how does benjamin franklin get his essays into the newspaper

Benjamin Franklin: A Champion of Free Press and Free Speech

• January 15, 2019
• vol 65 issue 19

On November 28, Penn President Amy Gutmann was one of five Philadelphia leaders recognized with the 2018 Inquirer Industry Icon Award. In her acceptance of the award, she spoke of the heritage of free expression bequeathed to the University of Pennsylvania by its founder, Benjamin Franklin.

Unhindered press, transformative higher education, engaged civic and business leaders: These are lynchpins for open and free expression in American society. These are the pillars of a free world.

Benjamin Franklin was America’s first great newspaperman and one of the greatest champions of a free press and free speech. “When this support is taken away,” he wrote, “the constitution of a free society is dissolved.”

If you lead the University of Pennsylvania, which Benjamin Franklin founded, open expression is not some abstraction. It is the bedrock of all that we do. Diverse and unexpected ideas are as foundational to Penn as they are to the survival of a free society.

During times when the tendency to treat political adversaries as mortal enemies is rampant, when honest debate and peaceful dissenters are being stifled, and when hate crimes are surging, universities such as Penn have a special obligation. Our fundamental mission is to open things up. I am proud to say that Penn is a place where unexpected ideas are welcome and given a fair chance to stand up to rigorous research and spirited debate.

This is not just a university issue; this is a universal issue. It transcends social divisions and party lines.

Receiving the Icon Award from the  Philadelphia Inquirer  is a signal honor. It is no less a reminder of how much we all depend upon excellent journalism, honest reporting, and the complete and accurate representation of a story to allow us to succeed at the difficult task of democratic self-government. Every day, you go to work on behalf of free speech and honest and open inquiry. Penn is honored to undertake this essential work by your side.

Poor Richard’s Almanack

On December 19, 1732, Franklin published his first issue of the periodical book, Poor Richard’s Almanack under the pseudonym Richard Saunders. It was published continuously for 25 years and provided a wide range of information, including calendars, weather predictions, sayings, poems and demographics, as well as recipes, trivia, advice, aphorisms and proverbs about industry and frugality, and even jokes.

According to the Library Company of Philadelphia, only three copies of the 1733 original issue exist. Franklin’s pseudonym is a bit of a riddle in a riddle: Richard Saunders was an English physician and astrologist who wrote under the pen name of Cardanus Rider, which is simply the letters in “Richard Saunders” rearranged. The real Saunders published Rider’s British Merlin . The name Poor Richard was adapted from another British almanac, Poor Robin , which was first published in 1664. The pseudonym Richard Saunders was initially distinct from Franklin, but throughout the years it became linked with Franklin’s character.

It is believed that Richard Saunders’ personality was modeled after Isaaq Bickerstaff Esq, a pseudonym used by Jonathan Swift as part of a hoax to predict the death of almanac writer John Partridge.

The almanac was a best seller in the American colonies printing up to 10,000 copies a year. Its success brought wealth to Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard’s Almanack was so popular that Napoleon ordered it translated into Italian and later it was also translated into French.

Almanac , the University of Pennsylvania’s journal of record, opinion and news began in November 1954 as a monthly and has been a weekly since spring 1971.

Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania

Ben Franklin’s 1749 pamphlet on the aims of education, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania , led directly to the founding of the Academy of Philadelphia, which has been known since 1791 as the University of Pennsylvania.

In this document, Franklin described his revolutionary and visionary plan to properly educate American youth. He believed in combining “every Thing that is useful, and every Thing that is ornamental.” Franklin spelled out his ideas for a perfect educational institution, addressing buildings, academic life, student health and service to the broader community, among other topics.

As a result of his writings, he was able to recruit 24 prominent citizens as trustees for a new institution of higher education. He persuaded the trustees to acquire George Whitefield’s New Building at Fourth and Arch St. and convert it for educational purposes.  The Trustees drafted a Constitution of the Publick [sic] Academy, in the City of Philadelphia in 1749, codifying Franklin’s ideas into a concrete school charter. In 1751, Franklin’s Academy opened at Fourth and Arch Streets, and four years later the Academy was converted to a College with the authority to confer undergraduate and professional degrees.

You can find the full proposal online ( Almanac January 24, 2006 ).

The Pennsylvania Gazette

The Pennsylvania Gazette was founded by Samuel Keimer in 1728 under the name of The Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences: and Pennsylvania Gazette . Each copy was published with an insert of Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia , or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences .

Bemjamin Franklin and his partner Hugh Meredith purchased the Gazette from Keimer on October 2, 1729. They shortened  the title to The Pennsylvania Gazette and dropped inclusion of the Cyclopaedia . They improved the paper’s appearance, articles and news, and soon the Gazette , published twice a week, became the most successful newspaper in the colonies.

The Gazette was unusual for the time in that it included essays and letters from readers, many of which were written by Franklin himself under pseudonyms.

Franklin used the Gazette to publish his experiments with electricity and to stress his political views. On May 19, 1754, during the French Indian War, Franklin published the first known American political cartoon known as ”Join, or Die.” In the editorial he tried to emphasize the need of the colonies to join forces with Great Britain to defeat the French and Indians. Ironically, one decade later the same cartoon became the symbol of the Revolutionary War. The cartoon shows a snake cut into eight parts, each one labeled with the initials of each American colony.

As Franklin moved up in his political career so did the profits of his business. By the mid-1730s, the Gazette became the most popular newspaper in the colony. In 1748 Franklin retired from business, and he left printing and editing of the Gazette to his partner David Hall. It ceased publication in 1800, 10 years after Franklin’s death.

The title was resurrected by Penn’s alumni magazine in 1918, a nod to the University’s founder and his publishing roots.

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin

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National Historical Publications & Records Commission

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, half-length portrait, engraving from portrait by Benjamin Wilson. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Yale University and the American Philosophical Society

Project Website: https://franklinpapers.yale.edu

Publisher: Yale University Press; Packard Humanities Institute (digital edition) at http://franklinpapers.org

A comprehensive edition of the papers of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of the founders of the United States of America. Franklin had many careers during the course of his life including service as a diplomat, printer, writer, inventor, scientist, lawmaker, and postmaster. At the age of 23, Franklin became a newspaper editor and printer, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette and later creating and publishing Poor Richard’s Almanack under the pseudonym “Richard Saunders.” He was part of the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence and was a delegate at the U.S. Constitution. Franklin also served as the first ambassador to France and helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris (1783) with England. He was a founder of the University of Pennsylvania and late in life petitioned Congress on behalf of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to end slavery.  

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin are also included in Founders Online ( https://founders.archives.gov/about/Franklin ).

Ongoing project, 42 volumes completed of a projected 47 volumes

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Silence Dogood: Benjamin Franklin in The New-England Courant

• Introduction
• The Birth of Silence Dogood (with links to 14 essays)
• Newspaper Publisher & Runaway
• Readings List

Benjamin Franklin—Newspaper Publisher and Runaway

A seemingly innocuous note on page two of The New-England Courant , Number 45, 4-11 June 1722 landed James Franklin in jail. Franklin suggested that colonial officials were lax in the pursuit of pirates: “the Government of the Massachusetts are fitting out a Ship to go after the Pirates … tis thought [the captain] will sail sometime this Month, if Wind and Weather permit.” Infuriated by the implication that they were in collusion with the pirates, the General Court ordered him jailed for remainder of the legislative session. For the three following weeks, sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin became the printer and publisher of the Courant while his older brother sat in jail just across the street.

The last Silence Dogood essay appeared in October 1722, but this did not end either Benjamin’s contributions to the Courant or James’s troubles with the Boston establishment. In January 1723, James Franklin was censured again for mocking religion and offending the magistrates. He was forbidden “to print or Publish the New England Courant, or any other Pamphlet or Paper of the like Nature, except it be first Supervised by the Secretary of this Province.” James Franklin went into hiding and evaded censorship by printing the Courant under the name of his younger brother. A month after his seventeenth birthday, Benjamin Franklin again became a nominal newspaper publisher. He may have written all or part of the explanation of the new management scheme in the 4-11 February 1723 Courant —the first issue to appear under his name. Please see the detail below.

In spite of his early success as a satirist and social critic, the younger Franklin grew restless under the strict control and abuse of his brother and master. In September 1723, with four years remaining in his apprenticeship, Benjamin escaped, first to New York and then to Philadelphia.

Detail of imprint on page two of the 4-11 February 1723 issue of The New-England Courant , with Benjamin Franklin's name shown as publisher. Please see the online presentation of the full newspaper .

History | June 2024

Benjamin Franklin Was the Nation’s First Newsman

Before he helped launch a revolution, Benjamin Franklin was colonial America’s leading editor and printer of novels, almanacs, soap wrappers, and everything in between

Looming large on Philadelphia’s Broad Street, a ten-foot-high statue—a gift to the city from the Pennsylvania Freemasons—shows young Benjamin Franklin at his printing press.

By Adam Smyth

Author, The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives 

Benjamin Franklin was, in his own words, “the youngest son of the youngest son for five Generations back.” Born to a Boston candlemaker who had emigrated from Ecton, England, Franklin became an American printer of national significance: the editor and publisher, at 23, of what became his nation’s most important newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette . An internationally lauded scientist of electricity, he broke through the frosty anteroom of London’s Royal Society—a colonial autodidact!—to become a celebrated fellow. A prolific humorist, he invented a tradition of wry, plain-speaking wit (among his pseudonyms: Margaret Aftercast and Ephraim Censorious).

He was the author of one of the only pre-19th-century American best sellers still read today (his Autobiography ). A Pennsylvanian politician and civic reformer of tireless energy. Founder of the Junto, a self-improvement society; of the Library Company of Philadelphia , the first subscription library in North America; of the American Philosophical Society; of the Union Fire Company; of the University of Pennsylvania. The author of essays on phonetic alphabets, demography, paper currency. A leader of resistance to the 1765 Stamp Act, which imposed taxes on colonial legal documents and printed materials, and, ultimately, to British colonial rule of America. Grand master of the Masons, Pennsylvania. The deputy postmaster general of North America and, eventually, postmaster general of the United States.

He was the ambassador to France . A famous Londoner; a famous Parisian; a famous Pennsylvanian. A celebrity in a time when that concept was only emerging. (Guests at his Fourth of July celebration in Paris, in 1778, stole cutlery as souvenirs.) One of the founding fathers who drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence. The inventor of the Franklin wood-burning stove, the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, a chair that converted into a stepladder, the glass armonica, a new kind of street lamp (with a funnel dispersing the smoke), a rocking chair with a fan, swimming fins, a flexible urinary catheter and a “long arm” for removing objects from high shelves.

The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

From Wynkyn de Worde’s printing of 15th-century bestsellers to Nancy Cunard’s avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.

Do you feel small? Don’t feel small. Franklin knew his faults as much as he cherished his fame: the absent husband away for his wife’s death; the man prone to jettisoning friends who ceased to be useful (former friend John Collins, too often drunk, was sent off to Barbados with a West India captain to work as a tutor: “I never heard of him after,” Franklin recalled); the public moralizer who refused to name the mother of his illegitimate son; the life punctuated by furious arguments and the obsession with public credit and reputation. And—in ways that are becoming increasingly apparent at the time of writing—a man who was actively complicit in the slave trade.

