Benjamin Franklin's Experiments with Electricity

I bought a silver bracelet from a Navajo friend of mine who was sort of a– of a hermetic messenger that used to go back and forth between all the Americas and I– when I was moving from a house up here by the observatory I lost it. And about two years to the day Mr. Hall turned up with this exact duplicate. And it’s the only two that I’ve ever seen. And it was just one of those odd situations. So see the reincarnation of my triple cloud– my Indian name is Triple Cloud. And so this was my namesake and I don’t know how Mr. Hall got it back or if it’s a duplicate but it’s exactly the same. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen. So that’s what time I have, perpetually.

I guess I should just re-alert you– some of you know and some don’t, but I follow the old lecture schedule which was refashioned in the High Renaissance by Ficino and Trithemius and John Colet and those individuals who brought learning back. And the tradition was to lecture every other day. And at that rate one has to continuously prepare. And also you can’t put a finished product out. So you have to speak truthfully, as they say, because you don’t have time to make up some kind of an intellectual scream. So I follow that regimen and I speak also on Tuesdays and Saturdays. And if you’re interested, the Tuesdays are for the next several months on Alexandria – Tuesday nights at 8:00 – and because Alexandria takes in such a wide swath of material– For instance this coming Tuesday night is on the book of Daniel. On the the esoteric visions of Messianic Judaism and Gnosticism as their origins are in the Book of Daniel. So if you’re at all interested in the origins and the– the depths of our civilization, this might be interesting to you. Saturdays are free-form lectures on the great tradition and there’s always a mix of the I Ching and the Rig Veda and the American Indian traditions and modern abstract art and the poetic traditions through the ages. And it’s all extempore but if you get interested you might want to drop in. And those are at 9:30 in the morning and they go until 11:00. We have a break and then we come back for another session for about an hour and a half. And those Saturday classes together form a demonstration of the way in which symbolic vision can be learned. It is a learnable tradition and it takes roughly two years to go through a cycle. It takes a year to develop a sensitivity for it and it takes a second year to learn to put that sensitivity back into the normal proportions of a daily life. And we’re– it’s an ongoing situation. And you’re– you’re welcome to look in on this. Both the Tuesday and the Saturdays are at 2029 Hyperion, which is just a mile down the road from here. You go down Griffith Park to Hyperion and you move down Hyperion as if you’re going to Sunset.

This– this series, of course is the first of four series that will attempt to outline at least our American tradition, the tradition that is not talked about in the universities. The tradition that is has been left out of the textbooks for some good long while and it comes as a great shock and surprise to most people of what we don’t know, about ourselves, about our origins. Take Franklin for instance. Franklin’s works were almost not made available. During his lifetime, of course, he published The Poor Richard’s Almanac. He published several books by himself. Several other friends published works. But almost all of these were in small editions, small printings. The Franklin Papers when he died in 1790, were left with his literary executor William Temple Franklin, who was a Tory who was a paid agent of the British government who took the Franklin papers to London who dallied for about 26 years not publishing anything. And finally when he died, the papers went to a creditor and lay on the shelf of a laundry for another twenty years. And it was only due to the will of the United States Congress, in the 19th century, that the papers were located. They were bought from the various individuals and places that they had been disbanded to, and were brought together. A great many of them were in Philadelphia at that time and a great many of them were put in the Library of Congress. It wasn’t until almost a century after Franklin’s death that there was any move at all to publish a coherent edition. And, the first edition of Franklin’s collected works is called the Federal Edition and it came out in 1904. And that’s the edition that I’m working out of. In 1959 Yale University Press, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and the US Congress put funds together to publish for the first time in history a complete collected works of Franklin. And they’re not yet finished. I think they’re up to probably the late 1770s. The latest volume I have from Yale is 1775, and it came out about two years ago.

Why is it that one of the great founders of the United States has never had his works completely published? Is it just because of a colossal lackadaisicalness? Or is it because when we look through the works of Franklin we discover something about the nature and character of our origins that have been discouraged from being generally known? Those of you who have come now for two lectures and are ready for the third tonight are beginning to realize that Franklin is a revolutionary mind. He is not your normal person. He is in fact, as the great philosopher David Hume wrote to him, the first great man from the New World. And Franklin was not only the first great man but he was a totally new kind of mind. And one of the demonstrations of Franklin’s freedom of mind, a characteristic which is incidentally peculiarly American, was his work in the sciences.

Now Franklin’s outlook on science, especially his electrical experiments, were written up by him in the form of letters to a friend in England – Mr. Peter Collinson – and then they were published by him as a collected work in 1754. This collection of works, along with the letters that followed it, had an international following. They were translated into Latin. They were translated into French. There were editions in German and in fact it was Franklin’s outlook on the nature of the physical world, the notion that there was an interconnected whole that man’s mind could patiently unravel through experiment, and through keeping a record of the experiments, and through keeping an open mind, not letting any theological or any philosophical prejudice color his capacity to experience and then to further the experiments along the lines of accruing experience. And so the relationship between experiment and experience in Franklin is crucial and it takes an open mind to do this. There’s very little real science even today in the late 20th century. So that Franklin becomes one of the first real working scientists, one for whom the acquisition of further information fed back into a body of experience which had been written up and transcribed into experiments which then could be duplicated or gone through by anyone at any place. There were Italians following, and they were experiencing the same results in Turin. There were Frenchmen who read Franklin and they were unsure about the translations. The great naturalist Buffon specifically put up the money, the funds, to have Franklin retranslated into French to make sure that they had the translations right because it was a revolutionary application of human intelligence. Franklin’s mind became the spearhead of what we today experience as science. His outlook vis-a-vis the natural electrical experience – he’s the first one for instance to ever discover that electricity has both a positive and a minus polarity to it; he’s the first one to understand that electricity collapse that points collect it and also that it has a dispersal capacity.

