London, 1765–1770
Mrs. Stevenson was out when Franklin arrived, unannounced, at his old home on Craven Street, and her maid did not know where to find her. “So I sat me down and waited her return,” Franklin recalled in a letter to her daughter, Polly. “She was a good deal surprised to find me in her parlor.” Surprised, perhaps, but prepared. His rooms had been left vacant, for his English friends and surrogate family had no doubt he would someday return.1
It would be just a short visit, he led his real wife, and perhaps even himself, to believe. He wanted to be back home by the end of the summer, he wrote Deborah soon after his arrival. “A few months, I hope, will finish affairs here to my wish, and bring me to that retirement and repose with my little family.” She had heard that many times before. He would, in fact, never see her again. Despite her pleas and declining health, he would continue his increasingly futile mission for more than ten years, right up to the eve of the Revolution.
That mission involved complex balancing acts that would test all of Franklin’s wiles. On the one hand, he was still a committed royalist who wanted to stay in favor with the king’s ministers in order to wrest Pennsylvania from the hated Penns. He also had personal motives: protecting his postmastership, perhaps achieving an even higher appointment, and pursuing his dream of a land grant. On the other hand, once it became clear that the British government had little sympathy for colonial rights, he would have to scramble to reestablish his reputation as an American patriot.2
In the meantime, Franklin had the pleasure of settling back into the life he loved in London. Sir John Pringle, the distinguished physician, had become his best friend. They played chess, made the rounds to their regular coffeehouse clubs, and soon got into the habit of taking summer trips together. The great Samuel Johnson biographer James Boswell was another acquaintance. After dropping in on one of their chess games, Boswell noted in his journal that Pringle had “a peculiar sour manner,” but that Franklin was, as always, “all jollity and pleasantry.” Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson resumed their relationship of domestic convenience, and Polly, still living with an aunt in the countryside, remained an object of Franklin’s paternal affection and intellectual flirtation.
He picked Polly as his first potential convert to a new phonetic alphabet that he had invented in a quixotic quest to simplify English spelling. It is easy to see why it did not catch on. “Kansider chis alfabet, and giv mi instanses af syts Inlis uyrds and saunds az iu mee hink kannat perfektlyi bi eksprest byi it,” went one of his more comprehensible sentences. After a long reply that is near impossible to translate, in which she halfheartedly says the alphabet “myit bi uv syrvis,” she lapses into standard English to conclude, “With ease & with sincerity, I can in the old way subscribe myself . . . ”
It was a measure of their intellectual bonding that Polly would indulge this linguistic fantasy as faithfully as she did. Franklin’s phonetic reform showed little of his usual regard for utility, and it took his passion for social improvement to radical extremes. It required the invention of six new letters for which there were no printing fonts, and it dropped six other letters that Franklin considered superfluous. Answering Polly’s many objections, he insisted that the difficulty in learning the new spellings would be overcome by the logic behind them, and he dismissed her concerns that the words would be divorced from their etymological roots and thus lose their power. But he soon gave up the endeavor. Years later, he turned his scheme over to Noah Webster. The famed lexicographer reprinted Franklin’s letters to Polly in his 1789 book Dissertations on the English Language (which he dedicated to Franklin) and called the project “deeply interesting,” but added, “Whether it will be defeated by insolence and prejudice remains for my countrymen to determine.”3
Franklin brought his grandson, Temple, the illegitimate son of his own illegitimate son, out of anonymity and into his odd domestic orbit on Craven Street. The relationship was weird, even by Franklin family standards. The boy, who was 4 when Franklin reestablished contact, had been cared for by a series of women who sent itemized bills for his expenses (haircuts, inoculations, clothes) to Mrs. Stevenson, who then sought reimbursement from William in New Jersey. In all of his letters to Deborah at the time, filled with details of various friends and acquaintances, Franklin never mentioned Temple. But by the time the boy turned 9, William was asking, in a quite cowardly way, whether his son could be brought to live with him in America. “He might then take his proper name and be introduced as the son of a poor relation, for whom I stood Godfather and intended to bring up as my own.”
Foreshadowing a later struggle for the boy’s allegiance, Franklin instead took him under his own wing. On Craven Street he was known merely as “William Temple,” and Franklin enrolled him in a school run by William Strahan’s brother-in-law, an eccentric educator who shared Franklin’s passion for spelling reform. Even though Temple became part of the extended Stevenson family, they pretended (at least publicly) to be unaware of his exact provenance.
(As late as 1774, in a letter describing a wedding in which he was an usher, Polly would refer to him as “Mr. Temple, a young gentleman who is at school here and is under the care of Dr. Franklin.” Not until later, after Franklin and his grandson returned to America and Temple took up his true last name, did Polly confess that she suspected all along that there was some relationship. “I rejoiced to hear he has the addition of Franklin [to his name], which I always knew he had some right to.”)4
Back in Philadelphia, Franklin was still seen as a “tribune of the people” and a defender of their rights. When word finally reached there in March 1765 of his safe arrival in London, bells were rung “almost all night,” his supporters “ran about like mad men,” and copious quantities of “libations” were drunk to his health. But their joy would be fleeting. Franklin was about to become embroiled in a controversy over the notorious Stamp Act, which would require a tax stamp on every newspaper, book, almanac, legal document, and deck of cards.5
It was the first time that Parliament had proposed a major internal tax on the colonies. Franklin believed that Parliament had the right to impose external taxes, such as duties and tariffs, to regulate trade. But he thought it unwise, perhaps even unconstitutional, for Parliament to levy an internal tax on people who had no representation in that assembly. Nevertheless, he did not fight the Stamp Act proposal with much vigor. Instead, he tried to play conciliator.
He and a small group of colonial agents met in February 1765 with George Grenville, the prime minister, who explained that the high cost of the Indian wars made some tax on the colonies necessary. What was a better way to levy it? Franklin argued that it should be done in the “usual constitutional way,” which meant by a request from the king to the various colonial legislatures, who alone had the power to tax their own inhabitants. Would Franklin and his fellow agents, Grenville asked, be able to commit that the colonies would agree to the proper amount and how to apportion it among themselves? Franklin and the others admitted that they could make no firm commitment.
Franklin offered another alternative a few days later. It stemmed from his long-standing desire, both as a rather sophisticated economic theorist and as a printer, to have more paper currency circulating in America. Parliament, he proposed, could authorize new bills of credit that would be issued to borrowers at 6 percent interest. These paper bills would serve as legal tender and circulate like currency, thus increasing America’s money supply, and Britain would collect the interest instead of levying direct internal taxes. “It will operate as a general tax on the colonies, and yet not an unpleasing one,” said Franklin. “The rich, who handle most money, would in reality pay most of the tax.” Grenville was, in Franklin’s words, “besotted with his stamp scheme,” and dismissed the idea. This may have been fortunate for Franklin, as he later heard that even his friends in Philadelphia disliked his paper credit idea as well.6
When the Stamp Act passed in March, Franklin made the mistake of taking a pragmatic attitude. He recommended that his good friend John Hughes be appointed the collection officer in Pennsylvania. “Your undertaking to execute it may make you unpopular for a time, but your acting with coolness and steadiness and with every circumstance in your power of favor to the people will by degrees reconcile them,” he mistakenly argued in a letter to Hughes. “In the meantime, a firm loyalty to the Crown and faithful adherence to the government of this nation will always be the wisest course for you and I to take, whatever may be the madness of the populace.” In his desire to remain on decent terms with the royal ministers, Franklin badly underestimated the madness of the populace back home.
