'Benjamin Franklin'
by Edmund S. Morgan
Yale University Press, $24.95
Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the best known, and least understood, of the American founding fathers.
To the popular imagination, Franklin is remembered as a portly man who shook the world with a novel electrical experiment and authored numerous witty aphorisms. But his contributions to the political, social and scientific history of America can scarcely be overstated.
Franklin played a pivotal role in our nation's birth - he represented the colonies in London in the stormy years leading to the American Revolution. He returned to America to sign the Declaration of Independence. He negotiated a critical alliance with the French, and even negotiated the terms of American independence.
Edmund S. Morgan brings Franklin's larger accomplishments alive in his new biography, "Benjamin Franklin," a thoughtful and imaginative volume that vividly recounts Franklin's astonishing achievements.
Morgan, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2000, is chairman of the voluminous Franklin Papers. He describes the book as "a character sketch that got out of control."
It's an apt description. Unlike the popular recent biographies of Lyndon Johnson or John Adams, Morgan doesn't comprehensively catalogue Franklin's life. He omits almost entirely any examination of Franklin's personal life, mentioning only in passing Franklin's illegitimate son (whose mother has never been identified) and his wife who stayed behind in Pennsylvania during the long years that Franklin spent abroad.
Rather, Morgan draws almost entirely from Franklin's own writings to weave a comparatively brief (314 pages) essay on his most important contributions to his city, nation and world. It's a refreshing focus on Franklin's larger contributions. Morgan's writing, fluid and thoughtful, narrates Franklin's life in the present tense, which brings a compelling immediacy to the text.
Franklin was a printer by trade. His immense curiosity led him to constantly experiment on the world around him. He experimented with the effect of oil on water, demonstrated how the temperature of the Atlantic revealed the course of the Gulf Stream, mapped the movement of storms and redesigned common stoves.
Franklin's experiments with electricity, conducted from 1748-50, were his most famous. Begun at age 40, the experiments explained the fundamental nature of lightning and electricity to a world that barely understood it. He proposed an experiment to demonstrate that lightning was actually an electrical charge, similar to static electricity (the only kind known at the time). This one experiment alone brought Franklin worldwide fame.
Sent to England to represent Pennsylvania in 1757, he was later appointed by other colonies and served, for practical purposes, as the "American" ambassador. In London, he earned fast friends, enormous respect and severe British approbation as the point of contact between restless colonies yearning for freedom and an angry imperial government determined to teach the colonials a lesson. Franklin sarcastically published in response a pamphlet entitled "Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One."
Franklin was convinced that American growth would lead to power and wealth. A reluctant revolutionary, he argued that the colonies should be allowed to legislate for themselves as a co-equal to the British Parliament, both subject to one sovereign. British Parliamentary rule was futile, in his view, and would lead only to alienation and, ultimately, to the exclusion of England from America's unlimited potential. But as the tension inexorably ratcheted both countries toward war, Franklin was unable to persuade an unyielding Parliament to compromise.
Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1775. Resigned to the necessity for war, he signed a Declaration of Independence drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson, and was appointed to negotiate a critical alliance with the French. He playfully wrote to an English friend early in the war to consider that "Britain, at the expense of three million pounds, has killed 150 Yankies this campaign, which is 20,000 a head; and at Bunker's Hill she gained a mile of ground. ... During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data [you] will easily calculate the time and expence necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory."
In October 1776, Franklin, now 69, returned to the Continent to represent the new American government in France, borrow money and purchase supplies for General Washington's army. He was treated with awe and respect by the French, courted by intellectuals, royalty and a seemingly endless supply of beautiful French women.
In 1782, Franklin helped negotiate the end of a war. He returned to Philadelphia in 1785, sat in the 1787 convention that framed the U.S. Constitution (replacing the Articles of Confederation), and died three years later in 1790.
From start to finish, he played one of the most central roles in creating modern America of any of the founding fathers. As Morgan concludes "We can know what many of his contemporaries came to recognize, that he did as much as any man ever has to shape the world he and they lived in. We can also know what they must have known, that the world was not quite what he would have liked.
