PAUL WENTWORTH (ca. 1740–1793). Britain’s spymaster in France who recruited Edward Bancroft. Born in New Hampshire, moved to London in the 1760s, became rich on stocks and land purchases in Guyana, and met with Franklin in Paris in December 1777 to try to scuttle American treaty with France.
SAMUEL WHARTON (1732–1800). Philadelphia-born merchant. Moved to London in 1769 and became involved in land deal schemes and stock speculations with Thomas Walpole.
GEORGE WHITEFIELD (1714–1770). Evangelist. Joined the Wesley movement while at Pembroke College, Oxford. Made seven trips to America as one of the foremost of the Great Awakening revivalist preachers and was supported by Franklin in Philadelphia in 1739.
Chronology
1706 Born in Boston on Jan. 17 (Jan. 6, 1705, Old Style).
1714 Attends Boston Latin.
1715 Attends Brownell’s school.
1716 Begins working at father’s candle shop.
1718 Apprenticed to brother James.
1722 Writes Silence Dogood essays.
1723 Runs away to Philadelphia. Works for Keimer.
1724 Moves to London.
1725 “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain”
1726 Returns to Philadelphia. Works with Denham.
1727 Rejoins Keimer’s print shop.
1728 Opens his own print shop with Hugh Meredith.
1729 Writes Busy-Body essays. Buys Pennsylvania Gazette.
1730 Enters common-law marriage with Deborah Read. William born?
1731 Joins Freemasons. Founds library.
1732 Francis born. Launches Poor Richard’s Almanack.
1733 Moral perfection project.
1735 Controversy over preacher Hemphill.
1736 Clerk of Pennsylvania Assembly. Francis dies. Forms Union Fire Co.
1737 Made Philadelphia postmaster.
1739 Becomes friends with evangelist Whitefield.
1741 Launches General Magazine, which fails. Designs stove.
1743 Sarah (“Sally”) born. Launches American Philosophical Society.
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 (University of Pennsylvania).
1751 Electricity writings published in London. Elected to Pennsylvania Assembly.
1752 Kite and lightning experiment.
1753 Becomes joint postmaster for America. Carlisle Indian summit.
1754 French and Indian War begins. Albany Plan of Union.
1755 Supplies Gen. Braddock. Passes militia bill. Fights Proprietors.
1756 Night watchmen and street lighting bills passed.
1757 Leaves for London as agent. Writes “Way to Wealth” and last Poor Richard’s Almanack. Moves in with Mrs. Stevenson on Craven Street.
1758 Visits Ecton to research ancestry with William.
1759 Visits northern England and Scotland. English and American troops capture Quebec.
1760 Urges Britain to keep Canada. Privy Council gives partial victory in fight with Penns. Travels in England with William.
1761 Travels to Flanders and Holland with William.
1762 Returns to Philadelphia. William made royal governor of New Jersey, marries.
1763 Begins new Market Street house. 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 against Stamp Act in Parliament. Act repealed. Partnership with David Hall expires.
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 Showdown with Hillsborough. Begins Autobiography. Visits Ireland and Scotland. Meets son-in-law, Bache.
1772 Secretly sends purloined Hutchinson letters to Boston.
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.
1774 Cockpit showdown over Hutchinson letters. Dismissed as postmaster. Coercive Acts passed. Begins peace discussions with both Lord Chatham and Lord Howe. Deborah dies.
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. Canada mission. Declaration of Independence. Meets with Lord Howe on Staten Island. Goes to France with Temple and Benny.
1777 Settles in Passy, feted throughout Paris.
1778 Treaties of alliance and commerce with France. William released from captivity and moves to loyalist New York.
1779 Becomes sole minister to France. Salons of Mesdames Brillon and Helvétius. John Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard defeats the Serapis.
1780 Adams returns, then Franklin helps get him dismissed as commissioner. British capture Charleston.
1781 Adams returns to Paris again as minister to negotiate with Britain. Franklin is then appointed (with Jay and others) to join Adams in that commission. Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown.
1782 Negotiates, with Adams and Jay, peace treaty with Britain. William returns to London.
1783 Balloon flights.
1784 Mesmer commission. Polly Stevenson visits Passy.
1785 Last meeting with William. Returns to Philadelphia.
1786 Builds addition to Market Street house.
1787 Constitutional Convention. Elected president of Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.
1790 Dies on Apr. 17 at age 84.
Currency Conversions
Rough equivalents of eighteenth-century currencies in today’s value based on price index comparisons of a bundle of consumer products:
1706
The British pound was the standard currency in America.
£1 in 1706 had the same purchasing power as £104 (or $161) in 2002.
A fine ounce of gold cost £4.35.
1750
The British pound was still the standard currency in America, but some colonies (including Pennsylvania at Franklin’s behest) were printing paper currency denominated in pounds that varied somewhat in value.
£1 in 1750 had the same purchasing power as £103 (or $160) in 2002.
