The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (38 page)

Franklin saw his opportunity when he read Jackson’s speech, and he made the most of it with the literary technique he knew best—a hoax. This, his final hoax, appeared in the
Federal Gazette
on March 25, 1790, under the signature of “Historicus.” It purported to reprint a speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim to the Divan, or council, of Algiers defending the time-honored custom of enslaving white Christians captured by Barbary pirates. Franklin took Jackson’s arguments and placed them in the mouth of this Muslim apologist for enslaving Christians. The Koran justified slavery, the Muslim leader said, and by every calculation it is necessary. “If we cease our Cruises against the Christians, how shall we be furnished with the Commodities their Countries produce, and which are so necessary for us? If we forbear to make Slaves of their People, who in this hot climate are to cultivate our Lands?” Besides, these white infidels were “brought into a Land where the Sun of Islamism gives forth its Light and shines in full Splendor,” and thus these poor benighted slaves had an opportunity of becoming “acquainted with the true Doctrine and thereby saving their immortal Souls.” After many such arguments, the conclusion was the same one that Jackson had made to Franklin’s petition to free the African slaves: “Let us hear no more of this detestable Proposition, the Manumission of Christian Slaves.” Just as Congress had decided, after some huffing and puffing about the injustice of slavery, so too did Franklin have his Muslim Divan behave: “The Divan came to this Resolution,” he wrote, that “ ‘The Doctrine, that Plundering and Enslaving the Christians is unjust, is at best
problematical;
but that it is the Interest of this State to continue the Practice, is clear; therefore let the Petition be rejected.’ ”
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FRANKLIN’S DEATH

During that same month of March 1790, Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, wrote Franklin to ask about his religious views. Franklin said that it was the first time anyone had questioned him about the subject. He did not want to take Stiles’s curiosity amiss, and he tried to answer him as succinctly as possible. He said that he believed “in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we can render to him, is doing Good to his other Children. That the Soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this.” Franklin went on to say that he (like Jefferson) believed Jesus’s “System of Morals and his Religion as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see.” He also expressed his doubts of Jesus’s divinity, but did not want to argue the matter. Practical to the end, he saw no harm in people’s believing in Christ’s divinity since that belief would likely make his doctrines more respected and observed. Knowing that his own views might not be well received by his countrymen, he asked Stiles to keep them confidential.

Early in April, Franklin developed a fever and some sort of lung ailment that made breathing difficult. He had been in pain for some time and was taking opium for relief. With him at the end were his daughter, Sally, her husband, and Franklin’s two grandsons, together with Mrs.

Stevenson’s daughter Polly, who had succumbed to Franklin’s appeals and had immigrated to Philadelphia with her family. At one point Sally told her father that she hoped he would recover and live many more years. He replied, “I hope not.” He died on April 17, 1790. He was eighty-four.

His will, drawn up in 1788, was odd. Instead of leaving the bulk of his four-thousand-book library to the Library Company, as the directors expected, Franklin left only a single multivolume work. Most of the rest of his books he left to his grandsons and a cousin. To the Philadelphia Hospital he left over £5000 in old debts that he had been unable to collect—a bequest that the hospital’s gentry patrons eventually turned down.
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Perhaps tired of the social snubbing he was getting from some genteel Philadelphians, he became in the end increasingly interested in young artisans. In a lengthy codicil drawn up in 1789 he left £1000 each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia in hopes of having other young men emulate his life. The cities were to use these funds as the source of loans for young journeyman mechanics setting themselves up in business. (At the present time these funds amount to millions of dollars.) By making these grants Franklin seemed to foresee something of the role he was to play in America following his death.
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THE REACTION TO FRANKLIN’S DEATH

Inevitably, the French reacted to Franklin’s death with greater emotion than did his fellow Americans—no doubt in part because the French were in the beginning stages of their own revolution and needed Franklin more than ever as a symbol of the new order. On June 11, 1790, amid a discussion in the French National Assembly of whether titles of nobility ought to be abolished, the great orator the Comte de Mirabeau rose to announce that
“Franklin estmort
."He called upon the assembly to honor “this mighty genius” who was most responsible for spreading the rights of man throughout the world. Franklin, he said, was a philosopher “who was able to conquer both thunderbolts and tyrants.” The assembly, electrified by Mirabeau’s speech, decreed three days of national mourning for Franklin.

The French at once recognized the extraordinary significance of this gesture, the first of its kind by the National Assembly. By speaking for the entire nation and usurping a right that hitherto had belonged to the king, the assembly had become, said one French journal, “the representative assembly of the human race, the Areopagus of the universe.” Bursting with enlightened enthusiasm, Brissot de Warville declared that the National Assembly’s declaration of national mourning for Franklin was an act of utter sublimity unmatched by any political body in Europe.

That summer the National Assembly sent a message to the President and Congress of the United States expressing France’s gratitude to Franklin, “the Nestor of America,” for his contributions to liberty and the rights of man. Although Franklin was a foreigner, the National Assembly declared, the French people regarded him, as they regarded all great men, as one of the “fathers of universal humanity.” His name “will be immortal in the records of Freedom and Philosophy,” and his loss will be felt by all parts of humanity, but especially by the French, who were taking their “first steps towards liberty.” The National Assembly hoped that it and the American Congress would march together in affection and understanding down the road toward freedom and happiness.

