ALTHOUGH SHE NO LONGER had her husband, Deborah at last had her own home in Philadelphia, only a few steps from the spot where she had first spied young Ben Franklin, the scruffy runaway from Boston. The handsome three-story brick house stood in the center of a courtyard set back from Market Street. She and Sally moved into the foursquare dwelling in May 1765, six months after her husband’s departure, and were preparing to paint and decorate the ten rooms that summer according to his instructions.
In the middle of August that year, as if by some prearranged signal, an appalling number of royal officers hired to implement the new Stamp Acts were hanged in effigy from Massachusetts to the Carolinas. In the words of Franklin’s friend John Hughes, who became a victim of it, “a sort of frenzy or madness has got hold of the people of all ranks, that I fancy some lives will be lost before this fire is put out.”
In the printing office a few doors away from the new house, Franklin’s partner, David Hall, was busy gathering dispatches and setting type for the Gazette that Deborah and Sally Franklin would read on September 12 describing the widespread mob violence along the Atlantic seaboard. William Franklin was writing to his father on Saturday, September 7, with similar intelligence.
It began with Andrew Oliver, provincial secretary of Massachusetts and member of the colonial council. On August 14, Oliver was hanged in effigy on the ruins of the building in which he was to conduct his office. The mob had razed it to the ground. A week later in New London at four o’clock in the afternoon, angry colonists hanged an effigy of the tax collector Jared Ingersoll on a gibbet twenty-five feet in the air above the Town Commons. He had a boot fixed upon one of his shoulders and a puppet of the devil grinning out of the boot. After an hour of exhibition he was taken down and carried through the streets, attended by most of the citizens and their screaming children while cannon from the fort boomed their approval. “Between ten and eleven the effigies were consumed [burned] amid the acclamation of the people.” The writer for The Pennsylvania Gazette approved everyone’s manners and reported that “no person suffered the least injury.”
On Monday morning, August 26, the citizens of Annapolis dressed up a dummy holding some sheets of paper in his hands before his face. Everyone agreed the dummy looked like the businessman Zachariah Hood, newly appointed an officer of the Crown. They placed the effigy in a horse-drawn cart and paraded it all around the state house and the cobblestone streets near the harbor until the church bell tolled the noon hour, a “solemn knell.” Then they climbed a hill and hanged the manikin on a gibbet. At last the leaders set fire to a tar barrel underneath and burned the figure until it fell into the barrel. “By the many significant nods of the head, while in the cart,” the reporter noted, the manikin “may be said to have gone off very penitently.”
So far, the readers of the news would have noted, the demonstrations were just “rough music”—terrifying, but not in themselves dangerous. “But as is usual with mobs when they once feel their own power,” William told his father, “they have gone much beyond what was desired by those who first raised them.”
On August 26, local patriots calling themselves the Sons of Liberty led a mob in the attack on William Story, deputy register of the admiralty court, in charge of naval affairs in Boston Harbor. They broke his windows, rushed into the house and office there, burned his books and papers, and broke up his furniture. Pleased with the fire and noise and smoke, the revelers advanced to the house of Ben Hallowell, comptroller of customs for the Port of Boston. There were not only books to burn and furniture to crash but also a cellar of liquor and trunks of fine clothing. When they had burned and looted to their satisfaction, and stolen thirty pounds of sterling kept in the coffer, they wondered where in the town of Boston they might go to find greater plunder.
Warmed to their work by rum and stolen waistcoats, the horde marched on to the beautiful mansion of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, whose daughter begged on her knees not to leave it and had to be dragged away as men were shattering the windowpanes with brick shards and rifle butts. Under a gibbous moon, the mob then “broke all the windows, wainscots, & c., cut down the cupola, and uncovered a great part of the roof, leaving the house a mere shell from top to bottom.” They broke up all the furniture, tore up what clothing they didn’t steal, carried off the jewelry, books, and papers, and drank, confiscated, or destroyed eight barrels and three quarter casks of wine, as well as assorted crates of fine vintages. And so on and on, “riotously assembled all night,” they stole £900 in sterling Hutchinson had laid up, and all his silver plate. Next they had their eyes on the custom house, and some other rich dwelling places, but the men were tired out from their labor, and went their ways to eat and sleep and divide the spoils.
The saddest part of the Hutchinson catastrophe, for him and for posterity, is that he was perhaps the greatest collector of antiquarian books and manuscripts of his generation, and all of these were lost.
In Philadelphia, Franklin’s friend John Hughes was about to become a target of this outrage over the Stamp Act. This new tax passed by Parliament on March 22, 1765, required American colonists to pay a tax on all printed documents, legal and commercial papers, newspapers, even playing cards and dice. The law was to go into effect in November, and John Hughes, along with Oliver, Ingersoll, Hood, and a half dozen other citizens, had been appointed stamp distributors. When Franklin recommended him for the job back in April, he had no idea the tax was going to cause such mayhem, or he would have picked one of his enemies. On September 12, Hughes wrote: “Our clamors run very high, and I am told my house will be pulled down and the stamps burnt. To which I give no answer than that I will defend my house at the risk of my life.”
