Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire by Carla J. Mulford (review)

Of the American founders, Benjamin Franklin was probably the one with the deepest roots in the Republic’s colonial past. Over seventy years old when Congress declared independence, Franklin had already led a full and active life—as a colonial printer and polemicist, as an imperial politician and official, as a scientist and inventor, and as a transatlantic man of letters with a truly international reputation. Given his humble origins and meteoric rise, Franklin had a particularly heavy debt to Britain. Although sometimes remembered as America’s first self-made man, Franklin freely admitted that he owed his wealth and prominence, at least in part, to the good fortune of having been born a subject of the British Empire. In 1776, few Americans had more compelling reasons to be grateful to their former rulers.

As her title suggests, this is the Franklin that Carla Mulford has written about in her splendid new book, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire. Because the book is what Mulford calls a “literary biography,” she is not so much concerned with the narrative details of Franklin’s life and times. Instead, her focus is on two things. One is the physical world of texts and documents that Franklin inhabited, as a reader as well as an author. The other is Franklin’s “mental world”—that is, the set of principles and ideas that he gleaned from what he read and that he developed in what he wrote (x–xi). Although Franklin’s thought is a familiar presence in works on early American history and culture, and most of his biographies are to some degree intellectual biographies, this approach serves Mulford well. By adding an analysis of what Franklin read to what he wrote, Mulford has crafted a remarkably comprehensive account of Franklin’s thinking about the British Empire. The result is a fresh and illuminating study of one of early America’s most written-about figures.

Mulford organizes the book into nine chronological, thematically distinct chapters, from Franklin’s sense of his family’s history during the English Civil War through his years as a politician in Pennsylvania and London, to the Revolution and its immediate aftermath. In the chapter on family history, Mulford starts with a seemingly offhand remark in the Autobiography about Franklin’s “obscure family” and its “early” commitment to the Reformation (19, 22). The comment is often taken as evidence of Franklin’s nostalgic or sentimental interest in his English genealogy, and little else. Mulford takes a different view. She notes that Franklin would have read the Puritan classics that his father, Josiah, brought with him when he left England or purchased after he settled in Boston, and he was familiar with the writings of his beloved uncle (and namesake) Benjamin about the family’s village in the Midlands. As she rightly points out, the elder Benjamin and Josiah, who were born in 1650 and 1657, respectively, grew up in the shadow of the English Civil War. Each man brought that experience with him to Massachusetts, and they each lived long enough to give Franklin a deep and abiding sense of what that tumultuous period had been like. Combined with the texts that he read as a young boy, the experiences of Josiah and his brother imbued Franklin with a much deeper sense of his family’s Puritan history than is usually found in scholarship on his life.

In the chapters that follow, Mulford hews more closely to the familiar story of Franklin’s subsequent rise. The man that emerges, however, is a good deal less dutiful and loyal to Britain and the empire than recent scholarship would lead us to expect. Although Franklin’s position can be hard to pin down, historians generally take his humiliation in 1774 by Alexander Wedderburn before the Privy Council, culminating in his dismissal as postmaster general of North America, as the crucial moment in his path from loyal subject to disaffected revolutionary. Without discounting the importance...