15
Franklin left England as full-blooded a Briton as he had ever been. By his own testimony heintended to return, permanently. He wrote to Strahan just prior to leaving, “I shall probably make but this one vibration and settle here forever. Nothing will prevent it, if I can, as I hope I can, prevail with Mrs. F. to accompany me, especially if we have a peace.”
Franklin’s inquisitive mind craved stimulation, consistently gravitating toward whatever community of intellects asked the most intriguing questions; his expansive temperament sought souls that resonated with his own generosity and sense of virtue. In five years in England he had found more of both than in a lifetime in America. “Of all the enviable things England has,” he told Polly Stevenson, “I envy most its people. Why should that petty island, which compared to America is but like a stepping stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one’s shoes dry; why, I say, should that little island enjoy in almost every neighbourhood more sensible, virtuous and elegant minds than we can collect in ranging 100 leagues of our vast forests?” He left such people reluctantly and, he trusted, temporarily.
The voyage home—Franklin’s fourth Atlantic passage—was slow but pleasant. The slowness reflected the wartime need to travel in a convoy, which, as convoys do, traveled at the rate of the slowest member. The pleasantness resulted from fair weather, agreeable company, and a delightful three-day stop at Madeira, located on the southern loop to the west, which carried the convoy close to Africa and out of the reach of the Gulf Stream. “It produces not only the fruits of the hot countries, such as oranges, lemons, plantains, bananas, &c. but those of the cold also, as apples, pears and peaches in great perfection,” Franklin recorded. “The mountains are excessively high, and rise suddenly from the town, which affords the inhabitants a singular conveniency, that of getting soon out of its heat after they have done their business, and of ascending to what climate or degree of coolness they are pleased to choose, the sides of the mountains being filled with their country boxes at different heights.” Grapes were in season at the time of Franklin’s visit; he and his shipmates took on numerous bunches, which they hung from the ceiling of the ship’s cabin and plucked for dessert after dinner for weeks afterward.
Franklin may have envied England its people, but he would have been churlish to complain of the welcome he received from the people of Pennsylvania. Rumors had arisen during his last year in England that he had fallen somewhat out of favor with his home folks; foremost of the rumormongers was the Reverend William Smith, recently arrived in London with what he retailed as the latest intelligence from the west. Franklin guessed that Smith was spinning stories, but he could not be sure. Now he was. “I arrived here well on the 1st ultimo,” Franklin told Richard Jackson at the beginning of December, “and had the pleasure to find all false that Dr. Smith had reported about the diminution of my friends. My house has been filled with a succession of them from morning to night almost ever since I landed to congratulate me on my return; and I never experienced greater cordiality among them.”
If Philadelphians had not changed, Philadelphia had. “I find this city greatly increased in building,” he told Jackson. “And they say it is so in numbers of inhabitants.” On this last point he did not consider himself the best judge, for his perspective had changed. “To me the streets seem thinner of people, owing perhaps to my being so long accustomed to the bustling crowded streets of London.”
The cost of living had greatly increased in the five years Franklin had been gone. “It is more than double in most articles, and in some ’tis treble.” For decades Franklin had advocated an expanded currency as a spur to trade; lately the currency had expanded so much the horse had run right out from under the rider. Citing the £800,000 Parliament had spent in Pennsylvania during the war, as well as large paper issues by Pennsylvania and its neighbors, Franklin asserted, “This is such an overproportion of money to the demand for a medium of trade in these countries that it seems from plenty to have lost much of its value. Our tradesmen are grown as idle, and as extravagant in their demands when you would prevail on them to work, as so many Spaniards.” Franklin wondered whether something similar might afflict England, now that it led the world in trading. “Your commerce is now become so profitable,” he told Jackson, “and naturally brings so much gold and silver into the island, that if you had not now and then some expensive foreign war to draw it off, your country would, like ours, have a plethora in its veins, productive of the same sloth and the same feverish extravagance.”
Franklin was hardly advocating war for the sake of the economy; this last remark was rather a relic from the arguments he had been making in England against an early halt to the war. By the end of 1762 such arguments were unnecessary, for the war was concluding, and to Britain’s advantage. Spain had entered the conflict opportunistically late—but also foolishly so, for the revivified British navy soon descended on Cuba and isolated Havana. The city fell in October 1762. Franklin described the victory as “a conquest of the greatest importance.” Yet Canada was more important, and Franklin feared that the earlier victory in the north would be frittered away. Pointing out the expense of the Havana campaign, in which thousands of British soldiers died of disease, he said that the success there would help Britain achieve favorable terms of peace—“if John Bull does not get drunk with victory, double his fists, and bid all the world kiss his a—e till he provokes them to drub him again into his senses.”
John Bull sobered up shortly. In November his negotiators initialed preliminary articles of peace with France and Spain; the following February the treaty became definitive.
Having taken such a strenuous part in the debate over the terms of peace, Franklin naturally and anxiously awaited details of the accord. To his delight he learned that on the issue of compelling concern west of the Atlantic and north of the Caribbean, the British negotiators had held firm. Canada, won in war, would be British in peace. With Canada came the eastern half of Louisiana, between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi, including the Ohio Valley. France would get back Martinique and Guadeloupe. Havana was returned to Spain, but Britain kept Florida.
Franklin greeted the settlement with enthusiasm. It was a “glorious peace,” he said, “the most advantageous to Great Britain, in my opinion, of any our history has recorded.” “Throughout this continent,” he told William Strahan, “I find it universally approved and applauded.” Franklin had been proud before of his Britishness; he was now nearly bursting. “The glory of Britain was never higher than at present.”
Franklin was more than happy to include the new young king in his encomiums. Britain, he said, “never had a better prince.” In his excitement Franklin went so far as to compare the prince of this peace to the Prince of Peace. Franklin’s informants in London described certain mumblings against George III; whence the complaints?, he asked an English correspondent rhetorically.
I can give but one answer. The King of the Universe, good as he is, is not cordially beloved and faithfully served by all his subjects. I wish I could say that half mankind, as much as they are obliged to him for his continual favours, were among the truly loyal. ’tis a shame that the very goodness of a prince should be an encouragement to affronts. An answer now occurs to me, for that question of Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday, which I once thought unanswerable, Why God no kill the Devil? It is to be found in the Scottish proverb: Ye’d do little for God an the Deel were dead.
