The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (34 page)

Because people will be interested in the sources of the “immense revolution of the present period,” said Vaughan, they will want to know the motivations of the revolutionaries and whether they were virtuous. “As your own character will be the principal one to receive a scrutiny, it is proper (even for its effects upon your vast and rising country, as well as upon England and Europe), that it should stand respectable and eternal.” Franklin’s life could establish the central point of this enlightened age—that men were not born to obscurity and viciousness but through their own efforts could rise and do good work. Vaughan ended his letter by appealing to Franklin to write his life in order to get Americans and Englishmen thinking well of each other again. But not just Americans and Englishmen needed to learn about his life. “Extend your views even further: do not stop at those who speak the English tongue, but after having settled so many points in nature and politics, think of bettering the whole race of men.”
⁴

Franklin could hardly have resisted these exhortations to become an exemplar for a rising people. In 1784 he thus resumed writing his
Autobiography
—the second part of it, which, like a game of chess, presumes man’s control over his life. Obviously influenced by Vaughan’s letter, Franklin laid out in this section of his memoir his method for achieving happiness. All of the intellectuals in the age of Enlightenment—from Francis Hutcheson to Claude-Adrien Helvétius—were preoccupied with discovering the moral forces in the human world that were comparable to the physical forces in the natural world uncovered by Newton and other scientists. Franklin was no different. In the 1750s he had revealed the workings of electricity in the natural world, but he had longed to make an equally important contribution to the moral or social sciences. He had been thinking about writing a book on the “Art of Virtue” for decades.
⁵
But now he realized that he might not have time to write it. So instead he decided to describe in his
Autobiography
his “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.”
⁶

THE PROJECT FOR ACHIEVING MORAL PERFECTION

In his
Autobiography
Franklin set forth a series of moral injunctions for living a good life, including reading, practicing modesty, and avoiding “Taverns, Games, and Frolicks of any kind.” He praised religion for whatever moral effects it had, but for little else. He believed that simply exhorting people to be good would not be enough; he wanted to present them with the means and manner of obtaining virtue—without relying on organized religion, which Franklin found often tended to divide people from one another rather than inspiring and promoting morality.

He listed thirteen virtues (temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility) with descriptions of each; for example, frugality— “Waste not”; industry—“Lose no time”; chastity—“Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring”; and humility—“Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” These were not utopian virtues, requiring a complete change of heart; instead, they were realistic, down-to-earth virtues, capable of being managed by ordinary people and not just a saintly few.
⁷
By creating an elaborate “Plan for Self-Examination”—a daily checklist for each virtue— Franklin tells us how he worked diligently to eliminate faults and promote his thirteen virtues—all with the aim not only of pleasing God but, more important, of getting along in life. This is the project that D. H. Lawrence and other imaginative writers have so much detested.
⁸

Franklin took his project to achieve moral perfection quite seriously, more seriously perhaps than many commentators have admitted. The Enlightenment promise of being able to make oneself over culturally seemed to be exemplified in Franklin’s life. The seriousness with which he took his project to become morally perfect is revealed in the wonderful but complicated anecdote of the speckled ax. He had told the story many times to French friends, and now he incorporated it into this second section of his
Autobiography.

In attempting to carry out the elaborate moral injunctions he had set for himself, he said, he had difficulty in ordering his time. In fact, he tells us, he made so little progress and had so many relapses in ordering his life that he was “almost ready to give up the Attempt” and content himself “with a faulty Character in that respect.” At this point he injected the story of the speckled ax.

A man had bought a new ax and now wanted to have the whole surface of his ax as bright as the edge. The smith who had sold him the ax consented to grind it bright for him if the man would turn the wheel. The smith pressed the broad face of the ax hard and heavy against the stone, which made turning it very fatiguing. The man, becoming more and more tired, kept leaving the wheel to see how the grinding was coming. Finally, the exhausted man declared he would take his ax as it was without further grinding. No, said the smith, keep turning and sooner or later we’ll have it bright; as yet, it was still only speckled. “Yes, says the Man; but—
I think I like a speckled Ax best"

This, said Franklin, was the way many people rationalized abandoning their efforts to break bad habits and establish good ones. They gave up the struggle “and concluded that
a speckled Ax was best."

