The Story of America: Benjamin Franklin

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:02]All have heaven in order to form a more tax to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a temple of safety deserve.

[00:00:42]There's something about Benjamin Franklin that embodies the soul of America. He's a window into the American mind. It's not a stretch to call him a lawgiver in the ancient sense of one who helps to shape the character of a people and their habits. He preached a model of the self-made individual and he lived that story himself. His life from his birth in 1706 to his death in 1790 spanned the formation of the American nation as we know it.

[00:01:13]His self-described rags to rich's story begins in Puritan Boston. At the age of 12, he's indentured as a servant to his brother James whose printer the New England current, a a radical paper for the time. He anonymously penned the silence dog good essays. He would slip them under the door of the print shop and those essays demonstrated his genius and keen insight into different character types.

[00:01:40]He was impious and funny. In one letter, Silence describes losing her father who comes above deck to praise God for his safe travel across the Atlantic Ocean.

[00:01:51]And he's suddenly washed overboard by a huge wave. Franklin was stubborn and even a troublemaker. He liked to argue to embarrass others in disputes and especially over religion and politics.

[00:02:04]And he mocked the Puritan establishment.

[00:02:07]But Ben's genius cost him both with the authorities and his brother who placed Ben in charge of the paper when he was jailed for his politics.

[00:02:18]James was abusive and often beat his younger brother. And Franklin ran away, breaking the terms. As he puts it in the autobiography, he found himself in New York, nearly 300 miles from home, a boy of 17, but without the least recommendation or knowledge of any person in the place, and with very little money in his pocket. And so hungry and exhausted, he traveled to Philadelphia. And there he buys three bread rolls and he cuts an iconic figure. He's walking down Market Street, eating one of those bread rolls with another tucked under each arm.

[00:02:56]As an 18-year-old, he embarked on a trip to London to acquire printing materials.

[00:03:02]But he found himself betrayed without credit and stranded. And while he learned much in London, Franklin was unsettled with the elements of his life.

[00:03:11]He records them as errata in his autobiography.

[00:03:15]He asked how he could be truly happy and achieve the greatest perfection possible.

[00:03:22]At the age of 20, he wrote a plan of conduct on his voyage home to guide his future behavior with the goal of becoming, as he says, both good and great, both happy and esteemed in society. Calls it the favor of God and man.

[00:03:40]Ambition, he concluded, must be educated by a steady resolution to both industry and frugality. It required a material basis.

[00:03:50]And so rather than war against human nature, Franklin sought to cultivate it as one would a garden. And he gives the same example for Philadelphia, which he compares to a garden.

[00:04:04]After acquiring the Pennsylvania Gazette, one of only two papers in the city, he launched the successful Poor Richard's Almanac, he included famous sayings to educate his readers, such as early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. To succeed in this new world, different virtues would be needed. And Franklin constructed a list of ancient Christian and commercial virtues. He combined them. And then he also added a method to achieve them. But importantly, he couldn't do it all alone. Uh, humans, he wrote, were social creatures, both naturally selfish as well as benevolent.

[00:04:44]And the self-interested desires for profit and praise could be channeled into public projects that benefited everyone.

[00:04:53]He helped to found the Gentto, a group of young citizens who met to discuss philosophy, morals, and public improvement. They would present papers before everyone at their meetings. Thus, Franklin embodies another American ideal of civic associations, which forms the foundation of self-government and republican habits. He helped to initiate a a vibrant civil society, a subscription library, a fire brigade, a fire insurance company, the academy, a hospital, and a militia.

[00:05:27]He also embodies the American love affair with science. When he achieved leisure and retired early, Franklin turned to the study of the natural world, including what he called electrical fluid, famous kite experiment with lightning. His experiments introduced terms like battery and positive and negative charges that we use today. But Franklin always insisted that questions of truth be connected with the human good. For example, knowledge of air flow to create a superior stove, the Franklin stove for heating homes.

[00:06:01]Knowledge of electricity to create lightning rods to prevent fires and death.

[00:06:07]knowledge of the Gulf Stream to expedite travel across the Atlantic.

[00:06:13]His ideas about government included all the elements of the future American republic. John Adams said that after reading Franklin's 1751 observations on the increase of mankind, he knew that separation from Britain was inevitable.

[00:06:29]James Madison said that Franklin's 1754 letters to William Shirley comprised the quote germ of American federalism.

[00:06:38]Franklin is including essays describing the separation of powers, the lawmaking authority, delegation doctrine.

[00:06:46]In 1747 during King George's war, Franklin was in his 40s at the time. He applied his views of social contract to found the association. It was an extraleal militia to defend Pennsylvania from French pirates and hostile Indian tribes. Franklin was a soldier. We often don't think of him that way.

[00:07:07]In 1751, Franklin was elected to the assembly.

