| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.4

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Benjamin Franklin

By Edmund S. Morgan

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 339. Illustrations, appendix, notes, index. Clothbound, $28.00; paperbound, $16.00.)

The Thames near Chelsea, London, 1725. An athletic young man plunges into the river's broad deep waters and swims more than two miles downstream to Blackfriars. This is the image Edmund Morgan wants us to hold of Benjamin Franklin, in place of the later portraits we know so well when trimness and vigor had lapsed into plump middle age. It is an image that captures Morgan's generous concern for Franklin's personal appeal: the nimble agility (which remained in mind if not in body to the end of his long life), the independence of mind and spirit (swimming was frowned upon as bad for health), the implacable endurance (he was fond of staying in the water for two or three hours), and the intent sociability (as he swam he entertained friends on a boat trip with "many Feats of Activity" [p. 3]). It is an image that also reminds us of the profoundly international quality of this most cosmopolitan of founding fathers. In 1725, Franklin was a young colonist on a brief visit from the North American mainland. After entering public life in his early forties, Franklin would spend more than a third of his career abroad, initially in England and later in France.

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