Benjamin Franklin: The Life and Legacy of a Founding Father

Here’s what the currency implies. Stability. Trustworthiness. Gravitas. The kind of man who anchored things.

Here’s the actual man. A kid who fled an indentured labor arrangement at seventeen, leaving his own brother furious and legally exposed. A man who left a woman he loved in Philadelphia, went to London, and basically ghosted her — not by intention initially but by cowardice. A man who had an illegitimate child and never told anyone, including the child, who the mother was. A man who spent seventeen years in London while his common-law wife stayed home in Philadelphia and slowly died from strokes, and who never came back to see her.

He also invented bifocals, helped found a nation, and at eighty-four years old signed the first anti-slavery petition to the United States Congress. Three weeks before he died.

The legend needs the whole thing, including the parts that make you uncomfortable.

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Item	What’s verified	Nuance that usually gets lost
Born	January 17, 1706, Boston	17th of 17 children; formal schooling ended at age 10
Fled apprenticeship	1723, age 17	Left brother James legally exposed; this was a genuine escape
Deborah Read	Common-law wife, 1730–1774	Never legally married — her first husband vanished but wasn’t confirmed dead
William Franklin	Illegitimate son, born ~1728–1729	Mother’s identity unknown to this day — including to William
Son Francis Folger	Died of smallpox, age 4, 1736	Franklin blamed himself partly; didn’t vaccinate Francis in time
Slavery	Enslaved people in household 1730s–1757	Brought two enslaved people to London 1757; became abolitionist president by 1787
London years	1757–1775 (with brief return)	Left Deborah for 10 years after 1764; she died December 1774 — never saw her again
Craven Street bones	1998 renovation: 10 bodies (6 children) in basement	From anatomy school Franklin knew about — illegal dissection
William’s Loyalism	William sided with British	Franklin essentially cut him off; they had a cold, brief reconciliation decades later
Death	April 17, 1790, Philadelphia, age 84	Died a millionaire; left almost nothing to William

The Runaway Nobody Calls a Runaway

Benjamin Franklin was an indentured servant. His family was short on money, his father pulled him out of school at ten, and eventually he was apprenticed to his older brother James — a printer — at twelve. Indentured. Legally bound. James was a harsh master by accounts Franklin himself left.

At seventeen, Benjamin wrote anonymous essays pretending to be a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood. He slipped them under the print shop door. James published them; they were a hit. Then James discovered who wrote them and was furious — not because he was impressed, but because he’d been embarrassed by his own little brother.

So Franklin ran. Just left. He was seventeen. Seeking an alternative to James’s print shop, we sailed to New York, Philadelphia, and finally London. What he left behind was a legally-binding labor contract — and when James died years later, Franklin sent his widow five hundred copies of Poor Richard for free. He remembered the debt even while refusing to fully acknowledge the escape.

The first thing to comprehend about him is that.He was a person who left.

The Woman He Left and the Marriage That Wasn’t

In 1724 he courted Deborah Read, then about sixteen. He proposed. Her mother blocked it — he was going to London, he was broke, he had no guarantee of return. So Deborah’s mother said no.

Then he went to London and wrote Deborah almost nothing. She eventually married a man named John Rogers, a potter, probably trying to move on. It turned out that Rogers was a bigamist with numerous debts. He stole a slave and fled to the Caribbean and nobody knew if he was dead or alive.

Franklin came back from London in 1726. He found Deborah in a legal trap — potentially still married to Rogers, who might come back at any moment and charge anyone who married her with bigamy. They therefore got married by common law on September 1, 1730.No ceremony. No legal document. Just the two of them deciding to live as married people.

She raised his illegitimate child William from a woman whose name Franklin never disclosed. She ran his print shop when he was out. She managed the household budget, built it into something profitable, and kept everything together while he went to assemblies and spent evenings at the tavern and accumulated prestigious positions.

