Benjamin Franklin Dies: America's First Renaissance Man

Benjamin Franklin died in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, at the age of 84, having lived long enough to see the Constitution ratified and the new republic he had helped create take its first uncertain steps. He was the only Founding Father to sign all four foundational documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War, and the Constitution. His funeral procession drew an estimated 20,000 mourners, the largest public gathering in American history at that time. Franklin's career was so varied that no single description captures it. He was a printer who retired wealthy at 42, a scientist whose experiments with electricity made him the most famous American in Europe, a diplomat who secured the French alliance that made independence possible, and a civic innovator who founded Philadelphia's first lending library, fire department, hospital, and university. His autobiography, left unfinished at his death, became one of the foundational texts of the American self-made man. His final public act was characteristically bold. Two months before his death, Franklin signed a petition to Congress urging the abolition of slavery, submitted in his capacity as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Southern congressmen were furious. Franklin responded with a devastating satirical essay, his last published writing, in which he invented a fictional North African pirate defending the enslavement of Christians using precisely the same arguments that American slaveholders used to justify enslaving Africans. The French National Assembly declared three days of mourning for Franklin, a honor it had extended to no other foreigner. The contrast with his own government was pointed. Congress debated whether to observe a month of mourning and decided against it, with Southern members objecting to honoring a man who had attacked slavery. Franklin had requested a simple burial. His gravestone in Christ Church Burial Ground reads only "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin," a modest marker for a man who invented the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, and a nation.