Franklin, from his deathbed, attempted to protest. Earlier, he’d tried to reassure his sister, “As to the Pain I suffer, about which you make yourself so unhappy, it is, when compar’d with the long life I have enjoy’d of Health and Ease, but a Trifle.”73 But this was the merest dissembling. He was in agony. Writing in the Pennsylvania Gazette, he offered an attack on slavery, signing his essay “Historicus”—the voice of history.74 He died two weeks later. He was the only man to have signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. His last public act was to
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