TWO
BECOMING A BRITISH IMPERIALIST

FRANKLIN’S ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTS

Becoming a gentleman changed Franklin’s life. He was no longer merely the “honest Tradesman.” He was a different person with different goals. Although he did not hide the fact that he had had only a tradesman’s education (which made his achievements all the more impressive), he certainly did not go about Philadelphia bragging of his humble and obscure origins.¹ As his portrait, new home, and new style of living suggested, he was eager to be accepted as a complete gentleman. Of course, there were some in Philadelphia who never forgot where he came from, and no doubt he had to overcome a thousand slights and snubs by sheer genius and persistence and by his remarkable ability to act the part not only of a gentleman of means but, more important for the enlightened eighteenth century, of a gentleman of learning.

Having “disengag’d . . . from private Business,” Franklin was now free to devote himself openly to gentlemanly activities. Once he became a gentleman and a “master of my own time,” Franklin says that he thought he would do what other gentlemen did—write and engage in “Philosophical Studies and Amusements.” As he told the New York official and scientist Cadwallader Colden, he now had “leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large with such ingenious and worthy Men as are pleas’d to honour me with their Friendship or Acquaintance on such Points as may produce something for the common benefit of Mankind, uninterrupted by the little Cares and Fatigues of Business.”2

For Franklin the most significant of those “Philosophical Studies and Amusements,” and an important inducement for his retiring, was his involvement with electricity. From his earliest years Franklin had been fascinated by all aspects of nature and human behavior. Indeed, throughout his life he retained a childlike sense of curiosity that led him to wonder about the workings of nearly everything. So he wondered about some pelagic crabs he found in seaweed; he wondered about the effects of differing amounts of oil on water; he wondered why an ocean voyage took two weeks longer going west than it did going east. Indeed, he could not drink a cup of tea without wondering why the tea leaves at the bottom gathered in one way rather than in another.³ Things that struck him as new and odd were always worth thinking about, for explaining them might advance the boundaries of knowledge. “For a new appearance,” he later wrote, “if it cannot be explain’d by our old principles, may afford us new ones, of use perhaps in explaining some other obscure parts of natural knowledge.” With such an enlightened need to know and to understand, it was inevitable that he would investigate the wonders of electricity.⁴

Electricity was one of those hidden forces, like gravity and magnetism, that came to fascinate every knowledgeable person in the eighteenth century. Initially, however, like so much that we today label “science,” electricity was simply a curious amusement, just a matter of showmen-savants or “electricians” playing parlor tricks with electrostatics, trying to get people to laugh at the way things attracted and repelled one another. The court electrician to Louis XV of France once sent an electric shock through 180 soldiers of the guard who were touching one another, in order to get them to jump simultaneously and amuse the court. To top himself, he did the same with 700 monks, and the king and court were greatly amused.⁵ On a visit to Boston in 1746 Franklin witnessed a performance by one of these electricians, Dr. Archibald Spencer from Scotland, who had begun his career as a male midwife and would end it as a clergyman.⁶ One of Spencer’s most spectacular tricks was to suspend a little boy from the ceiling by silken threads while drawing “electric fire”—that is, sparks—from his hands and feet. Although Spencer’s electrical experiments were “imperfectly performed,” they were new to Franklin, and “they equally surpriz’d and pleas’d” him.7 It was just the kind of thing that would excite Franklin’s insatiable curiosity, and soon after he jumped at the opportunity to purchase all Spencer’s apparatus.

At about the same time Peter Collinson, a wealthy English Quaker merchant interested in science, sent to the Library Company a glass tube and instructions for conducting various electrical experiments. Thomas Penn, the son of William Penn, also presented some electrical apparatus to the Library Company. Franklin borrowed more stuff from his household: thimbles, a vinegar cruet, a cake of wax, a pump handle, the gold leaf of a book binding—anything and everything that could help him experiment with this mysterious force.⁸ Finally he acquired a Leyden jar, or capacitor (“this miraculous Bottle,” Franklin called it), which allowed for the accumulation of far greater electrical charges.⁹ With all this equipment Franklin’s enthusiasm ran wild. He threw himself into studying and playing with electricity. “I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done,” he told Collinson in 1747. He practiced his experiments alone and then invited crowds of friends and acquaintances to witness them. For months he had “little leisure for anything else.”¹⁰

Franklin sent Collinson piecemeal reports of his ideas and his experiments. Because he could not know what European philosophers had already discovered and was never really sure of the significance of his findings, he presented them diffidently. He apologized for the crudity and hastiness of his thoughts and generously urged Collinson to share them with whomever he pleased.

But despite the fact that he was out of touch with the centers of European thought, his ideas were truly original. He concocted for the first time in history what he called an electrical battery for the storing of electrical charges; he created new English words for the new science—conductor, charge, discharge, condense, armature, electrify, and others; he replaced the traditional idea that electricity was of two kinds—vitreous and resinous—with the fact that it was a single “fluid” with positive and negative or plus and minus charges; and he came to understand that the plus and minus charges or states of electrification of bodies must occur in exactly equal amounts—a quantitative principle that is known today as the law of conservation of charge, a principle fundamental to all science.11

Although he was excited by his findings, he was chagrined that he could not at first discover any practical use for them, and for Franklin, science or philosophy—indeed, every area of thought—had to be useful. Initially the best he could do was to suggest using an electric shock to kill hens and turkeys for eating: it made them unusually tender. The French eventually picked up this technique and, predictably, spent many years trying to use electricity to improve the cooking of food. They even wondered if electricity might not make large animals more tender for eating, but Franklin thought the electrical charge necessary to kill large animals might end up killing the cook instead.¹²

Many people had guessed that lightning was an electrical phenomenon, but no one had ever set out a method for proving it until Franklin did in 1749.¹³ Not only did Franklin explain how lightning was generated, he also suggested that points grounded with conducting wires might be attached to houses, ships, and churches in order to draw off the lightning. The Royal Society in London showed little interest in publishing Franklin’s letters in full; in fact, according to Franklin, some members even laughed at some of his findings, probably convinced that no colonist living on the outer edges of Christendom could produce anything worthwhile. Collinson turned them over to a publisher, who in 1751 brought them out in an eighty-six-page book entitled Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America.¹⁴

During the eighteenth century Franklin’s book went through five English editions, three in French, one in Italian, and one in German. Although Franklin became known everywhere, it was the French who were most excited by his theories and who first successfully tested them. (Franklin’s own secret test of his ideas—his famous flying of a kite in a thunderstorm—came in the summer of 1752, after the successful French experiments but before news of them reached America.) Suddenly Franklin was an international celebrity. “All Europe is in Agitation on Verifying Electrical Experiments on points,” Collinson told Franklin in September 1752. “All commends the Thought of the Inventor. More I dare not Saye least I offend Chast Ears.”¹⁵

Collinson need not have worried about offending Franklin’s modesty, for Franklin, as he himself admitted, had his share of vanity. He had, of course, so much more ability than others to be vain about, but, knowing the effect on people, he wisely worked hard at restraining his vanity as much as possible. Although he was genuinely surprised by the acclaim he received for his experiments, he certainly welcomed it. He knew that people love to be praised, “tho’,” as he told a friend in 1751, “we are generally Hypocrites in that respect, and pretend to disregard Praise.”16

The praise was extraordinary, to say the least. Franklin began to emerge as a symbol of the primitive New World’s capacity to produce an untutored genius, a standing that he would use to great effectiveness when he later became the United States minister to France. Joseph Priestley declared that Franklin’s discoveries were “the greatest, perhaps, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton.”¹⁷ Immanuel Kant went so far as to call Franklin the modern Prometheus who had stolen fire from the heavens.¹⁸ Many honors soon followed. In May 1753 Harvard College awarded him an honorary master of arts degree, the first M.A. granted to someone not a member of its faculty. In September 1753 Yale followed with another M.A. degree, and three years later the College of William and Mary did the same. “Thus without studying in any College I came to partake of their Honours.”¹⁹ In 1753 the Royal Society awarded him the Sir Godfrey Copley Medal for “his curious experiments and observations on electricity,” and three years later, much to Franklin’s delight, made him a member.²⁰ Ezra Stiles, later president of Yale, wanted Franklin to be honored with a knighthood or some “hereditary Dignity.” Franklin, said Stiles, in one of his typical unctuous outbursts, “the Electrical Philosopher, the American Inventor of the pointed Rods will live for Ages to come.” Even the king of France sent his congratulations.²¹

He became the premier electrician in a world fascinated by electricians and electricity. He transformed what had been a curious wonder into a science, although he continued to think about science, as almost everyone in the eighteenth century did, in terms of its inventiveness and usefulness. For Franklin, all his discoveries would have meant little without the resultant lightning rod. And others agreed. Even those who did not read his writings or delve into his experiments could understand the significance of the lightning rod for the safety of their homes, churches, or ships. His name spread widely throughout Europe and not just among the learned few. He became in fact the most famous American in the world.

Yet through all the applause and acclaim Franklin remained skeptical of the fickle world of science and invention. People, he told the South Carolinian physician and scientist John Lining in 1755, did not really admire inventors. Not having any inventive faculty themselves, they could not easily conceive that others may possess it. “A man of their own acquaintance; one who has no more sense than themselves, could not possibly, in their opinion, have been the inventor of anything.” Perhaps he was thinking of the reaction of some of his genteel Philadelphia neighbors to his sudden fame—Franklin the printer (a printer!), married to Deborah Read, had become a world-renowned philosopher! Who would have guessed?

