The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
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Benjamin Franklin
By: History.com Editors
Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009
One of the leading figures of early American history, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a statesman, author, publisher, scientist, inventor and diplomat. Born into a Boston family of modest means, Franklin had little formal education. He went on to start a successful printing business in Philadelphia and grew wealthy. Franklin was deeply active in public affairs in his adopted city, where he helped launch a lending library, hospital and college and garnered acclaim for his experiments with electricity, among other projects. During the American Revolution , he served in the Second Continental Congress and helped draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He also negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War (1775-83). In 1787, in his final significant act of public service, he was a delegate to the convention that produced the U.S. Constitution .
Benjamin Franklin’s Early Years
Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in colonial Boston. His father, Josiah Franklin (1657-1745), a native of England, was a candle and soap maker who married twice and had 17 children. Franklin’s mother was Abiah Folger (1667-1752) of Nantucket, Massachusetts , Josiah’s second wife. Franklin was the eighth of Abiah and Josiah’s 10 offspring.
Did you know? Benjamin Franklin is the only Founding Father to have signed all four of the key documents establishing the U.S.: the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Alliance with France (1778), the Treaty of Paris establishing peace with Great Britain (1783) and the U.S. Constitution (1787).
Franklin’s formal education was limited and ended when he was 10; however, he was an avid reader and taught himself to become a skilled writer. In 1718, at age 12, he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a Boston printer. By age 16, Franklin was contributing essays (under the pseudonym Silence Dogood) to a newspaper published by his brother. At age 17, Franklin ran away from his apprenticeship to Philadelphia, where he found work as a printer. In late 1724, he traveled to London, England, and again found employment in the printing business.
Benjamin Franklin: Printer and Publisher
Benjamin Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726, and two years later opened a printing shop. The business became highly successful producing a range of materials, including government pamphlets, books and currency. In 1729, Franklin became the owner and publisher of a colonial newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette , which proved popular—and to which he contributed much of the content, often using pseudonyms. Franklin achieved fame and further financial success with “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” which he published every year from 1733 to 1758. The almanac became known for its witty sayings, which often had to do with the importance of diligence and frugality, such as “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
In 1730, Franklin began living with Deborah Read (c. 1705-74), the daughter of his former Philadelphia landlady, as his common-law wife. Read’s first husband had abandoned her; however, due to bigamy laws, she and Franklin could not have an official wedding ceremony. Franklin and Read had a son, Francis Folger Franklin (1732-36), who died of smallpox at age 4, and a daughter, Sarah Franklin Bache (1743-1808). Franklin had another son, William Franklin (c. 1730-1813), who was born out of wedlock. William Franklin served as the last colonial governor of New Jersey , from 1763 to 1776, and remained loyal to the British during the American Revolution . He died in exile in England.
Benjamin Franklin and Philadelphia
As Franklin’s printing business prospered, he became increasingly involved in civic affairs. Starting in the 1730s, he helped establish a number of community organizations in Philadelphia, including a lending library (it was founded in 1731, a time when books weren’t widely available in the colonies, and remained the largest U.S. public library until the 1850s), the city’s first fire company , a police patrol and the American Philosophical Society , a group devoted to the sciences and other scholarly pursuits.
Franklin also organized the Pennsylvania militia, raised funds to build a city hospital and spearheaded a program to pave and light city streets. Additionally, Franklin was instrumental in the creation of the Academy of Philadelphia, a college which opened in 1751 and became known as the University of Pennsylvania in 1791.
Franklin also was a key figure in the colonial postal system. In 1737, the British appointed him postmaster of Philadelphia, and he went on to become, in 1753, joint postmaster general for all the American colonies. In this role he instituted various measures to improve mail service; however, the British dismissed him from the job in 1774 because he was deemed too sympathetic to colonial interests. In July 1775, the Continental Congress appointed Franklin the first postmaster general of the United States, giving him authority over all post offices from Massachusetts to Georgia . He held this position until November 1776, when he was succeeded by his son-in-law. (The first U.S. postage stamps, issued on July 1, 1847, featured images of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington .)
