February 1774–April 1775

Benjamin Franklin knew as little about the conditions in most of the American colonies as his son did of England's hardening attitude toward her colonists. "Happily New Jersey is out of the question,"1 he wrote to his old Quaker friend James Kinsey, speaker of the New Jersey Assembly — by which he meant that New Jersey was free of riots and rebellious ideas. Franklin had not asked his son if this supposition was actually true, and as agent for New Jersey, he must have looked silly in Kinsey's eyes. In addition, he still did not question his firm belief that his son was in every way his dependent, that William's career was inextricably tied to his own political fortunes. On February 18, 1774, two weeks after his Cockpit ordeal, he sent a second letter of advice, confused and contradictory, to William: "Some tell me that it is determined to displace you likewise, but I do not know it as certain," he wrote. "I only give you the hint, as an inducement to you to delay awhile your removal to Perth Amboy, which in that case would be a trouble and an expense to no purpose." He had apparently paid little attention to the seriousness of William's financial plight. He had also ignored the pressing personal reasons for William's decision to move the capital from Burlington to Perth Amboy and make the Proprietary House there the official and permanent governor's residence. Moreover, Benjamin would not realize for nearly another year that he had also badly misjudged William's reaction to his public disgrace.

"Perhaps they may expect that your resentment of their treatment of me may induce you to resign and save them the shame of depriving you, whom they ought to promote. But this I would not advise you to do. Let them take your place, if they want it, though in truth I think it scarce worth your keeping since it has not afforded you sufficient to prevent your running every year behindhand with me." (Benjamin could not resist in every letter some insensitive dig about William's tardy accounts with him.) "But one may make something of an injury, nothing of a resignation."2

When William wrote hastily to his father in January 1774, he undoubtedly had just learned of the Boston Tea Party and as yet had little grasp of its importance. He certainly had no idea of his father's involvement or pillorizing by the ministry. Their letters crossed. William devoted most of his letter to talk about presents of barrels of pork and apples from the farm he was now forced to sell, only remarking parenthetically that he was "at present a good deal engaged" with the New Jersey Assembly.3

Indeed he was. The engagement was more along the order of a running battle that had placed him at sword's points with a tough new breed of rebellious New Jersey legislators. Even in this rural province of gardens and orchards, there were more men every year bitterly opposed to every symbol and representative of the established imperial order.

The issue that finally separated William Franklin from the popular party seems almost trivial, but at the time it was deeply symbolic of old antagonisms that were becoming inflamed in every American colony. For generations, settlers had paid quitrents, small but galling annual payments in hard cash to the holders of the original proprietorial shares in the province. It was as if a man were perpetually buying his land over and over again, though he had paid a purchase price to begin with. Even as the population surged, as thousands of Scotch-Irish squatted in the northwest frontier hill country and transplanted New Englanders filled up the river valleys, even when the land changed hands again and again, these payments came due every year, as if they were private and duplicate taxes. And every year their recipients were hated more by men who found it hard to come up with silver coins in a debt-ridden barter society. It was irksome that the man who also collected the taxes, the provincial treasurer, was one of these landed proprietors. It was downright infuriating when the treasury chest containing an entire year's tax receipts for the province was stolen from his mansion in Perth Amboy as he supposedly slept upstairs.

The theft of the New Jersey treasury forced William Franklin for the first time to take sides in the smoldering feud between the rich landlord class and the smallholders — usually farmers and mechanics. He chose not from instinct but from conviction, from a deep knowledge of and insistence on the law. And when his legal judgment was vigorously challenged for the first time, he sided with a close and trusted friend in the contest, who just happened to be the treasurer himself, Stephen Skinner. (Their wives were also best friends.)

The violent clash between Governor Franklin and the Assembly began innocuously enough. The Assembly passed a resolution expressing its faith in the treasurer's good character. But there were those who preferred to believe that the official had rigged the theft with the help of hired accomplices. They saw the case as an excellent way to embarrass the aristocratic Perth Amboy group both in the Assembly and on Governor Franklin's Council. The next session they mustered enough votes to demand an investigation. The committee of inquiry, while absolving the treasurer of stealing the money, found him negligent for keeping the money unguarded in his house and ordered him to repay the entire sum, with interest, as a fine. The governor, who had berated the penny-pinching Assembly for ignoring his reform programs and being in a lethargic stupor, now had reason to wish that the farmer-lawmakers would doze off again.

New quarrels irritated raw nerves on both sides. Because of its strategic location athwart the main road between Philadelphia and New York, New Jersey had traditionally been forced to feed and maintain British troops in large barracks. Now the uproar over quartering troops in Boston spilled over into New Jersey and gave radical politicians a fresh issue with which to test their strength. The governor finally arbitrated the matter. He reduced the demands of the British troops and induced the tightfisted lawmakers to acknowledge that free-spending soldiers also were good for the colony's shaky economy. But now another layer of tender scar tissue had been added. When the Assembly reopened the treasury case, demanding the treasurer's resignation as well as full restitution despite the treasurer's plea of innocence and his assertion that he could not afford the fine, William stepped in angrily. Accusing the Assembly of usurping his executive power to make appointments and ask for resignations, he declared hotly that "no consideration whatever shall induce me to give up that right but the King's express commands."4 Then he launched his own full-scale investigation and discovered evidence that a sizable gang of counterfeiters with connections in the radical party had actually stolen the treasury. Identifying the men by name in a proclamation after county justices refused to indict them for the theft, William offered a large reward to anyone willing to bring the men to the capital for trial. Not only did no one rise to his bait, but a mob broke into the Morris County jail, where three men were awaiting trial on the counterfeiting charge, and freed them.