In 1764, he sailed for London again on colonial business. The goodbye in Philadelphia was the last time they saw each other. She begged him to come back. She wrote letters saying she feared death without seeing him again. The letters survive. His letters back were warm and apologetic and he kept finding reasons to stay in London.

She died December 19, 1774. He was in London. He mourned her, he said. He asked to be buried beside her when he died, and was. Whether that’s justice or irony I genuinely cannot decide.

William Franklin and the Bones at Craven Street

William Franklin’s mother is one of the enduring mysteries of early American history. The man has been studied obsessively for over two centuries and we still don’t know who she was. Franklin never said. Not publicly, not in letters, not in the autobiography. He brought William home, introduced him to Deborah, and that was that.

William grew up to be the last royal governor of New Jersey. When the Revolution came, he stayed loyal to the Crown. This broke Franklin entirely — not publicly, not immediately, but it did. William was arrested by the Patriots in 1776, held for two years under miserable conditions. Franklin did not intervene.

After the war, William wrote to his father trying to reconcile. They met once, in Southampton, in 1785. Franklin was cold. When he died in 1790, he left William almost nothing — some land in Nova Scotia that everyone knew was basically worthless. The will made the reason plain: William had been an enemy of his country.

The man who spent decades preaching the importance of correcting one’s “errata” — his word for mistakes — could not correct this one.

Now the Craven Street bones. In 1998, during renovation of 36 Craven Street in London — where Franklin lived during his years in the city — workers found the remains of at least ten people buried in the basement. Six children. The explanation is William Hewson, an anatomist who ran an illegal anatomy school in the house in the early 1770s. Dissecting human bodies was illegal in England at the time. The bones came from grave robbers.

Franklin knew Hewson. He was practically family — Hewson married the daughter of Franklin’s landlady. The anatomy school was in the house Franklin was living in. The historical consensus is that Franklin probably knew what was happening and looked the other way. He was a scientist who believed in the advancement of knowledge. Grave robbing for medical research was a moral compromise many Enlightenment figures made quietly.

It doesn’t make him a murderer. It does make him a man who understood that useful knowledge sometimes came from ugly places and chose not to ask too many questions.

The Slavery Arc, Which Gets Compressed Into a Paragraph When It Deserves More

In 1735, Franklin enslaved two people. He bought them. He had enslaved people in his household through the 1750s. When he went to London in 1757, he brought two enslaved people with him — King and Peter — who lived at 36 Craven Street and were known to receive small wages, which was unusual but didn’t change their status.

What happened in London matters. The abolition movement was more advanced in Britain than in America. Franklin encountered it directly. He met anti-slavery thinkers. He encountered John Woolman and Anthony Benezet’s influence from afar. He began, slowly, to change.

His views shifted through the 1760s and 1770s. By the time he returned to America in 1775, he was moving toward abolition. By 1787, he was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. And on February 3, 1790, two months before his death at eighty-four, he signed a petition to Congress calling for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade.

Congress tabled it. Two southern representatives mocked it. Franklin was too sick to respond in person. He died April 17, 1790.

You can read that as a redemption arc, or as a man who spent fifty-plus years benefiting from slavery and signed a piece of paper near the very end. Both readings are correct. The question is which one you weight.

The Autobiography and the Performance of Wisdom

Let me say something about the Autobiography that most accounts don’t. It’s one of the great pieces of American self-invention, and it’s also extremely calculated.

Franklin started it in 1771, at age sixty-five, in the form of a letter to William. He wrote the first part at the estate of a friend in England, comfortable, satisfied, looking back. He never finished it. He kept returning to it — added more in 1784 in Paris, more in 1788 in Philadelphia — but it ends in 1757, thirty-three years before his death.

He doesn’t mention William becoming a Loyalist. He barely mentions Deborah’s death. He describes his younger self with such affectionate irony that you can feel him shaping the record. The “errata” framing — describing his youthful mistakes as printer’s errors to be corrected — is the most elegant piece of self-mythologizing in American history.

