The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

Franklin thanked his confessor for her leniency, remarking particularly that it covered sins yet to be committed. To her litany of the cardinal sins he riposted the Ten Commandments, although he said he had been taught that there were really twelve. “The first was: Increase and multiply, and replenish the earth. The twelfth is: A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another. It seems to me that they are a little misplaced, and that the last should have been the first.” Yet he had never made any difficulty on that point. “I was always willing to obey them both whenever I had an opportunity.” He wondered whether some bargain might be struck. “Pray tell me, my dear Casuist, whether my keeping religiously these two commandments, though not in the Decalogue, may not be accepted in compensation for my breaking so often one of the ten, I mean that which forbids coveting my neighbor’s wife, and which I confess I break constantly, God forgive me, as often as I see or think of my lovely confessor. And I am afraid I should never be able to repent of the sin, even if I had the full possession of her.” He added another argument. “I will mention the opinion of a certain Father of the Church, which I find myself willing to adopt, though I am not sure it is orthodox. It is this, that the most effectual way to get rid of a certain temptation is, as often as it returns, to comply with and satisfy it.”

Madame Brillon saw she was losing ground in theology. She appealed to natural law. “Let us start from where we are. You are a man, I am a woman, and while we might think along the same lines, we must speak and act differently. Perhaps there is no great harm in a man having desires and yielding to them; a woman may have desires, but she must not yield.” Switching back to the commandments, she reminded Franklin she was married. “My friendship, and a touch of vanity, perhaps, prompt me strongly to pardon you; but I dare not decide the question without consulting that neighbour whose wife ...

He refused to repent. “You renounce and exclude arbitrarily every thing corporal from our amour, except such a merely civil embrace now and then as you would permit to a country cousin. What is there then remaining that I may not afford to others without a diminution of what belongs to you?” He compared his affection toward women to her playing on the pianoforte: several people might enjoy it without any being cheated from the others’ partaking. Switching metaphors, he employed a figure of speech that could have been interpreted doubly, and—given his care with words—was almost certainly intended to be. “My poor little boy, whom you ought methinks to have cherished, instead of being fat and jolly like those in your elegant drawings, is meagre and starved almost to death for want of the substantial nourishment which you his mother inhumanly deny him!”

It was, says he, the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the Moulin-Joli, could not itself subsist more than 18 hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since by the apparent motion of the great Luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our Earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than 420 minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them, for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above 7 or 8 minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labour in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriots, inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general! For in politics, what can laws do without morals? Our present race of Ephemeres will in a course of minutes become corrupt like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as ...

Adams discovered, although he could not help observing that they seemed to have as much power to commit sins as to pardon them. “Oh Mores! I said to myself. What absurdities, inconsistencies, distractions and horrors would these manners introduce into our republican governments in America. No kind of republican government can ever exist with such national manners as these. Cavete Americani.”

Adams’s wife, Abigail, labored under no such constraints. Mrs. Adams supplied a fuller, but no more flattering, picture of Madame Helvétius. She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air; upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, “Ah, mon Dieu, where is Franklin? Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?” You must suppose her speaking all this in French. “How I look!” said she, taking hold of a chemise made of tiffany, which she had on over a blue lute-string, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman; her hair was frizzled; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty gauze half-handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze, than ever my maids wore, was bowed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders. She ran out of the room; when she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other; upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, “Helas! Franklin”; then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on the chief of the conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hand into the Doctor’s, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both the gentlemen’s chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor’s neck. I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in thi...

The writer Fontenelle, well into his nineties, captured the spirit of the gatherings with the witticism, uttered upon catching the casual hostess in one of her not uncommon states of undress: “Oh, to be seventy again!”

In a variation of the “Ephemere” letter he sent Madame Brillon (one wonders if the two women were comparing notes), he assumed the role of spokesman for the flies who lived in his apartment at Passy. The flies sent their respects to Madame Helvétius, who had taken pity on the untidy Doctor Franklin and ordered his apartment swept. This scattered the spiders that had preyed on the flies. “Since that time we have lived happily, and have enjoyed the beneficence of the said bonhomme F. without fear. There remains only one thing for us to wish in order to assure the stability of our fortune; permit us to say it, ‘Bizz, izzz ouizz a ouizzzz izzzzzzz, etc.’ It is to see both of you forming at last but one ménage.”

