The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

Through all of this Franklin remained silent. The audience, including many of the lords, laughed and cheered at the solicitor’s slashing assault on Franklin’s behavior and character, but the object of the day’s entertainment stood before his accuser betraying not the slightest emotion. “The Doctor was dressed in a full dress suit of spotted Manchester velvet,” Edward Bancroft recalled, “and stood conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed, so as to afford a placid tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear during the continuance of the speech in which he was so harshly and improperly treated.” He appeared, Bancroft said, “as if his features had been made of wood.”