The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (39 page)

Bache, called “Lightning-Rod Junior” by the Federalists, was notorious for his scurrilous attacks on President Washington and the Federalists. And inevitably the Federalists replied to this scurrility by assaulting Bache’s grandfather for being, in the words of William Cobbett, the fiery immigrant from England, “a whore-master, a hypocrite, and an infidel.”
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Joseph Dennie, the arch-Federalist editor of the Anglophilic
Port Folio,
dismissed Franklin as “one of our first Jacobins, the first to lay his head in the lap of French harlotry; and prostrate the christianity and honour of his country to the deism and democracies of Paris.”
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It became conventional

Federalist wisdom that Franklin had been “a dishonest, tricking, hypocritical character” who had championed French infidelity and fanaticism.
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THE CELEBRATION OF WORK

At the same time, however, the publication of Franklin’s
Autobiography
and some of his other writings in the 1790s began to create a quite different image of Franklin, at least among those who did not share the Federalists’ view of the world. With the emergence of all sorts of middling people into unprecedented prominence in the northern Republican party, the image of Franklin became a political football, to be kicked about and used and abused in the decade’s turbulent politics.
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In his will Franklin had bequeathed all his papers to Temple Franklin, who planned to publish the complete life along with his grandfather’s other works. Temple was surprised, however, to learn of the publication in 1791 of a French translation of the first part of his grandfather’s memoir.
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Although Temple tried to prevent an English version of the French edition, two English translations appeared in London in 1795. One of these translations was combined with a short life of Franklin written by Henry Stuber, which had originally appeared serially in Philadelphia in the
Universal Asylum, and Columbia Magazine
beginning with the May 1790 issue. Between 1794 and 1800 this collection was reprinted at least fourteen times in the United States.
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Franklin’s
Way to Wealth
also began to be frequently reprinted. Although Temple did not bring out his own edition of Franklin’s papers until 1817-1818, many Americans were already very familiar with the early life of Franklin.

Although the aristocratic Federalists described Franklin as a French-loving radical whose writings had sought “to degrade literature to the level of vulgar capacities ...by the vile alloy of provincial idioms and colloquial barbarism,” many middling Americans—tradesmen, artisans, farmers, proto-businessmen of all sorts—found in these popular writings a middling hero they could relate to.
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As early as Independence Day 1795, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of New York, composed of both masters and journeymen, toasted “the memory of our late brother mechanic, Benjamin Franklin: May his bright example convince mankind that in this land of freedom and equality, talents joined to frugality and virtue, may justly aspire to the first offices of government.”
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Everywhere master mechanics and journeymen alike began naming their associations and societies after Franklin and turning the former craftsman into a symbol of their cause. Printers especially were eager to use Franklin to justify their enhanced status as something other than mechanics. They wanted the world to know that they were a “profession” whose higher branches were “not mechanical, nor bounded by rules, but... soar to improvements ... valuable to science and humanity.”
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The cause of these artisans was the cause of working and middling people throughout America. For too long, they said, “tradesmen, mechanics, and the industrious classes of society” had considered “themselves of TOO LITTLE CONSEQUENCE to the body politic.”
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But now, in the aftermath of a Revolution dedicated to liberty and equality, they said, things were to be different. These laboring people began organizing themselves in Democratic-Republican societies, and eventually they came to make up the body and soul of the northern part of the Republican party. Throughout their extraordinary speeches and writings of these years, these middling sorts vented their pent-up egalitarian anger at all those leisured aristocratic gentry who had scorned them because they had had to work for a living. For a half century following the Revolution these ordinary men stripped the northern Federalist gentry of their aristocratic pretensions, charged them at every turn with being idle drones, and relentlessly undermined their traditional role as rulers. In their celebration of productive labor, these middling working people came to dominate nineteenth-century northern American culture and society to a degree not duplicated elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