Deborah Franklin, a few blocks away, was not about to let terrorists near her new house. Her husband came under fire as John Hughes’s patron. William Franklin rode down to Philadelphia the weekend of September 10, after dealing with the resignation of his own terrified tax man, William Coxe. He meant to take Deborah and Sally away with him to the safety of his home in Burlington. Sally went with him, but Deborah refused to budge.
A ship had arrived from Londonderry on September 16 with good news: There had been a change in the ministry. The Duke of Newcastle had replaced the Duke of Marlborough as Privy Seal (an important cabinet office), and the colonists saw this as an occasion for celebration and heavy drinking. They built bonfires in squares, graveyards, and parks and danced around them waving hats and cheering. John Hughes’s home on Fourth Street bordered a cemetery, where he heard the mob talking about roping the chimney and pulling down his house. Hughes thought he might not live to see the sun, and wrote to Franklin by candlelight telling him so, and that he was “well-armed with fire-arms and determined to stand a siege.” They would have to kill him first before wrecking his house and then Franklin’s new mansion around the corner.
For a week William and other relatives and friends in town had begged Deborah to leave the house for shelter elsewhere. But Mrs. Franklin declined. “Cousin Davenport [Josiah] come and told me that more than twenty people had told him it was his duty to be with me. I said I was pleased to receive civility from anybody so he stayed with me…Towards night I said he should fetch a gun or two as we had none.”
As the crowd and their shouting increased, so did the number of men who rallied to guard Mrs. Franklin, including her brother John Read, David Hall, and many neighbors, until there were more than a dozen under her command. “I sent to ask my brother to come and bring his gun also. We made one room into a magazine. I ordered some sort of defense upstairs such as I could manage myself.”
As the raucous volume increased, they pleaded with Deborah Franklin to leave the house. But she stood her ground. She declared she was very sure her husband had done nothing to hurt anyone, nor had she herself given offense to anybody, nor would anybody make her uneasy. “Nor would I stir or show the least uneasiness but if any one came to disturb me I would show a proper resentment,” said the sixty-year-old housewife, armed with a flintlock musket.
By nine o’clock John Hughes reported that several of his friends patrolling the neighborhood between his dwelling and the London Coffee House at the end of Market Street near the river came to tell him “the collection of rabble begins to decrease visibly in the streets and the appearance of danger seems a good deal less than it did.”
This was only the beginning of the turmoil.
DEBORAH’S HUSBAND HAD GONE to England primarily to persuade Parliament to rescue Pennsylvania from the Penns and place the colony under the king’s protection. In this he had become a royalist. He was also supposed to lobby for the repeal of the Stamp Act, but he had considered that matter secondary.
To his alarm, letters from David Hall and others from home informed Franklin that “nothing [was] talked of but the Stamp Act, with which the people are much displeased.” On July 11, Franklin had written, defensively, to Charles Thomson, leader of Philadelphia’s Sons of Liberty, that he had done everything in his power to prevent the passing of the Stamp Act. “Nobody could be more concern’d in interest than myself to oppose it, sincerely and heartily. But the tide was too strong against us. The Nation was provok’d by American claims of independence….We might as well have hinder’d the Suns setting.”
Never was the agent Franklin more wide of the mark than he had been during those mild days of midsummer in London, enjoying a diet so rich it was inflaming his gout. William, in Burlington, had been closer to American reality, although he presided over a peaceable session of his assembly there in the spring, calmly recessed on June 4 when William led the legislators to his mansion for a party. It was King George III’s birthday, and the crowd gathered to drink the king’s health. A brass cannon had been rolled down Pearl Street, and right outside the governor’s door it fired salutes. Then the company went indoors to take refreshment and to view the new full-length portraits of the king and queen in their coronation robes, recently arrived as a present from the Crown to the governor.
Everyone in town had heard about Patrick Henry’s speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses on May 29 denouncing the Stamp Act and taxation proposals of Parliament: “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III…” Patrick Henry’s voice had been submerged in the many cries of Treason! His conclusion, “George III may profit by their example,” was hardly audible in the riot of dissenting voices. The Virginia resolutions declared that the General Assembly alone had power to levy taxes upon a colony. Yet when the New Jersey delegates met in the courthouse at Broad and Main streets that day in June, there was not a word about the Stamp Act. William reported to the Board of Trade in July that his recent session had been “very amicable….The utmost harmony subsists between the several branches of the legislature….All is peace and quietness, & likely to remain so.”
