AS THEY SETTLED INTO the house on the hill, the fragrance of ripe apples mingled with the salt smell of the sea. The windows on all three floors, from the dormers above the classical pediment to the eight-paned casements lighting the main rooms, overlooked the Raritan River; and in back the west garden gave upon the orchards.
Mounting the cascade of sandstone steps, the governor’s wife opened the great Venetian door under a fanlight, entering the broad hall with its marble chimneypiece. To the right lay her dining room under a dazzling chandelier; to the left a drawing room, more fireplaces with tabernacle frames. The staircase from the grand foyer, yellow pine steps with an oaken balustrade, led to the upstairs hall, master bedroom, dressing room, and guest bedrooms.
The four levels, basement to attic, offered eighteen rooms, sixteen fireplaces, a wine cellar, two book-lined studies on the main floor, a breakfast parlor, and butler’s and housekeeper’s quarters. The tile roof was equipped with lead gutters and lightning rods. This was a house to compare to Twickenham, or Graeme Park. The governor wished his father could see it now that it was finished and he and Betsy had made it their home.
In fact, William Franklin wished, more than anything else, that his father would come home. Deborah was dying. He ought to be here to comfort her in her last days. His father’s effort to maintain peace between England and America was important, but it might be managed more efficiently from this side of the ocean. While he had lost credibility in England, he was more popular and respected than ever in America. He alone could use his authority and good reasoning to bring the congress to its senses. There might still be time to broker an agreement that would satisfy the radicals while preserving the Empire.
Governor Franklin had not given up hope of reconciliation or the dream of Vandalia. There were many intelligent men, like Galloway, who urged moderation. If all of them remained prudent and calm, they might end up on the right side of the civil dispute. On October 29, 1774, Franklin dispatched a secret letter to Lord Dartmouth with a full account of the congress’s proceedings, sounding a note of optimism: He felt confident the people of New Jersey would not support the congress’s resolutions.
Now William and Elizabeth were ready for Temple to join them. William had recently received a letter from his father concerning the boy’s education and prospects. Temple had just turned fourteen. His headmaster, James Elphinston, William Strahan’s brother-in-law, praised the boy’s learning and his behavior, arguing he should remain in the little school in Kent, although Dr. Franklin wanted to send him to Eaton, then Oxford. Benjamin thought he would make a fine lawyer, “as he has a good memory, quick parts, and ready elocution.” He might also make an excellent painter, being fond of sketching, and talented, “but I do not find that he thinks of it as a business.” Temple hinted he might like to be a surgeon, but he did not appear to hold that vocation in high esteem, either.
His grandfather wanted Temple to acquire some art or trade he could count on to earn his bread. “And after that, if anything better could be done for him, well and good. But posts and places are precarious dependencies,” Franklin averred, with a nod to his own place, and his son’s. “I would have him a free man.” And so, he concluded, “we should turn him to the law,” as a profession worthy in itself, and useful no matter what else he chose to do.
He expected they would sail in September, which would bring them home by Christmas. “But I begin to have my doubts,” he added. “With love to Betsy, I am, ever, your affectionate father.” In fact, William, Deborah, the Baches, and friends had curtailed writing to Franklin after his humiliation in the Cockpit because he had assured them he was on his way home. But he was not, though his reasons for staying never seemed as compelling as the reasons William saw for him to come home.
To be sure, Dr. Franklin was engaged in backstage diplomacy with the various lords, generals, and admirals and their friends, Whigs interested in the American cause—or at least in avoiding war. He spent months conferring with William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and preparing the still influential politician to present a conciliatory plan to Parliament on February 1, 1775. Chatham wanted a plan that would allow Parliament to send troops to the colonies and also to regulate imperial trade. But he believed that Parliament must also recognize the authority of the Continental Congress, and the exclusive right of the colonial legislatures to impose taxes upon their people. Franklin frowned upon the first two points but welcomed the last two. And he agreed to accompany Chatham to the House of Lords when the Great Commoner, renowned for eloquence, presented the proposals.