In the 1790s, when Jeffersonian Republicans such as Abraham Clark, Matthew Lyon, and William Manning described themselves as members of “the industrious part of the community,” they meant all those, wage earners and employers alike, who lived by their labor. In other words, Franklin, as a wealthy printer and entrepreneur before he retired from business in 1748 and became a gentleman, would have been regarded as one of these laborers. Against them, artisans and farmers charged, were all those Federalist gentry who were “not... under the necessity of getting their bread by industry,” which included “the merchant, phisition, lawyer & divine, the philosipher and school master, the Juditial & Executive Officers, & many others.” Such gentlemen, they said, lived off “the labour of the honest farmers and mechanics”; their “idleness” rested on “other men’s toil.”
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So successful was this assault on the Federalist gentry, so overwhelming was the victory of these middling sorts in their celebration of labor, that by the early nineteenth century, in the northern parts of America at least, almost everyone had to claim to be a laborer. Even the aristocratic slaveholding planter George Washington now had to be described as a productive worker. Washington’s popular biographer Parson Mason Weems (the inventor of the cherry tree myth) knew instinctively that he had to celebrate the great man as someone who worked as diligently as an ordinary mechanic. Of course, in a classical sense Washington had never worked a day in his life; he had been a farmer like Cicero who exercised authority over his plantation but had not actually labored on it. But for Weems and other spokesmen for the middling workers, exercising authority now became identified with labor and was praised as labor. Indeed, Weems wrote, “of all the virtues that adorned the life of this great man, there is none more worthy of our imitation than his admirable INDUSTRY.” Washington “displayed the power of industry more signally” than any man in history. Rising early and working hard all day were the sources of his wealth and success. He was “on horseback by the time the sun was up,” and he never let up; “of all that ever lived, Washington was the most rigidly observant of those hours of business which were necessary to the successful management of his vast concerns.... Neither himself nor any about him were allowed to eat the bread of idleness,” idleness being for Weems “the worst of crimes.”

Speaking to the new rising generation of entrepreneurs, businessmen, and others eager to get ahead, Weems was anxious to destroy the “notion, from the land of lies,” which had “taken too deep root among some, that ‘labour is a low-lived thing, fit for none but poor people and slaves! and that dress and pleasure are the only accomplishments for a gentleman!’” He urged all the young men who might be reading his book, “though humble thy birth, low thy fortune, and few thy friends, still think of Washington, and HOPE.”
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Yet for these middling people who were eager to celebrate the dignity of working for a living, it was Franklin, the onetime printer, who became the Founding Father most easily transformed into a workingman’s symbol.
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Indeed, no one became more of a hero to all those laboring people than Franklin. High-toned Federalists could only shake their heads in disgust at all those vulgar sorts who had come to believe “that there was no other road to the temple of Riches, except that which run through—Dr. Franklin’s works.”
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Everywhere, but in the northern states especially, speakers, writers, and publicists sought to encourage young men of lowly backgrounds to work hard and raise themselves up as Franklin had. They reached out beyond the cities to ordinary people in country towns and villages and followed Franklin’s example in creating libraries, schools, almanacs, and printed matter of all sorts for broader and deeper levels of the working population. In 1802 teacher and smalltime entrepreneur Silas Felton joined with thirteen other men in Marlborough, Massachusetts, to found a Society of Social Enquirers and urged others to follow this example. “Doct. Franklin relates, in his life,” Felton pointed out, “that he received a considerable part of his information in this way.”
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BECOMING THE SELF-MADE BUSINESSMAN