Thomas Penn, on the other hand, played the situation cleverly. He refused to offer his own candidate for stamp collector, saying that if he did so “the people might suppose we were consenting to the laying this load upon them.” John Dickinson, Franklin’s young adversary as the leader of the Proprietary party in the Assembly, drew up a declaration of grievances against the Stamp Act that resoundingly passed.7
It was one of Franklin’s worst political misjudgments. His hatred of the Penns blinded him to the fact that most of his fellow Pennsylvanians hated taxes imposed from London more. “I took every step in my power to prevent the passing of the Stamp Act,” he claimed unconvincingly to his Philadelphia friend Charles Thomson, “but the tide was too strong against us.” He then went on to argue the case for pragmatism: “We might well have hindered the sun’s setting. That we could not do. But since it is down, my friend, and it may be long before it rises again, let us make as good a night of it as we can. We may still light candles.”
The letter, which became public, was a public relations disaster for Franklin. Thomson replied that Philadelphians, rather than being willing to light candles, were ready to launch “the works of darkness.” By September, it was clear that this could include mob violence. “A sort of frenzy or madness has got such hold of the people of all ranks that I fancy some lives will be lost before this fire is put out,” a frightened Hughes wrote the man who had gotten him what had become an unenviable job.8
Franklin’s printing partner, David Hall, sent a similar warning. “The spirit of the people is so violently against everyone they think has the least concern with the Stamp law,” he wrote. Angry Philadelphians had “imbibed the notion that you had a hand in the framing of it, which has occasioned you many enemies.” He added that he would be afraid for Franklin’s safety if he were to return. A cartoon printed in Philadelphia showed the devil whispering in Franklin’s ear: “Thee shall be agent, Ben, for all my dominions.”9
The frenzy climaxed one evening in late September 1765 when a mob gathered at a Philadelphia coffeehouse. Leaders of the rabble accused Franklin of advocating the Stamp Act, and they set out to level his new home, along with those of Hughes and other Franklin supporters. “If I live until tomorrow morning, I shall give you a farther account,” Hughes wrote in a log he later sent Franklin.
Deborah dispatched their daughter to New Jersey for safety. But ever the homebound stalwart, she refused to flee. Her cousin Josiah Davenport arrived with more than twenty friends to help defend her. Her account of that night, while harrowing, is also a testament to her strength. She described it in a letter to her husband:
Toward night I said he [cousin Davenport] should fetch a gun or two, as we had none. I sent to ask my brother to come and bring his gun. Also we made one room the magazine. I ordered some sort of defense upstairs as I could manage myself. I said when I was advised to remove that I was very sure you had done nothing to hurt anybody, nor I had not given any offense to any person at all. Nor would I be made uneasy by anybody. Nor would I stir.
Franklin’s house and his wife were saved when a group of supporters, dubbed the White Oak Boys, gathered a force to confront the mob. If Franklin’s house was destroyed, they declared, so too would be the homes of anyone involved. Finally, the mob dispersed. “I honor much the spirit and courage you showed,” he wrote Deborah after hearing of her ordeal. “The woman deserves a good house that is determined to defend it.”10
The Stamp Act crisis sparked a radical transformation in American affairs. A new group of colonial leaders, who bristled at being subservient to England, were coming to the fore, especially in Virginia and Massachusetts. Even though most Americans harbored few separatist or nationalist sentiments until 1775, the clash between imperial control and colonial rights was erupting on a variety of fronts. Young Patrick Henry, 29, rose in Virginia’s House of Burgesses to decry taxation without representation. “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third . . . ” He was interrupted by shouts of “Treason!” before he could finish, but it was clear that some colonists were becoming deadly serious. Soon he would find an ally in Thomas Jefferson. In Boston, a group that would take the name the Sons of Liberty met at a distillery and attacked the homes of the Massachusetts tax commissioner and Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. Among the rising patriots there who would eventually become rebels were a young merchant named John Hancock, a fiery agitator named Samuel Adams, and his sour lawyer cousin John Adams.
For the first time since the Albany Conference of 1754, leaders from different parts of America were galvanized into thinking as a collective unit. A congress of nine colonies, including Pennsylvania, was held in New York in October. Not only did it urge the repeal of the Stamp Act, it denied the right of Parliament to levy internal taxes on the colonies. The motto they adopted was the one Franklin had written as a cartoon caption more than a decade earlier, as he sought to rally unity at Albany: “Join, or Die.”
From his distance in London, Franklin was slow to join the frenzy. “The rashness of the Assembly in Virginia is amazing,” he wrote Hughes. “I hope, however, that ours will keep within the bounds of prudence and moderation.” For the time being, he was still more in sympathy with Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts, later a great enemy. Both were reasonable men appalled by mob rule, and in this case threatened by it. “When you and I were at Albany ten years ago,” Hutchinson wrote him, “we did not propose a union for such purposes as these.”11
Franklin’s moderation was due in part to his temperament, his love of Britain, and his dreams of a harmonious empire. It was in his nature to be a smooth operator rather than a revolutionary. He liked witty discussion over Madeira, and he hated disorder and mob behavior. The fine wines and meals contributed not only to his gout, but also to his blurred vision about the animosity that was building back home. Perhaps more important, he was making one last attempt to turn Pennsylvania into a royal rather than Proprietary colony.
It was always an unlikely quest, now all the more so because of the turmoil over the Stamp Act, which made royal rule less popular in Pennsylvania and made colonial pleadings less popular in London. In November 1765, a year after Franklin’s arrival and just as he was absorbing the damage done to his reputation by his waffling over the Stamp Act, the Privy Council officially deferred action on the anti-Penn petition he had brought. Franklin initially believed (or at least publicly professed) that this was merely a temporary setback. But he soon came to realize that Thomas Penn was correct when he wrote to his nephew, Gov. John Penn, that the action meant the issue was dead “forever.”12
By the end of 1765, with his reputation as a defender of colonial rights in tatters because of his equivocation over the Stamp Act, Franklin faced one of the great challenges in the annals of political damage control. He began with a letter-writing campaign. To his partner David Hall and others, he strongly denied that he had ever supported the act. He also had prominent London Quakers write on his behalf. “I can safely aver that Benjamin Franklin did all in his power to prevent the Stamp Act from passing,” John Fothergill wrote a Philadelphia friend. “He asserted the rights and privileges of America with the utmost firmness.” Hall reprinted the letter in the Pennsylvania Gazette.
