Sets and Tyranny
INTRODUCTION
Franklin’s Footnote
Benjamin Franklin was twelve years old when he was apprenticed to his older brother. It was an unpleasant experience. James, himself only twenty-one, was a difficult young man, as headstrong and argumentative as his younger sibling. The memories still rankled a half century later. In the autobiography he began when he was sixty-five, Franklin complained that James had “considered himself as my master,” an odd comment since James had been just that, both by time-honored usage and by the cold realities of law. But Franklin expected more. James, he noted, had been “passionate and had often beaten” him, rather than treating him with “more Indulgence”—as “a Brother.” Franklin eventually found the situation so oppressive that he revolted. Taking advantage of a legal technicality, he fled his brother’s custody at sixteen.1
Almost two decades after writing his original 1770s account, Franklin returned to his manuscript, adding a note explaining the larger significance of his relationship with James. “I fancy his harsh and tyrannical Treatment of me,” he wrote, “might be a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole life.”2
Franklin’s footnote clearly recalled the American Revolution that he had done so much to further. Like his brother, Britain had also ignored its family obligations in order to press its prerogatives. The adolescent boy considered himself “demean’d.”3 So too the mature man. But Franklin’s addition went beyond individual experiences. His critique of his two would-be masters, his brother and his mother country, reveals an understanding of the connections between social relationships and political rule that had been widely shared for almost a century. Eighteenth-century American leaders such as Franklin had been deeply concerned about the dangers of anger and violence in both political and personal life. Both government leaders and individuals, they held, should reject arbitrary rule in favor of sympathetic concern.
Finding the proper means of restraining power formed a fundamental theme, perhaps the fundamental theme, in eighteenth-century political thought from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson. Recent discussions of the idea often emphasize structural issues, the use of elections and of checks and balances to keep government from being overbearing. But, as Franklin’s footnote suggests, eighteenth-century Americans considered the problem of limiting authority cultural as well as constitutional, personal as well as political.
This work considers the origins, development, and implications of this connection. It explores how and why views of limited political power developed in conjunction with a model of social relationships stressing personal refinement and emotional restraint. Eighteenth-century discussions about manners were intimately intertwined with fundamental political issues, closely linking politeness (discipline of the self) with power (discipline of others). Conversations about tea sets and tyranny were not precisely the same, but they were not as distinct as they usually seem. Both drew on a politics of politeness that rejected angry demands for obedience and instead sought to build restrained authority through sympathetic and responsive leadership.
Politeness and Its Politics
Politeness and its implications were much on the mind of another Bostonian in 1704, two years before Franklin’s birth. Jonathan Belcher, the future governor of Massachusetts (and the subject of Chapter 4), was only twenty-two when he traveled between England and Germany. His journal summed up the value of his trip—and of travel in general—by declaring that “A man without travelling is not altogether unlike a Rough diamond,” an uncut stone that was “Unpolisht and without beauty.”4
The meaning of the metaphor became clearer as Belcher continued. People who had not traveled, he suggested, were socially inept. Handicapped by “Selfishness & Sowerness,” they were “unaccomplish’d, & Ignorant” about how to handle themselves with other people and particularly with strangers. Only experience remedied these faults. Starting out “Sower, peevish, & fretfull,” travelers became “pleasant, affable & most agreeable,” with “a flexible & complaisant temper” that made them “ready to oblige all.” Broader experience also encouraged tolerance for other ways and even other religions, a recognition that “generally speaking Mankind is much the same.”5
Belcher’s account did not use the word “polite.” It did not need to. His diamond metaphor itself made the point. The term still retained its original meaning of smooth or polished. Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks, a foundational work of the scientific revolution published the year Belcher made his trip, uses it in that older sense. Even the second edition from the following decade remarks on a particular crystal’s “glossy polite surface,” noting that it could be rubbed to become even more “polite.”6 But the term was also increasingly being applied to humans and their behavior as well—often with the same comparison between people and gemstones.7 A book on manners published in London two years before Belcher’s arrival suggested that “Honesty, Courage and Wit” were merely “rough Diamonds … till they are Polish’d” by “Company and Conversation.”8 Readers of Belcher’s journal might also recall the same image in John Locke’s enormously influential discussion of education from the 1690s. The philosopher recommended that parents help children develop that polish that allowed them “a due and free composure of Language, Looks, Motion, Posture, Place, &c. suited to Persons and Occasions.”9
As these discussions of personal “polishing” suggest, Belcher’s praise of travel drew upon ideas circulating widely on both sides of the Atlantic. Just as his journal asserted that travel helped a person learn “to behave himself well in Company,” an essay reprinted in Franklin’s newspaper in 1730 suggested similar significance for conversation. The piece, originally from a British magazine, emphasized the importance of “Complaisance,” calling it the first of “two grand Requisites in the Art of Pleasing.” The Latin quotation at the start the essay encapsulated the meaning of the term—and the central message of the essay—in describing a character that sought (in one English translation) “to comply with the inclinations and pursuits of those he conversed with.” The same passage had earlier been used as an epigraph in the Spectator, the enormously influential London periodical published by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in 1711–1712 that popularized the values and attitudes of eighteenth-century politeness. Addison’s essay similarly stressed the importance of “complaisance,” connecting it with the “affability” and “easiness of temper” that made up the ideal of “good-nature.”10
These ideas inspired Franklin’s resolution to give up his early habit of contradicting people and thereby (as he put it in his Autobiography) “souring and spoiling the Conversation.” This growing sensitivity rejected the example of his “passionate” brother. The essay he reprinted in 1730 instead celebrated people who were “easy, courteous and Affable,” qualities highlighted in the title of the international organization of the public-spirited that Franklin proposed about this time, “the Society of the Free and Easy.”11
Figure 1. This painting shows Franklin as he appeared (or hoped to appear) in the late 1740s or early 1750s, about the time he retired from printing. The head seems to have been added later to a preexisting painting of a gentleman—much as the maturing Franklin attempted to embody the ideal of politeness in conversation, fitting in rather than insisting on his own position. Robert Feke, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), c.
