1730–1813

William Franklin

Royal GovernorLoyalist

Biography

William Franklin (1730–1813): The Governor Who Chose the Crown Over His Father

Born around 1730 in Philadelphia, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin entered the world under a cloud of social stigma that his famous father labored mightily to dispel. Benjamin acknowledged the boy, raised him in his household, and invested enormous energy in providing him with the connections, education, and polish that might overcome the circumstances of his birth. The elder Franklin's strategy worked remarkably well. Young William grew into a capable, ambitious man who absorbed both the practical resourcefulness of colonial Philadelphia and the refined culture of the British imperial world. He participated directly in his father's legendary electrical experiments, including the famous kite-and-key demonstration, grounding him in the Enlightenment scientific culture that made the Franklin name famous across two continents. He accompanied Benjamin on diplomatic missions to Britain, where he studied law at the Inns of Court and moved in elite London circles. This dual formation — American by birth and temperament, British by education and aspiration — would define William's entire life and ultimately destroy his most important relationship. By the early 1760s, he had become a polished gentleman, a trained lawyer, and a man whose loyalties were firmly anchored to the British constitutional system that had given him everything.

The turning point for William Franklin was not a single dramatic moment but a slow, grinding divergence from the path his father was walking. When Benjamin Franklin secured William's appointment as Royal Governor of New Jersey in 1763, both men saw it as a crowning achievement — proof that an illegitimate boy from Philadelphia could rise to the highest levels of imperial governance. William took up residence and threw himself into the work of colonial administration with genuine enthusiasm, governing from offices in New Jersey and engaging seriously with the colony's legislature and civic life. But as the imperial crisis escalated through the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and the growing radicalism of colonial resistance, father and son found themselves drifting toward opposite poles. Benjamin Franklin's experiences as a colonial agent in London gradually radicalized him, turning him from a loyal imperial subject into a skeptic and eventually a revolutionary. William watched this transformation with mounting alarm but refused to follow. For him, the British constitutional framework was not something to be abandoned in a fit of grievance — it was the very structure that had made his improbable rise possible. His commitment to the Crown was not merely political; it was deeply personal, rooted in identity and gratitude.

William Franklin's most significant political action was his stubborn, increasingly isolated defense of royal government in New Jersey as patriot authority consolidated around him. Through the early and mid-1770s, while other royal governors fled to British warships or simply abandoned their posts, Franklin continued to convene the New Jersey Assembly, correspond with British officials, and assert the legitimacy of Crown authority. He was not naive about the dangers he faced, but he believed deeply that the existing constitutional order could be reformed and preserved if cooler heads prevailed. He used his position to argue against the escalating rhetoric of independence, to counsel moderation among New Jersey's political leaders, and to maintain the formal machinery of royal government long past the point where it exercised any real power. His resistance was not military but institutional — a governor clinging to legal authority even as the revolutionary movement built parallel structures of power that rendered his office meaningless. This dogged persistence made him one of the last functioning royal governors in America and a symbol, to both sides, of the Loyalist position carried to its logical extreme. His refusal to resign or compromise made his eventual arrest inevitable and, in patriot eyes, entirely justified.

The decisive moment came in June 1776, when the New Jersey Provincial Congress, the patriot body that had effectively replaced royal government, ordered William Franklin's arrest. He was seized at his home and brought before the Congress, where he conducted himself with defiant dignity, refusing to sign a parole that would have restricted his movements but preserved his freedom. His refusal was both principled and provocative — he would not grant legitimacy to a body he considered illegal by submitting to its authority. The Congress responded by sending him to Connecticut under close confinement, where he was held for more than two years in conditions that were deliberately humiliating for a man of his rank. He was initially confined in the town of East Windsor, later moved to the Litchfield jail, where he endured isolation, limited correspondence, and the psychological toll of knowing that his father — by then a delegate to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence — had essentially disowned him. His imprisonment was not merely punitive; it was a powerful symbolic act, demonstrating that no one, not even the son of the most famous American alive, was above the revolutionary cause.

