The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

In another instance he posed as a Frenchman. France was in the process of subduing a rebellion in Corsica and was coming under considerable criticism in England for doing so. “You English consider us French as enemies to liberty,” Franklin covertly wrote. “How easy it is for men to see the faults of others while blind to their own.” Corsicans had never enriched France by their labor and commerce, had never fought side by side with Frenchmen in war, had never loved and honored France, were not the very children of France. “But all this your American colonists have been and are to you! Yet at this very moment, while you are abusing us for attempting to reduce the Corsicans, you yourselves are about to make slaves of a much greater number of those British Americans.” What did the British know about liberty? “All the liberty you seem to value is the liberty of abusing your superiors, and of tyrannizing over those below you.”