With John Adams and Edward Rutledge he was selected by Congress to discuss with Admiral Howe (September 1776, at Staten Island) the terms of peace proposed by Howe, who had arrived in New York harbour in July 1776, and who had been an intimate friend of Franklin; but the discussion was fruitless, as the American commissioners refused to treat “back of this step of independency.” On the 26th of September in the same year Franklin was chosen as commissioner to France to join Arthur Lee, who was in London, and Silas Deane, who had arrived in France in June 1776. He collected all the money he could command, between £3000 and £4000, lent it to Congress before he set sail, and arrived at Paris on the 22nd of December. He found quarters at Passy,[4] then a suburb of Paris, in a house belonging to Le Ray de Chaumont, an active friend of the American cause, who had influential relations with the court, and through whom he was enabled to be in the fullest communication with the French government without compromising it in the eyes of Great Britain.

At the time of Franklin’s arrival in Paris he was already one of the most talked about men in the world. He was a member of every important learned society in Europe; he was a member, and one of the managers, of the Royal Society, and was one of eight foreign members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Three editions of his scientific works had already appeared in Paris, and a new edition had recently appeared in London. To all these advantages he added a political purpose—the dismemberment of the British empire—which was entirely congenial to every citizen of France. “Franklin’s reputation,” wrote John Adams with characteristic extravagance, “was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire; and his character more esteemed and beloved than all of them.... If a collection could be made of all the gazettes of Europe, for the latter half of the 18th century, a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon le grand Franklin would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever lived.” “Franklin’s appearance in the French salons, even before he began to negotiate,” says Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, “was an event of great importance to the whole of Europe.... His dress, the simplicity of his external appearance, the friendly meekness of the old man, and the apparent humility of the Quaker, procured for Freedom a mass of votaries among the court circles who used to be alarmed at its coarseness and unsophisticated truths. Such was the number of portraits,[5] busts and medallions of him in circulation before he left Paris that he would have been recognized from them by any adult citizen in any part of the civilized world.”

Franklin’s position in France was a difficult one from the start, because of the delicacy of the task of getting French aid at a time when France was unready openly to take sides against Great Britain. But on the 6th of February 1778, after the news of the defeat and surrender of Burgoyne had reached Europe, a treaty of alliance and a treaty of amity and commerce between France and the United States were signed at Paris by Franklin, Deane and Lee. On the 28th of October this commission was discharged and Franklin was appointed sole plenipotentiary to the French court. Lee, from the beginning of the mission to Paris, seems to have been possessed of a mania of jealousy toward Franklin, or of misunderstanding of his acts, and he tried to undermine his influence with the Continental Congress. John Adams, when he succeeded Deane (recalled from Paris through Lee’s machinations) joined in the chorus of fault-finding against Franklin, dilated upon his social habits, his personal slothfulness and his complete lack of business-like system; but Adams soon came to see that, although careless of details, Franklin was doing what no other man could have done, and he ceased his harsher criticism. Even greater than his diplomatic difficulties were Franklin’s financial straits. Drafts were being drawn on him by all the American agents in Europe, and by the Continental Congress at home. Acting as American naval agent for the many successful privateers who harried the English Channel, and for whom he skilfully got every bit of assistance possible, open and covert, from the French government, he was continually called upon for funds in these ventures. Of the vessels to be sent to Paris with American cargoes which were to be sold for the liquidation of French loans to the colonies made through Beaumarchais, few arrived; those that did come did not cover Beaumarchais’s advances, and hardly a vessel came from America without word of fresh drafts on Franklin. After bold and repeated overtures for an exchange of prisoners—an important matter, both because the American frigates had no place in which to stow away their prisoners, and because of the maltreatment of American captives in such prisons as Dartmoor—exchanges began at the end of March 1779, although there were annoying delays, and immediately after November 1781 there was a long break in the agreement; and the Americans discharged from English prisons were constantly in need of money. Franklin, besides, was constantly called upon to meet the indebtedness of Lee and of Ralph Izard (1742-1804), and of John Jay, who in Madrid was being drawn on by the American Congress. In spite of the poor condition in Europe of the credit of the struggling colonies, and of the fact that France was almost bankrupt (and in the later years was at war), and although Necker strenuously resisted the making of any loans to the colonies, France, largely because of Franklin’s appeals, expended, by loan or gift to the colonies, or in sustenance of the French arms in America, a sum estimated at $60,000,000.

