Benjamin Franklin Influence

Benjamin Franklin is best known as one of the Founding Fathers of our country, who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Franklin was born in January of 1706 in Boston, where he was the fifteenth of seventeen children. He stopped going to school at age ten to help his father's business but got bored of making candles. At age twelve Franklin went to apprentice at his older brother’s print shop, before eventually opening his own print shop in Philadelphia. As a young apprentice for his brother at the New England Courant, Franklin desperately wanted his writings published. When his brother refused to publish him, Franklin went under a fake name, Mrs. Silence Dogood. “. . . 16-year-old Ben adopted
When Franklin first arrived in Philadelphia, he had close to no money. Over the next couple of decades, though, he became rich off of his print shop and his very successful publishment of Poor Richard’s Almanac. “. . . and became a successful author of Poor Richard’s Almanac, first published in 1733,” (Allen, 45). He was rich enough that he could stop working and live a life of leisure. Franklin used his spare time to study science and devise inventions that would greatly influence our history. He also turned to public service where he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional
He wanted to gain freedom through peaceful compromise, rather than fighting and through violence. Before he actually came out and said he supported American independence publicly, people believed that he might have been a British Spy. “When the Boston Tea Party took place in 1773, he dubbed it an “act of violent injustice on our part” and insisted that the East India Company should be compensated for its losses,” (Andrews). Since he spent so much time in London, and had held many royal appointments, he still had some respect for King George III. Franklin said once that “ “every encroachment on rights is not worth a rebellion.” He believed that there should be preservation of the empire and that the colonies should have respect for their land, rather than having war on