The Loyal(ist) Son: The Story of Ben Franklin’s Son Taking Britain’s Side During the Revolutionary War
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—but that wasn’t true for Ben Franklin and his only son. While Franklin became one of America’s most celebrated founding fathers, his son William remained loyal to the British Crown. In one of the most dramatic father-son divides in history, king and country collided with revolution and independence—the costs were massive. Here’s the astonishing story of how Ben Franklin and his son ended up on opposite sides of history.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:05.6 | Why is a soap opera Western like Yellowstone so wildly successful? |
| 0:10.6 | The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network. |
| 0:16.1 | So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today. |
| 0:28.2 | Listen to the American West with Dan Flores on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:46.8 | Music wherever you get your podcasts. This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, the show where America is the |
| 0:52.4 | star and the American people. And this next story |
| 0:56.2 | is how the signing of the Declaration of Independence divided the country and families, including |
| 1:02.6 | one founder's family. You know, it's been said that there's never been more partisan division than right now in the country. |
| 1:14.1 | Well, we're going to take you through a story that questions that narrative. |
| 1:19.1 | Historians who studied the matter differ as to the number of Americans who sided with the Patriots and the British Crown. |
| 1:25.5 | But one thing is certain, Americans were deeply divided. One third |
| 1:29.9 | were for the war, one third were against it, and one third were hiding under their tables, |
| 1:35.6 | hoping it would pass. But the consequences for choosing one side or another was not an ugly |
| 1:41.9 | Facebook post or a tweet storm. |
| 1:45.5 | Here's one of the signers describing what it was like, putting name and pen to paper, |
| 1:53.6 | signing the Declaration of Independence in Independence Hall. |
| 1:57.6 | This is what Benjamin Rush said. |
| 2:07.6 | A pensive and awful silence pervaded the house, as we were called up one after another, to the table of the President of Congress, to sign what was believed by many at the time to be our own death warrant. |
| 2:21.8 | Rush, who was there at our founding and signed our birth certificate, was right. |
| 2:25.4 | You see, the British government considered the Declaration of Independence a treasonous document, and treason was a capital crime. |
| 2:31.0 | How divided was America? |
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