Think of an American Revolution without Benjamin Franklin! As well think of English Literature without Shakespeare, a Civil War without Lincoln. Franklin was the Revolution itself. That is, he prepared the way for it, represented it, infused it with his lively spirit. He was indispensable. If the British had carried out their cheerful project of hanging Sam Adams, Patrick Henry would have continued to breathe out the flame of Liberty. Washington and Franklin, however, were unique figures. Without the courage, faith and personal leadership of Washington, the army would have gone to pieces at Valley Forge, and the United States of America would have been postponed.
On the other hand, it was Franklin’s cool sagacity that convinced first the French and then the British that there was an America; that several million people were determined to cling together as a nation. Washington was the standing proof of the willingness of Americans to fight for self-government; Franklin was the man who went far to convince the world that Americans were capable of carrying on their government after they got it. Besides his reputation as the greatest American writer of his time, and the most renowned scientific man, he gained and deserved the repute of being a main supporting pillar of the new United States of America.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S BIRTHPLACE
It stood on Milk Street, Boston, until destroyed by fire in 1810
Franklin in Massachusetts
In a time when most Americans passed their lives within the borders of their own colony, Franklin was a citizen of two colonies, and an official of four. He honored Massachusetts by being born in Boston in 1706, the son of an emigrant, like millions after him—his father being of English birth. Benjamin was a human kind of boy, eager to run away to sea; went to the kind of school kept by a school-master only two years of his life; educated himself on a mixed diet of John Bunyan, “Plutarch’s Lives” and the “Spectator”; became a kind of printer’s devil to his brother James; and early got into trouble through incautious writing for the newspapers. At seventeen the graceless youth ran away from home. Yet he came back four times to visit Boston, and toward the end of his life wrote, “I long much to see again my native place and to lay my bones there—my best wishes attend my dear country.”
THE SO-CALLED “VERSAILLES” PORTRAIT OF FRANKLIN