Throughout the Autobiography, Franklin focuses on the split between the public self and the private self. This is especially so in part 1, which narrates his formative years as an apprentice and then journeyman printer—that period during which, as Benjamin Vaughn asserted in his letter to Franklin (included by Franklin in the Autobiography), “the private and public character is determined” (Franklin 74). What is equally significant to our understanding of the influence of Franklin as a literary model for that “new race of man, the American” is the device through which Franklin escapes the indentures binding him to his master, for the device turns upon the division between public character and private character, what Crèvecœur described as the difference between “visible character” and “invisible character.” And the “manner unexpected” by which Franklin’s “Opportunity of shortening” his apprenticeship occurred is likewise significant for what it reveals about this split subject: “One of the Pieces in our News-Paper, on some political Point which I have now forgotten, gave Offense to the Assembly. [James Franklin] was taken up, censur’d and imprison’d for a month.…During my Brother’s Confinement…I had the Management of the Paper, and I made bold to give our Rulers some Rubs in it.…My Brother’s Discharge was accompany’d with an Order of the House, (a very odd one) that James Franklin should no longer print the Paper called the New England Courant” (Franklin 21). The “visible character” of “Benjamin Franklin” first appeared in the public sphere of print in the circumstances of the state’s attempts to suppress political speech. It is also significant that it was thus publicly known that Franklin, the apprentice, was managing the paper during his master’s confinement, and giving “Rubs to our Rulers in it,” which led others to “consider [him] in an unfavourable Light, as a young Genious that had a Turn for Libelling & Satyr” (21). Franklin represents himself as a young apprentice already fully capable of taking on the duties of the master printer, and already overstepping the limits of his station. In order “to evade” the House’s “very odd” injunction
it was finally concluded…to let it be printed for the future under the Name of Benjamin Franklin. And to avoid the Censure of the Assembly that might still fall on him, as still printing it by his Apprentice, the Contrivance was, that my old Indenture should be returned to me with a full Discharge on the Back of it, to be shown on Occasion; but to secure to him the Benefit of my service I was to sign new indentures for the Remainder of the Term, [which] were to be kept private. (Franklin 21)
The “contrivance” thus relies on a twofold split between “private” and “public” character. First, as I have noted, with the newspaper now printed officially under the “Name of Benjamin Franklin,” the textual character of Benjamin Franklin as a master printer (what would become his most iconic role) made its public debut. Further, for the “very flimsy scheme” to work, this new public character required that Franklin be “discharged” from his apprenticeship indentures: the contract, which only bound him because it was a publicly recognized document, would be dissolved, while his “new Indentures for the Remainder of the Term…were to be kept private” (Franklin 21). As a secret, “private” contract in direct contradiction to the public character Benjamin Franklin had since assumed, these new indentures did not really bind him.
It is this very split, between Franklin’s public character as one discharged from the bonds of his indenture on the one hand, and his private character as an apprentice still bound by secret contract on the other, that Franklin would manipulate when, as he describes, “a fresh Difference arising between my Brother and me, I took upon me to assert my Freedom, presuming he could not venture to produce the new Indentures” (Franklin 21). Franklin manipulated the already existing split between public and private character, while thus revealing the greater significance of the former to the social order of early America. Ultimately Franklin says that “it was not fair in me to take this Advantage, and this I therefore reckon one of the first Errata of my Life” (22). Yet we should note that what Franklin calls an errata was his manipulation of that split between public and private enacted in their contrivance to evade the House’s order; Franklin does not say it was an errata to have “assert[ed] my freedom” (23). Franklin here is “representative” not of patience, but rather of the individual capable of mastering the split between public and private, visible and invisible “character,” in order to leap past that period of apprenticeship inscribed in the laws of master and servant.56
Nor should we underestimate this aspect of the “character” Franklin represents in his Autobiography: twice in the next pages narrating the journey of his escape he refers to himself as the “figure” of the fugitive indentured servant: “I cut so miserable a figure too, that I found by Questions ask’d me I was suspected to be some runaway Servant, and in danger of being taken up on that suspicion” (Franklin 24). And later, after having arrived in Philadelphia, “several sly Questions were ask’d me, as it seemed to be suspected from my youth & Appearance, that I might be some runaway” (27). It is this representative version of Franklin, as the young apprentice who appropriated the discourse of his master (it was his master’s “contrivance” after all) and manipulated the terms of his subjection in order to assert his freedom, that made the Autobiography popular among “the youth”—young apprentices and journeymen—throughout the post-Revolutionary republic of the 1790s and the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a period of the early republic which saw the rapidly decreasing structural mobility promised by the eighteenth-century political-economic model of apprenticeship, and the breakdown of its cultural ideology: the individual’s gradual and orderly movement from bound, “qualifiedly free” subject to a position of independent self-mastery.57
Mixed Character and The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
In an influential interpretation of the significance of Olaudah Equiano’s representation of his manumission certificate to the larger cultural work of The Interesting Narrative, Houston Baker has argued that the “document…signals the ironic transformation of property by property into humanity.”58 Baker resituated Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in the “social ground” of eighteenth-century mercantilism with the critical insight that the Narrative “vividly delineates the true character of Afro-America’s historical origins in a slave economics and implicitly acknowledges that such economics must be mastered before liberation can be achieved.”59This understanding needs to be supplemented with a more expansive view of the political-economic “social ground,” one which comprehends the broader spectrum of labor subjection and bondage through which antislavery writers like Equiano imagined freedom, and those attributes of social personhood required for its realization.60 The claim that the document “signals the ironic transformation of property by property into humanity” is based on a historically inaccurate opposition between property and humanity. While there were eighteenth-century proslavery texts, such as James Tobin’s Cursory Remarks upon the Rev. Mr. Ramsay’s Essay, that questioned or denied the humanity of Africans, most of the eighteenth-century literature defending slavery accepted the philosophical and religious recognitions of their humanity, if only to claim it to be an uncivilized and a naturally inferior one. And in the context of a historical analysis of Equiano’s manumission certificate as not only a “linguistic occurrence” but a legal document, we should note that eighteenth-century British and American laws governing slave property did not deny the humanity of slaves. In British colonial and American slavery law, property and humanity were not absolutely opposed terms, and the slave was recognized throughout the transatlantic world as both property and person. In the United States, the recognition of slave humanity was extended to the legal recognition of the slave “as a moral person.” Writing behind the mask of Publius in