Ben Franklin: Founding Father, Flirt, and Flawed Abolitionist

Ryan Haylett

I’m not going to lie, and you may have guessed by now, I’m a bit of a Ben Franklin Fanboy. But not in the “let’s all hold hands and say he’s a Founding Father saint” way. More in the “this guy’s a walking contradiction and somehow got away with it” way. The guy’s face is on the hundred-dollar bill, and most people couldn’t tell you anything about him except, what, he flew a kite in a storm? Big deal. He didn’t even “discover” electricity, he just didn’t electrocute himself. Congratulations, you survived being a dumb ass.

Ryan Haylett

Franklin’s story starts like every “bootstrap” myth Americans love — except his family was broke and had seventeen kids. Seventeen. Imagine growing up in that house. You’re kid number fifteen, your dad makes soap and candles, and your big life plan is to dip wicks until you die. Franklin hated it. He bailed on school at ten, got shoved into his older brother’s print shop, and the two of them fought like cats in a bag. Franklin wanted to write, big brother said no, so Ben created this fake old widow character, “Silence Dogood,” just so he can sneak articles into the paper. Who does that at sixteen? A future celebrity troll, that’s who. Of course James found out, blew a gasket, and Ben ran away at seventeen like some colonial dropout chasing clout.

Ryan Haylett

So he finds himself in Philadelphia, that’s a city to this day will either wreck you, or turn you into a force to be reckoned with. He hustles in print shops, grabs a failing newspaper, flips it into The Pennsylvania Gazette, and suddenly he’s everywhere. He’s inventing bifocals, building stoves, starting a lending library, organizing the first fire department. It’s insane. The guy was basically America’s first guy-who-can’t-stop-launching-side-projects. Today, he’d be the dude on YouTube building gadgets in his garage with 47 Lamborghinis while pitching you a course on “early retirement through passive income.”

Ryan Haylett

Then you’ve got Poor Richard’s Almanack. He cranks this thing out for twenty-five years, full of weather tips, essays, and proverbs like “Early to bed, early to rise.” Stuff your grandma still quotes like it was written in the Bible. Half the things we say about hard work come from this guy. The truth is, Franklin was the original content machine. He figured out if you just keep producing, people will keep listening, even if half of it is recycled advice with a witty twist.

Ryan Haylett

Franklin’s life forces us to stare directly at contradiction. He built his reputation as a champion of liberty while also participating in slavery. In the 1730s and 1740s, as he climbed the ladder in Philadelphia, Franklin owned enslaved people who worked in his household. His newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, ran ads for enslaved men and women. He wasn’t an outlier; this was the behavior of the colonial elite. But being “normal for the time” doesn’t erase the cruelty of it.

Ryan Haylett

By the 1750s, Franklin’s world started to change. Philadelphia was full of Quakers who openly condemned slavery. Franklin spent years abroad in England and France, where abolitionist ideas were gaining traction. He began to interact more with free Black Philadelphians, saw the growth of mutual aid societies, and could no longer ignore the moral and intellectual weight of the antislavery argument. In the 1760s, Franklin freed the people he enslaved. By the 1770s, he was openly questioning the institution in print. And in the 1780s, he was fully committed—leading the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, pushing for gradual emancipation, and finally petitioning Congress in 1790 to end the slave trade.

Ryan Haylett

Here’s the hard question: how do we read this transformation? Was Franklin a man who genuinely saw the light? Or was he adjusting late in life because abolition was gaining respectability among certain intellectual circles? We’ll never know his private intent. What we do know is that he didn’t act until it was safe to do so. For three decades, he owned human beings. Only later, when he was old, wealthy, and secure, did he join the abolitionist cause.

Ryan Haylett

That doesn’t erase the significance of his turn, but it complicates it. It forces us to ask: how much credit do we give someone for changing when the costs are low? Was Franklin’s conversion a moral awakening, or was it convenient politics dressed up as virtue? The truth is probably both. He was capable of brilliance, capable of cruelty, and ultimately capable of change—but not fast enough to undo the harm done in his earlier years. That tension—that discomfort—is the real Franklin.

Ryan Haylett

By the time Franklin hit Paris in the late 1770s, he was in his seventies and should have been slowing down. Instead, he became the Revolution’s unlikely rock in Europe—sealing the French alliance that delivered the money, troops, and ships needed to win the war. That alone makes him indispensable.

Ryan Haylett

But let’s not ignore the other Franklin—the one who lived like a bachelor celebrity in Paris. He had a reputation, and he lived up to it. He openly flirted, wrote steamy letters, and carried on with women across French high society. Some of the names we know: Madame Brillon de Jouy, a talented musician who became his closest companion; Madame Helvétius, the widow he famously proposed to (and got rejected by); Madame Le Ray de Chaumont, the daughter of a French aristocrat; and Countess Diane-Adélaïde de Forbach, who was very likely more than just a friend. Franklin wasn’t subtle. He leaned into the image of the charming American philosopher, and French society ate it up.

Ryan Haylett

Franklin’s sex life wasn’t a distraction from his diplomacy—it was part of it. He wasn’t just charming in a vacuum; he was cultivating influence. He used personal warmth, wit, and yes, his affairs, to embed himself into networks of power. Was he a a slut? Absolutely. But those connections helped legitimize the American cause, made France care about this scrappy rebellion, and kept doors open that might’ve slammed shut for anyone else.

Ryan Haylett

Franklin’s diplomacy worked because he was more than a stiff politician. He was willing to play the role—intellectual, flirt, rustic sage—all at once. And if part of that included a bed-hopping social life, well, it was effective. He got the French alliance signed in 1778, and without it, Yorktown doesn’t happen. Independence doesn’t happen. Franklin’s private indulgences and public mission collided in Paris, and somehow, both sides worked.

Ryan Haylett

Franklin’s story doesn’t tie up neatly. He was an inventor who pushed science forward, and a man who printed ads for enslaved people. He was a philosopher who wrote endlessly about virtue, and someone who indulged freely in pleasure. He helped lay the groundwork for democracy, while also proving how much ego and compromise are baked into its foundation.

Ryan Haylett

Franklin forces us to deal with the whole picture: the brilliance and the blind spots, the progress and the hypocrisy. If you want a saint, you won’t find him here. If you want a villain, you won’t find that either. What you do find is someone who embodied the restless, messy, contradictory spirit of America itself.

Ryan Haylett

Franklin wasn’t perfect, but he was essential. Our history isn’t built by flawless heroes. It’s built by complicated people who left us with both progress to celebrate and failures we still have to reckon with.