Franklin put the matter slightly differently to Strahan. “Grumblers there will always be among you, where power and places are worth striving for, and those who cannot obtain them are angry with all that stand in their way. Such would have clamoured against a ministry not their particular friends even if instead of Canada and Louisiana they had obtained a cession of the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Franklin left the kingdom of heaven to the hereafter; he concentrated on empires of this earth. And he saw every reason to believe that the empire Britain had built would grow and prosper, especially on the western side of the Atlantic. “Here in America she has laid a broad and strong foundation on which to erect the most beneficial and certain commerce, with the greatness and stability of her empire.” In his Canada pamphlet he had argued that Britain could return the sugar islands to France with impunity; the treaty, he believed, bore him out. “While we retain our superiority at sea, and are suffered to grow numerous and strong in North America, I cannot but look on the places left or restored to our enemies on this side the ocean as so many pledges for their good behaviour. Those places will hereafter be so much in our power that the more valuable they are to the possessors, the more cautious will they naturally be of giving us offence.”
Franklin’s imperial vision included himself. Since 1754 he had floated proposals for erecting new settlements beyond the mountains to the west. In that year, as part of the thinking that produced his Albany Plan of union, he advocated the establishment of two colonies between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. Such colonies would appeal to the chronic land hunger of Americans (Franklin described the “many thousands of families that are ready to swarm, wanting more land”); at the same time they would forestall the French, subdue the Indians, and buffer the colonies of the seaboard from the turbulence of the frontier.
The war that broke out that summer prevented any action on Franklin’s proposal, even as it underscored the advantages he described. During the nine years of the Seven years’ War, western settlement did not simply stop but was reversed; Americans at war’s end were hungrier than ever for cheap land. The French were banished from Canada and the Ohio but not from beyond the Mississippi; British settlements on the eastern bank of that mighty river would help keep them beyond it. The Indians, though less troublesome in the absence of the French than in their presence, remained a potential source of friction; new settlements would encourage the aborigines to embrace an English fate.
And what would be good for the British empire might be very good for Franklin. Perhaps the rising price of nearly everything in Pennsylvania worried him; perhaps the life he led in England enhanced his tastes; perhaps the bug that bit almost everybody in America in position to be bitten found his soft spot—but for whatever reason, Franklin determined to speculate in western lands. While in England he had discussed a speculative scheme with John Sargent, a member of Parliament and a director of the Bank of England, and Sir Matthew Featherstone, a principal in the East India Company and also a presence in the Bank of England (and a fellow of Franklin’s in the Royal Society). The idea was that Sargent and Featherstone would use their influence with those who counted in England and apply for a land grant; Franklin would stroke the egos that needed stroking in America. At the time Franklin left London, the scheme was afoot but not moving very fast. “I know not how that application goes on, or if it is like to succeed,” he told Richard Jackson. Jackson by now had been elected to Commons himself; Franklin kindly offered to include him in the land deal. The offer reflected Franklin’s generosity but also his estimate that recent reversals in British politics—in particular the resignation of Featherstone’s sponsor, the Duke of Newcastle—had weakened the speculators politically. “I think it rather probable that it may fail,” Franklin said of the project.
Simultaneously he found a second road west. In 1629 Charles I, in a fit of political magnanimity and geographic ignorance, had granted to Sir Robert Heath an enormous tract of land extending from the 31st parallel to the 36th and from the Atlantic Ocean to the South Sea (the Pacific). For various reasons Heath made nothing of his claim, which, by a series of deaths and purchases, passed to the sons of Daniel Coxe of New Jersey. The sons, Franklin’s contemporaries, hoped to make good the original claim—or as much as was feasible after 150 years and the establishment of the Carolinas and Georgia on the old Heath claim.
The Coxe sons, William and Daniel, appealed to Franklin for help. They asked him to recommend someone in England to defend their claim or arrange for them to receive other territory in compensation for it. Cash compensation might be acceptable in lieu of land. They were prepared to offer the person thus engaged the option to purchase for £5,000 half of what they received.
Franklin agreed to help them find such a representative—for a fee of his own. He told the Coxe brothers he knew just their man: Richard Jackson. “I have assured them that no one was more capable, or would be better disposed to serve them, than yourself,” Franklin wrote Jackson. Then he recommended the brothers—and himself—to Jackson: “If this application of Messieurs Coxe should succeed, which, from its great equity may I think be very reasonably expected, I would very willingly engage with you and those gentlemen, and any others you may think proper to associate with you, and take a fifth of the half Messrs. Coxe offer in their letter to you, upon the terms there mentioned; and shall use all my diligence and all my interest in these colonies to promote a speedy settlement.”
Franklin went on to suggest bringing John Pringle into the plan. Franklin liked Pringle but especially valued Pringle’s tie to Bute. In registering confidence that Jackson would know whom to approach, Franklin said, “I would only request you to offer a share to my good friend Dr. Pringle, as, if the affair succeeds it may be advantageous to him whom I much desire to serve, and I have reason to think he has an interest that may greatly facilitate the application.”
Time was of the essence. Franklin sent Jackson a four-year-old article from a New Jersey magazine promoting a scheme to settle a new colony on the Ohio, and projecting the eager emigration thereto of ten thousand families. This enthusiasm was in spite of expectations then that the French would continue to control Canada. “Now that power is reduced,” Franklin said, “we may suppose people are much more willing to go into those countries. And in fact there appears every where an unaccountable penchant in all our people to migrate westward.” Within the week of writing these words, Franklin received reports of other settlement schemes. He postscripted Jackson: “We must strike while the iron is hot.”
Franklin’s closest partner in his land schemes would be his son, William, who arrived from England with his bride in the dead of February 1763 after a stormy Atlantic crossing. William and Betsy stayed with Franklin and Debbie and Sally for three days before William and Franklin ventured over the frozen Delaware River to New Jersey. (Betsy waited for warmer weather.) Father and son spent the first night at Trenton, the next at New Brunswick. Several inquisitive gentlemen in sleighs met the new governor on the road to Perth Amboy, the more eastern of the province’s twin capitals and the one in which William took his oath of office. Despite the bad weather, the ceremony brought out the leading figures of the province, who wished the new man well. Governor and father proceeded to Princeton, where the president of the College of New Jersey congratulated the two together by commending the governor for his education “under the influence and direction of the very eminent Doctor Franklin.”
The citizens of Burlington, New Jersey’s other capital, were even more generous in their welcome than those of Perth Amboy—hoping to persuade the new governor to make his residence there. Bonfires burned far into the night; church bells rang; volleys of gunfire echoed along the frozen streets. And where would the governor be staying? the event’s organizers asked. William declined to commit.
His father could not have been prouder. “I am just returned from a journey I made with him through his government,” Franklin told William Strahan, “and had the pleasure of seeing him every where received with the utmost respect and even affection by all ranks of people. So that I have great hopes of his being now comfortably settled.”
Franklin had his own official duties to tend. During his absence in England he had kept his job as deputy postmaster general for North America. Holding office in absentia was nothing unusual in the British empire in those days, when governors and other officials often managed for years at a time never to visit the territories under their care. That Franklin had a fellow deputy postmaster, William Hunter of Virginia, and a competent comptroller, James Parker of New York (taking the post previously held by William Franklin), eased both the task of directing the mails from a distance and the portion of his conscience that needed easing. Yet his conscience was not so calm that he did not feel obliged to cultivate his superiors in London on a regular basis, and to worry at times that his falling-out with the Penns might cost him his post-office job.
