr. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:114.
62. BF, “American Discontents,” London Chronicle, 5-7 Jan. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, J5:I2.
63. BF to Samuel Cooper, 8 June 1770, 27 Apr. 1769, in Papers of Franklin, 17:163; 16:118.
64. BF to Kames, 25 Feb. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:69.
65. BF to William Franklin, 1 Oct. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:224-27.
66. Deborah Franklin to BF, 3 Nov., 6 Oct. 1765, 21-22 Jan. 1768, and 20-25 Apr. 1767, all in Papers of Franklin, 12:354, 294; 15:23; 14:136.
67. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 155.
68. Deborah Franklin to BF, 3 July 1767, 21-22 Jan. 1768, 1 May 1771, 30 June 1772, and BF to Deborah Franklin, 14 July 1772, 1 Sept. 1773, all in Papers of Franklin, 14:207; 15:24; 18:91; 19:192, 207; 20:383; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 120-21, 134-36, 164-73. Lopez and Herbert’s book, to which I am much indebted, is a fair and balanced account of Franklin’s relationship with his family.
69. BF to William Franklin, 9 Jan. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:16.
70. BF to Jane Mecom, 30 Dec. 1770, in Papers of Franklin, 17:314.
71. BF to William Franklin, 2 July 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:159, 162, 160.
72. BF to William Franklin, 2 July 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:161, 162, 164.
73. BF to William Franklin, 2 July 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:163.
74. See Peter Marshall, “Lord Hillsborough, Samuel Wharton and the Ohio Grant, 1769-1775,” English Historical Review 80 (1965), 717-39.
75. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986), 29-36, 49-57, 64-65.
76. BF to Thomson, 18 Mar. 1770, and BF to Cooper, 8 June 1770, in Papers of Franklin, 17:112, 164.
77. BF, Account of His Audience with Hillsborough, 16 Jan. 1771, in Papers of Franklin, 18:12-16.
78. BF to Cooper, 5 Feb. 1771, in Papers of Franklin, 18:24-25.
79. William Strahan to William Franklin, 3 Apr. 1771, in Papers of Franklin, 18:65.
80. James Campbell, Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 178.
81. BF to Sarah Franklin Bache, 29 Jan. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:46.
82. Notes, in Franklin: Writings, 1557; J. A. Leo Lemay, “Benjamin Franklin,” in Everett Emerson, ed., Major Writers of Early American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 238-39; Melvin H. Buxbaum, Benjamin Franklin and the Zealous Presbyterians (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 225; Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988),
17. Because literary scholars are anxious to show Franklin as an artist in complete control of his materials, many of them tend to see all four parts of the Autobiography as a unified whole, directed at the same general reader. I am more inclined to agree with William H. Shurr’s argument that the first part addressed to Franklin’s son is distinctive. Shurr, “‘Now, Gods, Stand Up for Bastards’: Reinterpreting Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography” American Literature 64 (1992): 435-51. See also Hugh J. Dawson, “Franklin’s Memoirs in 1784: The Design of the Autobiography, Parts I and II,” Early American Literature 12 (1977-1978): 286-93; Hugh J. Dawson, “Fathers and Sons: Franklin’s ‘Memoirs’ as Myth and Metaphor,” Early American Literature 14 (1979-1980): 269-92; and Christopher Looby, “‘The Affairs of the Revolution Occasion’d the Interruption’: Writing, Revolution, Deferral, and Conciliation in Franklin’s Autobiography” American Quarterly 38 (1986): 72—96.
83. BF to Abiah Franklin, 12 Apr. 1750, and BF to Strahan, 2 June 1750, in Papers of Franklin, 3:475, 479.
84. BF to William Franklin, 30 Jan. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:50.
85. BF to William Franklin, 30 Jan. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:48.
86. BF to Galloway, 22 Aug. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:275.
87. BF to William Franklin, 19-22 Aug. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:259.
88. The editors of Franklin’s Papers say that in the Hutchinson affair Franklin “crossed, without recognizing it, a personal Rubicon. The days of his usefulness in London were numbered.” Papers of Franklin, i9:xxxii.
89. The Hutchinson Letters, 1768-1769, in Papers of Franklin, 20:550; Bailyn, Hutchinson, 227.
90. Tract Relative to the Affair of Hutchinson’s Letters, Feb. 1774?, Papers of Franklin, 21:419. Most people at the time thought that John Temple was the person who had passed Whately’s correspondence on to Franklin. Bailyn believes that it was Thomas Pownall who gave Franklin the letters. But the editors of the Papers suggest John Temple and William Strahan, as well as Pownall, as possibilities. Bailyn, Hutchinson, 225, 231-35; Papers of Franklin, 19:403-7.
91. The editors of Franklin’s Papers believe that his sending of these letters to the radicals in Massachusetts “was probably the most controversial act of his career.” Papers of Franklin, 19:401.
