Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.”

Franklin’s key insight was that hard currency, such as silver and gold, was not the true measure of a nation’s wealth: “The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess.”

And then there are those who are charmed and amused by the world and delight in charming and amusing others. They tend to be skeptical of both orthodoxies and heresies, and they are earnest in their desire to seek truth and promote public betterment (as well as sell papers). There fits Franklin. He was graced—and afflicted—with the trait so common to journalists, especially ones who have read Swift and Addison once too often, of wanting to participate in the world while also remaining a detached observer. As a journalist he could step out of a scene, even one that passionately engaged him, and comment on it, or on himself, with a droll irony. The depths of his beliefs were often concealed by his knack for engaging in a knowing wink.

“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”

It would be vain, he wrote, for any person to insist that “all the doctrines he holds are true and all he rejects are false.”

“The great uncertainty I found in metaphysical reasonings disgusted me, and I quitted that kind of reading and study for others more satisfactory.”

some Massachusetts commissioners who invited the Indians to send a dozen of their youth to study free at Harvard. The Indians replied that they had sent some of their young braves to study there years earlier, but on their return “they were absolutely good for nothing, being neither acquainted with the true methods for killing deer, catching beaver, or surprising an enemy.” They offered instead to educate a dozen or so white children in the ways of the Indians “and make men of them.”

The main concerns of the Proprietors were getting more land from the Indians and making sure that their property remained exempt from taxation.

He was, along with his son, preparing to publish a history of the Pennsylvania disputes, one “in which the Proprietors will be gibbeted up as they deserve, to rot and stink in the nostrils of posterity.”

Hereditary rule was a historic abomination. “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy. The miracle in question was performed only to hasten the operation.

Their mutual appointments, Franklin told Adams, were a great honor, but he wryly lamented that they were likely to be criticized for whatever they accomplished. “I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous, that was not censured as inadequate,” he said. “ ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed.”

“Great affairs sometimes take their rise from small circumstances,” Franklin recorded in the journal he began of the 1782 peace negotiations.

So he published on his Passy press, and sent to Adams and others, a fake issue of a Boston newspaper that purported to describe, in gruesome detail, the horrors that the British had perpetrated on innocent Americans. His goal was to emphasize that no sympathy was due the British loyalists, and that it was the Americans who deserved compensation. The fake edition was cleverly convincing. It featured a description of a shipment of American scalps purportedly sent by the Seneca Indians to England and a letter that he pretended was from John Paul Jones. To make it more realistic, he even included fake little ads about a new brick house for sale in south Boston and a missing bay mare in Salem.

His antipathy to excess wealth also led him to defend high taxes, especially on luxuries. A person had a “natural right” to all he earned that was necessary to support himself and his family, he wrote finance minister Robert Morris, “but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it.” Likewise, to Vaughan, he argued that cruel criminal laws had been wrought by those who sought to protect excess ownership of property. “Superfluous property is the creature of society,” he said. “Simple and mild laws were sufficient to guard the property that was merely necessary.”

“Declarations of a fixed opinion, and of determined resolution never to change it, neither enlighten nor convince us,” he said. “Positiveness and warmth on one side, naturally beget their like on the other.”

Even John Adams, generally less democratic in his outlook, wrote from London that under such a policy “all offices would be monopolized by the rich, the poor and middling ranks would be excluded and an aristocratic despotism would immediately follow.”

There are two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice; the love of power and the love of money. Separately, each of these has great force in prompting men to action; but, when united in view of the same object, they have in many minds the most violent effects . . . And of what kind are the men that will strive for this profitable preeminence, through all the bustle of cabal, the heat of contention, the infinite mutual abuse of parties, tearing to pieces the best of characters? It will not be the wise and moderate, the lovers of peace and good order, the men fittest for the trust. It will be the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits.

Elbridge Gerry, arguing against a large standing army, lasciviously compared it to a standing penis: “An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.”

Opponents attacked Franklin’s compromising approach as lacking in principle, yet that was the point of his message. “A stand for compromise,” Oberg points out, “is not the stuff of heroism, virtue, or moral certainty. But it is the essence of the democratic process.”

Franklin presented a formal abolition petition to Congress in February 1790. “Mankind are all formed by the same Almighty Being, alike objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness,” it declared. The duty of Congress was to secure “the blessings of liberty to the People of the United States,” and this should be done “without distinction of color.” Therefore, Congress should grant “liberty to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage.”

To assess Franklin properly, we must view him, instead, in all his complexity. He was not a frivolous man, nor a shallow one, nor a simple one. There are many layers to peel back as he stands before us so coyly disguised, both to history and to himself, as a plain character unadorned by wigs and other pretensions.

Edmund Morgan,