Benjamin Franklin
American author, scientist, and statesman
also called Ben Franklin, pseudonym Richard Saunders
born Jan. 17 [Jan. 6, Old Style], 1706, Boston, Mass. [U.S.]
died April 17, 1790, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.
Main
American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and
diplomat. One of the foremost of the Founding Fathers, Franklin helped
draft the Declaration of Independence and was one of its signers,
represented the United States in France during the American Revolution,
and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He made important
contributions to science, especially in the understanding of
electricity, and is remembered for the wit, wisdom, and elegance of his
writing.
Early life (1706–23)
Franklin was born the 10th son of the 17 children of a man who made soap
and candles, one of the lowliest of the artisan crafts. In an age that
privileged the firstborn son, Franklin was, as he tartly noted in his
Autobiography, “the youngest Son of the youngest Son for five
Generations back.” He learned to read very early and had one year in
grammar school and another under a private teacher, but his formal
education ended at age 10. At 12 he was apprenticed to his brother
James, a printer. His mastery of the printer’s trade, of which he was
proud to the end of his life, was achieved between 1718 and 1723. In the
same period he read tirelessly and taught himself to write effectively.
His first enthusiasm was for poetry, but, discouraged with the
quality of his own, he gave it up. Prose was another matter. Young
Franklin discovered a volume of The Spectator—featuring Joseph Addison
and Sir Richard Steele’s famous periodical essays, which had appeared in
England in 1711–12—and saw in it a means for improving his writing. He
read these Spectator papers over and over, copied and recopied them, and
then tried to recall them from memory. He even turned them into poetry
and then back into prose. Franklin realized, as all the Founders did,
that writing competently was such a rare talent in the 18th century that
anyone who could do it well immediately attracted attention. “Prose
writing” became, as he recalled in his Autobiography, “of great Use to
me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my
Advancement.”
In 1721 James Franklin founded a weekly newspaper, the New-England
Courant, to which readers were invited to contribute. Benjamin, now 16,
read and perhaps set in type these contributions and decided that he
could do as well himself. In 1722 he wrote a series of 14 essays signed
“Silence Dogood” in which he lampooned everything from funeral eulogies
to the students of Harvard College. For one so young to assume the
persona of a middle-aged woman was a remarkable feat, and Franklin took
“exquisite Pleasure” in the fact that his brother and others became
convinced that only a learned and ingenious wit could have written these
essays.
Late in 1722 James Franklin got into trouble with the provincial
authorities and was forbidden to print or publish the Courant. To keep
the paper going, he discharged his younger brother from his original
apprenticeship and made him the paper’s nominal publisher. New
indentures were drawn up but not made public. Some months later, after a
bitter quarrel, Benjamin secretly left home, sure that James would not
“go to law” and reveal the subterfuge he had devised.
Youthful adventures (1723–26)
Failing to find work in New York City, Franklin at age 17 went on to
Quaker-dominated Philadelphia, a much more open and religiously tolerant
place than Puritan Boston. One of the most memorable scenes of the
Autobiography is the description of his arrival on a Sunday morning,
tired and hungry. Finding a bakery, he asked for three pennies’ worth of
bread and got “three great Puffy Rolls.” Carrying one under each arm and
munching on the third, he walked up Market Street past the door of the
Read family, where stood Deborah, his future wife. She saw him and
“thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward ridiculous
Appearance.”
A few weeks later he was rooming at the Reads’ and employed as a
printer. By the spring of 1724 he was enjoying the companionship of
other young men with a taste for reading, and he was also being urged to
set up in business for himself by the governor of Pennsylvania, Sir
William Keith. At Keith’s suggestion, Franklin returned to Boston to try
to raise the necessary capital. His father thought him too young for
such a venture, so Keith offered to foot the bill himself and arranged
Franklin’s passage to England so that he could choose his type and make
connections with London stationers and booksellers. Franklin exchanged
“some promises” about marriage with Deborah Read and, with a young
friend, James Ralph, as his companion, sailed for London in November
1724, just over a year after arriving in Philadelphia. Not until his
ship was well out at sea did he realize that Governor Keith had not
delivered the letters of credit and introduction he had promised.
