Was Benjamin Franklin a Freemason?

Benjamin Franklin was initiated into Freemasonry in February 1731, at St. John’s Lodge in Philadelphia, the first lodge in the city. He was twenty-five, a printer building his name, and the lodge’s surviving account book records his steady attendance through the decade that followed, with small fines noted against the meetings he missed.

His rise was quick. By June 1732 he was helping to draft the lodge’s by-laws and serving as a junior officer of the new Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania. The fraternity suited a man who had already gathered a circle of Philadelphia tradesmen into a club for mutual improvement, the group he called the Junto, or Leather Apron Club. In the lodge he found the same thing on a wider scale: a society where men of different trades and backgrounds met as equals, governed themselves by agreed rules, and bound themselves to charity and good conduct.

In 1734, only three years after his initiation, Franklin was elected Grand Master of the Provincial Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania. That same year he turned his printing press to the service of the Craft, producing an edition of James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Free-Masons. It was the first Masonic book printed in America, and it remains one of the most important documents in the early history of the fraternity on this continent.

Franklin used his newspaper as well as his press. The Pennsylvania Gazette, which he owned, carried favorable notices of Masonry that helped shape how the young country understood the Craft. As Grand Master he also wrote to Henry Price in Boston, who held authority from England to organize Masonry in the colonies, seeking confirmation of Pennsylvania’s Masonic standing. Few colonial Americans did more to put the new fraternity on a documented and orderly footing. According to long-standing Pennsylvania tradition, the cornerstone of the State House, the building now known as Independence Hall, was laid during his term as Grand Master.

Franklin was the most prominent, but far from the only, Mason among the men who founded the country. The wider question of how many signers of the Declaration and the Constitution actually belonged is taken up in our guide to the Founding Fathers and Freemasonry.

When Franklin arrived in France in the 1770s as the new republic’s minister, he carried his Masonry with him. In 1777 he was elected a member of the Loge des Neuf Soeurs, the Lodge of the Nine Sisters, named for the nine Muses. It was among the most distinguished lodges in Paris, gathering writers, scientists, and artists of the French Enlightenment, and Franklin, already famous across Europe for his experiments with electricity, was a natural addition to its rolls.

In April 1778 the lodge initiated the philosopher Voltaire, then eighty-three and within weeks of his death. Franklin, a member of the lodge, took part in the ceremony, which has come down as one of the most celebrated late initiations in Masonic history. The following year the lodge elected Franklin its Worshipful Master, the officer who presides over its work, and he served in that office for two years. For a foreign diplomat to be chosen to lead one of the leading lodges of Paris was a measure of the regard in which he was held, both as a statesman and as a Mason.

Franklin’s Masonic life ran for nearly sixty years and across two continents, from a Philadelphia lodge room in 1731 to the head of a Parisian lodge in his seventies. Among American Masons of the era, only George Washington rivals him in lasting fame, and Franklin’s record reaches further back and further abroad. He died in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, at eighty-four.

The documented record is rich enough that it needs no embellishment, and embellishment is what much of the popular Franklin literature offers. Stories tying him to occult brotherhoods or to a so-called Hellfire Club belong to legend rather than to the lodge minutes. What the records actually show is steadier and more interesting: a working printer who found in Freemasonry a community of equals and a set of civic ideals, and who spent a lifetime advancing both. He remains one of the most famous names on any list of famous Freemasons.