A mere month later, William Coxe resigned in terror as distributor of stamps in New Jersey, while Bostonians gutted Governor Hutchinson’s mansion. In London, Ben Franklin heard of Patrick Henry’s speech and wrote to John Hughes on August 9, “the rashness of the Assembly in Virginia is amazing,” promising he would try to get the Act repealed. Meanwhile Hughes might be unpopular, but “firm loyalty to the crown and faithful adherence to the government” was always the wisest course “whatever may be the madness of the populace.” But Franklin was wrong again. John Hughes would have been better advised to follow Coxe and Oliver, or Augustus Johnson of Rhode Island, who fled to HMS Cygnet after witnessing his form in effigy hanged and burned in the town square. The colonists were protesting not merely because of the financial burden the Stamp Act promised but because it violated their right as Englishmen not to be taxed without consent.
The street protests and bonfires of summer prompted a Stamp Act Congress to be held in New York in the autumn. The Sons of Liberty were ready to use force against tax collectors who refused to resign, so Royal governors without clear direction from Parliament were in a ticklish situation. William Franklin blamed Coxe for resigning, calling it a betrayal, but in the face of so much public furor he was not sure he ought to replace him. What should he do with the stamps when they arrived? He considered sending them to New York, or leaving them on a ship at sea, then decided to guard them in the Burlington barracks.
For the rest of that year William Franklin was caught between his duty to Parliament and the sentiments of the New Jersey assembly members who now wanted to attend the Stamp Act Congress. In June, a calmer time, the Assembly had voted to avoid the congress, and now everyone blamed the governor for the vote not to attend. Emotionally the colonists regarded Parliament the way Pennsylvanians regarded the proprietary government, and it must have been strange for William to find himself the butt of that resentment.
When a group of lawyers met in Perth Amboy in September to consider the legal status of the Stamp Act, they agreed to work for its repeal and not to purchase the stamps when they arrived. As the autumn elections approached, Governor Franklin endured harsh criticism from Philadelphia to Burlington as the New Jersey liberals accused him—son of the man falsely rumored to have invented the Stamp Act—of intercepting invitations to the Congress and making “strong efforts to subdue the spirit of liberty in his government.” Tempers ran so hot that Sally was persuaded, once again, to escape to William’s home in New Jersey for safety.
The violence never spread to New Jersey, largely because of William’s careful management of the crisis. He wanted to keep the peace there as an end in itself, and so that his father might point to this province as a shining example of government under the Crown. On September 24 he met with seven members of the New Jersey council and asked for their advice. They told him time was on his side: He had no stamp distributor, and no instructions from Parliament as to what to do about it; finally, he had no stamps. Calling for troops would merely alarm the citizens and occasion turmoil; by delaying, one could maintain the peace.
Delay was a good idea. Franklin would make the most of this strategy, sometimes declining to convene the Assembly for longer than a year. Despite demands for a convention that would revisit the question of sending delegates to the New York Congress, William did nothing. When the speaker, Robert Ogden, called a rump gathering of thirteen anti–Stamp Act members at Sproul’s Tavern in Perth Amboy, William did not interrupt—although he thought it his duty to dissolve the unconstitutional meeting. As he explained to his superiors, “There was great reason to apprehend that I should thereby have thrown the province into the utmost confusion.”
At the rogue meeting in Sproul’s Tavern, the members had chosen two of their company to attend the Stamp Act Congress on October 7. During that twelve-day session in New York’s City Hall, the twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies framed resolutions petitioning the king and Parliament to repeal the law. The Franklins, father and son, reached the same unhappy conclusion in the same span of five days in mid-November—as if they were of one mind despite Benjamin’s distance from the turmoil. As there was a lag of several months between England and America when it came to events and round-trip responses, it is fascinating to see two letters of the Franklins crossing on ships passing in the North Atlantic in November, letters with identical sentiments concerning the Stamp Act.
“The general execution of the Stamp Act would be impracticable without occasioning more mischief than it was worth, by totally alienating the affections of the Americans from this country, and thereby lessening its commerce,” Benjamin wrote to William on November 9. And William wrote to his father on November 13: “For any man to set himself up as an advocate for the Stamp Act in the colonies is a mere piece of quixotism, and can answer no good purpose whatever. And if he is an officer of government he not only becomes obnoxious, but is sure to lose all the authority belonging to his office.”
In Philadelphia, Franklin’s enemies were using the Stamp Act as a blunt instrument to batter his name and his son’s, linking their so-called colonial agent with the parliamentary forces that sought to profit by this unlawful tax. They said that the Crown had bribed Franklin with promises of a high post in the government and that he had gotten money by recommending Hughes. In the same breath they accused William of curbing protests in New Jersey. Friends tried to defend Benjamin, but the slanderers who began their campaign in the summer found a public eager to think the worst of him. “My father is absent,” William wrote, in a defense published in October 1765, “but he has left friends enough on the spot who are both capable and willing to clear him from any aspersions which the malice of the proprietary party can suggest.” In the heat of the autumn elections, such words scattered in the wind. Ben Franklin came as close to political ruin in America as he ever would in his long life.
