October 21, 2025 • 46 mins
Learn all about Benjamin Franklin's early life. What was he like as a child? How did it impact him as an adult? Find out now!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now this is the FCB podcast network.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
The breed us all with cheer any firs day of.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
The thing, and they thought so we working with America and.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
Of the.
Speaker 5 (00:27):
Welcome back to the Growing Patriot podcast American History for Kids.
I'm your host, Amelia Hamilton. This is the first episode
of our series on our Founding Fathers. Today we're going
to be talking about Benjamin Franklin, our oldest and first
founding father, and we're going to be talking about his childhood,
(00:49):
his life, and what he was like as a person.
So first we have.
Speaker 6 (00:53):
Some questions from l and then some answers from our
expert Colin Brown.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
Hi. My name is Elle. I am thirteen years old
and I live in the Los Angeles area. Some of
my favorite things to do are reading, swimming, and doing crafts.
I have a few questions about Benny Franklin. What was
his life like when he was my age? Did he
ever have a wife in shortan of his own? Does
(01:25):
he have any descendants who are alive today thanks to me?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Probably the best way to start is kind of just
how I got interested in American history, right aside from
being an American and loving my own country. I was
when I was ten or eleven, so probably around the
same age as your listeners. I started reading this I
(01:56):
think I was, I think we're sitting in American history
or something, and I read this book called George Washington's World.
I can't remember the author. She It's an older work,
but it kind of gives a narrative telling of the
revolution and just and the founding and kind of like
(02:18):
what's going on in England, what's going on in Paris
at the time. And I fell in love with that,
like it just you know, it enchanted me. And ever
since then, I've kind of, you know, been a diehard
American in a lot of ways. But you know, with Franklin,
I didn't really come to like I knew the autobiography,
(02:42):
and I knew things most people know, right his inventions,
his you know a little bit about his political career,
his experiments and such, all his writings. But I really
got into Franklin and graduate school and it was kind
of studying Franklin's views on the British Empire and kind
(03:03):
of how ahead of his ahead of his time he
was that really got me interested in him. And so yeah,
that's uh, it's been a couple of.
Speaker 6 (03:12):
Years now, So what are you doing now?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Currently? I am a visiting assistant professor at the University
of Mississippi with their the Declaration of Independent Center for
the Study of American Freedom and well at the same
time finishing up the dissertation. So yeah, not yet, doctor, but.
Speaker 6 (03:33):
So close almost almost all right. So, you know, you
talked about, you know, loving American history from childhood, and
that's what we are going for here on the podcast.
So I would like to start with Benjamin Franklin's childhood.
So when he let's start right at the beginning. So
when he was born, was there any sign that he
(03:54):
was going to be an important man that we would
be talking about all these years later. Was he, you know,
born into a famous family or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
He wasn't. He actually was. So his parents were Josiah
and Abiah Franklin. He was born in Boston in seventeen
oh six, and he was one of seventeen children. His
father had been previously married and had five kids, and
his first wife passed away and then remarried and had
(04:31):
ten children total, including Franklin. And Franklin was the youngest boy,
so the tenth son and the youngest son. And so
you know at his birth, he you know, he's just
one one of the litter, so to speak, a bunch
of siblings. But you know, from a very early age
(04:54):
he kind of demonstrated or revealed a kind of of
precocious intellect. And he was very spirited. So I should
back up a little bit. So his his father, Josiah,
was a candle maker. He made soap and candles. So
(05:15):
not particularly a wealthy rising family really, more kind of
middle class, lower to middle class. But Franklin, you know, he,
like I said, was very smart and very spirited and
got himself, as he puts it in his autobiography, into
(05:38):
a lot of little scrapes. So one story he gives
is he had a tendency to be kind of be
a leader among his group of friends. And one day
they were playing around a river and decided they were
going to build a bridge. And this was Franklin's entire idea, right,
He was like, I want to build this bridge over
the river or over the creek, really, and so they
(06:01):
started taking a bunch of bricks that they found lying around,
and you know, all according to Franklin's direction, they built
this little bridge. It turns out that those weren't bricks
that Franklin could use though someone else was supposed to
be using them. So his father rightly chastised him, right
(06:21):
corrected him, and taught him that while it's you know,
you wanted to build something useful, but the most useful
thing is always also going to be honest. So from
an early age, Franklin you know, learned better to avoid
doing anything you know, no lying, no cheating, no stealing,
try to do everything honestly. So he you know, as
(06:47):
a as a child and as one of seventeen, he
he was only in school formal schooling for about a
year or so. He went to a small grammar school
when he was about eight years old. He did very well,
but his father didn't have enough money to send him
(07:07):
through all the way through college, and so decided that Franklin,
even though he was doing well and probably of his
siblings the most likely to excel at you know, school
and everything, he decided Franklin needed to learn a trade.
So he first he took him out of the grammar
(07:28):
school and then for a year Franklin was enrolled in
a kind of preparatory school for shopkeepers and such. He
learned penmanship and how to write and mathematics. And then
after that, about when he was about the age of ten,
Franklin went and worked with his father making candlesticks and soap.
(07:53):
And this was kind of the path that his father
had set for him. You know, you're gonna study a
trade and make your fortune off of that. Franklin didn't
like making candlesticks. He didn't like making so he since
he lived in Boston, Boston being a port town, he
(08:19):
was near the water all the time, and he became
really enamored with the idea of being a sailor, of
going off onto the high seas and having adventures, and
so that's what he wanted to do. And I think
he even threatened a couple of times, I'm going to
run away and you know, stow away on a ship
and you can't stop me. His father, though, discouraged him
(08:42):
on that right and said, Okay, if you don't want
to be a candlestick maker, then let's find another trade
for you. We have to something else, and they eventually
settled on printing. Franklin's older brother, James, owned a print shop,
a printing business, and eventually a newspaper, and from about
the age of twelve until he was seventeen, Franklin was
(09:04):
an apprentice with his older brother James, learning printing.
Speaker 6 (09:08):
Okay, and that actually takes us into Elle's first question
that she sent in, which is what was Benjamin Franklin's
life when like when he was her age which is thirteen.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
So you know, it's the eighteenth century, the seventeen hundreds,
So you know, young Franklin as a kid, he didn't
have a lot of things we have today, right, you know,
he had toys and such, but no TV, no internet,
no movies, none of those things. But what he did
have was he had his imagination and his friends, and
(09:42):
he also had books. In his autobiography, he talks about
how from a very early age he developed a great
appetite for reading, and he kind of devoured books. When
he was working for his older brother, he would he
would get paid a little bit and he would just
(10:03):
save up rather than pay for food. He would go
without meals or like eat only one meal a day
in order to save up money to buy more books.
Because that's what he was really passionate about was reading.
And he read a ton of things, right, He read
the Bible, He read lots of literature at the time,
(10:26):
like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Cotton Mather was a contemporary,
and he read some of Cotton Mather the Mathers Essays.
He also read the Greek, the ancient Greek historian Plutarch,
and read a bunch of the lives of these ancient
(10:46):
Greek and Roman statesmen and heroes, and plenty of other
things like we don't even I don't think we know
fully everything he read, but that you know, he spent
most of his time reading. When he wasn't reading, he
was swimming. He loved to swim as well. He a
(11:07):
few years later when he during his first trip to London,
he became he got the nickname the water American because
he taught a couple of Londoners how to swim, and
he even developed a couple of techniques of his own.
