The True Benjamin Franklin

Sydney George Fisher

The True Benjamin Franklin

Preface

This analysis of the life and character of Franklin has in view a similar object to that of the volume entitled “The True George Washington,” which was prepared for the publishers by Mr. Paul Leicester Ford and issued a year or two ago.

Washington sadly needed to be humanized, to be rescued from the myth-making process which had been destroying all that was lovable in his character and turning him into a mere bundle of abstract qualities which it was piously supposed would be wholesome examples for the American people. This assumption that our people are children who must not be told the eternal truths of human nature, but deceived into goodness by wooden heroes and lay figures, seems, fortunately, to be passing away, and in a few years it will be a strange phase to look back upon.

So thorough and systematic has been the expurgating during the last century that some of its details are very curious. It is astonishing how easily an otherwise respectable editor or biographer can get himself into a state of complete intellectual dishonesty. It is interesting to follow one of these literary criminals and see the minute care with which he manufactures an entirely new and imaginary being out of the real man who has been placed in his hands. He will not allow his victim to say even a single word which he considers unbecoming. The story is told that Washington wrote in one of his letters that a certain movement of the enemy would not amount to a flea-bite; but one of his editors struck out the passage as unfit to be printed. He thought, I suppose, that Washington could not take care of his own dignity.

Franklin in his Autobiography tells us that when working as a journeyman printer in London he drank nothing but water, and his fellow-workmen, in consequence, called him the “Water-American;” but Weems in his version of the Autobiography makes him say that they called him the “American Aquatic,” an expression which the vile taste of that time was pleased to consider elegant diction. In the same way Temple Franklin made alterations in his grandfather’s writings, changing their vigorous Anglo-Saxon into stilted Latin phrases.

It is curious that American myth-making is so unlike the ancient myth-making which as time went on made its gods and goddesses more and more human with mortal loves and passions. Our process is just the reverse. Out of a man who actually lived among us and of whose life we have many truthful details we make an impossible abstraction of idealized virtues. It may be said that this could never happen among a people of strong artistic instincts, and we have certainly in our conceptions of art been theatrical and imitative rather than dramatic and real. Possibly the check which is being given to our peculiar myth-making is a favorable sign for our art.

The myth-makers could not work with Franklin in quite the same way that they worked with Washington. With Washington they ignored his personal traits and habits, building him up into a cold military and political wonder. But Franklin’s human side would not down so easily. The human in him was so interlaced with the divine that the one dragged the other into light. His dramatic and artistic sense was very strong, far stronger than in most distinguished Americans; and he made so many plain statements about his own shortcomings, and followed pleasure and natural instincts so sympathetically, broadly, and openly, that the efforts to prepare him for exhibition are usually ludicrous failures.

But the eulogists soon found an effective way to handle him. Although they could ignore certain phases of his character only so far as the genial old fellow would let them, they could exaggerate the other phases to an almost unlimited extent; for his career was in many ways peculiarly open to exaggeration. It was longer, more varied, and more full of controversy than Washington’s. Washington was twenty-six years younger than Franklin and died at the age of sixty-seven, while Franklin lived to be eighty-four. Washington’s important public life was all covered by the twenty-two years from 1775 to 1797, and during more than three of those years he was in retirement at Mount Vernon. But Franklin was an active politician, philosopher, man of science, author, philanthropist, reformer, and diplomat for the forty-odd years from 1745 to 1788.

Almost every event of his life has been distorted until, from the great and accomplished man he really was, he has been magnified into an impossible prodigy. Almost everything he wrote about in science has been put down as a discovery. His wonderful ability in expressing himself has assisted in this; for if ten men wrote on a subject and Franklin was one of them, his statement is the one most likely to be preserved, because the others, being inferior in language, are soon forgotten and lost.

Every scrap of paper he wrote upon is now considered a precious relic and a great deal of it is printed, so that statements which were but memoranda or merely his way of formulating other men’s knowledge for his own convenience or for the sake of writing a pleasant letter to a friend, are given undue importance. Indeed, when we read one of these letters or memoranda it is so clearly and beautifully expressed and put in such a captivating form that, as the editor craftily forbears to comment on it, we instinctively conclude that it must have been a gift of new knowledge to mankind.

The persistency with which people have tried to magnify Franklin is curiously shown in the peculiar way in which James Logan’s translation of Cicero’s essay on old age was attributed to him. This translation with notes and a preface was made by Logan and printed in 1744 by Franklin in his Philadelphia printing-office, and at the foot of the title-page Franklin’s name appeared as the printer. In 1778 the book was reprinted in London, with Franklin’s name on the title-page as the translator. In 1809 one of his editors, William Duane, actually had this translation printed in his edition of Franklin’s works. The editor was afterwards accused of having done this with full knowledge that the translation had not been made by Franklin; but, under the code of literary morals which has so long prevailed, I suppose he would be held excusable.