He’s the first one to understand the tremendous complications that come about from what is called piezoelectric effect in crystals. Crystals especially it was discovered that tourmaline crystals if you simply heat them up they begin to manifest electrical voltage across the faces of their X,Y, and Z. And if you just increase the pressure the voltage will go up. And conversely, if a voltage is applied, if they’re put in an electric field, there’s a slight misshaping of the crystalline structure. All of this was puzzling in the– to the greatest possible extent. And there was almost no way to account for the increasing body of information until Franklin’s mind came along and began to put it into a form of open-ended experience. This was so revolutionary that by the late 1750s a German mathematician named Aepinus – A-E-P-I-N-U-S – took Franklin’s open ended mental map of what electricity, as a body of experience and a body of experiments expressing that experience, and Aepinus mathematized all of Franklin’s work. It came out in 1759. There’s just been an addition from Princeton University Press, just in the last year, called Aepinus’s Essay on the Theory of Electricity and Magnetism. And what it was was taking Franklin’s work and putting it into mathematical form. This is the beginning of modern physics. This is the beginning of the modern mentality which distinguishes our capacities from any other people at any other time. There never was a people at any other time or place who were able to conceive of the universe in an open-minded way like Franklin did. And when Franklin’s mental openness was put into a mathematical expression we had for the first time in history a body of mathematically expressed coherence on one of the basic structures of nature. This was 1759.

Within the generation of that modern science was on its way. And Franklin’s work was seminal in this. It was the beginning. It was the seed that was capable of growing. Now there are some great ideas that are stoppers. There are some great ideas that are so comprehensive that once they are uttered, that’s it. For instance, just to give you an example, Plotinus’s writings are a dead end. Plotinus was the finest metaphysical mind that the Western world has ever produced. The Aeneids cannot be better, but their expressiveness is so convoluted in its completeness and its perfection, that one is stymied to the point to where it takes years and years just to master the vocabulary. You cannot improve on Plotinus. Franklin’s mind was eminently improvable. His mental outlook was to turn over everything that he knew and in such a complete way that anybody else could take up and begin where he left off and carry it further. And he’s the first person to have this kind of outlook. He’s what we would call today, a pragmatist, somebody who believed that his work was not supposed to be a summation but a restructuring of closed ends into an open-ended situation that could be braided further by further experience. And so with Aepinus’s theory of electricity and magnetism, it occurred for the first time when it was put into mathematical form that electrical and magnetic occurrences were related, that they had the same matrix of operation.

Later on when he was aged and in France in the mid 1780s, when there was a tremendous interest in animal magnetism with Anton Mesmer. And the French population were being driven almost to hysterical outbreaks in these salons. Doctor Franklin, the old American sage, was brought in to experience one of these animal magnetic seances because he was the man that the French Enlightenment trusted above any other human being to see what was there to understand what actually occurred and to be able to express to everyone else what had actually occurred. He was somebody who was impeccable in his intellectual honesty, in his perceptual acumen, in his open-ended intelligence.

So Franklin becomes a very curious type of a human being. He is the first man whose mind is open. He doesn’t know the final solutions. He’s rather like Socrates. He does not possess knowledge, but he does possess the method for uncovering the knowledge which must be there somewhere in nature, somewhere in man’s capacity to experience. And he is able to teach others this openness. This becomes his prime characteristic. And it gives the United States a tremendous advantage.

If you think that Washington is the father of this country. Then we look back upon a glum capable military man able to see us through travail and able to hold together through the quiet dignity of his personality a structure of law and order a plan of government. But if you see Franklin as the founder of this country then the experience is different. Then it is open-ended. Then it is in fact not so much the government of the Constitution but the government of the great experiment in human liberty. What will come out if you suddenly have tens of millions of free individuals for whom the constraints psychologically religious and historical are taken off? We don’t know, would say Franklin, we’ve never seen this and we would like to see what happens. Therefore, wonderful as it is, the Constitution is but a working tool. It’s a plan that we carry in our pockets but we carry in our pockets and it is our life experience that must educate us to conditions perhaps that had never occurred before. In fact the mind of Franklin would say let us create new conditions. We have a good idea of what man has been like historically and we know his limitations and we know his capacities. We have gotten quite far with the limitations and the capacities. Now let us experiment and see what happens when tens of millions of human beings are ostensibly free to form relationships and associations which have never been seen before. It’s the capacity to dream dreams that had never been. I think the phrase once used in a speech I was at, “it’s the capacity to seek a new world.” A world that has never been.

[comment/question from the audience]

The cartoon at the time showed Doctor Franklin with his glasses and the diagram and walking into a salon and there are people diving under couches and there are people trying to put masks on and there are French ladies in compromised positions crying out Papa! – that’s what they called Franklin – and there’s Franklin looking at the entire situation as the as the Papa would, you see.

