The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin by Douglas AndersonReview by: Jeffery A. SmithThe American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Dec., 1998), pp. 1689-1690Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2650117 .

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United States 1689

and the jocular gave the writing and the speech its zest. But belletristic play with the realms of politics and moral propriety brought polite society to the borders of the public sphere, that realm of sober discourse on politics and morals conducted in print.

Shields situates these little communities, in aggre- gate called the beau monde, between the court society analyzed by Norbert Elias and the later public sphere of Jiirgen Habermas and Michael Warner. Polite soci- ety first developed in England at the edges of the royal court, but although they borrowed manners and style from the court, the nobility and the higher gentry of the beau monde were less ceremonial and severe. Being somewhat removed from the center of power, polite society afforded more space for free expression and the pursuit of pleasure. In fact, play rather than power or truth held this society together; it existed to please and give pleasure. Social criticism in polite society gave way to discourse in the public sphere when print replaced manuscripts as the dominant form of communication and sober reason and morality took control. A progressively larger population inhabited the royal court, the beau monde, and the public sphere. By the eighteenth century, all literate people who read the public prints imagined themselves in dialogue on large questions in the public sphere.

The sequence from court to public sphere can be read as a story of democratic progress that thankfully left the beau monde behind and sent belles lettres into well-deserved retirement. Republican critics nourished in the public sphere attacked the worldly pleasures of the assemblies and the indulgences of tavern and tea table, the most virulent republicans foregoing all plea- sure in the name of the public good. But the sociability of pleasure could not be vanquished as easily as that, Shields observes. Clubs did not disappear in the nine- teenth century, and people still formed circles to discuss books. As a theory and a practice, republican- ism suffered from a failure to recognize pleasure's value in organizing sociability; republican austerity raised the question of what freedom was for, if not for pleasure.

Shields's literary history resembles the work of the new historicists. He situates writings in the societies that gave them homes. But he departs from the new historicist assumption that the struggle for political hegemony explains literary aesthetics: that is, that literature draws its energy and purpose from politics. Although he once shared that view, Shields says, in the course of his research on belles lettres he reversed himself. He saw that aesthetics explained the forma- tion of politics and societies rather than the opposite. "I began reading British American literature as a register in which political innovation was revealed to be a function of new modes of communicating desires and pleasures" (p. xxiv). The literature, in other words, by supplying governing principles and generative en- ergy, changed social formations and political struc- tures, not the other way around. That possibility should send historians back to the texts to see if they

can reconstruct the interplay of literature and society as expertly as Shields has done.

RICHARD LYMAN BUSHMAN

Coluimbia University

DOUGLAS ANDERSON. The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin. (New Studies in American Intel- lectual and Cultural History.) Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins University Press. 1997. Pp. xviii, 261. $39.95.

Benjamin Franklin's long and extraordinarily full life is a challenge to any historian. Few purport to make all the pieces fit together, while many reduce him to proto-capitalist, provincial politician, or even proverb- spouting hypocrite. Douglas Anderson, who admits to having "simple affection and respect" (p. xv) for his subject, is among those who find a fusion of profoundly ethical and sane traits in the man. As Carl L. Becker observed in the Dictionaty of American Biography (1931), Franklin had a "rare combination of rare qualities."

Aided by the superb Papers of Benjamin Franklin project of Yale University Press, Anderson and other scholars have been reassessing the most intriguing and accomplished avatar of the Enlightenment. Franklin, it seems, was more than a joking journalist and inventor who rose to fame and fortune, became a statesman, and loved the ladies of Paris. Although Anderson does not say so very emphatically, Franklin regarded his relationship with God as a serious matter. In page after page of this perceptive and painstakingly written intellectual history, Franklin is imbibing or imparting eighteenth-century wisdom on divine providence. In fact, a more accurate title for the book might be The Religiotus Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin.

From his earliest days, Anderson writes, Franklin systematically investigated "the fundamental energies of life" and "how the human character as an agent of good might best be set in motion" (p. xvii). He understood the need for "the practice of Shaftesbu- rean brotherhood" in a "Mandevillean world" (p. 15). Anderson finds the influences on Franklin's philoso- phies almost entirely in London and often in works by authors-such as John Ray and William Petty-who are not particularly well known today. Anderson's book unfortunately says little about two writers whom Franklin's memoirs cite as important to the develop- ment of his public-spirited outlook, Cotton Mather and Daniel Defoe. Both were strong advocates of good works. Franklin even took "Silence Dogood" as his first pen name.

Anderson depicts Franklin as deeply involved in print culture and is mainly concerned with the first few decades of a writing career that spanned seventy years. Close attention is given to the often-neglected philo- sophical inquiries and statements of Franklin's youth, works that were frequently made for his private use. By the age of twenty-five, he had written his Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), "Plan of Conduct" (1726), "Articles of Belief and Acts

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1998

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1690 Reviews of Books

of Religion" (1728), and "Observations on My Read- ing History" (1731).

