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George Whitefield, the most popular of the Great Awakening’s roving preachers, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1739.
Though he was rising in the world in a way that would have allowed him, if he were so inclined, to put on aristocratic airs, Franklin was still allergic to snobbery and proud to be a Plainman defending the middling people.
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
he genuinely liked women, enjoyed their company and conversation, and was able to take them seriously as well as flirt with them.
in 1747, he proposed something that was, though he may not have realized it, far more radical: a military force that would be independent of Pennsylvania’s colonial government.
Franklin’s plan for a volunteer Pennsylvania militia
in an annotated article in his newspaper, he presented his plans for a militia,
he was never an avid or effective public orator,
Franklin did not quite realize how radical it was for a private association to take over from the government the right to create and control a military force.
(Franklin’s 1744 reprint of Pamela was the first novel published in America.)
Money flowed in, much of which he invested, quite wisely, in Philadelphia property.
in 1748 at age 42—which would turn out to be precisely the midpoint of his life—he retired
“Lost time is never found again.”
Franklin’s discovery that the generation of a positive charge was accompanied by the generation of an equal negative charge became known as the conservation of charge and the single-fluid theory of electricity.
pleasure and pain are always in balance.
ingenious as he was, was no Galileo or Newton. He was a practical experimenter more than a systematic theorist.
He was one of the foremost scientists of his age, and he conceived and proved one of the most fundamental concepts about nature: that electricity is a single fluid.
He quickly became not only the most celebrated scientist in America and Europe, but also a popular hero.
students would live “plainly, temperately and frugally” and be “frequently exercised in running, leaping, wrestling and swimming.”
Like any good Enlightenment thinker, Franklin loved order and precise procedures.
The academy opened in January 1751 as the first nonsectarian college in America (by 1791 it came to be known as the University of Pennsylvania).
“The good particular men may do separately in relieving the sick is small compared with what they may do collectively.”
By coming up with what is now known as the matching grant, Franklin showed how government and private initiative could be woven together,
it would end up taking a lot to radicalize him into an American revolutionary.
“Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of providence,” Franklin wrote, “we had need be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good.”
What made him a bit of a rebel, and later much more of one, was his inbred resistance to establishment authority.
His proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men.
richer people tended to be more “cautious” about getting married and having children.
Slaves made up about 6 percent of Philadelphia’s population at the time, and Franklin had facilitated the buying and selling of them through ads in his newspaper.
He personally owned a slave couple, but in 1751 he decided to sell them because, as he told his mother, he did not like having “Negro servants” and he found them uneconomical. Nevertheless, he would later, at times, have a slave as a personal servant.
In his later life, as we shall see, he became one of America’s most active abolitionists, one who denounced slavery on moral grounds and helped advance the rights of blacks.
“human felicity is produced . . . by little advantages that occur every day.”
“Reasonable, sensible men can always make a reasonable scheme appear such to other reasonable men.”
he printed the first and most famous editorial cartoon in American history: a snake cut into pieces, labeled with names of the colonies, with the caption: “Join, or Die.”13
Franklin in Albany had helped to devise a federal concept—orderly, balanced, and enlightened—that would eventually form the basis for a unified American nation.
“When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair,” he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, “one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater.”
The Albany Plan was rejected by all of the colonial assemblies for usurping too much of their power, and it was shelved in London for giving too much power to voters and encouraging a dangerous unity among the colonies.
Franklin was convinced that the acceptance of his Albany Plan could have prevented the Revolution and created a harmonious empire.
Despite a reputation for lecherousness that he did little to dispel, there is no evidence of any serious sexual affair he had after his marriage to Deborah.
Of all shades of feeling, this one, the one the French call amitié amoureuse—a little beyond the platonic but short of the grand passion—is perhaps the most exquisite.
For him, such relationships were not a sport or trifling amusement, despite how they might appear, but a pleasure to be savored and respected.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Franklin had abandoned his long-standing aversion to dispute. Henceforth he would become an increasingly fervent foe of the Proprietors.22
Franklin had become the de facto leader and most powerful man in the colony.
The colonial charters specified that the laws were to be made by the colonial assemblies, he argued; although the governors could veto them, they could not dictate them.
Parliament had rejected a clause that would give the power of law to governors’ instructions.
The True Conduct of Persons of Quality,
used his pamphlet to denounce prejudice and make the case for individual tolerance that was at the core of his political creed.
A darkness had indeed begun to infect Franklin’s usually optimistic heart. Feeling confined by Philadelphia and its foul politics, restless at home, and finding few scientific or professional diversions, he lost some of his amused, wry demeanor.
American democracy learned that it could thrive in an atmosphere of unrestrained, even intemperate, free expression.