On the other hand, Franklin appreciated the degree to which he was playing a role. John and Abigail Adams might be shocked at how the senior American commissioner was taking French liberties when he should have been promoting American liberty, but he understood that in doing the one he was doing the other. America was asking France to fight a war on America’s behalf (and France’s, to be sure), and even under monarchs wars require popular support. For the French, Franklin embodied America. If the French wanted to attribute the Articles of Confederation and all the state constitutions to him, he was not the one to correct them. (John Adams was more than happy to assume this chore.) If they saw in the septuagenarian gallant a reflection of what they hoped to be at his age—a lover of life, in all its glorious ramifications—that could only redound to America’s benefit.

He came in the door just behind the most famous French subversive of the age. Voltaire had been skewering orthodoxies of various sorts for decades, making him persona non grata with the monarchs of France and Prussia, to name two in particular. At Franklin’s arrival in 1776 Voltaire had been exiled from Paris for a quarter century. Yet as he felt the life flowing out of his bony frame—whether retarded or accelerated by the fifty cups of coffee he was said to drink each day, no one knew—he insisted on returning to the capital.

One that was long remembered came from a chess match between Franklin and the elderly Duchess of Bourbon. Inexpert, she illegally placed her king in check. Franklin, in the spirit of rule-breaking, captured it. She, knowing enough to realize that this was not permitted, declared that in France “we do not take kings.” With a sly smile he responded, “We do in America.”

The captain of the British vessel, convinced he had won, shouted to Jones, offering him the chance to strike his colors. Jones replied defiantly, “No! I’ll sink, but I’m damned if I’ll strike!” (This was remembered much later by one witness as, “I have not yet begun to fight!” and so transmitted to posterity.)

“I take no other revenge of such enemies than to let them remain in the miserable situation in which their malignant natures have placed them, by endeavouring to support an estimable character; and thus by continuing the reputation the world has hitherto indulged me with, I shall continue them in their present state of damnation.”

At times during the eighteenth century, war could be a gentlemanly endeavor. Captured officers were regularly paroled—that is, sent home upon their promise to engage no longer in hostilities. Such had been the fate of General Burgoyne after Saratoga. Soldiers of the rank and file were often exchanged for their counterparts from the other side. But the British government refused to accord such courtesies to captured Americans. London contended they were not belligerents but rebels. To an early application from Franklin regarding treatment of prisoners, the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Stormont, responded curtly, “The King’s ambassador receives no letters from rebels, unless they come to implore his Majesty’s mercy.” Such might have finished Franklin’s hopes for ameliorating the prisoners’ plight, if not for the assistance he gained from others in Britain. The Parliamentary opposition to the North ministry seized on the suspension of habeas corpus, as it related to the American prisoners, and attacked the government for hypocritically undermining essential English institutions in the name of defending them. English prisons were a scandal in the best of times, and though conditions there pricked few consciences regarding regular felons, the harsh treatment accorded the Americans elicited letters to editors and other forms of low-grade protest.

He that robs the rich even of a single guinea is a villain; but what is he who can break his sacred trust by robbing a poor man and a prisoner of eighteen pence given charitably for his relief, and repeat that crime as often as there are weeks in a winter, and multiply it by robbing as many poor men every week as make up the number of 600? We have no name in our language for such atrocious wickedness. If such a fellow is not damned, it is not worth while to keep a Devil.

“If the English are suffered once to recover that country, such an opportunity of effectual separation as the present may not occur again in the course of ages.” And on the fate of America hung the fate of Europe. “The possession of those fertile and extensive regions and that vast sea coast will afford them [the British] so broad a basis for future greatness by the rapid growth of their commerce, and breed of seaman and soldier, as will enable them to become the terror of Europe, and to exercise with impunity that insolence which is so natural to their nation, and which will increase enormously with the increase of their power.”

“I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous,” he told John Adams, one of his fellow peace commissioners, “that was not censured as inadequate, and the makers condemned as injudicious or corrupt. Blessed are the peace makers is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed. Being as yet rather too much attached to this world, I had therefore no ambition to be concerned in fabricating this peace.” All the same, he assured Adams, he deemed it an honor to serve with him in so important a business, and would work to the best of his ability.

“We do not consider ourselves as under any necessity of bargaining for a thing that is our own,” he said, “which we have bought at the expense of much blood and treasure, and which we are in the possession of.”

