There is only one member of the Founding Generation who, even if he had never turned his hand to statecraft, would be known to posterity as more than a footnote to the kind of obscure work of local history that gathers dust on the shelves of county historical societies throughout the east. George Washington would be remembered as a promising Virginia aristocrat who surrendered his militia company to the French at Fort Dusquesne; Jefferson as a debt-ridden gentleman farmer with a taste for exotic vegetables, heterodox religious opinions, and conventional racial views; Adams a splenetic lawyer overshadowed by his more charismatic cousin Sam; Madison a shadowy dreamer. Only Benjamin Franklin was already famous by the time of the American Revolution, a man known for his accomplishments not only throughout the colonies, but in Europe as well. Franklin was a world celebrity at a time before such a thing was even dreamed of.

Benjamin Franklin crammed into his long life—he died in 1790 at the age of eighty-four—almost more activity than can be comprehended. Starting out life as a printer, he edited one of Pennsylvania’s most popular newspapers for many years; more famously, he founded, provided the copy for, and printed Poor Richard’s Almanac, the best-selling reference work in colonial America. Poor Richard’s sayings alone would have earned Franklin’s place in American history.

In his spare time—even before he turned his printing business over to his partner so that he could devote himself to public life—Franklin became one of the foremost scientists of the eighteenth century, renowned for his pathbreaking experiments and scholarly papers on electricity and other natural phenomena; in recognition, he received honorary doctorates from a host of universities including Edinburgh and Oxford, membership in the Royal Society, and correspondent membership in virtually every other European learned society. In the process, he cultivated the friendship of kindred souls everywhere and hobnobbed with such intellectual giants as Joseph Priestley and David Hume.

Franklin’s insatiable curiosity led him to inventions ranging from the lightning rod and the Franklin stove, the most efficient indoor heat source available during his lifetime, to bifocal glasses. Characteristically, he refused to accept a patent on these devices, believing it wrong to make a profit on his discoveries. His studies of convection led him to design a more efficient street lamp and to develop a special knack for handling smoking chimneys—even Lord Kames sought Franklin’s help with a troublesome flue in a letter that also sought advice on the diplomatic situation between England and her North American colonies. And, for good measure, Franklin is generally credited with the first American political cartoon, a dismembered snake, the segments labelled for the thirteen colonies, with the motto “Join, or Die,” published in 1754.

Closer to his Philadelphia home, Franklin had a full career as a public citizen. He bore the laboring oar in founding Pennsylvania’s voluntary militia during the French and Indian War—voluntary because the Quaker-dominated Assembly refused to fund even a defensive armed force—as well as the city’s volunteer fire department and fire insurance company. In addition, Franklin led in the founding of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the prototype for all subscription lending libraries in the United States, the American Philosophical Society, an outgrowth of one of the intellectual clubs he had started, and the University of Pennsylvania—three institutions that exist to this day. And we haven’t yet mentioned Franklin’s heroic service to the American cause during the revolutionary years.

Until recently, despite his presence on the one-hundred-dollar bill, Franklin had not occupied a prominent place in the popular tradition. One explanation is that he was a generation older than the other Founders; he died just as they were embarking on the task that has captured the American imagination, transforming the new federal constitution into a working government and the thirteen states into a federal union. This relative obscurity, however, seems about to change. In the last year, Franklin has been the subject of at least one lengthy biography—nominated for the Pulitzer Prize—and his massive collection of papers has been made available on CD-ROM, something that, doubtless, would have intrigued the old inventor. And, as the sine qua non of a rising star, this fall Franklin faces the prospect of a three-part PBS documentary. Wonderfully, we now also have a short study of Franklin’s life by one of America’s most eminent colonial historians, Edmund S. Morgan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale and chairman of the editorial board of the Franklin Papers. At a time in which marginal personalities receive multi-volume biographies, it is a delight to read this elegant three-hundred page life of Franklin, a tribute to the biographer’s art—almost lost—of drawing a portrait that permits the ordinary reader to grasp what was significant about the subject without retailing every morsel of what he ate for breakfast.

Almost thirty years ago, in his graduate seminar on colonial history, Professor Morgan counselled his students—of whom, in the interests of full disclosure, I was privileged to be one—to let the original sources speak for themselves. In this work, Morgan has done exactly that with all forty-six volumes and counting of the Franklin Papers; he permits Franklin largely to speak for himself, with a literary style that remains enviable to this day. The man that emerges is at turns warm, witty, remarkably clear-eyed, and always fascinating—sometimes, as Morgan perceptively remarks, for his unquestioned assumptions, such as a world with nothing but hand power, as much as for those things he foresaw, such as an American empire. Morgan’s own approach to this wealth of material is deceptively spare; like Franklin, he wears his prodigious learning lightly. But, it is all there, and it grows with each rereading.

