October 4th, 2022
Spent the last 2 weeks on vacation and I reread the Education of Henry Adams while traveling. One of my favorites. I’ve read just about all of my physical books and am delving into my vast collection of pdfs and epubs that I’ve downloaded. This one I got off an audiobook CD from the library back when I drove an hour for work. The CD didn’t work, so now I have to read it the old fashion way. I had started it before and got distracted by something else. I read the first two chapters today, but had read them before. I probably read the next two chapters also. We’ll see.
October 5th, 2022
Another chapter that I probably read before. Franklin finds some success in Philadelphia, where the printers are lackluster. He becomes acquainted with the governor through a brother-in-law who wants him to open a print shop. Franklin’s only like 20 years old. He looks for his father’s permission, I guess because it’s olden times, who says no, but allows him to return to Philadelphia. He meets another governor in New York and quarrels with a friend who has turned into a drunkard. It’s interesting to see America in such a small community, where a young nobody can just show up to city and become highly favored by the governor. Maybe he is downplaying how important his connection through his brother-in-law was. It sounds very casual. It also gives a positive light to the Royal Governor of Pennsylvania. He seems generally interested in improving the industry of the city and thus the colony. There is still harmony between the colonists and the government.
October 6th, 2022
Turns out the government just makes a lot of promises and doesn’t keep them. He sends Franklin out to England but doesn’t deliver on any of his promises, so he’s out of luck. Despite this character flaw, Franklin says he means well and that he was a good governor (he wasn’t one to do the proprietors’ bidding). Franklin brings a friend, who secretly decided to abandon his wife and child to achieve success in writing in England. Franklin takes up work in printing and stays in England a year in a half. In that time, he made some important acquaintances, loaned his friend a lot of money, made a move on his friend’s lady, and lost his friend. After all this, he takes some work from a guy he met on the ship over and, per his advice, headed back to Philadelphia.
October 7th, 2022
Franklin comes back with more knowledge on printing and a job running a store. He eventually goes back to his old print shop for high wages to train some guys and indentured servants. He and the boss butt heads and one employee named Meredith, a Welsh colonist or son of a Welshman, gets Franklin to start a printing shop with him, using his father’s money as an investment. They have to ship everything in from England, and that takes time. There’s probably one or two ships per year. I don’t know how people had so much patience back then. The Welshman is a bit of a lush, but Franklin is a good influence on him, hence why his father invests. The business becomes successful. Franklin starts some clubs and societies for intellectual pursuits. It was a very different time. There isn’t anything like that today. Maybe on some forum or something, but nothing serious. Maybe people didn’t have such a big chip about being a pseudointellectual back then. The 19th century probably did a lot of damage for philosophy and the soft sciences. I might like it better this way, to be honest. I never really saw the point in philosophy. There’s the philosophies on how to live one’s life, which I think are important, but all the metaphysical stuff doesn’t really have a place in a astrophysical era.
October 10th, 2022
Franklin ends chapter 7 talking about his work and his club. He was able to buy out the Welshman Meredith and his father, who did not pay up the full loan. Two friends came to Franklin, separately and secretly, to loan him the funds to buy out the drunkard Meredith. Meredith followed a migration of Welsh to North Carolina, returning to his life as a farmer. It would seem this is where the notes originally ended. Chapter 8 opens up with some very boring letters from friends begging Franklin to write about the rest of his life. He starts again in 1784, obviously after the Revolution, still in Europe (Paris?). He begins with the opening of the first subscription-based library in 1730. I am curious if the post-revolutionary years will color his history differently than the initial chapters. The book is roughly halfway through.
October 11th, 2022
The next chunk of test is mostly Franklin describing his list of virtues and his method for cultivating them. It is certainly an interesting and a noble pursuit, but at some point it has to take the enjoyment out of life. Forbidding yourself from drinking or gambling is fine and all, but small amounts of these are legitimate forms of fun. Avoiding trifling conversation and joking just sounds insane to a rational human. What does one gain from ascetic pursuits? To some degree, it’s legitimate self-improvement. Beyond a point it just becomes extremism. Franklin would not approve of utilitarianism.
