Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, Part IV: Hope

          As I mentioned last week the tone of Franklin’s Rules, as with so many of his literary endeavors, is among its most striking qualities. Given how 21^st-century popular culture has, to a greater or lesser extent, come to understand the 18^th century as an era of courtly manners, powdered wigs, and suffocating formality, it’s both surprising and enlightening to find in the works of men like Franklin a strong, sharp, and highly relatable comedic sensibility. This sense of humour, however, is not all the only element of Rules that could be called striking. Wit and irony may have been the means by which Benjamin Franklin most often chose to communicate with his fellow man, but for him tone were very rarely an end in and of itself. What I mean to say is Franklin was not a comedian whose sole desire was to elicit laughter, but a satirist whose goal was to use humor in order to convey something he felt was very important. With that in mind, I’d like to turn the focus of this series away from the medium by which Franklin communicated and towards the message that was communicated.

          In particular, I want to speak for a moment about something that took me by surprise upon first reading Franklin’s Rules. Looking back I can see now why I was caught off guard, and in the spirit of teachable moments I believe that you, my small, dedicated, cult-like following, should be made to benefit from my mistake. You see, when I first read Rules with pen and highlighter at the ready I forgot to keep firmly in mind the vital element of context. I thought of the satiric essay in my hand as simply a piece of political commentary by Benjamin Franklin. This is probably going to seem so pedantic as to give you a nosebleed, but what I should have remembered is that it was a piece of political commentary by Benjamin Franklin written in 1773. I was thinking, as I read, of the social and political radical, the diplomat, the voluptuary; in short of the man that Franklin was, or perhaps was simply perceived as being, at the end of his life. In 1773 Benjamin Franklin was not that man, so I very quickly learned. And so I tell you now, and will expand on in a moment, that one of the more noteworthy elements of Franklin’s Rules which might not seem to square with the popular perception of the man is how sympathetic he seemed to the idea of Britain and the Thirteen Colonies maintaining their accustomed imperial relationship.

          Franklin was not a Loyalist I think it fair to say. He was no dyed-in-the-wool supporter of the Crown who would have overlooked a great deal of injury dealt by British ministers out of a sense of tradition or an emotional attachment to the political status quo. But he was, in 1773, an apparent supporter of reconciliation. Though he seemed more than willing to decry what he saw as clear violations on Britain’s part of the rights and liberties of his fellow colonists, he had yet to conclude that the breach could not be healed. More than that, he seemed to think that it should have been, that Britain was better off with the colonies and vice versa. Rules, I think, presents a fascinating window into the tension between these two impulses; criticism and preservation. Indeed, it was perhaps because he still believed there was value in the American colonies remaining within the British Empire that Franklin’s critique were so biting. Maybe he believed the relationship was being threatened from within, and sought to root out the cause in terms it would be difficult for those in a position to create positive change to ignore.

          Specific examples of Franklin’s particular regard for the imperial relationship between Crown and colonies are fairly numerous within the text of Rules. Admittedly their meaning has to be inferred to a degree because of the overarching ironic delivery, but they and their significance are only thinly veiled. In step three, for example, Franklin made the oblique claim that the establishment of British colonies in North America, though accomplished at the expense of the original colonists, had the end result of greatly strengthening Britain itself. In relation to the Empire such colonies would, as Franklin put it, “Increase her Strength by their growing Numbers ready to join in her Wars, her Commerce by their growing Demand for her Manufactures, or her Naval Power by greater Employment for her Ships and Seamen.” While this may not have been an explicit endorsement for the preservation of the Anglo-American relationship, it would seem to at least suggest that Franklin did not regard the role he and his fellow colonists had traditionally played within the larger British Empire with a great deal of bitterness or disdain. If American colonists had been forced into supplying the British military and British markets with manpower and resources it would seem likely that the famously forthright Franklin would not have hesitated to say so. Certainly the relationship between colonies and mother-country had become strained as of the 1760s and 1770s, something which Franklin pointed out in Rules at seemingly every opportunity. Overall Anglo-American history, however, did not seem for him to be a cause for shame or disgust.

          That Franklin was, in 1773, generally at ease with the nature of the relationship between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies is further evidenced by an admission at the beginning of step four of his satiric Rules. While again attempting to impart ironic advice to a theoretical group of government ministers Franklin indicated that Americans had traditionally regarded British rule with a degree of understanding and forbearance. Specifically he wrote that American colonists had, “Peaceably […] submitted to your Government, shewn their Affection to your Interest, and patiently borne their Grievances.” Though Franklin’s general intent with Rules was to portray via humorous exaggeration the deficiencies of British rule in America, it should not be overlooked that he appeared to regard his fellow colonists as a generally quiescent group. Indeed, that he described the relationship between Crown and colonies as possessing qualities like peace, affection, and patience indicates a perception on his part of the colonial population as being long-suffering but generally eager to continue their association with Great Britain. Again, had Franklin believed the opposite was true, that his fellow colonists had borne the slings and arrows of arbitrary British rule with justifiable anger, it seems likely he would not have had trouble finding the words to say as much. Consequently, Franklin’s apparently pacific outlook is significant not only because of how his opinion changed within a few short years of Rules’ publication, but also because it seemed to ignore some of the broader themes of Anglo-American history.

          As I mentioned at some length in a number of previous posts, the American Revolution was not necessarily the break with established history that it has often been made out to be. Though the Revolution was absolutely a decisive moment in the history of North America, if not the world, it was not the first rebellion by American colonists against their British-appointed governors. Those to which Franklin and his cohorts most directly responded were the various demonstrations that resulted from the imposition of an unprecedented tax regime upon the colonies in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, covering roughly the period from 1765 to 1774. These included the Stamp Act and Townshend Act protests, riots resulting from the events of the Boston Massacre and subsequent trial, and the little-remembered Gaspee Affair during which a British anti-smuggling vessel that ran aground on the Rhode Island coast was seized and burned by a local chapter of the Sons of Liberty. These events were, and are, highly significant to the way events unfolded in the lead-up to the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1775. Yet they too were far from unprecedented. There had been a number of prior revolts during the 17^th and 18^th centuries that unfolded across the Thirteen Colonies in response to a number of different grievances. These include, but are not limited to, Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), Culpepper’s Rebellion (1677), the Boston Revolt (1689), Leisler’s Rebellion (1689-1691), and the War of the Regulation (1765-1771). Colonial Americans, as I have tried to stress in the past, were generally very conscious of their rights and liberties and did not hesitate to take up arms when they felt them threatened. Consequently the history of the Thirteen Colonies prior to the American Revolution can fairly be characterized by a state of grudging acquiescence to British rule, often giving way to periods of heightened tension, and not infrequently leading to open revolt.