One of Franklin’s claims to renown is that he was a self-made man, the first distinguished American who was created in that way; and it would seem, therefore, all the more necessary that he should be allowed to remain as he made himself. I have endeavored to act upon this principle and so far as possible to let Franklin speak for himself. The analytical method of writing a man’s life is well suited to this purpose. There are already chronological biographies of Franklin in two volumes or more giving the events in order with very full details from his birth to his death. The present single volume is more in the way of an estimate of his position, worth, and work, and yet gives, I believe, every essential fact of his career with enough detail to enable the reader to appreciate it. At the same time the chapters have been arranged with such regard to chronological order as to show the development of character and achievement from youth to age.

I

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Franklin was a rather large man, and is supposed to have been about five feet ten inches in height. In his youth he was stout, and in old age corpulent and heavy, with rounded shoulders. The portraits of him reveal a very vigorous-looking man, with a thick upper arm and a figure which, even in old age, was full and rounded. In fact, this rounded contour is his most striking characteristic, as the angular outline is the characteristic of Lincoln. Franklin’s figure was a series of harmonious curves, which make pictures of him always pleasing. These curves extended over his head and even to the lines of his face, softening the expression, slightly veiling the iron resolution, and entirely consistent with the wide sympathies, varied powers, infinite shrewdness, and vast experience which we know he possessed.

In his earliest portrait as a youth of twenty he looks as if his bones were large; but in later portraits this largeness of bone which he might have had from his Massachusetts origin is not so evident. He was, however, very muscular, and prided himself on it. When he was a young printer, as he tells us in his Autobiography, he could carry with ease a large form of letters in each hand up and down stairs. In his old age, when past eighty, he is described as insisting on lifting unaided heavy books and dictionaries to show the strength he still retained.

He was not brought up on fox-hunting and other sports, like Washington, and there are no amusements of this sort to record of him, except his swimming, in which he took great delight and continued until long after he had ceased to be a youth. He appears, when a boy, to have been fond of sailing in Boston Harbor, but has told us little about it. In swimming he excelled. He could perform all the ordinary feats in the water which were described in the swimming-books of his day, and on one occasion tied himself to the string of his kite and was towed by it across a pond a mile wide. In after-years he believed that he could in this way cross the English Channel from Dover to Calais, but he admitted that the packet-boat was preferable.

His natural fondness for experiment led him to try the effect of fastening oval paddles to his hands, which gave him greater speed in swimming, but were too fatiguing to his wrists. Paddles or large sandals fastened to his feet he soon found altered the stroke, which the observant boy had discovered was made with the inside of the feet and ankles as well as with the flat part of the foot.

While in London, as a wandering young journeyman printer, he taught an acquaintance, Wygate, to swim in two lessons. Returning from Chelsea with a party of Wygate’s friends, he gave them an exhibition of his skill, going through all the usual tricks in the water, to their great amazement and admiration, and swimming from near Chelsea to Blackfriars, a distance of four miles. Wygate proposed that they should travel through Europe, maintaining themselves by giving swimming-lessons, and Franklin was at first inclined to adopt the suggestion.

Just as he was on the eve of returning to Pennsylvania, Sir William Wyndham, at one time Chancellor of the Exchequer, having heard of his swimming feats, wanted to engage him to teach his sons; but his ship being about to sail, Franklin was obliged to decline. If he had remained in England, he tells us, he would probably have started a swimming-school.

When forty-three years old, retired from active business, and deep in scientific researches, he lived in a house at Second and Race Streets, Philadelphia. His garden is supposed to have extended to the river, where every warm summer evening he used to spend an hour or two swimming and sporting in the water.

This skill in swimming and the agility and grace which Franklin displayed in performing feats in the water are good tests of general strength of muscles, lungs, and heart. So far as can be discovered, only one instance is recorded of his using his physical power to do violence to his fellow-man.

He had a friend named Collins, rather inclined to drink, who, being in a boat with Franklin and some other youths, on the Delaware, refused to take his turn at rowing. He announced that the others should row him home. Franklin, already much provoked at him for not returning money which he had lent him, and for other misconduct, insisted that he row his share. Collins replied that Franklin should row or he would throw him overboard, and, as he was approaching him for that purpose, Franklin seized him by the collar and breeches and threw him into the river, where they kept him till his strength was exhausted and his temper cooled.

