Proprietary House: Benjamin Franklin’s Son Chooses the Crown
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Transcript
The most interesting thing about William Franklin is not that he was Benjamin Franklin's son.
It is that father and son reached opposite conclusions about the American Revolution.
The Proprietors of East Jersey completed this house in 1764 as an official residence for New Jersey's royal governor.
William Franklin moved in during the 1770s.
He was politically experienced, socially connected and deeply loyal to the British Crown.
His father Benjamin moved toward independence.
The split became personal as well as political.
When the Revolution began, William did not quietly resign.
New Jersey's revolutionary authorities eventually arrested him in 1776.
He remained a Loyalist and later became active in Loyalist politics.
The Proprietary House therefore gives the Revolution a family scale.
Americans were not automatically united once independence became possible.
Families, congregations and communities divided.
Loyalism could be a principled political choice, a defense of property and order, a professional calculation—or several things at once.
The house itself had many later lives.
The New Jersey Historic Trust records use as a private residence, resort hotel, shelter for widows and orphans, and offices.
That survival history matters.
A governor's mansion stays standing because later generations keep finding uses for it.
For tourists, the Franklin surname can become the whole story.
Resist that.
This building was constructed because Perth Amboy held serious political importance within colonial New Jersey.
Its very existence tells you the town was not provincial in the modern sense.
Government expected a royal governor to live here in architecture appropriate to the office.
Then the Revolution made the office disappear.
The house remained.
Politics changed faster than brick.