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Benjamin Franklin

Born into a large family of Boston tradesmen, Benjamin Franklin learned early that hard work, thrift, integrity, and self-discipline were important personal virtues. Though Franklin attended school for only two years, he turned to books for reference, self-education, and delight. He was well-read in the religious and moral teachings of Boston’s Puritan leadership, and he modeled his own writing on famous philosophers and essayists.

At 12, Benjamin was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer. Franklin learned the trade easily and well, but ambition got the better of him. Brilliant and independent, he ran away from Boston when he was only 17. Franklin traveled first to New York but, finding no work, continued on to Philadelphia.

At 16, Franklin was an ambitious and accomplished writer. He guessed his brother would not knowingly print his work, so he used the pen name "Silence Dogood” to write a series of letters to the editor of The New-England Courant. His disguise was that of a prim, middle-aged widow from a rural area—a remarkable contrast to the cheeky, unmarried teenager who had never been out of Boston! The letters poke fun at the pretensions of the elite and the follies of everyday life, but also reveal Franklin’s emerging opinions on education, women, and religion.

Arriving in Philadelphia in 1723, Franklin worked to establish himself as a printer. Over the next 25 years, he expanded his network of personal friends and business connections both in the colonies and in England. In printing, Franklin found a way "do well by doing good.” Not only did he accumulate enough wealth to retire from active business at the age of 42, he was also able to use his publications to communicate his ideas.

Although Franklin spent the second half of his life as a gentleman of leisure, he remained proud of his roots as a tradesman. Of course, for Franklin, "leisure” meant the freedom to pursue his many other interests, a freedom bought by years of devotion to the craft of printing. Perhaps this is why, of all his many accomplishments, he most wished to be remembered as "B. Franklin, Printer.”

Within just a few years of arriving in Philadelphia, Franklin established his own shop, printing jobs for many customers and publishing his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and his Poor Richard’s Almanack. In addition, Franklin and his wife Deborah, sold stationery and dry goods from a store in front of the printing office. Franklin was honest and hard-working, and his growing reputation soon attracted customers away from rival printers.

To expand, Franklin set up several of his former apprentices with printing equipment and capital, enabling them to start their own businesses elsewhere in the colonies. He also maintained close ties with bookbinders, who helped to distribute his publications. Franklin even invested in several paper mills, and he extended his reach into the German-speaking backcountry of Pennsylvania by financing a German-language printing office.

Franklin and his common-law wife, Deborah, lived simply and frugally. Only after Franklin had established himself with a dependable income did they buy more extravagant possessions, often from Europe. Many of these objects are still owned by Franklin’s descendants.

Franklin and Deborah’s relationship was affectionate and loyal, if not particularly romantic. Deborah was involved in all aspects of the daily business, keeping the shop and its accounts. She raised William, Francis, and Sally in a crowded home typical of 18th-century artisans, sharing their space with Deborah’s mother and the family servants and slaves.

Though William was Franklin’s illegitimate son, Deborah brought him up as part of the family. Francis, their first child together, contracted smallpox as a toddler and died, which caused his parents deep and lasting grief. Their youngest child Sally was only 14 when Franklin was dispatched to London by the Pennsylvania Assembly, but she adored him and looked after him when he returned to Philadelphia as an old man. She would ultimately bear all but one of the Franklins’ eight grandchildren.

Even as a young tradesman, Franklin sought to better himself and his community. He organized the Junto–a small group of fellow tradesmen and artisans committed to mutual improvement. At their weekly meetings they asked how they "may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?” The Junto’s actions formed their answer. Franklin and his colleagues helped establish a lending library, firefighting brigade, university, learned society, militia, hospital, and insurance company.

Franklin’s lifelong efforts to improve himself and the world around him stemmed from the same ambition and intellectual energy he demonstrated as a printer and young boy. His commitment to public service also built on his sociable nature: Franklin was a true philanthropist. He believed that society’s many challenges required mutual action, collaboration, and generosity. This, for Franklin, defined citizenship, in the colonies and in the young republic.

Throughout his life, Franklin’s curiosity and hands-on approach to his surroundings attracted him to science or "natural philosophy,” as it was then called. A true man of the Enlightenment, Franklin’s reasoning was practical and observation-based, and he shared his theories in letters to international contemporaries and colleagues. Franklin firmly believed that scientific knowledge should directly benefit society, so he never patented his inventions and always sought useful applications for the theories he developed.

Franklin’s studies of electricity, including the legendary kite and key experiment, remain his most important and best known scientific achievements. Although he personally placed a higher value on public service than science, it was his scientific status that gave him the connections he needed to succeed in politics and diplomacy.

Franklin was a master diplomat and negotiator, exercising restraint, flexibility, and compromise to bring opposing visions into accord. Whether negotiating with Native Americans in western Pennsylvania or with the great powers of England and France, Franklin drew on strategies of collaboration and mutual self-interest to forge alliances that shaped the future of America.

When the French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote Letters from an American Farmer in 1782, he asked the salient question, "What then is the American, this new man?" Crevecoeur attempted to answer the question himself:

He is an American, who leaving behind all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the nezv mode of life he has embraced, the new govern ment he obeys, and the new rank he holds ... The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles.

