On the whole, the Founding Fathers, those towering patriarchs, fared poorly when it came to sons. George Washington and James Madison had none. Thomas Jefferson’s only legitimate one died in infancy. Samuel Adams also outlived his. With the exception of John Quincy Adams, no other son of a Founder rose to his father’s stature. The unluckiest of all may have been Benjamin Franklin, who, in the course of a deeply familial contest, lost a cherished son the hardheaded way: to politics.
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The two were for years each other’s closest confidant. As one associate noted, William Franklin had, by his late 20s, become his father’s “friend, his brother, his intimate and easy companion.” Franklin raised his son with all the advantages he had not enjoyed. Where he had only briefly attended school, William studied with a private tutor. He kept a pony. He signed no indenture papers.
Similarities surfaced early. Around the time he turned 15, William ran off to join the crew of a ship docked in Philadelphia, from which his father retrieved him. Franklin could hardly argue with the dash for freedom, having made his own at 17. He too had longed, as a youth, for the sea. Shortly after his escapade, William was allowed to enlist in the British army. The concession seemed to affirm that he in no way suffered from the brand of “harsh and tyrannical treatment” that Franklin had known as a boy, treatment he thought might explain his later aversion to arbitrary power. He was, and knew he was, an indulgent parent. He once counseled a friend to give a child all he wanted, so that the child would develop a pleasant countenance. William was exceedingly handsome.
William’s military career ended in 1748, with the conclusion of King George’s War. While studying law, he over the next few years stepped into a string of political posts as his father vacated them. Father and son joined the same clubs and supported the same charities. They performed electrical experiments together and campaigned for office together. They were nearly shipwrecked together when, in 1757, they sailed to London, where together they visited the British Museum and watched David Garrick play Hamlet. (A fiancée of whom Franklin disapproved was left behind, soon forgotten by William.) William made business calls on his father’s behalf when Franklin found himself confined, by a months-long illness, to bed. He took his dictation. Oxford conferred an honorary doctorate on Franklin in 1762 for his electrical discoveries. Farther back in the same procession marched William, then in his early 30s, who received a master’s degree.
Deeply grateful for his father’s “numberless indulgencies,” William in 1758 professed himself willing to follow him to America, or to go to “any other part of the world, whenever you think it necessary,” and he did. The two traveled around the British Isles and to the continent, from which they returned in time for the 1761 coronation of George III. (William alone obtained a special ticket that allowed him to join the procession, all the way into Westminster Abbey.) They visited Northamptonshire, where Franklin filled in some blanks in the family history. He returned to that visit later when he began his Autobiography, which masquerades as a letter to William.
Illustration by Maggie O’Keefe
Friends commented on how much the two men resembled each other in manner and bearing. There could be no tributes to the other side of the family; it was common knowledge in Philadelphia that Franklin’s wife was not William’s mother. If William knew her name, he was among the few who did. For all intents and purposes, he seemed to have been the love child of Ben Franklin and Poor Richard. His mother’s identity frustrates us as much today as it did the 18th-century gossips, who turned her—especially in the thick of an election season—into an abused handmaid or oysterwoman, left by Franklin to beg in the streets. She was likely a household servant for whom Franklin provided, having arranged to raise their son himself.
The stain of William’s birth reared its head in London only when—at a surprisingly early age—he was named a royal governor. He was too young to have made enemies of his own, but his father’s weighed in loudly. For years William would face down cracks about his “exalted birth.” As a rule, royal governors were gentlemen, if not always gentlemen with experience. Franklin was not on hand when William married that fall in London, but he was very much on hand for William’s 1763 New Jersey inauguration. He had reason to feel proud: The son who had grown up above a Philadelphia print shop, the keeper of his secrets and his political alter ego, was now “His Excellency William Franklin, Esq., Captain-General, Governor and Commander in Chief in and over the province of New-Jersey, and territories thereon depending in America, Chancellor and Vice-Admiral in the same.” William looked forward to “an easy agreeable administration.” In an office that did not count among his father’s hand-me-downs, he came into his own, proving an especially able governor, if one who continued to submit reports to his superiors first to his father, for editing.
In 1764, Franklin returned to London as a colonial agent. An ocean away, William remained expert at guessing which essays in the press were his father’s at a time when “An Admirer of Truth and Goodness,” “Timoleon,” and “Undeniable Facts” counted as bylines. If The London Chronicle reminded the arbiters of colonial affairs of “the lasting power of resentment on the human mind,” William was quick to recognize the hand behind it.
