Benjamin Franklin, who suggested to those inquiring about emigration to America that they read Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer, likewise employed this division between “invisible” and “visible” character in the depictions of his representative self.
Benjamin Franklin and the Character of the Fugitive Apprentice
Early in his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin relates that he “lik’d [the printer’s profession] much better than that of [his] Father, but still had a Hankering for the sea. To prevent the apprehended Effect of such an Inclination, my Father was impatient to have me bound to my Brother. I stood out some time, but at last was persuaded and signed the Indentures, when I was yet but 12 years old.”47 Critics have remarked upon both the oedipal structure and the self-consciously “representative” character of Franklin’s literary self-fashioning throughout part 1 of the Autobiography.48In their focus on these psychological and psychoanalytic themes, they ignore the economic reality to which Franklin refers, and the character-determining, formative role Franklin himself assigns to this period.49Franklin repeatedly emphasizes the significance of this apprenticeship under his brother, and characterizes the ploy he uses to free himself from his indentures as “one of the first Errata” of his life. In fact, it is the first of Franklin’s famous “errata” to be named as such in the Autobiography. And it is during this apprenticeship under his brother that the young Franklin “now had access to better Books” (Franklin 14), an initial store of cultural capital he links directly to his accumulation of social and economic capital later in life. Further, in introducing this moment of signing his indentures, Franklin is keen to point out that his life could have taken a different path, depending on the vocation to which he was bound: he might have become a clergyman, as his father had originally intended; or a tallow chandler and soap boiler (his father’s trade), a joiner, bricklayer, turner, or brazier; or he could have gone to Sea, as his brother Josiah “had done to his [father’s] great Vexation” (Franklin 12). Thus to appreciate the complexity of Franklin’s famous self-fashioning, we should attend to the ways in which Franklin narrates how he was formed in this apprenticeship period, for it is in his narration of the dynamic relation between social formation and the individual subject that Franklin becomes “representative” of the new American.
One of the books Franklin read during this period was “Locke on Human Understanding” (Franklin 17), whose conceptions of agency and freedom would be enacted in Franklin’s narrative of his escape from the bonds of his apprenticeship. What is most significant to our understanding of this formative period in Franklin’s apprenticeship is his narration of the conflict between the economic bonds of labor and the affective bonds of the family: “Tho’ a Brother, he considered himself as my Master, and me as his Apprentice; and accordingly expected the same Services from me as he would from another; while I thought he demean’d me too much in some he required of me, who from a Brother expected more Indulgence” (20). Franklin highlights the conflicting expectations of the contracting parties: his brother, viewing him solely as an apprentice, expected “the same Services” from Franklin as he would any other bound servant; in contrast, Franklin considers the familial relation and so “expected more Indulgence.” Significantly, Franklin never refers to his brother as his master; rather, it is the brother who “considered himself as my Master”: for his brother, the familial bond had been displaced by the economic, once the indentures were signed. Thus while there may very well be an oedipal drama subtending Franklin’s departure from his family, the political unconscious of this departure begins first and foremost as the apprentice’s flight from the laws of the master-servant relation.
Franklin underscores the significance of this political-economic relation in the transition to the narration of his escape from these indentures:
Our Disputes were often brought before our Father, and I fancy I was either generally in the right, or else a better Pleader, because the Judgment was generally in my favour: But my Brother was passionate and had often beaten me, which I took extremely amiss; and thinking my Apprenticeship very tedious, I was continually wishing for some Opportunity of shortening it, which at length offered in a manner unexpected. Note. I fancy his harsh and tyrannical Treatment of me, might be a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life. (20–21)
Franklin locates the origins of his lifelong “Aversion to arbitrary Power” in his own subjection as an apprentice to the “tyrannical treatment” by his brother, and thus proposes a direct allegorical reading of their master-apprentice contract as a socially and politically representative power relation.
Appearing in a text published after the success of the American Revolution, whose leaders famously cited Locke’s justification of the Whig Revolution (in his Second Treatise of Government) in their own justifications of colonial resistance to abuses of Parliament, Franklin’s allegory is suggestive in many ways. First, James Franklin’s character-function in this allegory of power is made explicit: disregarding the familial bond, the brother identifying as master is characterized as “passionate,” and the treatment of his apprentice “tyrannical.” In the conceptual grammar of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (which, as Franklin points out immediately prior to narrating this episode, he had read at this time), “passionate” is opposed to the calm of just reason and true liberty of thought: “But if any extreme disturbance…possesses our whole mind, as when the pain of…an impetuous uneasiness, as of love, anger, or any other violent passion, running away with us, allows us not the liberty of thought, and we are not masters enough of our own minds to consider thoroughly and fairly; God…will judge as a kind and merciful Father. But…the moderation of and restraint of our passions, so that our understanding may be free to examine, and reason unbiased give its judgment…it is in this we should employ our chief care and endeavors.”50 While James Franklin cannot master his passions and thus behaves as a tyrannical master over his own brother, the apprentice Benjamin Franklin, having read “Locke on Human Understanding” (Franklin 17), is the figure of reason (and his father, not unlike God, the “kind and merciful Father,” thus often showed him favor). As Locke elaborated in this chapter “On the Idea of Power,” the mind has the “power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires,” that is, the power to contain unreasonable “passions.”51Locke argued that this “power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire” was “the source of all liberty.…This is so far from being a restraint or diminution of freedom, that it is the very improvement and benefit of it; it is not an abridgment, it is the end and use of our liberty; and the further we are removed from such a determination, the nearer we are to misery and slavery.”52Locke incorporated this conceptualization of power and “freedom” (along with its contrasting metaphorical “slavery”) into his Second Treatise of Government (1690) based on the same analogy Franklin invokes in his apprentice’s allegory of “Arbitrary power”: just as “a man…cannot subject himself to the arbitrary power of another…but only so much as the law of nature gave him for the preservation of himself…this is all he doth, or can give up to the common-wealth, and by it to the legislative power.”53 Thus while the legislative power is “the supreme power in every common-wealth…[i]t is not, nor can possibly be arbitrary power over the lives and fortunes of the people.”54It is on this fundamental philosophical principle regarding the nature of man, that “no man or society of men [have] a power to deliver up their preservation…to the absolute will and arbitrary dominion of another,” that Locke would rest his political defense of the “supreme power of the people” to free themselves from the social contract: “when ever any one shall go about to bring them into such a slavish condition, they will always have a right…to rid themselves of those who invade this fundamental, sacred, and unalterable law of self-preservation, for which they entered into society.”55 Locke’s philosophical defense of the natural right of