A fine ounce of gold cost £4.25.
1790
The dollar was becoming the standard currency in the United States, and an official exchange rate was established. The gold price of the pound remained fixed, but its consumer purchasing power had fallen.
The exchange rate was £1 equals $4.55 equals 23.5 French livres.
A fine ounce of gold cost £4.25 or $19.50.
£1 in 1790 had the same purchasing power as £70 in 2002.
$1 in 1790 had the same purchasing power as $19.26 in 2002.
The changes in purchasing power of the pound and dollar from 1790 are not comparable.
Sources: Economic History Services, eh.net/hmit ; John McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2001).
Acknowledgments
Alice Mayhew at Simon & Schuster has been a diligent editor and gracious friend for twenty years and, now, three books. Her detailed notes and valuable edits on all my manuscripts are treasured possessions. She has always been rigorous about, among other things, shaping a logical narrative, and her energy in handling this book was unflagging and deeply appreciated. Amanda Urban at ICM has likewise been a valued friend and agent for all these years. She read my earliest drafts and offered good suggestions and warm encouragement, as well as an occasional guest room in which to work.
To h
elp ensure that my facts were as correct as possible and that I did not inadvertently fail to give due citations, I hired Carole Le Faivre-Rochester to vet my manuscript, sources, and credit notes. For twenty-four years, she worked at the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin founded and which has done great work in preserving his papers, and she retired as the editor of that society in2001. She was industrious in digging out material and making useful suggestions.
One of the joys of working on Franklin was meeting the generous and humorous Claude-Anne Lopez, who was a longtime editor at Yale compiling his papers and is the author of many delightful books and articles about him. She graciously agreed to read parts of the manuscript and edited the three chapters on his years in France, about which she is both an expert and an enthusiast.
Ms. Lopez suggested that I try to dig out information about Edward Bancroft’s spying activities on Franklin. To help in that task, I hired Susan Ann Bennett, a researcher in London who, among other things, wrote “Benjamin Franklin of Craven Street” when she was a curator at the RSA (formerly, the Royal Society of Arts). I am very grateful for her diligent work, transcriptions, and intelligent sleuthing at the British Library, where some of Bancroft’s reports in code and invisible ink are stored.
I am also grateful to the editors at Yale who continue the task of producing what I think must be the greatest collection of anyone’s papers ever. Their thirty-seventh volume, which goes through August 1782, is due out at the same time as this book and should be bought by everyone interested in Franklin. They were gracious in letting me study their manuscript of that work as well as their early drafts of volumes 38, 39, and 40. I particularly enjoyed a vibrant lunch I had in New Haven with Ms. Lopez and some core members of the current team, including Ellen Cohen, Judith Adkins, Jonathan Dull, Karen Duval, and Kate Ohno.
Also at that lunch was the justly venerated Edmund Morgan, retired Sterling Professor of History at Yale, who had written his own wonderful book analyzing Franklin and his papers. Professor Morgan has been kindly, beneficent, generous, and exceedingly helpful in the tradition of our subject. He graciously offered to read parts of my manuscript, and he provided suggestions and encouragement about my theme and concluding chapter. I tried to take a different approach from his by writing a chronological narrative biography, but I do not pretend to have matched his insights. Those who find my book interesting, and more important those who don’t, should buy and read his, if they haven’t already.
Márcia Baliscano is the director of the Franklin House on Craven Street in London, soon to be (we all hope) a fitting museum. With enormous skill and intellectual rigor, along with a diligence that would have dazzled even Franklin, she painstakingly dissected my entire manuscript and made scores of invaluable suggestions. In addition, she was very helpful in hosting me on Craven Street, and she did her duty by energetically enlisting me and others to her cause. One of her board members is Lady Joan Reid, a great repository of Franklin information. I deeply appreciate her willingness to volunteer for the arduous task of reading my manuscript and being both meticulous and unflinching in her crusade to separate facts from lore. In doing so, she expended not only an enormous amount of time and intellectual energy, but also a huge pile of colored Post-it notes filled with suggestions. Someday, I hope, she will write a book about Franklin’s London circle of friends.
Part of the pleasure of writing about Franklin is meeting his aficionados. Foremost among them is a group called the Friends of Franklin, based in Philadelphia, which hosts lunches, organizes seminars, and publishes the delightful Franklin Gazette.(To join, go to www.benfranklin2006.org) I want to thank Kathleen DeLuca, the executive secretary, for her hospitality. The group is working with the Franklin Institute, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Pew Charitable Trust to organize a celebration and exhibition, under the direction of Connover Hunt, that will culminate with Franklin’s three hundredth birthday in January 2006.