So mostly, you know, Franklin was reading, he was swimming.
(11:30):
So he had a pretty active intellectual life, right, a
pretty active active life physical life. And then he also
tried his hand at writing. So he and his friends.
A lot of his friends were also like him, very smart,
and they wanted to become writers, poets and such, and
(11:52):
so they had contests writing poetry, and Franklin was was
pretty good at it. He had a uncle who wrote
a couple of poems. One of them, his uncle, who
also was Benjamin Franklin, dedicated a poem to the younger
Benjamin Franklin, and it was kind of this connection that
(12:13):
led Franklin to, oh, you know, I'm going to imitate
my uncle write poetry. Aside from that, though, at the so,
starting at the age of twelve, he was working for
his brother James, and so most of his time was
spent in their print shop setting type in the printers,
(12:34):
transcribing essays and other things that they were putting into
their newspaper. And mostly it was kind of that. Mostly
it was sorry, that was about it. That was mostly
it right day to day life for twelve thirteen, fourteen
(12:56):
year old Franklin working in the print shop during the days,
during meals, reading as much as he could, staying up
late reading, sneaking books under the covers and such, and
then you know, going outside and playing a lot. But
also he had access to some of the smartest and
(13:22):
wittiest figures in Boston at the time. A lot of
his brother James's friends were kind of amateur writers themselves
who wanted to write essays and the newspapers and such.
And they were all also very learned, well learned, well read,
(13:42):
and so Franklin got to overhear and even participate in
some of their conversations, and this led him eventually to
his Silence Good, Silence do Good letters that he wrote
around fifteen or sixteen years old. So famous letters right
under and under the persona of this.
Speaker 6 (14:06):
How did those come to happen?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah? Well, so it's an interesting story, right, so he
there are a number of inspirations for it. The name Mather,
who whom I mentioned earlier, had a series of essays
about doing good, and Franklin kind of took his his
persona or his his monik or his name based on that.
(14:31):
But Franklin at that age, partly because of his own
kind of temperament, partly because of what he was reading
at the time, partly because of the broader kind of
social sphere of his brother and their friends, Franklin was
kind of becoming a little bit of a rebellious teenager
(14:53):
in some ways. He may not have had some of
the best influences. According to some of his fellow citizens
in Boston. So Franklin developed a kind of a taste
for being ironic, for making a lot of jokes, puns
and such, and also for kind of trying to you know,
(15:15):
he he he was smart. He knew he was smart,
and he wanted to prove it to everyone, which is,
you know, can be a good thing and it can
be a bad thing, right. But the Silence Do Good
letters were kind of a mix of both. So they
(15:36):
were primarily a series of letters kind of making fun making,
you know, parroting parts of Boston society. Sometimes they got
him into trouble, sometimes they got his brother into trouble,
(15:57):
and but but overall they were very witty and very impressive.
In his autobiography, Franklin recounts how he decided he was
you know, he admired his brother's acquaintances, and he thought, well,
I could do this, and so he wrote these letters anonymously.
(16:19):
No one knew that he was writing, not his brother
or his brother's friends. And what he would do is
he would come downstairs or come over to the print
shop early in the morning and slide the manuscript under
the door, right, so it just appeared there, and then
he would during the day he would get to witness
his brother and his brother's friends praise him, right, like, oh,
(16:42):
isn't this you know, this line so funny? Right, this
is a brilliant little joke right here, And all the
while Franklin's kind of there in the corner, you know,
you can imagine, you know, kind of smiling to himself,
right because they don't know he wrote it, but he
he knew.
Speaker 6 (16:58):
He Did they ever find out that it was him?
Speaker 2 (17:02):
They eventually did, and I think I think some of
them started to suspect that if it wasn't they suspected
it was one of their own, right, And eventually it
kind of discovered it was Franklin. But but yeah, so
(17:23):
that was his first major kind of attempt at writing.
What was those silence do get letters?
Speaker 5 (17:30):
Great?
Speaker 6 (17:30):
And then as he got older, did he stay with printing?
Did it work out better than candle making?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah? He uh, he came to see a lot of
value in printing, and he came to like it as well.
It was a really good way to make money. First
of all, you know, you didn't just print newspapers. You
printed books, You printed pamphlets, and if you were really good,
(17:57):
you ended up printing a lot of the official documents
for the colonies. So he stuck with printing well until
about the seventeen forties and fifties. Around that time he retired.
(18:18):
He was still writing, of course, but his profession as
a printer kind of he let others, his partners kind
of focus on that. But yeah, so he was stuck
with his brother until about seventeen seventeen, twenty two, twenty three,
(18:41):
so around the age of seventeen, so he was working
with his brother for about four or five years. And
around this time he started to make a unpleasant reputation
for himself. He got himself into trouble and his brother
(19:02):
was also getting him not his brother James also got
into trouble at the same time. Franklin, being a rebellious teen,
started to dislike how his brother was treating him, bossing
him around and such, and eventually Franklin decided, you know what,
(19:30):
I'm just gonna leave. So he runs away, leaves Boston,
ends up in Philadelphia, and in his biography autobiography, he
he explains he's kind of mixed about it. He does
think it was irregrettable how he acted towards his brother,
(19:52):
but at the same time he you know, his brother
kind of beat him from time to time tough love ya,
and so Franklin decided he was going to you know,
make it out on its own. But when he was
in Philadelphia, he decided to pursue the printing business. He
worked with a local printer there before eventually purchasing his
(20:20):
own or starting up at his own shop and starting
the pencil his newspaper at the Pennsylvania Gazette.
Speaker 6 (20:27):
Okay, so then how did that transition happen where he
became a politician or became interested in politics.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Well, so Franklin was interested in politics as a child,
so probably around the same age as you're, maybe not
the exact same age, but twelve thirteen fourteen, his Silence
Do Good letters talked about politics a little bit, so
he was he was definitely interested in politics from his
(20:55):
teenage years, and he filled his newspaper with a lot
of reports on what was going on elsewhere in the colonies,
what was going on back in England, and also a
number of essays of his own kind of supporting certain
(21:16):
political policies that were being debated at the time. But
Franklin didn't really kind of come into his own until
about the late seventeen forties. Up until that point, he
was pretty well known as a merchant, as a printer,
a newspaperman. He eventually, around a few years before this,
(21:39):
became postmaster for Philadelphia. But in seventeen forty seven he
really made a name for himself by trying to establish
a voluntary militia for Philadelphia or for Pennsylvania. So Pennsylvania
(22:01):
was one of the only colonies that didn't have a
military body to defend itself. Every other colony had a
militia or small kind of military force that they could
that could come out depending on the occasion. Pennsylvania didn't
(22:23):
have that, primarily because most Pennsylvanians were Quakers, and the
majority of Quakers were pacifists. They believed that to be
a good Christian meant not committing any acts of violence
towards one another. But not everyone in Pennsylvania was a Quaker,
and Franklin was not a Quaker. And around seventeen forty
(22:47):
five you had a war breakout between England and France,
and within a few years you started seeing French ships
up the Delaware River towards Philadelphia, and that got a
lot of people really concerned very alarmed, right, because what
(23:08):
are we going to do? So Franklin is you know,
Franklin watches the colonial Pennsylvania government kind of do nothing.
