ben franklin satire essay

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Benjamin Franklin’s Satire of Witch Hunting

Advisor: Robert A. Ferguson , George Edward Woodberry Professor of Law, Literature and Criticism, Columbia University Law School, National Humanities Center Fellow. Copyright National Humanities Center, 2014

Lesson Contents

Teacher’s note.

• Text Analysis & Close Reading Questions
• Student Version PDF

How does Benjamin Franklin’s satire of a witch trial argue that human affairs should be guided, above all, by reason?

Understanding.

Many people in the eighteenth century, especially the educated elite in Europe and America, believed that truth was discovered through reason, through the application of principles discovered through science, observation, and experimentation. In “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly” Benjamin Franklin asserts the primacy of reason by satirizing the efforts of those who would seek truth through superstition and irrationality.

Benjamin Franklin, ca. 1746 Harvard Art Museums

Benjamin Franklin, “ A Witch Trial at Mount Holly ,” 1730, from Founders Online , from the National Archives. Suggested secondary sources from “Divining America: Religion in American History” from the National Humanities Center: Deism and the Founding of the United States by Darren Staloff and The First Great Awakening by Christine Heyrman.

Informational text: Literary non-fiction, satire.

Text Complexity

Grades 11-CCR complexity band. For more information on text complexity see these resources from achievethecore.org .   Click here for standards and skills for this lesson.

Common Core State Standards

• ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.6 (Analyze a case in which grasping a point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement).)
• ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.9 (Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature.)

Advanced Placement English Language and Composition

• Reading nonfiction
• Analyzing satire and how an author’s rhetorical choices achieve a particular purpose

In addition to illustrating how satire works, this piece could be used to highlight cultural differences between the educated elite of the eighteenth century who were influenced by Enlightenment thought and the common folks who were not. The publication date of 1730 places the piece on the earliest fringe of the First Great Awakening , which had its initial manifestations around New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Thus the satire could be seen as foreshadowing the attitude many among the elite took toward the religious emotionalism, which they called “enthusiasm,” of those caught up in the Awakening’s fervor. Although Franklin later befriended the preacher George Whitefield, a major figure in the First Great Awakening, he remained suspicious of the revival’s enthusiasm throughout his life. In 1730, as a twenty-four-year-old, his firm embrace of the rationalistic philosophy of Deism could easily have moved him to take aim at the irrationality of enthusiasm as it might manifest itself in a witch hunt.

We provide the text in its entirety. Franklin wrote it as a single paragraph. We have numbered the sentences to make it easier to teach. For close reading we have analyzed the article through fine-grained, text-dependent questions. The first interactive activity asks students to do three things: identify words and phrases that make the piece a satire, explain why the language they chose is satirical, and compare their choices and rationales with ours. You may want to make these tasks, or at least the first two, a pencil-and-paper assignment. This exercise lends itself well to whole-class discussion with projection on a screen or smart board. The second interactive asks students to draw a conclusion from the piece. The student pdf also includes links to the interactive exercises.

This lesson is divided into two parts, both accessible below. The teacher’s guide includes a background note, the text analysis with responses to the close reading questions, access to the interactive exercises, and a follow-up assignment. The student’s version, an interactive worksheet that can be e-mailed, contains all of the above except the responses to the close reading questions, and the follow-up assignment.

Teacher’s Guide

Background questions.

• What kind of text are we dealing with?
• When was it written?
• Who wrote it?
• For what audience was it intended?
• For what purpose was it written?

The Pennsylvania Gazette was founded in Philadelphia in 1728. A year later Benjamin Franklin and a business partner bought it and in the following decades turned it into one of the most popular publications in the American colonies, printing reports from other papers as well as local news. In eighteenth-century America people hung on to newspapers, especially in inns, because paper was precious. They circulated widely, and with high literacy levels in Philadelphia, we can assume that the Gazette had a substantial general readership. Franklin frequently contributed articles, as he did for the October 22, 1730, edition when he published, anonymously, a satire datelined “Burlington, Oct. 12.”

Untitled when it appeared, a nineteenth-century editor dubbed it “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly.” The brief narrative describes the determined efforts of a mob in a small New Jersey town to find a man and a woman guilty of witchcraft after they had been accused of making sheep dance and hogs sing. In a normal proceeding only the accused would be tried, but in this one the accused cut a deal to put their accusers, also a man and a woman, on trial as well. The mob decides upon two tests. In the first the men and women will be weighed individually against a “huge great” Bible. If it outweighs them, they are witches; if they outweigh it, they are not. In the second test they will be cast into water. If they sink, they are innocent; if they float, they are guilty. The inclusion of the accused in the tests makes the proceedings less a trial and more an absurd experiment in which scales and water are used to detect virtue and vice. The tale is told by the sort of narrator who often appears in satire, an urbane, witty figure who coolly observes the action with an amused, tolerant attitude.

The article, presented as local news, is a literary hoax, similar to two others Franklin published in the Gazette . As far as scholars have been able to determine, he was neither reporting on nor responding to an actual event, certainly not a witch trial. No one has found records of one in New Jersey or Pennsylvania in or around 1730. Franklin may have written the piece to underscore themes in two other articles that appear in the October 22 issue. The lead story — datelined Paris, February 27 — describes the ridicule visited upon a Monsieur Languet, a bishop and a member of the esteemed French Academy, for a biography he wrote of a nun who died in 1690. The author of the article denounces Languet as a “Fanatick and a Visionary” for retailing stories of apparitions the nun claimed to have experienced. In language that echoes “A Witch Trial” the narrator notes that Languet’s book is surely “the Amusement and Diversion…of the thinking Part of the People of Paris.” The other article — datelined Oxford, July 30 — recounts the comic struggle that broke out over the body of a murderer named William Fuller after it was cut down from the gallows. As officials try to get the corpse out of town, they must fend off a mob and then a determined band of “gownsmen,” Oxford medical students, who want to carry Fuller off for dissection. The officials fail, and Fuller ends up serving science at Christ Church College. At one point the mob tosses Fuller’s coffin into water, and the gownsmen leap on it “like Spaniels,” much as a sailor in Mount Holly leaps on one of the men on trial as he floats in the local mill pond.

In addition to sharing language and motifs — repetition of the phrase “the thinking part,” mob behavior, and jumping on floating bodies — these stories share themes with “A Witch Trial.” The Paris story underscores the primacy of reason in its description of the ridicule the educated heap upon Monsieur Languet for his belief in apparitions. “A Witch Trial” also asserts the primacy of reason as the narrator mocks the people of Mount Holly for their belief in witches. Comic as it may be, the Oxford story recounts the triumph of science and empiricism, perspectives that drive the satire in “A Witch Trial.” It would not be surprising if these stories inspired Franklin to write his satire. He was twenty-four in 1730, and the piece reflects his youthful embrace of Deism , a form of religious belief, influential among the elite in eighteenth-century America, that placed faith in reason and rejected the supernatural.

Text Analysis

Close reading questions.

1. What does Franklin do to establish the “authenticity” of his hoax? Cite evidence from the text to support your answer. Through the dateline “Burlington, Oct. 12” he tells his readers that the incident took place in a real place at a specific time. He then offers details that make the dateline even more specific and thus make the event more believable. It took place “Saturday last” in the town of Mount-Holly, which he is careful to locate “about 8 miles from this Place.” Moreover, he tells us about how many people were involved, “near 300.”

2. What are the connotations of the word “experiment”? (Note: The word “experiment” is a key term in the story and deserves extended attention.) It suggests science and unbiased, rational, carefully conducted inquiry that follows the rules of logic.

3. What do experiments usually seek to do? Experiments usually seek to test a hypothesis, an assumption or proposition that calls for some sort of test to see if it is accurate or valid.

