The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

Revolutions are not made in a morning, nor empires lost in a day. But Britain did itself more damage in those two hours than anyone present imagined. By alienating Franklin, the British government showed itself doubly inept: for making an enemy of a friend, and for doing so of the ablest and most respected American alive. At a moment when independence was hardly dreamed of in America, Franklin understood that to independence America must come.

In the eyes of much of Europe, Franklin was America, and the enormous respect accorded Franklin extrapolated to the American cause. Of those patriots who made independence possible, none mattered more than Franklin, and only Washington mattered as much. Washington won the battle of Yorktown, but Franklin won the European support that allowed Washington his victory.

Massachusetts was writhing under what seemed Satan’s latest assault. The Salem witch trials of 1692 convulsed the colony as nothing before or after. No man or woman of consequence doubted that witches existed; Satan, according to the consensus, frequently acted through individuals who entered into demonic pacts with him. The only question was whether the nineteen people executed were actually the demonic agents they were alleged to be by their accusers, principally teenage girls given to an unsettling emotionalism. Cotton Mather’s attitude toward the accusations and the accused was typical—for him, and for his time and place. “The Devil, exhibiting himself ordinarily as a small black man, has decoyed a fearful knot of proud, froward, ignorant, envious and malicious creatures, to list themselves in his horrid service, by entering their names in a book by him tendered unto them.

With such awesome evil abroad in the land, Mather could only endorse the action of the Salem court that condemned the witches to death. Indeed, at one hanging he all but tied the noose himself.

Benjamin, who was named for his father’s next-older and favorite brother, was the eighth child of his mother and the fifteenth of his father. He was born on January 6, 1705, by the calendar then in use; this would translate to January 17, 1706, when the calendar was reformed halfway through his life.

Before long, Ben began to appreciate the advantages of his new line of work. His appetite for reading had always grown with the eating; of late he had devoured Pilgrim’s Progress and other works by Bunyan, Burton’s Historical Collections, Plutarch’s Lives, Defoe’s Essay on Projects, and various of Cotton Mather’s preachments. Now that he was thrown into regular contact with the most literate element in a highly literate society, he discovered that an even wider array of literature fell open to him. As apprentice to a printer, he daily dealt with

Money, however, was a problem. Philadelphia—like Boston, New York, and other North American cities—suffered from the chronic affliction of colonial commerce: a lack of money.

Philadelphia was still reeling when Ben Franklin arrived in October 1723. If he had known how bad things were, he might not have come. In any event, Philadelphia was not his first choice. Franklin’s original plan upon leaving Boston was to settle in New York, the thriving town on the island at the mouth of the Hudson River that retained the Dutch character of its founders, including the burghers’ ambitions of worldly success. In such a setting a young man of similar ambition ought to have no difficulty finding work, unbothered by the formalities of an unfulfilled contract back in Boston.

The marriage was tested almost at once, in a manner many wives would have found unendurable. Sometime in late 1730 or early 1731 a son was born to Benjamin Franklin by a woman other than Deborah Read Franklin.

Summer brought thunderstorms and the opportunity to test both his theory and his experimental design. A promising storm blew up one afternoon, with thunderheads rising high. Franklin and son launched their kite; it soared toward the base of the cloud. But nothing happened. The key gave no indication of absorbing an electrical charge. Franklin could not understand where he had miscalculated. Joseph Priestley, to whom Franklin related the afternoon’s events, described what happened next: At length, just as he was beginning to despair of his contrivance, he observed some loose threads of the hempen string to stand erect, and to avoid one another, just as if they had been suspended on a common conductor. Struck with this promising appearance, he immediately presented his knuckle to the key, and (let the reader judge of the exquisite pleasure he must have felt at that moment) the discovery was complete. He perceived a very evident electric spark. Others succeeded, even before the string was wet, so as to put the matter past all dispute, and when the rain had wet the string, he collected electric fire very copiously.

While William Penn had lived, relations between the provincial government and the local Indians were reasonably amicable.

“I never heard any objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce; but a right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in Parliament, as we are not represented there.”