It is stories like these that make interpreting Franklin and his
Autobiography
so difficult. Some otherwise sensitive readers have concluded from this anecdote that Franklin had learned his lesson—that seeking the sort of moral perfection that did violence to human nature was foolish. Indeed, Franklin himself suggests as much when he notes that every now and then he thought his entire project “might be a kind of Foppery in Morals,” which, if it became known, would make him “ridiculous.” He goes on to observe “that a perfect Character might be attended with the Inconvenience of being envied and hated,” and therefore “a benevolent Man should allow a few Faults in himself, to keep his Friends in Countenance.”

On the face of it such suggestions make Franklin appear to be a reasonable man, someone who counsels good sense and moderation instead of maintaining utopian fantasies of moral perfection. But for Franklin such thinking was only “something that pretended to be Reason,” and not reason itself. With his seemingly sensible suggestions he was not really trying to justify giving up the effort to be morally perfect. The real message of his story is that one has to keep grinding away and not remain satisfied with a speckled ax.

Although Franklin admits that he had not attained moral perfection in his lifetime but had fallen far short of it, “yet I was by the Endeavour a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been, if I had not attempted it.” In other words, Franklin tells us the delightful story of the speckled ax only to deny its lesson at the end. Any reader, however, is bound to be overwhelmed by the charm of the anecdote and the power of the rationalizations that excuse a less than perfect moral character. Hence, Franklin leaves us with a very morally ambiguous message. Which is why so many different readers can draw so many different lessons from the
Autobiography,
and indeed, from all of his writings.
⁹

Franklin wanted his posterity to know, he says, that even at the age of seventy-eight this “little Artifice” of self-examination was the source of the health and felicity of his life. Above all, he owed “to the joint Influence of the whole Mass of the Virtues, even in their imperfect State he was able to acquire them, all that Evenness of Temper, & that Chearfulness in Conversation which makes his Company still sought for, & agreeable even to his younger Acquaintance.”
¹⁰

As this boast indicates and as Franklin disarmingly admitted, he never had much success “in acquiring the
Reality
” of the virtue of humility, but he “had a good deal with regard to the
Appearance
of it.” Humility, he said, had not been on his original list of virtues; he had added it only because a friend had told him that he was too proud. Franklin was well aware of his pride and its near relation, vanity. He had begun his
Autobiography
by admitting the overwhelming power of vanity. “Most People,” he had written in 1771, “dislike Vanity in others whatever Share they have of it themselves.” But Franklin knew better. “I give it fair Quarter whenever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of Good to the Possessor and to others that are within his Sphere of Action.” Now in 1784 at the end of the second part of his
Autobiography
he was still struggling with the vanity and pride in himself that he could not help feeling and that he knew were the real sources of his benevolence and success in life. Pride, he conceded, was the hardest passion to subdue. “Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself.” Even if he could completely overcome his pride, he would probably then be proud of his humility.
¹¹

A STRANGER IN MY OWN COUNTRY

After the peace treaty was signed, Franklin reluctantly realized that he ought to end his days in America. But he had come to love France. It was “the civilest Nation upon Earth,” he believed, and the French were “a delightful People to live with.”
¹²
On at least two occasions he expressed a strong desire to settle there for good.
¹³
The first time was when he tried to arrange a marriage between his grandson Temple and the daughter of

Monsieur and Madame Brillon. To convince the Brillons that their daughter would not be taken away with Temple, Franklin promised not only to secure a diplomatic post in Europe for his grandson but also to remain in France for the rest of his life. The Brillons found reasons to put Franklin off, and the matter was dropped.

