Richard Bache (1784–1848), attorney, postmaster, and public official, was a grandson of Benjamin Franklin. Born in Philadelphia, he was admitted to the bar in 1805 and married a daughter of Alexander J. Dallas the same year. Over the next decade Bache worked as an attorney and clerk of the quarter sessions, wrote The Manual of a Pennsylvania Justice of the Peace (Philadelphia, 1810), and was captain in 1814 of the “Franklin Flying Artillery.” He served as his hometown’s postmaster, 1815–28, and published the daily Philadelphia Franklin Gazette, 1818–21. Bache moved thereafter to Texas, where he fought in the 1836 war of independence against Mexico and was a government clerk for several years before settling in Galveston in 1842. There he was commissioner of the naval yard and a justice of the peace. Bache cast the sole vote against joining the United States at the 1845 Texas Annexation Convention, but he signed the new state’s constitution later that year. At the time of his death he was sitting as a member of the Texas senate in Austin (Leonard W. Labaree and others, eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin [1959– ], 1:lxv; Philadelphia United States’ Gazette, 7 Mar. 1805; Boston New-England Palladium, 16 Apr. 1805; James Robinson, The Philadelphia Directory, for 1808 [Philadelphia, 1808]; Benjamin Kite and Thomas Kite, Kite’s Philadelphia Directory for 1814 [Philadelphia, 1814]; Philadelphia Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, 31 Aug. 1814; John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania, in the olden time [1879], 3:476; Brigham, American Newspapers description begins Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 1947, 2 vols. description ends , 2:907; Walter Prescott Webb and others, eds., The Handbook of Texas [1952–76], 1:93; Civilian and Galveston City Gazette, 22 Apr. 1843; Laws passed by the Second Legislature of the State of Texas [1848], 2:lxxxvi, xciii; Houston Democratic Telegraph and Texas Register, 13 Apr. 1848).