Benjamin Franklin

Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the tenth child of Josiah Franklin, a candle and soap maker, and Abiah Folger. He had only two years of schooling — a year of grammar school and a year learning writing and arithmetic — and at ten was working in his father’s shop. At thirteen he was apprenticed to his half-brother James, a printer who ran the New England Courant, and he slipped anonymous letters into the paper under the name Silence Dogood (later pen names included Alice Addertongue and Harry Meanwell). He educated himself by reading Plutarch, Defoe, Cotton Mather, and anything else he could find. In 1723 he ran away to Philadelphia.

There he built one of the colonies’ most successful printing businesses, eventually opening partner shops from Charleston to New Haven. He bought The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, made it a paper that presented several sides of an issue, and from 1732 published Poor Richard’s Almanack under the name Richard Saunders — for twenty-five years the colonies’ best-selling publication, often topping 10,000 copies. He became official printer for several colonies and printed their paper money. To the end of his life he described himself as “Benjamin Franklin, Printer.”

Franklin used his wealth and influence to build Philadelphia’s civic life: a subscription library, a volunteer fire company, an insurance company, a hospital, and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. He reorganized the colonial postal service. His experiments showing that lightning is electricity, and his invention of the lightning rod, made him famous among European scientists; he also devised bifocal spectacles and the Franklin stove. In 1747 he published what is called America’s first political cartoon, in a pamphlet urging the colonists to work together for their defense.

In 1754 he proposed the Albany Plan of Union, an early scheme for joining the colonies under one council; the colonies rejected it. From 1757 to 1775 he lived mostly in London as an agent for Pennsylvania and other colonies, and in 1766 helped persuade Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. Returning home as war began, he served in the Second Continental Congress and on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence.

His greatest service was in France. Sent to Paris in late 1776, he became a celebrity — his likeness appeared on medallions and snuffboxes — and, after the American victory at Saratoga, he secured the treaty of alliance with France in 1778. He was the first American minister received by a foreign government and helped negotiate the 1783 Treaty of Paris. At eighty-one he was the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention, where he urged his colleagues to sign the finished document despite its flaws.

Franklin championed practical improvement, religious tolerance, free inquiry, and self-education. He distrusted dogma of all kinds and believed that ordinary people, organized in voluntary associations, could solve common problems. His political views evolved from loyalty to the British Empire toward a conviction that the colonies had to become independent.

For roughly fifty years, Franklin’s household in Philadelphia included enslaved people of African descent, among them a married couple, Peter and Jemima, purchased before 1750, and a man named King whom Franklin took to London. His newspaper also printed advertisements for the sale of enslaved people and notices seeking those who had escaped. His views changed slowly. By the end of his life he was president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and in February 1790 he signed its petition asking the First Congress to act against the slave trade and slavery itself — a petition that sparked the first debates over slavery in Congress.

Franklin crossed the Atlantic eight times and was honored by universities and learned societies in Britain and France. He died in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, and was buried in the Christ Church graveyard. He remains the model of the self-made American — the runaway apprentice who became a scientist, philosopher, and statesman, and the only founder to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. His Autobiography shaped the American ideal of self-improvement, and the library, hospital, and university he founded still exist. His public turn against slavery at the very end of his life marked the first time the issue was formally put before the new national government.