Benjamin Franklin, episode 2: "The American" (Florentine Films, PBS-TV, aired April 5, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 my husband Charles and I watched the second and last episode of Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on Benjamin Franklin, dealing with what are probably the most interesting years of his life: the last 15, from the return to America in 1775 (when he found that the Revolutionary War he had worked so hard to avert was already underway) to his death in 1790. At the start of the Revolution Franklin was already 69 years old (at a time when few people lasted that long!) and, as writer Dayton Duncan pointed out in both episodes, Franklin’s son William was older than John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the rest of the Founding Fathers. Franklin’s son William was also a thoroughgoing Loyalist, regularly reporting secret information on the revolutionary struggle to the British authorities. Benjamin Franklin had, during his pre-revolutionary years in London, successfully lobbied to get his son William an appointment to be colonial governor of New Jersey, and William – who was so comfortable with the British aristocracy he had even married into it – took the oath he had sworn to George III so seriously he led to a break with his dad and the two met only once since the Revolution.

Though I don’t think Burns and Duncan have anticipated how closely the start of the American Revolution, as they depicted it, would anticipate the current crisis in Ukraine, the parallels were almost too obvious. In both cases, a superpower – Great Britain and Russia, respectively – mounted an assault on a country they regarded as “theirs” by right of common ancestry. In both cases, violence erupted when the troops encountered resistance from the locals, leading to pitched battles in which both soldiers and civilians died. And in both cases the would-be occupiers were led by arrogant monarchs who demanded the suppression of the revolution as much as a matter of personal pride as anything political. Also, both George III and Vladimir Putin seemed to have entered their wars without any idea of how they would end and what degree of subjugation they would be willing to accept from the rebels. In 1775 the Second Continental Congress (the first one to which Benjamin Franklin was a delegate) passed what became known as the “Olive Branch Petition,” in which the delegates pledged to continue to accept George III’s and the British government’s overall sovereignty in exchange for extensive powers of self-government, including the right to impose their own taxes and to trade freely with any other country instead of being locked in to the British industrial system and therefore barred from buying goods from any other country.

Alas, at least partly due to the slowness of travel back then, the Olive Branch Petition didn’t reach George III until after news of the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill already had, and George III decided not to answer the petition at all and instead issue his own proclamation that the colonies were already in a state of rebellion, and he was going to send armies to the colonies to suppress the revolt by any means necessary – which convinced the rest of the Continental Congress to agree to John Adams’ demand for a declaration of independence. In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was first drafted, Thomas Jefferson was the principal author but Franklin made some key editorial changes, notably changing the line “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “We hold these truths to be self-evident” – indicating Franklin’s Enlightenment belief that rights stem not from God but from the ordinary workings of the natural universe. (Like many others of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson and Franklin were both Deists, believers that God had created the universe but then left it alone and given dominion over it to human beings. Since their time an institutional form of Christianity has become a virtual state religion in the U.S. and it’s inconceivable that anyone could be elected President without subscribing to the belief in a God that took an ongoing active role in human affairs and could be appealed to via prayer – a belief Franklin and most of the other Founders explicitly rejected.)

The show dealt with Franklin’s term as the U.S. ambassador to France from 1776 to 1785, and in particular his negotiations with King Louis XVI and the Comte de Varennes, Louis’s foreign minister, for both military and trade assistance to the fledgling U.S. After doubts on the part of Louis that all this talk about “liberty, equality and fraternity” might spread to his own people and lead them to revolt (as indeed they did in 1789) and on the part of Varennes and others as to whether the Americans had enough of a chance militarily to defeat Great Britain – which the Americans decisively answered by winning a major battle against the British at Saratoga, New York, in 1778 – Franklin got his two treaties. This essentially made the American Revolution a modern-style “proxy war” between the two reigning European superpowers of the day, Britain and France, and it also set up the irony that George Washington, as supreme commander of the Continental Army, had cut his teeth in the Seven Years’ War fighting the French and now was relying on French aid to fight his former employers, the British. Franklin in particular became a beloved figure in France, an American superstar, acknowledged for his scientific discoveries and also for his willingness to join the sexual games of flirtation indulged in by many French aristocrats.

When the Continental Congress inexplicably sent the Puritan Bostonian John Adams to Paris in 1778 as Franklin’s co-counsel, the French turned off to Adams’ censorious moralism as they had turned on to Franklin’s more easygoing lifestyle, and much of the remaining time Franklin spent in France was making sure John Adams didn’t screw things up for the Americans and their cause. The American Revolution officially ended with the battle of Yorktown in 1781, when the British surrendered their American fleet (thanks largely to the French ships the U.S. had at its disposal), though the peace treaty wasn’t concluded until two years after that. Among other things, the Treaty of Paris gave (white) Americans sovereignty over any of the territory east of the Mississippi – thereby delivering a blow to the Native Americans who had held that land for millennia but would now be forced out by white settlers. (That’s why in the next war between the U.S. and Britain, the War of 1812, most of the Native tribes took the side of the British. They also placed their best general, Tecumseh, at the disposal of the British forces, and according to one article I read years ago Tecumseh outlined a strategy that could have won the war for the British and their Native allies – but with the good British generals fighting in Europe in the existential struggle against Napoleon, the ones that had got sent to the U.S. were the weakest and dumbest available and they rejected Tecumseh’s plan on the typically racist ground of, “Ah, what does that savage know about how to win a war?”)