President John Adams hailed Franklin’s benefaction “to his country and mankind,” but described also his personal hypocrisy and vanity: “He has a passion for reputation and fame, as strong as you can imagine, and his time and thoughts are chiefly employed to obtain it.”

The medium Franklin moved in was ink: He waded in it, up to his neck. The printing trade was his start, the profession that made him. While Franklin grew up at a time when printing in colonial America was not yet established, the trade was coiled like a spring, and his timing was right; to a considerable extent, Franklin released it. The first printing press in the British colonies was not established until 1638, when locksmith Stephen Daye sailed from Cambridge, England, to Massachusetts, carrying a press in pieces. In 1722, when Franklin was 16, there were just four cities in Britain’s North American colonies with presses, and only eight printing shops in all: five in Boston and one each in Philadelphia, New York, and New London, Connecticut. The Boston News-Letter started its publication in 1704; it was the only newspaper in the colonies for the next 15 years.

For Franklin, it starts early. In 1717, having alarmed his Puritan father with talk of a life on the seas, 12-year-old Franklin is set up as an apprentice to his elder brother, James, a printer. His brother had served his own apprenticeship in London and returned to Boston to found and edit the New-England Courant , the fourth paper in the colonies (and the third in Boston). As apprentice, Benjamin Franklin does the grunt work—“I was employed to carry the papers through the streets to the customers”—but he is ambitious, and he’s resentful of being held in check by an elder brother. He writes pseudonymous letters under the name of Silence Dogood, a middle-aged widow who mocks aspects of colonial life. Franklin’s letters are a hit; when it’s known that Silence is widowed, men write in with proposals of marriage.

Franklin, who left school at 10, has a powerfully “bookish inclination,” as he would later put it. He feeds off scraps in his father’s “little library” and then whatever volumes he can find. “Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.” His youthful language and conception of the world are forged by Pilgrim’s Progress , Daniel Defoe, Cotton Mather and John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives —that work of Greek and Roman biographies (such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar) conveying, to the young Franklin, the potential scope of a life.

In 1723, Franklin, squirming under his brother’s rule, flees the Boston print shop. He is illegally breaking the terms of his apprenticeship: He is on the run. Arriving disheveled and almost penniless in Philadelphia on October 6, he is bewildered and alone but seized also by the symbolism of a new start in this new place, Pennsylvania Colony having been founded just over 40 years before by William Penn. “I walked up the street, gazing about, till near the market house I met a boy with bread.” His future wife, Deborah, happens to see the down-at-heel 17-year-old and thinks he has “a most awkward ridiculous appearance.” Franklin—“forgetting Boston as much as I could”—finds printing work with English-born Samuel Keimer, a patchy printer who’d spent time in London’s Fleet Prison for debt before trying to start again in Philadelphia. Keimer is a bad poet, too, with a habit of composing verse directly in type, without recourse to pen and paper.

Franklin quickly decides that Keimer (“slovenly to extreme dirtiness” and an “odd fish”) knows “nothing of presswork”—that is, of working the press, in contrast to composing or ordering the metal type. Keimer’s hardware consists, in Franklin’s words, “of an old shattered press and one small, worn-out fount of English.” (“English” is a type size, the equivalent of 14 points on your computer, and, Franklin probably thought, unhelpfully large. “Font,” or occasionally “fount,” from the French fondre , to melt or cast, means a complete set of type, and the design it represents.)

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This article is a selection from the June 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Keimer asks Franklin to finish printing an elegy on a recently deceased young poet and printer’s assistant. This is the first work that Franklin prints in Philadelphia: not a book, but a fragile single leaf on the death of a young man with the impossibly poetic name of Aquila Rose. ( Aquila is Latin for “eagle.”) All known copies disappear by the early 19th century until 200 years later, when a book dealer finds a sheet in a scrapbook and sells it in 2017 to the University of Pennsylvania, where it now resides.

A pattern forms that will be repeated in Franklin’s early career. He vaults past the lesser talents he sees around him—he finds the two established Philadelphia printers “wretched,” Keimer “a mere compositor” and Andrew Bradford “very illiterate”—and catches the eyes of powerful men. Sir William Keith, governor of Pennsylvania, sees a young man of promising parts, and on his urging, Franklin sails to London to gain a printer’s education.

He arrives in London on December 24, 1724, to find Keith has failed to send the letters of support he promised. (“He wished to please everybody, and, having little to give, he gave expectations,” Franklin will later write of his would-be patron.)

Forced on by his ceaseless drive, and managing to hold at bay some if not all calls to the taverns, playhouses and brothels, Franklin secures work at two major London printers, where he learns quickly. At the print shop of Samuel Palmer, he sets the type for the third edition of William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated , an early work of Deism that argues ethics can be implied from the natural world and need not depend on revealed religion.

But Franklin feels he could do better, and he writes “a little metaphysical piece” titled “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,” arguing for the incompatibility of an omnipotent God and human free will. The pamphlet carries no note of author or place of publication. It’s bad: Palmer thinks it “abominable.” Franklin quickly regrets it, burning the copies he can find.

Franklin is being shaped by everything bookish. He borrows secondhand volumes about medicine and religion from “one Wilcox, a bookseller, whose shop was at the next door,” at the sign of the Green Dragon. He moves from Palmer’s print shop to John Watts’: a more prestigious establishment that doesn’t share the printing of single works with other printers. This means, as book historian Hazel Wilkinson notes, that a voracious autodidact like Franklin can read whole works as he prints them, peering closely at the copy and setting type.

In the beer-soaked world of the printing apprentice in 18th-century London, Franklin is the abstemious “Water-American”: “My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.” Franklin thinks this a “detestable custom” and proposes what he calls “some reasonable alterations in their chapel [printing house] laws.” It’s easy to imagine how these rational proposals sound to the ears of Franklin’s fellow apprentices: He urges his peers to leave off their breakfast of “beer and bread and cheese” and to instead eat “hot water-gruel, sprinkled with pepper.” No, thank you!

Franklin, now full of what London can offer, his head eternally generating new schemes (like the establishment, rather implausibly, of a swimming school), sails back to Philadelphia, and within two years, in 1728, he sets up his own print shop in partnership with Hugh Meredith, in a narrow brick house on Market Street. Type arrives from London. Orders trickle and then flow. Three-quarters of William Sewel’s History of the Quakers were printed by Keimer, but Franklin printed the remaining 178 pages plus the title page for each copy. Understanding he has to conspicuously surpass (to the point of humiliating) his rival, Franklin throws everything he has at the printing of his sheets of Sewel’s History . Keimer has been inching his way through printing this book for three years. Franklin composes a sheet a day—which means four large pages—as Meredith works the press.

Franklin, realizing that building “character and credit” is crucial, not only works with irresistible force; he also makes sure his neighbors see this industry. He wears plain clothes and pushes a wheelbarrow full of paper through the streets to convey the impression of honest labor. He wants to be a walking emblem of industry. “I see him still at work when I go home from club,” an eminent neighbor says, “and he is at work again before his neighbors are out of bed.” Virtue is crucial, for Franklin, but so is the chatter about virtue.

The personalities who dominate the early years of Franklin’s printing are soon pushed to the fringes and finally expelled. His partner Hugh Meredith—in Franklin’s judgment, “no compositor, a poor pressman, and seldom sober”—agrees to leave the business for life as a farmer in North Carolina. Franklin pays him £30 and a new saddle. Through drive, intelligence, determination and a variety of low cunning, Franklin is established as the major printer in Philadelphia.

It’s 1730. Franklin is 24. His ambitions can now unfold.

The history of the book is typically organized around big volumes. Books like Johannes Gutenberg’s 1450s Bible, the earliest full-scale work printed from movable metal type on Royal paper measuring 24 by 17 inches per leaf; or the Biblia Polyglotta , printed at Christopher Plantin’s shop in Antwerp, Belgium, between 1568 and 1572, in eight folio volumes, with parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Aramaic, and translations and commentary in Latin, a wonder of mise-en-page; or the great 17-volume statement of Enlightenment thought, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert; or the 435 hand-colored, life-size prints in John James Audubon’s Birds of America .

These titles are deeply unrepresentative of the texts that typically emerged from binders’ offices and printing chapels and that filled the stalls of booksellers and the pockets of readers. The flip side is the world of jobbing printing: the production of cheap, everyday, usually ephemeral texts, the torrent of non-book print that circulated in the world starting in the 1450s. And it still does today. Look around you: the takeaway menu; the supermarket receipt. Packaging is very easily the largest consumer of print in 2024.

Benjamin Franklin was sustained by just this kind of printing work. Since it was cheaper to import large books from London, American printing before about 1740 tended to concentrate on small books, pamphlets, government printing, sermons and ephemera. Franklin had his moments with big volumes. Most notable was his 1744 publication of Cicero’s Cato Major , a 44 B.C. essay on aging and death, translated by James Logan. Seventy-three copies survive today of a print run of 1,000, and it’s often held up with admiration as the best example of colonial printing: printed in Caslon type in black and red on either American-milled or Genoese paper, depending on the copy. Logan’s translation had been circulating in manuscript some years before, and Franklin actively pursued it—rightly perceiving the volume not as a source of financial profit (it wasn’t) but a means to acquire cultural capital in powerful, learned circles.

Two years earlier, in 1742, Franklin had begun printing Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded , Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel about 15-year-old maidservant Pamela Andrews and her attempts to fend off the unwanted advances of her wealthy employer, the enigmatically titled “Mr. B.” Pamela was a huge hit in London, but it took Franklin more than two years to complete. He sold it unstitched—folded, in sheets—for 6 shillings. But by the time Franklin’s edition was ready, the market was awash with cheap imported copies. The lesson he learned—and Franklin was all about lessons learned—was to avoid heavy investment in a single title.

Jobbing work meant printing many copies quickly, moving rapidly from order to order with no thought to posterity. Most of these items lack an imprint and were only ascribed to Franklin, or Franklin and Hall (that is, David Hall, Franklin’s business partner starting around 1748), by the meticulous study of account books and ledgers by Franklin’s pre-eminent bibliographer, C. William Miller. Jobbing commissions were frequent and not labor-intensive. In 1742, Franklin repeatedly suspended work on Pamela to print lottery tickets, licenses for peddlers and public houses, sheriff’s warrants, naval certificates, soap wrappers, medical cures, bookplates for libraries, 1,000 hat bills, Irish Society tickets, and thousands of advertisements.

If we could walk down Second Street, in Philadelphia, in the spring of 1757, past the former offices of Franklin’s rival Andrew Bradford, we might see one of the playbills Franklin and Hall printed for the visiting London Theater Company. (Of 4,300 copies, only two are known to survive today.) Or if in 1761 we turned up Market Street, we might notice, pasted on a lamppost or passing between hands, a copy of instructions for operating a watch printed by Franklin and Hall. One of the features of print that is most often invoked is its capacity to endure, but this was a world of transient texts: of print read, then dropped, or lost, or used to light pipes, or to stop mustard pots, or to wrap pies. Or, with modern toilet paper still awaiting its great movement—it came in 1857—as what the 17th-century English poet Alexander Brome referred to as “bum fodder.”

Franklin concentrated his attention on three kinds of printed text whose import and profit far exceeded Cicero’s Cato Major or Richardson’s Pamela . The first was paper money. Franklin printed money for the governments of Pennsylvania (from 1729 to 1764), New Jersey (1728-46) and Delaware (1734-60), producing nearly 2,500,000 individual paper bills, just a handful of which survive today in public collections.