Franklin went on to describe the vanity, envy, and jealousy that afflicted the world of science and invention—passions that made it impossible for any inventor to claim much reputation for long. We can scarcely remember who invented spectacles or the compass, he said; even paper and printing, which record everything else, have not been able to preserve with certainty their inventors. Do not wish therefore, he told Lining, for a friend or child to possess any special faculty of invention. “For his attempts to benefit mankind in that way, however well imagined, if they do not succeed, expose him, though very unjustly, to general ridicule and contempt; and if they do succeed, to envy, robbery, and abuse.” There was no humor or irony here to deflect the bitterness: Franklin had felt all the envy and ridicule that he spoke of.22

THE IMPORTANCE OF PUBLIC SERVICE

As much as Franklin appreciated the importance of his scientific achievements, science was not what he came to value most. Given the skeptical reactions of some of his Philadelphia neighbors to his scientific experiments, it could never be what he would most prize. At first, he had exulted in the leisure that his retirement from business had given him, even discouraging his friends from promoting his election to the assembly. But he soon had second thoughts. He came to realize that science and philosophy could never take the place of service in government. Being a public official—that was what counted, that was how the community was best served, that was where true greatness and lasting fame could be best achieved. In 1750 he warned his fellow scientist Cadwallader Colden not to “let your Love of Philosophical Amusements have more than its due Weight with you. Had Newton been Pilot but of a single common Ship, the finest of his discoveries would scarce have excus’d, or atton’d for his abandoning the Helm one Hour in Time of Danger; how much less if she had carried the Fate of the Commonwealth.”23 In other words, the greatest scientist of the age would have had no excuse for not serving the government if the state had needed him.

Franklin thought that the province of Pennsylvania needed him. Pennsylvania, founded in 1681 by William Penn as a refuge for his fellow Quakers, was a fast-growing colony continually beset by factionalism and conflict between its legislature and its Penn family–controlled executive. Its population in 1750 numbered over 120,000, making it the fourth-largest colony after Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maryland; by 1770 it would be the second largest. The lack of any established church and the Quaker reputation for religious toleration had attracted the most varied mixture of religious groups in all of North America. By midcentury the Quakers had become a minority in their own colony, dipping to just a quarter of the population. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians made up another quarter and the Germans, composed of a wide assortment of religious sects, totaled nearly 40 percent. Favoring the Quaker policies of pacifism, no militia, and low taxes, the Germans tacitly agreed to let a Quaker oligarchy run the assembly. But Indian problems on the frontier, where most of the Scotch-Irish were settled, and the fact that the Penn family, which had converted to Anglicanism, refused to pay what many thought was its fair share of taxes, meant that politics in the colony remained contentious and turbulent.

This was the faction-ridden political mixture that Franklin entered. Following his retirement from business, as he recalled in his Autobiography, “the Publick, now considering me as a Man of Leisure, laid hold of me for their Purposes.” Indeed, he said, “Every Part of our Civil Government, and almost at the same time, impos[ed] some Duty on me.”²⁴ As a gentleman, that is, as a man of leisure, he was brought into government. He became a member of the Philadelphia City Council in 1748; he was appointed a justice of the peace in 1749; and in 1751 he became a city alderman and was elected from Philadelphia to be one of the twenty-six members of the very clubby eastern- and Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania Assembly.

His “Ambition,” he admitted, was “flatter’d by all these Promotions . . . for considering my low Beginnings they were great Things to me. And they were still more pleasing, as being so many spontaneous Testimonies of the public’s good Opinion, and by me entirely unsolicited.” Indeed, Franklin was very proud of his aristocratic sense of obligation to serve the public and of his genteel disdain for electioneering. Like any good eighteenth-century gentleman, he stood, not ran, for office. Campaigning for public office was regarded as vulgar and contemptible. No self-respecting gentleman would engage in it, and certainly not Franklin, whose status as a gentleman was still suspect in the eyes of some. His election to the assembly, he recalled with pride, “was repeated every Year of Ten Years, without my ever asking any Elector for his Vote, or signifying either directly or indirectly any Desire of being chosen.”25

In the legislature he immediately became influential and was at once able to get his son William appointed to succeed him as its clerk. During all those years he had been clerk he had become bored stiff listening to tedious legislative debates in which he could take no part, and he had amused himself by inventing arithmetical games. Now it was different. He was at the center of assembly affairs, and very much in demand. No responsibility was too great or too small for his involvement, and he served on every kind of committee, dealing with both the most prestigious and the most minor matters. His committees drafted messages and responses to the governor, reviewed the history of and need for paper money, investigated the share of expenses borne by the province and the proprietors for Indian expenses, studied official fees, regulated the number of dogs in the city of Philadelphia, and recommended where a bridge across the Schuylkill should be built. Franklin seldom spoke in the assembly, for public speaking was never his strong point. Instead, he worked quietly behind the scenes, bringing people together, shaping opinions, and writing reports. By 1753 he had become the leader of the dominant Quaker party in the assembly, much opposed to the Penn family and the proprietary government.²⁶

Pennsylvania was an unusual colony. Because Charles II had granted William Penn a proprietary charter, the Penn family more or less owned the colony in a quasi-feudal manner. Maryland was also a proprietary colony held by the Baltimore family. These two provinces, together with Connecticut and Rhode Island, which were corporate colonies with separate charters, were the only colonies in British North America not controlled directly by the Crown and whose governors were not royally appointed. The fact that Pennsylvania was not a royal colony eventually became something of an obsession with Franklin.

Well before he became a member of the assembly, Franklin had been concerned with the way the Pennsylvania government had neglected the defense of the colony against America’s French and Indian enemies, largely because of the Quakers’ pacifist principles and their sympathy for the Indians. When the legislature didn’t act to defend the colony in 1747, Franklin almost single-handedly had privately raised 10,000 armed men in the Militia Association and had organized lotteries to raise funds to purchase cannons and to build batteries on the Delaware River.

Obviously these private efforts at raising an army posed a threat to the legitimate government; as soon as the most prominent of the proprietors, Thomas Penn, now living in England, learned of them, he became alarmed. Penn saw Franklin’s formation of the Association as “acting a part little less than Treason.” If the people of Pennsylvania could act “independent of this Government, why should they not Act against it.” The man behind these actions, said Penn, was “a dangerous Man and I should be very Glad he inhabited any other country, as I believe him of a very uneasy Spirit.” But Penn realized that Franklin was “a sort of Tribune of the People,” and as such, at least for the time being, “he must be treated with regard.”27 Thus, even before Franklin had become a member of the assembly, the lifelong enmity between him and Thomas Penn had taken root.

Although William Penn, the father of Thomas Penn, had founded Pennsylvania as a “holy experiment” for the Society of Friends, the present generation of Penns had abandoned their ancestor’s Quakerism for the Church of England, and they had come to regard their proprietary colony as more a source of income than a religious experiment. With such attitudes on the part of the proprietors, it was inevitable that the bulk of the population of Pennsylvania would come to believe that the Penns ought to do more to pay for the costs of supporting the colony. Above all, they ought to allow the assembly to tax the hundreds of thousands of acres of proprietary lands they had not yet granted or sold to settlers; after all, everyone else in Pennsylvania was paying taxes on their land. Franklin and the Quaker party were very much in the forefront of this opposition to the Penn family.

FRANKLIN’S VISION OF THE NEW WORLD

Before long Franklin began to see that there was more to America than the province of Pennsylvania. He had no sooner become a member of the assembly than he became eager to apply his immense intelligence and imagination to the issues and problems of the entire British Empire in North America.

In 1751, in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc., Franklin set forth basic principles that explained the difference between life in Europe and life in America. In Europe land was scarce in relation to people and therefore was expensive. Hence, unable to afford their own land to farm, Europeans were compelled to work for others, either by becoming laborers for landowners in the countryside or, more often, by migrating to the cities to engage in manufacturing goods in factories. In both cases since labor, because of its plentifulness, was cheap, the workers’ wages were low. Because their wages were so low, the European workers tended to postpone marriage and thus to have fewer children than if they had owned their own land.

In America, he wrote, the situation was reversed. Land was cheap and labor, which was relatively scarce, was expensive. Since land was so plentiful, a laborer in America who understood farming could in a short time save enough money to buy land for a family farm. Such people were not afraid to marry early and raise many children, for these American married couples could look ahead and “see that more Land is to be had at rates equally easy.” In America twice as many people per hundred married every year than in Europe and had twice as many children. Consequently, said Franklin, the population of America “must at least be doubled every 20 years.” He went on, “But notwithstanding this Increase, so vast is the Territory of North-America that it will require many Ages to settle it fully, and till it is fully settled, Labour will never be cheap, where no Man continues long a Labourer for others, but gets a Plantation of his own, no Man continues long a Journeyman to a Trade, but among those new Settlers, and sets up for himself, Etc.”

Franklin could scarcely restrain his excitement as he contemplated the future of this prolific New World that would eventually outnumber the Old. At the rate the colonies were increasing, he said, the population of North America “will in another Century be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water. What an Accession of Power to the British Empire by Sea as well as Land! What Increase of Trade and Navigation! What Numbers of Ships and Seamen!”28

With this vision of the people in North America eventually outnumbering those in Britain itself, Franklin was not anticipating the separation of the colonies from Great Britain. Quite the contrary: he was a true-blue Englishman; he had no thought that America should not be a part of England, at least as connected to England as Scotland was.²⁹ He thought the colonists were as much British subjects as those in Britain itself. They spoke the same language, possessed the same manners, read the same books, and shared the same religion. The growth of British subjects in America could only benefit the entire empire.