Franklin went home in 1785 and Thomas Jefferson took his place at the French court, which got him back in time to participate in the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Behind the scenes at the convention – which had been called merely to suggest revisions in the previous American document, the Articles of Confederation of 1778, but soon decided to draft an entirely new central law instead – Franklin worked tirelessly even though he was suffering from gout and literally had to be carried to and from the Constitutional Convention’s sessions even though he lived just 2 ½ blocks away from them. The show called Washington and Franklin the two leading lights of the Convention (which seemed to me to be unfair to Alexander Hamilton and James Madison) and argued that it was Franklin who suggested a four-year term for the President against Hamilton’s proposal that the President be elected for life. (My understanding was that it was George Washington who wanted a fixed term for the President because he knew he would be the first one, and he wanted an option period that would give him the chance to decide at periodic intervals whether he wanted to keep doing it or not.)

Naturally the show addressed modern sensibilities about how the Founding Fathers would so carefully construct an ideological edifice based on the idea that “all men are created equal” while carefully omitting African-Americans, Native Americans and women from actual equality – the sort of thing George Orwell 160 years later would call doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory principles at the same time and believe both of them with equal fervency. At least Franklin had one accomnplishment at the Constitutional Convention he was justly proud of: the Constitution did not contain a property qualification for voting. Franklin argued against this with his usual wit; he said that if a man owned a donkey, it counted as “property” and he could vote’ If the donkey later died, the man was no longer a property owner and therefore could not vote. So who had the vote in the first place: the man or the donkey?

The show also dealt with Franklin’s final controversy – his petition to the first United States Congress for the “gradual abolition” of slavery. If nothing else, this showed Franklin’s ability and willingness to change his mind based on new evidence; though he was never a Quaker (the one time he attended a meeting he fell asleep during the long period of silence and someone else in the congregation had to wake him up when the service was over), he seemed to have absorbed some of their skepticism towards slavery even while continuing to hold slaves himself. At the Constitutional Convention the issue of slavery had come up only in connection with the infamous three-fifths compromise which the South insisted on as precondition for joining the Union, and when Franklin arrived at the first post-Constitutional Congress with a resolution calling for the gradual abolition of slavery, a Southern member of the House of Representatives said that if the North screwed around with the South’s “right” to own Black people as slaves, that would be the end of the Union. (It nearly was; when Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860 on a platform calling, not for the abolition of slavery but just an end to its extension past the states that already had it, 11 Southern states voted to secede from the Union and made it clear in the ordinances of secession that the main motivation was their “right” to preserve and extend slavery. Only the North’s eventual victory in the Civil War answered once and for all the question of whether the U.S. was merely a confederation of several independent states or was actually a nation.)

Franklin was so appalled at the arguments raised against his anti-slavery resolution – especially by one Southern Congressmember who said that because white people were incapable of doing field labor under the hot, harsh, humid conditions of the South, they had to import a permanently enslaved workforce from parts of the world that had similar climates – that he wrote a parody of them from the point of view of a Muslim sultan justifying his country’s enslavement of white Christians with the same stupid arguments he’d heard from Southern politicians defending their own “peculiar institution.” Ken Burns’ presentation of the life of Benjamin Franklin was a warts-and-all view of a man whose noble nature came through despite the flaws – and on the biggest issue of all, at least to modern sensibilities, he changed his mind almost completely from accepting the racist prejudices of the time to definitively rejecting them and campaigning against them.

It’s also fascinating how many of the contradictions and complexities of Benjamin Franklin are still ongoing issues in today’s America: his scientific curiosity and Enlightenment belief that everything human beings need to know about themselves and their world can be discovered through scientific inquiry is an unexpectedly controversial one in today’s America, a country so dominated by theocrats (especially in the Republican Party) that Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene recently publicly ridiculed Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson for having declined to answer U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s (R-Tennessee) question of how she would define the word “woman.” “I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman,” Taylor Greene recently told an audience of Republican activists. “This is an easy answer. We are a creation of God. We came from Adam’s rib … We are the weaker sex, but we are our partner’s, our husband’s wife.” No doubt this bit of utter stupidity would have Benjamin Franklin turning a few cartwheels in his grave!