Paper money was a polarizing issue—farmers and tradesmen liked it; the rich did not—and Franklin contributed to the political controversy by advocating for it in A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency . Franklin also had some clever ideas about the printing process, and from 1739, the verso of his bills carried the impression of leaves to prevent counterfeits: Franklin placed a leaf on a piece of wet fabric and pressed this into smooth plaster, and used this negative impression as the mold for melted metal type. He had a capacity to see what was not there, and then to find it, or invent it. He devised and built a copper-plate press—“the first that had been seen in the country,” he later boasted—to produce these engravings.

Franklin’s second crucial kind of non-book printing was his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette . The Gazette became the most popular paper in the colonies. The sum of 10 shillings bought you a year’s subscription—that’s about 2 pence for every weekly four-page issue—and subscribers grew from a feeble 90 to more than 1,500 in 1748. What is a newspaper at this moment in history? And what qualities did Franklin’s possess that marked it out for success? Franklin’s paper, like most other colonial newspapers, was printed on both sides of one small folio sheet, but it was a better object. As Franklin himself wrote, “Our first papers made a quite different appearance from any before in the province; a better type”—a mix of English, pica and long primer—“and better printed.”

But it was the quality of Franklin’s writing, too, that set the Gazette apart—“one of the first good effects of my having learnt a little to scribble.” Like other papers, Franklin’s Gazette included reports from foreign newspapers, but Franklin increased the local and colonial content, cut tiresome encyclopedia recyclings, and added instead a series of essays, either reprinted from English journals (the London Journal, Spectator or Tatler ), or written by Franklin’s friends or Franklin himself. There were more advertisements. In a way that seems unimaginable amid the information overload of the 21st century, news was often thin on the ground—if the Delaware River froze over and ships didn’t come in, the news was stuck in the ice, too—and Franklin became adept at improvising content, often through the composition of original writing or (greatest of all literary genres) fake reader letters.

The effect was to produce a set of juxtapositions that at first might seem unstable: European and domestic news next to excerpts from Xenophon or The Morals of Confucius ; bawdy anecdotes written by Franklin and inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron , next to letters from readers, many written by Franklin under pseudonyms; an important interview with Andrew Hamilton, speaker of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives, in 1733, alongside mock news that crashes through our modern sense of acceptable limits but that proved hugely popular in its time. (“And sometime last week, we are informed, that one Piles a Fidler, with his wife, were overset in a canoe near Newtown Creek. The good man, ’tis said, prudently secured his fiddle, and let his wife go to the bottom.”) His paper ran the first American political cartoon in 1754 as part of an editorial titled “The Disunited State,” as well as jokes, satirical sketches, mocking accounts of the clergy, obituaries (Franklin’s inclusions did much to establish and popularize the form) and essays motivated by a growing sense of outrage at English rule (the dire conditions of English prisons, and the suffering endured by the Irish as a result of “their griping avaricious landlords”).

In his Autobiography , Franklin wrote, “I considered my newspaper, also, as another means of communicating instruction,” and this commitment played out in essays that often originated in his autodidacts’ club, the Junto. The Gazette was a newspaper, and Franklin an editor, increasingly convinced of the importance of the press as a means for what he called “Zeal for the Publick Good.” This meant the cultivation of informed, civic-minded leaders and represented a commitment that ultimately found expression in Franklin’s successful advocacy of American independence.

But one topic among the Gazette ’s noisy miscellanies is disturbing, if not unexpected, for a modern reader. This is the presence of advertisements for slaves, and Franklin’s role in these as a kind of broker. Recent work by historian Jordan E. Taylor has done much to uncover the intimate links between 18th-century American newspapers and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, articulated through both notices about runaway slaves, and—Taylor’s particular focus—through thousands of advertisements for slaves for sale that “empowered enslavers and strengthened the slave system.” In the 37 years that Franklin published the Gazette , his newspaper printed at least 277 advertisements offering at least 308 slaves for sale. (And these are conservative counts.)

In the 1740s in particular, Franklin’s Gazette was the crucial site for these advertisements. On March 10, 1743, the Gazette ran an advertisement for “A Negro man 22 years of age, of uncommon strength and activity.” (Advertisements typically denude slaves of anything as individuating as character and use instead stark identity—categories such as wench, woman, lad, boy, fellow, man, girl or child, with few details save age, health, sex and skills.) The advertisement instructed: “Any person that wants such a one may see him by enquiring of the printer hereof.” That was the clause that typically signed off these advertisements, and it implicates absolutely the newspaper printer in this slave-trade economy. Franklin is here the middleman, linking buyers and sellers and oiling the wheels of a slave economy, the advertisements serving as informal proxies for the auction or merchant firm. In an “enquire of the printer” advertisement in the Gazette for 1733, Franklin offered a “very likely Negro woman aged about 30 years” with a son “aged about 6 years, who … will be sold with his mother, or by himself, as the buyer pleases.”

Franklin’s brother James had also advertised slaves in his New-England Courant . Learning from his brother’s example, Franklin was the first printer outside Boston to broker slaves regularly through his newspaper, and his commercial success (but moral failure) catalyzed similar advertisements in newspapers in New York City, Baltimore and Providence, Rhode Island. Franklin later in life was known as a vocal and influential abolitionist, but as Taylor notes, “For most of the 18th century, to be a newspaper printer was to be a slave trader.”

Yet another publication at the heart of Franklin’s success was his Poor Richard series of almanacs. In publishing almanacs, Franklin was following the scent of the best seller. Almanacs compressed the world into miniature form. They were cheap, small, eminently portable books that provided readers with monthly calendars; astrological and meteorological prognostications; details of fairs and journeys between towns; chronologies of history; medical advice; a “zodiacal body” anatomizing the influence of the planets on parts of the body; and more. Thomas Nashe in 1596 said selling almanacs was “readier money than ale and cakes.”

The first edition of Franklin’s Poor Richard was printed in 1732; it sold for 5 pence a copy—or 3 shillings and 6 pence for a dozen—and contained, as the title page declares, “The Lunations, Eclipses, Judgment of the Weather, Spring Tides, Planets Motions & mutual Aspects, Sun and Moon’s Rising and Setting, Length of Days, Time of High Water, Fairs, Courts, and observable Days.” It was a huge commercial hit—“vending annually near ten thousand,” according to Franklin, in a colony with a 1730s population of around 50,000, with “scarce any neighborhood in the province being without it.” The almanac was a perfect form for Franklin, with an inclusive sweep of contents and a particularly Franklinian combination of big sales with plain-talking humility.

Franklin used the cheapest of books to educate a vast reading public toward his idea of virtue. In the 26th and final edition of Poor Richard , for 1758, Franklin gathered about 100 aphorisms and wove them into the speech of “Father Abraham” (“a plain clean old man, with white locks”). This piece of writing, variously known as “Father Abraham’s Speech,” “The Way to Wealth” or “La Science du Bonhomme Richard,” is Franklin’s most widely reprinted text. Franklin himself was proudly aware of its influence. In the Autobiography, he wrote: “The piece, being universally approved, was copied in all the newspapers of the Continent; reprinted in Britain on a broadside, to be stuck up in houses; two translations were made of it in French, and great numbers bought by the clergy and gentry, to distribute gratis among their poor parishioners and tenants.”

In it, Franklin reports how he overheard one Father Abraham (invented by Franklin) dispensing wisdom he had gathered from reading Poor Richard almanacs (written by Franklin):

Sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life. ‘Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright,’ as Poor Richard says. ‘But dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of,’ as Poor Richard says. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep! forgetting that ‘The sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave,’ as Poor Richard says.

The collective wisdom was the unsurprising philosophy that hard work, thrift and moderation produced both material comforts and spiritual salvation.

Franklin’s immersion in book culture was so complete that he repeatedly imagined his life, and even his physical self, as a printed book. As a young man in 1728, Franklin composed his own epitaph, which—eternal self-promoter that he was, even in the image of death—he was fond of copying out for friends:

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 believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and Amended By the Author. He was born January 6, 1706. Died 17­—

His actual gravestone, which he shares with his wife, reads simply: BENJAMIN AND DEBORAH FRANKLIN 1790.

Adapted from The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Adam Smyth. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC., a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. New York, NY, U.S.A. All rights reserved.

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Adam Smyth, an English professor at Oxford, is the author of The Book-Makers .

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Franklin and the Free Press

Arthur Milikh

Former Associate Director, B. Kenneth Simon Center

Many Americans today have an ambivalent stance toward the free press. On the one hand, nearly all citizens assent to the idealism that originally justified its creation: We value the discovery and circulation of the truth, and the prevention of governmental tyranny. As such, the press is meant to serve both intellectual and political liberty. Yet, on the other hand, few citizens directly experience this idealism, feeling instead the press's forcefulness, flattery, vehemence, and sometimes fanaticism — often akin to warfare directed at their minds and sentiments. Rather than heading off intellectual and political dogma, the press often creates or disseminates it. A great disparity thus exists between the press's ideals and its practice today.

As originally understood by many of America's founders, the open circulation of the truth through the press would serve both society and the individual. As Thomas Jefferson explains,

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press.

In addition, many of America's founders also understood the press as an essential bulwark against government for the securing of individual rights. Jefferson, again, summarizes:

I am...for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.

The press, and especially the mass press, is a means by which to enforce accountability and responsibility in the government, and to thereby compel government's virtue. Moreover, newspapers even help "maintain civilization," as Alexis de Tocqueville observes in  Democracy in America . By giving democratic citizens common opinions, common sympathies, and a resource for common action, newspapers can help prevent the individuation and isolation of citizens to which democracy disposes them.

These idealistic aims markedly diverge from the mass press's actual behavior and its effects on republicanism. And that is not a new problem. During America's founding, as historian Leonard Levy observes, an "extraordinary partisanship, vitality, and invective had become ordinary" in the press. Indeed, today's press has similar inclinations, often imposing onto the public its taste for derision and ridicule, which it substitutes for depth and thoughtfulness. Examples abound, but consider the  Huffington Post 's editor's note, added to nearly every article referencing Donald Trump during the 2016 election:

Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

Not stopping at public figures, the press also satisfies its penchant for crushing the will of private citizens and groups through shame and fear, making them feel their smallness and brittleness. Its behavior, in sum, often discloses the press's tacit opinion concerning America's moral hierarchy: that the press is not merely a fourth estate, but the judge of would-be rulers, and therefore the master, or at least the kingmaker. Yet it remains unclear whether the press rules with the spirit of humanity and prudence, or whether it is animated by the desire to dominate the public mind. It frequently vacillates between these extremes.

By contrast to the early Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin had no illusions about the character of the press in America. Few serious thinkers have reflected with as much clarity on the nature of the press as Franklin. And no other thinker has had so much experience and commercial success in it. A lifelong defender of the freedom of the press, Franklin was nevertheless not uncritical of its effects.

Franklin's short but rich essay, "An Account of the Supremest Court of Judicature in Pennsylvania, viz., The Court of the Press," written a year before his death in 1790, lays out a comprehensive analysis of the press: its effects on politics and the democratic mind, its mode of rule, and the origins of its power. His study is, in a sense, an examination of the effectual truth of the principle underlying freedom of the press. His reflections are urgently needed today.

