Histories of Lives are seldom entertaining,
unless they contain something either admirable or exemplar.
Know then, That I am an Enemy to Vice,
and a Friend to Vertue.
A mortal Enemy to arbitrary Government
and unlimited Power.
I am naturally very jealous
for the Rights and Liberties of my Country;
and the least appearance of an Incroachment on those invaluable Priviledges,
is apt to make my Blood boil exceedingly.
Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin is, by far,
the most approachable of our Founders.
He's not somebody made of stone,
like a George Washington.
Franklin was pretty simple in his moral code.
He was driven by a desire to pour forth
benefits for the common good.
But there's a lot in Benjamin Franklin
that makes you flinch,
and we see Franklin not as a perfect person,
but somebody evolving to see
if he could become more perfect.
He was a teenage runaway
who achieved such remarkable success
that his example would be handed down for generations
as the embodiment of the American dream.
He was a printer, a publisher, and a writer,
producing everything from essays on politics and religion
to biting satires and words of wisdom
that would endure forever.
He was a prolific inventor
and a scientist whose pioneering discoveries
would make him the most famous American in the world.
He was a civic leader,
the founder of a library and a college,
who introduced a host of improvements
that made the lives of everyday people better.
He embraced the Enlightenment belief
in the perfectibility of human beings;
but no one understood their foibles and failings,
including his own, better than he did.
He also owned and enslaved human beings
and benefited from the institution of slavery.
He was a reluctant revolutionary
who became an indispensable founder of a new nation;
helped craft the document
that declared his country's independence;
and then did as much as anyone
to secure the victory that assured it.
And he guided the complicated compromises
that created his nation's Constitution,
then tried to rectify its central failing.
He constantly remade himself
from apprentice, to printer, to scientist,
to government official, to revolutionary, to abolitionist.
He never was finished with himself.
He always thought that he was a work in progress.
He could be funny and unforgiving;
folksy and philosophical;
generous and shrewdly calculating;
broadminded, yet deeply prejudiced;
a family man, who spent years away from his wife
and let political differences
destroy his relationship with his son.
He concealed those contradictions behind
a carefully crafted public image.
He's a Puritan who then becomes
the leading figure in the Enlightenment.
So that he stands astride
so many contradictions in his own life,
that he understands them and they don't become
contradictions for him.
They become some seamless web of insight.
He wrote so much. He wrote so well.
He's somebody that we need to know about.
He can put us in touch with the sensibilities
of the 18th century in a way that makes it
both accessible and, yet, captures its remoteness.
Franklin is endlessly,
endlessly interesting.
He is the only Founding Father who
evidently had a sense of humor,
who was evidently human,
who evidently had a sex life.
And there's so much about him that makes him
seem approachable, on the one hand,
and super-human on the other hand.
"Let all men know thee," Benjamin Franklin said,
"but no man know thee thoroughly."
I never intend to wrap my Talent in a Napkin.
To be brief; I am courteous and affable, good humor'd
unless I am first provok'd,
and handsome, and sometimes witty.
If you would not be forgotten,
as soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write things worth reading,
or do things worth the writing. Benjamin Franklin.
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston
on January 17, 1706,
the youngest son and 15th child of Josiah Franklin,
who had come from England
to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1683.
Josiah made candles and soap
and became a respected member of South Church,
one of the town's 3 congregations of Puritans.
When his first wife died in childbirth,
Josiah married Abiah Folger of Nantucket,
who came from a family of free-thinkers.
Benjamin would be her eighth child.
He grew up in a 4-room house
where the dinner table was always crowded,
and often included friends his pious and serious-minded father
invited over for conversation.
From the start, the boy was precocious.
He was reading the Bible by age 5.
His sister Jane recalled that he "studied incessantly"
and "was addicted to all kinds of reading."
But he was also irreverent.
He found the long prayers before each meal tedious
and suggested his father simply say grace once
over the entire winter's supply of food.
"It would be," young Benjamin said, "a vast saving of time."
He and his boyhood friends
fished and frolicked in a nearby pond.
An avid swimmer, he designed rudimentary fins
to propel himself faster across the water;
other times, he floated on his back
and let himself be pulled along by a kite.
Josiah initially thought his son
should study for the ministry
and enrolled him at age 8 in the Boston school
that prepared students for Harvard College.
But the academy proved too expensive,
and eager to have another set of hands,
his father put him to work in the family's candle shop.
He was 10 years old; his schooling was over.
I think it was crucial to Franklin's success
that he had very little formal education.
When people go through formal schools,
they learn what you're supposed to know.
They also learn what you don't have to know.
With Franklin, he never knew what he didn't have to know,
so, he assumed he had to know everything.
In 1718, at age 12,
Franklin began the work that would define
the rest of his life.
He signed a 9-year apprenticeship,
legally indenturing himself to his older brother James,
who had opened a printing shop in Boston.
Printing was an amazing business if you were
both clever with your hands and good at thinking.
Printers are setting type upside-down and backward.
And you have to be really hyper-literate to understand
how language works that way,
and to correct things as you go along,
and get it right.
Handling the heavy sets of lead type
strengthened and broadened his shoulders.
Having access to books
strengthened and liberated his mind.
Often I sat up in my room
reading the greatest part of the night,
when the book was borrowed in the evening and had to be
returned early in the morning lest it should be missed.
And all the little money that came into my hands
was ever laid out in books.
Here was a kid who only had
two years of formal education, ever.
So, what did he do? He taught himself how to write.
He composed poetry-- including a ballad
commemorating the recent killing of Blackbeard the pirate.
He read articles from "The Spectator,"
a London periodical,
and, on paper salvaged from the print shop,
attempted to reproduce them by memory.
He stayed up late at night and rose early each morning
to continue his reading before the shop opened.
"I was," Franklin said, "extremely ambitious."
In 1721, his brother James decided to publish
his own weekly newspaper, "The New-England Courant."
From its inception, the paper courted controversy.
Its first issue attacked Cotton Mather,
Boston's pre-eminent preacher and the colony's
strict and severe moral authority.
Mather called the newspaper wicked,
filled with immorality, and lies.
What James Franklin does is he creates
the first real independent newspaper in America.
His paper, in Boston, is, quote,
"Not published by Authority."
All the others, you were given a stamp of authority.
On April 2, 1722, an essay appeared
over the name of Silence Dogood,
who claimed to be a widowed woman from the countryside,
and who had lots of homespun wisdom
and sharp social critiques to share.
It was an immediate hit.
No one, including James Franklin, had any idea
that the real author was a teenage boy,
James's 16-year-old brother Benjamin,
who had secretly slipped the essay under the door.
More of Silence Dogood's articles began to appear.
She offered irreverent advice on funeral eulogies,
advocated fiercely for women's education,
and in one dispatch poked fun at Harvard
and the wealthy parents who dreamed of
sending their children to the elite institution.
Most of them consulted their own Purses
instead of their Childrens Capacities.
At Harvard They learn little more than
how to carry themselves handsomely,
and enter a Room genteely...
and from whence they return,
after Abundance of Trouble and Charge,
as great Blockheads as ever,
only more proud and self-conceited.
In the summer of 1722,
James was jailed for 3 weeks without trial
for questioning the competence of Cotton Mather
and the colony's other leaders.
Quoting from an article he had read in a London newspaper,
Benjamin, as Silence Dogood, came to his brother's defense.
Without Freedom of Thought,
there can be no such Thing as Wisdom;
and no such Thing as publick Liberty,
without Freedom of Speech.
Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation,
must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.
When James was released from jail
and resumed putting out his newspaper,
Benjamin confessed publicly that he, in fact,
was writing Silence Dogood's essays.
Many cheered him for his artfulness,
but James was jealous.
They would argue--and it sometimes came to blows.
I fancy his harsh and tyrannical
Treatment of me, might be a means of
impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power
that has stuck to me thro' my whole Life.
Franklin decided to run away,
even if it meant breaking his legal obligation to his brother.
After selling some of his books to pay for his passage,
he slipped out of town on a ship heading south,
convincing the captain to keep quiet under the false pretense
that he had gotten a girl pregnant and needed to leave.
He was 17 years old.
11 days later, on October 6, 1723,
Franklin arrived at the Market Street wharf
on the Delaware River in Philadelphia,
the City of Brotherly Love founded by William Penn,
a Quaker for whom the colony of Pennsylvania was named.
With 6,000 residents, Philadelphia was now
America's third-largest city after Boston and New York.
It was a thriving outpost of the British Empire--
its streets filled with both newcomers and Native peoples,
including the Lenape, on whose land the city now stood.
People are coming from all sorts of backgrounds.
There's Anglicans, there's Jews,
there's slaves, freed slaves.
There's the Germans coming in and the Presbyterians
and the Native Americans who were there.
And, unlike Puritan Boston, where you have to follow
the theocratic maxims of the Mather family,
people in Philadelphia have a certain tolerance.
Colonial Philadelphia had a different vibe,
a different flavor.
Growing commerce, saloons and taverns,
a sort of hospitable place, but also a place in which
people could find themselves and create themselves.
Franklin landing in Philadelphia at this moment
was perfect for him, in terms of timing.
He didn't have to be someone who came from great wealth
in order to find opportunity.
He's just a kid.
He's run away from his apprenticeship,
so, he's scared, probably, that they're going to
track him down.
He's not sure what comes next.
"I was dirty from my journey," Franklin wrote,
"and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging.
I was fatigued and very hungry."
It was a Sunday, and he saw a crowd of well-dressed people
heading into a church.
They were Quakers about to attend their weekly service,
marked by sitting in silence together.
I sat down among them,
and after looking round awhile
and hearing nothing said,
I fell fast asleep, and continued so
till the meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to rouse me.
Walking up Market Street, he passed a house
and exchanged glances with a 15-year-old girl
standing in the doorway, who, he was sure,
"thought I made, as I certainly did,
a most awkward, ridiculous appearance."
He went to work at one of the city's print shops
and eventually began renting a room at the house
he had passed that first morning.
The girl he had seen was his landlord's daughter--
Deborah Read.
They struck up a romance,
and by the fall of 1724 were talking of marriage.
Meanwhile, patrons of the print shop had noticed
Franklin's skill and diligence.
One of them, Pennsylvania's governor William Keith,
offered what seemed to be the opportunity of a lifetime.
He would send Franklin to London
with letters of introduction and credit
to purchase the equipment needed
to start his own print shop in Philadelphia.
Marriage to Deborah would have to wait.
Benjamin was bound for England.
The great center of England
is the city of London and parts adjacent.
All that vast mass of buildings,
and how much farther it may spread, who knows?
New squares and new streets rising up every day
to such a prodigy of buildings that nothing in the world
does, or ever did, equal it, except old Rome.
Daniel Defoe.
With more than 600,000 residents,
100 times the size of Philadelphia,
London was the teeming hub of an empire
that considered its far-flung colonists with mild disdain.
They viewed Americans as backwards suppliers of raw materials
and as purchasers of manufactured goods
only England could provide.
Coming out of the Provinces,
he found a greater world.
In England, he was young and impressionable
and able to make his way into that huge metropolis of London
from nothing but his ability.
Upon his arrival, Franklin learned too late that
Governor Keith had a reputation for unreliability.
There were no letters of credit or introduction.
Once more, he would have to fend for himself.
For a year and a half, he made the most of it.
London had more print shops than all of
the American colonies combined,
and he quickly found work,
impressing his employers with his strength and his sobriety.
Unlike all the other workers, he did not drink
a pint of beer 6 different times during the workday.
I drank only Water; the other Workmen
wonder'd to see from this
that the Water-American, as they call'd me,
was stronger than themselves.
He spent his free time poring through books,
especially Enlightenment treatises by Isaac Newton,
René Descartes, John Locke, and other philosophers
who argued that truths were to be found
through the study of how things work in the natural world.
The Enlightenment.
It's a commitment to reason and science.
It's a belief that every problem can be solved
and that every institution can be reformed,
that life on Earth is perfectible,
at least up to a point,
and maybe altogether.
In London, Franklin also seemed
to have forgotten Deborah
and indulged in what he called
"foolish intrigues with low women."
He wrote her only one letter.
In his absence, Deborah married someone else.
But when a Quaker merchant
offered Franklin a job as a clerk
selling merchandise in a general store
back in Philadelphia
and then dangled a potential partnership,
he headed home.
During the 12-week voyage, Franklin wrote out a plan
for future conduct, with 4 basic rules:
be "extremely frugal,"
"endeavor to speak the truth in every instance,"
"apply myself industriously to whatever business I take,"
and "speak ill of no man whatever."
In Philadelphia, he threw himself into his new job,
becoming, he said, an "expert at selling."
But that winter, his employer took ill and died.
Franklin decided to return to his old trade as a printer.
In 1728, he opened
his own shop on Market Street
with a partner whose father underwrote
the initial expenses.
He had devised a foundry for casting type,
saving the cost of sending to England for replacements,
and won a contract to print
the authorized history of the Quakers.
When his new partner took to drinking,
Franklin found other backers to buy him out
and continued as sole proprietor.
In his drive to succeed, he often worked
until 11 at night
and was back at his shop before dawn.
I took care not only to be in Reality
Industrious and frugal, but to avoid
all Appearances of the Contrary.
He made sure people noticed,
and his business increased.
He was a writer. You know, writers invent.
He might be his own best invention.
Franklin is so relentless in learning how to do things,
learning how to do things correctly in a certain way,
how to write, how to dress, how to
speak to different kinds of people.
It's sort of impossible to know what was there
before he did all that and invented himself.
With 11 other up-and-coming tradesmen,
Franklin formed a club that met each Friday evening
to socialize and forge business connections.
But they also discussed current events
and politely debated a variety of topics--
What is wisdom? What defines good writing?
Did importing indentured and enslaved servants
help or hurt the colonial economy?
The official name of the group was the Leather Apron Club.
Informally, they called themselves the Junto,
from the Latin for "joined together."
At 21, Franklin was its youngest member,
but unquestionably its driving force.
Franklin believed that the virtues and values
of a working middle class
were going to be the backbone of American society.
The artisans, the shopkeepers,
the people who put on leather aprons early in the morning
to help serve the public.
The Junto moved its meeting place
from a local tavern to a rented house,
and at Franklin's suggestion,
each member brought some books
that the other members could read.
Eventually, they broadened the idea
into the Library Company of Philadelphia,
America's first subscription library
open to the public,
who paid small dues for the chance to borrow
books imported from Europe.
And, every year, more and more books would be
collected and extend knowledge.
What was so important about the Library Company
was that it wasn't just for wealthy, elite men.
This Library afforded me
the Means of Improvement by constant Study,
for which I set apart an Hour or two each Day;
and thus repair'd in some Degree
the Loss of the Learned Education
my Father once intended for me.
He always looked around wherever he was
and said, "What needs to be done?
"What's missing? What are the things
that a community ought to have?"
He had read enough to know that there was more elsewhere
and he wanted to make those good things happen
to the community of Philadelphia.
Self-reliance, which Franklin loved,
and community engagement may seem like
they oppose each other.
But as Franklin repeatedly said,
the good that we can do together
surpasses the good we can do alone.
Over the coming years, Franklin and his Junto
would turn to other civic projects
to improve life in Philadelphia.
Under their guidance, the city formed
volunteer fire companies.
They advocated for a police force
paid by a property tax.
And at one Junto meeting,
Franklin raised the idea of starting a college.
When the Public Academy of Philadelphia
finally opened in 1751,
Franklin would be elected president of the board.
It was the first non-sectarian college in America
and would later become the University of Pennsylvania.
Expanding on the Junto model,
he proposed and organized
the American Philosophical Society,
whose members would be scientists and intellectuals
from throughout the colonies,
who could share ideas and scholarly papers by mail
if they could not come to meetings in person.
It would become the colonies' first learned society.
And to build a new hospital, he devised a plan
that matched private donations with public funds,
giving people, he said, "an additional motive to give,
since every man's donation would be doubled."
He always believed that if you just get a few
good and interested men, always men,
on any civic problem, you can solve it.
Ben Franklin is, I think, emblematic of what
America wanted to be, should be, could be.
The things that he spoke of, the things that he wrote about,
often missing are other people.
Women, people of color, in particular,
enslaved men and women, never had
the opportunities that a Ben Franklin had.
Franklin's print shop was thriving.
Pennsylvania's colonial legislature awarded him
the contract to print its paper currency.
When he learned that South Carolina
was looking for a printer,
he dispatched one of his employees
to open a shop in Charleston.
And on October 2, 1729, he began publishing
his own newspaper, "The Pennsylvania Gazette."
