June 21, 2026 6:30 AM
On June 21, 1776, Thomas Jefferson presented Benjamin Franklin and John Adams with his first complete draft of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin’s role at that critical hour — which marked his return to the deliberations in Philadelphia after arduous months away on a journey that nearly killed him — reflected the great prestige that he brought to the cause of independence. In 1776, at 70 years old, Franklin was the most famous man in America, and the most prominent and respected American in the world. And by now, he was a rebel against his king.
A man of status and reputation elevates such an endeavor. That was true in the Civil War of Robert E. Lee, who lent a dignity to perceptions of the Confederate cause that it would otherwise have lacked, given the contrast between Lee’s gravitas, family name, and long service in the national army and the quality or pedigree of many of the other Confederate leaders. For Franklin, long esteemed in England, France, and the German states and with a son in the king’s service as a royal governor, the decision of a man so wise to put so much at risk was a public symbol of the seriousness of the patriot cause.
In understanding Franklin’s career in and after the American Revolution, it is useful to recall how much of his life was already behind him as a subject of the British kings before the Revolution came. In 1754, when 22-year-old George Washington touched off the conflict that became the Seven Years’ War (known here as the French and Indian War), Franklin was already 48 years old, a substantial age in an era when even the wealthy and prominent often died in their thirties or forties. He was already retired from his primary career as a newspaperman, and already well-known enough in Europe for his scientific experiments that King Louis XV of France ordered a test of Franklin’s investigations into lightning.
Self-Made in America
Born in Boston in 1706 — the year before the United Kingdom was formed under Queen Anne by the Act of Union between England and Scotland — Franklin was 32 years older than King George III, and was 21 when the king’s grandfather George II ascended the throne. In 1706, Louis XIV still ruled France, and Peter the Great still ruled Russia. The Glorious Revolution, which supplanted King James II and established the principle that the king ruled with the consent of Parliament, concluded 17 years before Franklin’s birth. Franklin was 13 when Robinson Crusoe (arguably the first English-language novel) was published, and 21 when Isaac Newton died. He came of age in the golden age of pirates and wrote an early poem about the death of Blackbeard.
Franklin’s father Josiah came to Boston from England in 1683 seeking safe haven for religious dissent. Benjamin was the 15th of Josiah’s children and the eighth of ten children of Josiah and his second wife. He was never given a full grade-school education (although he was precocious, later writing that “I do not remember when I could not read”), but by the end of his life, he would be arguably the most respected intellectual on earth.
Franklin was apprenticed to his older brother as a printer, which made him legally an indentured servant for nine years. Franklin never liked servitude, and that experience may have gnawed at him later in life when he turned against slavery, freed his own slaves, and began to campaign against the institution in Pennsylvania (which banned it in 1780 while Franklin was in France) and nationally (his last public act was an anti-slavery petition to the new federal government in 1790 as head of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society).
The heavy hand of government helped free Franklin. In 1723, his brother’s publication got in hot water with Cotton Mather and the Massachusetts authorities in part for denouncing Mather’s promotion of inoculation for smallpox — and to prove that the paper was under new, independent management, it was handed over to Ben (then 17 and already experienced at writing under pseudonyms), and his indenture was torn up. While a second, private indenture was redrawn, it would be hard to enforce, and taking no chances, Ben slipped out of town, bribing a sea captain, and made his way to Philadelphia to become his own man.
While most of our images of Franklin come from his old age, he was a tall, broad-shouldered man of great strength in his youth, a strong swimmer accustomed to lifting and carrying heavy sets of type. He would need strength of character as well. Like George Washington, another largely self-educated man who had to make his way in the world young, Franklin wrote himself up a series of rules, setting goals and virtues to which he aspired. By 1730, the 24-year-old Franklin was sole proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he built into the colony’s most popular newspaper. Two years later, he launched his highly popular annual Poor Richard’s Almanack; one of his readers was John Peter Zenger, the New York free-press pioneer. His newspaper published sermons by the Great Awakening preacher George Whitefield, although the skeptical Franklin gravitated to the Quakers.