He knew exactly what he was doing. He was a printer. He understood revision.

My Verdict

Benjamin Franklin was, depending on when you caught him, a runaway, a fraud, a negligent husband, a slaveholder, a brilliant scientist, a necessary diplomat, and eventually a genuine abolitionist who used the last months of his life to push the new government in a direction it refused to go.

Here’s the thing I keep returning to. He had eighty-four years. That’s long enough to be wrong about things and then change your mind. Long enough to leave people you loved and then mourn them. Long enough to watch your son become your enemy and then refuse to fully reconcile anyway.

He was not a symbol. He was a very specific person with specific failings and specific genius and a long enough life to contradict himself several times over.

The hundred-dollar bill treats him as an anchor. He would have found that funny and useful. He was good at finding things useful.

FAQs

1. Was Benjamin Franklin really one of the Founding Fathers?

Yes. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Treaty of Paris — the only person to sign all three. He’s also the only Founding Father who never served as president, which is its own kind of interesting.

2. What was Benjamin Franklin’s formal education?

Two years. His family couldn’t afford more. He educated himself through reading, arguing, and paying close attention to other people. He eventually received honorary degrees from Oxford, St Andrews, and Harvard — none of which he earned in any traditional sense.

3. Did Franklin really fly a kite in a thunderstorm?

He almost certainly did something like it, though the exact scene has been embellished. His 1752 experiment demonstrated the electrical nature of lightning. Whether it was precisely as described in accounts written years later is debated. The lightning rod he invented from that research is not debated.

4. Who was William Franklin’s mother?

Nobody knows. Franklin never revealed it. William himself apparently didn’t know. Two centuries of historians haven’t identified her. She may have been a sex worker — Franklin’s autobiography references visiting “low women” in his youth. She may have been a servant. The record is blank.

5. Was Benjamin Franklin a slaveholder?

Yes. He enslaved people from the mid-1730s through the 1750s. He brought enslaved people to London with him in 1757. He gradually changed his position and by 1787 was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, ultimately signing a petition to Congress calling for abolition in 1790.

6. What’s the story with the bones found at his London house?

In 1998, workers renovating 36 Craven Street — where Franklin lived during his London years — found the remains of at least 10 people (including 6 children) buried in the basement. They came from an illegal anatomy school run by his associate William Hewson. Franklin almost certainly knew about the school. Historians generally conclude he looked the other way in the name of scientific progress.

7. Why did Franklin and his son William stop speaking?

William chose the Loyalist side during the American Revolution and served as the last royal governor of New Jersey. Benjamin never fully forgave him. When he died, Franklin left William virtually nothing — some land in Nova Scotia he considered worthless. Their brief post-war meeting in 1785 was cold and formal.

8. Why was Franklin’s marriage to Deborah Read a “common-law” marriage?

Deborah’s first husband, John Rogers, had fled to the Caribbean with debts and a stolen slave. He might not have been dead. If Franklin married Deborah legally and Rogers turned up alive, they’d both be charged with bigamy. So they simply declared themselves married in 1730 and lived that way for 44 years, though Franklin spent nearly half of that time in Europe.

9. Did Franklin invent electricity?

No. He demonstrated that lightning was electrical and invented the lightning rod. He contributed fundamentally to understanding the nature of electricity. He didn’t “invent” it — it existed before he was born.

10. Did Franklin actually say all the things attributed to him?

Many of his famous sayings in Poor Richard’s Almanack were adaptations of older proverbs from other sources — European and classical traditions. He was a brilliant editor and popularizer. “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” appears in various forms well before Franklin published it.

11. How did Benjamin Franklin die?

He died April 17, 1790, in Philadelphia, aged 84, from pleurisy and an abscess in his lungs. He had been bedridden for weeks. About twenty thousand people attended his funeral — roughly one tenth of the entire population of Philadelphia at the time.

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