Another element that assuaged his conscience was the fact that at the time he left Philadelphia for London—after holding the postmaster’s position for four years—he still had not made any money at it. He and William Hunter had great hopes that their various improvements would pay for themselves and more, but until they did, the money came out of the postmasters’ pockets. By Franklin’s accounting, at the time he left for London the post office owed him and Hunter some £900.
Eventually the accounts improved, although not soon enough to yield full benefit to Hunter, who died in 1761. Franklin initially hoped Hunter would not be replaced—that the joint postmastership would become a sole occupancy. He reminded his superior, the Earl of Bessborough, that his commission specified that upon the death of either himself or Hunter, full powers would pass to the survivor. “Notwithstanding the decease of Mr. Hunter,” he wrote, “there is properly no vacancy; unless you should think fit to make one by revoking that commission, which, when my long and faithful service of 24 years in the Post Office is considered, I hope will not be done.” Franklin touted the improvements he and Hunter had made, hinted—not inaccurately—that they were mostly his doing, and expressed the desire that “now that in the course of things some additional advantage seems to be thrown in my way, I cannot but hope it will not be taken from me in favour of a stranger to the office.”
His hopes were vain. The governor of Virginia, who had better connections than Franklin did, was not about to let this piece of patronage escape. In November 1761 Franklin learned that his new joint deputy postmaster would be John Foxcroft, lately secretary to the Virginia governor.
Franklin thereupon laid plans to meet with Foxcroft and review their partnership. The peace with France made the meeting more necessary, for upon war’s end certain innovations became possible, others necessary. The necessary ones included the extension of Franklin and Foxcroft’s territory to Canada; they were now responsible for delivery of the mail to Montreal, Quebec, and beyond. According to the rate schedule posted by Parliament, a single-sheet letter from New York to Montreal must be delivered for two shillings. (For comparison, a similar letter from Philadelphia to London, which benefited from the subsidies supporting the government packet ships, cost one shilling.) Whether Franklin and Foxcroft could make any money at those rates was one of the issues they had to discuss.
Another innovation was the commencement of night travel for postal riders. On certain central routes—from New York to Philadelphia, for example—this allowed an expeditiousness of delivery that would not be surpassed even two centuries later. A Philadelphia writer could post a letter for New York one day and receive a reply back the next.
Implementing these and other innovations required personal oversight; to this end Franklin embarked in the late spring of 1763 on a tour of his postal domain that lasted nearly five months. Foxcroft met him at Philadelphia; thence they traveled through New Jersey, where they were entertained by the governor. They spent several days in New York City before embarking for New England. Unusually hot weather convinced them to travel by water rather than overland, causing them to miss Connecticut on the way to Newport, Rhode Island. From there they took a coach to Boston, which became their base for journeys to nearby towns and villages.
Franklin joined post-office business to personal pleasure. Sally accompanied him most of the way; he was delighted to introduce her to her New England kin and them to her. Sally turned twenty in Boston; the trip also served as something of a coming-out for an eligible young woman.
In visiting with his sister Jane Mecom and reflecting on how few of their large family remained alive, Franklin doubtless reflected on his own mortality. Two unanticipated events of the trip made him feel more mortal than ever. In July in Rhode Island he managed to be pitched from the open chaise in which he was riding and to fall heavily on his right shoulder. Fortunately the house of Katy Ray, now Catharine Ray Greene, and her husband, William, was not far away, and he recuperated there. A month later he fell again, reinjured the shoulder, and was confined to bed and chair for much of his Boston visit—which for this reason persisted longer than expected. “I am not yet able to travel rough roads,” he explained to Katy Greene in September, “and must lie by a while, as I can neither hold reins nor whip with my right hand till it grows stronger.”
The lying-by lasted till October. Franklin, fifty-seven now and beginning to feel his age, healed slowly. Luckily Jane Mecom and her neighbors could tend to him—but this was a mixed blessing, as he alluded in a letter to her from Philadelphia following his eventual arrival back home. He explained that his shoulder still hurt (as it would for many more months) but was better than before. “I am otherwise very happy in being home, where I am allowed to know when I have eaten enough and drank enough, am warm enough, and sit in a place that I like, &c. and nobody pretends to know what I feel better than I do myself.” Lest this gentle jibe give the wrong impression, he immediately added, “Don’t imagine that I am a whit the less sensible of the kindness I experienced among my friends in New England. I am very thankful for it, and shall always retain a grateful remembrance of it.”
“Now I am returned from my long journeys which have consumed the whole summer, I shall apply myself to such a settlement of all my affairs as will enable me to do what your friendship so warmly urges.” Franklin was writing to Strahan, and what Strahan’s friendship was urging was what it had been urging for years: for Franklin to relocate to London. “I have a great opinion of your wisdom …” Franklin said, “and am apt to think that what you seem so clear in, and are so earnest about, must be right; though I own that I sometimes suspect my love to England and my friends there seduces me a little, and makes my own middling reasons for going over appear very good ones. We shall see in a little time how things will turn out.”
How things turned out depended in part on Debbie. As before, she adamantly resisted any transatlantic transplantation. She had been born in Philadelphia, had grown up in Philadelphia, intended to die in Philadelphia. Nothing Franklin said could change her mind.
Yet that did not quite resolve the issue. Over the years Franklin and Debbie had learned to get along without the physical presence of each other. Her letters to him in England have been lost, but from his responses she does not appear to have complained particularly at his absence. That he spent five years apart from her, and then another five months not long after his return, suggests that for all his sentimental attachment to home and hearth, the attachment did not run very deep.
Moreover, he had missed Sally as much as he had missed her mother, and now that Sally was of marriageable age, that tie to home grew more tenuous. By all odds Sally would be another man’s responsibility before long. Her father would continue to care about her, but—as his relationship with his own parents had demonstrated—his was an affection able to sustain itself at a distance.
In 1763 Franklin contracted with a builder to construct a house for him and Debbie. Until this point in their married life the two had always lived in rented quarters; for the first time the Franklins would own the roof that sheltered them. William Franklin interpreted the hammering and sawing as evidence that his father had come home to stay. “My mother is so averse to going to sea,” William told Strahan, “that I believe my father will never be induced to see England again. He is now building a house to live in himself.”
As events would demonstrate, William was not the best judge of his father’s mind (nor the father of the son’s). William may have been right that Franklin aimed to settle into his new house forever; he may have been wrong. Like many another renter in inflationary times, Franklin may have decided for financial reasons that owning beat renting. He may also have had in mind that Debbie ought to have a house of her own even if—especially if—her husband did not always occupy it with her.