October 12th, 2022
Franklin talks about some of the stuff that everyone learns in school. He talks about Poor Richard’s Almanac, the fire company, probably some other stuff. He tells a lot of small stories as a way to give advice to people, and he mentions virtue a lot. I’m growing a little tired of that word. He’s currently talking about some of the preachers and experiences of the Great Awakening, though he doesn’t use that term by name. Franklin is surprisingly religious.
October 13th, 2022
Franklin starts going into some of the topics I read about in a book about colonial Pennsylvania. There was war between Britain and Spain, which then drew in France. I guess this was King George’s War, or of the Austrian Succession. This would’ve been of Maria Theresa and one of Louis XIV’s many wars in Holland, with Spain possibly being Bourbon by then. Franklin wanted a militia to protect the colony, but the Quaker-held Assembly would vote for no such thing, to the chagrin of the governor. Franklin then wrote a pamphlet and organized a voluntary service outside of the government, I think called the Association. This would be terrifying today, but back then I guess this was cool. It seemed necessary and had a large number of volunteers. Quakers flip flop on whether defensive war is acceptable or not, and often had to allocate funds to the crown under alternative titles. Also told is the story of the founding of U Penn, in the building that was built for the preachers of the Great Awakening. Franklin also has become wealthy enough to let someone else run his business and pursue personal projects, like his experiments. Now that it was known he was not occupied by business, we was elected to several public jobs, notably as a member of the Assembly.
October 14th, 2022
More talk about what Franklin did in Philadelphia. He was sent to workout an Indian treaty in Carlisle, helped a friend establish a hospital for the poor (by getting the Assembly to finance part of it), and worked to get some of the street paved. He talked a lot about street sweeping. When the French and Indian War began, he was sent to the Albany Congress. He and several others had come up with plans of Union for the general American defense and the Congress approved Franklin’s. The colonial governments did not like the plan. The Assembly voted against it, in Franklin’s absence. He talks about different governors and their quarrels with the Assembly, then moves on to Braddock’s Expedition. We are getting close to the Revolution and the end of Franklin’s personal history.
October 17th, 2022
Franklin was sent as postmaster general to assuage the British soldiers. The British failed to acquire the necessary wagons and horses, and Franklin said Pennsylvania could gather them. I read all about this already in a book on Washington. Franklin wrote a notice, promising good terms and money for volunteers. It was a big success. Braddock’s men marched and then were killed at Fort Duquesne. After the failed expedition, Franklin’s Assembly was back in the forefront of defense. The British army was useless for the defense of the frontier and the militia held the reins. Franklin was sent up towards Bethlehem to Gnadenhut to build a fort. Gnadenhut, now Lehighton, was the site of Moravian massacre, but the land was good for defense. They quickly built a fort and the Indians stayed away. Bethlehem, despite being Moravian and pacifist, was well defended. Apparently the Moravians were not opposed to bearing arms.
October 18th, 2022
The book ends abruptly. I guess Franklin did not have time to write any further before he died. He was recalled to the Assembly and stopped in Bethlehem along the way, spending a few nights learning about the Moravian ways. They seem a little strange. I wonder if I’ve ever met one. I spend a couple years down the street from Moravian University. There was a new governor in place and it was the same old story of proprietor interest. Franklin takes an aside to talk of his electrical experiments, which are world famous and need not be repeated here. The last bit of the book has Franklin sent to England in the 50s to address Thomas Penn and the court. I’ve read this before, probably in the book about colonial Pennsylvania. One Lord tells Franklin that the King’s word is the law of the land. Franklin disagrees, citing the charter’s creation of an assembly to pass laws. He makes a good point that the Commons struck down a law giving the King the ability to legislate the colonies. He then laments that this was so that they could rule the colonies in 1765, though these events are a generation apart. The book apparently originally ended with his arrival in England, 1757 or so. The rest was not originally published, being written in the last year of Franklin’s life. All his conversations with Thomas Penn, the fact that they could agree on nothing, and the rest were added a century later. That’s it.