Andrew P. challenged me to find out if Benjamin Franklin was an attorney.

Simon and Ben chat in Santa Barbara

I went to the source.  Franklin was not a lawyer.  Which brought up the question: How many of the founding fathers were lawyers?  To answer we first need to decide: who are the founding fathers?  To answer both questions I went to Joseph Ellis’s books American Creation and Founding Brothers. If you want to learn about the struggle for American independence and the compromises that it took to build our country both books are excellent.  Here is a list of the top Founding Fathers and their professions:

• George Washington                Plantation Owner
• John Adams                              Lawyer
• Thomas Jefferson                    Plantation Owner
• Alexander Hamilton                Lawyer
• Benjamin Franklin                   Printer
• James Madison                         Lawyer
• John Jay                                     Lawyer

Four out of seven were lawyers.  To put the number in perspective 57 of the current 100 members of the Senate have law degrees.  So things haven’t really changed that much.  To learn a lot more about the demographics of the 111th Congress see this Wickopedia article.

And finally a Benjamin Franklin quote to drive my caring liberal friends mad: “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”

This is from Wikiquote an excellent and relatively new resource.