Runaway America

 

"Engaging and provocative . . . What Waldstreicher refreshingly offers is less a conventional biography than a critical reconsideration of Franklin's economic and social world, and his political thought, that focuses on the spectrum of freedom and unfreedom in Colonial America . . . Waldstreicher effectively undermines Franklin's antislavery reputation without falling into the modern habit of extreme moralistic dismissal or outright condemnation . . . Indispensable reading for an understanding of the Founders' generation, for all of its glory and shortcomings."—Eric Arnesen, The Boston Sunday Globe

"Bold and immensely readable . . . A stunning inquiry into the complicated, if not outright deceptive, anti-slavery legacy of America's favorite self-made man. Rigorous and firmly unsentimental, Runaway America deserves a wide readership. Its clever broad-mindedness makes one of the freshest, most original books written about America's 'best-known colonist and revolutionary' . . . What distinguishes Runaway America from a shabby hatchet job is Mr. Waldstreicher's keen intelligence and, above all, his refusal to condemn . . . That he succeeded in throwing historians off the scent for so long is a tribute to Franklin. That Runaway America has found him out and still deepened our sense of the man without flaying him is a tribute to Mr. Waldstreicher's own considerable gifts. It is no mean feat to say something smart and new about one of the most overstudied men in American history, and Mr. Waldstreicher's remarkable book leaves us to wonder what yet we may have to learn to understand the Founders."—Kirk Davis Swinehart, The New York Sun

"[This is an] intricately detailed analysis of Franklin's thought and actions. It likely will not sit well with some Franklin champions, who prefer to highlight the unambiguously antislavery statements of his later years. Those came very late, in 1790, just weeks before his death. The author suggests that it is a disservice to history, and to an understanding of Franklin, to conflate or confuse these statements with those from the long decades in which he 'played both sides of the issue.'"—Roger K. Miller, The Denver Post

"The enigma of Benjamin Franklin regarding the issue of slavery is brilliantly explored by David Waldstreicher . . . Against a backdrop of slavery, Runaway America offers a powerful portrait of 18th-century life, and of one of the key players in the drama of a revolution that freed a nation from the shackles of its mother country while keeping others in bondage."—Barrett R. Richardson, The Virginian-Pilot

"Waldstreicher's [study] rightly does not try to re-examine the entire life and political leanings of Franklin. Instead, it focuses on a subject that is often glossed over by biographers, and by Franklin himself: slavery, the American Revolution, and Franklin's true beliefs on the role of the slave in America . . . Runaway America's strength lies in the fact that it does not try to interpret or 'spin' any of Franklin's actions that seem at odds with each other. Instead, Waldstreicher presents them as many sides of a man who both employed and fought against the society he was struggling to conquer. Another strong point of the book is that it uses Franklin's own writings about slavery and puts them in the proper historical context. Hence the reader can see how Franklin's narratives through the years deal with the issue of the 'unfree' in America. He writes about this over and over, using the voice of a sugar plantation slave woman, a native Briton, a rural New Englander—each grappling with the same question: what does it mean to be free? Again, Waldstreicher rightly highlights how Franklin dealt with slavery issues in terms of America's struggles for equity with England. Overall, this is a good book that will leave the reader with a new understanding of both Franklin and how the thorny issue of slavery helped shape early America . . . Runaway America should take its place alongside Ellis, Ambrose, and McCollough."—Jennifer McCready, Curled Up With a Good Book

"In Runaway America, author David Waldstreicher reveals the myths and truths of one of America's most beloved founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin . . . [Waldstreicher] exposes the complex irony of human nature rarely considered in history books . . . [Runaway America is] heavily researched and [has] well-formulated arguments. Overall, Waldstreicher deserves applause for documenting the duality of human nature, thus exposing the ironic reality of Benjamin Franklin and examining the often blurred relationship between 'unfree' and 'free.'"—Nicole Sealey, QBR: The Black Book Review

"A careful reader of Franklin's writings and times, David Waldstreicher has given us an extraordinarily fresh look at Franklin, slavery, and the American Revolution."—Barbara Oberg, Princeton University

"Waldstreicher's Runaway America asks readers to reconsider Benjamin Franklin's relationship to slavery, without damning he man for the age in which he lived. In a balanced assessment, Waldstreicher neither exalts nor attacks Franklin, but instead examines how the Founding Father embodies the American paradox."—Jill Lepore, author of A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States

"David Waldstreicher brilliantly cuts through the self-fashioning of Franklin, the master of spin. The familiar apprentice and runaway was also an employer of unfree labor, a slaveowner, an apologist for slavery, and a spokesman for slaveowning colonies. This is a corrosive corrective to the pieties about Franklin."—Alfred F. Young, author of Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier

"In this stunning book, David Waldstreicher shows how slavery was of fundamental importance not only in Benjamin Franklin's life but also in the story of the new American nation. Runaway America is at once a wonderful book to read and as penetrating a meditation on the link between American freedom and American slavery as has been published in more than a quarter century."—Shane White, author of Stories of Freedom in Black New York and coauthor of The Sounds of Slavery

"Benjamin Franklin is often considered one of America's first and greatest abolitionists, but in this unique work Waldstreicher shows that his life and success were in fact intimately tied to slavery. He relied on slave labor at home and in his businesses, argues Waldstreicher, selling advertisements to slave traders and publishing descriptions of runaway slaves. His criticism of slavery was always, at best, tentative and pragmatic, as shown by his suggestion to compromise on slave representation at the Constitutional Convention, resulting in the infamous three-fifths compromise. Well written and researched, this scholarly biography offers a balanced look at the practical Franklin, a man who often tried to be 'all things to all people.'"—Library Journal

"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 . . . Temple University historian Waldstreicher 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 . . . This penetrating interpretation, one that's likely to dismay Franklin's hagiographers, is true to the man, his times, and the facts."—Publishers Weekly