In London Franklin quickly found employment in his trade and was able
to lend money to Ralph, who was trying to establish himself as a writer.
The two young men enjoyed the theatre and the other pleasures of the
city, including women. While in London, Franklin wrote A Dissertation on
Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), a Deistical pamphlet
inspired by his having set type for William Wollaston’s moral tract, The
Religion of Nature Delineated. Franklin argued in his essay that since
human beings have no real freedom of choice, they are not morally
responsible for their actions. This was perhaps a nice justification for
his self-indulgent behaviour in London and his ignoring of Deborah, to
whom he had written only once. He later repudiated the pamphlet, burning
all but one of the copies still in his possession.
By 1726 Franklin was tiring of London. He considered becoming an
itinerant teacher of swimming, but, when Thomas Denham, a Quaker
merchant, offered him a clerkship in his store in Philadelphia with a
prospect of fat commissions in the West Indian trade, he decided to
return home.
Achievement of security and fame (1726–53)
Denham died, however, a few months after Franklin entered his store. The
young man, now 20, returned to the printing trade and in 1728 was able
to set up a partnership with a friend. Two years later he borrowed money
to become sole proprietor.
His private life at this time was extremely complicated. Deborah Read
had married, but her husband had deserted her and disappeared. One
matchmaking venture failed because Franklin wanted a dowry of £100 to
pay off his business debt. A strong sexual drive, “that
hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth,” was sending him to “low Women,”
and he thought he very much needed to get married. His affection for
Deborah having “revived,” he “took her to Wife” on Sept. 1, 1730. At
this point Deborah may have been the only woman in Philadelphia who
would have him, for he brought to the marriage an illegitimate son,
William, just borne of a woman who has never been identified. Franklin’s
common-law marriage lasted until Deborah’s death in 1774. They had a
son, Franky, who died at age four, and a daughter, Sarah, who survived
them both. William was brought up in the household and apparently did
not get along well with Deborah.
Franklin and his partner’s first coup was securing the printing of
Pennsylvania’s paper currency. Franklin helped get this business by
writing A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper
Currency (1729), and later he also became public printer of New Jersey,
Delaware, and Maryland. Other moneymaking ventures included the
Pennsylvania Gazette, published by Franklin from 1729 and generally
acknowledged as among the best of the colonial newspapers, and Poor
Richard’s almanac, printed annually from 1732 to 1757. Despite some
failures, Franklin prospered. Indeed, he made enough to lend money with
interest and to invest in rental properties in Philadelphia and many
coastal towns. He had franchises or partnerships with printers in the
Carolinas, New York, and the British West Indies. By the late 1740s he
had become one of the wealthiest colonists in the northern part of the
North American continent.
As he made money, he concocted a variety of projects for social
improvement. In 1727 he organized the Junto, or Leather Apron Club, to
debate questions of morals, politics, and natural philosophy and to
exchange knowledge of business affairs. The need of Junto members for
easier access to books led in 1731 to the organization of the Library
Company of Philadelphia. Through the Junto, Franklin proposed a paid
city watch, or police force. A paper read to the same group resulted in
the organization of a volunteer fire company. In 1743 he sought an
intercolonial version of the Junto, which led to the formation of the
American Philosophical Society. In 1749 he published Proposals Relating
to the Education of Youth in Pennsilvania; in 1751 the Academy of
Philadelphia, from which grew the University of Pennsylvania, was
founded. He also became an enthusiastic member of the Freemasons and
promoted their “enlightened” causes.
Although still a tradesman, he was picking up some political offices.
He became clerk of the Pennsylvania legislature in 1736 and postmaster
of Philadelphia in 1737. Prior to 1748, though, his most important
political service was his part in organizing a militia for the defense
of the colony against possible invasion by the French and the Spaniards,
whose privateers were operating in the Delaware River.