Franklin felt the best way to force repeal, one that appealed to his Poor Richard penchant for frugality and self-reliance, was for Americans to boycott British imports and refrain from transactions that would require use of the stamps. This approach would also rally British tradesmen and manufacturers, hurt by the loss of exports, to the cause of repeal. Writing anonymously as “Homespun” in a British paper, he ridiculed the notion that Americans could not get by without such British imports as tea. If need be, they would make tea from corn. “Its green ears roasted are a delicacy beyond expression.”13
Franklin’s two sardonic essays signed Homespun were among at least thirteen attacks on the Stamp Act that he published in a three-month period. In one hoax, signed “A Traveler,” he claimed that America had no need of British wool because “the very tails of the American sheep are so laden with wool that each has a car or wagon on four little wheels to support and keep it from trailing on the ground.” Writing as “Pacificus Secundus,” he resorted to his old tactic of scathing satire by pretending to support the idea that military rule be imposed in the colonies. It would take only fifty thousand British soldiers at a cost of merely £12 million a year. “It may be objected that by ruining our colonies, killing one half the people, and driving the rest over the mountains, we may deprive ourselves of their custom for our manufacturers; but a moment’s consideration will satisfy us that since we have lost so much of our European trade, it can be only the demand in America that keeps up and has of late so greatly enhanced the price of those manufacturers, and therefore a stop put to that demand will be an advantage to all of us, as we may thereafter buy our own goods cheaper.” The only downside for England, he noted, was that “multitudes of our poor may starve for want of employment.”14
(As has been frequently noted, Franklin often wrote anonymously or using a pseudonym, beginning as a young teen when he wrote as Silence Dogood and then as the Busy-Body, Alice Addertongue, Poor Richard, Homespun, and others. Sometimes, he was trying to be truly anonymous; at other times, he was wearing only a thin mask. This practice was not unusual, indeed it was quite common, among writers of the eighteenth century, including such Franklin heroes as Addison, Steele, and Defoe. “Scarce one part in ten of the valuable books which are published are with the author’s name,” Addison once declared, with a bit of exaggeration. At the time, writing anonymously was considered cleverer, less vulgar, and less likely to lead to libel or sedition charges. Gentlemen sometimes thought it was beneath their stature to have their names on pamphlets and press pieces. The practice also assured that dissenting political and religious writings were rebutted on their merits rather than by personal attacks.)15
Franklin also produced a political cartoon, a counterpart to his “Join, or Die,” that showed a bloodied and dismembered British Empire, its limbs labeled with the names of colonies. The motto underneath, “Give a Penny to Belisarius,” referred to the Roman general who oppressed his provinces and died in poverty. He had the cartoon printed on note cards, hired a man to hand them out in front of Parliament, and sent one to his sister Jane Mecom. “The moral,” he told her, “is that the colonies may be ruined, but that Britain would thereby be maimed.” Enforcing the Stamp Act, he warned one British minister, would end up “creating a deep-rooted aversion between the two countries and laying the foundation of a future total separation.”16
Still a loyal Briton, Franklin was eager to prevent such a split. His preferred solution was colonial representation in Parliament. In a set of notes he prepared for his meetings with ministers, Franklin jotted down the argument: “Representation useful two ways. It brings information and knowledge to the great council. It conveys back to the remote parts of the empire the reasons of public conduct . . . It will forever preserve the union which otherwise may be various ways broken.”
But he also warned that the time to seize that opportunity was passing. “The time has been when the colonies would have esteemed it a great advantage as well as honor to them to be permitted to send members to Parliament,” he wrote a friend in January 1766. “The time is now come when they are indifferent about it, and will probably not ask it, though they might accept it if offered them; and the time will come when they will certainly refuse it.”
Short of representation in Parliament, Franklin wrote, “the next best thing” would be the traditional method of requesting funds to be appropriated by each of the colonial legislatures. In the notes he wrote for his conversation with ministers, he suggested a third alternative that would be a step toward independence for the colonies: “empowering them to send delegates from each Assembly to a common council.” In other words, the American colonies would form their own federal legislature rather than be subject to the laws of Parliament. The only thing that would then unite the two parts of the British Empire would be loyalty to the king. It derived from the plan he had proposed more than a decade earlier; next to this idea in his notes he wrote the phrase “Albany Plan.”17
On February 13, 1766, Franklin got the chance to present his case directly to Parliament. His dramatic appearance was a masterpiece of both lobbying and theater, helpfully choreographed by his supporters in that body. In one afternoon of highly charged testimony, he would turn himself into the foremost spokesman for the American cause and brilliantly restore his reputation back home.
Many of the 174 questions directed at him were scripted in advance by leaders of the new Whig ministry of Lord Rockingham, which was sympathetic to the colonies and was looking for a way out of the Stamp Act debacle. Others were more hostile. Through it all, Franklin was cogent and calm. The questioning was begun by a member whose manufacturing business had been hurt by the breakdown in trade, who asked Franklin whether the Americans already paid taxes voluntarily to Britain. “Certainly many, and very heavy taxes,” he replied, and he went on to recount their history in detail (though leaving out some of the disputes over taxing of Proprietary lands).
An adversary broke in. “Are not the colonies,” he asked, “very able to pay the Stamp duty?” Replied Franklin: “There is not gold and silver enough in the colonies to pay the stamp duty for one year.”
Grenville, who had proposed the act, defended it by asking whether Franklin didn’t agree that the colonies should pay for the defense provided them by royal forces. The Americans, Franklin countered, had defended themselves, and by doing so had defended British interests as well. “The colonies raised, clothed and paid, during the last war, near 25,000 men and spent many millions,” he explained, adding that only a small portion had been reimbursed.
The larger issue, Franklin stressed, was how to promote harmony within the British Empire. Before the Stamp Act was imposed, asked a supporter named Grey Cooper, “What was the temper of America towards Great Britain?”
Franklin: The best in the world. They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid, in all their courts, obedience to the acts of Parliament . . . They cost you nothing in forts, citadels, garrisons or armies to keep them in subjection. They were governed by this country at the expense of only a little pen, ink and paper. They were led by a thread. They had not only a respect but an affection for Great Britain; for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fondness for its fashions, which greatly increased the commerce.
Cooper: And what is their temper now?
Franklin: Oh, very much altered.
Cooper: In what light did the people of America used to consider the Parliament?
Franklin: They considered the Parliament as the great bulwark and security of their liberties.
Cooper: And have they not still the same respect?
Franklin: No, it is greatly lessened.
Once again, Franklin emphasized a distinction between external and internal taxes. “I have never heard any objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce. But a right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in Parliament, as we are not represented there.”
Would America submit to a compromise? No, said Franklin, it was a matter of principle. So only military force could compel them to pay the Stamp Tax?
“I do not see how a military force could be applied to that purpose,” Franklin answered.
Question: Why may it not?
Franklin: Suppose a military force is sent into America. They will find nobody in arms. What are they then to do? They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.
The finale came when supporters of the Stamp Act tried to dismiss the distinction between external and internal taxes. If the colonies successfully opposed an internal tax, might they later start opposing tariffs and other external taxes?
“They never have hitherto,” replied Franklin. “Many arguments have lately been used here to show them that there is no difference . . . At present they do not reason so. But in time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments.”
It was a dramatic ending, and a foreboding one. In making a distinction between internal taxes and external tariffs, Franklin was again taking a stance more moderate and pragmatic than some emerging American leaders, including most members of the Massachusetts Assembly, who rankled at the prospect of heavy import duties levied by London. But the Boston Tea Party was still almost eight years in the future. On both sides of the Atlantic, there was great rejoicing when Parliament promptly repealed the Stamp Act, even though it laid the ground for future conflict by adding a Declaratory Act stating that Parliament had the right “in all cases whatsoever” to enact laws for the colonies.18
Franklin had displayed, with steely words cloaked in velvet, both reason and resolve. For a generally reluctant public speaker, it was the longest sustained oratorical performance of his life. He made his case less through eloquence than through a persuasive persistence in focusing the debate on the realities that existed in America. Even one of his diehard opponents told him afterward, Franklin recorded, “that he liked me from that day for the spirit I showed in defense of my country.” Famed in Britain as a writer and scientist, he was now widely recognized as America’s most effective spokesman. He also became, in effect, the ambassador for America in general; besides representing Pennsylvania, he was soon named the agent for Georgia, and then New Jersey and Massachusetts.
