13. “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,” 1725, Papers 1:58; Campbell 101–3.
14. Autobiography 70; Campbell 91–135.
15. Autobiography 92; Poor Richard Improved, 1753; Papers 4:406. See also Alfred Owen Aldridge, “The Alleged Puritanism of Benjamin Franklin,” in Lemay Reappraising 370; Aldridge Nature; Campbell 99. For good descriptions of the evolution of Franklin’s religious thought, see Walters; Buxbaum. See also chapter 7 of this book.
16. Autobiography 63.
17. “Plan of Conduct,” 1726, Papers 1:99; Autobiography 183.
18. “Journal of a Voyage,” July 22–Oct. 11, 1726, Papers 1:72–99. The idea that “affability and sociability” were core tenets of the Enlightenment is explained well in Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1991), 215–6.
Chapter 4
1. Autobiography 64. For overviews of life in Philadelphia, see Carl Bridenbaugh and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942); E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New York: Free Press, 1979). For a good overview of Franklin’s work as a printer, see C. William Miller, Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Printing 1728–1766 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974).
2. The chronology in the Autobiography is not quite correct. Denham took ill in the spring of 1727 but did not die until July 1728. Lemay/Zall Autobiography 41.
3. Autobiography 69; Brands 87–89; Van Doren 71–73.
4. Autobiography 71–79; Brands 91; Lemay/Zall Autobiography 49. The Quaker history was written by William Sewel. Franklin records that he published forty sheets of folio, which would have been 160 pages, but in fact he produced 178 pages and Keimer the remaining 532 pages.
5. Last Will and Codicil, June 23, 1789, Papers CD 46:u20.
6. Whitfield J. Bell Jr., Patriot Improvers (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999), vol. 1; Autobiography 72–73; “On Conversation,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 15, 1730. Dale Carnegie, in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People(1937; New York: Pocket Books, 1994), draws on Franklin’s rules for conversation. Carnegie’s first two rules for “How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking” are: “The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it” and “Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, ‘You’re wrong.’ ” In his section on “How to Change People without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment,” he instructs: “Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly” and “Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.” Carnegie’s book has sold more than 15 million copies.
7. Autobiography 96; “Rules for a Club for Mutual Improvement,” 1727; “Proposals and Queries to be Asked the Junto,” 1732.
8. BF to Samuel Mather, May 17, 1784; Van Doren 75; Cotton Mather, “Religious Societies,” 1724; Lemay/Zall Autobiography 47n. See also Mitchell Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
9. Autobiography 74; American Weekly Mercury, Jan. 28, 1729 (Shortface and Careful); Papers 1:112; Brands 101; Van Doren 94; Sappenfield 49–55.
10. Busy-Body #1, American Weekly Mercury, Feb. 4, 1729; Sappenfield 51; The Universal Instructor…and Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 25, Mar. 13, 1729; Papers 1:115–27.
11. Busy-Body #3, American Weekly Mercury, Feb. 18, 1729; Busy-Body #4, American Weekly Mercury, Feb. 25, 1789; Busy-Body #8, American Weekly Mercury, Mar. 28, 1729. Lemay’s masterly notes in the Library of America’s edition of Franklin’s Writings (p. 1524) describe which parts Franklin wrote and what was withdrawn in Busy-Body #8.
12. “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency,” Apr. 3, 1729; Autobiography 77–78. Franklin draws on William Petty’s 1662 work, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/˜econ/ugcm/3113/ petty/taxes.txt.
13. “The Printer to the Reader,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 2, 1729.
14. “Printer’s Errors,” Pa. Gazette, Mar. 13, 1730.
15. Pa. Gazette, Mar. 19, 1730; Autobiography 75.
16. “Apology for Printers,” Pa. Gazette, June 10, 1731; Clark 49; Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America (1810; Albany: Munsell, 1874), 1: 237.
17. Pa. Gazette, June 17, 24, July 29, 1731, Feb. 15, June 19, July 3, 1732.
18. Pa. Gazette, Oct. 24, 1734; not in the Yale Papers, but later ascribed to the Franklin canon by Lemay, see Lib. of Am. 233–34.
19. Pa. Gazette, Sept. 7, 1732. For an analysis of Franklin’s journalistic treatment of crime and scandal, see Ronald Bosco, “Franklin Working the Crime Beat,” Lemay Reappraising, 78–97.
