American History Hit - Inside Benjamin Franklin's House

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Join Don as he visits Benjamin Franklin's home of nearly 16 years: 36 Craven Street, London. Now a museum, its director Marcia Balisciano explains what brought the famous polymath to London, how he lived and the various things the famed scientist, diplomat, philosopher, inventor and Founding Father of the United States got up to while he was there - including his role in the beginnings of the American Revolution.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In the early hours of an ordinary spring day in London, England 1768, a portly man, aged 62, lifts the window sash in his first floor rooms, feeling the cool, bracing chill pour through the open window, enveloping his naked body.

The man sighs contentedly, settles into his chair, and begins his day as he now does on a routine basis. I will take occasion to mention a practice I have accustomed myself. the man once explained in a letter to a friend. The cold bath has long been in vogue here as a tonic, but I have found it much more agreeable to bathe in another element. I mean cold air. I rise every morning and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever. This practice is not painful in the least, but to the contrary, agreeable.

And if I return to my bed afterwards before I dress myself, I make a supplement to my night's rest of one or two hours of the most pleasant sleep imaginable. The man was Benjamin Franklin, and his nude air baths were one of the many innovations and inventions with which he occupied himself. During the 16 years he lived at 36 Craven Street, a five-story Georgian structure built in 1730, the only residence of Franklin's, which still stands today. Hey, everybody, it's Don Wilden. Welcome to American History Hit. It's hard to believe that a man like Benjamin Franklin could exist outside the pages of a work of fiction, much less that he's a kind of, accomplishments and thinking would still be so much a part of regular American life 300 years on. But the sweep and span of this founding father's biography is true and embodied today in some of the

major institutions of American life, the post office and public library being just two on a list as long as your arm. Franklin was a polymath genius of science, letters, civics, philosophy, and everything a human being can polymath about. His life was a flower rooted in the fertile soil of a new nation, one that fostered a freedom of thought, which usefully applied, made for the remarkable and accomplished careers of individuals exemplified by Franklin, who set out to build a pragmatic and moral society that could flourish. America could likely not have happened without Ben Franklin, but

neither could Ben Franklin have happened without America. But like so many American colonists, certainly prior to 76, Benjamin Franklin was a loyal Englishman, indeed spending years of his life living in London in the very house where I am standing right now at 36 Craven Street right in downtown London and meeting the director of the Benjamin Franklin House, Marcia Valisiana. Hello, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks for coming. Yeah, it's a real thrill for me to be here because, A, I was born in Philadelphia, and my middle name is Franklin. I am named for Benjamin Franklin, as a matter of fact. Okay, those are proper Franklin credentials. Thank you. Americans in general

do not know how much time Benjamin Franklin spent in London, which was decades worth, right? Yeah, he was here for the better part of 16 years when you add it all up. He came initially as a teenager in his late teens, turning into a young man to learn about the printing and publishing trade. So he had already had a stint, maybe in a somewhat misspent youth that he talks about in his autobiography. But when he comes back again in July 1757, he comes back as the most famous colonial of his day. So very different circumstances. And he chooses this house because it's pretty well located between the city of London and the city of Westminster, because he's got stuff to do when he's here. And also he maybe knew because of his London publisher,

Peter Carlinson, who was another polymath as so many of his friends were. He found this house, had a fine, upstanding widow who was taking a long-term lease on the building. And so he was very happy here. And we also know that there might have been a servant who came from Philadelphia, who was on staff in the house. So maybe a few different ways that he ended up here at 36 Craven Street, or what became 36 Craven Street, because, of course, initially there were no numbers. Oh, yeah. Well, and this was the only known, this was the only structure in existence still standing that he lived in, right? That's right. Some strange twist of fate that it's not in Boston where he was born in 1706, not in Philadelphia, which was his adopted city, which he loved so

dearly, not in Passy, in France, where when he does return to America from his years in England to support eventually the cause of revolution, he gets sent to Paris. He's there for, about eight years. That house doesn't stand. It's this one that is the only surviving residence of Benjamin Franklin. What brought him to London? We're talking about 1757. That's right. So Franklin pursued his two passions. Once he could find a business partner for his printing and publishing business, which is what gave him the financial wherewithal to do that. And those passions were around science, but it was also politics. He became a clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly. Then he becomes an elected official, and then he is sent by the colonists in Pennsylvania to try and convince

