Benjamin Franklin, the first American to rise from rags not only to riches but to greatness as a publisher, scientist, and statesman, was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 17, 1706 (o.s.). At the age of 16 he fled from his brother James, to whom he had been apprenticed as a printer, to Philadelphia, the only other city in the colonies with a printing press. By the time he was 30, Franklin was publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette, handling all of the colony's official printing business, and issuing Poor Richard's Almanac each year. This annual compilation of information, advice, and stories achieved popularity throughout the British-American colonies.

Franklin's business was so successful that he retired from it at age 41 and quickly became an important citizen of Philadelphia. He organized the Junto, a self-education study group for middling young men like himself who were not able to attend college; the colonies' first lending library, which survives today as the Library Company of Philadelphia; the city's first fire department, the Union Fire Company; and the Hospital for the Sick Poor, the first of its kind in the colonies. The society he proposed for promoting useful knowledge became the American Philosophical Society, which still flourishes today, and he was among the founders of the College of Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania. Franklin was an organizer of voluntary associations founded to accomplish civic projects outside government channels. He also shared the position of postmaster for the colonies starting in 1753. At the same time he was involved in these civic activities, he engaged in scientific work, inventing the Franklin stove and bifocal eyeglasses. His electrical experiments, including the dangerous flying of a kite with keys attached, led to the invention of the lightning rod and membership in Britain's Royal Society.

Franklin emerged as an intercolonial statesman when he represented Pennsylvania at the unsuccessful Albany Congress of 1754. His plan for a colonial union--consisting of a North American parliament and British governor-general with responsibility for intercolonial defense--was accepted by the delegates but was turned down by both the British Parliament and the colonial assemblies. Franklin proved crucial in organizing supplies and volunteer troops for General Edward Braddock's unsuccessful expedition to Fort Duquesne the next year. He became the leader of the Quakers in the Pennsylvania Assembly, to which he was elected in 1751. That body sent him to England in 1757 to present the case against the Penn family, who governed Pennsylvania but refused to pay taxes for the common defense.

Franklin spent the years 1757-62 and 1764-75 in England. During much of this time, he sought to ingratiate himself with British officials, hoping for some huge land grant and perhaps even gaining a title, while working to make Pennsylvania a royal colony. His influence peddling was successful to some degree since he managed to get his son William Franklin appointed as governor of New Jersey and his political ally John Hughes made Philadelphia's stamp agent in 1765. This second appointment suggests that Franklin was unprepared for the outrage the Stamp Act (1765) would provoke: Crowds in some 40 or more communities throughout the colonies compelled stamp agents to resign. In Philadelphia, only a hastily organized defense by Franklin's common-law wife Deborah Read Franklin--who, almost unknown to history, managed his household during his long absences--prevented his own house from being attacked.

Although Franklin thereafter was less willing to compromise with the British, he still sought ways to patch up the differences between the colonies and Great Britain. The most famous British American in Europe, he became the agent for several colonies and presented their case as Parliament passed laws such as the Townshend duties (1767), Tea Act (1773), and Coercive Acts (1774); restricted westward settlement; clamped down on illegal trade; and sent troops to Boston. In his 1766 examination before the House of Commons concerning the Stamp Act disturbances, Franklin reminded the British that the colonists paid heavy taxes of their own and had supported the mutual cause well during the French and Indian War (1754-63). Colonial Americans, Franklin asserted, were proud to be British, and only infringements of the rights they perceived as theirs (whether correctly so did not matter) would change their minds. Were military forces sent to North America, he predicted, "they will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one." Yet as late as 1768 he openly hoped for some royal appointment by declaring to Lord North that he would "stay with pleasure" in England if he "could any ways be useful to government."

By 1773, however, Franklin's British prospects had become bleak, and he decided on a desperate gamble to blame the Anglo-American tension on one person; Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson. In doing this, Franklin ended his British career in scandal. He sent copies of letters addressed to the British ministry by Massachusetts royal officials, including Hutchinson, to the Massachusetts Assembly, and although he had specified that they were only to be viewed privately, he could hardly have been surprised when the letters were published. His hope was that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean would blame Hutchinson for the mutual misunderstandings, but he miscalculated. Massachusetts leaders were irate and demanded Hutchinson's recall, while in Great Britain, officials screamed foul and hauled Franklin before the king and Privy Council where the British solicitor general, Alexander Wedderburn, making the most of this incident, denounced him as a thief. In January 1775, having been dismissed as the colonies' postmaster, Franklin left for North America in disgrace. His parting gift to the British was a letter of recommendation for a failed excise collector, Thomas Paine, who would soon move to Philadelphia and write Common Sense, the pamphlet that persuaded many colonists to favor independence.