20. Pa. Gazette, Sept. 12, 1732, Jan. 27, 1730.
21. “Death of a Drunk,” Pa. Gazette, Dec. 7, 1732; “On Drunkenness,” Feb. 1, 1733; “A Meditation on a Quart Mugg,” July 19, 1733; “The Drinker’s Dictionary,” Jan. 13, 1737. In Silence Dogood #12 (Sept. 10, 1722), Franklin had his sassy widow defend moderate drinking and condemn excess, drawing on Richard Steele’s essays in London’s Tatler. See Robert Arnor, “Politics and Temperance,” in Lemay Reappraising, 52–77.
22. Pa. Gazette, Sept. 23, 1731.
23. Autobiography 34, 80, 72; “Anthony Afterwit,” Pa. Gazette, July 10, 1732.
24. Autobiography 64, 81; Faÿ 135; Brands 106–9; Lopez Private, 23–24; BF to Joseph Priestley, Sept. 19, 1772; Poor Richard’s, 1738. The first volume of the Papers 1:1xii in 1959 said Deborah was born in Philadelphia in 1708, but that thinking was revised after Francis James Dallett published a paper the following year called “Dr. Franklin’s In-Laws,” which is cited in Papers 8:139. Dallett’s evidence indicates that Deborah was born in 1705 or 1706, maybe in Philadelphia but more likely in Birmingham, from which she emigrated to Philadelphia with her family in about 1711. See Edward James et al., Notable American Women 1607–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1:663, entry on Deborah Franklin by Leonard Labaree, the initial editor of the Yale Papers. If she did cross the ocean at age 5 or so, it may have caused her lifelong aversion to ever crossing (or even seeing) it again. For a good analysis, see J. A. Leo Lemay, “Recent Franklin Scholarship,” PMHB 76.2 (Apr. 2002): 336.
25. BF to “honoured mother” Abiah Franklin, Apr. 12, 1750; Lemay Internet Doc for 1728; Parton 1:177, 198–99; Randall 43; Skemp William, 4–5, 10; Brands 110, 243; Gentleman’s Magazine (1813), in Papers 3:474n. The Yale editors of Franklin’s papers say in volume 1 (published in 1959) that William was born circa 1731, but by volume 3 (published in 1961) they note the controversy (Papers 3:89n) and suggest that perhaps he was born earlier; however, in their edition of the Autobiography, published in 1964, they reiterate “circa 1731” as the year of his birth.
26. Van Doren 93, 231; Brands 110, 243. See also Charles Hart, “Who Was the Mother of Franklin’s Son?” PMHB (July 1911): 308–14; Paul Leicester Ford, Who Was the Mother of Franklin’s Son? (New York: Century, 1889).
27. Van Doren 91; Lopez Private, 22–23; Clark 41; Roberts letter, Papers 2:370n.; Bell, Patriot Improvers, 1:277–80.
28. Autobiography 92; BF to JM, Jan. 6, 1727; Poor Richard’s, 1733.
29. “Anthony Afterwit,” Pa. Gazette, July 10, 1732; “Celia Single,” Pa. Gazette, July 24, 1732.
30. “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 8, 1730, Lib. of Am. 151. This piece is not included by the Yale editors, but Lemay and others subsequently attributed it to Franklin.
31. Lopez Private, 31–37; BF to James Read, Aug. 17, 1745; “A Scolding Wife,” Pa. Gazette, July 5, 1733.
32. BF to Deborah Franklin, Feb. 19, 1758; “I Sing My Plain Country Joan,” 1742; Francis James Dallett, “Dr. Franklin’s In-Laws,” cited in Papers 8:139; Leonard Labaree, “Deborah Franklin,” in Notable American Women 1607–1950, ed. Edward James et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971), 1:663.
33. Autobiography 112; BF to JM, Jan. 13, 1772; Pa. Gazette, Dec. 23–30, 1736; Van Doren 126; Clark
43; Brands 154–55. Franklin had editorialized in favor of smallpox inoculations in his paper before Francis was born: Pa. Gazette, May 14, 28, 1730, Mar. 4, 1731.
34. “The Death of Infants,” Pa. Gazette, June 20, 1734, ascribed to the Franklin canon by Lemay, Lib. of Am. 228.
