Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was an American printer, writer, scientist, inventor, and diplomat, often regarded as a Founding Father of the United States. He rose to prominence as editor of The Pennsylvania Gazette and author of Poor Richard's Almanack before winning scientific renown for experiments with electricity. He also played a major role in the American Revolution (1765-1789).
Apprenticeship in Boston
Benjamin Franklin was born on 17 January 1706, in the house his parents leased on Milk Street in Boston, Massachusetts. He was, as noted in his autobiography, the "youngest Son of the youngest Son for five Generations back" (46). His father, Josiah Franklin, had emigrated to Boston partially because his older brothers received all the family inheritance in England. Josiah was a well-respected chandler with 17 children across two marriages; Ben was his tenth son and fifteenth child, born to his second wife, Abiah Folger. Ben learned to read at an early age and his father sent him to Boston Latin School, with the intention that he one day join the clergy. But after two years, Josiah was forced to pull Ben out of school due to lack of money. Instead, Josiah arranged for twelve-year-old Ben to be apprenticed to his elder brother James, a printer.
Ben quickly showed an aptitude for the printing trade and, in his free time, read voraciously and refined his writing skills. In 1721, James Franklin founded The New-England Courant, only the third newspaper to appear in Boston. When James invited readers to contribute to the paper, 16-year-old Ben took the opportunity. In 1722, he penned 14 satirical essays under the pseudonym 'Silence Dogood,' presented as a middle-aged widow. As Dogood, Franklin satirized Massachusetts society: he mocked the haughtiness of Harvard College students, questioned the purpose of women's hoop petticoats, and suggested changes to funeral eulogies. Dogood's irreverence soon made her essays the talk of the town, and Franklin listened with pleasure as James and his friends tried to guess the writer's identity. When James was briefly arrested for publishing material critical of the colonial governor, Ben took over the paper, using Dogood to advocate for free speech.
James was released from jail a month later on the condition that he not print or publish work in The New-England Courant. To circumvent this, he publicly stepped aside as publisher and let Ben run the paper, although James intended to keep managing things behind the scenes. To support the ruse, James publicly released Ben from the terms of his apprenticeship, although he had him sign a secret agreement in which he promised to fulfill the terms of his original indenture. Subsequently, the brothers often quarreled over the direction of the paper, and James became jealous upon discovering Ben was the author behind Silence Dogood, while Ben believed himself to be James' intellectual superior. In 1723, Ben left home and fled to New York City; although this broke the terms of the secret agreement, he was confident that James would not go to the authorities for fear of revealing his own duplicity. Franklin briefly stayed in New York but, after failing to find work, he moved on to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Poor Richard
Franklin arrived in Philadelphia in October 1723 and easily found work as a journeyman in one of the city's print shops. His talents drew the attention of Sir William Keith, deputy governor of Pennsylvania. Keith had a low opinion of Philadelphia's two current printers and, hoping to induce Franklin to remain in the city, offered to help him establish his own print shop. Franklin was receptive but unable to convince his father to lend him money for printing equipment. Keith agreed to bankroll the venture and sent Franklin to London to buy the equipment and make connections with English printers. It was after he had set sail in November 1724 that Franklin realized Keith had failed to supply him with the promised letters of credit and introduction. Stranded in London without prospects, Franklin made the most of his situation. He found work in several printing shops and spent his free time attending the theater and engaging in "foolish intrigues with low women," by which he likely meant prostitutes (Brands, 69). In 1725, he made an impression on the city's philosophic circles with his deistic pamphlet A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain in which he argued that happiness was an illusion and questioned the existence of the immortal soul.
By July 1726, Franklin had saved enough money to book passage back to Philadelphia. He briefly worked as a clerk in a merchant's shop before returning to the printing trade, going into business with a friend, Hugh Meredith. After securing a loan from Meredith's father, the pair ordered the necessary equipment from London and got to work. Thanks to Franklin's charismatic personality and work ethic – he often worked until midnight – the print shop soon attracted a good deal of business. In 1729, Franklin and Meredith began publishing their own newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, which contained news, gossip, and advertisements. In July 1730, Franklin was left as the sole proprietor of the business when the debt-ridden Meredith resigned, on the condition that Franklin assume his business-related debts. The paper became so successful that, in 1731, Franklin sent an editor to start a partner newspaper in South Carolina, and soon had partners running similar papers in New York and even in the Caribbean. In 1732, Franklin began another successful venture when he published the first edition of his Poor Richard's Almanack. Written under the pseudonym 'Richard Saunders,' the almanac contained a calendar for the coming year, with weather predictions, poems, trivia, recipes, and advice. 'Poor Richard' was also well-known for his wordplay and witty proverbs, many of which are still widely quoted today. Franklin published the almanac annually until 1758.