The glorious English empire he envisioned was supposed to be a single community made up only of Englishmen, which is why he interrupted his pamphlet on population growth with an angry outcry against the massive immigration of Germans into Pennsylvania, a development he was not alone in protesting. “Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?” Indeed, if he had his way he would exclude all the Germans and black people from the New World. The country, he said, ought to belong to only the English and the Indians, “the lovely White and Red.” But then again, he said, “perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”³⁰

To Franklin the rise of the British Empire was the greatest phenomenon of the eighteenth century, and with his ever growing ambition he wanted very much to be part of it. In the same year, 1751, that he wrote his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, he solicited the aid of Peter Collinson and Chief Justice William Allen to lobby on his behalf for the position of postmaster general for North America. His provincial offices were fine, but he had his sights on something bigger than postmaster of a single city.

Finally, in 1753, the Crown did appoint Franklin and William Hunter, postmaster at Williamsburg, joint deputy postmasters general for all the colonies of North America. Franklin was supposedly responsible for the northern colonies and Hunter for the southern colonies, but since Hunter’s health was not good, most of the responsibility of the post office fell on Franklin. He applied all he had learned running the Philadelphia post office to the colonial post office. He introduced strict accounting and increased the speed and reliability of mail delivery, and he made the post office profitable. By 1757 he had completely reorganized postal delivery in North America, exercised the patronage expected of someone in his position to secure postal jobs up and down the continent for nearly all of his many relatives, and helped to make the scattered colonies more aware of one another.

THE ALBANY PLAN OF UNION

Franklin had been thinking about the union of the North American colonies for a long while. The American Philosophical Society, which he had proposed in 1743, had been designed to bring intellectuals from the various colonies together. In 1751 his partner James Parker sent him a pamphlet by a New York official, Archibald Kennedy, entitled The Importance of Gaining and Preserving the Friendship of the Indians to the British Interest Considered, and asked Franklin’s advice on reprinting it in Philadelphia. Franklin very much agreed with the argument of the pamphlet and offered some additional suggestions. If the British Empire were to become as great as Franklin imagined, then the French had to be driven back and the Indians had to become allies of the English. If nothing were done, the French could occupy the entire Ohio Valley, take over the Indian trade, and cut Britain off from access to the continent’s interior. In order to prevent these dire developments, said Franklin, the colonists had to create some sort of intercolonial union for Indian affairs and defense, some kind of structure that would transcend the governments of the several colonies. If the Iroquois could unite, why couldn’t the colonists? “It would be a very strange Thing,” he wrote, “if six Nations of ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner as that it has subsisted for Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal Understanding of their Interests.”31

For such an imperial union the colonists could not rely on the governors and members of the assemblies of each of the colonies to act; they were much too caught up in their local squabbles to think about the empire as a whole. Instead, Franklin presented a solution that he was to return to time and again in his career—a reliance on a few good men, or even a single man, to set matters straight. That was the way he had operated with such success in Philadelphia, but whether he could operate the same way in larger arenas was the challenge of his career.

Now, if you were to pick out half a Dozen Men of good Understanding and Address, and furnish them with a reasonable Scheme and proper Instructions, and send them in the Nature of Ambassadors to the other Colonies, where they might apply particularly to all the leading Men, and by proper Management get them to engage in promoting the Scheme; where, by being present, they would have the Opportunity of pressing the Affair both in publick and private, obviating Difficulties as they arise, answering Objections as soon as they are made, before they spread and gather Strength in the Minds of the People, &c., &c. I imagine such a Union might thereby be made and established: For reasonable sensible Men, can always make a reasonable Scheme appear such to other reasonable Men, if they take Pains, and have Time and Opportunity for it.

At this point he thought a voluntary union entered into by the colonies themselves was preferable to one imposed by Parliament. After all, the colonists in the seventeenth century had formed confederations without the approval of Parliament. Why couldn’t they do the same now? Besides, it would be easier to make future changes in the union if people believed they had consented to it from the beginning.32

In detailing his plan for Indian affairs and colonial defense, Franklin proposed an intercolonial council made up of representatives from all the colonies, with a governor appointed by the Crown. Money for the union might be raised by an excise tax on liquor. To avoid jealousy among the colonies, the council might rotate its meeting place from colony to colony. If the colonists were to defend themselves during the war with the French and the Indians that seemed destined to come, Franklin was convinced, they had to put together some kind of union.

Other Englishmen were also worried about the French and Indians in North America. Even before fighting broke out on the Ohio frontier between English and French forces, the British Board of Trade in London had called for an unprecedented meeting of commissioners from the several colonies to negotiate a treaty with the Six Nations of the Iroquois. In June 1754 commissioners from each of the colonies were to meet in Albany with the Indians and consider issues of intercolonial defense and security. Franklin was one of the four commissioners selected to represent Pennsylvania, along with Richard Peters, secretary of the province, Isaac Norris, the speaker of the assembly, and John Penn, a grandson of the colony’s founder—a high-powered group that gives us some indication of Franklin’s remarkable political rise. Although Pennsylvania instructed its delegates merely to hold an interview with the Iroquois and renew friendship with them, Franklin had grander ideas. He went to Albany well prepared with a plan for union.³³

Although Franklin had been moving in the highest circles of Pennsylvania’s political society for several years, he now saw new political worlds opening up. On his way to Albany, he stopped in New York and showed his proposal to James Alexander and Archibald Kennedy, “two Gentlemen of great Knowledge in public Affairs,” whose approval fortified his confidence to present his proposal to the upcoming congress.³⁴ In Albany he met and impressed some of the most influential officials of the other colonies, including William Smith Sr., Yale graduate and member of the New York council, and Thomas Hutchinson, Harvard graduate and member of the Massachusetts council. In the few years since the public had “laid hold” of him, he had come a long way.

A squabble among the colonies over precedence at the conference did not bode well for their cooperation. Virginia, perhaps the most important colony of all, did not even send a delegation. But finally the representatives who attended agreed that some sort of colonial union was needed, and they appointed a committee made up of a commissioner from each colony to draw one up. Franklin was the Pennsylvania representative. Although a few other commissioners came with proposals for union, none had thought out or detailed his plan as fully as Franklin. His 1754 proposal was essentially the same as his earlier one, with one big difference. Whereas in 1751 he had believed that the union ought to be organized by the colonies themselves, he now thought the plan ought to be sent to England and unilaterally established by Parliament. His experience with the Pennsylvania Assembly’s reluctance to resist French encroachments in the Ohio Valley and his frustration with the parochialism of some other colonies had convinced him that only imposition by act of Parliament could bring about the kind of union he wanted.35

On the committee, Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts, in collaboration with Franklin, took the lead in presenting a case for some sort of colonial union—no easy task, since most of the delegates, like those from Pennsylvania, had been instructed simply to negotiate with the Indians, not construct a union. But the Albany Congress unanimously accepted the committee’s report and delegated Franklin, as the strongest proponent of the idea, to draw up a detailed plan of union. In doing so Franklin had to make some concessions to the views of his fellow commissioners. “When one has so many different People with different Opinions to deal with in a new Affair,” he explained to Cadwallader Colden, “one is oblig’d sometimes to give up some smaller Points in order to obtain greater.”³⁶ But the plan that the Albany Congress adopted in July 1754 came pretty close to his original proposal.

The union was to be headed by a president general appointed and paid by the Crown. This president general was to be aided by a grand council composed of representatives from each of the colonies and selected by the respective colonial legislatures in proportion to their monetary contributions to the general treasury. Until that could be determined, the grand council would comprise seven delegates each from Massachusetts and Virginia, six from Pennsylvania, and so on, down to two each from New Hampshire and Rhode Island. The president general with the advice of the grand council would be responsible for making war and peace with the Indians, raising soldiers and building forts, regulating the Indian trade, purchasing land from the Indians, granting that land to colonists, making laws, and levying taxes “as to them shall appear most equal and just.”37 It was an extraordinary proposal—totally out of touch with the political realities of the day, which was often the case when one relied on a few reasonable men for solutions to complicated political problems.

The plan was sent to the colonies for their approval, to be followed by confirmation by the king and Parliament. Franklin confessed that he had no idea how the assemblies or the home government would view the plan. Within a few months he realized that the prospects were not good. The colonial assemblies were not willing to adopt any plan of union at all. Even the Pennsylvania Assembly refused to go along with the Albany proposal. He had come to realize that the colonies would never unite without pressure from the mother country. Although everyone cried that a union was “absolutely necessary,” the “weak Noodles” who dominated the colonial assemblies were too distracted to act. “So if ever there be a Union,” he told Peter Collinson in December 1754, “it must be form’d by the Ministry and Parliament. I doubt not that they will make a good one.”³⁸

But the ministry (or what later would be called the cabinet) and Parliament were no more eager to adopt the Albany Plan than the colonial assemblies, and officials in Britain rejected it as well. Although most Americans in 1754 could scarcely conceive of the colonies’ becoming independent from Great Britain, many British officials continued to worry, as they had for decades, that the colonies were becoming too rich and strong to be governed any longer from London.³⁹ Bringing the colonies together in any way seemed to make such a possibility more likely. The Speaker of the House of Commons warned the Duke of Newcastle, the official responsible for American affairs, of the “ill consequences to be apprehended from uniting too closely the northern colonies with each other, an Independency upon this country to be feared from such an union.”40 With such opinions flying about it is not surprising that the British government dismissed the Albany Plan out of hand. As Franklin later recalled, “Its Fate was singular. The Assemblies did not adopt it as they all thought there was too much [crown] Prerogative in it; and in England it was judg’d to have too much of the Democratic.”⁴¹