the Penn family who were the proprietary owners of Pennsylvania, thanks to their father, William Penn, who was a Quaker, but Thomas Penn and his brother were by then Church of England, very established individuals. And what Franklin was trying to do is to get them to start paying a little bit more to support some stuff that's happening back in Pennsylvania, essentially the French and Indian War, which is a proxy war between the British and the French. They feel like they need more support on the borders and they need more money to be able to do that. It's a really interesting little nook and cranny of American history because the colonies were different. There were some colonies that were royal colonies and there were some that were called proprietary colonies,

proprietary colonies. And that was true of the Penn's colony, Pennsylvania, was owned. by the pens. They were paying off a debt the king owed to the Penn family. So they gave him this land. And so it became a weird kind of situation where as a government grew that Ben Franklin's a part of, the Pennsylvania Assembly, they're sort of in conflict with these proprietors who own the place. And Ben Franklin comes over here to sort of argue the case for this new sort of public governance of Pennsylvania. Is that about right? Yeah, it is. And they just didn't quite know what to make of Benjamin Franklin because, they found him to be a little bit colonial and not what they were used to, that he didn't know the ways that diplomacy was meant to be conducted. They wanted him to be incredibly deferential, and he just was himself always. Right. He could afford to be because he was a brilliant man. I mean, was he carrying himself with confidence in those days? I mean, as this sort of great individual that we think of him as being?

I think so. He seems to have been true to himself at all times. He never tried to mold him into himself into someone else's expectation. That isn't to say that he wasn't a good marketer of his own brand. So when he does go to France, there are this famous medallion, which we have an example of here at Benjamin Franklin House by a sculptor named Nini where Franklin is wearing him. his raccoon hat. I don't know if Franklin ever wore a raccoon hat, but it was what people expected someone to be wearing who came from the colonies. And so he was able to kind of exploit his image. But he definitely evolved over time, as we all do, but I think he very much remained true to himself. This house meant a lot to him. Can we take a look at it? Yeah. Come on. Let's go to the kitchen. This house was built in what year? Circus 1730. Okay. And typical of that architecture. It's a This house is really quite remarkable for how simple it is that it still stands.

There's a lot of amazing architecture in London from the 18th century. You can see just a stone's throw from the house, which Franklin would have seen, which is the church of St. Martin's in the field. This house is a very simple work-a-day Georgian building that probably wasn't ever meant to last as long as it has. So we're in the bottom floor right now. How many floors are there? So there is the basement, then what we call the ground floor, and then the first floor in British parlons, and then a second floor and a very top floor in the attic. And he occupied floors above, but it was a lodging house, right?

It was a lodging house, but there was this quote by Carl Van Doren who wrote a quintessential biography of Benjamin Franklin in the 1930s, for which he won the Pulitzer Pueck. about how Franklin was less a lodger than the head of a household living in serene comfort and affection. Apparently he even had a cat when he lived here. So he rented so many rooms, but anyone who was anyone coming to London from the colonies came to meet with Franklin, some stayed here. And then it also worked the opposite way that when people were going to the colonies often for the first time, They would come to this house and meet with Franklin, get the papers that they needed to, you know, function once they got in Pennsylvania. And the geography of the Thames is just a short walk that way. I'm pointing to my right.

The embankment stop on the tube was right down there. St. Martin's in the field. The church is up there. The government center that he would have been going to see, and that's right up on the strand, right? Yes, so this house is very well located. It is almost equidistant between the city of London, which is the financial center of London, and then the city of Westminster, which is where Parliament is located, where the King's residence was located, and including today, Buckingham Palace, today. So it was really a great spot, and also not far from the Penn family, to do. Today there is Trafalgar Square. And if you go to Trafalgar Square today,

you have these wonderful lions by Edward Luton. And if you look as you are facing down what's called Whitehall toward Parliament, you'll see an area which has this tiny little street called Spring Gardens. And that was where the pens were. So just not even a five-minute walk from here. And coffee houses.