William Franklin had no patience with mobs. He had already sat by nervously as rioters, resenting high legal fees, had taken over some of the county courts. On that occasion he allowed the local magistrates to settle the dispute. But now, when jailbreakers, thieves and counterfeiters roamed free, he called in dilatory sheriffs and judges to a Council meeting and dressed them down. Then he turned them over to the Assembly for legal action. The breakdown of law, the refusal of a grand jury to act in the face of clear evidence, thoroughly alarmed William. In his eyes an open rebellion was unfolding when a mob decided to break down jail doors and release felons politically favorable to their cause while at the same time the Assembly refused flatly to try the treasurer so that he could clear his name. This William could not tolerate. The last straw was the action of William Livingston, the leading radical lawyer in the province: he came out of retirement to write a legal opinion denouncing Governor Franklin's handling of the case and insisting that the treasurer resign. William's patience ended. Early in 1773 he joined the emotion-charged battle on the side of the wealthy Perth Amboy proprietors. At a time when it seemed that all laws were being challenged, he decided, by instinct as well as by education, to remain a legal conservative.

William ignored his father's recent letters of advice. He did not resign. And he accelerated his move to Perth Amboy, where he would at last be closer to like-minded advisors in the deepening crisis. In mid-September of 1774, he visited the Proprietary House in Perth Amboy with Lord Stirling, a member of the Council. Ten years earlier, when he had deliberately avoided taking up official residence in the palatial house built for the governor's use by the rich landed gentry of Perth Amboy, he had chosen instead the simpler life of Burlington. Over the years he had drifted closer to the East Jersey aristocrats. As early as 1770, he had been wined and dined at one land-rich proprietor's house in the company of the leading merchants and landowners of both New York City and New Jersey. His new alliance could not have been less popular. For years the East Jersey proprietors had evicted countless squatters who now were flocking to the Whig standard. But by now, William Franklin was ready for a profound change.

The minutes of a meeting of the East Jersey proprietors record that the Franklins, with several of the proprietors, visited the mansion, the hated symbol of proprietary quitrents and taxation, on September 21, 1773. He and Elizabeth toured the mansion and its grounds with new friends who were offering to repair the house, build stables, and generally fix up the place without charge. The rent was modest: the Franklins could have the splendid mansion for the meager housing allowance (sixty pounds) provided with the governor's salary.5

William climbed the tiered marble steps with Elizabeth, crossed the eighteen-foot-wide marble hallway, wandered through the marble-mantled ballroom, the study that would house his library, and up to the spacious bedrooms and dressing rooms. It was one of the finest houses in America, the rival of any other royal governor's residence. In his own hand, he sketched the plan for papering each wall in the latest London patterns to match Elizabeth's furniture and decorations. The pièce de résistance of the redecoration, "if it won't add much to the expense," was to be black-and-white murals: "the Falls [of] Passaic and Cohoes" on the walls of the main hall and "the Falls of Niagra [sic]" on the wall of the staircase.6

Even with a revolution breaking around him, Governor Franklin was determined to maintain a high royal standard. As the proprietors sent agents to scour the shops of New York to meet the governor's requests (the merchant John Roosevelt submitted twenty-eight patterns for the governor's study alone),7 William went to Philadelphia to say goodbye to his mother and sister while Elizabeth began the long process of packing and crating.

As soon as they had hung the gilt-edged portraits of King George and Queen Charlotte in the great parlor, William sat down to write Benjamin, asking him to bring William Temple, now fourteen, to Perth Amboy to him. "I hope to see you and him in the spring and that you will spend some time with me at Amboy, where I am now happily settled in a very good house and shall always have an apartment at your service."8

In the weeks between revealing his responsibility for the Hutchinson affair and his dismissal from office, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to his son that showed he felt he had righted the injuries of his actions by his candor and that he was not afraid of the consequences. The entire episode "has drawn some censure upon myself, but as I grow old, I grow less concerned about censure." That he was deeply wounded, deeply bitter, about his handling by the Privy Council, was evident, not only in his defensive pamphlets published at his own expense and his series of letters to the newspapers of England and America but certainly in his stiffening attitude toward his son in 1773 and 1774.

Benjamin had begun to reveal his changing political thinking to William months before the Cockpit trial, even as he denied he had urged Bostonians to hold out for independence. He had also insisted that he had urged the leaders of Boston's radicals to avoid confrontation. His letter to William of October 6, 1773, was quite the opposite of his apparent inflammatory rhetoric in anonymous tracts and in his signed preface to the Boston resolves. But Benjamin was beginning to acknowledge to William his change of sentiment toward King and Parliament: "From a long and thorough consideration of the subject," he wrote, "I am indeed of opinion that the parliament has no right to make any law whatever binding on the colonies. That the king, and not the king, lords and commons collectively, is their sovereign; and that the king with their respective parliaments [here Benjamin clearly meant the assemblies of each colony] is their only legislator. "I know your sentiments differ from mine on these subjects. You are a thorough government man, which I do not wonder at, nor do I aim at converting you. I only wish you to act uprightly and steadily, avoiding that duplicity which, in Hutchinson, adds contempt to indignation. If you can promote the prosperity of your people, and leave them happier than you found them, whatever your political principles are, your memory will be honored."9

William had not exactly kept his father abreast of his own changing thinking during the political struggle, even if his letters and legislation partly explained his views. He believed that his old friend Strahan, now a member of Parliament, had advised him wisely: that it was better for him to make it clear to the ministry that father and son were not one and the same in their beliefs. It was not entirely a case of wishing to protect his job. He sincerely believed that his father was wrong on a number of counts. Nevertheless, ministerial rumors that William was to be removed from the governorship were actually planted in the New York newspapers shortly after the Cockpit trial. They stopped a few months later when Thomas Hutchinson reached London and told authorities that to his knowledge Governor Franklin did not approve of his father's conduct. In his diary Hutchinson recorded that "Governor Franklin had wrote a letter to William Strahan, the King's Printer, in which he condemns his father's whole conduct in the affair of the letters."10