In the works of Franklin we notice that by the late 1740s we find a letter, the first one, to Peter Collinson. It’s dated March 28th 1747, Philadelphia. And Franklin is writing here to England. And he writes this:

“Your kind present of an electric tube, with directions for using it, has put several of us on making electrical experiments, in which we have observed some particular phenomena that we looked upon to be new. I shall therefore communicate them to you in my next, though possibly they may not be new to you, as among the– daily. –the numbers daily employed in those experiments on your side of the water, ‘tis probable [that] some one or other has hit [upon] the same observations. For my own part I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has [done lately]; for what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my Friends and Acquaintances, who, from the novelty of the thing, come continually in crowds to see them, I have, during some months past, had little leisure for any thing else. I am, etc. Benjamin Franklin.”

Now this tube that was sent by Collinson was eventually improved upon, and glass jars, Leyden jars, were put into use for collecting electrical energy. As Collinson would receive these letters from Franklin, he would communicate them, through men’s clubs of the time and through a letter circuit, and some of these then were translated and published in part. Franklin then, writing to Collinson later that summer of 1747, writes on “New Observations,” he says:

“The first of the wonderful effect of pointed bodies, [is] both in drawing off and throwing off the electrical fire.” So that he begins to notice that there is an ebb and a flow. There’s a flux to electrical energy. He rather thought of it at this time as a fluid. A very subtle electrical fluid. And this being able to throw off as well as draw off this electrical fire became quite interesting to Franklin. And in his experiments he realized that the reverse of the capacity was sudden and rather violent. That what had been drawn would be suddenly repelled as if there were a line drawn and then on the other side of the line was something else.

So later that fall, in a letter to Collinson, he writes that: “At the same time the wire and [the] top of the bottle is electrised positively or plus, the bottom of the bottle is electrised negatively or minus, in exact proportion…” Franklin is the first one to discover this capacity – the positive and the negative poles of electricity. And so he’s reporting this for the very first time: September 1st, 1747. That is, “...whatever quantity of electrical fire is thrown in at the top, an equal quantity goes out at the bottom.” So that there’s an equilibrium and now this became very interesting to him because this is a universal phenomenon. Nature preserves its equilibrium through attraction and repulsion and that attraction and repulsion is in the same cycle of effectiveness. This becomes very interesting to Franklin. He writes: “The equilibrium cannot be restored in the bottle by inward communication or contact of the parts; but it must be done by a communication formed without the bottle…” – on the outside of the bottle – “...between the top and [the] bottom, by some non-electric, touching or approaching both at the same time; in which case it is restored with a violence and quickness inexpressible; or, touching each alternately…” – top or bottom – “...in which case the equilibrium is restored by degrees.” This becomes a paradigm. This begins to sink into Franklin’s mind.

As 1747 went on, his range of acquaintances began to widen and those individuals who were following Franklin’s experiments began to include some very famous individuals on both sides of the Atlantic. In the Philadelphia area, one of the most famous individuals was a man named James Logan. I don’t know how much so-called basic standard history you know. James Logan was the individual that William Penn chose to be his agent in Pennsylvania when he had to go back to England. And so Logan, by 1747, was a very old man. In fact he would live just about 3 or 4 more years and die close to age 80. He had been the contact for the Quaker people with the American Indians. In fact, one of the great American Indian orators was named Logan for James Logan. And Logan was also a scientist, and one of Linnaeus’s classifications in botany was named after James Logan. So this old distinguished man, quite amazing, who had run the province of Pennsylvania for William Penn, who had been the head of the provincial proprietorship up until about 1738, now was retiring into science. And we find so many of this great first two generations of American immigrants once they settled in like Franklin and became fairly successful, instead of going on and making just more money, they settled into a scientific correspondence among themselves. All this was happening in the late 1740s.

So Franklin was writing to him about electricity and about his experiments and also writing to him about the need to write political descriptions – as Franklin would call them – which were based upon what he called plain truth simply informing people of the conditions, giving them the information, and not putting it together for them. In other words here’s Franklin’s open-endedness again but this time in politics not in science. That what needs to be made available are the facts of a situation. The arrangement of the statistics as it were, the information in unadulterated collections (columns and numbers and so forth), and along with it just the encouragement to others to have a sense of humanity about the information and to put it together in their own way. And that when they have done this for themselves then they should collect themselves together. Then they should go to public meetings and express to each other what impressions, or what conclusions they have come to. So that the process is rather scientific.

First there is the collecting of the data of the information then the arranging of it in public reports and given off to individuals to privately and personally come to an understanding for themselves as best they can. Then to come into public meetings, together, and exchange the ideas of what they have made out of this information. And then when they come to some consensus to go back to the information. Go back to the basic experience and in this way to try and inform their decisions along an experimental scientific line. This is quite a– quite a new procedure incidentally. So Franklin is talking about this at the same time as he is talking about the procedure of investigating natural forces so that the– the nature of man, our insides, is a natural force. It can be investigated in a similar way if not even the same way that nature can be investigated. And if we are developing our sense of community together along these lines we at the same time develop a real relationship to the natural world. This of course was what Franklin was attempting to do.

