In a series of prose sketches of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, William Pierce of Georgia noted of Benjamin Franklin that, while he was “well known to be the greatest phylosopher of the present age,” he did not “seem to let politics engage his attention.” Franklin fostered this impression in his Autobiography, where he wrote that his first election to the Pennsylvania assembly “was repeated every Year for Ten Years, without my ever asking any Elector for his Vote, or signifying either directly or indirectly any Desire of being chosen.”

Contemporaries and credulous readers of the Autobiography might believe this, but we should not. More than any of the Founders, Franklin was a man of multiple and shifting identities. One of the best known today is the one that dazzled Pierce: Franklin the scientist-sage, flying his kite, inventing his stove, and writing his almanacs. Almost as well known is Franklin the randy old man, flirting with Frenchwomen, and penning the essay on farting which is still advertised in supermarket tabloids. Last year, Robert Middlekauff (Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies) gave us the angry man, a proud and prickly Franklin bearing life-long grudges against former associates, including his son William. One historian has even argued that Franklin the American patriot was in fact a British agent during the Revolutionary War. Poor Brits—if they used Franklin in such a capacity, he was surely feeding them disinformation.

Francis Jennings is best known for a trio of histories on war and empire-building on the colonial frontier. The title of the first, The Invasion of America (i.e., by white men), captures the tone. Jennings weaves a complicated tale, distinguishing not only between the competing interests of British, French, and Indians, but between those of different Indian tribes and different British colonies. But when he goes into overdrive, he rails against the anti-Indian bias of early and modern Americans, especially historians. He would seem to be an unlikely biographer for a paleface.

The Franklin that emerges in Jennings’s Benjamin Franklin, Politician, however, is a sympathetic figure: “a giant who was believably human.” The inconsistencies and deceptions which confirm his humanity arose, Jennings believes, from the fact that Franklin was a genius forced to conceal his virtu from his fellows. “He came early to an understanding of his own mental and physical superiority, which he delighted in showing off by constructing mathematical magic squares and performing feats of long-range swimming. Such entertaining displays of vanity threatened no one and made no enemies, and Franklin took good care to hide other manifestations of superiority.” The manifestation that interests Jennings is Franklin’s skill as a politician, which he honed in the jockeying of mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania was one of the first states to develop a modern party system, and even before independence, it had a set of competing interest groups and voting blocs. First came the Quakers, whose main goal was the preservation of religious liberty. They were divided into “defense” and orthodox Quakers. Defense Quakers were willing to fund the military defense of the colony, so long as it was done discreetly—at the outbreak of one war, the Pennsylvania assembly voted four thousand pounds for the purchase of “Bread, Beef, Port, Flour, Wheat or other Grain,” meaning gunpowder. Beginning in the 1750s, the purist wing withdrew from political life rather than make such compromises. Next was a large number of German-speaking refugees from the wars and persecutions of Louis XIV (Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower descended from Pennsylvania German families). Many of them, like the Mennonites, followed religions similar to Quakerism, and they all placed a high value on religious liberty. Anglicans and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians chafed at Quaker principles, and wished to impose their own. Sitting atop these factions were the proprietors of the colony, the Penns. The Penns literally owned Pennsylvania, every bit as much as Bill Gates owns Microsoft. But in order to make a profit from their huge property, they had to attract purchasers of land, which they did by ceding rights to the assembly, and by guaranteeing that their tracts were clear of Indian claims. William Penn, the founder of the colony, bought out the Indians in the open market. His son Thomas employed other means.

Benjamin Franklin came to Philadelphia, the capital of this not-so-melting pot, from Boston in 1723, when he was seventeen. His trade was printing, and one of the most lucrative contracts in the colony was printing the laws and paper money of the assembly. Franklin got the contract in his twenties, becoming an associate of the leaders of the main English-speaking factions. He worked more closely with the Proprietary faction, which had the most patronage to dispense. But the Quakers controlled the assembly, and Franklin stayed on good terms at least with the defense wing (he called orthodox Quakers “stiffrumps”). He was scathing about the Germans. “Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens?” A special reason for Franklin’s ire against the Germans was that they had their own printers.