In 1748 Franklin, at age 42, had become wealthy enough to retire from
active business. He took off his leather apron and became a gentleman, a
distinctive status in the 18th century. Since no busy artisan could be a
gentleman, Franklin never again worked as a printer; instead, he became
a silent partner in the printing firm of Franklin and Hall, realizing in
the next 18 years an average profit of over £600 annually. He announced
his new status as a gentleman by having his portrait painted in a velvet
coat and a brown wig; he also acquired a coat of arms, bought several
slaves, and moved to a new and more spacious house in “a more quiet Part
of the Town.” Most important, as a gentleman and “master of [his] own
time,” he decided to do what other gentlemen did—engage in what he
termed “Philosophical Studies and Amusements.”
In the 1740s electricity was one of these curious amusements. It was
introduced to Philadelphians by an electrical machine sent to the
Library Company by one of Franklin’s English correspondents. In the
winter of 1746–47, Franklin and three of his friends began to
investigate electrical phenomena. Franklin sent piecemeal reports of his
ideas and experiments to Peter Collinson, his Quaker correspondent in
London. Since he did not know what European scientists might have
already discovered, Franklin set forth his findings timidly. In 1751
Collinson had Franklin’s papers published in an 86-page book titled
Experiments and Observations on Electricity. In the 18th century the
book went through five English editions, three in French, and one each
in Italian and German.
Franklin’s fame spread rapidly. The experiment he suggested to prove
the identity of lightning and electricity was apparently first made in
France before he tried the simpler but more dangerous expedient of
flying a kite in a thunderstorm. But his other findings were original.
He created the distinction between insulators and conductors. He
invented a battery for storing electrical charges. He coined new English
words for the new science of electricity—conductor, charge, discharge,
condense, armature, electrify, and others. He showed that electricity
was a single “fluid” with positive and negative or plus and minus
charges and not, as traditionally thought, two kinds of fluids. And he
demonstrated that the plus and minus charges, or states of
electrification of bodies, had to occur in exactly equal amounts—a
crucial scientific principle known today as the law of conservation of
charge (see charge conservation).
Theodore Hornberger
Gordon S. Wood
Public service (1753–85)
Despite the success of his electrical experiments, Franklin never
thought science was as important as public service. As a leisured
gentleman, he soon became involved in more high-powered public offices.
He became a member of the Philadelphia City Council in 1748, justice of
the peace in 1749, and in 1751 a city alderman and a member of the
Pennsylvania Assembly. But he had his sights on being part of a larger
arena, the British Empire, which he regarded as “the greatest Political
Structure Human Wisdom ever yet erected.” In 1753 Franklin became a
royal officeholder, deputy postmaster general, in charge of mail in all
the northern colonies. Thereafter he began to think in intercolonial
terms. In 1754 his “Plan of Union” for the colonies was adopted by the
Albany Congress, which was convened at the beginning of the French and
Indian War and included representatives from the Iroquois Confederacy.
The plan called for the establishment of a general council, with
representatives from the several colonies, to organize a common defense
against the French. Neither the colonial legislatures nor the king’s
advisers were ready for such union, however, and the plan failed. But
Franklin had become acquainted with important imperial officials, and
his ambition to succeed within the imperial hierarchy had been whetted.
In 1757 he went to England as the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly
in order to get the family of William Penn, the proprietors under the
colony’s charter, to allow the colonial legislature to tax their
ungranted lands. But Franklin and some of his allies in the assembly had
a larger goal of persuading the British government to oust the Penn
family as the proprietors of Pennsylvania and make that colony a royal
province. Except for a two-year return to Philadelphia in 1762–64,
Franklin spent the next 18 years living in London, most of the time in
the apartment of Margaret Stevenson, a widow, and her daughter Polly at
36 Craven Street near Charing Cross. His son, William, now age 27, and
two slaves accompanied him to London. Deborah and their daughter, Sally,
age 14, remained in Philadelphia.
Before he left for London, Franklin decided to bring his Poor
Richard’s almanac to an end. While at sea in 1757, he completed a
12-page preface for the final 1758 edition of the almanac titled “Father
Abraham’s Speech” and later known as the The Way to Wealth. In this
preface Father Abraham cites only those proverbs that concern hard work,
thrift, and financial prudence. The Way to Wealth eventually became the
most widely reprinted of all Franklin’s works, including the
Autobiography.
