Autobiography

Abstract

Chapter 11 outlines Franklin’s return to America in time to offer advice to the new government and plans for a new constitution. He also wrote his Autobiography in instalments over the last fifteen years of his life, which was one part memoir, one part uplift. In some respects, it carried on Puritan conventions of introspection in journals and diaries. At the end of his life, friends and family pressed him to make a Christian profession. His well-lived life, with its work ethic and emphasis on self-help, he believed, was sufficient. The chapter also discusses his anti-slavery views, his friendship with Ezra Stiles, his deathbed scene and the views of his sister, Jane Mecom.