Prior to going to London, Franklin had courted Deborah Read, the 15-year-old daughter of the family he lodged with, and even suggested marriage upon his return from England. However, his prolonged absence forced Read to consider other options, and she eventually married Jack Rogers, a potter. Rogers stuck around long enough to collect the dowry before fleeing to Barbados to escape his creditors. When Franklin returned from London, he rekindled his courtship, but the pair was unable to marry so long as Rogers' fate remained unknown. By 1730, it seemed unlikely that Rogers would return to charge the couple with bigamy, so, on 1 September, Benjamin and Deborah entered a common-law marriage, living together as husband and wife. The following year, Franklin acknowledged the birth of an illegitimate son, William, taking him into his home to raise. Franklin never publicly disclosed who William's mother was, and her identity remains a mystery today. In 1732, Deborah gave birth to a son, Francis Folger Franklin, who tragically lived just five years before dying of smallpox. A daughter, Sarah 'Sally' Franklin, was born in 1743 and lived long enough to marry and have children.
Public Service & Scientific Fame
With the success of his business and the start of his family, Franklin had put down roots in Philadelphia and now sought to improve his adopted city. In 1727, he formed the Junto, otherwise known as the 'Leather Apron Club,' a group of well-educated individuals who gathered to discuss morals, politics, and philosophy, similar to the European philosophers of the Enlightenment with their coffeehouses and salons; Franklin would form an intercolonial version of this, called the American Philosophical Society, 16 years later. With the help of the Junto, Franklin established the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, a subscription library whereby members would pool their funds to buy books for any of them to read. Five years later, he founded the Union Fire Company which, based on models he had observed in London, was the first volunteer firefighting company in the Thirteen Colonies. In 1743, Franklin began looking into creating an academy, something he would accomplish twelve years later when he helped found the University of Pennsylvania. Franklin also looked to the defense of the city; during King George's War (1744-1748), he helped organize a militia force and raised funds to purchase artillery through a lottery.
Franklin's civic-mindedness helped turn him into one of Philadelphia's leading citizens, while his business ventures continued to make money, both figuratively and literally; Franklin had always been an advocate of paper currencies and, by the 1740s, had been commissioned to print paper notes for the colonial governments of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. By 1748, the 42-year-old Franklin had accumulated enough wealth to retire. He handed the reins of the printing business to a trusted foreman, David Hall, but remained a silent partner, continuing to make an annual £600 from the business's profits over the next 18 years. Turning to a life of gentlemanly scholarship in his retirement, Franklin became particularly interested in studying electricity which, at the time, was little understood. Over the next several years, Franklin conducted a series of electrical experiments, sending his findings off to correspondents in London, where they were eventually published. He was the first to mark the distinction between positive and negative electrical charges, discovered the principle of charge conservation, and created a kind of electrical battery out of glass, lead plates, and wires.
In 1752, Franklin set out to see whether lightning was electrical in nature. To do this, he and his son William flew a kite during a storm; the kite was attached to a wet hemp string, which itself was tied to a house key. As he flew the kite, Franklin observed that the threads of the string were repelling one another, acting as a conductor for the electricity in the thunderclouds, a notion that was confirmed when the key produced an electric spark. Experiments such as these catapulted Franklin into international fame, cementing his place as a leading figure in the American Enlightenment, and led him to invent the lightning rod. Some of his other inventions include bifocal glasses and the Franklin stove, a fireplace designed to produce more heat and less smoke.
Political Career
In 1751, Franklin was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly and, two years later, became deputy postmaster general for all British North America. In June 1754, in response to the opening hostilities of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), delegates from seven colonies met at the Albany Congress to discuss how best to defend against the French and their Indigenous allies. Franklin, representing Pennsylvania, unveiled his Albany Plan of Union, which called for the creation of a unified, intercolonial government. Inspired by the model of the Iroquois Confederacy, each colony would send representatives to a 'grand council', which would be overseen by a president appointed by the British Crown. This colonial government, though still subservient to Britain, would handle all issues relating to colonial defense and Indian affairs. Franklin lobbied for his plan in The Pennsylvania Gazette, in which a cartoon was published depicting the colonies as a snake that had been cut into pieces with the words 'Join, or Die' printed underneath. Ultimately, the other delegates rejected Franklin's Plan of Union, fearing it would deprive the colonies of their autonomy.
