Summary
The British government is wary of the Albany plan and sends over General Braddock and two regiments of regular English troops to keep the colonies in line as well as to fight against France. Franklin and his son travel to meet him and express the need for more wagons. Franklin is tasked with advertising for wagons and stipulating the payments given to those colonists who donate theirs to the war. He also convinces the British not to simply go in and seize horses and carriages from the colonists. He urges the colonists to donate these to foster a sense of their loyalty.
Franklin stays at the camp with Colonel Dunbar’s regiment and hears Dunbar confess that the subalterns are wanting in provisions. Franklin writes to the Assembly and has them set aside provisions for each man. The Colonels and General are pleased with him and thank him repeatedly.
Franklin concedes that the General is brave but is too self-confident and thinks too little of the French and Indians. Franklin begins to feel doubts about the campaign but only warns him about Indian ambuscades. And indeed, the campaign fails and the much smaller force of French and Indians best Braddock and the British. This is the first time, Franklin writes, that Americans have “the first Suspicion that our exalted Ideas of the Prowess of British Regulars had not been well founded” (143).
There are some letters recommending Franklin, written by Braddock, but they never bring about any good. What Franklin is most pleased with is getting the officers not to enlist any more indentured servants. Over time some of the men who’d lent the wagons and horses become angry that they have not been paid and start to sue Franklin, but General Shirley sets up commissioners to order payment.
Governor Morris continues to reject the assembly’s bills for defending the province because they include provisions for taxing the proprietary estates. Finally, the British government set aside some money for this purpose, fearing the colony’s backlash. Franklin writes up a plan for the militia. The Governor asks him to go to the Northwestern frontier and he complies, though he does not think he has the military qualifications.
Franklin and those under him are in charge of building forts, which they begin to do. They have to make camp one night, and fear Indian attacks. The Indians killed ten farmers recently. The men arrive at Gnadenhut where one fort is to be built, and begin their work. This leads Franklin to conclude that men are happier and more good-natured when they are employed at something.
In this area Franklin notes how the Indians had ingeniously set up places (now abandoned) where they spied on the Americans. He marvels how they had a way to have fires without the smoke escaping.
The Governor sends a letter calling for Franklin to return to the Assembly, so he transfers command to Colonel Clapham and departs. Here he muses on the practices of the Moravians, a religious sect. He asks one of the men with him about marriage, and whether it is done in a lottery. The man replies that when the young man is ready for marriage a few women are selected that would best fit him, and only if there are two or more would there be a lottery. Franklin comments that this might lead to unhappiness, but the Moravian silences him by saying that unarranged marriages can be unhappy too.
Back in Philadelphia, Franklin sees that the Association, the defense militia, is doing well. There are about 1200 men parading. He recalls one time when officers of his regiment gamely decided to escort him out of town. He did not know of the plan in advance and was very embarrassed at the spectacle, especially when it made one of the Proprietors mad.
Overall, the governor and Franklin still maintain a civil discourse. They work together to provision Braddock’s army.
Franklin pauses here to account for his philosophical reputation, detailing his experiments in electricity and how his papers were finally read in the Royal Society. He acknowledges one man, Abbe Nolle, who refused to believe Franklin’s work in electricity was true and that an American could do this. In the end the Abbe was discredited and Franklin’s fame spreaded.
Franklin is very proud of his experiment to draw lightning from the sky and prove it is electricity. For this he earns a Gold Medal of Sir Godfrey Copley in 1753, which is brought to him by the new governor, Captain Denny. One evening Denny asks to speak with him in private at a dinner party, and asks him to have a good understanding with him and cultivate a friendship with him. Franklin thanks him for this but says he will not accept any favors; indeed, he is always active in the opposition in the Assembly. There is no enmity between the men, however.
The Assembly asks Franklin to travel to England to discuss with the King the intransigence of the Proprietaries. Before he can depart out of New York, Lord Loudon, the General, comes to see him and ask him to create an accommodation between the Assembly and Governor. Loudon says he can spare no troops for the defense of the colony’s frontiers, which annoys Franklin.
Franklin also becomes annoyed by how indecisive Loudon is, and how long it actually takes to depart. He wonders how the man was given command over such a large army, but realizes that that is the way the world often works. Loudon leaves the army exposed while he parades around at Halifax, and Fort George is lost. The mercantile operations and trade of the colonies are also hurt because of this. Loudon also drags his heels on getting Franklin paid back for the money he spent in the war effort.
The Packet, the ship upon which Franklin sails, moves very slowly on account of the way it is loaded. Franklin ruminates on how you never know how a ship will sail until it is actually in the water, and that there will always be subtle differences between them due to the multitude of men with their individual proclivities and skills who work on them.
Along the way Franklin is impressed with lighthouses and resolves to build more in America. He and his son arrive in England and view Stonehenge on the way to England. They arrive in London on July 28th 1757. He visits Dr. Fothergill, who says he ought to talk to the Proprietaries in person. He also visits Lord Granville, the president of the council. Granville receives him civilly but subtly rebukes him, saying Americans have the wrong idea of the nature of their constitution: they do not have the right to pass or deny laws because the King is the legislator of the colonies. Franklin says this doctrine is new to him; privately, these remarks alarm him.
The opinion of the Proprietaries and the Assembly appear very divergent as Franklin makes his case. While he is gone, though, the Assembly does get Denny to pass an act taxing the proprietary estates at the same rate as the people. The Proprietaries are furious and petition the King, saying they will be ruined and that the tax was collected unfairly. An inquiry is done and the tax is revealed to be collected fairly. The Proprietaries get rid of Denny and threaten to sue him.
