The papers of Benjamin Franklin

Author(s)

• Franklin, Benjamin
• Labaree, Leonard W. (Leonard Woods)
• Willcox, William Bradford
• Lopez, Claude Anne
• Arnold, Douglas M.
• Oberg, Barbara B.

Bibliographic Information

The papers of Benjamin Franklin

Leonard W. Labaree, editor ; Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., associate editor ; Helen C. Boatfield and Helen H. Fineman, assistant editors

Yale University Press, 1959-

• v. 1
• v. 2
• v. 3
• v. 4
• v. 5
• v. 6
• v. 7
• v. 8
• v. 9
• v. 10
• v. 11
• v. 12
• v. 13
• v. 14
• v. 15
• v. 16
• v. 17
• v. 18
• v. 19
• v. 20
• v. 21
• v. 22
• v. 23
• v. 24
• v. 25
• v. 26
• v. 27
• v. 28
• v. 29
• v. 30

Note

Vol. 1: Jan. 6, 1706 through Dec. 31, 1734 -- v. 2: Jan. 1, 1735 through Dec. 31, 1744 -- v. 3: Jan. 1, 1745 through June 30, 1750 -- v. 4: July 1, 1750 through June 30, 1753 -- v. 5: July 1, 1753 through Mar. 31, 1755 -- v. 6: Apr. 1, 1755 through Sep. 30, 1756 -- v. 7: Oct. 1, 1756 through Mar. 31, 1758

Vol. 8: Apr. 1, 1758 through Dec. 31, 1759 -- v. 9: Jan. 1, 1760 through Dec. 31, 1761 -- v. 10: Jan. 1, 1762 through Dec. 31, 1763 -- v. 11: Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 1764 -- v. 12: Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 1765 -- v. 13: Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 1766 -- v. 14: Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 1767 -- v. 15: Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 1768 -- v.16: Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 1769-- v. 17: Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 1770 -- v. 18: Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 1771 -- v. 24: May 1 through Sep. 30, 1777 -- v. 25: Oct. 1 1777, through Feb. 28,1778 -- v. 26: Mar. 1 through June 30, 1778 -- v. 27: July 1 through Oct. 31,1778 -- v. 28: Nov. 1 1778, through Feb. 28, 1779 -- v. 29: March 1 through June 30, 1779 -- v. 30: July 1 through October 31, 1779

Vols. 1-14 / Leonard W. Labaree, editor: Vols. 15-26 / William B. Willcox editor: v. 27 / Claude A. Lopez, editor: Vols. 28-30 / Barbara B. Oberg, editor

"Sponsored by the American Philosophical Society and Yale University"--Half title page

Includes bibliographical references and indexes

v. 31以降は別書誌 (BA27251865)

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

v. 1 ISBN 9780300006506

Description

This is the first volume to come from a great scholarly undertaking, the assembly and editing of Benjamin Franklin's complete writings and correspondence. Sponsored jointly by the American Philosophical Society and Yale University, this new edition of forty volumes will contain everything that Franklin wrote that can be found and, for the first time, in full or abstract, all letters addressed to him, the whole arranged in chronological order. To be published over a period of fifteen years, it will supersede all previous editions, for thousands of letters by Franklin have been located since Smyth's edition fifty years ago.This first volume, for example, contains more than triple the amount of material in the Smyth edition for this period of Franklin's life, from his birth on January 17, 1706 to the end of 1734. This is a period reflecting the young Franklin of Boston and Philadelphia as a man of letters-essayist, journalist, pamphleteer-and as a rising young printer. here are the literary pieces he wrote and printed in the New-England Courant, the American Weekly Mercury, or the Pennsylvania Gazette, or as separately printed pamphlets. Here are the first issues of Poor Richard's Almanack. Here is his famous Epitaph and his ritual for private worship, "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion," together with legal and business papers connected with his printing business. Also included is a genealogy, the fullest ever compiled, of Franklin's complicated family, with chronology of Franklin's first twenty-nine years. Each volume will have its own index, with a cumulative index at the end. As a large proportion of Franklin's literary production has never been reprinted since it first appeared in the 1720s and 1730s, this volume should add usefully to the available body of early American materials. Especially significant to collectors will be the reproduction in photographic facsimile, for the first time, of the entire twenty-four pages of the "first impression" of the first Poor Richard, that for 1733, from the unique copy in the Rosenbach Foundation.

Volume

v. 8 ISBN 9780300006582

Description

In this volume Franklin is representing the Pennsylvania Assembly in London, meeting with limited success before the Privy Council over the question of the Proprietor's alleged fraud in Indian lands and with complete reversal over an issue of parliamentary privilege. The personal antagonism between him and Proprietor Thomas Penn develops into an angry break. His personal success, however, is extensive. He travels widely, looking up ancestors and surviving relatives; he receives local honors in Edinburgh and Glasgow and an honorary degree from the University of St. Andrews, becoming "Doctor Franklin." He enjoys scientific and intellectual associations with members of the Royal Society, and warm and delightful friendships with people he meets on his travels as well as in London.