This time Franklin’s experience in London was very different from his
sojourn in 1724–26. London was the largest city in Europe and the centre
of the burgeoning British Empire, and Franklin was famous; consequently,
he met everyone else who was famous, including David Hume, Captain James
Cook, Joseph Priestley, and John Pringle, who was physician to Lord
Bute, the king’s chief minister. In 1759 Franklin received an honorary
degree from the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland, which led to
his thereafter being called “Dr. Franklin.” Another honorary degree
followed in 1762 from the University of Oxford. Everyone wanted to paint
his portrait and make mezzotints for sale to the public. Franklin fell
in love with the sophistication of London and England; by contrast, he
disparaged the provinciality and vulgarity of America. He was very much
the royalist, and he bragged of his connection with Lord Bute, which
enabled him in 1762 to get his son, William, then age 31, appointed
royal governor of New Jersey.
Reluctantly, Franklin had to go back to Pennsylvania in 1762 in order
to look after his post office, but he promised his friends in London
that he would soon return and perhaps stay forever in England. After
touring the post offices up and down North America, a trip of 1,780
miles (2,900 km), he had to deal with an uprising of some Scotch-Irish
settlers in the Paxton region of western Pennsylvania who were angry at
the Quaker assembly’s unwillingness to finance military protection from
the Indians on the frontier. After losing an election to the
Pennsylvania Assembly in 1764, Franklin could hardly wait to get back to
London. Deborah stayed in Philadelphia, and Franklin never saw her
again.
He soon had to face the problems arising from the Stamp Act of 1765,
which created a firestorm of opposition in America. Like other colonial
agents, Franklin opposed Parliament’s stamp tax, asserting that taxation
ought to be the prerogative of the colonial legislatures. But once he
saw that passage of the tax was inevitable, he sought to make the best
of the situation. After all, he said, empires cost money. He ordered
stamps for his printing firm in Philadelphia and procured for his friend
John Hughes the stamp agency for Pennsylvania. In the process, he almost
ruined his position in American public life and nearly cost Hughes his
life.
Franklin was shocked by the mobs that effectively prevented
enforcement of the Stamp Act everywhere in North America. He told Hughes
to remain cool in the face of the mob. “A firm Loyalty to the Crown and
faithful Adherence to the Government of this Nation…,” he said, “will
always be the wisest Course for you and I to take, whatever may be the
Madness of the Populace or their blind Leaders.” Only Franklin’s
four-hour testimony before Parliament denouncing the act in 1766 saved
his reputation in America. The experience shook Franklin, and his
earlier confidence in the wisdom of British officials became punctuated
by doubts and resentments. He began to feel what he called his
“Americanness” as never before.
During the next four or five years Franklin sought to bridge the
growing gulf between the colonies and the British government. Between
1765 and 1775 he wrote 126 newspaper pieces, most of which tried to
explain each side to the other. But, as he said, the English thought him
too American, while the Americans thought him too English. He had not,
however, given up his ambition of acquiring a position in the imperial
hierarchy. But in 1771 opposition by Lord Hillsborough, who had just
been appointed head of the new American Department, left Franklin
depressed and dispirited; in a mood of frustration, nostalgia, and
defiance, he began writing his Autobiography, which eventually became
one of the most widely read autobiographies ever published.
In recounting the first part of his life, up to age 25—the best part
of the Autobiography, most critics agree—Franklin sought to soothe his
wounds and justify his apparent failure in British politics. Most
important, in this beginning part of his Autobiography, he in effect was
telling the world (and his son) that, as a free man who had established
himself against overwhelming odds as an independent and industrious
artisan, he did not have to kowtow to some patronizing, privileged
aristocrat.
