Benjamin Franklin

On January 17, 1706, in Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay, Benjamin Franklin was born into a large artisan family and apprenticed in his brother James Franklin's printing shop. He moved to Philadelphia in 1723, built a printing business, and used the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard's Almanack to enter public life. By the 1750s he had become a leading figure in the Pennsylvania Assembly, the postal system, and colonial reform.

Franklin proposed the Albany Plan of Union in 1754, represented several colonies in London during the imperial crisis, and joined the Second Continental Congress in 1775. In 1776 Congress sent him to France, where he negotiated the Treaty of Alliance in 1778 and helped secure the loans and naval aid that made Yorktown possible. He later joined John Adams and John Jay in the diplomacy that produced the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Franklin's diplomatic success established the model of an American foreign service built on alliance, credit, and republican negotiation. Institutions he shaped, from the postal system to the University of Pennsylvania, linked the colonial world he knew to the national republic that followed.