Yet that day in Whitehall, in the chamber teeming with peers, nothing seemed much more important than abusing Dr. Franklin. He was seen as the evil genius behind all this radical rhetoric. When Chatham had finished, Lord Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, took the floor. Arrogant and peevish, he attacked Chatham’s bill before fixing his attention upon Franklin, seated in the gallery. Lord Sandwich would not be persuaded that the points of Chatham’s proposal had come from such a distinguished English peer.
“I have in my eye,” he announced, staring at Franklin, “the person who drew it up, one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies this country has ever known.” He said it had all come from Franklin’s lobbying and undercover plotting with Whigs and lords and admirals in and out of favor. So Chatham’s bill was treated with no more respect than they might have afforded “a ballad offered by a drunken porter,” Franklin wrote.
For this Dr. Franklin had remained in England during months when he might have been sailing home to comfort his wife in her last days, or using his charm and common sense to disarm the Sons of Liberty, who wanted to smash the fragile vase of the British Empire.
WILLIAM KNEW NOTHING, AT the time, of his father’s dealings with Lord Chatham or his other affairs. He did not know then of his father’s intimate friendship with the beautiful and eccentric American sculptor Patience Wright, whose career he championed in London. In the autumn of 1774 William and Elizabeth were settling into their home upon the Raritan River, unpacking their trunks and preparing that magnificent mansion for the holiday season. Mrs. Skinner, the former treasurer’s wife, who had a knack for it, would help with the decorations.
The center of interest and master stroke of the Franklins’ design was to be seen when visitors entered the front hall: from the cornice molding of the ceiling to the chair-rail paneling, the walls were papered with black-and-white panoramas of Passaic and Cohoes Falls, printed on a buff-colored ground. A matching panorama on the stair wall depicted the Horseshoe Falls of Niagara. The American landscape suggested the hypnotic sound of rushing water, violent power rendered peaceful by the painter’s art.
In such amusements and reflections the time passed pleasantly for the governor and his wife, despite the gathering clouds of war. The situation was troubling but not desperate: there was still time for the colonists to come to their senses and for cooler heads to prevail—especially if Benjamin Franklin were to join the conversation in Philadelphia. He was expected any day.
Surrounded by books in his green study, William wrote candidly to Lord Dartmouth on December 6. While many colonists disdained the proceedings of the congress, he was sure their resolutions would be carried because “few have the courage to declare their disapprobation publicly” and risk becoming targets of popular resentment. This had happened to him, and even royal officers—except in Boston—had no protection from the mob. William joined Dartmouth in hoping that the actions of the congress would not remove the last promise of union with the mother country. But even the most moderate among us, William admitted, the most hopeful, understand that the Continental Congress has left Parliament no choice but this: “consent to what must appear humiliating in the eyes of all Europe, or compel obedience to her laws by a military force.” The congress might have avoided the dilemma by embracing Galloway’s Plan of Union, but they buried it. William enclosed a salvaged copy. He signed and sealed this letter, entrusting it to a courier who would assure it was conveyed, confidentially, via the next packet bound for England.
A week later, Wednesday, December 14, Deborah Franklin suffered a massive stroke paralyzing most of her body. Sally and Richard summoned Dr. Thomas Bond, Franklin’s partner in founding the Pennsylvania Hospital at the west edge of town. He would have come prepared to bleed or purge the patient to reduce the pressure on her system. The doctor gave them reason for hope. Then, on Sunday night, as the full moon peeked in the windows, she took a turn for the worse. Without showing signs of pain she continued breathing until Monday morning at eleven o’clock. “Then,” Richard Bache wrote to her husband, “without a groan or even a sigh, she was released from a troublesome world, and happily relieved from all future pain and anxiety.”
He sent an express rider to Perth Amboy, who reached the governor’s mansion Tuesday night. William set out in a snowstorm the next morning, crossing the river at dawn and posting along the lower road through Allenstown and Burlington. It was slow going in the blizzard, the horses breathing hard, bogging down in drifts. He did not reach Philadelphia until four o’clock Thursday afternoon, an hour before the body was to be moved to Christ Church for the funeral. Following the casket to the snowy churchyard as chief mourners were Richard Bache and William. Several of Benjamin Franklin’s best friends, charter members of the Philosophical Society, served as pallbearers.
