Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies

...Franklin's meaning, writes Middlekauff, was clear...

...The Other Side of Gentle Ben Franklin Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies Robert Middlekauff University of California Press 255 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan Ates a young boy growing up in eigh- enth-century Boston, Benjamin ranklin read Cotton Mather's Essays to Do Good...

...Yet not everyone concurs...

...Franklin was horrified...

...There are natural duties which precede political ones," he wrote back to William, "and cannot be extinguished by them...

...Lawrence called Franklin a "snuff-colored little man," self-satisfied, repressed, and without imagination or JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor o The American Spectator...

...His son should have put aside his principles in favor of his father's, because he was his father's son...

...It was a bizarre idea...

...Anyone who reads his book is unlikely to make that mistake again...

...L% 64 Ju n e 1996 • The American Spectator...

...I was astonished to see him thus meanly give up his Father's Character," he later wrote, "and conceived that moment a more cordial and thorough Contempt for him than I ever before felt for any Man living—a Contempt that I cannot express in words...

...Franklin's unforgiving attitude here seems almost uncharacteristic...

...Franklin's rage was so overpowering that he could not forgive his only surviving son, William, for remaining loyal to the Crown...

...To get Penn to change his mind, in 1757 the Pennsylvania Assembly sent the wonderfully persuasive Franklin to London to meet with him...

...The meeting was a disaster...

...Given that William had acquired his Anglophilia at his father's knee, so to speak, and that Franklin himself had been an ardent Anglophile right up to the Revolutionary War, one might expect him to show some sympathy for his son...

...and to John Jay (1781): the English are like "pirates," the "Enemies to all Mankind...

...After imparting this message, Franklin refused to see his son...

...The great British statesman, William Pitt, called Franklin "an honor not to the English nation only but to human nature," and it is precisely for his nature—benevolent, sunny, tolerant, and wise—that Franklin is revered today...

...Franklin was well aware that Adams could not stand being in the same room with him, but he also recognized that Adams was totally devoted to America's cause, and he did not wish to provoke an open break...

...Consider the gentle way in which he handled his difficult colleague, John Adams, who served alongside Franklin in Paris as part of an American delegation sent by Congress to secure an alliance with France...

...A turning point came in 1774, when Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general, humiliated Franklin before a meeting of the Privy Council...

...Franklin told Penn that his father had granted the Assembly all the powers it was claiming...

...And should the Crown take over a Colony, it would look to tighten the reins, not loosen them...

...The "province" of Pennsylvania, as it was known before the Revolution, had a most peculiar government...

...In Philadelphia, his adopted home, Franklin organized a fire department, established a lending library, got the streets paved, built a hospital, and supported a school for the poor...

...I therefore never think of your present Ministers and their Abettors but with the Image strongly painted in my View of their Hands red, wet and dropping with the Blood of my Countrymen, Friends and Relations...

...Franklin, who was 70 years old when he arrived in Paris in 1776, was idolized by the French...

...He therefore instructed the governor to block any such legislation...

...But Mather's emphasis on the importance of good works became the central theme of Franklin's life...

...D.H...

...to James Hutton (1778): you are "the worst and wickedest Nation upon Earth...

...Middlekauff's Franklin emerges as a man of great spirit and tempestuous emotions, barely kept under control by an imperious and dominating intellect...

...William, governor of New Jersey when the war began, was at first placed under a mild form of house arrest, but when he broke the terms of his detention to assist some nearby British army units, he was placed in solitary confinement in a filthy jail, where he suffered horribly...

...He has forfeited all the respect of societies and men...

...Franklin returned to Philadelphia about two weeks before the Revolutionary War began...

...But Franklin was implacable...

...But there was a hardness to his character, a ferocity, even, that recalls his Puritan forebears and that we, who live in what Middlekauff calls "a period of slack," are apt to overlook...

...People of good sense seldom fall into it," he wrote, "except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts who have been bred at Edinburgh...

...spirit...

...On the one hand, there was the proprietor, who held a charter from the king, and who both appointed and "instructed" a governor...

...The American Spectator • June 1996 63 To punish Penn, Franklin attempted to have Pennsylvania taken away from him by urging its citizens to petition Parliament to have their province governed directly by the Crown...