The relationship that most profoundly defined William Franklin's role in the Revolution was, of course, his relationship with his father. Their bond had been unusually close for decades — collaborators in science, companions in diplomacy, partners in the project of William's social advancement. Benjamin had poured resources, influence, and affection into making William a success, and William had repaid that investment with genuine devotion and capable service. But the Revolution shattered this bond with a completeness that shocked contemporaries on both sides. Benjamin Franklin came to view William's Loyalism not as a legitimate political difference but as an act of filial betrayal so profound that it could never be forgiven. He reportedly told friends that he had lost a son. William, for his part, felt equally betrayed — his father had helped build the very imperial career that revolution now destroyed. Beyond his father, William's alliances with British officials and fellow Loyalists shaped his wartime role significantly. His connections to figures in the British military command gave him influence in New York after his release, and his relationships with other displaced Loyalists provided the foundation for his later organizational efforts on behalf of the Crown's displaced supporters.

William Franklin's story is shot through with moral complexity and controversy that resist easy judgment. His decision to remain loyal to Britain was not irrational or cowardly — it was grounded in sincere constitutional convictions shared by a substantial minority of colonists. But his wartime activities, particularly after his release from captivity, pushed him into darker territory. As president of the Board of Associated Loyalists in British-held New York, he helped organize and direct raids against patriot communities in New Jersey and Connecticut. These operations were often brutal, targeting civilians and their property in what amounted to a guerrilla war waged by displaced and embittered men seeking revenge for their own losses. The most notorious incident linked to the Associated Loyalists was the execution of Captain Joshua Huddy, a patriot prisoner hanged by Loyalist raiders in 1782 in an act of extrajudicial killing that provoked outrage even among British commanders and nearly triggered retaliatory executions. While Franklin's direct responsibility for the Huddy affair remains debated, his leadership of the organization that carried it out permanently stained his reputation and contributed to the broader narrative of Loyalist cruelty that patriots used to justify their cause.

The war transformed William Franklin from a confident, socially ambitious colonial administrator into a bitter exile consumed by grievance and loss. The man who had once presided over New Jersey's government with genuine authority found himself a prisoner, then a refugee, then a partisan organizer engaged in the ugliest kind of irregular warfare. His years of confinement in Connecticut hardened him considerably — the humiliation of imprisonment, the knowledge that his own father had abandoned him, and the destruction of everything he had built in New Jersey combined to produce a man far angrier and more radical than the measured governor of the 1760s. His leadership of the Associated Loyalists reflected this transformation; the raids he helped organize had a vindictive quality that went beyond military necessity. On a personal level, the permanent rupture with Benjamin Franklin left an emotional wound that never healed. Late in life, the two men exchanged a few letters in which Benjamin made clear that while he would settle financial matters, the relationship itself was finished. William's attempts at reconciliation were rebuffed with a coldness that testified to the depth of his father's sense of betrayal. The Revolution had not merely changed William Franklin's politics; it had destroyed his identity as a son.

After the war ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, William Franklin sailed for England, joining the growing community of Loyalist exiles in London who petitioned the Crown for compensation for their lost property and ruined lives. He pursued claims through the Loyalist Claims Commission, eventually receiving modest financial compensation that bore little resemblance to what he had lost — his estates, his position, his standing in American society, his family. In London, he lived quietly, a relic of a lost cause in a city that had largely moved on from the American debacle. He maintained some contact with fellow exiles and occasionally corresponded with acquaintances in America, but he never seriously contemplated returning. His father died in 1790 without effecting any meaningful reconciliation, leaving William a token inheritance in his will accompanied by pointed language about his Loyalism. The final decades of William's life were marked by obscurity and diminished circumstances — a painful contrast to the prominence he had once enjoyed. He died in London on November 17, 1813, at approximately eighty-three years of age, and was buried far from the country where he had been born and had governed.