Everywhere there were coffee houses up here, on the Strand, especially, right? The meeting places that he was talking to all the people he wanted to talk to. Yeah, incredible places of ideas and learning. So the Club of Honest Wigs was one of them, for example. And he was actually the first international member of what became the Royal Society of Arts. So it was set up by a gentleman named William Shipley.

And they invited Franklin before he came to London to be their first international member. He's very well known, of course, because he has written his poor Richard's almanacs, which are like the colonial equivalent to a bestseller, but he also is so famous for his kite and key experiment. So they invite Franklin to be a member, but pays his dues and somehow the money goes missing. So then he has to write and send more money to become a member of the Society of Arts, Commerce and Manufacture. But it was another kind of coffee house of me. like-minded individuals who were equally fascinated about everything. And I think to your point about Franklin being a polymath, today we are often quite rigidly

defined. You're either this thing or you're not. But for Franklin and for many of his contemporaries, if you had a curious mind, there wasn't anything that you couldn't turn your hand to. This was the age of enlightenment and people were seeking it in all sorts of ways. Yeah. Okay. So we're down here in the basement.

This is the scullery and kitchen world down here, I would imagine, right? Yes. And then the street right outside. I'm really curious about the lifestyle he had in this house. I mean, this was a very comfortable place for him to live. It was, but it was still a very simple Georgian house. But it did have below stairs where the kitchens were located. So we're standing in the historic kitchen, and we've got a wonderful Victorian stove.

I think one of the things about this house, and it's the only house, on Craven Street to have the highest architectural rating that you get in England is a grade one listing for the amount of original fabric that's here as well as the historical connection with Franklin. So the idea has been to show how the house has evolved over time rather than taking everything back to when it was built circa 1730. So we have a fantastic Victorian stove. And if you do come and visit, and I'm glad that I'm able to show you today, we have another Victorian stove in the ladies' restroom. So these are the kind of wonderful things that you can find.

The floor that we're standing on, I love. This is an original Yorkstone floor. It's just beautiful. So every nook and cranny of this house has some kind of interesting architectural feature. Frankl had food sent to him from America, right? Oh, he did. His very long-suffering wife, Deborah, who was afraid to cross the ocean.

who was his great partner in life, sent items that he would request, Norton Pippin apples, cranberries, other things that could not be found here. And of course, he had a lively set of friendships that he maintained everywhere that he went, including with colleagues back in Philadelphia, who would send seedlings to London.

He was a good friend here of Joseph Banks, who's considered to be the founder of Kew Gardens, one of the world's great arboretums and places for plants and seeds. I don't think modern people, myself included, really conceive of this. I mean, this is no vacation he's on. We're talking about almost two decades of his life. He's spent in one go here in London and in England and in Europe, right? No, because there's a little blip in between.

So he arrives in July 1757, and he leaves in 7,000, 1762, because he thinks that his work, everything that he can do with the pens has been done. So he goes back. But when he's in Philadelphia for, oh, just over about a year, there's all this talk about taxation without representation. So he gets sent back to London. And the second tour of duty, if you will, between 1764 and 1775. So he leaves, and we can talk about that, just before the outbreak of armed hostilities between the colonists and the crown.

He is also the agent for New Jersey, for Massachusetts. Georgia. And Georgia. Now, Georgia, we have a problem with because apparently they didn't pay him all of what his salary was meant to be. So we need to maybe collect that at some point. So in three parts, it's really a three-part thing. He comes as a young man as a teenager, first, short stay, then another stay as an older man in his 50s, I guess, right? And briefly after that, or quickly after that, he comes back for the third one.

So there's three phases in London. That's right. Now, he does come back to England one other time, and that is after those eight years in France, where he has convinced the French court to support the revolution. Maybe we'd be Canada if he had been unsuccessful, much with the chagrin of John Adams. he calls into Portsmouth on his way back to Philadelphia, where he sees his son William for the final time, but not privately. Because that's one of the great breaches of Franklin's life,

is the relationship with his son who decided to be loyal to the king and felt that his father was doing something treasonous and supporting the revolutionaries. I'll be back with more from Marcia Beliciano after this short break. He has a sweeping life that even from a modern perspective is epic. I mean, global. It's incredible. I really was all over the place. It's kind of hard to find out where he was all the time.