The press, Franklin argues, unlike any other republican institution, has a power that does not fall under any constitutional check. It is motivated to act viciously by its very principle (created to attack dogma, false knowledge, and political corruption), though in practice it is neither limited nor moderated by either its own idealism or by any institution. While the press claims to rule like a court — passing all things before its judgment — it may rule tyrannically because it is liberated from considerations of justice or precedent. Thus unchecked, the press can subvert rational habits of mind among citizens and reverence for the law while flattering public resentments and antagonizing citizens' pride. Franklin was consciously witnessing the birth of a new class, a kind of press corps, created by this new principle, and his assessment of the human content of this class is contrasted with the powers it wields. For Franklin, a free press must be checked by a vigilant and jealous public, which he hopes to energize against abuses of liberty.

Franklin's literary style differs from that of the other founders. As University of Chicago professor Ralph Lerner has observed, Franklin often "works on us through indirection and insinuation. But he leaves it to  us  to catch his drift." In his analysis of the press, Franklin tacitly points out both the problems with our idealism (so as to soften their deleterious effects) and the conflicts in our motives and hopes (so as to encourage a liberating skepticism). He does so with a view to protecting democratic self-respect while exposing and ridiculing the ability of the press to undermine the host democracy's institutions.

POWER AND SUBVERSION

In order to get at Franklin's perspective on the press in America, we need to take a step back to get a sense of its powers. According to Franklin, the press's powers resemble those of a "court," a term he uses in several ways. In the first sense, the press resembles a conventional court of law: It has the power to "judge, sentence, and condemn to infamy" citizens both public and private. The press even carries out court-like powers by conducting what look like hearings and inquiries. And since in a republic none can claim superiority to the law, "all persons" and "all inferior courts" are subject to its jurisdiction and judgment. In this way, the press claims to imitate the majesty, objectivity, and moral authority of a court of law.

The press does these things, however, without being "governed by any of the rules of common courts of law." Unlike a legal court, the press is not part of the judicial system and is therefore not subject to the institutional checks that moderate political power and authority. While the claims to equity and justice authorize such powers in a court of law, the press is neither restrained by legal precedent nor by evidentiary standards that assure the maintenance of those claims. Thus, for example, rather than relying on witnesses sworn to truthfulness, it may use anonymous sources, who suffer no consequences for dishonesty. In fact, as it often rules through mere "accusation," no limits seem to exist on the nature or extent of the accusations, just as there are no limits on who can be accused.

The press's proceedings occur "with or without inquiry or hearing,  at the court's discretion " (emphasis in original). The press acts on its own initiative, rather than through citizen or executive complaint. It can pick and choose its own cases — selectively closing its eyes to some, while opening them to others — not with a view to satisfying justice or the law, but in accordance with its own prejudices or interests. Since the press follows its own discretion, its operations and methods are not fully knowable, and one therefore cannot appeal to it rationally. The press is conscious of this supremacy, Franklin contends.

The press also resembles a religious court, Franklin half-jokes, the "Spanish Court of Inquisition," in its moral authority to force and shape belief through fear and intimidation. Like the Spanish Inquisition, the press enforces its pre-eminence by reaching into individual souls and compelling belief. When the press acts against individuals and institutions:

The accused is allowed no grand jury to judge of the truth of the accusation before it is publicly made, nor is the Name of the Accuser made known to him, nor has he an Opportunity of confronting the Witnesses against him; for they are kept in the dark, as in the Spanish Court of Inquisition.

The open presentation of evidence of wrongdoing corroborated by facts shows respect for rational and transparent procedures that embody the spirit of justice. Such proceedings presume citizens' intellectual capacity to be convinced by the force of facts and arguments. With the Inquisition, to the contrary, assent is founded on fear and intimidation, as one would expect from despotism. Here there is darkness, mystery, and anxious anticipation. In its practice, Franklin contends, the press contradicts the principles by which it justifies its authority: It claims that belief stems from the free and rational persuasion of the mind, but in its deeds it insists that belief should be compelled through its own powers of insinuation, intimidation, and accusation.

The press has a despotic inclination for making citizens experience its overwhelming power: It takes an "honest" and "good" citizen who, through what is almost a miraculous transformation, "in the same Morning" is judged and condemned by the press to be a " Rogue  and a  Villain " (emphasis in the original). Its rapidity and forcefulness appear to be almost irresistible. Though the press does not burn individuals at the stake, nonetheless, like tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition, Franklin sees in the press the capacity for fanaticism originating in complete confidence in its ability to judge.

This unrestrained power can even willfully direct public opinion against the law itself, perhaps despite the public's interests. We witness one contemporary example of this power. Whatever one's view of immigration policy might be, the press, by relentlessly calling "illegal aliens" "undocumented immigrants" for years, has subtly altered public sympathies against would-be enforcers of the law. The press can make the law appear weak and its authority questionable in comparison to its own power.

Although prepared to subvert the law at times, the press relies on the law's protection when using it for its own advantages:

[I]f an officer of this court receives the slightest check for misconduct in this his office, he claims immediately the rights of a free citizen by the constitution, and demands to know his accuser, to confront the witnesses, and to have a fair trial by a jury of his peers.

In sum, the press sometimes reveres and sometimes subverts the law; sometimes it guides public opinion toward the law, sometimes against it. But the press always seems to know its interest in maintaining its superiority over the public mind. 

SUPERIORITY AND MEDIOCRITY  

Franklin asks us to contrast this remarkable power with the character of the members of the class wielding it. The freedom of the press creates a new human type that dominates the liberal-democratic landscape to this day. This new type is "appointed to this great Trust" of guiding the public intellect, deciding upon citizens' fates, and sometimes even determining the future of the nation.

This new class, Franklin notes, is open to anyone. The officers of the press corps are not appointed by an executive authority on the basis of their virtue. Nor is the press a hereditary institution governed by and therefore subordinated to considerations of honor or tradition. (Franklin is not in favor of such alternatives, of course.) As such, he observes that under the new democratic conditions, this class is self-created, so to speak:

[A]ny Man who can procure Pen, Ink, and Paper, with a Press, and a huge pair of Blacking Balls, may commissionate himself; and his court is immediately established in the plenary Possession and exercise of its rights.

The effect of this, for Franklin, is the creation of a class requiring neither "Ability, Integrity, [nor] Knowledge." Surely these qualities sometimes exist — look at Franklin! — but just as surely they are not necessary prerequisites. Franklin chooses his words carefully, subtly leading us to ask whether, in practice, these virtues often become their opposites: Sensationalism will often be mistaken for ability, contempt for all those inferior to it mistaken for integrity, and pedantry mistaken for knowledge. Franklin suggests that the public mind may come to imitate this confusion of virtue and vice under the press's influence.

This class of unelected opinion makers is also unified by a specific motive, Franklin contends. It is a community that shares the "privilege of accusing and abusing the other four hundred and ninety-nine parts at their pleasure." These numbers are invented, of course, but Franklin is pointing to the hidden motive unifying this community — the mutual indulgence in feigned superiority, the pleasure of punishing, and a taste for contempt for one's fellow citizens and for would-be rulers. Can one serve the public if one has contempt for it?

Furthermore, Franklin observes that the powers granted to the press, through the principle authorizing its existence, often culminate in the appearance of principled courage. Feeling its superiority to individual citizens or other public institutions, the press rebels against inquiries into its authority and the modes of its rule: "For, if you make the least complaint of the  judge's  conduct, he daubs his blacking balls in your face wherever he meets you." What at first glance may seem like dignified courage in carrying out its duties is perhaps merely the protection of its own superiority coupled with vengeance against those questioning it. 

Indeed, the press, Franklin argues, may use its capacity to "[mark] you out for the odium of the public, as an  enemy to the liberty of the press ," in order to suppress dissent against its authority. This has the effect of crushing the voice of reason in citizens along with the self-confidence necessary for them to voice their thoughts publicly. Franklin tacitly suggests that, over time, citizens may lose their habits of reason through this kind of rule.

One barely needs to add that this class serves for its own "Emolument." Franklin draws our attention to a dual unity in motive: Satisfying the pleasures of ruling citizens and indulging its own taste for contempt become financially lucrative under these new democratic circumstances. In an era of egalitarianism, most human beings are born without genuine wealth, the security of inherited social class and standing, or special destiny. Individuals therefore to a greater extent than ever before  become  their professions.

It's important to point out that during Franklin's time, owners of printing presses printed all kinds of things for profit: newspapers, books, and pamphlets, encompassing every subject, sometimes including the printing of the libelous and scurrilous as well. Our newspapers no longer do precisely this, of course (though it is subject to debate whether appearing to praise oneself for alleged objectivity, as newspapers do today, while printing what is essentially partisan, has polluted the moral and intellectual waters more than when, as during Franklin's time, all citizens knew that the press was for hire). Nevertheless, the problem Franklin draws our attention to is still with us. When intermixed with the self-serving powers to command public opinion, merely aspiring to uphold a principle for one's livelihood rarely results in independence of mind or judgment. In fact, the appearance of acting on principle can be lucrative.

As Franklin makes clear, it is not entirely obvious whether the press's belief in its guiding principles is sincere, as it does not apply them equally to all other individuals or institutions. Today, for example, much of the press class is in favor of campaign-finance laws that regulate the expression of candidates, parties, and interest groups, but is uninterested in applying similar regulations to itself. Taken to its logical extreme, this may suggest that this class has a secret motive, aiming to limit free speech by making only its own speech acceptable. Its unwillingness to subject itself to the same standards of law and regulations as other authorities is suspect.

HUMAN WEAKNESS

Franklin also sees in the press a tendency to deform and undermine the idealism necessary for republicanism. Republicanism presumes that citizens are willing, at times, to sacrifice a great deal for liberty, like the signers of the Declaration of Independence who mutually pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Yet it is difficult to love liberty if it is experienced as moral chaos, which the press can infuse into democratic life. In fact, Franklin fears that political liberty, as redefined by the press, may come to mean the "Liberty of affronting, calumniating, and defaming one another." In such an environment, liberty may come to be experienced as burdensome, tedious, and ugly, encouraging citizens to "cheerfully consent to exchange [their]  Liberty  of Abusing others for the  Privilege  of not being abus'd [themselves]."

In theory, the freedom of the press presumes that what is most crucially common to all human beings is each individual's rational faculty, on the basis of which modern republicanism is created and defended. Thus, for Franklin, among the highest manifestations of the freedom of the press is the "Liberty of discussing the Propriety of Public Measures and political opinions." By this definition, he seems to mean the publication of works like the Federalist Papers (which appeared as a series of newspaper columns) or his own writings — though he is of course aware that this standard is rarely achieved in practice. Such writings elevate and deepen citizens. One should contrast Franklin's understanding to the recently developed public view of speech which considers dignified any spasmodic effusion of half-formed feeling, obscenity, or agitation subversive of republicanism.

These powers to abuse rather than bolster republican idealism and rational habits of character, Franklin contends, find their "natural Support" in human resentment. Resentment, a "depravity" of the human character, is a powerful though hidden source of the press's power over the mind. Franklin quotes Juvenal's  Satires  to explain:

There is a Lust in Man no Charm can tame,  Of loudly publishing his Neighbour's Shame.  On Eagle's Wings immortal Scandals fly,  While virtuous Actions are but born and die.

Resentment is an ugly, double-sided passion. It leads one to assert moral superiority over others, thereby demanding superior desert for oneself, while simultaneously desiring that harm befall others so as to protect one's own inflated self-appraisal. As Franklin politely puts it, "Whoever feels pain in hearing a good character of his neighbour, will feel a pleasure in the reverse." Resentment does not even depend on one's own faring well, for one can be resentful and at the same time prosperous.