In the three months following the elder Franklin's disgrace in England, William actually wrote nothing to his father. When he finally broke the silence, on May 3, 1774, he wrote cautiously that he was visiting his mother in Philadelphia and "I have it not in my power to write particularly by this opportunity." (He evidently meant he could find no safe channel.) Once again, he concealed his personal feelings from his father, only commenting, "It seems your popularity in this country [America], whatever it may be on the other side, is greatly beyond whatever it was." That night, in fact, as William was writing his letter, the effigies of Wedderburn and Hutchinson were burned in the streets of Philadelphia. "But you may depend when you return here," he continued, "on being received with every mark of regard and affection." He added that he was no longer worried about his own political security: a wealthy New York landowner who was a close friend had journeyed to England and talked to friends in the ministry and had just written him that Lord Dartmouth's "sentiments respecting my conduct . . . [have] made me easy as to my office." He would not resign his office but would act carefully from now on. "I am determined not to give any just cause of complaint, so that if, after all, I should receive any injury from that quarter, I shall be at no loss what to do."11

That William knew exactly what he was doing is revealed by records in British as well as New Jersey archives. Coincidentally, on May 4, 1774, the day after he wrote that he would not step down out of any sense of familial loyalty to his dismissed father, a letter was addressed to him from Lord Dartmouth at Whitehall which cryptically indicated that the King would continue to favor the younger Franklin. William's appointment of his close friend Richard Stockton as an associate justice of the New Jersey supreme court was confirmed by the King. This was a mark of royal favor that probably would not have been made if William's tenure were at all in jeopardy.

That same month, William took the fateful step of opening a "secret and confidential" correspondence with Lord Dartmouth. In a long letter, written on the thirty-first, he in effect set himself up as a royal advisor and offered himself as the instrument of what he hoped would be Anglo-American reconciliation. The letter indicates that he had decided on this course after studying the harsh act of Parliament that had closed the port of Boston in punishment for the Tea Party. He warned that some merchants and farmers were organizing aid to the people of Boston. Their assistance would neutralize the effect of the Royal Navy blockade. But William doubted that other colonies would set off another round of nonimportation agreements. Thus, he said, Britain had little to fear from America's principal weapon, a boycott on trade. On the contrary, many merchants, fearing an embargo, "have ordered much greater quantity of goods than is common to be sent out by the next fall ships from England."

He then informed his lordship that "a Congress of members of the several Houses of Assembly" had been called for the autumn of 1774, and each assembly was to vote on sending a delegation. He had stalled off the New Jersey vote for three months — a longer time than any other colony — but neighboring New York had then voted a delegation and New Jersey, "not wanting to appear singular," had followed suit. He called such an unauthorized intercolonial congress "very absurd if not unconstitutional." The assemblies, he said, could be dissolved at any time by their governors, rendering their committees and delegations illegal, a step he declared he was prepared to take if necessary.

"His Majesty may be assured that I shall omit nothing in my power to keep this province quiet," William pledged. "Let the event be what it may, no attachments or connections shall ever make me swerve from the duty of my station."12

Benjamin still did not know of William's decision when he wrote again, on June 30, to report the news from Boston: a full-scale, nonimportation agreement was intended by Boston radicals. "If it is general, and the Americans agree in it, the present ministry will certainly be knocked up," Benjamin wrote. He spoke to William as if they were coconspirators against a common enemy, as if William would still be a party to such an anti-British agreement. The lag in mails left Benjamin unaware of William's change of course, but William's next two letters to England, sharply at variance with his father's view of him, underscored Benjamin's total lack of comprehension of his son's thinking.

On June 28, Governor Franklin sent to Lord Dartmouth a set of documents: the resolves of a meeting of rebellious citizens of Essex County, New Jersey, the onetime center of anti-Stamp Act resistance. Many of the protestors were relocated Massachusetts men. Several were large landholders, graduates of Princeton and Yale. Indeed, most of New Jersey's future revolutionary leaders had attended the meeting. A comparison of drafts of the resolves reveals that the Essex meeting had taken on the shape of an illegal assembly, called without the governor's sanction as required by law. Indeed, the clerk of the gathering drew a line through the word "meeting" and replaced it with the much stronger phrase "members of this assembly." These revolutionary resolves, as sweeping as those of the Boston town meetings, announced that the Essex County radicals were making "common cause" with Bostonians, were entering and enforcing a total embargo of British goods and were urging other New Jersey counties to send delegates to the general congress in Philadelphia. Finally, the Essex organizers had summoned a New Jersey congress.13

Not only did Governor Franklin maintain in his report that he was powerless to stop such meetings, since he had no police and no troops, but he went further than any American had gone thus far in attempting to bring about peace between the two opposing camps. He urged the Crown to outmaneuver the radicals by calling its own congress. "If properly authorized by His Majesty and consisting of the several governors and some members of the Council and Assembly in each province," he wrote Lord Dartmouth, such a legally sanctioned imperial congress would produce "the most beneficial consequences to the British Empire in general," especially if "assisted by some gentlemen of abilities, moderation and candor from Great Britain."

As the constitutional lawyer William Franklin pointed out, there was ample precedent for sending a royal commission to meet with American leaders to "settle matters of far less importance." The present crisis, he stressed, was "worthy of more attention and consideration than anything that has ever before concerned Great Britain." His plea went beyond any suggestion sent so far to the ministry. It also directly opposed his father's outraged advice to radicals to stand their ground. The King must act with equal moderation before less thoughtful men prevailed and managed to gain control of what to William was now an obviously fast-spreading conflict. "There is no foreseeing the consequences which may result from such [an unsanctioned] Congress as is now intended," he warned Lord Dartmouth.14

A few days later, even before he knew whether Lord Dartmouth still trusted this particular Franklin, Governor Franklin received proof that he had gambled correctly. The letter was dated July 6 from Whitehall: "I should do injustice to my own sentiments of your character and conduct in supposing you could be induced by any consideration whatever to swerve from the duty you owe the king."15

If Benjamin still thought that William was on his side in the growing controversy, William just as obviously believed that Benjamin, since he had been ousted from office, would be more willing to come around and join with him, that his father had somehow moderated his views since his dressing down before the Privy Council. "There is no foreseeing the consequences which may result from such a Congress," William wrote his father — the identical words he had penned to Lord Dartmouth. Then, for the first time, he clearly revealed how far from his father's way of thinking he had journeyed in their years apart, how total his transformation from impecunious young office seeker to conservative middle-aged man of influence and property.