When the signals from the British government shifted and Hillsborough
was dismissed from the cabinet, Franklin dropped the writing of the
Autobiography, which he would not resume until 1784 in France following
the successful negotiation of the treaty establishing American
independence. Franklin still thought he might be able to acquire an
imperial office and work to hold the empire together. But he became
involved in the affair of the Hutchinson letters—an affair that
ultimately destroyed his position in England. In 1772 Franklin had sent
back to Boston some letters written in the 1760s by Thomas Hutchinson,
then lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, in which Hutchinson had made
some indiscreet remarks about the need to abridge American liberties.
Franklin naively thought that these letters would somehow throw blame
for the imperial crisis on native officials such as Hutchinson and thus
absolve the ministry in London of responsibility. This, Franklin
believed, would allow his friends in the ministry, such as Lord
Dartmouth, to settle the differences between the mother country and her
colonies, with Franklin’s help.
The move backfired completely, and on Jan. 29, 1774, Franklin stood
silent in an amphitheatre near Whitehall while being viciously attacked
by the British solicitor-general before the Privy Council and the court,
most of whom were hooting and laughing. Two days later he was fired as
deputy postmaster. After some futile efforts at reconciliation, he
sailed for America in March 1775.
Although upon his arrival in Philadelphia Franklin was immediately
elected to the Second Continental Congress, some Americans remained
suspicious of his real loyalties. He had been so long abroad that some
thought he might be a British spy. He was delighted that the Congress in
1776 sent him back to Europe as the premier agent in a commission
seeking military aid and diplomatic recognition from France. He played
on the French aristocracy’s liberal sympathies for the oppressed
Americans and extracted not only diplomatic recognition of the new
republic but also loan after loan from an increasingly impoverished
French government. His image as the democratic folk genius from the
wilderness of America preceded him, and he exploited it brilliantly for
the American cause. His face appeared everywhere—on medallions, on
snuffboxes, on candy boxes, in rings, in statues, in prints; women even
did their hair à la Franklin. Franklin played his role to perfection. In
violation of all protocol, he dressed in a simple brown-and-white linen
suit and wore a fur cap, no wig, and no sword to the court of
Versailles, the most formal and elaborate court in all of Europe. And
the French aristocracy and court loved it, caught up as they were with
the idea of America.
Beset with the pain of gout and a kidney stone, and surrounded by
spies and his sometimes clumsy fellow commissioners—especially Arthur
Lee of Virginia and John Adams of Massachusetts, who disliked and
mistrusted him—Franklin nonetheless succeeded marvelously. He first
secured military and diplomatic alliances with France in 1778 and then
played a crucial role in bringing about the final peace treaty with
Britain in 1783 (see Peace of Paris). In violation of their instructions
and the French alliance, the American peace commissioners signed a
separate peace with Britain. It was left to Franklin to apologize to the
comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s chief minister, which he did in a
beautifully wrought diplomatic letter.
No wonder the eight years in France were the happiest of Franklin’s
life. He was doing what he most yearned to do—shaping events on a world
stage. At this point, in 1784, he resumed work on his Autobiography,
writing the second part of it, which presumes human control over one’s
life.
Last years (1785–90)
In 1785 Franklin reluctantly had to come to America to die, even though
all his friends were in France. Although he feared he would be “a
stranger in my own country,” he now knew that his destiny was linked to
America.
His reception was not entirely welcoming. The family and friends of
the Lees in Virginia and the Adamses in Massachusetts spread stories of
his overweening love of France and his dissolute ways. The Congress
treated him shabbily, ignoring his requests for some land in the West
and a diplomatic appointment for his grandson. In 1788 he was reduced to
petitioning the Congress with a pathetic “Sketch of the Services of B.
Franklin to the United States,” which the Congress never answered. Just
before his death in 1790, Franklin retaliated by signing a memorial
requesting that the Congress abolish slavery in the United States. This
memorandum provoked some congressmen into angry defenses of slavery,
which Franklin exquisitely mocked in a newspaper piece published a month
before he died.
Upon his death the Senate refused to go along with the House in
declaring a month of mourning for Franklin. In contrast to the many
expressions of French affection for Franklin, his fellow Americans gave
him one public eulogy—and that was delivered by his inveterate enemy the
Rev. William Smith, who passed over Franklin’s youth because it seemed
embarrassing.