While never doubting which side he was on, Franklin made the short-sighted decision to tolerate the Stamp Act until the situation became so dire that he was called upon to attack it. At last he did this in a series of letters to the press in the New Year, and in private conversations with British officials. Commerce had begun to suffer—English merchants, manufacturers, and shippers—from an American boycott of all transactions requiring the hated stamps, instituted by the Stamp Act Congress. In a matter of months the cost had become more than the Empire could bear.
In the second week of February 1766, the House of Commons called for a hearing to consider all problems resulting from the Stamp Act. A number of experts, English and colonial merchants, were interviewed before Franklin was called to testify on Thursday the thirteenth. But his role as agent, his celebrity, and his profound understanding of the colonies made him the star witness. Everyone was waiting to hear what he had to say.
Franklin dazzled the members of Parliament with logic, eloquence, and humor. In all, he answered 174 questions. He knew that most of his questioners were friendly, men who had opposed the act in the first place.
Q. What was the temper of America towards Great Britain before the year 1763?
A. The best in the world. They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid, in all their courts, obedience to 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 only of a little pen, ink, and paper. They were led by a thread. They had not only a respect but an affection for Great Britain…They considered the Parliament as the great bulwark and security of their liberties and privileges, and always spoke of it with the utmost respect and veneration….
Q. And have they not still the same respect for Parliament?
A. No, it is greatly lessened.
Q. To what causes is that owing?
A. The restraints lately laid on their trade by which the bringing of foreign gold and silver into the colonies was prevented; the prohibition of making paper money among themselves, and then demanding a new and heavy tax by stamps….
Strahan reported that some lord had commented “that he never knew truth to make so great a progress in so very short a time.” It was two hours of incomparable theater.
Q. Can anything less than a military force carry the Stamp Act into execution?
A. I do not see how a military force can be applied to that purpose.
Q. Why may it not?
A. Suppose a military force [is] sent to America, they will find nobody in arms; what then are they 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.
Q. If the Act is not repealed, what do you think will be the consequences?
A. The total loss of the respect and affection the people of America bear to this country, and of all the commerce that depends on that respect and affection.
When the Stamp Act was repealed eight days later, on February 22, Strahan wrote to David Hall, who published the dialogue, “To this very examination more than anything else, you are indebted to the speedy and total repeal of this odious law.”
Benjamin Franklin went from being a scapegoat to a hero in a matter of weeks. William did not do as well in New Jersey. He had yielded to public pressure for a special meeting to discuss the Stamp Act in November; then, once the official session convened in Burlington, he had little to do with it. On the last day he did rebuke the members for their “late unprecedented, irregular and unconstitutional meeting at Perth Amboy.” His criticism of the offending members was rigorous, yet it was meant more for the record, to show his superiors he was upholding the law, rather than to take charge of a situation that had spun out of control. Privately, William blamed his troubles not on the people of New Jersey but on Parliament. They had failed to foresee the furor the Stamp Act would cause, and then had given him no guidance through the storm that followed.
Still, he had survived the Stamp Act crisis with his dignity and his property unspoiled. No other colonial governor had handled the matter so skillfully.
WHAT PARLIAMENT GAVE WITH one hand it took away with the other. The Stamp Act was gone, but in its place a month later the Declaratory Act confirmed Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies. In addition, the so-called Mutiny Act had been on the books for a year, demanding that every colony furnish quarters for the British troops, bedding and pots and pans, candles and firewood, beer and rum. And then there was the renewed Currency Act, which made money so scarce that obeying the Mutiny Act was infeasible. In these infringements glowed the embers of rancor that the Sons of Liberty would soon blow into a bonfire.
But for a while at least—until the bad news arrived on the heels of the good—there was peace in William’s colony. He began building a three-story townhouse of brick, with broad lawns and gardens, on the Delaware River. He bought five acres of woods nearby, and eleven more acres five miles south on Rancocas Creek, where he built a farmhouse. Always interested in crops and planting, now he accumulated a shelf of books on agriculture and husbandry. He hired an English farm manager and experimented with new plows and windlasses. He cleared a park that could graze a hundred deer, and a plantation that would cover six hundred acres by 1770.
It is obvious from Elizabeth’s relations with all the children in the family that she loved children, and there is no reason to believe she would not have wanted a child herself. As for William’s inclinations, there is proof in his letters that he was prepared to have more children after Temple, and that he found in his wife an attractive mate. The year they came to America she was thirty-five and he was two years younger. As she was not a woman of robust health, it seems probable that she was infertile and it was a matter of some frustration, and disappointment, that she would pass her childbearing years without giving birth.
As governor, Franklin was expected to host banquets for visiting dignitaries, and to entertain councilmen, mayors, and assemblymen on state occasions; and as a representative of the Crown, he was expected to be a member of the Church of England. The governor and his wife attended Sunday services in St. Mary’s Church on Broad Street in Burlington. The white sanctuary with its cupola and gable, its low door with sash windows on either side, was sixty years old and in poor repair; William made donations to the church fund for remodeling it.