Volume

v. 9 ISBN 9780300006599

Description

Early in the period covered by this volume Franklin wrote the "Canada Pamphlet," one of his earliest and most important efforts to influence British public opinion. In it he urged that in peace negotiations with France, Great Britain should insist on receiving the whole of Canada as a permanent possession, rather than the island of Guadeloupe. Franklin's time and attention were also taken up by a major contest with the Pennsylvania Proprietors before the officers of the Crown to gain royal approval of a series of important acts passed by the Assembly. Neither side won a complete victory, though on the central issue that had taken Franklin to England he achieved the recognition of the Assembly's right to tax the proprietary estates on the same basis as the property of other landowners. His periods of leisure were brightened by a widening circle of British friends and by travel in England and the Low Countries.

Volume

v. 13 ISBN 9780300011326

Description

The most important event in Franklin's career during 1766 was his influential examination before the House of Commons advocating the repeal of the Stamp Act. The verbatim account of that examination, as recorded by the assistant clerk, is reprinted here. Included are notations by Franklin and one of the members as to who asked the various questions to which he address his remarks.His other activities as colonial agent relating to the Stamp Act and the act restraining paper money are indicated in both his personal correspondence and his letter to English newspapers.Early in 1766, Franklin's printing partnership with David Hall expired; the final accounts of this venture reveal much about the activities of one of the major printing and publishing firms in the colonies.During the summer Franklin accompanied an English friend on a trip through Germany. In what must have been a series of interviews, one scholar drew from him extended information about America, which was later printed in a Hanoverian journal. This report, reprinted here, appears for the first time in a complete English translation.Mr. Labaree is Farnam Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University.

Volume

v. 17 ISBN 9780300015966

Description

The year 1770 was momentous on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, Lord North began his long and calamitous ministry by repealing all the Townsend duties except that on tea. This partial repeal eroded the basis of the nonimportation agreements and they quickly collapsed. Franklin lost his campaign in America to keep them in force, just as he lost his campaign in England to secure total repeal. Perhaps these defeats forced Franklin to re-examine his position. In any case he became less an irenic pragmatist and more a radical. In Massachusetts, where political debate was at its hottest, he publicized for the first time his belief that Parliament did not have sovereignty over the empire. A few months later he was elected agent of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and thereafter he was de facto spokesman for four of the thirteen colonies. For that very reason he was open to attack. In Boston he was suspect as a royal official and the father of a colonial governor. In England he was vilified as an unfaithful servant of the crown, and his position in the post Office was endangered. But he continued on his course, unrepentant, and in the privacy of his study he resumed his habit of writing lengthy marginalia on the pamphlets he was reading. These comments are the nearest we can come to listening to the man in conversation.

Volume

v. 20 ISBN 9780300019667

Description

Franklin's activities in 1773 were as multifarious as ever, but behind them were two developments that closely affected his future. One was the growing impact on him and his London world of the shock waves emanating from Boston-the constitutional debate between Governor Hutchinson and his opponents in the General Court, the petition from the House of Representatives for the removal of the Governor and Lieutenant Governor, and in December the Tea Party. The Bostonians were more and more openly defiant, and their agent was almost as busy in antagonizing Whitehall. His revelation on Christmas Day that he had obtained and send the Hutchison letters were only the latest in a series of provocations during the year. In June he published, with a preface of his own, a set of radical resolutions passed by the Boston town meeting November, 1772; and in September he attacked British policy in his two famous satires, "Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One" and the "Edict by the King of Prussia." The other development that affected his future was the appearance of the first comprehensive French translation of his works. Hitherto only small snippets of what he had written in the past two decades had been available to the French-speaking intelligentsia of Europe. Now the whole man, shrewd, wide-ranging, and voracious in his curiosity, was there to be seen; and his stature commanded recognition. At the moment when his political position in England was being eroded, his place in the Enlightenment was becoming more secure.

Volume

v. 21 ISBN 9780300022247

Description

The fifteen months that this volume covers were the climax as well as the end of Franklin's British mission. They include the months of negotiation in which his aid was sought in the unsuccessful attempt to find a peace settlement with the colonists. In March Franklin sailed for home.

Volume

v. 23 ISBN 9780300028973

Description

Franklin in France was in a world that was strange to him. His previous visits had shown him a little of French society; now that he was exposed to it at many level and on unfamiliar ground, a new phase of his education was beginning. It has many sides. He was a guest at salons and attended his first meeting of the Academic royale des sciences; he and his fellow commissioners negotiated over tobacco with the farmers general; Le Ray de Chaumont, a merchant prince close to Vergennes, took him under his roof in the rural quiet of Passy, surrounded by neighbors who soon became friends. Passy was a solace in his trial. He was pestered day in, day out by importunate favor-seekers, while he and his colleagues wrestled with questions that seemed insoluble. How to pay for supplies with no money from Congress, or publicize the American cause with no news from home? How to influence, or even plumb, the intentions of Versailles? Franklin's past experience gave little guidance. His years in England had turned him into a colonial spokesman but not a suitor for his country; his months in Philadelphia had taught him much about the war, but not how to get the French to pay for it. Yet the past had also served him well: by repeatedly forcing him to learn ways, it had kept him limber. Otherwise he would never have been able, in his seventies, to continue his education.