When rumors flew in the colonies that Franklin had personally designed the Stamp Act, William refuted the charges. When his half sister fell in love, William stepped in, on his father’s behalf, to attempt to head off what seemed a disadvantageous marriage. (He was unsuccessful. The purported fortune hunter became his brother-in-law.) Franklin’s most intimate letters—the reports on the compliments that puffed him up, the hints that he might expect an appointment in the British administration, the violent longings for home—went to William. With no other man was Ben Franklin ever so naked on the page.
A spark of discord flared in 1773, after Franklin mailed a packet of confidential Crown correspondence to Boston, to sensational effect. Not for a minute did the royal governor of New Jersey believe his father capable of retailing stolen letters of his fellow Crown officers; he was appalled to discover him behind such a morally dubious transaction. As Franklin explained once his secret was revealed, he had hoped the documents might temper colonial animosity toward London. He did not mind throwing a royal governor—at least a Massachusetts royal governor—under the bus. He had come around to the belief that Parliament “has no right to make any law whatever” for the colonies. He knew William disagreed but would not attempt to convert him. He hoped only that William would act with integrity, leaving his constituents happier than he had found them.
That was before Franklin was hauled before the Privy Council to answer for the stolen letters and—in a quirk of timing—take the blame for the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, in which he had played no role. He had believed himself impervious to censure. A brutal, public evisceration proved him wrong. His first instinct, days later, was to suggest that William resign in solidarity. Given Franklin’s disfavor in London, William could expect no promotion. (William had been angling for a more lucrative post in Barbados. For years, Franklin had subsidized New Jersey’s royal governor, his salary insufficient to meet his needs.) Two weeks later, Franklin changed his mind. Surely the Crown would expect a resignation. He preferred to deprive it of that satisfaction.
The advice hardly mattered, as William had not the slightest intention of resigning. He did assure his father of one rule of colonial physics; with the London drubbing, Franklin’s American popularity soared to new heights. William permitted himself to vent a little about the absurd entity that called itself the Continental Congress. The split screen opens around this time: William was shocked that Boston had no interest in reimbursing the East India Company for the 342 chests of tea the town had launched into its harbor. By September 1774, Franklin was arguing that Parliament should reimburse the company’s loss, with the monies it had extorted from the colonies. Then, as if out of the blue, came a poisoned dart. “But you,” Franklin wrote to his son, “who are a thorough courtier, see every thing with government eyes.”
By the time he replied, in late December 1774, William had cause for anger. He was fresh from having buried his stepmother. Her disappointment in not having seen her husband in a decade, William reported, lips pursed, “had preyed a good deal on her spirits.” He could not understand why his father remained abroad. Franklin would change no minds in London, where he was regarded with “an evil eye” and where he risked arrest. Would he not be more useful quieting the turbulent spirits in America? William assumed the paternalistic role, reminding his father of his responsibilities; it was the older generation that had been radicalized. However lunatic Franklin might think the London administration, surely he had to admit that there was equal lunacy in America. This was, William ultimately acknowledged, “a disagreeable subject, and I’ll drop it.”
As he finally sailed for Philadelphia in 1775, Franklin composed the longest letter we know him to have written, a 196-page behemoth that catalogs the raised and dashed hopes of his final London months, during which he labored—in a tour of drawing rooms and a round of covert discussions, with sweet words and in “cool sullen silence”—to work out an Anglo-American compromise. He reported on the searing insults and abject flattery; the hints of bribes; the contempt for a people understood to be “the lowest of mankind, and almost of a different species from the English of Britain”; and his conviction, in the end, that the House of Lords appeared “to have scarce discretion enough to govern a herd of swine.” This account he addressed to the son whom he had not seen in a decade. As Dr. Franklin wrote on the high seas, Governor Franklin was secretly passing every scrap of intelligence he could gather on the activities of the Continental Congress to London. Franklin disembarked to the news that shots had been fired at Lexington and Concord.
There was an additional wrinkle. Illegitimate children seemed to run in the family. With Franklin sailed William’s 15-year-old son, Temple, born in London. Neither William’s wife nor the rest of the family knew of his existence. Initially William hoped he might introduce Temple as the son of an unfortunate relative whom he had agreed to raise as his own. Franklin preferred the direct approach. “I brought over a grandson with me,” he baldly informed his sister. There is no record of how William’s wife greeted the news of the instant stepson with the polished manners, who impressed even his hard-driving grandfather. Franklin had taken charge of Temple’s education, a statement that spoke volumes, as did the fact that Franklin billed William for the expenses.
