Background note
With a face as familiar, he wrote, as the man in the moon, Benjamin Franklin was one the most recognizable Americans of the
eighteenth century, and one of the most written about. A scientist, inventor, pamphleteer, printer, politician, and diplomat,
and above all an institution builder, Franklin's intellect and organizational skills, combined with a preternatural gift for
crafting his image to appeal to a diverse array of audiences has ensured his lasting reputation.
The story of Franklin's life has become so thoroughly ingrained in American popular culture -- through his autobiography,
if nothing else -- that it requires little more than the briefest recapitulation. Born in 1706 to a tallow chandler from
Boston, Franklin ran away from an apprenticeship at his brother James' printing establishment in 1723 to strike out on his
own in that other colonial metropolis, Philadelphia. After barely a year in the Quaker city, the restless and ambitious young
man traveled to England to purchase an outfit and refine his printing skills, and within a short time after returning in October
1726, he established a reputation as the finest printer in the city. His position not only as a printer, but a writer was
clinched in 1729 with his purchase of the city's most important newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette and with the appearance of his widely popular Poor Richard's Almanac in 1732. Equally important, in 1730 he was appointed to the lucrative position of official printer to the Province, testimony
to his abilities as a printer and a harbinger of what would come as a politician.
From early in his career, Franklin fashioned himself as a promoter of the public weal, using his extraordinary organizational
skills to establish a series of organizations that buoyed the city's intellectual and cultural life. His discussion and mutual
improvement society, the Junto (1727) was followed by the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731) and a suite of other organizations
that included, among others, the city's first fire company, an insurance company, and an academy that later grew into the
University of Pennsylvania. Franklin was also the principal founder and first secretary of the nation's first learned society,
the American Philosophical Society (1743). Although subsequent events ensured that he would be largely an absentee leader
for much of its early history, his colleagues in the APS considered Franklin so essential to the enterprise that they elected
him president when the Society was revived in the late 1760s. Although he lived in Philadelphia for a total of only about
seven of the twenty one years in which he was president of the Society, he exerted an enormous influence over the selection
of its membership and its priorities.
Part of Franklin's importance to the Library Company and the APS, and to the civic culture of Philadelphia more generally,
lay in the reputation he earned as America's preeminent savant. His ingenuity in invention was renowned, and was piqued by
his reputation for bringing the same concerns for public welfare to mechanical work as to intellectual. His Franklin stove
(1742), for example, was hailed as safer and more efficient than its predecessors, and Franklin was credited (sometimes erroneously)
with a host of other inventions, from swim fins to bifocals, bulls-eye "busy-body" mirrors, the lightning rod, and extensible
arms.
Franklin's scientific work, however, was the source of even greater fame. Beginning in 1745, he conducted a series of electrical
experiments that brought him international acclaim, demonstrating the identity of lightning and electricity and later championing
the single fluid theory of electricity and formulating a theory of the conservation of electrical charge. On the basis of
this work, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1756 and was given honorary degrees by Harvard and Oxford. Franklin
was also noted for research on oceanic currents and for contributions to knowledge in dozens of other areas.
Scarcely a decade after his emigration to Philadelphia, Franklin began to turn to more direct participation in the political
life of the colonies. He was elected clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1736 and Postmaster at Philadelphia in 1737, eventually
becoming one of two deputy Postmasters General for the colonies in 1753. Having amassed his fortune, Franklin retired from
active involvement in business affairs in 1749 to devote himself to formal politics. A fierce partisan in the anti-Proprietary
faction of the Pennsylvania Assembly during the Seven Years' War, he was the prime mover behind the Albany Plan of Union of
1754, in which the prospect of uniting all of the British North American colonies under a single government was first proposed
as a measure to improve mutual defense and for "other important general purposes." Although the plan was ultimately not approved,
Franklin emerged as a major figure in colonial politics.
In July 1757, Franklin was dispatched by the General Assembly to go to London and request that the Proprietors' be stripped
of control of the government in Pennsylvania. He spent most of the next eighteen years in England as colonial agent for Pennsylvania
and other colonies, weathering the imperial crises of the 1760s and although he was steadfast in directing his efforts toward
reconciliation of the growing differences between the colonies and crown, he drifted gradually into the radical Whig camp.