Despite the failure of his Albany Plan, the whole experience of making plans for the empire was exhilarating. Being deputy postmaster for North America could not compare with this kind of top-level participation in imperial affairs. When word spread of Franklin’s major involvement in drawing up the plan of union, prominent imperial officials were eager to talk with him. One of these was William Shirley, royal governor of Massachusetts, who became commander in chief of the British forces in North America in 1755. Franklin had not previously met Shirley but knew him to be “a wise, good and worthy Man,” who, as governor, had been “made the Subject of some public virulent and senseless Libels.”⁴² Acquiring these kinds of imperial connections was a heady experience for Franklin, and he could not help feeling some pride. He was eager to tell his son that during his meeting with Governor Shirley in 1754 the governor had been “particularly civil to me.”⁴³

He presumably began exchanging views with Shirley over the nature of the British Empire and the kind of union that might be possible in North America. Apparently, Shirley proposed that the colonial assemblies be bypassed not only in establishing a general government but also in the administering of such a government. Franklin admitted that a “general Government might be as well and faithfully administer’d without the people, as with them,” but he reminded Shirley that “where heavy burthens are to be laid on them, it has been found useful to make it, as much as possible, their own act.”⁴⁴ The colonists themselves, he argued, knew better the needs of the colonies for defense than did the distant Parliament. Franklin said all this at the very moment he was telling his friend Collinson that the colonial assemblies were so fuzzy-headed that the ministry and Parliament not only had to impose a plan of union on the colonies but would do it right. This raises the question of just how sincere he was with Shirley, or whether he in fact then wrote this to Shirley at all. (His three letters to Shirley in December 1754 were printed in a London newspaper in 1766, but the originals in Franklin’s hand do not survive.)45

If he did write this to Shirley that winter, he was sufficiently confident of himself to tell a crown-appointed governor to his face that such royal governors were not to be trusted to look after the colonists’ interests. Royal governors, he informed Governor Shirley, were “not always Men of the best Abilities and Integrity, have no Estates here, nor any natural Connections with us,” and “often come to the Colonies merely to make Fortunes, with which they intend to return to Britain.” He went on to remind Shirley “that it is suppos’d an undoubted Right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own Consent given thro’ their Representatives.” Since the colonists had no representatives in Parliament, for Parliament to tax the colonists “would be treating them as a conquer’d People, and not as true British Subjects.”⁴⁶

In reply, Shirley suggested that the colonists might be granted representation in Parliament. Franklin liked this idea, as long as the colonists “had a reasonable number of Representatives allowed them; and that all the old Acts of Parliament restraining the trade or cramping the manufacturing of the Colonies, be at the same time repealed, and the British Subjects on this side the water put, in those respects, on the same footing with those in Great Britain.” What he wanted above all in 1754 was for the people of Great Britain and the people of the colonies to “learn to consider themselves, not as belonging to different Communities with different Interests, but to one Community with one Interest.” This plea for treating the colonists as equals of those living in England itself was a measure of Franklin’s heightened sense of his own personal equality with nearly anyone in the British Empire. Once he actually began meeting some of the so-called great men of the empire, such as Lord Loudoun, he came to realize that they had no more ability than he had.⁴⁷

PENNSYLVANIA POLITICS

When the French and Indian War (or the Seven Years War, as it was called in Europe) began in 1754 with the expedition into the Ohio Valley by a young Virginia militia colonel named George Washington, Franklin inevitably became involved. By the next year, when the British government sent General Edward Braddock with two regiments of regulars to engage the French in the interior, Franklin had already persuaded the Pennsylvania Assembly to create a land bank to finance the war effort. The assembly deputed Franklin to meet with Braddock, disabuse him of his prejudices against Pennsylvania, and explain to him just how much the colony was contributing to the war effort. When Braddock discovered that he was short of horses and wagons to haul his expedition westward, Franklin offered to gather the horses and wagons and to stand bond for them personally. That Braddock’s expedition ended in a shocking disaster in July 1755 was not Franklin’s fault; he had warned the arrogant general that frontier warfare would not be easy.

By the fall of 1755 the situation had become desperate. Frontier defenses had collapsed, westerners were fleeing eastward in droves, and with virtually no military force to stop them French-inspired hostile Indians were closing within a day’s ride of Philadelphia. Thoroughly alarmed, the Pennsylvania Assembly finally authorized expenditures for defense, and to raise the money passed a bill taxing all the property in the colony, including the proprietary estates. Under instructions from the proprietors in England, the governor vetoed the bill.

Thus were renewed the increasingly angry exchanges between the governor and the legislature over the issue of taxing the proprietors’ lands, with Franklin writing most of the assembly’s messages. Franklin later recalled that “our Answers as well as his Messages were often tart, and sometimes indecently abusive.”48 But as much as Franklin abused the governor, it was the proprietors, especially Thomas Penn, who really aroused his ire. That the proprietors, who were subjects of the king as well as he, refused to pay taxes on their lands in Pennsylvania along with everyone else galled Franklin to no end.

But something had to be done, and Franklin worked out a compromise that allowed the governor and legislature to agree to the organization of a militia. Unlike Franklin’s Militia Association of 1747, this army was public and legal, though military men regarded its democratic organization with soldiers electing their own officers as absurd. Franklin not only wrote a public defense of the militia but also took charge of raising the troops. With no military title this corpulent forty-nine-year-old civilian led a commission escorted by fifty mounted militiamen to the northwest frontier of the province in order to organize its defense. Governor Robert Morris of Pennsylvania finally recognized Franklin’s military role, and in January 1756 formally appointed him sole military commander of that area of the frontier. After overseeing the building of several forts, Franklin got word that the assembly was convening and he was needed back in Philadelphia. Franklin later recalled that the governor even proposed making him a general in charge of provincial troops to do what Braddock had failed to do and take Fort Duquesne.49 He could hardly help thinking that he had become a kind of indispensable one-man government for the colony.

All this, together with the accolades he was receiving at the same time for his scientific accomplishments, was enough to turn any man’s head, and Franklin began to become pretty full of himself. When later that year he was elected once again to the colonelcy of the militia regiment, he accepted gladly and was even escorted by his regiment with drawn swords, an honor never paid to the proprietor of Pennsylvania or to any of the colony’s governors, as Franklin delighted in pointing out.⁵⁰

Rumors reached Thomas Penn in London of the incident, and it alarmed him. He had earlier thought Franklin a dangerous man, and Franklin’s presuming to be escorted with drawn swords, “as if he had been a member of the Royal Family or Majesty itself,” made Penn even more suspicious of this parvenu printer.⁵¹ Penn’s confidants in Pennsylvania told him that Franklin was trying to dupe everyone in order to take over all power in the province.⁵²

Even Franklin’s friends were distressed that he seemed to be overreaching himself. Colden found Franklin’s conduct “most surprising,” and alerted Collinson. When a worried Collinson wrote Franklin about his display of arrogance, Franklin dismissed the matter. “The People happen to love me. Perhaps that’s my Fault.” Besides, he had nothing but contempt for the proprietors and had “not the least Inclination to be in their good Graces.” They were petty and mean men, and he had a “natural Dislike to Persons” like them. His opposition to the proprietors was based not on personal pique or resentment but on his “Regard to the Publick Good.” He may be mistaken about what that public good may be, he told Collinson, “but at least I mean well.” That’s more than could be said for the proprietors. He was ashamed for them. They should have become “Demi Gods” in the eyes of the people; instead they have “become the Objects of universal Hatred and Contempt.” Despite all the power their charter, laws, and wealth gave them, “a private Person (forgive your Friend a little Vanity),” he said to Collinson, was able to “do more Good in their Country than they.” And this “private Person” was able to do so much more than the proprietors “because he has the Affections and Confidence of their People, and of course some Command of the Peoples Purses.”53

By 1756 Franklin must have thought he was on top of the world. No one had seen more of America, and no one knew more important people in the colonies, than he. He was in a position, he thought, to accomplish extraordinary things. “Life,” he wrote that year, was “like a dramatic Piece” and thus “should not only be conducted with Regularity, but methinks it should finish handsomely. Being now in the last Act, I begin to cast about for something fit to end with.”⁵⁴ Of course, he could scarcely have foreseen how handsomely it would end. At this point in the drama of his life he wanted only to help shape the future of the entity he most admired—the British Empire.

In 1754, while formulating the Albany Plan, he had envisioned two new colonies being created in the West “between the present frontiers of our colonies on one side, and the lakes and Mississippi on the other.” These colonies, he said, would lead “to the great increase of Englishmen, English trade, and English power.” The Crown should grant to the contributors and settlers of these colonies “as many and as great privileges and powers of government . . . as his Majesty in his wisdom shall think for their benefit and encouragement, consistent with the general good of the British empire.”⁵⁵

This dream of landed empires in the West was one he long clung to and one he shared with his son William. Two years later he fantasized with his friend the evangelical preacher George Whitefield about their being “jointly employ’d by the Crown to settle a Colony on the Ohio. . . . What a glorious Thing it would be, to settle in that fine country a large Strong Body of Religious and Industrious People! What a Security to the Other Colonies: and Advantageous to Britain, by Increasing her People, Territory, Strength, and Commerce.” He and Whitefield could spend the remainder of their lives in such an endeavor, and “God would bless us with Success, if we undertook it with a sincere Regard to his Honour, the Service of our gracious King, and (which is the same thing) the Publick Good.”56

MISSION TO GREAT BRITAIN

Franklin was very much the loyal Englishman. Although few Americans in the 1750s expressed anything other than deep loyalty to the mother country, Franklin did seem to have an unusual degree of confidence in his gracious king. He was in fact coming to believe that royal authority might even supplant the proprietary government of Pennsylvania.