He filled its pages with reports from other newspapers
in America and England,
along with crime stories,
notices of fires and deaths,
a moral advice column,
funny tales he concocted that flirted with sexual innuendo,
and letters from readers, including some he wrote himself,
under tongue-in-cheek pseudonyms like
Anthony Afterwit and Alice Addertongue.
"If you would make your paper a vehicle of scandal,"
Addertongue advised in one letter,
"you would double the number of your subscribers."
The "Gazette" caught on.
Ben Franklin understood the power
of the printing press.
He understood that those who controlled words,
those who are able to disseminate information, um,
had a certain amount of power.
He could be the arbiter of what was seen as important.
The idea, first, was to engage people,
to entertain people.
Franklin understood that if you could get people
to laugh with you, you're halfway to
getting them to agree with you.
He also welcomed essays
espousing opinions of all kinds.
If all printers were determined
not to print anything till they were
sure it would offend nobody,
there would be very little printed.
He said in the end you have to bear
some responsibility for the type of ideas that you put forward.
And if they're really odious, if they're really harmful,
you have to curate them out.
If you made a mistake, you could,
as they always did in those days, add an errata page.
And you could fix anything with that errata page.
Local merchants advertised their goods
in the "Gazette;"
tradesmen advertised their services.
Franklin also published notices offering rewards
for runaway indentured servants,
like he had once been,
and slaves for sale.
To be sold in Lots or singly,
a choice parcel of Negroes lately Imported,
consisting chiefly of young Men and Girls,
bred to Plantation Business;
also Jamaica Rum, Sugar of sundry Sorts,
Molasses, Cotton, and Pimento.
Run away from the subscriber, a Negroe lad called Ned,
about 18 years of age, 5 feet 7 inches high,
speaks pretty good English, but thick,
has very thick lips, and is much pitted with the small-pox;
TO BE SOLD, A LIKELY young breeding Negroe Woman,
speaks good English, understands her Needle
and any sort of Household Work,
and has had the Small-Pox.
Enquire of the Printer.
When Benjamin Franklin
had returned from England,
he had fallen back into some of the habits
he had acquired in London.
That hard-to- be-govern'd Passion of Youth
hurried me frequently into Intrigues with low Women
that fell in my Way,
which were attended with some Expence.
Besides a continual Risque to my Health by a Distemper
which of all Things I dreaded,
tho' by great good Luck I escaped it.
Now, as he became a successful businessman,
he decided he needed to settle down and get married.
Meanwhile, his former fiancée Deborah Read
had seen her marriage fall apart.
Her husband had abandoned her and fled to the West Indies.
Reports came back that he had died there in a brawl,
but they were unconfirmed.
In Quaker Pennsylvania, Deborah was in a legal limbo.
If she remarried and it turned out he wasn't dead,
she would be guilty of bigamy, punishable at the time
by 39 lashes and life imprisonment.
She now lived with her widowed mother,
who sold homemade remedies to support them both
in their house on Market Street.
Franklin felt some responsibility
for Deborah's unhappiness, and he said,
"our mutual affection was revived."
On September 1, 1730, forgoing a legal wedding,
they simply moved in together
and entered into a common-law marriage,
a practice not all that uncommon.
She prov'd a good and faithful Helpmate.
Assisted me much by attending the Shop.
We throve together, and have ever mutually endeavour'd
to make each other happy.
I think he loved her.
I think they rubbed on together beautifully,
as he would have said.
I think during the time that Franklin was
an up-and-coming tradesman,
it was a perfect union.
She was an excellent choice for a wife.
She was well connected; she belonged to Christ Church,
which was the church in town.
It was less of a romantic relationship than it was
a good, strong, business-like partnership.
But there was a complication.
Franklin had recently fathered a son with another woman.
He never revealed the mother's identity,
but Franklin wanted to take custody of the child.
Deborah agreed the boy could live with them.
He was named William.
She takes in his son, who is not her son,
and raises him, not always happily.
Benjamin and Deborah
expanded the print shop to include
sales of her mother's ointments,
fine soap from Franklin's family back in Boston,
coffee, tea, chocolate, and other items.
Deborah purchased rags, which mills throughout
the colonies turned into paper,
creating another profit center.
She also managed the household,
and at night bound books by candlelight.
Two years into their union, in 1732,
they had a child of their own, Francis.
His proud and doting father called him Franky.
But just after his fourth birthday,
Franky came down with smallpox and died.
The huge tragedy of their lives
was the death of Franky.
Franklin was one of the few people in the Colonies
who was 100% behind inoculation.
But it was thought that because Franky
had a very bad cold at the time,
they should hold off until he recovered enough
to be able to withstand the assault on his system
that inoculation would provide.
He never was inoculated.
Franklin never forgave himself.
Franklin's exposure to the writings of
Europe's Enlightenment thinkers
had led him to reject most of the Puritan teachings
of his family's church in Boston.
He no longer worshipped a God intimately connected
with a person's daily life
who answered private prayers or sent down punishments.
But he still believed in a Supreme Being
who had created the world.
I believe He is pleased
and delights in the happiness
of those He has created;
and since without virtue man can have no happiness in this world,
I firmly believe He delights to see me virtuous.
Avirtuous heretick shall be saved
before a wicked Christian.
No one feared for Benjamin's soul
more than his pious parents back in Boston,
whose Calvinist Puritanism espoused that salvation
came solely through God's grace
rather than good works
and anyone who strayed from that doctrine
would be eternally damned.
Benjamin, for whom tolerance was becoming
central to his evolving beliefs,
tried to explain himself.
Honored Father and Mother, I imagine
a Man must have a good deal of Vanity who believes
that all the Doctrines he holds, are true;
and all he rejects, are false.
I think vital Religion has always suffer'd,
when Orthodoxy is more regarded than Virtue.
And the Scripture assures me, that at the last Day,
we shall not be examin'd by what we thought,
but what we did.
He's a man of omnivorous curiosity, um,
of endless invention, of endless self-invention.
He's so bent on self-improvement,
on teaching himself how to write properly,
or cleansing himself of his moral sins.
He gives us this idea that human nature
may be flawed in some ways,
but anything can be improved.
In his constant effort for self-improvement,
Franklin made a list of 12 virtues
that could lead him to what he called "moral perfection":
temperance, silence, order,
resolution, frugality, industry,
sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness,
tranquility, and chastity.
Then he made a chart with 7 columns
for each day of the week
and rows labeled with each virtue
and went to work on his progress,
marking any infraction with a black spot.
"I was surprised," he said, "to find myself much fuller
of faults than I had imagined."
Every week, Franklin would make a chart and check,
did he master the virtue?
At one point, he said, "I've mastered all the 12
"virtues I had.
"And I showed it around with great pride.
"And one of my friends said, 'Franklin, you're missing
a virtue you might want to try.'"
And Franklin says, "What's that?"
And the friend says, "Humility.
You might want to add that one to your list."
In reality, there is perhaps no one of our
natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride.
Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it,
mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive,
and will every now and then peep out and show itself.
Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it,
I should probably be proud of my Humility.
7 years after the death of their son Franky,
Deborah gave birth to another child, a daughter named Sarah.
They called her Sally.
Franklin's son William was now a teenager,
as restless as his father had been at that age.
Deborah treated him with occasional coldness,
but Franklin was indulgent as a father,
making sure the boy got the formal education
Franklin himself had been denied.
At age 16, William enlisted to fight against
the French and their Indian allies
in what was called King George's War,
and quickly rose to the rank of captain,
tracking down deserters in Pennsylvania.
When he returned to Philadelphia,
his father began to envision William
rising in the ranks of the British Empire
and made plans for him to study the law in England.
Franklin had started to acquire some wealth.
Like many other Colonial Pennsylvanians,
he held a number of enslaved people,
up to 5 or 6, in his home,
including a married couple, Peter and Jemima.
He was committed to slave labor.
He used it alongside of his business ventures
in order to gain more wealth.
At the time,
nearly a tenth of Philadelphia's residents
were enslaved,
toiling in homes and businesses.
We tend to associate slavery with
plantation labor in the South.
But there were slaves all up and down the Eastern Seaboard,
every one of the 13 Colonies.
And they did everything. They served as domestic servants;
they served as cooks; um, they served as nursemaids;
they served as dock workers; they served as hired hands.
The advantage was that Africans couldn't leave.
Indentured servants filled out their time.
Africans, you had for life.
Many of Franklin's Quaker friends
considered slavery a sin that threatened to corrode
the moral fiber of the community at large.
Franklin published some of their anti-slavery tracts--
though he intentionally kept his own name as printer
off the title page.
Franklin lived in a moment in which slavery was
being challenged, pretty constantly, in Philadelphia.
He was very aware that this was happening, yet he still
made the decision to hold onto his men and woman
who were enslaved.
He made a choice.
Franklin's publishing empire was
expanding and making more money.
He was named clerk of Pennsylvania's
colonial assembly, which didn't pay well,
but had won the contract to print their proceedings,
which did.
He made even more profits printing the paper currency
for Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey.
With former employees, he would establish
printing partnerships in Newport, Rhode Island;
New York City; and Antigua in the West Indies;
as well as the one in Charleston, South Carolina.
He published Bibles, and Samuel Richardson's
"Pamela," the first novel printed in America,
along with treaties with Native peoples that were used
to systematically dispossess them of their lands.
In 1737, he was appointed Philadelphia's postmaster,
giving him access to news from Europe
and the rest of the Colonies before his competitors.
One of the advantages of being a printer is that
he is totally tuned into the news.
He's totally tuned into everything that's
going on in North America.
His vision is broader than most of his neighbors.
He had a kind of public opinion embedded in his brain.
And he knew that opinion in the end was what would
decide where power resided.
Early to Bed, and early to rise,
makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.
By now, thousands of readers
from South Carolina to New York
were buying Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack,"
which he had launched in 1733.
Many printers published almanacs.
They outsold everything in the colonies except Bibles
and had the advantage of requiring people
to buy a new one each year.
But Franklin's stood out.
In addition to weather predictions,
astronomical, astrological, and other observations,
he included aphorisms that combined wisdom with humor,
philosophy with word play.
All of it was ostensibly written
by the hapless Richard Saunders,
who claimed he was writing his almanac
simply because his wife threatened to burn his books
if he didn't earn something from them.
Franklin got this from his reading
of Jonathan Swift.
Swift had produced the "Bickerstaff Papers,"
which was a parody of the almanac.
And Franklin decides to incorporate this style
into Richard Saunders.
And it was genius.
People go to almanacs for all sorts of important things--
when to plant potatoes or peas;
when... what's the best time to harvest--
but they stayed because these fillers were
funny, witty, and useful.
"Fish and visitors," Poor Richard wrote,
"stink in 3 days."
"He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas."
"God helps them that help themselves."
"Haste," he said, "makes waste."
And "lost time is never found again."
God heals, and the doctor takes the fees.
A countryman between two lawyers
is like a fish between two cats.
The greatest monarch on the proudest throne,
is obliged to sit upon his own arse.
Franklin is endlessly quotable.
You could live your life, I think, in Franklin aphorisms,
most of which, we should say, are stolen from other people
but slightly reworked, so in Franklin's version,
they're in a better form.
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
I think one of Franklin's great inventions is
that American style of homespun humor,
somebody who's pricking at the pretensions of the elite,
somebody who has sort of a cracker barrel sensibility.
This new style of humor where people are poking fun
at themselves indirectly.
You see it in Mark Twain and Will Rogers and others.
I think it started with Franklin.
The man who had arrived in Philadelphia
virtually penniless at age 17
was now the city's largest bookseller,
its most successful printer and publisher,
and the biggest paper merchant in all the colonies.
He considered himself prosperous enough to retire
from the day-to-day running of his businesses in 1748,
at age 42.
"I would rather have it said, 'He lived usefully, '"
Franklin wrote his mother, "than 'He died rich.'"
I am in a fair Way of having
no other Tasks than such as I shall like to give my Self,
and of enjoying what I look upon as a great Happiness,
Leisure to read, make Experiments,
and converse at large with such ingenious and worthy Men
as are pleas'd to honor me
with their friendship and Acquaintance,
on such points as may produce
something for the common benefit of mankind,
uninterrupted by the little cares and fatigues
of business.
There was something in Franklin that always
wanted a little bit more.
He wanted to learn more. He wanted to go
to more interesting places.
He wanted to have a broader influence.
Despite his lack of a formal education,
Franklin had turned himself
into an influential writer and thinker.
Now, with more time to pursue
whatever intrigued his restless imagination,
he would become better known as a scientist and inventor.
He studied the earth's rotation;
conducted experiments showing that dark cloths
absorb more heat than bright fabrics;
and became fascinated by the human body's
circulatory system.
He loved anatomy, he loved botany,
he loved the way leaves had veins.
He was most curious to know everything you can know about
everything that was possibly knowable.
Wanting to know everything is a key to his creativity.
He observed weather patterns
and correctly deduced that the coastal storms
now called Nor'easters
actually moved in from the south.
For an ailing brother, he fashioned
a more comfortable catheter.
And he designed a metal stove to fit into a hearth,
improving on the ones many German immigrants were using.
Franklin's radiated more heat out into the room
and had an opening for those who still wished
to bask in the fire's glow.
An ironworker who was a fellow Junto member
began manufacturing them, and they sold for 5 pounds each
throughout the northeast.
When Franklin was urged to take out
a potentially lucrative patent on his invention, he declined.
As we enjoy great advantages
from the invention of others,
we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others
by an invention of ours,
and this we should do freely and generously.
But nothing he did as a scientist
would do more to serve others,
and bring him more fame,
than his work in the fledgling field of electricity.
"I never was before engaged in any study," Franklin wrote,
"that so totally engrossed my attention and my time."
Franklin had become interested in electricity,
which, at the time, was certainly not understood,
but it was also sort of a parlor trick.
People would come in with a--with a glass rod
and some silk and shock each other and lift
pieces of paper.
He and his Junto friends
staged electricity parties
in which they used a charge to ring bells
and make a toy he called an electrical spider jump around.
Men and women exchanged electrical kisses.
Franklin also electrified
a gilt-edged portrait of King George II that created
what he called a high-treason shock
if someone touched his crown.
He used a more powerful shock to kill a turkey and reported
that it seemed uncommonly tender
compared to one slaughtered the conventional way.
He kept saying, "We have to find useful things
to do with this electricity."
He said one of the only useful things in his first year
of experiments was that he would get shocked
and knock him down; and he said, "Electricity was useful
for making a vain person humble."
As his studies turned more serious,
and he began documenting his observations,
he came up with new terms to describe
electricity's mysterious properties.
It had two charges, he wrote,
positive and negative,
and it could travel by what he called a conductor.
He grouped a collection of glass containers together,
each possessing an electrical charge,
and named it a battery, using the military term
for an array of cannons.
Benjamin Franklin comes up with the most
important theory of the era, which is
the Single Fluid Theory of Electricity,
which is that it's not some substance,
but it's a positive and a negative.
And it flows from positive to negative.
But pure science had less appeal to Franklin
than putting it to practical use.
Lightning was seen as being Divine Retribution.
Of course, the irony was that most of the buildings
that were destroyed by lightning were churches
'cause in a lot of communities in the 18th century,
they were the highest structure.
Franklin is convinced that lightning
bears a similarity to an electrical spark.
He's looking at electric sparks,
he's looking at lightning, and he puts in his notebook
all the similarities and at the end of the page,
he says, "Let the experiment be made."
Franklin detailed his theory
that lightning was electricity
and that metal objects could draw off a charge.
He proposed an experiment that involved placing a person
in what he called a sentry box
on a high tower or hilltop
and raising a sharply pointed iron rod
when storm clouds approached.
He shared his observations with a London scientist,
Peter Collinson, who had supplied him with equipment
for his electrical studies.
Franklin was planning to conduct the experiment
on the new steeple of Christ Church off Market Street
as soon as its construction was completed.
But the work went slowly and Franklin grew impatient.
He then came up with an alternative way
to test his theory.
He was less confident in this method
and decided to do it in secret,
trusting only his son William to take part.
In June of 1752, with storm clouds threatening,
he and William went to a field with a silk kite,
to which Franklin had attached a sharp-pointed wire.
Dangling at the end of the kite's long twine string
was a metal key.
They got the kite aloft and Franklin maneuvered it
toward the approaching clouds.
What he was showing was that the atmosphere
became electrified,
not that the kite had to be struck by a lightning bolt,
which is often the way it's depicted in illustrations.
Franklin suddenly noticed
the individual strands of hemp
along the kite's string
stiffening and standing on end.
He moved his free hand toward the key
and felt a mild shock on his knuckle.