Benjamin Franklin's Inventions
In 1748, Franklin, then 42 years old, had expanded his printing business throughout the colonies and become successful enough to stop working. Retirement allowed him to concentrate on public service and also pursue more fully his longtime interest in science. In the 1740s, he conducted experiments that contributed to the understanding of electricity, and invented the lightning rod, which protected buildings from fires caused by lightning. In 1752, he conducted his famous kite experiment and demonstrated that lightning is electricity. Franklin also coined a number of electricity-related terms, including battery, charge and conductor.
In addition to electricity, Franklin studied a number of other topics, including ocean currents, meteorology, causes of the common cold and refrigeration. He developed the Franklin stove, which provided more heat while using less fuel than other stoves, and bifocal eyeglasses, which allow for distance and reading use. In the early 1760s, Franklin invented a musical instrument called the glass armonica. Composers such as Ludwig Beethoven (1770-1827) and Wolfgang Mozart (1756-91) wrote music for Franklin’s armonica; however, by the early part of the 19th century, the once-popular instrument had largely fallen out of use.
READ MORE: 11 Surprising Facts About Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution
In 1754, at a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New York , Franklin proposed a plan for uniting the colonies under a national congress. Although his Albany Plan was rejected, it helped lay the groundwork for the Articles of Confederation , which became the first constitution of the United States when ratified in 1781.
In 1757, Franklin traveled to London as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly, to which he was elected in 1751. Over several years, he worked to settle a tax dispute and other issues involving descendants of William Penn (1644-1718), the owners of the colony of Pennsylvania. After a brief period back in the U.S., Franklin lived primarily in London until 1775. While he was abroad, the British government began, in the mid-1760s, to impose a series of regulatory measures to assert greater control over its American colonies. In 1766, Franklin testified in the British Parliament against the Stamp Act of 1765, which required that all legal documents, newspapers, books, playing cards and other printed materials in the American colonies carry a tax stamp. Although the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, additional regulatory measures followed, leading to ever-increasing anti-British sentiment and eventual armed uprising in the American colonies .
Franklin returned to Philadelphia in May 1775, shortly after the Revolutionary War (1775-83) had begun, and was selected to serve as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, America’s governing body at the time. In 1776, he was part of the five-member committee that helped draft the Declaration of Independence , in which the 13 American colonies declared their freedom from British rule. That same year, Congress sent Franklin to France to enlist that nation’s help with the Revolutionary War. In February 1778, the French signed a military alliance with America and went on to provide soldiers, supplies and money that proved critical to America’s victory in the war.
As minister to France starting in 1778, Franklin helped negotiate and draft the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War.
Benjamin Franklin’s Later Years
In 1785, Franklin left France and returned once again to Philadelphia. In 1787, he was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention. (The 81-year-old Franklin was the convention’s oldest delegate.) At the end of the convention, in September 1787, he urged his fellow delegates to support the heavily debated new document. The U.S. Constitution was ratified by the required nine states in June 1788, and George Washington (1732-99) was inaugurated as America’s first president in April 1789.
Franklin died a year later, at age 84, on April 17, 1790, in Philadelphia. Following a funeral that was attended by an estimated 20,000 people, he was buried in Philadelphia’s Christ Church cemetery. In his will, he left money to Boston and Philadelphia, which was later used to establish a trade school and a science museum and fund scholarships and other community projects.
More than 200 years after his death, Franklin remains one of the most celebrated figures in U.S. history. His image appears on the $100 bill, and towns, schools and businesses across America are named for him.
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Franklin and the Vexing Question of Race in America
by Dr. Emma Lapsansky-Werner , Haverford College Emeritus Professor of History Emeritus Curator of the Quaker Collection.
Benjamin Franklin: probably no American child over the age of 10 doesn't recognize his name. We all know he was an American hero from "some time in the past," and in 2005, several museums around the world celebrated his life in an exhibition titled Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World. In 2018, the legendary Franklin would have celebrated his 312th birthday. Of what use is such an old legend? What can Franklin—a slaveholder-turned-abolitionist—teach us today?