“A very respectable number of the inhabitants were at the funeral,” William reported to his father on Saturday, Christmas Eve. He had decided to stay in Philadelphia to comfort his sister in the house where mother and daughter had lived together for a decade. Betsy was snowbound in Perth Amboy, so they would spend this sad holiday apart, the first they might have enjoyed in their new home.
William gazed out at the snow-covered yards and streets of his hometown. Upstairs was the library, and through another door the dusty relics of a laboratory—glass tubes and retorts, magnets, copper wires, rods, and Leyden jars. He had a great deal to say to his father. By daylight and candlelight, as Sally played with her boys, five-year-old Benny and the toddler Billy, named after him, William Franklin composed a long and passionate letter describing his journey through the snow and the funeral procession. He did not dwell upon the details of his mother’s illness, saying only that “her death was no more than might be reasonably expected after the paralytic stroke she received some time ago, which greatly affected her memory and understanding.” Then William told his father of his mother’s pathetic words back in October, when she prayed he would come home in the winter to see her while she was still alive. He could not conceal his resentment: “I heartily wish you had happened to have come over in the fall, as I think her disappointment in that respect preyed a good deal on her spirits.” At the moment, to William and probably the Baches, his failure to return home seemed contemptible. Resorting to irony, he continued: “It gives me great pleasure to find that you have so perfect an enjoyment of that greatest of blessings, health.” William was baffled that despite his father’s recent words that he could not “in the course of nature” long expect such good health to continue, he still postponed returning to his family.
“If there is any prospect of your being able to bring the people in power to your way of thinking, or those of your way of thinking’s being brought into power, I should not think so much of your stay.” But by now “neither can be expected,” he wrote, and “you are looked upon with an evil eye in that country, and are in no small danger of being brought into trouble for your political conduct.”
Sitting in his father’s chair, in his father’s house, with Deborah Franklin’s ghost over his shoulder and the snow edging the windowpanes, he admonished the old traveler: “You certainly better return, while you are able to bear the fatigues of the voyage, to a country where the people revere you, and are inclined to pay a deference to your opinions.” His countrymen “ardently” wanted him to return for the last meeting of the Continental Congress. “I have since heard it lamented by many that you were not at that meeting.” They believed Franklin might still devise a plan of reconciliation that would subdue the radicals.
The world was out of kilter, and his father knew only half of it, the country that had abused him. “However mad you may think the measures of the ministry are, yet I trust you have candor enough to acknowledge that we are no ways behind with them in instances of madness on this side of the water. However, it is a disagreeable subject, and I’ll drop it.” William turned then to the agreeable subject of his son. He agreed that Temple ought to study the law and suggested he attend the New York College for a year or two. In closing, William looked forward to seeing them both in the spring. He was happy to say that he and Betsy were well settled in their new house, and they would always have a fine room prepared for him.
There was a knock at the door. A messenger informed the family that the packet was about to sail and he must have all their letters at once. So William bade his father a hasty adieu, and turned his thoughts again to his grieving sister.
WILLIAM RETURNED TO PERTH Amboy in the new year and began to prepare for a difficult session of the Assembly. This would be the first meeting in nine months, since those rogue gatherings in Lower Freehold, Newark, and other townships had declared their solidarity with Massachusetts, endorsed the embargoes, and appointed delegates to the Continental Congress.
Thirty assemblymen and twelve executive councilors from every county in New Jersey gathered in the stone courthouse on Market Street on January 11, 1775. Their chief concern was the actions of the congress, and whether this province would endorse the boycott and the congress’s other measures. Franklin figured the House would be divided: Burlington and the western counties would favor the nonimportation pact; moderates in Bergen County, and Quakers in Salem would resist the radicals. The upper house would be pitted against the lower, and it was the governor’s task to diffuse the conflict. His language must confirm loyalty to the Crown as well as everyone’s shared desire to preserve their constitutional rights.