When the rain began, and water
started streaming down the twine,
sparks flew off the key.
Franklin was exultant.
"Thereby," he wrote of his experiment,
"the sameness of electrical matter with that of lightning
has been completely demonstrated."
Meanwhile, the theories
he had shared with Collinson
had been published,
and unbeknownst to him, other scientists
were already testing and verifying them.
Experiments using his original sentry box proposal
had been taking place all over England and Europe.
"Monsieur Franklin's idea," a French physicist wrote,
"has ceased to be a conjecture;
here it has become a reality."
The kite experiment, that really was
the symbol of his breakthrough.
It showed that the atmosphere was electrified,
that thus thunder and lightning were electrical forces.
And it overthrew centuries of superstition
and scientific confusion about what this might be.
He made a really fundamental contribution
to basic science.
And the fact that he did it as an American,
coming out of the wilds of, uh, of America,
in the European eyes, made him, uh, instantly world famous.
There's a hilarious little piece
in the "Gentleman's Magazine" in London
where this commentator says that "Now we know
"that Mr. Franklin's theories about
"emptying the clouds of electricity are actually true;
"whereas, once upon a time, we didn't even think there was
such a person as Mr. Franklin."
'Cause it does seem incredibly improbable
that the reigning expert on
an enormous attribute of Nature
would come from Philadelphia, wherever the hell that was.
Benjamin Franklin had unlocked
the mystery of electricity,
but he still wanted to put his discovery to work.
In Germany during the mid-century,
386 churches had been struck by lightning
and more than 100 bell ringers killed.
In Italy, hundreds more people perished
when a bolt hit a building that had gunpowder stored in it.
Franklin concluded that lightning
seeks the path of least resistance
to connect with the ground.
Providing a better conductor
might safely divert the charge.
He then arranged for what he called lightning rods
to be placed atop Pennsylvania's State House
and his college building--
the first such devices ever erected in the world.
Lightning bolts aren't there
sent by an angry god.
It's not something you can just
try to pray and it goes away.
You have to find practical, scientific solutions
that help us understand our cosmos.
The lightning rod changes the world.
It's one of the most important inventions
of the Enlightenment and, of course,
he won't patent it.
He believes a good idea
belongs to humankind.
Some religious leaders objected
that Franklin was attempting to interfere
with one of God's most effective methods of punishing sinners.
Surely the Thunder of Heaven is no more
supernatural than the Rain, Hail or Sunshine of Heaven,
against the Inconvenience of which we guard
by Roofs & Shades without Scruple.
Scientists in America and Europe
were hailing him for his achievements in electricity.
Harvard, Yale, and the College of William and Mary in Virginia
gave him honorary degrees.
London's Royal Society made him the first person
living outside of Britain to receive
its prestigious Copley Medal.
And one English scientist called his work
"the greatest discovery that has been made
since the time of Sir Isaac Newton."
In Germany, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant said
Franklin had stolen the fire of heaven and called him
the "modern Prometheus."
By the collision of different sentiments,
sparks of truth are struck,
and political light is obtained.
He had a kind of social intelligence
that matched his book learning intelligence.
He really was an American genius, but part of his genius
lay in his ability to get people to work with him
and to move things in a direction
he wanted them to go.
Franklin's involvement in civic affairs
took a new political turn when he was elected to
Pennsylvania's colonial Assembly in 1751.
I conceived my becoming a member
would enlarge my power of doing good.
I would not however insinuate that my ambition was not
flattered by all these promotions.
It certainly was.
For considering my low beginning
they were great things to me.
He worked on everything from regulations
on the size of bread loaves
to a tax on dogs;
pushed through a plan to pave Market Street
and keep it swept of dust;
then gained approval to install newly designed
street lamps in the city
with 4 replaceable glass panes
that made them easier to repair.
In 1752, the British government appointed
the 46-year-old Franklin
to the top postal job in America,
sharing the title of deputy postmaster
with a man from the South.
Franklin immediately started making the colonies'
mail service more efficient.
He established the first home-delivery system
and cut the time it took for a letter to get from
Philadelphia to New York City to one day.
On an inspection tour that took him through
Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia,
he learned more about the colonies south of Pennsylvania.
The American identity begins to form
when Franklin creates a Postal System that allows people
to communicate up and down the coast.
Most of the Colonies thought of themselves
closer to London.
Even letters would go, from Charleston,
if it had to go to Boston, it would go to London,
and then back to Boston.
So, by doing a Postal Road up and down the coast,
he helps knit the American Colonies together.
The future prosperity of the British Empire,
Franklin wrote in one essay,
lay in the American colonies.
Because of the abundance of land,
he predicted the white population would double
every 20 years, and within a century
would even surpass England's.
All of this disregarded the sovereignty of Native peoples,
whose land it had been for millennia.
In the same essay, he argued,
strictly on economic grounds,
that the importation of black slaves diminished a nation
because "The Whites who have Slaves"
are "enfeebled" by not working themselves.
He is combining racism
and opposition to the slave trade, simultaneously.
Some of the initial efforts
to stop the slave trade to North America
originated in concern that there were
too many black people there.
It was an immigration problem, rather than a moral problem.
He also worried about the influx of immigrants
he described as having "a swarthy complexion,"
including Spaniards, Italians,
French, Russians, and Swedes--
even the Germans, who now represented
a third of his own colony.
"Why," he wrote, "should Pennsylvania,
"founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens,
"who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us
instead of our Anglifying them."
We have so fair an Opportunity,
by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys,
of increasing the lovely White and Red.
But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country,
for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
In the middle decades of the 18th century,
notions of racial inferiority were so deeply embedded
that the unusual fact of this document, actually,
is how he says, at the end, "Or maybe I'm just biased
in favor of people like myself."
Franklin doesn't deserve particular praise for that.
But it is unusual in the sense of
he's being self-reflective about his own prejudices.
It's the self-reflective part which is slightly unusual.
The prejudices are not.
In 1754, increased white settlement
in the Ohio River Valley
ignited another struggle with France
for control of Native lands--
what would come to be called the French and Indian War.
Franklin was chosen as one of 4 Pennsylvania delegates
to meet with representatives from 6 other colonies
in Albany, New York, to negotiate with Native Americans
they hoped would side with England in the conflict.
He was familiar with the way the Iroquois nations
had formed a confederation, the Haudenosaunee,
more than a century earlier
that promoted unity through consensus
on matters that affected them all.
It gave him an idea.
It would be a very strange thing,
if 6 nations of ignorant savages should be
capable of forming a scheme for such a union,
and be able to execute it in such a manner
as that it has subsisted for ages,
and appears indissoluble;
and yet that a like union should be impracticable
for 10 or a dozen English colonies,
to whom it is more necessary,
and must be more advantageous.
Franklin urged his fellow delegates
to consider creating their own charter
to encourage the colonies to work together.
He and Thomas Hutchinson, an ally from Massachusetts,
spearheaded a committee that drew up what was called
the Albany Plan of Union.
It proposed a Grand Council for the Colonies,
empowered to make treaties with Indians,
regulate trade, oversee land sales on the frontier,
build forts and raise troops for common defense,
and enact whatever taxes and duties
were needed for it all.
Individual colonies would keep their own authority
over everything else under their own constitutions.
In an article in the "Gazette," he attached
a drawing showing a dismembered snake
representing the colonies.
At the bottom was a dire warning.
It says, "Join or die."
And it's his way of saying that we have to come together
to have one national sensibility.
So, he's the great visionary
that sees that we have to
knit the Colonies together,
rather than have each of the Colonies think of themselves
as sort of a separate entity reporting back to London.
On both sides of the Atlantic,
the Albany Plan was considered too radical.
Its Fate was singular.
The Assemblies did not adopt it,
as they all thought there was too much Prerogative in it;
and in England it was judg'd to have too much of the democratic.
Despite all the failure, and it was
a total failure,
it did possibly plant some kind of seed
for future organization among the Colonies.
In 1755, Franklin met with
Major General Edward Braddock,
who had arrived in America boasting
that he and his British redcoats would have little trouble
defeating the French and their Native American allies.
Franklin warned the general against overconfidence.
On July 9, 1755,
8 miles from Fort Duquesne,
where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers
join to form the Ohio,
Braddock's forces stumbled into an ambush
and were routed by French and Indian soldiers.
Nearly 1,000 of the British were killed or wounded;
most of the officers died, including Braddock.
In the battle, two horses were shot out from underneath
a young lieutenant colonel
and land speculator from Virginia,
and 4 bullets pierced his coat.
But somehow, 23-year-old George Washington survived.
The French and Indians soon pushed
farther into Pennsylvania,
burning houses, killing and capturing settlers,
spreading panic across the colony.
In Philadelphia, the Assembly seemed paralyzed.
Dominated by Quaker pacifists, it resisted raising an army.
Meanwhile, the governor, appointed by
William Penn's sons in England,
steadfastly rejected any tax
on the family's lands in Pennsylvania
to help defend the colony.
Vassals fight at their lord's expense;
but our lord would have us defend his estate
at our own expense!
It is even more slavish than slavery itself.
When a raiding party struck a settlement
only 75 miles north of Philadelphia,
Franklin led a force of militiamen,
including his son William, over rough terrain to the scene,
where they buried the dead
and began to build
a series of forts.
The winter weather was cold and wet.
Franklin spent his 50th birthday
encamped at Lehigh Gap.
But the immediate crisis had been met.
In Philadelphia, Franklin was hailed as a hero.
"The people," he wrote a friend, "happen to love me."
In June of 1757, Franklin once more
found himself on a ship bound for England.
The Assembly had sent him on a mission to try to negotiate
with the Penn family in person
about their refusal to be taxed.
He brought his son William along as his assistant,
but Deborah and Sally stayed behind.
Deborah worried that her husband's ship
might be attacked by the French
or go down in the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic.
I have been in much pain
for some days on account of my Husband,
for by this time he is, as I suppose,
near the Land's End of England,
and of course in danger of being taken,
which I pray God prevent.
I am not able to bear the least thing in the world
and I find myself very weak indeed.
Approaching the coast of England,
Franklin's ship was nearly
wrecked on the rocks,
just as his wife had feared,
but finally landed safely.
"Were I a Roman Catholic," he wrote Deborah,
"perhaps I should on this occasion
"vow to build a chapel to some saint;
"but as I am not, if I were to vow at all,
it should be to build a lighthouse."
In London, he found lodging at a home on Craven Street,
a short walk from the British government offices
at Whitehall.
When he gets to London, Franklin tries to
recreate his family life.
And, so, he finds a landlady who's quite like
Deborah Franklin, named Margaret Stevenson,
who has a daughter named Polly.
And they set up on Craven Street a replica
of what he had back in Philadelphia.
Franklin and William had brought along
two enslaved men, known only as Peter and King, as servants.
"Peter behaves very well to me in general,"
Franklin wrote home to Deborah,
"and begins to know the town so as to go anywhere on errands."
But King, sensing an opportunity for freedom
in his new surroundings, ran away.
What we know about these men
is relatively little.
What we do know is that, while Ben Franklin's
feelings or opinions about slavery
may have changed over time,
he doesn't set his slaves free, ever.
They run off and he doesn't necessarily pursue them,
perhaps, with as much vigor as he might have.
And they die off.
But at no moment do we really see Franklin step out front
and say, "I am setting an example
by setting my slaves free."
When Franklin met with the Penn family,
they categorically dismissed the notion that they should
pay any taxes at all.
They saw the colony solely as
a source of wealth and power for them,
and declared Franklin a malicious villain.
Franklin decided to change tactics.
He thought he might be able to persuade
King George II and his ministers
to declare Pennsylvania a Crown colony,
like most of the others in America,
where governors were appointed by the King.
He let Deborah know he would not be returning as quickly
as the two of them had planned.
Franklin was enjoying London.
London was the greatest city in the world
at the time.
It was filled with coffee shops
and had a thriving intellectual middle class.
And Franklin goes around with his friends,
mainly scientists and writers,
and they spend their afternoons in the coffee shops
discussing new ideas.
That glittering, sophisticated world
was made for Ben Franklin.
He was made for a dinner party and conversation.
Philadelphia might have been extraordinary
for the New World, but it couldn't compare
to the absolute sophistication of the Old World.
There were people who shared his views on science;
there were people who shared his broadminded view
of all sorts of human institutions.
He made friends very easily.
In fact, if Debbie
had been willing to relocate from Philadelphia to London,
Franklin might very well
have become a permanent resident of London.
In England, as he had in America,
Franklin forged intellectual and affectionate relationships
with a number of young women
whose intelligence he appreciated--
exchanging letters, providing advice,
and encouraging their ambitions;
the kind of attention he neglected to give
his own daughter Sally.
Sally was born at a bad time, I think,
just as Benjamin Franklin became involved in politics
and was away most of the time.
And, so, I don't think she ever really
got to know her father.
And her father didn't seem particularly interested
in knowing her in those days.
She wanted the education that her brother had
and never got it.
She wanted to go to England with him;
that never happened.
With William by his side,
Franklin traveled beyond London whenever possible.
A friend reported to Deborah that
"William is daily in the company of his father,
"who is at the same time his friend, his brother,
his intimate, and easy companion."
In Edinburgh, they socialized with
two of the Enlightenment's leading thinkers,
the economist Adam Smith and the philosopher David Hume.
At St. Andrews, the university placed
a crimson and white robe over Franklin's shoulder
and presented him, a man with
only two years of formal education,
with an honorary doctorate.
From that moment on, most people referred to him
as Doctor Franklin.
One evening in Cambridge, he attended
a concert of sorts,
where the rims of wine glasses
were rubbed to produce musical notes.
Franklin looked at that and he thought,
"Now, that's just inefficient."
Why move your arms to that degree?
Why not take the glasses and have them move
and your hand stay still?
He hired a London glassblower to create
a series of 36 glass bowls, to specific thicknesses and sizes.
And rather than having your fingers
move around the glass,
the glasses rotated,
and he wet his fingers
and played it like a keyboard.
He named his new invention the armonica,
after the Italian word for harmony,
and charmed visitors with performances on it.
Soon, more of the instruments were being
manufactured and sold, though Franklin again refused
to patent or profit from his invention.
What pleased him most was that,
in musical circles throughout
England and Europe,
the armonica
created a sensation.
In Austria, Franklin's invention
provided the music for a royal wedding.
Even Mozart and Beethoven
would compose chamber pieces for it.
The sound it made was described as
celestial ravishment.
I have long been of the opinion
that the foundations of
the future grandeur and stability
of the British Empire lie in America,
broad and strong enough to support the greatest
political structure human wisdom ever yet erected.
By 1761, the French and Indian War had exploded
into a global conflict called the Seven Years' War,
involving all the European powers.
In North America, England had won a decisive victory
against the French by capturing Quebec.
No one can rejoice more sincerely
than I do on the possible addition of Canada;
and this not merely as I am a colonist,
but as I am a Briton.
Franklin is one of the earliest to say,
"Look, the weight of the British world
is going to be in North America."
And he put himself at the center of it.
He imagined himself as being the kind of linchpin between
these--this emerging empire in North America
and the seat of power in London.
By this time, William Franklin had completed
his legal studies
and enjoyed socializing with
wealthy friends in the upper class.
William also took up with
women from London's high society,
and others with less sterling reputations.
Just like his own father, he sired a son out of wedlock.
Unlike his father, William arranged for the baby boy
to be secretly placed in a foster home.
On September 22, 1761,
hundreds of England's well-born and well-connected
gathered in Westminster Hall
for the coronation of a new monarch:
King George III.
Among those present for the occasion
were two staunch defenders of the Empire--
Benjamin and William Franklin.
From the balcony, Benjamin watched the lavish ritual.
On the hall's floor, his son William
stood with a more privileged crowd
of nobles and high officials.
Then William marched in a small procession
into Westminster Abbey, where the crown
was to be placed on George's head.
Benjamin, not part of that select group,
walked back to Craven Street alone.
Franklin's efforts to elevate his son's station
were paying off.
William had caught the attention of ministers
in the new king's government
who decided that he, though barely into his early thirties,
was a natural leader.
With their support, William Franklin
was chosen to be the next royal governor of New Jersey.
And there was other good news.
William had fallen in love with Elizabeth Downes,
the daughter of a wealthy owner of
sugar plantations in Barbados,
and they were now engaged.
Benjamin Franklin had been gone from Philadelphia
for 5 years.
He was now 56, and still captivated by life in England.
Why should this island,
which compared to America is but like
a stepping stone in a brook,
enjoy in almost every neighborhood
more sensible, virtuous, and elegant minds
than we can collect in ranging 100 leagues of our vast forests?