4. What is the effect of the narrator’s use of the word “experiment”? The narrator ridicules the witch trials by calling them experiments. Clearly, they are not carefully reasoned, logical attempts to test a verifiable hypothesis. Rather, they are inappropriate and ineffectual attempts to determine a person’s guilt or innocence. By applying the term to the witch trials, the narrator ironically highlights the extent to which they diverge from rational processes of science and stray into superstition. The term bestows a comically inflated dignity and importance to this slapstick enterprise.

In addition, the term helps to define the narrator’s persona. It suggests that he is a man of the Enlightenment, familiar with the ways of science. Indeed, he seems more interested in how the trials are conducted than in their outcome. Note his careful description of each step. Note, too, that he never tells us how the mob judges any of the men subjected to the tests.

5. How would you describe the persona of the narrator or “reporter” of this story? The narrator/reporter is calm, casual, off-handed, bemused, and condescending.

6. How does Franklin create this persona? Cite evidence from the text to support your answer. Franklin creates the persona through the language the narrator uses. It suggests that he is not necessarily well informed or even terribly concerned about what is going on: the people have gathered to see “an Experiment or two ”; “ It seems ” that the accused are charged with witchcraft. He describes two remarkable accusations, but any others he dismisses with an off-handed “&c.” He highlights the comic nature of the charges by turning one of them into a joke. If sheep were made to dance in “an uncommon manner,” one is tempted to ask how they commonly dance.

7. What is the narrator’s point of view? How does Franklin establish it? Cite evidence from the text to support your answer. The narrator stands apart from the other spectators. While the townspeople are passionate in their demand for a trial and, it would seem, a guilty verdict, he calmly and wittily observes the scene and describes it without any of the bias that fires the crowd. He is deeply uninvolved . Franklin further establishes the narrator’s distance from the townspeople by having him ironically describe these rather simple provincial folks with comic exaggeration. They meet in “grand Consultation.” They are “the King’s good and peaceable Subjects.” Of course, there is nothing “peaceable” about them; they are a mob in pursuit of a verdict they have already reached.

8. What are the connotations of the word “plump”? How does Franklin use it in the story? It suggests weight, flesh, heaviness. Franklin uses it for comic effect. With it he undermines the seriousness of the scale trial. We can almost see and hear—the word is slightly onomatopoeic—the accused plummeting to the ground and bouncing upon arrival. Moreover, the word “plump” reminds readers that the subjects are flesh and blood, merely human, and not supernatural beings.

9. What does the term “Lumps of Mortality” refer to? How does Franklin use it? It refers to the bodies of the people tested in the scales. “Lumps” echoes “plump” and, like that word, suggests weight and heaviness. Linking it to “Mortality,” Franklin again reminds his readers that the accusers and the accused are mere mortals, not witches. Juxtaposing “Lumps of Mortality” with “Moses and all the Prophets and Apostles,” the narrator suggests the absurdity of attempting to learn something about the supernatural from a test that measures only the weight of flesh, blood, and bone.

10. What does Franklin mean when he says that the male accuser “with some Difficulty began to sink”? Why would he include this detail? He suggests that the man initially floats but sinks only when he tries to. This detail sets up the narrator’s ridicule of “the more Thinking Part of the Spectators,” for while they reach the correct conclusion about people with air in their lungs floating, they mistakenly conclude that a thin person’s physique would cause him or her to sink.

11. How does Franklin focus our attention on the word “naked”? What function does it play in the story? He makes us pause before it and heightens its comic effectiveness by setting it off with a comma. Functioning rather like the punch line of a joke, it completely demolishes any pretense to seriousness that the trials may have claimed and suggests their true purpose as entertainment for the masses.

12. How does Franklin characterize the trials? Cite evidence from the text to support your answer. Franklin portrays the trials as essentially comic, thoroughly unserious undertakings — note the deal by which the accusers are put on trial, the “plump” landing in the scale trials, the search for pins, the attempt to sink the floaters. He also characterizes them as an entertainment spectacle. They are advertised. The scales are set up on a gallows to enable the ladies of the town to view them without going into the crowd. To accommodate that crowd, town officials have cleared an open space “after the Manner of Moorfields.” When it becomes apparent that the trials will have to be repeated, officials insure a crowd by promising nudity at the next performance.

A Witch Trial at Mount Holly

BURLINGTON, Oct. 12. [1] Saturday last at Mount-Holly, about 8 Miles from this Place, near 300 People were gathered together to see an Experiment or two tried on some Persons accused of Witchcraft.

[2] It seems the Accused had been charged with making their Neighbours Sheep dance in an uncommon Manner, and with causing Hogs to speak, and sing Psalms, &c. to the great Terror and Amazement of the King’s good and peaceable Subjects in this Province; and the Accusers being very positive that if the Accused were weighed in Scales against a Bible, the Bible would prove too heavy for them; or that, if they were bound and put into the River, they would swim; the said Accused desirous to make their Innocence appear [desiring to prove their innocence], voluntarily offered to undergo the said Trials, if 2 of the most violent of their Accusers would be tried with them.

[3] Accordingly the Time and Place was agreed on, and advertised about the Country; The Accusers were 1 Man and 1 Woman; and the Accused the same.

[4] The Parties being met, and the People got together, a grand Consultation was held, before they proceeded to Trial; in which it was agreed to use the Scales first; and a Committee of Men were appointed to search the Men, and a Committee of Women to search the Women, to see if they had any Thing of Weight about them, particularly Pins.

[5] After the Scrutiny was over, a huge great Bible belonging to the Justice of the Place was provided, and a Lane through the Populace was made from the Justices House to the Scales, which were fixed on a Gallows erected for that Purpose opposite to the House, that the Justice’s Wife and the rest of the Ladies might see the Trial, without coming amongst the Mob; and after the Manner of Moorfields [in the eighteenth century, an open space in London often the site of markets and shows], a large Ring was also made.

[6] Then came out of the House a grave tall Man carrying the Holy Writ before the supposed Wizard, &c. (as solemnly as the Sword-bearer of London before the Lord Mayor) the Wizard was first put in the Scale, and over him was read a Chapter out of the Books of Moses, and then the Bible was put in the other Scale, (which being kept down before) was immediately let go; but to the great Surprize of the Spectators, Flesh and Bones came down plump, and outweighed that great good Book by abundance [a large amount].

[7] After the same Manner, the others were served, and their Lumps of Mortality severally [separately] were too heavy for Moses and all the Prophets and Apostles.

[8] This being over, the Accusers and the rest of the Mob, not satisfied with this Experiment, would have the Trial by Water; accordingly a most solemn Procession was made to the Mill-pond; where both Accused and Accusers being stripp’d (saving only to the Women their Shifts [undergarments]) were bound Hand and Foot, and severally placed in the Water, lengthways, from the Side of a Barge or Flat, having for Security only a Rope about the Middle of each, which was held by some in the Flat.

[9] The Accuser Man being thin and spare [bony], with some Difficulty began to sink at last; but the rest every one of them swam [floated] very light upon the Water.

[10] A Sailor in the Flat jump’d out upon the Back of the Man accused, thinking to drive him down to the Bottom, but the Person bound, without any Help, came up some time before the other.

[11] The Woman Accuser, being told that she did not sink, would be duck’d a second Time; when she swam again as light as before.

[12] Upon which she declared, That she believed the Accused had bewitched her to make her so light, and that she would be duck’d again a Hundred Times, but she would duck the Devil out of her.

[13] The accused Man, being surpriz’d at his own Swimming, was not so confident of his Innocence as before, but said, If I am a Witch, it is more than I know .