The most likely explanation of the discrepancy between Franklin’s words and his actions is that he simply did not know what he was going to do. He loved England and longed to rejoin his friends there; he also loved Debbie, after his fashion, and Philadelphia. Nothing now forced him to choose between the two sides of the Atlantic, and until something did, he would not.
Meanwhile he insisted on being apprised of events in London. “I expected when I left England to have learnt in your letters the true state of things from time to time among you, but you are silent and I am in the dark,” he chided Strahan. The papers carried reports of faction, even sedition, in court and Parliament. What was the true story? “Think, my dear friend, how much satisfaction ’tis in your power to give me, with the loss only of half an hour in a month that you would otherwise spend at cribbage.”
“Not an hour have I spent on cribbage since you left us, nor shall it cost me one till you return, which I hope you still seriously think of,” answered Strahan. All the same, Franklin’s friend devoted a long letter to lamenting the sorry state of British politics. In the process he may have undermined Franklin’s inclination to return—a consequence that, anticipated, may have been a reason for Strahan’s reticence.
Strahan interpreted events of which Franklin had read. The most shocking of these events—shocking to conventional opinion, at any rate—was the inexplicable emergence of one of the most scurrilous characters—again the conventional judgment—to cross the stage of British politics in the eighteenth century. John Wilkes was a well-educated, uncommonly ugly man with a frightful squint who nonetheless, through wicked wit and ribald humor, managed to charm persons of both sexes. He himself liked to say it took him half an hour to “talk away his face” with any woman, but then she was his. He may have overstated his persuasiveness, but on the evidence of his conquests, not excessively. Among his male acquaintances Edward Gibbon declared that Wilkes had “inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit and humour, and a great deal of knowledge.” Samuel Johnson said, “Jack has a great variety of talk, Jack is a scholar, Jack is a gentleman.” Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, asserted that Wilkes had “an elasticity of mind that nothing can crush.”
Wilkes’s private life was a scandal in an age and a city not easily scandalized; reports regularly circulated of his participation, with a group called the “Medmenham Monks” (alternatively the “Hell-fire Club”), in orgies of the most obscene character in the ruins of the abbey at Medmenham. The order broke up when Wilkes released a baboon, dressed as the devil, in the middle of a prayer to Satan by one of the members, who went nearly insane upon seeing his prayer answered so swiftly and in the flesh.
Wilkes habitually skewered his critics with verbal thrusts, more than one of which were appropriated by subsequent sharp tongues. After Wilkes entered politics a constituent vowed he would vote for the devil over Wilkes. “Naturally,” retorted Wilkes. “But if your friend is not standing, may I hope for your support?” The Earl of Sandwich predicted that Wilkes would die on the gallows or of venereal disease. “That depends, my lord,” Wilkes replied, “on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.”
Wilkes entered Parliament in 1757 but made little splash until five years later, when he began publishing a paper called The North Briton. With the encouragement of William Pitt and others in opposition, Wilkes ridiculed Bute and the ministry he headed. The Paris peace treaty became a particular target. “It is certainly the peace of God for it passeth all understanding,” Wilkes declared in the fifth issue of The North Briton. Bute could not abide the criticism, and retired from office in early 1763. (Lord Shelburne was not surprised, observing of Bute that despite being “proud, pompous, imposing,” he was “the greatest political coward I ever knew.”) Wilkes’s triumph raised questions as to what he would do next. On a visit to Paris he was asked by Madame de Pompadour how far freedom of the press extended in England. “I do not know, madame,” Wilkes replied. “But I am trying to find out.”
He did, soon. Wilkes typically attacked by indirection, denying some low rumor about a minister but in the process publicizing it—if not simply creating it. He modified this approach in the forty-fifth issue of The North Briton, an issue of that journal that became as famous, or notorious, as any single publication in the history of English-language journalism. The occasion of Wilkes’s latest blast was a speech from the throne proroguing Parliament in the wake of Bute’s resignation. Wilkes took a large swipe at the king even as he disclaimed doing so. “The King’s speech,” he wrote, “has always been considered by the legislature, and by the public at large, as the speech of the Minister.” The minister in question was the new premier, George Grenville, whom Wilkes accused of putting falsehoods in the mouth of the king. The speech asserted that the Paris treaty was honorable to the Crown and beneficial to the people; this was a lie, Wilkes alleged. The speech asserted that the peace was beneficial to Britain’s allies; another lie, Wilkes asserted. The treaty had been ratified not on its merits but by bribery, Wilkes claimed. The chief culprit—Bute—had been forced from office, but the current ministers were no better: “tools of despotism and corruption.” Summarizing, Wilkes registered indignation and wonder that “a prince of so many great and amiable qualities” could be persuaded “to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures, and to the most unjustified public declarations.”
Whatever The North Briton Number 45 said about Grenville and the other ministers, it put George in the position of choosing between being a ventriloquist’s dummy and a liar. The king felt no obligation to accept such a choice; instead he signed a general warrant (one that did not name a particular individual) for the arrest of those responsible for the publication of the noxious issue. The charge was seditious libel. The sweep yielded more than two score prisoners before Wilkes was apprehended. He was clapped in irons and tossed into the Tower of London.
But the arrests backfired. A judge freed Wilkes on grounds that his arrest violated his immunity as a member of Parliament. Juries threw out charges against the other prisoners. Wilkes and the others sued the ministers who signed the general warrant; Wilkes won £1,000, while several others received smaller amounts, and the use of general warrants was declared illegal.
But Wilkes’s scrapes were far from over. Some years earlier he had collaborated on an obscene, blasphemous, and likely libelous parody of Pope’s Essay on Man, entitled Essay on Woman. Through theft and bribery the authorities acquired copies of the proof sheets. These were read to Parliament, with some gusto, by Lord Sandwich, formerly a Wilkes ally but now a member of the government. (“Satan preaching against sin,” remarked one listener of Sandwich’s performance.) Wilkes’s ouster from Parliament seemed certain, prosecution probable. Hoping to add injury to insult, a partisan of Bute’s challenged Wilkes to a duel. Wilkes was considerably less skilled with pistol than pen; moreover, his challenger had been practicing. This was frowned upon among gentlemen, but few gentlemen were willing to include Wilkes among their number.
Yet the masses loved him. Mobs crowded the streets shouting “Wilkes and Liberty!”; the scrawled numeral “45” decorated walls across the city. Nor did enthusiasm diminish when Wilkes, assessing the weight of the forces arrayed against him, decamped from London on Christmas Eve of 1763 and fled to France. Three weeks later he was formally expelled from Commons; the following month a (specific) warrant was sworn out for his arrest. When he refused to return to England he was officially declared an outlaw. And thus was completed, according to the Annual Register,“the ruin of that unfortunate gentleman.”