          Benjamin Franklin seemed not to perceive this rather raucous aspect of his countrymen’s history, however. Or at least if he did his views in that direction are not to be found in his satiric Rules. There would seem to be several potential reasons for this that I can perceive. It is possible, though we might like to think better of old Ben, that he simply was not aware of the various revolts that dotted the history of the Thirteen Colonies. In fairness, his lifetime happened to more or less coincide with a period of relative peace stretching from the end of the 17^th century until the middle of the 18^th-century. Putting aside the fact that a number of Franklin’s fellow revolutionaries professed a great deal of reverence for the Whig supporters of the Glorious Revolution (1688), and the English Bill of Rights (1689), it’s conceivable that Franklin’s perception of the Anglo-American relationship as a mainly peaceful one was based more on his own life experience than a detailed study of colonial history. It’s also possible that Franklin was indeed aware of his countrymen’s rebellious history but did not think it relevant to the present discussion. By the time of his birth in 1706 revolts against Crown officials in Virginia (led by, fittingly, Messrs. Bacon and Culpepper), Massachusetts (centred on Boston) and New York (led by a German-American merchant) had flared out, and the Thirteen Colonies were in the midst of a period of relative peace and stability. Consequently, Franklin may have looked back at these earlier rebellions as native to an era in colonial history that had since come to an end; the turbulent 17^th-century had given way to the calm and prosperous 18^th-century, and whatever problems arose in the latter had little to do with the former. I cannot say whether or not this is what Franklin believed, and I stress that this line of thought represents merely a theory on my part meant to potentially explain the discrepancy between what is known about colonial American history and what Franklin appeared ready to ignore.

          That being said, the most likely explanation for Franklin’s characterization of the Anglo-American relationship as generally peaceful and affectionate is that it was rhetorically useful for him to do so. Rules is a satiric essay; humorous, but also expressive of a particular point of view. Franklin probably attempted to portray his fellow colonists as patient, accommodating, and diplomatic because it made them seem put-upon, made Britain’s continued disregard for their liberties seem all the more aggressive, and helped define the American struggle for restitution as a righteous defence rather than a chaotic revolt. Acknowledging that the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies had engaged in numerous prior incidents of disobedience to British rule, at times to the point of taking up arms or overthrowing Crown-appointed governors, would, conversely, not have been of service to Franklin’s general intent. Indeed, within the larger context of historical Anglo-American tensions the demonstrations that characterized the immediate pre-Revolutionary era might have seemed to a British audience like yet another series of emotionally-driven riots by a population that had never had much regard for law and order. If Franklin’s goal with Rules was to call attention to British abuses in order to secure a more equitable footing for reconciliation (and I do believe it was), this would not have been a wise tactic to pursue.

          Keeping Franklin’s attention to rhetoric firmly in mind, there are several other occasions in Rules during which the relationship between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies is described positively that bear investigation. Then most obvious, after those noted in steps three and four, occurs in the middle of step nine. Amidst a rather pointed description of the many burdens shouldered by the American colonists on a day-to-day basis, from maintaining their own infrastructure to defending their frontiers, Franklin listed the various ways in which the commercial relationship between Britain and the colonies directly benefited the British people. “Think nothing,” he wrote to his supposed ministerial audience,

Of the Wealth [your] Merchants and your Manufactures acquire by the Colony Commerce; their encreased Ability thereby to pay Taxes at home; their accumulating, in the Price of their Commodities, most of those Taxes, and so levying them from their consuming Customers: All this, and the Employment and Support of thousands of your Poor by the Colonists.

From these words alone it would seem reasonable to conclude that Franklin believed trade between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain had and did contribute greatly to enriching the lives and livelihoods of untold numbers of British citizens. Considering the fact that said colonies traded exclusively (on the record, at least) with Britain, that they were among its main suppliers of raw materials and main consumers of manufactured goods, and that the resultant shipping industry employed thousands on both sides of the Atlantic from shipmasters to dockworkers and everyone in between, this would seem a fair claim. The question that arises, however, is why Franklin felt the need to make this particular point.

            Consider: if Franklin had been, like his later compatriots Thomas Paine or Samuel Adams, a believer in the inevitability of American independence, why would he have tried to being to the attention of a British audience all they stood to lose in the event of such a separation? Granted, he made no secret of his displeasure with how the colonies had been lately administered. But if he truly wished to see parent and child part ways, why would he have spoken favorably of the relationship he hoped to do away with to the people best positioned to change things for the better? Why give them the chance? In fact it seems likely that this was exactly was Franklin was attempting to do; give the British ministers responsible for overseeing the colonies a chance to reflect on what their careless policies were endangering and how best to remedy the widening breach between Crown and colonies. Franklin appeared to adopt the same tack in step seventeen of Rules. To that end he wrote,

If you see rival Nations rejoicing at the Prospect of your Disunion with your Provinces, and endeavoring to promote it: If they translate, publish and applaud all the Complaints of your discontented Colonists, at the same Time privately stimulating you to severer Measures; let not that alarm or offend you.

Bearing in mind once again that Franklin’s tone in Rules was intended to be ironic, and that he generally believed the opposite of what he wrote, the purpose of this passage would seem to have been to warn the British public and British officials that a separation from the Thirteen Colonies would be strategically, as well as economically, disastrous. Considering how ardently the Great Powers of the day jockeyed for position with one another, how ready they were to enlist allies in their struggle, and the lengths to which they were historically willing to go to undercut their rivals, this too seems an eminently reasonable observation.

            Indeed it was reasonable, if not also serendipitous and rather prophetic. After the American Revolution formally began in mid-1775 and American independence was declared in July, 1776, the French and Spanish were among the first foreign powers the Continental Congress saw fit to reach out to in search of monetary and military support. Longstanding rivals of Great Britain, both were eager to cut off their adversary’s North American trade and extended generous loans, sales of arms, and even dispatched military expeditions to aid their newfound American allies. Benjamin Franklin in particular, as it happened, was instrumental in securing support from the court of Louis XVI of France as well as currying favor with the French public. Taking these facts into account it thus seems the height of irony that Franklin had, not but a few short years prior in 1773, warned a British audience in print of almost exactly what was about to transpire thanks in no small part to his own efforts.  Putting aside this amusing coincidence, however, the question arises once again as to why Franklin would have attempted to make the relevant British offenders aware of the events they were helping set in motion by their misguided actions (or inactions).         