In Philadelphia, his reputation was fully restored. His friend William Strahan helped assure that by sending a transcript of the testimony back to David Hall for publication there. “To this examination,” Strahan wrote, “more than to anything else, you are indebted to the speedy and total repeal of this odious law.” Salutes were fired from a barge christened The Franklin, and at the taverns there were free drinks and presents to all those who arrived with news of the triumph from England. “Your enemies at last began to be ashamed of their base insinuations and to acknowledge that the colonies are under obligation to you,” Charles Thomson wrote.19
The battle served to remind Franklin about the virtues of the wife he had left back home, or at least to feel guiltier about his neglect of her. Deborah’s frugality and self-reliance were symbols of America’s ability to sacrifice rather than submit to an unfair tax. Now that it was repealed, Franklin rewarded her with a shipment of gifts: fourteen yards of Pompadour satin (he noted that it “cost eleven shillings a yard”), two dozen gloves, a silk negligee and petticoat for Sally, a Turkish rug, cheeses, a corkscrew, and some tablecloths and curtains, which he politely informed her had been selected by Mrs. Stevenson. In the letter accompanying the gifts, he wrote:
My Dear Child,
As the Stamp Act is at length repealed, I am willing you should have a new gown, which you may suppose I did not send sooner as I knew you would not like to be finer than your neighbors, unless in a gown of your own spinning. Had the trade between the two countries totally ceased, it was a comfort to me to recollect that I had once been clothed from head to foot in woolen and linen of my wife’s manufacture, that I was never prouder of any dress in my life, and that she and her daughter might do it again if necessary.
Perhaps, he jovially noted, some of the cheese would be left for him to enjoy by the time he got home. But even though he had turned 60 during the repeal battle and his work in England seemed done, Franklin was not ready to return. Instead, he made plans to spend the summer of 1766 visiting Germany with his friend the physician Sir John Pringle.20
Deborah’s letters to her husband, awkward though they were, convey both her strength and her loneliness: “I partake of none of the diversions. I stay at home and flatter myself that the next packet will bring me a letter from you.” She coped with his absence and the political tensions by cleaning the house, she said, and she tried hard (perhaps on his instructions) not to bother him with her worries about political matters. “I have wrote several letters to you one almost every day but then I could not forbear saying something to you about public affairs then I would destroy it and then begin again and burn it again and so on.” Describing their newly completed house, she reported that she had not yet hung his pictures because she feared driving nails into the wall without his approval. “There is great odds between a man’s being at home and abroad as everybody is afraid that they shall do wrong so every thing is left undone.”
His letters, in return, were generally businesslike, focusing mainly on the details of the house. “I could have wished to have been present at the finishing of the kitchen,” he wrote. “I think you will scarce know how to work it, the several contrivances to carry off steam and smell and smoke not being fully explained to you.” He issued detailed instructions for how to paint each room and occasionally made tantalizing references to his eventual homecoming: “If that iron [furnace] is not set, let it alone till my return, when I shall bring a more convenient copper one.”21
At the end of 1766, his printing partnership with David Hall expired after eighteen years. The end came with a bit of acrimony. Hall had become less ardent about using the pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette to attack the Proprietors, and two of Franklin’s friends helped fund a new printer and paper to take up the cause. Hall considered this a breach of the spirit of their partnership agreement, even though it had expired. “Though you are not absolutely prohibited from being any farther concerned in the printing business in this place, yet so much is plainly implied,” he wrote plaintively.
Franklin replied from London that the new rival print shop had been “set on foot without my knowledge or participation, and the first notice I had of it was by reading the advertisement in your paper.” He professed his deep affection for Hall and said he had no disagreements with his politics or editorial policies, even if some of his political allies felt otherwise. “I never thought you of any party, and as you never blamed me for the side I took in public affairs, so I never censured you for not taking the same, believing as I do that every man has and ought to enjoy a perfect liberty of judging for himself in such matters.”
Still, he felt compelled to add that their original agreement did not in fact prevent him from competing now that it had expired: “I could not possibly foresee 18 years beforehand that I should at the end of that term be so rich as to live without business.” Then he added a veiled threat, wrapped in a promise, by saying that he had been offered a chance to become a partner in the rival business but would refrain from doing so as long as Hall provided some more of what Franklin thought he was owed. “I hope I shall have no occasion to do it,” he said of the possibility that he would join with Hall’s rival. “I know there must be a very great sum due to me from our customers, and I hope much more of it will be recovered by you for me than you apprehend.” If so, Franklin promised, that money along with his other income would allow him to stay retired. “My circumstances will be sufficiently affluent, especially as I am not inclined to much expense. In this case I have no purpose of being again concerned in printing.”22
The expiration of the partnership meant that Franklin would lose about £650 in income a year, which stoked his sense of economy. His life in London was a middle-class mix of frugality and indulgence. Although he did not entertain or live in the grand style that might be expected of someone of his stature, he liked to travel, and his accounts show that he ordered top-quality beer for his home at 30 shillings a barrel (a sharp contrast to his first stay in London, when he preached the virtues of bread and water over beer). His efforts at economy were mainly directed at his wife. In June of 1767 he wrote her:
A great source of our income is cut off, and if I should lose the post office, which . . . is far from being unlikely, we should be reduced to our rents and interests of money for a subsistence, which will by no means afford the chargeable housekeepings and entertainments we have been used to. For my own part I live here as frugally as possible not to be destitute of the comforts of life, making no dinners for anybody and contenting myself with a single dish when I dine at home; and yet such is the dearness of living here that my expenses amaze me. I see too by the sums you have received in my absence that yours are very great, and I am very sensible that your situation naturally brings you a great many visitors, which occasion an expense not easily to be avoided . . . But when people’s incomes are lessened, if they cannot proportionally lessen their outgoings they must come to poverty.23
What made the letter particularly cold was that it was written in response to the news that their daughter had fallen in love and hoped for his approval to marry. Sally had grown into a distinguished fixture in Philadelphia society, attending all the balls and even riding in the carriage of Franklin’s adversary Governor Penn. But she fell in love with a man who seemed to be of questionable character and financial security.
Richard Bache, the suitor in question, had emigrated from England to work as an importer and marine insurance broker with his brother in New York, and then he headed to Philadelphia to open a dry goods store on Chestnut Street. Charming to women but hapless in business, Bache had been engaged to Sally’s best friend, Margaret Ross. When Margaret became fatally ill, she made a deathbed request for Sally to take care of Bache for her, and Sally was quite willing to oblige.24
For Deborah, deciding what to do in her husband’s absence was an overwhelming responsibility. “I am obliged to be father and mother,” she wrote Franklin, with a tinge of accusation. “I hope I act to your satisfaction, I do so according to my best judgment.”
Surely, this should have precipitated Franklin’s return. He remained, however, distant from his family. The only time he had hastened home to Philadelphia was when his son was planning to marry—in London. “As I am in doubt whether I shall be able to return this summer,” he wrote Deborah, “I would not occasion a delay in her happiness if you thought the match a proper one.” Permitting himself to be indulgent from afar, he sent Sally two summer hats with the letter.