Yet during these years, nothing was more important for William than the well-being of the three women in his life. When his father departed in 1764, he left his son as surrogate head of the family. Deborah relied on him. She, who rarely had left her neighborhood, rode back and forth to the governor’s house in all kinds of weather, and Sally spent weeks at a time there. William and Elizabeth, accompanying Sally home, would pass pleasant weekends at the new house in Market Street, going to horse races and enjoying the other amusements of the city, the concerts and theater and chophouses. William and Sally’s affection for each other deepened during these years. Her visits were frequent during the Stamp Act crisis and for years after, and Elizabeth’s bond with Sally combined the joys of sisterhood and motherhood. Sally found freedom as well as opportunity in the governor’s mansion, under the First Lady’s supervision. Elizabeth would chaperone her at the balls, suppers, and other entertainments.
So it was with proper concern that William heard, in March 1767, that twenty-three-year-old Sally had fallen in love with a thirty-year-old dealer in European and East India goods in Philadelphia. Her suitor, Richard Bache, looked a little like Benjamin Franklin. This resemblance was disarming, more than his manners, those of an English squire whose favorite pastime was riding to the hounds. Their courtship was peculiar, as Bache had been engaged first to Peggy Ross, Sally’s best friend. Miss Ross became ill in the summer, and “bore a long and lingering fit of sickness with patience,” according to the Gazette. Sally faithfully attended Peggy in her last days, and heard her dying request that Richard Bache marry her best friend. This request he took to heart upon the lady’s death on August 19, proposing to Sally sometime in the next year.
Deborah’s letter to her husband of May 16, 1767, includes a little-known and revealing anecdote: “I went up to see our children at Burlington on Saturday and Billy come down with me on Monday and returned yesterday and Sally went up with him and I expect her down this day or tomorrow.” Deborah encouraged her daughter to go with her brother to Burlington because she looked pale and unwell, she said. It was not unusual for Sally to have allergies or headaches this time of year, but still it worried her mother, and the trip to see her brother and his wife always did her good. “Besides,” Deborah said, “I think she has been made uneasy about her brother who was challenged on Monday night.” William had been challenged to a duel—a serious thing in 1767—the week before while he was in Philadelphia. “I should not a said one word to you but I think somebody will tell.”
William Hicks, a political enemy of Franklin’s, had challenged him. Hicks believed that William was responsible for a letter that appeared in the newspaper on behalf of the Franklins, Galloway, and the Old Ticket, accusing Hicks of beating his aged father and ridiculing Hicks as a second-rate lawyer. The men tried to negotiate a disclosure. When William kept stonewalling, Hicks put him on notice that the next time he stepped outside New Jersey he would have his choice of weapons. William boldly replied that if called out of his province “I shall not postpone my going on account of your menaces.”
Not long after William entered his mother’s house, Deborah later recalled, Hicks’s challenge arrived in the hands of a young doctor, who was drunk. Sally was so terrified that she would not let her brother leave without her. Brother and sister were fiercely loyal to each other, and mutually protective. Nothing came of Hicks’s challenge, which dissipated in meaningless exchanges, but if William had reached the dueling ground, his sister would have stood right by him.
Writing to Ben in May 1767, Deborah reported that Sally and her brother in Burlington were “very happy together indeed but I long to see her back again as I could not live above another day without her as I am…a mind flustered…sometimes glad then depressed and so on. O that you was at home but be assured no little family ever had more harmony in it than yours has and I trust will have.”
Sally’s father was not coming home. And in response to letters from her, Deborah, and Richard Bache proposing the marriage, Ben Franklin had advised his wife in May that he was leaving the matter to her and William “for at this distance I could neither make any enquiries into his character and circumstances, nor form any judgment.” William was in a position to make inquiries, and what he discovered was unsettling. Bache had come from Yorkshire in 1760 to join his older brother Theophylact in the importing business in New York. In 1766 he moved to Philadelphia to strike out on his own. By June he was running ads in the Gazette for his store in Chestnut Street, to capitalize on the sale of the first yard goods to reach America after the Stamp Act’s repeal and the end of the boycott. Bache also owned a trading vessel, heavily mortgaged to finance his retail business.
Somehow Bache’s line of credit got tangled in England. William reported to Benjamin in May that “the amount is greater than the sum he is worth by his own account, which account too I am credibly informed must be greatly exaggerated.” His “bills are come back protested,” and Richard and his brother were bound to pay them with interest. Theophylact ran up debts for goods Richard had purchased and not paid for, even after selling the ship. And this was not the worst of it. Continuing his inquiries into Bache’s character, William learned that John Ross, the late Peggy’s father, recalled that Bache “had often attempted to deceive him about his circumstances.” Ross was convinced that even before the misfortune of the protested bills, Mr. Bache was useless even if his debts were paid.