Crevecoeur might have shortened his answer by simply stating that Benjamin Franklin was this new American. Was it not Franklin, after all, who acted upon new principles and forged a new identity for himself, defying the ancient prejudices and manners of the old world? Franklin, more than any other founding father, embodied the character of the new nation. He had overcome poverty and the prejudices of the time, while at the same time defining the future course of American history. In short, he was the embodiment of America's future, and as the tercentenary year of his birth draws to an end, it is worth reconsidering just how important he was to the founding of the United States.

On 1 January 1748, Franklin had acquired a small fortune as a printer, enough to retire at the young age of 42 and pursue his interests in science and politics. He had served as the clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly since 1736, as postmaster of Philadelphia since 1737, and had helped to form the first Pennsylvania militia a decade later to defend the province against Spanish, French and Indian incursions. But it was only after retirement, when he had more free time, that he devoted himself endlessly to public life. In October 1748, for example, he was selected councilman, and justice of the peace for Philadelphia the following year. In 1751, the same year Franklin formed the Philadelphia Contributionship (the first insurance company in America), he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly and successfully petitioned the Assembly for a charter to establish the first hospital in America. By 1753, he was appointed joint deputy postmaster-general of North America, and successfully reformed the postal service so that mail was delivered more frequently and, for the first time, the post office made a profit.

With the French incursions into the Ohio Valley and along the western borders of Virginia and Pennsylvania, Franklin soon shifted his attention from provincial to intercolonial politics. In early May 1754, he wrote and published an editorial in the Pennsylvania Gazette promoting the idea of colonial unification, in which he inserted a political cartoon of a snake cut into pieces with the caption, "JOIN, OR DIE." A month later, after the British government had called for an intercolonial conference with the objective of reaffirming Britain's alliance with the Six Nations and arranging a common defense of the frontier, Franklin, as one of the delegates, drafted his plan of union while en route to Albany, New York.

According to the details of that plan, the colonies would be united under "one General Government", with the colonial assemblies sending representatives to the "Grand Council" and the Crown appointing a "President General". Together they would oversee the general defense of British North America and pay for it by drawing on tax money, which, according to the individual wealth of each colony, would be paid into the "General Treasury". After some revisions, the delegates at Albany passed Franklin's plan, but it was defeated by the colonial assemblies because they feared it gave too much power to Britain.

In London, British officials also rejected the plan, but because they feared it gave to much power to the colonies and might result in colonial independence. By December, Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts informed Franklin of the British counterproposal of a colonial union, which Franklin rejected on the grounds that it did not give the colonists the right to choose their own representatives, and also because Parliament did not have the right to tax the colonies without representation. In a letter of 4 December 1754, long before the Stamp Act crisis, Franklin informed Shirley: "That it is suppos'd an undoubted Right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own Consent given thro' their Representatives."

Franklin's vision of colonial unification eventually found its expression in the "Articles of Confederation" and the Constitution of 1787, but in the meantime, he turned his attention to the defense of the frontier and the outcome of the French and Indian War. After a short stint as colonel in the Pennsylvania militia, the Assembly sent him to England, where he petitioned Parliament and the king to tax the proprietary lands of the Penn family.

At first Franklin had little success fulfilling his commission, but, shortly after he arrived in 1757, he noticed that the British people and government were ill-informed about the colonies. And so he wrote "A Defense of the Americans", in which he defended the character and manners of American colonials, and The Interest of Great Britain Considered, in which he promoted the economic and strategic advantages of Canada and influenced the British decision to claim Canada instead of Guadeloupe at the conclusion of the French and Indian War.

Franklin's Aphorisms Genius without Education is like Silver in the Mine. Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is. Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults. He's a Fool that makes his Doctor his Heir. Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. He that waits upon Fortune, is never sure of a Dinner. To serve the Publick faithfully, and at the same time please it entirely, is impracticable. Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards. Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices. Kings and Bears often worry their Keepers. When the Well's dry, we know the Worth of Water. Little Strokes, Fell great Oaks. A selection from his Poor Richard's Almanack. (Note: The proverbs in the Almanack were not all Franklin's own. He borrowed freely from "the wisdom of many ages and nations.")

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in the summer of 1762, but he was soon back in England after the Pennsylvania Assembly commissioned him to petition the king about changing Pennsylvania's form of government from a proprietorship to royal province.

Immediately upon his arrival on 10 December 1764, Franklin was forced to devote much of his time to opposing Lord Grenville's stamp tax. Parliament eventually repealed the Stamp Act, but for the next decade, Franklin found himself embroiled in one political crisis after another. With each successive attempt by Parliament to tax the colonies, Franklin defended the right of Americans to tax themselves and was consequently appointed an agent for Georgia, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

As colonial agent, Franklin, in late 1772, obtained the private letters of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Oliver with the British Undersecretary of State Thomas Whatley, which he then sent to Thomas Cushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly The Assembly immediately petitioned King George III for Hutchinson's and Oliver's removal, and with Franklin's subsequent confession that he had been the one to send the letters to Cushing, it was simply a matter of time before the British authorities queried him on the Hutchinson affair.

Since his death in April 1790, more than two centuries ago, Franklin has been memorialized, revered, romanticized, spoofed, and made into an advertising and financial icon. His face and figure have been depicted in every medium—stone, paint, film, cartoon, the Internet—and can be seen on billboards and building facades, postage stamps, and the $100 bill. Franklin’s name evokes imagination, wit, and entrepreneurial ingenuity worldwide.

Michael Sletcher. Benjamin Franklin: The First American. . December/January 2007.

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