In the summer of 1762,
he booked passage for Philadelphia,
determined to convince Deborah to come back with him,
and promising his English friends
he intended to return to London permanently.
In two Years at farthest
I hope to settle all my Affairs in such a Manner,
as that I may then conveniently remove to England,
provided we can persuade the good Woman to cross the Seas.
That will be the great Difficulty.
Franklin would be at sea
when William was married
in St. George's Church in London,
and when he bowed to George III
in St. James's Palace,
kissed the new king's ring,
and swore his eternal allegiance to the crown.
On November 1, 1762,
Benjamin Franklin arrived back in Philadelphia.
It wasn't a teeming metropolis like London,
but with a population of nearly 25,000,
it had surpassed Boston and New York
as the largest city in the American colonies.
Deborah and 19-year-old Sally welcomed him home.
A few months later, William arrived from England
with his new wife Elizabeth,
and Franklin accompanied them across the Delaware River
to New Jersey, where Benjamin watched proudly
as his son became that colony's ninth governor.
As deputy postmaster of His Majesty's
colonies in North America,
Franklin embarked on another inspection tour
that took him through 6 colonies,
all the way to New Hampshire.
The trip lasted 5 months.
Franklin sees the many different
American styles.
There's a Northern community;
there's a New England community;
there are the Middle Colonies;
the Upper South; the Lower South.
He begins to understand the vast complexity
of the Colonial situation.
And nobody else did.
He was the best-informed person in the New World
about the diversity of geography, of economy,
of social structure, and he also saw discontentments.
There was concern about representation;
there was concern about arbitrary economic tariffs
that were being imposed by Britain,
and the increasing sense that the British
don't really understand us
and they're also using us as an extraction machine
for British wealth.
And, even though they will
say we're British citizens,
they're not treating us with full respect
that an Englishman deserves.
I went to hear the Negro children at Church.
There were 17 that answered very prettily indeed,
and 5 or 6 that were too little, but all behaved very decently.
It gave me a great deal of Pleasure, and I shall send
Othello to the School.
Deborah Franklin had enrolled Othello,
an enslaved child in the Franklin household,
in a new school in Philadelphia,
part of an effort to educate Black children in North America
that Benjamin Franklin had endorsed.
At Deborah's urging, her husband
made a personal visit to the school.
I was on the whole much pleas'd,
and from what I then saw, have conceiv'd a higher Opinion
of the natural Capacities of the black Race,
than I had ever before entertained.
Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong,
and their Docility in every Respect
equal to that of white Children.
You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it,
and I will not undertake to justify all my Prejudices,
nor to account for them.
I think a major turning point in Franklin's life
was when he visited that classroom.
He did not like Black people when he was a young man.
There's no way of getting around that.
It's very distasteful to say, but it's true.
He had once written that the hardest thing for a man to do
is to change long-standing prejudices of belief.
But to succeed in doing it is a test of one's humanity.
If an Indian injures me, does it follow
that I may revenge that injury on all Indians?
These poor People have been always our Friends.
Their Fathers received ours, when Strangers here,
with Kindness and Hospitality.
Behold the Return we have made them!
Native Americans
had been completely left out
of the treaty negotiations between France and Britain
that ended the Seven Years' War.
As white settlements continued to push onto their homelands,
Indians from the Great Lakes to Western Pennsylvania
fought back.
On December 14, 1763, 50 frontiersmen
from the town of Paxton, Pennsylvania
swarmed into the small village of Conestoga
and slaughtered the 6 unarmed
Susquehannock Indians they found there.
The mob moved on to Lancaster, where they murdered 14 more
defenseless men, women, and children.
Though the Susquehannocks were known to be friendly,
the so-called Paxton Boys had killed them anyway.
Public opinion about the massacre was split--
between the Quakers, guided by William Penn's advice
to be friends of the Indians,
and the newer immigrants, mostly
Scots-Irish and Germans from the backcountry,
who accused the Quaker-led assembly
of coddling native peoples.
Benjamin Franklin called the perpetrators
"barbarous Men"
who had brought "eternal disgrace"
to their race and religion.
The Paxton Boys then marched on Philadelphia,
where more than 100 Indians had been brought for their safety.
Franklin helped raise a militia to stop them
and negotiated an end to the crisis.
But his outspokenness created a backlash,
especially among the settlers of the backcountry,
which the Penn family exploited.
They slandered Franklin's son William as illegitimate,
falsely claiming that his birth mother
had starved to death, and that Benjamin
had hidden her body in an unmarked grave.
In all the controversy,
Franklin lost his Assembly seat.
But the legislature now adopted his position
that Pennsylvania should be a Crown colony
and reappointed him as their agent in London.
After only two years in Philadelphia,
Franklin was going back to England.
Deborah had made it clear she intended to stay;
they were building a new home just off Market Street.
He promised he wouldn't be gone long.
Coming out of the Seven Years' War,
Britain is on top of the world.
They had acquired a huge amount of territory,
all the territory up to the Mississippi River.
It was expensive to maintain
and, so, you needed to tax it.
Franklin certainly went along with it.
And he said, "Well, empires cost money."
And, much to his chagrin,
he found himself going the wrong way,
out of touch with American public opinion.
The recent war with France
had expanded England's empire, but left its treasury depleted.
In the spring of 1765,
the king's ministers and Parliament
came up with a new way to raise more money
from the American colonies.
Now all legal documents, newspapers, books, almanacs,
even decks of playing cards, would need official stamps,
purchased from the government.
In Virginia, Patrick Henry denounced the act
as taxation without representation.
Riots broke out in New York; New London, Connecticut;
Annapolis, Maryland.
In Boston, a group calling themselves the Sons of Liberty
hanged and burned the stamp commissioner in effigy.
Then the mob destroyed the mansion
of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson,
who had worked with Franklin back in 1754
to propose the Albany Plan of Union.
The leaders of the protests had appropriated the motto
Franklin had used at the time
to encourage the colonies to act TOGETHER: "join or die."
Franklin didn't like the Stamp Act either,
but from London advised Pennsylvanians
against over-reacting.
His political enemies back home now spread false rumors
that he helped write the Stamp Act
and had been bribed by promises of a higher royal appointment.
When a mob threatened to attack
the Franklin home in Philadelphia,
Deborah wouldn't budge.
I said when I was advised
to remove that I was very sure
you had done nothing to hurt anybody,
and I had not given any offense to any person at all.
I sent to ask my brother to come and bring his gun.
If any one came to disturb me,
I would show a proper resentment.
Shocked at the reports of mob violence in the colonies,
Franklin wrote William that unless
some compromise could be found
to ease the tensions,
events were "laying the Foundation
of a future total Separation."
He flooded London newspapers with letters
arguing that the Stamp Act was unfair,
that the recent riots did not represent
the attitude of a majority of the colonists.
He circulated a political cartoon illustrating that,
if the crisis escalated,
the Empire would be dismembered.
On February 13, 1766, Franklin appeared before Parliament,
patiently answering questions posed by its members.
Could an army make the colonists comply,
he was asked.
Suppose a military force
is sent into America.
What are they then to do?
They cannot force a man to take stamps
who chooses to do without them.
They will not find a rebellion;
they may indeed make one.
The Stamp Act was repealed.
But the Privy Council, the King's top advisors,
had refused to act on Franklin's petition
to make Pennsylvania a Crown colony.
Franklin decided to remain in England anyway.
There were hints that he might be in line for a high post
in the ministry responsible for the American provinces.
And he used his connections to begin lobbying
on behalf of William and a group of speculators
to acquire millions of acres of Indian land
along the Ohio River,
then sell it in small parcels to settlers for an immense profit--
and create a new colony.
Meanwhile, Franklin put his scientific skills
to work for the empire.
He helped install lightning rods
on St. Paul's Cathedral;
came up with a hot-water piping system
to keep the House of Commons warm;
and, working with a cousin,
a whaling captain from Nantucket,
he created the first chart
of what was called the Gulph Stream,
which helped explain why ships going from London to America
took longer than those going the other way.
Yesterday I had the pleasure
to receive your letter.
I had not heard one word about you
since the latter end of August,
which was near 5 months,
but I shall not dwell on that at this time.
Back in Philadelphia, as she had
always done during Benjamin's long absences,
Deborah Franklin took care of everything.
She managed her husband's many business enterprises
and supervised the myriad details
of the new home they were building.
All the while, she waited for his promised return.
In the fall of 1767, their daughter Sally married
a Philadelphia merchant, Richard Bache,
and in 1769 she gave birth to a baby boy,
whom she named after his grandfather.
They called him Benny.
That same year, Deborah suffered a stroke
that left her incapacitated for months.
As she recovered, she wrote her husband
that her worries about him
had been at least partly responsible.
I often tell my friends I was not sick,
it was only more than I could bear.
And so I fell down and could not get up again.
But I had taken up a resolution
never to make any complaint to you
or give you any disquiet.
Even though the Stamp Act had been repealed,
the colonies were still expected
to help pay off war debts;
Parliament now imposed import duties
on glass and china, paint and tea.
When the Massachusetts Assembly passed a resolution
objecting to the new measures--
and called on other colonial legislatures to do the same--
Britain sent 15 warships and 1,000 troops to Boston.
Their presence, Franklin wrote from London,
"seems like setting up a blacksmith's forge
in a magazine of gunpowder."
He redoubled his efforts to find a compromise between
the hard-liners on both sides of the Atlantic.
He sees the issue as one of respect.
What holds an empire together is a sense of common feeling.
Right? Of common economic interest,
of interdependence, of identification.
The power doesn't reside in the capacity
to make people do what you want them to do.
Benjamin Franklin keeps trying to hold
the British Empire together.
Trying to figure out some middle ground
in which the Colonies get to control themselves
through their own assemblies and legislatures,
but still loyal to the Crown of England.
And that was Franklin's hope, that somehow
he could keep together what he called
this "fragile, noble vase."
'Cause he said, "Once it gets broken,
you're not going to put it back together."
Being born and bred
in one of the countries,
and having lived long in the other,
I wish all prosperity to both.
But I do not find that I have gained
any point in either country,
except that of rendering myself suspected by my impartiality:
in England of being too much an American,
and in America of being too much an Englishman.
As the political crisis continued to build,
Franklin spent part of the summer of 1771
at a friend's estate southwest of London.
He was 65 years old and decided to make
an accounting of his life,
something, he wrote, "my posterity may like to know."
It was filled with stories of how, in his words,
"I emerged from the poverty and obscurity
"in which I was born and bred,
"to a state of affluence and some degree
of reputation in the world."
It was the beginning of what would become
one of the most-read and influential
autobiographies ever written.
He begins with two very interesting words:
"Dear Son."
And he's addressing it to William, or at least
pretending he's addressing it to William.
'Cause he's trying to say, "Remember where we come from.
"We're working class and middle class.
We're not trying to be aristocratic."
But he soon put his memoir aside;
world affairs were overtaking both Benjamin Franklin--
now the agent representing several colonies in England--
and William Franklin--the royal governor of New Jersey.
It is very uncertain what Turn
American Affairs will take here.
The Friends of both Countries wish a reconciliation;
the Enemies of either, endeavor to widen the Breach;
God knows how it will end.
He was never thinking,
we need to be independent.
He was always thinking, if we can just
work out a few fundamental problems
between us and the British Ministry,
that things are going to be fine.
He probably could have been won over to the British side
as a Loyalist, like his son,
if things had gone slightly differently.
Tensions between England and the colonies worsened,
especially after British soldiers fired on
a Massachusetts mob in 1770,
killing 5 Americans-- the Boston Massacre.
Franklin's position was becoming increasingly untenable.
He was trying to represent the interests of Massachusetts,
New Jersey, and Georgia, in addition to Pennsylvania.
In 1772, Franklin was shown confidential letters
written by his old ally Thomas Hutchinson,
now the governor of Massachusetts.
The only way to quell colonial unrest,
Hutchinson had advised London,
was through harsher measures, including, he suggested,
"an abridgment of liberties."
Franklin surreptitiously sent copies of the letters
to the leaders of the Massachusetts Assembly.
He hoped that the firebrands in Boston
would turn their anger from Parliament to Hutchinson,
blaming his bad advice for the crisis with Britain,
making room for cooler heads to broker a reconciliation.
Instead, it only inflamed passions.
The letters were leaked to newspapers,
sparking an uproar throughout the colonies.
The Massachusetts Assembly drafted
an angry petition to the king,
demanding that Hutchinson be removed.
As the Assembly's agent, Franklin would have to be
the one to present that petition
before the King's Privy Council.
To make matters worse, Franklin had felt
obligated to admit that he was the one
who had originally shared Hutchinson's letters.
And, so, Franklin was seen as this person who
stole other people's mail,
which was quite an egregious offense
for someone who was a postmaster.
Just a few days before Franklin was scheduled
to appear before the Privy Council in January of 1774,
news arrived from America that changed everything.
The Sons of Liberty, dressed as Indians,
had boarded 3 ships in Boston Harbor
and dumped 46 tons-- 342 crates--
of English tea into the sea.
Officials in London were still seething
at that act of defiance
when, on January 29, Franklin entered
a meeting room at Whitehall called the Cockpit,
where Henry VIII had once staged cockfights.
To the Privy Council, and the crowd of spectators
gathered there, Franklin was now the face
of an insolent American uprising,
although Franklin considered the Boston Tea Party
an "act of violent injustice on our part"--
the very kind of provocation he had always counseled against.
Alexander Wedderburn, the sharp-tongued
and politically ambitious solicitor general,
who considered the recent events in Boston treasonous,
made clear from the start that the hearing
would be an attack on Franklin's character.
Your Lordships will not wonder
that I consider Dr. Franklin not so much in the light of an agent
for the Assembly's purpose, as in that of a first mover
and prime conductor of it for his own as the actor...
Wedderburn spoke for a solid hour,
sometimes pounding on the table as he berated Franklin
with one denunciation after another,
sometimes using sarcasm that prompted
the nobles and high officials in the audience
to snicker and jeer as they urged him on.
Throughout it all, Franklin stood stock still,
refusing to show any emotion.
...answerable to the law.
The good men of Boston have lately held their meetings...
They're accusing Benjamin Franklin of
fomenting this Revolution
and he just stays there, silent,
and treats them with silent contempt.
When Wedderburn finally finished his diatribe,
he asked if Franklin had a statement to make
or would take questions.
Franklin refused.
The hearing was over.
London newspapers now referred to Franklin as
"old Doubleface," a "grand incendiary,"
and a "gray-headed traitor."
Americans, the essayist Samuel Johnson wrote,
"have been taught by some master of mischief
how to put in motion the engine of political electricity."
Two days after his humiliation in the Cockpit,
Franklin was informed that he had been dismissed
as deputy postmaster for North America.
Any hopes he had for a higher post also evaporated,
as did his dreams for the vast land scheme along the Ohio.
Franklin walked into the Cockpit an Englishman
and walked out of the Cockpit an American
because it became very clear to Franklin
that he, as an American, would never receive
the respect that he believed he was due.
At that point, Franklin realized there is no future
for me or for people like me within the British Empire.
On December 14, 1774,
Deborah Franklin had another stroke,
more massive than the one 5 years earlier.
She lingered on for a few days,
then died on the 19th,
still waiting for her husband,
who had been away for 15 of the last 17 years,
to return to her and the new house on Market Street
he had never seen.
He's away from Deborah for the last 10 years of her life.
He knows she's ill.
And he doesn't come back.
If Franklin gets failing grades in any subject,
it's the family relations, both in terms of the marriage
and in terms of his son.
Philadelphia, December 24, 1774.
Honored Father, I came here on Thursday last
to attend the Funeral of my poor old Mother.
I heartily wish you had happened to have
come over in the Fall,
as I think her Disappointment in that respect
preyed a good deal on her Spirits.
I cannot help being concerned to find that
you postpone your Return to your Family.
You have had by this Time pretty strong Proofs
that you are look'd upon with an evil Eye in that Country.
You had certainly better return
to a Country where the People revere you,
and are inclined to pay a Deference to your Opinions.
I am ever, Honored Sir, Your dutiful Son William.
For Franklin, his breach with England
was complete.
Now a political rift seemed to be growing
between him and his son.
In the coming year, a revolution would begin,
unlikely alliances would be forged,
loyalties would be tested,
families would be torn apart,
and Benjamin Franklin would be in the middle of it all.
Being now in my last Act,
I begin to cast about for something fit to end with.
Or if mine be more properly compar'd to an Epigram,
I am very desirous of concluding
with a bright Point.
Benjamin Franklin.