92. BF to Thomas Cushing, 2 Dec. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:411-13.
93. BF to Cushing, 2 Dec. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:411-12. Bailyn thinks that these words “must be either the most naive or the most cynical that Franklin ever uttered.” Bailyn, Hutchinson, 237. Perhaps they are both. Since Franklin was still so emotionally committed to the empire that he had come to believe that almost anything, even the sacrifice of one’s honor, justified trying to save it, his words may be more naive than cynical. At the same time, he seems to have sincerely believed that his former friend Hutchinson had become so duplicitous and so detested by the people of Massachusetts that he deserved to have his reputation destroyed for the sake of the empire. See BF to William Franklin, 6 Oct. 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:437, 439.
94. BF to Cushing, 2 Dec. 1772, 3 Jan. 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 19:409-13; 20:7-10.
95. If fixing blame on local officials in order to absolve the English ministry was indeed Franklin’s motivation, then the editors of his Papers believe that “his miscalculation was spectacular, and does small credit to his acumen.” Papers of Franklin, i9:408.
96. BF to William Franklin, Mar. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:552.
97. BF, Last Will and Testament, 22 June 1750, and BF to John Winthrop, 25July 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 3:481; 20:330.
98. BF to Cushing, 2 Dec. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:411; Bailyn, Hutchinson, 223. Bailyn has the fullest account of Franklin’s involvement in the affair of the Hutchinson letters.
99. BF to Lord Dartmouth, 21 Aug. 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:373.
100. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 121-22.
101. BF, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” 11 Sept. 1773, and BF, “An Edict by the King of Prussia,” 22 Sept. 1773, in Papers of Franklin, 20:389-99, 413-18.
102. BF, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” BF to William Franklin, 6 Oct. 1773, and BF to Mecom, 1 Nov. 1773, all in Papers of Franklin, 20:393, 436-39, 457-58.
103. London General Evening Post, 11 Jan. 1774, in Verner W. Crane, ed., Letters to the Press, 175—1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), 239.
104. BF, Extract of a Letter from London, 19 Feb. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:112.
105. The Final Hearing Before the Privy Council, 29 Jan. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:60, 47, 48-49.
106. The Final Hearing Be
fore the Privy Council, 29 Jan. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:70.
107. BF to Galloway, 18 Feb. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:109-10.
108. European Magazine (London) 3 (March 1783), quoted in P. M. Zall, ed., Ben Franklin Laughing: Anecdotes from Original Sources by and About Benjamin Franklin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 77.
109. BF to Galloway, 12 Oct. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:334.
110. BF to Galloway, 12 Oct. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:334.
111. BF to Timothy, 7 Sept. 1774, BF to Mecom, 28 July, 26 Sept. 1774, BF to William Franklin, 1 Aug. 1774, and BF to Jonathan Shipley, 28 Sept. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:291, 265, 317-18, 266, 321.
112. BF to Shipley, 28 Sept. 1774, BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., 28 Sept. 1774, and BF to Cushing, 3 Sept., 6 Oct. 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:280, 322, 323, 327.
113. BF to William Franklin: Journal of Negotiations in London, 22 March 1775, and BF to Thomson, 5 Feb. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:579, 581, 478.
114. BF to William Franklin: Journal of Negotiations in London, 22 March 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:583.
115. BF to William Franklin: Journal of Negotiations in London, 22 March 1775, BF, Proposed Memorial to Lord Dartmouth, March 1775, and BF to Galloway, 25 Feb. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 21:583, 526, 598, 509; BF to Strahan, 19 Aug. 1784. In May 1774 Franklin published a bitterly satiric account in the London press suggesting that the commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in America and five battalions march up and down the continent and castrate all American males. The essay was undoubtedly stimulated by the British general’s remark, which he recalled in his 1784 letter to Strahan. Crane, Letters to the Press, 262-64.
116. BF to David Hartley, 3 Oct. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:217.
117. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 196.
118. Samuel Johnson, Tyranny No Taxation (1775), in Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 444.
CHAPTER 4: BECOMING A DIPLOMAT
1. H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 494.
2. In 1769 William had considered bringing his illegitimate son Temple to America under the guise of “the Son of a poor Relation, for whom I stood God Father and intended to bring up as my own.” Apparently William’s wife did not know about the existence of Temple until Franklin showed up with him in America in 1775. William Franklin to BF, 2 Jan. 1769, in Papers of Franklin, 16:5; Sheila L. Skemp, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 179.
3. Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 197, 201.
4. John Adams to Mrs. Mercy Warren, 8 Aug. 1807, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections., 5th ser., 4 (1878): 431.
5. As Adams recalled in his Autobiography, Franklin “often and indeed always appeared to me to have a personal Animosity and very severe Resentment against the King. In all his conversations and in all his Writings, when he could naturally and sometimes when could not, he mentioned the King with great Asperity.” Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:150.
6. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 23 July 1775, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1:253.
7. Joseph Hewes to Samuel Johnson, 13 Feb. 1776, in Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to the Congress, iyy^-iySfi (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, j976- ), 3:247. Franklin even stopped wearing a wig when he arrived in America. Despite a scalp irritation, in London he would never have dared to go out in public without a wig; but in America this symbol of hierarchy was not the fashionable necessity it was in England. Charles Coleman Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 97.
