Benjamin
Franklin

From 1748 to 1790 Benjamin Franklin pursued science, diplomacy, and public service. The primary documents record his electrical experiments, his testimony before Parliament on the Stamp Act, his role securing the French alliance, his work at the Constitutional Convention at age eighty-one, and his final petition against slavery six weeks before his death.

After retiring from the printing business in 1748, Franklin turned to scientific inquiry. He had received a glass tube from London and began conducting electrical experiments. He wrote a series of letters describing his experiments to Peter Collinson, a fellow of the Royal Society in London. Collinson had the letters read before the Royal Society and then published them in April 1751 as Experiments and Observations on Electricity. The work made Franklin internationally known.

In the summer of 1752, Franklin conducted the kite experiment — flying a kite in a thunderstorm with a metal key attached, drawing electrical charge from the clouds and into a Leyden jar, demonstrating that lightning and electricity were the same phenomenon. He described the experiment in the Pennsylvania Gazette on October 19, 1752, and wrote to Collinson about it. The kite experiment letter is at Founders Online. The lightning rod — a practical application of his findings — was placed on the Pennsylvania State House that same year.

In May 1754, Franklin published a cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette — a snake cut into eight pieces, each labeled with the name of a colonial region, beneath the caption "Join, or Die." It was the first political cartoon published in an American newspaper. The occasion was the Albany Congress, called to coordinate colonial defense against French expansion and negotiate with the Iroquois nations. Franklin had been arguing for a formal union of the colonies since at least 1751.

At the Congress in June–July 1754, Franklin drafted and circulated "Short Hints towards a Scheme for Uniting the Northern Colonies." The delegates worked from his draft and adopted the Albany Plan of Union on July 10, 1754 — a proposal for a Grand Council of colonial delegates and a President-General appointed by the Crown, with authority to raise taxes, maintain an army, and regulate trade with Native nations. Every colonial assembly rejected it. The Crown rejected it. It was not adopted. Franklin reflected on it in 1789 that if the Plan had been accepted, the colonies might not have separated from Britain so soon. The Plan is at Yale Avalon.

In 1757 Franklin sailed to London as the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly, representing colonial interests before the British government. He remained in London — with one return to Philadelphia — for the next eighteen years. When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, taxing the American colonies directly, Franklin initially underestimated the colonial opposition. He quickly learned otherwise. On February 13, 1766, he was examined before the Committee of the Whole of the House of Commons — questioned for hours about colonial attitudes toward the Stamp Act and British taxation. The examination is at Founders Online.

The Stamp Act was repealed the following month. Franklin's examination — published as a pamphlet — circulated widely in the colonies and made him the most recognized American voice in British politics.

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in May 1775, after eighteen years abroad, to find the Revolution underway. He was sixty-nine years old. He was immediately elected to the Second Continental Congress. He served on the Committee of Five appointed to draft the Declaration of Independence — alongside Jefferson, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. Jefferson wrote the draft. Franklin made a small number of changes — the most noted being the replacement of Jefferson's "sacred and undeniable" with "self-evident." On August 2, 1776, Franklin signed the Declaration. He was seventy years old — the oldest of the fifty-six signers by more than a decade.

In September 1778 Congress appointed Franklin Minister Plenipotentiary to France — the American government's chief diplomatic representative in Europe. He had arrived in France in December 1776 as a commissioner. In France he was a celebrity — the scientist who had tamed lightning, the philosopher who had written Poor Richard, the republican who had stood before Parliament. He used that reputation to negotiate the Franco-American Treaty of Alliance, signed February 6, 1778, which brought France formally into the war on the American side. Without French money, troops, and naval support, the outcome of the war would have been different. The Treaty of Alliance is at Yale Avalon.

When the war ended, Franklin was one of three American commissioners — with John Adams and John Jay — who negotiated the Treaty of Paris with Britain, signed September 3, 1783. The treaty recognized American independence. It is at Yale Avalon.

Franklin returned to Philadelphia from France in September 1785. He was seventy-nine years old. He was elected President of Pennsylvania — the state's chief executive — within days of his return. In May 1787 he was selected as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He was eighty-one years old — the oldest delegate by nearly twenty years. He attended the Convention regularly, carried in a sedan chair when his gout prevented walking. He spoke infrequently. On September 17, 1787 — the final day — he delivered an address urging the delegates to sign the Constitution despite its imperfections. James Madison recorded the address in his Convention Notes.

William Franklin was Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son, born around 1730. Benjamin raised him, educated him, and took him to London in 1757. In 1763 Benjamin helped William secure the appointment as Royal Governor of New Jersey — a position William held until the Revolution forced him from office. When the Revolution came, William remained loyal to the Crown. Benjamin did not. The two were on opposite sides. William was arrested by the Continental Congress in 1776 and held for two years. After his release he went to London and never returned to America. Benjamin and William exchanged very few letters after 1775. The reconciliation attempt of 1784 — they met once in Southampton — left the breach unhealed.

Benjamin recorded the estrangement's final legal consequence in his will, signed July 17, 1788. The will is at Founders Online.

Franklin owned two enslaved people in Philadelphia — Peter and King — during the 1750s. He carried advertisements for the sale of enslaved people in the Pennsylvania Gazette. He later freed the two people he personally owned. In 1787 he became president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, which had been founded in 1775. After the ratification of the Constitution he began writing publicly against slavery. The National Archives Center for Legislative Archives documents this arc at archives.gov/legislative/features/franklin.

On February 3, 1790 — six weeks before his death — Franklin signed and submitted to the First Congress a petition on behalf of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. He was eighty-four years old and President of the Society. The petition called on Congress to use its authority "to countenance the Abolition of Slavery, and to discourage every Species of Traffick in the Persons of our fellow Men." Congress tabled it after a bitter debate. The petition is at Founders Online.

Benjamin Franklin died at his home in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790. He was eighty-four years old. His funeral was attended by approximately 20,000 people — nearly the entire population of Philadelphia. He was buried in Christ Church Burial Ground alongside his wife Deborah.