16
“Mr. Franklin died like a philosopher,” Charles Pettit said. The Stoic himself attributed his defeat to his rivals’ clever mistranslation of an earlier comment by him on Pennsylvania’s Germans, in which he was said to have called them pigs. (He had spoken of the “Boers herding together”; this came out as “herd of boars.”) “They carried (would you think it!) above 1000 Dutch from me,” Franklin told Richard Jackson. Though hardly pleased at losing, Franklin could see the humor in his situation. “This is quite a laughing matter.”
Laughing came easier when the Assembly, in an obvious slap at the Penns, reappointed Franklin agent to England. He should sail back east and petition for an end to proprietary rule. Franklin gladly obliged, and his departure turned into a raucous triumph. Three hundred supporters followed him from his home to the quay at Chester; cannons were fired in his honor and hurrahs shouted. An anthem was sung—“God Save the King,” with lyrics adapted to the occasion, culminating in “Confound their politics/Frustrate such hypocrites/Franklin, on thee we fix/God save us all.”
His reception in London, after a rough but fast winter crossing, was quieter but hardly less devoted. William Strahan greeted him with delight, determined that his friend not escape again. Mrs. Stevenson had held his rooms for him; he resumed residence on Craven Street as though he had never been gone. He surprised Polly Stevenson by writing her from her mother’s own parlor; Polly responded with her usual warmth. Other old friends, he told Deborah, gave him a “most cordial welcome.”
Richard Jackson had a political reason for being happy to see Franklin. George Grenville had lately proposed a new plan for taxing the American colonies; it involved stamps on various documents and papers. Jackson and some of his fellow agents for the American colonies—including Charles Garth, representing South Carolina—had objected to the stamp tax, but to no avail. Now Jackson enlisted Franklin, as a person recently arrived from America and consequently familiar with the mood there, to approach Grenville directly. Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut, another recent arrival, joined Jackson, Franklin, and Garth. Ingersoll later summarized the meeting.
Mr. Grenville gave us a full hearing—told us he took no pleasure in giving the Americans so much uneasiness as he found he did—that it was the duty of his office to manage the revenue—that he really was made to believe that considering the whole of the circumstances of the Mother Country and the colonies, the latter could and ought to pay something, and that he knew of no better way than that now pursuing to lay such tax, but that if we could tell of a better he would adopt it.
Franklin and the others had reason to doubt Grenville’s candor on this point. The Americans did not love taxes, but they chose to make their case on the question of who would levy the taxes: Parliament or the colonial assemblies? The Americans stood on the right of Englishmen to be taxed only by their own representatives—that is, their assemblies. Grenville and most members of Parliament, without disputing the principle of self-taxation, contended that the writ of Parliament ran to America, that the colonies wererepresented in Parliament, at least as well represented as many of the king’s subjects living in Britain.
When Grenville had first floated the possibility of a stamp tax, Jackson and other agents argued that if revenue needed to be raised, the colonies ought to be allowed to raise it themselves. Grenville voiced vague support for this alternative but failed to provide the information necessary to apportion the tax burden fairly among the several colonies. In the meeting with Franklin and the others, Grenville again said he might listen to a proposal from the colonial assemblies; he asked if the agents “could agree upon the several proportions each colony should raise.” At this late hour, and still lacking critical details, the agents were in no position to answer affirmatively. “We told him no,” Ingersoll recorded—which, by most evidence, was what Grenville wanted to hear.
Yet Franklin would not leave the matter at that. Instead he proposed an alternative to Grenville’s stamp scheme. Franklin’s plan would raise the revenue Grenville needed; it would also solve a perennial problem for the colonies—and for that reason be far more palatable than a batch of new taxes. As part of Grenville’s program for reorganizing imperial finances, Parliament recently had forbidden the colonies to issue paper currency. Presumably the ban was temporary, but in the meantime the colonial economies, already suffering from a postwar depression, might strangle.
Franklin proposed that Parliament authorize the issue of paper currency at interest. In effect this would be a stamp tax on paper money, but Franklin thought it would go down far better than a stamp tax on the sorts of items Grenville envisioned: licenses, deeds, indentures, leases, newspapers, almanacs, playing cards, dice. Grenville’s list hit people unused to paying for those items, people often without much money. The appeal of Franklin’s plan was that the people likely to avail themselves of the paper money—merchants, most obviously—were used to paying for money (in the form of interest) and had the wherewithal to do so. As Franklin explained his scheme, “It will operate as a general tax on the colonies, and yet not an unpleasing one, as he who actually pays the interest has an equivalent or more in the use of the principal.” He added, “The rich, who handle most money, would in reality pay most of the tax.”