In 1781 Franklin, with John Adams, John Jay, Jefferson, who remained in America, and Henry Laurens, then a prisoner in England, was appointed on a commission to make peace with Great Britain. In the spring of 1782 Franklin had been informally negotiating with Shelburne, secretary of state for the home department, through the medium of Richard Oswald, a Scotch merchant, and had suggested that England should cede Canada to the United States in return for the recognition of loyalist claims by the states. When the formal negotiations began Franklin held closely to the instructions of Congress to its commissioners, that they should maintain confidential relations with the French ministers and that they were “to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge and concurrence,” and were ultimately to be governed by “their advice and opinion.” Jay and Adams disagreed with him on this point, believing that France intended to curtail the territorial aspirations of the Americans for her own benefit and for that of her ally, Spain. At last, after the British government had authorized its agents to treat with the commissioners as representatives of an independent power, thus recognizing American independence before the treaty was made, Franklin acquiesced in the policy of Jay. The preliminary treaty was signed by the commissioners on the 30th of November 1782, the final treaty on the 3rd of September 1783. Franklin had repeatedly petitioned Congress for his recall, but his letters were unanswered or his appeals refused until the 7th of March 1785, when Congress resolved that he be allowed to return to America; on the 10th of March Thomas Jefferson, who had joined him in August of the year before, was appointed to his place. Jefferson, when asked if he replaced Franklin, replied, “No one can replace him, sir; I am only his successor.” Before Franklin left Paris on the 12th of July 1785 he had made commercial treaties with Sweden (1783) and Prussia (1785; signed after Franklin’s departure by Jefferson and John Adams). Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on the 13th of September, disembarking at the same wharf as when he had first entered the city. He was immediately elected a member of the municipal council of Philadelphia, becoming its chairman; and was chosen president of the Supreme Executive Council (the chief executive officer) of Pennsylvania, and was re-elected in 1786 and 1787, serving from October 1785 to October 1788. In May 1787 he was elected a delegate to the Convention which drew up the Federal Constitution, this body thus having a member upon whom all could agree as chairman, should Washington be absent. He opposed over-centralization of government and favoured the Connecticut Compromise, and after the work of the Convention was done used his influence to secure the adoption of the Constitution.[6] As president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Franklin signed a petition to Congress (12th February 1790) for immediate abolition of slavery, and six weeks later in his most brilliant manner parodied the attack on the petition made by James Jackson (1757-1806) of Georgia, taking off Jackson’s quotations of Scripture with pretended texts from the Koran cited by a member of the Divan of Algiers in opposition to a petition asking for the prohibition of holding Christians in slavery. These were his last public acts. His last days were marked by a fine serenity and calm; he died in his own house in Philadelphia on the 17th of April 1790, the immediate cause being an abscess in the lungs. He was buried with his wife in the graveyard (Fifth and Arch Streets) of Christ Church, Philadelphia.