Contemporaries viewed William Franklin through sharply divided lenses. To American patriots, he was a traitor who had chosen tyranny over liberty and, worse, had betrayed the greatest American of the age — his own father. His name became shorthand for Loyalist perfidy, and his association with the Huddy affair and other acts of irregular warfare confirmed, in patriot eyes, the moral bankruptcy of the Loyalist cause. Among fellow Loyalists, the picture was more sympathetic: William Franklin was a man who had sacrificed everything for principle, who had endured imprisonment and exile with dignity, and who had worked tirelessly to support others who had made the same costly choice. British officials regarded him with a mixture of respect and discomfort — grateful for his loyalty but uneasy about the excesses committed under his organizational leadership. In the broader culture of the early American republic, William Franklin was largely forgotten, overshadowed entirely by his father's towering legacy. When he was remembered at all, it was usually as a cautionary tale about the personal costs of political division or as a footnote in Benjamin Franklin's biography, the ungrateful son who chose wrong.

Students and visitors today should know William Franklin because his story illuminates dimensions of the American Revolution that triumphant national narratives often obscure. He reminds us that the Revolution was also a civil war — fought not only between colonies and empire but within families, communities, and individual consciences. His life demonstrates that Loyalism was not simply a failure of courage or imagination but a coherent political position held by intelligent, principled people who genuinely believed that the British constitutional system was worth preserving. His tragic relationship with his father humanizes both men, revealing Benjamin Franklin not as a plaster saint of national mythology but as a flawed, proud father capable of permanent unforgiveness. William's postwar exile speaks to the Revolution's human wreckage — the tens of thousands of Loyalists who lost everything and were written out of the story the new nation told about itself. His journey from privilege to imprisonment to exile to obscurity is a powerful reminder that the founding of the United States was not a universally celebrated event but a catastrophe for many who lived through it, and that understanding those people is essential to understanding the full meaning of American independence.

WHY WILLIAM FRANKLIN MATTERS TO NEW BRUNSWICK

William Franklin governed New Jersey during one of the most turbulent periods in colonial history, and New Brunswick sat at the heart of the world he tried to hold together. As Royal Governor, Franklin engaged directly with New Jersey's political institutions and communities, including those centered in New Brunswick, which served as a significant hub of colonial governance and commerce. His arrest and removal in 1776 marked the definitive end of royal authority in New Jersey — an authority that had shaped the laws, courts, and civic life of towns like New Brunswick for generations. For students and visitors walking the streets of New Brunswick today, William Franklin's story is a visceral reminder that this community was once contested ground, a place where neighbors chose opposite sides and where the collapse of British government was not abstract political theory but a lived, local experience with real consequences for real people.

TIMELINE

1730: Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin
1752: Participates in Benjamin Franklin's famous electrical experiments, including the kite-and-key demonstration
1757–1762: Accompanies his father to England, studies law at the Inns of Court in London
1763: Appointed Royal Governor of New Jersey by King George III
1774–1775: Continues to defend royal authority in New Jersey as the imperial crisis escalates toward revolution
1776 (June): Arrested by the New Jersey Provincial Congress and sent to confinement in Connecticut
1778: Released in a prisoner exchange; relocates to British-held New York City
1780: Becomes president of the Board of Associated Loyalists, organizing raids against patriot communities
1782: The Associated Loyalists are implicated in the execution of Captain Joshua Huddy, provoking widespread outrage
1782–1783: Departs for permanent exile in England following the end of hostilities
1813 (November 17): Dies in London, England, never having returned to America

SOURCES

Skemp, Sheila L. William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King. Oxford University Press, 1990.
Skemp, Sheila L. Benjamin and William Franklin: Father and Son, Patriot and Loyalist. Bedford/St. Martin's, 1994.
Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
National Archives (UK). "Loyalist Claims Commission Records, AO 12 and AO 13." https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
Franklin, Benjamin. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Yale University Press (ongoing). https://franklinpapers.org/