Benjamin Franklin - They Who Can Give up Essential Liberty

In the winter of 1775, Benjamin Franklin was still in London, still trying to find terms that would keep Britain and the colonies together. The Quaker banker David Barclay drew up draft articles of reconciliation on February 16. Franklin wrote out his objections the next day.

Inside that reply is the sentence on this print, in the words he chose that day: "They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." He had written a version of it twenty years earlier for the Pennsylvania Assembly; this time the setting was the dispute between Parliament and the colonies, not a tax on proprietary land.

The talks went nowhere. Franklin sailed for home on March 20 and reached Philadelphia on May 5, by which time Lexington and Concord had been fought.

A warm sepia portrait: Franklin stands in a brown coat and spectacles with a rolled scroll in one hand, the quote lettered in gold on the stone below him, his name and the words Founding Father, Inventor & Statesman beneath it. An eagle crosses the upper left against a stormy sky, and forks of lightning split the clouds, a nod to his electrical experiments of the early 1750s. Chain links curl across the base of the stone.