          There are several potential answers to this. The one that seems most likely is that Franklin, in addition to being capable of assessing quite clearly what the benefits of a continued connection between Britain and North America were, desired to ensure that his British audience was similarly informed. In addition to the economic advantages of British merchants and British labor having access to colonial commodities, markets and employment, a continued British presence in the region of the Thirteen Colonies would help offset continued French and Spanish ambitions on the continent and more effectively secure the British Empire’s Great Power status. While it doubtless comes as no surprise that Franklin was astute enough to see all of this, the reason he chose to expound on these facts in Rules would seem less obvious. That is, unless one considers that his desire to inform a British audience of the value of their association with colonial America was driven by the value he himself invested in the same. Why publicly catalogue the various errors of British colonial authorities, thus enabling them to more effectively correct said errors, unless the desired goal was to solidify the relationship between Great Britain and British America? Again, why give them the chance unless that was the whole point of the exercise? While I reiterate once more that Franklin was far from an apologist for Britain’s often callous treatment his fellow colonists and their respective governments received between 1765 and the mid-1770s, it would likewise seem fair to conclude, based on the way he discussed certain topics in the text of Rules, that he believed reconciliation was possible so long as the right people in Britain were made aware of the right things.

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, Part III: Wit

            Now that we all know far more about Benjamin Franklin than some of us likely ever desired to, let us turn at long last to the true object of this most recent inquiry. I refer, in case you might have forgotten or simply skipped past the title mere inches above this opening paragraph, to the verbosely named Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One. Before diving right into a textual analysis, which I know is what you keep coming to this obscure corner of cyberspace for every week, I entreat you to please contain yourselves for a moment while I dispense a few notes concerning the when, where, and how.

            Franklin’s Rules, as I believe I mentioned previously, was published in the Public Advertiser. This was a daily broadsheet printed by Henry Woodfall (and later his son, also Henry Woodfall) beginning in 1752 in London that folded in the 1790s and consisted in its heyday of a mix of adverts and general news content. It was not, much like James Franklin’s New England Courant or Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, what we might now think of as a paper of record. It was popular, though, and in a city like London its potential audience would have been quite large (the city possessing over 700,000 inhabitants by the 1770s; Philadelphia, by comparison, encompassed less than 50,000). It is thus worth considering, these facts in hand, why Franklin chose this particular publication through which to communicate. Perhaps he simply felt comfortable writing for an audience like that which he had become accustomed to addressing in Pennsylvania; namely the kind of people who regularly patronized a popular, ad-filled, literarily unsophisticated newspaper. Or maybe he felt that a popular broadsheet in a city like London would inevitably reach a wider audience than would a specially-printed treatise or pamphlet. I don’t suppose I could say which one of these, if either, is the case, though I think both are plausible and well-worth considering as we move forward.

            Similarly worthy of your continued recollection is the date when Franklin’s Rules was first published. As recorded at the top of the particular copy I have procured the document first saw print on September 11^th, 1773. Putting aside the dreadful significance of that specific day, let’s look to the month and year and think back to the events that immediately preceded the American Revolution. The Seven Years War, aptly named because it lasted for nine years, had by then been over for just about a decade. The Stamp Act and Townshend Acts, all of which imposed unprecedented taxes on goods being imported into the American colonies, had been repealed amid protest, public demonstrations, the tarring and feathering of more than one hapless tax collector, and significant Parliamentary debate (to which Benjamin Franklin notably contributed his testimony). In March, 1770 a tense confrontation outside the headquarters of the Massachusetts government between a near-riotous crowd and a patrol of British Army regulars (stationed in the city since 1768) turned violent when the soldiers fired into the gathering. Eleven men were struck by musket fire, five of which ultimately died. The resulting trial came to be viewed by the colonial government with keen interest; amidst the ongoing conflict between colonies and Crown Massachusetts was eager to prove to Britain that soldiers serving under her authority could be assured of a fair trial in an American court. Future President of the United States and Boston solicitor John Adams was tasked with leading the defense, a responsibility he performed so ably as to secure a full acquittal for six of the eight accused (the remaining two were declared guilty of manslaughter and given reduced sentences). Though Crown authorities were generally pleased with this outcome, memories of the so-called Boston Massacre did little to heal the widening breach between Britain and the citizens of colonial America. 

            Three years thereafter, in March, 1773, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation known as the Tea Act, whereby the East India Company was granted licence to ship its tea directly to North American ports. Though this may seem a relatively innocuous measure to modern eyes, its implications were significant. Because the provisions laid out in said act permitted the EIC to bypass the British and America merchants who customarily resold Indian tea, large numbers of colonial resellers were effectively cut out of the market. The illegal tea trade, which funnelled the commodity through the Dutch colonies of the West Indies, was undercut as well, granting the East India Company a virtual monopoly on the colonial American tea market. Because the taxes levied on tea as part of the 1767 Townshend Duties were still in place, this ensured that American consumers would be left little choice but to purchase the beverage from the EIC and thereby endorse the claimed British right to lay revenue duties on colonial trade.  I’ll grant that this likely all sounds rather obtuse, but the point is that American tempers had been aflame for the better part of the 1760s and 1770s and the passage and enforcement of the Tea Act did not exert anything like a cooling influence. It would thus be fair to say that when Benjamin Franklin sat down to pen his satirical Rules it was amidst a climate of distinct and perhaps even mounting tension. Americans had just been made to suffer fresh outrages; blood had been spilt, and the future of the relationship between Crown and colonies was distinctly uncertain.

            The manner in which Benjamin Franklin chose to respond to this state of affairs is, but of course, where I enter the scene. A satirical essay, Rules is divided into twenty sections or steps whereby the process of dismantling an empire from within is described in significant detail. It is not a lengthy piece – my copy, at size twelve font, covers only five pages – but it is dense with information and positively dripping with self-serious irony to the point that it communicates a great deal about its author’s intentions, sense of humour, and political affiliation. Its many and various noteworthy elements will be covered in due course, but I’d like to begin by saying a few words about Franklin’s aforementioned taste for irreverence and his love of satire.

            Because that’s what Rules is at its very core: satire. The title alone is indicative of this; Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One. Not only does this seem to play to the 18^th-century predilection for wordy designations for treatises or pamphlets, often involving needless detail and an array of colons, semicolons, and subheadings, but the very idea it seeks to address would seem to betray a humorous intent. Why, the title begs, would anyone seek to unravel a great empire? To whom was the author of Rules presumably addressing themselves, so desperate to shrug off the burden of greatness? The title is meant to be a kind of absurdity, eye-catching as well as meaningful, that helps both set the tone for what follows while also communicating something very important about the topic at hand. This being, and which I’ll remark on in greater detail later, that the manner in which the British government attempted to oversee the Thirteen Colonies in the latter half of the 18^th-century seemed to many in America specifically designed to cause maximum offense, breed resistance, and ultimately result in the separation of the colonies from the motherland. This is an amusing idea – the British sought to divest themselves of their colonial responsibilities through a lengthy and inefficient campaign of alienation – and one which Franklin does not deviate from at any point. From start to finish, Rules is presented as though it were a series of sober policy recommendations, gleaned from experience and delivered dryly, almost matter-of-factly.

