Benjamin Franklin (3)

Elected to the original American Philosophical Society in 1743. Elected to the American Society in 1768.

First secretary of the original APS (1743-1744), president of the unified APS (1769-1790)

Benjamin Franklin (6 January 1706–17 April 1790) was a printer, writer, diplomat, inventor, scientist, slaveholder, and the principal founder of the American Philosophical Society. Born in Boston, the youngest of over a dozen siblings and half-siblings in a family of Congregationalist soapmakers, Benjamin Franklin only received two years of formal education, from about the ages of eight to ten. He briefly attempted to work for his father before apprenticing in his brother James’s print shop (1718), and eventually debuted his first of many literary aliases, Silence Dogood, in his older brother’s newspaper (1721). Two years later, Franklin escaped the tumult of his brother’s shop to eke out his own printing career in Philadelphia. He worked in the shop of Samuel Keimer for about a year before sailing to London to expand his horizons once more. In London, Franklin discovered he did not have access to the capital previously promised by the recently befriended Governor of Pennsylvania, but he scraped by working in various print shops until he returned to Philadelphia in 1726. The following year, Franklin became the manager of Keimer’s shop and had formed the Junto, a “society for mutual improvement,” and precursor of the APS. Franklin soon broke ties with Keimer and began his own print shop (1728), the fruits of which would influence public policy when Franklin published an essay advocating for paper currency (1729), and thereafter Pennsylvania adopted the practice. Franklin then purchased Keimer’s Pennsylvania Gazette (at a notably low price, as Franklin had orchestrated the paper’s downfall during his break with Keimer), and that same year, became Pennsylvania Province’s official printer, due to his growing connections with the Assembly (1729). 

In 1730, Franklin began his common-law marriage with Deborah Reed, who he previously courted before leaving for England. He gained admission as a Freemason in 1731 and in 1734 became Grand Master. Despite his humble beginnings and lack of formal education, Franklin now operated in the elite circles of Philadelphia: he founded the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), began Poor Richard’s Almanac (1731), and leveraged his public influence to found Philadelphia’s first fire company (1736). That same year he invented an anti-counterfeit paper currency which he printed for New Jersey by using casts of biological leaves to make flawless replication impossible. Franklin’s passion for studying natural phenomena also took root in this era. He observed local weather patterns, correctly theorized the mechanics of waterspouts, and developed the most efficient fireplace to date (1740–1744). Franklin also began dabbling with civil and political matters, becoming clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1736, and postmaster of Philadelphia the subsequent year.

            In 1743 Franklin published A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge, which laid the groundwork for the establishment of the APS, though it took some time for the Society to blossom to full flower. Beginning in 1745, Franklin began in earnest his electrical experimentation: in a 1747 letter to Peter Colinson, Franklin recounted some of his experiments that disproved the dominant theory that there are two kinds of electricity, and correctly proposed the view that there are merely two kinds of the same energy, which he dubbed plus and minus. Franklin’s electrical experiments became a public spectacle. His 1751 publication of Experiments and Observations on Electricity encouraged the most famous of his experiments— — the 1752 kite-and-key—which further validated his assertion that lightning is electric in nature. This discovery resulted in the invention of a lightning rod to protect buildings from such phenomena. Together they won him the high honor of the Copley Medal from the British Royal Society (1753). Simultaneously, Franklin also established the academy which later became the core of the University of Pennsylvania (1749), promoted and raised funds for the creation of the Pennsylvania Hospital (which opened in 1752), and continued writing for the Gazette and Poor Richard’s.

In 1748, Franklin retired from printing in time for his legislative career to begin: in 1749 he was nominated as a councilman on the common council of Philadelphia, and not long after, a justice of the peace (1751), and additionally joint-deputy postmaster-general of North America. He also created the nation’s first political cartoon, a cut-up snake representing the fractured North American colonies, accompanied with the caption “Join or Die.” Franklin rallied for unification in the face of French encroachment at the Albany Conference (1754), and he became additionally concerned with the colonists’ lack of representation in British Parliament. In 1757, the Pennsylvania Assembly sent Franklin to London to protest unequal taxation, and to this end, he began a pro-American propaganda campaign in the London media, and eventually won the equitable property tax rates, but the proprietary governors, the Penn family, vetoed the idea. Franklin also made myriad political and intellectual connections while abroad, meeting figures like David Hume and Adam Smith during his travels through the British Isles. 

