The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White
not subject to a steadily predictable, incremental dynamic. The configuration can undergo sudden shifts, and seemingly important figures may disappear, while obscure figures suddenly assume new significance.
Let us return for a moment to Nathanael Greene, who, as we mentioned before, experienced a similarly rapid and dramatic symbolic investment during the war. A nice summation of his signification is offered in Crèvecoeur’s mosaic of Revolutionary-era mythology, in which he includes this anecdote about Greene:
The history of the war in Carolina . . . is a eulogy for General Green more exact than anything one could say.—Among the many qualities that distinguished him, I will mention only this one.—All the dispatches announcing reversals were always addressed to Congress in his capacity as commander in chief of the southern department.—But every time he gained any advantage, it was to general Washington that he made his reports, as an officer under the Commander in chief.25
Greene’s outstanding qualities, then—the particular combination of military ability and humility, of taking on the burdens of the war while passing on the laurels to others—are precisely those qualities that underlay the symbolic development of Washington. And in Crèvecoeur’s anecdote, we see with great clarity how Greene is not a separate figure but a parallel one—an alternative Washington much as Washington was an alternative Greene. In a similar fashion, Crèvecoeur describes a number of Revolutionary generals reluctantly drawn to war and then happily retiring to their farms: all of these formulations of the Cincinnatus myth speak to the development of a symbolic designation that transcends George Washington and that George Washington finally filled decisively.26 In short, Greene was not a distinctive figure or even a homologous one—he was the very same position, a variant through which the Washington configuration, a necessary relational slot, was developed. One might imagine a counterfactual scenario whereby Washington, not Greene, had died in 1786: in that case, the symbolic work invested in Washington could easily have shifted to Greene.
Here we may turn to a different symbolic nexus, in fact the main configuration that was juxtaposed to the Washington figure—that of Benjamin Franklin. If we look ahead to the late 1780s and the ratification battles over the US Constitution, one finds that these two names—Franklin and Washington—are the two that have achieved and maintained a special status. What was the specific position of Franklin at this point? Here we must be careful not to confuse the “Franklin” of the 1770s with the “Franklin” that took shape in the 1790s and helped generate additional symbolic positions in the Founders’ pantheon. In the mid-1770s, Franklin’s significance was that of the intellectual or “philosopher”: he was Doctor Franklin, scientist of electricity, theorist of the Gulf Stream, inventor, genius, and so on. None of these qualities was enough to determine his symbolic importance, which did not become clear until the Hutchinson affair of the early 1770s. Gordon Wood is correct when he writes that “this affair was the most extraordinary and revealing incident in his political life . . . [and] effectively destroyed his position in England and ultimately made him a patriot.”27 But where Wood makes this a biographical claim about Franklin, we read this as a claim about the symbolic construction of the “Franklin” position. In 1772, Franklin had received some private correspondence which included a now infamous letter in which lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson advised British administrators to pursue “an abridgment of what are called English liberties” in order to avoid the growing “anarchy” of the American independence movement.28 Franklin passed these letters on to North American colleagues, who published them. All indications suggest that Franklin hoped to effect a reconciliation between the colonies and the empire by casting Hutchinson as a scapegoat, but the public drama cast Franklin very differently. With the 1773 publication of the Hutchinson letters, and relations inflamed by the Boston Tea Party, Franklin himself became the scapegoat and was famously called before the Privy Council—in the “Cockpit”—to receive criticism and insults from Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn. Franklin famously received an hour of abuse in total silence, while the audience cheered and laughed. Two days later, Franklin was fired from his position as deputy postmaster general of North America; relations between Great Britain and the colonies continued to deteriorate. Meanwhile, as Michael Warner notes in his account, “The incident greatly recuperated Franklin’s colonial reputation, which had suffered in the mid-1760s, and did much to inflame revolutionary sentiment.”29
The Hutchinson affair—or the Wedderburn-Franklin exchange, as it was frequently presented in the early republican press—proved fundamental to the formation of “Franklin” not because of its biographical significance but because it took the famous figure of the intellectual and encoded it in relation to the figure of Lord Bute. The Cockpit humiliation made this distinction hard to avoid: Wedderburn was one of Bute’s alleged minions and as solicitor general embodied the position of imperial intellectual—the schemer using his wits to insult, mislead, manipulate, and misdirect. In this confrontation, the intellectual Franklin’s behavior was recast in a contrasting position: he had used his formidable gifts to expose the schemings of Bute and company. This use of his intellect—to bring bad political advising to light and therefore check it, rather than to obscure it further—was then doubly encoded as he refused to use his famous wit to respond to the Privy Council, opting instead for silence. In this respect, “Franklin” answers and corrects the figure of Lord Bute much as “Washington” answers and corrects the figure of the king. Where Bute was a figure of considerable culture and learning complementing, enabling, and amplifying the executive symbolic position, Franklin suddenly rises to significance as a corrective figure. A perfect illustration may be found in John Trumbull’s 1774 poem “An Elegy on the Times,” which Elihu Hubbard Smith featured prominently as the opening piece of his 1793 anthology American Poems, Selected and Original. The poem laments the “mock debate,” “servile vows,” “well-dissembled praise,” and generally “fruitless offerings” of English politics (ll. 48–52)30 and then transitions to this description of Franklin’s encounter:
While Peers enraptur’d hail the unmanly wrong,
See Ribaldry, vile prostitute of shame,
Stretch the brib’d hand and prompt the venal tongue,
To blast the laurels of a franklin’s fame!
But will the Sage, whose philosophic soul,
Controul’d the lightning in its fierce career,
Hear’d unappal’d the aerial thunders roll,
And taught the bolts of vengeance where to steer;—
Will he, while echoing to his just renown
The voice of kingdoms swells the loud applause;
Heed the weak malice of a Courtier’s frown,
Or dread the coward insolence of laws? (3)
In the event, Franklin remains silent “While Infamy her darling scroll displays, / And points well pleas’d, oh, wedderburne, to thee!” (4). Characteristics later associated with Franklin—most notably his ribald humor and his expressiveness about wealth—are at this moment English vices one could never associate with the seemingly puritanical and disinterested scientist. Franklin stands an impassive scientific observer, his response to hostile questioning akin to his “unappal’d” assessment of the thunderstorm. Nonetheless, we may see glimmerings of mythical elements later to accrue to Franklin—for example, the adoption of the Poor Richard persona, in which intelligence assumes an assertive modesty; or the crucial figure of the printer (as distinct from the author), who publishes but also maintains a kind of modest silence; or the scientist, who tries to describe things as they are, as opposed to the political theorist describing how they should be; or the creator of the public library, trying to make information available to all. Indeed, the famous 1778 portrait of Franklin by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis—Franklin in simple coat, lips noticeably clamped shut—pictorially codifies this symbolic moment.31
Let us be clear about our argument. The symbolic relational pairing of George III and Lord Bute generated not one new position (Washington) or an infinite series of countersymbols (Washington, his generals, various political leaders, and so on) but a decisively answering pair: Washington-Franklin. Washington