Chapter 19

Ben Franklin Returns

As Ethan Allen and Seth Warner rode south with their frustrations, the Second Continental Congress had been meeting since May 10 in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia. Fired by the events on Lexington Green and at Concord’s North Bridge, this gathering was to prove more assertive than the plodding session John Adams had bemoaned the previous fall. Still, there were far more questions than answers about the course to be taken, and some of the uncertainty was directed toward the oldest head in the room. It had been a long time, but Ben Franklin was home.

Revered though he was by many on both sides of the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin was nonetheless something of an unknown quantity to the younger generation of rebels who now gathered around him. At sixty-nine, he was far and away the oldest delegate. Despite his reputation as a stalwart proponent of colonial rights, Franklin had been away from the colonies for most of the last two decades. Some couldn’t help but wonder if the years in London had softened his resolve. Especially among the most ardent of this crowd of young Turks, who knew where Franklin’s true loyalties lay?

Benjamin Franklin had arrived in Philadelphia on board the Pennsylvania Packet on Friday evening, May 5. Ever the inquisitive scientist, Franklin, with his fifteen-year-old grandson, Temple, had recorded the differing water temperatures in the Atlantic to bolster his theory of the Gulf Stream during their crossing from London. The very next day, the Pennsylvania assembly voted to add Franklin’s name and those of two others to the list of Pennsylvania delegates already approved the prior December.¹

“Dr. Franklin is highly pleased to find us arming and preparing for the worst events,” a private observer wrote in a letter that was given wide circulation in rebel newspapers. “He thinks nothing else can save us from the most abject slavery and destruction.”² But in practice, during those first weeks in what would come to be known as Independence Hall, Franklin was far more reserved. John Adams recalled him “sitting in silence, a great part of the time fast asleep in his chair.”³ Others were more skeptical. Some of the delegates, Philadelphia printer William Bradford wrote James Madison, “begin to entertain a great Suspicion that Dr. Franklin came rather as a spy than as a friend, & that he means to discover our weak side & make his peace with the minister [Lord North] by discovering it to him.”⁴

Madison did not give Franklin the benefit of the doubt. “Indeed it appears to me,” Madison responded to Bradford, “that the bare suspicion of his guilt amounts very nearly to a proof of its reality. If he were the man he formerly was, & has even of late pretended to be,” Madison continued, “his conduct in Philada. on this critical occasion could have left no room for surmise or distrust.”⁵

Part of Franklin’s reticence to engage in these early debates was a matter of style. He had always been one to brood and contemplate privately before uttering what in retrospect would appear as profound observations. But since he had missed the gathering of so many of these same men the prior fall, Franklin was also taking his time—in between naps—to be certain he understood the depth of their individual commitments.

By now the moderates, it appeared, had largely been sent packing. Even Franklin’s friend and longtime ally in Pennsylvania politics, Joseph Galloway, had been swept aside. Despite his election as a delegate to this congress, Galloway asked that he be excused from serving. His moderation had failed, and even Franklin had criticized his compromise plan for a junior-level Parliament in North America. Galloway would soon take his place in the loyalist camp, and his friendship with Franklin would run its course.

But most trying to Franklin during these days was the matter of loyalties within his own family. Even as Franklin landed in Philadelphia, his son, William, was still the royal governor of New Jersey and going to great lengths to proclaim his loyalty to the king. With family confrontation quite likely, grandson Temple became a pawn between the grandfather he adored and the father he barely knew. (Siring illegitimate sons—such as William and Temple—was something of a Franklin family tradition.) Ironically, it was Joseph Galloway, with whom William Franklin had once studied law, who made a last-ditch effort to broker a family truce.

Galloway hosted the three generations of Franklins at Trevose, his magnificent country home just north of Philadelphia. To all appearances, Galloway had long been the lord and master of Trevose, but the vast estate was legally part of his wife’s inheritance, a situation that would come to weigh heavily on Galloway’s own family relationships as the divide widened between rebels and loyalists. But for now, his attention was focused on the Franklins.