“In short,” William told his father, “he is a mere fortune hunter, who wants to better his circumstances by marrying into a family that will support him.” William confessed he did not know what to make of all the different accounts he had heard of Sally’s beau. But he was sure the man’s debt load was more than his assets and that if Sally married him they would both be entirely dependent upon Franklin for subsistence. “For if he should get forward in the world he must repay his brother. Do burn this.”
After reading William’s report, Benjamin wrote to Bache in August a letter of condolence for his bad luck. Being young, Franklin advised, Mr. Bache would with industry replace what he had lost. However, it would be wrong to take on the expense of a family before he had recovered. “I am obliged to you for the regard and preference you express for my child…but 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.” The same day, he wrote a letter to Deborah, responding to hers of May 16: “The harmony you mention in our family and among our children gives me great pleasure.”
But the harmony that gave everyone so much pleasure was disturbed by the marriage proposal when both Franklin men took sides against the women. Elizabeth raised her glass in a toast “to brother Bache” as Sally sat writing to him in mid-May. Deborah understood the futility of standing between Sally and the man she loved. Then her father gave in, writing to Deborah that he “would not occasion a delay of her happiness if you thought the match a proper one.” William was dismayed that after all his efforts he had been shut out of the decision, his careful research on the suitor ignored. His visits to Philadelphia became less frequent. And when Sally and Richard said their vows on Thursday, October 29, in Philadelphia, William was not present.
Time and grandchildren and Bache’s innately good character would soon mend the breach, restoring harmony to the Franklin households. But for the present, William felt distanced not only from his mother and sister, but also from his father. True to character, he had accepted his daughter’s choice, knowing that there was no way of preventing it.
ON A MORE PLEASANT note, William corresponded with his father about land speculation in the west. In November 1765, two old friends of his had visited him in Burlington, the merchant Sam Wharton and George Croghan, the Indian trader from Conrad Weiser’s expedition into Indian country. They proposed acquiring a million acres of good farmland beyond the Ohio River. The idea rekindled William’s youthful dream of making his fortune in the west. He was inspired.
Why not form a colony in the Illinois territory? He understood enough now about history, law, and politics to know how it might be done. His friends agreed this was a capital idea and planned to travel to New York and discuss the prospects with the superintendent of Indian affairs, William Johnson. Franklin sat down to draft an agreement for the creation of a land company, and then wrote a persuasive pamphlet, “Reasons for Establishing a British Colony at the Illinois,” meant to convince the British ministry to approve his proposal. The territory, he claimed, was a “terrestrial paradise” that would serve as a supply base for the army, as well as a rich source of hemp, flax, and beaver and raccoon fur. He mentioned the idea in a letter to his father on April 30: “The company shall consist of 12 now in America, and if you like the proposals, you will be at liberty to add yourself and such gentlemen of character and fortune in England, as you may think will be most likely to promote the undertaking.”
On September 12, 1766, Ben Franklin received Sir William Johnson’s letter with William’s proposal for the colony and forwarded it to Secretary of State Henry Conway. Ben wrote to William enthusiastically. “This is an affair I shall seriously set about….The plan I think is well drawn, and I imagine Sir William’s approbation will go a long way in recommending it.” Here at last was an idea that was wholly William Franklin’s creation, in which his father was eager to have a part. If the grant were approved, the vast wealth it would guarantee to both men would erase any balance of debt on the ledger.
“I thank the company,” said his father, “for their willingness to take me in, and one or two others that I may nominate….I wish you had allowed me to name more…by numbers we might increase the weight of interest here.” Nearly a year later, on June 13, 1767, he wrote to William: “The Illinois affair goes forward but slowly. Lord Shelbourne…highly approved it, but others were not of his sentiments, particularly the Board of Trade.”
The same day, Dr. Franklin reported to Joseph Galloway ominous events in the Parliament, a “general prejudice against the colonies so strong” that no favor to them was likely to pass. The chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, had decided to support Lord George Grenville’s motion that America pay for the British troops sent to defend it—and then pay for all judges, governors, and other crown employees. The resulting Townshend Acts, passed between June 15 and July 2, began with the suspension of the New York Assembly until it complied with the quartering act, and culminated in revenue acts levying duties on “glass, china ware, paper pasteboard, painters colors, tea & c.”
This legislation revived the fury that had greeted the Stamp Act. The Franklins’ old rival John Dickinson began writing his elegant “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” a series of essays widely published in colonial papers. This Philadelphia lawyer argued that the colonies were sovereign in all internal affairs, and whenever liberties were menaced, “English history affords frequent examples of resistance by force.” Predictably, organized protest began in Boston. In December 1767, Sam Adams of the Massachusetts legislature drafted a letter to all colonial assemblies requesting their cooperation in a conference and joint petition to rescind the Townshend Acts as unconstitutional.
