| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Benjamin Franklin. By Edmund S. Morgan. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xii, 339 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-300-09532-5.)
Benjamin Franklin generated much controversy in his own times, and historians have reflected this in their treatment of him. Professor Edmund S. Morgan, in his new and readable biography, relies heavily on Franklin's writings to tell Franklin's side of the story. He does it well.	1
Morgan begins his narrative with Franklin as a young man, already exhibiting the characteristics that would epitomize his life. He was strong, vigorous, personable, and curious; a doer, a talker, a writer; a man of action, fascinated by how things worked, inclined to make them work better, and determined to be useful. Neither bashful nor boastful, he disciplined his passions, subordinated his pride, and attacked policies, not persons. Not a traditional Christian, he built his life on the Christian virtue of charity.	2
From the mid-1720s through the mid-1750s Morgan's Franklin subtly persuaded Philadelphians to do good things for themselves, providing the ideas, the plans, the publicity, and the organization for achieving "virtually every scheme that made the city an attractive place to live" (p. 58). He took pride in being English and worked to protect Pennsylvania's Englishness from dilution by others.	. . .

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