Ben Franklin's son ... a Royal Governor and British loyalist

American patriot Ben Franklin did his best to ensure the success of his son in colonial America, but regretted it when the son became too successful and dedicated to meeting his professional responsibilities … leading to an estrangement that never reconciled between the father and son.


William Franklin

Born illegitimately to a mother who is unknown to history, William Franklin grew up with his father and a stepmother, Ben Franklin’s common-law wife Deborah. The stepmother/stepson relationship tended to be strained.

As William became a young adult, his father arranged for him to study law under a respected Philadelphia attorney. And after Ben was appointed deputy postmaster for pre-revolutionary America in 1751, he appointed William as postmaster of Philadelphia, a post that the elder Franklin held previously. Father and son appeared to be very close during this stage of their lives, not only in the professional world, but personally as well, with William serving as Ben’s only assistant for his famous kite experiment. Both men jointly speculated in acquiring western lands, too, believing strongly in their growing value as the colonies expanded.

William joined his dad on a trip to England in 1757. Ben had been appointed by the Pennsylvania Assembly to approach the British government with concerns about the Penn family’s control of the colony as its “proprietors.” At the time, the Assembly could pass its own laws, but the Penn family, which technically owned the colony based on the original land charter given to it by the British king more than 75 years earlier, had final say on any such action by the Assembly. That governance structure produced a considerable amount of conflict in the rapidly growing colony. During his visit to England, Ben was unsuccessful in his efforts to loosen the proprietors’ control.

But Ben – and William – did enjoy another success that surprised almost everyone.  Thanks to the elder Franklin’s connections with the British prime minister, Britain’s newly crowned George III appointed William to be the Royal Governor of New Jersey. William took the position seriously and never wavered in performing his responsibilities. He remained a dutiful British loyalist even as his father and others moved toward revolution during the late 1760s and early 1770s. William and Ben grew further and further apart during those years.

“Away from his father, [William] had grown into a man of his own, as convinced of the correctness of his principles as his father was of his principles, and as stubborn in defending them,” wrote H. W. Brands in his 2000 book The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. “The apple had fallen close to the tree in regard of character, if not of politics.”

As hostilities between the colonists and British broke out and continued for years, colonial militiamen put William Franklin under house arrest in 1776. A few months later, he was seized and taken to Connecticut, where he remained under control of Governor Jonathan Trumbull. In contrast to William, Trumbull supported the American cause despite his appointment to his position by the British crown.

Released as part of a prisoner exchange in 1778, William lived among other loyalists in New York. He then went to England about 1782, never to return to America. In 1784, William wrote to his father, who was nearing the end of a stint as the American ambassador to France, that he wished to “revive that affectionate intercourse and connexion which till the commencement of the last troubles had been the pride and happiness of my life.”

On his way back to America, Ben agreed to meet with William when he passed through England. Ultimately, it became a business meeting to tie up legal and financial issues involving land William owned in America and debts that he owed to his father. A complicating issue was the presence of Temple Franklin, William’s own illegitimate son (fathered prior to his marriage, also with a mother unknown to history), who Ben had taken in and raised, although William later acknowledged Temple as his own.

“The meeting of the three generations occurred under inauspicious circumstances,” wrote Brands in his Ben Franklin biography. “[Ben] Franklin’s guests were coming and going … the three had scarce time and less privacy for the sort of soul-searching a genuine reunion required. Doubtless Franklin preferred it this way. Scars had formed over wounds he felt at what he considered his son’s betrayal; better not to reopen them.”

“William found the encounter acutely distressing,” added Brands. “His hopes for reconciliation were dashed, his ties to his homeland severed.”

Franklin and Adams ... pillow talk

American founding fathers John Adams and Benjamin Franklin had a complex relationship, based in their very different personalities and approaches to life in general. Adam was known to be the more stern, frugal, and serious of the two, while Franklin was more lighthearted, interested in finding and experiencing the more enjoyable parts of life. Perhaps there is no better illustration of their differences than Adams’ report of the night they spent together, sharing a bed in a small room – the only one available – at a New Jersey inn.

The two patriots were traveling as part of an American delegation to meet with Britain’s Lord Howe on New York’s Staten Island in September 1776. Howe had requested a conference as part of a British attempt at reconciling with the Americans after they declared independence from British rule.

Adam’s account of the evening, written in his diary, reports that the room was only a bit larger than the bed itself, and with only one small window. Adams seems to have been recovering from an illness, and closed the window to shut out the chilly nighttime air. But Franklin protested.

In Adam’s words (with his original punctuation, spelling, and grammar): 

“Oh! says Franklin dont shut the Window. We shall be suffocated.

I answered I was afraid of the Evening Air.

Dr. Franklin replied, the Air within this Chamber will soon be, and indeed is now worse than that without Doors: come! open the Window and come to bed, and I will convince you: I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds.

Opening the Window and leaping into Bed, I said I had read his letters … in which he had advanced, that Nobody ever got cold by going into a cold Church, or any other cold Air: but the Theory was so little consistent with my experience, that I thought it a Paradox: However I had so much curiosity to hear his reasons, that I would run the risque of a cold.

The Doctor then began an harrangue, upon Air and cold and Respiration and Perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his Philosophy together …”

Draw your own metaphors to this account, perhaps after reading more of it at the Massachusetts Historical Society’s online digital collection. And let the rest of us know what you think in comments below.

Although Adams and Franklin had an agreeable relationship at this point in the birth of our country, their relationship was not particularly warm in following years. Adams would come to not like Franklin very much at all, primarily for what he viewed as Franklin’s too-frivolous approach to life and the American cause. But that’s another story.

Ben Franklin on immigrants ...

Despite its reputation as a melting pot of the world’s people and cultures, America often feels threatened, in the past and today, when large groups of immigrants, speaking languages other than English and not appearing to assimilate quickly enough into American life, arrive on its land. Even in the mid-1700s, Benjamin Franklin was concerned when a new group of immigrants – the Germans – began populating Pennsylvania. H.W. Brands, author of The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, quotes this most famous and legendary founding father:  “Few of their children in the country learn English; they import many books from Germany. ... The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal writings in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say.”