Franklin, Benjamin

Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790), writer, scientist, statesman, and philanthropist.Born in Boston, Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed as a youth to his half‐brother James, a printer. Largely self‐taught and an avid reader, Benjamin at the age of sixteen published in James's New England Courant his Silence Dogood essays, the first essay‐series in American literature. At seventeen, he ran away to Philadelphia. Employed in Samuel Keimer's print shop, Franklin was befriended by Governor William Keith, who offered to lend him money to travel to London to buy a press, type, and printing supplies. After reaching England, Franklin learned that he had been deceived. Forced to make his own way, he worked briefly for two printing establishments in London.

Back in Philadelphia by 1726, Franklin soon became the city's premier printer. Shortly after he and Hugh Meredith purchased the failing Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, they were chosen as the official printers for the province. In 1732 Franklin brought out the first issue of Poor Richard's Almanac, which quickly became the staple of his business. He also profitably printed the sermons and journals of the touring English revivalist George Whitefield. In 1730 Franklin and Deborah Read, whom he had courted before going to England, contracted a common‐law marriage and raised in their home his illegitimate son, William. The couple also had two children of their own.

During his working years in Philadelphia, from 1726 through 1748, Franklin led the life of an involved urban citizen. He founded the Junto (1727), a self‐improvement society for artisans, and joined the Masonic Order. He established America's first subscription library, the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), and drafted the founding document of what became the American Philosophical Society, the nation's first learned society. He organized Philadelphia's first fire‐fighting company and the nation's first mutual insurance company, the Philadelphia Contributionship (1752). He also contributed to the opening of an academy that would evolve into the University of Pennsylvania and to the creation of the Pennsylvania Hospital, the first permanent hospital in what became the United States.

Franklin earned lasting fame as one of the eighteenth century's most original scientists, or “natural philosophers”. He conducted experiments demonstrating that electricity is a single fluid identical to lightning, publishing his findings in Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751–1753). He also undertook important work on the Gulf Stream; conceived experiments on the conductivity of metals; and is remembered for several practical inventions, from the fuel‐efficient Franklin stove and the lightning rod to the flexible catheter and bifocals.

Retiring from active management of his printing business in 1748, Franklin turned to politics. He sat in the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1751 to 1764. As Pennsylvania's delegate to the Albany Congress of 1754, called in response to the outbreak of the French and Indian War, he drafted a Plan of Union that anticipated the later Constitution of the United States. He undertook two missions to England (1757–1762 and 1764–1775) to represent Pennsylvania in its struggles with its proprietors, the Penn family. During his residence there he published numerous newspaper articles defending the American cause to the British government and people.

Between his missions to England, Franklin again immersed himself in Pennsylvania politics. The massacre of friendly Christian Indians by frontiersmen (the “Paxton Boys”) and the movement for a petition to substitute royal government for the Penns’ proprietorship prompted two of his most important polemical writings, A Narrative of the Late Massacres and Cool Thoughts (both 1764). His failure to win reelection to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1764 was a bitter blow, but the new Assembly appointed him agent to England to petition the Crown for royal government in Pennsylvania.

The most pressing problem confronting Franklin upon his arrival in London in December 1764 was the Stamp Act, recently proposed by George Grenville. Franklin initially opposed it, but after its passage by Parliament in February 1765 he urged acceptance, underestimating the depth of American resistance to the measure. After helping secure repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, Franklin stayed on in England, serving in effect as the ambassador from the American colonies as the imperial crisis deepened.

Once Franklin sailed for America in March 1775, he abandoned all efforts at reconciliation and vociferously championed the patriot cause. He was unanimously chosen a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, served on the committee that chose George Washington to command the revolutionary army, and was one of four commissioners on a failed mission to urge Canada to join the independence movement. He also sat on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence.

Named one of a three‐person commission to seek diplomatic recognition and financial assistance from France, Franklin departed in October 1776 for an extended stay in France that brought him both diplomatic success and great personal satisfaction. He not only negotiated treaties of alliance, amity, and commerce with France (1778), but, as minister plenipotentiary, he raised substantial loans and gifts for the American cause from the French government, issued letters of marque for American privateers, and provided relief for American seamen held in English jails while he worked for prisoner exchanges. Lionized by Parisian society, he shrewdly played the role of the simple American democrat. With his colleagues John Jay and John Adams, Franklin negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris with Great Britain that ended the Revolutionary War and secured American independence.

Returning to Philadelphia in September 1785, Franklin, now nearing eighty, served as president of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, represented his state in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and presided over the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Among his last writings was an attack on slavery and the slave trade published in the Federal Gazette in March 1790. His posthumously published Autobiography became the prototype of a classic American genre, the story of the self‐made man. Although his historical reputation has fluctuated, Benjamin Franklin's status in the American pantheon seems secure.
See also Antislavery; Colonial Era; Hospitals; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Penn, William; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Science: Colonial Era; Seven Years’ War.

Bibliography

Carl Van Doren , Benjamin Franklin, 1938.
Leonard W. Labaree, William B. Willcox, and Barbara B. Oberg, eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 3 vols. to date, 1959–.
Claude‐Anne Lopez and and Eugenia W. Herbert , The Private Franklin, 1975.
J.A. Leo Lemay, ed., Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, 1981.
Jonathan R. Dull , Franklin the Diplomat, 1982.

Barbara B. Oberg