between personality and character is Adam Verver, the mysterious millionaire of Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl. Verver is a man of enormous social and personal power, yet he appears altogether bland. James’s description of him applies as well to the unassuming Franklin:

Similarly, the historical Franklin, without pushiness or perceptible glow, must have been unbudgingly determined to have his way. That burning ambition did fire “kind, humane and benevolent Ben. Franklin” was confirmed by his colleague John Adams, among others, who saw in him “a Passion for Reputation and Fame, as hard as you can imagine, and his Time and Thoughts are chiefly employed to obtain it.”

Franklin himself explains why his ambition is hard to detect. He writes in the Autobiography concerning humility: “I cannot boast of much Success in acquiring the Reality of this Virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the Appearance of it.” An indication of his success in cultivating the semblance of humility is that when he served as minister to France, one of the many Parisians who clustered around him in the streets reportedly asked, “Who is this old peasant who has such a noble air?” To the French painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun he looked like “a big farmer.” Franklin knew quite well what he looked like. “Figure me in your mind … as very plainly dress’d,” he wrote to a friend at the time, “wearing my thin grey straight Hair, that peeps out under my only Coiffure, a fine Fur Cap, which comes down my Forehead almost to my Spectacles. Think how this must appear among the Powder’d Heads of Paris.” The comment discloses how Franklin inwardly experienced his outward pose of humility: as an awareness of appearing slightly ridiculous to others with simultaneously a somewhat vindictive feeling of having controlled their reactions, and of superiority to them.

In the Autobiography, too, Franklin’s ambition and competitiveness become visible in acutely selfconscious recollections of having seemed gauche to others, notably as the runaway adolescent entering Philadelphia with a roll under each arm, making “a most awkward ridiculous Appearance.” The element of self-vindication is no way more evident than in the self-effacement of the hero, who often wins out over others by his simplicity. In London his beer-guzzling fellow printers mock him as “the water-American”; yet they wonder to see him carry up- and downstairs a heavy font of type in each hand, while they can carry, using both hands, only one. Often in the Autobiography young Franklin retaliates against older and more powerful persons who exploit his innocence, by showing them up or outsmarting them. With his tyrannical brother looking on, he flaunts his new suit and watch before James’s workmen, to whom he also gives some money for drinks, turning his brother “grum and sullen.” In the presence of his untrustworthy employer, Samuel Keimer, he is invited for a glass of Madeira by the governor of Pennsylvania, making Keimer stare “like a Pig poison’d.”

Much of this aggressive energy is masked by the modest style of the Autobiography. Yet, like the Quaker garb he wore in Paris, this style was itself in Franklin’s mind an instrument of control and power. His stylistic creed was that “one cannot be too Clear,” and the communicativeness of his writing, to be sure, speaks for both his penetrating intelligence and his probity. He had much to say, and the rare strength of character to say it simply enough. Yet if he cared nothing for sounding important, he cared everything for winning his case. He was probably the greatest rhetorician in American literary history (taking rhetoric in Aristotle’s sense, as the art of persuasion), extremely effective in mobilizing large public efforts. One of his most frequent and disarming rhetorical techniques he traces in the Autobiography to Socrates, from whom he learned to assume the manner of “the humble Inquirer & Doubter”—the pose of such innocents and underdogs as Poor Richard, Silence Dogood, and “kind, humane and benevolent Ben. Franklin” himself. He resolved never to advance any view as certainly correct, but rather to express himself in terms of “modest Diffidence”—a habit that “has been of great Advantage to me, when I have had occasion to inculcate my Opinions & persuade Men into Measures that I have been from time to time engag’d in promoting.” The modesty of Franklin’s style is itself, that is, an expression of his desire to prevail. This rhetorical prescription for winning one’s case by seeming to have nothing at stake represents another version of never praying for a particular benefit, and perhaps had for Franklin the psychological