Americans appreciated, above all others, people with practical talents. “The People have a saying, that God Almighty is himself a Mechanic [artisan], the greatest in the Univers[e].” His material creation, the universe itself, was the ultimate practical invention.32
This America suited Franklin quite well. He had been an artisan. He was a deist who believed in the argument from design, which deduced God’s existence from his marvelous Creation. He prized learning, though he admitted that the United States offered only limited institutional support for it; universities, academies, some libraries, and one learned society—the American Philosophical Society—were its only berths. Above all, people had to work—Americans labored with their heads but also with their hands. Leisure of the grandly aristocratic variety was impossible in the new country. Even wealthy Americans had farms, plantations, merchant houses, or professions to tend.
Franklin wanted to keep America as it was, characterized socially by that happy mediocrity he described. He feared that postwar Americans might welcome the reintroduction of aristocracy; he wished instead to abolish what inherited privileges remained in the country. To antislavery advocate Granville Sharp, Franklin deplored the custom of primogeniture, which gave property to the firstborn child or son. He agreed with Sharp that the law of “gavelkind,” which divided estates equally among all children, was entirely preferable and should spread.33
For the same reason, Franklin despised the new Society of the Cincinnati, which passed its membership to male descendants of officers of the Continental Army. To his daughter (his female heir, since he had effectively disinherited his loyalist son), Franklin sneered that the Cincinnati’s only value was that it demonstrated that “the Absurdity of descending Honours” was “capable of mathematical Demonstration.” A person had too many ancestors to treasure the blood of one. “A Man’s Son, for instance, is but half of his Family, the other half belonging to the Family of his Wife. His Son, too marrying into another Family, his Share in the Grandson is but a fourth.” “Thus in nine Generations,” Franklin concluded, “(no very great Antiquity for a Family), our present Chevalier of the Order of Cincinnatus’s Share in the then existing Knight, will be but a 512th part.” A total of 1,022 men and women had created the “knight”—how could one male ancestor matter most?34
Franklin’s denunciation of inherited status might have surprised his French friends, many of whom were aristocrats, but his was a common American sentiment in the 1780s. He emphasized his views in his autobiography after a British friend, Benjamin Vaughan, urged him, in 1783, to finish it. The work would be, Vaughan claimed, an “efficacious advertisement” for America and “tend to invite to it settlers of virtuous and manly minds.” When Franklin resumed writing in 1784, he indeed picked up at his and his fellow workingmen’s creation of the Library Company and his struggles to make his printing business a success. He insisted that he had “spent no time in Taverns, Games, or Frolicks”—an implicit warning to migrants who expected to be idle or frolicsome in America. Franklin seemed nostalgic. As he wrote, he decided to go home.35
HE HAD SPENT ten years in France and had seriously considered staying there. (In fact, he had contemplated marriage, both for himself and for Temple.) But Franklin ultimately chose to spend his last years in Philadelphia. The long journey back would have severely tested any seventy-nine year old, but this one had gout and a bladder stone so big he felt it migrate when he turned in bed. He could not have endured a jolting coach all the way to the coast—that would have been screamingly painful. So the king and queen sent a royal litter and smoothly paced mules. The loan was kind. And it was shrewd—the royals doubtless wished to avoid the bad publicity that might result should the famous American die in agony on a French roadside. On July 12, 1785, Benny Bache reported that his grandfather “ascended his litter” while a crowd at Passy kept “a mournful silence . . . only interrupted by sobs.” Once at Le Havre, Franklin and the entourage would take a channel boat for Southampton and then begin a sea passage for Philadelphia.36
It was quite an operation: a famous invalid, his two grandsons and grandnephew, their two tons of baggage—one disassembled printing press, one miniature of Louis XVI surrounded by diamonds (the king’s standard parting gift to an ambassador), three Angora cats, one crate of fruit trees, twenty-three of books, four of scientific instruments, and so on. There was also a hanger-on, Jean-Antoine Houdon, the sculptor who had rendered Franklin in marble.
Why was Houdon heading for the United States? Franklin had said Americans could not afford fine art. And Houdon, acknowledged as the best sculptor of the day and a fine talent indeed, was exactly the kind of person Franklin had said would be as out of place in America as silk sheets on a camp bed. Yet Houdon would execute several American commissions, including a daringly shirtless George Washington. The sculptor’s presence in the entourage showed Franklin’s conviction that he and those around him were exceptional. America was no haven for geniuses, unless they were on the order of Benjamin Franklin, who could go where he pleased with whoever pleased him.37
On July 24, the Franklin party crossed the channel. That notoriously choppy body of water did not disappoint: “All sick except my Grandfather,” Temple reported. Benny repeated the line—it must have been a rueful, much-repeated joke on everyone else. The old would-be sailor had sea legs. Franklin then refreshed himself at a saltwater bathing establishment in Southampton where the waters were so soothing that he floated and napped for almost an hour, remarking that it was “a thing I never did before.”38
From Southampton, Franklin and his grandsons went up to London. Several of Franklin’s oldest friends visited him there, and they promised to write or visit Philadelphia. But the Atlantic remained a formidable barrier. A very dear friend, Jonathan Shipley, the Bishop of St. Asaph, knew he would never see Franklin again; he stayed with him in London until the last minute. There was also a cool but cordial meeting with William Franklin, for whom Temple intended one of the Angoras. Alas, a servant managed to lose the cat (or sold it on the side) before the transfer. That pretty much summed up the family’s lack of sweet reconciliation: there were some rather oddly expressed good intentions but no resolutions. And then, on July 29, it was time to go back to America.
