History of Ben Franklin: The Original Founding Father?

HISTORY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Part of the series on America 250, the US Semiquincentennial

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[In my previous article, I discussed Alexander Hamilton, who founded America’s first political party, the Federalist Party.]

We know this polymath as a writer, publisher, printer, merchant, scientist, moral philosopher, international diplomat, and inventor.

He invented the glass harmonica in music, but he also invented the Franklin stove and started the first lending library and fire brigade in Philadelphia.

He did experiments with electricity and developed the lightning rod. He was considered:

America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. – Walter Isaacson. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

What is he remembered for, what were his roles as a Founding Father, what did he do in France, and what were his thoughts on religion?

Ben Franklin in America

Born in Boston on January 17, 1706*, he was among the earliest and oldest of the American Founding Fathers. He served as a lobbyist to England, was the first Ambassador to France, and has been called “The First American.”

He was one of the five drafters of the American Declaration of Independence, along with John Adams and the primary drafter Thomas Jefferson. Franklin was 70. At 81, he served as the oldest delegate at the Constitutional Convention.

Ben Franklin in France

Franklin’s Marten Fur Cap

During the Revolutionary War, he served as Minister to France. With his sagacity and salon celebrity, he convinced King Louis XVI of France to support the American cause financially and militarily. Much to John Adams’ chagrin, he dazzled the salon crowd with his notoriety and flirtation.

When a person appeared before the French king at Versailles, they were always without a hat. Franklin arrived wearing a marten fur cap. They loved him. Franklin captivated Paris society.

Café Procope, Paris

He frequented the first, and to this day, the oldest coffeehouse in Paris, the Café Procope, as did other luminaries over the years, including Voltaire and Jefferson during Franklin’s era, and later a young Napoleon Bonaparte.

While it is difficult to imagine in a world of royalty and celebrities, Franklin was America’s most famous private citizen and the most celebrated American in Europe.

Although he never progressed past the second grade in school, he was often called publicly “Doctor Franklin”. The University of St. Andrews and Oxford University awarded him an honorary Doctorate, and Harvard and Yale each awarded him an honorary Master’s degree.

Ben Franklin in Philadelphia

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

Following the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin exited the Philadelphia State House (Independence Hall) and was reportedly asked a question. The outspoken Mrs. Elizabeth Willing Powel of Philadelphia, the leading American saloniste acquainted with John Adams and a close personal friend of George Washington, asked him,

“Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin’s famous reply was,

“A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

Ben Franklin’s Moral Philosophy

As a moral philosopher, he was a personal mystery. Though he believed the new Republic could survive only if its citizens were virtuous, he wrote pithy and wise sayings in “Poor Richard’s Almanac” – he did not live by all of them himself. He is typically regarded as a deist, at least in his early years. Nevertheless, he proposed that clergy lead prayer each morning during the Constitutional Convention in June 1787.

Franklin said

“God governs the affairs of men”

… yet he also said,

“I have some doubts as to [Jesus’] divinity.”

He was a huge fan and supporter of the international evangelist George Whitefield and would go on to publish all his sermons. But he did not subscribe to Whitefield’s theology.

Was Ben Franklin a Deist, or…

Puritan Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, knew of Franklin’s deist leanings but wanted, if possible, to pin down the nimble-footed freethinker to some basics. In friendship, Stiles asked for some creedal confession, however limited. Franklin, who said that this was the first time he had ever been asked, on March 9, 1790, readily obliged:

“Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe: that he governs the world by his providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we can 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 as you do, in whatever sect I meet with them.”

Stiles wanted to know specifically what Franklin thought of Jesus: was Franklin really a Christian or not? Franklin responded that Jesus had taught the best system of morals and religion that “the world ever saw.” But on the troublesome question of the divinity of Jesus, he had, along with other deists, “some doubts.”

It was an issue, he said, that he had never carefully studied, and, writing only five weeks before his death, he thought it

“needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opport[unity] of know[ing]the truth with less trouble.”

It would be difficult to burn a heretic like that.

Ben Franklin’s Epitaph

For his own epitaph, Franklin wrote at the age of 22:

“The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out, stripped of its lettering, and gilding, lies here, food for worms. But the work shall not be lost; for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.”

After he died, though, 62 years later, at 84, his will stipulated that on his gravestone appear only “BENJAMIN And DEBORAH FRANKLIN 1790.” Though Deborah died sixteen years earlier, Franklin’s funeral in Philadelphia attracted the largest crowd of mourners ever recorded, an estimated 20,000.

Gravestone of Ben and Deborah Franklin

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com

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*Or was he born on January 6?

Significant parts of the Western world adopted the Gregorian Calendar from the Julian Calendar in the mid-1700s. However, when Pope Gregory XIII of the Roman Catholic Church decreed the calendar fix, not everyone embraced the change. Britain and her colonies were latecomers to the Gregorian Calendar, adopting it in 1752, nearly 170 years after Catholic Europe. Those born in that gap lost 11 days of their lives: the day after Wednesday, September 2, 1752, was Thursday, September 14.

September 2 instantly became September 14, and, as explained at Project Britain, nothing happened between September 3 and 14, 1752. In other words, the British Calendar Act of 1751 proclaimed that in Britain (and her American Colonies), Thursday, September 2, 1752, should become Thursday, September 14, 1752. Franklin embraced the change, though others in England and America remained slightly upset.