Until he was forty years old Franklin worked on his own account or for others as a printer, which included hard manual labor; for, even when in business for himself, he did everything, – made his own ink, engraved wooden cuts and ornaments, set the type, and worked the heavy hand-presses. His pleasures were books, the theatre, and love-affairs. Except swimming, he had no taste for out-door amusements. Sport, either with rod, gun, horse, or hound, was altogether out of his line. As he became prosperous and retired from the active business of money-getting, he led an entirely sedentary life to the end of his long career.

Although he did a vast amount of work in his time, was fond of early rising, and had the greatest endurance and capacity for labor, there was, nevertheless, a touch of indolence about him. He did the things which he loved and which came easy to him, cultivated his tastes and followed their bent in a way rather unusual in self-made men. It has been said of him that he never had the patience to write a book. His writings have exerted great influence, are now considered of inestimable value, and fill ten large volumes, but they are all occasional pieces, letters, and pamphlets written to satisfy some need of the hour.

His indolence was more in his manner than in his character. It was the confident indolence of genius. He was never in a hurry, and this was perhaps one of the secrets of his success. His portraits all show this trait. In nearly every one of them the whole attitude, the droop of the shoulders and arms, and the quietude of the face are reposeful.

He seems to have been totally without either irritability or excitability. In this he was the reverse of Washington, who was subject to violent outbursts of anger, could swear “like an angel of God,” as one of his officers said, and had a fiery temper to control. Perhaps Franklin’s strong sense of humor saved him from oaths; there are no swearing stories recorded of him; instead of them we have innumerable jokes and witticisms. His anger when aroused was most deliberate, calculating, and judicious. His enemies and opponents he always ridiculed, often, however, with so little malice or sting that I have no doubt they were sometimes compelled to join in the laugh. He never attacked or abused.

Contentment was a natural consequence of these qualities, and contributed largely to maintain his vigor through eighty-four years of a very stormy life. It was a family trait. Many of his relations possessed it; and he describes some of them whom he looked up in England as living in happiness and enjoyment, in spite of the greatest poverty. Some able men struggle with violence, bitterness, and heart-ache for the great prizes of life, but all these prizes tumbled in on Franklin, who seems to have had a fairy that brought them to him in obedience to his slightest wish.

His easy-going sedentary life, of course, told on him in time. After middle life he had both the gout and the stone, but his natural vitality fortified him against them. He was as temperate as it was possible to be in that age, and he studied his constitution and its requirements very closely. He was so much interested in science that he not infrequently observed, reasoned, and to some extent experimented in the domain which properly belongs to physicians.

When only fifteen years old, and apprenticed in the printing-office of his brother in Boston, in the year 1721, he became a vegetarian. A book written by one of the people who have for many centuries been advocating that plan of living fell in his way and converted him. It appealed to his natural economy and to his desire for spare money with which to buy books. He learned from the book the various ways of cooking vegetables, and told his brother that if he would give him half the money paid for his board he would board himself. He found very soon that he could pay for his vegetable diet and still save half the money allowed him, and that he could also very quickly eat his rice, potatoes, and pudding at the printing-office and have most of the dinner-hour for reading the books his spare money procured.

This was calculating very closely for a boy of fifteen, and shows unusual ability as well as willingness to observe and master small details. Such ability usually comes later in life with strengthened intellect, but Franklin seems to have had this sort of mature strength very early.

He did not remain an entire convert to the vegetarians, but he often practised their methods and apparently found no inconvenience in it. He could eat almost anything, and change from one diet to another without difficulty. Two years after his first experiment with vegetarianism he ran away from his brother at Boston, and found work at Philadelphia with a rough, ignorant old printer named Keimer, who wanted, among other projects, to form a religious sect, and to have Franklin help him. Franklin played with his ideas for a while, and finally said that he would agree to wear a long beard and observe Saturday instead of Sunday, like Keimer, if Keimer would join him in a vegetable diet.

He found a woman in the neighborhood to cook for them, and taught her how to prepare forty kinds of vegetable food, which reduced their cost of living to eighteen pence a week for each. But Keimer, who was a heavy meat-eater, could stand it only three months, and then ordered a roast-pig dinner, to be enjoyed by the two vegetarians and a couple of women. Keimer, however, arrived first at the feast, and before any of his guests appeared had eaten the whole pig.

While working in the printing-office in London, Franklin drank water, to the great astonishment and disgust of the beer-guzzling Englishmen who were his fellow-laborers. They could not understand how the water-American, as they called him, could go without strength-giving beer and yet be able to carry a large form of letters in each hand up and down stairs, while they could carry only one with both hands.