In this development it became apparent to some of Franklin’s correspondents that there should be according to their prejudices, or according to the likes of traditional background, there should be basic qualities that exist in matter and they set about trying to arrange experiments to prove what they felt must be there. One of the ideas at this time that was mooted rather publicly in Europe was the idea of inertia. That inertia should exist in matter. And Franklin was dead set against this. He didn’t like the idea that there should be something there aside from what actually does occur in the phenomenon and in its operation. And at this time Franklin writes a letter to– in late 1747 to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence incidentally, a man named Thomas Hopkinson, and he writes to him trying to prove that there cannot be this quality of inertia in matter as a quality. And he’s writing in here:

“Let me turn the thing in what light I please, I cannot discover the Vis Inertiae nor any effect of it. Tis allowed by all that a [body say] Body 1A, moving with a Velocity 1C, and a Force of 1F, striking another Body 1A at Rest, they will afterwards move on together, each with one-half C, and one-half F; which, as I said before, is equal in the Whole to 1C and 1F. If [inertia] as in this Case neither abates the Force nor the Velocity of Bodies, What does it, or how does it discover itself? I imagine I may venture to conclude my Observations on this Piece, almost in Words of this author,” – that he’s criticizing – “ ‘That if the Doctrines of the Immateriality of the Soul, and the Existence of God, and of Divine Providence are demonstrable from no plainer Principles, the Deist…” – that is the theist – “...hath a desperate Cause in Hand.’ I oppose my Theist to his Atheist, because I think they are diametrically opposite and not near of kin…” And he goes on then to close off his letter in a very humane way, sort of poking gentle fun, in the Franklin way, at this European gentleman trying to see a king or some royal prerogative sitting somewhere in the universe but not really participating in its actual flow. This was one of the functions that Franklin was very very critical about. If the universe has a working dynamic which is real all of its properties all of its effects must be in the right the dynamic and not in some hidden esoteric static implicit in all that happens dynamically but not discoverable. This is what Franklin objected to.

If the universe is real it must be real in its workings and not in some sub-universe beneath the actual workings. This of course was a viewpoint which was very difficult for many people at that time to understand. It’s very difficult for many people at this time to understand that it’s not irreligious at all, but is rather religious in an experiential mode. If the divine exists, it exists in the workings of nature, and not abstractly separate from nature. That if it existed abstractly separate from nature, the mind of man, the experience of man, would never know, would never be able to know. There is no speculative leap or jump that would permit us to even guess at it. Whereas Franklin’s emphasis is that we can discover, we can experience, because it actually occurs there. Therefore we should trust to our capacities to learn to find out and trust also to our capacities to discover, among ourselves, a more clearer picture. That the limitations of one are not necessarily the limitations of another and that if we come together in a working ensemble we have a chance to see the entire spectrum of a situation very clearly in terms of which it really exists. And that if we do this repeatedly, long enough, we will build up an actual experience of reality that is indistinguishable from the actual case. This is what he is driving at. This is what he is getting to.

He writes a whole series of letters to Collinson all through the 1740s and occasionally we find him including in his letters not only the wonderful magic squares that Franklin was famous for, but even magic circles. And what Franklin’s mind is playing with here is rather like the capacity of some people to do crossword puzzles. It’s the capacity to see the hidden structures and orders, the hidden correlations of an expression matrix, brought out in the open. In this case the matrix is the relationship of numbers, all numbers, and the fact that numbers organize themselves is then a disclosure that if we understand the nature of number in its patterned order to any limited extent that that pattern is expandable indefinitely we can understand the whole by a coherent pattern of the part given enough experience we don’t have to have all the experience in the world just enough to put the pattern together right once. So these magic squares and these magic circles are for Franklin a first indication that the language of mathematics, if it could be understood in a rather complete expressive way just once, we could then have a complete true picture of reality. This becomes apparent later on in atomic theory for instance. We don’t get this very much anymore because everything is now subatomic, but the nature of the elements do not depend upon the nucleus and the arrangement of the nucleus. They depend upon a relationality in structure in the electron arrangement and these patterns are limited. There are about ten or twelve of these patterns and they reoccur. And every so often in the increasing complexity of the electron relationship the same pattern reoccurs only on a more complex level. So that if one looks at a table of elements. They’re arranged in families and all of the natural elements that occur are in family structures. And once one knows the pattern, one sees a cyclical sequence of patterns that reoccur again and again. And we discovered in nuclear physics that if one goes further along creating new elements as it were, they also participate in this family resemblance. So that the Franklin idea that we have to understand the patterns of nature as completely as possible, in a limited though rather amplified set of human experience and once we do we are no longer baffled. We don’t have to experience everything. We will know the basic pattern.

So this is what he is looking at in the 1740s and it was rather peculiar for the Europeans – and you have to realize that Franklin was almost the only American who they were following at this time. And it was peculiar for the learned Europeans – in France and Germany and England and Italy – to be experiencing this exquisite openness of mind being tutored almost as it were in the method of free thinking of open ended mentality which at the same time was precisely ordered. This is a very peculiar note, it incidentally is true also of English as a language. The French language, the Spanish language, the German language, all have their proper usages. English has no one proper usage. However it is used it makes its field of expressive applicability anew again and again so that proper English is quite different at different places in different times. One could use Chaucer’s English expressively accurate, or one could use Shakespeare’s English, or one could use the English of William Faulkner. They’re all quite different. It is the same language and there is no one proper form. Franklin’s mind is rather like the English language. It is open in this– this peculiar way.

