Benjamin Franklin

6 Pages 1498 Words

On learning of Benjamin Franklin’s death in the spring of 1790, the French National Assembly, the “temporary” French government established after the initial stages of the French Revolution, decreed three days of mourning, a fitting tribute for the man who was for most eighteenth-century European intellectuals the quintessential American. At his death Franklin ranked with Voltaire and Rousseau as a philosophe, one of those multifaceted geniuses whose writings helped inspire the wave of intellectual and political freedom which swept Western Europe in the closing years of the eighteenth century. Unlike most philosophers, however, Franklin had the chance to put his ideas into practice in the founding of a new nation: “He seized the lightening from the sky and the scepter from the hand of tyrants,” proclaimed the philosopher-scientist Turgot.

Franklin’s life has become so much the stuff of legend that it is necessary to try to separate fact from myth. The youngest son in a family of eleven living children, Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. After one year of education at the Boston Grammar School and one year at George Brownell’s English school, he was apprenticed at age twelve to his brother James, a printer. The precocious and rebellious Franklin rejected his parents’ pious congregationalism in favor of free-thinking deism before he turned sixteen. He reluctantly settled to a trade, threatening his parents with his desire to run off to sea, and his adolescent satire of Harvard College suggests that he resented those whose wealth enabled them to escape the drudgery of a tradesman’s life despite their inferior intellectual talents. Franklin also joined vigorously in his brother’s attacks on Massachusetts worthies such as Increase and Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall, but after quarreling with his brother he broke his indenture at age seventeen and sailed secretly for New York and then Philadelphia.

Franklin’s st...