They the Assembly, being made up of Quakers, said we
you know, we pray that nothing happens, but we can't
(23:29):
do anything. And the governor there wasn't a governor in
Pennsylvania at the time. The previous governor had left and
the next governor was on his way, so they didn't
really have anyone who was officially governor. They had someone
who could act as governor, but even he didn't really
(23:50):
have any powers to create a legal militia force for defense.
And if I'm into too much detail, look no, no,
it's great. So Franklin, watching all of this and getting
concerned about, you know, what are we going to do
(24:11):
to defend ourselves, decides, you know what, I'm just going
to form a militia myself in the you know. In
the years before this, Franklin had kind of made a
reputation for a lot of his civic projects. It's the
seventeen thirties. He started one of the earliest volunteer firefighting groups.
(24:36):
Groups of firefighters. He would start a hospital, he would
start a school, he would start a private eventually public library.
So he was he had experience with, you know, reaching
out to his fellows citizens and getting them to go
(24:59):
along with of his ideas, and so this was kind
of the capstone in a lot of ways. Like the
most ambitious one was, well, let's create a voluntary militia
to defend ourselves, and so he writes this in seventeen
forty seven, he writes this pamphlet called Plain Truth, in
(25:21):
which he says, well, you know, all the tradesmen, merchants, shopkeepers,
you know, we have to do something. So let's band
together and form this militia, which he called the Association.
The Association was pretty interesting for its time. Everyone had
to provide their own arms and ammunition, their own weapons
(25:47):
and ammunition. But what was unique about it was how
the officers were chosen. Franklin decided. Franklin thought, well, rather
than have a governor appoint officers, why don't we let
the people who are serving in the militia elect their
(26:10):
own officers. Because you know, his idea, his thinking was, well,
people are more going to they're more willing to fight
under someone whom they chose, who they themselves think is
the best person for this job. So they established an association. Initially,
(26:31):
Franklin gets five hundred people in like, he holds a
couple of meetings and he gets five hundred people to
sign on right away. Within a week, that doubles, so
then he gets a thousand people to sign on, and
then by the summer, within six months he gets a
total of ten thousand people to sign on. So it
(26:54):
was an incredibly successful endeavor and undertaking.
Speaker 6 (27:00):
And that way of choosing leaders is a little little
preview of how, yeah, yeah, structure things later, so.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
That you know that was We might not think of
it as particularly political, but Franklin was definitely thinking of
what's the best way for you know, the Pennsylvanians and
then later Americans, how we ought to rule ourselves? Yeah,
(27:29):
And he thought, well, we elect those whom we think
are best suited to rule us to govern us. Because
of the Association's success, Franklin became probably one of the
most famous Pennsylvania Pennsylvanians of his time. Of that time
and a lot of his friends and other members of
(27:52):
society were like, well, you need to join the Assembly.
We want you to run and become an assemblyman, and
frank was like, oh, I don't want to do this, right, Like,
I was happy to help, but I want to read more.
I want to explore electricity a lot more. You know.
(28:13):
He was just let's see, he's in his forties around
this time, and so he you know, he was he
had made enough money to kind of retire a little
bit and decided, okay, well I'm going to you know,
study my own pursuits. But that didn't you know, that
(28:34):
didn't last long. Franklin was a very civic minded person,
a patriot, and eventually he was convinced by his fellow
Philadelphians to run for office. So he becomes elected to
the Assembly in seventeen fifty one.
Speaker 6 (28:57):
Okay, I think that's something we're going to hear about
a lot of our founders is that they didn't necessarily
want to be in positions of leadership, but they thought
it was their duty when people people ask them to.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah, yep, definitely, that's true. A lot of our founders
they also did want to. Like they were also the
type of people who thought, if I can do something good,
then I ought to do it. And the best good
I can do is for my country. So it was
a little you know, a mixture of public spirit and
(29:30):
personal ambition, which definitely you know was key for them
to found a country and made them so exceptional.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
Absolutely. While all of this was going on, what was
Benjamin Franklin's private life?
Speaker 4 (29:50):
Like?
Speaker 6 (29:50):
Did he did he find a wife and settle down?
Did he have children of his own?
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yep? So he got married to Deborah Read he met
Deborah with uh as he as he tells it in
the autobiography With Within a few days of arriving in Philadelphia,
Franklin is walking around the city with with little money,
(30:18):
and he ends up buying He's hungry, and he ends
up buying a couple of loaves of bread. Uh. He
he just wanted to buy a couple of rolls, but
it turns out he could get a lot more for
a lot less money. And so he has these three
big like French loaves right in his arms and he's
just walking around eating it. And I and as he's
(30:39):
walking around watching him is Deborah Reid and so his
future wife. Her first memory of him is this kind
of raggedy looking, you know, scrawny young man carrying bread,
just walking around the town. M So, so they get
married and and Franklin ends up having two sons and
(31:04):
a daughter, William Franklin, who was his first son. Then
there was his daughter Sarah, whom he referred to as Sally,
and then a third son named Francis, whom he called Frankie. Unfortunately,
(31:27):
when Francis was born a few years later, there was
a small pox outbreak and little Frankie caught it and
passed away, but he had William and Sally with him
for most of his life. William ended up both both
(31:49):
children were very devoted to Franklin. William kind of became
his assistant and like personal secretary in some ways when
when he would go on his trips and would eventually
become governor of New Jersey before the American Revolution. But
(32:12):
the American Revolution kind of divided them. They had different
opinions about what Americans ought to do, but Sally always
sided with her father and definitely and so when he
when eventually, when he was much older and came back
after his time in France, he lived with her for
(32:32):
the rest of his life. Aside from his family, he
had quite a lot of friends, a handful of very
close friends from all parts of Philadelphia, society, both fellow
printers and merchants and tradesmen like him, and then some
of the more richer, more well to do people in society.
(32:58):
Franklin was very very good at making friends and get
very good at getting people to like him for the
most part. He also ended up having a lot of enemies,
uh when when he started getting involved in politics and
having to take a stand. But as he told his son,
(33:18):
either to his son or to one of his son's friends,
that it would be it's better to have enemies because
it means you stood for something. And those who don't
have enemies also really don't have friends because they don't
really stand for anything.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
But most of Franklin, most people liked Franklin and Philadelphia
during his early years, and he ended up they were
some of the people he went to whenever he had
these civic projects. He had this this group some of
his closest friends he organized into this kind of book
(34:00):
up that he called the Junto, and they would meet
about once a week or so and they would discuss
whatever pressing topic was happening in the city, or they
would write essays of their own or poetry or something,
and they would discuss them, So it's kind of a
(34:21):
reading group, a book club, a discussion club. And Franklin
he thought that the Juto was kind of the best thing,
right Like he described it as the best school in
politics and morality and philosophy that existed, because there's a
bunch of good friends gathering together to discuss the truth
(34:46):
and to discuss what is good.
Speaker 6 (34:49):
So, through William or Sally, does Benjamin Franklin have any
descendants that are still around today?