The thing about Franklin is,
whatever you say about him, on the one hand,
you can always say the opposite, as well.
I mean, this is a man who is very much pro-temperance
and he writes bawdy drinking songs.
He founds a fire company,
and he founds a fire insurance company.
He does play all sides.
But during those British years, he very much plays
the British gentleman.
He has a--a crest on the door of his carriage.
And, yet, by the time he becomes an American rebel,
so to speak, he is entirely an American.
In January of 1775, Benjamin Franklin turned 69.
He had already achieved extraordinary success
as a printer and publisher in his adopted hometown
of Philadelphia, where a library, a college,
and countless civic improvements
testified to his belief that his highest calling
lay not in making money,
but in improving the lives of everyday people.
And his revolutionary breakthroughs
in unraveling the mysteries of electricity
had made him the most famous American in the world.
He is every man,
but he's a very extraordinary every man.
He was a Nobel Prize-winning caliber scientist,
probably the great--greatest prose stylist of his generation,
and he's probably the greatest diplomat
in American history.
Franklin had been in England for the last decade,
trying desperately to bridge the growing gulf
between Parliament and the American colonies.
Only a year earlier, the future he had envisioned
for himself and his family seemed bright and tethered
inextricably to the British Empire.
Now that dream was in ruins.
During his long absence from home,
he had missed his wife Deborah's death and funeral.
In London, in a government chamber called the Cockpit,
he had been publicly humiliated,
accused of inciting the colonial crisis he had, in fact,
worked so hard to prevent.
And as that crisis intensified, his son William,
now the royal governor of New Jersey,
seemed to be choosing the wrong side.
The longer William stayed in New Jersey,
the more corrupt and rebellious and selfish
the colonies started to look to him
and the more wonderful and inspiring the Crown looked.
I think that the longer that Benjamin Franklin stayed
in England, the more he idealized the colonies and saw
the corruption and venality around him in England.
And so, they began to see things
kind of as a mirror image of one another.
For years, Franklin had reveled
in the intellectual life of Britain.
But increasingly, he dwelled more on the differences
between the Old World and the New,
rather than what they shared in common.
In America,
People do not enquire, concerning a stranger,
"What is he?" but "What can he do?"
The people have a saying,
that God Almighty is himself a mechanic,
the greatest in the universe;
and he is respected more for the variety, ingenuity,
and utility of his handiworks
than for the antiquity of his family.
"Life," he once said, "is like chess."
And in the turbulent years ahead, as his country and his
family would be challenged as never before, Benjamin Franklin
would need every skill the game had taught him.
The game of chess
is not merely an idle amusement.
By playing at chess, we may learn, Foresight,
Circumspection, Caution.
The habit of not being discouraged by present
bad appearances in the state of our affairs,
the habit of hoping for a favorable change,
and that of persevering.
He's different from the other Founders,
from a Washington, from a Jefferson.
He's older. And so he brought a past,
a past in which he created himself as a man.
He brought his wisdom, his experience,
his travel abroad to make,
I think, a much more cosmopolitan and urbane
understanding of what America could be.
Franklin was born an Englishman, like everybody else
in the American Colonies of his generation.
He died an American.
He is made to realize that he will never be allowed to be
sort of a--a fully recognized, respected Briton.
And, for that reason, he decides he has to
become an American.
Dear Father,
The Measure of Sending Troops to Boston
is putting a Stop to the Riots.
The same Spirit however, still prevails
in the Colonies, and nothing can make them acknowledge
the Right of the Parliament to tax them.
Your dutiful son, William.
The repercussions of the Boston Tea Party
had created a tinderbox in the American colonies.
King George III ordered a crackdown
on the American upstarts.
"The New England governments are in a state of rebellion,"
he declared.
"Blows must decide whether they are to be subject
to this country or independent."
Parliament quickly passed a flurry of new laws.
Until the East India Company was compensated for its lost tea,
Boston Harbor was to be closed.
Massachusetts was placed under martial law,
the colonial charter was suspended,
the elected assembly outlawed,
and most public meetings banned.
Communities were required to provide quarters
for British troops.
Americans called the new laws the Intolerable Acts.
Protests sprang up in every colony.
Committees of correspondence were established.
They urged colonists "not to purchase any goods which shall
be imported from Great Britain."
Each colony was asked to send delegates
to a Continental Congress
that could propose a united response.
In New Jersey, Governor William Franklin wrote to his
superiors in London.
My Lord,
His Majesty may be assured that I shall
omit nothing in my Power to keep this Province quiet,
no Attachments or Connexions shall ever make me swerve
from the Duty of my Station.
Your Lordship's most obedient
and humble Servant.
For more than a decade, William Franklin
had managed better than other colonial governors
to work with his assembly and steer it toward a more
moderate course.
"The most despotic and worst of all Tyrannies," he told them,
is "the Tyranny of the Mob,
"which must at length involve us all
in one common ruin."
William wrote to his father in London suggesting that
the necessary first step was for Boston to "do justice" and pay
for the tons of tea that had been destroyed.
Dear Son,
As to "doing Justice,"
that should have been thought of by Parliament
before they demanded it of the Bostonians.
They have extorted many Thousand Pounds from America
unconstitutionally and with an armed Force.
Of this Money, they ought to make Restitution.
But you, who are a thorough Courtier, see everything
with Government Eyes.
The Franklins were coming to
different conclusions about which side was to blame,
but both men still hoped that a complete split between
Britain and her colonies might be avoided.
The British government was never a monolith.
There were always dissenters, sympathizers with America,
people who thought that Americans were justified
in their opposition.
There were people, well-placed within the British Government,
who believed, with Franklin,
that the future of the British Empire could be great
and could be bright if the British government
recognized that America could be this second pillar
of a transatlantic empire.
Working behind the scenes,
because his public image in England
was now so badly tarnished,
Franklin and sympathetic members of Parliament
struggled to find some compromise
that could avert a war.
But nothing came of it.
Franklin knows exactly what's going on.
And what's going on leads him to despair.
I'm not sure there were many who were more disappointed
by the separation than Franklin.
In part, because I think he really thought it
was avoidable.
Gentlemen,
You have now two roads--
one evidently leading to peace, happiness, and a restoration
of the public tranquility--
the other inevitably conducting you
to anarchy, misery, and all the horrors
of a civil war.
In New Jersey, William had refused to
convene the colonial assembly in order to prevent them from
sending delegates to the Continental Congress.
They chose representatives anyway.
When the Congress met in Philadelphia
in the fall of 1774, it had asserted that only
elected colonial legislatures had the right of taxation
within their borders.
It banned all imports from Britain
until the Intolerable Acts were repealed
and set a deadline for Parliament to do it.
Otherwise, American exports to England would cease
and a Second Continental Congress would convene in 1775
to consider further steps.
If only his father had been there, William wrote, he might
have been able to steer the Congress toward something
less confrontational.
However mad you may think the Measures
of the Ministry are, yet I trust you have Candor enough
to acknowledge that we are no ways behind hand with them
in Instances of Madness on this Side of the Water.
Benjamin Franklin now believed
any chances of averting war were unlikely; but he was
growing more and more worried that he and William
were ending up on opposing sides.
He was ready to head for home.
If he couldn't keep the colonies and England together,
at least he might be able to keep his son.
On March 21, 1775, Franklin finally set sail
for Philadelphia.
With him was William's own son, Temple, who had been born
out of wedlock 15 years earlier in England
and discreetly given over to a foster family.
In London, Benjamin had decided to take custody
of the boy and enrolled him in school
but did not tell him he was his grandfather.
Now, he was bringing Temple to America, where he would meet
the father he had never known.
When Benjamin Franklin sails home in 1775,
he's estranged from William.
His wife Deborah has died.
He feels this enormous sense of failure.
His whole mission had been to try to hold the Colonies
and Britain together.
And that has failed.
But being at sea
always revived Franklin's spirits
and ignited his scientific curiosity.
He still wants to chart the Gulf Stream.
He still is curious about natural phenomenon.
And, so, there's Temple Franklin helping
his grandfather Benjamin as they lower barrels into the ocean
to take the temperature of the water,
to see where the Gulf Stream could be,
and he's almost replicating those moments
with William Franklin, where Ben Franklin and William
flew the kite in the rain to discover electricity.
When he and Temple arrived in Philadelphia
on May 5, 1775, Franklin learned startling news.
While he was at sea, the war he had once hoped to prevent
had already started in Massachusetts.
On April 19th, 700 British troops had marched from Boston
to capture munitions stockpiled in Concord.
A skirmish on the Lexington town green
left 8 Americans dead...
but a larger fight broke out
at Concord's North Bridge that sent British redcoats
retreating back toward Boston.
The Revolutionary energy in Philadelphia was palpable.
Regular people were talking about "revolution,"
were talking about "power," were talking about "human rights,"
were talking about "freedom" and "democracy."
These were the things that Franklin came home to.
A week after Franklin got back home,
delegates to the Second Continental Congress were
gathering in Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Assembly
elected him as one of their representatives.
I can inform you that some delegates
begin to entertain a great suspicion that Dr. Franklin
came rather as a spy than as a friend, and that he means to
discover our weak side.
William Bradford.
In the early meetings, Franklin remained quiet,
so quiet, John Adams of Massachusetts complained
that he seemed to spend "a great part of the time
fast asleep in his chair."
In the evenings, while other delegates congregated
in taverns and debated whether the Congress
should declare independence,
he preferred to stay at his new house,
with his daughter Sally and her family.
By this time, Franklin had confessed to Temple
that he was the boy's grandfather.
When Governor William Franklin visited from New Jersey,
Temple met his father for the first time.
And later, when Benjamin and William met privately,
Benjamin made it clear he wanted his son to join the cause.
William wanted his father to stay neutral. He still thought
a reconciliation with England might be possible.
They argued all night.
At another meeting, neighbors could hear them shouting.
Father and son went their separate ways.
William would remain a Loyalist.
Benjamin had become a fervent revolutionary--
what was called a Patriot.
Of the major leaders,
he came to the Revolution very late.
In fact, it's hard to understand why he even joined
the Revolution, uh...
He was already successful. He was an old man.
Revolution is a young man's game,
but Franklin decided this is what needs to be done.
At age 69, he was the oldest delegate.
Many of the 62 other delegates had not even been born when he
first entered political life 40 years earlier
and knew Franklin only by his reputation.
John Adams was 39;
Patrick Henry and John Hancock, 38;
Virginia's Thomas Jefferson was only 32--
all younger than Franklin's son William.
He's the "old" one. He's the sage one.
And he talks in parables and metaphors.
And a lot of people don't quite know what to make of him.
Here's Franklin, coming with a worldwide reputation,
certainly the most famous American in the world,
and yet, they're not fully trusting him.
Who is this guy? We don't really know him.
Franklin had traveled more extensively than
any of the others--throughout Europe, but also through most
of the colonies that were only now beginning to think
of themselves as something more than individual
English provinces.
It was an idea he had proposed more than 2 decades before.
The delegates unanimously elected him
as postmaster general,
and he donated his salary to help wounded soldiers.
They assigned him to important committees, creating a system
for paper currency, raising money for weapons
and manufacturing gunpowder,
and negotiating with Indian nations in the hope
they would not side with the British.
Following the battles of Lexington and Concord,
Franklin heard from his favorite sister Jane,
who witnessed the chaos in Boston, the town of his birth.
"The distress it has occasioned
is past my description," she wrote.
"The commotion the town was in after the battle, bringing in
"their wounded men, caused such an agitation of mind,
I believe none had much sleep."
Colonial militia had surrounded the city
and the occupying British forces there.
12,000 of Boston's 15,000 residents, including Jane,
evacuated in panic.
British soldiers then ransacked the nearly empty town.
They would use the pews and pulpit
from the Old South Meeting House as firewood.
On June 17th, in the Battle of Bunker Hill,
British forces attacked the militiamen in nearby Charlestown
and were repulsed twice,
until the defenders' ammunition ran out.
At the end of the day, the British had taken
the heights, but suffered more than 1,000 casualties
to fewer than half that by the Patriots.
Much of Charlestown had been burned by the British
to rid it of American snipers.
Jane's son, Josiah, fought for the Patriots and died.
One of her in-laws died fighting for the British.
"O how horrible is our situation," she wrote
to Benjamin, "that relations seek the destruction
of each other."
Enraged by what the British had done, Franklin sent
a letter to a friend in England,
intended for publication there.
Britain, at the expense
of three millions, has killed 150 Americans
this campaign, which is 20,000 pounds a head;
and at Bunker's Hill she gained a mile of ground.
During the same time 60,000 children have been
born in America.
From these data, calculate the time and expense
necessary to kill us all,
and conquer our whole territory.
And he had written a second letter
to another English friend, which he shared
with colleagues in America but never sent.
You have begun to burn our towns,
and murder our people.
Look upon your hands!
They are stained with the blood of your relations!
YOU AND I WERE LONG FRIENDS: You are now my enemy,
and I am Yours.
The suspicions against Dr. Franklin
have died away.
Whatever was his design at coming over here, I believe he
has now chosen his side and favors our cause.
Dr. Franklin
has discovered a disposition entirely American.
He is a great and good man.
John Adams.
In October 1775,
Franklin traveled to Massachusetts to confer
with General George Washington, who desperately
needed more money from Congress to fight the British.
He was trying to cobble together a Continental Army
that would eventually include fishermen, frontiersmen
and farm laborers; recent immigrants, vagrants
and teen-aged boys with few prospects;
Native Americans, free African Americans
and enslaved men, hoping to be freed when the war ended.
Franklin promised Washington he would do what he
could to help.
On his way back, Franklin reunited with his sister Jane
in Rhode Island.
She was still a refugee from occupied Boston.
He persuaded her to come with him to Philadelphia, and they
stopped briefly in New Jersey, so she could see her nephew
William at the governor's mansion.
Franklin hoped her description of the carnage in Boston might
prompt his son to reconsider his loyalty to the Crown.
She was unsuccessful.
William would be the last royal governor trying to carry on
the king's affairs in America.
People always ask, why were people Loyalists.
And I think the question to ask is,
"Why were people Patriots?"
Uh, to be loyal is not to change.
It's simply to go on believing what you've always believed
your entire life.
His father taught him to be principled.
He was doing exactly what his father had always
taught him to do.
For King and Country was the Motto
I assumed when I first commenced my Political Life,
and I am resolved to retain it till Death
shall put an end to my mortal Existence.
William Franklin had assured his
superiors in London he did not intend to leave his post.
He had advised his wife Elizabeth to seek refuge
with relatives in Barbados, but she insisted on staying
with him in New Jersey.
Benjamin Franklin would not see his son again
for 10 years.
March!
One day in Philadelphia, Franklin noticed
a drummer who had painted a rattlesnake on his drum
along with the words "Don't Tread on Me."
It occurred to me
that the Rattle-Snake is found
in no other quarter of the world besides America, and may
therefore be chosen, on that account, to represent her.
She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged,
I confess I was wholly at a loss what to
make of the rattles, 'till I went back and counted them
and found them just thirteen, exactly the number
of the Colonies united in America;
One of those rattles singly,
is incapable of producing sound,
but the ringing of thirteen together, is sufficient to
alarm the boldest man living.
A delegate from South Carolina
created a bright yellow flag, which was flown from the
flagship of America's first deployment of Marines.
In March of 1776, Franklin was on his way overland to
Montreal, to try to convince the Canadians to join
the colonial cause.
Learning of the mission, William Franklin wrote
immediately to London, betraying his
father's movements.
It was an arduous 9-week trip.
Benjamin Franklin's efforts failed.
Canada would remain loyal.
And when he returned to Philadelphia, he was so sick
he was unable to attend the proceedings in Congress.
All he had to show for his troubles was a soft cap
of marten fur that had kept his head warm.
In June of 1776, William was arrested
at the governor's mansion by Patriot soldiers.
His secret reports about proceedings
in the Continental Congress had been intercepted.
He was declared an "enemy to this country."
Congress voted unanimously that he be transported under guard
out of New Jersey to Connecticut.
His father, still housebound after his trip to Canada,
was spared having to cast a vote against his son.
On June 21, 1776, a packet arrived at Franklin's
Market Street home.
It was from Thomas Jefferson, who with Franklin, John Adams,
and two other delegates, had been assigned to draft
a declaration of independence.
Working in a rented second- floor room of a house a few
blocks from Franklin's and attended by his enslaved
servant Robert Hemings,
Jefferson completed a first draft.
He asked Franklin to "suggest such alterations as your
more enlarged view of the subject will dictate."
The old editor and writer recognized the elegance
of Jefferson's prose and made only a few changes
before returning it.