On Friday, the thirteenth of January, Governor Franklin left his wife at the door of the mansion, his speech rolled in his hand, and walked east toward the river. He was forty-three years old and the winters had begun to weigh upon him. His greatcoat and his tricorn hat scarcely kept him warm. He knew what he would say to the fractious legislators, but it would be his tone of voice and his composure that must win them over. He walked two blocks north and mounted the stone steps of the courthouse. Inside, several dozen lawmakers seated at their desks in a half circle awaited him in the dry, smoky council chamber where he had been sworn into office eleven years before.
“Gentlemen of the Assembly,” he began, warmly, welcoming them and inviting all to continue in supporting their government. On this day it would be a grave oversight to “pass over in silence the late alarming transactions in this and the neighboring colonies.” He called upon the good people of New Jersey to resist any further “mischiefs to this country.” He did not presume to resolve the dispute between Great Britain and her colonies, and he had no desire to censure anyone who sought to redress a grievance, a duty the people “owe themselves, their country, and their posterity.” Upon this note the lawmakers might have applauded the governor, if he had paused.
“All that I would wish to guard you against is giving any countenance or encouragement to that destructive mode of proceeding which has been unhappily adopted in part by some of the inhabitants in this colony, and has been carried so far in others as totally to subvert their former constitution.” All these unlawful congresses had usurped the powers rightfully owned by the provincial assemblies. He urged the lawmakers to petition the Crown by legal means. Otherwise you will “destroy that form of government of which you are an important part.” There is no greater threat to a free society, he declared, than that the chief men of a country might “show a greater regard to popularity than to their own judgment.” Franklin would make no such mistake, and now he asked the assemblymen also to be leaders and not the pawns of demagogues.
“You have now pointed out to you, gentlemen, two roads—one evidently leading to peace, happiness, and a restoration of the public tranquility—the other inevitably conducting you to anarchy, misery, and all the horrors of a civil war.” It was his best speech, written in heat by winter light and candlelight—the culmination of his life’s work as a lawyer, a governor, and a patriot. As he stepped down and made his way to the door, Franklin could tell from the look in the men’s eyes, and their congenial murmuring, that his words had touched them. It was up to them to choose the proper road.
Days passed, then a week, as the legislators discussed and debated the congress’s petition. Franklin had cause for hope. His Council (the higher chamber of the legislature) backed the governor, promising “Your excellency may be assured that we will exert our utmost influence, both in our public and private capacities.” But the greater force lay on the side of the new congress and its resolutions. On January 25, not two weeks after Franklin had given his “Two Roads” speech, he received a bill of resolutions from the House. The proceedings of the Continental Congress had been approved unanimously; three delegates were to be named to attend the next congress in May; and a copy of these resolutions was to be sent to the assemblies of New York and Philadelphia, so that they might act likewise.
This was a sad day for the governor and his wife. For the first time, they had reason to fear for the security of their home. An assembly that pledged allegiance to an American congress before promising it to their English king might soon do without a royal governor. The Franklins took what comfort they could in playing cribbage and sipping wine in the company of sympathetic friends like the Skinners and William Coxe, Franklin’s old friend from Burlington and fellow parishioner from St. Mary’s; David Ogden, the judge from Newark; and Francis Hopkinson, the witty poet and composer whose friendship had spanned decades encompassing both Betsys—the bluestocking ingénue from Philadelphia and the delicate wife from Barbados. Hopkins was good company despite his waxing sympathy with the radicals, and the old judge, a Yale graduate, was a match for him in conversation.
All agreed that the Assembly had at least kept up an appearance of loyalty to the king: Every communication began with the formulaic oaths. In a hollow gesture to placate their governor, after his speech they did prepare a separate petition to send to King George, in the same language as the congress’s petition—requesting relief for taxation, and other intolerable acts. Under the circumstances it made William angry. He refused to forward the petition and left it to them to send it via their agent, Benjamin Franklin.
The governor adjourned his assembly on Monday, February 13, to convene again exactly a month later. On the eighteenth, measuring the danger of the situation, he wrote to notify Dartmouth that he would enforce His Majesty’s order concerning the importation of arms. The custom officers would seize any guns or ammunition imported without the king’s license.