Analysis
The Autobiography comes to an end rather abruptly and anticlimactically. Ending the narrative with an account of how Governor Denny is not sued is not particularly inspiring. This is, of course, due to the fact that Franklin dies in 1790 before he can finish the work. Its lack of a clear ending only adds to the disjointed feeling brought about by the awkward amalgam of the various parts.
Despite all of this, the last part of the Autobiography has much to offer readers. It is an inside look at the French and Indian War from the colonists’ side, showcasing the multitude of tensions between the British and Americans that were now beginning to manifest themselves. Famously, Franklin comments that this is the moment the colonists started to see that the British military was not all it was reputed to be. Franklin also details more of his scientific experiments and his work wrangling the Pennsylvania Assembly. And towards the work’s end, the account of the conversation with Lord Granville in which the aristocrat scoffs at the ignorant pretensions of the upstart colonists in regards to their presumption to legislate for themselves is a stirring reminder of what is to come: the Revolution.
A few things present themselves as food for thought at the end of the Autobiography. The first is the oft-acknowledged “universality” of the work during its time and in subsequent generations. Indeed, Franklin does elevate himself socially and economically in an admirable fashion. However, the reality is that Franklin was a white man in the 18th century. If he were a woman, black, or Native American, he would not have been able to achieve such tremendous success. It is somewhat ignorant to claim, then, that the text is truly universal. Franklin was aided by his whiteness and maleness, and his narrative would have been a useful guide to wealth and reputation only for one occupying a similar demographic space.
Another thing to consider at the close is the shift in the Franklin-as-author’s persona from beginning to end. Critic Joseph Fichtelberg notes that by the end of the work Franklin knew he had a “corporate life." Roland Barthes’s work on the depersonalization of the author, a prominent postmodern literary critique, explains that “[a] text is absorbed into a cultural tissue of meanings.” No interiority of the author exists but language, so he is ultimately emptied out as he adapts his private internal thoughts to the external mode of discourse. The text becomes more about the audience than the author as the author is lost in translation.
Even though Franklin lived centuries before Barthes, he recognized that he was writing to be emulated, to have the reader understand that life was a composition just as his writing of the work was. This is apparent in the earliest parts of the autobiography when Franklin emulated the writers of the Spectator, copying out pieces, learning from them, and ultimately making them his own. He was the reader and the writer. The stages of that process, Fichtelberg writes, is thus: “life yielded to memory, writing, and revision, in continuous, often fragmentary fashion, concluding in an artifact, a perfected work.” Franklin often conflated life and text. He saw the reader of it crucial to his self-conception, immersing them in his life, knowing that he was writing not truly to his son but for posterity. His account of his success requires practice, revision, reflection, and arduous effort.
Benjamin Vaughn’s letter acknowledges what Franklin had become and why he needed to finish the text, for he was a “universal figure,” and his understanding of the great man’s autobiography was that he rendered himself a “public, objective, impersonal” figure. The octogenarian Franklin was certainly a public figure, abstracted and universalized, worthy of his contemporary and future readers’ admiration, adulation, and emulation.
The sprawling volume that makes up The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin tackles many themes over its many pages. Franklin’s life story can be considered the rough draft for what has come to be labeled the American Dream: success is there for anyone willing to work hard enough to achieve. The story of his rise from poor young man to world renowned ambassador is individualized allegory of American’s own transformation slavish crown colony to independent captain of its own destiny. One persistent motif which is evident at all points of Franklin’s long life is how Franklin subtly and slyly attempts to wrest the spiritual foundation of the American identity from Puritan conservatism and supplant it with Quaker liberalism.
Puritan belief that God is an active agent in the fate and destiny of His creations stands as one profoundly religious movements stimulating the very founding of America as a haven for freedoms of thought not so easily attained back in Europe. The word “Puritan” has the effect of immediately conjuring images of fundamentalist churchgoers clad in dully colored garb speaking with ample use of “thee” and “thou”–and, on occasion, hanging alleged witches. Lost amid the witch hunts and the rigidity of the Puritan legacy is their devotion to hard work. Also of great importance to many Puritans was the freedom to be gained from the knowledge that getting into heaven was not dependent upon your hard work resulting in good deeds, but only by the predestined grace of God. Puritan work ethic is thus notorious for placing duty to serving God above utilitarian purpose.
That very definition of freedom to be enjoyed by subscribing to Puritanical virtues became the conceptualization of the American identity from which Benjamin Franklin would later flee. That flight from Boston to Philadelphia felt throughout the entirety of his autobiography as it proved to be a trek across an ideological expanse that dwarfed the geographical distance between the two cities already battling for prominence as America’s City. The differing views on the positive attributes of the Puritan lifestyle and the demands it expected from hard work and Quaker conviction that purpose in deed mattered more than duty proves throughout Franklin’s recollections to be the defining distinction between conservatism and liberalism, and Franklin unabashedly leans to the left at the point at every major point detailed in his life story.
To suggest that Benjamin Franklin did not subscribe to the positive attributes of the Puritan work ethic is to court ridicule, but it is clear from the inexorable progression of the narrator through his many careers as a printer, inventor, fire response innovator, statesman and supporter of the Revolution that his work ethic was entirely based on producing positive results rather than hoping that his obligation to work produced good results merely as a by-product.
Franklin’s chronicle of his own prodigious work ethic is not a concerted rejection of the Puritan ethos in which he grew up, but is instead a persistent demonstration of a lack of capacity to take seriously as a definition of the American identity the belief that divine intervention would produce any good deeds that need to result from an obligation to duty.