The man who worked one of the presses with Franklin drank a pint before breakfast, a pint with bread and cheese for breakfast, one between breakfast and dinner, one at dinner, another at six o’clock, and another after he had finished his day’s work. The American boy, with his early mastery of details, reasoned with him that the strength furnished by the beer could come only from the barley dissolved in the water of which the beer was composed; that there was a larger portion of flour in a penny loaf, and if he ate a loaf and drank a pint of water with it he would derive more strength than from a pint of beer. But the man would not be convinced, and continued to spend a large part of his weekly wages for what Franklin calls the cursed beverage which kept him in poverty and wretchedness.

Franklin was, however, never a teetotaler. He loved, as he tells us, a glass and a song. Like other people of that time, he could drink without inconvenience a quantity which nowadays, especially in America, seems surprising. Some of the chief-justices of England are described by their biographer, Campbell, as two- or four-bottle men, according to the quantity they could consume at a sitting. Washington, Mr. Ford tells us, drank habitually from half a pint to a pint of Madeira, besides punch and beer, which would now be thought a great deal. But Franklin considered himself a very temperate man. When writing his Autobiography, in his old age, he reminds his descendants that to temperance their ancestor “ascribes his long-continued health and what is still left to him of a good constitution.”

Like most of those who live to a great age, he was the child of long-lived parents. “My mother,” he says, “had likewise an excellent constitution; she suckled all her ten children. I never knew either my father or mother to have any sickness but that of which they died, – he at eighty-nine and she at eighty-five years of age.”

He was fond of air-baths, which he seems to have thought hardened his skin and helped it to perform its functions, and when in London in 1768 he wrote one of his pretty letters about them to Dr. Dubourg in Paris.

“You know the cold bath has long been in vogue here as a tonic; but the shock of the cold water has always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise almost every morning and sit in my chamber, without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. This practice is not in the least painful, but, on the contrary, agreeable; and if I return to bed afterwards, before I dress myself, as sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night’s rest of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined. I find no ill consequences whatever resulting from it, and that at least it does not injure my health, if it does not in fact contribute much to its preservation. I shall therefore call it for the future a bracing or tonic bath.” (Bigelow’s Works of Franklin, vol. iv. p. 193.)

Some years afterwards, while in Paris and suffering severely from gout in his foot, he used to expose the foot naked out of bed, which he found relieved the pain, because, as he supposed, the skin was given more freedom to act in a natural way. His remarks on air-baths were published in the early editions of his works and induced many people to try them. Davis, in his “Travels in America,” says that they must have been suggested to him by a passage in Aubrey’s “Miscellanies;” but, after searching all through that old volume, I cannot find it. Franklin, however, made no claim to a discovery. Such baths have been used by physicians to strengthen delicate persons, but in a more guarded and careful manner than that in which Franklin applied them.

It was characteristic of his genial temperament that he loved to dream in his sleep and to recollect his dreams. “I am often,” he says, “as agreeably entertained by them as by the scenery of an opera.” He wrote a pleasant little essay, addressed to an unknown young lady, on “The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams,” which may be said to belong among his medical writings. Fresh air and ventilation are the important dream-persuaders, and bad dreams and restlessness in bed are caused by excess of perspirable matter which is not allowed to get away from the skin. Eat less, have thinner and more porous bedclothes, and if you are restless, get up, beat and turn your pillows, shake all the sheets twenty times, and walk about naked for a while. Then, when you return, the lovely dreams will come.

Closely connected with his faith in air-baths was his opinion that people seldom caught cold from exposure to air or even to dampness. He wrote letters on the subject and prepared notes of his observations. These notes are particularly interesting and full of curious suggestions. The diseases usually classed as colds, he said, are not known by that name in any other language, and the name is misleading, for very few of them arise from cold or dampness. Indians and sailors, who are continually wet, do not catch cold; nor is cold taken by swimming. And he went on enumerating the instances of people who lived in the woods, in barns, or with open windows, and, instead of catching cold, found their health improved. Cold, he thought, was caused in most cases by impure air, want of exercise, or over-eating.

“I have long been satisfied from observation, that besides the general colds now termed influenzas (which may possibly spread by contagion, as well as by a particular quality of the air), people often catch cold from one another when shut up together in close rooms and coaches, and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other’s transpiration; the disorder being in a certain state. I think, too, that it is the frouzy, corrupt air from animal substances, and the perspired matter from our bodies, which being long confined in beds not lately used, and clothes not lately worn, and books long shut up in close rooms, obtains that kind of putridity which occasions the colds observed upon sleeping in, wearing, and turning over such bedclothes or books, and not their coldness or dampness. From these causes, but more from too full living, with too little exercise, proceed, in my opinion, most of the disorders which, for about one hundred and fifty years past, the English have called colds.”

Much of this is true in a general way, for medical practitioners have long held that all colds do not arise from exposure or draughts; but they do not admit that colds can be taken from turning over old books and clothes, although the dust from these might make one sneeze.