It was this image of the hardworking and bookish Franklin that captivated most middling folk. Everywhere village publicists encouraged ordinary people to read all the books within their reach, as Franklin had. Almanac-maker Robert Thomas of Sterling, Massachusetts, thought that winter was a good time for farmers to catch up on their reading. “The life of Dr. Franklin,” he said, “I would recommend for the amusement of winter evenings.”
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Northern working people found in Franklin a means of both releasing their resentments and fulfilling their aspirations. In Boston and Philadelphia hundreds of artisans from dozens of different crafts took advantage of Franklin’s bequest to better themselves.
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They sponsored Franklin Lectures, issued numerous broadsides containing Franklin’s “Maxims and Precepts for Conduct in Life and the Just Attainment of Success in Business,” and published and republished account after account of Franklin’s life.
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It was not Franklin the scientist and diplomat they emulated but the young man who through industry and frugality had risen from obscurity to fame and fortune. “Who can tell,” asked the president of the Mechanics Society of New York in 1820 of an audience of young artisans, “how many Franklins may be among you?”
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Between 1794 and 1828, twenty-two editions of Franklin’s
Autobiography
were published. After 1798 editors began adding the Poor Richard essays, and especially
The Way to Wealth,
to editions of the
Autobiography.
Since it was young men who needed the inspiration of Franklin, writers and editors began aiming their works specifically at young readers.

Parson Weems, who had made so much money with his fanciful life of Washington in 1800, was bound to do something with Franklin. He began by publishing extracts from Franklin’s
The Way to Wealth
and his
Autobiography.
And then in 1818 he created his own fictitious life of Franklin, which may have become more popular in the early nineteenth century than Franklin’s actual
Autobiography.
Weems was eager to use Franklin as a moral example for wayward youth.

O you time-wasting, brain-starving young men, who can never be at ease unless you have a cigar or a plug of tobacco in your mouths, go on with your puffing and champing—go on with your filthy smoking, and your still more filthy spitting, keeping the cleanly house-wives in constant terror for their nicely waxed floors, and their shining carpets—go on I say; but remember, it was not in this way that our little Ben became the GREAT DR. FRANKLIN.
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Franklin’s life, wrote Weems, had essential lessons for the young. Sometimes, he said, young men were laughed at for their “oddities”— their poverty, their awkwardness, or their habit of reading. “Yet if, like Franklin, they will but stick to the
main chance,
i.e. BUSINESS AND EDUCATION, they will assuredly, like him, overcome at last, and render themselves the admiration of those who once despised them.”

But it was not enough that Weems’s Franklin was a model of entrepreneurial ambition and hard work. Since Weems was writing for ordinary people, and ordinary people in the early republic were deeply religious, he had to turn Franklin into a “true” Christian who “not only had religion, but had it in an eminent degree.” Although Franklin might have neglected religion when he was young and did not attend church very often, he was, said Weems, always sincerely devoted to the teachings of Christ. Indeed, all his “extraordinary benevolence and useful life were imbibed, even
unconsciously
from the Gospel.” According to Weems, Franklin gained comfort during his final illness by gazing at a picture of Christ on the cross. If Franklin was to be a hero to middling nineteenth-century Americans, he had to become a good Christian.
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Since Franklin’s life, whether in bits and pieces of the
Autobiography
or in versions like that of Weems, was available everywhere, it could not help but inspire the dreams of countless individuals in the early republic. Indeed, some ambitious men actually attributed their rise to reading Franklin. In 1811 sixteen-year-old James Harper left his father’s farm on Long Island for New York City after reading Franklin’s life. Eventually he founded one of the most successful publishing firms in the country and became mayor of New York. When he had his portrait painted, he had the artist insert a profile of Franklin in it.

The experience of Thomas Mellon, the founder of the great banking fortune, was similar. In 1828 fourteen-year-old Mellon had thought he would remain a farmer like his father on their modest farm outside of Pittsburgh. But reading Franklin’s
Autobiography
and Poor Richard’s sayings became “the turning point” of his life. “For so poor and friendless a boy to be able to become a merchant or a professional man had before seemed an impossibility; but here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame.” He “wondered if I might do something in the same line by similar means.” He read Franklin’s words over and over and began to apply himself in school as he never had before. When Mellon finally founded his bank, he placed Franklin’s statue in front of it as a tribute to his inspiration. Near the end of his life he bought a thousand copies of Franklin’s
Autobiography
and distributed them to young men who came seeking his advice. Franklin had come to epitomize the new and radical notion of the “self-made man.”
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