            This should not be taken to mean that the humour in Rules is more conceptual than anything; that it is the product of an amusing idea, but is not amusing in execution. Franklin was not Thomas Paine, a friend and colleague whose tone of freewheeling mockery seemed to reach off the page and grasp the reader by the throat. What Benjamin Franklin knew how to do, and which Rules accomplishes with casual ease, is cultivate a cool, dry wit that pokes, prods, exaggerates, and generally skewers the chosen target to the point that its faults are made painfully evident without having to result to out-and-out invective or vulgarity. To that end, and I’ll grant this may not seem particularly funny to 21^st-century sensibilities, Franklin introduced his series of twenty steps by declaring that, “An ancient Sage once valued himself upon this, that tho’ he could not fiddle, he knew how to make a great City of a little one. The Science that I, a modern Simpleton, am about to communicate is the very reverse.” Perhaps not the strongest opener, but much improved, I think, by the punchline that followed. “I address myself,” Franklin wrote, “to all Ministers who have the Management of extensive Dominions, which from their very Greatness are become troublesome to govern, because the Multiplicity of their Affairs leaves no Time for fiddling.”

            The implication of these passages – the hilarious, hilarious implication – is that the minsters of the British government most directly responsible for administering colonial affairs were positively overwrought with responsibility, and would much have preferred to direct their energies toward simpler pursuits like playing the fiddle. The intention therein may well have been one of several. Perhaps Franklin wished to portray said ministers as lazy, unmotivated, and put-upon; their assigned responsibilities had become burdensome because they interrupted the idle pastimes about which they were truly concerned. Or, more stinging yet, he maybe hoped to project an image of British government functionaries as inept, incompetent, or horrendously unqualified to the task of overseeing events in the American colonies; fiddling was all they were fit for, and would gladly have destroyed a transoceanic empire to once more take up the bow and rosin. Neither is a flattering portrait, yet the manner in which Franklin expressed himself was very measured. It was with a dry, deadpan tone that he offered assistance to the beleaguered officers of Britain’s colonial office, their duties so severe, the “extensive Dominions” so “troublesome to govern.” In the guise of a self-styled “modern Simpleton” (perhaps because the advice he was prepared to dole out had not been difficult to discern), Franklin offered a solution that was proven by experience. In so doing he effectively held a mirror to the actions of British colonial officials in an attempt to expose them for the manifestly illogical policies he and his follow colonists believed them to be.

            The deadpan delivery, dry wit, and sense of irony with which Franklin opened Rules, with the intent of “sending-up” the flaws in contemporary British colonial policy, reappeared frequently in subsequent sections. In section (or step) one, for example, Franklin offered to his readers in a thoughtful, attentive tone a useful simile through which to better understand how a great empire might be lessened. “In the first Place, Gentlemen,” he wrote, “you are to consider, that a great Empire, like a great Cake, is most easily diminished at the Edges.” In addition to comparing something vast and weighty, like a great expanse of territory and the administrative machinery required to govern it, with something trifling and mundane, like an artful arrangement of Genoise and buttercream (amusing in itself), this passage seems also to serve the purpose of patronizing the ministers to whom it is theoretically addressed. These were, ostensibly, great statesmen Franklin was speaking to, tasked with the administration of a vast and far-flung set of territories and blessed with greater knowledge and experience of the same than most men could ever aspire to. Yet Franklin offered to help them better understand the magnitude of their responsibilities – in itself rather presumptuous – by presenting them a turn of phrase perhaps best suited to the intellectual capacity of a young and ignorant child. Thus Franklin was able to allude to his and his fellow countrymen’s low estimation of the talents of the ministers responsible for British colonial policy in a way that was biting, yet subtle. Indeed, I think this is an apt summation of Franklin’s overall comedic sensibility; acerbic, dry, and ironic.

            Irony in particular seemed to be a favored rhetorical device of Franklin’s. Aside from the overall tone of the piece itself, that purports to be helpful while in fact exhibiting merciless mockery, there are certain very specific examples that one can point to of the good doctor saying one thing while plainly meaning another. Step seven, which recommended to British colonial administrators that they reward corrupt and abusive Royal Governors with lavish pensions, further advised that certain among the latter could also have been granted peerages in recognition of their service. “You man make them Baronets too,” Franklin wrote, “If that respectable Order should not think fir to resent it.” As a political thinker strongly sympathetic to republicanism Franklin was almost certainly not in favor of expanding the rolls of the British nobility. Nor did he think that august body a truly “respectable Order.” Indeed, perhaps he intended to hint at the opposite by recommending inept colonial governors be made barons; their corrupt dealings and frequent abuses of authority would make them well suited to join the ranks of the landed gentry. The meaning Franklin wished to convey rested just below the surface and therein laid its strength. A person who read Rules and took it seriously was made to look a fool, to their chagrin and the amusement of the citizens of colonial America for whom Franklin was speaking. A person who read the same and understood the author’s true intention would also have known that the mockery therein was at someone else’s expense; in particular someone(s) whose social standing was accompanied with a great deal of self-conscious dignity, and who was therefore a ripe target ridicule. In this way Franklin’s Rules flowed out of the longstanding literary tradition of popular satire to mock public discourse, and in particular prominent figures in a given society, as a kind of safety valve for the pressure of widespread social frustration.

            Step eight evinces a similar brand of mockery, at once self-serious and ridiculous, as it seeks to make light of and point very seriously to the discrepancy between the stated intentions and the actions of British America’s colonial administrators. After making lightly veiled reference to the manner in which the colonies leapt to the task of providing money and manpower to the British effort during the Seven Years War, Franklin asserted therein that the ministers he was supposedly addressing should not be swaying into thinking well of said colonies’ generosity and moderating their tax policies accordingly. “Reflect,” he cautioned, “That a Penny taken from them by your Power is more honorable to you than a Pound presented by their Benevolence.” Again, it should be obvious that Franklin did not write this because he agreed with it. Rather, he was projecting what he thought the men responsible for structuring and implementing the taxation of the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s must have believed; that money taken by force was better than money freely given. The implications a statement such as this help point, as aforementioned, to the evident contradictions between the words and deeds of the contemporary British government.

            Franklin, it would seem fair to say, along with a significant portion of his fellow colonists, were willing to believe that British authorities really did derive some twisted satisfaction from extorting money from the American colonies. They need have looked no further for evidence to support this position than the history of the decade previous to 1773. British authorities, and in particular those directly responsible for setting and implementing taxes on colonial commerce, would doubtless have disagreed with this assessment, however. From their perspective they were attempting to shrink the debts that had been accrued during the recent war with France, to the benefit of the whole of the empire and its citizens. This apparent discrepancy between benevolent intent and malevolent effect was what Franklin sought to expose, theoretically with the intention of holding the government to account and creating positive change. Barring that, however, satirizing establishment hypocrisy at least gave voice to the frustrations of those who had been most directly affected, eased tensions (if only slightly), and helped foster a stronger sense of social solidarity.

