It was somewhat prophetic when Ben asked me to include this little rhyme in my 1738 Almanac:
“If you wou'd not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.”
As if prescient, Franklin went on to do both. Besides writing the best selling autobiography of all time, a multitude of influential political, scientific tracts, and volumes of poignant yet whimsical love letters, Ben participated in the creation of 3 of the most important documents in US history, the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris (formally ending the Revolution and British rule) and the U.S. Constitution. All in all, a historic body of work. As for being ink worthy, few Americans, rather make that, no other American, has been cited so often or written about, (Elvis P, Marilyn M. and Michael J. notwithstanding) then our man Franklin.
That same year I included the following to my collection of pithy sayings:
“Sell not virtue to purchase wealth,
nor Liberty to purchase power.”
This was a time when the concept of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (loosely adapted from Epicurus - see previous post), was being bantered about in European capital city's salons and coffeehouses. Franklin, as well as the privileged few tutored in the classics here in America, were no strangers to this discussion. Contemporary philosophers such as Locke, Spinoza, Johnson, et. al. , were much in vogue. Their ideas on the rights of man were spreading like a medieval plague.
It was not long before it took hold in the Americas. However, most of our residents were preoccupied with finding shelter, food, as well as keeping the natives and bears on the other side of their door. As such, the logic of the “Age of Enlightenment” was useful to most colonists as quadratic algebra. Perhaps just as daunting, was the fact that books were as rare and precious in America, as silver and silk. Hence few countrymen had the time nor the resources to become familiar with these new concepts. That was soon to change with the production and staging of a new and wildly popular play, doing land office business in the theaters of Europe.
Joseph Addison
1672 - 1719
Brought the Age of Enlightenment
to the footlights
Joseph Addison told the story of Cato, a Roman senator who resisted Caesar's overthrow of the Roman Republic, casting the western world into 2000 years of divine sovereign rule. The play popularized the intellectual idea of man's right to govern himself and elevated the concept of liberty to a high ideal. The very ideals and themes that Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" would capitalize on 40 years later, to incite a revolution. Forrest McDonald, a fellow with the Project Liberty Fund, put the play into historical perspective:
"Cato" was wildly popular in colonial America.
It went on to become the"Uncle Tom's Cabin"of the American Revolution by putting a face on the concept of "Liberty."
"The more-educated and better-informed citizens looked in every conceivable place for guidance on this new "Age of Enlightenment", and they found but little. There was the Bible—which almost everyone read—but its only political advice was that monarchy was bad, and Americans had already reached that conclusion. Political theorists abounded, but the dicta of Locke and Montesquieu were not applicable to American conditions, nor were those of Plato and Aristotle. The Scotsmen David Hume and Adam Smith were relevant but far from adequate. By default, that left the history of the ancient Roman republic, and all educated Americans were familiar with that history, but its essence was a tragic tale of decline into tyranny.
Ordinary people knew about ancient Rome, too, not from books but from an enormously popular play by Joseph Addison, Cato. Though the seventeenth-century Puritanical prejudice against stage productions still lingered in parts of New England, eighteenth-century Americans elsewhere were avid playgoers, and Cato was by far their favorite play. It was first performed and published in London in 1713. It was soon republished in Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, Göttingen, Paris, and Rome; at least eight editions were published in the British-American colonies by the end of the century. The play was also performed all over the colonies, in countless productions from the 1730s until after the American Revolution.
Cato is woven into our American Revolutionary rhetoric.
Patrick Henry shared Cato's extreme views on Liberty.
That most of the founding generation read it or saw it or both is unquestionable, and that it stuck in their memories is abundantly evident. Our friend Benjamin Franklin, as a young and aspiring writer, committed long passages from it to memory and then attempted to write them out, in hopes that Addison’s writing style would rub off on him. Patrick Henry adapted his famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech directly from lines in Cato. Nathan Hale’s celebrated last words, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” echoes a remark by Cato, “What a pity it is that we can die but once to save our country.”
Cato was the favorite play of George Washington, who saw it many times and quoted or paraphrased lines from it in his correspondence over the course of four decades. The first known occasion when he cited it was when he identified himself with one of its characters in a letter to Mrs. George William Fairfax in 1758. In 1775 he wrote to Benedict Arnold to commend his heroism in the ill-fated Quebec expedition: “It is not in the power of any man to command success; but you have done more—you have deserved it.” Nathan Hale - Outside CIA Headquarters
Nathan Hale's valediction: "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
(Supposed reference to Act IV, Scene 4: "What a pity it is/That we can die but once to serve our country.").
There is a certain ironic symmetry to the fact that a play about the death of a great republic would become the catalyst to rekindle the spirit of liberty Just as we acknowledge Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for ending slavery in this country. We should be indebted to Joseph Addison for bringing the idea of Liberty and a free republic to life for us.
Thank you Joe. Long live our Republic!
