Benjamin Franklin: The Self-Made Enlightenment Man

In the fall of 1723, a runaway apprentice printer named Benjamin Franklin was standing on the wharf at Market Street in Philadelphia, with three puffy rolls of bread under his arms and a handful of copper coins in his pocket, trying to look less hungry than he was. A woman at a nearby window noticed him and laughed at the absurdity of his appearance. “I have been the more particular,” Franklin wrote in his Autobiography some fifty years later, “in describing the Article of my Dress, as it was a Matter of the greatest Vanity, and I had not the least Idea of ever appearing in the World.” He was seventeen. He had walked from Boston in three weeks, working his passage on a sloop, eating badly, and not at all sure what he would do when he arrived. The woman in the window — Deborah Read, whom he would later marry, after the inconvenient death of her first fiancé and the inconvenient persistence of a colonial bigamy law — was, in his own account, the first Philadelphia resident ever to make him feel ridiculous. It was a useful education.

Franklin is the most thoroughly mythologized of the American founders, and the mythology is not entirely his fault. The Autobiography he wrote in the last twenty years of his life — addressed to his son William, who was, by that time, a loyalist and an embarrassment — is, in form and tone, the founding text of the American success story, and it has been used as a self-improvement manual ever since. The man underneath the book is, in most respects, more interesting and more troublesome than the book.

The Printer’s Boy

Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, the fifteenth of seventeen children (only eight of whom survived to adulthood) of Josiah Franklin, a candle and soap maker with strong Puritan leanings. He had two years of formal schooling and was apprenticed at twelve to his older brother James, a printer and the publisher of the New-England Courant. The apprenticeship was a brutal one. James beat him, starved him, and kept him working sixteen-hour days. Benjamin ran away in September 1723, eventually making his way to Philadelphia, where he found work as a printer’s compositor and, by 1728, had set up a printing house of his own in partnership with Hugh Meredith.

The two years before the partnership — 1724–1726, spent in London, where he had been cheated by a colonial merchant who had promised him work — were the most educational of Franklin’s youth. London was then the largest, richest, and most literate city in Europe, and Franklin arrived in it with no money, no connections, and very little idea what to do. He worked for two years in the printing houses of the capital — Palmer’s on Bartholomew Close, Watts’s near Lincoln’s Inn Fields — and was thrown, for the first time in his life, into the company of men who had read everything and produced little. The experience hardened his already strong sense of the difference between the work of the hands and the work of the head. The first could be done well or badly; the second, in the colonies, was mostly being done badly.

The Pennsylvania Gazette, the Poor Richard’s Almanack, and the Junto, the small discussion club he founded in 1727, were all products of the years between 1728 and 1748, the period in which Franklin made himself the most successful printer in the Middle Colonies. The Almanack, published annually from 1732 to 1758, sold an average of 10,000 copies a year — extraordinary for a colonial publication — and made Franklin rich enough to retire from active printing by the time he was forty-two. The Junto, twelve working tradesmen and one clergyman who met on Friday evenings to discuss “Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy,” was the seed of the American Philosophical Society (founded 1743), the Union Fire Company (1736), and the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), the first subscription library in the British colonies.

The institutional history of colonial America is, in significant part, the history of societies that began as Junto spinoffs.

The Scientist

The famous kite experiment, performed in June 1752 in a field outside Philadelphia, was a much smaller event than the mythology suggests. Franklin did not “discover” electricity. He had been thinking about it for at least six years, and the letters he had published in 1750 and 1751 in the Gentleman’s Magazine had already laid out the hypothesis he wanted to test: that lightning was an electrical phenomenon, and that pointed metal rods attached to buildings could conduct it harmlessly into the ground. The kite, with a metal key tied to the hemp string, was, in his own careful description, an instrument of confirmation rather than discovery. The man who should have been electrocuted by the experiment, and the experimenters in France who were electrocuted while trying to repeat it, were lucky; Franklin was careful.

The science is interesting, but the more interesting thing is what Franklin did with it. He invented the lightning rod, declined to patent it, and wrote one of the most successful pieces of scientific public relations in the eighteenth century: the 1751 letter to the Royal Society describing the experiments in plain English, with no mathematics and a great deal of practical advice. The Society, which had ignored his earlier letters, translated and reprinted the paper and awarded him the Copley Medal in 1753. The trick — making natural philosophy useful to working men, and useful to working men in language they could read — was a deliberate rhetorical strategy, and it was the strategy of the entire Enlightenment applied to one specific case. The lightning rod was a model of the Salon science that Franklin was helping to invent, in which the man of letters explained the discoveries of the laboratory to the man of affairs.