            Looking back for a moment, I realize that most of what I’ve been doing for the last few paragraphs is try to explain why certain elements of Benjamin Franklin’s Rules are funny. Not, I think, the best way to ensure that my audience (at this point having grown to perhaps ten people on a good week) is left rolling on the floor. I apologize if it seems like I’m belabouring the point, but I feel it’s very important to understand exactly how it is Franklin approached social and political commentary, and in turn what sort of role he played in the public life of pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary America. Discussing this topic with a friend, it struck me that a fitting modern counterpart for Franklin, in terms of satire if nothing else, would be Jon Stewart of the Daily Show fame. When Stewart presents his take on current events he does so in a very sardonic, mocking tone. He’s being funny; his knows he’s being funny, and so does his audience. But there is also an understanding that events the Daily Show seeks to make light of are very important. Jon Stewart would not, for instance, present a humorous segment on drought conditions and water regulation in California because he or his audience think the resultant economic and social strife is amusing. Rather, he and his staff of very talented writers use humour to both hold the attention of their audience and also make clearer how ridiculous certain elements of our contemporary social and political status quo are. We all laugh, we all learn something, and we all feel a little better about the state of our world.

            While I don’t think it’s necessarily the most accurate comparison, I’m still willing to say that in terms of their use of humour and their social clout Benjamin Franklin was the 18^th-century equivalent(ish) of Jon Stewart. Franklin, like Stewart, sought to shine a light on things he felt were unjust, irresponsible or ridiculous by mocking, poking fun at or satirizing them in print. Perhaps he hoped to cause change; stung by his dry wit and biting observations those on the receiving end of his barbs would make good on their errors lest they suffer another merciless tongue-lashing. I don’t know how likely this might have been, or how likely Franklin might have thought it was, but I don’t suppose he would have objected to such an outcome. More likely, however, he simply sought to educate the public on an issue or series of issues that he felt had gone unremarked, while at the same time easing existing frustrations and offering the aggrieved a stronger sense of social cohesion. This may not seem all that important, considering that other of Franklin colleagues were in the same era declaring independence from vast empires and helping forge new forms of government. While I’ll grant that satirizing British tax policies was indeed less important than much of what Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton or Madison did over the course of the Revolution in the grand, earth-shattering historical sense, it was, and is, perhaps more important in the small, ephemeral, human sense.    

            As I mentioned a moment ago, when he wrote Rules Franklin was tapping into a long-existent strain of humour rooted in the history of literature and political discourse. This may sound somewhat grandiose, but as I pointed out earlier it’s actually something we, at the dawn of the 21^st century, understand very well. Benjamin Franklin was an 18^th-century media personality. A satirist, printer, and cultural and political commentator, he helped bind his fellow colonists together through a shared sense of humour, of outrage, and of social and political consciousness. His appeal was broad, his voice cultivated, charming. He helped people laugh at their social betters, and at their own predicaments, while also cultivating and directing their frustrations in what he believed was a constructive direction. We feel, I am sure, very much what Franklin’s 18^th-century readers felt when we watch the Daily Show, the now-departed Colbert Report, or Last Week Tonight; we laugh, we learn something, and we feel a little better about the state of our world. Grasping this, I hope that my readers feel the Revolutionary era and Ben Franklin in particular becoming a little more real, and a little more human.

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, Part II: Context, contd.

            In addition to heralding the expansion of his public profile and incipient fame, the 1750s also witnessed Franklin’s return to Europe and to Britain in particular in the guise of diplomat and advocate for his adopted home colony of Pennsylvania. This period in his life eventually saw his role evolve into that of an itinerant emissary for the American cause. This would continue intermittently until just before his death in 1790, and constitutes the lion’s share of his contribution to the success of the American Revolution. Sent originally in 1757 by the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin’s task was to advocate in favor of abolishing the proprietary form of government under which the colony had been operating since its inception in the 1680s. This style of administration, whereby a single individual was the effective ruler of a colony, had functioned adequately under Pennsylvania founder William Penn. His sons Richard, John and Thomas proved to be less capable than their father, however, and there was a growing movement in the 1740s and 1750s among the colonial elite to have the proprietorship replaced by a royally-appointed governor. Franklin’s mission ultimately failed, due in part to his lack of connections in the halls of power in London, but he nonetheless took full advantage during his stay of the intellectual and social stimulations present in the imperial homeland. These included, among others, meeting with a host of influential contemporary thinkers, visiting the Universities of St. Andrews and Oxford and being awarded an honorary doctorate by both, and joining the Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce (now the Royal Society of Arts). After returning to Pennsylvania in the early 1760s, being elected speaker of the colonial Assembly in May, 1764, and losing said position in October of the same year, Franklin was dispatched a second time to London to try his hand once more at international diplomacy.

            Though ostensibly sent to again advocate for the replacement of the Penn family proprietorship over Pennsylvania, events quickly conspired to drastically alter the character of Franklin’s second mission to London. The passage of the Stamp Act (1765) and the accompanying outrage from among the population of colonial America thrust him into the limelight as a kind of spokesperson for the sentiments of his fellow colonists. This role was most vividly expressed in 1766 when Franklin was called to testify before a session of the House of Commons as to the extent of colonial resistance. That the Stamp Act was subsequently repealed was widely attributed in the American colonies to his intervention, and he was subsequently appointed by New Jersey, Georgia, and Massachusetts to represent their interests in London as well as Pennsylvania’s. From then until the early 1770s Franklin set about advocating for what he perceived to be the interests of his fellow colonists, penning numerous essays and editorials to that effect under his own name, a variety of pennames, and anonymously. He also very effectively built on some of the relationships he had established during his earlier stay in England, travelling widely and being hosted by such notables as theologian Joseph Priestly, physician Thomas Percival, Secretary of State for Colonies Lord Hillsborough, and philosopher David Hume. These travels also included a journey across parts of Germany in 1766, and a visit to Paris in 1767 during which news of his electrical experiments gained him access to a number of scientists, politicians, and even King Louis XV. The connections forged during this time in Franklin’s life would serve him well during the Revolutionary years, as would the reputation he began to build for himself as that of a “rustic American genius.”

            So there you have it. Franklin remained in Britain until 1775, and in 1773 he wrote a satiric editorial for publication in a London paper about how a great empire could effectively reduce itself to something much less. I do hope this has been an interesting journey through the life of one of the Founding Generation’s most interesting men. I know I enjoyed it, anyway, and isn’t that really what matters? Before I conclude, however, I’d like to briefly run down what I consider to be the major through-lines of Benjamin Franklin’s life and career, or at least those I feel bear upon the analysis to follow.