Their reunion was cordial, but rather stiff and without mention of politics until a few glasses of Madeira managed to loosen their tongues. “Well, Mr. Galloway,” the senior Franklin asked his host, “you are really of the mind that I ought to promote a reconciliation?” Galloway affirmed that he was, but Franklin had already heard that much and more from Lord Howe back in England. He responded with a litany of colonial complaints, which Galloway answered with his own list of affronts that included anonymous rebels sending him a noose: evidently his moderation in proposing to save the British union was intolerable to some of his countrymen.

As Galloway and Ben Franklin volleyed back and forth, William offered that it might be best for them all to remain neutral. To his father, such a course smacked of timidity rather than resolve, and one senses that Franklin would have had more respect for his son had William firmly staked out his position then and there, no matter how opposed it was to Franklin’s own views. By the time they all parted, there could be no question in Galloway’s mind or that of William where Benjamin Franklin stood. There could be no middle ground. He was for independence.

The one family matter that the Franklins resolved at Trevose was to agree that young Temple would spend the summer with his father in New Jersey before returning to Philadelphia to enroll in the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. William lobbied to send the lad to King’s College (later Columbia College, then Columbia University) in New York City instead, but grandfather Benjamin vetoed that plan because New York had become “a hotbed of English loyalism.” Poor Temple remained caught in the middle between his father and grandfather.⁶

Joseph Galloway would go on to assist the British in their administration of Philadelphia during the war. Years later, particularly bitter from the defeat of his moderate plan at the First Continental Congress, Galloway would claim that the rebel leaders had used “every fiction, falsehood, and fraud to incite the ignorant and vulgar to arms.”⁷

When Galloway finally slunk away to England in exile as the British abandoned Philadelphia in 1778, his wife, Grace Growden Galloway, stayed behind to fight for her inheritance of Trevose even though she had two strikes against her—she was a woman and a loyalist. William Franklin continued to serve as the royal governor of New Jersey until the New Jersey Provincial Congress finally declared him “an enemy to the liberties of this country” and had him arrested. Later exchanged for a rebel prisoner, he then offered his services to the British in administering New York City.⁸ Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin went about building a new nation.

AMONG FRANKLIN’S FELLOW DELEGATES AT the Second Continental Congress were a high number of reappointees from the first session, held the previous September. The new man in the Massachusetts delegation was John Hancock, never one to shrink from any prominent role. Hancock’s short-lived experience as president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and his habit of leading in any venue in which he found himself would stand him in good stead.

One of Samuel Adams’s preoccupations upon arriving in Philadelphia was to outfit himself with new clothes befitting his role—perhaps at the dapper Hancock’s urging. Adams had arrived in Philadelphia straight from Lexington with “only the Cloaths on my back, which were very much worn.” With his customary casual approach to monetary matters, it was almost two years before Adams got around to billing the Massachusetts legislature for what he considered “a Necessity, of being at an extraordinary Expense, to appear with any kind of Decency for Cloathing & Linnen after my Arrival in this City.”⁹

The five South Carolina delegates who had sailed so gaily from Charleston had arrived in Philadelphia in time, as had John Jay of New York and Caesar Rodney of Delaware. An assembly in Savannah, Georgia, declined to certify a slate of delegates, but St. John’s Parish took exception and dispatched Dr. Lyman Hall on his way nonetheless. Hall was seated with the understanding that he would not vote upon matters “when the sentiments of the Congress were taken by colonies.” Once the delegates had assembled, Peyton Randolph of Virginia was again elected president of the congress.¹⁰

Aside from an inordinate amount of fussing with parliamentary procedure and credentials, the Continental Congress addressed three issues of major and continuing importance during its first few weeks: publicity, money, and an army. John Hancock’s first action as a delegate was to lay before the congress resolutions passed by Massachusetts in the wake of Lexington and Concord, along with the depositions taken from participants and Joseph Warren’s fiery letter to British inhabitants, which had been sent to England aboard the Quero. Recognizing the importance of disseminating the rebel version of events throughout the colonies, the Continental Congress ordered that the same be published in as many newspapers as possible.¹¹

