Last Ledger: Leo Lemay's Unfinished Business with Ben Franklin

Leo Lemay always struck me as a courtly man, in his awkward way. But he could be outrageous without even realizing that he was over the line. He had a defective sense of occasion and even of propriety. And no shortage of amour propre.

I still remember a session we shared, some years ago, at an annual meeting of a learned society—or perhaps at a conference. The details fade, but the essence of his performance is still vivid. I presented a paper on, perhaps, the history of early American childhood. Lemay was the session's commentator.

My paper was an ambitious one. It might even have been a bit provocative. Lemay made clear from the first that my arguments were misconceived and pernicious but that he would need some time to explain exactly why. The case was complicated. It required some mastery of the deeper history of the West: a good deal more command of that history than I seemed to have. After he supplied the requisite background, he would draw on it to demonstrate the fatuousness of my formulation.

Back he went: to the Greeks, to the Romans; and if memory serves, to the Etruscans before them. To the Dark Ages. To the little renaissance of the twelfth century. Lemay traversed this territory without notes, and the sweep of his learning was quite astounding. But time was running on, and he had lost control. My paper had taken its appointed twenty-five minutes. Lemay was barely coming up on the Renaissance when the chairman of the panel finally found the nerve to suggest that things were out of hand. Lemay had by then gone on for forty minutes, far beyond his allotted time, and he needed to speed up, or get to the point, or just stop. Lemay demurred. He still had a lot to say, and he went right on saying it. When the session expired and the bemused audience made its way out of our room, Lemay was still going. I think he was closing in on the seventeenth century. I never did find out how it would all, eventually, have eviscerated my argument.

It was an astonishing, appalling performance. Lemay was oblivious to everything but his own erudition and the urgency of setting the record straight.

But that was then and this is now.

Then, time cut him short. Now, the time that waits for no man has cut him off.

That was nothing more than a protracted moment at a long-forgotten meeting. Words on the wind. This would have been an imperishable monument. Seven volumes. The longest American biography ever written, of the greatest American who ever lived.

And Lemay was the only one who could have carried it off on such a scale. He really did know more about Franklin than anyone. His project was outsized but not, for him, outlandish. On the contrary. Had he finished, his seven volumes would not have been definitive—there will never be a definitive biography of Franklin—but they would have been indispensable.

Even as they stand, the three volumes that Lemay did live to complete are indispensable. They are not so readily categorized as some other recent lives of Franklin. They lack Morgan's sunny geniality, Isaacson's deft popular touch, Wood's tendentious simple-mindedness. Lemay had no gift for gripping narrative and no patience for glib, superficial theses. But the work he did complete—especially this third and last volume—is invaluable in ways that more accessible accounts are not.

In it, Lemay follows Franklin through the prime of his life, the decade from 1748 to 1757. These were in many ways Franklin's finest years. During this span, he consolidated his standing as colonial America's greatest publisher, wrote his epochal essay on demography, initiated every civic enterprise of consequence in his city, became the most influential politician in his province, and designed...