Word: masterful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Franklin became an apprentice at the printshop of his older brother James, who tended to be quite tough as a master. "I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me," Franklin later speculated, had the effect of "impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life." That was a bit unfair to poor James, whose newspaper in Boston was the first feisty and independent publication in the colonies and who taught young Benjamin how to be cheeky about establishment authority...
...lived at "Widow Read's in Market Street." That same address is where Franklin found a wife, the daughter of Widow Read, and where he had his first close contact with an enslaved African. Over a long life, Franklin remained engaged with slavery--as a buyer, seller and master of slaves and finally as an abolitionist...
Franklin and his wife Deborah purchased slaves--Peter and Jemima--for the first time in the late 1740s, but he was uneasy about keeping them in the succession of small rented houses where the Franklins lived. Franklin believed that owning slaves diminished the master's work ethic and ruined the white children in the families that owned them because they are "educated in idleness." Yet, while rearing son William, the Franklins bought more slaves, named Othello, King and George. The last two were in tow when Franklin left for England with his 26-year...
...Franklin's dismay, King fled when his master was visiting outside London. King was later found in Suffolk in the service of a lady who had taught him to read and write and to play the violin and French horn. Franklin, who agreed to sell King to the woman, may have appreciated the slave's newfound skills because, at the time, Franklin was revising his opinion about Africans' capabilities. A few years later, after visiting an Anglican school for blacks in Philadelphia, he concluded, "Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal...
...having set out "to abolish monarchy, aristocracy, and hierarchy, throughout the world." If he could, he might well have; he had long been allergic to titles and idle elites and dynastic privilege. Fifty-three years before he sailed to France, he noted that Americans do not speak of "Master Adam" or "the Right Honourable Abraham" or "Noah, Esquire." Those observations had not endeared him to the ruling elites of America or Britain any more than his humble origins did. He did not fit into the new American aristocracy and he had never fit into the old British aristocracy, but somehow...