Healthy, Wealthy and Despised
By Robert Wilson
Sunday, March 17, 1996
We know Benjamin Franklin as a wily but essentially benign man. The good-natured home truths of Poor Richard define him for us, as do his ebullient entrepreneurialism, his almost offhanded civic-mindedness, his multifaceted intelligence, his cleverness as an inventor and scientific experimentalist, and his playful near-licentiousness as his country's representative in Paris during the Revolution. It's true that he had a Perot-like ability to grow rich off the government, but at least he had the good grace not to gnaw at that hand once he was well-fed. When he finally retired from public service at age 82, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the abolition of slavery. All in all, he is the most lovable of the Founding Fathers, and perhaps after Lincoln the most beloved of Americans.
Part of Franklin's charm is his humanness. He was not an aristocrat like the Virginians and not a prig like John Adams. He was a working man, a Mason, a slightly ridiculous figure in his brown velvet suit, fur hat and granny glasses. In spite of Poor Richard's many strictures on diet, he was chubby. Nonetheless, he loved the ladies to a fault and they loved him.
For all his human frailties, we do not think of Franklin as a man with enemies, as a man who was deeply hated and capable of deep hatreds of his own. But Robert Middlekauff's short, well-written study changes that. Middlekauff, who won the Bancroft Prize a quarter-century ago for The Mathers: Three Generations of a Puritan Family, writes in his preface to Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies that "the era of the American Revolution, after all, was a period of enormous passion, and its politics translated into intense, galvanizing, organizing animosities." As one of his time's seminal figures, Franklin would naturally be the object of some of these hatreds. And he was so much a character of his time that such passions "throbbed and influenced virtually all that seemed so rational" in him.
The man Franklin hated most cordially in his life was Thomas Penn, the sour and anti-democratic son of the sainted William, who founded Pennsylvania after being granted proprietary rights to most of its land in 1681. In 1746, Thomas became proprietor of the province, coldly administering those rights, which the family still controlled. Franklin, who was already becoming a famous man when he retired as a printer in 1748, began to devote himself in earnest to the affairs of Pennsylvania just when Thomas Penn took up the proprietorship, and the two clashed almost immediately. Penn, who lived in England, felt threatened by Franklin's formation of a voluntary militia in 1747. Over the next two decades they would become bitter adversaries.
Middlekauff writes that "the crisis of the 1750s," between Penn and his governors in the province on the one side and the elected Pennsylvania Assembly including Franklin on the other, "really came down to a question of who would govern Pennsylvania." As a historian, Middlekauff believes that "emotions are as important as objective circumstances" to an understanding of history, and "they are usually inseparable from what can be counted and measured and seen." This struggle in Pennsylvania between English aristocratic control and the rising democratic will was of course an important prelude to the Revolution, and it is a perfect test of Middlekauff's thesis.
Franklin became so consumed by his hatred for Penn that he behaved in a way that "defied his most profound impulses." When Penn would not voluntarily pay taxes on proprietary lands and loosen his control of the governor and the Assembly, Franklin spent years of his life working to return the province to the crown -- something that clearly went against the tide of history and that was unpopular in Pennsylvania and in Parliament. It was not until 1768 that Franklin gave up this foolish proposition. He would have done well to remember Poor Richard's advice: "Take this remark from Richard poor and lame,/ Whate'er's begun in anger ends in shame."
Franklin's reputation was so large on so many fronts that whatever shame this interlude engendered did not seriously damage it. Congress sent him to Paris in 1776, along with Silas Deane and Arthur Lee. He would remain there for nearly a decade, years in which he would inspire the hatred of these two and later, more perplexingly (because Deane and Lee were not large-spirited men) of John Adams. Adams, whom Middlekauff characterizes as "a good and, perhaps, great man," became a member of the American delegation in Paris and later was minister plenipotentiary to Britain, but based in Paris. The French pressed Franklin to their (sometimes heaving) bosoms. He was revered throughout Europe as a man of science, but the French also managed to romanticize him as a noble savage. His image became iconic in Paris, "with his portrait painted on almost every inanimate object," as Middlekauff puts it.
All this must have been trial enough to his compatriots. For the Puritan Adams, Franklin was far too comfortable with the French. Although Middlekauff discounts the rumors of Franklin's sexual profligacy -- he reckons that, given Franklin's age and health, he was "all talk and no action" -- he was clearly anything but censorious of French morals. This shocked Adams. More important, the two men had different diplomatic styles, Adams's more direct and, well, undiplomatic. He mistrusted Franklin's smooth, seemingly yielding attitude toward the French, and even suspected Franklin of disloyalty.
Middlekauff's sensible and sensitive portraits of Franklin and the people with whom he came into conflict in middle and old age remind us that a period of our history we are tempted to see as costume drama was a time of passionate and potentially fatal seriousness. Although Franklin's enemies came almost entirely from his public life, Middlekauff also examines one sad instance in which the passions of the time seriously affected Franklin's private life. His illegitimate but much-loved son, William, who was governor of New Jersey, remained loyal to the British during the Revolution, and was imprisoned by the Continental Congress. His father did nothing to spare him, and never forgave him. The situation caused Benjamin Franklin an extraordinary amount of grief, but his actions, Middlekauff concludes, constituted a failure of the heart.
Robert Wilson is the editor of Historic Preservation magazine.
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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