With the legislature and the governor continuing to wrangle over the issue of taxing the proprietary lands, the assembly early in 1757 decided to send a mission to England to argue its case with the proprietors and, if that should fail, with the British government. The assembly’s ostensible aim was to get the proprietors to change their attitude toward taxing their lands and to cease issuing oppressive instructions to their gubernatorial appointees; but behind the negotiations with the proprietors lay the threat of seeking to have Parliament remove the Penns from control of Pennsylvania.

Naturally, the fifty-one-year-old Franklin was selected as emissary. He could not have been more excited by the prospect of going “home to England,” to the metropolitan center of the empire.⁵⁷ At last he would have an arena fit for what he assumed would be the final act of his remarkable life.⁵⁸

He knew he was leaving “some Enemies in Pensilvania, who will take every Opportunity of injuring me in my Absence.” To “watch” these enemies and “guard my Reputation and Interest as much as may be from the Effects of their Malevolence,” he turned to the young lawyer Joseph Galloway, a friend who had helped to train his son William in the law. Indeed, this wealthy and well-connected future loyalist, in whose care Franklin “chearfully” left his “dearest Concerns,” became his principal political ally and Pennsylvania confidant during his many years in London.⁵⁹

Not surprisingly, Franklin decided to take the twenty-seven-year-old William with him to London. The father and son had grown increasingly close in recent years. William had accompanied his father to the Albany conference, had aided him in rounding up supplies for General Braddock’s ill-fated expedition, and had enjoyed his father’s company during the military buildup on the frontier. In fact, from the beginning Franklin had sought to give William every advantage that he had lacked as a boy. Instead of being taken out of school after only two years, William was sent to the best schools in Philadelphia. William did not have to borrow books or learn a trade. It was clear at the outset that William would be a gentleman who would never have to work for a living with his hands.

If it was inevitable that Franklin would take his son with him to London, it was equally inevitable that he would leave Deborah and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Sally, at home. To be sure, Deborah said she feared crossing the ocean, but no doubt she also knew that the London world that Franklin was entering would not be for her. If she was not invited to the homes of the Philadelphia gentry, how much more out of place would she be amid the sophistication and elegance of London? Besides, Franklin was becoming used to being with William away from the women of the family. In the summer of 1755, a visitor to the Franklin household reported that Deborah had accused her husband of “having too great an esteem for his son in prejudice of herself and daughter.” She certainly had misgivings about her husband and William’s leaving for what was likely to be an extended stay in London, but she promised her husband that she would never complain.60

THE WAY TO WEALTH

Knowing he was off to England for some time, Franklin decided to bring the writing of his Poor Richard’s Almanack to an end. While at sea in the summer of 1757, he completed a preface for the final, 1758 edition. Unlike his earlier prefaces, which were usually a page long, this preface, entitled “Father Abraham’s Speech,” and later known as The Way to Wealth, ran about a dozen pages. It eventually became the most widely reprinted of all Franklin’s works, including the Autobiography.

In this preface Franklin introduced a new persona, Father Abraham, who presumably carries biblical authority and wisdom and yet in fact seems to be a comic figure. When a crowd of shoppers waiting for an auction to begin asks Father Abraham to comment on the economic condition of the country, the old man rises and begins spouting a series of aphorisms taken from previous editions of Poor Richard’s Almanack, repeating over and over again “as Poor Richard Says.” But instead of drawing indiscriminately from the wide variety of proverbs in the earlier almanacs that dealt with all sorts of social and domestic issues, Father Abraham cites only those proverbs that concern hard work, thrift, and financial prudence, such as “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.” At the end of Father Abraham’s harangue, says Franklin’s Richard Saunders persona, the audience heard his counsel, “approved the Doctrine, and immediately practised the contrary, just as if it had been a common sermon.” When the auction finally opened, “they began to buy extravagantly, notwithstanding his Cautions and their own Fear of Taxes.”61

It has been suggested that Franklin was taking the opportunity in this, his last almanac and last series of proverbs, to question the whole project of using maxims to reform behavior. In other words, he was warning his readers not to take all his proverbial advice too literally. Remember, he has Father Abraham finally caution, people cannot get rich on their own; God has something to do with a person’s prosperity.⁶²

Franklin could only believe that God was now firmly on his side. He had all the wealth he needed, and this time, unlike thirty years earlier, he was off to London as a full-fledged gentleman.

LONDON

This time he was emotionally prepared for London; indeed, he so fell in love with Britain that he eventually found it difficult to contemplate going back to America. Along with Dr. Johnson, he came to believe that to love London was to love life and to love life was to love London. London, with its three quarters of a million people, was much larger than it had been thirty years earlier and even more a world unto itself. One in ten Englishmen lived there. Despite its own exceedingly rapid growth, Philadelphia, with fewer than twenty thousand people, could not compare at all to this teeming metropolis. London’s appalling poverty and gin-soaked slums were still present, but the city was improving itself, erecting impressive new Palladian buildings and laying out large elegant squares and crescents. The expensive Westminster Bridge across the Thames had just recently been completed, and the West End, “the polite end of the town,” was being rapidly developed. London was drawing talented people from all over the greater British world—men such as David Hume, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Dr. Johnson, David Garrick, James Boswell, and now, of course, Benjamin Franklin. Not only was London the largest city in Europe, but, some thought, it might become the most grand as well. But this was not to be: it was too noisy, too busy, too turbulent, and too free. In London, James Boswell discovered, “we may be in some degree whatever character we choose.”63

Amid the cosmopolitan excitement of this world-class cultural center—with its numerous clubs, coffeehouses, and theaters—Franklin began to realize just how limited and parochial life was in the distant colonies. Instead of the brief mission that he originally expected, he stayed for more than five years, and then, after a two-year trip back to Philadelphia, he returned to London for another ten years. He came close to staying forever.

He and William and two slaves were soon comfortably ensconced in the apartments of Margaret Stevenson, a widow living with her daughter Mary, called Polly, at No. 7 (later No. 36) Craven Street, near Charing Cross and the fabulous shopping mall of the Strand, and only a short walk from the government offices of Whitehall (see page ref).⁶⁴ As long as he stayed in London, he lived with the Stevensons, where everything, he said, was “pretty genteel.” Mrs. Stevenson and Polly seemed to make up for the absence of Deborah Franklin and Sally. Indeed, he soon came to lavish much more emotion on this surrogate family than he did on his real one back in Philadelphia. The best he could do for his wife and daughter back home, it seemed, was to send them portraits of himself that he commissioned.⁶⁵

At last he met friends with whom he had corresponded for years but had never set eyes upon, men like Peter Collinson, the Quaker merchant, naturalist, and member of the Royal Society, and William Strahan, the Scottish-born printer of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary and the first volumes of David Hume’s history of England and later a member of Parliament. They in turn introduced him to ever widening circles of important people. With his affable nature Franklin was as “clubbable” as Dr. Johnson said James Boswell was, and he joined several clubs, where he met all sorts of scientists, philanthropists, and explorers, including Captain James Cook and Joseph Priestley.66 His favorite club was the Club of Honest Whigs, whose members included his close friends the Quaker physician Dr. John Fothergill and the Scottish scientist John Pringle, who was physician to the Earl of Bute, George III’s confidant and favored minister in the early 1760s. Dr. Pringle, soon to be president of the Royal Society and physician to the king himself, eventually became one of Franklin’s most intimate friends.

Franklin’s house on Craven Street, London

Franklin’s scientific reputation preceded him and opened dozens of doors. He was invited to Cambridge University, where in May 1758 he performed some of his electrical experiments. He enjoyed his visit so much that he and his son went back in July for the university’s commencement ceremonies. He and William, he told Deborah, “were present at all the ceremonies, dined every day in their halls, and my vanity was not a little gratified by the particular regard showed by the chancellor and vice-chancellor of the university, and the heads of colleges.”67 A year later the University of St. Andrews in Scotland conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, which resulted in his thereafter being called “Dr. Franklin.” Another honorary doctoral degree from Oxford followed in 1762.

His fame was extraordinary; it was not simply that he was a world-celebrated scientist but that he was a colonial from the far wilderness across the Atlantic. So celebrated was he that enterprising individuals could make money from his image: one of his portraitists, Benjamin Wilson, had engraver James McArdell make mezzotints for sale to the general public. The 1761 print features Franklin in a great white wig with a static electric machine and writing materials on a table with a lightning storm raging in the background. A year or so later a portrait by another artist, Mason Chamberlain, was likewise reproduced, by engraver Edward Fisher, and widely distributed in England and the colonies (see page ref). This portrait also emphasizes Franklin’s erudition, his electrical experiments, and his honorary degrees.⁶⁸

  

LEFT: Franklin, by Benjamin Wilson, c. 1759
RIGHT: Franklin, mezzotint by James McArdell, 1761

  

LEFT: Franklin, by Mason Chamberlain, 1762
RIGHT: Franklin, mezzotint by Edward Fisher, 1763

In 1759 Franklin toured Scotland, was made a burgess and guild brother of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and met such Scottish luminaries as William Robertson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Honors from Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, and the American provinces were one thing; but this acclaim and these honors were coming from the enlightened centers of the British world. His friend Richard Jackson, who would also become an agent or lobbyist for Pennsylvania, even proposed to get him elected to Parliament. But Franklin said he was “too old to think of changing Countries.” He would soon have second thoughts about that possibility. He was as happy as he had ever been in his life.69

DEBORAH

Time flew by and the months turned into years. Negotiations with the proprietors, especially with the principal proprietor, Thomas Penn, turned out to be slower and more difficult than he expected. But, more important, he soon found that he enjoyed London more and more and was now as much at home in the huge metropolis as he had been in Philadelphia. As early as January 1758, he told his wife that he could not possibly return for at least a year from then. His work, he said, required “both time and patience.”70 By 1760 he had given up even bothering to mention to Deborah when he might return. Although he repeatedly told his wife that he missed her and his daughter, Sally, his letters home soon became more and more perfunctory. Perhaps to ease his conscience over his long absence from his family, he showered gifts on Deborah and Sally. Crate after crate of fine goods were shipped to Philadelphia—carpeting, bedding, tablecloths, blankets, glassware, silverware, shoes, gloves, and curiosities of all sorts. Franklin, who earlier in his life had been happy with his simple pewter spoon and earthen bowl, now spared no expense in spreading luxury over his absent family.

