BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BY EDMUND S. MORGAN
I just finished this delightful, short (300-page) biography of Benjamin Franklin.
Wow! How little I knew; how much I learned.
Of course, I had heard about his extraordinary curiosity, his scientific discoveries, his luminous writing. But I really had not appreciated the role he played in navigating relationships with Britain and then France, first in the path leading to the Revolutionary War and then the path to win the war and peace.
He spent years in Britain, where he became a highly respected intellectual, and then later years in France as he worked, successfully, to secure loans which were essential to the American victory.
In Britain, in the years leading inexorably to the Revolutionary War, he approached the subject as a British-American, trying to persuade the British government to rescind the taxes they were imposing, give the Colonies a significant degree of freedom, and not subject then to parliamentary rule. He warned them that if they did not do this, they were going to be giving up the most valuable colony they could ever have. They didn’t listen. He was right.
The striking out for independence was inevitable. The size of the United States, its strength, and eventual population made it a question of time. But it happened a lot sooner because of the intransigence of British leadership. It took a long while for Franklin to come to see that full independence needed to happen, and when he saw that, he was riveted on it with total focus.
Franklin would have preferred not to involve the French in supporting America in the fight against Britain but, practically, there was no choice. We needed French money in order to build the ships and provide supplies. Franklin secured the loans to do it.
*****
There is an extraordinary felicity in Morgan’s ability to describe Franklin. A few examples:
“People trusted him. And with trust came power, a power he never sought or at least gave no sign of seeking. What won in people’s trust and the power that accompanied it was his care to act the part of a foot soldier in campaigns where he was in fact the commanding officer. He made an asset out of an apparent weakness, the fact that he was not a good public speaker.”
I can identify with some of these same qualities.
Franklin was a product of his age and his view of different ethnicities. His focus was to have “Englishmen keep multiplying in America.” Why allow anyone else to come, he asked. “Why should the palatine boors (that is, Boers, peasant farmers) be suffered to swarm into our Settlements and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?
Wow. As we have long known, racial prejudice is not a newborn thing.
Franklin again and again asserted that the right way to govern was to recognize the importance of public opinion. In assessing the treaty to end the Revolutionary War, he believed it would not be merely a matter of hammering out the limits, boundaries and privileges of each party in a treaty. As Morgan writes, “There has to be trust. There had to be goodwill. Franklin knew that nations act in their own interest, but he also believed that it was in every nation’s interest to cultivate goodwill, just as France had cultivated American goodwill by its generosity.”
Franklin wrote presciently, “If you do not with the Peace recover the Affections of that People, it will not be a lasting or profitable one; nor will it afford you any Part of that Strength which you once had by your Union with them and might (if you had been wise enough to take Advice) have still retained as its Adoption.”
The War of 1812, which was to follow, amply bore out Franklin’s counsel, as wishful as one has to say it was at the time.
Franklin’s reputation today rests on his pragmatism, his down-to-earth realism in dealing with human relations on a day-to-day basis.
The venom with which our countries’ leaders attacked each other is a reminder that the assaults we hear today on character are not new.
John Adams, accusing Franklin of messing up the treaty wrote: “As if he had been conscious of the Laziness, Inactivity and real Insignificance of his advanced Age, he has considered every American Minister, who has come to Europe, as his natural enemy.”
James Madison reported to Jefferson at about the same time about John Adams’ conduct, writing that, “Congress yesterday received from Mr. Adams several letters…not remarkable for anything unless it be a display of his vanity, his prejudice against the French court and his venom against Doctor D. Franklin.”
Then there was this comment in a letter Franklin wrote to Livingston, assessing the character of John Adams: “I am persuaded, however, that he means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”
I appreciate Morgan’s conclusion about Franklin: “We may discover a man with a wisdom about himself that comes only to the great of heart. Franklin knew how to value himself and what he did without mistaking himself for something more than one man among many. His special brand of self-respect required him to honor his fellow men and women no less than himself. His way of serving a superior God was to serve them. He did it with a recognition of their human strengths and weaknesses as well as his own, in a spirit that another wise man in another century has called ‘the spirit which is not too sure it is right.’ It is a spirit that weakens the weak but strengthens the strong. It gave Franklin the strength to do what he incredibly did, as a scientist, a statesman and a man.”
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