bred...........................

 

      There were many specific events that pushed Franklin across the line to rebellion: personal slights, dashed hopes, betrayals, and the accretion of hostile British acts.  But it is also important to take note of the core causes of Franklin's evolution and, but extension, that of a people he had come to exemplify.

      When Englishmen such as his father had immigrated to a new land, they had bred a new type of people.  As Franklin repeatedly stressed in his letters to his son, America should not replicate the rigid ruling hierarchies of the Old World, the aristocratic structures and feudal social orders based on birth rather than merit.  Instead, its strength would be its creation of a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen who were assertive of their rights and proud of their status.

     Like many of these new Americans, Franklin chafed at authority, which is why he had run away from his brother's print shop in Boston.  He was not awed by establishment elites, whether they be the Mathers or the Penns or the peers in the House of Lords.  He was cheeky in his writings and rebellious in his manner.  And he had imbibed the philosophy of the new Enlightenment thinkers, who believed that liberty and tolerance were the foundation for a civil society.

     For a long time he had cherished vision of imperial harmony in which Britain and America could both flourish in one great expanding empire.  But he felt that it would work only if Britain stopped subjugating Americans through mercantile trading rules and taxes imposed from afar.  Once it was clear that Britain remained intent of subordinating its colonies, the only course left was independence.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life