The Many Faces of Benjamin Franklin
Paper trail. Behind these re-evaluations lies the ample offering of an even more monumental scholarly endeavor: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin Project. Launched by Yale University and the American Philosophical Society in 1954, the project is devoted to annotating and publishing nearly everything Franklin wrote and received--some 30,000 documents in all. So far, it has brought out 36 volumes of a projected 47-volume opus. A soon-to-be-released CD-ROM will allow the curious reader to peruse the same documents that recent biographers have examined, but it will be approximately an additional 13 years before all the documents are annotated.
Franklin turns out to be both more delightful and more troubling than the man we thought we knew. According to Ellen Cohn, editor in chief of the Papers, "There's not a single thing he writes that doesn't belie extraordinary intelligence--and often charm and wit." She also points to a major reason so few people have been aware of Franklin's darker side. "Franklin never tried to exacerbate tensions," she says. "He vented in private, in letters he never sent but put in a drawer." Similarly, to Edmund Morgan, who is finishing an introduction to the CD-ROM, the papers above all reveal "the range and sharpness of the intellect hidden behind all those aphorisms." Franklin, as Morgan puts it, "was just so damn bright--but he did hide it. It was another democratic aspect of the man."
A vast intellect is not the only thing Franklin hid. What comes through clearly in all of the new biographies is a powerful contradiction at the heart of this most gregarious and beloved of individuals: a profound reticence and distance verging on coldness, particularly in relation to those people with whom he should have been closest. As Morgan writes: "But we have to admit at the outset that there are things we will never know about Franklin."
Among them, prominently, was the high cost of being such a thoroughly self-made man. Sneaking away from his native Boston after apprenticing both to his father and to his brother was no easy step, and Franklin bore the guilt. The Puritan strictures of New England were certainly ample justification, and Isaacson astutely ventures that Franklin's abbreviated schooling resulted less from his family's financial difficulties than from his father's belief that Ben's free-thinking ways made him ill-suited for a clerically oriented Harvard education. But while he might have had career reasons for leaving home, his lingering touchiness about family betrayal came out with repressed force in his break with his own son, William (born of an out-of-wedlock dalliance). Charging William with betraying the primordial bond of filial allegiance by remaining a British loyalist during the Revolution, Franklin never fully forgave the son on whom he had so long doted--and for whom he had expressly written his autobiography. It was, as Isaacson and Morgan make clear, too hard by half.
And Franklin could be inhumanly icy with others in his family as well. Beginning in the 1750s, he spent more time in Europe than he did at home--usually enjoying the company, and sometimes the strong affections, of women whom he charmed. But when his wife, Deborah, wrote pleading for him to return, fearing (rightly) that poor health would soon lead her to the grave, he remained abroad, responding with letters that mainly discussed matters of household business.
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