Deborah Franklin, by Benjamin Wilson, c. 1759

Franklin’s friend William Strahan wrote a strange and convoluted letter to Deborah and tried to persuade her and Sally to join Franklin in London. He even hinted that there were ladies in London who would sail twice the ocean to get her illustrious husband. But Deborah knew better than to try to enter Franklin’s ever widening London world. She refused Strahan’s appeal, pleading her fear of the ocean, and stayed in Philadelphia.

Franklin was not surprised by Deborah’s refusal to heed Strahan’s clever and cunning pleas to come over to London. In fact, he told her, he “was much pleas’d” with her answer to Strahan’s “Rhetoric and Art.” He certainly would not have been comfortable with the loud and plain Mrs. Franklin accompanying him on all his calls, dinners, and sojourns. Although Franklin continued to call Deborah his “dear child” and never voiced any feelings about her lack of sophistication, most of his letters to her from London have all the intimacy of a business manager talking to his employee—in sharp contrast to the warm and chatty letters Franklin wrote to his sister Jane Mecom. Deborah was not like John Adams’s Abigail: although she was an efficient and doting wife—“a good and faithful Helpmate,” Franklin called her—she was scarcely an intellectual companion. It is hard, for example, to envision Deborah fully appreciating the charming humor of The Craven Street Gazette, a parody of newspaper gossip about the court that Franklin wrote for the amusement of the Stevensons and their friends.71

Deborah’s situation was awkward, to say the least. When Strahan told Deborah that Mrs. Stevenson, “a very discreet good gentlewoman,” had nursed Franklin through a two-month illness “with an assiduity, concern, and tenderness, which perhaps, only yourself could equal,” she had no answer. What could she say?⁷² As a Quaker friend in Philadelphia noted, Deborah and Sally bore Franklin’s “long absence with a more resign’d and Christian Spirit than could be expected.” In fact, the friend added, many Philadelphians were also wondering when Franklin was coming back home.⁷³

But Franklin, like many other colonists, had always thought of England as “home.” Now he was beginning to identify with Britain even more closely than he had earlier and was actually thinking of following Strahan’s advice and settling in England permanently. He and his son visited his ancestral home in Northampton and discovered roots and relatives they had not known. When Franklin looked up Deborah’s relatives in Birmingham, he found that “they are industrious, ingenious, working people and think themselves vastly happy that they live in dear old England.”74 The more he thought about the differences between the mother country and the colonies, the more impressed he was with Britain and with the British government.

THE ROYALIST FRANKLIN

By the early 1760s Franklin had become a thoroughgoing imperialist and royalist. He had developed an emotional commitment to the Crown’s empire, a vision of a pan-British world that was rivaled in its grandeur only by that of William Pitt. Few Englishmen in 1760 were more proud of being English, and few were more devoted to the English monarchy and the greatness of the British Empire. Although he remained sensitive to criticism of the colonists, he sought at every turn to affirm his own and his fellow Americans’ “respect for the mother country, and admiration of everything that is British.”⁷⁵

With the British conquest of Canada, Franklin’s long existing dream of establishing new colonies in the West seemed closer to realization, and he himself now became involved in several land schemes, first in Nova Scotia and later in the American West. Although he believed that “the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire” lay in America, he spoke, as he said, “not merely as I am a Colonist, but as I am a Briton.”⁷⁶ The New World might be the source of “the greatest Political Structure Human Wisdom ever yet erected,” but this structure, this empire, would remain British.

Although some Britons in the mother country continued to suggest that the colonists at some future date might get together and break up this empire, Franklin, like most colonists in 1760, would have none of it. There was no danger whatsoever, he said, of the Americans’ “uniting against their own nation, which protects and encourages them, with which they have so many connections and ties of blood, interest, and affection, and which ’tis well known they all love much more than they love one another. . . . I will venture to say, an union amongst them for such a purpose is not merely improbable, it is impossible.” Of course, “the most grievous tyranny and oppression” could drive any people to rebellion, but in 1760 Franklin could not conceive of the British government’s becoming tyrannical.77

At the outset of his mission Franklin had been so confident of his reputation in the world that he had tried to go right to the top of the British government and meet with the Crown’s chief minister, William Pitt. But Pitt refused to see him. “He was then too great a Man,” Franklin later explained, “or too much occupy’d in Affairs of greater Moment,” and Franklin had to settle for meeting with secretaries and ultimately with Thomas Penn, the principal proprietor.⁷⁸

As he became increasingly frustrated negotiating with Penn, his dislike of the man deepened. When Franklin suggested to Penn in January 1758 that the 1682 charter granted to Penn’s father to establish the colony gave the General Assembly all the rights of a parliamentary legislature, Penn disagreed. Penn said that the royal charter was not empowered to make such a grant and that if his father had granted any privileges to the assembly, it was not by authority of the charter. Franklin replied that if William Penn had no right to grant these privileges and yet had promised the many settlers who came to the province that they would have them, then the colonists had been “deceived, cheated and betrayed.”

Penn’s answer infuriated Franklin. The colonists themselves, Penn said, “should have looked” into the royal charter; it “was no Secret; . . . if they were deceiv’d, it was their own fault.” According to Franklin, Penn said all this “with a Kind of triumphing laughing Insolence, such as a low Jockey might do when a Purchaser complained that He had cheated him in a Horse.” At that moment, said Franklin, he conceived “a more cordial and thorough Contempt for him than I ever before felt for any Man living.”⁷⁹

As a consequence, Franklin became more certain than ever that the king’s government in Pennsylvania would be far preferable to rule by such a man. Friends cautioned him that his enthusiasm for turning Pennsylvania into a royal province might be disastrous for the colony. They suggested that only Parliament could take away the proprietors’ charter, and Parliament might in the process decrease the power of the assembly and some of the province’s liberties. But in his passion and with his confidence in royal authority, Franklin ignored such warnings and pressed ahead, much to the bewilderment of some of his contemporaries and some modern historians. He urged the General Assembly to petition “the Crown to take the Province under its immediate Government and Protection.” Although he had little evidence that the Crown was interested in taking the colony under its protection, he told the legislature that such a petition “would be even now very favourably heard” and “might without much Difficulty be carried.”80

In light of what eventually happened to the empire in 1776, Franklin’s efforts to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony may seem as futile and foolish as some contemporaries and some subsequent historians have asserted.⁸¹ But at the time they did not seem so to Franklin and to others who were enamored of crown authority. Franklin was not simply driven by his hatred of Thomas Penn. He was in fact a good royalist, a crown officeholder, after all, who was completely devoted to the king and to the king’s empire. Therefore, despite considerable opposition within Pennsylvania itself to changing the charter, it was not at all strange or irrational for him to want to enhance royal authority and tighten the bonds of the empire by eliminating an anachronistic private interest like that of the Penn proprietors.

Knowing what happened in 1776 as we do makes it difficult for us to interpret American thinking in 1760. There were many Americans who were as excited over the accession of George III to the throne in 1760 as Englishmen and many who were as deeply loyal to the British Empire as anyone in the mother country. Franklin was one of the most excited and most loyal of all.⁸²

Although in his mission of 1757 Franklin ostensibly had been the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly, he had become in reality the king’s man. No one in 1760 could have been more respectful of royal authority. Royalty fascinated him, and he cut short a trip to the Continent so that he could attend the new king’s coronation.⁸³ Like most colonists that year, he had no inkling of any impending imperial crisis, but, unlike most colonists, he had no sense either of any real disparity of interests between Britain and her colonies. In fact, his confidence in the virtue and good sense of politicians at the highest levels of the British government was so great that it bewildered and amazed even some of his British friends. He could not share their “melancholly Apprehensions” and “Fears for the Nation,” and he castigated “the stupid brutal Opposition” that the new young king and his measures were receiving. Far from declining, English virtue, he wrote in 1763, “bids fair for Increasing,” especially “if the old Saying be true, as it certainly is, Ad Exemplum Regis, &c.” Ahead he saw only a “happy and truly glorious” reign for George III.84

Franklin used his influence with Dr. Pringle and perhaps Peter Collinson to meet George III’s “dearest friend” and chief minister, Lord Bute. Bute was a great patron of the arts and sciences, very interested in botany and electricity, and would have wanted to meet the celebrated Dr. Franklin. At any rate Franklin bragged of his acquaintance with his lordship. He bought two engravings of Allan Ramsay’s portrait of the chief minister and even sent one of them back to Pennsylvania to be prominently displayed in his Philadelphia home, along with a picture of the king and queen. Indeed, he had enough influence with Lord Bute in 1762 to get his thirty-one-year-old son appointed royal governor of New Jersey.⁸⁵

