Benjamin Franklin in Alberta
Donald Trump, heir to "The First American" in Canada
Benjamin Franklin was fleeing Montreal 250 years ago this month, running for his life, wishing he could have bought Canada instead of trying to conquer it. The thing is, before invading Canada, Franklin and his partners had previously signed a deal with the Privy Council to own a huge part of the new British colony formerly called New France. How Franklin blew the deal says much about U.S. international relations to this day and Canada’s present troubles.
It’s a story rarely told in American popular history, because it shows America, then as now, ruled by ultra-wealthy people seeking to expand power at any cost.
Ben Franklin, one of the most famous names in history, is lauded as “The First American.” Polymath. Prolific inventor. Exemplary entrepreneur. Bestselling writer. Architect of the revolution. But his failure in Canadian real estate development, where he aimed to become one of the world’s richest men, is excised from the myth of Benjamin Franklin, Genius. His brilliance did not make him immune to greed, deception and haste. Donald Trump is a feature, not a bug, in the American program.
Bruno Paul Stenson knows the story of “The First American” in Canada as well as anyone. Stenson is a guide at the Chateau Ramezay in Montréal, the home of the Governor of Canada, built in 1705.
But in 1775 “Montréal was an American city, and the Chateau Ramezay was City Hall,” says Stenson.
The Continental Army’s very first mission was invading Canada, a year before the Declaration of Independence. Understanding their march on Canada is to understand how America came to be, and why it’s the way it is today.
Franklin and the Continental Congress framed it as delivering French settlers from British rule. But one needs greater context to consider whether the motive was a righteous “liberation,” or more like what Wall Street calls “a hostile takeover.”
Ben Franklin’s story reframes a global question at a human scale. Franklin’s inventions and ambitions tame the achievements of today’s tech oligarchs. Yet, his most audacious business venture was to obtain 20 million acres of land in what had recently been the French colony of Canada.
In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War, European empires horse-traded colonies from Asia to America. The King of France swapped Canada, a vast but unprofitable inland empire, for two tiny sugar islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique, boasting fantastic annual profits.
For 150 years, the booming population of England’s coastal colonies was constrained from expanding westward by French control of North America’s interior from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. Canadien settlers were a tiny population of 75,000. But from the mahogany-panelled walls of the Chateau Ramezay, the governor in Montréal held two million English settlers in check thanks to alliances with most of the 100,000 Native Americans east of the Mississippi.
In primordial forest warfare, one Indigenous warrior had what modern militaries call a “force multiplier effect” equal to ten non-native combatants. The French leveraged that multiplier effect by making constant payments to their native allies, which is why Canada was always in the red.
After Louis XV traded Canada away, Ben Franklin and other expansionist colonial leaders formed land development ventures like the Grand Ohio Company to resell Canada to English settlers. The venture stood to make Franklin & Co fortunes equivalent to today’s centi-billionaires.
There was only one thing in their way: the “force multiplier effect” of 100,000 Native Americans. The ruling party in Britain’s Parliament noted that Native American forces had inflicted severe losses on British armies and the treasury was nearly bankrupt by seven years of global war.
Rather than financing westward expansion, Parliament’s ruling party wanted Franklin and his fellow colonists to pay a fair share for their own defence. Their enormous new northwestern frontier was besieged by the military chief of the Ottawa nation. Pontiac united a multi-tribal coalition angered by Britain’s refusal to pay the largesse the French had paid to control this immense network of continental rivers, great lakes, immense forests and fertile plains.
A few compromise-minded American settlers were paying rent to the Native Americans. Renting was a precedent set by German settlers living peacefully amidst the Iroquois nations on the frontier, in what’s now western New York and Pennsylvania. Many Germans farmed cooperatively with the Iroquois and even schooled their children together.
Ben Franklin did not like Germans in the new world. They did un-American things like erecting bilingual road signs, printing German newspapers, adopting co-op farming and advocating pacifism. Franklin envisaged a continental empire of English stock, all Protestants, not Germans or Catholics like les Canadiens. Franklin was a chauvinist, not a pacifist.
Franklin and his partner Samuel Wharton (the family name on the world’s first business school) had a business plan reselling land to English settlers, not renting from Indigenous folks. To buy influence, their Grand Ohio syndicate absorbed high-placed British politicians, bankers and aristocrats into the partnership.