Franklin is being neither flippant nor pedantic regarding the central importance of resentment. He is pointing to the deeper problem which resentment reveals — human confusion about desert. As Jerry Weinberger has argued in  Benjamin Franklin Unmasked , among the central premises of Franklin's philosophical thought is that human beings want more for themselves than they deserve. This desire deludes our judgment, distorts our opinion of ourselves, and to a great extent accounts for the human comedy of errors. It also accounts for our jealous hatred of others' success.

This passion, in conflict with republicanism, is flattered by the press, Franklin argues. In amplifying and dignifying resentment, the press cultivates its own popularity and reach. There are always many "who, despairing to rise into distinction by their virtues, are happy if others can be depressed to a level with themselves." In flattering the public's resentment, the press blinds it to its own mediocrity, Franklin suggests. Today, this psychology follows a predictable pattern: tacitly or overtly belittling or ridiculing human greatness, cutting it down to a digestible size, while exposing and laughing at private vices — or, alternatively, encouraging indulgence in feigned great moral feeling without the requirement of sacrifice or sincerity. The steady stream of examples of baseness, greed, and dishonesty teach the lesson that such individuals are no better than you — in fact, they are worse, because you can look down upon them. By implicitly calling resentment high-mindedness in flattering its audience, the press often both ridicules virtue and avoids making mediocrity appear contemptible.

Franklin sees the formation of a community of mutual flattery between the press's desire to rule and the public's resentment. On the one hand, fostering resentments maintains the press's power over the public — for in satisfying the public in such a way, it is allowed to govern the public's tastes and passions. And the public, on the other hand, in showing its gratitude for not being targeted or undone by the press, redoubles rewards by showing obliging subordination.

Thus, in a final sense of the press's playing the role of a "court," it is akin to a monarchical court, for it serves a monarch — the public. Yet in serving its monarch, does the press play the role of the French revolutionary, re-enacting the guillotine by beheading individuals or institutions in order to satisfy the public's resentments? Oddly, the press, originally conceived as an essential means by which to preserve political and intellectual freedom, may become a mechanism through which the public oppresses itself.  In suggesting that the lust to satisfy resentment guides "such minds, as have not been mended by religion, nor improved by good education," Franklin is goading us to consider more closely the kind of education he is providing his readers, which can correct this natural defect. His wit makes us aware of our defects, while his humor attempts to shame us out of them.

LIBERTY OF PRIDE AND HONOR

Is it possible to correct for these abuses of the free press? Unlike the other powers enumerated in the Constitution, Franklin observes that the press has no corresponding check against it:

[S]o much has been written and published on the federal Constitution, and the necessity of checks in all other parts of good government has been so clearly and learnedly explained, I find myself so far enlightened as to suspect some check may be proper in this part also; but I have been at a loss to imagine any that may not be construed an infringement of the sacred  liberty of the press .

Franklin jokes that the only check he can find is the " liberty of the cudgel ." In other words, the press is free to print as it pleases so long as citizens are free to go to an authentic offender "and break his head." Franklin's ludicrous solution points to a contradiction in republican laws.

Self-government presumes a certain measure of self-respect and pride among citizens. Republicanism depends on the conviction that individuals have the psychological and physical ability to order their lives and to legislate for themselves and their community on the basis of their judgment.

Individual pride, of course, cannot be given full reign in a republic, nor can its demands be fully satisfied. When carried to its extremes, pride points to absurd self-importance and tyranny. In republics, individual pride must be restrained to some degree for the protection of others' rights, for too much of it can destroy a republic. Yet republican law puts man in an odd state: On the one hand, man desires the full security of his pride and therefore his reputation — loving his reputation perhaps more than his life, as Franklin observes — while the law constrains his ability to defend it fully against its attackers. Defending one's self-respect, Franklin implies, is perhaps a right as much as any other. On the other hand, however, "the right [of the press] of abusing seems to remain in full force, the laws made against it being rendered ineffectual by the  liberty of the press " (emphasis in original). Citizens cannot fully protect their self-respect while the press is given broad authorization to abuse it. For Franklin, the effect of this may be the weakening of citizens' pride and the diminishing of their attachment to self-government, which correspondingly grows the space for the press's influence over the mind. 

What is to be done, according to Franklin? He jokes, "[L]eave the liberty of the press untouched, to be exercised in its full extent, force, and vigor; but to permit the  liberty of the cudgel  to go with it  pari passu " (emphasis in the original). Franklin wants the vindication of republican pride — not just because he honors such sentiments, but because he thinks that such a counterbalance or check, like the checks employed in other parts of the Constitution, is necessary against the press's powers, too. In fact, the public can unite if it is affronted, " as it ought to be ," by the press's abuses (emphasis in original). The public can show its "moderation," he jokes, by "tarring and feathering, and tossing them in a blanket." Franklin is of course not advocating such actions, but he does want the public to recall its power to humiliate.

Franklin concludes by emphasizing the need to secure citizens' reputations:

If, however, it should be thought that this proposal of mine may disturb the public peace, I would then humbly recommend to our legislators to take up the consideration of both liberties, that of the  press , and that of the  cudgel , and by an explicit law mark their extent and limits; and, at the same time that they secure the person of a citizen from  assaults , they would likewise provide for the security of his  reputation .

Balancing both liberties, for Franklin, ought to be among the highest considerations of legislators and statesmen — the liberty of the press and the liberty to defend one's pride. One wonders whether Franklin here explicitly means only libel laws, or is also referring to citizens who are jealous of their liberty and who know their power. 

The press exists as an institution to protect and strengthen republicanism, resting on the idea that human beings and public institutions must be made good, or, as we say today, made responsible. But the press can also exceed its limits, becoming over-powerful and therefore no longer serving the interests of the society that hosts it. Franklin's solutions to the problems created by the press are partly comical, both because they are exaggerated and because relatively little, it seems, can be done about the effectual truth of this principle.

To some degree, the conservative oppositional press begun a few generations ago has addressed what is among the worst diseases of a republic: the centralization of the press. As Tocqueville observes:

When a large number of organs of the press come to advance along the same track, their influence becomes almost irresistible in the long term, and public opinion, struck always from the same side, ends by yielding under their blows.

The press's powers (as analyzed by Franklin), combined with centralization, may be lethal to a republic. In this regard, America's conservative oppositional press — which has no parallel anywhere else in the Western world — has greatly contributed to breaking up centralization. Yet having guided us away from the shoal of centralization, the oppositional press has created new problems.

With the help of new media technologies, the oppositional press has ushered into existence the parallel universes that American citizens now construct for themselves by choosing which press better flatters their prejudices. Alarmingly, citizens who inhabit each of these monolithic realities are more than merely at partisan ends of a political spectrum — they have become to some degree almost different kinds of beings, given the extent of their differences in sentiments, passions, habits of character, and tastes. Indeed, the new multiplicity of news sources, despite some obviously healthy effects, can create a greater and greater cacophony of similar sentiments while reducing genuine thoughtfulness. This need not, however, be our nation's final situation.

The quality of our press will decide the fate of our civilization. We might try to follow Franklin's general lessons in order to facilitate public discourse: bolstering citizen pride as a means of preventing the press's excesses; diminishing the public's resentment by ridiculing rather than flattering it; all while recalling that the press must serve republicanism rather than weaken it. For this to be possible, the press must renew its self-understanding. And the public ought to demand it. On the side of the press, this would mean a new devotion to elevating political debate — while consciously avoiding self-flattery, dogmatism, and partisan dishonesty — about important political questions facing the nation. On the side of the public, this means deepening its understanding of the stakes to the nation, and showing a new willingness to speak freely and rationally, despite the obstacles of political correctness or fear of intimidation.

Finally, lessons in moderating the press's power and reach may be seen in Franklin's own activity. Perhaps lampooning and parodying the press — that is, exposing it, its inferior personages, and its interests, through film, books, and on stage, as Franklin himself did — can liberate the democratic mind to some degree from its power. Also following Franklin, we see that democratic resentment — though exploited by the press — can be harnessed and directed toward useful ends. For example, resentment can despise and envy the great, or it can satisfy itself through the prosecution of corruption, both governmental and that of the press itself.

This piece originally appeared in National Affairs

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Founding Forger: How Benjamin Franklin Mastered the Art of Fake News

Accounts of Benjamin Franklin ’s years in Paris describe a celebrated bon vivant, wily diplomat and aging lion prowling on behalf of the cause of liberty. None of these labels negates any other, but in focusing on them chroniclers almost always leave out the clandestine aspects of Franklin’s activities abroad. If the popular bespectacled grandfatherly image of Franklin, a genial gentleman given to aphorisms and electrical experimentation , seems at odds with the intricacies of espionage, all the better. Spycraft is never more effective than when practitioners seem unlikely to be engaged in it.

Arriving in Paris in December 1776, Franklin remained in the French capital until 1785. Operating from a well-appointed residence in Passy, a wealthy Parisian suburb, he included in his multifarious efforts on behalf of the American project the printing of official documents as well as surreptitious production of propaganda and misinformation.

SPYmaster Franklin

Franklin, of course, was no stranger to intrigue. As one of the original members of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, established in 1776 by the Continental Congress to communicate with sympathetic Britons and other Europeans, he was an early and active participant in the emerging nation’s first spy organization. And he had done clandestine printing. In Philadelphia he produced leaflets, folded to hold tobacco, incorporating a surreptitious message aimed at Hessian troops. The leaflets, distributed among the Germans’ camps, promised a prosperous and peaceful life in the new nation to mercenaries who deserted working for the British side.

There is also reason to credit Franklin with the mysterious document known as the “Sale of the Hessians Letter.” Dated Feb. 18, 1777, the purported communique ostensibly is from a fictitious Count de Schaumbergh in Germany to an equally fictitious Baron Hohendorf, supposedly the commander of Hessian troops in North America. The message, in French, requests that Hohendorf see to it that more Hessians die in combat or from denial of medical treatment to enhance the flow of mercenary revenue from Britain. 

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FRANKLIN: PASSY FIST

Franklin, upon setting up housekeeping at Passy, quickly acquired a printing press and related equipment. Years of experience as a printer and publisher had schooled him not only in the skills those roles demanded but also the power of the printed word. Parisian print shops would have eagerly turned out whatever documents the colonial envoy required, but Franklin, who apprenticed as a printer in youth and mastered the trade, insisted on overseeing the printing himself and soon had brought his young grandson Benjamin “Benny” Franklin Bache into the operation.

His press, one of the finest available, was largely outfitted by the Fournier family’s type foundry in Paris. In addition to standard typefaces, the Fourniers supplied a typeface — Le Franklin— designed and cast for his exclusive use. Franklin also acquired type from British foundry Caslon, buying typefaces through a front company in the Netherlands. So that he could create his own typefaces, he also outfitted his shop at Passy with a small foundry, and for a while employed a multilingual compositor.          

Franklin’s insistence on having his own press arose in part from his duty to produce passport blanks, loan certificates and other sensitive official documents. Maintaining end-to-end control over these items discouraged attempts at forgery. However, he also used his press and his skills to publish witty satirical essays he composed in French and English. These Bagatelles, as he called them, numbered a dozen or so, and went to close friends. The best known may be “ A Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout, ” followed by the “ Morals of Chess .”