Although William possessed his own charm and connections, having Franklin as his father was undoubtedly his most important attribute, which William was more than willing to acknowledge. Since Franklin had found posts for his son back in Philadelphia—first the clerkship of the Pennsylvania Assembly and later the office of postmaster of Philadelphia—it was natural that he would try to help William in London. William first asked Bute for the office of secretary of the colony of South Carolina, but when he learned that that position had gone to another, he asked Bute for the governorship of New Jersey, which had recently become vacant. In his memorial to Bute, the Scottish lord, William shrewdly appealed to their mutual non-Englishness. If “your Lordship,” he said, had not “given such repeated Proofs of your having no local Attachments, that you consider all His Majesty’s Subjects, however distant, if of equal Virtue and Loyalty, on an equal Footing, I who am an American, should scarce have had the Boldness to solicit your Patronage and Assistance on this Occasion.” Although we do not have all the details relating to the appointment, Lord Bute satisfied William’s desire to be “particularly serviceable to Government.”⁸⁶

Since New Jersey was a relatively poor colony and its governor’s salary was not large, not everyone wanted the position; indeed, Thomas Pownall, who had returned to England after several administrative positions in the colonies, was reported to have refused it. Still, there were usually more candidates for colonial governorships than could be satisfied. Thus William’s appointment, especially since he was a native American and, in John Adams’s later caustic phrase, “a base born Brat,” was no small achievement. In fact, as one observer noted in September 1762, “many Scruples were raised on account of [William’s] being Illegitimate, which we were Strangers to till very lately.”87 The entire process of William’s appointment as governor of New Jersey reveals not only the peculiar nature of that patronage-dominated world but also the desires and the ability of the two Franklins, father as well as son, to move in that world and to be “serviceable to Government.” It was thought that Franklin himself had an eye on an imperial office. Some of his enemies accused him of wanting to turn proprietary Pennsylvania into a crown colony so that he could become its first royal governor.

Franklin had long accepted the cultural inferiority of the New World to the Old World without embarrassment or complaint. In 1745 he had told his correspondent Strahan that he and his fellow colonists were eager to gobble up anything and everything written in the mother country, whether good or bad. Indeed, he said, the British authors had so much “Fame . . . on this Side [of] the Ocean” that the colonists had become “a kind of Posterity with respect to them. We read their Works with perfect Impartiality, being at too great a Distance to be bypassed by the Fashions, Parties, and Prejudices that prevail among you. We know nothing of their personal Failings; the Blemishes in their character never reach us, and therefore . . . we praise and admire them without Restraint.”⁸⁸

Sometimes the distance from the center of British civilization seemed so great to Franklin that his imagination ran wild. In his 1749 pamphlet Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, Franklin had noted that “Something seems wanting in America to incite and stimulate Youth to Study.” He thought that “the Encouragements to Learning” were much greater in Europe than in America. “Whoever distinguishes himself there, in either of the three learned Professions, gains Fame, and often Wealth and Power: A poor Man’s Son, has a Chance, if he studies hard, to rise . . . to an extraordinary Pitch of Grandeur; to have a Voice in Parliament, a Seat among the Peers; as a Statesman or first Minister to govern Nations, and even to mix his Blood with Princes.” No wonder he wanted to get to England.89

His experience when he arrived in England in the late 1750s was very different from that of many other Americans. Wealthy colonists such as John Dickinson of Delaware or Charles Carroll of Maryland who lived in London in these years were overawed by the city’s sophistication and grandeur and in response seemed to need to justify the deficiencies and provinciality of colonial America by expressing disgust with the luxury and corruption of English life. As a young law student at the Inns of Court in 1754, Dickinson was shocked at the notorious ways in which hundreds of thousands of pounds were being spent to buy elections. This “most unbounded licentiousness and utter disregard of virtue,” he told his parents, could end, as it always had, only in the destruction of the empire. Young Carroll in 1760, despite his worldliness from having studied and traveled abroad for twelve years, agreed with this dire prediction of England’s fate. “Our dear-bought liberty,” he told his father, “stands upon the brink of destruction.” These became increasingly widely held views among the colonists.⁹⁰

Franklin felt little of this American provincial need to denigrate English life. Of course, he had long recognized that the English themselves were continually complaining in their public papers of their own “prevailing corruption and degeneracy.” But he himself had always known, as he had told Peter Collinson back in 1753, that “you have a great deal of Virtue still subsisting among you” and that the English constitution was “not so near a dissolution, as some seem to apprehend.” Upon his arrival in England he had met up with the same mood of England’s feeling “itself so universally corrupt and rotten from Head to Foot, that it has little Confidence in any publick Men or publick Measures.”⁹¹ Yet his experience in London soon convinced him that much of that English self-criticism was mistaken.

He began filling his letters with disparaging comments about the provinciality and vulgarity of America in contrast with the sophistication and worthiness of England. Britain, “that little Island,” he wrote in 1763, enjoyed “in almost every Neighbourhood, more sensible, virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests.”92 No one brought up in England, he said, could ever be happy in America. In fact, it was not England that was corrupt and luxury-loving, it was America; and the great danger was that the English nation, if it did not draw off some of its wealth, “would, like ours, have a Plethora in its Veins, productive of the same Sloth, and the same feverish Extravagance.”⁹³ Everywhere in the Old World he saw contrasts with provincial America that mortified him. The Sunday gaiety of the people of Flanders, together with their ordered prosperity, for example, only reminded him, by contrast, of how narrow and straitlaced, and how silly, was Puritan New England.⁹⁴ In these years Franklin scarcely seems to have regarded himself as an American.

So happy was he during his five years in Britain that he very nearly did not return to America. When his friend Strahan urged him to stay and run for Parliament, he was tempted. Although he talked of growing “weary” of his long “Banishment” and of his desiring to return to “the happy Society of my Friends and Family in Philadelphia,” he repeatedly put off leaving. Finally, in 1762, the need to settle his affairs in America, especially the business of the post office (the royal office that he much valued), compelled his return. But he knew he would come back to England. “The Attraction of Reason,” he told Strahan on the eve of his departure for America, “is at present for the other Side of the Water, but that of Inclination will be for this side. You know which usually prevails. I shall probably make but this one Vibration and settle here for ever.”⁹⁵

FRANKLIN’S BRIEF RETURN TO AMERICA

When he arrived in America in the fall of 1762, Franklin found that it had changed. The streets of Philadelphia seemed “thinner of People, owing perhaps to my being so long accustom’d to the bustling crowded Streets of London.” But, more alarming, there was too much money everywhere, and the Philadelphia artisans were not what they used to be when he was one of them. “Our Tradesmen are grown as idle, and as extravagant in their Demands when you would prevail on them to work, as so many Spaniards.”⁹⁶

He was no sooner back in America than he began thinking of returning to England. “No Friend can wish me more in England than I do my self,” he told Strahan in August 1763. “But before I go, every thing I am concern’d in must be so settled here as to make another Return to America unnecessary.” First, he had to settle the business of the North American post office. He spent seven months of 1763 on postal inspection tours that took him from Virginia to New England, totaling, he said, some 1,780 miles. He sought to improve service between the major cities and to extend it to the newly acquired territory of Canada. He tried to talk Deborah into accompanying him on these trips, but she refused.

While he was away on these tours he did give Deborah permission to open all the mail that would arrive from England. He told her, in a sentence as revealing of their relationship as any, “It must give you Pleasure to see that People who knew me there so long and so intimately, retain so sincere a Regard for me.” Knowing that his wife would never leave Philadelphia, he now laid plans to build a new three-story brick house on Market Street, just a few feet from the spot where Deborah had first spied him in 1723. Since he began building it at the same time he was telling his friends in England that he would soon be with them, the home, which he never saw completed until 1775, may have been for Deborah alone. Maybe it was another part of the business he had to settle so he would not have to come back to America again—another salve for his conscience perhaps.97

Before he could return to England, Franklin had to deal with an uprising of some Scotch-Irish settlers from the Paxton region on the Pennsylvania frontier who were angry at Indian violence and neglect by the eastern-dominated assembly. Franklin had no sympathy with “armed Mobs” and was happy to have the governor call on him for help in putting them down. He wrote a pamphlet, he said, “to render the Rioters unpopular; promoted an Association to support the Authority of the Government and defend the Governor by taking Arms, sign’d it first myself, and was followed by several Hundreds, who took Arms accordingly.”

The governor flattered him with an offer of the command of the militia, but he “chose to carry a Musket.” More flattering still, with the so-called Paxton Boys threatening to march on Philadelphia, the governor ran “to my House at midnight, with his Counsellors at his Heels, for Advice, and made it his Head Quarters for some time.” The governor then appointed him and several others to negotiate with the rioters; the delegation met with the armed frontiersmen and persuaded them to return home. Although he made fun of the colony’s desperate need for him, Franklin could barely suppress his glee at his renewed authority in Pennsylvania politics. Think of it, he said to Dr. John Fothergill back in London, “within four and twenty Hours, your old Friend was a common soldier, a Counsellor, a kind of Dictator, an Ambassador to the Country Mob, and on [the governor’s and his counsellors’] Returning home, Nobody, again.”

