Runaway America
Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Descrição da editora
Scientist, abolitionist, revolutionary: that is the Benjamin Franklin we know and celebrate. To this description, the talented young historian David Waldstreicher shows we must add runaway, slave master, and empire builder. But Runaway America does much more than revise our image of a beloved founding father. Finding slavery at the center of Franklin's life, Waldstreicher proves it was likewise central to the Revolution, America's founding, and the very notion of freedom we associate with both.
Franklin was the sole Founding Father who was once owned by someone else and was among the few to derive his fortune from slavery. As an indentured servant, Franklin fled his master before his term was complete; as a struggling printer, he built a financial empire selling newspapers that not only advertised the goods of a slave economy (not to mention slaves) but also ran the notices that led to the recapture of runaway servants. Perhaps Waldstreicher's greatest achievement is in showing that this was not an ironic outcome but a calculated one. America's freedom, no less than Franklin's, demanded that others forgo liberty.
Through the life of Franklin, Runaway America provides an original explanation to the paradox of American slavery and freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Why another biography of Franklin? Because this is a distinctive, long-overdue effort to ask some tough questions about someone who is usually given a pass for his genius and charm by otherwise critical historians and biographers. If Waldstreicher's writing isn't as deft as, say, David McCullough's, it's more searching and more balanced. This biography explores Franklin's relationship to free labor and slavery. Himself an indentured servant in his youth, Franklin was inordinately sensitive to questions of freedom and servitude. Yet he was a slaveholder for part of his life and, in Waldstreicher's telling, spoke in circles to avoid having to take a stand for or against racial slavery and those who sought to flee it. Temple University historian Waldstreicher (In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes) skillfully sets Franklin's posture in the context of 18th-century Northern prevarication and racism, but the book's effect is to desacralize Franklin. It reveals the founder's dissimulation in his brilliant, beloved Autobiography and other writings that have been used wrongly, it turns out to place him among the nation's early antislavery reformers. Waldstreicher might have dug more deeply into the psychological roots of Franklin's complex behavior. Yet this penetrating interpretation, one that's likely to dismay Franklin's hagiographers, is true to the man, his times and the facts. 16 pages of b&w illus. not seen by PW.