The westward passage, Franklin’s last Atlantic crossing, was probably his easiest. One can imagine that everyone on board took tender care of the famous passenger. He may even have conferred with the captain about their route. When the ship encountered another, Benny Bache recorded that it “proposed going to the no [r] th of the Azores and we to the south [, we] fearing the gulf stream, and he, the Algerines.” Certainly, Franklin traveled like an aristocrat, with attendants and plenty of comforts—none of the inedible food or peremptory mariners of previous voyages. The journey took forty-nine days but, to understand what this meant, we should review all of Franklin’s Atlantic crossings.
EASTWEST
1724: 49 days 1726: 83 days
1757: 28 days 1762: 38 days
1764: 33 days 1775: 45 days
1776: 39 days 1785: 49 days
His average westbound voyage lasted almost 54 days, whereas the average going the other way was only 37, a difference of 16.5 days, over two weeks. (The extremes were the agonizingly slow return from London in 1726 and the amazingly fast wartime crossing in 1757.) Franklin’s experience verified his point that something in the North Atlantic made its westbound traffic slower than the eastbound. Only the westward journey via Madeira, in 1762, beat the overall trend by avoiding the northernmost waters. And that route had been possible only because a truce prevented Spanish or French attacks on British ships.39
Franklin took advantage of the 1785 voyage to make his third set of readings of ocean temperature. His data were extensive. Clearly, he was determined not to lose the opportunity, deferred since 1776, to make a general statement about the Gulf Stream. He took readings for the forty-four days from July 29 to September 10, including the temperature of the air and water at eight
in the morning and six in the evening. He also always noted the ship’s position. On August 12, Franklin’s party must have noticed (or someone pointed out to them) that a ship’s officer calculated their position at noon, when the sun was at its zenith; Franklin thereafter made temperature readings three times a day, including noon.40
For his measurements, he surely relied on his spry grandsons, on his grandnephew (who recorded the data), and possibly on Houdon. Grandson Benny reported that he and the Frenchman braved the deck during an August gale, “contemplating the beauty of this spectacle.” Benny would “now and then” go below “to tie down the sick who were turned upside down” in their hammocks or berths. Bursting with the unsympathetic health of youth, alert, and maybe getting under foot as the crew fought the gale, Benjamin Franklin Bache now resembled an earlier incarnation of his grandfather.41
The young Benjamin Franklin could never have imagined the welcome Philadelphia gave him on September 14, 1785. As he sailed in, the ships in the harbor, even the British ones, showed their colors. Hundreds of people crowded the docks, church bells rang, and cannon roared. It was quite a contrast to Franklin’s first arrival in the city as an unkempt, hungry runaway. It rivaled the crowds and excitement he had seen for the Reverend George Whitefield, who had preached on the Court House steps in the 1740s, and for the Declaration of Independence, read on an astronomical platform before the State House in 1776. This time, the hullabaloo was all for him.
It was a relief to be home. Franklin described himself as “one, who, although he has crossed the Atlantic eight times, and made many smaller trips, does not recollect his having ever been at sea without taking a firm resolution never to go to sea again.” He was delighted to see friends and family, especially Sally Bache and her children.42
Yet Philadelphia must have been a shock to Franklin. He had spent not quite two of the preceding twenty years in America, and his idea of a city was London or Paris. He surely noticed that the mass of Philadelphians who had greeted him was dwarfed by the thousands of assembled Parisians with whom he had watched the ascent of the first manned balloon. Franklin had worked so hard to establish himself in the centers of European knowledge. What did home mean for him?
Philadelphia’s main advantage was its peace and quiet. Like his puritan ancestors, Franklin had crossed the ocean to get away from it all. In Paris, he had delighted in his importance. But his fame came at the old cost of the relentless demands of public service, and that was, in Paris, time-consuming. “Celebrity may for a while flatter one’s Vanity,” he had admitted to Ingenhousz, “but its Effects are troublesome”43
Franklin would be less troubled by fame at home. In the United States, he was not quite the idol he was in France. Nor, ironically, did he have as great a reputation in the new republic as he enjoyed in its vanquished enemy, Great Britain. Franklin would learn of his diminished importance when he requested reimbursement for his expenses in Paris. None ever came, nor did any official praise or thanks for his service. As in 1776, when he was ignored by his bedfellow John Adams, Franklin was remarkably alone with his philosophy.
