The Sage of Common Sense

The English novelist and critic D.H. Lawrence didn’t like Benjamin Franklin. “I haven’t got over those Poor Richard tags yet,” he wrote. “I still rankle with them. They are thorns in young flesh.”

Mark Twain spoke more satirically than Lawrence, but no more charitably, in describing his own encounter with Franklin. “His simplest acts ... were contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys forever--boys who might otherwise have been happy.... With a malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work all day and then sit up nights and let on to be studying algebra by the light of a smouldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them.” John Adams judged Franklin to be vastly overrated. Adams called his famous contemporary “the old Conjuror” and said Franklin’s life was “a Scene of continual Discipation.”

Edmund Morgan disagrees, and devotes this “purposely short” book to explaining why. Begun as a preface to a digital edition of Franklin’s papers, it is not so much a biography, in the cradle-to-grave sense of relating a life, as an appreciative inquiry into the mind of America’s foremost polymath--”a letter of introduction to a man worth knowing, worth spending time with.”

“Benjamin Franklin” reflects its origins, relying almost entirely on Franklin’s letters and printed works. It also reflects Morgan’s scholarly interests. A professor emeritus of history at Yale, Morgan has authored several distinguished volumes on the American Colonial experience and the social and intellectual construction of an American identity therein. Franklin provides Morgan with a revealing case study; by examining Franklin’s changing views on citizenship, obligation, empire and authority, Morgan goes far toward explaining America’s decision for independence from Britain.

Franklin’s first step toward independence was personal: He ran away from home at 17. In doing so he rejected family (he was apprenticed to his elder brother), authority (he violated his indenture in doing so) and religious orthodoxy (he had got into trouble with the Puritan establishment that governed Massachusetts and tried to control its conscience). Morgan says little about the physical journey that carried Franklin from Boston to Philadelphia, but he says much about the moral and intellectual journey that carried Franklin from predestinarian Congregationalism to latitudinarian deism. “Morality or virtue is the end, faith only a means to obtain that end; and if the end be obtained, it is no matter by what means,” Franklin concluded, in words that were heresy to the Cotton Mather crowd. Turning convention on its head, he declared, “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, but it is forbidden because it is hurtful.” Thus Franklin arrived at a central tenet of the dawning Enlightenment: that man is the measure of morality, not morality of man.

From this Franklin derived his own rule of social conduct. “I would rather have it said, he lived usefully, than, he died rich,” he told a friend with whom he had been reflecting on the far end of the mortal coil. Few people have made themselves more useful to their contemporaries than Franklin. As a beginning businessman, he gathered several others in like circumstances to form a discussion club devoted to self-and civic improvement. When the club came up short on reading material, he organized America’s first lending library. After fires ravaged Philadelphia, he founded a firefighting company. He raised money for a hospital, chartered the school that became the University of Pennsylvania, conceived the American Philosophical Society and mustered the Pennsylvania militia.

In each of these initiatives, he struck a nice balance between personal interest and public interest, operating on the premise--which he confirmed in practice--that what served Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, and made the city and colony more comfortable and cultured, served all who lived there, including Franklin. This coincidence of the public and private prompted some to see Franklin as a master manipulator who used the larger community to further his own ends; he may not have helped his reputation by frequently disguising his sponsorship of the initiatives. He had thought to spread the credit and thereby speed the work, but he raised suspicions as to what he might be hiding.

Morgan covers these civic projects, but he is more interested in the evolution of Franklin’s political philosophy. Citing, as Franklin did, Edmund Burke to the effect that when people start talking about their rights, government is already far gone, Morgan draws a nice distinction between Franklin’s theory of right (as what might be given) and prevailing theories of rights (as what is owed). After discontent began to bubble up in Boston and other parts of America, Franklin argued that by demanding more, Americans would get less. He clung to his belief that accommodation was possible between the Americans’ desire to run their affairs as they had for more than a century, and the British government’s need to tighten up the administration of the empire. As the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly (and later of other Colonial assemblies) to the government in London, Franklin sought to convince both sides that requests would be more productive than demands, and that insistence would provoke resistance.

For his mediating pains he earned the distrust of both parties. American radicals thought that he was too British, British conservatives that he was too American. He inadvertently provoked an uproar by leaking letters from British officials in Massachusetts, in which they said that the rights of the Americans must be abridged to curb the political violence. Franklin had hoped to blame growing difficulties on these few bad apples, forcing their recall and appeasing the Boston radicals. But the radicals read the letters as evidence of a grand conspiracy against America, and meanwhile the British treated the leak as an unpardonable breach of trust. Franklin was rhetorically hanged, drawn and quartered in a vitriolic session in the London “Cockpit,” the Privy Council, which effectively completed his conversion to the idea that the colonists must become Americans because they could never be fully British.

In the pantheon of American Founders, Franklin is often accounted the sage of common sense, in contrast to such supposedly deeper thinkers as James Madison, James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton. Franklin indeed had more common sense than most, but, as Morgan demonstrates better than anyone else to date, he also had a subtle and coherent philosophy of nationality, of representation and of administration. Here Morgan’s sharp focus on Franklin’s writings--Morgan says his book “is the result of reading everything on the disk and in the volumes [that is, the digital and printed versions of Franklin’s papers] but not much else”--usually serves readers well, but not always. Morgan dismisses Franklin’s work at the Constitutional Convention in a few sentences, at least in part, one supposes, because Franklin wrote little about his work there. But, as notes kept by Madison make clear, Franklin interjected himself at a couple of crucial moments to help the convention get past difficulties created by the intransigence of the more vocal delegates. (To the surprise of many, Franklin advocated opening each session with a prayer. His point was not to elicit divine intervention, in which he didn’t believe, but to remind the delegates that none had a monopoly on wisdom. His motion was rejected, with Hamilton reportedly saying that foreign assistance was not required.)

Readers expecting a full life of Franklin will be disappointed at seeing little of various aspects of the life that don’t relate to Franklin’s politics. Many of his personal affairs--the operation of his printing business, his pursuit of land grants in the American West, his relationships with his wife, Deborah, and especially with his son William, whom he disowned during the American Revolution--are treated cursorily or not at all. Similarly scant attention is paid to much of the context in which Franklin lived and operated, so that readers unfamiliar with the terrain of the 18th century will often wonder about individuals and influences with whom and which Franklin came into contact.

But for an introduction to the mind of Franklin--one of the most inquisitive, productive and engaging minds of his or any other day--readers can’t do better than this incisive volume. Had it been available to Lawrence and Twain, they certainly would have thought better of Franklin. (Adams probably would have judged Franklin more overrated than ever, with Morgan the latest to fall under the Conjuror’s spell.)