Speaker 2 (34:57):
From what I can tell, most of his descent are
through through Sally. No one actually knows how many descendants
he has. I think as I was looking into this,
because it's an interesting question, right, we naturally would want
to know if any of the founding fathers have relatives
(35:20):
alive today. But it turns out that most of them
didn't know each other, like they didn't realize how many
there were until recently. So there was a there's a
gathering a couple of years ago in Philadelphia where they
kind of all gathered together and met one another, and
it was kind of the first, really the first instance
of a kind of family gather Franklin family gathering. What's
(35:44):
interesting about it, and this is this is kind of
characteristically Franklin, right, he didn't like aristocracy or aristocrats, and
he eventually decided that monarchy wasn't that cool of a
thing either, And in his view kind of, you know,
everyone is equal, and as he put it, everyone's blood
(36:07):
is equally ancient. We all have the same common parentage,
but going all the way back. So so you can
imagine Franklin himself, although he was interested in his ancestors,
he wanted to know where he came from. You can
kind of imagine Franklin not thinking it being a big
deal that like, oh, you know, I mean, he loved
(36:31):
his children and his grandchildren and everything, but they weren't
going to become like a special kind of family name
or something, even though they ended up becoming that, right,
despite kind of his preferences. A lot of his descendants,
it turns out they all have or many of them
have a similar story where you know, it was, yeah,
(36:53):
you're you're you're great great great great, great great great
great grandfather is Benjamin Franklin. But that's not a big deal, right, Like,
they didn't make a big deal, a big deal about it,
and and so you know, it was just something that
they kind of kept to themselves to the extent that
they could. I mean, some of them were named Benjamin Franklin,
(37:13):
you know, Benjamin Franklin Brown or Brenjamin Franklin Smith or
something like that, but they kind of all really kind
of kept it to themselves. You know. The the only
like famous person, the only celebrity that I know of
who is a descendant of Benjamin Franklin is Barbara Eden,
(37:36):
whom I so, the lead actress of I Dream of Genie,
which you know your your audience's parents probably or grandparents,
grandparents probably. Yeah, so a a descendant of Franklin, but
(37:56):
as far as I can tell, she was the only
famous one.
Speaker 6 (38:00):
That's funny, Well, fact about Barbara Eden television in the
what seventies or sixties? Even I never knew. I always
learned something interesting on this podcast. I wasn't expecting a
sitcom fact from.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I wasn't expecting it until I got the question.
Speaker 6 (38:17):
That's funny, all right, So one thing you talked about
was Benjamin Franklin. You're keeping William with him on his
travels and things like that. So that is a good
lead to our next episode, which takes us to London.
But I would love for you to tell us how
he got sent to London. How did that come to happen.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
So it's a long and somewhat complicated story, but to
keep it short and sweet. Pennsylvania at the time was
what was called a proprietary government. Best way to describe
a proprietary government is imagine if ron DeSantis was not
(39:02):
only governor of Florida but also owned the state of Florida.
He owned the land, okay, and so the Penn family
they owned, they had a title to the land in Pennsylvania,
and they kind of served as landlords as well as governors.
(39:27):
Franklin and a lot of his fellow members in the Assembly, though,
they weren't really keen on this idea. They thought that
this kind of you know, if your governor is also
your landlord, that kind of leads to a conflict of interest.
(39:50):
It's a little too a little too old worldly, or
too much like an aristocracy. Yeah, And Franklin, being a
democratic sold individual, a Republican, he and his fellow assemblymen
(40:12):
kind of came into conflict with the proprietors, with the
Penn family and their governors. They couldn't really come to
any agreement on a number of issues. One of those
issues was when it came to raising money for defense,
where the Pen's going to pay their fair share, and
(40:33):
the Pens were paying, in Franklin's opinion, not enough, not
their fair share. They were kind of free writing off
of the defense, you know, off of the efforts of
their fellow Pennsylvanians. So Franklin initially goes to London in
seventeen fifty seven as representing the Pennsylvania Assembly to negociate
(41:00):
with the Pens and if necessary, to talk to British
imperial officials to come to an agreement. Aside from a
brief time back in Philadelphia in seventeen sixty four, Franklin's
(41:21):
in London until up to the Revolution, and unfortunately, or
ironically maybe fortunately looking back at it from our perspective,
they could never come to an agreement with the Pens,
(41:41):
and so eventually things would only change with revolution.
Speaker 6 (41:48):
All right, we'll leave it on that cliffhanger for the
next episode. But do you have a favorite story about
Benjamin Franklin's life, whether it's from this time period or
any other time.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
I think my favorite story so so along with the
story of him as a young as a boy building bridges,
and such. I think I think a lot of my
favorite stories tend to involve him doing things politically, so
so the Voluntary Militia, his trip to to London as
(42:24):
he navigates British politics, uh later on in life. But
also a lot of the funniest stories are things Franklin
himself wrote. You know, he was always a a great writer,
a very amusing writer, and so most of his most
(42:49):
of what I think the best stories about Franklin are
stories he came up with.
Speaker 6 (42:54):
Yeah, he was something else as my as my grandpa
would Okay, now I.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Do now this is my favorite story about Franklin. It's
not true, but but I think it's great. John Adams
who initially admired Franklin, but as he got to know him,
kind of John Adam Adams was a bit of a prickly,
prickly fellow. As he got to know got to know Franklin,
(43:23):
he got a little more sour about Franklin from time
to time, and part of it was because of how
famous Franklin was, so so the most the two most
famous Americans at the time of the Revolution were Benjamin
Franklin and George Washington, and so Adams he writes, you know,
(43:43):
the way most people talk about Franklin and Washington, it's,
you know, it's almost like an ancient mythological story, as
if Franklin took his lightning rod and struck the ground
and summoned George Washington and from the sky to write
the Constitution. So that that, you know, I like, that's
(44:06):
my favorite story.
Speaker 6 (44:07):
He sounds a little bit jealous.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
A little jealous.
Speaker 6 (44:10):
Yeah, okay, I like that. That is that is quite
an image too so, and that is certainly another founding
father that we will be talking about down the road. Excellent,
all right, well, thank you for joining us, Colin. I
am excited to share Benjamin Franklin. We laid the groundwork
(44:33):
of his early life here and we will certainly be
getting into the rest of his political life and the
revolution and episodes to come.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Great. Can't wait to hear it.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
M I hope you.
Speaker 6 (44:52):
Learned something really cool today about Benjamin Franklin, who he
was as a person, his early life, and all about
his family. I wanted to mention one other thing. We
heard the word autobiography a few times today. Do you
know what a biography is. It's a story of someone's life,
but an autobiography is when that person writes the story
(45:14):
himself or herself. So that's the story that Benjamin Franklin
wrote about his own life. That sounds pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Now.
Speaker 6 (45:25):
I also think it's pretty cool that Benjamin Franklin was
born into a pretty regular family up there in Boston.
He wasn't born to be famous, he wasn't born into
a rich family or a powerful one. He was just
kind of a regular guy, born into a huge family.
He loved to read, he was always learning things, always
(45:46):
trying out something new, and he went into public life
because he had kind of a sense of duty. He
wanted to make things better, and people saw that he
could and asked more of him. And even if it
wasn't necess necessarily something that he wanted to do, he
did it anyway because he thought it was right. So
when we left off in this episode, he was on
(46:09):
his way to London, and that is where we're going
to pick up next time. Remember you can find coloring pages, links,
and all kinds of things that go with this episode
at Growingpatriots dot com. You can also find out more
information at Growing Patriots on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And
I can't wait to see you next time where we
(46:31):
find out all about Benjamin Franklin's life and work in London.