In 1737, as Franklin was rising in the world, Thomas Penn, desperate to extricate his family from debt, turned to an expedient with grave consequences. In order to clear the banks of the Delaware River for sale, he told the Delaware Indian chief who owned the land that an old deed of his father’s entitled him to whatever territories his men could walk around in a day and a half. Penn’s agents blazed a trail ahead of time and, in a frontier power walk, dispossessed the Delaware of all he had. In his Ph.D. dissertation thirty years ago, Jennings showed that the “Walking Purchase” was worse than a hardball real estate deal: Thomas Penn’s interpretation of the old deed was fraudulent, and the minutes of the meeting in which the chief allegedly acknowledged it were doctored afterwards. Jennings cannot say whether Franklin knew what his patrons had done. “Perhaps [he] realized that some game was afoot and preferred not to inquire too closely.”

The Delawares took their revenge in 1755, with the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. After a British army which had been sent to capture Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) was destroyed in the woods, the Delawares descended on the defenseless colony, killing or kidnapping more than four hundred settlers. “Houses and Improvements,” wrote a contemporary source, were “reduced to Ashes.” The selfishness of the Proprietary faction in the face of this crisis turned Franklin against them. When the assembly, which Franklin by then dominated, proposed a tax on land (including Penn family land) to pay for defense, Thomas Penn balked. The quarrel between assembly and proprietor went all the way to London, where Franklin confronted Penn in 1757. Penn told him that if immigrants to the colony “were deceiv’d” in expecting political rights,  

it was their own Fault; and that he said with a Kind of triumphing laughing Insolence, such as a low Jockey might do when a Purchaser complained that He had cheated him in a Horse. I … conceived that Moment a more cordial and thorough Contempt for him than I ever before felt for any Man living.

Though Penn’s henchmen offered Franklin a “fat price” to cooperate, he refused, and rallied the embattled colony to defend itself. Jennings judges Franklin’s resistance to “enemies without and within” to be “his finest hour.”

The military problem was finally solved by a strange alliance between General John Forbes, the new British commander in North America, and the pacifist wing of the Quakers, who had formed a Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures. The Friendly Association reestablished such good relations with the Delawares that when Forbes marched on Fort Duquesne in 1759 he took it without firing a shot.

Franklin meanwhile had decided that Pennsylvania’s problems went deeper than Thomas Penn and his minions. Proprietary rulers, he wrote, were not “worse Men than other Rulers,” nor were “all People in Proprietary Governments … worse People than those in other Governments. I suspect, therefore, that the Cause is radical, interwoven in the Constitution … and will therefore produce its Effects as long as such Governments continue.” Franklin’s solution was to eliminate the proprietors and bring Pennsylvania under the authority of the British crown.

Crown government, however, would mean the establishment of the Church of England. This the defense Quakers and the Germans could not accept. They turned against Franklin (his anti-German tirades, reprinted by his enemies, did not help) and he lost his seat in the assembly in the election of 1764, though his allies retained enough influence to send him to London as Pennsylvania’s agent, where he pursued his vision of colonial royalism for the next decade.

Franklin enjoyed his years in England, associating sometimes with fellows of the Royal Society, sometimes with members of the Hellfire Club, a gang of noble rakes with a taste for whores and black masses. Along the way, he managed to get his illegitimate son, William, appointed Governor of New Jersey (John Adams called the elevation of this “base born brat” an “Insult to the Morals of America”). There is every reason to think Franklin could have continued to live on happily in England if his vision of empire had been realized. What Franklin and Joseph Galloway, Speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly, wanted was something like the Dominion system that evolved more than a century later: a confederation of independent domains, each running its own affairs, united by a common crown. They had not reckoned that Parliament, and the King, might be as self-interested as the Penns. By 1773, Franklin was writing the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives recommending “a general Congress” of the colonies. “Such a step I imagine will bring the Dispute to a Crisis.” The crisis split the colonial royalists asunder. Benjamin Franklin sailed for Philadelphia in March 1775. William Franklin and Galloway sided with Britain.

Jennings leaves Franklin before the climax of his political career: his service on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence (Jefferson wrote about “sacred and undeniable” truths; Franklin changed it to “self-evident”); his star turn as American Minister to France; his deathless throwaways at the Constitutional Convention (“a republic, if you can keep it”; “I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun”). But he had learned the trade of politics, and his dislike of irresponsible rule, in the rough and tumble of his adopted home.

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