He began to collect together not only an interesting coterie of individuals in Europe and America, but he began to become interested in the early 1750s in the forms which human life took in collective action. We would call it today, politics or civic arrangement. And one of the models for Franklin was the American Indian, and in the American Indian the Six nations of the Confederation, the Iroquois Confederation, the Onondaga, the Senecas, the Mohawks, and so forth. By the early 1750s France and England were vying with each other for control of North America and the only movable pawn in this game really were the American Indian tribes. And the French and the English were doing their best to try to bring the tribes over to one side or the other – the French being more successful generally at this. In Franklin’s experience in his mind he was trying to see the American Indians not as pawns but as the quintessential Americans as the individuals from whom the relationalities which could obtain in this landscape in this environment in this history was the viable model. And when we come back from the break I’ll try and give you some of the information in the American Indian which became crucial to the formation of the United States largely through the mind of Franklin. He’s the only one of that time who understood. And the only person he could ever pass it on to was Thomas Jefferson.

Well let’s take a little break here and then we’ll come back to this interesting point.

I’d like to read you a description of human nature from Franklin – this is 1756. He’s writing this to the daughter of one of his nieces. Her father had died and so Franklin is writing to her and this is his way of consoling, not by being sentimental but by being spiritually exact. This is his– his phrasing.

“...a man is not completely born until he be dead: Why then should we grieve that a new child is born among the immortals? A new member added to their happy society? We are spirits. That bodies should be lent to us, while they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or [in] doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of God – when they become unfit for these purposes and afford us pain instead of pleasure – instead of an aid, become an incumbrance and answer none of the intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that way. We ourselves [in some cases] prudently choose a partial death.… a mangled painful limb, which cannot be restored, [is] willingly cut off. He who plucks out a tooth, parts with it freely since the pain goes with it, and he who quits the whole body, parts at once with all pains and possibilities of pains and diseases [which] it was liable to, or capable of making him suffer. Our friend and we [were] invited abroad on a party of pleasure – [which] is to last for ever. His chair was [ready first] and he is gone before us. We could not all conveniently start together, [but] why should you and I be grieved at this, since we are soon to follow, and we know where to find him.”

This was Franklin’s way of looking at life. He is very forthright, wide-eyed as they say – the owl.

This is the first letter from Benjamin Franklin to George Washington. This is August 1756. Washington at this time was commander in chief of the Virginia forces that were raised to protect the frontiers in the French and Indian Wars. Franklin of course had been one of the few individuals who believed in preparedness. This is very difficult in Pennsylvania because Pennsylvania was largely a Quaker colony. That is to say there were three kinds of colonists. There were charter colonies that were given a sort of a parliamentary beginning and so forth. There were colonies that evolved themselves out of need for religious freedom. And then there were colonies – proprietary colonies they were called and Pennsylvania and Maryland were the last two proprietary colonies. They were owned by a proprietorship. This is a form, like the British East India Company in India: we give you the right to use this land and this property and you pay us so much and you can own and sell this property but the ultimate ownership rests with us. We’re proprietors and you work out your destiny but under the ultimate aegis we own this.

The Quakers were the proprietors of Pennsylvania. They did not want to fight. In fact they took it greatly amiss about fighting with the American Indians. All of the early Pennsylvania geniuses, like James Logan or Conrad Weiser, they all spoke American Indian languages. They talked with the Indians in their own language. And whenever there was a meeting, a confab, for the province as a whole, the American Indians were there to participate in the conferences. In 1754 we’ll see that the Albany Congress in upstate New York invited the representatives of the Six Nations tribes there to the Albany Conference. And there was no idea of having a government without the Indians. Well, the basic thing was that the Quakers trusted the Indians but many of the colonists did not trust the French. And so Franklin was one of the few individuals who understood that you have to be armed and you have to have weapons and you have to have a defensive fort system. You don’t have to man it and garrison it all the time but they have to be there so that in times of trouble you have some place to energize with men and weapons and create a defensive net. So they had gone out and made these forts, and Washington, as a young man was in charge of Virginia militia who were doing their tours on the frontiers. And this is the first time that Franklin wrote to Washington. It’s about postal service. It’s about the mail. It’s about paying the postal clerks. And the old man is telling him, if you guys want mail, you’re going to have to kick in, because we can’t pay all these expenses all the time and the only reason that there’s any mail going up there is that you have made this situation. He says,

“I have… forwarded the Pacquet inclos’d in that of July 23rd as directed; and shall readily take care of any other Letters from… you that pass thro’ my hands. The Post between this Place and Winchester was established for the Accommodation of the Army chiefly, by a Vote of our Assembly; they are not willing to continue the Charge, and it must I believe be dropt, unless your Assembly and that of Maryland will contribute to support it, which perhaps is scarce to be expected. I am sorry [that] it should be laid down as I shall my self be a Loser in the Affair of Newspapers: But the Letters per Post, by no means defray the Expence. If you can prevail with your Assembly to pay the Rider from Winchester to Carlisle, I will endeavour to persuade ours to continue Paying the Rider from Carlisle hither…” and so on.

And this is the first indication that Washington and Franklin were going to know each other – 1756.

Franklin was extremely wise about the American Indians. Being raised in Boston gave him a certain outlook. Growing up in Philadelphia gave him another. But being an open-minded man gave him the most comprehensive viewpoint, and his basic tone was that any Indian who had ever been educated in Europe or given an English education in the colonies always went back to his people, never stayed in the White ways. That the only Indians who stayed in the White ways were very few who had made their peace as a population of people, various tribes who had agreed upon a peaceful relationship with their White neighbors. And he said invariably the case was that the Indian populations declined slowly but inevitably. They never expanded. Whereas on the other hand, that if White people learn to live with the Indians, either against their will as captives, or even those individuals who had gone out on their own, they never wanted to return back to White society. He says even when they were brought back, so-called rescued, they would be morose after a while and after two or three years they’d be back filtering out into the wilderness and no one would ever see them again.