Franklin sits back and ponders it a little
and he makes a few
really extraordinary suggestions to Jefferson.
And one of them is world class.
Jefferson had written, "We hold these truths to be
sacred and undeniable."
And Franklin said, "No, no.
'We hold these truths to be self-evident.'"
Just as 2 plus 2 is 4 and the sun rises in the morning,
it is self-evident that we have a right to revolution.
Franklin is saying, "We're trying to create a new type
"of nation in which our rights come from rationality
"and the consent of the governed, not the dictates or
dogma of a religion."
They were doing something very radical and very scary.
To say something is "self evident," to say that it's
common sense, is to say that there is no other way to think
about this, that only an irrational person, who's not
using their mind correctly could contend with this thing,
which is, in fact, really contentious.
It's a classic lawyer's trick to say,
"We all agree to this thing."
Who is "we?" The "we" is presumptuous.
They were not talking about liberating women in any
particular way or certainly not slaves.
But in incremental ways, it grew and grew because if you
talk about liberty for the individual, of you and me, uh,
you're talking about a greater liberty that can be applied
to other people.
On July 2, the Continental Congress
unanimously approved the central clause
of the declaration, proclaiming
American independence.
Two days later, July 4, 1776, 12 of the 13 former
colonies approved the entire declaration.
New York would take a few more days to make up its mind.
And for the support
of this declaration,
we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes,
and our sacred honor.
On the same day Benjamin Franklin
was voting to approve the Declaration, his son William
arrived in Connecticut, where he was told he was now
officially a prisoner of the brand-new
United States of America.
At this point, what are the odds?
If you were making a book on this, who would you bet on?
There was the greatest military power in Europe,
arguably the greatest military power in the world, and then
there are these 13 Colonies.
So, it was a longshot, to put it mildly.
And then there are significant numbers
of enslaved men and women who were eying the situation,
trying to figure out, is there some way that this conflict
could serve my interests personally,
serve people like me collectively.
And then you have, both within the Colonies, at the borders
of the Colonies, Native nations who are trying to
understand what this emerging divide might mean for control
of their land or access to trade.
We know how it turned out.
But nobody in 1775 or 1776 has any idea how this is
going to turn out.
And, so, choosing sides also means choosing fates.
The Revolution, as it emerges
and becomes a war, is a civil war.
Families are divided, uh,
friends are divided, neighborhoods are divided.
Almost everyone involved in the Revolution has family
members who are on the other side,
often, very vitriolically on the other side.
So, this really does tear families apart.
In Franklin's case, um, it comes as a complete break
with his son.
By now, hundreds of British ships had arrived
in New York Harbor with 35,000 British soldiers
and sailors and Hessian mercenaries, the greatest
and best-equipped expeditionary force
of the 18th century.
Washington's army would be overmatched and easily routed
from Long Island.
British Admiral Lord Richard Howe sent Franklin a letter
offering a truce, with pardons for the rebels, and rewards
for any Americans who helped restore peace.
Franklin and a small delegation met with Howe
on Staten Island on September 11.
Howe now suggested that the colonies might also have
control of their own legislatures and taxes,
yet still be part of the empire.
The Americans said it was too late.
He should ask the king for permission to negotiate
with an independent nation.
Howe urged them to reconsider.
"When an American falls, England feels it," he said.
And if America were to fall, he added, "I should feel
and lament it like the loss of a brother."
"We will do our utmost," Franklin responded, "to save
your Lordship that mortification."
"They met, they talked, they parted," Howe's secretary
wrote of the 3-hour meeting.
"And now, nothing remains but to fight it out."
Two weeks after the meeting with Lord Howe, Congress
secretly chose Franklin to be one of 3 envoys to France
to seek King Louis XVI's help in the fight with England.
He is the perfect choice.
First of all, there's no other person who knows
the, uh, the European world as Franklin does.
And he is the most celebrated American in Europe.
And he's a natural for the job.
On October 27, he was on board the "Reprisal,"
a swift but cramped American 2-masted brig.
With him were two grandsons-- 16-year-old Temple
and Sally's 7-year-old son Benny.
14 years earlier, when France and Britain
were at war, Franklin had sailed from England
under the protection of the Royal Navy.
Now it was imperative he avoid British ships at all costs.
The rough voyage across the wintry Atlantic
"almost demolished me," he wrote.
The diet on board of salted beef had ruined his digestion
and caused boils, scabs, and rashes all over his body,
including his scalp.
They reached the west coast of France in early December.
A fisherman agreed to row him and his two grandsons to shore
at the hamlet of Auray in Brittany, 300 miles from Paris.
Franklin had intended to keep a low profile, but news of his
arrival spread quickly and reached the capital
long before he did.
The real purpose of his visit, securing a formal alliance
with France, remained secret.
But everywhere he went, he was a sensation.
In 1776, people in France had never
heard of any American except for Benjamin Franklin.
From the French point of view,
they have sent the greatest celebrity on Earth,
this side of Voltaire, to Paris.
He is like Newton or Galileo reincarnated.
The city of Nantes celebrated the renowned
Docteur Franklin, tamer of lightning, and crowds
cheered him on his carriage ride into Paris.
They were fascinated by his soft hat of marten fur,
which resembled the famous cap worn by the philosopher
Rousseau, in contrast to the powdered wigs
of the Parisian elite.
Franklin was wearing it to keep his head warm and to hide
the unsightly sores on his balding head.
It's such a great costume and prop,
immediately announcing himself as a man of science.
I am the famous Benjamin Franklin--
the "Prometheus of the Modern Age,"
don't forget it-- here on business.
French admirers hung portraits of him over the
mantelpieces in their homes.
Poems were written about the great American scientist
and philosopher who had miraculously arrived
in their midst.
A collection of "Poor Richard's" aphorisms
was translated into French as
"La Science du Bonhomme Richard."
Franklin loved it.
Dear Sally,
The clay medallion of me
was the first of the kind made in France
and the numbers sold are incredible.
These, with the pictures, busts, and prints, of which
copies upon copies are spread everywhere, have made your
father's face as well known as that of the moon.
The King, Louis XVI, became sort of
slightly annoyed and amused by the Cult of Franklin.
He had a chamber pot with an image of Franklin put
on the inside of it just as a way of saying,
"Enough, already."
Franklin had serious and vital business to attend to.
Without France's money, supplies, and, ideally,
military assistance, America's fight for independence might
be lost and lost quickly.
There's no question that someone is going to have to
step in to underwrite this Revolution.
There is no gunpowder in the Colonies; there is no materiel;
there are very few guns; there are no uniforms.
There's very little common purpose, in fact.
The obvious candidate, um, for that alliance is France.
Franklin had a terribly difficult assignment.
He had to convince one monarch to help the Americans
overthrow another monarch.
The French had reasons to oppose Britain.
They wanted to weaken Britain.
But, King Louis XVI didn't want to underwrite this
overthrow of monarchies.
The French people might get ideas.
Persuading France's king and his ministers to
provide any assistance at all would require delicacy
and discretion, persistence and shrewd calculation.
Franklin had taken on the most momentous chess match
of his life.
And playing it would require him, on his own, to improvise
his strategy again and again.
Franklin understood they're not committed
to our people's republican revolution here.
They want to get back at the British.
They side with the colonials and allow us each
to spend ourselves down in this protracted fight,
that this improves France's position in the European
balance of power and maybe gives it a chance to reassert
itself a little bit in the New World.
And, so, everyone's operating out of self-interest.
But, Franklin, and Franklin alone, knows how to negotiate
this slowly, with suavity and humor and patience.
He met frequently and always surreptitiously
with the Comte de Vergennes, France's foreign minister,
who found Franklin tactful, smart, and unassuming.
Vergennes arranged for several million livres, French pounds,
to be secretly advanced for the Americans
to purchase supplies.
But he would go no further, unless the Patriots' military
situation improved.
At the moment, that didn't appear likely.
George Washington's army had been chased out of Manhattan,
across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania.
A large British force moving south from Canada
had captured Fort Ticonderoga.
Its general, John Burgoyne,
boasted that he would be home in England by Christmas.
British soldiers also threatened Philadelphia.
Congress abandoned the city, as did many of its residents.
Only a few days earlier, Franklin's daughter, Sally,
had given birth to a baby girl.
Now the whole family, including Franklin's sister Jane,
were refugees.
After an American defeat at Brandywine Creek, Philadelphia
fell without a fight.
A British officer commandeered Franklin's home and stole his
books and papers, musical instruments,
and scientific equipment.
In France, Franklin strove to appear upbeat,
despite the setbacks.
The Americans could hold out for 30 years,
he bravely declared.
Franklin is, first and foremost, a man of the press.
And he plays that role to the hilt
in those first months in France.
He is essentially engaged
in a thorough disinformation campaign.
Washington's men are almost without uniforms.
There's a wonderful quote in which someone says,
"They could have scared the British away
by their nakedness." They have nothing.
And Washington, during this time, is in despair.
While Washington is struggling all over, Franklin is
in France saying, "It's victory after victory."
Um..."He, like, he has an army of 80,000," um...
"Yes, the--the British may take Philadelphia, but they
"will be trapped there, the river will freeze,
"they won't be able to reach their ships.
Washington will surround them."
He's utterly making this up.
He's promoting a war that isn't really happening.
And he doesn't, for a moment, in public, drop that mask.
Benjamin Franklin also realizes he has to win
the hearts and minds of the French people.
He knows that within the French population, there's
welling up this sentiment for liberty and fraternity
and equality.
And he taps into that by being a public diplomat, not just
a private diplomat.
Franklin moved from a hotel in crowded Paris to
the village of Passy, 2 miles west, where
a wealthy merchant offered the use of a wing
of his sprawling estate rent-free.
Soon, a lightning rod sprouted from its roof.
Franklin sent his grandson Benny to a boarding school
in Switzerland and assigned Temple to help with
the diplomatic paperwork-- there were mountains of it--
and the steady stream of visitors
who began arriving once they knew the famous
Doctor Franklin was living there.
You can have no Conception
how I am harass'd.
The Noise of Every Coach now that enters my Court
terrifies me.
Besides his constant efforts
to get more money from the French, much of Franklin's
time was consumed handling requests from individual
Europeans eager to fight the hated English in America.
Frequently if a Man has
no useful Talents, is good for nothing, and burdensome
to his Relations,
they are glad to get rid of him by sending him to
the other End of the World.
They came from every corner of Europe.
All of them, regardless of their talents and experience,
expected to be commissioned as officers.
General Washington finally begged Franklin not to send
anyone else.
But 3 of the men Franklin recommended would
prove invaluable to the Revolution:
Count Casimir Pulaski of Poland
would organize the American cavalry
and serve with bravery and distinction before being
killed in action at Savannah, Georgia.
Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben would develop a system
of military discipline and drilling and impressed
the Continental soldiers with his ability to swear
in multiple languages.
And the Marquis de Lafayette of France, whose father had
been killed by the British in the Seven Years' War, believed
that "To injure England is to serve my country."
Only 19 years old when he went to America, he would
become a surrogate son to General Washington and one
of the most ardent champions of the Revolution.
Early into his diplomatic mission, Franklin was warned,
"You are surrounded with spies who watch your every
movement, who you Visit and by whom you are visited."
He said he didn't care.
As it is impossible
to prevent being watched by Spies,
I have long observed one Rule:
to be concerned in no affairs that I should blush to have
made public.
If I was sure, therefore, that my valet
was a spy, as probably he is, I think I should probably not
discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him.
The chief spy in Franklin's midst
was not his valet.
It was Edward Bancroft, a Massachusetts-born scientist
now serving as the secretary to the American
delegation in France, with access to every document
and letter.
Every week, Bancroft wrote seemingly personal letters
and then, in invisible ink, provided his clandestine
reports in the margins.
Each Tuesday night, he dropped them into the hollow of a tree
in the Tuileries Garden, where they were retrieved
and taken to the British embassy in Paris.
For his work as a secret agent, England paid him
£1,000 a year, the same amount the Americans were
giving him to be their secretary.
His double-dealing would not come to light
for a hundred years.
Franklin is encircled
by two sets of extremely effective spies--
a set of French spies, who are, themselves,
surrounded by a set of British spies.
And every piece of paper that, essentially, moves off
of Franklin's desk will end up in the wrong place,
will end up either at Versailles or in London,
but very rarely in the colonies.
Franklin was no fool.
He knew what was happening.
He knew the spying that was going on was to America's
advantage because the Brits got the sense that America was
really quite close to France.
And, uh, Franklin did nothing.
I mean, he just sat there and let it happen.
On December 4, 1777, a messenger rode into
Franklin's courtyard at Passy with startling news.
After two battles near Saratoga, New York,
British General Burgoyne had found himself
surrounded by a larger American force,
and on October 17, he surrendered, along with
his entire army, nearly 6,000 troops.
Saratoga changes everything.
This is the moment Franklin has been waiting for.
There is no reason for the French to enter into any
serious alliance until the Americans have proved that
they can actually win this war, or at least put up a fight.
So, this is the news that he needs to take to Vergennes,
the French foreign minister, and to the Court
to be able to say, "OK, now, will you take us seriously?
Now, will you officially--" because until this point,
the help has been unofficial-- "Will you officially
underwrite our Revolution?"
Franklin sprang into action, writing reports
of the American victory that would be spread
throughout Paris,
praising valiant French officers now serving in America,
like Lafayette, and leading the British ambassador
to realize he had completely underestimated Franklin.
MAN AS AMBASSADOR LORD STORMONT: They play us off
against one another.
Franklin's natural subtlety gives him a great advantage
in such a game.
It is easy to see that in such a situation peace between
England and the House of Bourbon hangs by the slightest
of all threads.
On February 6, 1778, Franklin
met with Vergennes and signed 2 treaties.
One, a treaty of friendship and commerce, meant French aid
would flow in greater quantities and no longer
in secret.
The other, the most important, was a treaty
of military alliance.
France had officially joined the American Revolution.
When they signed the treaty, he wears this old,
frayed suit.
And it's the one he had worn in the Cockpit, when he had
been berated by the British lords for what he was doing.
And he was asked why he wore that coat.
And he said, "To give it a little revenge."
A month later, he was presented to King Louis XVI
at Versailles.
And he meets the king, who congratulates him
and says, "I hope this is for the good
of both countries."
And Franklin utters a line, which is almost astonishing
in its treachery, which is, basically, he--he says to
the king, um, "If all rulers ruled with your benevolence,
republics would never be formed."
Franklin, a French statesman proclaimed,
has "seized the lightning from the heavens and now
the scepter from the tyrants."
This is the civilest nation
upon Earth.
Your first Acquaintances endeavor
to find out what you like, and they tell others.
Somebody, it seems, gave it out that I lov'd Ladies.
So everybody presented me their Ladies
or the Ladies presented themselves to be embraced,
that is to have their Necks kissed.
For as to kissing of Lips or Cheeks, it is not the Mode here;
the first, is reckoned rude, and the other may
rub off the Paint.
'Tis a delightful People to live with.
All the while he was negotiating
and maneuvering for the alliance with France, Franklin
immersed himself in the intellectual circles
and social salons of Paris.
He considered it part of his diplomacy and very enjoyable.
He had loved London, but he adored Paris.
In France, you can flirt at a very high level
of sophistication and it's all a beautiful game
of sexual ballet.
And it has nothing to do with carnality, really.
It's more about, nuance and just the right touch
of flirtation.
he found personal happiness in France that he had never found
in the course of his life.
I don't think you can find anyone, anyone except his
colleagues, who fails to fall under the charms
of Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin is everywhere adored and everywhere cossetted
in Paris, by no one more so, than by the women of France.
Every word that drops from his lips, they think is a gem.
And Franklin just adores the fact that these women are
essentially hanging about him at all times.
Franklin became particularly enchanted
with a neighbor of his in Passy, Madame Brillon de Jouy.
She was beautiful and well- educated and, at age 33,
a year younger than Franklin's daughter Sally.
He went to her home twice a week for tea and music;
composed essays in her honor; and once played a late-night
game of chess while she watched from her
covered bathtub.
I think that Franklin's relationships
with women were more in the mind than in the flesh.
He loved being flirtatious, loved being around them,
but I don't think he pursued a truly passionate romance
with any of them.
We'll never know what happened.
I think Madame Brillon pointed out to Franklin that she was
a married woman, that any kind of hanky-panky was simply
out of the question.
I believe Franklin must have been disappointed,
but he took it very gracefully and from that point forward,
they agreed that he would be "Papa" and she would be
his daughter.
Franklin's attentions turned to another woman
a little closer to his own age.
