Neural correlates of behavioral responses to pain in nerve growth factor beta mutation carriers (original) (raw)

Francis Jennings has to his credit an impressive array of titles in colonial American studies, including The Invasion of America and The Founders of America (on native peoples and the contact between them and European colonizers) and The AmbiguousIroquoisEmpire and Empire of Fortune (both of which treat Six Nations culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). To these well-known, densely constructed, and often-cited studies, Jennings is adding a study of Benjamin Franklin. In introductory matter to the volume, Jennings says that he had studied Franklin closely decades ago. In many ways, though, the major scholarly contribution of the volume-a discussion of Franklin's activities from the 1750s through the 1770s-seems a logical outgrowth of Jennings's earlier work on Six Nations culture and the conflicts between the Six Nations Iroquois and the Lenni Lenape (the Delaware) peoples during the middle of the eighteenth century, as both groups faced continued settlement by Europeans on their ancestral lands. Jennings assumes from the outset that his book is revisionary. Among the epigraphs is Harrison Salisbury's comment from Heroes of My Time, "I harbor deep distrust of obvious heroes." Jennings himself insists in the introduction that the events of Franklin's life "reveal the ego hidden so carefully behind his words" (p. 15), and he avers that "the long life of Benjamin Franklin requires some reassessment of the standard thought about the beginnings of the American Revolution" (p. 16). In "A Note on the Sources," he concludes: "My findings herein are strongly revisionist" (p. 204). Jennings's assertions are to some extent accurate, if overstated. Scholars of the past two decades or so have been reexamining the papers of the so-called "founders" in an effort to fill in gaps left by World War II and postwar historians who sought a predominantly "American" story and made of the founders important "American" heroes. If we find these earlier historians wanting at this stage in the century, it is nonetheless useful if we keep the era of the world wars in sight: midcentury historians had an eye to developing a nationalistic construct, perhaps, just as scholars today might wish to examine colonial history from a transnational and multiethnic perspective. Jennings's book seems to divide into two sections, the first examining Franklin's common-law marriage and activities in Philadelphia to about the 1750s (the first THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXXI, No. 4 (October 1997) 372 BOOK REVIEWS October eight chapters) and the latter examining the years from the assembly campaigns of the early 1750s through the era of the Revolution. In the first eight chapters, the major thrust of Jennings's revisionism is a filling in of the gaps Jennings finds in Franklin's autobiography. Thus Jennings features Israel Pemberton, Jr., who "is a nonperson in the Autobiography" and who in Jennings's view was "as active as Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia's civic affairs outside the Assembly/' Pemberton's absence from Franklin's memoir indicates to Jennings that "the competition rankled Franklin, who could be generous to the Quakers who were deferential to himself' (p. 44). Likewise, with regard to his securing the post of deputy postmaster at Philadelphia, Franklin's not having mentioned the unneeded patronage of Thomas Penn's provincial chief justice William Allen is also taken by Jennings as a sign of Franklin's ego (pp. 38-39). Perhaps more surprisingly, Franklin's not mentioning in his memoir his friend James Logan's activities during the nefarious Walking Purchase land-grab-indeed, the omission of any mention whatsoever of the chicanery of the Penn descendants and Franklin's early friendship with them, for patronageis understood by Jennings to be a "trivialization" of "the struggle by Pennsylvanians against their feudal lord": 'The self-consciously wise Franklin of the Autobiography could not admit how he had been duped by Penn and, worse, had actually worked hard to support Penn's political machine" (pp. 57, 58). For the same reasons, according to Jennings, Franklin omitted talking about William Smith in faz Autobiography: "To mention him would have required Franklin to confess that Smith had used and made a fool of him, had outsmarted him, and such a confession would be intolerable" (p. 70). For the most part, the key aspects of these early chaptersthe discussion related to Pemberton and the sneaking nature of the Walking Purchase-are detailed in Jennings's earlier writings, though here the discussion centers on people with whom Franklin was in contact. The other matters of these chapters are well-known and much-discussed, often in more detail, by most Franklinists. Although Jennings's later chapters cover some of the same issues as chapters 6 through 8, they focus on two central issues: first, Franklin's growing personal antagonisms with