[14] The more thinking Part of the Spectators were of Opinion, that any Person so bound and plac’d in the Water (unless they were mere Skin and Bones) would swim till their Breath was gone, and their Lungs fill’d with Water.

[15] But it being the general Belief of the Populace, that the Womens Shifts, and the Garters with which they were bound help’d to support them; it is said they are to be tried again the next warm Weather, naked.

• Robert Feke, portrait of Benjamin Franklin, oil on canvas, ca. 1746. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Harvard University Portrait Collection, Bequest of Dr. John Collins Warren, 1856, H47. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reproduced by permission.
• The Pennsylvania Gazette , Oct. 15-22, 1730, p. 3 (detail). Digital image reproduced by permission of Accessible Archives, Inc.

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In 1781, Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay about farting

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In 1781, Benjamin Franklin decided to write about a truly important scientific topic: flatulence.

"It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind,"  Franklin wrote in an essay variously known as "To the Royal Academy of Farting" or simply " Fart Proudly ." "That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it."

Franklin's reason for taking up the topic of farting? To urge the Royal Academy of Brussels, which had put out a call for scientific papers, to take up the goal of discovering "some Drug wholesome & not disagreable, to be mix’d with our common Food, or Sauces, that shall render the natural Discharges of Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreable as Perfumes."

franklin wanted scientists to figure out how to make farts smell good

In other words, statesman, author, scientist, and inventor Benjamin Franklin wanted scientists to focus on creating a medicine that would make farts smell good.

Of course, the whole essay ( which you can read here ) was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Franklin — who was living in Paris at the time — was frustrated by the impracticality of most questions taken up by the scientific establishment, so he wrote this essay in response, but didn't actually send it to the Royal Academy. Instead, he sent copies to a few friends, including British chemist Joseph Priestley and philosopher Richard Price .

Franklin's dream is still unrealized: we don't have a medicine that makes farts smell good, though we do have drugs (like Beano) that  cut down on gas production . Research has also found that foods which contain hydrogen sulfide — like beans, onions, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and dairy — disproportionately contribute to farts smelling bad.

In the essay, after making a few shrewd body-odor-related observations (namely, that asparagus makes urine smell bad , and turpentine makes it smell good ), Franklin asserted that the value of a medicine that makes farts smell good would trump many of science's biggest achievements. "What Comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give to a Man who has Whirlwinds in his Bowels!" he exclaimed.

Finally, he concluded with a few puns — declaring that when it comes to practicality, the discoveries of Aristotle, Newton, Descartes, and others are "scarcely worth a FART-HING."

For more on farting: 9 surprising facts about flatulence you may not know

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6 of Ben Franklin's Greatest Hoaxes and Pranks

By amanda green | apr 1, 2015.

As the story goes , the Continental Congress tasked Thomas Jefferson with writing the first draft of the Declaration of Independence… because they feared Ben Franklin would sneak in jokes. And with a history of pranks like these, who can blame them?      

1. Silence Dogood  

Ben Franklin knew all about faking it 'til you make it. At the age of 16, he apprenticed at his older brother's Boston print shop, publisher of The New-England Courant . Alas, James Franklin wasn't supportive of Ben's writing ambitions and rejected every piece he submitted. Desperate to get published—and to prove his brother wrong—the younger Franklin wrote a letter to the editor under the pseudonym Silence Dogood and slipped it under the shop's door at night. James Franklin found the middle-aged widow's social commentary humorous and, in 1722, printed 14 Dogood letters. 

The letters really resonated with the community—a few eligible bachelors even mailed marriage proposals to the fictitious woman! When Ben came clean as the real Silence Dogood, James wasn't amused. But we all know who got the last laugh: Ben Franklin moved to Philadelphia and founded Poor Richard's Almanack 10 years later, while the Courant folded in 1726.  

2. Titan Leeds's Death  

The first edition of Poor Richard's Almanack , published in 1733, established an ongoing prank on Titan Leeds, an astrologer, competing almanac publisher, and frenemy of Ben Franklin. Under the pseudonym Poor Richard Saunders, Franklin predicted Leeds's death and encouraged readers to stick around to see if his prognostication was right. The feud that followed sold a lot of pamphlets, benefiting both publishers. 

The next year, the Almanack printed an obituary for the still living Leeds and reported that the man claiming to be him was an identity thief. When Leeds actually died in 1738, Saunders commended the imposter for ending the prank once and for all. But Franklin doesn't get all the credit for this one. The hoax was inspired by Jonathan Swift, who used the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff to pull an enduring April Fool's Day joke on astrologer John Partridge in 1708. 

3. The Speech of Miss Polly Baker

Franklin clearly enjoyed using pseudonyms, but one of his more progressive "pranks" was done completely anonymously. In 1747, he published " The Speech of Miss Polly Baker " in The General Advertiser . In it, a woman goes on trial for having an illegitimate child—a crime she's committed four other times—and wonders why the men involved were never punished. Franklin perfectly balanced humor, sex, and sympathy to both entertain readers and challenge the double standard. While many people believed Miss Baker’s was a true story, it was in fact only partially inspired by true events: Franklin himself had a son out of wedlock. Allegedly, the founding father didn't come clean as the story's author until 1777, at which time he was ambassador to France.  

4. Faking the Boston Independent Chronicle  

Long before The Onion , in 1782, Ben Franklin published a fake supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle . It wasn't all in good fun—he hoped to arouse the sympathies of British citizens for the Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War in time for peace negotiations. To do so, he needed content that would get reprinted in British newspapers, and, well, sensationalism sells. The most affecting bogus story was a grisly letter detailing how the British employed Native Americans to scalp colonists. When Franklin sent the letter to correspondents, he admitted the supplement's questionable veracity, but maintained that the scalping issue was very real and warranted reporting. No one knew it was a hoax until more than 70 years later!  

5. Daylight Saving Time  

Satire is rooted in truth. In the essay "An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light," published in the Journal de Paris in April 1784, Ben Franklin suggested that the French could conserve 64 million pounds of candle wax if they woke up with the sun in springtime. He hilariously proposed firing cannons and ringing church bells as a sort of unavoidable alarm clock. It was a preposterous idea… until it became a reality (minus the cannons). 

Today, the joke's on us. A New Zealand entomologist named George Vernon Hudson proposed the daylight savings time we temporarily loathe today in 1895. European countries adopted it in 1916, and the U.S. followed suit two years later.

6 Benjamin Franklin’s Ethnic Drag – Notes on Abolition, Satire, and Affect

• Published: January 2014
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This chapter discusses a relatively neglected satirical attack on slavery by Benjamin Franklin, “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade” (1790). It examines the maneuvers employed in the text to displace debates over enslavement practices in the United States onto a distant temporal, spatial, and political plane. The chapter reads the mobilization of the generic framework and affective economies of the Barbary captivity narrative as a textual performance of “ethnic drag.” It discusses the ambivalent effects of this performance to engage with the absent issue of the dehumanization of enslaved blacks. It is argued that Franklin’s satire ultimately remains confined to the realm of a master discourse about the most adequate economic and political forms and norms of a modern state. The abolitionist text thus partakes in establishing and normalizing hegemonic speaking position in the late eighteenth-century Transatlantic sphere.

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Franklin’s Parody Slavery Apology

• Introduction
• When we change our clocks
• Incidents and anecdotes
• Rationale & original idea
• Opposition & obstacles
• First there was Standard time
• Early adoption and U.S. law
• Worldwide daylight saving
• Museum store

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At the age of 78, in a moment of whimsey, Benjamin Franklin wrote An Economical Project , a discourse on the thrift of natural versus artificial lighting. He included several funny regulations that Paris might adopt to help. Over two centuries later, nations around the world use a variation of his concept to conserve energy and more fully enjoy the benefits of daylight.

