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Benjamin Franklin's Alter Egos Gave Him the Most Freedom

Published: 08/30/2026, 01:09 AM

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