Franklin’s other great scientific contribution — the discovery that the electrical fluid is conserved, in a one-fluid theory of positive and negative charge — has been the subject of a long priority dispute with the French chemist and abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet, who advanced a two-fluid theory in 1746. The dispute was ugly and personal, and it confirmed Franklin in the conviction that national rivalries in science were, in the long run, bad for science. By the time of his second London visit, in 1757, he had become a kind of unofficial ambassador of the international scientific republic, an early example of the “soft power” that would later be the special pride of the American republic.

The Politician and Diplomat

Franklin’s public career divides into two more or less separate parts: a colonial career (1751–1774) in which he was the most important American in the Pennsylvania assembly and the colonies’ chief lobbyist in London, and a revolutionary career (1775–1790) in which he became, in turn, a member of the Second Continental Congress, the principal American diplomat in France, and an elder statesman of the new republic. The two careers were not equally successful. In the first, Franklin was a brilliant polemicist and a useful fixer; in the second, he was a brilliant celebrity and a difficult colleague.

His post-1776 career in France is the most thoroughly studied and the most thoroughly entertaining. He arrived at Passy in December 1776, in a fur cap and a plain brown coat, and proceeded to become the most popular American in the history of French fashion. The fur cap was an immediate sensation; it was imitated by the Marquis de Lafayette, by the queen herself, and by a generation of French women who wanted to look as wise as the man from Pennsylvania. The plain coat was a calculated effect. The fur cap was not. Franklin understood, in a way that John Adams never did, that diplomacy in 1778 was as much a matter of self-presentation as of negotiation, and that the Americans’ most valuable asset in France was the image of a man who had not come from Versailles.

The treaty of alliance of 1778, the peace of 1783, the recognition of American independence — these were Franklin’s real diplomatic achievements, and they were considerable. The Adams–Franklin quarrel of 1783, in which the two American envoys nearly came to blows in a Paris drawing room, is a useful reminder of how badly the new republic managed its early foreign policy. The historical scholarship on this period — the work of Jonathan Dull, of Catherine Prelinger, and of the great Franklin scholar Edmund Morgan — has generally been kinder to Franklin than to Adams, but it has also been more critical than the older heroic accounts.

The Philosophy

Franklin was not a philosopher in the European sense. He did not construct a system, did not enter into the quarrels of the schools, and was mildly contemptuous of the metaphysics that was being written in the German universities in his later years. He was, however, a serious natural philosopher with strong opinions about the relationship between virtue and happiness, and he was a political thinker whose writings on slavery and on the limits of British imperial authority were a substantial contribution to the moral arguments of the Revolutionary generation.

The Autobiography is the most famous of his writings, but it is the least typical. The Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), written in his London years and circulated but not published, was a hedonistic, deterministic, and faintly materialist work that was, in some ways, a more honest statement of his early philosophical commitments than the Poor Richard persona he later cultivated. The 1725 dissertation is the text of a young man who had read Mandeville and was trying to write himself out of the consequences. The Autobiography is the text of an old man who had decided, for political reasons, to pretend he never wrote the 1725 dissertation.

The historical reputation has cycled. The 19th century knew Franklin as the printer, the almanac maker, the man who flew the kite. The early 20th century, following the work of Max Farrand and Vernon Parrington, recovered Franklin the politician and Franklin the moralist. The more recent biographical work — Edmund Morgan’s Benjamin Franklin (2002), Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Gordon Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004) — has recovered, in addition, Franklin the strategic actor, the man who used his own mythology as a tool, and who understood with a clarity that none of his contemporaries matched that the new republic would need, above all, a usable past.

A Judgement

Franklin is the most American of the major Enlightenment figures, in the sense that the American national self-conception is, more than any other, an Enlightenment self-conception that has been deliberately cultivated. The Autobiography is the script. The lighting rod is the prop. The fur cap at Passy is the costume. None of these was an accident, and none of them, in the long run, has been the most important thing he did. The most important thing he did was the postal system, the subscription library, the volunteer fire company — the small, unromantic, non-ideological work of constructing the institutional infrastructure of a republic. The man who built it was a more difficult, more brilliant, and more compromised figure than the mythology admits. The Autobiography, in its famous final paragraph, gives the old man instructing the young man to imitate Jesus, Socrates, and the great lawgivers of antiquity. It is an oddly modest conclusion from an oddly immodest life. Read in the light of the rest of the work, it is also an honest one.