A Scurrilous Colonial Election and Franklin's Reputation

ECENT investigations have shown not only that is a key figure in understanding colonial and Revolutionary America, but also that the study of his posthumous influence and reputation offers fruitful insights into the development of the American mind. Over a decade ago Legacy to the Gilded Age was duly recorded, and more recently two studies have explored the Franklin in the popular national consciousness and his stature as an American hero. Another scholar has demonstrated that F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to link his Gatsby more closely to the American tradition by patterning Gatsby's youthful resolutions after the famous regimen outlined in the Autobiography.' Less has been done, however, to discover Franklin's standing among his colonial contemporaries, especially in the pre-Revolutionary period. John Adams's rather grumpy judgments are well known, but from a later date; and Franklin's lionization in France is likewise irrelevant to his stature in colonial America. This article focuses on a restricted, but highly charged, moment in Franklin's colonial experience in an attempt to amend the neglect of his earlier reputation and to suggest reasons for some of the currents of derogatory opinion about which persisted all through the nineteenth century. A strong tincture of aristocratic contempt for is one of the most striking things revealed by studies of his reputation. Early in the nineteenth century, Joseph Dennie, a Philadelphia editor whose ideal for *Mr. Gleason is a member of the Department of History, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana. 1 Louis B. Wright, Legacy to the Gilded Age, Virginia Quarterly Review, XXII (i946), 268-279; Richard D. Miles, American Image of Franklin, American Quarterly, IX (I957), II7-143; Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., Benjamin as an American Hero, Association of American Colleges Bulletin, XLIII 0957), I2I-I32; Floyd C. Watkins, Fitzgerald's Jay Gatz and Young Ben Franklin, New England Quarterly, XXVII 0954), 249-252. In the early i9th century, was considered the perfect civic leader by the townsmen of the rising cities of the Middle West. Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., I959), 319

Colonialism · Political science · Reputation · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Humor Studies · History · Law · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

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