Summary
In 1736 Franklin is chosen as Clerk to the General Assembly, a position he enjoys for its proximity to the men of power and the business of printing all the laws and money and jobs. He works assiduously to cultivate good relationships.
Franklin also accepts the proffered position of Post-Master General. It is at this time that he begins to look to public affairs more generally. He sees the need for a better city watch and moves to improve pay and regulation of it. He also oversees a project to start a fire department.
At this time George Whitefield, the famous itinerant preacher from London, comes to America to speak. He has to speak in the fields because many churches do not want him at their pulpit. This is a time of great religious revival, and Franklin helps promote a project to set up a public speaking platform for ministers and speakers of all faiths.
Whitefield starts preaching in Georgia, an area full of debtors and poor, idle people, as well as suffering children. Franklin resolves not to get caught up in the preacher’s call for collections for the children, thinking his own idea to help them is better, but he cannot help marveling at the man’s oratory skills and eventually donates money, seemingly against his will. Overall, he admires Whitefield’s honesty and develops a civil friendship with him, even to the point that he invites Whitefield to stay with him one time when he was passing through town. One of the things that impresses Franklin most is Whitefield’s ability to project his voice, and how perfectly intoned his speeches are after he practices them many times on different audiences.
Franklin’s business and investments continue to prove financially lucrative. He helps some of his men open their own printing houses and maintains good relationships with them. He sees the need for a militia and a college, but knows that the Quakers in government may have a problem with the former. He forms a voluntary association of the people to this effect and paves the way with articles published in his newspaper. A colonel is chosen and cannons brought in. The Governor and Council approve of all of this and start to confide in Franklin.
Some of Franklin's Quaker friends warn him that he might lose his influence in the Assembly, but he is reelected as Clerk. He vows to never ask for, refuse, or resign an office. He continues to work with the Assembly on the formation of a military, and comes to see that they are more apt to provide for defense rather than offense. After some political maneuvering, he succeeds in getting a Defense passed.
Franklin often has opportunities to observe the Quakers’ embarrassment arising from their antiwar principles. They risk offending the government or their own members. By contrast, Franklin meets a leader of a sect called the Dunkers, who are suffering from disapprobation but will not yet publish their principles because they are honest that they change them when they see that they no longer fit; Franklin admires this modesty greatly.
Around 1742 Franklin is working on a concept of an open stove, and writes a pamphlet on fireplaces. Unfortunately a man in London reads it, invents a model, and patents it, but Franklin says he cares little for patents or disputes.
Franklin now turns his attention to establishing an academy. He involves some of his Junto friends and writes a pamphlet on the subject. He then starts a subscription for raising money, saying it is from public-spirited gentlemen, not just himself. Of the subscribers there are 24 trustees. Mr. Francis and Franklin draw up constitutions for the academy's governance and start hiring faculty and soliciting students. They find an appropriate building: the one that had been erected for the listeners of Whitefield. The Trustees are from all faiths, just as the contributions for the building were. Franklin, as a man not attached to any sect, is invited to also be on the board. Through being a part of this and the Trustees, he is able to bring them both to agreement on various matters. Part of the building would always be for preachers, and there would be a free school for children as well. This whole affair does not interfere with his printinghouse business, which he leaves in the hands of his able partner, David Hall. Thus the University of Philadelphia is established, and Franklin is immensely proud of it.
During this time Franklin also carries on his electrical experiments, but the public seeing him as a man of leisure often tries to procure him for civil government. He is in the Commission of the Peace and the Common Council, is an alderman, and represents the people of Pennsylvania as a burgess. He likes this better than being the Clerk because he can actually take part. Overall, these things please him because of his humble beginnings.
Franklin also becomes a Justice of the Peace but has little knowledge of laws, preferring to be a Legislator in the assembly. He tells of a time when he helped negotiate a treaty with the rowdy Indians, who were besotted by rum.
Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond work to establish a hospital in Philadelphia. He also provides advice for others wishing to carry out their projects, such as a reverend who wants to find funds to make a meetinghouse. He works to get the streets of the city paved and pass laws regarding the cleanup of dust during the summer, which turns to terrible mud in the winter. He works to get the city lit with lamps, and invents a better form of a lamp that does not trap the smoke and thus darken over the hours. All of these small improvements to people’s everyday lives, he notes, bring about human felicity more than large pieces of great fortune.
Various universities bestow honorary degrees on Franklin, and he becomes Postmaster General. At this time war with France begins, and he proposes at Albany a plan that unifies all the colonies. There would be a Grand Council with representatives chosen by the people of the colonies, and a President General appointed by the Crown. The colonial assemblies refuse to support this, though, and England thinks it is too democratic. Franklin thinks it would have been a good thing to have passed, and perhaps good have precluded the Revolutionary War. It seems that wise things only happen when forced, not when adapted from previous wisdom.
A new governor of Pennsylvania, Mr. Morris, is newly arrived from England and befriends Franklin. He asks for advice and Franklin says not to be disputatious with the Assembly, but the new governor is so anyway. Franklin is critical of the governors because they only want to pass laws for defense when their own estates are not taxed. When war with France starts, Governor Morris refuses to pass a bill arming the colony because his property would be taxed; Franklin worked with Mr. Quincy in the Assembly to go around him.
Analysis
In this section Franklin describes his variety of civic projects with which he is involved; many of these things are those that end up in American history textbooks for their ingenuity and importance. Most schoolchildren have heard of the Franklin stove, the electrical experiment with the kite, the establishment of the first fire department and hospital in the colonies, and the Albany Plan, a prescient call for intercolonial unity during the French and Indian War. Other projects make life more livable in the city, such as better roads and a more dedicated city watch. Franklin’s project for self-improvement and moral perfection clearly dovetails with the betterment of society. Significantly, he no longer seems to need the influence and connections of other men: his name has achieved renown due to its own merits, and people seek him out for advice and assistance.
At this point in the Autobiography it becomes clear that Franklin’s historical person is competing with his literary persona. Many critics have argued back and forth about the text’s literary vs. historical merits and whether or not it can even be discussed in literary terms. Much scholarship lauds the Autobiography for giving us access to Dr. Franklin, the great American statesman. Franklin’s “claims to immortality lie wholly outside the bounds of literature,” as critic John Griffith writes. Nevertheless, it is indeed a literary classic and can be analyzed in terms of its rhetorical offerings.
First, Griffith explains that all writers create a literary “character” when they write, even when they are writing their own story; these characters are obviously a lot less complex than their author as their entire being must be distilled into language. Franklin clearly desires to manipulate his life story and create a persona in order to get his universal message across (although the “planned artistry” should not be taken exorbitantly serious). Griffith sees in the style of the work “an artistic persuasiveness quite separable from considerations of how true or false it is to the ‘real Franklin’ or the facts of Franklin’s era.”
This persuasiveness is rooted first in the prose Franklin uses, which can be viewed as modern in the sense that it is simple, smooth, and lucid, but which is actually a bit more stilted and stuffy than other prose of the era oriented toward the everyman reader. It is also found in Franklin’s impressive but light wit, his awareness of his sense of audience (as Griffith writes, “[Franklin] creates an impression that the speaker and his audience share a common role as spectators to his past life”), and the way he deals with the progression of young Franklin to old Franklin. In regards to that last point, there actually is not much of a long and gradual evolution inasmuch as the change is abrupt, the moments discontinuous. The younger Franklin is “an opaque figure, seen from the outside and treated rather objectively, as if he were another Keimer or George Whitefield, to be dispassionately described and discussed.”
Franklin’s conversions and epiphanies and personal perfection projects are not very logical in terms of their progression, which illuminates them more in a rhetorical light than one concerned with plot and structure. The unity of the text is more imaginative, Griffith notes, than formal. He claims that overall the rhetoric of the work is “patently improvisational, with little claim to being closed and rounded and finished. The rhetorical patterns are casual, discontinuous, uninsistent.” Clearly, then, the Autobiography has more to offer readers than just illumination of Franklin and his day: it is a fascinating literary study of style and artistry as well.