It was an intriguing idea. It might have worked. If it had, it would have saved both Britain and America a great deal of trouble and ill will. Whether it would have materially altered the course of the next two decades is impossible to know.
But Grenville—“besotted with his stamp scheme,” according to Franklin—refused to entertain it. Nor was Parliament interested. To some degree the very unpalatableness of the stamps in America became an argument for approving them. Charles Townshend, whom the Americans would learn to loathe, defended the principle of Parliamentary taxation of the colonies: “Will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence until they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”
A lonely few in Westminster challenged this version of imperial history. Isaac Barré, a veteran of the French and Indian War, rebuffed Townshend:
They planted by your care? No! Your oppressions planted them in America…. They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of them…. They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defence of a country whose frontier, while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument.
Barré’s words drew cheers in America but moved Grenville not at all. The prime minister pushed the stamp bill through the necessary three readings; on February 27, 1765, it passed the House of Commons; on March 22 it received the royal assent.
Franklin had done as much as any reasonable man in his position could to prevent Grenville’s bill from becoming law; once it became law he did what any reasonable man in his position would have done to make the best of an unsatisfactory situation.
“I think it will affect the printers more than anybody,” he told David Hall when passage appeared inevitable; “as a sterling halfpenny stamp on every half sheet of a newspaper, and two shillings sterling on every advertisement, will go near to knock up one half of both. There is also fourpence sterling on every almanac.” Franklin could not do much about the almanacs, but he hoped to save Hall and himself some money on the newspapers. The Pennsylvania Gazette was printed on what technically was called a full sheet (although when folded and printed on both sides it yielded four pages). Certain London papers were printed on half-sheets, which despite their name yielded almost as much printed area (when folded twice into an eight-page paper) as the full sheets. Yet an American paper printed on the latter would pay but half the new tax of a paper made from the former. Aiming to outfox the taxman, Franklin ordered one hundred reams of the half-sheets from his friend and supplier Strahan, to be sent to Hall in Philadelphia.
He was too clever for his and Hall’s good. As the Stamp Act took final shape, it mandated that newsprint receive its stamp in England. The fifty thousand sheets proved useless as sent, and had to be expensively returned. “I hope you will excuse what I did in good will, though it happened wrong,” Franklin wrote Hall.
Another Franklin slip was less easily excused. In working to stop the stamp bill, Franklin found himself in an uncomfortable alliance with Thomas Penn, who likewise opposed new taxes on his colony. The alliance dissolved upon passage, however, not only because of the longstanding hostility between the two men but because Grenville, evidently appraising Franklin as the more significant of the two, awarded him the right to name the stamp commissioner for Pennsylvania. The post would not be the most lucrative in the colony, but it might earn its holder a neat supplement to an existing income.
Franklin put forward John Hughes, whom Grenville approved at once. Hughes was a Franklin friend from Philadelphia, a staunch ally in the fight against the proprietors. It was Hughes who had moved that Franklin be dispatched to England after his defeat at the polls in October 1764; Hughes continued to defend Franklin against the attacks of the proprietary party in Franklin’s absence. The contest was more bitter than ever. Chief justice and ardent Penn man William Allen, judging Franklin a “grand incendiary … fully freighted with rancour and malice,” lambasted him from behind a thin veil of anonymity. Franklin’s friends responded with “tomahawk, scalping knife, chewed bullets, or any other barbarous weapons,” in the metaphor of Penn foe Cadwalader Evans. John Hughes was in the thickest of the fight. Hughes challenged Allen to come out in the open, promising to pay £10 to the provincial hospital for every accusation against Franklin that could be proved true, if Allen would agree to pay £5 for every accusation shown false. Allen declined the challenge, allowing Hughes and the pro-Franklin forces to claim a “victory as complete as we could wish,” in Evans’s characterization. Franklin, appreciating his debt to Hughes, sought to repay it by having Grenville award Hughes the concession on the stamps.