A few weeks later, he sent his long sermon about saving money. “Do not make an expensive feasting wedding,” he wrote Deborah, “but conduct everything with frugality and economy, which our circumstances really now require.” She should make clear to Bache, he added, that they would provide a nice but not excessive dowry:
I hope his expectations are not great of any fortune to be had with our daughter before our death. I can only say that if he proves a good husband to her, and a good son to me, he shall find me as good a father as I can be. But at present I suppose you would agree with me that we cannot do more than fit her out handsomely in clothes and furniture not exceeding in the whole five hundred pounds of value.25
Then came more disturbing news. At Franklin’s request, William checked into Bache’s financial situation and discovered it was in shambles. Worse yet, he learned that Margaret Ross’s father had previously found the same thing and denied them permission to marry. “Mr. Bache had often attempted to deceive him [Ross] about his circumstances,” William reported. “In short, he is a mere fortune hunter who wants to better his circumstances by marrying into a family that will support him.” He ended the letter with a request: “Do burn this.” Franklin didn’t.
So the marriage was put on hold, and Bache tried to explain himself to Franklin in a letter. It was true, he admitted, that he had suffered a severe financial reversal, but he claimed it was not his fault. He had unfairly been left holding the bills for a merchant ship that suffered in the Stamp Act boycott.26
“I love my daughter perhaps as well as ever a parent did a child,” Franklin replied with perhaps some exaggeration. “But I have told you before that my estate is small, scarce a sufficiency for the support of me and my wife . . . Unless you can convince her friends of the probability of your being able to maintain her properly, I hope you will not persist in a proceeding that may be attended with ruinous consequences to you both.” Franklin wrote Deborah the same day to say that he assumed Bache would now back off. “The misfortune that has lately happened to his affairs,” said Franklin, “will probably induce him to forbear entering hastily” into a marriage. He suggested that Sally might, instead, want to visit England, where she could meet other men, such as William Strahan’s son.27
Though Franklin’s sentiments were clear, his letters did not outright forbid his daughter from getting married. Perhaps he felt that, because he was unwilling to come home to deal with the matter, he had neither the moral right nor practical ability to issue any decrees. Detached from his family by distance, he also remained rather emotionally detached.
Further complicating the odd family dynamics, Mrs. Stevenson decided to weigh in. Having lived with Franklin, she felt herself to be Deborah’s soul mate, and she wrote to share her sympathy. Franklin, she reported, was in a foul humor. Stung by his temper, she consoled herself by buying some silk and making a petticoat for his daughter, even though she had never met her. Indeed, she confided, she was so excited by the possible wedding that she had wanted to buy even more gifts, but Franklin had forbidden it. She longed for the opportunity to sit down and chat, she told Deborah. “I truly think your expectations of seeing Mr. Franklin from time to time has been too much for a tender affectionate wife to bear.”28
Ignoring the family drama back in Philadelphia, Franklin escaped in August 1767 for a summer vacation to France. “I have stayed too long in London this summer, and now sensibly feel the want of my usual journey to preserve my health,” he wrote Deborah. His mood was so sour that, on the way, he “engaged in perpetual disputes with the innkeepers,” he told Polly. He and his traveling companion, John Pringle, were upset that their carriage was rigged in such a way that they had little view of the countryside. The coachman’s explanation of the rationale, Franklin groused, “made me, as upon a hundred other occasions, almost wish that mankind had never been endowed with a reasoning faculty, since they know so little how to make use of it.”
When they got to Paris, however, things improved. He was intrigued by how the ladies there applied their rouge, which he chose to share in great detail in a letter to Polly rather than to his own daughter. “Cut a hole of three inches in diameter in a piece of paper, place it on the side of your face in such a manner as that the top of the hole may be just under your eye; then with a brush dipped in the color paint face and paper together, so when the paper is taken off there will remain a round patch of red.”29
Franklin was feted as a celebrity in France, where electrical experimenters were known as franklinistes, and he and Pringle were invited to Versailles to attend a grand couvert (public supper) with King Louis XV and Queen Marie. “He spoke to both of us very graciously and cheerfully,” Franklin reported to Polly. Despite his travails with England’s ministers, however, he stressed he was still loyal “in thinking my own King and Queen the very best in the world and the most amiable.”
Versailles was magnificent but negligently maintained, he noted, “with its shabby half brick walls and broken windows.” Paris, on the other hand, had some pristine qualities that appealed to his affection for civic improvement schemes. The streets were swept daily so they were “fit to walk in,” unlike those of London, and the water was made “as pure as that of the best spring by filtering it through cisterns filled with sand.” While his daughter was preparing for a wedding without him, Franklin was getting new tailored clothes and “a little bag wig” that made him look “twenty years younger,” he told Polly. The trip had done so much to invigorate his health, he joked, that “I was once very near to making love to my friend’s wife.”30
On his return from France, Franklin promptly wrote charming letters to Polly and others, but only a short note home. He seemed miffed that the letters from Philadelphia carried little news of his daughter, other than that she was “disappointed” that her marriage plans were put in limbo. He assured Deborah that he had been “extremely hearty and well ever since my return,” and then deigned to inquire about his daughter’s welfare.
By that time, though he did not know it, Sally and Richard had already gone ahead and gotten married. In October 1767, as recorded in the Pennsylvania Chronicle (the new rival to Franklin’s old Gazette), “Mr. Richard Bache, of this city, merchant, was married to Miss Sally Franklin, the only daughter of the celebrated Doctor Franklin, a young lady of distinguished merit. The next day all the shipping in the harbor displayed their colors on this happy occasion.”31
There is no sign that Franklin ever expressed regret for missing the wedding of his only daughter. In December, his sister Jane Mecom wrote to offer congratulations on the “marriage of your beloved daughter to a worthy gentleman whom she loves and is the only one that can make her happy.” Franklin replied the following February in a cool manner: “She has pleased herself and her mother, and I hope she will do well; but I think they should have seen some better prospect than they have, before they married, how the family was to be maintained.”32
In his occasional letters over the next few months, Franklin would send his love to Deborah and Sally, but he never made any overtures to Bache. Finally, in August 1768, Franklin wrote Bache admitting him into the family. “Loving son,” he began promisingly, before turning a bit cool. “I thought the step you had taken, to engage yourself in the charge of a family while your affairs bore so unpromising an aspect with regard to the probable means of maintaining it, a very rash and precipitate one.” This was why, Franklin explained, he had not answered Bache’s earlier letters. “I could say nothing agreeable: I did not choose to write what I thought, being unwilling to give pain where I could not give pleasure.” But at the end of the one-paragraph letter, Franklin softened somewhat. “Time has made me easier,” he said. “My best wishes attend you, and that if you prove a good husband and son, you will find me an affectionate father.” In a one-sentence postscript, he gave his love to Sally and noted that he was sending her a new watch.
Deborah was thrilled. In a note she sent when forwarding Franklin’s letter to Bache, who was visiting Boston, she wrote, “Mr. Bache (or my son Bache), I give you joy: although there are no fine speeches as some would make, your father (or so I will call him) and you, I hope, will have many happy days together.”33
Deborah got even better news from Franklin at the beginning of 1769. His health was very good, he wrote, but “I know that according to the course of nature I cannot at most continue much longer.” He had just turned 63. Therefore, he was “indulging myself in no future prospect except one, that of returning to Philadelphia, there to spend the evening of my life with my friends and family.” Sally and her husband came back from Boston hoping to find Franklin there. But he was still not ready, despite what he had written, to return.