Grenville answered that France had provoked the present war by encouraging the Americans to revolt. “On which the Count de Vergennes grew a little warm,” Franklin recorded, “and declared, firmly, that the breach was made, and our independence declared, long before we received the least encouragement from France; and he defied the world to give the smallest proof of the contrary. ‘There sits,’ said he, ‘Mr. Franklin, who knows the fact, and can contradict me if I do not speak the truth.’”

The Morals of Chess, printed on his Passy press, was more serious than some of the other bagatelles, but hardly ponderous. “Life is a kind of chess,” he explained, “in which we have often points to gain, and competitors and adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and evil events that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it.” In playing chess a person could learn foresight. “If I move this piece, what will be the advantages of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me?” Likewise circumspection, “which surveys the whole chessboard, or scene of action, the relations of the several pieces and situations, the dangers they are respectively exposed to.” Also caution, in that once a piece was touched, that piece must be moved, and once a piece was set down, there it must stand. “If you have incautiously put yourself into a bad and dangerous position, you cannot obtain your enemy’s leave to withdraw your troops and place them more securely; but you must abide all the consequences of your rashness.”

British officials saw much more from Franklin’s pen than his bagetelles. As a civil conflict the Revolutionary War was fertile soil for secret agents. The differences of language and culture that typically separate countries at war did not exist; patriots and loyalists looked alike, sounded alike, dressed alike. And—despite the nomenclature applied to the opposing parties—questions of patriotism and loyalty were often clouded. A Frenchman selling secrets to England during the Seven years’ War, for example, could be expected to have to wrestle harder with his conscience than an American cleaving to King George during the Revolutionary War. There is no evidence, and little reason to believe, that William Franklin’s conscience was any less clear than his father’s.

As it is impossible to discover in every case the falsity of pretended friends who would know our affairs; and more so to prevent being watched by spies, when interested people may think proper to place them for that purpose, I have long observed one rule which prevents any inconveniences from such practices. It is simply this: to be concerned in no affairs that I should blush to have made public, and to do nothing but what spies may see and welcome. When a man’s actions are just and honourable, the more they are known, the more his reputation is increased and established. If I was sure, therefore, that my valet de place was a spy, as he probably is, I think I should probably not discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him.

Franklin remarked elsewhere that when rascals proliferated, honest men might prosper. “If the rascals knew the advantage of virtue, they would become honest men out of rascality.” For himself, speaking the truth served admirably. “That is my only cunning.”

Fourth and finally, Britain should cede Canada to the United States. In British hands Canada would become the bone of contention in Anglo-American relations it had long been in Anglo-French relations. Better to bar such quarrels by transferring Canada to the United States at once.

“After much occasion to consider the folly and mischiefs of a state of warfare,” Franklin wrote, “and the little or no advantage obtained even by those nations who have conducted it with the most success, I have been apt to think that there has never been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a good war, or a bad peace.”

Let us now forgive and forget. Let each country seek its advancement in its own internal advantages of arts and agriculture, not in retarding or preventing the prosperity of the other. America will, with God’s blessing, become a great and happy country; and England, if she has at length gained wisdom, will have gained something more valuable, and more essential to her prosperity, than all she has lost.

Yet Franklin doubted England really had learned anything from the war. Her “great disease,” he said, was the large number and emoluments of her political offices; her downfall the “avarice and passion” these aroused in her public officials. “They hurry men headlong into factions and contentions, destructive of all good government.” As long as riches attached to office, Britain would suffer. “Your Parliament will be a stormy sea, and your public councils confounded by private interests.”

The essence of the Revolution was the triumph of virtue over vice. In the years before the Revolution he had watched corruption permeate British politics; on that fateful morning in the Cockpit he had felt corruption’s foul breath. He knew himself to be the most reluctant of revolutionaries, an ardent Briton driven from the arms of the mother country only by a deep, personal disillusionment. Others of the Revolutionary generation subscribed to the notion of America’s peculiar virtue, but for few did it have the personal meaning it had for Franklin, because few had been so disillusioned.

The emotional counterpart to Franklin’s disillusionment with Britain was his investment of hope in America. For Franklin the Revolution had to be about more than self-rule, for self-rule was, at bottom, simply another form of office-seeking. On the other hand, if the Revolution was about virtue, and the application of virtue to politics, then the struggle became transcendent. “Our Revolution is an important event for the advantage of mankind in general,” he wrote his English friend Richard Price. Mankind already showed evidence of following the American lead. The summer of 1783 brought murmurings of anti-British rebellion in Ireland; Franklin credited “the contemplation of our successful struggle” as a central element in the resistance. He went on to reflect with satisfaction “that liberty, which some years since appeared in danger of extinction, is now regaining the ground she had lost; that arbitrary governments are likely to become more mild and reasonable, and to expire by degrees.”