Well, I'm very proud to be an American, also a British subject. But I know that Americans are sometimes noted for having passports if they do and not using them. But Franklin crossed the ocean eight times in his life at a time when, This was very hazardous, took a long time. And even when he's on the boat, he's busy. So his mother is a biofulcher. She was born on Nantucket, 30 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. And she is from a fairly large, prosperous family. And her cousin is, or becomes the cousin of Benjamin Franklin, is a guy named Timothy Folger. He's a sea captain. And Franklin is collecting water temperature samples, basically charting the Gulf Stream, learning lots of things, making every minute count.

Right. Let's go upstairs. I want to talk about how he lived in this house. Okay, fantastic. All right, so we're moving from a basement change to this ground floor. In America, that would be the first floor. The entrance is right here. We're right off the street. It's a beautiful staircase. It's an amazing staircase, and it's one of the most valuable architectural features in the house. It has these beautiful oak handrail and turn balustrae. and it's the original staircase, Franklin said that he walked up and down the stairs for exercise, and it wasn't how long he did the exercise for. It was that it would elevate his pulse.

So we like to say that Benjamin Franklin should be credited with inventing the stairmaster in addition to his other things. It's cardio. Let me just show you some things about the front doors. I was saying there's no space in the house that doesn't have something interesting. So you can see we actually have an original 18th century door locking system here. A little corkscrew rod irons, I don't know, a hook, right? Yeah. And you just put the chain right on.

Which it still fits across. That's cool. Look at that. Boom. So it would take a lot for somebody to try. Exactly. But even these things are just beautiful. These are original wrought iron door bolts.

Yeah, exactly. On the top and on the bottom. That is cool. So I'm just to be clear to the audience, I'm pulling over a big chain across the door and booking it to this crazy corkscrew sort of thing. And that's a lock. So we are walking in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin

coming home from his government work back into the folds of his family virtually, right? I mean, this was like a second time before him over here. It absolutely was. So how many actually find this house, I mean, land in this place? Well, we don't know if his London agent, Peter Collinson, who was also a polymath, very interested in botany, knew of this house and recommended it to Franklin. Might have known Margaret Stevenson, who was a widow, who ran a fine,

upstanding house. And he supposedly rented four rooms, but definitely overran the place. People like Thomas Payne came and stayed in the house. And also, I love this line from one of the almanacs of Benjamin Franklin about house guests and fish are similar because they both start to stink after three days. But he had his niece come and live three years in the house. And also Benjamin Franklin was incredibly good at keeping secrets. So we don't know who his son William's mother was. And William Franklin, his son, also had an illegitimate child whom he also named William. So part of the cast of characters living in the house is also Franklin's grandson, William Temple Franklin. And the story goes that it is until Franklin is on a boat back to

Pennsylvania at the end of his day in London that he reveals to William Temple that he's not just this nice man who's been looking after him all these years. It is actually his grandfather. Wow. Interesting. Well, see, let me understand who's actually the cast of characters in this house. It's owned by a woman named Margaret Stevenson. Margaret Stevenson. And her daughter's Polly, right? Yes, Mary Stevenson. And her nickname was Polly. Okay. And she's married to William Houston. She eventually marries William Houston. So he's kind of left behind a wife and a daughter in Philadelphia because his son, William comes with him initially because he's studying to be a lawyer at the bar, as it's called, here in London. And what he finds is a kind of wife and daughter. And

People are endlessly fascinated and always want to know if there was some kind of relationship between he and Margaret or with Polly. But we don't see that in the letters, which is our go-to for the historical record, don't reveal that. They had a good friendship and he loved Polly. She was a kind of daughter. And it's really incredibly charming some of the letters that they wrote to each other because either he was traveling from the house, going around England or places like Germany. He was faded everywhere he went. Or she was traveling because she didn't have a father and he had died. And so she was also Polly traveling quite a bit because she'd be visiting various relatives. And their letters to each other are really wonderful. And in fact,

one that we highlight on our historical experience because today we do three things in this house. We have a historical experience, which is a piece of theater that runs through the historic rooms that tells that story of Benjamin Franklin in London. We have a student science center, and we do about 40 public events each year. But on the historical experience show, we feature a letter, and it's about science. And at the end of the letter, he says,

I think three pages of natural philosophy, as it was called, to a young girl is proof of my affectionate enough that I don't have to sign it affectionately, your friend Benjamin Franklin. Okay, any more. So we're in the second floor, I would call it the second floor. It's the first floor here. This is the Franklin rooms, right?

