INTRODUCTION An Outline of the Life of BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1706, the fifteenth of seventeen, children of a thrifty tallow chandler, or candle maker. As a boy he was industrious and bookish, and before he was seventeen years old he had trained himself to use his pen, had been apprenticed in his brother's printing shop, and had written many articles published in his brother's paper, The New England Courant. In 1723, as the result of his brother's harsh treatment, he ran away to Philadelphia. In 1724 he went to London for two years on the promise of the irresponsible Governor Keith of Pennsylvania to set him up in the printing business on his return. The Governor's failure to keep his word did Franklin no harm in the end, for he established his own printing house in 1728, applied himself with the thrift and industry which he always taught by word and precept, and in 1748, at the age of fortytwo, was able to retire with a moderate fortune. During this time he had not only succeeded at Philadelphia, but had combined with partners in New York, Newport, Lancaster (Pennsylvania), Charleston (South Carolina), Kingston (Jamaica), and Antigua. ix The activities of his life were so crowded and interwoven that they may best be summarized under a few simple heads. As a public-spirited citizen of Philadelphia he organized a debating society, the Junto, in 1727; published The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729; founded the first circulating library in America in 1731; conducted Poor Richard's Almanac from 1732 to 1748; organized the American Philosophical Society in 1744; and in 1749 founded the academy which developed into the University of Pennsylvania. As an inventor he perfected the Franklin stove in 1742, and contrived methods of street-lighting and paving which were widely adopted. As a scientist he demonstrated the identity of lightning and electricity in 1752, and went from that to further investigations which sooner or later brought him election to the Royal Academy of London with the award of their Copley medal, an appointment as one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences, and medals and diplomas from other societies in St. Petersburg, Madrid, Edinburgh, Padua, and Turin. As a holder of public trusts and offices he became clerk of the Assembly of Pennsylvania in 1736; postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737; deputy postmaster-general of the colonies in 1753; commissioner from Pennsylvania to the Albany Congress in 1754; colonial agent in London for Pennsylvania in 1757 and 1764, and for Massachusetts in 1770; one of the framers of the Declaration of Independence; minister to the French court from the United States in 1778; a signer of the Peace Articles in 1783; presi dent of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1785-87; and a framer of the Constitution of the United States. Such a catalogue is not a thing to memorize. Its value is like that of an entry in Who's Who in America: it should be referred to when needed. Yet it is worth reading and re-reading as an evidence of the almost unparalleled variety and usefulness of this man's life. Franklin's Education and Culture Although Franklin enjoyed the very least of formal schooling, for he was set to work at the age of ten, he received a thorough education, not merely in the general experiences of life but in the learning which is drawn from the library and the laboratory. Two years in his father's shop showed him the rudiments of business. In his teens he was reading Bunyan, Burton, the Mathers, Locke, Defoe, Plutarch, Addison, and Pope. Five years in the handling of printer's type drilled him in accuracy and gave him the foundation for his selfimposed and self-conducted course in arithmetic, and the more ambitious course in composition with Addison as his literary model. So, too, he mastered the elements of logic for a while, applying them in discussion with his friends to the point of making himself a nuisance. His years in London, while he was eighteen to twenty, afforded a happy widening to his vista. He was always reading, largely in borrowed books until he enjoyed the privileges of the circulating library which he founded himself, and which was the one source of recreation he allowed himself after his return to Philadelphia. His attempt to develop sound moral habits amounted to a profitable course in applied ethics. At the age of twenty-seven he began the study of languages, and in succession acquired a reading knowledge of French, Italian, and Spanish. Finally, in the way of technical and deliberately acquired learning, came his study and his achievements in the field of electricity. Moreover, his capacity for learning and his alertness of mind led to the enrichment of his education through the fronting of definite problems, the visiting of various countries, and contact with the best minds of western Europe, England, and America. From a surprisingly early age he had come into acquaintance with well known men. He knew Cotton Mather the theologian, Whitefield the evangelist, Rush the physician, West the artist, Webster the lexicographer, Jay, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and a host of other statesmen. In England, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in coöperation, he encountered men and minds of no less distinction; and in France his acquaintances included the most brilliant men and women of the time. All the while in the scientific world, which knows no national bounds, he was led into exchange of ideas with physicists in England, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. His mind, his studies, and his wider experiences developed him into a wise and accomplished citizen of the world. Yet wide as his education was, it was the education of a thrifty and industrious man whose interests were focused on the acquiring of "useful attainments." He escaped being a poet, he stated, but prose writing was very useful to him. His sole allusions to poetry were to certain pat couplets of Pope and to a passage in Thomson ridiculing the ambitions of would-be poets. There are almost no references to the theater, the drama, fiction, music, painting, sculpture, or architecture. There is no instinctive resort in his writings to the illuminative facts or principles of history, the broad reaches of philosophy, seldom to the larger implications of science. One need only compare Franklin's range of interests with those of Burke or Talleyrand or Jefferson, or with those of his fellow-townsman, Francis Hopkinson, to realize how relatively limited it was in point of cultural variety. Franklin and Puritanism It is safe to say that up to 1759 Benjamin Franklin was the most notable American who did not come out of the ranks of the Puritans. It is quite clear, too, that Franklin was not a Puritan himself; it is the fashion to discuss the changing ideals in eighteenth century American life by drawing the contrast between the puritanism of Jonathan Edwards and the rationalism of his great contemporary, Franklin. But as a matter of history, the difference between them is in a way too obvious, because so much of it lies on the surface. Edwards was unique even among Puritans. In a comparison between Franklin and Cotton Mather, for example, it becomes quite evident that the difference lay far more in their thinking than in their characters or their conduct. |