In an effort to cultivate in me a lifelong taste for thrift, my parents once gave me a leather-bound copy of Benjamin Franklin’s 1758 essay “The Way to Wealth.” I never finished it. Franklin’s admonition to rise early struck my 9-year-old self as unduly austere. I sought out other models, settling fast (to my parents’ chagrin) on the profligate Thomas Jefferson, whose love of wine, shoes, furniture, books, and architectural renovation left him in a sinkhole of debt at the time of his death in 1826.

Franklin wasn’t so abstemious, or plebeian, as he made himself out to be. He was a brilliant raconteur very much at ease in the wider world. Like Jefferson, he adored France, its women, and – to judge from his ample girth – its food and drink as well. But he survives in the public mind as an elder statesman, purveyor of sunny conviviality, enemy of tyrannies large and small, the most likeable – and unassailable – of the Founding Fathers.

On one particularly sensitive count he has been elevated high above others of his generation: his fierce opposition to slavery. But that couldn’t last, in these days of pedestal-toppling. Fast on the heels of several prominent books about Franklin comes David Waldstreicher’s bold and immensely readable “Runaway America” (Hill & Wang, 298 pages, $26). It gives us Franklin as we’ve not seen him – as slaveholder and slave profiteer.

Mr. Waldstreicher’s book is not mere expose but a stunning inquiry into the complicated, if not outright deceptive, anti-slavery legacy of America’s favorite self-made man. Rigorous and firmly unsentimental, “Runaway America” deserves a wide readership. Its clever broadmindedness makes it one of the freshest, most original books written about America’s “best-known colonist and revolutionary.”

Mr. Waldstreicher, a professor of history at Temple University, understands all too well Franklin’s ingenious facility for portraying himself as he wished to be recalled. “When Americans think of Benjamin Franklin, they think of freedom,” he begins. Yet Franklin’s relationship to the peculiar institution proves to have been ambivalent at best.

It wasn’t only that he owned slaves and, according to Mr. Waldstreicher, “never systematically divested himself of them”: Franklin made money by the lash. His newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, was emphatically a master’s paper. Its pages contained not only news from Europe and other colonies but advertisements for runaway ser vants and slaves. Masters paid Franklin handsomely for these. There are enough “smoking guns,” Mr. Waldstreicher writes, to denounce Franklin as others have denounced the slaveholding “hypocrite” Jefferson.

This is not Mr. Waldstreicher’s intention. Instead, he invites us to set aside Franklin the myth and to see his later anti-slavery incarnation as the invention of an older Franklin, who scrupulously avoided public discussions of slavery because he was preoccupied with securing his favorable reputation at a time when slavery had become “a national scandal.” And he acknowledges that this Franklin did indeed come to inspire the efforts of anti-slavery radicals in the 19th-century.

What distinguishes “Runaway America” from a shabby hatchet job is Mr. Waldstreicher’s keen intelligence and, above all, his refusal to condemn. He does not write to convince us of Franklin’s moral infirmity but rather to comment on the “paradox” of a revolution founded on freedom. If at times he goes out of his way to assure us that his task isn’t to undo Franklin, it’s only because shrill revisionism is what readers increasingly expect from the academy.

As Mr. Waldstreicher shrewdly observes, the “good founder” vs. “bad founder” school of scholarship says more about us than it does about the Founding Fathers. Mr. Waldstreicher succeeds in providing a convincing portrait of Franklin exactly because he avoids the predictable ideological traps. His book affirms that Franklin was complicated in the extreme, ever alert to the prospects of prosperity, and eminently worthy of the laurels laid before him.

In recent years, the Founding Fathers have made an extraordinary comeback. And they’re arguably more knowable and amiable than ever before. In stylish, often searching books that narrow the emotional distance between the 18th century and our own, an impressive roster of historians continues to do the admirable, necessary thing: make these men live upon the page. How much more scrutiny they can bear remains to be seen.

That he succeeded in throwing historians off the scent for so long is a tribute to Franklin. That “Runaway America” has found him out and still deepened our sense of the man without flaying him is a tribute to Mr. Waldstreicher’s own considerable gifts. It is no mean feat to say something smart and new about one of the most overstudied men in American history, and Mr. Waldstreicher’s remarkable book leaves us to wonder what yet we may have to learn to understand the Founders.