The autobiography of benjamin franklin summary part 1
Benjamin Franklin
American polymath and statesman (–)
"Ben Franklin" redirects here. For other uses, see Benjamin Franklin (disambiguation).
Benjamin Franklin FRSFRSAFRSE | |
|---|---|
Portrait by Joseph Duplessis, | |
| In office October 18, – November 5, | |
| Vice President | |
| Preceded by | John Dickinson |
| Succeeded by | Thomas Mifflin |
| In office September 28, – April 3, | |
| Appointed by | Congress of the Confederation |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Jonathan Russell |
| In office March 23, – May 17, | |
| Appointed by | Continental Congress |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Thomas Jefferson |
| In office July 26, – November 7, | |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Richard Bache |
| In office May – October | |
| In office August 10, – January 31, | |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Vacant |
| In office May – October | |
| Preceded by | Isaac Norris |
| Succeeded by | Isaac Norris |
| In office – | |
| Succeeded by | William Smith |
| Born | January 17, [O.S.
January 6, ][Note 1] |
| Died | April 17, () (aged 84) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Resting place | Christ Church Burial Ground, Philadelphia |
| Political party | Independent |
| Spouse | |
| Children | |
| Parents | |
| Education | Boston Latin School |
| Signature | |
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, [O.S.
January 6, ][Note 1] – April 17, ) was an American polymath: a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher.[1] Among the most influential intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States; a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence; and the first postmaster general.[2]
Franklin became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies, publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette at age [3] He became wealthy publishing this and Poor Richard's Almanack, which he wrote under the pseudonym "Richard Saunders".[4] After , he was associated with the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the policies of the British Parliament and the Crown.[5] He pioneered and was the first president of the Academy and College of Philadelphia, which opened in and later became the University of Pennsylvania.
William franklin: Downloads downloads in the last 30 days. He describes his relationships with family members, particularly his father, and shares anecdotes about his education and love for reading. Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. EMBED for wordpress.
He organized and was the first secretary of the American Philosophical Society and was elected its president in He was appointed deputy postmaster-general for the British colonies in ,[6] which enabled him to set up the first national communications network.
He was active in community affairs and colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs.
Franklin became a hero in America when, as an agent in London for several colonies, he spearheaded the repeal of the unpopular Stamp Act by the British Parliament. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired as the first U.S. ambassador to France and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco–American relations. His efforts proved vital in securing French aid for the American Revolution.
From to , he served as President of Pennsylvania. At some points in his life, he owned slaves and ran "for sale" ads for slaves in his newspaper, but by the late s, he began arguing against slavery, became an active abolitionist, and promoted the education and integration of African Americans into U.S. society.[7]
As a scientist, his studies of electricity made him a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics.
He also charted and named the Gulf Stream current. His numerous important inventions include the lightning rod, bifocals, glass harmonica and the Franklin stove.[8] He founded many civic organizations, including the Library Company, Philadelphia's first fire department,[9] and the University of Pennsylvania.[10] Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity.
He was the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, Treaty of Paris, peace with Britain and the Constitution. Foundational in defining the American ethos, Franklin has been called "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become".[11]
His life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and his status as one of America's most influential Founding Fathers, have seen Franklin honored for more than two centuries after his death on the $ bill and in the names of warships, many towns and counties, educational institutions and corporations, as well as in numerous cultural references and a portrait in the Oval Office.
The autobiography benjamin franklin pdf download Uploaded by Unknown on August 4, Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. It not only reflects on his personal journey but also serves as an inspiring narrative of self-improvement and perseverance. Open Library American Libraries.His more than 30, letters and documents have been collected in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin.Anne Robert Jacques Turgot said of him: "Eripuit fulmen cœlo, mox sceptra tyrannis" ("He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants").[12]
Ancestry
Benjamin Franklin's father, Josiah Franklin, was a tallowchandler, soaper, and candlemaker.
Josiah Franklin was born at Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, on December 23, , the son of Thomas Franklin, a blacksmith and farmer, and his wife, Jane White. Benjamin's father and all four of his grandparents were born in England.[13]
Josiah Franklin had a total of seventeen children with his two wives. He married his first wife, Anne Child, in about in Ecton and emigrated with her to Boston in ; they had three children before emigration and four after.
Following her death, Josiah married Abiah Folger on July 9, , in the Old South Meeting House by Reverend Samuel Willard, and had ten children with her. Benjamin, their eighth child, was Josiah Franklin's fifteenth child overall, and his tenth and final son.[citation needed]
Benjamin Franklin's mother, Abiah, was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts Bay Colony, on August 15, , to Peter Folger, a miller and schoolteacher, and his wife, Mary Morrell Folger, a former indentured servant.