The Boston Tea Party was an illegal attack on property, he wrote. Restitution must be made. Nothing else would do. "I cannot but think it very extraordinary that neither the Assembly of Massachusetts Bay nor the town of Boston have so much as intimated any intention or desire of making satisfaction to the East India Company and the officers of the customs," William wrote. "By doing these two things, which are consistent with strict justice, and by declaring that they will not hereafter attempt to hinder the landing at Boston of any goods legally imported, they might get their port opened in a few months."

William was lecturing his father, the architect of Boston resistance to the tea duties, and advocating surrender to the very demands contained in the ministry's coercive Boston Port Act! And he was making it seem the only rational and legal alternative. "If they are to wait for this until the Congress meets, and until the Grand Question is settled between the two countries, they may as well never have their port opened, for by that time all their trade will have got into another channel. Besides, they ought first to do justice before they ask it of others." William, not totally unsympathetic to the Whig cause, added that in his view apologies for the tea raid would help the radicals win redress of their just grievances "and do credit to their cause."16

When Benjamin Franklin read this letter, he immediately fired off a long, angry reply to William, methodically attacking each of his son's arguments: "In my opinion, all depends on the Americans themselves. If they make and keep firm resolutions not to consume British manufactures 'til their grievances are redressed and their rights acknowledged, this ministry must fall and the aggrieving laws be repealed." Gratuitously, he added, "This is the opinion of all wise men here." He dismissed his son's proposal for an imperial congress with a single line: "I hear nothing of the proposal you have made." And then he swung his full powers of political reasoning into refuting his son's arguments, numbering each point as if in a legal brief. "I do not, so much as you do," he began sarcastically, "wonder that the Massachusetts have not offered payment for the tea." What guarantee was there the British would keep their word and reopen the port? And what sum should be paid? And what would satisfy the customs men who were in the King's power?

"As to doing justice before they ask it, that should have been thought of by [Parliament] before they demanded it of the Bostonians. They have extorted many thousands of pounds from America unconstitutionally under color of acts of Parliament and with an armed force. Of this money they should make restitution. They might first have taken out payment for the tea and returned the rest. But you, who are a thorough courtier, see everything with government eyes."17 It was Benjamin Franklin's most radical statement on the proper responsibility of the British to Boston. It was, moreover, his worst imaginable insult: to equate his son with the venal and corrupt courtiers he had so lately come to despise and loathe.

Another month, another mail ship, and he continued in a calmer tone, this time arguing for an all-American congress without British intervention. One British jurist, he said — a man whom William respected — had declared "he would give half his worth in the world to be present at the debates of such an uncorrupted body on so important an occasion. . . . I often regret that I did not leave this country in time to have been there myself." The letter ended with the old irritating refrain: William was behind in his remittances.18

A man of remarkable patience, William had endured his father's dressing downs for more than thirty years. He had learned how to control his temper. He did not now throw more paper on the fire between them. He did not answer his father for three months, a full year after the Cockpit hearing, and then he wrote only because he had to. His letter gave Benjamin a far more personal reason to wish he had returned to America sooner.

Honoured Father,

I came here on Thursday last to attend the funeral of my poor old mother, who died the Monday noon preceding. Mr. Bache sent his clerk express to me on the occasion, who reached Amboy on Tuesday evening, and I set out early the next morning, but the weather being very severe and snowing hard, I was not able to reach here 'til about 4 o'clock on Thursday afternoon, about half an hour before the corpse was to be moved for interment. Mr. Bache and I followed as chief mourners. . . . Several other of your friends were carriers, and a very respectable number of the inhabitants were at the funeral. . . . Her death was no more than might be reasonably expected after the paralytic stroke she received some time ago, which greatly affected her memory and understanding. She told me, when I took leave of her on my removal to Amboy, that she never expected to see you unless you returned this winter, that she was sure she should not live 'til next summer. I heartily wish you had happened to have come over in the fall, as I think her disappointment preyed a good deal on her spirits.19

Then William softened for a moment. His father, he must have sensed, would be stricken enough by the letter. Benjamin had just kept putting off his return, he knew. As long as two years before, Deborah had written to her husband, "I find my selef growing very febel verey faste." For nearly a year she had not been able to write at all. But Benjamin had been too absorbed in his own affairs to notice. He wrote her only short impersonal notes, one of his to every three of hers: promises of returning, excuses for delaying. There was no sense affixing blame. Benjamin should have known from the pathetic letters, the feeble handwriting, that Deborah was pining away without her Benny, that she had been failing steadily since a partial stroke five years earlier. But now was not the time to recriminate. It was time to get him to come home. The rest of the letter was only the pleading of a son for a father, nearing seventy, to rejoin his son after a ten-year absence: "It gives me great pleasure to find that you have so perfect an enjoyment of that greatest of blessings, health. Notwithstanding you are sensible that you cannot in the course of nature long expect the continuance of it, yet you postpone your return to your family."

The courier for this sad strong letter was none other than their trusted old mutual friend John Pownall, secretary of the British Board of Trade. Pownall told William face to face of Benjamin's implacable private and press warfare with the ministry; how his three petitions against the closing of Boston port had been rejected by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Parliament and by the King himself; of the utter hopelessness of Benjamin's campaign; and arrest for sedition if he further antagonized the government by plotting with opposition leaders to reverse anti-American legislation. Benjamin, he knew, had actually been denounced on the floor of the House of Lords, called little less than a traitor by noblemen who were amazed that he was still allowed to remain at large on the streets of London.

Worried by all that he had heard, William added to his letter, "If there was any prospect of your being able to bring the people in power to your way of thinking, or those of your way of thinking's being brought into power, I should not think so much of your stay. But as you have had by this time pretty strong proofs that neither can be reasonably expected and that you are looked upon with an evil eye in that country, and are in no small danger of being brought into trouble for your political conduct, you had certainly better return while you are able to bear the fatigues of the voyage to a country where the people revere you and are inclined to pay a deference to your opinions. However mad you may think the measures of the ministry are, yet I trust you have candor enough to acknowledge that we are no ways behindhand with them in instances of madness on this side of the water. However, it is a disagreeable subject, and I'll drop it."

There is no letter or memoir to reveal whether Benjamin mourned his wife of forty-four years. He merely noted that he would have to clear up his business in London quickly in order to return home and assume the personal management of their financial affairs. But it was nearly three years before he commented on her death: "I have lately lost my old and faithful companion, and I every day become more sensible of the greatness of that loss, which cannot now be repaired."20

In his first days as a self-sure young governor fussing over the furniture, Governor Franklin had dealt mostly with wealthy West Jersey Quaker farmers and rich Anglican land barons of East Jersey, many of them absentee landlords who were also active in New York politics and society. But in the ten ensuing years, even as most Quakers withdrew from politics to avoid further tests of their scruple against warfare, Presbyterian newcomers rushed in. From their twin power bases of Elizabethtown in the north and the College of New Jersey at Princeton in the south, they quickly became a major political force, challenging the Anglican proprietors at every turn. The rise of these plain Presbyterian men, most of them only a generation or two removed from the Lowlands of Scotland, must have seemed ironic to William.

As a young boy, he had witnessed the fervid, writhing crowds moaning and shouting out at the fire-and-brimstone preaching of George Whitefield and his disciples during the Great Awakening religious revival. The revival had filled the streets of Philadelphia, closed the Assembly balls, and bolstered the ranks of the Indian-fighting militia with tough soldiers. Although the elder Franklin had rarely taken a public stand on religion, he had nonetheless led the movement to build a meetinghouse for New Light Presbyterians when they were barred from holding services in other Philadelphia churches. In the editorial columns of his Pennsylvania Gazette he had openly supported zealous Presbyterian missionaries based in New Jersey. He had dreamed aloud of peopling new western colonies with Presbyterians. A generation later, the revival had matured into an educational movement. Presbyterians had formed the University of Pennsylvania and the Indian college of Dartmouth while the Awakeners of New England vigorously proselytized Yale students who were trying to study in their rooms. They had brought about renewed religious fervor all over America as converted collegians returned to preach in their home colonies. But the heart of the Presbyterian movement remained the College of New Jersey at Princeton.

As ex officio president of the Princeton trustees, William Franklin evidently concurred in recruiting from Scotland the fieriest and most articulate of the Presbyterian reformers, the Reverend John Witherspoon, a beetle-browed, bombastic orator who had become famous for his attacks on the performance of the first Scottish plays. By 1774, Witherspoon had turned the infant college into a mecca for strict anti-English Presbyterians from all over colonial America.

William must have remembered his long-ago Scottish tour, when the fundamentalist preacher was busily defending his radical attacks on Anglican backsliding. Nonetheless, in Witherspoon William had welcomed another literate man to rural New Jersey. He had sponsored him for membership in the American Philosophical Society. In his turn, Witherspoon included the Franklins' electrical experiments in his lectures at Princeton and duplicated William's design for the kite.21 But by the 1770s, as the pace of revolutionary events quickened, students at Princeton, undoubtedly with Witherspoon's knowledge, quite possibly with his consent, were in the forefront of open resistance to British policies. They burned in effigy merchants, governors and members of Parliament, broke into the college storehouse, and destroyed a large quantity of tea at the appropriate moment. With Governor Franklin on the dais, they showed up for graduation in homespun American garb instead of imported academic gowns to dramatize their embargo of English goods. Even valedictory addresses, delivered in Latin, were defiant diatribes on patriotism. One was delivered by President Witherspoon's own son. If Witherspoon had disapproved in the slightest, immediate expulsion would have resulted.

Among Witherspoon's devoted alumni were young merchants and lawyers at the core of the radical movement in Essex County. By 1774, Witherspoon himself, still denouncing the clergy's participation in politics from the pulpit, was secretly campaigning for independence among delegations to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia when he was not meeting at the Hudibras Tavern in Princeton with fellow members of one of the New Jersey radical political committees based there.

While Governor Franklin watched apprehensively, a new element of unyielding grassroots politicians slowly took power, squeezing out Quakers and lukewarm patriots in county after county until radicals all but controlled the New Jersey Assembly. Without troops, there was little the governor could do.

The most widespread lawlessness was the smuggling. The royal customs officials were but a feeble check on a large and well-organized industry. The bulk of what today would be approximately $200 million in goods smuggled annually into Philadelphia from the West Indies passed through booming New Jersey contraband ports. Long wagon trains rumbled through the Pine Barrens day and night under heavily armed escort. Customs officers daring to interfere received harsh treatment. One unsuccessful royal collector complained to the governor that ships were being unloaded and that untaxed wagonloads were hauled right past his window: the governor could only add the man's complaint to the stack on his desk. When the collector and his two sons tried to seize a smuggler's shipload of claret, they were beaten off and then robbed by the smugglers. Persisting, he dispatched one of the sons to Philadelphia for reinforcements. There the youth was pursued by a mob, dragged out of a house, tarred and feathered, then beaten with sticks as he was dragged with a rope around his neck through the streets. After several hours of being further abused in a pillory, he was finally thrown into the river. Miraculously, he survived.22

Adding a special virulence to the mob's hatred of Britain was a strong element of religious prejudice, which had been exploited for fifteen years by Samuel Adams in Boston, William Livingston in New York, and Witherspoon wherever he went. The radical Puritans raised the bogeyman of popery, trying to confuse the ignorant and deliberately blurring the distinction between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, or "the Whore of Babylon," as Boston bigots preferred to call both. Religious prejudice had been mixed with fear of Catholic Canada and its baptized Indian raiders since the foundation of the American settlements. The radical leaders in the Continental Congress received timely assistance in stirring the coals of religious hatred from the bungling and insensitive North ministry in the weeks just before the Continental Congress convened.

For fifteen years, conquered Canada had been ruled by martial law. At this exquisitely inopportune moment, North, Dartmouth and their advisors decided that since they were rewriting American colonial policy anyway, they should draft a new charter for the province of Quebec. Intended as a model of its kind, the Quebec charter created a highly centralized government. It was to be ruled by a governor and a council entirely appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the King, with no representative elective lower house. Taxes were to be voted by Parliament in London. All laws were to be subject to Crown veto. The rights, religious and civil, of the French Catholic majority were to be guaranteed. Since most Canadians were Catholic, the guarantee, in effect, made Catholicism the state religion. The courts were to follow French law, which did not admit trial by jury. Moreover, the French-Canadian fur traders were rewarded by the extension of the provincial borders south to the Ohio River, thus wiping out the land grants not only of the Franklins but of the Lees, the Washingtons, the Whartons, and other land-hungry speculators from Massachusetts to South Carolina. Parliament had created "an arbitrary government on the back of our settlements dangerous to us all," as Benjamin Franklin described it. To the radicals as well as to Franklin it was obvious that Britain intended to subdue Puritan New England, then bring it under just such a popish, Parliament-controlled government.23

The prospect of French traders and Catholic priests roaming — no, owning — the Ohio backcountry did more than anything else to convince frontier Scotch-Irish as well as New England Puritans that the Catholic Stuarts were once again ascendant and about to invade America from the north. Sam Adams was able to tell the Boston mobs with sincerity what Benjamin Franklin had concluded when he first read the Quebec Act in London. As the Congress met, moderate southern leaders, driven into the camp of the Boston radicals by the destruction of their chances for more lands to support their topsoil-depleting crops of tobacco and cotton, joined in vehement chorus against this latest intolerable transgression by the Tory ministry.

The anti-British movement was spreading throughout New Jersey by the summer of 1774. In little more than the month following the Essex County resolves, some seventy-two radical delegates from every county gathered to reject the Boston Port Act as "repugnant to the common principles of humanity and justice." They voted unanimously to dispatch five delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. William immediately informed London of their action.24

The delegation was led by William Livingston, the squire of Liberty Hall in Elizabethtown, who had for years packed the coffeehouses and taverns of New York City with noisy debaters as each weekly installment of his magazine, The Independent Reflector, came off the press. Promulgating radical and Puritanical political theories, he attacked the established provincial government, the tax laws and, most especially, the Anglican Church. One early and eager subscriber had been the printer Benjamin Franklin, who evidently first imbibed Locke's doctrine of the right to revolution by reading distillations of Scottish political philosophy as they came from the pen of Livingston.

After retiring to the idyllic life of a country gentleman from a law practice stunted by his time-consuming radical writings, Livingston announced his return to politics by issuing a long legal opinion attacking Governor Franklin's stand in the case of the New Jersey treasurer. As radical leaders from all over British America headed for the Continental Congress, he then maneuvered to emerge as the head of the New Jersey delegation.

William Franklin could foresee that the swirling revolution would soon spill over with blood. His suggestion for a British-sponsored congress unanswered, he made a fresh attempt at reconciliation. He urgently requested that Lord Dartmouth convince his peers that Americans, if they were to be taxed and regulated by Parliamentary law, should be given seats in Parliament. Again he had to wait, even though he knew that time was running out. Then, in the summer of 1774, as revolutionary committees planned the strategy for the Continental Congress, William crossed the Delaware River to meet frequently with his old law teacher, Joseph Galloway, who had held the Franklin party together through the long years of Benjamin Franklin's absence. Together, they worked hard to revise and modify the Albany Plan of Union, which Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Hutchinson had presented in 1754 at the Albany Convention to counter the French offensive. That plan had called for a union of colonies under a president-general appointed and paid by the Crown. A grand council elected by the colonial assemblies (each colony to have from two to seven delegates) was to have legislative power subject to approval by the president-general and the Crown.

More recently, Galloway had drafted a letter from the Pennsylvania committee of correspondence to the Massachusetts committee of correspondence proposing union between the American colonies and England similar to the merger between Scotland and England in 1707.

When William Franklin and Joseph Galloway met at Trevose in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in early September, they each apparently had drawn up resolutions to submit to the Continental Congress when it met later that month. Their proposals differed slightly not only from Benjamin's plans of twenty years ago but from each other's.

The Franklin-Galloway Plan of Union called for a grand legislative council to be elected triennially by the legislatures of all the colonies and to meet annually. Only its president was to be appointed by the King. Whereas Benjamin's plan had merely called for a union of all the colonies to facilitate defense against the Indians and arbitrate land claims, the Franklin-Galloway Plan went much further: the American legislature was to be connected to Parliament, and would send delegates from America to sit in the House of Commons. This particular provision, proposed by William, would provide virtual representation of Americans in Parliament, the lack of which had done so much to provoke the unrest of the 1760's. Furthermore, either Parliament or the American colonies could propose laws to govern the colonies, but the underlying principle behind the Franklin-Galloway Plan of Union was that no law could bind America without her consent.

The only other major difference between William's and Galloway's provisions were characteristic of the two men themselves. Galloway's called for another humble petition from the Congress to the Crown; William wanted the Continental Congress to send the plan to each colonial legislature, which in turn could legally pass on it and then present it to the Crown. William's approach was not only the more constitutional of the two, but it was the more Whiggish, honoring the authority not only of Parliament but of the colonial legislatures. It was a statesmanlike difference which, if it had been adopted, could have helped to avert the Revolutionary War. It also anticipated in many ways the British Commonwealth of Nations, adopted by Parliament a century and a half later.

The version printed and presented to the Continental Congress by Galloway, Pennsylvania's chief delegate to the Congress, was supported by moderates in South Carolina and New York as well as in the Middle Colonies. In 1774, it was all the congressional radicals could do to keep it from winning adoption. Patrick Henry saw it as the ruin of all his plans if it were to pass. The radicals stalled for time. They moved to table the plan for further consideration, polling only one more vote than the moderates in the crucial motion to table.

As Galloway complained to William in a letter William transmitted to Lord Dartmouth, the radical faction then went skillfully to work "out of doors." Part of its success came from the well-concerted activities of the Philadelphia radicals. Soon after Galloway's compromise plan was shelved, he received a strong hint to withdraw the plan from consideration. A box was delivered to his mansion containing a hangman's noose and orders to use it himself or else a mob would. Also in the box was a torn insurance policy. William reported to Lord Dartmouth that Galloway abruptly withdrew his motion and decided not to submit William's plan in its stead. Galloway then retired to his farm.25

The Congress had agreed in advance to make all its votes unanimous to protect individual members. The Galloway Plan of Union was unanimously withdrawn. Then the Congress voted unanimously to instruct its secretary to expunge the motion entirely from the minutes.

William Franklin's compromise plan never was presented to the Congress. When Galloway anonymously published his plan a few months later, calling the Congress an "illegal, motley" gathering inciting "a Presbyterian plot for independence from England,"26 William sent it without comment to Lord Dartmouth.

When he was not funneling Galloway's reports of the debates in the Congress to England, Governor Franklin was trying to keep order in his own province. For him the key test of his ability to maintain royal authority in New Jersey came two months later. In January 1775 the Assembly convened to consider whether it would follow the recommendations of the Continental Congress by endorsing the Association, a total boycott of British imports and exports, and send cash and supplies to the inhabitants of blockaded Boston. William knew that several populous New Jersey counties were strongly opposed to the radicals and had voted delegates to the provincial Assembly with instructions to block involvement in what they considered a Massachusetts quarrel. William clung to the hope that he could keep New Jersey neutral. If he failed, there would probably be open hostilities in those counties where radical committees of observation and inspection had been trying to stop all trade with England by searching out and destroying goods owned by increasingly resistant pro-British merchants.

Earlier that winter, the Essex County grand jury, siding with Boston, had boldly sent a warning to the province's second highest Crown official, its chief justice: "No fawning servility . . . no hopes of future preferment will induce any man to damp [his] . . . patriotic ardor nor lend his helping hand to . . . riveting those chains which are forging for us."27

At the same time, New York newspapers circulated in New Jersey warned that the radicals were "elated with power, new and unconstitutional." One asked bluntly in a headline, "What Think Ye of Congress Now?" and scolded, "These men arraign the highest authority on earth, insolently trample on the liberties of their fellow subjects, take from them their property, grant it to others and expose them to the vilest injuries."28

Hoping for peace and compromise, William Franklin tried to remain in the middle of the road in this struggle. But he felt increasingly isolated and skeptical of the courage of like-minded men around him to resist the incessant pressure of the Congress party, of the mob. He had gradually ceased being the passionate Whig who, only five years earlier, had railed at the incompetence and arrogance of Lord Hillsborough's bungling anti-American policies.

"Few have the courage to declare their disapprobation publicly," he wrote confidentially to Lord Dartmouth. "They well know, if they do not conform, they are in danger of becoming objects of popular resentment." And, he bemoaned, "It is not in the power of government here to protect them." He was even beginning to worry for his own safety, for that of his wife. "Indeed, the officers of government [except at Boston] have but little or no protection for themselves."29 He was bitter that the Congress had failed to propose some compromise such as his plan of union. He knew that such a union between England and Scotland had, earlier in that century, helped to end a millennium of conflict. Without compromise, he was certain England must, as a point of honor, punish her upstart American colonies. Passing along a copy of the suppressed Galloway-Franklin Plan of Union, he turned gloomily to prepare what he knew could be his most important speech.

To prevent violent legislative reaction to the news of the Boston Port Act, William had stubbornly refused for nearly a year to call the Assembly, as was his lawful prerogative. He knew that to call the Assembly was to risk legitimate legislative endorsement of the proceedings of the extralegal Continental Congress. Yet there was also a thin chance that doing so would provide a forum in which he could make his appeal to avoid war with England.

On January 11, 1775, Governor Franklin climbed the steps of the old stone courthouse at Perth Amboy and entered the chamber where he had taken his oath of office on just such a frozen blustery morning twelve years earlier. After the thirty assemblymen and the twelve executive councillors and provincial officials filed to their places, William rose, tall, grave, confident. Arranging his carefully prepared text on the lectern before him, he looked up to face these men, many of them old friends, but so many of them strangers. In his clear commanding voice he welcomed these "gentlemen of the Assembly." This was to be the keynote address of their most important meeting, and the governor's speech left no doubt that he expected them to uphold royal authority, that he intended in every way to "prevail on you to exert yourselves" to prevent further "mischiefs to this country." But he also made it clear he was holding to his decided course of careful neutrality and would tread lightly on their prerogatives.

"It is not for me to decide on the particular merits of the dispute between Great Britain and her colonies, nor do I mean to censure those who conceive themselves aggrieved for aiming at a redress of their grievances. It is a duty they owe themselves, their country, and their posterity.

"All that I would wish to guard you against is giving any countenance or encouragement to that destructive mode of proceeding which has been unhappily adopted" (every member knew his sympathies now) "by some" (and they knew some of the most radical were sitting in this chamber) "in this colony." William paused often, spoke slowly, ominously. "If you, gentlemen of the Assembly, should give your approbation, you will do as much as lies in your power to destroy that form of government of which you are an important part, and which it is your lawful duty to preserve."

There was, moreover, absolutely no need for the freeholders of New Jersey to imperil themselves, their families, their estates so hard-bought and prospering. If they had any grievances of their own or proposals for the Crown, "I can assure you from the best authority" — and here every man must have known his meaning, his direct personal link to the King through Lord Dartmouth — "that such propositions will be properly attended to and certainly have greater weight coming from each colony in its separate capacity than through a channel the propriety and legality of which there may be much doubt."

He had not once mentioned the word "congress," denying it a legal part in these proceedings, refusing to acknowledge its existence. Yet every assemblyman knew that what his excellency was proposing was in fact their outright defiance of the Continental Congress. He was proposing a separate peace between this single, small colony in the middle of America and the British Empire, in spite of the concerted acts and opinions of all the other colonies.

"You have now pointed out to you, gentlemen, two roads — one evidently leading to peace, happiness and a restoration of the public tranquillity — the other inevitably conducting you to anarchy, misery, and all the horrors of a civil war. Your wisdom, your prudence, your regard for the true interests of the people, will best be known when you have shown to which road you give the preference."

And then William Franklin concluded as he had once before, ten tumultuous years earlier during the Stamp Act crisis. "Every breach of the Constitution, whether it proceeds from the Crown or the people, is, in its effects, equally destructive to the rights of both. It is a most infallible symptom of the dangerous state of liberty when the chief men of a free country show a greater regard to popularity than to their own judgment."30

No sooner had Franklin confidently left the council chamber at the end of this sobering speech than the radical leaders in the Assembly began arguments that lasted for days. They brought in William Livingston and Elias Boudinot, who urged the moderates not to stand alone but to adopt the measures of the Congress as their own and to do it quickly, to set an example for the neighboring New York Assembly, deadlocked in the same debate. Do not stand alone, they warned. Act quickly before the governor has time to dissolve the Assembly. The debate raged off and on for three weeks. Finally, the two houses voted. The upper house, the Council, its members for the most part personally appointed by Governor Franklin over the past decade, sided unanimously and openly with the governor: "Your Excellency may be assured that we will exert our utmost influence, both in our public and private capacities, to restore harmony."31

But the Assembly argued down to the last moment of its longest session in years. A majority of members finally folded under the pressure of what the governor denounced as radical "caballing." The Franklins' old political ally, the Quaker Assembly leader James Kinsey, tried to push through the governor's plan for a joint British-American legislature, but had to withdraw it under intense radical pressure. Furthermore, the radicals again would not allow any trace of dissent. Seven assemblymen had voted against complaining to the King. They were lectured on the need for unanimity. Again a vote was taken, and again, and again, until there were no nays. In a last-ditch effort to block the petition, and as a signal to the governor, to London, that slavishness to the wishes of the radicals was not total, the speaker of the Assembly refused to sign the petition. Again, the radicals forced the issue. The members would decide whether he was to sign or not. The vote was tied. The speaker cast the tie-breaking vote. He was not forced, this time, to put his name on a document complaining about the abridgment of civil liberties.32

Wavering a moment, the Assembly then indulged in some classic fence-straddling. Declaring themselves "His Majesty's loyal subjects," they nevertheless approved the grievances drawn up by the Continental Congress. To placate their governor, they sent the petition, not through the Congress, but separately to the King, asking for relief from grievances "under which your American subjects have been so long laboring . . . although the grievances do not immediately affect the people of this colony."33 Angrily William refused to forward the petition. Instead, the Assembly sent it to Benjamin Franklin, its London agent, to present to Lord Dartmouth. William did send Lord Dartmouth a long letter damning these "demagogues of faction [who] oppose everything which may have even the remotest tendency to conciliate matters and omit nothing which may widen the breach."34 And he named Livingston and the other radicals, in essence accusing them of treason. By mid-1774, as Lord Dartmouth's papers reveal, he was gathering evidence of treason by American radicals.

One month earlier, Lord Dartmouth and his fellow privy councillors had conferred with Crown lawyers and decided that the radicals were in open rebellion against the King and were therefore to be "treated as rebels and traitors."35 Now, William took from his desk a royal order he had kept pigeonholed for four months. He had objected as loudly as any American to British regulations on smuggling. He had ignored the appeals of British customs officials for more rigid enforcement because he had considered the laws ill advised, unworkable, provocative. But now he took his own position as a British official seriously, as if for the first time. As captain general as well as governor, he ordered all customs officers and sheriffs to search out and seize all arms and ammunition the radicals smuggled into the colony. He would no longer shield New Jersey from royal rules. He would henceforth govern his colony despite the displeasure of the radicals.

All through the tense winter and into the spring of 1775, William heard nothing from his father. No reaction to Deborah's death, to the resulting confusion of family matters, to his own serious problems and proposals to the Crown. His financial plight had improved slightly, but his land speculations were in ruins. The Illinois grant had been comatose since his father's disgrace. Virginia had sent an army to seize the Forks of the Ohio as signs of war appeared everywhere.

William still clung to the hope that one day his father would return, if only so that Benjamin could see the "glorious public virtue," as he called it from afar, that every day beset William in America as he tried to keep the forces of discord from tearing his province apart. He was, his father would see, succeeding so far as anyone could in steering the narrow neutral course of peace with all parties. But his hope for compromise diminished drastically at dusk on April 25, 1775, when a weary rider whipped his panting horse down the Great Post Road and turned off at Elizabethtown. Pounding on the door of Elias Boudinot's house — Boudinot was the chairman of the committee of safety for Essex County — the exhausted courier handed the radical leader a countersigned letter from Massachusetts. Fighting had broken out in a little village just outside Boston.