Reflection on Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

               I was left with a much better impression of Benjamin Franklin from this biography than I was of Thomas Jefferson of his biography. There may be author bias at work- the subtitle of the Jefferson biography is, after all, “The Art of Power.” In comparing the two, I would say that Jefferson and Franklin were both extraordinarily intelligent- Franklin as a humorist, an inventor, a scientist, and a pragmatist; Jefferson as a philosopher and also as a scientist. As men, I prefer Franklin, who has his own faults, but largely seems like a good person. Franklin had a lot of issues with his family, as a son and a brother, and later as a husband and a father. With him, as opposed to Jefferson, I can cut some more slack because it’s an inability to show affection. With Jefferson on the other hand, it’s some pretty heinous moral crimes like rape and the enslavement of his own children.

               This book, like the Jefferson biography, reminded me of how closely related the American Revolution was to the Glorious Revolution. The restoration of the monarchy in Britain occurred in just 1660, a short 104 years before the Stamp Act. In fact, it was the end of Puritan rule and the restrictions on Puritans that came with the restoration that drove the Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. Franklin was always a sort of social butterfly, and for all his life would avoid disagreement and promote compromise. In a sort of educated tradesmen’s society he founded in Philadelphia, the Junto, they would mostly debate issues using questions, using the Socratic method to avoid heated disagreements. Franklin also rarely voiced opinions in his own name in the newspaper’s he published, though he would publish his own opinions with great frequency. He would always use a pseudonym, though sometimes would hint at who it really was.

               In the decade before the Revolutionary War, Franklin was already an old man, and he was living in England at that point, away from his family and his wife, who he would not see in the several years before her death. He argued strenuously to keep the colonies and mother country together until shots were fired and colonists were killed. His son, William, was the governor of New Jersey and a British loyalist. Franklin would be stoic and unemotional about his son being on the opposing side of the war, but of the separation of England and America itself, he was despondent. On one occasion, reading newspapers about the issue with a friend, “the tears in his eyes made it impossible for him to read.”

               Franklin’s significance in American history is enormous. As a politician, he signed the Declaration of Independence, the alliance with France, and the peace treaty with England. He led the Albany Convention and signed the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, having drafted an earlier version in the 1770’s that did not passed but influenced the latter. As a scientist, he made major discoveries in the field of electricity. As an inventor, he introduced the world to bifocals, flippers, and many other things. As a writer, he was sort of a proto-Mark Twain, developing a n early form of American humor. He is one of the last men of the Enlightenment and one of the most influential Americans of the 18^th century, being revered by nearly all his contemporaries upon his death. The author points out that he doesn’t represent the American character, but rather a side of it that is rational and tolerant in a dichotomy against the religiously fervent and the xenophobic, such as Jonathan Edwards at the time.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In the early 18^th century, Harvard spent 11 percent of its budget on financial aid, which is more than it does today.
• Inoculation was introduced to America by black slaves from Africa, where inoculation was common.
• Franklin owned a few slaves, though he would become more liberal later in life and oppose slavery, proposing a formal abolition petition to congress in 1790, though it failed to pass.
• For scale, Franklin’s Philadelphia was the largest city in America in the 1750’s with just 23,000 inhabitants, while London boasted 750,000, the second largest city in the world behind Beijing with 900,000.
• French support in the Revolutionary War was truly critical. At the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, the French fleet blocked the sea and Lafayette’s column of Frenchmen covered the south of the town as Washington’s force was nearly half French.