The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (139 page)

interest “to such young married artificers under the age of twenty-five years as have served an apprenticeship in the said town and faithfully fulfilled the duties required in their indentures.” The loans were to be in small amounts, no more than £60 (nor less than £15), and must be cosigned by “at least two respectable citizens” willing to vouch for the moral character of the borrowers. The term of each loan was set at ten years; as the money was repaid, it should be re-lent.

Under this scheme Franklin’s bequest would be immediately useful, yet it would gain philanthropic power with passing years. By Franklin’s calculation, each £1,000 fund should increase to more than £130,000 after a hundred years. He directed that £100,000 of this be spent on public works deemed most useful (in the case of Philadelphia he specifically mentioned piping in water from outside the city and improving navigation on the Schuylkill); the remainder should be returned to the revolving fund, the operation of which would continue as before, for another hundred years. At the end of the second century each fund should total more than £4 million. Franklin decreed that the Boston fund be then divided between Boston and the state of Massachusetts, with the former getting one-fourth and the latter three-fourths, and the Philadelphia fund split similarly between Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania.

Franklin appreciated that two centuries was a long time. “Considering the accidents to which all human affairs and projects are subject in such a length of time, I have, perhaps, too much flattered myself with a vain fancy that these dispositions, if carried into execution, will be continued without interruption and have the effects proposed.” In the event, the Franklin funds did encounter various accidents, including wars, economic depressions, political wrangling over control of the funds, and an industrial revolution that significantly altered the role of apprenticeship in career advancement.

Yet at the bicentennial of his death the Boston fund amounted to $4.5 million, and that of Philadelphia, which had been less well managed, $2 million. Franklin would have been pleased—and happy at that distance to have relinquished responsibility for deciding how the money was to be spent. “Everyone and his brother is after the money,” observed an official of Boston’s Franklin Institute, a South End trade school founded with funds from the payout at the end of the first century. In Philadelphia, which had built a tourist industry around Franklin, initial thoughts of spending the city’s share on promoting more tourism were dropped in favor of financial aid for students in the applied sciences.

Philadelphia’s mayor embraced this decision as being “in the true spirit of Benjamin Franklin.”

The spirit
of Franklin was palpable in his adopted city, and undeniable across America, at the bicentennial of his death. As it happened, the University of Pennsylvania observed its 250th anniversary that same year, honored as one of the most eminent institutions of higher education in America, fulfilling Franklin’s vision—and, not incidentally, having abandoned the attempt to inflict Latin and Greek on reluctant young minds. The American Philosophical Society similarly flourished, sponsoring and disseminating research by leading scholars. Libraries and fire departments were staples of city and town life throughout the land. Hospitals were equally ubiquitous. The post office delivered letters from coast to coast. Paper currency had long since ceased to provoke controversy, or even question.

Franklin’s legacy in science was no less distinguished than in civic affairs. The electrical revolution he helped unleash, and for which he provided a lexicon, in time transformed the world, magnifying muscle and mind, knitting a net of information that encompassed the globe. His work in demography inspired economists and practitioners of allied social sciences. His conjectures on meteorology, geology, and oceanography, while not uniformly accurate, challenged others to correct his mistakes.

Franklin’s literary legacy was equally impressive. His autobiography became a landmark of American letters, and indeed one of the great lives in the English language. Poor Richard grew only more famous after his author’s death, causing most Americans to forget that any other almanackers ever existed. Franklin’s bagatelles, satires, hoaxes and correspondence made him a model for commentary that always had a point but was never pedantic.

In letters, science, and commitment to the common weal, Franklin was the first—in the sense of foremost—American of his generation. Considering the length and breadth of his multiple legacies, he was probably the first American of any generation. Yet he was the first American in another sense as well. Sooner than almost anyone else, certainly sooner than anyone equally placed to act on the insight, Franklin realized that he and his fellow Americans were no longer Britons but a breed apart—a people not suited to rule by others but compelled to rule themselves. He did not initially welcome the knowledge, which contradicted
his hopes for America within the British empire. But once convinced, he acted decisively on the knowledge, and did more than almost anyone else to give this new people—these Americans—a government of their own. In the Continental Congress at the start of the Revolution, in Paris during the war and the peace negotiations, at the Constitutional Convention back home in Philadelphia, he served his new country with unsurpassed energy, devotion, and skill.

At his death the millions he had touched stopped to acknowledge his preeminence and profess their gratitude. Twenty thousand Philadelphians—nearly half the city—turned out for the funeral. In the House of Representatives, James Madison offered a motion for official mourning, which passed unanimously. France took the news of Franklin’s passing even harder. “He has returned to the bosom of the Divinity, the genius who freed America and shed torrents of light upon Europe,” Mirabeau told the tearful National Assembly, which likewise voted to don black. Felix Vicq d’Azyr, a personal friend of Franklin’s and secretary of the French Royal Society of Medicine, summarized the Atlantic gloom: “A man is dead, and two worlds are in mourning.”