In Franklin’s mind the mobs and rioting had some good results. It suggested that the colony was “running fast into Anarchy and Confusion,” and that “our only Hopes are, that the Crown will see the Necessity of taking the Government into its own hands, without which we shall soon have no Government at all.” Franklin was able to get the assembly to pass a number of resolves blaming the proprietors for all of Pennsylvania’s troubles.98

With the help of his young political lieutenant Joseph Galloway, Franklin next sought to organize a popular petition urging that Pennsylvania be turned into a royal colony. He hoped that such a show of popular support would win over doubters in the assembly and in the colony. In order to convince Pennsylvanians of the benefits of substituting royal for proprietary authority, he, Galloway, and their allies launched a propaganda campaign of unprecedented intensity and scale. Franklin and Galloway organized a mass meeting in Philadelphia at which Galloway, known as the “Demosthenes of Pennsylvania,” harangued the crowd, arguing that “the way from Proprietary Slavery to Royal Liberty was easy.” The proponents of making Pennsylvania a royal colony not only plied potential signers with liquor; they got many people to sign their names to blank sheets of paper with no knowledge of what they were signing. At the same time Franklin’s press poured forth thousands of pieces of propaganda, including the assembly’s resolves and “Explanatory Remarks” on them, newspaper articles, and broadsides, all promoting the cause of royal government, with Franklin writing much of the material. Both Galloway and Franklin wrote pamphlets as well and “by the thousands” gave them away free. In his own pamphlet, entitled CoolThoughts on the Present Situation of Our Public Affairs, Franklin tried to assure the people that Pennsylvania would lose none of its privileges by becoming a royal colony. Only an act of Parliament could take those privileges away, he said, “and we may rely on the united Justice of King, Lords, and Commons, that no such Act will ever pass, while we continue loyal and dutiful Subjects.”99

But his persuasive powers were not very effective with the public: the petition to replace the proprietary government gained only 3500 signatures, and those were mostly from Philadelphia. At the same time Franklin faced a determined opponent of his plans in the assembly, John Dickinson, the well-to-do lawyer, originally from Delaware, who had trained in England and who would later become famous in the colonies with the publication of his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in 1767–68. In an impressive speech in May 1764, Dickinson argued that revoking the charter and turning Pennsylvania into a royal colony might endanger the colony’s liberties, especially its religious freedom. “Have we not sufficiently felt the effects of royal resentment?” Dickinson asked. “Is not the authority of the Crown fully enough exerted over us?”¹⁰⁰ Equally damaging to Franklin’s cause was the defection of the Speaker of the assembly, Isaac Norris. Although Norris had earlier encouraged making Pennsylvania a royal colony, he now followed Dickinson, his son-in-law, and spoke against a crown takeover; then, pleading ill health, he abruptly resigned from the assembly.

Franklin and Galloway were not used to opposition from members of the Quaker party. Dickinson had no sooner finished his speech in the assembly than the arrogant young Galloway was on his feet to answer him. Galloway was proud of his oratorical abilities, and in a vigorous extemporaneous rebuttal to Dickinson he defended the disinterestedness of the Crown in contrast to the private interest of the proprietors—a position with which Franklin completely agreed. This encounter and the subsequent publication of the speeches, with Dickinson claiming that Galloway’s printed version was “a pretended speech,” created bad blood between the two men, leading to a fistfight and a challenge to a duel that never came off.¹⁰¹ Despite the opposition of Dickinson and Norris, however, Franklin and Galloway still had nearly all the votes in the legislature. Franklin was elected Speaker in place of Norris, and the assembly overwhelmingly voted to request that the Crown take over the government of the colony.

The supporters of the proprietors decided to emulate Franklin and solicit people’s signatures on petitions opposing the scheme to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony. By September 1764 they had garnered 15,000 signatures, over four times the number Franklin had raised for his petition. Under the leadership of William Smith, Anglican clergyman and provost of the College of Pennsylvania, and William Allen, chief justice of the colony, both of whom had just returned from England, the proprietary cause rapidly gained strength. More and more Pennsylvanians were having second thoughts about abandoning the charter of William Penn, which had brought them so many privileges, so much religious freedom, and so much prosperity.

The campaign for elections to the Pennsylvania Assembly in October 1764 was one of the most scurrilous in American colonial history, and both Franklin and Galloway lost their seats. Franklin was accused of a host of sins—of lechery, of having humble origins, of abandoning the mother of his bastard son, of stealing his ideas of electricity from another electrician, of embezzling colony funds, and of buying his honorary degrees. But what ultimately cost Franklin his seat was the number of Germans who voted against him, angry at his earlier ethnic slur about “Palatine Boors.”102

Franklin was stunned by his defeat. He had completely misjudged the sentiments of his fellow colonists, something he would continue to do over the succeeding decade. Nevertheless, even though he was now out of the assembly, his political influence remained strong, and his Quaker party still controlled a majority of the legislature. At least some members of the assembly wanted to continue threatening the Penns with royalization in order to extract taxes and other privileges from them.¹⁰³ Hence in late October the assembly voted to send Franklin once again to England to request the Crown to end proprietary rule in Pennsylvania. Although some legislators may have intended to use Franklin’s mission simply to intimidate the proprietors into reforms, Franklin himself was as serious as ever in his desire to bring royal government to the colony. No doubt he was equally desirous of getting back to London, where he was more appreciated.

“A LONDONER FOR THE REST OF MY DAYS”

His two years back in America had not diluted in any way his love of London and his faith in the beneficence of royal authority, a faith that exceeded not only that of his fellow Americans but that of his British friends in London. He told his friend Strahan that if the proprietary party with which he was at war was able to destroy him and prevent his bringing royal government to Pennsylvania, then he would become “a Londoner for the rest of my Days.”104 He was as fervent a royalist as he had ever been. In defending his reputation among His Majesty’s ministers and his ability to bring royal government to Pennsylvania, he emphasized his “constantly and uniformly promoting the Measures of the Crown.” In fact, he told his fellow Pennsylvanians, as “a Man who holds a profitable Office under the Crown,” he could be counted on to behave “with the Fidelity and Duty that becomes every good Subject.”¹⁰⁵

Most colonists in the early 1760s were not yet thinking of rebellion, but they were certainly no lovers of crown prerogative as exercised by their royal governors. They prided themselves on the ability of their colonial assemblies—the “democratic” part of their mixed constitutions—to defend their English rights and liberties against what was always thought to be the continually encroaching power of the Crown. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, colonial politics had been marked by greater degrees of popular participation than people in the mother country experienced. Not only could two out of three adult white males vote in most colonies, compared with one out of six in England, but the royal patronage and political power necessary to control the people and their legislative representatives were much weaker in the colonies than in Britain itself. Coupled with this popular participation was a confusion over who precisely the leaders of the society were, a situation that made authority in the colonies repeatedly vulnerable to challenge. Eighteenth-century royal governors continually complained of the fury and madness of the people in the colonies and the extent to which republican principles were eroding proper respect for royal authority. Thomas Penn himself warned that the power of the contentious colonial assemblies must be curbed or “the constitution will be changed to a perfect Democracy.”¹⁰⁶

Although Franklin at one time had been one of those colonial demagogues whom British officials frequently complained about, he was now on the other side of the water and the other side of the political fence. Just at the moment when many of his fellow colonists were becoming ever more fearful that Great Britain was becoming corrupt and losing its liberty, just at that moment that many Americans were becoming more mistrustful of the intentions of the British government, Franklin was becoming ever more confident of its benevolence and the future of the British Empire. Far from seeing the British nation sinking in luxury and corruption, he was seriously considering settling there forever. He had an excessive faith in the British Crown, and he had many friends and acquaintances in the colonies who shared his faith and who encouraged his mission to change Pennsylvania into a royal colony. Indeed, it is remarkable how many of his American friends in the early 1760s were future Tories and loyalists.

In 1764 Rhode Islander Martin Howard Jr. asked Franklin, whom he had known from the Albany Congress, to support a secret petition already on the way to England requesting the transformation of his colony’s popular government into a crown colony. Rhode Islanders, complained Howard, who would eventually become a prominent loyalist, had “now Nothing but a Burlesque upon Order and Government, and will never get right without the Constitution is altered.” The Anglican clergyman Samuel Johnson of Connecticut was likewise disgusted with his colony’s government. It was, he said, “so monstrously popular, that all our Judges and the other officers depend intirely on the people, so that they are under the strongest Temptation in many Cases to consider not so much what is Law or Equity, as what may please their Constituents.” He told Franklin on the eve of Franklin’s departure for England, “Would to God you were charged with pleading the same Cause in behalf of all the Governments, that they might all alike be taken into the Kings more immediate Protection.”

Only because Franklin’s royalist friends and acquaintances expected a sympathetic hearing from him did they dare to voice such sentiments to him, sentiments that, if they should be revealed, these men realized would “bring a popular Odium” on those who held them. They had heard Franklin’s views on the king and the empire, and they knew that he was a crown officer and that his son was the royal governor of New Jersey. Consequently, they had every reason to believe that he was one with them. In fact, Howard said as much. He told Franklin that he had “not time to enlarge [on the issue of becoming a royal colony] and indeed your thorough Knowledge of the Subject would anticipate all and more than I could say.”107

Franklin’s Pennsylvania supporters who saw him off on November 7, 1764, now openly linked his fate with that of King George III, hoping that they would soon have cause “to sing with Heart and Voice, GEORGE AND FRANKLIN.”¹⁰⁸ Before the year was over, Franklin was back in London in his old lodgings with Mrs. Stevenson on Craven Street. This time also Franklin thought his mission in England would be brief. Instead, it lasted over a decade. Deborah Franklin remained in Philadelphia and never saw her husband again.