Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft4d5nb373&chunk.id=0&doc.v... Preferred Citation: Middlekauff, Robert. Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4d5nb373/ Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies Robert Middlekauff UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1996 The Regents of the University of California For Beverly Preferred Citation: Middlekauff, Robert. Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4d5nb373/ For Beverly ― ix ― Preface Benjamin Franklin in the pages that follow is not the "harmonious human multitude" depicted in Carl Van Doren's great biography. Franklin certainly possessed a multitude of talents, and his achievements in a variety of fields were enormous. But though his psyche had its harmonies, he was sometimes out of tune with himself and his world. This book seeks to see him under the pressure of enemies, several of whom were deeply interesting men-and one, John Adams, a good and, perhaps, great man. It is, in a sense, also about the force of the passions in history, including love and friendship, but mostly hatred, anger, scorn, the feelings enemies have for one another. It looks at a man, Benjamin Franklin, and at others around him in crisis, entangled in the affairs of eighteenth-century government and the diplomatic relations among nations. The American Revolution plays an important part in this story, but so does the politics of a British colony, Pennsylvania, before the Revolution. Revolutions and politics, primarily public events (upheavals of masses of people, wars) are made by organized institutions, factions, interest groups, leaders and led. In analyzing them, historians usually resort to studying their "objective" circumstances-their sources in society and economics, the ideas that 1 of 132 7/11/2006 3:04 PM Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft4d5nb373&chunk.id=0&doc.v... draw their support, the resources that make possible the movements that ― x ― shape them, and the wars that the participants fight. This book makes use of such accounts, for they are the stuff of written history. But its central assumptions are that emotions are as important as objective circumstances and that they are usually inseparable from what can be counted and measured and seen. It seeks to demonstrate that even in Benjamin Franklin, a rationalist and the preeminent American philosophe, the affective side of life throbbed and influenced virtually all that seemed so rational. I trust that this book also says something about Franklin's time. The era of the American Revolution, after all, was a period of enormous passion, and its politics translated into intense, galvanizing, organizing animosities. The study of these animosities-which often became passionate hatreds-can be made into an important device for viewing the era and its issues. Franklin and many of those he dealt with in America and Europe translated their political beliefs, hopes, and fears into intensely personal terms. This process of translation may not have been admirable, but it was a form of acting on principle. The passing of English power in America, with all that meant for English aristocratic and gentry classes, generated passions of extraordinary power in England and America. Franklin and his enemies shared these feelings-and acted on them. Franklin responded unevenly to crisis-sometimes calling on his intellectual resources, which were of a very high order, and sometimes ignoring reason and fact in favor of giving expression to a dark side of his passions when fear and anger took over. He lost his political equilibrium when he was in middle age and behaved foolishly, persuading a good many others, mostly in Pennsylvania, to behave in a similar way. But he was at his best as an old man, his good judgment restored, in the service of his country in Paris. Franklin's enemies were of several sorts. I have tried to be fair ― xi ― to them and to Franklin. One of them, John Adams, has always seemed to me admirable, even though he was sometimes foolish and vain; but then so at times was Franklin. My comments about two of Franklin's modern enemies in the Prologue are meant to be suggestive and to point up the ironies of perception in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. R.M. ― xiii ― Acknowledgments In the course of writing this book, I called upon many friends and institutions for help. I began it while I was director of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery and finished it as a member of the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. Both institutions support scholarship in a variety of ways. I wish to thank President Robert Skotheim of the Huntington and Martin Ridge, then Director of Research there, for a Fletcher Jones Fellowship in 1990-91, and for a variety of kindnesses. My own university provided stimulation and tangible support, especially through the Preston Hotchkis Chair. Claude-Anne Lopez and I originally planned to write the book together. Not long after we began our collaboration, Mrs. Lopez decided not to proceed. But she has remained an interested party, and she has been an inspiration to me. Her own books on Franklin, one co-authored with Eugenia W. Herbert, set a high standard. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, to which Mrs. Lopez contributed for many years, has been the most important source for my study. I wish to acknowledge, however inadequately, its great distinction and the superb scholarship of its editors over the years: the late Leonard Labaree and William Willcox, Claude-Anne Lopez, and the present editor, Barbara Oberg. Dr. Oberg and her colleagues, especially Jonathan Dull and Kate Ohno, were wonderfully helpful to me when I worked in the unpublished papers in the Franklin collections at Yale University. ― xiv ― I owe much to Michael Zuckerman, who invited me to try out several ideas in 1991 in his Philadelphia seminar; to Leo Lemay, who provided a similar opportunity at the conference "Reappraising Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective," held in Philadelphia in April 1990; and to The [San Francisco] Bay Area 2 of 132 7/11/2006 3:04 PM Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft4d5nb373&chunk.id=0&doc.v... Colonialists, who commented helpfully on a part of Chapter 4 in 1993. Librarians at the American Philosophical Society, in particular Ted Carter; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, especially in the manuscripts room; and the Huntington Library, in particular Mary Robertson and Alan Jutzi, eased my way. John Van Home of the Library Company of Philadelphia and Mark Lloyd of the Pennsylvania Archives provided valuable information about sources. I am very grateful to colleagues who read all or parts of this study, much to its profit: James Thorpe, the former Director of the Huntington and Paul Zall, a Research Scholar there; Gunther Barth, James Kettner, Lawrence Levine, Nicholas Riasanovsky, and Irwin Scheiner of my department. Several students also helped in various ways-Mark Cachia-Riedl, Jacqueline Frobose, Brian Gregg, and Ralph Squillace. My greatest debt is to my beloved wife, Beverly. ― xv ― Prologue: The Modern Enemies There were those in Franklin's time who thought virtue and morality fell too easily from his tongue. The aphorisms he made famous in Poor Richard's Almanac frequently advise good conduct. They urge restraint in eating and drinking, caution in choosing friends; and they suggest that a man should select his wife with his eyes wide open and when the deed is done, close them. They also more commonly praise hard work, saving time, frugality. Not content to give such counsel, Franklin lived a life that exemplified the virtues he advocated and then wrote his Autobiography telling about his success in practicing what he preached. Franklin did much more of course. Almost any of his major achievements would have satisfied an ordinary man. He was a successful businessman, retiring from business when he was forty-two; in retirement he turned his attention to electricity and dazzled the learned of the century with his experiments. While he did such things, and sat in the legislature at the same time, he served his city in various ways, getting its streets paved and lighted and establishing a fire department, a lending library, schools, and a hospital among other useful institutions. He represented his province in Britain and, a little later, his country in Paris. And through it all, he wrote essays, doggerel, letters, reports of great interest and sometimes of distinction. ― xvi ― A later age celebrated his achievements, admired his virtues, and wrote his biography over and over again. There is no state named after him, but just about every other sort of institution has been-schools, towns, cities, hospitals, colleges, a mint, and many children as well. All the celebration and honor seem just and appropriate given his achievements. But such a paragon makes many uneasy. Franklin has too many accomplishments, and he has perhaps received too much commendation. This age in particular seems put off by all that has come to him by way of praise. For Franklin's virtues are those not prized in our time, a period of slack, an age that has made leisure an occupation, one that celebrates the liberated spirit-and flesh-not the disciplined mind. Even in the nineteenth century, a sterner time than our own but also a century much given to moralism not far different from Franklin's, there were skeptics or critics fond of mocking the high-mindedness of Franklin and his apparently ceaseless efforts to do good.