Along with much of America, William waited to see on which political side his father would land. Franklin remained so tight-lipped that some wrote him off as a British spy. The reserve persisted for some time, though William had his suspicions, as would any close reader of that 196-page letter. More than anything, he wished that his father would retire from all public affairs. He warned him that if Franklin intended “to set the colonies in a flame, he would take care to run away by the light of it,” a friend later recalled.
When finally it came, the confrontation was loud. At William’s stately New Jersey home that summer, the two men quarreled so violently that they roused the neighbors. Franklin warned William that his position would soon prove uncomfortable, as William well knew. As early as June 1775, he anticipated arrest. His legal authority seemed at an end. His militia no longer reported to him. He begged London to observe strict secrecy with his correspondence, every shred of which could prove his undoing. Despite the dangers, he assured London that nothing would induce him “to swerve in the least from that loyalty and duty, which I owe His Majesty which has been the pride of my life to demonstrate upon all occasions.”
Not for the first time, a tussle broke out over the word patriotism. In America after 1775 an honest patriot subscribed to American independence. In the mind of the New Jersey royal governor, those individuals were “pretended patriots,” “desperate gamesters,” “banditti,” and delusional dupes. “A real patriot,” William informed his disgruntled legislature, “can seldom or ever speak popular language. A false one will never suffer himself to speak anything else.” Those lines figured in his last address as governor. As his father read drafts of the Declaration of Independence, William was carted off, to jeers and insults. He refused to answer questions, railed that the Continental Congress had usurped the King’s authority, and attempted escape. Under heavy guard, he reached Connecticut on July 4, 1776. He left behind a wife nearly out of her wits with fright.
As the son of a leading Loyalist and the grandson of a leading Revolutionary, Temple turned overnight into a sort of walking embodiment of civil war. To deliver word from his stepmother, he requested Franklin’s permission to visit his father in prison. It was denied, but not, as Temple parried, because Franklin feared that his grandson might share dangerous intelligence. At his address, William could make little use of such information even if Temple happened to impart it, Franklin dryly observed. Temple might retire any political suspicions; Franklin was acting solely from “tender concern” for his welfare. He belonged, Franklin chided, at school rather than rambling about Connecticut. Or so Franklin wrote on September 22. He was soon to have a better idea.
William meanwhile remained recalcitrant. For collaborating with British officers while on parole, he was transferred to solitary confinement in a filthy cell. He felt buried alive, in the company of rats. He preferred to be taken out and shot. After three months he appealed, in moving terms, to George Washington. William could hardly eat or sleep. He was “one of the most miserable wretches breathing.” His wife’s failing health was paramount in his mind. Might he be granted permission to visit her? He assured Washington that his father, too, would be grateful were he to grant William’s request. The two men differed in their political convictions, “yet it has not lessened his natural affection for me, any more than it has mine for him, which I can truly say is as great as ever.” If Franklin knew of the appeal, he made no effort to intervene. By the time William emerged from prison, he looked his father’s age. He was also a widower.
William did not share Franklin’s gift for “cool sullen silence.” When the time came to discuss a prisoner exchange, he made for a poor candidate, as he seemed unlikely to desist from launching counter-Revolutionary raids. His stubborn loyalty is easier to explain than is Franklin’s stubborn anger. A royal governor for 13 years, William had finally clambered out from under Franklin’s shadow. His father’s politics had spoiled the earlier love affair, from which the London trip had removed him. William may have been unwilling to submit to a second sacrifice. It could not always have been easy to be Ben Franklin’s son; a little rebellion may have brought relief. William had moreover swallowed an early, heady dose of Anglophilia. Only one Franklin had processed into Westminster Abbey with George III.
Before the war divided father and son, the two joined the same clubs, supported the same charities, and conducted electrical experiments together. (Universal History Archive / Getty)
The royal governor of New Jersey had moreover heard enough about base-born bastards. Respectability mattered to him in a way it did not to his iconoclastic father, whose rags-to-riches story appeals more to us than it did to the Philadelphia elite. William initially resisted arrest because he refused to answer to an illegal assembly but also because his inquisitors had failed to treat him as a gentleman. The assault on his authority was an attempt to “filch from me my good name,” he howled in 1776. That name was “of more value than all other considerations,” as he later explained. For it he maintained always an outsize regard; his father tended to let the insults fall where they might. Having arrived at last at an exalted status, nothing would pry William from it. He had risen above dishonor. Where Franklin well knew he had difficulty submitting to his superiors, William prided himself on his devotion to the King. While Parliament drafted the 1774 Intolerable Acts, he insisted—as he alone among Crown officials needed to do—that “no attachments or connections shall ever make me swerve from the duty of my station.”
