William Franklin

A biography of Benjamin Franklin's son, William, who remained a loyalist.

The dramatic story of a founding father, his illegitimate son, and the tragedy of their conflict during the American Revolution—from the acclaimed author of The Lincolns. Ben Franklin is the most lovable of America’s founding fathers. His wit, his charm, his inventiveness—even his grandfatherly appearance—are legendary. But this image obscures the scandals that dogged him throughout his life. In The Loyal Son, award-winning historian Daniel Mark Epstein throws the spotlight on one of the more enigmatic aspects of Franklin’s biography: his complex and confounding relationship with his illegitimate son William. When he was twenty-four, Franklin fathered a child with a woman who was not his wife. He adopted the boy, raised him, and educated him to be his aide. Ben and William became inseparable. After the famous kite-in-a-thunderstorm experiment, it was William who proved that the electrical charge in a lightning bolt travels from the ground up, not from the clouds down. On a diplomatic mission to London, it was William who charmed London society. He was invited to walk in the procession of the coronation of George III; Ben was not. The outbreak of the American Revolution caused a devastating split between father and son. By then, William was royal governor of New Jersey, while Ben was one of the foremost champions of American independence. In 1776, the Continental Congress imprisoned William for treason. George Washington made efforts to win William’s release, while his father, to the world’s astonishment, appeared to have abandoned him to his fate. A fresh take on the combustible politics of the age of independence, The Loyal Son is a gripping account of how the agony of the American Revolution devastated one of America’s most distinguished families. Like Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough, Epstein is a storyteller first and foremost, a historian who weaves together fascinating incidents discovered in long-neglected documents to draw us into the private world of the men and women who made America. “The history of loyalist William Franklin and his famous father has been told before but not as fully or as well as it is by Daniel Mark Epstein in The Loyal Son. Mr. Epstein, a biographer and poet, has done a lot of fresh research and invests his narrative with literary grace and judicious sympathy for both father and son.”—The Wall Street Journal

This is a new release of the original 1944 edition.

Beginning in the 1950s, Edwin Wolf 2nd embarked on a biblio'l. quest to reconstruct the library of Benjamin Franklin, which was the largest & best private library in Amer. at the time of his death & was subsequently dispersed. The contents of Franklin's library were virtually unknown until Wolf identified the unique shelfmarks that Franklin used to organize his books. That discovery allowed Wolf to locate 2,700 titles in 1,000 vols. that Franklin actually owned. Wolf also identified a further 700 titles owned by Franklin. After wolf's death, Kevin Hayes took up the project & brought it to fruition. This catalogue includes almost 4,000 books known to have been owned by Franklin, & the Intro. tells the complete story of Franklin's library, its dispersal, & its reconstruction.

When the stability of American life was threatened by the Great Depression, the decisive and visionary policy contained in FDR's New Deal offered America a way forward. In this groundbreaking work, William E. Leuchtenburg traces the evolution of what was both the most controversial and effective socioeconomic initiative ever undertaken in the United States—and explains how the social fabric of American life was forever altered. It offers illuminating lessons on the challenges of economic transformation—for our time and for all time.

This study examines William Franklin Sands, the high-ranking US advisor in the Korean government during the final years of the Choson dynasty. The author argues that his efforts to institute reform and achieve Korean neutrality were scuttled by Korean, Japanese, Russian, and US officials.