Mark Cole
(continued from last week)
Ben Franklin was the only Founding Father who signed each of the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. Each of those was required for the United States to exist. No one matches his track record in that regard: not Washington, not Adams, not Hancock, not Jefferson.
He increased the sum of human knowledge by creating two new scientific fields, the study of electricity and meteorology. He discovered the principle of the conservation of charge in electricity. He invented the Franklin stove and the lightning rod.
He wrote the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a classic work of American literature.
He founded scores of institutions and enterprises, including a school, a newspaper, a hospital, the American Philosophical Society, a fire department, a public library, and one of the first abolitionist societies in America. He was the first postmaster general of the United States of America and was the chief executive of Pennsylvania.
And those are only his big achievements.
At the end of the day, though, Benjamin Franklin the man was far more than the sum of his achievements. His achievements flowed from who he was, from his character.
Perhaps Carl van Doren said it best in the closing of his magisterial 1938 biography of Franklin:
“In any age, Franklin would have been great. Mind and will, talent and art, strength and ease, wit and grace met in him as if nature had been lavish and happy when he was shaped. Nothing seems to have been left out except a passionate desire, as in most men of genius, to be all ruler, all soldier, all saint, all poet, all scholar, all some one gift or merit or success. Franklin’s powers were from first to last in a flexible equilibrium. Even his genius could not specialize him. He moved through his world in a humorous mastery of it. Kind as he was, there was perhaps a little contempt in his lack of exigency. He could not put so high a value as single-minded men put on the things they give their lives for. Possessions were not worth that much, nor achievements. Comfortable as Franklin’s possessions and numerous as his achievements were, they were less than he was. Whoever learns about his deeds remembers longest the man who did them. And sometimes, with his marvellous [sic] range, in spite of his personal tang, he seems to have been more than any single man: a harmonious human multitude.”
From Benjamin Franklin by Carl van Doren, page 782.
Check out Mark’s book:
Lives, Fortunes, Sacred Honor: The Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence
