RUNAWAY AMERICA: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution
David Waldstreicher, . . Hill & Wang, $26 (315pp) ISBN 978-0-8090-8314-5
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. If Waldstreicher's writing isn't as deft as, say, David McCullough's, it's more searching and more balanced. This biography explores Franklin's relationship to free labor and slavery. Himself an indentured servant in his youth, Franklin was inordinately sensitive to questions of freedom and servitude. Yet he was a slaveholder for part of his life and, in Waldstreicher's telling, spoke in circles to avoid having to take a stand for or against racial slavery and those who sought to flee it. Temple University historian Waldstreicher (
Reviewed on: 06/07/2004
Genre: Nonfiction
Open Ebook - 336 pages - 978-1-4668-2152-1
Paperback - 336 pages - 978-0-8090-8315-2