We're in the three rooms that were his place. Yes, and then one at the top in the attic as well. Where did he actually spend most of his time? Maybe in this room that we're in right now, we call it Franklin's Parlor. It is the only room in the house that has this dental molding. So it's a bit of a flourish at the ceiling level. and it almost looks like it's called dental molding

because it looks like little teeth maybe but it has the best light in the house because it's facing out to Craven Street It has a beautiful wall to floor to ceiling windows Three in a row here Classic British architecture Looking at other houses just like it across the street A beautiful light coming in

Gorgeous wooden floors A great big fireplace over here I can just imagine the man Either taking visitors in here or reading or, I mean, it's a beautiful room. Sometimes he would say that he had dinner parties and he would try shocking certain things with his electrical devices.

So, yes, it was a great place for him to be. And I think, you know, he could have gone anywhere, but he chose to stay here on Craven Street. It has a Philadelphia feeling to it. I don't know if you've been there, but Philly feels like this. It does. And same kind of architecture

and same sorts of windows. as a matter of fact. So he would have been comfortable, I guess. Beyond that, we walk back into another room, is this a bedroom here? No. It could have been. We call this his laboratory.

We found in this fireplace the remnants of a Franklin's Dove. So before I knew much about Benjamin Franklin, I thought of Franklin's Dove was a cast iron thing. But actually, it's a system of chambers that instead of sending the smoke out through the chimney, and Franklin was way ahead of his time in so many ways, but including on fuel efficiency and ecology, focus on the environment. He was interested in how he could send the smoke back down into the fire.

And if you had an air source like we do in this room with a window, you could pull the heat out of the fireplace and into the room. So kind of the principles of convection. Yes, yes, exactly. Interesting. And there was a former installation there of that sewer or not? Well, it's something that you can't see. It's just something inside into the fireplace. But then in the room that is attached to this, where he also might have had his bed if it wasn't in this space, which is like a powder closet, we have the remnants of a damper, which was able to shut off the cold air.

And this, he said, was a little device that might become pretty common. Yeah. So what was his reception here in the royal court? How did they act towards Benjamin? frankly. Well, unlike when he shows up at the end of his nearly 16 years in London in France, where he was quite a novelty and adored by the French aristocracy, I think here in England, they found him to be quite irritating, those who were very much around the ministry of the king and wanting the colonists to stay in their place.

do what they were meant to do, which was to produce the raw materials that could be manufactured at this very early stage of the Industrial Revolution, and everybody would be happy that way. But, you know, they were keen for their own development and their own expertise. Generally speaking, Franklin's life, his career, as political career, it straddles the phase where American colonists thought they could have their own. own nation, but it would be in loyal service to the motherland, but they would still be autonomous. That was the notion that they were working on, that they should still govern themselves and

be, and Franklin travels that distance between that might work and then it's not going to work. And all that kind of happens here in London, his change of thinking, right? Yes, it is such a pivotal moment for him. This is incredibly public for him, but it's also personal. So I mentioned that his mother was born on Nantucket. His father came from Ecton in Northamptonshire. So he was very much an Anglo-American. And how do you play out this tension when you have roots in both places?

And you spend all of your life feeling that you are a loyal subject of the king. So this is a major transformation. And I think one of the things that leads him to decide that there isn't going to be this reconciliation, even though he's tried every technique that he can conceive of, writing spoofs and treatises, using drawings, talking with people behind the scenes, lobbying, using his writing, is something that happens to him in 1774. So Franklin is very good at keeping secrets. So he leaks some letters to the Sons of Liberty in Boston. These were written by the colonial governor of Massachusetts, a guy named Thomas Hutchinson. And Franklin wanted them to be

aware of what was being said, which is these people in Massachusetts are getting increasingly unruly. We may need to exert something extra to kind of keep them in line. And, of, Of course, back in Boston, Samuel Adams and colleagues are agitating toward a revolution. It was just what they needed. They published these letters. And it precipitated the Boston Tea Party. So that's not something that Franklin is typically associated with. But it leads to a duel here in England between one person accusing another person as having leaked these letters of Thomas Hutchinson.