Following the publication of the Autobiography in 1794, Franklin’s
youth was no longer embarrassing. In the succeeding decades, he became
the hero of countless early 19th-century artisans and self-made
businessmen who were seeking a justification of their rise and their
moneymaking. They were the creators of the modern folksy image of
Franklin, the man who came to personify the American dream.
Assessment
Franklin was not only the most famous American in the 18th century but
also one of the most famous figures in the Western world of the 18th
century; indeed, he is one of the most celebrated and influential
Americans who has ever lived. Although one is apt to think of Franklin
exclusively as an inventor, as an early version of Thomas Edison, which
he was, his 18th-century fame came not simply from his many inventions
but, more important, from his fundamental contributions to the science
of electricity. If there had been a Nobel Prize for Physics in the 18th
century, Franklin would have been a contender. Enhancing his fame was
the fact that he was an American, a simple man from an obscure
background who emerged from the wilds of America to dazzle the entire
intellectual world. Most Europeans in the 18th century thought of
America as a primitive, undeveloped place full of forests and savages
and scarcely capable of producing enlightened thinkers. Yet Franklin’s
electrical discoveries in the mid-18th century had surpassed the
achievements of the most sophisticated scientists of Europe. Franklin
became a living example of the natural untutored genius of the New World
that was free from the encumbrances of a decadent and tired Old World—an
image that he later parlayed into French support for the American
Revolution.
Despite his great scientific achievements, however, Franklin always
believed that public service was more important than science, and his
political contributions to the formation of the United States were
substantial. He had a hand in the writing of the Declaration of
Independence, contributed to the drafting of the Articles of
Confederation—America’s first national constitution—and was the oldest
member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that wrote the
Constitution of the United States of America in Philadelphia. More
important, as diplomatic representative of the new American republic in
France during the Revolution, he secured both diplomatic recognition and
financial and military aid from the government of Louis XVI and was a
crucial member of the commission that negotiated the treaty by which
Great Britain recognized its former 13 colonies as a sovereign nation.
Since no one else could have accomplished all that he did in France
during the Revolution, he can quite plausibly be regarded as America’s
greatest diplomat.
Equally significant perhaps were Franklin’s many contributions to the
comfort and safety of daily life, especially in his adopted city of
Philadelphia. No civic project was too large or too small for his
interest. In addition to his lightning rod and his Franklin stove (a
wood-burning stove that warmed American homes for more than 200 years),
he invented bifocal glasses, the odometer, and the glass harmonica
(armonica). He had ideas about everything—from the nature of the Gulf
Stream to the cause of the common cold. He suggested the notions of
matching grants and Daylight Saving Time. Almost single-handedly he
helped to create a civic society for the inhabitants of Philadelphia.
Moreover, he helped to establish new institutions that people now take
for granted: a fire company, a library, an insurance company, an
academy, and a hospital.
Probably Franklin’s most important invention was himself. He created
so many personas in his newspaper writings and almanac and in his
posthumously published Autobiography that it is difficult to know who he
really was. Following his death in 1790, he became so identified during
the 19th century with the persona of his Autobiography and the Poor
Richard maxims of his almanac—e.g., “Early to bed, early to rise, makes
a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”—that he acquired the image of the
self-made moralist obsessed with the getting and saving of money.
Consequently, many imaginative writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry
David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and D.H. Lawrence, attacked
Franklin as a symbol of America’s middle-class moneymaking business
values. Indeed, early in the 20th century the famous German sociologist
Max Weber found Franklin to be the perfect exemplar of the “Protestant
ethic” and the modern capitalistic spirit. Although Franklin did indeed
become a wealthy tradesman by his early 40s, when he retired from his
business, during his lifetime in the 18th century he was not identified
as a self-made businessman or a budding capitalist. That image was a
creation of the 19th century. But as long as America continues to be
pictured as the land of enterprise and opportunity, where striving and
hard work can lead to success, then that image of Franklin is the one
that is likely to endure.
Gordon S. Wood