the Penns and the assembly's distrust of the whole proprietary system; and, second, Franklin's developing disillusionment with royalism and his eventual prorebellion fervor, ultimately ending in his refusal to assist royalist son, William, and his wife, once William had been taken into custody. These later chapters offer, for the most part, a condensed version of Jennings's magisterial book, Empire of Fortune. Their contribution lies in their treatment, especially for a general reader, of the events in which Franklin was entangled during the decade just prior to the Revolutionary War. With specific regard to Franklin's place in the growing turmoil, these chapters trace several of the well-known issues in Franklin's dealings with friends and with the British government: Franklin's statement of utter contempt for Thomas Penn after Penn slurred his father William Penn's name; Franklin's initial 1997 BOOK REVIEWS 373 acceptance of stamp measures set out by parliament, his attempted land negotiations with a number of lords; his imperialist attitudes that denied the legitimacy of settlement claims by Germans, Irish, Scotch-Irish, and native peoples to lands held by the Penn proprietary. In terms of Franklin's life story, the revisionary nature of these later chapters is less apparent, and thus the tone Jennings takes toward Franklin seems a little less smug, although here, too, Jennings takes Franklin to task for what Jennings sees as Franklin's inability to abide Quakers. Broadly speaking, Jennings's book seems to have three key issues at stake. Ostensibly, Jennings says he is filling in the gaps that historians (popular historians, really-not specialists) have left open in their celebrations of Franklin and the American revolutionary past. But the book's effect is actually more expansive. Jennings is, first, critiquing New England-oriented history-writing and the New England historians' focus on, for instance, the Boston Tea Party, instead, Jennings posits the centrality of midcentury affairs in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Ohio territory, and the importance of the proprietary charter rights versus Crown prerogative that Franklin addressed during his life. Historians of the American Revolution, in seeking to establish the revolt on ideological grounds based on a Whig interpretation of charter rights and liberties, wrongly focus on the rhetoric that came out of New England and more suitably might stress the economic, ethnic, and land concerns of the Middle Atlantic. Jennings's close analysis of the entanglements Franklin faced indicates the importance of a largely revisioned history that would account for more general tendencies rather than a few selected incidents from New England. If only for this reason, the book is a useful revisionist study. Second, Jennings is establishing (in the discussion of the Pennsylvania proprietary problems and the border settlers) a set of issues that more narrowly depicts the causes of the Revolution as economic and social, more middle-brow, mercantile, and plebeian, rather than ideological, and he thus shows the day-today causes as of key importance, not the rhetoric of revolution for which famous men are celebrated. Third, Jennings is participating in a revision of the history of the Religious Society of Friends, based on his assumption that the Quakers have received negative attention because of their pacifist stance during the Revolution. While Jennings might be correct in his assessment that Quaker calumniators then and perhaps now have driven negative readings about Quakers of the era of the American Revolution, to some extent, he seems to overstate his case with regard to Franklin and the Quakers. It is hard to miss the humor of Franklin's Autobiography where Franklin points to the quietness and security of a meeting of the Religious Society of Friends by announcing that, having repaired to such a meeting upon his first arrival in Philadelphia, he promptly fell asleep. To Jennings, however, Franklin's "massive ego is revealed more complexly in his callous conduct toward Quakers" (p. 197). Yet Jennings himself has shown the key issues that were at stake. Franklin initially wanted Crown intervention that would force taxation of the 374 BOOK REVIEWS October proprietary lands, because the border areas needed defending. Quakers did not wish themselves to provide for the defense of English settlers, based on their peace testimony; this would be an alternate way to provide for defense while stopping proprietary prerogative. Crown intervention might have mandated test oaths which Quakers would not be able to take. Franklin, an imperialist, not a Quaker, evidently did not see the contradiction that might have eventuated for Quakers between the chartered liberties original to the William Penn tract grant and those "liberties" associated with British imperial policy. Many imperialists might not have seen the potential problems herein. In pushing the position that Franklin disliked Quakers, especially during the 1750s and through the...