And they knew about it giving. So they didn't know anything about Franklin. that point. They just were accusing each other. And so it wasn't a very successful duel because they both lived and they were going to go back at it again. So Franklin thought, oh, this has got to stop. So in Christmas Day, 1773, he publishes something in one of the newspapers. He said, I'm not going to tell you who my source was, but I'm responsible for these letters. And so it leads to a trial the following summer in the House of Commons, which is supposed to be about removing Thomas Hutchinson from office, but instead becomes a trial of Benjamin Franklin. So the Solicitor General

who's one of the characters that we feature. So we use live performance, sound, and visual projection on our historical experience show. If you're coming to this house and you're expecting to see it fully furnished, sometimes people, it takes them a while to adjust to the idea that we're really about these authentic spaces and not bringing in things that were never here, but letting these walls that Franklin would recognize speak for themselves. So in this trial, Franklin doesn't say much. And in fact, one of his friends says to him afterward, because Franklin was a great writer. And his pen was his most important weapon, if you will, but he was not an order. And he asked, why didn't you say something in your own defense? And he said, well, they were throwing up so much

mud. I thought I would wait until it dried and then just brush it off. But this trial, Mark the transition in his thinking. And he's writing to his son, William, and saying, you need to know how they've treated your father. But still, he didn't leave. He could have left then. And they also stripped him of his crown role. One of the things that he was doing was he was postmaster for the colonies. So he had lots of things, agents, agent for a number of the American colonies, this crown role. He also was part of a group that was interested in trying to buy Ohio. They were part of of a group that wanted the king to give them a land grant for that land. So that could be another reason for him staying beyond.

But he was still working right up into the last moment. He met with William Pitt, the elder, who was by then, not in good health, who made one of his last major speeches in parliament to try and get his colleagues to think about, let's avoid bloodshed here and find this way. and this is what he had been talking with Franklin about, and they came up with a plan behind the seams that he was working right up into the last moment. The whole story is really reflected in Ben Franklin's personal experience.

Like, his life is a microcosm of a journey of colony to nation, really, and very much happens right here in London. I mean, his interactions with the court and all the thinkers and enlightened things going on here. He is the embodiment of that phase of American history. It's incredible. And so much of it happened right here in this house. How great is this?

It's amazing. Every time I come to Benjamin Franklin House and I've been doing it for a lot of years as the founding director, I always think it's so amazing and so beautiful. I know. To sit among the rooms and kind of breathe the air that Ben Franklin breathed and took airbags in.

He was a famous nudist. He loved it. Yeah, so again, whether he did it, he said he did, that he would open up the window in his main parlor, and you can see we're not that far away from our neighbors. So it must have been quite a sight, but he thought that it was very healthful to get a dose of fresh air every day. And then he said that he could go back to sleep and have a

good supplement to his sleep. But, you know, he had really far-reaching ideas around the calm and cold and not going in a carriage with a few other people who were sick. I mean, having just come out of a global, if we have, come out of it fully, two years of global pandemic. You know, Franklin had these ideas. Well, he's a very interesting man, because on one hand, he's a He's this brilliant kind of quirky, genius, inventor, full of life, bigger than life kind of personality. But he's also a calculating politician and military mind. I mean, in a sense, how to build a nation. It's this incredible double personality almost in one man.

And I think we have this tendency when we look at history to take these figures that we've all learned about and studied about and put them on some type of a pedestal. Yeah. But what I like about Franklin is the very, rich and well-rounded picture that you can get of this individual because he's as flawed as the rest of us. You know, what kind of a guy goes away and leaves his wife behind? She dies ultimately before he can come home. You know, what kind of a person can maintain relationships even during the Revolutionary War, including with Polly, this kind of second daughter, but cannot

forgive his own son. So, you know, he's like us, you know, a mixture of contradictions and wonderful things and challenges as well. Yeah. I'm going to pace around and absorb Ben Franklin, if you don't mind. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.