For one subsequently cited as an apostle of capitalist virtues, Franklin took a strikingly socialistic view of property. “All property, indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his match-coat, and other little acquisitions absolutely necessary for his subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public convention,” he wrote. Laws and customs made accumulation of property possible; the public therefore had the right to regulate the quantity and use of property. “All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition.” Needless to say, this was hardly a universal opinion among a people who had fought a war over taxes. But Franklin was unmoved. “He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages.”

“Is not the hope of being one day able to purchase and enjoy luxuries a great spur to labour and industry? May not luxury, therefore, produce more than it consumes?” Even the clearest cases of squandering resources might not be so clear after all. “A vain, silly fellow builds a fine house, furnishes it richly, lives in it expensively, and in a few years ruins himself. But the masons, carpenters, smiths and other honest tradesmen have been by his employ assisted in maintaining and raising their families; the farmer has been paid for his labour and encouraged; and the estate is now in better hands.”

“There seems to be a region high in the air over all countries, where it is always winter, where frost exists continually,” he wrote. The evidence? Hail, which fell even during the warmest months and occasionally acquired impressive dimensions. “How immensely cold must be the original particle of hail which forms the future hailstone, since it is capable of communicating sufficient cold, if I may so speak, to freeze all the mass of vapour condensed round it, and form a lump of perhaps six or eight ounces in weight!”

“Universal space, as far as we know of it, seems to be filled with a subtle fluid, whose motion, or vibration, is called light,” Franklin wrote in a letter read to the American Philosophical Society. The vibrations of light—sunlight, for example—heated objects on which the light fell by causing the particles of those objects to vibrate in turn. Franklin used the word “fire” to denote a combination of electromagnetic, kinetic, and chemical energy—a combination about which he was rather vague (and, in fact, confused). He was not sure whether this “fire” was something material or immaterial (although in this he unknowingly anticipated the Einsteinian equivalence of mass and energy). But he hit on a fundamental law of conservation of mass-energy. “Thus, if fire be an original element, or kind of matter, its quantity is fixed and permanent in the world. We cannot destroy any part of it, or make addition to it; we can only separate it from that which confines it, and so set it at liberty, as when we put wood in a situation to be burnt; or transfer it from one solid to another, as when we make lime by burning stone, a part of the fire dislodged from the wood being left in the stone.”

In a concession to advancing age Franklin had taken to using two sets of eyeglasses, one for close work, the other to see things at a distance. This was never convenient, but Franklin found it particularly irksome in traveling, when he would shift his gaze from a book or paper he was reading to a distant object he wished to observe. After considering the matter for some time, he directed his optician to take one pair of each of his spectacles and cut the lenses in half horizontally. Two each of these half-lenses were then fitted together in a single set of wire frames, with the farsighted halves on top and the nearsighted on the bottom. “By this means,” he explained, “as I wear my spectacles constantly, I have only to move my eyes up or down, as I want to see distinctly far or near, the proper glasses being always ready.” The invention brought an unexpected bonus. “This I find more particularly convenient since my being in France, the glasses that serve me best at table to see what I eat, not being the best to see the faces of those on the other side of the table who speak to me; and when one’s ears are not well accustomed to the sounds of a language, a sight of the movements in the features of him that speaks helps to explain; so that I understand French better by the help of my spectacles.”

What good was a balloon? demanded one critic. “What good is a newborn baby?” Franklin replied.

As one recently responsible for making war and peace, Franklin was intrigued by the possibility that balloons might become instruments of the former—and thereby of the latter. Seventeen decades before the development of the theory of nuclear deterrence, Franklin identified its essence in the discovery of balloon flight. “Convincing sovereigns of the folly of wars may perhaps be one effect …” he wrote, “since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions. Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line, and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?”