 In one notable instance, Franklin did rely on a French printer. In 1783, he arranged through a nobleman, Louis-Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, to have the 13 American colonies’ constitutions translated into French for printing and distribution in his host country. In addition to offering French officials a preview of what the U.S. Constitution would likely include, the gesture marked an early appearance by the Great Seal of the United States, prominent on the volume’s title page. Since the document was to be circulated openly, Franklin went through official channels and hired Paris printer M. Pirres to print the edition. In June 1783, Franklin had the finished copies bound in an assortment of lavish calfskin and Moroccan leather covers. The first circulated went to King Louis XVI and his family.

The gesture seems to have gone over well. In a Dec. 25, 1783, letter to Thomas Mifflin, president of Congress, Franklin wrote, “It has been well taken, and has afforded Matter of Surprise to many, who had conceived mean Ideas of the State of Civilization in America, and could not have expected so much political Knowledge and Sagacity had existed in our Wildernesses. And from all Parts I have the satisfaction to hear, that our Constitutions in general are much admired. I am persuaded that this Step will not only tend to promote the Emigration to our Country of substantial People from all Parts of Europe by the numerous Copies I shall disperse, but will facilitate our future Treaties with foreign Courts, who could not before know what kind of Government and People they had to treat with.”

Revolutionary Fake News

Franklin’s masterpiece of disinformation and covert influence came late in the Revolution, when he forged a newspaper supplement whose contents effectively but falsely alleged that Native Americans, at the British army’s behest, committed atrocities against American rebels. The 1782 forgery represented itself as “A Supplement to The Boston Independent Chronicle.”

Franklin’s fake, measuring 14 5/16 inches by 9 1/8 inches, was a broadsheet in size and design. Posing as an addendum to a legitimate edition of an actual and widely read newspaper, the bogus two-pager incorporated phony real estate advertisements and a notice of a “stolen or stray Bay Horse.” These quotidian items, staples of the form, lent credibility to the main content.

Franklin also indulged in literary trickery intended to enhance his creation’s credibility. The field report, ostensibly written by “Captain Samuel Gerrish” of the New England militia, incorporates a letter by British agent James Craufurd to Colonel Haldimand, governor of Canada, detailing the Indian atrocity. Craufurd, purported to have been captured by Patriot troops, describes the scalps of men, women and children taken by Native American allies of the Crown. In an appropriately dispassionate military voice, the letter says that goods captured included “eight Packs of Scalps, cured, dried, hooped and painted, with all the Indian triumphal Marks.”

The Crauford missive also presents what purports to be a transcribed translation of a Native American speech paying tribute to King George and presenting the monarch with the grisly cargo. The three narratives’ specificity bolsters one another’s believability, suggesting this may not have been the first such macabre tribute the king had received.

The false story’s recitation of gruesome details sought to attract, repulse and outrage European readers and thereby influence peace talks with Britain, then entering a crucial phase. In an aside in the “Gerrish” letter Franklin introduces another character, a “Lieutenant Fitzgerald.” Granted leave to return to Ireland on a family matter, the fictional Fitzgerald has volunteered to detour to London with the scalps and “… hang them all up in some dark Night on the Trees in St. James’s Park, where they could be seen from the King and Queen’s Palaces in the Morning …”            

In addition to his canny choice of format, Franklin took care to salt his fiction with familiar references. Indirectly invoking the French and Indian War of the 1750s, he had his characters contrast “Indian savagery” and the code of “civilized warfare,” echoing contemporaneous news reports and post-war memoirs. The passage also fit European assumptions regarding North America as a wild and untamed land.

As with all good propaganda and disinformation, the material played to existing beliefs and added accurate details. In composing his falsehoods Franklin ignored his own enlightened and moderate view of Native Americans, which he expressed in “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America” (1784), also printed at Passy.

The flip side of the broadsheet was a letter purportedly written by American naval commander John Paul Jones to British Adm. Sir Joseph Yorke, then serving as ambassador at the Hague. “Jones” was protesting treatment of American seamen imprisoned by the British for piracy, a cause genuinely close to Franklin’s heart. At least some of the passports that Franklin printed were slipped to sailors who had escaped British prisons and reached France. And Franklin had funded a London operative smuggling escaped seaman out of England. A one-sided early run of the fake broadsheet, sans the “Jones” letter, was printed but does not appear to have been circulated.

 “A pirate makes war for the sake of rapine. This is not the kind of war I am engaged in against England,” “Jones” writes to “Yorke.” “Our’s is a war in defence of liberty … the most just of all wars; and of our properties , which your nation would have taken from us, without our consent, in violation of our rights, and by an armed force. Yours, therefore, is a war of rapine ; of course, a piratical war: and those who approve of it, and are engaged in it, more justly deserve the name of pirates, which you bestow on me.”

Getting the fake news out

Franklin did not personally distribute the Chronicle forgery but relied on credible but unsuspecting acquaintances to circulate it. Ideally, his agents would get the supplement to editors at trusted publications whose reputations would enhance the report’s credibility. Franklin sent copies to John Adams, now an envoy in Amsterdam, and John Jay, stationed in Madrid. Additional copies went to an American operative, Charles William Frédéric Dumas, a German national of Swiss parentage and trusted friend of Franklin’s who operated in Amsterdam, and James Hutton, a prominent congregant of the Moravian church in London.

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 In an April 22, 1782, letter to Adams sent with a copy of the fake broadsheet, Franklin strongly hinted at the document’s true nature.

“I send enclosed a paper, of the Veracity of which I have some doubt, as to the Form, but none as to the Substance, for I believe the Number of People actually scalp’d in this murdering war by the Indians to exceed what is mentioned in invoice,” he wrote. “These being substantial Truths the Form is to be considered as Paper and Packthread. If it were republish’d in England it might make them a little asham’d of themselves.”

A May 3,1782, letter to Dumas also suggests the Gerrish report’s veracity and purpose. 

“Enclosed I send you a few copies of a paper that places in a striking light, the English barbarities in America, particularly those committed by the savages at their instigation,” Franklin wrote. “The route may perhaps not be genuine, but the substanceis truth; the number of our people of all kinds and ages, murdered and scalped by them being known to exceed that of the invoice. Make any use of them you may think proper to shame your Anglomanes, but do not let it be known through what hands they come.”

Dumas was a particularly good choice as a collaborator. Not only had he gained experience in clandestine matters at the start of the Revolution, creating the first diplomatic cipher used by the Continental Congress, but previously planted stories in Dutch papers, such as the popular Gazette de Leyde in Leiden, Netherlands.

Too Good for his Own Good

As a typesetting propagandist and psychological warfare operative, Franklin was both meticulous and sloppy. He took care to give his fake broadsheet a genuine edition number — “Numb. 705,” issued on March 12, 1782 — and to refer in it to Nathaniel Willis, a well-known Boston newspaper editor. But the editor and the actual paper involved were not connected. Franklin’s forgery was supposedly the Boston Chronicle; Willisedited the Boston-based Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser. Whether this mix-up was intentional or inadvertent is unknown.

Franklin also was over-enthusiastic with typefaces. As a matter of style and economics, a newspaper of the day would have kept font changes to a minimum in a given issue, but in laying out his fake broadsheet Franklin employed a variety of faces and fonts clearly beyond the means of even a prominent Boston newspaper. He also used the custom typeface the Fourniers had created for him. No one apparently blinked at the jumble of styles, nor noticed that the sheet used the faces he had employed in composing the Bagatellesand official documents.  

Franklin’s prose also may have been too clever by half. British parliamentarian and noted author Horace Walpole, reading the forgery as reprinted in London’s Public Advertiser on Sept. 27, 1782 , grew skeptical of the “Jones” letter. “Dr Franklin himself I should think was the author,” Walpole wrote to a friend. “It is certainly written by a first-rate pen, and not by a common man-of-war…The ‘Royal George’ is out of luck!”

Walpole was not alone. The editor of the London Public Advertiser called the letter to Yorke a work of “contemptuous insolence” and “the Production of some audacious Rebel.”

Misinformation’s impact is difficult to quantify, but the success of Franklin’s fakery shows in its durability. THe “Gerrish” atrocities report resurfaced multiple times, notable in the years preceding the War of 1812 . The Reporter, whose circulation included Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, ran the fake report on its front page in December 1811, headlined, “British Warfare.” The editors’ introduction read, “At a time when it is notorious that English agents are actively employed in exciting the savages to commence war on the citizens of our western frontier, we consider it a duty we owe our country to give a place to the following account of some of the atrocities committed by the Indians in this state during the revolutionary war, to which they were excited by the ministry, of that idiot king, who we hope will live to atone, in some degree, in his own person, for part of the evils with which he has so long afflicted mankind.”

According to one historian, the Gerrish story was reprinted no less than 35 times with many periodicals simply copying it from other publications. To date, the earliest public confirmation of the forgery was by the State Gazette in Trenton, New Jersey, in that paper’s Oct. 4, 1854, issue.

Secrets he kept till his death

Franklin, who died in 1790, never commented publicly on his clandestine publishing career and left few clues to the extent of his disinformation activities. His grandson downplayed the press at Passy, writing, “Notwithstanding Dr Franklin’s various and important occupations, he occasionally amused himself in composing and printing, by means of a small set of types and press he had in the house, several of his light essays, bagatelles, or jeux d’esprit written chiefly for the amusement of his intimate friends.”

The truth of Franklin’s involvement and extent of his printing operations in France emerged in 1914 when Luther S. Livingston , a bibliophile and scholar, brought out “Franklin and his Press at Passy.” In that volume, published by the Grolier Club in a limited edition of 300, Livingston brought together the document’s text, technical aspects, letters and other evidence to paint a clear picture of not only Franklin’s involvement but also his intent.

“The sheet was circulated with a political purpose which was quite foreign to the light-hearted, philosophical or amusing ‘Bagatelles’ already enumerated, and though it has been called a ‘bagatelle’ by modern Franklin editors, I have not included it in my description of those pieces,” Livingston wrote.

Livingston had it right. The bogus supplement was neither satire nor whimsy. Unfamiliar with espionage jargon, he and other commenters to this day invariably call the spurious Revolutionary War-era broadsheet a “hoax.” In his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Franklin, Carl van Doren labeled the escapade an instance of “gruesome propaganda.” Today Benjamin Franklin’s imaginative effort would be called “fake news.”

Henry R. Schlesinger is an author and journalist with a specialty in espionage. His latest book, Honey Trapped is available through The History Press in the U.K. and Rare Bird in the U.S.

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11 Surprising Facts About Benjamin Franklin

By: Evan Andrews

Updated: July 18, 2023 | Original: January 15, 2016

1. He only had two years of formal education.

The man considered the most brilliant American of his age rarely saw the inside of a classroom. Franklin spent just two years attending Boston Latin School and a private academy before joining the family candle and soap-making business. 

By age 12, he was serving as an indentured apprentice at a printing shop owned by his brother, James. Young Benjamin made up for his lack of schooling by spending what little money he earned on books, often going without food to afford new volumes. He also honed his composition skills by reading essays and articles and then rewriting them from memory. 

Despite being almost entirely self-taught, Franklin later helped found the school that became the University of Pennsylvania and received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the College of William and Mary, the University of St. Andrews and Oxford.

