In the decades that followed, as he built his own profitable printing and publishing business in Philadelphia, Franklin founded or co-founded some of America’s greatest surviving cultural institutions, including the Library Company, the American Philosophical Society, and what was to become the University of Pennsylvania. Henry Pemberton, and Bernard Mandeville, whose Deist book The Fable of the Bees was the publishing sensation of the time. The Franklin who returned to America at the age of 20 had the self-confidence bred from talking on equal terms with men such as Sir Isaac Newton’s co-author, Dr. Franklin recognized his debt, later describing Addison as a man “whose writings have contributed more to the improvement of the minds of the British nation, and polishing their manners, than those of any other English pen whatever.” They provided him with a brilliant introduction to London’s intellectual coffeehouse society, enabling the young American to deploy the necessary “polite conversation” that won him rapid acceptance. He perfected his writing style and focus by reading and re-reading Joseph Addison’s and Richard Steele’s articles in The Spectator and rewriting them in his own words. Young Ben’s intellectual framework was formed by the British written word. Even as late as 1774, Thomas Jefferson, the chief framer of the Declaration of Independence, used a collection of English Civil War pamphlets when he “cooked up a resolution … to avert us from the evils of civil war.” Franklin himself stayed in London right up to March 1775, in an increasingly desperate search for a peaceful settlement.īorn in Boston in 1706, to an English father, Franklin first lived in London between 17 and worked as a printer. Indeed, many of our Founding Fathers initially set out to assert their rights as Englishmen. Until the Stamp Act, most Americans had no conception that they would ever be separated from Britain. Furthermore, during a full four-fifths of his very long life, Franklin was a loyal British royalist. Yet, for the better part of two decades, Franklin called London home.
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This image of Franklin-working in London to secure Britain’s hold on America-is at odds with the usual picture of a great American patriot and Founding Father.
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In his own words, he viewed the colonies “as so many counties gained to Great Britain.” Franklin was determined to heal the breach unlike most British politicians, he understood the American continent’s vast potential as part of a closely knit Great British empire. His aim, which he achieved triumphantly, was to persuade Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act, the legislation that had usurped the power of the colonial assemblies and caused the first major breakdown in relations between Britain and its American colonies. Two hundred and fifty years ago, in February 1766, Benjamin Franklin, the most famous American in London, addressed the British House of Commons.