Events would reveal the gross prematurity of this judgment, but it was one Franklin shared. Writing at the time of Wilkes’s expulsion from Parliament, Franklin told Richard Jackson he was “pleased to find a just resentment so general in your House against Mr. W.’s seditious conduct.”
Gratified though he was at Wilkes’s comeuppance, Franklin could hardly take comfort from other developments in British politics. Strahan, as promised, provided Franklin a firsthand view. Bute’s fall, Strahan asserted, was richly deserved. “I am sorry to tell you that my countryman [both were Scots] has shewn himself altogether unequal to his high station. Never did a ministry, in our memory, discover so much weakness. They seem to have neither spirit, courage, sense, nor activity, and are a rope of sand.” Pitt, the leader of the opposition, was no better. Citing recent insults the former prime minister had hurled against constituents who differed with him on the merits of the peace treaty, Strahan said, “Did you ever before hear of such an instance of arrogance?” Strahan went on to call Pitt “this imperious tribune of the people,” a man “of whose honesty I entertain no good opinion, and whom I strongly suspect to be a secret abettor and fomentor of the present unreasonable discontents, and of that contempt with which the king and his government hath of late been treated.”
Strahan saw little prospect of improvement. The “jaws of faction” were closing on the king, who was well meaning but “not possessed of any striking talents or any great degree of sagacity.” Strahan closed gloomily: “In my mind the danger is greater than most people seem to apprehend.”
Such a statement from the most ardent advocate of Franklin’s relocation to England could not but call the project into question. “Surely you would not wish me to come and live among such people,” Franklin said half jokingly. “You would rather remove hither, where we have no savages but those we expect to be such.”
Yet Franklin hoped for better, as he usually did. “I think your madmen will ere long come to their senses, and when I come I shall find you generally wise and happy.”
If Strahan spied danger in political corruption, Richard Jackson detected it in political reform. At the end of the war with France and Spain the Grenville ministry undertook to reorganize the finances of the empire and reinstitute responsibility where profligacy had reigned. Government debt had reached record levels, largely from the cost of the war. Government spending, which included enormous sums devoted to debt service, was projected for 1764 at twice what it had been just twenty-five years earlier. Grenville, head of the Treasury as well as premier, scrutinized both sides of the ledger in seeking a solution to the country’s financial problems; he would raise revenues even as he curtailed expenditures.
Revenues meant taxes. Inhabitants of Britain paid a discouraging diversity of taxes, of which the most important were property taxes, import taxes, and excise taxes. By the end of the war the British people bore about all the taxes they or their leaders thought they could stand; indeed, an excise on cider touched off demonstrations in Exeter and the burning of Bute in effigy.
If Britons in Britain could not be made to pay more, perhaps Britons across the sea could be. From the east side of the Atlantic the Americans looked like the chief winners of the war, which freed them from fear of the French. They were taxed lightly by British standards, and little of what they paid went to imperial purposes, broadly construed. It certainly occurred to Grenville and others contemplating new sources of revenue that the Americans, unlike those boisterous cider-makers in Exeter, could not vote for members of Parliament. This rendered new American taxes constitutionally suspect, in that a cardinal tenet of English constitutionalism insisted that taxes could be levied only by the representatives of those who would pay. But it made such taxes politically tempting. If the Americans complained, who would be listening?
As part of the Grenville program, Charles Townshend, the president of the Board of Trade, proposed a change in the duty on molasses imported into America from non-British sources—meaning, for the most part, the French and Spanish West Indies. For thirty years the tax had been six pence per gallon; Townshend recommended a reduction to two pence. This may have seemed like a gift to the Americans but decidedly was not. At six pence the duty had been widely evaded, via smuggling and bribery of customs officials; at two pence importers might actually pay it, for honesty would then become competitive with criminality. It would certainly be so if, as London threatened, it cracked down on bribery in the customs ranks and sent warships to patrol the coasts.
“I fear something relating to America will be done very much against my opinion,” Jackson wrote Franklin regarding the molasses proposal. “But I shall endeavour to prevent it by all the means in my power both in the House and out of the House.” The government and British molasses-makers were too strong to prevent some such change as Townshend proposed, but Jackson would try to mitigate the ill effects. “I shall only say that though I wish the duty on foreign molasses was but 1 d. I shall not oppose a duty of 2 d. a gallon.”
In the event, Jackson’s efforts were not simply unsuccessful but perhaps counterproductive. By the time the Townshend proposal became the Sugar Act of 1764, the duty on foreign molasses had been increased to three pence per gallon. The measure also levied a fee on foreign wine and certain luxury goods, including silk from the East Indies.
Franklin was phlegmatic about the change. He understood London’s logic in lowering the molasses tax. “A moderate duty on foreign molasses may be collected, when a high one could not,” he told Jackson. At the time he wrote, duties on tea and slaves were under consideration, along with those on molasses and wine; Franklin thought such taxes could benefit both the character and commerce of the empire. “A duty not only on tea but on all East India goods might perhaps not be amiss, as they are generally rather luxuries than necessaries, and many of your Manchester manufactures might well supply their places. The duty on Negroes I could wish large enough to obstruct their importation, as they everywhere prevent the increase of Whites.”
Although an imprudent ministry and Parliament might get carried away with taxing the colonies, Franklin hoped for prudence—or, more specifically, an appreciation that the interests of the empire subsumed, but need not subordinate, those of the colonies. “If you lay such duties as may destroy our trade with the foreign colonies, I think you will greatly hurt your own interest as well as ours,” he said. He elaborated: “I am not much alarmed about your schemes of raising money on us. You will take care for your own sakes not to lay greater burthens on us than we can bear; for you cannot hurt us without hurting your selves. All our profits center with you, and the more you take from us, the less we can lay out with you.”
As neither an importer of molasses nor a heavy consumer of the rum into which the molasses was made, Franklin fretted little over the Sugar Act. (He preferred milk punch, made with brandy.) But as a student of population growth, an expansive imperialist, and a promoter of settlement schemes, he remained intensely interested in the question of land.
Americans—including Franklin—interpreted the end of the war as the beginning of a new age of expansion, across the mountains and into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Two other interested parties took a different view. The British government, having just finished a long and expensive war that began on the American frontier, had no desire to let the frontier trigger another such war. To be sure, the French were no longer as able to provoke unrest among the Indians as formerly, but the English (and Scottish and German) settlers had shown themselves sufficiently provocative on their own. The best way to minimize such provocations, it seemed to Grenville and his associates, was to insulate the Indians and the settlers from each other. To this end the government issued a proclamation in October 1763 placing the transmontane territories essentially off-limits to settlement.