35. Franklin writes in the Autobiography (p. 92) that he was “educated as a Presbyterian,” but the Puritan sect in Boston into which he was baptized in fact became what is now called the Congregational Church. Both Presbyterians and Congregationalists generally follow the doctrines of John Calvin. See Yale Autobiography 145n. For more on Jedediah Andrews, see Richard Webster, A History of the Presbyterian Church in America, from Its Origin until the Year 1760 (Philadelphia: J. M. Wilson, 1857), 105–12. For more on Franklin and the Presbyterians, see chapter 5, n. 7.
36. Autobiography 92–94.
37. Deism can be an amorphous concept. Despite his qualms about the consequences of unenhanced deism, Franklin did not shy from the word in labeling his beliefs. I use the word, as he did, to describe the Enlightenment-era philosophy that (1) rejects the belief that faith depends on received or revealed religious doctrines; (2) does not emphasize an intimate or passionate spiritual relationship with God or Christ; (3) believes in a rather impersonal Creator who set in motion the universe and all its laws; (4) holds that reason and the study of nature tells us all we can know about the Creator. See Walters; “Franklin’s Life in Deism,” in Campbell 110–26; Kerry Walters, The American Deists (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992); Buxbaum; A. Owen Aldridge, “Enlightenment and Awakening in Franklin and Edwards,” in Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, ed. Barbara Oberg and Harry Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27–41; Aldridge, “The Alledged Puritanism of Benjamin Franklin,” in Lemay Reappraising, 362–71; Aldridge, Nature; Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia; Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America (New York: Viking, 1973); Donald Meyer, “Franklin’s Religion,” in Critical Essays, ed. Melvin Buxbaum (Boston: Hall, 1987), 147–67; Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Mark Noll, America’s God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
38. “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” Nov. 20, 1728, Papers 1:101.
39. Walters 8, 84–86. Walters’s book is the most direct argument that Franklin was not espousing a literal polytheism. The opposite view is expressed in A. Owen Aldridge’s comprehensive Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God. Read figuratively, Franklin seems to be saying that different denominations and religions each have their own gods: there is the God of the Puritans, who is different from Franklin’s own God, or the God of the Methodists, of the Jews, of the Anabaptists, or, for that matter, of the Hindus, Muslims, and ancient Greeks. These different gods arise because of differing perspectives (producing what Walters calls Franklin’s “theistic perspectivism”). Franklin believed that the idea of a God as Creator and first cause is common to all religions, and thus can be assumed true. But different religions and sects add their own expressions and concepts, none of which we can really know to be true or false, but that lead to the existence of a multiplicity of gods that allow a more personal relationship with their believers. This interpretation com-ports with Franklin’s comment in his essay that these gods can sometimes disappear as times and cultures evolve. “It may be that after many ages, they are changed and others supply their places.”
40. “On the Providence of God in the Government of the World,” Papers 1:264. The Yale editors posit 1732 as its date. A. Owen Aldridge, Leo Lemay, and others persuasively argue, based on a letter Franklin later wrote about it, that it was actually 1730; BF to Benjamin Vaughan, Nov. 9, 1779. See Aldridge Nature, 34–40; Lemay Internet Doc for 1730. The Library of America edition of Franklin’s writings accepts the 1730 date. Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), 70; John Calvin, Commentaries, “On Paul’s Epistle to the Romans” (1539), www.ccel.org/c/calvin/comment3/comm_vol38/htm/TOC.htm.
41. Walters 98; Campbell 109–11; Aldridge Nature, 25–38; BF to John Franklin, May 1745.
42. “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly,” Pa. Gazette, Oct. 22, 1730.
43. BF to Josiah and Abiah Franklin, Apr. 13, 1738. When his beloved sister Jane also conveyed her misgivings about his emphasis on good works rather than prayer, he offered a similar mix of explanation and mild reassurance. “I am so far from thinking that God is not to be worshipped that I have composed and wrote a whole book of devotions for my own use,” he says, and then urges tolerance. “There are some things in your New England doctrines and worship which I do not agree with, but I do not therefore condemn them…I would only have you make me the same allowances.” BF to JM, July 28, 1743.
44. Autobiography 94–105, 49; D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1923), 10–16, xroads. virginia.edu/˜HYPER/LAWRENCE/dhlch02.htm.
45. Randy Cohen, “Best Wishes,” New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2002; David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 64; Morgan Franklin, 23; Autobiography 104.
46. Autobiography 94–105, 49; Sappenfield 187–88; Lopez Private, 24; Lopez Cher, 277. The French friend was the scientist Pierre-Georges Cabanis, Complete Works (Paris: Bossange frères, 1825), 2:348.