There was a new colonial secretary, and his response was stern and swift. Lord Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough, bull-necked, beetle-browed, fifty years of age, was an effective speaker in Parliament. And he had been president of the Board of Trade and Plantations for several years under Grenville before being made first secretary of state for the colonies in January 1768. But Benjamin Franklin considered Hillsborough arrogant, dogmatic, and, worst of all, incompetent. King George himself once said he knew no one with less judgment than Lord Hillsborough. His overreaction to Sam Adams’s circular letter was stupefying. On April 22 he demanded that Massachusetts withdraw the letter, and he ordered all governors to dissolve their assemblies if they responded to it.
When the Massachusetts House voted 92–17 against revoking the letter, in June, citing their right to petition, Governor Francis Bernard dissolved the legislature. The empty chamber of the Massachusetts House of Commons produced an ominous echo. Colonial legislatures were the symbol of self-government, and within a few months Lord Hillsborough nearly wiped them out. Governors of New York, Maryland, and Georgia adjourned their assemblies, while Virginia, in defiance, sent out its own circular letter. In Boston and New York, people feared a recurrence of the mob violence of 1765, and with good reason.
As outdated news of Hillsborough’s demands reached America, a British battleship sailed into Boston Harbor, the fifty-gun frigate Romney, part of a squadron sent to enforce the Townshend Acts. Ships had been unloading taxable tea, glassware, paper, and wine in defiance of the revenue act, and Captain John Corner had come to put a stop to it. Needing more able-bodied seamen, the captain began to impress local sailors, declaring he would target crews aboard vessels suspected of avoiding duties.
The sheer size of the ship, the largest in the North American fleet, was meant to strike fear in the hearts of the Sons of Liberty. Captain Corner’s report to the admiral boasted that “the sight of the Romney silenced Boston.” Samuel Adams, in a rage, told his cousin John Adams “the country shall be independent, and we will be satisfied with nothing short of it.” Far from being silenced, friends and relatives of the threatened mariners began attacking the press gangs. The conflict escalated on June 9 when customs officials under armed guard boarded John Hancock’s merchant sloop Liberty. They accused Hancock of having unloaded a cargo of Madeira wine without paying the required duty. On the evening of June 10, Ben Hallowell, comptroller of the port, drew the king’s mark, in the shape of an arrow, on the main mast of Hancock’s sloop, then confiscated it, ordering that the Liberty be cut loose from its moorings and hauled alongside the Romney for protection.
A furious mob chased the officials and the seamen preparing to tow the sloop up against the battleship, throwing stones, potsherds, and oyster shells. When the navy had been driven out of range, the protesters turned and headed toward the customs office. There, according to a letter from Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson, a gang surrounded the remaining officers, “tore their clothes and bruised and otherwise hurt them until one after another they escaped. The mob increased to 2 or 300, chiefly sturdy boys and negroes, and broke the windows of the Comptroller’s house and then the Inspector[’s].”
While that mob was breaking the last of the windowpanes, another squad of marauders searched for a customs boat to capture in exchange for the seized Liberty. They found one, hauled it to the Boston Common in a parade, and burned it to cinders there, crying death to all enemies of liberty.
AT A SAFE DISTANCE from the violence in Boston—though not from the withering surveillance of Lord Hillsborough—William Franklin was once again on the horns of a political dilemma.
The New Jersey Assembly convened early in April, ignorant of the fact that Hillsborough had sent restraining orders. The governors had been commanded to obstruct assemblies protesting against the Townshend Acts and to use their “utmost influence to defeat this flagitious attempt to disturb the public peace.” By the time William received these instructions, in June, it was too late: on April 15, Speaker Cortlandt Skinner had laid the Massachusetts circular before the Assembly, and the next day they appointed a committee to draft a reply. William had been ill, and the whole business of the circular seemed at the time so harmless that Skinner never showed the letter to him. Subjects of the Crown had a right to petition. When Franklin found out about it he was confident that the Assembly’s response would be a humble request for repeal that would not embarrass him and he turned his attention to other matters. Then all hell broke loose.
When William received Lord Hillsborough’s orders, he scrambled to control the damage, writing immediately that his assembly had sent a perfectly legal petition directly to the king. At the same time, he assured his superior that the legislators had not answered the circular directly, and the people here were not disposed “to enter into any unwarrantable combination” with the unruly mobsters in Boston. Unfortunately for William, Speaker Skinner had misinformed him. Skinner had indeed actually written to the Massachusetts Assembly approving their initiative. Franklin would have to write to Hillsborough again in July, embarrassed, promising that his colony had no intention of further uniting with the others.
Over the next year, Lord Hillsborough’s displeasure, a blend of anger and contempt for New Jersey’s governor, was humiliating to William Franklin. It also seemed out of proportion. Hillsborough lambasted the governor and the Assembly, complaining that their petition meant “to draw in question, the power and authority of Parliament to enact laws binding upon the colonies in all cases.” This was true, but what of it? Furthermore, the secretary complained, one could no longer say that New Jersey was simply following the lead of more wayward provinces. The people of William’s colony now marched arm in arm with the rebellious Sons of Liberty in Massachusetts.