The Proclamation of 1763 came too late to mollify the third party interested in the question of western lands—the party, in fact, most interested of all. If the defeat of the French augured peace and cheap land for the English, it did so at the expense of the Indians. As long as two imperial powers had vied for control of North America, the Indians had been able to play one against the other; now, with but one imperial power, the Indians were at that power’s mercy. To what extent the Indians appreciated that London wished to protect them against the Americans is unclear; considering their experience of the last few decades they might have been forgiven for thinking all English acted alike. In any event, while the British government prepared the proclamation it would make regarding the American west, the Indians launched a war against the settlers.
Almost at once the war became associated with the name of Pontiac, an Ottawa chief of uncertain origins but undeniable ambition and charisma. Pontiac invoked the Great Spirit, as translated by a mystic called the Delaware Prophet, in calling for Indians to return to their traditional ways and drive out the invaders. One account (historically problematic, to be sure, in that it was fourth hand, quoting Pontiac quoting the Delaware Prophet quoting God) caught the gist of the message:
Why do you suffer the white man to dwell among you? My children, you have forgotten the customs and traditions of your forefathers. Why do you not clothe yourselves in skins, as they did, and use the bows and arrows, and the stone-pointed lances, which they used? You have bought guns, knives, kettles, and blankets from the white men, until you can no longer do without them; and, what is worse, you have drunk the poison fire-water, which turns you into fools. Fling all these away; live as your wise fore-fathers lived before you. And as for these English—these dogs dressed in red, who have come to rob you of your hunting grounds and drive away the game—you must lift the hatchet against them. Wipe them from the face of the earth. And then you will have my favor back again, and once more be happy and prosperous.
The message caught on. The fighting between British and French had hardly ended before fighting erupted between British and the Indians under Pontiac. During the spring and summer of 1763 Pontiac’s forces swept through the region of the Ohio and the Great Lakes, capturing half a dozen British forts and besieging British garrisons at Detroit and Pittsburgh. The British commander for North America, General Jeffrey Amherst, was sufficiently alarmed to suggest employing biological warfare against Pontiac’s soldiers, in the form of smallpox-laced blankets. Whether the local commander complied is unclear (like others in similar positions, Colonel Henry Bouquet feared that his own troops would succumb to the germ attack).
Reports of the new war in the west reached Franklin at New York on his postal journey in the summer of 1763. Amherst, aware of Franklin’s experience with Indians, summoned him for an interview. Underestimating the seriousness of Pontiac’s offensive, the British general judged it a vestige of the French war that would subside once word got out to the Indians that England was now the master of the continent.
Franklin did not deny this explanation but deemed it incomplete. The source of the trouble touched the fundamental relationship between Indians and whites, he said. “The Indians are disgusted that so little notice has lately been taken of them, and are particularly offended that rum is prohibited [not all the Indians followed the Prophet in forswearing alcohol], and powder dealt among them so sparingly. They have received no presents. And the plan of preventing war among them, and bringing them to live by agriculture, they resent as an attempt to make women of them, as they phrase it, it being the business of women only to cultivate the ground. Their men are all warriors.”
Yet this interpretation did not prompt Franklin to advocate a more moderate policy toward the Indians, at least not under current circumstances. Indeed he recommended just the opposite. “We stooped too much in begging the last peace of them, which has made them vain and insolent…. We should never mention peace to them again till we have given them some severe blows and made them feel some ill consequences of breaking with us.”
British troops belatedly delivered the blows Franklin spoke of. In August, Bouquet smote the Indians at the battle of Bushy Run and rescued Pittsburgh; three months later, Pontiac dropped the siege of Detroit. An uncertain peace settled upon the Pennsylvania hinterland.
Franklin worried that the peace, such as it was, came too soon. “I only fear they have not smarted enough to make them careful how they break with us again.”
Many of Franklin’s Pennsylvania compatriots felt the same way. Some of them attempted, in the most brutal fashion, to make the peace more permanent.
If the Paris treaty had not seemed to promise an end to the warfare that had plagued the frontier for a generation, the Pontiac uprising might not have provoked the overreaction it did. But to settlers who looked for a respite from the terror and guerrilla warfare, the renewal of fighting came as a heartbreaking last straw. In December 1763 a band of armed frontiersmen from the town of Paxton, on the Susquehanna River, descended on a small community of Indians living on the proprietors’ Conestoga Manor near Lancaster. Reports had indicated the presence of arms among Conestoga Indians; rumors suggested that an Indian implicated in recent raids was hiding there. The Paxtonites did not tarry long with questions; instead they massacred the six Indians unfortunate enough to be at home, and burned the village to the ground.
The other fourteen Indian members of the (very small) Conestoga community were thereupon taken into protective custody in Lancaster. Tragically for them, the custody afforded insufficient protection, and on December 27 the Paxton mob battered down the doors of the workhouse that provided their refuge, and murdered them all: men, women, and children.
The Lancaster County massacres shocked even those Pennsylvanians not especially sympathetic to the Indians; the shock intensified when the Paxton mob threatened to march on Philadelphia. Some weeks earlier a group of Indians living among the Moravians near Bethlehem had been accused of abetting the recent uprising. The Pennsylvania government encouraged these “Moravian Indians” to take refuge near the provincial capital. More than a hundred accepted the offer. The Paxtonites, hot with the lust of killing, vowed to dispatch all these Indians—and anyone who tried to prevent them.
As his earlier remarks revealed, Franklin shed no tears for warpath Indians, but this murder of innocents appalled him. And the threat the Paxton mob posed to government and order dismayed him almost beyond bearing. A man of reason, he saw reason being challenged by the darkest, bloodiest forces of unreason.
At first he took up pen. Near the end of January he wrote A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, Friends of This Province. The pamphlet was quickly published and began circulating.
Franklin never wrote a more emotional piece. To some degree his lamentations were calculated, designed to impress on readers the terrible wrong inflicted not only on the unfortunate victims of the violence but on society itself. But without doubt the murders troubled him deeply. Much of his philosophy of life was based on the premise that human nature was, if not perfectible, at least improvable. That such savage acts could be perpetrated, with apparent impunity, in his own Pennsylvania, by his fellow Pennsylvanians, hit at the heart of this premise.
Franklin reminded readers that the Conestoga Indians were descendants of the Indians who welcomed the first settlers in Pennsylvania, with gifts of venison, corn, and skins. They had peaceably sold land to the settlers and moved to their present community, which had been guaranteed them by the proprietors. “There they have lived many years in friendship with their white neighbours, who loved them for their peaceable inoffensive behaviour.”
Franklin identified the victims by name. One very old man, Shehaes, had known William Penn and had sat down to treaty with the original proprietor in 1701. Peggy was Shehaes’s daughter: “She worked for her aged father, continuing to live with him, though married, and attended him with filial duty and tenderness.” John was “another good old man.” John Smith was “a valuable young man,” Peggy’s husband and father of their three-year-old child (whose name Franklin apparently did not know). Betty was “a harmless old woman.” Her son Peter was “a likely young lad.” Sally was “a truly good and an amiable woman” with no children of her own; but a relative had died, leaving a child, whom Sally had adopted “to bring up as her own, and performed toward it all the duties of an affectionate parent.”