Because science was becoming somewhat more specialized, it was being divided from other realms of knowledge, including politics. Adams had already made this distinction when he conceded that Franklin was “a great philosopher” but denied that he was a true “legislator” for the Republic. By the 1780s, young Americans, even if concerned with the human sciences, did not assume they had to learn about physics and chemistry—or nature in any form—in order to talk about politics. And politics were the focus of American life in the 1780s. Propertied men were very busy reworking state constitutions. Other pursuits, including the sciences, were pushed aside. Men with legal training and an extensive knowledge of political systems—such as Adams—were the center of attention.44
But the world had not changed altogether. The result was that, even though he was slighted in his home country, Franklin was still called on to serve his state and nation. He was annoyed that the political frenzy prevented his retirement yet again. From Paris, he had told a British friend, “I am going home to go to bed! ” But someone or other kept hiding his nightshirt. He had scarcely unpacked before he was drafted as head of Pennsylvania’s Executive Council—the governor, in effect. “I had on my return some right,” Franklin complained to other friends, “to expect repose; and it was my intention to avoid all public business.” Pennsylvanians had other plans. “I find myself harnessed again in their service.... They engrossed the prime of my life. They have eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to pick my bones.”45
And most of them ignored his strong suit, natural philosophy. As Franklin himself had predicted, the nation’s happy mediocrity did not support learning. Americans had renounced the complex, hierarchical society that Britain had extended over the Atlantic. They now had neither monarch nor aristocrats to act as patrons. Until 1789, there was no central government that could invest in anything other than the basics, such as warships or postal riders. And the individual states, particularly after the war, had no resources for luxuries. “Philosophy,” Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush lamented, “does not here, as in England, walk abroad in silver slippers.”46
In America, philosophers found refuge in two learned societies. The American Philosophical Society took seriously its status as the oldest learned society in the United States. Created in 1768 under colonial law, it had been incorporated anew in 1780 as part of a new political order. Meanwhile, John Adams had been the prime mover for the creation of Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 1780. But neither society shone very brightly. After its brilliant first volume of Transactions, showcasing colonial observations of the 1769 transit of Venus, the APS had produced nothing. The fledgling AAAS was even further behind.47
The inertia confirmed Old World prejudice. Europeans may finally have recognized the political independence of the United States, but they still rightly assumed its cultural dependence on the Old World. In 1774, the Abbé Raynal had come out and said what everyone was thinking, that it was “astonishing that America has not yet produced a good poet, an able mathematician, a man of genius in a single art, or a single science.” A few years later, Raynal met Franklin, who disproved his words but proved his point: geniuses defied categorization. If Franklin was an exception, he was the exception who proved the rule.48
Americans resented European criticism, and members of U.S. learned societies tried to refute it. The United States had one significant advantage—North America’s natural bounty. If they were willing to make the effort, Americans could use science to prove themselves twice over: they lived amid nature of stunning expanse and variety, and they could intellectually master that natural array, informing the world of new species and new phenomena.
In their 1780 act of incorporation, members of the APS defiantly claimed that the land “offers to these United States one of the richest subjects of cultivation, ever presented to any people upon earth.” With less justification, the APS asserted that the “public spirited gentlemen” who founded the society, “to the great credit of America, have extended their reputation so far, that men of the first eminence in the republic of letters in the most civilized nations in Europe, have done honour to their publications, and desired to be enrolled among their members.” This claim pretended that the singular gentleman who actually had done these things—Benjamin Franklin—was somehow representative of the plural gentlemen who, by and large, stood in his shadow.49
Members of the APS continued to keep in touch with European centers of learning. Indeed, the society’s main business was processing news from abroad. In June 1784, the APS fellows had considered the Montgolfier description of balloons and hoped to send up an “Air Ballon by subscription.” The society politely noted, on August 12, 1784, that “the marquis la Fayette entertained” it with an account of mesmerism. (Unfortunately for Lafayette, the Académie des Sciences’s denunciation of the theory of animal magnetism arrived four months late
r.) The society was also gearing up to solicit new corresponding members. One was the Comte de Vergennes, who expressed his “Honour” at being rewarded for his assistance to the Republic by being selected. Such members were essential both as conduits of information and as potential donors—lacking American aristocrats, American men of science had to seek notables abroad.50
Franklin was, usefully, both an American and a European. The APS fellows had faithfully reelected him president in each year of his absence. They were ecstatic, incredulous that he had finally returned to them. Two days after his return, the APS formed a committee “to invite the Honourable Doctor Franklin, to take his Seat as President.” On September 27, two weeks and a day after his arrival in Philadelphia, Franklin went to the society. “It reflects Honour on Philosophy,” declaimed the official address to him, “when one, distinguished for his deep Investigations and many valuable Improvements in it, is known to be equally distinguished for his Philanthropy, Patriotism, and liberal attachment to the Rights of human Nature.” By returning to the society, Franklin added “to the Institution much Lustre in the eyes of all the World.” He gave “grateful Acknowledgments” of the society’s compliments.51
Then, everyone settled down to hear some letters and reports. Rather marvelously, these included a communication on “the East India manner of writing” and John Fitch’s model and drawing of a boat powered by a “Steam Engine.” Empire and expansion remained at the heart of the sciences. Americans were even interested in the British empire from which they had just removed themselves. Distant India could not but continue to fascinate them. Distance itself remained a compelling problem, though steam power offered a new way to conquer it.52
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