Benjamin in Paris

As he neared the end of his long tenure as American delegate in Paris, Benjamin Franklin felt his years. Gout and gallstones hampered his movements and left him virtually confined to his house in the Parisian suburb of Passy. Such restrictions to a man of Franklin's dynamic and social nature would have been vexing indeed had he not the company of close friends, men like Antoine Alexis-Francois Cadet de Vaux, editor of the Journal de Paris , who encouraged him to work on simple, yet important, problems. To show his appreciation to these comrades, Franklin penned a series of bagatelles for their amusement.

One such piece took the form of a letter to the Journal de Paris concerning the economy of lighting in the home, which Franklin wrote after attending the demonstration of a new oil lamp. In it, he parodied himself, his love of thrift, his scientific papers and his passion for playing chess until the wee hours of the morning then sleeping until midday. His friend Cadet de Vaux published the letter in the Journal on April 26, 1784, under the English title An Economical Project . Franklin began the letter by noting that much discussion had followed the demonstration of an oil lamp the previous evening concerning the amount of oil used in relation to the quantity of light produced. This he followed with details of how a great discovery of an avenue of thrift came to him.

The Parisians never woke before noon

Franklin had eventually bedded down at three or four hours past midnight but was awakened at six in the morning by a sudden noise. Surprised to find his room filled with light, Franklin at first imagined that a number of the new oil lamps were the source, but he soon perceived the light to be originating from the outside. Looking out the window, Franklin saw the sun rising above the horizon, its rays pouring through the open shutters.

"I looked at my watch, which goes very well, and found that it was but six o clock; and still thinking it something extraordinary that the sun should rise so early, I looked into the almanac, where I found it to be the hour given for his rising on that day. I looked forward too, and found he was to rise still earlier every day towards the end of June; and that no time during the year he retarded his rising so long as till eight o clock. Your readers, who with me have never seen any sign of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early; and especially when I assure them, that he gives light as soon as he rises. I am convinced of this.

Sly Franklin claimed that a noted philosopher assured him that he was most certainly mistaken, for it was well known that "there could be no light abroad at that hour." His windows had not let the light in, but being open, had let the darkness out.

" This event has given rise in my mind to several serious and important reflections ," the letter continued. Had he not been aroused at so early a morning hour, he would have slept until noon through six hours of daylight and therefore, living six hours the following night by candlelight. Realizing the latter was much more expensive than the former, he began calculating, for the sheer love of economy, the utility of his discovery -- the true test of any invention.

On the assumption that 100,000 Parisian families burned half a pound of candles per hour for an average of seven hours per day (the average time for the summer months between dusk and the supposed bedtime of Parisians), the account would stand thus:

"183 nights between 20 March and 20 September times 7 hours per night of candle usage equals 1,281 hours for a half year of candle usage. Multiplying by 100,000 families gives 128,100,000 hours by candlelight. Each candle requires half a pound of tallow and wax, thus a total of 64,050,000 pounds. At a price of thirty sols per pounds of tallow and wax (two hundred sols make one livre tournois), the total sum comes to 96,075,000 livre tournois.

"An immense sum," the astonished Franklin concluded, "that the city of Paris might save every year."

Some "new" regulations

To answer skeptics who cried that old habits are hard to change, and it would be difficult to induce the population of Paris to rise before noon, Franklin proposed the following regulations:

Future of the idea

The great discovery, conceived in humor and reported with all the wit and wisdom of Poor Richard was not soon forgotten. Cadet de Vaux reprinted the article on November 30, 1785. Messrs Quinquet and Lange, inventors of the oil lamp that sparked the idea, were so taken by the scheme that they continued corresponding with Franklin even after he returned to America.

Franklin continued to think about the scheme, and it may have prompted this description of 18th-century London written in his autobiography:

"For in walking thro' the Strand and Fleet Street one morning at seven o clock, I observed there was not one shop open tho it had been daylight and the sun up above three hours -- the inhabitants of London choosing voluntarily to live much by candlelight and sleep by sunshine, and yet often complaining a little absurdly of the duty on candles and the high price of tallow."

Decades later, church bells and cannon to rouse a sleeping populace were replaced by the simple act of altering the hands on clocks in the spring as the hour of dawning becomes too early for most sleepy eyes. In 1973, for the second time in American history, the Congress declared the year-round use of Daylight Saving Time to save energy during the oil embargo as a general concern for the nation's good and a love for economy. Today as fossil fuel supplies diminish and increase in price and their use damages the environment, we need to heed Franklin's advice still again.

Benjamin Franklin : Silence Dogood, The Busy-Body, & Early Writings

“The reader seems to see many Franklins, one emerging from another like those brightly painted Russian dolls which, ever smaller, disclose yet one more.” — John Updike, The New Yorker

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By Jill Lepore

Benjamin Franklin’s genius gave him no rest. A discontented man finds no easy chair. On April 4, 1757, he left Philadelphia by carriage, and reached New York just four days later, ready to sail for London. But one delay piled upon another, like so much ragged paper jamming a printing press, and he found himself stuck for more than two months. In all his fifty-one years, he could barely remember having “spent Time so uselessly.” (From childhood, Franklin, the son of a chandler, had toiled from dawn to dusk only to squander the tallow “reading the greatest Part of the Night.”) Waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough . He had some business to attend to—he wrote a new will, and more letters than other men write in a lifetime—but it was scarcely enough. “This tedious State of Uncertainty and long Waiting, has almost worn out my Patience,” he wrote to his wife, asking her to send along a pair of spectacles he had left behind. What signifies your Patience, if you can’t find it when you want it. He didn’t board until June 5th, and then the confounded ship lay anchored at Sandy Hook for two weeks. In his cabin, maybe even before the ship finally sailed on June 20th, he at last found something to do: he set about stringing together proverbs taken from twenty-five years of his “Poor Richard’s Almanack.”

Franklin finished his little essay at sea, on July 7, 1757. When he reached England, he sent it back on the first westbound vessel. It was published as the Preface to “Poor Richard Improved, 1758,” although it was soon reprinted, in at least a hundred and forty-five editions and six languages even before the eighteenth century was over, usually with the title “The Way to Wealth.” “It long ago passed from literature into the general human speech,” Carl Van Doren wrote in 1938, in an extraordinarily elegant biography of Franklin. This year marks the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of “The Way to Wealth,” among the most famous pieces of American writing ever, and one of the most willfully misunderstood. A lay sermon about how industry begets riches ( No Gains, without Pains ), “The Way to Wealth” has been taken for Benjamin Franklin’s—and even America’s—creed, and there’s a line or two of truth in that, but not a whole page. “The Way to Wealth” is also a parody, stitched and bound between the covers of a sham.

In 1767, when Franklin was sixty-one, long since famous the world over for his experiments with electricity but years before he signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution, his sister asked him for a copy of “all the Political pieces” he had ever written. “I could as easily make a Collection for you of all the past Parings of my Nails,” he answered. Today, more than a half century after the editors of “The Papers of Benjamin Franklin” started collecting those parings—not just Franklin’s published writings but his thousands of letters, ledgers, notebooks, and unpublished essays—they’re still not finished, and not for lack of trying. (Thirty-eight of a projected forty-seven volumes of Franklin’s Papers have been published.) If you wou’d not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing. Very few people have written more than Benjamin Franklin, and you would be hard pressed to think of anyone who has done more. And yet he remains as woefully misunderstood as his “Way to Wealth.” Let all Men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly .

Franklin, who had a rule for everything, had a rule for writing: “ No Piece can properly be called good, and well written, which is void of any Tendency to benefit the Reader, either by improving his Virtue or his Knowledge .” But he roped himself to this and so many other masts only because he found himself so cast about by “the Force of perpetual Temptations.” He is a Governor that governs his Passions, and he a Servant that serves them. He carried with him a little book in which he kept track, day by day, of whether he had lived according to thirteen virtues, including Silence, which he hoped to cultivate “to break a Habit I was getting into of Prattling, Punning and Joking.” What made Franklin great was how nobly he strived for perfection; what makes him almost impossibly interesting is how far short he fell of it.

The vast bulk of Franklin’s writing, and especially of his political pieces, is sober, stirring, and grave, as the occasion, and the times, all too often demanded. But he was also a sucker for a good joke, or, really, even a lousy one. He loved hoaxes and counterfeits and had the sort of fondness for puns that, if he hadn’t been so charming, would have been called a weakness. As it was, his enemies damned his “trivial mirth.” John Adams, who resented him, conceded, “He had wit at will,” and “talents for irony, allegory, and fable,” but characterized his humor as “infantine simplicity.” Franklin’s best satires are relentlessly scathing social and political commentary attacking tyranny, injustice, ignorance, and, at the end of his life, slavery. Yet reading his letters you get the sense that he couldn’t always govern his wit, as when, striving to collect himself, he began a new paragraph, “But to be serious.”

When Franklin was sixteen, and in the fourth year of a miserable apprenticeship to his brother James, a Boston printer, because their father had no money to send any of the six surviving Franklin sons to college (there were also seven daughters), he pulled off his first notable stunt. Disguising his handwriting, he wrote an essay under the pen name Silence Dogood, and slipped it under the printing-house door. James, who, like many masters, beat his apprentice, had no idea that his pest of a little brother was the author, and printed not only that first essay but thirteen more, in his newspaper. As the sharp-tongued Widow Dogood, the well-drubbed Ben offered “a few gentle Reproofs on those who deserve them,” including Harvard students, whose blindness to their good fortune left the poor apprentice all but speechless. Young Franklin then did his caustic widow one better. He invented for her a priggish critic, Ephraim Censorious, who beseeched Mrs. Dogood to save her scolding for the fair sex, since “Women are prime Causes of a great many Male Enormities.” Ahem.

Franklin wrote heaps of this kind of stuff. He got older, and a little less sophomoric— At 20 years of age the Will reigns; at 30 the Wit; at 40 the Judgment —but he never lost his appetite for satire and imposture. In 1732, when he was an aspiring twenty-six-year-old printer in Philadelphia, having run away from his apprenticeship, fathered an illegitimate child, and married, he gave birth to the fictional Richard Saunders, a kindhearted but hapless astrologer with empty pockets. In the preface to the first “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” Saunders addressed his “Courteous Reader”: “I might in this place attempt to gain thy Favour, by declaring that I write Almanacks with no other View than that of the publick Good; but in this I should not be sincere; and Men are now a-days too wise to be deceiv’d by Pretences how specious soever. The plain Truth of the Matter is, I am excessive poor, and my Wife, good Woman, is, I tell her, excessive proud.” Sincerity and plain truth? Not a bit of it. Poor Richard was naught but pretense.

Almanacs, issued just before the New Year, were cheap page-a-month calendars, with tides, important dates, and the phases of the moon. They were handy. They were purchased, as Franklin pointed out, by “the common People, who bought scarce any other Books.” Printers filled their blank space with poems, jokes, prophecies, and proverbs, which were, alas, almost never beautiful, funny, true, or wise. Then came Poor Richard.

Franklin didn’t write most of Poor Richard’s proverbs. By his own guess, he wrote perhaps one out of every ten; the rest he found in books, especially anthologies like Thomas Fuller’s 1732 “Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British.” But Franklin was the kind of literary alchemist who could turn drivel into haiku. Fuller had written, “A Man in Passion rides a horse that runs away with him.” Franklin outpaced him: A Man in a Passion rides a mad Horse. Where Titan Leeds, the author of “The American Almanack,” blathered, “Many things are wanting to them that desire many things,” Poor Richard pegged it: If you desire many things, many things will seem but a few.

What really set Franklin’s almanacs apart was Poor Richard himself, who started out as an affectionate imitation of Jonathan Swift’s 1708 parody of an imaginary almanac-maker, Isaac Bickerstaff. Like Bickerstaff, Saunders confidently, and, of course, wrongly, prophesied the death of his chief rival—in this case, the unfortunate Titan Leeds—reading the future by the stars badly to suggest that it couldn’t possibly be done well. Not everyone picked up on the homage to Swift, but Franklin’s lampoon was hard to miss. (It helped that the word “poor” in the title of an almanac was an eighteenth-century term of art, a promise that a book would be silly and a warning that it might be vulgar. Poor Richard’s rivals included Poor Robin and Poor Will.) Almanacs forecast twelve months’ worth of weather. Franklin knew this for nonsense: in 1741, Poor Richard predicted only sunshine, explaining to his Courteous Reader, “To oblige thee the more, I have omitted all the bad Weather, being Thy Friend R.S.”

Franklin’s brainchild was tenderhearted, henpecked, and witless. Ever since Follies have pleas’d, Fools have been able to divert. Poor Richard had picked up his pen because his wife had threatened to burn his books and stargazing instruments if he didn’t earn a few more farthings, and because “The Printer has offer’d me some considerable share of the Profits.” Saunders liked his privacy, and never told anyone where he lived: “I would eat my Nails first.” But everyone knew that Franklin kept his house and printshop on Market Street, where he sold his almanacs for five pence each. Franklin’s wife, Deborah, who called the best-selling almanacs “Poor Dicks,” could barely keep them in the shop.

Saunders once complained that rumors had circulated “ That there is no such a Man as I am; and have spread this Notion so thoroughly in the Country, that I have been frequently told it to my Face by those that don’t know me.” Some ill-natured fiends had even suggested that Benjamin Franklin was really Poor Richard. A pox on them. “My Printer, to whom my Enemies are pleased to ascribe my Productions,” Saunders protested, “is as unwilling to father my Offspring as I am to lose the Credit of it.”

Poor Richard was Benjamin Franklin’s most famous bastard, but by no means his last. Over the course of his long life, Franklin used dozens of pen names, from the high-minded Americanus to the humble Homespun to the farcical and low FART-HING . Still, a pseudonym was too thin a veil for his most scandalous pieces, which he circulated only in manuscript. Strange! That a Man who has wit enough to write a Satyr; should have folly enough to publish it. In 1745, when Franklin was thirty-nine, he produced a parody of a gentleman’s-conduct manual that his most exhaustive biographer, J. A. Leo Lemay (in the second volume of a planned seven-volume biography), calls “a small masterpiece of eighteenth-century bawdry.” Franklin, who had suffered much from “that hard to be govern’d Passion of Youth,” wrote a letter advising a young man suffering the same, but unwilling to seek the remedy of marriage, to take only older women for mistresses, because “There is no hazard of Children.” Also, older women are wiser, better talkers, better at intrigue, and better at other things, too, “every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement”; not to mention, “They are so grateful!! ”

Franklin counterfeited court documents, elegies, and even Scripture. Some of his fakes are so cunning that they weren’t discovered to be fakes, or his, until long after he was dead, partly because he was remarkably discreet ( Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead ) and partly because he was a practiced mimic. The boy too poor to go to Harvard had taught himself to write by imitating the prose style he found in an English gentleman’s magazine, The Spectator . He made The Spectator the tutor he never had: he read an essay, abstracted it, and then rewrote the argument from the abstract, to see if he could improve on the original. To make his prose more lyrical, he then turned the essays into poetry, and back again. In an essay he later wrote on literary style, which reads like Strunk and White, he pledged himself to brevity (“a multitude of Words obscures the Sense”), clarity (“To write clearly , not only the most expressive, but the plainest Words should be chosen”), and simplicity: “If a Man would that his Writings have an Effect on the Generality of Readers, he had better imitate that Gentleman, who would use no Word in his Works that was not well understood by his Cook-maid.”

