Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life is a full-scale narrative biography of the most versatile of the American founders, tracing Franklin's life from his birth in 1706 as the fifteenth of seventeen children in a Boston candle-maker's household to his death in Philadelphia in 1790 at age 84. Isaacson shows how this runaway apprentice who taught himself to write by imitating London essayists became, sequentially and sometimes simultaneously, America's foremost printer and publisher, its most celebrated scientist, its most effective diplomat in securing the French alliance that won the Revolution, and its indispensable conciliator at the Constitutional Convention. Throughout, Isaacson argues that what Franklin invented most creatively was himself—a public persona of the plain, industrious tradesman that shaped an emerging American national identity built on middle-class virtues, religious tolerance, democratic instincts, and a faith in the wisdom of ordinary citizens.

Join, or Die. The colonial assemblies rejected the Albany Plan for granting too much central power, and London shelved it for fostering too much colonial unity. Franklin was already thinking in continental terms that his contemporaries were not yet ready to share.

In 1757, the Pennsylvania Assembly sent Franklin to London as its agent to petition against the proprietary power of the Penn family, who governed the colony under a royal charter. He settled into a cozy Craven Street boarding house managed by the widow Margaret Stevenson, developed an intense intellectual friendship with her daughter Polly, and built a circle of London friends—the philosopher David Hume, the economist Adam Smith, the scientist Joseph Priestley, the printer William Strahan. His mission against the Penns was deeply frustrating. Thomas Penn refused meaningful concessions and eventually broke off all personal negotiations. The Privy Council gave Franklin a partial victory on the specific question of taxing Penn lands, but the underlying struggle over colonial governance remained unresolved. After five years he returned to Philadelphia in 1762.

He was back in England by 1764, sent by the Assembly to continue the fight. But the political landscape had shifted violently. Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765—the first major direct internal tax on the colonies—and Franklin badly misjudged the colonial reaction. Thinking pragmatism counseled a degree of acceptance, he recommended his friend John Hughes as stamp collector. Philadelphians were outraged; a mob threatened his house; Deborah armed it and held her ground. Franklin's political reputation in Philadelphia collapsed. He recovered by staging a masterful performance before the House of Commons in February 1766, testifying brilliantly against the Stamp Act, drawing the crucial distinction between external trade duties that Americans had always accepted and internal taxes that required representation. The testimony helped secure the act's repeal. Ships named the Franklin fired salutes in Philadelphia harbor; his reputation was restored.

But the underlying tensions with Britain kept deepening. The Townshend duties of 1767 imposed new import taxes; Franklin responded with a torrent of anonymous essays explaining the American position to British readers. Lord Hillsborough, the colonial secretary, refused to recognize his credentials as Massachusetts's agent, and the two men clashed repeatedly. Franklin wrote devastating parodies—most notably Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One and An Edict by the King of Prussia—showing the absurdity of British colonial policies by holding up satirical mirrors to them.

In December 1772, Franklin sent to Massachusetts a batch of private letters by Governor Thomas Hutchinson that advocated reducing English liberties in the colonies. He asked that they not be made public; John and Samuel Adams ensured they were published immediately. The furor led to Franklin's most humiliating moment: on January 29, 1774, he stood in the Privy Council's cockpit while the solicitor general Alexander Wedderburn harangued and insulted him for an hour before a packed, jeering audience. Franklin stood in a plain suit of Manchester velvet, face immobile, betraying nothing. The next day he was dismissed as colonial postmaster. He stayed in London for most of 1774, sounding out back channels for reconciliation through chess games with the admiral's sister Caroline Howe and discussions with Lord Chatham. Nothing came of it. He learned belatedly that Deborah had died in December 1774 without him having returned. He had spent fifteen of the last seventeen years of her life across the ocean.

Franklin sailed for Philadelphia in March 1775, arriving on May 5 just weeks after Lexington and Concord. He was immediately appointed to the Second Continental Congress. In July 1775 he drafted a detailed proposal for Articles of Confederation—a stronger central government than what was eventually adopted—and in a family summit at Joseph Galloway's Trevose estate in May, he declared himself in favor of independence, cutting definitively across the line from his loyalist son William. Through the rest of 1775 and into 1776 he served on committees dealing with the postal system, military supply, currency design, and Indian relations, donating his postmaster's salary to care for wounded soldiers.

When the Continental Congress formed a drafting committee for the Declaration of Independence in June 1776, Franklin was a member alongside Jefferson, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston. Jefferson wrote the draft. Franklin made a handful of changes, the most consequential being his alteration of one phrase: where Jefferson had written we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, Franklin crossed out the last three words and substituted self-evident—shifting the moral foundation of American rights from divine sanction to rational proof accessible to any thinking person. He also helped shepherd the text through Congress's final editing. At the signing, Hancock declared they must all hang together; Franklin reportedly replied that they must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly they would all hang separately.

In October 1776, Congress secretly assigned Franklin—now 70, gout-ridden, plagued by kidney stones—the most consequential mission of the Revolution: to go to Paris and secure French recognition and military alliance. He took his grandsons Temple, about 17, and Benny, just turned 7. The mission seemed nearly hopeless: Washington was retreating from Long Island, the British had occupied Philadelphia. Franklin knew exactly what he was doing. He arrived to tumultuous celebrity, settled in the village of Passy in a compound provided by the merchant Chaumont, and cultivated the French foreign minister Vergennes with patience and strategic skill. He wore his marten fur cap and plain coat as deliberate theater, casting himself as the frontier philosopher of a virtuous new republic. Within weeks, portraits and medallions bearing his face circulated across Paris; he was, in John Adams's later words, more universally known than Leibniz, Frederick the Great, or Voltaire.