2. Franklin became a hit writer as a teenager.

After his brother James founded a weekly newspaper called the New England Courant in the 1720s, a 16-year-old Franklin began secretly submitting essays and commentary as “Silence Dogood,” a fictitious widow who offered homespun musings on everything from fashion and marriage to women’s rights and religion.

The letters were hugely popular, and Mrs. Dogood soon received several marriage proposals from eligible bachelors in Boston. Franklin penned 14 Dogood essays before unmasking himself as their author, much to his jealous brother’s chagrin. Sick of the toil and beatings he endured as James’ apprentice, the teenaged sensation then fled Boston the following year and settled in Philadelphia, the city that would remain his adopted hometown for the rest of his life.

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3. He spent half his life in unofficial retirement.

Franklin arrived in Philadelphia in 1723 practically penniless, but over the next two decades he became enormously wealthy as a print shop owner, land speculator and publisher of the popular “Poor Richard’s Almanack.” 

By 1748, the 42-year-old was rich enough to hang up his printer’s apron and become a “gentleman of leisure.” Franklin’s retirement allowed him to spend his remaining 42 years studying science and devising inventions such as the lightning rod, bifocal glasses and a more efficient heating stove. It also gave him the freedom to devote himself to public service. 

Despite never running for elected office, he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention , diplomat and ambassador to France and Sweden, the first postmaster general and the president of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania.

4. Franklin designed a musical instrument used by Mozart and Beethoven.

Among Franklin’s more unusual inventions is his “glass armonica,” an instrument designed to replicate the otherworldly sound that a wet finger makes when rubbed along the rim of a glass. He made his first prototype in 1761 by having a London glassmaker build him 37 glass orbs of different sizes and pitches, which he then mounted on a spindle controlled by a foot pedal.

To play the instrument, the user would simply wet their fingers, rotate the apparatus and then touch the glass pieces to create individual tones or melodies. The armonica would go on to amass a considerable following during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Thousands were manufactured, and the likes of Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss all composed music for it. 

Franklin would later write that “Of all my inventions, the glass armonica has given me the greatest personal satisfaction.”

5. He was a reluctant revolutionary.

Franklin was among the last of the Founding Fathers to come out in favor of full separation from Britain. Having lived in London for several years and held royal appointments, he instead pushed for peaceful compromise and the preservation of the empire, once writing that, “every encroachment on rights is not worth a rebellion.” 

When the Boston Tea Party took place in 1773, he dubbed it an “act of violent injustice on our part” and insisted that the East India Company should be compensated for its losses. Franklin had soured on the monarchy by the time he returned to the United States for the Second Continental Congress in 1775, but his past support for King George III earned him the suspicion of many of his fellow patriots. Before he publicly announced his support for American independence, a few even suspected he might be a British spy.

6. Franklin created a phonetic alphabet.

While living in London in 1768, Franklin embarked on a project “to give the alphabet a more natural order.” Annoyed by the many inconsistencies in English spelling, he devised his own phonetic system that ditched the redundant consonants C, J, Q, W, X and Y and added six new letters, each designed to represent its own specific vocal sound. 

Franklin unveiled his “Scheme for a new Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling” in an essay published in 1779, but later scrapped the project after it failed to arouse public interest.

7. His son was a British loyalist.

Along with the two children he had with his wife, Deborah Read, Franklin also fathered an illegitimate son named William around 1730. The two were once close friends and partners—William helped Franklin with his famous kite experiment—but they later had a major falling out over the American Revolution . While Franklin joined in calling for independence from the mother country, William remained a staunch Tory who branded the patriots “intemperate zealots” and refused to resign his post as the royal governor of New Jersey. 

He spent two years in a colonial prison for opposing the revolution and later became a leader in a loyalist group before moving to England at the end of the war. The elder Franklin never forgave his son for “taking up arms against me.” He all but cut William out of his will, arguing, “the part he acted against me in the late war…will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”

8. Franklin was a fashion icon in France.

In 1776, the Continental Congress sent Franklin to France to seek military aid for the revolution. The 70-year-old was already world-renowned for his lighting experiments—the French even called their electrical experimenters “Franklinistes”—but his fame soared to new heights after his arrival in Paris.

Franklin capitalized on the French conception of Americans as rustic frontiersmen by dressing plainly and wearing a fur hat, which soon became his trademark and appeared in countless French portraits and medallions. Women even took to imitating the cap with oversized wigs in a style called “coiffure a la Franklin.” 

When Franklin later traded the fur cap for a white hat during the signing of the 1778 treaty between France and the United States, white-colored headgear instantly became a fashion trend among the men of Paris.

9. He spent his later years as an abolitionist.

Franklin owned at least two slaves during his life, both of whom worked as household servants, but in his old age, he came to view slavery as a vile institution that ran counter to the principles of the American Revolution.

He took over as president of a Pennsylvania abolitionist society in 1787, and in 1790 he presented a petition to Congress urging it to grant liberty “to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage.” 

While the petition was ignored, Franklin kept up the fight until his death a few months later and even included a provision in his will that required his daughter and son-in-law to free their slave to get their inheritance.

10. Franklin left Boston and Philadelphia an unusual gift in his will.

When he died in April 1790, Franklin willed 2,000 pounds sterling to his birthplace of Boston and his adopted home of Philadelphia . The largesse came with an unusual caveat: for its first 100 years, the money was to be placed in a trust and only used to provide loans to local tradesmen. A portion could then be spent, but the rest would remain off-limits for another 100 years, at which point the cities could use it as they saw fit. Boston and 

Philadelphia followed Franklin’s wishes, and by 1990 their funds were worth $4.5 million and $2 million, respectively. The two towns have since used the windfall to help finance the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston. Philadelphia also put some of its funds toward scholarships for students attending trade schools.

11. He’s a member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

Franklin had a lifelong love of swimming that began during his childhood in Boston. One of his first inventions was a pair of wooden hand paddles that he used to propel himself through the Charles River, and he wrote of once using a kite to skim across a pond. 

While living in England in the 1760s, he displayed such an impressive array of swimming strokes during a dip in Thames that a friend offered to help him open his own swimming school. Franklin declined the offer, but he remained a proponent of swimming instruction for the rest of his life, once writing, “every parent would be glad to have their children skilled in swimming.” His aquatic exploits have since earned him an honorary induction into the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

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Collection Benjamin Franklin Papers

A chronology of key events in the life of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), statesman, publisher, scientist, and diplomat.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

1706, jan. 17, 1730, sept. 1, 1743, sept., 1774, dec. 19, 1776, mar.-may, 1778, feb. 6, 1778, sept., 1783, sept. 3, 1785, sept., 1787, may-sept., 1790, apr. 17.

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Observations concerning the increase of mankind, 1751, observations concerning the increase of mankind.

Printed in [William Clarke], Observations On the late and present Conduct of the French, with Regard to their Encroachments upon the British Colonies in North America. … To which is added, wrote by another Hand; Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries,&c. Boston: Printed and Sold by S. Kneeland in Queen-Street. 1755. (Yale University Library)

The “immediate occasion” for writing this essay, according to Van Doren, 6 was the British Iron Act of 1750, which prohibited the erection of additional slitting and rolling mills, plating forges, and steel furnaces in the American colonies. 7 While English ironmasters rejoiced in the protection the law afforded them, a few farsighted Britons and most Americans appreciated that the act would curb colonial growth at just the moment when Britain and France were engaged in a climactic struggle for possession of North America. 8

Franklin wrote the essay in 1751. In the following spring he sent a copy to Peter Collinson and Richard Jackson, who were “greatly entertained” by it; 9 and Jackson eventually sent Franklin a full criticism of it. 1 Collinson hoped it would be published: “I don’t find anyone has hit it off so well”; 2 and Dr. John Perkins of Boston, who also received a copy, judged it such an “informing Piece” that it “should be read and well considered by every Englishman who wishes well to his Country.” 3 Not until late in 1754, however, did Franklin consent to its publication: it appeared the next year as an appendix to William Clarke’s Observations . 4 The pamphlet, including Franklin’s essay, was reprinted at once in London; and the essay alone, with some excisions, appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for November 1755 and the Scots Magazine for April 1756. 5 In 1760 and 1761 it was printed, also with excisions, as an appendix to London, Dublin, Boston, and Philadelphia editions of Franklin’s Interest of Great Britain Considered; and it was reprinted in part in the London Chronicle , May 20, 1760. Franklin included it in the fourth edition of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity , 1769. Thus Franklin’s ideas on the growth of population entered the current of English economic thought. They had a demonstrable influence on Thomas Malthus, who quoted Franklin approvingly and accepted his surprisingly accurate estimate of the rate of population increase in America, and on Francis Place, who studied these and others of Franklin’s ideas on population. Adam Smith is known to have had two copies of the essay in his library. 6

Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.

1. Tables of the Proportion of Marriages to Births, of Deaths to Births, of Marriages to the Numbers of Inhabitants, &c. form’d on Observaions made upon the Bills of Mortality, Christnings, &c. of populous Cities, will not suit Countries; nor will Tables form’d on Observations made on full settled old Countries, as Europe, suit new Countries, as America.

2. For People increase in Proportion to the Number of Marriages, and that is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. When Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life.

3. In Cities, where all Trades, Occupations and Offices are full, many delay marrying, till they can see how to bear the Charges of a Family; which Charges are greater in Cities, as Luxury is more common: many live single during Life, and continue Servants to Families, Journeymen to Trades, &c. hence Cities do not by natural Generation supply themselves with Inhabitants; the Deaths are more than the Births.

4. In Countries full settled, the Case must be nearly the same; all Lands being occupied and improved to the Heighth: those who cannot get Land, must Labour for others that have it; when Labourers are plenty, their Wages will be low; by low Wages a Family is supported with Difficulty; this Difficulty deters many from Marriage, who therefore long continue Servants and single. Only as the Cities take Supplies of People from the Country, and thereby make a little more Room in the Country; Marriage is a little more incourag’d there, and the Births exceed the Deaths.

5. Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People: America is chiefly occupied by Indians, who subsist mostly by Hunting. But as the Hunter, of all Men, requires the greatest Quantity of Land from whence to draw his Subsistence, (the Husbandman subsisting on much less, the Gardner on still less, and the Manufacturer requiring least of all), The Europeans found America as fully settled as it well could be by Hunters; yet these having large Tracks, were easily prevail’d on to part with Portions of Territory to the new Comers, who did not much interfere with the Natives in Hunting, and furnish’d them with many Things they wanted.

6. Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered.

7. Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe. And if it is reckoned there, that there is but one Marriage per Annum among 100 Persons, perhaps we may here reckon two; and if in Europe they have but 4 Births to a Marriage (many of their Marriages being late) we may here reckon 8, of which if one half grow up, and our Marriages are made, reckoning one with another at 20 Years of Age, our People must at least be doubled every 20 Years.

8. But notwithstanding this Increase, so vast is the Territory of North-America, that it will require many Ages to settle it fully; and till it is fully settled, Labour will never be cheap here, where no Man continues long a Labourer for others, but gets a Plantation of his own, no Man continues long a Journeyman to a Trade, but goes among those new Settlers, and sets up for himself, &c. Hence Labour is no cheaper now, in Pennsylvania, than it was 30 Years ago, tho’ so many Thousand labouring People have been imported.

9. The Danger therefore of these Colonies interfering with their Mother Country in Trades that depend on Labour, Manufactures, &c. is too remote to require the Attention of Great-Britain.