Franklin's quickening into the revolutionary cause came in January 1774 when he was called before the Privy Council for Plantation
Affairs to answer charges that he had stolen letters from Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts, with the intent of
positioning himself to usurp Hutchinson's seat and inciting unrest. Stripped of his position as postmaster and impaired in
his ability to operate, Franklin returned to Pennsylvania in 1775 and was elected to the Continental Congress. In the following
year, he was selected as a member of the drafting committee for the Declaration of Independence and later helped frame the
Articles of Confederation. From 1776 until 1785, he was appointed by the American government as Commissioner to the Court
of France, helping to sway King Louis to support the American cause with money and arms and to negotiate the peace between
the United States and Great Britain.
Franklin remained active into his eighties, serving as a delegate and key contributor to the federal Constitutional Convention
in 1787. A late convert to antislavery, he also became the first president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the
Abolition of Slavery. Franklin died in Philadelphia in April 17, 1790. His common law wife, Deborah Read, predeceased him
in 1774. He left behind his estranged illegitimate son William (in exile in England), his daughter Sarah Franklin Bache,
and grandsons William Temple Franklin and Benjamin Franklin Bache.
Scope and content
The APS Library houses over 60% of the surviving papers of its founder Benjamin Franklin, along with a large number of documents
associated with Franklin, his family, and his intellectual circle. Distributed in a number of separate collections that reflect
the complex history of custodial care, these materials form a remarkably coherent whole that document nearly every phase of
Franklin's adult life and comprise one of the finest assemblages for study of scientific and civic culture in late colonial
and early national America.
The largest and most important Franklin collection was acquired from Charles Pemberton Fox and Mary Fox in 1840. The
Benjamin Franklin Papers, thoroughly calendared by Isaac Minis Hays in 1908, contains 48.5 linear feet of correspondence, documents, and personal,
business, and postal, and accounts, along with other records of his printing establishment. Approximately 80% of this collection
is comprised of correspondence received by Franklin, most of which dates from after his "retirement" from his printing business
in 1749. Although the collection provides relatively little information about Franklin's early life, it includes a full measure
of his scientific correspondence and abundant material about his role in the Seven Years' War and the Revolution, his life
as a politician and diplomat, as an institution builder and philanthropist, and more generally, as a public figure. The finding
aid, based upon Hays' calendar, is arranged chronologically in two parts: letters received by Franklin and letters written
by him. A third part, consisting of materials calendared by Hays that were given by Fox's descendants to the
University of Pennsylvania, has also been encoded and is made available on the APS website for the convenience of researchers. Requests for duplication
or publication of material owned by the University of Pennsylvania must be made through them.
The
Franklin-Bache Collection (4 linear feet) provides particularly rich documentation of Franklin's years as a diplomat in France, with some valuable
material illuminating his personal life as well. In particular, it includes a suite of letters from Franklin's wife, Deborah,
his sister Jane Mecom, his son William and daughter Sarah Franklin Bache, and his close friend Polly Stevenson Hewson. With
some exceptions, most of the remaining miscellaneous collections consist of letters written by Franklin. The
Franklin Miscellaneous Collection is, as the name implies, a truly miscellaneous assortment of letters and documents written throughout Franklin's life. A
number of photostats of letters from other collections, mostly collected in the 1950s and 1960s, have been retained in this
collection.
The
Bradford Collection, which passed through descendants of Mary ("Polly") Stevenson Hewson, is an excellent complement to the Benjamin Franklin
Papers, providing the bulk of correspondence in both directions between Franklin and one of his closest female friends. The
other miscellaneous collections focus on Franklin's correspondence with Mme. Brillon, Francis Childs, Catherine Ray Greene,
Richard Jackson, and his sister Jane Mecom.
The APS is also the primary repository for material about Franklin's beloved grandson,
William Temple Franklin. The William Temple Franklin Papers, which also came to the APS from Charles Pemberton Fox, contains approximately 4.5 linear
feet of material concentrated in the period that Temple served as Benjamin Franklin's aide in France during and after the
American Revolution. The other William Temple Franklin collections document his financial interests in the years after his
grandfather's death, particularly in land holdings in Pennsylvania.
To varying degrees, other of Franklin's relatives are documented at the APS, including his son William, daughter Sarah Franklin
Bache, his grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache (see the
Castle-Bache Collection, nephew
Jonathan Williams, his granddaughter
Catherine Wistar Bache and her daughter
Sarah Bache Hodge. For the most part, these collections are small (usually less than 0.5 linear feet) and offer far less complete coverage
of the lives of the individuals represented, but there are important individual letters and occasional insights into their
relation to Benjamin.