“The reader will observe,” Franklin editorialized, “that many of their names are English. It is common with the Indians that have an affection for the English to give themselves, and their children, the names of such English persons as they particularly esteem.”
The reader would also note how few the Indians were. “It has always been observed that Indians settled in the neighbourhood of white people do not increase, but diminish continually.” At the time of the murders the tribe consisted of twenty souls altogether—by no stretch of the imagination a threat to anyone.
Franklin related the atrocities in heartrending detail. He told how fifty-seven mounted and heavily armed men had ridden down upon Conestoga Manor.
They surrounded the small village of Indian huts, and at just break of day broke into them all at once. Only three men, two women, and a young boy were found at home, the rest being out among the neighbouring white people, some to sell the baskets, brooms and bowls they manufactured, and others on other occasions. These poor defenceless creatures were immediately fired upon, stabbed and hatcheted to death! The good Shehaes, among the rest, cut to pieces in his bed. All of them were scalped, and otherwise horribly mangled. Then their huts were set on fire, and most of them burnt down. When the troop, pleased with their own conduct and bravery, but enraged that any of the poor Indians had escaped the massacre, rode off.
Nearly all the white people in the neighborhood were shocked and outraged at this display of barbarism, Franklin explained. The magistrates of Lancaster County brought the other members of the tribe under official protection, and the governor of the province ordered a search for the perpetrators.
But the evildoers were undeterred.
Those cruel men again assembled themselves, and hearing that the remaining fourteen Indians were in the work-house at Lancaster, they suddenly appeared in that town, on the 27th of December. Fifty of them, armed as before, dismounting, went directly to the work-house, and by violence broke open the door and entered, with the utmost fury in their countenances. When the poor wretches saw they had no protection nigh, nor could possibly escape, and being without the least weapon for defence, they divided into their little families, the children clinging to the parents. They fell on their knees, protested their innocence, declared their love to the English, and that, in their whole lives, they had never done them injury; and in this posture they all received the hatchet! Women and little children—were every one inhumanly murdered!—in cold blood!
The murderers again rode off, again congratulating themselves on their valor. As yet they remained at large, defiant of human and divine authority. “But the wickedness cannot be covered,” Franklin promised. “The guilt will lie on the whole land till justice is done on the murderers. THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT WILL CRY TO HEAVEN FOR VENGEANCE.”
Heaven gave no sign of listening, instead leaving the mortals involved to sort matters out themselves. Franklin’s pamphlet struck some readers as melodramatic and factually suspect. How did he know what the Indians said and did in their last moments? The only surviving witnesses were the murderers, and they were not talking. Even so, the pamphlet galvanized opinion against the Paxtonites as they threatened to kill the Moravian Indians. “It would perhaps be vanity in me to imagine so slight a thing could have any extraordinary effect,” Franklin told Richard Jackson. “But however that may be, there was a sudden and very remarkable change; and above 1000 of our citizens took arms to support the government in the protection of those poor wretches.”
This spur-of-the-moment militia included many Quakers, which amazed Philadelphians who remembered when Friends categorically refused to bear arms. Yet by itself the rally to arms did not end the crisis. With the Paxton Boys, as they were called (doubly misleadingly, in that they were not boys nor all from Paxton), camped at Germantown, the provincial authorities hastened to devise means to keep them at bay. “You may judge what hurry and confusion we have been in for this week past,” Franklin told Jackson. “I was up two nights running, all night, with our governor; and my rest so broken by alarms on the other nights that the whole week seems one confused space of time, without any distinction of days.” During one alarm the governor ran to Franklin’s house at midnight and set up temporary headquarters there. Franklin’s suggestions became tantamount to orders. The governor sought to formalize this command by giving Franklin control of the militia, but he declined. “I chose to carry a musket and strengthen his authority.”
Yet he did agree to lead a delegation to parley with the Paxton mob. Representatives of the latter listed their grievances, which went beyond what they saw as the harboring of Indian enemies, and included neglect by the provincial government of frontier security, and underrepresentation of the frontier counties in the Assembly. Franklin’s delegation agreed to present the grievances to the Assembly and to allow a (carefully supervised) search of the Moravian Indians’ camp for Indians involved in recent raids. As Franklin knew it would, all this took time; as he hoped, during that time the fury of the frontiersmen dissipated. They eventually returned to their homes.
It was a partial victory at best. Philadelphia was secure against insurrectionary violence, but the Paxton murderers remained at large.
Under the circumstances a partial victory would have to do. With a certain exhilarated satisfaction Franklin summarized events for John Fothergill in England: “Your old friend was a common soldier, a counsellor, a kind of dictator, an ambassador to the country mob, and on their returning home, nobody, again. All this has happened in a few weeks!”
The Paxton rising afforded an opportunity for Franklin to reflect on something novel he had recently encountered. In his Narrative of the Late Massacres he pointed out that the behavior of the murderers would have put to shame even those considered savages by most Pennsylvanians. He recounted a story he had read of a New Englander marooned on the Guinea coast amid raids by Dutch slavers. A crowd of angry locals wished to vent their anger on the New Englander, the only white man in reach, but another African, who had befriended him and taken him in, refused to let the would-be murderers approach. They must not kill a man that had done no harm, simply for being white, he said. This was wrong, and he would not allow it. They would have to kill him before they killed his guest. “The Negroes,” Franklin concluded the story, “seeing his resolution, and convinced by his discourse that they were wrong, went away ashamed.”
Franklin might have used this anecdote anyway, because it served his current purpose, but he almost certainly was encouraged to do so by an observation he had made just the previous month, which compelled him to reconsider his perceptions of the African race. Since the visit of George Whitefield to America in 1739, Franklin had supported the idea of Negro education, even as he continued to hold slaves. In this he assumed, with most members of his own race and era, that education might improve black children but could never make them the equal of whites.
A visit to a school run by the Reverend William Sturgeon in Philadelphia changed his mind. The students were bright, cooperative—and promising. As he explained to an English friend, also involved in Negro education:
They appeared all to have made considerable progress in reading for the time they had respectively been in the school, and most of them answered readily and well the questions of the catechism. They behaved very orderly, and showed a proper respect and ready obedience to the mistress, and seemed very attentive to, and a good deal affected by, a serious exhortation with which Mr. Sturgeon concluded our visit.
I was on the whole much pleased, and from what I then saw, have conceived a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black race, than I had ever before entertained. Their apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong, and their docility in every respect equal to that of white children.
Recollecting his audience, Franklin added, “You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my prejudices, nor to account for them.”
