Ken Burns Talks to Jacobin About the Revolutionary Benjamin Franklin
Ken Burns sat down with Jacobin to discuss his new documentary, Benjamin Franklin, and how the founding father’s spirit of humanitarianism and progress led him to establish America’s first abolitionist society two years before the Declaration of Independence.
Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, Benjamin Franklin, 1783. (National Portrait Gallery)
- Interview by
- Ed Rampell
Ken Burns’s Benjamin Franklin, written by longtime collaborator Dayton Duncan, chronicles the multifaceted private and public life of the eighteenth-century Renaissance man. The son of a candlemaker, Franklin was born 1706 in Boston and, despite only two years of formal schooling, went on to become a writer, printer, publisher, humorist, slave owner, scientist, inventor, revolutionary, Constitutional Convention member, and celebrity as “America’s greatest diplomat.”
In covering Franklin’s eighty-four years, Burns does much more than merely create a standard biopic. The filmmaker uncovers an electrifying fact, long overlooked (if not hidden) by school textbooks and even by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Benjamin Franklin unearths the title character’s grand finale, how, in the last months of his life, Franklin fought to live up to the egalitarian credo he’d helped Thomas Jefferson draft in the Declaration of Independence. Franklin’s jaw-dropping final political act, as disclosed by Burns in his almost four-hour nonfiction epic, is genuinely heartwarming and full of hope for our troubled age.
Why did young Franklin leave Puritan Massachusetts?
It’s very interesting. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was essentially — it’s so ironic — founded by Puritans escaping religious persecution in Europe, particularly England. But they had a dogmatic approach to how they ran the colony. So much so that we celebrate people like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson who fled Massachusetts for religious freedom of their own.
What you find is a young Franklin, who is an indentured servant to his brother in his printshop, beginning to pen things — as his brother is doing — that are upsetting the powers that be. Of course, his brother does spend some time in jail. But what’s so notable about it, besides Benjamin’s fleeing to Philadelphia and becoming a runaway, is that he’s also beginning a literary career — first with these anonymous letters that are tongue in cheek but also making people laugh, yet also have a distance from the kind of criticism he’s leveling.
Franklin seems to be someone embraced by right-wing libertarians today both for his advocacy of being self-made as well as his belief in individual liberty. But your film shows it’s not as simple as that with Franklin.
Isn’t it amazing that we’re debating the tension? Franklin is celebrated for being a self-made person by libertarians. Of course, he’s also someone very into the common good and civic improvement. He’s inventing these wonderful — in some cases — lifesaving inventions, but he doesn’t take out a patent on them.
So it’s plus ça change — it’ so very contemporary without us ever saying that. We didn’t need to. It’s hard for people to believe, with all our films, because they feel like they’re written with an eye on today, and they’re not. Human nature just doesn’t change.
What was the Albany Plan of Union?
It was something Franklin and Thomas Hutchinson, then the lieutenant governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, came up with. It was this idea of borrowing from the Haudenosaunee — the Iroquois Confederacy, the five, six tribes that had decided to band together to figure out how to solve common things and disputes without warfare. Franklin had long admired this as a good way of governing, and was beginning to perceive, because of his travels as postmaster, that as disparate as they were from Georgia to New Hampshire, they did hold some things in common. He’s the first one to conceive of an America. He presents a plan in 1754, but it’s threatening to the states — they feel like they’d be giving up some sovereignty over their special interests.
It’s only going to be at the Constitutional Convention that a compromise is forged that would be one of the most horrible compromises, but one that creates the United States of America. That’s the three-fifths clause that gives Southerners an edge on representation without having to treat their enslaved people as human beings or citizens.
Are there other ways Franklin was influenced and inspired by the continent’s indigenous peoples?
He had a great admiration for them. He experienced and expressed at times a “nativism” that we’d find familiar today. He worried that the Germans, of all people, were swarthy and not befitting the beautiful white and red, meaning “the red man.” He was often championing them when they were indiscriminately slaughtered. Even peaceful tribes, once white encroachment in Western Pennsylvania and the Great Lakes region began, were beginning to rebel and fight back. Often the vigilante response was to take it out on any native people, however peaceful they might be. Of course, we have the celebrated massacre of the Paxton Boys that we detail. Franklin was, of course, outraged by it and led a militia to put down the Paxton Boys.
At the same time, he believed in the inferiority of the native people. And he also had enslaved some household people. It’s very contradictory and very American. He does, over the years, change his mind and position, and in his later years he’s a very fervent and articulate abolitionist.
Over the years, how did Franklin come to regard slavery?
When Franklin came home from England, he became instrumental in promoting black education. His wife, Deborah, had taken a hand in it. He becomes the most famous American in the world, and probably equally the most famous man in America, along with George Washington. Without Franklin, we don’t have any success in our revolution. He is beginning to evolve in his views and the Pennsylvania abolitionist society makes him the president in 1787. He introduces in Congress a petition that doesn’t get anywhere. It’s defeated in the House and not even brought up in the Senate.
But it shows he’s willing to fight for it. He answers his Southern critics with an unbelievable piece of writing, of which I urge you to get the original. It’s from the point of view of a Muslim owner of white Christian slaves. He was saying the same arguments that a Georgia proslavery congressman was arguing. You can see the absurdity when it was switched. It’s a brilliant piece of writing.
In 1790, Franklin petitioned Congress to free the slaves. Until I saw your documentary, I never ever heard about this last public act of Franklin’s, an attempt to liberate the enslaved. Why is this not widely known in America?
It doesn’t fit into the convenience of our superficial, conventional sense of ourselves. It roils the waters about slavery too early. What we have is a grand republic’s founding, the Declaration, the glorious revolution, the Constitutional Convention, the greatest country set in motion, and then four score and five years, in 1861, 4 million Americans are owned by other Americans. That just doesn’t fit.
So if you find out that, very early on, there’s somebody advocating emancipation, it just makes the narrative a little bit messier. Which for me is what everything is — all of life is messy. I had the great privilege of interviewing I. F. Stone for my film on Huey Long, and when he was nearing eighty, he told me one of his acolytes asked him how he could possibly admire Thomas Jefferson, and Stone said this wonderful thing: “History is tragedy, it isn’t melodrama. In melodrama, all heroes are perfectly virtuous. All villains are perfectly villainous. But that’s not the way life — tragedy — is.”
After the Constitutional Convention adjourned, a woman famously asked Franklin what kind of government the founders conjured up, and he quipped, “A republic — if you can keep it.” This quote is oft-repeated nowadays, but what seems overlooked is the simple fact that Franklin did not say “a democracy.”
Oh, yeah. There were democratic aspects, but the Senate at that time, until the early twentieth century, was elected by the state legislators, not by the commonfolk, not until an amendment to the Constitution in the first decade of the twentieth century. So yeah, it’s a republic and has aspects of, essentially, not so much a governing class as people who aspire to be part of a governing class.
About what percent of all of the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies that formed the new United States of America were eligible to vote?
Pretty small. I don’t have the numbers in front of me; that’s an excellent question. When you say “inhabitants,” you’ll therefore have to include native peoples, women, people owned by others, and freed slaves. Essentially, when Jefferson said, “All men are created equal,” he meant all white men of property, free of debt. It doesn’t say that in the Constitution, but that’s what they wanted. And they feared as much as anything else the democratic mob, the mob that would act with unchecked passions. What you are trying to create was a republic in which passions could be tempered to conversations, discourse through compromise.