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Robert Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. 255 pp. $20.00, ISBN 0-5202-0268-6.
Relationships with friends and associates are often the most revealing materials of biography, as demonstrated in works like Robert E. Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins, Joseph Lasch's Eleanor and Franklin, Harold Dean Cater 's Henry Adams and His Friends, and Claude- Anne Lopez's Mon Cher Papa: Benjamin Franklin and the Ladies of Paris.
This arresting new study of Franklin, however, takes the unusual route of characterizing him by his relationships with his enemies, and the results are stunning. Middlekauff does not give us the drab, admonitory, and prudential Franklin that Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and other artists and modernists have reacted against. He does not give us the man of the world and "harmonious human multitude" painted by Carl Van Doren and most other biographers. Nor does he give us Franklin the literary artist and self-inventor who has been celebrated by recent explicators of the Autobiography. Instead, Middlekauff covers periods of Franklin's life which are either not covered at all in the Autobiography or are treated incompletely and not very clearly. He introduces people for the most part unknown to all but specialists in eighteenth-century literature and history. Middlekauff dramatizes ambitions and rivalries in Franklin's life that have been largely neglected by twentieth-century readers. And so he reveals some fascinating aspects of Franklin's character, making him at once more human and more difficult and even forbidding.
The first "enemies" of Franklin whom Middlekauff introduces are William Penn's son Thomas, who succeeded his father as proprietor of Pennsylvania, and William Smith, a talented Scot from the University of Aberdeen, whom Franklin initially liked and backed as the head of the Philadelphia Academy but who later became one of Thomas Penn's agents. Franklin's troubles with them developed as a result of the peculiar makeup of Pennsylvania government, which consisted of the proprietor on the top, a governor who was his representative in the colony, and an Assembly which represented the people, though giving disproportionate power to Quakers. Each body overestimated its own authority, and conflicts between them became especially tense during the French and Indian War. Quakers in the Assembly balked at paying taxes to support...