Founding Daughter
Wallace Baine
What if the noble words of the Declaration of Independence were not written by Thomas Jefferson, but by an author of much lower station still aspiring to be free? What if “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was the idea of an especially precocious, bookish, half-Black, teenaged servant girl with a boundless faith in the ideas of the Enlightenment?
In a grimy, frigid flat in post-revolutionary Paris, in the days of ruin after Napoleon, an old man named Temple Franklin lies dying in squalor and misery. Born into privilege and family eminence, he has nothing to look back on but a life of debauchery and waste.
Adrift on an ocean of regret and paralyzed by fear of divine judgment, Temple decides to unleash onto the world a secret from his youth he has kept entombed in memory for decades. It is a secret likely to upend the historical reputation of his sainted grandfather Benjamin Franklin, and to unmask the perversity at the heart of the nation that old Ben was instrumental in establishing.
Set amid the revolutionary ferment of Philadelphia in 1776, Founding Daughter is packed with familiar figures like Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Paine. But they all take a back seat to the compelling love story between starstruck young Temple Franklin, an actual historical figure, and exuberant, idealistic Charlotte “Lottie” Berbich, a literary creation inspired in part by the life of young 18th-century Black poet Phillis Wheatley. Faithful to history — except when it’s not — this story is a galvanizing reminder that American ideals, as articulated in our nation’s founding documents, belongs to all Americans, especially to those still struggling to be free.
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About The Author
Wallace Baine
Wallace Baine began his career in daily journalism in October 1989. By the end of his first day’s overtime shift, he had contributed to the front-page story of the Gilroy Dispatch on the largest earthquake to strike Northern California in generations, trumpeted on the newspaper’s headline as “7.0 MONSTER”. Wallace then worked for the Santa Cruz Sentinel for many years as a columnist, critic, and editor, winning awards locally and nationally for his writing. He has also served as a staff writer for the weekly Good Times and is now the City Life Correspondent for the news site Lookout Santa Cruz.
Wallace is the author of A Light in the Midst of Darkness, a cultural history of the independent bookseller Bookshop Santa Cruz. He is also the author of the novel Rhymes with Vain: Belabored Humor and Attempted Profundity, and the story collection, The Last Temptation of Lincoln. His work has been syndicated in newspapers nationwide, and his fiction has appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader and the Chicago Quarterly Review. His play, “Oscar’s Wallpaper”, was adapted from one of the stories in The Last Temptation of Lincoln. His fiction was also included in the anthology, Santa Cruz Noir.