Whatever his dreams for a special place in a transatlantic Anglo-American empire, upon Franklin's return from Europe he quickly declared himself on the side of the revolutionaries and became a member of the Second Continental Congress. He was one of the five-person committee assigned to frame the Declaration of Independence (1776), although he only added a few minor corrections to Thomas Jefferson's draft. That same year, he was one of the peace commissioners chosen by Congress to meet with British general Sir William Howe on Staten Island, and he joined his fellow delegates in refusing any offer save independence. Meanwhile, Franklin became the first president of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Unlike most members of the old Quaker and proprietary factions who became Loyalists, he took a leading role among the "radicals" who controlled the new government of Pennsylvania. These radicals disfranchised Quakers and Tories, handed over local rule to militia committees, and gave power at the state level to the pro-revolutionary counties and Philadelphia workers from whose ranks Franklin had sprung.

Franklin did not remain long in Pennsylvania. Since he had an international reputation as a man of science, in 1777 Congress sent him to France to negotiate the French alliance that would be signed the following year. Franklin fully understood his role and played to the sympathies of a French court enamored with the ideals of the Enlightenment: He wore a fur cap to symbolize the "natural man" praised by the philosopher then in vogue, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and charmed the court and the ladies, although legends of his sexual conquests are greatly exaggerated. Franklin's popularity enabled him not only to negotiate treaties but to deal with the animosity among other diplomats from the United States. John Adams, for instance, resented Franklin's standing at court and thought him too pro-French and lacking in caution. (Franklin's private secretary was a British spy.) Throughout the war, Franklin nurtured his relationship with France, worked to obtain loans, assisted stranded seamen in Europe, and smoothed over a host of diplomatic difficulties. Along with Adams, John Jay, and Henry Laurens, Franklin negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783), which sidestepped the provision of the French Alliance that had promised not to engage in separate peace negotiations. This diplomatic sleight of hand came about in part because of his friendship with the comte de Vergennes, who wanted the United States to make a separate treaty to put pressure on the Spanish to accept an end to the war without the conquest of Gibraltar.

Returning to the United States early in 1785, Franklin abandoned the Pennsylvania states-rights radicals. Like most people who had represented the United States as a nation in the army, Congress, or diplomatic service, he became convinced that only a strong national government could save 13 disunited states from disaster. Elected to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the aged statesman slept a good deal during a stifling Philadelphia summer; his speeches were read by James Wilson. Nevertheless, his final statement--which urged his countrymen to accept the proposed document as the best possible despite reservations that they, like himself, were sure to have--was circulated throughout the states and had some role in achieving ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Ill and in pain from gallstones, Franklin spent the final years of his life in Philadelphia, teaching the printing business to his grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache, but he never totally retired. Although he had owned at least six slaves at different times in his life, he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. In his last published writing in 1790, he impersonated an African Muslim who held U.S. sailors captive, and he parroted the arguments proslavery advocates used to justify slavery (civilize slaves and teach them the true religion). During his last years he frequently sat in his front yard with a model of a bridge designed by Thomas Paine and tried to persuade his countrymen to support its construction over the Schuylkill River to further economic development.

After his death (April 17, 1790), Franklin's reputation grew to mythic proportions. As a public benefactor, he left a substantial amount of money for the education of youth, much of which became the endowment of the Franklin Institute. He is best remembered, however, as "Printer Ben," the most down-to-earth of the Founding Fathers--one who, as he described in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, appeared in Philadelphia as a youth with a loaf of bread under each arm. Magazines published excerpts of this literary classic first in 1790. The entire book was published in Paris in 1791 and in the United States in 1794. During the next 34 years, some 22 editions were issued carrying the lightning tamer's rags-to-riches story. Franklin became the model of self-improvement in the egalitarian atmosphere of the early republic and offered a blueprint of middle-class values in a burgeoning capitalist economy. Erased from popular memory was the transatlantic parvenu lobbying for land and office in Great Britain. In its place was the poor boy who made good. Franklin became a businessman turned scientist, philanthropist, diplomat, and statesman who stood up to a king, helped guide the new nation toward independence, carried out delicate negotiations with foreign powers, and offered a calming presence at the Constitutional Convention.

Bibliography:

1)         Benjamin Franklin, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987)

2)         Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003)

3)         J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Reappraising Benjamin Franklin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993)

4)         Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002)

5)         Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2004)

6)         Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

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