Franklin was a polymath, never truly satisfied to confine his energies to just one field. In the 1740s and 1750s, he was especially active, particularly after retiring from the newspaper business in 1748. He started the American Philosophical Society, one of the earliest inter-colonial organizations, to promote scientific discussion. He was the founder and innovator of Philadelphia’s firefighting companies, the first president of the University of Pennsylvania, and a postmaster responsible for inter-colonial mail. He invented a stove that revolutionized home heating, as well as bifocal glasses, a urinary catheter, a new musical instrument, and more than a dozen other devices. He made news across the scientific world for his experiments connecting lightning and electricity, and he pioneered theories about ocean currents and even the size of molecules that were decades ahead of his time. His theories of population growth later influenced Malthus, except that Franklin drew from them optimistic rather than gloomy conclusions.
Affairs of State
Politics was never Franklin’s chief concern, but neither was he a man to be confined. He fought the Penn family’s control of the colony. He entered the Pennsylvania Assembly, was briefly a colonel of militia, and in 1754, presented an early plan for a defensive union of the colonies as war with France loomed. Independence was on nobody’s mind yet, but even within the structure of British rule, Franklin was already thinking big.
really think big, he needed to be in the capital: London. Franklin first visited the city in 1724, and between 1759 and 1774, he spent most of his time there as an agent for Pennsylvania and other American colonies. He appeared before the House of Commons to make the case against the Stamp Act, even as his wife was defending the family home from anti-Stamp Act rioters with the family firearm. He corresponded with Hume, Kant, and Burke and wrote a pioneering autobiography, crafting his self-made image as a son of the imperial frontier. Much like Washington and John Adams, Franklin in these years suffered a thousand cuts both to his personal standing and to the interests of the colonies, and he radicalized only gradually and in stages to the conclusion that American rights would never gain equal respect.
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The climactic breaking point came in January 1774. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Tea Party the prior month — which, like the Stamp Act riots, shocked Franklin in its disorder — it came out that Franklin had been involved in leaking controversial letters written by the governor of Massachusetts to the British government. Worse, he had stayed silent while a duel was fought over accusations that someone else was the leaker. Franklin was hauled before a Privy Council inquiry that was basically just one-sided abuse, with accusations leveled against him that were so slanderous the London papers wouldn’t print them. He came away convinced that no fair hearing could be had in London. After a last-ditch scheme to help the Whigs take power and reverse the British course — a doomed effort, given the remaining power of the king in the system — Franklin went home. His wife had died while he was in England, and his best friend in London noted tears in Franklin’s eyes as they talked of revolution on his last day in the city. Franklin was reluctant and mournful — but decided.
The Wise Man of the Revolution
Given the scope and variety of Franklin’s talents, it is unsurprising that his contributions to the nation’s founding were equally varied. Returning to America in May 1775, a few weeks after Lexington and Concord, he was immediately selected to serve in the Second Continental Congress. He would be the oldest man there. The average age of the signers of the Declaration the following year was 44. Only 13 of the 56 signers were over 50. While the Continental Congress and later the Constitutional Convention (at which he also served as a delegate) were full of men too strong-willed to be led, everyone looked to Franklin’s wit and wisdom, which as often as not was deployed to defuse tensions and avoid dissension.
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That spirit was necessary in 1775–76. John Dickinson, his fellow Pennsylvania delegate, was insistent that the rebellion should aim for a better deal with Britain rather than independence, and he was a personal adversary of Franklin who even refused to put a lightning rod on his house. Franklin went along, for the sake of a unified front, with Dickinson’s “Olive Branch Petition” in mid-1775, the last effort to reach a negotiated end. Its conspicuous failure left no realistic alternative to independence.
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In July 1775, Franklin proposed an “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union” that took some of the general outlines of his 1754 defensive league of colonies loyal to the Crown and revised it into a federal governing structure — the starting point of our first federal constitution, the Articles of Confederation, which was adopted two years later. He also organized the new national postal service before there was even a national government. In the summer of 1776, shortly after signing the Declaration, he went to work helping draft a constitution for Pennsylvania. There as in his other constitution-writing roles, Franklin insisted on popular self-government.
He also played an indirect role in the most explosive publication of the Revolution: Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, which relative to the population of the day is rivaled only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the most widely read tract published in American history. It was Franklin who had spotted the penniless Paine’s talents, arranged for his passage from England to America in 1774, and secured him a job with a printer.
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Franklin had to endure his share of hardships for the cause. He fell out bitterly and permanently with his son William, who as royal governor of New Jersey remained loyal to the king. In March 1776, after the initial invasion of Quebec had already gone disastrously wrong, Franklin was dispatched to head a congressional fact-finding expedition that made it to Montreal, where he personally handed £53 of his own money to Benedict Arnold but could offer little more, and recommended that the invasion and efforts to induce Quebec to join the rebellion both be abandoned. He was so exhausted and ill from the travel that he was barely able to leave his bed for a month upon his return in May. But a visit from Washington and news that there was a draft declaration to review roused him back to action.
