Jeffersonian America

The Founders and America's Future

Robert M. S. McDonald, Peter S. Onuf, Robert M. S. McDonald, Peter S. Onuf

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813945002
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The America of the early republic was built on an experiment, a hopeful prophecy that would only be fulfilled if an enlightened people could find its way through its past and into a future. Americans recognized that its promises would only be fully redeemed at a future date. In Revolutionary Prophecies, renowned historians Robert M. S. McDonald and Peter S. Onuf summon a diverse cast of characters from the founding generation—all of whom, in different ways, reveal how their understanding of the past and present shaped hopes, ambitions, and anxieties for or about the future.

The essays in this wide-ranging volume explore the historical consciousness of Americans caught up in the Revolution and its aftermath. By focusing on how various individuals and groups envisioned their future, the contributors show that revolutionary Americans knew they were making choices that would redirect the "course of human events." Looking at prominent leaders such as Washington, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, and Monroe, as well as more common people, from backcountry rebels and American Indians to printer Isaiah Thomas, the authors illuminate the range and complexity of the ways in which men and women of the founding generation imagined their future—and made our history.

1

Raconteur, Memorialist, Founder

Benjamin Franklin Meets Himself in History

Robert A. Ferguson

Benjamin Franklin belongs more profoundly than others to what the theorist of history Michael Oakeshott named “a practical past,” “a present composed of objects recognized as exploits that have survived.”1 The notion applies to Franklin in many ways, not least in how his own exploits have survived. History is about the details of the past that are selected for recognition, and historians argue endlessly over “by what accident or process of attrition that minute selection of facts, out of all the myriad facts that must have once been known to somebody, had survived to become the facts of history.”2 These arguments grow when the selector of facts writes his own history and that selection prevails.

The Franklin we now know offers the most volatile personal mix of the then and now that we have from the revolutionary era. He is “the Oldest Revolutionary,” born seventy years before the Declaration of Independence, and yet he is also everyone’s new American on the rise.3 His image is more immediately recognized today than any other founder except that of George Washington. Franklin’s many lasting identifications outpace those of his compatriots too. He is not just a political leader, draftsman of national documents, and diplomat extraordinaire, though he is uniquely effective in those combinations. He is also an entrepreneur, businessman, scientist, inventor, philosopher, folk moralist, Enlightenment icon, and media symbol, and each of these facets of his life has held up remarkably well against the oblivion of time.

How did all of this recognition sustain itself in an ever-changing country that has always been fickle in its handling of the past? Much of the answer lies in the book that Franklin called his “Memoir,” a work written for his own time, the age of Enlightenment, but carefully couched in rhetoric for the future American that he would never know. The Autobiography, as we now know it, epitomizes one of the many gnomic sayings of Lewis Namier about historiography. Historians, quoth Namier, “imagine the past and remember the future.”4 The past has to be written in a way that the future will want to remember it.

The Autobiography has two other great advantages in this regard. With few exceptions, the figures we remember most clearly from the Revolution—Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, even George Washington—hold our attention today through what they wrote.5 The Revolution is as much a writerly event through the invention of the portable printing press as a military one at a time when “the accomplished figure demonstrated a worthiness for place and preferment by writing about the world at hand.”6 In popular reception, Franklin’s book becomes the most enduring work of art that the period provides. Even so, endurance raises its own question. Does his work or any work from the period mean the same thing now as it did then?

In its second great advantage, one over other writings, the Autobiography stands out for a particular reason. “We see literature above all,” writes the literary historian Paul Benichou, “as the crucible in which our direct experience of life and society is elaborated philosophically, but without loss of immediacy.”7 Franklin has the knack of making the past immediate without losing any of the philosophical import of his social moment, but that knack also presents several puzzles over the meaning, importance, and even sincerity of the writer’s effort that will turn us back on the meaning and reception of history itself.

Many controversies about the Autobiography have thus to do with one of its greatest virtues. To the extent that Franklin belongs to “a practical past” available to the present, disputes over his book turn on disagreements over whether this practicality helps or hurts a later present. Critics who complain that Franklin repeatedly tells people how to go about things ignore the circumstances in which he lived.8 Method gave form to a fairly inchoate world. A raw eighteenth-century society of uncertain dimensions needed every ordering device Franklin could provide.

One useful example of method comes early in the Autobiography, and it conveys as well the problematics in historical awareness. Franklin, like many other Enlightenment figures, believed that the spread of knowledge could lead to a new kind of harmonious society if there were high levels of literacy and exchange. Despite this generally shared optimism, only Franklin, among all of the accomplished holders of the revolutionary pen, tries to show future Americans how to become “a tolerable English writer.” Why is it so important? “Prose Writing has been of great use to me in the Course of my Life,” Franklin notes, “and was a Principal means of my Advancement.”9 You can read this claim as either one of many bland personal claims of success or as the necessary requirement in forming a successful culture.