Physically Franklin was large, about 5 ft. 10 in. tall, with a well-rounded, powerful figure; he inherited an excellent constitution from his parents—“I never knew,” says he, “either my father or mother to have any sickness but that of which they dy’d, he at 89, and she at 85 years of age”—but injured it somewhat by excesses; in early life he had severe attacks of pleurisy, from one of which, in 1727, it was not expected that he would recover, and in his later years he was the victim of stone and gout. When he was sixteen he became a vegetarian for a time, rather to save money for books than for any other reason, and he always preached moderation in eating, though he was less consistent in his practice in this particular than as regards moderate drinking. He was always enthusiastically fond of swimming, and was a great believer in fresh air, taking a cold air bath regularly in the morning, when he sat naked in his bedroom beguiling himself with a book or with writing for a half-hour or more. He insisted that fresh, cold air was not the cause of colds, and preached zealously the “gospel of ventilation.” He was a charming talker, with a gay humour and a quiet sarcasm and a telling use of anecdote for argument. Henri Martin, the French historian, speaks of him as “of a mind altogether French in its grace and elasticity.” In 1730 he married Deborah Read, in whose father’s house he had lived when he had first come to Philadelphia, to whom he had been engaged before his first departure from Philadelphia for London, and who in his absence had married a ne’er-do-well, one Rogers, who had deserted her. The marriage to Franklin is presumed to have been a common law marriage, for there was no proof that Miss Read’s former husband was dead, nor that, as was suspected, a former wife, alive when Rogers married Miss Read, was still alive, and that therefore his marriage to Deborah was void. His “Debby,” or his “dear child,” as Franklin usually addressed her in his letters, received into the family, soon after her marriage, Franklin’s illegitimate son, William Franklin (1729-1813),[7] with whom she afterwards quarrelled, and whose mother, tradition says, was Barbara, a servant in the Franklin household. Another illegitimate child became the wife of John Foxcroft of Philadelphia. Deborah, who was “as much dispos’d to industry and frugality as” her husband, was illiterate and shared none of her husband’s tastes for literature and science; her dread of an ocean voyage kept her in Philadelphia during Franklin’s missions to England, and she died in 1774, while Franklin was in London. She bore him two children, one a son, Francis Folger, “whom I have seldom since seen equal’d in everything, and whom to this day [thirty-six years after the child’s death] I cannot think of without a sigh,” who died (1736) when four years old of small-pox, not having been inoculated; the other was Sarah (1744-1808), who married Richard Bache (1737-1811), Franklin’s successor in 1776-1782 as postmaster-general. Franklin’s gallant relations with women after his wife’s death were probably innocent enough. Best known of his French amies were Mme Helvétius, widow of the philosopher, and the young Mme Brillon, who corrected her “Papa’s” French and tried to bring him safely into the Roman Catholic Church. With him in France were his grandsons, William Temple Franklin, William Franklin’s natural son, who acted as private secretary to his grandfather, and Benjamin Franklin Bache (1769-1798), Sarah’s son, whom he sent to Geneva to be educated, for whom he later asked public office of Washington, and who became editor of the Aurora, one of the leading journals in the Republican attacks on Washington.

Franklin early rebelled against New England Puritanism and spent his Sundays in reading and in study instead of attending church. His free-thinking ran its extreme course at the time of his publication in London of A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), which he recognized as one of the great errata of his life. He later called himself a deist, or theist, not discriminating between the terms. To his favourite sister he wrote: “There are some things in your New England doctrine and worship which I do not agree with; but I do not therefore condemn them, or desire to shake your belief or practice of them.” Such was his general attitude. He did not believe in the divinity of Christ, but thought “his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is like to see.” His intense practical-mindedness drew him away from religion, but drove him to a morality of his own (the “art of virtue,” he called it), based on thirteen virtues each accompanied by a short precept; the virtues were Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity and Humility, the precept accompanying the last-named virtue being “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” He made a business-like little notebook, ruled off spaces for the thirteen virtues and the seven days of the week, “determined to give a week’s strict attention to each of the virtues successively ... [going] thro’ a course compleate in thirteen weeks and four courses in a year,” marking for each day a record of his adherence to each of the precepts. “And conceiving God to be the fountain of wisdom,” he “thought it right and necessary to solicit His assistance for obtaining it,” and drew up the following prayer for daily use: “O powerful Goodness! bountiful Father! merciful Guide! Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen my resolution to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to Thy other children, as the only return in my power for Thy continual favours to me.” He was by no means prone to overmuch introspection, his great interest in the conduct of others being shown in the wise maxims of Poor Richard, which were possibly too utilitarian but were wonderfully successful in instructing American morals. His Art of Virtue on which he worked for years was never completed or published in any form.