And when they were at the Albany Congress Franklin made it clear that the Six Nations had told the colonists that they would be very interested if any of the colonists wanted to send their children to the Six Nations they would educate them and they would take care of them. And when they were finished they could come back if they wanted to. That they’d like to help them to understand how to be human in this world that they actually were in. And so Franklin is saying in his letters constantly that there is an importance to the American Indians. We have to gain and preserve the friendship of the American Indians – that this is extremely necessary. In fact, he writes, 1751, Philadelphia:

“Dear Mr. Parker,
I have, as you desire, read the Manuscript you sent me; and [I] am of Opinion, with the publick-spirited Author, that securing the Friendship of the Indians is of the greatest Consequence to these Colonies; and that the surest Means of doing it, are, to regulate the Indian Trade, so as to convince them, by Experience, that they have the best [the] cheapest Goods, and the fairest Dealing from the English; and to unite the several Governments, so as to form a Strength that the Indians may depend on for Protection, in Case of a Rupture with the French.”

…

“…therefore if the English Gentlemen would send a dozen or two of their Children to [the] Onondago Great Council [they] would take care of their Education, bring them up in what was [really] the best manner and make men of them.”

So Franklin had this wonderful understanding of the Indians and at the plan for the union of the colonies that he mooted in 1754, the various northern colonies sent together about twenty-five different commissioners. And Franklin was the head commissioner from Pennsylvania. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. And this was the first of the talks that they were holding. And the American Indian tribes were also invited. And a motion was made that the commissioners deliver their opinion whether a union of all the colonies is not at present absolutely necessary for their security and defense. The question was put and passed affirmatively, unanimously, so that in Albany in 1754 was the first unanimous agreement that there had to be an union, a plan for the union.

How to do this? So Franklin’s mind conceived this first plan and in the matter of forming a union. He wrote,

“No doubt any private person may in a proper manner make any proposals which he thinks for the public benefit but if they are to be made by the Commissioners of the Several Colonies who now meet at Albany it may be presumed that they speak the sense of their constituents. What Authority have they to do this? I know of none from either the Council or Assembly of New York. However these things may be properly talkt of in conversation among the Commissioners for [further] information and in order to induce the several assemblies to give proper powers to Commissioners to meet afterwards for this purpose.”

So the first thing that Franklin does – here we’re having a meeting to effect a union. The first thing we need to do is to send you people back to your respective colonies To let them understand that the reason that we’re meeting and coming together is to form a union, that we can’t do this unless they have proper representational authority. And so the colonies individually are going to have to think this through for themselves. And in whatever way they decide, in their respective colonies, they’re going to have to return you back here with the proper authority to represent these different colonies. This is Franklin’s way of beginning. Not with a political theory; not with some grand plan of taking over; but with the very practical scientific outlook. Before we can do anything we’ve got to make sure that we have the right to do this in terms of those people that we’re trying to represent. So this was the first ago.

He established that the necessity for a union must be a product of an established act of Parliament. That is it cannot simply be a plan that somebody foists on someone else – that the strong have over the weak or that the clever have over those who are not so secret. That whatever union is established it has to be established by an act of Parliament which means that there has to be this representation of Parliament in the first place. He writes here,

“In all cases where the strength of the whole was necessary to be used against the enemy, there would be the same difficulty in degree, to bring the several unions to unite together, as now the several colonies; and consequently the same delays on our part and advantage to the enemy. Each union would be [weaker separately] than when joined by the whole,” and that we have to get over the various selfish views that individual colonies seem to have regarding themselves, regarding the lands, regarding Indian trade, and so forth.

One of the first indications then of the union of all the colonies would be that they could treat fairly as a whole with the American Indians. He writes, “The Indian trade would be better regulated by the union of the whole than by the partial unions.” And further. And Franklin is the first to put this in print, that the colonies on the Atlantic seaboard are not going to be in the future the only colonies. Franklin, in his writing, says, “The establishing of new colonies westward on the Ohio and the lakes, (a matter of considerable importance to the increase of British trade and power, to the breaking that of the French and to the protection and security of our present colonies,) would best be carried on by a joint union.”

Franklin is the first to envision this – this is 1754. And in fact his contention was many pronged at the same time. These new colonies on the Ohio River and on the Great Lakes, from all reports, would be the most fertile of all the colonies in terms of food production. They would also entail having new relationships with Indian tribes that they had not come into contact with heretofore. They would also bring themselves into a direct conflict with the French empire building tendency, and that hidden underneath it all it would bring the colonies into conflict with the British Empire if it were not handled just exactly right. Franklin is trying in print in this report to set up this grand Council to discuss unity. And he says here, “The Grand Council is intended to represent all the several houses of representatives of the colonies, as a house of representatives doth the several towns or counties of a colony.”

In other words the House of Representatives for the Union is going to be a representation of the individual houses of representatives in the various colonies so that the Union is not going to be something other than what the colonies were, but that the practical relationship of bringing the colonies together in a unity, the unity is going to take that particular flavor that was there in the relationship of the whole, so that the– the unity will not be something new, something just dreamed up, something speculatively brought into being, but will be an accurate record of the exact relationship that actually does obtain between the colonies.