Even in drafting the Declaration, Franklin’s role was less about perfecting the language than about sustaining Jefferson’s morale in enduring edits to his prose. It was Jefferson who recorded in his memoirs Franklin’s anecdote about a man who proposed a sign for his hat-making shop that read “‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,’ with a figure of a hat subjoined,” and through a series of suggested edits wound up with nothing left on the sign but his name and a picture of a hat. Every writer who has been edited by a committee can share the pain; its effect on Jefferson can be deduced from how he retold it years later.
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Franklin was also a master of intrigue. Already skilled in the art of intelligence gathering (as was illustrated by the purloined letters that got him hauled before the Privy Council), Franklin founded Congress’s Committee on Secret Correspondence, putting him in charge of establishing an American intelligence network. (Less auspiciously, he employed a secretary in Paris who was actually a British double agent). Franklin also put his technological know-how to use, promoting the first experimental submarine, the Turtle (it was used once in October 1776, but sank). David Bushnell, the submarine’s inventor, consulted Franklin on how to provide lighting by phosphorus inside the one-man sub, given that candles would consume the oxygen supply.
France and Back to Philadelphia
Franklin’s flurry of activity in 1775–76 was set aside when he was summoned again for a new task: traveling to France in October 1776, where he remained for a decade. Franklin mustered French support for the American war effort, signed the treaty of alliance with France in 1778, ran an expanded network of spies abroad, negotiated a trade treaty with Sweden, and ultimately represented the United States (along with John Adams and John Jay) in negotiating the Treaty of Paris that resolved the war, formally recognized American independence, and let us walk away with extensive Western possessions beyond the original 13 colonies. Franklin, being Franklin, also found time in Paris to meet Voltaire and witness the first hot-air balloon flight in 1783.
Franklin was 81 and in failing health when he attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Some of the moving forces at the convention, such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, were still young and establishing their reputations, but once again it was the presence of Washington and Franklin at the convention that lent it prestige and public confidence. It was Franklin who quipped at the close of the final session that he had watched the sun carved on Washington’s chair and wondered whether the sun 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 Franklin, as Maryland delegate James McHenry recorded, who was immediately accosted outside the hall by a woman who asked what type of government Franklin and his fellow delegates had given them, prompting a reply that is one of his most storied: “a republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
Inside the hall, Franklin’s closing remarks reflect his insistence on putting unity and compromise above anyone standing on their own principles — and that included his late-in-life abolitionist convictions, upon which the new Constitution made delicate compromises:
Every possible objection has been combated. With so many different and contending interests it is impossible that any one can obtain every object of their wishes. We have met to make mutual sacrifices for the general good, and we have at last come fully to understand each other, and settle the terms. Delay is as unnecessary as the adoption is important.
I confess [the Constitution] does not fully accord with my sentiments. But I have lived long enough to have often experienced that we ought not to rely too much on our own judgments. I have often found I was mistaken in my most favorite ideas. I have upon the present occasion given up, upon mature reflection, many points which at the beginning, I thought myself immovably and decidedly in favor of . . . These objections shall never escape me without doors; as, upon the whole, I esteem the constitution to be the best possible, that could have been formed under present circumstances; and that it ought to go abroad with one united signature, and receive every support and countenance from us. I trust none will refuse to sign it.
Anyone standing on their objections, Franklin added with characteristic humor, would “put me in mind of the French girl who was always quarrelling and finding fault with every one around her, and told her sister that she thought it very extraordinary, but that really she had never found a person who was always in the right but herself.”
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We were fortunate to have men of genius such as Franklin at the Founding of the country. And we were fortunate to have men of his virtues, too. Any serious book on the American founding will not omit the flaws, foibles, and sins of Franklin and his contemporaries. Yet, in an inversion of the line that Shakespeare gives to Marc Antony, it is their virtues that have endured. Over and over, Franklin put his own good name and accumulated respect and goodwill on the line in service of his country — and not the other way around. He set his considerable ego aside to make compromises, secure a united front, and make room for dissenting views to be reconciled. It is not only Franklin’s inventiveness and vision that contributed so much to the making of America, but also his wisdom, humility, unselfishness, and congeniality.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 