Volume

v. 27 ISBN 9780300041774

Description

This volume marks the beginning of hostilities between Britain and France. Although Franklin and his fellow commissioners do not play a major role in the new wartime diplomacy and military strategy, the documents richly illustrate his relationship with his American colleagues, his neighbors in Passy, and a wide variety of French correspondents. Franklin, in a moment of personal discouragement at the failure of his amorous pursuit of Mme. Brillon, writes a haunting literary piece the "Ephemera." Part of his wistful mood undoubtedly stems from his expectation of recall by Congress. Instead Congress at the end of this volume elects him America's first minister plenipotentiary to the French court.

Volume

v. 28 ISBN 9780300046731

Description

The twenty-eighth volume of the collected writings and correspondences of the American statesman, ambassador, and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin The last two weeks covered by this volume represent a new chapter in Franklin's career: minister plenipotentiary to the French Court. For the first fourteen weeks, however, the work of the American commissioners, Franklin, John Adams, and Arthur Lee, goes on as usual, although in an atmosphere of uncertainty and distrust as news of the abolishment of the commission reaches Paris in late November. In addition to the bickering within the commission, the commissioner designate to Tuscany continues to irritate Franklin, who, in response, writes one of his most brilliant and witty invectives, "The Petition of the Letter Z." Much of the diplomatic story of this volume concerns the implementation of the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce. While those documents demonstrate France's support for the American cause, putting them into practice is still to be achieved. American merchants seek French convoy protection for trade to North America, trade that is essential to paying for the war. And owners of privateers seek a resolution of the legal dilemma in which they are caught because of recent French admiralty regulations governing retaken prizes. But Franklin's role as American minister does not confine him to the world of accounts and routine correspondence. On the contrary, in this volume we see clearly Franklin the American scientist and man of letters in the world of the French Enlightenment. In December, for example, he returns to earlier scientific interests, writing in French a paper on the aurora borealis for presentation to the Academie des sciences. He begins 1779 reinvigorated, productive, and attentive to his new responsibilities.

Table of Contents

• Statement of methodology
• abbreviations and short titles
• notes by the editors and the administrative board
• chronology 1778-1779.

Volume

v. 29 ISBN 9780300051889

Description

The twenty-ninth volume of the collected writings and correspondences of the American statesman, ambassador, and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin This volume marks the first full months of Franklin's tenure as sole American minister to the Court of France. Relieved from the necessity of having to work any longer with John Adams and Arthur Lee, Franklin took charge of the American mission with new-found vigor, writing on average fifty letters a month, sometimes in spurts of six or seven a day. No other period of his life has left so full a documentary record. In the absence of a network of American consuls in France, the business of receiving cargoes, fitting out ships, supervising the procurement of supplies, and tending to the interests of American citizens abroad fell to the American minister plenipotentiary. Prominent among the naval captains with whom he dealt was John Paul Jones; this volume reveals the first attempts of Franklin and the French Court to devise a mission for the Bonhomme Richard squadron. Busy diplomat that he was, Franklin always had time for scientific and other pursuits. His paper on the aurora borealis was delivered to the Academie des sciences. He attended experiments on the ingenious microscope solaire by the young scientist of future Revolutionary fame, Jean-Paul Marat. In May, he was elected Venerable of his Masonic lodge. During these months too, Franklin resumed his earliest profession and avocation, printing. He established a type foundry at Passy in 1778 and had his press in operation by the following spring. In this volume is reproduced the first Passy imprint that can be dated with any certainty, his invitation to an Independence Day celebration. Also in the spring he reworked an essay that he had conceived over sixty years before. Entitled "The Morals of Chess," it became one of his best-known lighter pieces.

Volume

v. 30 ISBN 9780300055351

Description

The thirtieth volume of the collected writings and correspondences of the American statesman, ambassador, and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin In the months covered in this volume, Benjamin Franklin continues his tenure as sole minister plenipotentary to the French Court. The volume begins with the toasts of Franklin's Independence Day party and goes on to record the documents of diplomatic and naval events during these four months. Many of the figures who appear are familiar from previous volumes (Arthur Lee, John Paul Jones, Madame Brillon, Richard and Sally Bache).

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

• NCID: BA07208579
• ISBN:
  • 0300006500
  • 0300006586
  • 0300006594
  • 0300011326
  • 0300013175
  • 0300015704
  • 0300015968
  • 0300016859
  • 0300018657
  • 0300019661
  • 0300022247
  • 0300026188
  • 0300028970
  • 0300031629
  • 0300033702
  • 0300038194
  • 0300041772
  • 0300046731
  • 0300051883
  • 0300055358
• LCCN: 59012697
• Country Code: us
• Title Language Code: eng
• Text Language Code: eng
• Place of Publication: New Haven ; London
• Pages/Volumes: v.
• Size: 23 cm
• Classification:
  • LCC : E302
  • DC : 973.3/092/4
• Subject Headings:
  • LCSH : Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790