Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
colonies. Central to the beginning of the American Revolution, Franklin was also
central to its end in 1783 through the Treaty of Paris that he, John Jay, and John
Adams shaped and signed. And he helped shape the future of the United States of
America by serving on the Constitutional Convention that wrote the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights.
Throughout all these great actions and events, Franklin wrote didactic works
leavened by an extraordinary blend of worldliness and earnestness and enlivened
by wit, humor, and sometimes deceptive irony.
Image 3.4 | Congress Voting Independence
Artists | Robert Edge Pine and Edward Savage
Source | Wikimedia Commons
License | Public Domain
3.4.1 “The Way to Wealth”
(1758)
COURTEOUS READER,
I have heard that nothing gives an author so great pleasure, as to nd his works
respectfully quoted by others. Judge, then, how much I must have been gratied
by an incident I am going to relate to you. I stopped my horse, lately, where a
great number of people were collected at an auction of merchants’ goods. The
hour of the sale not being come, they were conversing on the badness of the times;
and one of the company called to a plain, clean, old man, with white locks, ‘Pray,
Father Abraham, what think you of the times? Will not those heavy taxes quite
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