In 1755, Franklin helped supply British General Edward Braddock for his ill-fated campaign to capture the French Fort Duquesne. The catastrophic defeat of the Braddock Expedition led to increased French and Indian raids against the Pennsylvanian frontier. But while Franklin and other Assembly members scrambled to organize a militia, the proprietors of the colony, the Penn family, seemed less concerned with Pennsylvania's defense; the Penns refused to allow the Assembly to tax their proprietary lands, which could have helped fund the defense. In 1757, the Assembly sent Franklin to London as their agent to lobby against the undue influence of the Penns. Franklin spent the next five years in London, basking in the celebrity status he found there. For his scientific findings, he was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford and the University of Saint Andrews – and was thereafter known as Dr. Franklin – and rubbed shoulders with the most famous intellectuals in Britain including David Hume and Joseph Priestley. In 1762, Franklin's friendship with the prime minister, Lord Bute, allowed him to get his son William appointed as royal governor of New Jersey.
In 1762, after the king's Privy Council mediated a compromise between the Pennsylvania Assembly and the Penns, Franklin returned to America to resume his duties as deputy postmaster general. He spent five months touring colonial post offices but longed to return to London, having become accustomed to its sophistication. He would get his chance in October 1764, when he lost reelection to the Assembly, thanks to the political maneuverings of the Penns. The Assembly sent him back to London as their agent, this time tasking him with turning Pennsylvania from a proprietary colony into a royal one. Franklin said goodbye to his wife Deborah, who opted to remain in Philadelphia; they would never meet again, as she would die in 1774, before Franklin's return.
Revolution
By 1763, Britain had won the French and Indian War but had been saddled with a large amount of war debt. To begin paying this off, Parliament imposed a direct tax, the Stamp Act, on the colonies. Franklin initially opposed the act because the colonies were used to taxing themselves, but when it appeared that the act would inevitably pass, he decided he may as well profit from it. Franklin arranged for his partner David Hall to print the stamps in Philadelphia and got his friend, John Hughes, an appointment as Pennsylvania's stamp distributor. However, Franklin had not anticipated the vitriolic response with which the colonies would greet the Stamp Act; deriding the policy as an attack on their liberties, American revolutionaries rioted. Hughes was intimidated into resigning his post, and Franklin was denounced as a traitor. Taken aback, Franklin corrected course and urged Parliament to repeal the act, which it did in 1766.
Over the next decade, relations between Parliament and the Thirteen Colonies steadily deteriorated. Parliament insisted on its authority to tax the colonists, while the Patriots believed they could not be taxed by a legislature they were not represented in. Franklin attempted to chart a middle course and wrote over 100 essays trying to mend the divide. In 1772, Franklin obtained letters written by Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts, in which the governor disparaged the liberties of Americans. Franklin leaked the letters the following year; he hoped this would shift the blame away from Parliament and toward the colonies' own officials. The effect backfired, however, and contributed to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773. After this, British officials began to regard Franklin with suspicion. On 29 January 1774, he was hauled before the Privy Council and forced to stand in silence as he was ridiculed and humiliated by the solicitor-general. This experience appears to have finally helped Franklin choose a side; in May 1775, shortly after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, he returned to Philadelphia and was immediately elected to the Second Continental Congress. (William Franklin remained a leading Loyalist and went to Britain in self-exile at the end of the war).
Franklin, having thrown his lot in with the revolutionaries, worked diligently to support the cause; he had no other option, for as he expressed to John Hancock, "we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately" (Brands, 512). He was part of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence and, in October 1776, was selected as the United States commissioner to France. Franklin spent the next several years in Paris, making the most of his reputation as a paragon of the American Enlightenment. He attended court dressed rustically in a fur hat and plain brown coat, playing up to the French idea of Americans as simple, uncorrupted folk. He made quite an impression, and before long his likeness was being sold on snuff boxes and dolls throughout Paris. His efforts helped lead to the Treaty of Alliance in 1778, in which France entered the war as a US ally and helped turn the tide. He remained in France long enough to sign the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the war and recognized the independence of the United States.
Later Years
When Franklin returned to the United States in 1785, he was hailed as a hero; the service he rendered to his country was recognized as second only to that of George Washington. At age 79, he was now suffering from multiple health issues, including gout, and had come home to enjoy a quiet retirement. However, he had one final part to play on the stage of American politics. In 1787, the aged Franklin attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia; although he played little part in the proceedings, his presence added much-needed legitimacy to the convention. He was ultimately one of the 39 men to sign the United States Constitution, which created a government similar to that which he had proposed in Albany three decades earlier. Afterward, he was rarely seen in public, although he was not inactive; he spent his final years writing a series of essays denouncing the institution of slavery and urging Congress to abolish it. He died in Philadelphia on 17 April 1790 at the age of 84, leaving behind a legacy as the most famous American of his time, and as one of the most consequential figures of the 18th century.