They mourned one who came as close as any to realizing the full potential of the human spirit. To genius he joined a passion for virtue. His genius distinguished him from others, yet it also connected him to others, for he sought knowledge not for its own sake but for humanity’s. His passion for virtue reflected not hope of heaven but faith in his fellow mortals. It afforded the foundation for his greatest accomplishments, and for the glorious achievement he shared with others of his revolutionary generation.

At the precocious age of twenty-two Franklin wrote what became one of the most famous epitaphs in that lapidary genre:

The Body of
B. Franklin,
Printer;
Like the Cover of an old Book,
Its contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms,
But the Work shall not be wholly lost,
For it will, as he believed, appear once more,
In a new & more perfect Edition,
Corrected and amended
By the Author.

When the time came, however, he preferred something simpler. In his will he directed that only “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin 1790” adorn the headstone he shared with his dear country Joan.

A life as full as Franklin’s could not be captured in a phrase—or a volume. Yet if a few words had to suffice, a few words that summarized his legacy to the America he played such a central role in creating—and that, not incidentally, illustrated his wry, aphoristic style—they were those he uttered upon leaving the final session of the Constitutional Convention. A matron of Philadelphia demanded to know, after four months’ secrecy, what he and the other delegates had produced.

“A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.”

Source Notes

The primary source for any life of Benjamin Franklin is Franklin himself: his correspondence and published writings. Several editions of Franklin’s papers exist; by far the best (and a model of scholarly editing) is
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin,
published by Yale University Press, starting in 1959. The original editor was Leonard W. Labaree; the current editor is Barbara B. Oberg. The most recent volumes in this series carry Franklin’s story to 1781. In the present book, citations of Franklin up to 1781 are drawn almost exclusively from this edition, and are typically cited by date alone. Other editions of Franklin papers, for the years after 1781, that have been used extensively here are by Smyth and Bigelow (see full information below). As a general rule, where the date of a document locates it unambiguously, the date alone has been given. In other cases, volume and page numbers are furnished.

Franklin’s original manuscripts lie in scores of collections scattered about America and Europe. The most important of these collections are located at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and at the Library of Congress in Washington. The vast majority of substantive letters by Franklin in these collections have been published in one or more of the printed editions of Franklin papers. Where such is the case, citations in the present book are to a printed version, for reasons of accessibility. In the rare exceptional cases, the archives are cited.

One of Franklin’s published works that requires special mention is his justly famous
Autobiography.
Numerous editions exist; the one cited here is also edited by Leonard W. Labaree and published by Yale University Press, in 1964. It is abbreviated below as
ABF.

For clarity and readability, most archaisms have been silently modernized. Franklin capitalized many more nouns than modern writers do; these have usually been rendered lowercase. Franklin wrote British English; where British usage and spellings persist at the start of the twenty-first century, these have generally been retained.

In the notes below, references are given only for direct quotations. The works cited include many, but by no means all, of the most important sources consulted for this book. Considerations of space preclude any effort to present a comprehensive bibliography of materials relating to Franklin’s life, let alone his times. The interested reader is referred to Melvin H. Buxbaum,
Benjamin Franklin: A Reference Guide
(2 volumes: Boston, 1983–88). J. A. Leo Lemay,
Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective
(Newark, Del., 1993), comprises papers by Franklin scholars; the references nicely complement those in the Buxbaum volumes.

ABBREVIATIONS

Individuals

BF: Benjamin Franklin

DF: Deborah Read Franklin

WF: William Franklin

Archives and Published Works

ABF: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
(New Haven, Conn., 1964).

Adams Papers: The Adams Papers,
ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, Mass., 1961—)

AHR: American Historical Review.

APS: Benjamin Franklin Collection, American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia).

Bagatelles: Franklin’s Wit and Folly: The Bagatelles,
ed. Richard E. Amacher (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953).

Bigelow:
The Works of Benjamin Franklin,
ed. John Bigelow (New York, 1904).

DAR: Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783
(Colonial Office Series), ed. K. G. Davies (Shannon, Ireland, 1972–1981).

Facsimiles: Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America, 1773–1783,
ed. B. F. Stevens (London, 1889–98).

Giunta:
The Emerging Nation: A Documentary History of the Foreign Relations of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, 1780–1789,
ed. Mary A.
Giunta et al. (Washington, D.C., 1996).

HSP: Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia).
Lafayette Letters: Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790,
ed. Stanley J. Idzerda (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979).