For months French aristocrats and
philosophes
delivered eulogy after eulogy in praise of the simple philosopher of humanity who had taught them so much about liberty and the foolishness of vain titles and hereditary distinctions. As late as 1792 the French linked the names and busts of Franklin, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Mirabeau as promoters of liberty and equality.
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No other foreigner ever received such tributes from France as did Franklin. French mourning amounted to what one historian has called “a republican apotheosis of Franklin.”
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This expression of French affection and adulation for Franklin contrasted sharply with what happened in America. To be sure, Franklin’s death aroused crowds of ordinary mourners in Philadelphia, and under James Madison’s leadership the House of Representatives adopted a moving tribute to Franklin on April 22, 1790, and urged its members to wear badges of mourning for a month. But the next day, when Senator Charles Carroll proposed that the Senate adopt a similar tribute to Franklin, several senators leaped to their feet in opposition even before the proposal could be seconded. Senator Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut urged that the proposal be withdrawn since it was sure to be defeated. Consequently, the Senate did nothing.

The Senate’s behavior was extraordinary but explicable. The president of the Senate, Vice President John Adams, had long been jealous of Franklin, and of Washington too for that matter. On April 4, two weeks before Franklin’s death, Adams spilled out to Benjamin Rush his accumulated resentment of the ill-deserved adulation that other Revolutionary leaders were receiving, seemingly at his expense. “The history of our Revolution,” he told Rush with biting sarcasm, “will be one continued Lye from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be
that Dr. Franklin’s electrical Rod, smote the Earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod—and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislatures and War.”
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Inevitably then, Adams, as president of the Senate, was in no mood to honor Franklin. Several senators, namely Richard Henry Lee and Ralph Izard, inveterate enemies of Franklin, shared Adams’s hostility. But other senators, such as Rufus King and William Samuel Johnson, who were not longtime enemies of Franklin, nonetheless also opposed endorsing the House’s tribute. Their opposition to honoring Franklin had more to do with their dislike of the disorder of the emerging French Revolution, with which they now identified Franklin.

For a decade French
philosophes
had vigorously criticized the American constitutions for slavishly imitating the English constitution in their bicameral legislatures and separation of powers. Since Franklin himself had favored a unicameral legislature and a weak executive, he came to represent in the eyes of the Federalist opponents of the French Revolution all of the democratic turbulence that they feared for America. So that when the Senate early in 1791 received several communications from France honoring Franklin, including the tribute from the National Assembly, it treated these French tributes with what Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania called astonishing “coldness and apathy.” What will the French think, Maclay wrote in his diary, when they find out that “we cold as Clay, care not a fig about them, Franklin or Freedom”?
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For months Americans paid not a word of public tribute to Franklin. Although the American Philosophical Society decided two days after

Franklin’s funeral to eulogize its founder and former president, it delayed its eulogy for almost a year. The two vice presidents of the society, the scientist David Rittenhouse and the Anglican priest William Smith, received an equal number of the members’ votes to deliver the eulogy; and consequently for months nothing was done. When the French tributes arrived and were opened early in 1791, however, the delay became embarrassing. Smith was finally selected as the eulogist, and the occasion became far more important and public than had originally been intended; in fact, it became as close to an official eulogy of Franklin as the nation ever managed.

Smith had long been one of Franklin’s enemies. In fact, back in 1764 he had accused Franklin of being an “inflammatory and virulent man,” with a “foul” mouth and “crafty” and “wicked” spirit.
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Thus, it is not surprising that his eulogy, delivered in Philadelphia on March 1, 1791, before an audience of dignitaries from the city, state, and nation, was what one literary historian has called “a half-hearted, colorless piece ... an artificial, uninspired, rhetorical exercise.”
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Smith began by confessing that he was perhaps not the best person to be presenting the eulogy, the truth of which statement he proceeded to demonstrate. He first linked Franklin with two other patriots who had recently died, William Livingston, governor of New Jersey, and James Bowdoin, governor of Massachusetts—as if Franklin’s stature was no different from theirs. He next apologized for Franklin’s “low beginnings” and quickly passed over them. Smith admitted that he had a hard time describing Franklin’s participation in Pennsylvania politics since he himself was “too much an actor in the scene to be fit for the discussion of it.” Smith then summed up Franklin’s contributions to the Revolution in a single short paragraph, declaring they were “too well known to need further mention.”

Throughout the eulogy Smith emphasized that Franklin was “ignorant of his own
strength”
implying at times that Franklin did not know what he was doing. Smith did spend some time praising Franklin’s electrical experiments, emphasizing Franklin’s “caution and modesty” in communicating his findings in the form of guesses. “But,” said Smith, “no man ever made bolder or happier guesses, either in
philosophy
or
politics."
It was true, Smith conceded, that Franklin never troubled himself with using mathematics to prove his speculations, but most of the time he guessed right. Smith quoted a letter of Jefferson’s describing the fame Franklin enjoyed abroad, which he used to sum up Franklin’s role as diplomat during the Revolution. Aside from listing a half dozen of Franklin’s inventions and experiments, Smith did not have very much to say about what Franklin actually had contributed to America and the world. Even what little backhanded praise Smith could manage may have been a strain. When Smith’s daughter asked him whether he believed one tenth of what he had said about “old Ben Lightning Rod,” he only roared with laughter.
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In contrast to this single homage paid Franklin, Washington received hundreds of eulogies at his death a decade later. Even someone like James Bowdoin received at least a dozen funeral tributes. The relatively weak American response to Franklin’s death was remarkable, and it shocked the French minister in America, Louis Otto. He reported home that “the memory of Dr. Franklin has been infinitely more honored in France than in America.”
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Indeed, the more France honored Franklin, the more Franklin’s image suffered, at least in the eyes of those Americans opposed to the French Revolution. The Federalists in the 1790s, believing that the Republican party’s opposition to their leadership was fomented by the French Revolution, saw in Franklin a symbol of much of what they feared and hated. The fact that the Federalists’ principal vilifier in the press was Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache, the intemperate editor of the Philadelphia
General Advertiser
(later called the
Aurora),
only added to their dislike of Franklin.