Anne-Catherine Helvétius was nearly 60, a widow who lived
on a grand estate near Passy.
Eccentric and free-spirited, she hosted one of the most
renowned salons in France, attended by intellectuals
and artists.
Franklin became a regular visitor, sometimes playing his
glass armonica while people sang his favorite
Scottish ballads in French.
She's a philosopher's widow and very Bohemian.
She had this fleet of cats whom she would dress
in brocades and silks, and who would--who would, basically,
wander around her house and eat their meals off china.
Um, and into that menagerie, um, walks Benjamin Franklin,
who's immediately smitten.
If this lady is pleased to spend
her days with Monsieur Franklin,
he would be just as pleased to spend his nights with her.
She declined, but never discouraged him
from showering her with affection.
There is a moment there where he essentially
says to her, "I would stay in France, if you would have me."
And she's not interested.
But I would say that that was probably the most serious
of the relationships with-- with any--with the French women.
Meanwhile, Franklin's social calendar was
always filled with lunches, teas, and lavish dinners.
He didn't speak or understand French all that well.
He wanted to be able to see the meal in front of him
at a dinner party, but, also, at the same time, he needed to see
the lips of the people speaking to him across the table.
So, he became frustrated that his glasses couldn't do
both things.
This is typical Franklin. He analyzed the problem.
He sawed his existing glasses in half, and glued them
together so that one top-- one side did one function,
the other, the other.
He called his newest invention
"double-spectacles"-- bifocals.
And Franklin was always ready for a game of chess
with anyone.
In one case, he was having this chess match with
the Duchess of Bourbon and Franklin professed to forget
the rules and he captured the king.
His opponent, the Duchess says, "Well, in--in France,
"we don't capture kings.
That's not the way the game is played."
He said, "Ah, but in America, we do."
It was late when he breakfasted,
and as soon as breakfast was over,
a crowd of carriages came.
By far the greater part were women and children, come to
have the honor to see the great Franklin, and to have
the pleasure of telling stories about his
simplicity and his bald head.
He was invited to dine every day and never declined
and it was the only thing in which he was punctual.
John Adams.
In April, while the treaties
were crossing the Atlantic,
John Adams arrived in Paris.
He had been sent by Congress to push more vigorously
for a French alliance and was chagrined to learn that
Franklin had already secured two treaties.
Even more aggravating to him was how Franklin seemed to be
conducting himself.
Adams called it "a scene of continual dissipation."
He was absolutely horrified.
Franklin's desk was a mess.
There were papers all over the place.
And there was no security.
Adams said, "Where's 'Poor Richard?'"
"Early to bed, early to rise
"makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
"Where's--where's the-- the Franklin that we're all--
that's famous for his discipline?"
It's hard to imagine 2 such talented people, 2 men
with so much in common, who are of absolutely
opposite temperaments.
One of them is very rigid and dogmatic and brilliant.
And the other one is very flexible and easy-going
and affable and brilliant.
And they got on each other's nerves.
Adams is quite wary of the French, quite Puritanical.
Adams learned French by memorizing funeral orations,
and Franklin learned French by writing poetry
and letters to women.
Franklin knew how to be popular and Adams had no idea
how to be popular.
In fact, Adams per-perceived popularity
as a sign that he was not doing the right thing.
Franklin's popularity drives Adams to distraction.
He's--he feels he's being-- he feels that Franklin is being
ineffective and utterly given over to Old World luxury,
and, moreover, people are throwing themselves at him
left and right.
He can't stand these celebrations of what he sees
as this utterly irresponsible colleague.
Shortly after his arrival, Adams accompanied
Franklin to the Academy of Sciences to see Voltaire,
France's greatest Enlightenment writer
and philosopher.
He was 83 and in poor health, a month away from dying.
When the crowd demanded that the two great men embrace,
Adams had to watch from the sidelines.
Adams is an impatient man, he's a brittle man.
And he doesn't understand the channels of diplomacy.
And he certainly doesn't understand the way
the French Court works.
He doesn't see that the secret to Franklin's success is,
in large part, his inactivity, the fact that he is...
essentially being polite and genteel
and is expressing gratitude toward these people who are
underwriting our-- our Revolution.
Adams wants to be demanding things at all times and,
essentially, makes himself very unwelcome
at the French Court.
It's the "good cop" and the "bad cop."
And Franklin is the good cop.
I think they become an effective team and instead
of seeing one as right and the other as wrong, um, it works
for the American cause.
This is probably the greatest assemblage of diplomatic
talent in American history--two people.
But Adams is perceived by the French, especially Vergennes,
the French foreign minister, as this impossible creature.
In February 1779,
Adams learned that, at Vergennes' insistence,
Congress had named Benjamin Franklin
the United States' sole representative in France.
John Adams left for home.
This was a war that was not a sectional war.
This was not North versus South.
Americans were fighting against Americans.
This was a Continental war where every single person had
to decide which side they were on.
After being taken to Connecticut as
a prisoner in 1776, William Franklin had been
persuaded to sign a paper promising not to attempt
an escape or to work against the Patriots so he could be
placed under house arrest in a comfortable home.
It didn't last long.
He began secretly corresponding with British
officials in New York, advising them about Loyalists
in Connecticut and New Jersey.
Congress learned what William was doing and ordered him
taken to the infamous Litchfield jail.
He was kept there in solitary confinement for 8 months,
with nothing but a chamber pot and a straw pallet
on the floor.
It was, he wrote, as if "I have been buried alive."
His wife, Elizabeth, had moved to British-held New York City,
where her already fragile health worsened.
William appealed to General Washington, begging
for permission to see her.
I am certain that an indulgence
in my present request will be
thankfully acknowledged by my father,
for he has great esteem for my wife,
and I believe that though we differ
in our political sentiments,
yet it has not lessened his natural affection for me,
any more than it has mine for him.
Washington passed his request
on to Congress, which refused to intervene.
The same day, Elizabeth died at age 43.
In his jail cell, William's own health
began deteriorating.
My Life has become quite a burden to me.
In short, I suffer so much
that I should deem it a Favour to be immediately
taken out and shot.
Franklin's daughter Sally
and her husband appealed to Congress to move him.
So did many of Franklin's Philadelphia friends.
In France, Benjamin Franklin himself did nothing
on his son's behalf.
In September of 1778, Congress approved an exchange
of prisoners.
The British released the Patriot governor of Delaware.
William Franklin was taken to New York City.
It was assumed he would sail to England.
Instead, he stayed to help the British, establishing a network
of spies that operated behind American lines and organizing
guerrilla units that conducted raids along the coast
of Connecticut and Rhode Island and up the Hudson River
in New York.
He came out of that jail time experience
in the same way that Benjamin came out of the Cockpit.
He was angry, and he wanted to do everything that he could
to defeat the Patriots.
He became head of something called the "Associate Board
of Loyalists," which was a terrorist organization,
pure and simple.
In New Jersey, Patriots were routinely
murdering Loyalists.
In response, William's group issued a warning.
A Warning to Rebels:
If you continue in your murder and cruelties,
we Loyalists do Solemnly Declare that we
will Hang Six for One, which shall be Inflicted
on your Headmen and Leaders.
Word of the alliance with France had
prompted the British to abandon Philadelphia
and bolster their defenses in New York.
Franklin's family moved back into their Market Street home.
Sally organized women who went door-to-door to raise money
for the Continental Army and knitted shirts
for Washington's men.
But elsewhere in America, the war was not going well.
The first joint American- French military operation,
in Rhode Island, had failed to take Newport
back from the British,
who opened up their own offensive in the South.
They captured Savannah, Georgia, and later,
Charleston, South Carolina, where 5,000 American troops,
4 ships, and 300 pieces of artillery were surrendered.
Soon, a British army, under General Lord Cornwallis,
would begin marching toward Virginia.
"Our present situation makes one of two things essential to us,"
George Washington wrote to Franklin.
"A peace or the most vigorous aid of our allies,
particularly in the article of money."
Lafayette reported to Franklin how dire things had become.
My dear friend, You have no idea
of the shocking situation the Army is in.
We are naked, shockingly naked, and worse off on that
respect than we have ever been.
For God's sake let us have
fifteen or twenty thousand uniforms
and let it be done in such a way as will insure their
timely departure from France.
In France, managing the purchase
and shipment of supplies proved frustratingly slow.
Franklin did what he could to speed things up, but some
in Congress blamed him for the delays anyway and discussed
having him replaced.
Vergennes was angered at the news.
He approved an outright gift, not a loan, the largest
of the war to the United States, and wrote Congress
that it had been granted specifically because
of Franklin's persistence.
Franklin, meanwhile, wrote Congress,
asking to be replaced.
I have pass'd my 75th Year.
I have been engag'd in publick Affairs, and enjoy'd public
Confidence in some Shape or other, during the long Term
of fifty Years, an Honor sufficient to satisfy any
reasonable Ambition, and I have no other left, but that
of Repose, which I hope the Congress will grant me,
by sending some Person to supply my Place.
On November 19, 1781, a young American merchant
named Elkanah Watson paid a visit to Passy
and found the old man lost in thought.
Franklin invited him in for dinner, played a Scottish
pastoral tune for him on the armonica, and then they talked
late into the night about the state of the war.
We weighed probabilities, balanc'd
vicissitudes, dissected the best Maps; and finally it
resulted in a disheartening foreboding,
that the English Fleet wou'd intercept
& destroy the French Fleet, Land their Army & brake up
Washington's quarters.
Thus our unhappy Country would again bleed at every vein
& the war commence with fresh vigor
on the part of our implacable enemy.
Franklin was extremely discouraged.
He was working night and day to supply the Americans
with everything they needed.
But the war was dragging on and on and on.
So, when, at midnight, a courier came galloping into
Franklin's courtyard with the news of the victory
at Yorktown, it transformed him.
A month earlier, Washington's army
of 9,000 Americans and nearly as many French troops
had trapped British General Cornwallis at Yorktown
on the Virginia Peninsula.
The French fleet offshore had cut off any chance of his
being resupplied or reinforced.
After 9 days of heavy bombardment, Cornwallis
surrendered his 8,000 troops on October 19, 1781.
Lafayette, a division commander of American forces,
was at Washington's side.
If France had not supplied the ships,
if Lafayette hadn't come over,
if Vergennes and others hadn't done what they did,
if we hadn't had the French Navy helping by
the time we got to Yorktown, I do not think that
the American Colonies would have won the Revolution.
I think Benjamin Franklin, by sealing the alliance
with France, did as much to win the Revolution as anybody
with the possible exception of George Washington.
The Americans had won a great victory,
but the British still had 26,000 troops in North America,
and the war with England was not over.
Neither were Franklin's duties.
Congress refused to accept his resignation and instead gave him
an additional mission.
He was now part of a delegation to begin peace
negotiations with England.
Franklin drew up a list of 4 non-negotiable demands
during informal talks with the British and rebuffed their
suggestions that the Americans cut the French
out of the deliberations.
To complicate things, when two other American negotiators
arrived in Paris, they had their own opinions
on the best way forward.
One was John Jay, a brilliant New York lawyer.
The other was John Adams.
That I have no friendship
for Franklin, I avow.
That I am incapable of having any with a man of his moral
sentiments, I avow.
His whole Life has been one continued Insult
to good Manners and to Decency.
I can have no Dependence on his Word.
I never know when he speaks the Truth, and when not.
I wish with all my Soul he was out of public Service,
and in Retirement, repenting of his past Life,
and preparing, as he ought to be, for another World.
Franklin was the kind of man put on Earth
to drive a man like Adams absolutely crazy.
Franklin, himself, writes back to the Congress during
the time they're both Ministers in France and says,
"John Adams is an honest man; sometimes, a great one.
"But, in some ways and some things, absolutely out
of his senses."
Despite their differences, the Americans
settled down to work.
John Jay agreed with Adams,
that they should not consult with Vergennes,
even though the alliance with France required it.
For the sake of unanimity, Franklin reluctantly consented.
By November of 1782, more than a year after Yorktown,
a preliminary agreement seemed within reach.
England would recognize American independence,
remove its troops from the United States,
allow American fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland,
and relinquish any claims south of the Great Lakes.
But there was a sticking point.
The British wanted a provision that would compensate
American Loyalists for their losses during the war.
Adams and Jay wavered on the issue.
Franklin wouldn't budge.
And Franklin got angry.
He didn't very often get angry, and he said,
"Wait a minute. You ruined our crops.
"You burned our cities.
"You took our citizens across the Atlantic
"and tortured them.
"You engaged in state terror against the citizens
"of the United States.
"Don't talk to me about recompensing Loyalists unless
"you want to pay for Norfolk and all the cities you burned
"and trashed, and the houses that you ruined, and the lives
that you shattered."
Even Adams was struck by Franklin's vehemence
on the issue.
His fury came in part from reports of his son William's
conduct back in the United States.
Intent on keeping the war going, despite the British
defeat at Yorktown, William's group of guerrilla marauders
had pressed forward with their raids.
In one notorious incident, they hanged a Patriot leader
in the midst of what was supposed to be a peaceful
exchange of prisoners.
It was an outrage that threatened to mushroom into
an international crisis, complicating Franklin's
diplomacy in Paris at precisely the wrong time.
At the end of 1782, a preliminary agreement
of peace was signed and sent to London and Philadelphia
for approval.
It did not require reparations to Americans who had remained
loyal to England.
And France, which had given so much to the new nation,
had been excluded altogether.
Franklin was assigned the task of smoothing things over
with Vergennes.
Franklin writes one of the greatest letters
he ever wrote to Vergennes,
apologizing for this in a beautiful way and--
and really disarming the-- what could have been a huge
international crisis, that we had not fulfilled our promise
to work out the diplomatic aspects of the end of the war
with France and not separately.
But he also, in that same letter of apology to Vergennes,
this masterpiece, said, "And, by the way,
we need some more money, too," and he got it!
Finally, on September 3, 1783,
the Treaty of Paris was signed.
England officially recognized its former colonies
as the United States of America.
The Revolutionary War was over.
Members of the British delegation refused to pose
for the portrait meant to commemorate the moment.
In the unfinished painting, Franklin sits in the middle,
with his grandson Temple, the delegation's secretary,
sitting to his left.
On Franklin's right sits John Adams, already worried
about how history would remember the Revolution.
The history of our revolution will be
one continued lie from one end to the other.
And the essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's
electrical rod smote the Earth, and out sprang
General Washington.
That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward
these two conducted all the policy, negotiations,
legislation and war.
The Treaty of 1783 is one of the most
lopsided treaties in American diplomatic history.
It's a total victory for the United States.
Its independence is recognized by France and the rest
of Europe and England.
And we get a third of a continent, everything from the
Mississippi to the Atlantic, and from the Canadian border
to Florida.
We now become a nation larger than France, England,
and Spain put together.
There is a consensus, at the end, uh, among the negotiators,
including the Brits, that we're witnessing
the creation of an American empire.
By the end of the war, France's coffers were
more or less depleted.
France had the satisfaction in triumphing over their
arch enemy Great Britain,
but they hadn't counted on bankrupting, uh, their own
country in the process.
So, Franklin extracted, in a way, the lifeblood
out of the royal coffers and he gave in return something
that the monarchy was not counting on.
He lit a fire, not only in France,
but in all of Europe, promoting the democratic ideals
that the United States stood for.
To put down tyranny was something that all
the peasants could understand.
For Native Americans, the treaty was devastating.
Many Nations had decided that they would be better off by
allying with the British, not the colonists, who for nearly
2 centuries had been encroaching on their lands.
Now the United States was claiming
an even vaster territory,
and as its white citizens pushed farther west,
more and more Native people would be dispossessed,
regardless of whose side they had taken during the war.
In the summer and fall of 1783, huge balloons suddenly
appeared in the skies over Paris.
Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to see
human beings flying for the first time.
And Franklin is watching this, with his usual spirit of,
you know, what does this portend and what are
the applications for war, for travel, for recreation.
And a man that was standing next to him, uh, watched all
this and said, "Interesting, but what's the use of it?"
And Franklin turned to him and said,
"What's the use of a newborn baby?"
In early 1785, another balloon crossed
the English Channel and landed in France.
It carried the world's first airmail letter addressed to
Temple Franklin at Passy.
It came from his father, William, who was now in London.
He had reestablished his relationship with Temple
and was hoping to do the same with his father.
Dear and Honored Father,
Ever since the termination
of the unhappy contest between Great Britain and America,
I have been anxious to write to you,
and to endeavor to revive that affectionate connection
which till the commencement of the late troubles
had been the pride and happiness of my life.
