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ROGER K. MILLERWhen examined through the magnifying lens of author David Waldstreicher, the founding father is seen as a consummate politician about slavery.
"Unhappy the land that needs heroes," wrote Bertolt Brecht. If the apothegm of a wealthy, cheeky communist is to be believed, we Americans are in a bad way, for we seem to be daily on a search for fresh heroes.
Old ones will do, too, as the recent small crop of mostly adulatory, if not hagiographic, studies of Benjamin Franklin attest: Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Edmund S. Morgan's Benjamin Franklin and the just-released The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood. In them he is the rags-to-riches poster boy, the foresighted philosopher, the uncompromised and uncompromising herald of equality and freedom.
Of this popular image, David Waldstreicher, a professor of history at Temple University and the author of In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820, says: "I do not come to bury this story, this Benjamin Franklin, so much as to show how it became the story, and how the story Franklin told about himself and the Revolution he led made it difficult to see how much American freedom depended on American slavery."
A hero Franklin may be, but like most heroes, more praiseworthy accomplishments and characteristics have been unqualifiedly attributed to him than a close study of the facts warrants. In no area is this truer than slavery, Waldstreicher says: "Franklin's antislavery credentials have been greatly exaggerated."
As the author observes, neither nations nor lives are made without a good deal of forgetting. We forget that Franklin, though having been a "runaway" himself (from indentured servitude to his brother), owned slaves for nearly 50 years and never systematically divested himself of them. We forget that he profited from the slave trade (through advertisements for runaways in his publications and otherwise), that he complained about slaves joining the British army in the 1740s and 1750s (thus unjustly depriving their owners of their property) and that he defended slaveholding rebels during the Revolution.
There is more, but does it matter? After all, isn't the important consideration not that Franklin and other founding fathers owned slaves, but that they were forward-thinking in their denunciation of slavery? That is the "foundational antislavery" view of our national beginnings, as opposed to the "foundational slavery" view, which sees slavery as a bedrock of the republic.
Yes, it does matter, is Waldstreicher's answer. That answer is not easy to follow, because his study takes a thematic or topical, rather than chronological, approach and involves intense scrutiny of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Franklin's writings and those of others. But it rewards close attention if we want a truer picture of Franklin in relation to issues of freedom.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Franklin was slippery. He was slick. Heck, he was a weasel, saying one thing at one time to one person and another at another to another.
Waldstreicher describes a Franklin who cannily straddled fences. Particularly in his earlier years, he would not justify slavery, nor would he attack it. (In all this, does the word "politician" come to mind?)
As he moved along in the 18th century, his concept of slavery altered. Franklin began to refer to the colonies' loss of political and economic control to Britain as nothing less than slavery itself. "Antislavery," Waldstreicher writes, "had less and less to do with conscience and more and more to do with politics."
In Britain, especially, where Franklin spent many years as an agent of the colonies, this manipulative streak and ambivalent stance was noticed. More and more he was hung with political nicknames such as "Dr. Doubleface."
Franklin, as a revolutionary leader, began to spin the slavery question to take it out of anti-American hands. "Slavery had to be seen as an example of British tyranny, not American provincialism and hypocrisy."
This meant, among other things, that Britain could not be allowed to threaten America by encouraging slave revolt. "For Franklin, runaway slaves were the equivalent of loyalist traitors and foreign mercenaries; masters were the patriots."
The foregoing is but the merest taste of Waldstreicher's intricately detailed analysis of Franklin's thought and actions. It likely will not sit well with Franklin champions who prefer to highlight the unambiguous antislavery statements of his later years.
Those came very late, in 1790, weeks before his death. The author suggests that it is a disservice to history, and to an understanding of Franklin, to conflate or confuse these statements with those from the long decades in which he "played both sides of the issue."
"Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution," by David Waldstreicher, Hill and Wang, $26, 298 pages.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer and reviewer for several publications. He lives in Milwaukee.