Franklin correspondence and bifocals on display From an exhibition at the Franklin Institute
The only one of the Founding Fathers to sign the Declaration of Independence , the Treaty of Paris , and the Constitution , the long-lived Franklin was multifaceted: innovator, philosopher, entrepreneur, statesman, public intellectual, and—at the end of his life—an anti-slavery advocate. A man ahead-of-his-times, his limitless ingenuity fueled a seemingly limitless spectrum of "modernizations:" the concept of a lightning rod; improvements to the wood-burning stove ; the magic of bi-focal glasses. Franklin was among the first to advocate the "time-driven" workday, focused around laboring for a preset period of time, as opposed to the "task-driven" workday, which allowed a worker to quit whenever assigned jobs were completed.
And surely, part of Franklin's enduring legacies result from his commitment to "democracy" and "community," including helping to conceive a postal service , a lending library , a hospital for the poor, a fellowship for "promoting useful knowledge," a university , and a widely-publicized cartoon urging the squabbling American colonies to "join or die."
But the publisher/inventor/writer was also a man of his times, struggling to grasp how past notions of "community" should inform the "community" of the future. One vexing aspect of the community-of-the-future was defining the role and rights of "Others" in the new society: women, immigrants, Native Americans, and—especially—African Americans and/or slaves. Such issues bedeviled Franklin and his fellow Constitution-framers.
In many facets of his life and work Franklin—himself a slaveholder—repeatedly bumped up against the conundrum of race, and like most men of his age and status, he lacked templates for shaping answers. But unlike many of his peers, the pragmatic Franklin wrestled with the vexing questions, often reaching ambiguous—even contradictory—answers.
In the last decade of his life, Franklin served as president of an abolition organization, but his progress to that role is murky and inconsistent. As of the 1750s, he showed himself to be suspicious of many "Others:" disparaging "low women," Catholics, and Jews; decrying "alien" German immigrants who would "swarm into our settlements;" and labeling Native Americans as "drunken "savages who delight in war. take pride in murder," and should be pursued with "large, strong, and fierce dogs." Yet, in the 1760s, when white Americans attacked an Indian settlement, he labeled the attack "white savagery." African Americans, he described as "sullen, malicious, revengeful" and "by nature [thieves.]" Yet, ever the inquiring scientist, he visited a school for black children, emerging from the visit with a "higher opinion of the black race than I had ever before entertained," and conceding that slaves' tendency to thievery might be attributed more to their situation than to "nature." But he framed his concern for "poor Negro slaves who are . . . sick or lame" only in the context of the burden they placed upon their owners. Late in his life, he ordered that his slaves should be freed — partly out of his concern that slaves and servants made their owners lazy and unambitious. But for all this in consistency of thought, Franklin consistently showed himself to be thoughtful, open, teachable.
Franklin scholar Lorraine Pangle described Franklin as "the founder who has the most to teach us today, both about the art of living and about restoring civility to our public sphere." Indeed, Franklin consistently kept his eye on what he believed were the loftiest goals of justice and integrity. But Franklin was a man of his times, and some of the context of his times may seem ill-informed and convoluted in today's times. Though modern Americans are often suspicious of "heroes," Franklin can remind us that though "heroes" can be inconsistent and imperfect, they can inspire us toward the possibility of reaching for our own "better selves," even if—in Robert Browning's words—"our reach exceeds our grasp." Always "In Search of a Better World," Franklin was enigmatic, but he was a man of inquiring intellect, broad vision, and a dogged commitment to "justice," "democracy," and "community"—as best he could probe and understand these elusive principles. Indeed, his life and his struggles have much to inform modern America's pursuit of these same elusive principles.
Written for the 2018 Celebration! of Benjamin Franklin, Founder event: Race Awareness in America
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[on freedom of speech and the press, 17 november 1737], [on freedom of speech and the press].
Printed in The Pennsylvania Gazette , November 17, 1737, and following issues.
Duane ( Works , IV , 319–40) and, on his authority, though less certain, Sparks ( Writings , ii, 285–311), printed this long historical essay with its examples drawn mainly from Roman and English history. It is signed “X.” No evidence, internal or external, persuades the present editors that Franklin wrote it.
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