The APS also houses dozens of images of Franklin dating from the 18th through 20th century. Many of these may be viewed on
the
Franklin graphics pages on the APS website.
Administrative information
Restrictions
The APS cannot provide reproductions or permission to publish for Franklin materials held in other institutions.
Provenance
Acquired variously, 1840-1990.
Custodial history:
In his will of July 17, 1788, Benjamin Franklin bequeathed his books and manuscripts to his beloved grandson, William Temple
Franklin, presumably for posterity. The subsequent peregrinations of the papers, however, rival those of the man himself,
traversing two continents, three countries, and several archival repositories.
At the time of Franklin's death in 1790, the papers were stored at Champlost, a country estate outside of Philadelphia owned
by George Fox. Fox, a longtime friend of the family, agreed to care for the papers while Temple culled a selection of letters
and documents to help prepare for an edition of his grandfather's autobiography, suitably updated to reflect later life.
Temple never returned to the States, and after his death on May 25, 1823, the portions of the papers that he had with him
were discovered in London and eventually entered into the collections of the Library of Congress. The manuscript of the autobiography
is now at the Huntington Library, having been obtained by John Bigelow from the DeSenarmont family in Paris, descendants of
LeVeillard, to whom Franklin had sent a copy for criticism. The material at Champlost was formally bequeathed to Fox, who
in turn, left the papers to his children Charles Pemberton Fox and Mary Fox.
During the 1830s, the Harvard professor Jared Sparks was given access to the papers, which served as the major source for
his monumental ten volume Works of Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Hillard, Gray and Co., 1840). It appears that Sparks may have encouraged the younger Foxes to donate the papers
to the American Philosophical Society to make them more readily available to the scholarly public. The collection of approximately
14,000 items arrived at the American Philosophical Society in 1840, becoming the nucleus of the current Benjamin Franklin
Collections.
As it turns out, however, not all of the papers made it to the APS. A portion remained at the Fox home, perhaps intentionally,
and in 1887 there passed from Mary Fox to Thomas Hewson Bache, who decided to donate them to the University of Pennsylvania,
seeding a third important collection of Franklin Papers.
Other Franklin collections, some substantial, have periodically come to the surface, having descended through other lines
of the Franklin family or, more often, through correspondents of Franklin. The second largest grouping at the APS (1,100
items) arrived in 1936 as a gift from Franklin and Nannie Bache.
Preferred citation
Cite as: [Name of Collection], American Philosophical Society.
Processing information
Recatalogued 2003.
Other finding aids
The bulk of the Franklin Papers at the APS are indexed in Hays, Isaac Minis, Catalogue of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: APS, 1908).
Additional information
Related material
The Franklin Papers project at Yale have provided the APS with a complete on-line version of all of Franklin's correspondence.
As a donor, correspondent, mentor, or colleague, Franklin appears in dozens of APS collections. The Printed Materials Department
includes a large number of books owned, donated, or acquired by Franklin, and the majority of works printed by him.
Other major collections of Benjamin Franklin Papers are located at the Library of Congress, the
University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and the Huntington Library, although many other repositories house significant collections or individual
manuscripts.
References
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 1959- ). Call no. 308 F85ay.
Lingelbach, William E., "Benjamin Franklin's Papers and the American Philosophical Society" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 99 (1955): 359.
Lingelbach, William E., "Benjamin Franklin and the American Philosophical Society in 1956" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100 (1956): 354.
Among the many biographies of Franklin are:
Aldridge, Alfred Owen, Benjamin Franklin: Philosopher and Man (Philadelphia, 1965). Call no. B F85a26.
Bowen, Catherine Drinker, The Most Dangerous Man in America : Scenes from the Life of Benjamin Franklin (Boston, 1974). Call no. B F85bow.
Brands, H. W., The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 2000). Call no. B F85bra.
Isaacson, Walter, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York, 2003). Call no. B F85isa.
Le May, J. A., ed., Reappraising Benjamin Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (Newark, Del. 1993). Call no. B F85lem2.
Lopez, Claude Anne, Mon Cher Papa: Benjamin Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven, 1966). Call no. B F86lo.
Morgan, Edmund S., Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 2002). Call no. B F85mrg.
Schoenbrun, David, Triumph in Paris: The Exploits of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1976). Call no. B F85sscho.
Srodes, James, Franklin: The Essential Founding Father (Washington, D.C., 2002). Call no. B F85sr.
Van Doren, Carl, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938). Call no. B F85va.
Wright, Esmond, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). Call no. B F85wr.
Return to MOLE