            One of the first things that occurred to me upon compiling this chronicle – I won’t speculate as to when it occurred to you – was the sheer length of the man’s life. When Thomas Jefferson sat down to pen his celebrated Declaration he was only thirty-three years old. John Adams, by comparison, was forty-one, Washington forty-four, and Alexander Hamilton a mere stripling of twenty-one. Benjamin Franklin, at that same period in 1776, was full seventy years of age. Born just after the turn of the 18^th century in 1706, he had, by the dawn of the American Revolution, already lived a long and full life. In that time Franklin had been many things, from printer, to scientist, to diplomat, and had taken a leading role in shaping the society of his adopted home in colonial Philadelphia. He had also witnessed a great deal of change overtake colonial American society, between wars with Native Americans and rival colonial powers, religious awakenings, increasing technological and social sophistication, and the growth of a distinctly American culture. I don’t suppose that I could say with any great degree of certainty exactly what the impact of Franklin’s longevity was on his outlook and actions during the era of the Revolution. I don’t know that living quite so long made him more vocal, more patient, or more daring; he seemed to possess an abundance of all three traits as early as his teenage years. I couldn’t say, either, that the changes he witnessed take place in the colonies over the course of his life imparted to him a sense of progress, or an appreciation of the inevitability of, or need for, social/cultural/political evolution. Perhaps both of these things are true, but I am sure that I couldn’t prove it.

            What I do feel comfortable stating, in general terms, is that Franklin had had, by the 1770s, more time than the great majority of his revolutionary colleagues to flex his creative and intellectual muscles, to transition through several different vocations, and to expand and broaden his person base of knowledge. Unlike, say, John Adams or even George Washington, Franklin’s reputation in America and abroad was also, by the 1770s, well established. As a result, I think it fair to say, he was by 1776 a very well-rounded individual who knew a great deal about a great many things and could very easily command attention. This made him, I have no doubt he and his cohorts agreed, a very useful advocate for the revolutionary cause. By nature a man of wisdom, equanimity, curiosity, and energy, his talents combined with his connections and repute to make him an extraordinarily effective diplomat, civic activist, and political and cultural commentator. A younger man, like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison whose public careers were only just getting started when the Revolution dawned, could not have exerted the same influence that the elder statesman Franklin had long since earned by 1776. This is, I think, key to understanding the role Benjamin Franklin enjoyed in late-18^th century colonial culture, the role he played in the American Revolution, and the way he and his literary audience understood and communicated with one another.    

            The second trend to take notice of across the length of Franklin’s public life is the abiding favor he seemed to hold for satire, or humour in general, as an effective means to deliver information, moral commentary, or social criticism. As aforementioned he began his career, or rather the first of his careers, working as a typesetter in his brother’s printing shop while secretly penning sardonic letters under an assumed name. He was seventeen when he gave birth to the morally upright and self-confessedly judgemental widow Silence Dogood, and though he would go on to dabble in science, politics, and civic advocacy he seemed to retain a lifelong appreciation for the satirical form. Indeed, if his Rules are any indication, Franklin continued to make use of sarcastic, irreverent, or mocking rhetoric well into his late sixties. The significance of this seeming fondness is twofold at least, on the one hand concerning message and on the other having to do with medium.

            It would first seem safe enough to conclude that Franklin’s frequent attempts to use humour and exaggeration as a means of offering commentary or criticism likely indicate a belief in the efficacy of what we’ll call “charm and disarm.” Whereas contemporaries like Jefferson or Hamilton put forward their written opinions in the form of pamphlets, polemics, and essays, all tending towards confrontation and debate, Franklin appeared far more likely to deliver his thoughts in the guise of a snide commentary or irreverent observation. He didn’t argue as much as he insinuated; didn’t declare as much as suggest. Thus I’d wager he understood that making a person laugh helped put them at their ease, made them more likely to give an accompanying opinion the benefit of the doubt, and rendered what he had to say that much more memorable. This was not a literary style that was common among the classically-educated elite of the American colonies. Those who formally studied rhetoric among the Founding Generation understood how to render their opinion in terms of fact and evidence, point and counterpoint. They had their tricks, their means of manipulating the attention or tapping into the emotions of their audience – I’m thinking of the Federalist Papers and of Jefferson’s Summary View – but in general their efforts were rendered in a very didactic, very academic, and very serious style of address. As Benjamin Franklin possessed very little in the way of formal education, however, it should come as no surprise that he tended not to approach his commentaries, editorials and essays in the classical rhetorical mode.

            This brings us to the second significance of Franklin’s apparent love of satire, having to do with the form in which he so often delivered it. Whereas John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and, say, John Dickinson were members of the colonial elite who wrote for an elite audience, Benjamin Franklin was of distinctly middling origins and tended to write his satiric missives and irreverent editorials for a somewhat more popular readership. The New-England Courant, in which the Silence Dogood letters were first published, was a daily broadsheet whose stock-in-trade was shipping information, local news, and letters to the editor. Franklin’s own Pennsylvania Gazette trafficked in similar fare, and appealed mainly to the middle-class, artisan and mercantile community to which its editor belonged. These publications were not what we might call papers of record; nor were they much favored by the colonial political class with whom we normally associate the American Revolution. Rather, they were intended to be both a useful tool and an entertaining distraction for the middling classes who had little knowledge of classical rhetoric but a finely-honed appreciation for well-delivered wit and wisdom. That Franklin seemed to be continually drawn to this rather humble platform, in spite of his frequent associations with the elite of both the colonies and their British motherland, is quite telling. If nothing else it would seem to indicate the manner of discourse he believed most effective, and to whom he supposed his thoughts were best addressed.

            Franklin’s preference for the popular platform of the daily newspaper may also have had something to do with the last element of his biography I feel it worthwhile to point out, that being his status as a self-made man. Putting aside the almost mythic regard with which modern American culture seems to hold the self-made, bootstrap hoisting ethos, which is another beast altogether, Franklin’s middling origins were, and continue to be, key to understanding how he perceived of himself and in turn how others perceived him. In a society like that which existed in 18^th-century colonial America social mobility was practically non-existent. Though the colonies were more egalitarian than their mother country, in terms of income, lifestyle, and social standing, even multicultural, multilingual, freedom-of-conscience-loving Pennsylvania was British at its very core. Certain base assumptions, I mean, carried over. There were distinct social classes in the colonies as in Britain, defined by wealth, ethnic origin, and faith. Though families could and did improve their lot over generations via investment, education, and a bit of luck, it was terribly uncommon for an individual to accomplish the same over the course of a single lifetime. Benjamin Franklin was just such an uncommon individual, however, and his life and career often present a highly compelling mix of common and elite associations.

