Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution [Hardcover]

David Waldstreicher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 18, 2004

Scientist, abolitionist, revolutionary: that is the Benjamin Franklin we know and celebrate. To this description, the talented young historian David Waldstreicher shows we must add runaway, slave master, and empire builder. But Runaway America does much more than revise our image of a beloved founding father. Finding slavery at the center of Franklin's life, Waldstreicher proves it was likewise central to the Revolution, America's founding, and the very notion of freedom we associate with both.

Franklin was the sole Founding Father who was once owned by someone else and was among the few to derive his fortune from slavery. As an indentured servant, Franklin fled his master before his term was complete; as a struggling printer, he built a financial empire selling newspapers that not only advertised the goods of a slave economy (not to mention slaves) but also ran the notices that led to the recapture of runaway servants. Perhaps Waldstreicher's greatest achievement is in showing that this was not an ironic outcome but a calculated one. America's freedom, no less than Franklin's, demanded that others forgo liberty.

Through the life of Franklin, Runaway America provides an original explanation to the paradox of American slavery and freedom.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Why another biography of Franklin? Because this is a distinctive, long-overdue effort to ask some tough questions about someone who is usually given a pass for his genius and charm by otherwise critical historians and biographers. If Waldstreicher's writing isn't as deft as, say, David McCullough's, it's more searching and more balanced. This biography explores Franklin's relationship to free labor and slavery. Himself an indentured servant in his youth, Franklin was inordinately sensitive to questions of freedom and servitude. Yet he was a slaveholder for part of his life and, in Waldstreicher's telling, spoke in circles to avoid having to take a stand for or against racial slavery and those who sought to flee it. Temple University historian Waldstreicher (In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes) skillfully sets Franklin's posture in the context of 18th-century Northern prevarication and racism, but the book's effect is to desacralize Franklin. It reveals the founder's dissimulation in his brilliant, beloved Autobiography and other writings that have been used—wrongly, it turns out—to place him among the nation's early antislavery reformers. Waldstreicher might have dug more deeply into the psychological roots of Franklin's complex behavior. Yet this penetrating interpretation, one that's likely to dismay Franklin's hagiographers, is true to the man, his times and the facts. 16 pages of b&w illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

David Waldstreicher, professor of history at Notre Dame, is author of In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism and editor of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (Bedford Books).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang; First Edition edition (August 18, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809083140
• ISBN-13: 978-0809083145
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #216,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #39 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( F ) > Franklin, Benjamin

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, Waldstreicher writes a lucid book!!, July 21, 2005

By 

Scholar "18th century student" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Hardcover)

It should merit 3 stars alone just to have Prof. Waldstreicher actually come out with a book that people can read! His other works have been dreadfully written (esp. his work in Journal of the Early republic), the worst prose in the business. However, not only is this book very nicely written, for which he deserves commendation, but its also interesting. What Waldstreicher does is demostrate how labor inthe 1st half of the 18th century in America was quite often "unfree": either due to slavery, indentured servitude or an apprenticeship. Waldstreicher's contribution here si to show how BF's life was marked by all three. He was an apprentice himself, kept Indentured servants and owned a slave or two. It is a great way to explore this issue of labor and freedom in the colonies, and to do so by using the life of a Founding Father.
Given the subject and the prose, I have no reservations at all about rating this book 5 stars.