In Philadelphia, Governor John Penn echoed many of Franklin’s sentiments, advising his assembly on February 21 “that any grievances, which his Majesty’s subjects in America have reason to complain of should be humbly presented to His Majesty by the several assemblies.” In the debates in the Pennsylvania Assembly, Joseph Galloway was one of the moderates who supported Governor Penn. But he so enraged the Independent Party that they threatened to throw open the doors of the State House and turn the mob loose on him. Learning of this in advance, Galloway was able to gather friends to guard him.
He had driven down from Trevose, his country estate, and was staying at an inn near the State House. One night the porter informed him that a box had been delivered addressed to him. Prying the lid off the nailed box, Galloway found a hangman’s noose and a letter. The letter suggested how he might use the noose if he did not mend his opinions. He read and reread the unsigned note, nailed up the contents of the box, and locked it in the trunk of his carriage. On March 26 he wrote to William that the time that had been bought by the adjournment was useless, the Assembly would vote against them, as even Governor Penn’s speech had been no more than a charade “to save appearances.” Like William Franklin, Galloway longed for Benjamin Franklin to come home. Perhaps he would find a way to set things right.
And at last Dr. Franklin was on his way. He left London on March 20 a step ahead of the sheriff, as he was threatened with a civil suit regarding the Hutchinson affair. He embarked with his fifteen-year-old grandson from Portsmouth on the packet Pennsylvania the next day.
Franklin had spent his last day in London with his friend the chemist Joseph Priestley. They sat in the sunlit parlor on Craven Street as Mrs. Stevenson, sad and distracted, bustled around them. She must deliver the broad copper plate at the head of the garret stairs to Mr. Pownall. She must return another print to Captain Walsingham, MP, and a number of borrowed books. Much of that Sunday was passed in reading the American newspapers, especially the accounts of how the Boston Port Bill had been received. “And as he read the addresses to the inhabitants of Boston,” Priestley recalled, “from the places in the neighborhood, the tears trickled down his cheeks.” Distressed by the specter of civil war, he told his friend he had done all he could do to prevent it. America would win, surely, but the war would take a decade and he would not live to see the end of it.
There is no other record of Franklin’s ever weeping. Were those tears really shed over the prospect of war, or some other, more private grief? He had learned of his wife’s death only three weeks earlier. He never wrote a line to any friend or relative about Deborah’s passing. But on board Captain Osborne’s ship he spent hours each day in his cabin, for six weeks, composing a two-hundred-page letter to his son. Known to scholars as the “Journal of Negotiations in London,” it is the chief source of information concerning those secret meetings with the Howes, Chatham, and others that took up several months of Franklin’s time late in 1774. All of it may have happened as Franklin recalled, although he confessed, at the end, that in his own confusion from “discoursing with so many different persons about the same time on the same subject,” he may sometimes have forgotten who said what to whom.
It is the only letter he had written to William since receiving William’s of Christmas Eve, informing him of Deborah’s death and taking him to task for his absence. The two-hundred-page screed is, among other things, an apology—a rhetorical defense of his actions. The reason he was not at his wife’s side was that he was toiling, day and night, to turn back the tide of civil war. Nothing less would excuse him; and the more he made of the story, the more likely William was to forgive, or at least understand him.
Benjamin Franklin’s timing in returning to America on Captain Osborne’s ship was uncanny. It was natural for a superstitious man to think him a wizard; it was difficult for a reasonable person to think him anything else. His movements upon the Continent during the last decade had been capricious, instinctive. Now instinct had placed him and his grandson upon the high seas, taking the daily temperature of the water, mapping the Gulf Stream, just as news of the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, raced from Massachusetts to South Carolina as fast as a man on horseback could travel.
Governor Franklin heard news of the fighting on Sunday evening, April 23. He was beside himself with fury at General Gage for initiating such an action—sending seven hundred infantry and grenadiers across the Charles River to attack Concord. Until then there had been no violence in New Jersey, only the calm enforcement of the nonimportation agreement and the measure to approve the proceedings of the Continental Congress. Now Gage had put him and the other governors in a devilish position, reducing their chances to negotiate a conciliation. In the coming week, town meetings from Newark to Burlington would call for voluntary militia as well as delegates to a provincial congress, set for May 23.
