Benjamin Franklin.

• Author: Curtis, III, George M.
• Position: Book Review

By Edmund S. Morgan

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 339. $24.95 cloth, $16.00 paper.

In 1818, John Adams wrote a letter to Hezekiah Niles that was destined for a long and famous life as commentary on the causes of the American Revolution. Edmund Morgan remembers this Adams comment in his new biographical sketch of Benjamin Franklin when he quotes Adams as claiming that the revolution "was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people" (p. 188). Originally, Adams then expanded on this subject, concluding that "this radical change in the principles, opinion, sentiments and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution" (qtd. in An American Primer, edited by Daniel Boorstin [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966], p. 249) In the past generation of historical writing, few have paid such careful attention to Adams as has Morgan. Fewer still have noticed what Adams wrote later in that same letter. Part of what had prompted him to write to Niles in the first place was the assertion made by Virginian William Wirt that Patrick Henry and others from the Old Dominion had led the charge to independence. Adams would have none of it, responding that the folks from the Cod Colony were the first to raise the battle flag of American liberty.

One of the endearing features of Morgan's present embrace of Franklin is that it takes place within the context of this long-standing and delightful sideshow of U.S. history--the arguments of those Monday-morning historical quarterbacks who ask about who manned these now-much-vaunted barricades first. The studies of the U.S. Civil War, as anyone who has ever attended a Civil War Roundtable can tell you, are littered with such second-guessers. And more power to them, for they attend an important flame. Most people are interested in causation, and most people believe that individuals are the agents. William Wirt and John Adams certainly believed so. Sure, there are forces everywhere, and historians since Marx who have touted the causal influence of impersonal forces have enjoyed center stage. But not so with this new biography of Franklin. Going beyond Wirt and Adams, Morgan argues that Franklin was distinctively at center stage for the coming of the American Revolution. In retrospect, when compared with the various penmen such as Dickinson and Jefferson, with political organizers such as Samuel Adams, and with military figures such as Washington, Franklin stands...