Other requests from Massachusetts could not be accommodated so readily. Joseph Warren’s most critical communication from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress proudly reported Massachusetts’s “unanimous Resolve” to raise its own force of 13,600 men, but made clear that in the face of British reinforcements this would not be enough. The rest of New England was arming itself in similar proportions, but Warren warned that “a powerful Army, on the side of America” and under the direction of the Continental Congress, was the only means left “to stem the rapid Progress of a tyrannical Ministry.”¹²

This was a big step, and the Continental Congress did what legislative bodies have always done with thorny issues: they referred it to a committee—in this case the entire congress sitting as a committee of the whole—for due consideration. But events were overtaking any semblance of measured debate. Rebels in New York sent the congress a missive similar to Warren’s and asked what their response should be to the arrival of the fresh regiments of British troops that were expected any day in New York City. The congress encouraged New York to act only on the defensive, as long as they could do so “consistent with their safety and security.” The British troops should be allowed to take up quarters in barracks “so long as they behave peaceably and quietly… [but] if they commit hostilities or invade private property, the inhabitants should defend themselves and their property and repel force by force.”¹³

This defensive posture was similar to the position that Massachusetts maintained it had taken at Lexington and Concord—the vicious attacks on Percy’s retreating column notwithstanding. But then came news via John Brown of Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold’s capture of Fort Ticonderoga. This act could hardly be considered “defensive,” no matter how the Green Mountain Boys chose to portray it.

The Continental Congress vacillated and dispatched its wishy-washy response—advising the rebels to store captured property until it could be returned to the king—that so infuriated both Allen and Arnold. Benjamin Franklin at this point still seems to have been in his phase of brooding observation. Having recognized the threats from beyond the northern frontier and called for common defense as early as 1754, in his Albany Plan of Union, Franklin should have been a force who urged a concerted offensive. But Franklin wasn’t quite ready to lead his fellow delegates off a cliff that could only end in independence or destruction.

Barely had the Continental Congress sent its Ticonderoga response north, however, than it addressed the situation in New York with more military vigor and passed resolutions concerning fortifications along the Hudson River and the arming and training of troops. Next came a letter to “the oppressed Inhabitants of Canada” drafted by New York’s John Jay. It expressed hope that the recent forays around Ticonderoga had given Canadians “no uneasiness” and assured these northern neighbors, “We yet entertain hopes of your uniting with us in the defence of our common liberty.” The missive was translated into French, and one thousand copies were printed and “sent to Canada, and dispersed among the Inhabitants there.”¹⁴

Meanwhile, all this talk about armies was stirring the martial spirit in almost every delegate assembled, save perhaps Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams. Franklin had never held strong military ambitions, and Samuel Adams had long recognized that his place was among the plotters in legislative halls and not upon battlefields. But his cousin John couldn’t help but be caught up in the glory of it. “Oh that I was a Soldier!” John Adams wrote Abigail. “I will be.—I am reading military Books.—Every Body must and will, and shall be a soldier.”¹⁵

One of those who most wished for a military command was John Hancock. When Peyton Randolph, after only two weeks as the congress’s president, decided that he must return immediately to Virginia, Hancock saw his opportunity to move to the forefront. He turned to both John Adams and George Washington for assistance. These two men had begun to form close ties with each other that went well beyond their respective provincial boundaries. They were discussing the broader ramifications of continental union as opposed to mere independence. On May 24 with their support, Hancock was unanimously elected to succeed Randolph as president of the Continental Congress.¹⁶ (Randolph was also speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and Governor Dunmore had unexpectedly called it into emergency session. By midsummer, a young Thomas Jefferson would arrive in Philadelphia to replace Randolph as a member of the Virginia delegation.)