Dear Son, I received your letter.
Nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such
keen sensations as to find myself deserted in my old age
by my only son; and not only deserted, but to find him
taking up arms against me.
There are natural duties which precede political ones,
and cannot be extinguished by them.
You may confide to your son the family affairs you wished
to confer upon with me.
I shall hear from you by him.
Benjamin Franklin was estranged from
many of his British associates and friends during the war.
But after the war, he was able to repair all those
relationships, except with William.
And I'm not sure I can say exactly why.
William is willing to make up, but Benjamin is not.
And I just sort of imagine that William is--is holding out
his hand to his father and his father just won't take it.
I guess the hurt went too deep.
By May of 1785, Thomas Jefferson had arrived
as the new ambassador to France, and Franklin learned
that Congress had finally accepted his resignation.
By July, with his grandsons Temple and Benny,
he was ready to leave.
They crossed the Channel and lingered for several days
in the port at Southampton, where Franklin visited
with some of his oldest English friends.
Then William arrived.
He and his father had not seen each other in a decade.
Whatever expectations William held for the reunion,
his father treated it as a business negotiation.
He insisted that the deeds to William's properties
in America be turned over to Temple.
Franklin also made clear that Temple, William's own son,
would be returning to the United States with him.
Legal documents were drawn up.
William signed them all.
They would never see each other again.
On July 27, Franklin's ship set sail
for his 8th crossing of the Atlantic.
On board, he soon immersed himself in the most sustained
scientific work since his experiments with electricity
back in 1752.
Most of his time was focused on observations and theories
about the ocean and ships-- from more efficient designs
for hulls and sails, to thoughts on the outrigger boats
of Pacific Islanders and the canoes of Native Americans,
from proposals for better anchors to a better soup bowl
that would be less likely to spill when the ship tilted.
And with Temple and Benny's help,
he continued gathering details about the Gulf Stream-
taking the temperature of the air and water
3 times a day for more than 40 days.
Finally, his ship docked at the wharf in Philadelphia,
62 years after his first arrival as a teenage runaway.
Back then, no one had heard of him.
This time, he was greeted by booming cannons,
ringing church bells,
and the cheers of his fellow Americans.
He's been away for 8 1/2 years.
He's about to see a country that he's created.
It didn't exist when he'd left.
It's a really, um, rather extraordinary return.
He's greeted at the pier in Philadelphia by crowds
and acclamations.
The crowd carried him to his Market Street home,
where his daughter Sally introduced him to
4 new grandchildren who had been born while he was away.
I am now in the Bosom of my Family,
and find four new little Prattlers,
who cling about the Knees
of their Grand Papa, and afford me great Pleasure.
In May of 1787, delegates from
all the former colonies began converging again
on Philadelphia.
The Articles of Confederation that had been drawn up after
the Declaration of Independence had proved inadequate
for the new nation during the Revolution.
When the Constitutional Convention
is called,
it's really a last chance for America
to get its act together.
The Articles of Confederation really did not do what
Franklin had asked for,
which is unite the Colonies into one nation.
When George Washington arrived
in Philadelphia, his first stop was to pay
Franklin a visit.
At the Constitutional Convention,
he was one of the two great figures.
There was George Washington and there was
Benjamin Franklin, and nobody else came third.
Up until the end of the War,
if you were trying to rate American leaders,
Washington would be behind him
and Franklin would be at the head.
Franklin's the great man.
By the end of the War, Washington has gone ahead,
and in his will, Franklin says, "I leave him my crab-tree
walking stick for his stroll towards destiny."
On May 25, 1787, when the convention
gathered for its first day, Washington was unanimously
elected to preside.
Benjamin Franklin's health is starting to fade.
Prisoners from the Walnut Street Jail, they have to
carry him from his home on Market Street
for the 2 or 3 blocks
to get to what is now called Independence Hall.
Franklin was 81, nearly crippled by gout
and kidney stones.
Still, he would attend every session but one.
From the start, it was clear that the 55 delegates did not
agree on the details of how to fix
the Articles of Confederation.
Franklin favored a single-body Congress and a 3-member
executive council instead of a president.
Virginians proposed 2 legislative bodies--
a House of Representatives
that would select the members of an upper body
to be called the Senate
and also name the president and judiciary.
Alexander Hamilton of New York thought the president should
be elected--for life.
Fierce debates on all the issues raged for days
during a sweltering Philadelphia summer.
We must not expect
that a new government may be formed,
as a game of chess may be played, by a skillful hand,
without a fault.
We are making experiments in politics.
The players of our game are so many, their ideas
so different, their prejudices so strong
and so various,
that not a move can be made that is not contested.
The convention adopted many provisions
that Franklin did not initially support--
a 2-body legislature, a single executive who could veto laws--
and others that he did-- a 4-year presidential term,
the legislature's power of impeachment,
and no requirement of property ownership for voting
or holding office.
One of the thorniest issues was how Congress
would be apportioned.
Under the Articles of Confederation, each state had
an equal vote, and delegates from smaller states demanded
that it stay that way.
Larger states, which would be contributing more in taxes,
wanted Congress to be based on population.
Franklin was placed on a committee to find
a workable compromise.
And, finally, Franklin gets up and he says,
"When we were young tradesmen here in Philadelphia,
"we had a joint of wood that didn't quite fit,
"we'd take a little from one side and shave from the other
until we had a joint that would hold together for centuries."
And his point was that compromises may not make
great heroes, but they do make great democracies.
As the impasse over apportionment threatened to
derail the convention, Franklin began inviting
important delegates to his home, where they could
socialize in the late afternoon, under the branches
of his mulberry tree, and try to find common ground.
They discuss science, they discuss the things
they're talking about that they have to compromise on.
And he helps cool the passions of that hot summer
under the shade of his mulberry tree.
In the end, a compromise was reached.
Each state would have the same number of senators, 2,
chosen by their legislatures.
The members of the House of Representatives would be
elected by voters, white men only, and each state's share
would be based on its population.
To mollify the southern states, their populations
would include their number of enslaved people,
but each of those human beings would be counted
as only three-fifths of a person.
They can't talk about slavery directly, and the word
"slavery" is never mentioned in the document itself.
The difficult fact to accept is that the Union is only
possible if it includes the South.
And the states south of the Chesapeake are committed
to slavery, especially Virginia and South Carolina.
If you did the moral thing in the summer of 1787 and took
a clear stand and insisted on it, the Constitution would
have never passed.
It was a tragic compromise, obviously, for many
populations in the United States who had no party
to this agreement.
They had never agreed that they would be represented
in this way.
And, so, the compromise looks especially compromised
in those terms.
This is America's original sin, and they know it.
Nobody in the Convention or at that moment
talks about slavery as anything other than a necessary evil.
The original sin of slavery
was more than just simply compromising.
The original sin of slavery began, at least
for these colonists, years before.
For Franklin, unity and compromise was the only thing
that could make this new nation move forward.
Without it, it would be a failed journey.
American democracy would not develop without it.
And for that reason, Franklin, as well as others,
sidestepped the issue of slavery.
On September 17, 1787, the delegates gathered
to vote on the proposed Constitution.
Benjamin Franklin made the motion for its adoption.
I agree to this Constitution
with all its faults, if they are such,
because I think a general government necessary for us.
I doubt, too, whether any other convention we can obtain
may be able to make a better Constitution.
For, when you assemble a number of men, to have
the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably
assemble with those men all their prejudices,
their passions, their errors of opinion,
their local interests, and their selfish views.
From such an assembly can a perfect production
be expected?
It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system
approaching so near to perfection as it does;
and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting
with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded,
like those of the builders of Babel, and that our States are
on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter
for the purpose of cutting one another's throats.
Thus I consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect
no better, and because I am not sure that it is
not the best.
Franklin's motion was approved.
One by one, the delegates signed the new Constitution,
so it could be sent to the states for ratification.
He signed it.
And I think he was relieved that it brought Americans together.
And that was something that he had wanted ever since
the Albany Conference.
He had wanted Americans to be a part of one grand whole.
This might not be the best,
but it was the best that you could get,
and he recognized that.
The Constitution is the framework for an ongoing
argument about who we are as a people
and where power resides.
And it's presumed that each generation will be engaged
in an argument and take it in new directions.
What do we mean by, "We the people"?
And certainly, we mean a lot more people now
than we did then.
With the work done,
the doors to Independence Hall were thrown open.
Franklin was approached by one of the city's
most prominent citizens, Elizabeth Willing Powel,
whose own rights had not been considered.
She asked him, "Well, Doctor, what have we got,
a republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic," he answered, "if you can keep it."
"A republic, if you can keep it,"
which turns out to be
maybe the most prophetic sentence of all.
Everyone who cares about this country
has to ask that question every day.
"A republic, if you can keep it."
Hitherto, this long life
has been tolerably happy,
so that if I were allowed to live it over again, I should
make no objection, only wishing for leave to do what
authors do in a second edition OF THEIR WORKS: correct some
of my Errata.
By early 1790, the Constitution
had been ratified, and Franklin was now 84 years old.
His kidney stones put him in such pain, he took regular
doses of laudanum, a tincture of opium,
to get through the day.
"I should have died 2 years ago," he wrote to Washington,
who had been elected as the nation's first president,
"but I am pleased that I have lived them,
since they have brought me to see our present Situation."
Our grand machine has at length
begun to work.
I pray God to bless and guide its operations.
If any form of government is capable of making a nation happy
ours I think bids fair for producing that effect.
But after all, much depends upon the people
who are to be governed.
Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems
to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is
certain except death and taxes.
As an Enlightenment scientist and inventor,
he considered America's new democracy an experiment.
It should be tested and tinkered with,
if improvements were needed.
As a man who had once constructed an elaborate chart
and checklist to help him better himself,
he still believed in keeping track of his failings.
Now Benjamin Franklin felt there was still one more
public duty to carry out, one more of his life's "errata"
to correct.
During his time as a delegate
to the Constitutional Convention,
Franklin, a former slave owner,
had accepted the presidency
of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting
the Abolition of Slavery,
a Quaker group in Philadelphia.
He had considered introducing a statement of principle
into the Constitution,
condemning slavery and the slave trade,
but several delegates had persuaded him to drop it.
The question of anti-slavery, pro-slavery, was not
an important issue for the vast majority of people
who wrote or thought about or argued about
the American Revolution.
On the other hand, given the fact that it is the daily
reality for enslaved men and women, in some ways, that was
the key question every day.
The gross hypocrisy in fighting a war for liberty,
liberty of people, and not including everybody
was obvious.
If you're talking about liberty, you're talking about liberty.
With the Constitution in place,
Franklin felt free to address the issue head-on.
To the Senate
and House of Representatives of the United States.
From a persuasion that equal liberty
is still the Birthright of all Men,
we earnestly entreat your serious attention to the subject
of Slavery; that you will be pleased to countenance
the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men, who alone
in this land of Freedom
are degraded into perpetual Bondage,
that you will devise means for removing this Inconsistency
from the Character of the American People.
The first real act of Franklin's life,
or the first public act, I guess,
is his running away from home.
So, here you have a young man in quest of freedom.
And the last real act of-- the last public act
of Franklin's life, um, is a treatise against slavery.
So, the end--the life is largely bookended in a way, um,
by these two, um, endorsements, in some way, of freedom.
Benjamin Franklin evolved as far as his understanding
of race relations and slavery were concerned.
He had owned slaves.
He didn't see anything wrong with it
until very late in the game.
But in his last years, he started to change his mind.
Philadelphia became a leader in abolition
and the emancipation of enslaved people of African descent.
There were laws on the books that began the dismantling
of slavery.
It was a train that could not be stopped.
And, so, we see someone who understands the tide
of the city, of the state,
looks at the laws, understands that slavery is going to end,
at least in Pennsylvania,
and he got on the right side of that conversation.
If this were a petition coming from anybody else,
the Congress would have never even considered it,
but because of Franklin's signature,
they're forced to consider it.
And it's the first outspoken, in public, debate
in the American history on-- under the new nation
on slavery.
In Congress, the petition was immediately
attacked by southerners.
Representative James Jackson of Georgia warned that if
Congress tried to abolish slavery, it would "light up
the flame of civil discord" and the southern states
"will never suffer themselves to be divested of their property
without a struggle."
Another congressman claimed that the South's sweltering climate
prohibited whites from working the soil.
For that, he said, they needed slaves.
And Franklin goes back to a device he had used as
a teenager, which is to write a parody in the voice
of somebody else.
So he writes a sermon that he pretends has been given by
a Muslim from North Africa about why they have to keep
white Europeans in slavery.
And it parodies the entire argument of all those who are
opposing abolition in the United States.
"If we forbear to make slaves
of the Christians," Franklin's character asks,
who, in this hot climate, are to cultivate our lands?"
And if we set our slaves free,
what is to be done with them?
For men accustomed to slavery, will not work
for a livelihood when not compelled.
Here they are brought into a land where the sun of Islam
gives forth its light
and they have an opportunity of making
themselves acquainted with the true doctrine, and thereby
saving their immortal souls.
And, so, of course, the reader realizes
that Franklin is using precisely the same arguments
of James Jackson of Georgia, which immediately proves to you,
without question, the absurdity of the arguments.
This is the genius of Franklin, to--to take something
and just turn it around, to switch the lens and say,
"So, how would you like it if it looked like that?"
The House of Representatives voted 29-25
that "Congress has no authority to interfere"
on the issue of slavery.
In the Senate, the petition was tabled without discussion.
What they agree on, more than anything else,
is we're not talking about this.
The Federal Government is not talking about this.
This is not the forum to deal with the national question
of slavery, because there is no national question.
It's a state question.
The question of the future of slavery is really left
for the individual States to decide.
That's how we end up with the North-South division.
I would put it this way.
Before the Revolution, slavery was never a major public issue.
There were people who spoke, before the Revolution,
who spoke against it and gave good reasons to what evil
it was, but it was not a major public issue.
After the Revolution, there never was a time when it wasn't.
Here is my creed:
I believe in one God, creator of the universe.
That he governs it by his providence.
That he ought to be worshipped.
That the most acceptable service we render to him
is doing good to his other children.
That the soul of man is immortal and will be treated
with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.
These I take to be the fundamental principles of all
sound religion, and I regard them
in whatever sect I meet with them.
Franklin's worsening health kept him housebound.
"People who live long, who will drink from the cup
of Life to the very bottom," he wrote a friend,
"must expect to meet with some of the usual dregs."
In the spring of 1790, he suffered chest pains
and a fever that confined him to his bed,
surrounded by his family.
He asked his daughter Sally to arrange things so he could
"die in a decent manner."
She told him everyone hoped he would live many more years.
"I hope not," he replied.
On April 17, 1790, an abscess in his lung burst,
and he slipped into unconsciousness.
At 11:00 that night, Benjamin Franklin died.
He was 84 years old.
More than 20,000 people,
the largest crowd Philadelphia had ever seen,
turned out for his funeral procession.
Leading it from his house on Market Street
to the burial ground at Christ Church
were the clergy of every church of every sect in the city,
walking arm in arm.
When he was 22 years old,
Franklin had composed an epitaph for his grave.
"The Body of B. Franklin, Printer,
"Like the Cover of an old Book,
"Its contents torn out, And Stript of its Lettering
"and Gilding, "Lies here, Food for Worms.
"But the Work shall not be wholly lost,
"For it will, as he believed, appear once more,
"In a new & more perfect Edition
Corrected and amended By the Author."
As he aged, however, the old printer had, of course,
edited it down.
The gravestone's epitaph became,
"BENJAMIN And DEBORAH FRANKLIN."
He had never completed the autobiography he started
back in 1771.
His grandson Temple eventually published the manuscript.
The book would go through hundreds of editions
in dozens of languages,
inspiring generations of ambitious strivers
wanting to get ahead in life.
There's nothing dreamy or romantic about Franklin.
But in that self-improving, marvelously protean way,
there's something about him that so much becomes what we
all quest for, what we think of as the sort of, American
ingenuity, that American feeling that we can
accomplish anything.
In his will, Franklin left most of his wealth
and possessions to members of his family,
except to his son William.
But in memory of his start as a lowly printer's apprentice,
he created a trust fund, still active today,
to help young people with ambition and talent
from his two hometowns of Boston and Philadelphia.
I begin to be almost sorry
I was born so soon,
since I cannot have the Happiness of knowing what will
be known 100 Years hence.
But it is the will of God and Nature that these mortal
bodies be laid aside.
Whether I have been doing good or mischief is for time
to discover.
I only know that I intended well,
and I hope all will end well.
Adieu.
Benjamin Franklin.