Speaker 3 (46:40):
Agreed to solve the tyranny everything, and they thought so
well working America and
Now this is the FCB podcast network.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
The breed us all with cheer any firs day of.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
The thing, and they thought so we working with America and.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
Of the.
Speaker 5 (00:27):
Welcome back to the Growing Patriot podcast American History for Kids.
I'm your host, Amelia Hamilton. This is the first episode
of our series on our Founding Fathers. Today we're going
to be talking about Benjamin Franklin, our oldest and first
founding father, and we're going to be talking about his childhood,
(00:49):
his life, and what he was like as a person.
So first we have.
Speaker 6 (00:53):
Some questions from l and then some answers from our
expert Colin Brown.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
Hi. My name is Elle. I am thirteen years old
and I live in the Los Angeles area. Some of
my favorite things to do are reading, swimming, and doing crafts.
I have a few questions about Benny Franklin. What was
his life like when he was my age? Did he
ever have a wife in shortan of his own? Does
(01:25):
he have any descendants who are alive today thanks to me?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Probably the best way to start is kind of just
how I got interested in American history, right aside from
being an American and loving my own country. I was
when I was ten or eleven, so probably around the
same age as your listeners. I started reading this I
(01:56):
think I was, I think we're sitting in American history
or something, and I read this book called George Washington's World.
I can't remember the author. She It's an older work,
but it kind of gives a narrative telling of the
revolution and just and the founding and kind of like
(02:18):
what's going on in England, what's going on in Paris
at the time. And I fell in love with that,
like it just you know, it enchanted me. And ever
since then, I've kind of, you know, been a diehard
American in a lot of ways. But you know, with Franklin,
I didn't really come to like I knew the autobiography,
(02:42):
and I knew things most people know, right his inventions,
his you know a little bit about his political career,
his experiments and such, all his writings. But I really
got into Franklin and graduate school and it was kind
of studying Franklin's views on the British Empire and kind
(03:03):
of how ahead of his ahead of his time he
was that really got me interested in him. And so yeah,
that's uh, it's been a couple of.
Speaker 6 (03:12):
Years now, So what are you doing now?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Currently? I am a visiting assistant professor at the University
of Mississippi with their the Declaration of Independent Center for
the Study of American Freedom and well at the same
time finishing up the dissertation. So yeah, not yet, doctor, but.
Speaker 6 (03:33):
So close almost almost all right. So, you know, you
talked about, you know, loving American history from childhood, and
that's what we are going for here on the podcast.
So I would like to start with Benjamin Franklin's childhood.
So when he let's start right at the beginning. So
when he was born, was there any sign that he
(03:54):
was going to be an important man that we would
be talking about all these years later. Was he, you know,
born into a famous family or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
He wasn't. He actually was. So his parents were Josiah
and Abiah Franklin. He was born in Boston in seventeen
oh six, and he was one of seventeen children. His
father had been previously married and had five kids, and
his first wife passed away and then remarried and had
(04:31):
ten children total, including Franklin. And Franklin was the youngest boy,
so the tenth son and the youngest son. And so
you know at his birth, he you know, he's just
one one of the litter, so to speak, a bunch
of siblings. But you know, from a very early age
(04:54):
he kind of demonstrated or revealed a kind of of
precocious intellect. And he was very spirited. So I should
back up a little bit. So his his father, Josiah,
was a candle maker. He made soap and candles. So
(05:15):
not particularly a wealthy rising family really, more kind of
middle class, lower to middle class. But Franklin, you know, he,
like I said, was very smart and very spirited and
got himself, as he puts it in his autobiography, into
(05:38):
a lot of little scrapes. So one story he gives
is he had a tendency to be kind of be
a leader among his group of friends. And one day
they were playing around a river and decided they were
going to build a bridge. And this was Franklin's entire idea, right,
He was like, I want to build this bridge over
the river or over the creek, really, and so they
(06:01):
started taking a bunch of bricks that they found lying around,
and you know, all according to Franklin's direction, they built
this little bridge. It turns out that those weren't bricks
that Franklin could use though someone else was supposed to
be using them. So his father rightly chastised him, right
(06:21):
corrected him, and taught him that while it's you know,
you wanted to build something useful, but the most useful
thing is always also going to be honest. So from
an early age, Franklin you know, learned better to avoid
doing anything you know, no lying, no cheating, no stealing,
try to do everything honestly. So he you know, as
(06:47):
a as a child and as one of seventeen, he
he was only in school formal schooling for about a
year or so. He went to a small grammar school
when he was about eight years old. He did very well,
but his father didn't have enough money to send him
(07:07):
through all the way through college, and so decided that Franklin,
even though he was doing well and probably of his
siblings the most likely to excel at you know, school
and everything, he decided Franklin needed to learn a trade.
So he first he took him out of the grammar
(07:28):
school and then for a year Franklin was enrolled in
a kind of preparatory school for shopkeepers and such. He
learned penmanship and how to write and mathematics. And then
after that, about when he was about the age of ten,
Franklin went and worked with his father making candlesticks and soap.
(07:53):
And this was kind of the path that his father
had set for him. You know, you're gonna study a
trade and make your fortune off of that. Franklin didn't
like making candlesticks. He didn't like making so he since
he lived in Boston, Boston being a port town, he
(08:19):
was near the water all the time, and he became
really enamored with the idea of being a sailor, of
going off onto the high seas and having adventures, and
so that's what he wanted to do. And I think
he even threatened a couple of times, I'm going to
run away and you know, stow away on a ship
and you can't stop me. His father, though, discouraged him
(08:42):
on that right and said, Okay, if you don't want
to be a candlestick maker, then let's find another trade
for you. We have to something else, and they eventually
settled on printing. Franklin's older brother, James, owned a print shop,
a printing business, and eventually a newspaper, and from about
the age of twelve until he was seventeen, Franklin was
(09:04):
an apprentice with his older brother James, learning printing.
Speaker 6 (09:08):
Okay, and that actually takes us into Elle's first question
that she sent in, which is what was Benjamin Franklin's
life when like when he was her age which is thirteen.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
So you know, it's the eighteenth century, the seventeen hundreds,
So you know, young Franklin as a kid, he didn't
have a lot of things we have today, right, you know,
he had toys and such, but no TV, no internet,
no movies, none of those things. But what he did
have was he had his imagination and his friends, and
(09:42):
he also had books. In his autobiography, he talks about
how from a very early age he developed a great
appetite for reading, and he kind of devoured books. When
he was working for his older brother, he would he
would get paid a little bit and he would just
(10:03):
save up rather than pay for food. He would go
without meals or like eat only one meal a day
in order to save up money to buy more books.
Because that's what he was really passionate about was reading.
And he read a ton of things, right, He read
the Bible, He read lots of literature at the time,
(10:26):
like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Cotton Mather was a contemporary,
and he read some of Cotton Mather the Mathers Essays.
He also read the Greek, the ancient Greek historian Plutarch,
and read a bunch of the lives of these ancient
(10:46):
Greek and Roman statesmen and heroes, and plenty of other
things like we don't even I don't think we know
fully everything he read, but that you know, he spent
most of his time reading. When he wasn't reading, he
was swimming. He loved to swim as well. He a
(11:07):
few years later when he during his first trip to London,
he became he got the nickname the water American because
he taught a couple of Londoners how to swim, and
he even developed a couple of techniques of his own.