From the earliest days of his governorship, William professed himself willing to risk his life in His Majesty’s service. And by 1775, he had begun to feel more validation from the British administration than from his father. The tragedy was that for all his eloquent tributes to the Crown, he remained Ben Franklin’s son, suspect, for different reasons, in both camps. Or as Lord Howe’s secretary put it while William languished in prison, “His father is and has been every way his misfortune.”
Both men availed themselves of substitutes. When Franklin sailed to France in late 1776 to secure aid for the Revolution, he did so with Temple in tow. He needed a trusted secretary. Temple was excellent, bilingual company. A European education was at the time superior to an American one. The exchange also constituted a bit of underhanded score-settling, as Franklin acknowledged. He had, he wrote several years later, rescued a valuable young man from the clutches of the Tories, instilling in him honest republican principles. “It is enough that I have lost my son,” Franklin cried, in a rare nod to the emotional toll, for which he enlisted an equally rare exclamation point. “Would they add my grandson! ”
William was long in learning of Temple’s departure and flabbergasted when he did. Christmas Eve 1776 found Temple at Versailles, the ideal messenger for a sensitive, exploratory overture to the French minister of foreign affairs. Having raised an Englishman, Franklin over the next years inadvertently raised a Frenchman, which is what happens when you send an impressionable adolescent with a carriage and servants on an overnight mission to Versailles.
No word passed between father and son over the next nine years. Friends evidently intuited that it was best not to mention William to Franklin, though occasionally someone blundered ahead. Family members tiptoed around the awkwardness by referring to William, when necessary, as “Temple’s father.” Franklin’s Parisian friends universally spoke of Temple as Franklin’s son, erasing the intermediate generation. So as not to muddy either the political or familial waters, Franklin discouraged Temple from any contact with his father. Comfortable at Versailles, devoted to his grandfather, Temple ably acquitted himself of his duties. Franklin had great ambitions for the teenager, on whom he doted. He seemed to understand that he had been granted a do-over. He did not intend to get this one wrong. “The doctor,” the Marquis de Lafayette would note, introducing Temple to General Washington, “loves him better than any thing in the world.”
Franklin had his work cut out for him in Paris, where Congress expected him to appeal to a monarchy for assistance in establishing a republic. Surrounded by spies, at odds with his colleagues, forced to proceed by stealth in a second language and an unfamiliar culture, Franklin had difficulties enough without having to hear of his son’s Loyalist activities. Those reports came his way all the same, especially when William made a noisy 1782 return to London. Given the prison time, he was no longer simply a Loyalist. He was a Loyalist hero. Franklin claimed that he made it a fixed rule never to confuse private and public resentments and the evidence is largely on his side. When the time came to negotiate a peace in 1783, however, no one argued so vehemently against compensating the Loyalists for their lost American properties as the sole commissioner with a Loyalist son. If the people whom Franklin preferred to call royalists—he believed the true Loyalists to have been those who had fought for American liberty—were to be compensated for their losses, surely the Americans should be too? Coolly conflating the personal and the political, he cited the destruction of his library, carried off by the British officer who had occupied and looted his home. He happened, as Franklin surely knew, to be an associate of William’s.
Franklin relented a little in 1784, hinting that he would welcome renewed contact with William now that the countries had settled their differences. William was surprised, having concluded from his father’s “total neglect and inattention” during his prison years that the relationship was over. Leaping at the overture, he offered to come to Paris. He himself had buried all his American hatchets at the signing of the peace. He hoped “to revive that affectionate intercourse and connection which till the commencement of the late troubles had been the pride and happiness of my life.” (The line rhymes with the 1776 “pride of my life” tribute to George III.) William believed he had acted purely out of duty to his sovereign. Given the same circumstances, he would comport himself no differently. He was forthright: “If I have been mistaken, I cannot help it. It is an error of judgment that the maturest reflection I am capable of cannot rectify.” He hoped they might each forget the past. He refrained from any mention of his father having spirited off his son.
