There are Founding Fathers and then there are Founding Fathers. While anyone who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution is, virtually by definition, a Founding Father, that doesn’t make Button Gwinnett the equal of George Washington in historical importance.

Indisputably, the top tier of the Founding Fathers consists of Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin, who in fact is the only one of the six to have signed both documents and who, not incidentally, fundamentally helped to shape them and thus to shape the country.

Having signed the Declaration, Franklin was soon dispatched to France, where he proved to be a highly skilled diplomat. Lionized by French society—which he thoroughly enjoyed—he worked hard and successfully to get the French to intervene in the American Revolution, first with money and matériel and then with troops. Without French help it is hard to see how the nascent United States could have prevailed and won its independence. After the Battle of Yorktown brought the war effectively to an end, Franklin helped negotiate a remarkably favorable peace treaty with Great Britain.

So Franklin is undoubtedly one of the giants of American history. Twenty-four states have counties named for him (there is only one named for Gwinnett, in his home state of Georgia), and there are countless eponymous towns. Indeed, there are six towns just in the state of Wisconsin named in his honor, along with schools, colleges, mountains, institutes, a genus