So mostly, you know, Franklin was reading, he was swimming.
(11:30):
So he had a pretty active intellectual life, right, a
pretty active active life physical life. And then he also
tried his hand at writing. So he and his friends.
A lot of his friends were also like him, very smart,
and they wanted to become writers, poets and such, and
(11:52):
so they had contests writing poetry, and Franklin was was
pretty good at it. He had a uncle who wrote
a couple of poems. One of them, his uncle, who
also was Benjamin Franklin, dedicated a poem to the younger
Benjamin Franklin, and it was kind of this connection that
(12:13):
led Franklin to, oh, you know, I'm going to imitate
my uncle write poetry. Aside from that, though, at the so,
starting at the age of twelve, he was working for
his brother James, and so most of his time was
spent in their print shop setting type in the printers,
(12:34):
transcribing essays and other things that they were putting into
their newspaper. And mostly it was kind of that. Mostly
it was sorry, that was about it. That was mostly
it right day to day life for twelve thirteen, fourteen
(12:56):
year old Franklin working in the print shop during the days,
during meals, reading as much as he could, staying up
late reading, sneaking books under the covers and such, and
then you know, going outside and playing a lot. But
also he had access to some of the smartest and
(13:22):
wittiest figures in Boston at the time. A lot of
his brother James's friends were kind of amateur writers themselves
who wanted to write essays and the newspapers and such.
And they were all also very learned, well learned, well read,
(13:42):
and so Franklin got to overhear and even participate in
some of their conversations, and this led him eventually to
his Silence Good, Silence do Good letters that he wrote
around fifteen or sixteen years old. So famous letters right
under and under the persona of this.
Speaker 6 (14:06):
How did those come to happen?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah? Well, so it's an interesting story, right, so he
there are a number of inspirations for it. The name Mather,
who whom I mentioned earlier, had a series of essays
about doing good, and Franklin kind of took his his
persona or his his monik or his name based on that.
(14:31):
But Franklin at that age, partly because of his own
kind of temperament, partly because of what he was reading
at the time, partly because of the broader kind of
social sphere of his brother and their friends, Franklin was
kind of becoming a little bit of a rebellious teenager
(14:53):
in some ways. He may not have had some of
the best influences. According to some of his fellow citizens
in Boston. So Franklin developed a kind of a taste
for being ironic, for making a lot of jokes, puns
and such, and also for kind of trying to you know,
(15:15):
he he he was smart. He knew he was smart,
and he wanted to prove it to everyone, which is,
you know, can be a good thing and it can
be a bad thing, right. But the Silence Do Good
letters were kind of a mix of both. So they
(15:36):
were primarily a series of letters kind of making fun making,
you know, parroting parts of Boston society. Sometimes they got
him into trouble, sometimes they got his brother into trouble,
(15:57):
and but but overall they were very witty and very impressive.
In his autobiography, Franklin recounts how he decided he was
you know, he admired his brother's acquaintances, and he thought, well,
I could do this, and so he wrote these letters anonymously.
(16:19):
No one knew that he was writing, not his brother
or his brother's friends. And what he would do is
he would come downstairs or come over to the print
shop early in the morning and slide the manuscript under
the door, right, so it just appeared there, and then
he would during the day he would get to witness
his brother and his brother's friends praise him, right, like, oh,
(16:42):
isn't this you know, this line so funny? Right, this
is a brilliant little joke right here, And all the
while Franklin's kind of there in the corner, you know,
you can imagine, you know, kind of smiling to himself,
right because they don't know he wrote it, but he
he knew.
Speaker 6 (16:58):
He Did they ever find out that it was him?
Speaker 2 (17:02):
They eventually did, and I think I think some of
them started to suspect that if it wasn't they suspected
it was one of their own, right, And eventually it
kind of discovered it was Franklin. But but yeah, so
(17:23):
that was his first major kind of attempt at writing.
What was those silence do get letters?
Speaker 5 (17:30):
Great?
Speaker 6 (17:30):
And then as he got older, did he stay with printing?
Did it work out better than candle making?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah? He uh, he came to see a lot of
value in printing, and he came to like it as well.
It was a really good way to make money. First
of all, you know, you didn't just print newspapers. You
printed books, You printed pamphlets, and if you were really good,
(17:57):
you ended up printing a lot of the official documents
for the colonies. So he stuck with printing well until
about the seventeen forties and fifties. Around that time he retired.
(18:18):
He was still writing, of course, but his profession as
a printer kind of he let others, his partners kind
of focus on that. But yeah, so he was stuck
with his brother until about seventeen seventeen, twenty two, twenty three,
(18:41):
so around the age of seventeen, so he was working
with his brother for about four or five years. And
around this time he started to make a unpleasant reputation
for himself. He got himself into trouble and his brother
(19:02):
was also getting him not his brother James also got
into trouble at the same time. Franklin, being a rebellious teen,
started to dislike how his brother was treating him, bossing
him around and such, and eventually Franklin decided, you know what,
(19:30):
I'm just gonna leave. So he runs away, leaves Boston,
ends up in Philadelphia, and in his biography autobiography, he
he explains he's kind of mixed about it. He does
think it was irregrettable how he acted towards his brother,
(19:52):
but at the same time he you know, his brother
kind of beat him from time to time tough love ya,
and so Franklin decided he was going to you know,
make it out on its own. But when he was
in Philadelphia, he decided to pursue the printing business. He
worked with a local printer there before eventually purchasing his
(20:20):
own or starting up at his own shop and starting
the pencil his newspaper at the Pennsylvania Gazette.
Speaker 6 (20:27):
Okay, so then how did that transition happen where he
became a politician or became interested in politics.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Well, so Franklin was interested in politics as a child,
so probably around the same age as you're, maybe not
the exact same age, but twelve thirteen fourteen, his Silence
Do Good letters talked about politics a little bit, so
he was he was definitely interested in politics from his
(20:55):
teenage years, and he filled his newspaper with a lot
of reports on what was going on elsewhere in the colonies,
what was going on back in England, and also a
number of essays of his own kind of supporting certain
(21:16):
political policies that were being debated at the time. But
Franklin didn't really kind of come into his own until
about the late seventeen forties. Up until that point, he
was pretty well known as a merchant, as a printer,
a newspaperman. He eventually, around a few years before this,
(21:39):
became postmaster for Philadelphia. But in seventeen forty seven he
really made a name for himself by trying to establish
a voluntary militia for Philadelphia or for Pennsylvania. So Pennsylvania
(22:01):
was one of the only colonies that didn't have a
military body to defend itself. Every other colony had a
militia or small kind of military force that they could
that could come out depending on the occasion. Pennsylvania didn't
(22:23):
have that, primarily because most Pennsylvanians were Quakers, and the
majority of Quakers were pacifists. They believed that to be
a good Christian meant not committing any acts of violence
towards one another. But not everyone in Pennsylvania was a Quaker,
and Franklin was not a Quaker. And around seventeen forty
(22:47):
five you had a war breakout between England and France,
and within a few years you started seeing French ships
up the Delaware River towards Philadelphia, and that got a
lot of people really concerned very alarmed, right, because what
(23:08):
are we going to do? So Franklin is you know,
Franklin watches the colonial Pennsylvania government kind of do nothing.