I am deeply indebted to Strobe Talbott, who has long been a friend and inspiration. He helped to shape and carefully edit both The Wise Men, which I coathored in 1986, and a biography of Henry Kissinger that I published in 1992. This time, he volunteered again to read my manuscript, and he came back with a wealth of helpful suggestions and comments. Stephen Smith, one of the most deft editors I have ever known, also read the entire manuscript and offered useful perspectives and ideas. Evan Thomas, my coathor on The Wise Men, spotted some mistakes I made about John Paul Jones, about whom he has written a great book. Steven Weisman read a draft and provided very insightful suggestions. Many other friends have given wise counsel, among them: James Kelly, Richard Stengel, Priscilla Painton and Tim Smith, Elisabeth Bumiller, Andrew and Betsy Lack, David and Sherrie Westin.
Elliot Ravetz, my former assistant at Time, helped me get started by giving me my first collection of Franklin papers, inspired me later with a bust of Franklin, offered comments on my manuscript, and has been an earnest compatriot. I am also grateful to Tosca Laboy and Ashley Van Buren at CNN, who are both truly wonderful people.
My father and stepmother, Irwin and Julanne Isaacson, also read and edited my manuscript. They are, along with my late mother, Betsy Isaacson, the smartest people I have ever known.
Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Cathy, and daughter, Betsy. Cathy read through what I wrote with enormous care and was invaluable in sharpening the themes and spotting some problems. But that is merely a tiny fraction of what she did as my partner in this book and in life. As for Betsy, after a bit of prodding, she faithfully plowed through some of the manuscript. Parts of it she admitted were interesting (as befitting a 12-year-old, she liked the section on ballooning) and other parts (like that on the Constitutional Convention) she declared boring, which I guess was a help, especially to readers who were thus treated to shortened versions of a few of these sections. They both make everything not only possible but worthwhile.
None of these people, of course, deserve blame for any errors or lapses that I have undoubtedly made. In a May 23, 1785, letter to his friend George Whatley, Franklin said about his life, “I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping however that the errata of the last may be corrected.” I feel the same of this book.
Sources and
Abbreviations
Except where otherwise noted, Franklin’s writings cited are in the Franklin Papers edited at Yale (see below) and the CD-ROM by the Packard Humanities Institute.
In using Internet addresses, please note that the periods, commas, hyphens, and semicolons used below to separate entries should not be included as part of a URL.
Abbreviations Used in Source Notes
People
BF = Benjamin Franklin
DF = Deborah Franklin, wife
JM = Jane Franklin Mecom, sister
MS = Margaret Stevenson, London landlady
PS = Mary “Polly” Stevenson [Hewson], landlady’s daughter
RB = Richard Bache, son-in-law
SF = Sarah “Sally” Franklin [Bache], daughter
TF = [William] Temple Franklin, grandson
WF = William Franklin, son
Franklin’s Writings
Autobiography = The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
For the reader’s convenience, page citations refer to the most commonly available edition, the Signet Classic paperback (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001), which is primarily based on a version prepared by Max Farrand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).
There are more than 150 editions of this classic. The one that best shows his revisions is the “Genetic Text” edited by J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), which is also to be found in the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Lemay and Zall (New York: Norton, 1986), referred to in the notes below as the Lemay/Zall Autobiography and Norton Autobiography, respectively. The authoritative edition produced by Leo
nard Labaree and the other editors of the Franklin Papers at Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), referred to below as the Yale Autobiography, is based directly on Franklin’s handwritten manuscript and includes useful annotations and a history of various versions.
Searchable electronic versions of the autobiography can be found on the Internet at ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/index.htm ; cedarcottage.com/eBooks/ benfrank.rtf ; earlyamerica.com/lives/franklin/index.html ; odur.let.rug.nl/˜usa/B/ bfranklin/frank.htm ; etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Fra2Aut.html ; eserver.org/books/franklin/.
Lib. of Am. = Benjamin Franklin Writings
with notes by J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987). This 1,560-page volume has an authoritative collection of Franklin’s most important writings along with source notes and annotations. It includes important revisions to the Franklin canon by Lemay that update the work of the Yale editors of Franklin’s papers. A searchable electronic version of much of the text is on the Internet at www.historycarper.com/resources/twobf1/contents.htm.
Pa. Gazette = The Pennsylvania Gazette
Searchable electronic versions are on the Internet at www.accessible.com/ about.htm ; etext.lib.virginia.edu/pengazet.html ; www.historycarper.com/re sources/ twobf2/pg29-30.htm.
Papers = The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
(New Haven: Yale, 1959–). This definitive and extraordinary series of annotated volumes, produced at Yale in conjunction with the American Philosophical Society, was begun under Leonard Labaree. Recent members of the distinguished team of editors include Ellen Cohn, Judith Adkins, Jonathan Dull, Karen Duval, Leslie Lindenauer, Claude-Anne Lopez, Barbara Oberg, Kate Ohno, and Michael Sletcher. By 2003, the team had reached volume 37, which goes through August1782. All correspondence and writings cited below, unless otherwise noted, refer to versions in the Papers. See: www.yale.edu/franklinpapers.
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Page 59