This is a whole profound way of looking at the United States as a– as an entity. This also completely forestalls the whole States rights issues. It forestalls the whole development of a tyrannical federal government. It forestalls the whole nature of people being forced to choose between necessary allegiance to a monolith and preferable allegiance to a neighborhood, a township, a city, a state, a colony. That is to say Franklin’s original idea here, mooted in 1754, is that whatever form the unity, the Union, is going to have, it must pragmatically take its working impress from the actual conditions that obtain between the colony. And the model for this was the six nations; that these tribes had come together, had formed a council together, and when they made a decision it was a decision where the tribal leaders met together. And the one Grand Council was actually the tribe of the tribe, and it was not a separate authority from the tribes themselves being only made up of what was actually there in terms of the representatives.

In other words, it’s just like in the scientific theory about inertia; that there’s no hidden esoteric power of the whole outside of its manifestation in the relationality of the parts. The pattern of unity is the complete working of all the parts together and whatever integrity it has is based on that relationship, on that unity and nothing else comes into play, that it is a tyrannical speculative quality of the human mind. It is a depraved irrationality to think that well now we’ve got a new entity, something else has to come into play other than what was there in the first place. This of course has been forgotten, again and again, and when it’s been discovered it seemed revelatory. This was in fact the argument that Lincoln used to hold the Union together. That the Union is not some superpower different from the States, but is all the states together as a unity. And that’s what this is about. Not creating a monolith, but creating a pattern of interrelation where all participate. That’s different.

If one thinks in terms of monolithic power where the unity, the Union, becomes a super state then the tendency to control that super state leaps away from the pragmatic experience of the people and leaps into the speculative realms of power mongering. And instead of people governing themselves, you have political factions that seek to control the mechanisms of bureaucratic control of the people. and this is a whole different thing. This of course will become the bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, because this is exactly where the battle lines finally came to pass and the election of 1800 is the place that will discover that it comes out into the open.

But Franklin is the first man to moot this reality and understand it. And further, to insist that the only way that human beings can understand this is to develop an open-ended mind. That if they addict themselves to plans of control, they will always opt for this kind of bureaucratic structure. Whereas, if they base themselves on a scientific humanistic open-ended experience, they will always require that the representatives represent them and not some distant idea of control, some distant plan of action. So Franklin then writes that the first place of meeting for this should be the city of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania because Philadelphia is, “nearer the center of [all] the colonies where the Commissioners would be well and cheaply accommodated. The high-roads through the whole extent, are for the most part very good, in which forty or fifty miles a day may well be and frequently are travelled.”

Do you remember about those roads? The roads were made largely for the Postal Service. And who was the Postmaster General who made those roads possible? It was Franklin. It seems like an old chess player. He’s readying all these pieces a couple decades before they come together. But he’s not moving on one plan alone. But he’s developing a whole matrix of plans. This is the way Mother Nature works: something here, something there, something over here, and down the line. When they proliferate and grow they tend to come together because they have a natural affinity. All of these items all of these occurrences have a relational unity together.

The United States grew more out of the open-ended mind of Franklin than it ever did in any convention. Franklin trained three or four generations of individuals to see what was there to deal with what relationalities actually obtain. Not always successful but pretty much so.

His idea was, “That there should be a new election of members of the Grand Council every three years; …” – but the whole thing should go up every three years and that, “...on the death or resignation of any member, his place [should] be supplied by a new choice at the next sitting of the assembly of the colony he represented. Some colonies have annual assemblies, some continue during a governor’s pleasure; three years was thought [to be] a reasonable medium, as affording a new member time to improve himself in the business, and to act after such improvement; yet giving opportunities, frequent enough, to change him if he misbehaved.”

The Grand Council should meet every year. It should come together. It shouldn’t be a permanently sitting body in some location constantly but be reconvened every year. And when they come together they could come together sooner if occasion require, at such time and such place, as they shall adjourn to at the last preceding meeting. The idea here is a free-floating democracy that the center of the government is where it is this year, and where it’s going to be next year might be different, depending on the circumstances. That, “...the President General on any emergency; he having first obtained in writing the consent of seven of the members to such [a] call, and sent due and timely notice to the whole.”

So that when the time came it was the pressure from the individuals who made up the Grand Council of that time to initiate the convening.

“...the Grand Council should have [the] power to choose their speaker; and shall neither be dissolved, prorogued, nor continued sitting longer than six weeks at one time; without their own consent or [by] the special command.”

In other words six weeks was long enough to be at work. When there would be enough complications that should come up then it’s time to take a break, let things calm down, take a little time off, and then go back to work and stay there until everything was finished for the year.

“That the President General, with the advice of the Grand Council, [should] hold or direct all Indian treaties in which the general interest of the colonies may be concerned; and make peace or declare war with Indian nations.”

The whole idea of the unity of the colonies in Franklin’s mind was essentially to set up, to establish, a bridging with the American Indian populations. That the colonies individually could not have long term developing relationships with the Indian tribes by themselves. And he goes into this quite vociferously, I don’t want to bring some of this information out at this time, but Franklin was extremely sensitive to this issue. The trade with the American Indians, he felt, should be done from the basis of the unity of the whole of all the colonies. And of course the notion here was that the Indian tribes as a population would eventually form a union and deal with the colonies on the basis of a whole, rather than tribe by tribe, rather than small pocket of people by small pocket of people.

“That they [should] make such laws as they judge necessary for regulating [them] all Indian trade.”

“That they make all purchases from Indians for the crown, of lands not now within the boundaries of particular colonies or shall not be within their bounds when some of them are reduced to more convenient dimensions.”