Mary Folger came from a Puritan family that was among the first Pilgrims to flee to Massachusetts for religious freedom, sailing for Boston in after King Charles I of England had begun persecuting Puritans. Her father Peter was "the sort of rebel destined to transform colonial America."[14] As clerk of the court, he was arrested on February 10, , and jailed on February 19 for his inability to pay bail.
The autobiography benjamin franklin pdf free Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Somewhat difficult to read. Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.He spent over a year and a half in jail.[15]
Early life and education
Boston
A May photograph of Franklin's birthplace in Boston, commemorated with a bust of Franklin atop the building's second-floor façade
Franklin was born on Milk Street in Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay on January 17, ,[Note 1] and baptized at the Old South Meeting House in Boston.
As a child growing up along the Charles River, Franklin recalled that he was "generally the leader among the boys."[18]
Franklin's father wanted him to attend school with the clergy but only had enough money to send him to school for two years. He attended Boston Latin School but did not graduate; he continued his education through voracious reading.
Although "his parents talked of the church as a career"[19] for Franklin, his schooling ended when he was ten. He worked for his father for a time, and at 12 he became an apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who taught him the printing trade. When Benjamin was 15, James founded The New-England Courant, which was the third newspaper founded in Boston.[20]
When denied the chance to write a letter to the paper for publication, Franklin adopted the pseudonym of "Silence Dogood," a middle-aged widow.
Mrs. Dogood's letters were published and became a subject of conversation around town. Neither James nor the Courant's readers were aware of the ruse, and James was unhappy with Benjamin when he discovered the popular correspondent was his younger brother. Franklin was an advocate of free speech from an early age. When his brother was jailed for three weeks in for publishing material unflattering to the governor, young Franklin took over the newspaper and had Mrs.
Dogood proclaim, quoting Cato's Letters, "Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech."[21] Franklin left his apprenticeship without his brother's permission, and in so doing became a fugitive.[22]
Moves to Philadelphia and London
At age 17, Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, seeking a new start in a new city.
When he first arrived, he worked in several printing shops there, but he was not satisfied by the immediate prospects in any of these jobs. After a few months, while working in one printing house, Pennsylvania governor Sir William Keith convinced him to go to London, ostensibly to acquire the equipment necessary for establishing another newspaper in Philadelphia.
Discovering that Keith's promises of backing a newspaper were empty, he worked as a typesetter in a printer's shop in what is today the Lady Chapel of Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great in the Smithfield area of London, which had at that time been deconsecrated. He returned to Philadelphia in with the help of Thomas Denham, an English merchant who had emigrated but returned to England, and who employed Franklin as a clerk, shopkeeper, and bookkeeper in his business.[23][page needed]
Junto and library
In , at age 21, Franklin formed the Junto, a group of "like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community." The Junto was a discussion group for issues of the day; it subsequently gave rise to many organizations in Philadelphia.[24] The Junto was modeled after English coffeehouses that Franklin knew well and which had become the center of the spread of Enlightenment ideas in Britain.[25][26]
Reading was a great pastime of the Junto, but books were rare and expensive.
The members created a library, initially assembled from their own books, after Franklin wrote:
A proposition was made by me that since our books were often referr'd to in our disquisitions upon the inquiries, it might be convenient for us to have them altogether where we met, that upon occasion they might be consulted; and by thus clubbing our books to a common library, we should, while we lik'd to keep them together, have each of us the advantage of using the books of all the other members, which would be nearly as beneficial as if each owned the whole.[27]
This did not suffice, however.
Franklin conceived the idea of a subscription library, which would pool the funds of the members to buy books for all to read. This was the birth of the Library Company of Philadelphia, whose charter he composed in [28]
Newspaperman
Further information: Early American publishers and printers
Upon Denham's death, Franklin returned to his former trade.
In , he set up a printing house in partnership with Hugh Meredith; the following year he became the publisher of The Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper in Philadelphia. The Gazette gave Franklin a forum for agitation about a variety of local reforms and initiatives through printed essays and observations.
Over time, his commentary, and his adroit cultivation of a positive image as an industrious and intellectual young man, earned him a great deal of social respect. But even after he achieved fame as a scientist and statesman, he habitually signed his letters with the unpretentious 'B. Franklin, Printer.'[23]
In , he published the first German-language newspaper in America – Die Philadelphische Zeitung – although it failed after only one year because four other newly founded German papers quickly dominated the newspaper market.[29] Franklin also printed Moravian religious books in German.