“Benjamin Franklin, Printer,” was Franklin’s own favourite description of himself. He was an excellent compositor and pressman; his workmanship, clear impressions, black ink and comparative freedom from errata did much to get him the public printing in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the printing of the paper money[8] and other public matters in Delaware. The first book with his imprint is The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament and apply’d to the Christian State and Worship. By I. Watts ..., Philadelphia: Printed by B. F. and H. M. for Thomas Godfrey, and Sold at his Shop, 1729. The first novel printed in America was Franklin’s reprint in 1744 of Pamela; and the first American translation from the classics which was printed in America was a version by James Logan (1674-1751) of Cato’s Moral Distichs (1735). In 1744 he published another translation of Logan’s, Cicero On Old Age, which Franklin thought typographically the finest book he had ever printed. In 1733 he had established a press in Charleston, South Carolina, and soon after did the same in Lancaster, Pa., in New Haven, Conn., in New York, in Antigua, in Kingston, Jamaica, and in other places. Personally he had little connexion with the Philadelphia printing office after 1748, when David Hall became his partner and took charge of it. But in 1753 he was eagerly engaged in having several of his improvements incorporated in a new press, and more than twenty years after was actively interested in John Walter’s scheme of “logography.” In France he had a private press in his house in Passy, on which he printed “bagatelles.” Franklin’s work as a publisher is for the most part closely connected with his work in issuing the Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack (a summary of the proverbs from which appeared in the number for 1758, and has often been reprinted—under such titles as Father Abraham’s Speech, and The Way to Wealth).[9]

Of much of Franklin’s work as an author something has already been said. Judged as literature, the first place belongs to his Autobiography, which unquestionably ranks among the few great autobiographies ever written. His style in its simplicity, facility and clearness owed something to De Foe, something to Cotton Mather, something to Plutarch, more to Bunyan and to his early attempts to reproduce the manner of the third volume of the Spectator; and not the least to his own careful study of word usage. From Xenophon’s Memorabilia he learned when a boy the Socratic method of argument. Swift he resembled in the occasional broadness of his humour, in his brilliantly successful use of sarcasm and irony,[10] and in his mastery of the hoax. Balzac said of him that he “invented the lightning-rod, the hoax (’le canard’) and the republic.” Among his more famous hoaxes were the “Edict of the King of Prussia” (1773), already described; the fictitious supplement to the Boston Chronicle, printed on his private press at Passy in 1782, and containing a letter with an invoice of eight packs of 954 cured, dried, hooped and painted scalps of rebels, men, women and children, taken by Indians in the British employ; and another fictitious Letter from the Count de Schaumberg to the Baron Hohendorf commanding the Hessian Troops in America (1777)—the count’s only anxiety is that not enough men will be killed to bring him in moneys he needs, and he urges his officer in command in America “to prolong the war ... for I have made arrangements for a grand Italian opera, and I do not wish to be obliged to give it up.”[11]

Closely related to Franklin’s political pamphlets are his writings on economics, which, though undertaken with a political or practical purpose and not in a purely scientific spirit, rank him as the first American economist. He wrote in 1729 A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, which argued that a plentiful currency will make rates of interest low and will promote immigration and home manufactures, and which did much to secure the further issue of paper money in Pennsylvania. After the British Act of 1750 forbidding the erection or the operating of iron or steel mills in the colonies, Franklin wrote Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries (1751); its thesis was that manufactures come to be common only with a high degree of social development and with great density of population, and that Great Britain need not, therefore, fear the industrial competition of the colonies, but it is better known for the estimate (adopted by Adam Smith) that the population of the colonies would double every quarter-century; and for the likeness to Malthus’s[12] “preventive check” of its statement: “The greater the common fashionable expense of any rank of people the more cautious they are of marriage.” His Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth (1769) shows that he was greatly influenced by the French physiocrats after his visit to France in 1767. His Wail of a Protected Manufacturer voices a protest against protection as raising the cost of living; and he held that free trade was based on a natural right. He knew Kames, Hume and Adam Smith, and corresponded with Mirabeau, “the friend of Man.” Some of the more important of his economic theses, as summarized by W. A. Wetzel, are: that money as coin may have more than its bullion value; that natural interest is determined by the rent of land valued at the sum of money loaned—an anticipation of Turgot; that high wages are not inconsistent with a large foreign trade; that the value of an article is determined by the amount of labour necessary to produce the food consumed in making the article; that manufactures are advantageous but agriculture only is truly productive; and that when practicable (as he did not think it practicable at the end of the War of Independence) state revenue should be raised by direct tax.