A closer look indicates the higher purpose. Franklin personalizes his presentation about writing to help make it doubly effective for any time and place, and he is never above it all. Yes, he is the teacher posting himself in a universal classroom, but he does it through the eyes of a pupil trying to learn to write, which is to say through the person who needs help, and the device disarms pedantry by making himself that struggling pupil in a homespun presentation. The double perspective, in this case teacher and pupil, is a frequent device for plotting an immediate scene within a historical perspective, and it is just as significant that Franklin opens this discussion of writing by saying, “one does not dress for private Company as for a public Ball.”10 Not only does he understand the difference better than other writers, but the words themselves are as prophetic as they are instructive. They introduce a document that hovers between the public and the private in unique ways and for reasons that we need to explore. At issue is a peculiarly opportune form of instructive communication.11

The technique used in reaching so many readers of all ages and times cannot be overemphasized. The quiet personality Franklin presents on the page is there to help anyone who is willing to listen, and that listener is engaged by the practical effort involved as much as by its eventual success. The lesson in writing proceeds through admissions of personal failings. From his father, Franklin realizes, “I fell far short in elegance of Expression, in Method and Perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several Instances . . . and thence grew more attentive to the Manner in Writing.”12 The rhetorical boost given to all frustrated future students is a palpable one: don’t worry; as I improved, so can you improve.

Consider how Franklin’s four strategies in writing work. Again they are based on method, the primary source of order. First, you jot down the ideas of a text and duplicate its merits in your own essay. Second, you compare the original to your effort while turning to a related text in another genre (in Franklin’s case poetry) to extend vocabulary, master form, and develop an ear for tone. Third, you rewrite ideas back and forth between poetry and prose to study concision, generic priorities, and style. Fourth, you jumble the ideas of a popular text into “Confusion” and rewrite the essay. This fourth stipulation provides the final “Method in the Arrangement of Thoughts.”13 Notice how Franklin holds onto the pleasure in writing against the dull drill in most expository writing exercises. Even today you will find no better guide to an effective and graceful style anywhere.

The determined presentism in this writing lesson notwithstanding, it contains a boon for historians. Franklin reveals his sources in developing a style, and they figure in the themes of the Autobiography. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Plutarch’s Lives, Daniel Defoe’s Essays on Projects, and Cotton Mather’s Essays to Do Good were all favorites. Thomas Hobbes, in arguably the best advice he ever gave to historians, explains another use: “There being nothing in the world Universall but Names; for the things named, are every one of them Individuall and Singular.”14 Words change their meanings. They migrate across time and mean different things to different people. Critics of the Autobiography make a mistake when they read Franklin without allowing for the variation in words, forms, concepts, and audience from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Franklin’s sources help us to track down accuracies in meaning, though more needs to be done on this level of interpretation to recover the historical document from its later influence. For if the Autobiography is obviously written to help others, as the writing lesson portends, it is regularly criticized for trying to be helpful even though interpreters concede that it is the second most influential autobiography in Western literature after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Confessions, written a few years before Franklin’s effort.15

Is Franklin’s self-styled “Memoir” really an autobiography? Is Franklin sincere or an artificer in what he writes despite his seemingly candid admissions of error? Does he really tell us who he is? Is he mainly a prophet of the pernicious aspects of capitalism? Has the writer used a mask to hide his real person? Why do most people only remember the first two sections of a book that is written in disparate moments across nineteen years in four sections, starting in 1771 and ending in 1790?16 Most frustrating of all, why does this most facile, gifted, and prolific of rapid writers fail to get to the thrilling revolutionary years? The Autobiography stops abruptly in 1757.

All of these questions are frequently asked in ahistorical ways. We forget, against the timeless quality in so much of the Autobiography, that Franklin is an eighteenth-century man, and an early eighteenth-century man at that. He is a contemporary of Jonathan Edwards, the architect of the First Great Awakening in the 1730s, and knew Cotton Mather, the greatest divine of the previous Puritan generation. Critics go after Franklin in part because he seems fully available to them when he is only partially accessible on current terms.

We must recover a book written well over two hundred years ago but also meant for future generations of Americans. Franklin understood the possibility in those future generations but could only guess at the evolution of the country. How startling, even unsettling, was that evolution to a writer who, whatever his misgivings, always seems calmly afloat in his milieu and who wants to be seen that way? Certainly that equanimity was hard won in a world that changed so constantly under him and forced him to change.

Mark just how much change there was. Franklin begins as a loyal colonial subject with thoughts of staying in England. He becomes a reluctant revolutionary, manages to shift at the right moment to serve as a vigorous revolutionary leader, then morphs into a cosmopolitan diplomatic figure who looks on France as “the country he loves most in all of the world,” and finishes as one of the two leading patriotic giants of a continent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Raconteur, Memorialist, Founder: Benjamin Franklin Meets Himself in History
• 2. Yankee Continentalism: The Provincial Roots of John Adams’s Vision for American Union, 1755–1776
• 3. George Washington’s Vision for the United States
• 4. Agrarian Founders: Three “Rebellions” as Legitimate Opposition, 1786–1799
• 5. The Sovereign People: Indians, Treaties, and the Subversion of the Founders’ Colonialist Vision
• 6. “Arraying Him against Himself”: The Jefferson Presidency and the American Future through the Eyes of Alexander Hamilton
• 7. James Madison and American Nationality: The View from Virginia
• 8. Mastery over Slaves, Sovereignty over Slavery: James Monroe, Virginia, and the Missouri Crisis
• 9. Antiquarian America: Isaiah Thomas and the New Nation’s Future
• Afterword: The Contradictions and Paradoxes of American Future-Gazing
• Notes on Contributors
• Index