Franklin agreed to the mutual amnesia, though not before hurling a few thunderbolts. Nothing had ever hurt him so much as the abandonment in his old age of his only son, who had gone so far as to take up arms against him “in a cause wherein my good fame, fortune and life were all at stake.” He could have understood had William remained neutral. But “there are natural duties which precede political ones,” stressed the man who had defied his parents and missed his wife’s funeral and both children’s weddings. Consciously or not, he echoed William’s 1774 words: It was a disagreeable subject. He would drop it. He preferred William not come to Paris, but—bowing to Temple’s ardent wishes—Franklin would send Temple to London. He submitted operating instructions. Franklin intended Temple to study law. William was to supply him with his old law books. He should introduce him to no improper company. He could confide any and all family matters in Temple. They had no secrets. Temple appears to have had at least one: Franklin seemed unaware that the 24-year-old left behind in Paris a (married) mistress, pregnant with his child.
Franklin often could not remember to be angry. He shied from open confrontation. He found disputes as useless as they were unpleasant. Most of all, he reminded feuding relatives, he disliked family feuds. He insisted that he preferred immortal friendships to immortal enmities. Both he and Poor Richard advocated always for forgiveness. But he could not, or would not, fold William back into his affections. The embarrassment and dishonor, the sense of betrayal—all words he avoided, preferring to detour around what was for him the greatest casualty of the war, which had cost him his best friend—ran too deep. He continued to believe there was not a man on Earth who could justly say that Ben Franklin had wronged him, wholly overlooking the one in London. He could brook dissent—he corresponded with any number of friends who saw the Revolution differently—but not by someone who shared his name.
Long after he had signed the Treaty of Paris, establishing America’s existence, Franklin remained implacable on the subject of Loyalist compensation. A hired assassin, Franklin conceded, “has a right to his pay.” But surely his employers should compensate him rather than his victims. He loaded his anger into an unpublished fable, writing off the royalists as a fratricidal “mongrel race,” lines he could not have written without realizing that his own son belonged to that genus. To the end of his life, the resentment burned bright. “We are commanded to forgive our enemies,” he reminded one correspondent, “but we are nowhere commanded to forgive our friends.”
There was a brief 1785 reunion in Southampton, as Franklin prepared to sail to America. It was probably not much helped that he could have read, days earlier, that William continued to petition the Crown on behalf of the Loyalists. Franklin was affectionate in person but also adamant that William assign his American properties to Temple, to settle his debt to him for the years of subsidies. William balked. The properties were worth twice as much. He assumed he was being penalized for his politics, as he indisputably was. He was wounded; the transaction drove home that his father “preferred my son’s interest to mine, and that I held not an equal place in his affections.” For the sake of family harmony, he agreed all the same to his father’s terms. Franklin afterward went silent, refusing to answer his letters. Temple explained that he was offended still by William’s bristling at his terms. On the rare occasion when he referred to William, Franklin explained that they were estranged and that William kept aloof, which was untrue. Father and son never saw each other again.
When Franklin’s will was read in 1790, William discovered that he had essentially been disinherited all over again. The first item was a rebuke for the wartime part he had played against his father, a part, Franklin added revealingly, of “public notoriety.” William was struck by Franklin’s “shameful injustice” but also furious for practical reasons, having made little progress with the British administration in securing reparations. To prove his loyalty to the King and to put an end to a rumor that he and his father had hedged their bets, he had submitted Franklin’s pitiless letters to him, now lost. Not only had there been no collusion, but he had placed his duty to his sovereign over “the wishes of a revered parent.” In the process he had forfeited every shred of his father’s affection.
Having claimed damages of £48,000, William received £1,800, along with a pension that barely covered his London expenses. (When his sister came to visit, he regretted that he did not have room to put her up. There had been multiple guest rooms in the New Jersey mansion, far more lavish than Franklin’s Philadelphia home.) Temple returned to London after Franklin’s death but preferred Paris, where he settled after siring a second illegitimate child. (The first had died in infancy.) Franklin’s son and grandson quarreled. William wrote Temple out of his will, substituting his granddaughter. William was more hurt, he claimed, than he had ever been. He did not relish the idea of “dying at enmity with one so nearly connected.” He and Temple never reconciled.
Aside from his supersize 1775 letter, Franklin left only one other piece of sustained writing. Though he added to his Autobiography nearly until his death, he never carried the story of his life beyond the late 1750s, when he was still a loyal British subject. William, too, endures as a devoted subject, if one who fades from view in the book’s later sections. The “lasting power of resentment on the human mind” figures nowhere in Franklin’s pages, the most popular autobiography in America and a clear-eyed ode to tolerance and reason. Franklin had ample opportunity to revise the work, and he did. He never touched the first words, which remain “Dear Son.”
This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “Dear Son.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
