Benjamin Franklin and the Provincial Imagination

Benjamin Franklin seems to defy categories. Or maybe he conjures up too many. The philosopher-scientist-inventor-economist-politician-postmaster-diplomat-agent-printer-gentleman-demographer-renaissanceman-everyman did even more than this daunting list describes. What biography does not stand in awe of all he did? In fact, the more pertinent question would be: “Do we need another recitation of all the things he did?” Shelves groan with all of the biographies; what more is there left to say? Two recent book argue otherwise. George Goodwin and Carla Mulford suggest that what made Franklin Franklin can be summed up in one word: provincial. He considered himself, first and foremost, a British American. The hybridity implicit in the term accounts for a great deal of both his ideals and his energy.

We used to have another term for such a split identity. Franklin was, so we learned decades ago, vexed by the “provincial’s dilemma.” In 1954, Bernard Bailyn and John Clive published a seminal article on what it meant to be a provincial. Comparing Scotland to America, they argued that, in the eighteenth century, those on the margins of a dynamic British world embraced intellectual pursuits to make sense of their status within the whole. These provincials had a fascination with and attraction to the metropole. They experienced a simultaneous repulsion as well, as they worked to prove that their societies belonged. Bailyn and Clive suggested that what we could call the Scottish Enlightenment stemmed from this dilemma. So too did Benjamin Franklin. His intellectual energy was spent on trying to figure his way out of a bind.¹

Scots and Americans were not the only ones to try to negotiate the dilemma. As Jim Smyth argues, members of the Irish Ascendancy also considered themselves “amphibious animals.” In their case, they seemed Irish when in England and English when in Ireland. Adding another layer to the dilemma, Irish scholars argue that Ascendancy figures found themselves straddling two different sorts of worlds: one in which they were outnumbered by the indigenous and one in which they were regarded as second-class citizens by metropolitans. The same predicament applies, of course, to American elites and to Scottish lowlanders. They could “go native.” They could also “go British.” But neither choice, given their amphibious status, could do justice to the complex and multidimensional worlds between which they moved.²

Think of all who struggled with these dilemmas. Some of the most prominent and creative personages in the British Atlantic were provincials, with all that freighted word implies. Jonathan Swift, James Boswell, and Edmund Burke, just to name three, all sought fame and fortune in the metropole. Two succeeded, one did not. These three, and others like them, contributed a great deal to metropolitan culture. Some did so even more visibly. The Americans John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West, the Irishman James Barry, and the Scot Allan Ramsay left their provincial homes for London to perfect their craft—in their cases, as painters. All became leading visionaries of what empire should be. Each also experienced disillusionment when empire did not live up to their heady dreams. Most interestingly, even as these painters imagined things earlier—especially the shape of what empire had to be—they did so through the prism of their own distinctive provincial experiences. West, for instance, tended to focus on civility—and Indians—to relate his story of empire, pressing for a vision that could incorporate what he considered to be even the rudest Americans. Barry offered an ideal of empire in which Britain would have to recapture its Catholic past if it ever were to balance libertas and imperium. Ramsay imagined an empire in which Scots would be indistinguishable from the English. His Scotland, he believed, had achieved all England had; all Scots...