Read Online The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood - Free Book Online Page A

Behavior,” which, said Smith, was the main “Characteristic of the Gentleman.” Gentlemen were admired for their “real humility, condescension, courteousness, affability, and great good manners to all the world.” 59
    Only a hierarchical society that knew its distinctions well could have placed so much value on a gentleman’s capacity for condescension—that voluntary humiliation, that willing descent from superiority to equal terms with inferiors. For us today condescension is a pejorative term, suggesting snobbery or haughtiness. But for the eighteenth century it was a positive and complimentary term, something that gentlemen aspired to possess and commoners valued in those above them. Rufus Putnam, a young Massachusetts enlisted man serving with the provincial forces attached to the British army in northern New York during the Seven Years War, was especially taken with the ability of one British officer to condescend. The officer frequently came among his men, said Putnam, “and his manner was so easy and fermiller, that you loost all that constraint or diffidence we feele when addressed by our Superiours, whose manners are forbidding.” 60
    Ultimately, beneath all these strenuous efforts to define gentility was the fundamental classical quality of being free and independent. The liberality for which gentlemen were known connoted freedom—freedom from material want, freedom from the caprice of others, freedom from ignorance, and freedom from having to work with one’s hands. The gentry’s distinctiveness came from being independent in a world of dependencies, learned in a world only partially literate, and leisured in a world of laborers.
    We today have so many diverse forms of work and recreation and so much of our society shares in them that we can scarcely appreciate the significance of the earlier stark separation between a leisured few and a laboring many. In the eighteenth century, labor, as it had been for ages, was still associated with toil and trouble, with pain, and manual productivity did not yet have the superior moral value that it would soon acquire. To be sure, industriousness and hard work were everywhere extolled, and the puritan ethic was widely preached—but only for ordinary people, not for gentlemen. Hard steady work was good for the character of common people: it kept them out of trouble; it lifted them out of idleness and barbarism; and it instilled in them the proper moral values.
    Most people, it was widely assumed, would not work if they did not have to. Franklin certainly thought so: it was conventional wisdom. “It seems certain,” he wrote in 1753, “that the hope of becoming at some time of Life free from the necessity of care and Labour, together with fear of penury, are the mainsprings of most people’s industry.” 61 People labored out of necessity, out of poverty, and that necessity and poverty bred the contempt in which laboring people had been held for centuries. Since servants, slaves, and bonded laborers did much of the work of the society, it seemed natural to associate leisure with liberty and toil with bondage. 62 A gentleman’s freedom was valued because it was freedom from the necessity to labor, which came from being poor.
    Indeed, only the need of ordinary people to feed themselves, it was thought, kept them busy working. “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower class must be kept poor or they will never be industrious,” declared the English agricultural writer Arthur Young. Only “poverty,” wrote Thomas Hutchinson in 1761, by then the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, “will produce industry and frugality” among the common people. Franklin agreed. Since people were naturally indolent, “giving mankind a dependence on anything for support in age and sickness, besides industry and frugality during youth and health, tends ... to encourage idleness and prodigality, and thereby to promote and increase poverty, the very evil it was intended to