For the moment, Hancock’s role was that of a civilian leader. Joseph Warren was adamant about the supremacy of civilian control of any military forces—“otherwise,” as he wrote to Samuel Adams, “our soldiery will lose the ideas of right and wrong, and will plunder, instead of protecting the inhabitants.”¹⁷ But President Hancock clearly expected military lightning to strike him when the time was right. What Hancock apparently did not grasp was that when that time came, one of the brokers of his election as president of the congress would be his rival. George Washington had been wearing his resplendent colonial uniform to the sessions, and at forty-three it gave him an air of a battle-tested hero. Three days after Hancock’s election as president, Washington was appointed to chair a committee of seven, which included Samuel Adams, to consider “ways and means to supply these colonies with Ammunition and military stores.”¹⁸

The floodgates that had been holding back concerted military action were opening. It hadn’t taken very long. On May 31, the congress received Benedict Arnold’s warning that a force of four hundred British regulars—almost surely an inflated number—were gathering at St. John’s and along with “a number of Indians” were expected to sail up Lake Champlain “with a design of retaking Crown-point and Ticonderogo.” The congress quickly reversed its mild-mannered approach of only two weeks before and requested that Governor Trumbull of Connecticut send a strong reinforcement to garrison both forts and keep “so many of the cannon and other stores… as may be necessary for the immediate defence of those posts.” New York was asked to furnish those troops with provisions and other necessary stores and also provide a sufficient number of bateaux for use on the lake.¹⁹

How to pay for all this was another matter. This was to be a leap of faith. During a Saturday session on June 3, the congress took the first step and resolved to empower the Pennsylvania delegation to borrow six thousand pounds, “the repayment of which with interest, the Congress will make full and ample provision.” The intent was that the locals would knock on the doors of Philadelphia banks, obtain loans, and then apply the funds toward “the purchase of gunpowder for the use of the Continental Army.”²⁰ Technically, there was not yet a Continental Army, but a strong plea to create one was on the table.

The day before, Dr. Benjamin Church had arrived in town and delivered the petition of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which had been entrusted to his special care and personal delivery. Church had been a very busy person—signing Benedict Arnold’s original commission, dispatching the committee to investigate Arnold’s leadership, and attending to myriad details for the committee of safety among the troops gathering about Cambridge. But in that critical month of May, with so much in flux on all sides, it is hard to imagine a more important or delicate assignment for Church than to convey to the Continental Congress the Massachusetts plea that it create a national army. “As the Army now collecting from different colonies is for the general defence of the right of America,” the petition concluded, “we wd beg leave to suggest to yr consideration the propriety of yr taking the regulation and general direction of it, that the operations may more effectually answer the purposes designed.”²¹

The words, signed by Joseph Warren as president of the Provincial Congress, were one thing, but Dr. Church was also counted on to lend a persuasive personal touch and credibility to the Massachusetts delegates and help them convince the other delegates of the exigencies of the moment. In the end, however, that diplomatic duty would fall to John Hancock and Samuel Adams, because deep down in his soul Benjamin Church was a very conflicted man.

On May 24, the day before he left Cambridge for Philadelphia—he may or may not have previously made another clandestine visit to Boston—Church had written a lengthy letter to someone who appears to have been a frequent recipient of his communications. “May I never see the day when I shall not dare to call myself a British American,” Church confessed before getting to the nub of the matter: “I am appointed to my vexation to carry the dispatches to Philadelphia, & must set out tomorrow wh will prevent my writing for some time, unless an opportunity should be found thence by water.”²²

One hundred and fifty years later, this letter—along with Rachel Revere’s undelivered note to her husband—would be found among the papers of Thomas Gage. When it was, it would become damning evidence that for at least two years, Dr. Benjamin Church, the insider’s insider of the Massachusetts committee of safety, had been passing rebel information to General Gage.

But for the moment, Dr. Church was above suspicion. As he left Philadelphia about a week later to carry resolutions from the Continental Congress back to Massachusetts, no one among the rebel hierarchy doubted his allegiance to their cause. Only Church and General Gage knew the depth of his treachery. For Gage, it was simply a matter of military intelligence bought and paid for. As for Church, he had gladly taken the pieces of silver, but at a cost to himself that was much greater. “Oh for Peace & honor once more,” Church lamented, but it was not to be.²³ Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin, the man whose own loyalty some had questioned, was appointed to a committee charged with drafting yet one more last-ditch petition of reconciliation to George III.²⁴