He often visited Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, staying at the Moravian Sun Inn.[30] In a pamphlet on demographic growth and its implications for the Thirteen Colonies, he called the Pennsylvania Germans "Palatine Boors" who could never acquire the "Complexion" of Anglo-American settlers and referred to "Blacks and Tawneys" as weakening the social structure of the colonies.
Although he apparently reconsidered shortly thereafter, and the phrases were omitted from all later printings of the pamphlet, his views may have played a role in his political defeat in [31]
According to Ralph Frasca, Franklin promoted the printing press as a device to instruct colonial Americans in moral virtue.
Frasca argues he saw this as a service to God, because he understood moral virtue in terms of actions, thus, doing good provides a service to God. Despite his own moral lapses, Franklin saw himself as uniquely qualified to instruct Americans in morality. He tried to influence American moral life through the construction of a printing network based on a chain of partnerships from the Carolinas to New England.
He thereby invented the first newspaper chain.[citation needed] It was more than a business venture, for like many publishers he believed that the press had a public-service duty.[32][33]
When he established himself in Philadelphia, shortly before , the town boasted two "wretched little" news sheets, Andrew Bradford's The American Weekly Mercury and Samuel Keimer's Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences, and Pennsylvania Gazette.[34] This instruction in all arts and sciences consisted of weekly extracts from Chambers's Universal Dictionary.
Franklin quickly did away with all of this when he took over the Instructor and made it The Pennsylvania Gazette. The Gazette soon became his characteristic organ, which he freely used for satire, for the play of his wit, even for sheer excess of mischief or of fun.
The autobiography benjamin franklin pdf Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. In Browsing: History - American. The text chronicles the life and experiences of Benjamin Franklin, one of America's founding fathers, as he recounts his journey from modest beginnings in Boston to becoming a prominent printer, inventor, and statesman. Read now or download free!From the first, he had a way of adapting his models to his own uses. The series of essays called "The Busy-Body," which he wrote for Bradford's American Mercury in , followed the general Addisonian form, already modified to suit homelier conditions. The thrifty Patience, in her busy little shop, complaining of the useless visitors who waste her valuable time, is related to the women who address Mr.
Spectator. The Busy-Body himself is a true Censor Morum, as Isaac Bickerstaff had been in the Tatler. And a number of the fictitious characters, Ridentius, Eugenius, Cato, and Cretico, represent traditional 18th-century classicism. Even this Franklin could use for contemporary satire, since Cretico, the "sowre Philosopher," is evidently a portrait of his rival, Samuel Keimer.[35][page needed]
Franklin had mixed success in his plan to establish an inter-colonial network of newspapers that would produce a profit for him and disseminate virtue.
Over the years he sponsored two dozen printers in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New York, Connecticut, and even the Caribbean. By , eight of the fifteen English language newspapers in the colonies were published by him or his partners.[36] He began in Charleston, South Carolina, in After his second editor died, the widow, Elizabeth Timothy, took over and made it a success.
She was one of the colonial era's first woman printers.[37] For three decades Franklin maintained a close business relationship with her and her son Peter Timothy, who took over the South Carolina Gazette in [38] The Gazette was impartial in political debates, while creating the opportunity for public debate, which encouraged others to challenge authority.
Timothy avoided blandness and crude bias and, after , increasingly took a patriotic stand in the growing crisis with Great Britain.[39] Franklin's Connecticut Gazette (–68), however, proved unsuccessful.[40] As the Revolution approached, political strife slowly tore his network apart.[41]
Freemasonry
In or , Franklin was initiated into the local Masonic lodge.
He became a grand master in , indicating his rapid rise to prominence in Pennsylvania.[42][43] The same year, he edited and published the first Masonic book in the Americas, a reprint of James Anderson's Constitutions of the Free-Masons.[44] He was the secretary of St. John's Lodge in Philadelphia from to [43]
In January , "Franklin appeared as a witness" in a manslaughter trial against two men who killed "a simple-minded apprentice" named Daniel Rees in a fake Masonic initiation gone wrong.
One of the men "threw, or accidentally spilled, the burning spirits, and Daniel Rees died of his burns two days later." While Franklin did not directly participate in the hazing that led to Rees' death, he knew of the hazing before it turned fatal, and did nothing to stop it. He was criticized for his inaction in The American Weekly Mercury, by his publishing rival Andrew Bradford.
Ultimately, "Franklin replied in his own defense in the Gazette."[45][46]
Franklin remained a Freemason for the rest of his life.[47][48]
Common-law marriage to Deborah Read
At age 17 in , Franklin proposed to year-old Deborah Read while a boarder in the Read home. At that time, Deborah's mother was wary of allowing her young daughter to marry Franklin, who was on his way to London at Governor Keith's request, and also because of his financial instability.