10. But in Proportion to the Increase of the Colonies, a vast Demand is growing for British Manufactures, a glorious Market wholly in the Power of Britain, in which Foreigners cannot interfere, which will increase in a short Time even beyond her Power of supplying, tho’ her whole Trade should be to her Colonies: Therefore Britain should not too much restrain Manufactures in her Colonies. A wise and good Mother will not do it. To distress, is to weaken, and weakening the Children, weakens the whole Family. 7

11. Besides if the Manufactures of Britain (by Reason of the American Demands) should rise too high in Price, Foreigners who can sell cheaper will drive her Merchants out of Foreign Markets; Foreign Manufactures will thereby be encouraged and increased, and consequently foreign Nations, perhaps her Rivals in Power, grow more populous and more powerful; while her own Colonies, kept too low, are unable to assist her, or add to her Strength. 8

12. ’Tis an ill-grounded Opinion that by the Labour of Slaves, America may possibly vie in Cheapness of Manufactures with Britain. The Labour of Slaves can never be so cheap here as the Labour of working Men is in Britain. Any one may compute it. Interest of Money is in the Colonies from 6 to 10 per Cent. Slaves one with another cost £30 Sterling per Head. Reckon then the Interest of the first Purchase of a Slave, the Insurance or Risque on his Life, his Cloathing and Diet, Expences in his Sickness and Loss of Time, Loss by his Neglect of Business (Neglect is natural to the Man who is not to be benefited by his own Care or Diligence), Expence of a Driver to keep him at Work, and his Pilfering from Time to Time, almost every Slave being by Nature 9 a Thief, and compare the whole Amount with the Wages of a Manufacturer of Iron or Wool in England, you will see that Labour is much cheaper there than it ever can be by Negroes here. Why then will Americans purchase Slaves? Because Slaves may be kept as long as a Man pleases, or has Occasion for their Labour; while hired Men are continually leaving their Master (often in the midst of his Business,) and setting up for themselves. § 8.

13. As the Increase of People depends on the Encouragement of Marriages, the following Things must diminish a Nation, viz.

1. The being conquered; for the Conquerors will engross as many Offices, and exact as much Tribute or Profit on the Labour of the conquered, as will maintain them in their new Establishment, and this diminishing the Subsistence of the Natives discourages their Marriages, and so gradually diminishes them, while the Foreigners increase. 2. Loss of Territory. Thus the Britons being driven into Wales, and crowded together in a barren Country insufficient to support such great Numbers, diminished ’till the People bore a Proportion to the Produce, while the Saxons increas’d on their abandoned Lands; ’till the Island became full of English. And were the English now driven into Wales by some foreign Nation, there would in a few Years be no more Englishmen in Britain, than there are now People in Wales. 3. Loss of Trade. Manufactures exported, draw Subsistence from Foreign Countries for Numbers; who are thereby enabled to marry and raise Families. If the Nation be deprived of any Branch of Trade, and no new Employment is found for the People occupy’d in that Branch, it will also be soon deprived of so many People. 4. Loss of Food. Suppose a Nation has a Fishery, which not only employs great Numbers, but makes the Food and Subsistence of the People cheaper; If another Nation becomes Master of the Seas, and prevents the Fishery, the People will diminish in Proportion as the Loss of Employ, and Dearness of Provision, makes it more difficult to subsist a Family. 5. Bad Government and insecure Property. People not only leave such a Country, and settling Abroad incorporate with other Nations, lose their native Language, and become Foreigners; but the Industry of those that remain being discourag’d, the Quantity of Subsistence in the Country is lessen’d, and the Support of a Family becomes more difficult. So heavy Taxes tend to diminish a People. 6. The Introduction of Slaves. The Negroes brought into the English Sugar Islands, have greatly diminish’d the Whites there; the Poor are by this Means depriv’d of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habit of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain’d 100. The Whites who have Slaves, not labouring, are enfeebled, and therefore not so generally prolific; the Slaves being work’d too hard, and ill fed, their Constitutions are broken, and the Deaths among them are more than the Births; so that a continual Supply is needed from Africa. The Northern Colonies having few Slaves increase in Whites. Slaves also pejorate the Families that use them; the white Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry.

14. Hence the Prince that acquires new Territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes the Natives to give his own People Room; the Legislator that makes effectual Laws for promoting of Trade, increasing Employment, improving Land by more or better Tillage; providing more Food by Fisheries; securing Property, &c. and the Man that invents new Trades, Arts or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may be properly called Fathers of their Nation, as they are the Cause of the Generation of Multitudes, by the Encouragement they afford to Marriage.

15. As to Privileges granted to the married, (such as the Jus trium Liberorum 1 among the Romans), they may hasten the filling of a Country that has been thinned by War or Pestilence, or that has otherwise vacant Territory; but cannot increase a People beyond the Means provided for their Subsistence.

16. Foreign Luxuries and needless Manufactures imported and used in a Nation, do, by the same Reasoning, increase the People of the Nation that furnishes them, and diminish the People of the Nation that uses them. Laws therefore that prevent such Importations, and on the contrary promote the Exportation of Manufactures to be consumed in Foreign Countries, may be called (with Respect to the People that make them) generative Laws , as by increasing Subsistence they encourage Marriage. Such Laws likewise strengthen a Country, doubly, by increasing its own People and diminishing its Neighbours.

17. Some European Nations prudently refuse to consume the Manufactures of East-India. They should likewise forbid them to their Colonies; for the Gain to the Merchant, is not to be compar’d with the Loss by this Means of People to the Nation.

18. Home Luxury in the Great, increases the Nation’s Manufacturers employ’d by it, who are many, and only tends to diminish the Families that indulge in it, who are few. The greater the common fashionable Expence of any Rank of People, the more cautious they are of Marriage. Therefore Luxury should never be suffer’d to become common.

19. The great Increase of Offspring in particular Families, is not always owing to greater Fecundity of Nature, but sometimes to Examples of Industry in the Heads, and industrious Education; by which the Children are enabled to provide better for themselves, and their marrying early, is encouraged from the Prospect of good Subsistence.

20. If there be a Sect therefore, in our Nation, that regard Frugality and Industry as religious Duties, and educate their Children therein, more than others commonly do; such Sect must consequently increase more by natural Generation, than any other Sect in Britain.

21. The Importation of Foreigners into a Country that has as many Inhabitants as the present Employments and Provisions for Subsistence will bear; will be in the End no Increase of People; unless the New Comers have more Industry and Frugality than the Natives, and then they will provide more Subsistence, and increase in the Country; but they will gradually eat the Natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in Foreigners to fill up any occasional Vacancy in a Country; for such Vacancy (if the Laws are good, § 14, 16) will soon be filled by natural Generation. Who can now find the Vacancy made in Sweden, France or other Warlike Nations, by the Plague of Heroism 40 Years ago; in France, by the Expulsion of the Protestants; in England, by the Settlement of her Colonies; or in Guinea, by 100 Years Exportation of Slaves, that has blacken’d half America? The thinness of Inhabitants in Spain is owing to National Pride and Idleness, and other Causes, rather than to the Expulsion of the Moors, or to the making of new Settlements.

22. There is in short, no Bound to the prolific Nature of Plants or Animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each others Means of Subsistence. Was the Face of the Earth vacant of other Plants, it might be gradually sowed and overspread with one Kind only; as, for Instance, with Fennel; and were it empty of other Inhabitants, it might in a few Ages be replenish’d from one Nation only; as, for Instance, with Englishmen. Thus there are suppos’d to be now upwards of One Million English Souls in North-America, (tho’ ’tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over Sea) and yet perhaps there is not one the fewer in Britain, but rather many more, on Account of the Employment the Colonies afford to Manufacturers at Home. This Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will in another Century be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water. What an Accession of Power to the British Empire by Sea as well as Land! What Increase of Trade and Navigation! What Numbers of Ships and Seamen! We have been here but little more than 100 Years, and yet the Force of our Privateers in the late War, united, was greater, both in Men and Guns, than that of the whole British Navy in Queen Elizabeth’s Time. 2 How important an Affair then to Britain, is the present Treaty for settling the Bounds between her Colonies and the French, 3 and how careful should she be to secure Room enough, since on the Room depends so much the Increase of her People?

23. In fine, A Nation well regulated is like a Polypus; take away a Limb, its Place is soon supply’d; cut it in two, and each deficient Part shall speedily grow out of the Part remaining. 4 Thus if you have Room and Subsistence enough, as you may by dividing, make ten Polypes out of one, you may of one make ten Nations, equally populous and powerful; or rather, increase a Nation ten fold in Numbers and Strength. 5

And since Detachments of English from Britain sent to America, will have their Places at Home so soon supply’d and increase so largely here; why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why 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, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

24. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where 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.

6 .  Franklin , p. 216.

7 .  Lawrence H. Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution III (Caldwell, Idaho, 1936), 204–32.

8 .  See the letter of Robert Charles, later agent of Pennsylvania in London, to Thomas Lawrence, Feb. 10, 1750/51, which comments on the Iron Act, the union of interests of the northern colonies and Great Britain, and threats of French expansion, and requests a “Calculation of all the present numbers and Strength of the Continent, and … of the French.” PMHB , VII (1883), 232–3.

9 .  See below, pp. 319–20.

1 .  Under date of June 17, 1755, below.

2 .  See below, p. 358.

3 .  See below, p. 358.

4 .  Clarke was a close friend of Perkins, as also of Governor Shirley, who warmly appreciated BF .

5 .  Both magazines named BF as the author, which neither the Boston nor London editions of 1755 did. The last sentence was omitted from sections 13, 16, 21, and 23 in the magazines. The three exclamatory sentences in section 22 and all of section 24 were also omitted.

6 .  Useful discussions of BF ’s essay include: Lewis J. Carey, Franklin’s Economic Views (Garden City, N.Y., 1928), pp. 46–60; Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Franklin as Demographer,” Jour. Econ. Hist. , IX (1949–50), 25–44; Norman E. Himes, “Benjamin Franklin on Population: A Re-examination with Special Reference to the Influence of Franklin on Francis Place,” Econ. Hist. , III (1934–37), 388–98; and Conway Zirkle, “Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Malthus and the United States Census,” Isis , XLVIII (1957), 58–62. Dubourg included Franklin’s essay (from the 1760 London edition) in his translation of John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania , 1769; and a MS translation, noting the 1761 London edition, endorsed by Mirabeau, is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

7 .  “Therefore … weaken the whole family” is omitted from Exper. and Obser. , 1769 edition.

8 .  The paragraph is omitted from Exper. and Obser. , 1769 edition.

9 .  In Exper. and Obser. , 1769 edition: “from the nature of slavery” in place of “ by Nature .”

1 .  The Lex Papia Poppaea (usually considered with the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus) allowed mothers of three children to wear the stola as a mark of distinction, exempted them from tutelage, gave them the right to inherit from their children, and conferred other civil rights. Carey, Franklin’s Economic Views , p. 53 n; Bouvier’s Law Dictionary (1934 edit.), p. 299.

2 .  Compare above, II , 453.

3 .  The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748.

4 .  Compare this reference to the polypus with that in Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1751 (above, p. 93).

5 .  The remainder of this section and all the next were omitted from the reprintings of 1760 and 1761 and from Exper. and Obser. , 1769 edition. Lawrence C. Wroth, An American Bookshelf , 1755 (Phila., 1934), pp. 42–3. But they were remembered and revived by BF ’s political enemies in 1764.

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