About 1755, Franklin wrote a pastiche of the Old Testament, a parable attacking religious persecution, in pitch-perfect King James. He had it printed and bound within the pages of his own Bible so that he could read it aloud and see who would fall for it. (Franklin was a Deist, though he usually kept his skepticism to himself. Talking against Religion is unchaining a Tyger .) In Franklin’s chapter of Genesis, Abraham casts a bent and bowed old man out of his tent and into the wilderness when the stranger reveals himself to be an infidel. At midnight, God, finding the old man gone, thunders at Abraham, “Have I borne with him these hundred ninety and eight Years, and nourished him, and cloathed him, notwithstanding his Rebellion against me, and couldst not thou, that art thyself a Sinner, bear with him one Night?”

Benjamin Franklin took a great deal of pleasure in his wit, and maybe most of all in Richard Saunders. Even after he retired from business, in 1748, to devote himself to reading, writing, scientific experiments, and what would turn out to be forty-two years of tireless public service, he kept on writing the prefaces to Poor Richard’s almanacs, now printed by his partner, David Hall. But by 1757, on that voyage to London to lobby for a more equitable distribution of the taxes Parliament was raising to pay for the French and Indian War, Franklin took up his favorite role for what he must have thought would be the last time. “The Way to Wealth” was Poor Richard’s swan song, Franklin’s farewell to a troubled America. (He did not return until 1762, and left again two years later. He spent most of the rest of his life in England and France.)

Saunders began by thanking his readers, “for they buy my Works; and besides, in my Rambles, where I am not personally known, I have frequently heard one or other of my Adages repeated, with, as Poor Richard says , at the End on’t.” This pleased him so much, he said, that “I have sometimes quoted myself with great Gravity.” Then he told a story. He had stopped his horse at an auction, where one Father Abraham, “a plain clean old Man, with white Locks,” stood before a crowd. (It’s hard not to hear the echo of Franklin’s Biblical Abraham.) “ Pray, Father Abraham, what think you of the Times ?” the crowd asked the old man. “ Won’t these heavy Taxes quite ruin the Country ? How shall we be ever able to pay them ?” What followed—Father Abraham’s harangue—was, of course, Franklin himself, quoting himself, just as he’d hinted, with counterfeit gravity, and with his characteristic charity, since the speech was his parting gift to countrymen bearing the cost of a war for which there was no end in sight (not for nothing did it come to be called the Seven Years’ War):

Friends, says he, and Neighbours, the Taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the Government were the only Ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness , three times as much by our Pride , and four times as much by our Folly , and from these Taxes the Commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an Abatement. However let us hearken to good Advice, and something may be done for us; God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says.

The rest of Father Abraham’s speech, strung together from proverbs hoarded from earlier almanacs, endorsed thrift: “Here you are all got together at this Vendue of Fineries and Knicknacks . You call them Goods , but if you do not take Care, they will prove Evils to some of you. You expect they will be sold cheap , and perhaps they may for less than they cost; but if you have no Occasion for them, they must be dear to you. Remember what Poor Richard says, Buy what thou hast no Need of, and ere long thou shalt sell thy Necessaries .”

After the hoary old man finished, the people “approved the Doctrine and immediately practised the contrary, just as if it had been a common Sermon.” The sale opened, and “they began to buy extravagantly.”

Franklin didn’t heed Father Abraham’s advice, either. When he reached London, he went shopping, and shipped to his wife a huge collection of china (“there is something from all the china works in England”), along with melons, bowls, coffee cups, four silver salt ladles, “a little instrument to core apples,” tea cloths (“for nobody here breakfasts on the naked table”), a carpet, tablecloths, napkins, sheets, fifty-six yards of cotton, seven yards of fabric for covering chairs, snuffers, a snuff-stand, silk blankets, and a gown made of sixteen yards of flowered tissue. He even thought about buying his daughter a harpsichord, but, thrifty man, decided against it.

The best-known proverb of “The Way to Wealth” has vexed generations of the lazy-boned and sleepy-headed. Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise. “The sorrow that that maxim has cost me through my parents’ experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell,” Mark Twain once wrote. By the time Twain was writing, in 1870, Benjamin Franklin had turned into Father Abraham in the American imagination. “The Way to Wealth,” so useful in the farming, boycotting, non-importing, independence-loving eighteenth century, came to be worshipped in the capitalizing, industrializing, Founders-revering nineteenth century. The joke fell flat. The parody within the sham became the man. Of the nineteenth-century’s frugal, prudent, sober, homey, quaint, sexless, humorless, preachy Benjamin Franklin—loved (by Dale Carnegie), hated (by D. H. Lawrence), and held up (by Max Weber) as the original American Puritan striver, the prophet of prosperity—Twain wrote, “He was a hard lot.”

Until Carl Van Doren’s 1938 biography, Franklin was hostage to this narrow view of his character. Valiantly, Van Doren vowed “to rescue him from the dry, prim people who have claimed him as one of them.” He wrote, “They praise his thrift. But he himself admitted that he could never learn frugality, and he practised it no longer than his poverty forced him to. They praise his prudence. But at seventy he became a leader of a revolution.” Van Doren, who had earlier written a biography of Swift, couldn’t have tried harder to free Franklin from the shackles that bound him. “The dry, prim people seem to regard him as a treasure shut up in a savings bank, to which they have the lawful key. I herewith give him back, in his grand dimensions, to his nation and the world.”

Bad biographies make small men great; Franklin’s biographers have had the opposite problem. It’s difficult to fit Franklin between the covers of a book. His contributions to statesmanship, science, philanthropy, and literature were unrivalled both in his time and in ours. Even though Van Doren’s “Benjamin Franklin” was “cut with hard labour to the bone,” it still runs well past eight hundred pages. People who fall for Franklin fall hard. William Strahan, the London printer who brought out Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, wrote in 1757, on meeting Franklin, “I never saw a man who was, in every respect, so perfectly agreeable to me. Some are amiable in one view, some in another, he in all.” Van Doren felt the same way.

For all that Van Doren did, he failed to set Franklin free. Nearly every biographer to follow him has had to try to unfetter Franklin from his myth. “I do not come to bury this story, this Benjamin Franklin,” David Waldstreicher wrote in his 2004 study of Franklin and slavery, “so much as to show how it became the story.” “We seem to have been blinded” by Franklin’s light, Joyce Chaplin observed, in “The First Scientific American.” “Debunking Franklin” is what Gordon Wood tried to do in his 2004 “Americanization of Benjamin Franklin,” in which he suggested that Franklin, the man Frederick Jackson Turner dubbed “the first great American,” was essentially European. “Not Your Usual Founding Father,” Edmund Morgan titled his 2006 selection of Franklin’s writings, in which he deliberately skipped over “The Way to Wealth” and instead included a chapter called “The Uses of Laughter.” But Benjamin Franklin is still good and stuck—a walking, talking, page-a-day desk calendar. To his twee reputation, the man’s cosmopolitan, enlightened, revolutionary life and volume after volume of his Papers seem to matter not at all. As Poor Richard once said, sometimes Force shites upon Reason’s back .