...As the war went on, the man who, above all others, is known to posterity for his geniality and even temper, gave vent in his letters to a ferocious hatred of all things English: To Joseph Priestley (1777): "Of all the Wars in my time, this on the part of England appears to me the wickedest...

...Unlike his Quaker father, who conceived of Pennsylvania as a "holy experiment" in religious freedom, Thomas (who married an Anglican and worshipped in the Church of England) had only one interest in Pennsylvania: to avoid having his extensive landholdings taxed by the Assembly...

...He'd arrived, writes Middlekauff, as someone who "loved England and the British Empire more than anything else and probably more than anyone else...

...The book's Puritan theology had little influence on him, and all his life Franklin entertained a horror of religious controversy...

...Wedderburn accused Franklin (probably correctly) of stealing and publishing some confidential political letters, and the viciousness of his attack ("I hope, my Lords, you will mark and brand the man...

...Lawrence and his epigoni see Franklin as the quintessential "Yankee"—shrewd and industrious, but without a soul...

...He invented the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, and bifocals—and refused to patent, or profit from, any of his inventions...

...On the other hand, there was the Quaker-dominated Assembly, which could initiate legislation and thought of itself as a parliament...

...to Hartley (1778): "Your Nation is hiring all the Cut Throats it can collect of all Countries and Colours to destroy us," and you "thirst for our Blood and pursue us with Fire and Sword," and you are a "barbarous" enemy...

...As Middlekauff writes, "Neither the Crown nor Parliament would welcome proposals from America that would relax control from England...

...But serving in London as representative of the Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Massachusetts legislatures, Franklin got a close view of the inner workings of British politics, and was not amused...

...Artists sketched him, and his portrait appeared in all the likely and unlikely places...

...In a letter to Robert Livingston, secretary for foreign affairs of the revolutionary Congress, an indignant Adams urged that Franklin be recalled at once, and he added this observation: "If I was in Congress, and [Franklin] and the Marble Mercury in the Garden of Versailles were in Nomination for an Embassy, I would not hesitate to give my vote for the Statue, upon the principle that it would do no harm...

...It is to refute the views of Franklin's critics that Robert Middlekauff has written Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies...

...led the proud and defiant Franklin to turn irrevocably against England...

...When that control broke down and Franklin's passions surged to the surface, the results were terrible to behold—which reminds us that it wasn't always easy being Benjamin Franklin...

...Undeterred, and "in defiance of all the evidence," Franklin, "a man usually extraordinarily responsive to empirical realities," set out upon a lengthy, utterly quixotic campaign for royal government in Pennsylvania...

...The king of France, both amused and annoyed by all the attention Franklin attracted, had Franklin's face painted on the bottom of a chamber pot—inside the pot...

...If so, replied Penn, he had done so without authority, and his promises were worthless...

...Middlekauff, professor of American history at the University of California, although a great admirer, is quick to point out that "Franklin was not all sunshine and light...

...Not until 1768—eleven years after the start of his mission—did Franklin bow to political reality and acknowledge that Parliament would never annul Thomas Penn's charter...

...Franklin's earliest lapse into what Middlekauff calls "irrationality and passion" came in the course of a political struggle...

...In 1784 William, now in England, wrote a pathetic letter to his "Dear and Honored Father," begging him "to revive that affectionate intercourse and connection which, till commencement of the late troubles, had been the pride and happiness of my life...

...During the course of his mission to London—he would not finally leave until 1775—Franklin's attitude to England underwent a complete transformation...

...When Adams arrived in Paris two years later, he was scandalized by the laxity of French morals and Franklin's ability to thrive in this corrupt environment...

...That was Benjamin Franklin at his best: genial, kind, and absolutely deadly...

...So when he wrote to Livingston about Adams, his letter was filled with praise—until the very end: "I am persuaded however, that he means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Sences...

...Mark Twain wrote a satiric essay arguing that Franklin acted with "a malevolence which is without parallel in history"—he "would work all day and then sit up nights, and then let on to be studying algebra by the light of a smoldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also, or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them...

...In Franklin's day, Pennsylvania's proprietor was Thomas Penn, son of William Penn...

...His face soon became familiar everywhere," writes Middlekauff...

...to Hutton again (1778): "The Slaughter of Men in Support of an unjust Cause is nothing less than Murder...