He returned home in 1762, and two years later he briefly served as speaker of the Pennsylvania House before undertaking another diplomatic assignment to Britain, to once again protest the Penn family’s grip on Pennsylvania, as they continued blocking all attempts at fair taxation. But Parliamentary debates on the Stamp Act made the question of fair taxation unavoidable. Despite Franklin’s efforts, the Stamp Act passed and galvanized anti-British sentiment in the American colonies. Franklin generated and distributed anti-Stamp Act material en masse and eventually managed to convince the English Parliament to repeal the measure altogether–thereby cementing himself at the forefront of the American cause. Despite this victory, Parliament still stalled on disenfranchising the State’s proprietors. For his part, Franklin spent much of his mission traveling through mainland Europe, ingratiating himself in intellectual circles, gaining membership to myriad learned institutions, and promoting the APS and its findings along the way. Around this time the APS had become fully organized and elected Franklin its president (1769), a position he held until his death.

Franklin’s diplomatic mission to Britain dissolved. While the imperial compromise was already foundering Franklin triggered a whistleblowing controversy in 1775: he leaked the correspondence of the Governor of Massachusetts and his government and revealed the Governor's complicities in the Crown’s repression of the colonists. After the resulting Boston Tea Party, members of the British government excoriated Franklin in Parliament. He attempted to salvage relations between Crown and colony but failed and returned home.

            Upon landing in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Assembly unanimously selected Franklin as their delegate to the Second Continental Congress wherein he composed his own Articles of Confederation, became the first effective secretary of state, and undertook a diplomatic mission to Canada (to join the rebellion as a fourteenth colony) as the Continental Army undertook an invasion with support from the largely Roman Catholic populace. While they took Montréal they ultimately failed.

            On return, Franklin joined the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Though Thomas Jefferson penned the near entirety of the document, Franklin served as one of the five editors (The Committee of Five). After the provisional passage of the Declaration (4 July 1776), Franklin served as president of the Pennsylvania state convention before sailing out later that year on a diplomatic mission to France.

            In Versailles he exploited the French image of the rugged colonial outdoorsman and their Rousseauian passion for such back-to-nature individualists to its full effect. He moved between royals and nobles, thinkers and tradesmen, and successfully negotiated French financial and military support (1778). Now minister plenipotentiary to France, Franklin oversaw prison exchanges, arms shipments, and funneled French capital to Congress back overseas.

            After General Cornwallis’s surrender in 1781, Franklin joined the team sent to negotiate the peace, and their efforts finally culminated in 1784. Thereafter he left his residence in Passy and characteristically spent the voyage home writing and musing on various scientific topics. He returned to a historic reception and soon thereafter began his tenure as president of Pennsylvania’s supreme executive council (1785), whereby he became effective governor of the state. He additionally served in the Constitutional Convention, where he promoted the “Great Compromise” that established two legislative bodies, one with equal representation per state and the other proportional (1787). Despite having been a slaveholder himself, he exemplified the complex delusions of the period and President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery during this time (1787). He retired from public life in 1788 and died of pleurisy in early 1790. His body was laid to rest in Christ Church burial ground, alongside many of his fellow fathers of the nation. (ANB, ODNB, PI)

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These are less errata—a term Franklin much loved—than addenda which attempt to address caveats unique to his bibliography. In general, the below does not represent every single copy of every edition held by the American Philosophical Society; the bibliography points to APS First Editions at times, which should allow researchers to locate all copies either via title or using the “Browse Shelf” feature as necessary. We do not below cover every Franklin imprint edition in every translation, and generally as a rule, stop chronicling a year after his death in 1790. There are a few exceptions, though, too, such as the first imprint detailing the rules of the Junto, below as 3.037. The Metropolitan Museum of Art saw fit to deposit its William H. Huntington collection of Frankliania in 1926, some 450 pieces. Many holdings appear below and are acknowledged in the catalog. References are not exhaustive because at the scale of Franklin’s various editions and reprints, choosing to include everything would make the bibliography visually exhausting and would do little to assist researchers. Researchers should generally find waypoints to our usual bibliographic authorities. Here we also include references to Paul Leicester Ford’s Franklin Bibliography (1889) when retained by our production system or when easily at hand and sensibly necessary.