In vain would William protest that this was not his fault, that it had been a quirk of fate that his assembly had been in session when the circular arrived. He wrote that there was hardly a legislator here “but what either believes that the Parliament has not the right to impose taxes for the purpose of a revenue in America, or thinks that it is contrary to justice, equity, and sound policy to exercise that right.” If other assemblies had been in session, he knew they would have done the same as his. But nothing he said mattered, as Hillsborough continued to single him out for criticism. Perhaps it was his name that marked him—Franklin, the son of a colonial agent whose critique of Parliament was growing more strident with the passing days.
Benjamin had written to his son on July 2, “I apprehend a breach between the two countries….you see a turn of the die may make a great difference in our affairs. We may be either promoted or discarded; one or the other seems likely soon to be the case.”
In response to the Boston riots, the Privy Council voted on July 27, 1768, to send two regiments, each with five hundred men, to subdue the unruly colonists. Fifteen warships arrived in Boston harbor on September 28, and the red-coated Irish soldiers under command of Colonel William Dalrymple went ashore. They made a great show of marching, guns on their shoulders, bayonets gleaming, the full mile down Long Wharf to the Boston Common. With the assembly dissolved, they made quarters of Faneuil Hall and the chamber of the House of Commons. The Bostonians refused to comply with the quartering bill; their response to the military occupation was sullen rage and an expanded boycott of British goods.
Ben Franklin wrote to Joseph Galloway on January 9, 1769: “I am glad to hear that matters were yet quiet at Boston, but fear they will not continue long so. Some indiscretion on the part of their warmer people, or of the soldiery, I am extremely apprehensive may occasion a tumult; and if blood is once drawn, there is no foreseeing how far the mischief may spread.”
Eleven days later, Thomas Hutchinson, the new governor of Massachusetts, wrote to the British official Thomas Whately in England: “There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties” in order to rescue the colony from chaos. Hutchinson had seen his house demolished; “I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connection with the parent state should be broken.”
Those letters of old friends, Franklin and Hutchinson, crossing on the high seas in January 1769 had a power of prophecy and transformation that now seems demonic. Fate would deliver Hutchinson’s letter into the hands of Franklin, who should never have read it. Not only did he read the private letter, he left it where the whole world could see it, making both of them infamous for a while.
THAT WINTER WILLIAM FRANKLIN had his hands full with family troubles.
While Sally was pregnant with her first child in March 1769, Deborah suffered a severe stroke. Dr. Thomas Bond of Pennsylvania Hospital wrote to Benjamin Franklin on June 7: “Your good Mrs. Franklin was affected in the winter with a partial palsey in the tongue, and a sudden loss of memory, which alarmed us much…her constitution in general seems impaired.” He had to learn this from Dr. Bond. William would not mention it.
Six months later Deborah wrote to him that her illness had been brought on by a series of misfortunes: her niece Debby Dunlap nearly died after giving birth, while her husband, the Reverend William Dunlap, fell deathly ill at the same time (“such a helpless family”); then her cousin Betsy Mecum “was taken ill, and so much distress so soon that added to my own…distress at your staying so much longer that I lost all my resolution and the very dismal winter both Sally and myself live so very lonely [Bache was away in Jamaica on business] that I had got in so very low a state and got into so unhappy a way that I could not sleep a long time.”
She and Sally were visiting a neighbor, and while she was there, Deborah lost her memory. She appears to have lain semicomatose for days or weeks during Sally’s pregnancy, waking to sharp pains in her abdomen. “This time I was very ill…very mortally, and thank god…I have my memory in some measure returned….I did grow very thin so much that Billy said he had never seen so much changes in me.”
Her son rode back and forth to Philadelphia with Elizabeth at his side that spring and summer (the Assembly was adjourned from April 1768 until October 1769) doing whatever he could for his ailing mother and pregnant sister. All the while he was shielding his father from any news that might upset him. Deborah wrote to him long after her stroke, “I am in hopes I shall get better again to see you…I often tell my friends I was not sick….It was only more [than I could] bear…and so I fell down and could not get up again indeed it was not any sickness but too much disquiet of mind but I had taken up a resolution never to make any complaint to you or give you any disquiet.”
William wrote to his father when there was good news: Sally’s first child, Franklin’s first legitimate grandchild, was born on August 12, 1769. “I came to town with Betsy on Monday last in order to stand for my little nephew.” They drove from New Jersey with the Reverend Jonathan O’Dell, the rector of the Burlington mission, met Deborah, Sally, and Richard at the house on Market Street, then carried the baby around the corner to Christ’s Church. With Betsy and Deborah standing as godmothers, the Reverend Richard Peters christened Benjamin Franklin Bache at the same font in which William Penn had been baptized in 1644.
“He is not so fat and lusty as some children at his time are, but he is altogether a pretty little fellow, and improves in his looks every day,” William wrote. Deborah was proud to say “I was well enough to stand for myself.” She thanked God that Sally was well and “in a way of making a fine nurse.”