Silence Dogood. Richard Saunders. Benevolus. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. All were pen names that allowed Franklin to say things he couldn’t have otherwise said

Victoria Maxfield

Benjamin Franklin’s fertile mind constantly spun off inventive and useful ideas. His lightning rod saved buildings and lives. His energy-saving improvement of the wood-burning fireplace kept families warm and forests from being leveled. His lending library extended literacy to those who couldn’t afford books. His map of the Gulf Stream made travel faster and commerce more efficient.

But Franklin’s ingenuity showed most clearly in his invention, or rather recurrent reinvention, of himself. In the course of his life, Franklin devised dozens of authorial personas in print, which allowed him to challenge authority, identify folly and promote human progress with an unsparing vigor he never could have achieved under his own name.

Franklin created his first alter ego when he was in his teens: a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood. Mrs. Dogood allowed Franklin to evade an embargo against publication imposed by his jealous elder brother James, a printer to whom Ben was apprenticed. James had a newspaper and sought contributors, but he refused Ben’s submissions as corrosive of the master-apprentice relationship. So Ben disguised his handwriting and surreptitiously slipped letters from Mrs. Dogood under the door of the print shop. Franklin’s account of her life delighted readers while underscoring the difficulties facing widows and women of the day.

Polly Baker was a literal—as opposed to an actual—descendant of Silence Dogood. Polly had the misfortune of falling in love with men who had no intention of marrying her. When she became pregnant, she was brought before the magistrates to be punished for her crime of fornication. In defending herself, she said she had done nothing more than obey the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply. Anyway, she asked, why was no sanction brought against the men who were equally responsible for her illegitimate children and more responsible for the corruption, as the court insisted, of the honest if imperfect woman who stood before it?

Franklin’s most famous alter ego was Richard Saunders, an astronomer and a polymath who annually published Poor Richard’s Almanack. The almanac provided information on holidays, solstices, phases of the moon and the like. What made it special were the squibs of advice and humor that filled otherwise blank spots on the pages. “Fish and visitors stink in three days” recommended itself to guests and hosts alike. “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead” chided the garrulity of blabbers and the naïveté of confiders. (Franklin’s Saunders didn’t invent adages so much as he improved on earlier versions.) 

Franklin retired Saunders after going into politics—a move that inspired him to create additional personas. Americanus appeared in Franklin’s own paper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, when he responded to news that the British Parliament planned to transport felons to America. The measure was intended to relieve the British government of the expense of incarcerating the convicts at home but was cast as a gift to the colonies, which could always use more people. “Such a tender parental concern in our Mother Country for the welfare of her children calls aloud for the highest returns of gratitude and duty,” Americanus wrote. The colonies must reciprocate. “In some of the uninhabited parts of these provinces, there are numbers of these venomous reptiles we call rattlesnakes, felons-convict from the beginning of the world.” Americanus expatiated on the virtues of rattlesnakes, concluding that they “seem the most suitable returns for the human serpents sent us by our Mother Country. In this, however, as in every other branch of trade, she will have the advantage of us,” as “the rattlesnake gives warning before he attempts his mischief.”

Franklin, appointed as agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the British government in 1757, relocated to London. There he wrote to British newspapers as Benevolus, to rebut arguments in Parliament that the American Colonies were too lightly taxed. Benevolus was a serious fellow compared with Franklin’s other alter egos. After the Stamp Act provoked riots in America, Benevolus identified numerous errors in fact and reasoning that misinformed British policy. He concluded with the fond hope that the British would be “a little less hasty in censuring their brethren in America upon the groundless surmises and mistaken facts so frequently delivered as truths in our public papers, and that they will consider the importance of a firm union between the two countries in affection as well as in government.”

Fun fact: How Benjamin Franklin charted the Gulf Stream

• As deputy postmaster general, Franklin wondered why British mail-packet ships arriving in New York City were so much slower than American ships on similar routes.  

• From his cousin Captain Timothy Folger, a veteran whaler, Franklin learned that American whaling expeditions had been aware of a hidden eastbound current of warm water—one that British crews didn’t know to avoid while sailing west. 

• In 1769, sharing credit with Folger, Franklin published a chart of this hidden current, (a “river in the ocean”). Following Franklin and Folger’s map, ships knew to sail north of the current on the westbound journey from Europe, saving two weeks or more. For some vessels, that was nearly half the trip. Trans-Atlantic trade and communications accelerated significantly as a result.

Franklin’s personas provided varying degrees of cover. Readers in Philadelphia caught on that Richard Saunders was Franklin. Americanus and Benevolus, too, were obvious pseudonyms, fit for an age when political opinion pieces often appeared under made-up bylines. Sometimes this was to keep the authors out of trouble with the authorities. Equally it reflected the philosophy that a persuasive argument depended on evidence and reasoning rather than the expertise of the writer. But many people who read about Polly Baker thought she was real. 

Franklin’s parting alter ego appeared just weeks before his death in 1790. By now a leader of the abolitionist movement in America, Franklin sent a petition to Congress urging an end to slavery. In response, slavery apologists mustered a vehement defense, citing economic necessity and religion in support of the institution.

In high satirical style, Franklin thereupon claimed to have discovered a speech by one Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim of Algiers justifying the enslavement of Christians: “If we cease our cruises against the Christians, how shall we be furnished with the commodities their countries produce and which are so necessary for us?” asked Ibrahim. “If we forbear to make slaves of their people, who in this hot climate are to cultivate our lands?” To fail to enslave Christians would deny them access to the true faith. “Here they are brought into a land where the sun of Islamism gives forth its light and shines in full splendor, and they have an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true doctrine and thereby saving their immortal souls.” Franklin’s Ibrahim concluded, “Let us then hear no more of this detestable proposition, the manumission of Christian slaves.” 

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