Anderson gives surprisingly little attention to "On the Providence of God in the Government of the World" (1732), which rejects the notion of a potent Creator with "nothing to do." Franklin describes hu- manity as free, accountable, and sharing, to some degree, the wisdom, power, and goodness of God. He concludes the essay by calling for a religion that will be "a Powerful Regulator of our Actions, give us Peace and Tranquility within our own Minds, and render us Benevolent, Useful and Beneficial to others."

Franklin's metaphysical forays into matters of per- sonal and public morality led him to conclude that human beings have responsibilities to each other and that they can enjoy a relationship of mutual delight with God if they are virtuous. Such religious views, which in later life were spelled out in his memoirs and elsewhere, evidently stimulated Franklin's prodigious contributions to politics and to society in general.

Anderson's analysis could be carried further into Franklin's career than it is, but this book helps to show how his "last Will and Testament" (1757) could ex- press a feeling of "reposing my self securely in the Lap of God and Nature, as a Child in the Arms of an affectionate Parent."

JEFFERY A. SMITH University of Iowa

EARL P. OLMSTEAD. David Zeisberger: A Life among the Indians. Foreword by GEORGE W. KNEPPER. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 1997. Pp. xxiv, 441. $39.00.

For eighteen years now, Earl P. Olmstead has im- mersed himself in the story of David Zeisberger, a missionary who was a member of the Moravian Church, a pietistic group that established a complex network of settlements and missions around the world, including a short-lived settlement in Georgia in the late 1730s and permanent settlements in Pennsylvania and North Carolina beginning in the 1740s and 1750s, respectively. Olmstead's first book, Blackcoats among the Delaware: David Zeisberger on the Ohio Frontier (1991), focused on the last part of Zeisberger's life and work following the American Revolution, with special emphasis on the mission in Goshen, Ohio. This new book is an account of Zeisberger's life up to 1782. Historiographically, it fits into the tradition of narra- tive rather than analytic biography. It records in meticulous detail the events in Zeisberger's Indian mission work, the successes and failures of his Indian missions, and the comings and goings of Zeisberger and his missionary cohorts. In the process, it also depicts the challenges to Indian life as seen through the eyes of Zeisberger, who lived among Native Amer- icans for over sixty years and identified with them as much as any European ever did.

The book is divided into four parts, which roughly correspond to the period before the French and Indian

War, the French and Indian War, the period between wars, and the American Revolution. The first part sets the stage with accounts of early Moravian history, the expansion of Moravian settlements to America, the early life of Zeisberger, and the first Moravian contacts with Native Americans in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. The second part depicts the mission work among Indians in eastern Pennsylvania, including the tragedies of the murders at Gnadenhuetten on the Lehigh River by non-Moravian Indians and murders in Philadelphia by the Paxton Boys. The third focuses on Moravian missions in western Pennsylvania and east- ern Ohio and the fourth on tragic effects of the American Revolution on the lives of Ohio Indians, especially the heart-rending attempts of Moravian Indians to find peace in an environment of hostility from both British and American partisans. The book ends with the murders of ninety Moravian Indian converts at Gnadenhuetten in Ohio by a local Ameri- can militia group.

Olmstead's principal sources are English transla- tions of the mission diaries kept by Zeisberger and others, including those from the period of the Amer- ican Revolution, which Olmstead commissioned for his research. These diaries provide detailed daily accounts of mission activities for distribution among other Moravian settlements. Although these sources do not, in general, provide as much in the way of individual viewpoints as personal diaries or letters would, they depict in great detail relationships between Moravians and Indians, both converted and unconverted, and they reflect a great deal about Indian diplomacy with other Indians as well as with Europeans. This book uses some of the bibliography on relations between other Europeans and Native Americans during the colonial period, most notably the work of James Axtell, Francis Jennings, and Anthony F. C. Wallace, but it would benefit by a more thorough historio- graphic grounding in that literature, particularly from the last decade. Olmstead's bibliography of Moravian sources is quite adequate.

While Olmstead does not explicitly state an overall argument in this biography, a number of important recurring themes suggest possible arguments. First, Zeisberger possessed almost super-human determina- tion to build and rebuild his Moravian Indian commu- nities over and over as these were challenged and destroyed by the effects of war, European-Indian antagonism, disease, alcohol, and inter-Indian con- flicts. Second, Indians had a highly ambiguous rela- tionship with Moravianism. As converts, they gained relative security under the Moravian umbrella, but they had to sacrifice deeply held traditional Native American religious practices proscribed by Moravian regulations. Thirdly, Moravians had a difficult time establishing the trust of colonial governments outside of Pennsylvania.

Olmstead provides a brief bibliography of mostly Moravian sources, with special emphasis on mission work in North America, a substantial index, including

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1998

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