            For example, Franklin was the son of a Boston candle maker, and as an adult had personal exchanges with Louis XV and Louis XVI of France. He was rejected as a suitor by his common-law wife’s mother in the 1720s because he was financially insubstantial, and was awarded honorary doctorates by St. Andrews and Oxford universities in the 1760s. In 1723 at age seventeen he arrived in Philadelphia with little money in his pocket and rather shaky prospects, and in 1785 was elected President of Pennsylvania. Granted, a great deal happened between these respective sets of events. In addition to his own hard work, energy and ingenuity, Franklin was the beneficiary of his fair share of favors and lucky breaks. Nevertheless, having started with so little and ended up with so much, in the process becoming perhaps the most well-known man in America and the most well-known American in Britain, could not but have an effect on his outlook. I will grant once again that I am engaging in speculation, but I suspect that his social, political, and economic rise made him very conscious of wealth disparities and the need to promote public access to resources. That during his life he helped found a public library, a hospital, and a volunteer fire brigade, among other public organizations, and also created a number of devices intended to ease the lives of his fellow men that he chose not to patent, would seem to speak to his sense of philanthropy, compassion, and generosity. That he also, in spite of the august company he became accustomed to keeping in later life, continued to publish editorials and satirical letters in popular daily broadsheets, appears to indicate an attachment to the popular press and a degree of regard for its audience. Even in his preferred manner of address I perceive, rightly or wrongly, a degree of class-conscious pretension. After being awarded his aforementioned honorary degrees he insisted on being referred to as “Doctor Franklin.” I really do wonder if this wasn’t the Boston chandler’s son quietly relishing the social distinction he’d managed to attain and attempting to prompt those he met to show respect for the same.

            Perhaps I’m reading too much into things. It wouldn’t be the first time. In any case, I do think the core elements I’ve tried to point out in Benjamin Franklin’s biography are worth remembering. He was significantly older than almost all of the Founding Fathers, he was fonder of satire and less given to aggressive rhetoric then they were, and he was of generally much more modest origins. In whatever sense, however they manifested, these facts are significant, and I do believe understanding them is essential to understating the nature and importance of Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to the founding of the United States.

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, Part I: Context

            After the lengthy sagas that I've subjected you to over the past few months I think it appropriate, nay deserved, to try over the next few weeks for something a bit more compact. A brief dip in the pool, say, after having attempted to swim the English Channel. To that end I’ve decided to shine a light on one of the most well-known Founding Fathers about which I have had very little to say thus far. This is not because I find him less worthy of respect than his peers or his work less worthy of reflection. Rather, it’s only because the man is not really known for his political or philosophical rhetoric, my bread and butter I think we can all agree, that he has so long been absent from these pages. I’m speaking, as I’m sure you haven’t guessed because I’m being terribly and unnecessarily obtuse, of Benjamin Franklin.

            The thing about Benjamin Franklin – and isn’t that just a great way to begin a sentence – is that he wasn’t really much of a politician or a statesman in either the archaic or modern sense. Unlike most of his contemporaries among the Founding Generation he was not a lawyer by trade, was not very deeply involved with the politics of his home state, and seemed generally uninterested in seeking national political office. Though he did serve as the first Postmaster General of the United States and was elected the sixth President of Pennsylvania (before it adopted a constitution in which “Governor” was the title of the chief executive), his strengths and interests seemed to tilt more towards diplomacy, science, and what might be called the liberal arts. For this reason there would seem very little an interested person, such as myself, could point to in the way of political treatises or essays that really encapsulate even a portion of his personal ideology or philosophy. There are papers written on the topics of oceanography, thermodynamics, and electricity, of course, as well as satirical narratives purportedly from the pen of characters like Silence Dogood and Poor Richard. But solid, theory-rich political writings of the kind Madison, Jefferson and Hamilton churned out as if their lives depended on it, there would appear to be few.  That is, unless or until one recalls that Franklin was, among his many vocations, a printer and editorialist of some renown and thereafter delves into the reams of political commentary he turned out over the course of his long and prolific literary life.

            So you see, I can admit when I am wrong.

            And so I come to the present topic of discussion, an editorial entitled Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One that was published in a London newspaper called The Public Advertiser in September, 1773. Among Franklin’s most celebrated pro-American satirical essays, made all the more remarkable by it being printed in a British paper, Rules (as it shall hereafter be known) provides its readers with a series of steps by which a great and powerful empire could supposedly be reduced and eventually destroyed from the inside out. Intended as a rhetorical jab at British trade and tax policies that had, over the course of the 1760s and 1770s, turned many in the Thirteen Colonies against Parliament and the Crown, Franklin’s editorial voice is on full display throughout. Consequently, Rules provides ample evidence of its author’s wit and humour, his political savvy, and his willingness to confront a potentially hostile audience with what he believed needed to be said. Were this not enough to justify giving said editorial a thorough once-over, two specific aspects, relating to its context and general approach, further set it apart as worthy of our particular attention. The first has to do with when, relative to Franklin’s life and experiences, it was published, while the second concerns the basic philosophical assumption, utilized by Franklin to satiric effect, which underlies its rhetoric. Both of these elements will, of course, be discussed in greater detail in the fullness of time. For the moment, as you should no doubt have been expecting, we turn to the larger context.

            Another thing about Benjamin Franklin  - which isn’t as good, but comes pretty close – is that he, more than any other of his fellows among the hallowed pantheon of America’s Founding Fathers, could honestly be described as a “self-made man.” Far from the scion of a southern planter family or the offspring of a member of New England’s merchant elite, his origins were distinctly working class. In addition to nurturing a latent disdain for inherited privilege, this had a powerful effect on the trajectory of Franklin’s life and to a great extent shaped his social and political outlook. If nothing else, the fact of his modest upbringing and hard-won success speak to his ability to conceive of the British Empire and the Crown, America, and its potential independence in distinctly down-to-earth terms. As past weeks’ discussions have hopefully made clear, this was not always a skill his contemporaries possessed.     

            The eighth child of his British-born father’s second marriage (making him Josiah Franklin’s fourteenth child overall), Benjamin Franklin came into the world in 1706 in Boston, capital of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. The son of a Puritan chandler (candle-maker), Franklin’s father encouraged him to join the clergy from a young age, though the family’s lack of resources cut his formal education short after only two years at Boston Latin School. Thereafter he supplemented his limited learning by reading extensively while working for his father, and at age twelve became apprenticed to his brother James. A printer by trade, James Franklin introduced his younger sibling to what would become perhaps his most durable vocation. Under his training young Benjamin, at age fifteen, helped found the New England Courant, one of the earliest newspapers in the colonies which ran from 1721 to 1726. It was as the typesetter of the Courant that Franklin first dabbled in satire, penning more than a dozen letters under the stereotypically Puritan pen name Silence Dogood. As a platform for ridiculing the morally censorious culture of mid-18^th century Boston, the fifteen Dogood letters proved very popular with the reading public and helped keep the Courant, and James Franklin’s printing business, afloat. Unfortunately because James had not been aware that Benjamin was the author behind Silence Dogood’s pen he was angered when he ultimately discovered the ruse. Thereafter Benjamin left his apprenticeship without his brother’s permission, an illegal act under Massachusetts law, and ran away to Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. The years that followed would prove to be among the most productive of Franklin’s young life.