William had no idea his father was on the ship bound for Philadelphia, nor did anyone else in America. Dr. Franklin had put himself out of reach of his enemies on both continents, blameless for the violence on one shore and the tyrannical policy on the other. He said of himself, “I do not find that I have gained any point in either country except that of rendering myself suspected for my impartiality: in England, of being too much an American, and in America of being too much an Englishman.”
The Pennsylvania lowered its anchor in the Delaware River on Friday, May 5, in fine weather. As their longboat lunged toward the Market Street wharf under a waxing moon, the first news the Franklins would have heard from the oarsmen was of Lexington and Concord, the shots heard ’round the world. Half a hundred American militia had been killed, and sixty-five British regulars, a little more than two weeks ago. New England was in mourning and all of America was up in arms.
FOR THE FIRST TIME, he entered the courtyard through the brick arch on Market Street and beheld the house he had designed, three stories high.
His homecoming after more than a decade was bittersweet. His wife had been dead half a year. Upon the furniture, the draperies, the bed linens and colored counterpanes he saw her shadow, her fingerprints upon the silver. The home they had planned together now belonged essentially to his thirty-two-year-old daughter, who had lived there for years, her husband, and their children. He came upon the little boys drilling up and down the hall with toy muskets.
They made up a bed for Temple and embraced him as a member of the family. After a night’s rest in his old bed and an early breakfast, Franklin opened his doors to a stream of friends, relations, and dignitaries eager to welcome him home and brief him on the state of affairs. This would have included his oldest friend, Hugh Roberts, a merchant who had helped him start the library, the philosophical society, and the university, and had served as a pallbearer at Deborah’s funeral; Charles Thomson, secretary of the recent congress; John Morton, Speaker of the Assembly; and politicians of every stripe eager for news of England as well as Franklin’s opinions. Governor Penn himself might have paid a call, embattled as he was and in need of advice and support.
News of his return was widely celebrated and put to use. One New York correspondent quoted Franklin as saying the colonies had no favors to expect from the ministry, as “nothing but submission will satisfy them” and they expected no opposition to their troops. “Dr. Franklin is highly pleased to find us arming and preparing for the worst events, he thinks nothing else can save us.” While this was not the opinion he wanted published so soon after his arrival, it was foremost in his thoughts on Saturday evening as he sat down to write to a friend in London, David Hartley. He said he was pleased to learn that the colonies were in agreement; even New York—which the ministry was so sure would defect—appeared as courageous as the others. Before the day was done, the Assembly had chosen Franklin unanimously as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was all the more a hero in America for having made himself a villain in England.
William learned of his father’s and son’s arrival on May 7—a happy surprise. He could not go to them immediately, as he had called his assembly to convene the following week. In view of the recent turmoil, the session promised to be challenging, perhaps defiant, so the governor had to be well prepared. He sent word by return courier that he would be in Burlington on May 15; if he could not ride that afternoon to Philadelphia, he wished his father and son would come to him.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin was getting his bearings in a new world that was full of surprises, most of them deeply disturbing. He wrote again to Hartley on Monday the eighth: “You will have heard before this reaches you of the commencement of a civil war; the end of it perhaps neither myself, nor you, who are much younger, may live to see.” What seemed six weeks ago in England to be a dark possibility, here and now was reality. He wrote on the same day to his protégé and partner in politics Joseph Galloway, eager to share information and frame a plan of action. At the moment it would be safer to be seen with Galloway than with his own son.
Galloway had sent a note down from Trevose, Pennsylvania, twenty miles to the north, welcoming Franklin home and congratulating him on his accomplishments as agent for the Assembly. He also confided his recent decision to retire from public life, troubling news. Galloway offered to send his carriage to bring his friend up from the city. On a Monday, Franklin replied, accepting the kind offer for later that month, adding that a man of Galloway’s talents was greatly needed and that he hoped he would change his decision to retire.
