Not that the brevity or affection for his subject is a liability. He might be in awe of Franklin, but Morgan is historian enough to acknowledge when events require further discussion, and when Franklin was simply wrong. For example, of all the accounts I've read, Morgan charts most clearly Franklin's transformation from English Patriot to American Patriot in the years leading up to the American Revolution.

Franklin spent the years before the Revolution in England, trying to achieve compromise between the colonies and Crown. At the time, Franklin thought of himself as a British Citizen from America-- not an American. At the same time that his counterparts in the colonies were beginning to speak of revolution, Franklin was still actively dedicated to preserving the union. Morgan spends much time discussing how this identity shaped Franklin's efforts to reconcile an intransigent Parliament to the real needs of the colonies despite repeated setbacks and open hostility. The change comes not after his public humiliation in Parliament, when the powerful forces he had on his side-- William Pitt among them-- cannot sway a government determined to punish the colonies for demanding a say in their own affairs, but after Parliament and King reject out of hand petitions sent from America. To Franklin, this meant that the ancient right of subjects (the colonies) to petition the Crown for a redress of grievances had been revoked, and that Britain had done the damage. Despite this realization, Franklin continued working to keep war at bay, but with the realization that when push came to shove, he was first an American.

The same episode demonstrates that Franklin was prone to miscalculation, often misreading to disastrous effect signals coming from America to England. As the chief agent of America at Parliament, he was often called on to speak for all 13 colonies on slim information, often blundering at full speed into powerful opposition. Morgan digs beneath Franklin's own words here, repeatedly wondering aloud if Franklin in these years understood what he was doing and who he was dealing with. The impression Morgan gives here is quite a departure from the slick and homely man-of-the-world image Franklin himself cultivated.

One gets the sense that Morgan has been doing some outside reading, because he spends many pages on Franklin's time in France raising money for the American Revolution. This in itself is unremarkable, but Morgan seems to have read David McCullough's recent biography of John Adams. In that book McCullough, through Adams, casts the elderly Franklin as a doddering old fraud, chasing tail and recieving guests but never actually doing any work. In contrast Adams comes across in Morgan's book as a pushy, blustery jerk with a persecution complex. The truth is of course somewhere between-- Adams totally failed to understand that tail-chasing was a vital part of court diplomacy in France, and Franklin never let Adams (who was a pushy jerk) in on his plans.