Her own husband had recently died, and she declined Franklin's request to marry her daughter.[23]
Franklin travelled to London, and after he failed to communicate as expected with Deborah and her family, they interpreted his long silence as a breaking of his promises. At the urging of her mother, Deborah married a potter named John Rogers on August 5, John soon fled to Barbados with her dowry in order to avoid debts and prosecution.
Since Rogers' fate was unknown, bigamy laws prevented Deborah from remarrying.[49][50]
Franklin returned in and resumed his courtship of Deborah.[49] They established a common-law marriage on September 1, They took in his recently acknowledged illegitimate young son and raised him in their household.
Benjamin franklin quotes In Browsing: Biographies. Smith, E. Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.They had two children together. Their son, Francis Folger Franklin, was born in October and died of smallpox in Their daughter, Sarah "Sally" Franklin, was born in and eventually married Richard Bache.[51][52][53][Note 2]
Deborah's fear of the sea meant that she never accompanied Franklin on any of his extended trips to Europe; another possible reason why they spent much time apart is that he may have blamed her for possibly preventing their son Francis from being inoculated against the disease that subsequently killed him.[56] Deborah wrote to him in November , saying she was ill due to "dissatisfied distress" from his prolonged absence, but he did not return until his business was done.[57] Deborah Read Franklin died of a stroke on December 14, , while Franklin was on an extended mission to Great Britain; he returned in [58]
William Franklin
Main article: William Franklin
In , year-old Franklin publicly acknowledged his illegitimate son William and raised him in his household.
William was born on February 22, , but his mother's identity is unknown.[59] He was educated in Philadelphia and beginning at about age 30 studied law in London in the early s. William himself fathered an illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin, born on the same day and month: February 22, [60] The boy's mother was never identified, and he was placed in foster care.
In , the elder William Franklin married Elizabeth Downes, daughter of a planter from Barbados, in London. In , he was appointed as the last royal governor of New Jersey.
A Loyalist to the king, William Franklin saw his relations with father Benjamin eventually break down over their differences about the American Revolutionary War, as Benjamin Franklin could never accept William's position.
Deposed in by the revolutionary government of New Jersey, William was placed under house arrest at his home in Perth Amboy for six months. After the Declaration of Independence, he was formally taken into custody by order of the Provincial Congress of New Jersey, an entity which he refused to recognize, regarding it as an "illegal assembly."[61] He was incarcerated in Connecticut for two years, in Wallingford and Middletown, and, after being caught surreptitiously engaging Americans into supporting the Loyalist cause, was held in solitary confinement at Litchfield for eight months.
When finally released in a prisoner exchange in , he moved to New York City, which was occupied by the British at the time.[62]
While in New York City, he became leader of the Board of Associated Loyalists, a quasi-military organization chartered by King George III and headquartered in New York City. They initiated guerrilla forays into New Jersey, southern Connecticut, and New York counties north of the city.[63] When British troops evacuated from New York, William Franklin left with them and sailed to England.
He settled in London, never to return to North America. In the preliminary peace talks in with Britain, " Benjamin Franklin insisted that loyalists who had borne arms against the United States would be excluded from this plea (that they be given a general pardon). He was undoubtedly thinking of William Franklin."[64][unreliable source?]
Success as an author
In , Franklin began to publish the noted Poor Richard's Almanack (with content both original and borrowed) under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, on which much of his popular reputation is based.
He frequently wrote under pseudonyms. The first issue published was for the upcoming year, [65] He had developed a distinct, signature style that was plain, pragmatic and had a sly, soft but self-deprecating tone with declarative sentences.[66] Although it was no secret that he was the author, his Richard Saunders character repeatedly denied it.
"Poor Richard's Proverbs," adages from this almanac, such as "A penny saved is twopence dear" (often misquoted as "A penny saved is a penny earned") and "Fish and visitors stink in three days," remain common quotations in the modern world. Wisdom in folk society meant the ability to provide an apt adage for any occasion, and his readers became well prepared.
He sold about ten thousand copies per year—it became an institution. In , Franklin began publishing The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for all the British Plantations in America. He used the heraldic badge of the Prince of Wales as the cover illustration.
Franklin wrote a letter, "Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress," dated June 25, , in which he gives advice to a young man about channeling sexual urges.
Due to its licentious nature, it was not published in collections of his papers during the 19th century. Federal court rulings from the mid-to-late 20th century cited the document as a reason for overturning obscenity laws and against censorship.[68]