Maybe the blame ought to be laid at Franklin’s own desk. On board that ship to London in 1757, he looked at twenty-five years’ worth of Poor Dicks and chose ninety-odd proverbs to put in “The Way to Wealth,” a set that, by any measure, is no fair sample of Poor Richard’s wisdom, which was not mostly or even very much about money and how to get it. If Franklin hadn’t been so worried about taxes, he might instead have pulled together some of Poor Richard’s many proverbs about equality: The greatest monarch on the proudest throne, is oblig’d to sit upon his own arse. Or hypocrisy: He that is conscious of a Stink in his Breeches, is jealous of every Wrinkle in another’s Nose. Or courtship: Neither a Fortress nor a Maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parly. Or religion: Serving God is Doing good to Man, but Praying is thought an easier Service, and therefore more generally chosen . Or delusion: He that lives upon Hope, dies farting . (Scholars have suggested that the last one was a printer’s error, and should have read “fasting,” but, I ask you, who was the printer?) Or he might have chosen to collect the dozens of Poor Richard’s proverbs advising against the accumulation of wealth: The Poor have little, Beggars none; the Rich too much, enough not one .

Franklin didn’t live by Poor Richard’s proverbs, nor did he agree with all of them. He that best understands the World, least likes it could hardly be farther from Franklin’s philosophy. And Nothing dries sooner than a Tear is not the sentiment of a man who, thirty-six years after the death of his four-year-old son, Francis, was still felled by grief at the thought of the boy.

But he did believe, earnestly and passionately, in hard work and sacrifice. The man behind Silence Dogood was committed to the principle of silently doing good. And he had boundless sympathy for the common people who bought his almanacs, people John Adams disdained as “rabble,” people as poor and humble as the tenth son of a second-rate chandler. In 1757, when Franklin finally set sail on that ship to England, he picked proverbs that might help struggling Americans bear the cost of the war. “I would rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich ,” Franklin once wrote, and he meant it.

In 1764, just before sailing again for England, Franklin may have written—scholars are uncertain—one last preface to his almanac. The war had ended in 1763, but half of Britain’s revenues were now going to pay interest on its debt, and Parliament, which had just passed the Sugar and Currency Acts, was debating a new stamp tax. Once again, Poor Richard urged frugality. “Taxes are of late Years greatly encreased among us, and now it is said we are to be burthened with the Payment of new Duties,” a distressingly sober and spiritless Saunders observed. “What are we to do, but, like honest and prudent Men, endeavour to do without the Things we shall, perhaps, never be able to pay for; or if we cannot do without them or something like them, to supply ourselves from our own Produce at home.” In these dire times, Poor Richard offered not proverbs but recipes, to help Americans get by without imported sugar: recipes for wine made from homegrown grapes, rum made from corn, and sugar made from beets. In London, in 1766, Franklin was questioned before the House of Commons during its deliberations on the repeal of the Stamp Act. Asked how soldiers sent to enforce the new taxes would be received, Franklin answered, “They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.”

The king and Parliament heeded Franklin’s advice just about as much “as if it had been a common Sermon.” They sent the soldiers. They made a rebellion. In 1771, not long after the Boston Massacre, in which British troops fired into a crowd of civilians, Franklin began writing his autobiography. He never finished it; it breaks off in 1758, just after he tells the story of sailing to London. By 1771, “The Way to Wealth” had already risen to its unexpected status as his most celebrated piece of writing. “The Piece being universally approved was copied in all the Newspapers of the Continent,” Franklin noted. It had proved useful. Franklin’s “Autobiography,” as carefully crafted a piece of prose as anything he ever wrote, is, in some ways, “The Way to Wealth” writ large; it was, as he must have judged it, the most useful thing he could offer to the American people, into whose service he had long since pressed his very self. The Master-piece of Man is to live to the purpose.

Benjamin Franklin abridged his genius, his character, his life. But he reads better unabridged; and “The Way to Wealth” makes a poor epitaph. Maybe it’s wiser to repay his wit with irreverence, and remember him by the epitaph he wrote for himself, in 1728:

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 and more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended, By the author.

And sweet, tenderhearted Poor Richard? Maybe he’s best remembered by his annual farewell: “May this Year prove a happy One to Thee and Thine, is the hearty Wish of, Kind Reader, Thy obliged Friend, R. SAUNDERS .” ♦

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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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Did Ben Franklin Invent Daylight Saving Time?

Benjamin Franklin’s 1784 essay on rising with the sun appeared in the Journal de Paris .

Daylight saving time—the practice of moving the clock forward one hour—has many critics. Losing an hour of sleep only to wake up to darkness? No thanks. But is Benjamin Franklin to blame for this “invention”?

Daylight saving time is one thing that Franklin did not invent. He merely suggested Parisians change their sleep schedules to save money on candles and lamp oil.

The common misconception comes from a satirical essay he wrote in the spring of 1784 that was published in the Journal de Paris . In the essay, titled “An Economical Project,” he writes of the thrifty benefits of daylight versus artificial light. He describes how—when woken by a loud noise at 6 a.m.—he noticed that the sun had already risen.

“Your readers, who with me have never seen any sign of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early; and especially when I assure them, that he gives light as soon as he rises . I am convinced of this. I am certain of my fact. One cannot be more certain of any fact. I saw it with my own eyes.”

His conclusions? Rising with the sun would save the citizens of Paris, where he was living at the time, a great deal of money: “An immense sum! That the city of Paris might save every year by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.”

Tongue firmly in cheek, Franklin went on to propose regulations to ensure Parisians became early risers:

First. Let a tax be laid of a louis [gold coin] per window, on every window that is provided with shutters to keep out the light of the sun. Second … Let guards be placed in the shops of the wax and tallow chandlers, and no family be permitted to be supplied with more than one pound of candles per week. Third. Let guards also be posted to stop all the coaches, etc. that would pass the streets after sunset, except those of physicians, surgeons, and midwives. Fourth. Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient? Let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest.

“For the great benefit of this discovery, thus freely communicated and bestowed by me on the public, I demand neither place, pension, exclusive privilege, nor any other reward whatever,” he continued. “I expect only to have the honour of it.”

So, who actually first proposed daylight saving time? We can place the blame on a New Zealand entomologist, George Hudson, who wanted more daylight in the evenings and presented the idea in 1895.

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From benjamin franklin to the royal academy of brussels, [after 19 may 1780], to the royal academy of brussels.

Passy, printed by Benjamin Franklin; AL : Chicago Historical Society; AL (draft) and copy: Library of Congress

The Académie impériale et royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles did not, according to its own historians, produce a body of work of enduring value during its founding decade. It was formed in 1772 in an attempt to raise what had been a small literary society from a level of “frivolity.” By incorporating the sciences, the academy hoped to become a serious institution. 2 One of its chief activities in its early years was to organize and judge intellectual contests, for which it devised questions and awarded medals. 3 At a meeting of October 13 and 14, 1779 (the report of which was not published until the following May), the society announced four questions for the upcoming year. The first three were literary and historical. The final one, in mathematics, was proposed “au lieu d’une question physique”: given a certain geometric figure, how could one determine the greatest number of smaller figures that could be contained inside the first? 4 Franklin found the question so ridiculous, especially in light of its being advertised as having a practical value, that he penned this sarcastic response.