Nor did he return that spring when he learned that Deborah had suffered a small stroke. “These are bad symptoms in advanced life and augur danger,” her doctor wrote to Franklin. He consulted his traveling companion, John Pringle, who was physician to the queen, and forwarded his advice to Deborah. For once expressing slight impatience with her wayward husband, she disparaged the advice and said that her condition was largely caused by “dissatisfied distress” brought on by his prolonged absence: “I was only unable to bear any more and so I fell and could not get up again.”
Even good news could not yet entice him back to Philadelphia. When he heard that Sally was pregnant that summer, he conveyed his affection by sending a little luxury: six caudle cups, which were used by pregnant women to share a brew of wine, bread, and spice. Sally missed no opportunity for seeking his affection. The child, born in August 1769, was named Benjamin Franklin Bache. Franklin would turn out to be closer to his grandchildren than his children; Benny Bache, like his cousin Temple, would eventually become part of his retinue. In the meantime, he sent his best wishes and instructions to make sure that Benny was inoculated for smallpox.34
In his family life, as in the rest of his personal life, Franklin clearly did not look for deep commitments. He did, however, have a need for domestic comfort and intellectual stimulation. That is what he found with his surrogate family in London. On Craven Street there was a cleverness and spirit that was absent on Market Street. His landlady, Mrs. Stevenson, was livelier than Deborah, her daughter, Polly, a bit smarter than Sally. And in September 1769, just after Franklin returned from France, Polly found a suitor who was more distinguished than Bache.
William Hewson was a good catch for Polly, who by then was 30 and still unmarried. He was on the verge of what would be a prominent career as a medical researcher and lecturer. “He must be clever because he thinks as we do,” Polly gushed in a letter from the country home where she was staying. “I should not have you or my mother surprised if I should run off with this young man; to be sure it would be an imprudent step at the discreet age of 30.”
Amid these half-jokes, Polly played coy with Franklin by confessing (or feigning) her lack of enthusiasm for marrying Hewson. “He may be too young,” she told her older admirer. She was filled with happiness, she added, but she couldn’t be sure whether “this flight might be owing to this new acquaintance or to the joy of hearing my old one [meaning Franklin, who had been in Paris] is returned to this country.”
Franklin’s reply, written the very next day, contained more flirtations than felicitations. “If the truth were known, I have reason to be jealous of this insinuating handsome young physician.” He would flatter his vanity, he said, and “turn a deaf ear to reason” by deciding “to suppose you were in spirits because of my safe return.”
For almost a year, Polly held off getting married because Franklin refused to advise her to accept Hewson’s proposal. Finally, in May 1770, Franklin wrote that he had no objections. It was hardly an overwhelming endorsement. “I am sure you are a much better judge in this affair of your own than I can possibly be,” he said, adding that the match appeared “a rational one.” As for her worry that she would not bring much of a financial dowry, Franklin could not resist noting that “I should think you a fortune sufficient for me without a shilling.”35
Although he had missed the weddings of both his own children, this was one Franklin made sure not to miss. Even though it was held in midsummer, when he usually traveled abroad, he was there to walk Polly down the aisle and play the role of her father. A few weeks later, he professed to be pleased that she was happy, but he confessed that he was “now and then in low spirits” at the prospect of having lost her friendship. Fortunately for all, it was not to be. He became close to the new couple, and he and Polly would exchange more than 130 more letters during their lifelong friendship.
Indeed, a few months after their wedding, Polly and William Hewson came to stay with Franklin while Mrs. Stevenson spent one of her long weekends visiting friends in the country. Together they published a fake newspaper to mark the occasion. The Craven Street Gazette for Saturday, September 22, 1770, reported on the departure of “Queen Margaret” and Franklin’s ensuing grumpiness. “The GREAT person (so called from his enormous size) . . . could hardly be comforted this morning, though the new ministry promised him roasted shoulder of mutton and potatoes for his dinner.” Franklin, it was reported, was also miffed that Queen Margaret had taken the keys to a closet so that he could not find his ruffled shirts, which prevented him from going to St. James’s Palace for Coronation Day. “Great clamors were made on this occasion against her Majesty . . . The shirts were afterwards found, tho’ too late, in another place.”
For four days, the newspaper poked fun at various Franklin foibles: how he violated his sermons about saving fuel by making a fire in his bedroom when everyone else was out, how he vowed to fix the front door but gave up because he was unable to decide whether it required buying a new lock or a new key, and how he pledged to go to church on Sunday. “It is now found by sad experience that good resolutions are easier made than executed,” Sunday’s edition reported. “Notwithstanding yesterday’s solemn Order of Council, nobody went to church today. It seems the GREAT person’s broad-built bulk lay so long abed that breakfast was not over until it was too late.” The moral of the tale could have been written by Poor Richard: “It seems a vain thing to hope reformation from the example of our great folks.”
One particularly intriguing entry seems to refer to a woman living nearby with whom Franklin had an unrequited flirtation. That Sunday, Franklin pretended to visit her: “Dr. Fatsides made 469 turns in his dining room, as the exact distance of a visit to the lovely Lady Bar-well, whom he did not find at home, so there was no struggle for and against a kiss, and he sat down to dream in his easy chair that he had it without any trouble.” By the third day of Mrs. Stevenson’s absence, the Gazette was reporting that Dr. Fatsides “begins to wish for her Majesty’s return.”
That final edition contained one of Franklin’s inimitable letters to the editor, signed with the pseudonym “Indignation,” decrying the food and conditions. Referring to Polly and her husband, it railed: “If these nefarious wretches continue in power another week, the nation will be ruined—undone!—totally undone if the Queen does not return; or (which is better) turn them all out and appoint me and my friends to succeed them.” It was answered by “A Hater of Scandal,” who wrote that the surly Franklin had been offered a wonderful dinner of beef ribs and had rejected it, saying “that beef does not with him perspire well, but makes his back itch, to his no small vexation now that he hath lost the little Chinese ivory hand at the end of the stick, commonly called a scratchback, presented to him by Her Majesty.”36
Franklin was able to indulge on Craven Street the many eccentricities he had developed. One of these was taking hour-long “air baths” early each morning, during which he would open his windows and “sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever.” Another was engaging in little flirtations. The famous painter Charles Willson Peale recounted how he once visited Craven Street unannounced and found “the Doctor was seated with a young lady on his knee.” The lady in question was probably Polly, though the sketch Peale later made of the scene is ambiguous.37
Eventually, Polly and William Hewson moved into Craven Street and brought with them Hewson’s skeletons, “prepared fetuses,” and other tools for his medical research. Later, Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson moved a few doors away. Their odd relationship was reflected in a crotchety letter Franklin wrote her during one of her regular escapes to visit friends in the country. Reminding her of Poor Richard’s adage that guests become tiresome after three days, he urged her to return on the next stagecoach. But lest she think he was too dependent on her, he spelled out his contentment at being alone. “I find such a satisfaction in being a little more my own master, going anywhere and doing anything just when and how I please,” he claimed. “This happiness however is perhaps too great to be conferred on any but Saints and holy hermits. Sinners like me, I might have said us, are condemned to live together and tease one another.”38
In his dramatic testimony arguing for repeal of the Stamp Act, Franklin made a serious misjudgment: he said that Americans recognized Parliament’s right to impose external taxes, such as tariffs and export duties, just not internal taxes that were collected on transactions inside the country. He repeated the argument in April 1767, writing as “A Friend to Both Countries” and then as “Benevolus” in a London paper. In an effort to soothe troubled relations, he recounted all the times that Americans had been very accommodating in helping to raise money for the defense of the empire. “The colonies submit to pay all external taxes laid upon them by way of duty on merchandise imported into their country and never disputed the authority of Parliament to lay such duties,” he wrote.39
Charles Townshend, the new chancellor of the exchequer, had been among those who grilled Franklin in Parliament about his acceptance of external but not internal taxes. The distinction was complete “nonsense,” Townshend felt, but he decided to pretend to please the colonies—or call their bluff—by adopting it. In a brilliant speech that earned him the nickname “Champagne Charlie” because it was delivered while he was half-drunk, he laid out a plan for import duties on glass, paper, china, paint colors, and tea. Making matters worse, part of the money raised would be used to pay royal governors, thus freeing them from dependence on colonial legislatures.