            Though by the end of the 18^th century Philadelphia was among the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the Thirteen Colonies, during the 1720s when Benjamin Franklin first arrived it was still a somewhat primitive backwater port whose growth had been stunted by economic depression. It was in fact due to the efforts of men like Franklin and his civically-minded colleagues that the city grew and flourished into a centre of culture and learning, and by the 1770s was the natural choice to host the First and Second Continental Congress. Upon his arrival in 1723, however, young Benjamin found the city somewhat less congenial than would his revolutionary compatriots. Though he managed to find work among some of the local printing shops, putting to good use the skills and experience he had acquired under his brother’s tutelage, he was unsatisfied with his immediate prospects. He was accordingly convinced by Pennsylvania’s colonial governor Sir William Keith to depart as an emissary to London in order to acquire the materials necessary to establish a newspaper of his own in Philadelphia. When Governor Keith’s proposal turned out to have had little basis in fact, however, Franklin was forced to find work among the printing shops and merchants of London before returning to Pennsylvania in 1726. Older and somewhat wiser, he subsequently turned his energies to more public-minded pursuits, and in 1727 helped establish a civic organization in Philadelphia known as the Junto. A discussion group as well as a charitable organization, the Junto’s members came from among the city’s middling classes (printers, cobblers, merchants, surveyors, clerks, etc…), discussed topics ranging from business, to politics, to natural philosophy, and helped establish the first public library in Pennsylvania (the still-extant Library Company of Pennsylvania).

            In addition to fostering the exchange of knowledge and forging relationships between members of the artisan community, Franklin also helped enrich Philadelphia’s public life by contributing his own voice to its growing literary and cultural traditions via his trade as a printer. To that end he re-founded the struggling Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729 alongside his partner Hugh Meredith, and thereafter acted as both editor and frequent (anonymous) contributor. Though by modern standards the Gazette did not offer much in the way of journalism, as was the norm in the 18^th century, it did provide the business community in Philadelphia with a reliable source of classified ads, retail notices, and ship listings. More importantly, however, it provided Franklin with an unrivalled platform from which to dispense his favored brand of satirical public and cultural commentary. Once again utilizing a series of pen names, he gave full vent over the years that followed (the Gazette remained in print until 1800) to his self-generated wisdom, his caustic wit, and his general sense of mischief as he sought to skewer the morals and manners of his adopted neighbors, and of colonial Americans in general. In addition the paper also contributed to his efforts to popularize and sell what he felt was “improving” literature; the publication carried reviews written by Franklin of books he had acquired, and his printing office also served as a retail book shop. Subsequently, the Pennsylvania Gazette became perhaps the most successful newspaper in the Thirteen Colonies, and Benjamin Franklin began to acquire the reputation as one of colonial America’s most enduring public personalities.

            The 1730s saw the scope of Franklin’s interests and activities expand at the same time his personal life began to take on the complex and at-times morally ambiguous character for which he has since become known. The year 1730 in itself proved to be quite eventful; therein Franklin entered into a common-law marriage with Deborah Read, whom he had first met and proposed to in 1723 when he was seventeen. That year he also publicly acknowledged a child named William as his illegitimate son. The unofficial nature of his union with Read was born out of necessity. During Franklin’s absence in London between 1723 and 1726, Deborah married a man named William Rogers who subsequently absconded with her dowry and fled to Barbados in order to escape his looming debts. Contemporary bigamy laws denied Deborah the freedom to remarry, though her relationship with Franklin proved to be more durable than most formal unions, lasting until her death in 1774. William Franklin (1730-1813), meanwhile, was subsequently raised in his father’s household and for all intents and purposes treated as the child of Deborah Read and the sibling of her and her husband’s other children Francis (1732-1736) and Sarah (1744-1808). Over the course of his upbringing he often assisted in Benjamin’s various scientific experiments, accompanied him during his frequent stays in Europe, and received, by colonial American standards, a very thorough education between the elder Franklin’s tutelage, attending school in Philadelphia, and studying law in 1760s London. William later became the royally-appointed governor of New Jersey in 1763, an office he held until deposed by the colony’s revolutionary government in 1776.

            Aside from these personal goings-on, the 1730s witnessed the rise of Franklin’s increasing interest in science. Over the decades that followed he undertook a series of well-documented studies and experiments into, among other things, demography, oceanography, physics, electricity, meteorology, refrigeration and certain aspects of human cognition. Nurtured from a young age by his self-directed reading, his intense curiosity also led Franklin to a secondary career as a successful inventor. Among his creations, none of which he ever patented, are counted the lightning rod, a type of musical instrument called a glass armonica, bifocal glasses, and a form of heat-efficient fireplace known as the Franklin Stove. During this period of creative profligacy in Franklin’s life he also began to dabble in literature. Beginning in 1733 he wrote and published a series of yearly pamphlets in the form of a simultaneously practical and entertaining Almanac under the pseudonym Poor Richard. Containing a calendar for the coming year, weather forecasts, poems, sayings, astrological data, and the occasional mathematical exercise, Poor Richard’s Almanac became an annual best-seller in the American colonies, regularly running through ten thousand copies every year until they ceased publication in 1758. In spite of his attempt to remain anonymous, as had become his custom, Franklin’s authorship of Poor Richard became widely known during his lifetime and greatly enhanced his mounting fame.

            On the professional front, because satire, science and innovation were really just pastimes, Franklin’s role in Pennsylvania society evolved over the course of the 1740s, 50s, and 60s from public intellectual and civic advocate to philanthropist, man of letters, and eventually credentialed diplomat. Between 1736 and 1751 he helped establish the Union Fire Company, one of the first volunteer fire brigades in colonial America, began printing paper currency (for which he was an ardent advocate) for the government of New Jersey, founded the Academy and College of Pennsylvania (later united with the University of the State of Pennsylvania to form Penn State) and the American Philosophical Society (a national scientific discussion group), and aided in the establishment of the Pennsylvania Hospital, the first of its kind in America. He was elected as a councilman for the City of Philadelphia in 1748, became a Justice of the Peace in 1749, and joined the colonial assembly in 1751. Three years later, in 1754, Franklin headed the Pennsylvania deputation to the Albany Congress, organized with the intent of forging closer defensive ties between the various colonies at the outset of the Seven Years War (1754-1763). At said meeting of colonial notables he proposed a plan of union for the colonies that, while not adopted, became an influence on similar developments like the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution. 1754 also witnessed one of Franklin’s most lasting contributions to American political and popular culture. Published in his Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, the image of a segmented snake over the label “Join, or Die” was intended to encourage a display of unity among the colonies in the face of invasion by the forces of France and their Native American allies. The stark imagery lodged itself firmly in the colonial American consciousness, resurfaced as a plea for unity again during the American Revolution, and has since become one of the most vibrant and recognizable images from the founding era of the United States.