Franklin as a scientist[13] and as an inventor has been decried by experts as an amateur and a dabbler; but it should be remembered that it was always his hope to retire from public life and devote himself to science. In the American Philosophical Society (founded 1743) scientific subjects were much discussed. Franklin wrote a paper on the causes of earthquakes for his Gazette of the 15th of December 1737; and he eagerly collected material to uphold his theory that waterspouts and whirlwinds resulted from the same causes. In 1743, from the circumstance that an eclipse not visible in Philadelphia because of a storm had been observed in Boston, where the storm although north-easterly did not occur until an hour after the eclipse, he surmised that storms move against the wind along the Atlantic coast. In the year before (1742) he had planned the “Pennsylvania fire-place,” better known as the “Franklin stove,” which saved fuel, heated all the room, and had the same principle as the hot-air furnace; the stove was never patented by Franklin, but was described in his pamphlet dated 1744. He was much engaged at the same time in remedying smoking chimneys, and as late as 1785 wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, physician to the emperor of Austria, on chimneys and draughts; smoking street lamps he remedied by a simple contrivance. The study of electricity he took up in 1746 when he first saw a Leyden jar, in the manipulation of which he became expert and which he improved by the use of granulated lead in the place of water for the interior armatures; he recognized that condensation is due to the dielectric and not to the metal coatings. A note in his diary, dated the 7th of November 1749, shows that he had then conjectured that thunder and lightning were electrical manifestations; in the same year he planned the lightning-rod (long known as “Franklin’s rod”), which he described and recommended to the public in 1753, when the Copley medal of the Royal Society was awarded him for his discoveries. The famous experiment with the kite, proving lightning an electrical phenomenon, was performed by Franklin in June 1752. He overthrew entirely the “friction” theory of electricity and conceived the idea of plus and minus charges (1753); he thought the sea the source of electricity. On light Franklin wrote to David Rittenhouse in June 1784; the sum of his own conjectures was that the corpuscular theory of Newton was wrong, and that light was due to the vibration of an elastic aether. He studied with some care the temperature of the Gulf Stream. In navigation he suggested many new contrivances, such as water-tight compartments, floating anchors to lay a ship to in a storm, and dishes that would not upset during a gale; and beginning in 1757 made repeated experiments with oil on stormy waters. As a mathematician he devised various elaborate magic squares and novel magic circles, of which he speaks apologetically, because they are of no practical use. Always much interested in agriculture, he made an especial effort (like Robert R. Livingston) to promote the use of plaster of Paris as a fertiliser. He took a prominent part in aeronautic experiments during his stay in France. He made an excellent clock, which because of a slight improvement introduced by James Ferguson in 1757 was long known as Ferguson’s clock. In medicine Franklin was considered important enough to be elected to the Royal Medical Society of Paris in 1777, and an honorary member of the Medical Society of London in 1787. In 1784 he was on the committee which investigated Mesmer, and the report is a document of lasting scientific value. Franklin’s advocacy of vegetarianism, of sparing and simple diet, and of temperance in the use of liquors, and of proper ventilation has already been referred to. His most direct contribution to medicine was the invention for his own use of bifocal eyeglasses.