The core of the book, not surprisingly, rests in its description of Franklin’s diplomatic activities on behalf of the colonies from 1757, when he first served as Pennsylvania’s colonial agent in London, through his time in France where, in 1782, he negotiated the peace treaty that ended the war with England. Overall, Franklin lived in England for roughly eighteen years, and in France for another nine or so. Indeed, from 1757 to 1785, he seems to have lived on his native soil for no more than four years—arriving from a second diplomatic stay in England just in time to be elected to the Second Continental Congress, to head Philadelphia’s Committee for Public Safety, and to help write the Declaration of Independence, before being swept off to France.

Morgan’s lucid account of the incompetence of the English ministries as they lurched from the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Intolerable Acts of 1774 makes for depressing reading; Franklin himself captured their utter blindness to colonial opinion in the title of his 1773 pamphlet Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, dedicated to Lord Hillsborough, British secretary for colonial affairs. Morgan also does much to recapture a lost perspective, a world of largely personal relationships lubricated by Franklin’s charm, in which neither side expected the dispute over parliamentary power to tax and legislate for the colonies to end in war.

In fact, for those laypeople unacquainted with Morgan’s earlier work on the Stamp Act crisis, it may come as a surprise to learn how long the colonists—even a patriot such as Franklin—continued to consider themselves not simply English, not simply part of the Empire, but subjects of the British Crown. As late as 1775, Franklin still hoped to work out a solution rather like today’s Commonwealth, in which North America would be a self-governing part of the Empire allied to England through allegiance to the king.

This is not to say that Morgan ignores the private side of Franklin’s life; no biographer worth his salt could resist some of the material Franklin provides. After all, it was Franklin, who, at twenty-four, entered a common-law union with the sweetheart he had abandoned in his teens because no one was quite sure whether her deadbeat husband was dead or alive, and then brought along his own year-old illegitimate son by another woman—whose identity he never revealed. What is more, the book is full of vintage Morgan aperçus. Take, for example, this contrast between Franklin and Jefferson. As Morgan observes, during the middle of the Revolution, Jefferson admonished the astronomer David Rittenhouse that he was squandering his time serving in the Pennsylvania legislature, proclaiming there is “an order of geniuses” above the obligation of public service—the “common drudgery of governing a single state”—and therefore exempt from it; this while Franklin was in France negotiating the alliance that secured American independence. Years earlier, during the less pressing circumstances of peacetime, Franklin had written a scientist friend, that it was exactly such talents that rendered public service imperative: “Had Newton been pilot but of a single common Ship, the finest of his Discoveries would scarce have excus’d, or atton’d for his abandoning the Helm one Hour in Time of Danger; how much less if she had carried the Fate of the Commonwealth.” And Morgan offers a tonic alternative to the current inflation of John Adams’s stock, much of it in Franklin’s own wonderfully dry words. Having put up with Adams’s officious intermeddling in the French treaty negotiations, Franklin summed up the man with what Morgan calls “the fairest and most quoted assessment anyone ever made of the character of John Adams: ‘I am persuaded … that he means well for his Country, and is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.’”

If there is any weakness in the narrative, it is that Franklin emerges as almost too good to be true—always at the center of events, forebearing in the face of calumny, leading his recalcitrant countrymen “by a thread” to the greatness he foresaw for them while writing helpful advice on everything from the placement of lightning rods to the Gulf Stream. He is too charming, too wise, too good, too prescient altogether, except for a strange two-year interlude after his first diplomatic mission to England during which he misread the increasingly radical direction of colonial opinion. While in France, he alone manages the delicate business of maintaining the French alliance—with its critical financial support—in the face of congressional incompetence, competition from none-too-honest state agents, and the marginal sanity of the various commissioners sent to assist him, each of whom seems bent on alienating the good will of the French foreign minister and destroying the credit of the United States. Indeed, Morgan remarks that “It could be said that Franklin had been singlehandedly conducting negotiations for peace throughout the war.” Only once does the reader catch a glimpse of another side of the story, when Franklin’s fellow commissioner to the peace negotiations, John Jay, is credited with a “series of dangerous undercover maneuvers designed to extract better terms from the British by suggesting a willingness to desert the French”—but, only when Franklin fell ill with kidney stones.

Having said that, too much of a good thing is sometimes not enough. It may be trite, but there is a deep affinity underlying this book, Morgan’s first in fifteen years. At eighty-five, Edmund Morgan is the dean of American colonial historians, yet his work remains very much on par with the writings of his youth, among which I count at least three biographies and several character studies. Morgan’s broad humanism, gentle wit, and continuing curiosity all mirror those of his subject. As with Benjamin Franklin, we are unlikely to see his like again.