They the Assembly, being made up of Quakers, said we
you know, we pray that nothing happens, but we can't
(23:29):
do anything. And the governor there wasn't a governor in
Pennsylvania at the time. The previous governor had left and
the next governor was on his way, so they didn't
really have anyone who was officially governor. They had someone
who could act as governor, but even he didn't really
(23:50):
have any powers to create a legal militia force for defense.
And if I'm into too much detail, look no, no,
it's great. So Franklin, watching all of this and getting
concerned about, you know, what are we going to do
(24:11):
to defend ourselves, decides, you know what, I'm just going
to form a militia myself in the you know. In
the years before this, Franklin had kind of made a
reputation for a lot of his civic projects. It's the
seventeen thirties. He started one of the earliest volunteer firefighting groups.
(24:36):
Groups of firefighters. He would start a hospital, he would
start a school, he would start a private eventually public library.
So he was he had experience with, you know, reaching
out to his fellows citizens and getting them to go
(24:59):
along with of his ideas, and so this was kind
of the capstone in a lot of ways. Like the
most ambitious one was, well, let's create a voluntary militia
to defend ourselves, and so he writes this in seventeen
forty seven, he writes this pamphlet called Plain Truth, in
(25:21):
which he says, well, you know, all the tradesmen, merchants, shopkeepers,
you know, we have to do something. So let's band
together and form this militia, which he called the Association.
The Association was pretty interesting for its time. Everyone had
to provide their own arms and ammunition, their own weapons
(25:47):
and ammunition. But what was unique about it was how
the officers were chosen. Franklin decided. Franklin thought, well, rather
than have a governor appoint officers, why don't we let
the people who are serving in the militia elect their
(26:10):
own officers. Because you know, his idea, his thinking was, well,
people are more going to they're more willing to fight
under someone whom they chose, who they themselves think is
the best person for this job. So they established an association. Initially,
(26:31):
Franklin gets five hundred people in like, he holds a
couple of meetings and he gets five hundred people to
sign on right away. Within a week, that doubles, so
then he gets a thousand people to sign on, and
then by the summer, within six months he gets a
total of ten thousand people to sign on. So it
(26:54):
was an incredibly successful endeavor and undertaking.
Speaker 6 (27:00):
And that way of choosing leaders is a little little
preview of how, yeah, yeah, structure things later, so.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
That you know that was We might not think of
it as particularly political, but Franklin was definitely thinking of
what's the best way for you know, the Pennsylvanians and
then later Americans, how we ought to rule ourselves? Yeah,
(27:29):
And he thought, well, we elect those whom we think
are best suited to rule us to govern us. Because
of the Association's success, Franklin became probably one of the
most famous Pennsylvania Pennsylvanians of his time. Of that time
and a lot of his friends and other members of
(27:52):
society were like, well, you need to join the Assembly.
We want you to run and become an assemblyman, and
frank was like, oh, I don't want to do this, right, Like,
I was happy to help, but I want to read more.
I want to explore electricity a lot more. You know.
(28:13):
He was just let's see, he's in his forties around
this time, and so he you know, he was he
had made enough money to kind of retire a little
bit and decided, okay, well I'm going to you know,
study my own pursuits. But that didn't you know, that
(28:34):
didn't last long. Franklin was a very civic minded person,
a patriot, and eventually he was convinced by his fellow
Philadelphians to run for office. So he becomes elected to
the Assembly in seventeen fifty one.
Speaker 6 (28:57):
Okay, I think that's something we're going to hear about
a lot of our founders is that they didn't necessarily
want to be in positions of leadership, but they thought
it was their duty when people people ask them to.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah, yep, definitely, that's true. A lot of our founders
they also did want to. Like they were also the
type of people who thought, if I can do something good,
then I ought to do it. And the best good
I can do is for my country. So it was
a little you know, a mixture of public spirit and
(29:30):
personal ambition, which definitely you know was key for them
to found a country and made them so exceptional.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
Absolutely. While all of this was going on, what was
Benjamin Franklin's private life?
Speaker 4 (29:50):
Like?
Speaker 6 (29:50):
Did he did he find a wife and settle down?
Did he have children of his own?
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yep? So he got married to Deborah Read he met
Deborah with uh as he as he tells it in
the autobiography With Within a few days of arriving in Philadelphia,
Franklin is walking around the city with with little money,
(30:18):
and he ends up buying He's hungry, and he ends
up buying a couple of loaves of bread. Uh. He
he just wanted to buy a couple of rolls, but
it turns out he could get a lot more for
a lot less money. And so he has these three
big like French loaves right in his arms and he's
just walking around eating it. And I and as he's
(30:39):
walking around watching him is Deborah Reid and so his
future wife. Her first memory of him is this kind
of raggedy looking, you know, scrawny young man carrying bread,
just walking around the town. M So, so they get
married and and Franklin ends up having two sons and
(31:04):
a daughter, William Franklin, who was his first son. Then
there was his daughter Sarah, whom he referred to as Sally,
and then a third son named Francis, whom he called Frankie. Unfortunately,
(31:27):
when Francis was born a few years later, there was
a small pox outbreak and little Frankie caught it and
passed away, but he had William and Sally with him
for most of his life. William ended up both both
(31:49):
children were very devoted to Franklin. William kind of became
his assistant and like personal secretary in some ways when
when he would go on his trips and would eventually
become governor of New Jersey before the American Revolution. But
(32:12):
the American Revolution kind of divided them. They had different
opinions about what Americans ought to do, but Sally always
sided with her father and definitely and so when he
when eventually, when he was much older and came back
after his time in France, he lived with her for
(32:32):
the rest of his life. Aside from his family, he
had quite a lot of friends, a handful of very
close friends from all parts of Philadelphia, society, both fellow
printers and merchants and tradesmen like him, and then some
of the more richer, more well to do people in society.
(32:58):
Franklin was very very good at making friends and get
very good at getting people to like him for the
most part. He also ended up having a lot of enemies,
uh when when he started getting involved in politics and
having to take a stand. But as he told his son,
(33:18):
either to his son or to one of his son's friends,
that it would be it's better to have enemies because
it means you stood for something. And those who don't
have enemies also really don't have friends because they don't
really stand for anything.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
But most of Franklin, most people liked Franklin and Philadelphia
during his early years, and he ended up they were
some of the people he went to whenever he had
these civic projects. He had this this group some of
his closest friends he organized into this kind of book
(34:00):
up that he called the Junto, and they would meet
about once a week or so and they would discuss
whatever pressing topic was happening in the city, or they
would write essays of their own or poetry or something,
and they would discuss them, So it's kind of a
(34:21):
reading group, a book club, a discussion club. And Franklin
he thought that the Juto was kind of the best thing,
right Like he described it as the best school in
politics and morality and philosophy that existed, because there's a
bunch of good friends gathering together to discuss the truth
(34:46):
and to discuss what is good.
Speaker 6 (34:49):
So, through William or Sally, does Benjamin Franklin have any
descendants that are still around today?