The second time Franklin declared he would remain in France was when he proposed marriage to Anne-Catherine Helvétius, the widow of the philosopher. Madame Helvétius was over sixty but still lively and attractive. But, more important, she maintained a spirited salon in Auteuil, next to Passy, that was celebrated for its wit and irreverence. Franklin, like many others, was smitten with her. “I see that statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets, and men of learning of all sort are drawn around you, and seem as willing to attach themselves to as straws about a fine piece of amber,” he once told her. “We find in your sweet society, that charming benevolence, that amiable attention to oblige, that disposition to please and be pleased, which we do not always find in the society of one another. It springs from you; it has its influence on us all; and in your company we are not only pleased with you, but better pleased with one another and with ourselves.”
¹⁴
It may have been Madame Helvétius who inspired Franklin’s famous compliment, the kind of bon mot that any eighteenth-century French aristocratic woman would have prized. When one of these French ladies reproached the doctor for putting off a visit she had expected, Franklin, taken aback, supposedly replied, “Madame, I am waiting until the nights are longer.”
¹⁵

Franklin was so admiring of Madame Helvétius that he wanted everyone to meet her. When he introduced John Adams’s wife, Abigail, to her, however, the puritanical lady from Massachusetts was not at all impressed; in fact, she was disgusted, as she was with Paris in general. Madame Helvétius was much too bold and loose for Mrs. Adams’s taste, bawling out her greetings, throwing her arms about her dinner partners’ chairs, sprawling on a settee, “where she shew more than her feet.”
¹⁶
John Adams agreed with his wife about the dissolute behavior he observed in the Helvétius household. “Oh Mores,” he said. “What Absurdities, Inconsistencies, Distractions and Horrors would these Manners introduce into our Republican Governments in America: No kind of Republican Government can ever exist with such national manners as these. Cavete Americani.”
¹⁷

Franklin shared none of this kind of straitlaced American reaction to French manners. He understood the French and was charmed by them, and especially by Madame Helvétius and the warm and bantering cheekiness of her household. He repeatedly proposed to her, but always with a certain playful detachment so their pride would not be endangered. His French friends, however, thought he was quite serious and blamed Madame Helvétius for letting him go. If Madame Helvétius had accepted him, the most expert authority on Franklin’s female relations believes, the good doctor would never have returned to America.
¹⁸

One can hardly blame him for wanting to stay in Europe. He was an old man, and, as John Adams noted, Frenchwomen had “an unaccountable passion for old age.”
¹⁹
Franklin had spent all but three and a half years out of the previous twenty-seven years abroad, the last eight years in France. “I am here among a People that love and respect me, a most amiable Nation to live with,” he wrote in 1784, “and perhaps I may conclude to die among them; for my Friends in America are dying off one after another, and I have been so long abroad that I should now be almost a Stranger in my own Country”—a phrase that he had used repeatedly over the previous decade or so when he thought about returning to America.
²⁰
Indeed, all his most cherished friends were in Europe, not America; and his former close American confidants—Joseph Galloway and his own son William—had become loyalists, and he would have nothing to do with them. But even more important, his intimate connection with France and the symbolic importance he had had for France as an American—the very things that had helped make possible French aid to America—were now being turned against him by his fellow Americans.

By 1783 some of his countrymen had come to believe that he was more loyal to France than to America. He seemed entirely too close to the French, hobnobbing with members of the French aristocracy and spending much too much time with Frenchwomen in their salons. He even received from Louis XVI the gift of a small box containing the king’s portrait. Edmund Randolph later declared that Franklin’s accepting this gift was what led the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to insert in the Constitution the clause prohibiting officials of the United States from accepting presents or emoluments from foreign princes or states. The members of the Convention, said Randolph at the Virginia ratifying convention, had wanted to avoid in the future any possibility of foreign princes’ corrupting America’s ambassadors, in the manner in which some Americans in the early 1780s thought Franklin had been corrupted.
²¹