[00:07:12]He sat on all of its standing committees. He drafted bills and responses to the governor during the tumultuous French and Indian War. and recognized for his genius. He became the leader of the popular party that disputed with the Pennsylvania proprietors over the rights of the legislature.

[00:07:31]He insisted on equality that the laws must be for the good of the whole as the foundation for justice was the good of the whole as opposed to the interest of a few. Under a new militia bill, Franklin was elected a colonel by the soldiers themselves and he led an expedition to build forts on the frontier.

[00:07:52]In 1757, Franklin was sent by the assembly to England. There he's involved in the attempt to repeal the proprietary charter and to replace it with the royal charter.

[00:08:05]He thought he was entering the last act of his life, 1756, and he had reason to be ambitious.

[00:08:13]He had been made the deputy postmaster general of British North America and he aspired to be governor over a new colony in Ohio. But his mission to make Pennsylvania a royal colony faded in relief to growing quarrels over taxation with parliament. And Franklin wrote volumes of articles to defend the colonial rights to consent to tax measures. And so from 1768 to 1770, he was appointed agent for Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

[00:08:44]He would always be an outsider in the British aristocratic society. And it all came to a head in 1773.

[00:08:53]Having secretly obtained letters from Governor Thomas Hutcherson of Massachusetts, he wanted to blame the imperial disputes on Hutcherson.

[00:09:03]Franklin sent them to leaders in the Massachusetts Assembly. But when the letters created a scandal, he had to admit that he had sent them. And so in the cockpit where Henry VIII had watched fights, Franklin was mocked for a solid hour by Solicitor General Alexander Wedburn, very witty. And he did this in front of all of the British lords. And so Franklin stood there stone-faced, silent, refusing to respond. And so Franklin's career in Britain was over.

[00:09:37]He lost his position as postmaster and he returned to Pennsylvania in 1775.

[00:09:44]But he displayed another American characteristic.

[00:09:48]He reinvented himself.

[00:09:52]Removing himself from public business for about a month, he met with those with whom he had been closest.

[00:09:59]Joseph Galloway in the Pennsylvania Assembly >> and his own son William who was governor of New Jersey and the three stayed up late drinking and Franklin then openly announced he was for independence.

[00:10:13]Neither agreed and it would be the end of their relationships. As a Tory, William encouraged acts of terror against Patriot Towns and Benjamin refused to intervene to release him from prison, his own son. Now Franklin took every opportunity he could to further the break between the two nations. He reorganized the postal system. This is all at the age of 70 and served on committees that oversaw petitions to the king, the manufacturer of salt peter for gunpowder, the printing of paper currency, colonial arms and defenses, Indian affairs, foreign affairs.

[00:10:47]Franklin drafted the Articles of Confederation.

[00:10:50]He was also reelected to the Pennsylvania Assembly. He was president of its constitutional convention, probably the most radical of all the new state constitutions, the 1776 constitution that had unicameal legislature. His eyes were so tired he could hardly write at night and eventually he resigned from several of those committees. But in February 1776, he traveled on a failed, frozen mission to entice Canada to revolt with the colonies. He assumed he would die on the journey.

[00:11:22]It was Franklin's international reputation as a natural philosopher that proved most useful for American diplomacy.

[00:11:30]He gained access to leading men in foreign nations, Spain, Holland, France, to secretly fund the war. In June 1776, his French friend Jacqu Barbau deberg secured a shipment of arms. The United States was caught between a rock and a hard place. It must declare independence to receive aid from France, but it must receive aid to declare independence. And Franklin was on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence.

[00:11:58]Franklin made some key changes to Jefferson's draft. He changed the words sacred and inviable. We hold these truths to be self-evident, Franklin added. He changed Jefferson's words, reduced them to arbitrary power to reduce them under absolute desperatism.

[00:12:18]And in his final key role, he accepted the mission to France.

[00:12:26]Franklin returned home in 1785. His last years were in public service as much as he wanted to retire.

[00:12:33]He was elected to three consecutive terms as governor and was a delegate to the 1787 constitutional convention.

[00:12:43]He endorsed the new constitution not as a perfect document but perhaps as the best that the founders were able. And finally, he made a motion, which was not passed, for the clergy, the clergy of the city of Philadelphia to lead the remaining sessions in prayer, lest the founders become, he says, like the builders of Babel. He said that during the revolution, the same men had prayed for unity, but now they mistakenly thought they could found a nation without divine aid. And it was a comment on the necessity of a a pre-political faith and loyalty, a common belief that binds a people together and transcends their partisan interests.

[00:13:23]Finally, Franklin agreed to be president of the Pennsylvania Society for promoting the abolition of slavery. Its 1790 petition brought heated debate in Congress. For a man who would own slaves and servants, it was a fitting end to a life that embodied Republican ideals of equality, liberty, and self-reliance.

[00:13:44]Franklin was a true genius, a self-made man, a fervent Republican, and a man instrumental to the founding of the nation he so dearly loved.

[00:13:58]Heat. Heat.