First among the misconceptions was that Americans were rich but ignorant, able, and willing to shower wealth upon Europeans with the slightest ingenuity. Second was the belief that with so many new governments and so few families of standing, the thirteen states must have hundreds of offices available to well-born Europeans willing to cross the water. Third was the notion that the new governments bestowed land gratis on strangers, complete with livestock, tools, and slaves. “These are all wild imaginings,” Franklin declared, “and those who go to America with expectations founded upon them will surely find themselves disappointed.” What was the reality? “Though there are in that country few people so miserable as the poor of Europe, there are also very few that in Europe would be called rich. It is rather a happy mediocrity that prevails.” Americans were far from ignorant; their country supported nine colleges or universities and numerous academies. The several states did employ many people, but those employed often served at personal sacrifice. “It is a rule established in some of the states that no office should be so profitable as to make it desirable.” Birth counted for next to nothing in America. “People do not enquire, concerning a stranger, What is he? But What can he do? If he has any useful art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him; but a mere man of quality, who on that account wants to live upon the pub...

The only encouragement offered to strangers was what derived from liberty and good laws. Who came without a fortune must work to eat. “America is the land of labour, and by no means what the English call Lubberland, and the French Pays de Cocagne, where the streets are said to be paved with half-peck loaves, the houses tiled with pancakes, and where the fowls fly about already roasted, crying, Come eat me!” Who, then, should travel to America? “Hearty young labouring men, who understand the husbandry of corn and cattle…. Artisans of all the necessary and useful kinds…. Persons of moderate fortunes and capitals, who having a number of children to provide for, are desirous of bringing them up to industry.” Such people would find opportunities for material improvement unequaled in Europe.

They would find something else as well. America was a land where virtue grew among the corn. “Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of the morals and virtue of a nation. Hence bad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be a comfortable consideration to parents.” Comforting too was the encouragement American liberty and tolerance afforded to real religion. “Atheism is unknown there, infidelity rare and secret, so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an atheist or an infidel. And the Divine Being seems to have manifested his approbation of the m...

Death held no terror for Franklin. To his friend George Whately he explained the principle of his bifocals and said they made his failing eyes almost as useful as ever. He went on, “If all the other defects and infirmities were as easily and cheaply remedied, it would be worth while for my friends to live a good deal longer; but I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.”

Franklin received better than Laurens; in August 1784 the other missing commissioner, Thomas Jefferson, arrived. The contrast between Adams and Jefferson could hardly have been greater. Adams was jealous of Franklin (and of every other successful person he met); Jefferson easily accepted Franklin’s status as the greatest American of all. Adams embodied the prudishness of New England; Jefferson lived the tolerance of Virginia. Adams cared little for philosophy or speculation; Jefferson was a philosopher and scientist second among Americans only to Franklin. Adams distrusted France and inclined toward England; Jefferson felt just the opposite.

In his final months in Paris, Franklin oversaw negotiation of treaties with various countries; one, with Prussia, contained an article he thought should be generalized. In the event of war between them, the United States and Prussia would forgo the use of privateers. Although privateers had played a critical role for America in the late war, with Franklin urging the privateers on, he disliked this form of licensed lawlessness. Privateers were nothing better than pirates, and to allow—indeed encourage—their depredations was to foster disrespect for law and order. “Justice is as strictly due between neighbour nations as between neighbour citizens,” he wrote to Benjamin Vaughan, with the intention that his letter be published (it was). “A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.” Needless to say, Franklin believed that America’s defensive war against Britain had been just; it was this that excused America’s resort to privateers. But every war entailed injustice on one side or the other, and Franklin judged that the greater justice dictated abolition of this evil practice.

The rich trade routes of the European powers to the West Indies ran right by American shores, making the merchant vessels of those powers tempting targets for American craft. But privateering under any flag was a heinous business, starting with theft and ending with murder. “It is high time, for the sake of humanity, that a stop be put to this enormity.” He and his fellow commissioners were trying to include antiprivateering clauses in all their treaties. “This will be a happy improvement in the law of nations. The humane and the just cannot but wish general success to the proposition.” Franklin’s opposition to privateering suggested that he thought America would be involved in war rarely if ever; otherwise he would not so lightly have bargained away a potentially important American advantage. Indeed, a true son of the Enlightenment, he believed that wars would become less frequent—if national leaders employed their reason rather than their passions. To a correspondent who registered disapproval of war on grounds of its inhumanity, he agreed, then added that war was not simply inhumane but foolish. “I think it wrong in point of human prudence, for whatever advantage one nation would obtain from another, whether it be part of their territory, the liberty of commerce with them, free passage on their river, &c., it would be much cheaper to purchase such advantage with ready money, than to pay the expense of acquiring it by war.” An army was a “devouring monster” that had to b...

“Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early, and especially when I assure them that he gives light as soon as he rises.” Savants with whom this finding had been shared refused to accept it. “One, indeed, who is a learned natural philosopher, has assured me that I must be mistaken as to the circumstance of the light coming into my room; for it being well known, as he says, that there could be no light abroad at that hour, it follows that none could enter from without; and that, of consequence, my windows, being accidentally left open, instead of letting in the light, had only served to let out the darkness.” Yet additional experiments confirmed the truth that Paris lay in broad daylight for several hours before noon. This prompted certain deep, and most useful, reflections. “I considered that if I had not been awakened so early in the morning, I should have slept six hours longer by the light of the sun, and in exchange have lived six hours the following night by candle-light.”

For the great benefit of this discovery, thus freely communicated and bestowed by me upon the public, I demand neither place, pension, exclusive privilege, nor any other reward whatever. I expect only to have the honour of it. And yet I know there are little, envious minds who will, as usual deny me this, and say that my invention was known to the ancients, and perhaps they may bring passages out of the old books in proof of it. I will not dispute with these people that the ancients knew not the sun would rise at certain hours; they possibly had, as we have, almanacs that predicted it; but it does not follow thence that they knew he gave light as soon as he rose. This is what I claim as my discovery. If the ancients knew it, it might have been long since forgotten; for it certainly was unknown to the moderns, at least to the Parisians; which to prove, I need use but one plain simple argument. They are as well instructed, judicious, and prudent a people as exist anywhere in the world, all professing, like myself, to be lovers of economy; and, from the many heavy taxes required from them by the necessities of the state, have surely an abundant reason to be economical. I say it is impossible that so sensible a people, under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing.

Another bagatelle had a decidedly darker theme. It involved a lion, king of the beasts, who numbered among his subjects a body of faithful dogs, devoted to his person and government, and through whose assistance he had greatly extended his dominions. The lion, however, influenced by evil counselors, took an aversion to the dogs, condemned them unheard, and ordered his tigers, leopards, and panthers to attack and destroy them. The brave dogs, dismayed at their master’s change of heart, reluctantly defended themselves—but not without internal dissent. “A few among them, of a mongrel race, derived from a mixture with wolves and foxes, corrupted by royal promises of great rewards, deserted the honest dogs and joined their enemies.” After a sore struggle the dogs fought off the tigers, leopards, and panthers. In their victory they refused to suffer the return of the mongrels—who thereupon applied to the lion to fulfill the promises he had made. The wolves and the foxes supported their appeal and urged that every loyal subject of the lion should be taxed to that end. Only the horse, with a boldness and freedom that became the nobility of his nature, spoke against the mongrels and the wolves and foxes. The lion, he said, had been misled by bad ministers to war unjustly on his faithful subjects. Royal promises, when made to encourage subjects to act for the public good, should indeed be honored; but if made to encourage betrayal and mutual destruction, they were wicked and void fr...

“The name loyalist was improperly assumed by these people,” he wrote a British friend. “Royalists they may perhaps be called. But the true loyalists were the people of America, against whom they acted.” Eventually Franklin acknowledged that if Parliament wished to compensate the Loyalists, it might do so. But his reasoning revealed his continuing bitterness. “Even a hired assassin has a right to his pay from his employer.”

We are men, all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own power; they are formed and governed much by circumstances that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your situation was such that few would have censured your remaining neuter, though there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them.

The war had been hard on Philadelphia, but the peace was almost harder. The march of armies through the streets, the arrival of refugees, the flight of refugees, the occupation by the British, the evacuation by the British, the sundry other insults of war had left William Penn’s “green country town” battered and worn. Visitors remarked the peeling paint and broken windows. Houses and public buildings that had sheltered soldiers and horses stank of the waste of both species. Light rains made rock-strewn quagmires of streets where tight cobbles had formerly defied the heaviest downpours. But at least the war had been good for business. Bakers, butchers, tailors, printers, and purveyors of all manner of necessities and luxuries had supplied the contending armies in turn (and in some cases simultaneously). The same crew had fed, housed, entertained, and otherwise supplied the members of the Congress and their assorted supplicants and dependents.

The Revolution had solved the problem with the Penns, the one that had consumed so much of Franklin’s political career, by placing them definitively on the wrong side of history.