At one time there were rumors that Benjamin Franklin had lots and lots of children born out of wedlock. (Insert your favorite “lightning rod” joke here.) As usual, the real story is more complicated than that.

Franklin courted a woman named Deborah Reed. At the time, he was 17 and she was 15, so her mother forbade the marriage. Deborah later married another man who fled the country. Sometime after this, Franklin re-entered the picture, but because the status of her marriage was unclear, they simply lived together as common-law spouses. They had two children together, so technically they were “born out of wedlock.” Francis Folger Franklin died of smallpox at the age of four, and Sarah Folger Franklin was also politically active until her death at the age of 68. Meanwhile, Franklin had another “illegitimate” son whose mother is not known (and was also probably Deborah), but he acknowledged his own parentage and together they raised him. This was William Franklin, the future Royal Governor of New Jersey.

That’s it. That’s all of Benjamin Franklin’s kids. But we’re focused on William today.

William was appointed the Royal Governor of New Jersey largely because he was known to have Loyalist leanings. And while he was pretty good at being governor, there did come a point where New Jersey said “Enough of this” and imprisoned him locally for six months before moving him to Connecticut for two years. (This is an event alluded to in the play 1776, but by that point Franklin really had to know that his son had been removed from office. He probably didn’t know yet that William had just been moved to Connecticut, so by early July that would have been news to him.)

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