He writes here, “Purchases from the Indians made by private persons, have been attended with many inconveniences. They have frequently interfered, and occasioned uncertainty of titles, many disputes and expensive law-suits, hindered the settlement of the land so disputed.” And so on.

A lot of this incidentally came out at the Treaty of Albany. One of the Delaware chiefs spoke, representing all of the Indian tribes and Indian peoples, and in his speech he pointed out the difficulty of the original land titles in the colonies. He pointed out that originally the land titles were given temporarily by the Indian tribes to specific individual families; that the lands were not sold to those families, but that the families were given the right to live their lives on such and such plots of land. But that then the descendants of those people made up false papers that said that they owned these lands and therefore they could sell these lands to other people, so that the next generation – sort of the grandparent generation to the people that had made the original agreements with the Indians – the grandparent generations were people who had no idea of the reality of the relationship. And they came in and said we own these lands because we bought the land titles for money. So the Delaware chief was saying at the Albany conference that this is now going on for four or five generations so that many people have the wrong idea about the lands. They’re thinking that they’re owning these lands. No one owns these lands. They are taking care of them as long as they do take care of them, but when they leave those lands automatically revert back to nature, back to what the White men would call the wilderness. They are no longer carved out entities that exist on paper. And this was a very great problem for the American colonists. It was a very great problem for the mind of most of the individuals at that time. Franklin was understanding them.

You see it’s all very much like electricity. Who owns this electricity? You have this Leyden jar and it becomes electrified. And you have the use of that electricity that’s in there. And you may use it, you may store it and use it later on. When you use it, where does that electricity go? It goes back into nature. This was the model. Not so much a model but it was like an object lesson in reality. What actually is real vis a vis nature? Our participation with it, as we are now, but we can’t abstract that participation and make it something other than what it is and then trade on that symbolic representation of that other – pieces of paper, histories, etc. If we do, we’re participating in a very very corrosive illusion because then we’re corralling people in their own lives and their own livingness in terms of papers that are accrued from debt and long forgotten relationships that no longer obtain. It’s like living under a curse.

This bothered Franklin a lot that this was not understood. And later in England, in the 1760s when he was back for a second time, he pointed out one of the worst situations that had occurred in the colonies. And I’m going to, probably have to bring this in next time. I don’t know it’s– it’s very difficult to bring this in. It was an event that happened outside of Philadelphia involving the massacre of the last twenty Indians who had made the personal deal with William Penn and James Logan. The– There were twenty surviving members of this tribe. Seven men, five women, and eight children. And they were– Three of the men and two of the women and one of the children were massacred by a vigilante group of fifty-seven White riders. They broke in– These Indians were called the Conestoga Indians because they lived at Conestoga Manor which was near to Philadelphia.

The Indians had– had been reduced down to this population in this manner in the seventy years of their– their lives with the colonists there. Well, these fifty-seven vigilantes came in and killed hatchets and scalped these five adults and this child. And the others were out selling baskets and various other wares that the Indians would make in order to secure funds to keep themselves going. So the head of the Quaker proprietorship, appalled by this, brought the Indians into Philadelphia and they put them into a guarded blockhouse. And he sent out a declaration saying that these people should be brought to justice. But there was a contention between the population, who were for expanding business in the colonies and their hold, and those individuals who were appalled as just simple individuals. And the private feelings of individuals who were appalled, were largely private grievings. People who felt bad in themselves but did nothing about it. And the vigilantes recollected themselves, rode into Philadelphia, stormed the blockhouse, and killed all the rest of the Indians – seven children.

The whole contention of Franklin was that we are at a watershed of understanding, not only nature, but human nature in its only profound reality. That those who are capable of living life as a real experience must come together and must effect a form of government which is real, is not based on speculative ideas of what we’re going to do when we get rid of those other people, but based upon the real relationship of actual living human beings together, because ethics do not occur as shoulds and should nots in some abstract system but they occur in what we do as an individual now in our lives, in actual fact.

And I’ll bring all this up in more detail next week. But Franklin was attempting in his work – all through the 1740s and 1750s – to spread out this whole methodology of apprehending the real, in terms of nature, in terms of experience. And of arranging and ordering experience in terms of experiments so that individuals could come together in collectives and share their experience and their experiments with each other. So that they had a real relational communication to build upon. So that they would not throw themselves into some speculative mentality and daydream up some plan of action, some code of behavior. No matter how high sounding it would be, it would still have all of the irrationality of something distant from the true, distant from the real. It would be made up and would inevitably fall into these old patterns that illusions always fall into. They produce bitterness and disappointment. They produce false hope and self-aggrandizement. And sooner or later lead to tragedies. That there is no way out of this except to sober ourselves up and build on nature as it really is, and build on human relationalities in terms of who we really are. And not to throw away all of this valid experience which is real and natural, for plans which are dreamed up in the minds of the few.

Well, this of course becomes extremely powerful, and when these ideas are in the hands of someone who can express them they produce what they did in the 1770s and 1780s – they produce revolutions. Because when there are enough persons who understand this, the old rickety ways of arranging human reality crack like brittle dried leaves and fall by the wayside. And what comes in its place is something unknown and something new and fresh. And that is called who we are and what we’re doing now. It happened in Philadelphia and it happened in Paris and there were just a handful of individuals led by Franklin who were the liaison between these two spots. So we’ll look at those two revolutions next week and try and get some idea of how Franklin taught the first generation of pragmatic human beings to be real to each other. The legacies were the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

You’ll see that in more detail next week.