The syndicate did not immediately prevail in the Privy Council, the executive arm of Parliament. Ben Franklin’s lobbying lost its lustre when he was caught stealing mail to advance his schemes. Stealing mail was not a good look for the man who also held the title of Postmaster General in America.
Frustrated in London, Franklin set sail for Philadelphia on 20 March 1775. There was a double twist of fate while he was at sea. The London banking partners of the Grand Ohio Company managed to get the deed to 20,000,000 acres in the Province of Canada signed by the Solicitor General of the Privy Council on 1 May 1775. For its £10,000 payment ($2.5 million USD today), Franklin’s partnership would be worth over a trillion dollars today.
The deal was signed. But before it was fully executed, news arrived at Parliament that less than two weeks earlier, Patriot militiamen in Concord had ambushed British soldiers and besieged Boston. “The shot heard round the world” blew up the deal. Thus, while Franklin floated between the old world and the new, the greatest land deal in history was gained and lost.
Instead of arriving with a deed to a big chunk of the continent, Franklin disembarked and the next day joined Congress, which then ordered the 1775 invasion to “liberate” the province. However, their army would do about as well in Canada as the American army would later do liberating Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran.
The American commander Richard Montgomery was not welcomed as a liberator. He was shot dead by a French Canadian loyalist militia around the same time his second in command, Benedict Arnold, was shot in the thigh.
Franklin was sent to Montréal to rescue the mission. Thus, by sending real estate developer Ben Franklin to Canada, Congress set the precedent for Donald Trump to send Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, ambitious real estate developers, to negotiate liberation with the Iranians.
Franklin’s fabled charm did not sway the Montréal establishment to join his treasonous venture. Then, as now, the talks stalled. The American army had pillaged villages, ravaged farms and spread smallpox. The Americans had also banned Catholic mass in Montréal, which did not win the hearts and minds of devout habitants.
On May 11, 1776, word arrived in Montréal that thousands of British Redcoats had crossed the Atlantic and were sailing down the St. Lawrence River. Ben Franklin, Benedict Arnold and the rest of the Americans fled.
Canada’s Governor, Guy Carleton, emerged from his successful defence of the Quebec Citadel. Carleton hoped the fleeing Americans might tell Congress to negotiate their grievances peaceably. That illusory hope would flummox every other British commander like Carleton, charged with Parliament’s conflicted intentions towards their fellow Englishmen: quell the rebellion, but negotiate.
Carleton didn’t punish the few Canadiens who had collaborated with the American enemy. Instead, he formed a commission of reconciliation, initiating a Canadian tradition of patiently resolving thorny issues with long, if sometimes tedious, conversations.
Historian emeritus Marc Egnal (in his scholarly 1988 opus A Mighty Empire and his accessible 2025 Challenging the Myths of US History) says the unrelenting drive for territorial and economic expansion is the founding ethos of the United States. Today’s use of tariffs as a weapon has roots in the founders' aggressiveness. Trump’s drive to expand the borders of the U.S.A. is as American as the Declaration of Independence.
Everyday Americans are not wrong, nor exceptional, to cherish ideals of liberty and freedom, but Egnal argues that wealthy individuals set on economic and territorial expansion are the true shapers of the American narrative.
Early in life, the self-made man Benjamin Franklin had impressed the world with his wit and inventive genius. Then, he got into real estate speculation, and bent his great will to expansionism, at any cost.
Again: Donald Trump is a feature, not a bug, in the American program. When Trump’s proxies are working with the separatists in Alberta to break up and seize valuable parts of Canada, they work in the tradition of Ben Franklin.
Franklin’s last real estate development deal is now the state of West Virginia, much of Kentucky and western Pennsylvania, home to the largest natural gas reserve in the United States and one of the largest in the world. Alberta has one of the largest reserves of oil and gas in the world.
Alas, Franklin has no descendants to collect rents or royalties. His son William was his partner during the early electrical experiments. William Franklin was also very active in advancing the Grand Ohio Company. But he decided he could not join his father in treason against Parliament. So William Franklin was imprisoned by his father’s Congress, and his personal fortune was confiscated.
Benjamin Franklin disinherited his son. Donald Trump is his heir.
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Thanks George, for the whirlwind tour of the underside of America’s founding. A fun read!
Terrific essay.