Once again, as with the passage of the Stamp Act, Franklin expressed little concern when the Townshend duties passed in June 1767, and he did not realize how far he lagged behind the growing radicalism in parts of the colonies. Outrage at the new duties grew particularly strong in the port city of Boston, where the Sons of Liberty, led by Samuel Adams, effectively roused sentiments with dances around a “Liberty Tree” near the common. Adams got the Massachusetts Assembly to draft a circular letter to the rest of the colonies that petitioned for repeal of the act. The British ministry demanded that the letter be rescinded and sent troops to Boston after the Assembly refused.
When reports of American anger reached him in London, Franklin remained rather moderate and wrote a series of essays calling for “civility and good manners” on both sides. To friends in Philadelphia, he expressed his disapproval of the radicalism growing in Boston; in articles published in England, he tried hard—indeed, too hard—to pull off an adroit feat of ambidexterity.
His juggling act was reflected in a long, anonymous essay he wrote in January 1768 for the London Chronicle, called “Causes of the American Discontents.” Written from the perspective of an Englishman, it explained the Americans’ belief that their own legislatures should control all revenue measures, and it added in a squirrelly manner, “I do not undertake here to support these opinions.” His goal, he averred, was to let people “know what ideas the Americans have.” In doing so, Franklin tried to have it both ways: he warned that America’s fury at being taxed by Parliament could tear apart the empire, then pretended to lament these “wild ravings” as something “I do not pretend to support.”40
His reaction was similar when he read a set of anonymous articles, published in Philadelphia, called “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.” At the time, Franklin did not know that they were written by John Dickinson, his adversary in Philadelphia’s battles over the Proprietors. Dickinson’s letters conceded that Parliament had a right to regulate trade, but he argued that it could not use that right to raise revenues from the colonies without their consent. Franklin arranged to have the letters published as a pamphlet in London in May 1768 and wrote an introduction. But he refrained from fully endorsing their arguments. “How far these sentiments are right or wrong I do not pretend at present to judge.”
By then, Franklin had begun to realize that his distinction between external and internal taxes was probably unworkable. “The more I have thought and read on the subject,” he wrote William in March, “the more I find myself confirmed in my opinion that no middle doctrine can be well maintained.” There were only two alternatives: “that Parliament has a power to make all laws for us, or that it has the power to make no laws for us.” He was beginning to lean toward the latter, but he admitted that he was unsure.41
Franklin’s inelegant dance around the issue of parliamentary power during the first half of 1768 caused his contemporaries (as well as subsequent historians) to come to different conclusions about what he really believed or what games he was playing. In fact, there were many factors jangling in his mind: he sincerely hoped that moderation and reason would lead to a restoration of harmony between Britain and the colonies; he wanted to make one last attempt to wrest Pennsylvania from the Proprietors; and he was still pursuing land deals that required the favor of the British government. Above all, as he admitted in some letters, his views were in flux and he was still trying to make up his mind.
There was one other complicating factor. His desire to help resolve the disputes, combined with his ambition, led him to hope that he might be appointed an official in the British ministry overseeing colonial affairs. Lord Hillsborough had just been named secretary of state of that ministry, and Franklin thought (incorrectly) that he might turn out to be friendly to the colonies. “I do not think this nobleman in general an enemy to America,” he wrote a friend in January. In a letter to his son, Franklin admitted the more personal ambition. “I am told there is talk of getting me appointed undersecretary to Lord Hillsborough,” he said. His chances, he admitted, were slim: “It is a settled point here that I am too much of an American.”
That was the crux of Franklin’s dilemma. He had rendered himself suspect, he noted in a letter to a friend, “in England of being too much of an American, and in America of being too much of an Englishman.” With his dreams for a harmonious and growing British Empire, he still hoped that he could be both. “Being born and bred in one of the countries and having lived long and made many agreeable connections in the other, I wish all prosperity to both,” he proclaimed. Thus, he was intrigued, even hopeful, about securing a government job in which he could try to hold the two parts of the empire together.42
When Hillsborough consolidated his power by becoming the head of the board of trade as well as colonial secretary, Franklin won support from other British ministers who felt that giving him a government post would provide some balance. Most notable was Lord North, who had become chancellor of the exchequer after Townshend’s death. Franklin met with him in June and professed to have plans to return to America. He added, however, that “I should stay with pleasure if I could any ways be useful to government.” North took the hint, and he began trying to line up backing for his appointment.
It was not to be. Franklin’s hope of joining the British government ended abruptly when he had a long and contentious meeting with Lord Hillsborough in August 1768. Hillsborough declared that he had no intention of appointing Franklin and would instead choose as his deputy John Pownall, a loyal bureaucrat. Franklin was dismayed. Pownall “seems to have a strong bias against us,” he wrote Joseph Galloway, his ally in the Pennsylvania Assembly. Adding injury to insult, Hillsborough also rejected once and for all any further consideration of the petition to remove Pennsylvania from Proprietary rule. With two of his main goals dashed, Franklin was ready to abandon his moderation in the colonies’ battles with Parliament. The turning point had been reached.43
With the situation clarified in his own mind, Franklin took up his pen to wage an essay war against Hillsborough and the Townshend duties. Most of his articles were anonymous, but this time he did little to disguise his authorship. He even signed one of them, with clear frankness, “Francis Lynn.” Relations between Britain and America had been amicable, he argued, “until the idea of taxing us by the power of Parliament unfortunately entered the heads of your ministers.” He claimed that the colonies had no desire to rebel against the king, but misguided ministers were likely “to convert millions of the King’s loyal subjects into rebels for the sake of establishing a newly-claimed power in Parliament to tax a distant people.” Something must be done. “Is there not one wise and good man to be found in Britain who can propose some conciliating measure that may prevent this mischief?” In another piece, written as if from a concerned Englishman, he proposed seven “queries” to be considered “by those gentlemen who are for vigorous measures with the Americans.” Among them: “Why must they be stripped of their property without their consent?” As for Hillsborough personally, Franklin labeled him “our new Haman.”44
His opponents returned the fire. One article signed by “Machiavel” in the Gazetteer called it a “burlesque on patriotism” that so many Americans were “filling newspapers and consecrating trees to liberty” with lamentations about being taxed while at the same time surreptitiously recommending their friends for appointments and “trying to obtain offices” for themselves. Machiavel provided a list of fifteen such hypocrites, with Franklin the postmaster at the top. Franklin responded (anonymously) that the Americans were attacking Parliament, not the king. “Being loyal subjects to their sovereign, the Americans think they have as good a right to enjoy offices under him in America as a Scotchman has in Scotland or an Englishman in England.”