Speaker 2 (34:57):
From what I can tell, most of his descent are
through through Sally. No one actually knows how many descendants
he has. I think as I was looking into this,
because it's an interesting question, right, we naturally would want
to know if any of the founding fathers have relatives
(35:20):
alive today. But it turns out that most of them
didn't know each other, like they didn't realize how many
there were until recently. So there was a there's a
gathering a couple of years ago in Philadelphia where they
kind of all gathered together and met one another, and
it was kind of the first, really the first instance
of a kind of family gather Franklin family gathering. What's
(35:44):
interesting about it, and this is this is kind of
characteristically Franklin, right, he didn't like aristocracy or aristocrats, and
he eventually decided that monarchy wasn't that cool of a
thing either, And in his view kind of, you know,
everyone is equal, and as he put it, everyone's blood
(36:07):
is equally ancient. We all have the same common parentage,
but going all the way back. So so you can
imagine Franklin himself, although he was interested in his ancestors,
he wanted to know where he came from. You can
kind of imagine Franklin not thinking it being a big
deal that like, oh, you know, I mean, he loved
(36:31):
his children and his grandchildren and everything, but they weren't
going to become like a special kind of family name
or something, even though they ended up becoming that, right,
despite kind of his preferences. A lot of his descendants,
it turns out they all have or many of them
have a similar story where you know, it was, yeah,
(36:53):
you're you're you're great great great great, great great great
great grandfather is Benjamin Franklin. But that's not a big deal, right, Like,
they didn't make a big deal, a big deal about it,
and and so you know, it was just something that
they kind of kept to themselves to the extent that
they could. I mean, some of them were named Benjamin Franklin,
(37:13):
you know, Benjamin Franklin Brown or Brenjamin Franklin Smith or
something like that, but they kind of all really kind
of kept it to themselves. You know. The the only
like famous person, the only celebrity that I know of
who is a descendant of Benjamin Franklin is Barbara Eden,
(37:36):
whom I so, the lead actress of I Dream of Genie,
which you know your your audience's parents probably or grandparents,
grandparents probably. Yeah, so a a descendant of Franklin, but
(37:56):
as far as I can tell, she was the only
famous one.
Speaker 6 (38:00):
That's funny, Well, fact about Barbara Eden television in the
what seventies or sixties? Even I never knew. I always
learned something interesting on this podcast. I wasn't expecting a
sitcom fact from.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I wasn't expecting it until I got the question.
Speaker 6 (38:17):
That's funny, all right, So one thing you talked about
was Benjamin Franklin. You're keeping William with him on his
travels and things like that. So that is a good
lead to our next episode, which takes us to London.
But I would love for you to tell us how
he got sent to London. How did that come to happen.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
So it's a long and somewhat complicated story, but to
keep it short and sweet. Pennsylvania at the time was
what was called a proprietary government. Best way to describe
a proprietary government is imagine if ron DeSantis was not
(39:02):
only governor of Florida but also owned the state of Florida.
He owned the land, okay, and so the Penn family
they owned, they had a title to the land in Pennsylvania,
and they kind of served as landlords as well as governors.
(39:27):
Franklin and a lot of his fellow members in the Assembly, though,
they weren't really keen on this idea. They thought that
this kind of you know, if your governor is also
your landlord, that kind of leads to a conflict of interest.
(39:50):
It's a little too a little too old worldly, or
too much like an aristocracy. Yeah, And Franklin, being a
democratic sold individual, a Republican, he and his fellow assemblymen
(40:12):
kind of came into conflict with the proprietors, with the
Penn family and their governors. They couldn't really come to
any agreement on a number of issues. One of those
issues was when it came to raising money for defense,
where the Pen's going to pay their fair share, and
(40:33):
the Pens were paying, in Franklin's opinion, not enough, not
their fair share. They were kind of free writing off
of the defense, you know, off of the efforts of
their fellow Pennsylvanians. So Franklin initially goes to London in
seventeen fifty seven as representing the Pennsylvania Assembly to negociate
(41:00):
with the Pens and if necessary, to talk to British
imperial officials to come to an agreement. Aside from a
brief time back in Philadelphia in seventeen sixty four, Franklin's
(41:21):
in London until up to the Revolution, and unfortunately, or
ironically maybe fortunately looking back at it from our perspective,
they could never come to an agreement with the Pens,
(41:41):
and so eventually things would only change with revolution.
Speaker 6 (41:48):
All right, we'll leave it on that cliffhanger for the
next episode. But do you have a favorite story about
Benjamin Franklin's life, whether it's from this time period or
any other time.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
I think my favorite story so so along with the
story of him as a young as a boy building bridges,
and such. I think I think a lot of my
favorite stories tend to involve him doing things politically, so
so the Voluntary Militia, his trip to to London as
(42:24):
he navigates British politics, uh later on in life. But
also a lot of the funniest stories are things Franklin
himself wrote. You know, he was always a a great writer,
a very amusing writer, and so most of his most
(42:49):
of what I think the best stories about Franklin are
stories he came up with.
Speaker 6 (42:54):
Yeah, he was something else as my as my grandpa
would Okay, now I.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Do now this is my favorite story about Franklin. It's
not true, but but I think it's great. John Adams
who initially admired Franklin, but as he got to know him,
kind of John Adam Adams was a bit of a prickly,
prickly fellow. As he got to know got to know Franklin,
(43:23):
he got a little more sour about Franklin from time
to time, and part of it was because of how
famous Franklin was, so so the most the two most
famous Americans at the time of the Revolution were Benjamin
Franklin and George Washington, and so Adams he writes, you know,
(43:43):
the way most people talk about Franklin and Washington, it's,
you know, it's almost like an ancient mythological story, as
if Franklin took his lightning rod and struck the ground
and summoned George Washington and from the sky to write
the Constitution. So that that, you know, I like, that's
(44:06):
my favorite story.
Speaker 6 (44:07):
He sounds a little bit jealous.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
A little jealous.
Speaker 6 (44:10):
Yeah, okay, I like that. That is that is quite
an image too so, and that is certainly another founding
father that we will be talking about down the road. Excellent,
all right, well, thank you for joining us, Colin. I
am excited to share Benjamin Franklin. We laid the groundwork
(44:33):
of his early life here and we will certainly be
getting into the rest of his political life and the
revolution and episodes to come.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Great. Can't wait to hear it.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
M I hope you.
Speaker 6 (44:52):
Learned something really cool today about Benjamin Franklin, who he
was as a person, his early life, and all about
his family. I wanted to mention one other thing. We
heard the word autobiography a few times today. Do you
know what a biography is. It's a story of someone's life,
but an autobiography is when that person writes the story
(45:14):
himself or herself. So that's the story that Benjamin Franklin
wrote about his own life. That sounds pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Now.
Speaker 6 (45:25):
I also think it's pretty cool that Benjamin Franklin was
born into a pretty regular family up there in Boston.
He wasn't born to be famous, he wasn't born into
a rich family or a powerful one. He was just
kind of a regular guy, born into a huge family.
He loved to read, he was always learning things, always
(45:46):
trying out something new, and he went into public life
because he had kind of a sense of duty. He
wanted to make things better, and people saw that he
could and asked more of him. And even if it
wasn't necess necessarily something that he wanted to do, he
did it anyway because he thought it was right. So
when we left off in this episode, he was on
(46:09):
his way to London, and that is where we're going
to pick up next time. Remember you can find coloring pages, links,
and all kinds of things that go with this episode
at Growingpatriots dot com. You can also find out more
information at Growing Patriots on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And
I can't wait to see you next time where we
(46:31):
find out all about Benjamin Franklin's life and work in London.
Speaker 3 (46:40):
Agreed to solve the tyranny everything, and they thought so
well working America and
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.