A Benjamin Franklin Passy Passport From 1780
The Benjamin Franklin Passport That Arrived in My Inbox, Not My Mailbox
I have been running passport-collector.com since 2010, and if there’s one thing that never stops surprising me, it’s what shows up in my inbox. Somewhere between a grandson looking for his grandmother’s old travel document and a British gentleman who, at 68, genuinely wanted to become a Queen’s Messenger, I stopped expecting anything ordinary. But nothing prepared me for the email that arrived a few years back: a reader claiming to own a passport signed by Benjamin Franklin.
The Emails That Land in My Inbox After a Decade Online
Running a historical archive for this long means readers eventually treat you as their personal document detective. “Do you know where I can get a copy of my grandmother’s passport?” is a fairly typical message. I’ve thought about building a proper FAQ section for questions like that, an idea a fellow collector suggested to me more than once.
Then there are the requests that have nothing to do with history at all. One man wrote asking if I could get passports for himself, his wife, and his two kids, apparently under the impression my site was some kind of consular office rather than a research archive. I gently explained otherwise. And then there was the retiree who wanted to become a Queen’s Messenger at 68. Honestly, I could fill another book with stories like these alone.
But the emails I treasure most come from people holding an actual piece of history, sometimes looking to learn more about it, sometimes ready to part with it. Over the years I’ve been offered glimpses of documents connected to Elton John (1972), Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1932), Idi Amin (1963), Anwar el-Sadat (1979), Enrico Caruso (1919), and even Joe Frazier’s final passport. Each one is a reminder that a passport is never just paperwork, it’s a fingerprint of a life in motion.
When a Reader’s Passy Passport Turned Out to Be Real
A US reader’s Benjamin Franklin passport dated 23 May 1780 turned out, after careful verification, to be a genuine document from Franklin’s own printing operation in Paris. My first instinct, honestly, was skepticism. A surviving Passy passport is not the kind of thing that turns up in someone’s family papers every day. So I pushed back gently and asked questions.
The more we talked, the more the story held up. The gentleman sent me a photograph of the document, and he told me it had already been examined and verified by researchers connected to Yale University’s ongoing publication of Franklin’s papers. That gave me enough of a thread to pull. I went looking at the digitized Papers of Benjamin Franklin hosted by Founders Online at the National Archives, a joint project of the American Philosophical Society and Yale University Press, and ran my own queries against the record.
Four Sailors, One Passport: Plummer, Herbert, Carr, and Taylor
This particular passport protected four crew members of the USS Alliance as they made their way back toward American soil. The names on the document are Joseph Plummer, Charles Herbert, Benjamin Carr, and Benjamin Taylor, all of them crew aboard the USS Alliance, the frigate that had carried Franklin’s diplomatic mission to France. A passport like this was not a travel formality in the modern sense, it was a document meant to keep four ordinary sailors safe from seizure as they crossed contested waters during the American Revolutionary War.
The American Philosophical Society and Yale University’s ongoing scholarship on the different printed versions of Franklin’s Passy passports goes considerably deeper than I can cover here. That’s a rabbit hole I may well return to in a future article of its own.
Inside the Passy Press: Franklin’s Underground Print Shop
Franklin ran his own printing press out of his lodgings in Passy, and it produced far more than official paperwork. Passy was Franklin’s home for nine years during his time in France, and for much of that stay he lodged with Monsieur de Chaumont on a rural estate then just outside Paris.
Franklin set up what he called the Passy Press primarily to keep French support for the revolution alive through pamphlets and other printed material. But the press became something more personal too. He printed his own comic essays, the Bagatelles, and he developed a distinctive typeface known as “le Franklin.” He also printed Pierre-André Gargaz’s 1782 treatise proposing a permanent European peace council to arbitrate disputes between nations, decades ahead of anything resembling the League of Nations. And, of course, he printed passport forms, the very kind that protected Plummer, Herbert, Carr, and Taylor on their journey home.
When Franklin finally left Passy, his successor as American Ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, wrote that “when he left Passy, it seemed as if the village had lost its patriarch.” A street in the neighborhood still carries his name today, Rue Benjamin Franklin, a small permanent souvenir of the printer, diplomat, and passport-issuer who once called it home.
Why This 1780 Passport Still Matters to Collectors
For anyone collecting early American travel documents, a verified Passy passport from 1780 sits close to the top of the pyramid, both historically and in rarity. It was issued only four years after independence, printed by Franklin’s own press, and it survived more than two centuries in private hands before landing, quite unexpectedly, in my inbox.
I’m genuinely grateful to the American gentleman who shared this document with me and gave permission to display it here. He told me he’d inherited it from his father-in-law, which is so often how these things survive: quietly, in a drawer, until someone finally asks the right questions about it.
Further reading: Franklin’s Passy Press Passports: A Collector’s Guide
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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