Throughout 1769, Franklin became increasingly worried that the situation would lead to a rupture. America could not be subjugated by British troops, he argued, and it soon would be strong enough to win its own independence. If that happened, Britain would be sorry that it missed the opportunity to create a system of imperial harmony. To make his point, he published a parable in January 1770 about a young lion cub and a large English dog traveling together on a ship. The dog picked on the lion cub and “frequently took its food by force.” But the lion grew and eventually became stronger than the dog. One day, in response to all the insults, it smashed the dog with “a stunning blow,” leaving the dog “regretting that he had not rather secured its friendship than provoked its enmity.” The parable was “humbly inscribed” to Lord Hillsborough.45
Many in Parliament were seeking a compromise. One proposal was to remove most of the Townshend duties, leaving only the one on tea as a way to assert the principle that Parliament retained the right to regulate trade and tariffs. It was the type of pragmatic solution that in earlier days would have appealed to Franklin. But he was now in no mood for moderation. “It is not the sum paid in that duty on tea that is complained of as a burden, but the principle of the act,” he wrote Strahan. A partial repeal “may inflame matters still more” and lead to “some mad action” and an escalation that “will thus go on to complete the separation.”46
Separatist sentiments were, in fact, already being inflamed, especially in Boston. On March 5, 1770, a young apprentice insulted one of the redcoats sent to enforce the Townshend duties, a fight broke out, bells rang, and a swarm of armed and angry Bostonians came out in force. “Fire and be damned,” the crowd taunted. The British soldiers did. Five Americans ended up dead in what soon became known as the Boston Massacre.
Parliament went ahead with the partial repeal of the Townshend duties that month, leaving a duty on tea. In a letter to his Philadelphia friend Charles Thomson, which was promptly published throughout the colonies, Franklin urged a continued boycott of all British manufactured goods. America, he argued, must be “steady and persevere in our resolutions.”
Franklin had finally caught up with the more ardent patriotism spreading through the colonies, most notably Massachusetts. Writing to Samuel Cooper, a Boston minister, he declared that Parliament had no authority to tax the colonies or order British troops there: “In truth they have no such right, and their claim is founded only on usurpation.”
Still, like many Americans, he was not yet willing to advocate a total break with Britain. The solution, he felt, was a new arrangement in which the colonial assemblies would remain loyal to the king but no longer be subservient to Britain’s Parliament. As he told Cooper, “Let us therefore hold fast our loyalty to our King (who has the best disposition toward us, and has a family interest in our prosperity) as that steady loyalty is the most probable means of securing us from the arbitrary power of a corrupt Parliament that does not like us and conceives itself to have an interest in keeping us down and fleecing us.” It was an elegant formula for commonwealth governance. Alas, it was based on the unproven assumption that the king would be more sympathetic to colonial rights than was Parliament.47
Franklin’s letter to Cooper, widely published, helped to secure him an appointment by the Massachusetts lower house to be its agent in London as well. In January 1771, he paid a call on Lord Hillsborough to present those new credentials. Although the minister was dressing for court, he cheerfully had Franklin admitted to his chambers. But when Franklin mentioned his new appointment, Hillsborough sneered. “I must set you right there, Mr. Franklin. You are not agent.”
“I do not understand your lordship,” replied Franklin. “I have the appointment in my pocket.”
Hillsborough maintained that Massachusetts governor Hutchinson had vetoed the bill appointing Franklin.
“There was no such bill,” said Franklin. “It is a vote of the House.”
“The House of Representatives has no right to appoint an agent,” Hillsborough angrily retorted. “We shall take no notice of agents but such as are appointed by Acts of Assembly to which the governor gives his assent.”
Hillsborough’s argument was clearly specious. Franklin had, of course, been appointed as the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly without the consent of the Penn family’s governors there. The minister was trying to eliminate the right of the people to choose their own agents in London, and Franklin was appalled. “I cannot conceive, my lord, why the consent of the governor should be thought necessary to the appointment of an agent for the people.”
The discussion went downhill from there. Hillsborough, turning pale, launched into a tirade about how his “firmness” was necessary to bring order to the rebellious colonials. To which Franklin added a personal insult: “It is, I believe, of no great importance whether the appointment is acknowledged or not, for I have not the least conception that an agent at present can be of any use to any of the colonies. I shall therefore give your lordship no farther trouble.” At that point, Franklin abruptly departed and went home to write down a transcript of the discussion.48
Hillsborough “took great offense at some of my last words, which he calls extremely rude and abusive,” Franklin reported to Samuel Cooper in Boston. “I find that he did not mistake me.”
Initially, Franklin pretended to be unconcerned about Hillsborough’s enmity. “He is not a whit better liked by his colleagues in the ministry than he is by me,” Franklin claimed in his letter to Cooper. In another letter, he described Hillsborough as “proud, supercilious, extremely conceited of his political knowledge and abilities (such as they are), fond of everyone that can stoop to flatter him, and inimical to all that dare tell him disagreeable truths.” The only reason he remained in power, Franklin surmised, was that the other ministers had “difficulty of knowing how to dispose of or what to do with a man of his wrong-headed bustling energy.”
Nevertheless, it soon became clear that the showdown with Hillsborough depressed Franklin. His friend Strahan noticed that he had become “very reserved, which adds greatly to his natural inactivity and there is no getting him to take part in anything.” It also made him far more pessimistic about the eventual outcome of America’s growing tensions with Britain. One could see in Parliament’s actions “the seeds sown of a total disunion of the two countries,” he reported to the Massachusetts Committee on Correspondence, which brought out the more radical side of him. “The bloody struggle will end in absolute slavery to America, or ruin to Britain by the loss of her colonies.”49
Despite such pessimistic feelings, Franklin still hoped for a reconciliation. He urged the Massachusetts Assembly to avoid passing an “open denial and resistance” to Parliament’s authority and instead adopt a strategy designed “gradually to wear off the assumed authority of Parliament over America.” He even went so far as to advise Cooper that it might “be prudent in us to indulge the Mother Country in this concern for her own honor.” And he continued to urge a policy of loyalty to the Crown, if not to Parliament.
This led some of his enemies to accuse him of being too conciliatory. “The Dr. is not the dupe but the instrument of Lord Hillsborough’s treachery,” the ambitious Virginian Arthur Lee wrote to his friend Samuel Adams. Lee went on to accuse Franklin of wanting to cling to his postmastership and keep his son in office. All of this explained, he said, “the temporizing conduct he has always held in American affairs.”
Lee had his own motives: he wanted Franklin’s job as agent in London. But Franklin still had the support of most Massachusetts patriots, including (at least for the time being) Samuel Adams. Adams ignored Lee’s letter, allowed it to leak, and Franklin’s friends in Boston, including Thomas Cushing and Samuel Cooper, assured him of their support. Lee’s attack, Cooper wrote, served to “confirm the opinion of your importance, while it shows the baseness of its author.” But it also highlighted the difficulty that Franklin faced in attempting, as he had during the Stamp Act crisis, to be both a loyal Briton and an American patriot.50