2007 MLA

Session 655: Benjamin Franklin's New Scientific Horizons

The primary document by which Benjamin Franklin is known to scholars of literature is his autobiography, which has brought much attention to Franklin's literary skill, the complexity of his masks and irony, and his views about virtue and success, commingled, as the primary witness to one's life, one's labor's reward. In recent years, even with the plethora of biographies that continue to appear, there is still a tendency among literature scholars to emphasize the Autobiography. We propose to bring attention to what we conceive as a more crucial area of Franklin's contemporary reputation -- his use of the new science -- and examine the means by which he brought new science to bear in three different areas that he explored throughout his life: "political arithmetick," as he often called it, following William Petty; nautical science; and economics. All three papers reflect the extent to which Franklin, conversant with the new science, was attempting to bring his scientific findings to bear in the social formation.

In his presentation titled "Franklin's 1751 Fundamental Document of the American Revolution," J. A. Leo Lemay (U of Delaware) continues his own life's work on Franklin and engages his thesis about Franklin's lifelong commitment to the American Revolution by looking into Franklin's then-well-known tract analyzing population, Observations on the Increase of Mankind (1751). Professor Lemay summarizes his paper thus: "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" was a popular idea from long before the discovery of America, and Americans were fond of the idea in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Benjamin Franklin, however, proved for his eighteenth-century contemporaries that the future greatness of America was already happening. The white population of America was doubling within every 25 years. In contrast, England's and Europe's population was only doubling in five hundred years. Franklin's population statistics, and his explanations for their underlying reasons, convinced the future leaders of the American Revolution that America could survive a war with England and that, within a century, it would have more population and must thereafter become more powerful than England. His Observations on the Increase of Mankind was, I argue, the fundamental document of the American Revolution. His analysis of the ongoing effect of the frontier in America was more significant than Frederick Jackson Turner's – and it anticipated, rather than followed, the influence of the frontier in American history.

In his paper titled "Benjamin Franklin's 'strong Inclination for the Sea,'" David E. Curtis (Belmont U) draws attention to Franklin's lifelong maritime observations and the extent to which Franklin's studies of the sea had resonance throughout his writings, including his memoir. Professor Curtis summarizes his discussion this way: Benjamin Franklin's writings about the sea span nearly his entire adult life, from the "Journal of a Voyage" the 20-year-old Franklin kept from London to Philadelphia in 1726 to his impressive Maritime Observations, composed during Franklin's eighth and final Atlantic crossing in 1785.  Because of his wide knowledge of the sea and sailing and his understanding of American maritime culture, Franklin employed ships and the ocean symbolically in the design of American money and, later, on proposals for national emblems; nautical references dot much of Franklin's correspondence, and nautical metaphors power some of his most compelling public rhetoric. By attending to Franklin's mastery both of seafaring and of the rhetoric of nautical terminology as evidenced in his many writings, we can access a particularly important and under-studied context for reading his Autobiography, especially those parts written between 1788 and 1790. Read in light of what Franklin called his "nautical budget" (especially the Maritime Observations) Part Three of Franklin's Autobiography seems a coherent and deliberate rhetorical project separate from the other parts he had written, one that depends heavily on nautical images and anecdotes for its effectiveness.

In her paper on "Franklin's Mercantilist Critique," Carla Mulford (Penn State U) examines Franklin's little-studied writings on economy and society, but particularly his revisionist economic theories offered in his tract, The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies (1760). Unlike Lemay, Mulford argues that in an early stage of his life, Franklin embraced much of the political and economic policy behind British imperial practice, including policies associated with what Adam Smith later called mercantilism. Franklin well understood the economic writings of William Petty and Josiah Child, and he sought a means by which the British economy could be improved by the assistance of the colonies. When, in the middle of his life, he began to understand the extent to which existing mercantilist practices were undermining colonists' rights (supposedly protected by the customary liberalism of the Magna Carta), Franklin began to devise a new theory of imperial economy that would enable the colonists to embrace their traditionary freedoms while Britons in England could reap the benefits of colonial trade. Taking up the theme of her book in progress, Mulford shows the extent to which Franklin proved that Britain's vaunted liberalism was an engine of an imperial economy that duplicitously masked its oppressive tendencies. He wrote, she argues, to the troubled intersection of mercantilism and early modern liberalism.