8. Arthur Lee to Samuel Adams, 10 June 1771, in R. H. Lee, Life of Arthur Lee (Boston, 1829), 1:216-18.
9. William Goddard to Isaiah Thomas, 15 Apr. 1811, quoted in Ralph Frasca, “From Apprentice to Journeyman to Partner: Benjamin Franklin’s Workers and the Growth of the Early American Printing Trade,” PMHB114 (1990): 245n.
10. William Bradford to James Madison, 2June 1775, and Madison to Bradford, 19 June 1775, in William T Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 1:149, 151-52. That Franklin was a British spy may seem improbable to us, but at least one modern historian, Cecil B. Currey, in his Code No. 72: Benjamin Franklin, Patriot or Spy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), has suggested the possibility of Franklin’s being a British spy while serving as envoy to France.
11. BF to William Strahan, 3 Oct. 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:219. (I owe this citation to Konstantin Dierks.)
12. Proposals and Queries to Be Asked the Junto, 1732, in Franklin: Writings, 209.
13. BF to Strahan, 5 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:85. David Freeman Hawke, in Franklin (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 353-54, says that Franklin’s July 5 letter to Strahan was widely published in America and Europe, but there is no evidence for this. Yet it seems evident to me that Franklin wrote this letter for local effect and showed it to friends and members of Congress in Philadelphia. There was no other reason for his writing such an overwrought and impassioned letter to one of his oldest British friends, especially since his other letters to English friends at this time express none of this exaggerated personal enmity. Moreover, the fact that two days later, on July 7, Franklin wrote a letter to Strahan, now lost, that presumably was as friendly as ever reinforces the idea that Franklin designed the July 5 letter to thwart rumors of his being a spy.
14. Bradford to Madison, 18 July 1775, in Hutchinson, Papers of Madison, 1:158.
15. BF to Strahan, 3 Oct. 1775, and BF to Jan Ingenhouse, 12 Feb.-6 Mar. 1777, in Papers of Franklin, 22:219; 23:310.
16. BF to Strahan, 3 Oct. 1775, and BF to John Sargent, 27 June 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:218, 72.
17. BF to Sargent, 27 June 1775, BF to David Hartley, 12 Sept. 1775, BF to Jonathan Shipley, 13 Sept. 1775, and BF to Strahan, 3 Oct. 1775, all in Papers of Franklin, 22:72, 196, 199-201, 218.
18. BF to Hartley, 3 Oct. 1775, and BF to Lord Kames, 3 Jan. 1760, in Papers of Franklin, 22:217; 9:7.
19. BF to Shipley, 7 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:94.
20. BF to Shipley, 7 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:95-98.
21. BF to Charles Dumas, 2 May 1782.
22. BF to William Franklin, 2 Feb., 7 May 1774, in Papers of Franklin, 21:75, 211-12; Skemp, William Franklin, 181.
23. Strahan to BF, 14 July 1778, in Papers of Franklin, 27:97.
24. BF to William Franklin, 16 Aug. 1784.
25. BF, Will Codicil, 23 June 1789; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 278-79, 305.
26. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 3:77; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 247.
27. Pennsylvania State Constitution (1776), Section 36, in Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation, A Documentary History of the American Revolution (New York: Norton, 1967), 343.
28. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776—1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 233.
29. Adams, Notes for an Oration at Braintree, 1772, in Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 2:57—60.
30. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 236, 568—87.
31. BF to Lord Howe, 20 July 1775, in Papers of Franklin, 22:519-21.
32. Adams, Autobiography and Diary, 3:418—19.
33. Lord Howe’s Conference with the Committee of Congress, 11 Sept. 1776, in Papers of Franklin, 22:601—5.
34. BF, Sketch of Propositions for a Peace [after 26 Sept. and before 25 Oct. 1776], in Papers ofFranklin, 22:630—32.
35. Currey, Code No. 72, 77—78; Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 321—22.
36. Rockingham, quoted in Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, j938) 573.
37. Thomas Penn to Richard Peters, 14 May 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:111.
38. BF to William Franklin, 19—22 Aug. 1772, in Papers of Franklin, 19:259.
39. Rockingham, quoted in Van Doren, Franklin, 573.
40. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 26. Aldridge’s book is the best work on the French adoration of Franklin, and my account is much indebted to it.
41. BF to Mary Stevenson, 14 Sept. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:254—55.
42. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 29.
43. Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 181J (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 27n.
44. Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 18.
45. For a full discussion of this debate over the New World as a human habitat, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: A History of a Polemic, 1730—1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).
46. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf,
1989), 172; Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 8—57.
47. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 61, 66.
48. Van Doren, Franklin, 576; Brands, First American, 528.
49. BF to Sarah Franklin Bache, 3 June 1779, in Papers of Franklin, 29:613.
50. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 96—139; Ellen G. Miles, “The French Portraits of Benjamin Franklin,” in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 272—89.
51. BF to Thomas Diggs, 25 June 1780, in Papers of Franklin, 32:590.
52. Van Doren, Franklin, 632. On the many images of Franklin in France, see Bernard Bailyn’s illustrated essay, “Realism and Idealism in American