He was pleased enough with the essay to print it as one of the bagatelles, but uneasy enough at its “grossiereté” to explicitly request William Carmichael not to publish it in Spain. 5 In September, 1783, writing to Richard Price after the peace treaty had been signed, Franklin was reminded of the topic of “inflammable air” while describing the French balloon craze. He enclosed a copy of this bagatelle, calling it “a jocular Paper I wrote some Years since in ridicule of a Prize Question given out by a certain Academy on this side the Water.” But, realizing that Price was a mathematician and might see merit where he had seen none, Franklin then suggested that his friend simply forward it to Priestley, “who is apt to give himself Airs (i.e. fix’d, deflogisticated, &c. &c.) and has a kind of Right to every thing his Friends produce upon that Subject.” 6 If Franklin read the volume of the Academy’s memoirs published that year (1783), he would have learned that the prize question was withdrawn because it had not been satisfactorily resolved. 7

[after May 19, 1780] 8

To the Royal Academy of *****

I Have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year, viz. “ Une figure quelconque donnée, on demande d’y inscrire le plus grand nombre de fois possible une autre figure plus petite quelconque, qui est aussi donnée. ” I was glad to find by these following Words, “ l’Académie a jugé que cette découverte, en étendant les bornes de nos connoissances, ne seroit pas sans UTILITÉ ”, that you esteem Utility an essential Point in your Enquiries, which has not always been the case with all Academies; and I conclude therefore that you have given this Question instead of a philosophical, or as the Learned express it, a physical one, because you could not at the time think of a physical one that promis’d greater Utility .

Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious Enquiry of learned Physicians, Chemists, &c. of this enlightened Age.

It is universally well known, That in digesting our common Food, there is created or produced in the Bowels of human Créatures, a great Quantity of Wind.

That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it.

That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving such Offence, forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.

That so retain’d contrary to Nature, it not only gives frequently great present Pain, but occasions future Diseases, such as habitual Cholics, Ruptures, Tympanies, &c. often destructive of the Constitution, & sometimes of Life itself.

Were it not for the odiously offensive Smell accompanying such Escapes, polite People would probably be under no more Restraint in discharging such Wind in Company, than they are in spitting, or in blowing their Noses.

My Prize Question therefore should be, To discover some Drug wholesome & not disagreable, to be mix’d with our common Food, or Sauces, that shall render the natural Discharges of Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreable as Perfumes .

That this is not a chimerical Project, and altogether impossible, may appear from these Considerations. That we already have some Knowledge of Means capable of Varying that Smell. He that dines on stale Flesh, especially with much Addition of Onions, shall be able to afford a Stink that no Company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some Time on Vegetables only, shall have that Breath so pure as to be insensible to the most delicate Noses; and if he can manage so as to avoid the Report, he may any where give Vent to his Griefs, unnoticed. But as there are many to whom an entire Vegetable Diet would be inconvenient, and as a little Quick-Lime thrown into a Jakes will correct the amazing Quantity of fetid Air arising from the vast Mass of putrid Matter contain’d in such Places, and render it rather pleasing to the Smell, who knows but that a little Powder of Lime (or some other thing equivalent) taken in our Food, or perhaps a Glass of Limewater drank at Dinner, may have the same Effect on the Air produc’d in and issuing from our Bowels? This is worth the Experiment. Certain it is also that we have the Power of changing by slight Means the Smell of another Discharge, that of our Water. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour; and a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in Nature, to find Means of making a Perfume of our Wind than of our Water?

For the Encouragement of this Enquiry, (from the immortal Honour to be reasonably expected by the Inventor) let it be considered of how small Importance to Mankind, or to how small a Part of Mankind have been useful those Discoveries in Science that have heretofore made Philosophers famous. Are there twenty Men in Europe at this Day, the happier, or even the easier, for any Knowledge they have pick’d out of Aristotle? What Comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give to a Man who has Whirlwinds in his Bowels! The Knowledge of Newton’s mutual Attraction of the Particles of Matter, can it afford Ease to him who is rack’d by their mutual Repulsion , and the cruel Distensions it occasions? The Pleasure arising to a few Philosophers, from seeing, a few Times in their Life, the Threads of Light untwisted, and separated by the Newtonian Prism into seven Colours, can it be compared with the Ease and Comfort every Man living might feel seven times a Day, by discharging freely the Wind from his Bowels? Especially if it be converted into a Perfume: For the Pleasures of one Sense being little inferior to those of another, instead of pleasing the Sight he might delight the Smell of those about him, & make Numbers happy, which to a benevolent Mind must afford infinite Satisfaction. The generous Soul, who now endeavours to find out whether the Friends he entertains like best Claret or Burgundy, Champagne or Madeira, would then enquire also whether they chose Musk or Lilly, Rose or Bergamot, and provide accordingly. And surely such a Liberty of Ex-pressing one’s Scent-iments , and pleasing one another , is of infinitely more Importance to human Happiness than that Liberty of the Press , or abusing one another , which the English are so ready to fight & die for. —In short, this Invention, if compleated, would be, as Bacon expresses it, bringing Philosophy home to Mens Business and Bosoms . 9 And I cannot but conclude, that in Comparison therewith, for universal and continual UTILITY , the Science of the Philosophers abovementioned, even with the Addition, Gentlemen, of your “ Figure quelconque ” and the Figures inscrib’d in it, are, all together, scarcely worth a

F A R T-H I N G.

2 .  See L’Académie royale de Belgique depuis sa fondation (1772–1922) (Brussels, 1922), pp. 11–13. See also Richard E. Amacher, Franklin’s Wit & Folly: the Bagatelles (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953), pp. 63–5.

3 .  L’Académie royale de Belgique , pp. 12, 15.

4 .  Mémoires de L’Académie impériale et royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles , III (1780), xliii–xlv. BF quotes from this question at the beginning of the bagatelle.

5 .  To Carmichael, Jan. 23, 1782, Smyth, Letters , VIII , 369.

6 .  To Price, Sept. 16, 1783, Library of Congress.

7 .  Mémoires de L’Académie …, IV (1783), p. xxiv.

8 .  The date on which volume III of the Mémoires , containing the satirized prize question, was announced for sale: Edouard Mailly, Histoire de l’Académie impériale et royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Bruxelles (Brussels, 1883), p. 267.

9 .  From the dedication to the 1625 edition of Essayes: Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (Michael Kiernan, ed., Oxford, 1985), p. 5.

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Benjamin Franklin's Anti-Slavery Petitions to Congress

During his life, Franklin had many careers including service as a diplomat, a printer, a writer, an inventor, a scientist, a lawmaker, and a postmaster, among others. In his later years he became vocal as an abolitionist and in 1787 began to serve as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. The Society was originally formed April 14, 1775, in Philadelphia, as The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage; it was reorganized in 1784 and again in 1787, and then incorporated by the state of Pennsylvania in 1789. The Society not only advocated the abolition of slavery, but made efforts to integrate freed slaves into American society.

Franklin did not publicly speak out against slavery until very late in his life. As a young man he owned slaves, and he carried advertisements for the sale of slaves in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. At the same time, however, he published numerous Quaker pamphlets against slavery and condemned the practice of slavery in his private correspondence. It was after the ratification of the United States Constitution that he became an outspoken opponent of slavery. In 1789 he wrote and published several essays supporting the abolition of slavery and his last public act was to send to Congress a petition on behalf of the Society asking for the abolition of slavery and an end to the slave trade. The petition, signed on February 3, 1790, asked the first Congress, then meeting in New York City, to "devise means for removing the Inconsistency from the Character of the American People," and to "promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race."

The petition was introduced to the House on February 12 and to the Senate on February 15, 1790. It was immediately denounced by pro-slavery congressmen and sparked a heated debate in both the House and the Senate. The Senate took no action on the petition, and the House referred it to a select committee for further consideration. The committee reported on March 5, 1790 claiming that the Constitution restrains Congress from prohibiting the importation or emancipation of slaves until 1808 and then tabled the petition. On April 17, 1790, just two months later, Franklin died in Philadelphia at the age of 84.

Petition from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery to Vice President John Adams signed by Benjamin Franklin (front), February 3, 1790; Records of the U.S. Senate, RG 46.

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Petition from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery to Vice President John Adams signed by Benjamin Franklin (back), February 3, 1790; Records of the U.S. Senate, RG 46.

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