47. Cotton Mather, “Two Brief Discourses,” 1701; A. Whitney Griswold, “Two Puritans on Prosperity,” 1934, in Sanford 42; Campbell 99, 166–74; Ziff, Puritanism in America, 218; Aldridge, “The Alleged Puritanism of Benjamin Franklin,” in Lemay Reappraising, 370; Lopez Private, 104. Perry Miller notes: “This child of New England Puritanism simply dumped the whole theological preoccupation overboard; but, not the slightest ceasing to be a Puritan, went about his business”; see “Ben Franklin, Jonathan Edwards,” Major Writers of America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), 86. See chapter 4, n. 37 for sources on deism and the Enlightenment.
48. See chapter 18 for details of the Romantic-era view of Franklin.
49. John Updike, “Many Bens,” The New Yorker, Feb. 22, 1988, 115; Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 26.
The strongest argument that Franklin was a pure exemplar of the Enlightenment is in historian Carl Becker’s masterful essay on him in the Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1933), in which he called Franklin “a true child of the Enlightenment, not indeed of the school of Rousseau, but of Defoe and Pope and Swift, of Fontenelle and Montesquieu and Voltaire. He spoke their language, although with a homely accent…He accepted without question all the characteristic ideas [of the Enlightenment]: its healthy, clarifying skepticism; its passion for freedom and its humane sympathies; its preoccupation with the world that is evident to the senses; its profound faith in common sense, in the efficacy of Reason for the solution of human problems and the advancement of human welfare.” See also Stuart Sherman, “Franklin and the Age of Enlightenment,” in Sanford.
50. Autobiography 139; Albert Smyth, American Literature (Philadelphia: Eldredge, 1889), 20; BF to Benjamin Vaughan, Nov. 9, 1779; BF to DF, June 4, 1765. For additional words of disgust about metaphysics, see BF to Thomas Hopkinson, Oct. 16, 1746. For a fuller assessment of Franklin’s religious and moral beliefs, see the final chapter of this book. The ideas here draw in part from the following: Campbell 25, 34–36, 137, 165, 169–72, 286; Charles Angoff, Literary History of the American People (New York: Knopf, 1931), 295–310; Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1934), 3–7; Lopez Private, 26; Alan Taylor, “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” The New Republic, Mar. 19, 2001, 39; Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt, 1930), 1:178; David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” The Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. “In its naive simplicity this hardly seems worthy
of study as a philosophy,” writes Herbert Schneider, “yet as a moral regime and outline of the art of virtue, it has a clarity and a power that command respect.” Herbert Schneider, The Puritan Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 246.
51. Alan Taylor, “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” 39.
52. Poor Richard’s 1733–58, by Franklin, plus editor’s note in Papers 1:280; Faÿ 159–73; Sappenfield 121–77; Brands 124–31. There was also a real Richard Saunders who appears in the account books as a customer of Franklin’s. Van Doren 107.
53. Pa. Gazette, Dec. 28, 1732.
54. Poor Richard’s, 1733; Autobiography 107.
55. Poor Richard’s, 1734, 1735; Titan Leeds’s American Almanack, 1734; Jonathan Swift, “Predictions for the Ensuing Year by Isaac Bickerstaff, esq.,” 1708, ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext97/bstaf10.txt. Swift’s piece was a parody of an almanac by John Partridge; he predicted Partridge’s death, and then engaged in a running jest similar to the one Franklin perpetrated on Leeds.
56. Poor Richard’s, 1734, 1735, 1740; Papers 2:332n; Sappenfield 143; Brands 126.
57. Poor Richard’s, 1736, 1738, 1739. See also the verses by “Bridget Saunders, my duchess” about lazy men in 1734 (“God in his mercy may do much to save him/ But woe to the poor wife whose lot is to have him”), which “Poor Richard” prints as a response to his own 1733 verses about lazy women.
58. Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy, July 1870, www.twainquotes.com/Galaxy/187007e.html ; Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me(New York: Random House, 1959), 6.
59. For an exhaustive study of the provenance of “early to bed and early to rise” see Wolfgang Mieder, “Early to Bed and Early to Rise,” in the Web-based journal De Proverbio, www.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/DP,1,1,95/FRANKLIN.html. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1882; Boston: Little, Brown, 2002) in its thirteenth edition (1955) and previous editions attributes the phrase to Franklin but also cites John Clarke’s Proverbs (1639); it drops the reference to Clarke in subsequent editions.
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Page 61