Nor in this letter did Franklin undertake to justify that massive social prejudice, slavery, in which he still participated. But having concluded—almost alone among his generation—that blacks were innately equal to whites in matters of intelligence, he had started down the road that would compel him to conclude that slavery was indefensible.
Under the guns of the Paxton mob, Franklin had been willing to make common cause with the governor, but as the mob dispersed, the two men turned upon each other. John Penn was the grandson of William Penn and the nephew of Thomas Penn; like his grandfather he had incurred paternal wrath for youthful indiscretions, in his case a marriage to a young woman the Penn elders deemed below his (and their) station. Like his grandfather he returned to the fold—he sent his wife packing—and prepared to receive his inheritance: his father Richard’s quarter of the proprietary rights to Pennsylvania. Thomas and Richard thought the boy would benefit from personal experience of his estate-to-be, and they put him on a ship for Philadelphia, where he served for three years as a member of the provincial council. In this capacity he joined Franklin at Albany for the 1754 congress. He returned to England for several years before the bribing of William Denny convinced his father and uncle that the only way to guarantee the loyalty of their American deputy was to make him one of them. John Penn was named (lieutenant) governor of Pennsylvania in June 1763; he arrived in Philadelphia in October (to a rare earthquake that rattled the windows of the city and shook down the autumn leaves).
Franklin determined to give the young man—who was thirty-four on arrival—a fair hearing. The first meetings went well enough. “He is civil, and I endeavoured to fail in no point of respect,” Franklin told Peter Collinson. “So I think we shall have no personal difference; at least I will give no occasion. For though I cordially dislike and despise the uncle, for demeaning himself so far as to back-bite and abuse me to friends and to strangers, as you well know he does, I shall keep that account open with him only.”
Franklin was fooling himself if he thought John Penn would not take personally Franklin’s attacks on Thomas Penn, which of course he did. By the spring of 1764 the governor was writing lurid letters home regarding the “rank abuse” of the proprietors and identifying Franklin as the “chief cause” of the troubles.
It is observed by every body that while he was in England there was at least an appearance of peace and quietness, but since his return the old sparks are again blown up, and at present the flame rages with more violence than ever. I really believe there never will be any prospect of ease or happiness here, while that villain has the liberty of spreading about the poison of that inveterate malice and ill nature, which is so deeply implanted in his own black heart.
The occasion for the governor’s comments was a renewal of Franklin’s antiproprietary campaign. Franklin had returned from London convinced that Pennsylvania needed to break the proprietary shackles that kept it from becoming the country it might be; in the ebullience of his Britishness he embraced royal rule as the solution to the problems of the province. The Indian troubles and the Paxton uprising had distracted him from this objective even as they confirmed his conviction that Pennsylvania was nearly ungovernable under current arrangements. During the spring of 1764 he resumed the offensive.
The opening salvo was a series of resolutions that Franklin guided through the Assembly. This “necklace of resolves,” as he called it, amounted to a twenty-six-part indictment of proprietary government. The proprietors were said to be merely owners of private property, without the least authority regarding legislation; therefore it was “high presumption” in them to interfere between the Crown and the people. Despite the affectionate regard and continuing generosity of the people, the proprietors were endeavoring to “diminish and annihilate” the people’s rights. The Indian policy of the proprietors having rendered the inhabitants of the frontier “easy prey to the small skulking parties of the enemy,” the proprietors—acting in a manner “dishonourable, unjust, tyrannical and inhuman”—exploited this danger “to extort privileges from the people, or enforce claims against them, with the knife of savages at their throat.” The current victims of the proprietors were the people of Pennsylvania, but should the proprietors’ interpretation of the provincial charter prevail, their powers would inevitably become “as dangerous to the prerogatives of the Crown as to the liberties of the people.” In conclusion, “as all hope of any degree of happiness, under the proprietary government, is, in our opinion, now at an end,” the Assembly resolved that power ought to be taken from the proprietors “and lodged where only it can be properly and safely lodged, in the hands of the Crown.”
Such language, needless to say, did not endear Franklin to the proprietors or their man on the scene. John Penn called the resolves a “dirty piece of scurrility.” A subsequent Franklin pamphlet entitled Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation fanned the flames, being anything but cool. The people of Pennsylvania, Franklin said, were in a “wretched situation.” The government was weak and ineffectual. “Mobs assemble and kill (we scarce dare say murder) numbers of innocent people in cold blood, who were under the protection of the government.” Proclamations against the violence were issued, but were treated “with the utmost indignity and contempt” by the killers. “They assemble again, and with arms in their hands, approach the capital. The Government truckles, condescends to cajole them, and drops all prosecution of their crimes; whilst honest citizens, threatened in their lives and fortunes, fly the province, as having no confidence in the public protection.”
In making such an argument Franklin elided his own participation in the government he contemned; his entire purpose here was to cast obloquy on the status quo. The objective was nothing less than the destruction of that status quo: the replacement of proprietary government by royal government.
Though Franklin framed his case as one of the people against the proprietors, the situation was considerably more complicated, and as the annual elections of October 1764 approached, a bitter campaign developed. Franklin continued to assault the proprietors and their governor; the governor and his friends counterattacked with a vengeance. Among other asserted sins, Franklin was charged with desiring the governorship of Pennsylvania for himself, to be bestowed by the king in exchange for Franklin’s help in converting Pennsylvania into a royal colony. Much was made of William Franklin’s bastardy; Franklin was said to have mistreated the mother—the alleged Barbara—allowed her to starve, and dumped her body in an unmarked grave.
Franklin joked of his enemies, “God has blessed me with two or three, to keep me in order.” They certainly tried—and they succeeded, temporarily. During the months before the election Franklin grew even more visible as the symbol of the antiproprietary cause when the Assembly unanimously elected him speaker of the house. Yet the visibility brought liability, for Franklin became the lightning rod (a term just now being used metaphorically) for all manner of complaints against the legislature and its antiproprietary majority.
The voting began at nine o’clock on the morning of October 1. Philadelphia had never witnessed the like. From morning till long past midnight the poll was crowded with voters, who stood in a line that ran far down the street. At three o’clock on the morning of October 2 the proprietary party called for a close, but Franklin and the antiproprietors insisted that the voting continue.
“O! fatal mistake,” declared Charles Pettit, an eyewitness insider, who went on to explain the thinking of Franklin and his allies: “They had a reserve of the aged and lame, which could not come in &c., and some who needed no help: between 3 and 6 o’clock, about 200 voters.” But the proprietary party meanwhile sent messengers to Germantown and other outlying neighborhoods aggrieved against the Assembly. The messengers roused several hundred voters, most of whom backed the proprietors.
This late vote doomed Franklin’s candidacy. Running simultaneously for seats from the city of Philadelphia and Philadelphia County, Franklin lost the former by a small margin, the latter by a whisker—19 votes of nearly 31,000 cast.