“Horrid Massacre” was how Sam Adams styled the affair. “Bloody Massacre” was the headline of the Paul Revere print that soon began circulating. “Boston Massacre” was the message that echoed down the American seaboard,

By the early 1770s Franklin was by far the most famous American in the world, and arguably the most illustrious subject of George III. His electrical papers, first published in London in 1751 as Experiments and Observations on Electricity, were now in their fourth edition;

On the evening of December 16 the largest meeting yet brought perhaps eight thousand people to Boston’s Old South Church. At a signal from Adams a group of about fifty men thinly disguised as Indians stormed the wharf where the Dartmouth lay, moored next to its recently arrived sister ships, the Eleanor and the Beaver, which also carried tea. Quite evidently the band of raiders included some longshoremen, for they knew the business of unloading a ship. They brought the casks of tea from hold to deck, opened them, and dumped the leaves out upon the bay. It was a long night’s work, for by morning some 90,000 pounds of tea, worth £10,000, had been consigned to the waves. For weeks leaves washed ashore all about the area. Nothing else aboard the ships was damaged; a single padlock, broken by mistake, was replaced. The Boston Tea Party could hardly have happened at a more awkward time for Franklin. While the news of this most recent outburst was crossing the Atlantic, Franklin became linked to Massachusetts in the minds of ministers and others in England as never before, and the linkage did him no credit. Upon the printing in Boston of the Hutchinson letters, Franklin initially hoped to keep clear of the affair. “I am glad my name has not been heard on the occasion,” he told Thomas Cushing. “And as I do not see it could be of any use to the public, I now wish it may continue unknown.” Yet he added, realistically, “I hardly expect it.” To his surprise his secret held for several

When he had left America in 1757 he was fifty-one, in the prime of his adult life. Now he was sixty-nine, an old man by anyone’s reckoning. Few of his contemporaries survived; for a decade or more his associates had been primarily of a younger generation.

The latest, and most poignant, reminder of mortality was the death of Deborah. After her stroke six years earlier she had never been the same. He could read in her letters that she was slipping from this earthly sphere. If it pained him he did not say—neither in letters nor in comments recorded by friends. Nor did he mention feeling guilty at having essentially abandoned her in her old age. “Her death was no more than might reasonably be expected after the paralytic stroke she received some time ago, which greatly affected her memory and understanding,” William wrote on Christmas Eve 1774, conveying the sad news. “She told me, when I took leave of her on my removal to Amboy [several months earlier] that she never expected to see you unless you returned this winter, for she was sure she should not live till next summer.”

On April 14 Governor Gage in Boston received orders from London to preempt the increasing strength of the Massachusetts militia. These “minutemen” and their slower comrades were training regularly, caching arms and ammunition, and growing more dangerous by the day.

The British troops had no more experience than the Americans—the last war having ended a dozen years earlier, and these being young men. As it became clear the Americans were serious about resisting, the British fell back. They retreated down the road to Concord, with the Americans close behind. The rest of the day was a nightmare for the British; all the way to Boston they encountered snipers hiding behind the trees and rock walls at the side of the road, and were harassed at their rear by the advancing militiamen. Only after sunset did they reach the safety of the city. A tally of the losses showed some 270 killed or wounded. The American losses were a little over a third as many.

Franklin was easily the oldest man present, a full twenty or thirty years older than the moving spirits of the body. George Washington was forty-three; his fellow Virginians Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were thirty-eight and thirty-two respectively. John Adams was thirty-nine; John Hancock, also of Massachusetts, thirty-eight.

None was so vital as that of American independence, which in late 1775 inspired Paine to write perhaps the most inspired political pamphlet in American history. Common Sense appeared in January 1776; at two shillings for forty-seven pages it soon sold more than a hundred thousand copies. “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine declared in asserting that continued connection with Britain made no more sense than perpetual childhood for a grown adult, that no continent should be forever governed by an island, that attachment to Britain would inevitably draw America into Europe’s wars, and, finally, that “a government of our own is our natural right.”

Washington had anticipated the redirection of British forces and marched his army south. But he was outnumbered and, after General Howe moved 20,000 troops east to Long Island, outflanked. In sharp fighting the British inflicted a major defeat on the Americans; only a skillful nighttime crossing of the East River to Manhattan averted the wholesale destruction of the American army.

George III felt the same way, although most nights he had little more reason to lose sleep over the Americans’ activities than the Holy Roman emperor did. Even after the American victory at Saratoga the war went poorly for the rebels.

For all the hardship, Washington and the army survived the winter at Valley Forge—partly because by the standards of old-timers in that country, the winter of 1777–78 was relatively mild. The arrival of spring brought additional good news: that France had embraced the American cause.

Briefly before the end his symptoms abated. Sally and some of the others allowed themselves optimism. But then the abscess that had been growing in his lung burst, and in his weakened condition he could not expel the fluid. He slipped into unconsciousness, and at eleven o’clock on the night of April 17, 1790, three months after his eighty-fourth birthday, with his grandsons Temple and Benny at his bed, he quietly died.