Franklin’s timing, as one has observed, was uncanny. On Tuesday, May 9, 1775, George Washington, Peyton Randolph, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and the rest of the delegation from Virginia arrived in Philadelphia, along with those of North Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware, for the meeting of the Continental Congress. Washington had packed his uniform, the blue cutaway with gold buttons over the scarlet waistcoat. And on Wednesday, John Hancock, the Adamses, and Thomas Cushing rode in from Massachusetts. Ben Franklin could not have planned his entrance upon the scene more perfectly if he had possessed a flying machine and mental telepathy.
He received a hero’s welcome in the State House, although the delegates gathering there on May 10 were not sure quite what to make of him. Quiet, old, and rather mysterious, he was a celebrity, but many held him in suspicion. No one really knew whether he would side more with his son and Joseph Galloway than with Sam Adams and Patrick Henry. Galloway’s situation had become so problematic that the once revered legislator felt compelled to publish a letter in his own defense on May 12. He stood accused of insulting a provincial council, declaring that their meeting was unlawful “and that the magistrates ought to disperse them.” More serious was the charge that he had written letters to Parliament harmful to America, an act potentially treasonable. “I have, neither directly nor indirectly, any such correspondence…injurious to the rights and freedom of America,” he wrote. He went on to say he had not recommended any measures to resolve the present dispute between the two countries.
This, of course, was not true. And Franklin must have wondered at the contradiction, even as he was looking forward to his carriage ride to Trevose that weekend in mid-May. Galloway himself had sent him the ill-starred Plan of Union back in February so that he could share it with Lord Chatham. A few weeks later he was surprised to hear that his friend had already sent it directly to Lord Dartmouth. Parliament cited it in censuring the Continental Congress. In a careful letter to his “dear friend,” Franklin offered a word of caution: “It is whispered here by ministerial people that yourself and Mr. Jay of New York are friends to their measures, and give them private intelligence” of what the radicals are doing in America. Although he doesn’t believe it, Franklin thinks it a duty of friendship to let Galloway know the English regard him as a spy.
What really had happened is that William had sent the Plan of Union, with other bits of intelligence, to Dartmouth, after receiving it from Galloway first. The day Franklin arrived home, May 6, William was writing secretly to the colonial secretary, Lord North, in his ongoing role as an informant: “Alarms are spread, which have a tendency to keep the mind of the people in a continual ferment…and prevent their paying any attention to the dictates of sober reason.” A New Jersey militia, he said, had marched toward Perth Amboy armed with firelocks to protect the treasury upon a mere rumor that a British man of war had anchored off Sandy Hook. Hearing it was a false alarm, the men turned back; but they made a point of parading through the town past the governor’s house “with colors, drum, and fife.”
He knew very well that his son the governor was Dartmouth’s chief spy. His own sister Jane, and his friend the Reverend Thomas Coombe, Jr., had written to him about the scandal over William’s letter to Strahan, which somehow got reincarnated as a letter to Whitehall. He feared for William, a royal officer, even more than he did for Joseph Galloway. But he must not mention this concern to anyone; above all he must not write to William about it, for fear that such a letter, falling into the wrong hands, might be construed as proof of collusion between father and son. That would be fatal.
So instead he wrote to Galloway, his son’s friend and confederate, knowing he would share the burden with William and that both would stand warned. He addressed his friend and his son as one man, with vehemence and fire, in terms that could not be mistaken: He desired no reconciliation with Britain.
I have not heard what objections were made to the Plan in the Congress, nor would I make more than this one, that when I consider the extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this rotten state, and the glorious public virtue so predominant in our rising country, I cannot but apprehend more mischief than benefit from a closer Union. I fear they will drag us after them in all the plundering wars their desperate circumstances, injustice and rapacity, may prompt them to undertake; and their wide-wasting prodigality and profusion [will] devour all revenue and produce continual necessity in the midst of natural plenty. I apprehend therefore that to unite us intimately, will only be to corrupt and poison us also.
This letter must have put the fear of God in Joseph Galloway and his friend the governor of New Jersey, arriving when it did, only days before the carnage at Lexington and Concord, and weeks before the appearance of the old wizard himself, in his doublet jacket and cocked hat, on the Market Street wharf. It never occurred to them that his would be anything other than a voice of reason.