Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was a printer, a scientist, a diplomat, a humorist, a postmaster, a librarian, an inventor, an abolitionist, a philanderer, and the only founding father who was world-famous before the United States existed. He was sixty-nine years old when the Continental Congress convened in 1775, already the most accomplished American alive by any reasonable measure, and he then spent the last fifteen years of his life founding a country. Born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the fifteenth of seventeen children of a candle-maker, he had two years of formal schooling before going to work in his older brother's print shop at twelve. That was the entirety of his education. Everything he ever knew — five languages, the modern science of electricity, the political theory that shaped a republic — he taught himself, mostly by reading whatever was available in whatever shop or library he found himself in. He ran away to [[philadelphia|Philadelphia]] at seventeen, built one of the most successful printing businesses in colonial America, retired wealthy at forty-two, and spent the rest of his life as a scientist, inventor, diplomat, and political organizer, making contributions in each field that any single person might have considered a life's work. He signed [[the-declaration-of-independence|the Declaration of Independence]], the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War, and [[the-constitution|the Constitution]] — the only person to sign all four of the founding documents. He died on April 17, 1790, at eighty-four. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral, the largest gathering Philadelphia had ever seen.

The Printer

Franklin's early career was as a printer and writer. He published the Pennsylvania Gazette, which became colonial America's most successful newspaper, and Poor Richard's Almanack, which sold ten thousand copies a year for twenty-five years — an enormous circulation by the standards of the time. The Almanack made him rich. Its aphorisms — "Early to bed and early to rise," "A penny saved is a penny earned," "Fish and visitors stink after three days" — entered the language and have never left it. Franklin invented "Poor Richard" Saunders as a folksy persona because he understood that political and economic advice landed harder when it came from a humble narrator than from a wealthy printer. Most of the wisdom Americans associate with the "common sense" tradition was Franklin in a costume. The print shop also published [[poor-richards-almanack|the Almanack]]'s political analogues — newspaper essays under various pseudonyms (Silence Dogood, Polly Baker, Richard Saunders) that argued for civic virtue, religious tolerance, and self-improvement. Franklin understood that an informed citizenry was the precondition for self-government, and he spent his print career trying to produce one.

The Scientist

In 1748, at forty-two, Franklin sold his print shop and retired to pursue science full-time. He had been experimenting with electricity in his spare hours for years. The kite experiment in 1752 — flying a kite into a thunderstorm to demonstrate that lightning was electrical — made him internationally famous overnight. He invented the lightning rod, which has prevented incalculable damage from lightning strikes on buildings for two and a half centuries. He named the two kinds of electrical charge "positive" and "negative" — the convention is still ours. He invented bifocal glasses, the Franklin stove, the flexible urinary catheter (for his brother), the glass armonica musical instrument, and a system of medical care for the poor at Pennsylvania Hospital, which he co-founded. His scientific reputation in Europe was such that the French chemist Lavoisier and the English chemist Priestley both corresponded with him, and Immanuel Kant called him "the new Prometheus" for taking fire from the sky. When Franklin arrived in Paris in 1776 as a diplomat, the French welcomed him as a celebrity — fur hat and all — because they already knew him from his science. The diplomatic mission succeeded partly because Franklin was already a star.

The Diplomat

Franklin spent the most consequential years of his life abroad. He represented Pennsylvania in London from 1757 to 1775 — eighteen years away from home — trying to manage the colonies' relationship with Parliament. He testified before Parliament against the Stamp Act in 1766, helping secure its repeal, and was treated by his colleagues there as the unofficial ambassador of America before any official such role existed. He returned to Philadelphia in 1775 only to be sent back to Europe the next year — this time to Paris, to secure French support for the American Revolution. The diplomatic situation was almost impossibly difficult: France was a Catholic monarchy being asked to fund a Protestant republican rebellion against another European monarchy. Franklin's strategy was charm and patience. He wore a coonskin cap (which the French read as noble savage primitivism), held court in salons, flirted with French aristocratic women, and let the French come to him. The 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France was the diplomatic turning point of the war. Without French money, French ships, and French troops, the Americans could not have won. Franklin's eight years in Paris produced the single most important diplomatic achievement in American history, and he was nearly seventy-five when it was finalized.

The Constitutionalist

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1785, expecting to die at home in peace. He was eighty-one. He had four years left. Instead he served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 — the oldest delegate by twenty years, almost invariably the wisest voice in the room. He spoke little (often having his speeches read by another delegate because his voice was failing), but when he spoke he tended to settle arguments. He proposed the compromise on representation that became the bicameral Congress — proportional representation in the House, equal state representation in the Senate — though the actual breakthrough is usually credited to Roger Sherman. At the end of the Convention, when the final document was being signed, Franklin spoke about the chair behind the president of the Convention, which had a sun painted on its back. "I have often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that sun behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun." It was the only optimistic speech he gave at the Convention, and he gave it because he had decided the Constitution would be ratified.

The Abolitionist

Franklin had owned slaves earlier in his life — a fact he later regretted publicly. He had run advertisements for the return of escaped slaves in his newspaper. In his old age, after a long correspondence with British abolitionists and reflection on the contradiction between American liberty and American slavery, he became president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery — the first abolitionist organization in the country. His final act of public writing was a satirical petition to Congress in 1790 — three weeks before his death — written in the voice of an imaginary Algerian potentate justifying his enslavement of European Christians. The petition reproduced point-by-point the arguments slaveholders used to defend American slavery and turned them around, ending with the impossible question of why arguments good enough to justify enslaving white Christians would not be good enough to justify the reverse. The piece was published anonymously. Congress laughed. Slavery continued. Franklin died three weeks later. The petition is the last word from the founders on the question, and it is unambiguous.

Used as a teaching source at school.ai-ministries.com.