Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution Liam Riordan (bio) Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution. By David Waldstreicher. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Pp. 336. Cloth, $25.00; Paper, $15.00.) When an amazon.com keyword search yields nearly 4,000 hits for Benjamin Franklin under the "biography and memoir" heading alone (over 30,000 for a general search) one might fairly ask if we really need another close study of this most famous early American. In the wake of the tercentenary of his birth we have been showered with so much about the man that one begins to suspect that Franklinmania has reached a point of diminishing returns. Yet Franklin continues to surprise, confound, and remain relevant, and nowhere more so than in this remarkable book that emphasizes the central place of slavery in eighteenth-century America. Countering the long-dominant view of Franklin as "the root of things [End Page 788] American and middle-class" (87), and spurning an "embraceable Franklin" (229), David Waldstreicher presents his subject as a politically savvy, sharp-dealing smooth talker, profoundly shaped by his experience of servitude. Runaway America is far too capacious to be fairly categorized as a biography. While a life story provides its binding, Waldstreicher ambitiously unites "the social history of unfree labor to the political history of nation-making" (xiv) to demonstrate how Franklin constructed a personal and a national ethos that "escapes all traces of the legacy of slavery" (239). To repair this denial of slavery, the book explores freedom and bondage as two sides of the same coin, especially Franklin's "knack for eloquently finessing" slavery's "continuous presence in his life, thought, and politics" (xiii). Although the meaning of race for Franklin and his time remains elusive and the broadly ranging analysis is occasionally difficult to follow, this book makes a totally original contribution to the rich historiography of the "problem" and "paradox" of slavery's place vis-à-vis the American Revolution. If a less-than-heroic protagonist emerges whose "antislavery credentials have been greatly exaggerated" by others (xii), Franklin's significance is not at all reduced. While not a work of Founding Father hagiography, it also eschews mere condemnation, and judges Franklin's importance to arise from his long "mediation of slavery, freedom, and revolution" that helped give "Americans the cultural tools of denial and forgetting as well as the political wherewithal to resist a national and international attack" on slavery (xiii–xiv). The book's three parts are centrally informed by the fundamental manner in which American shortage of labor and abundance of land distinguished it from Europe. In Part One we meet Franklin as a servant, runaway, and struggling printer where the servant/slave gradations of unfreedom were closely calibrated with one another. In Part Two Franklin's perspective as a master becomes dominant, both in the quotidian sense of how his rise benefited from the unpaid labor of servants, slaves, and wife and in his expression of masterdom in varied texts. Throughout the book Franklin is contextualized via his relationships with individuals from two key groups of which he had once been part: runaways who attempted to refashion themselves as self-made men and young printers (most of them dependent upon Franklin), almost all of whom fail. The recovery of numerous stories of unknown (or little known) figures like John Holt, Charles Roberts, Jean Montague, Benjamin Mecom, and Venture Smith, and taking Franklin's measure by them, [End Page 789] is one of the signal achievements of this book. In the workaday world of these relationships one cannot doubt that Franklin shrewdly protected his own interests at every turn. Franklin's engagement with slavery in print receives close attention, especially his evocation of a "[r]acial nationhood" to unite Anglo-America as a white empire (135). Franklin's "expansionist, cosmopolitan, and pro-master politics" repeatedly addressed the labor question and the "threat of the runaway" (143) and did so by "pairing enlightenment progress with racism and opposition to slavery" (139). Critical to the assessment of Franklin's relationship to antislavery is an understanding of his "role-playing approach to public life" (57) that...