This turned out to be no favor to Hughes, and it was one of the worst mistakes of Franklin’s career. Franklin had a tendency to believe he knew best in most situations, and, brilliant and reasonable man that he was, he usually did. But he grievously misgauged the reaction to the Stamp Act. When news of the act’s approval reached America, several colonies erupted in protest. The first outburst was rhetorical. In Williamsburg, Virginia, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named Patrick Henry stood up in the House of Burgesses—after a tenure there of less than two weeks—and declared the Stamp Act unconstitutional. As Englishmen, Henry said, Americans had the right to be taxed by none but their own elected representatives; as Englishmen they must resist this encroachment on their rights. Inflamed by his own eloquence, Henry uttered words to the effect that Caesar had met his Brutus and Charles I his Cromwell, and that George III might encounter someone similar among the Americans. At this the speaker of the house shouted treason and cut Henry off. Henry thereupon begged the House’s pardon and swore his loyalty to the king—but then undercut his apology by explaining that he had been carried away by fear for his country’s “dying liberty.”
The apology was undercut further by a set of resolves Henry laid before the House. Four of these reiterated in comparatively innocuous terms the rights of Englishmen regarding taxes. The fifth was more straightforward, claiming for the Virginia assembly the “only sole and exclusive right and power” to tax Virginians, and asserting that any effort to vest this right and power elsewhere had a “manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom.”
Support for Henry’s resolves was far from overwhelming. He introduced them only at the end of the legislative session, after most of the burgesses had gone home. The debate over the fifth resolve was, in Thomas Jefferson’s recollection, “most bloody.” Jefferson also recalled Peyton Randolph declaring afterward, “By God, I would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote!” Following the bloody debate all five resolves passed the house, but the fifth was rescinded after Henry departed in premature triumph.
Yet the point had been made, and during the following summer and autumn it was made again and again, and far more violently. In Boston the Stamp Act exacerbated tensions of long duration and deep bitterness; opponents of the act seized the occasion to take their fight to the streets. A group of artisans and shopkeepers initially calling themselves the Loyal Nine (a name soon changed to Sons of Liberty) met at a distillery on Hanover Square and, after fortifying their spirits, plotted a protest. Of late the historically competing North End and South End mobs had linked arms; the Sons of Liberty engaged the combined mob to attack the property of Andrew Oliver, the stamp commissioner for Massachusetts, and those connected to him.
On August 14 the mob hanged Oliver in effigy. The lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who was Oliver’s brother-in-law, took the insult both officially and personally and ordered the sheriff to remove the effigy. The sheriff prudently gathered intelligence regarding the mood of the mob before reporting back to Hutchinson that any effort to follow his orders would result in loss of life, probably starting with his and his deputies’.
As evening fell, the leader of the mob, Ebenezer MacIntosh, and his fellows cut down the effigy themselves and carried it about the town. They hooted at the office where the governor was meeting with his council, then marched to the waterfront, to Oliver’s dock. Somewhat arbitrarily denominating a new building on the dock the “Stamp Office”—although no stamps had yet arrived from England—MacIntosh and crew demolished it. They proceeded to Oliver Street, where Oliver lived. While some amused themselves ripping the head of the Oliver effigy from the torso, others hurled rocks through the windows of the Oliver house. The rioters did not lack a certain sense of humor, as they demonstrated by “stamping” the stamp commissioner’s effigy—with their boots. Then they burned it.
The mob began to hunt for Oliver himself. They broke through the barricaded doors of Oliver’s house and searched each room—splintering furniture along the way. But the owner was not at home, and after a futile examination of nearby houses—in one of which Oliver in fact was hiding—they called off the hunt.
The experience persuaded Oliver to resign his post as stamp commissioner, which he did the next day; but the mob was not appeased. On August 26 the crowd mobilized once more and went on a rampage against houses owned by various government officials known or merely thought to favor the Stamp Act. Hardest hit was the mansion of Thomas Hutchinson. The Hutchinson house was not only magnificent, it was sturdy—so sturdy that the mob needed all night to complete its destruction, and even then some brick walls and part of the roof remained. But everything else—doors, windows, wainscoting, wallpaper, china, silver, lamps, furniture, clothing, £900 cash—was shattered, burned, scattered, or stolen. Hutchinson escaped with his life, but perhaps not by much. He was dining with his family when word arrived that the mob was approaching; he vowed to defend his home against the intruders. Only when his daughter swore similar defiance, saying she would not leave if he would not, did he relent and retreat.
John Hughes anticipated like treatment in Philadelphia. In early September he wrote Franklin:
You are now from letter to letter to suppose each may be the last that you will receive from your old friend, as the spirit or flame of rebellion is got to a high pitch amongst the North Americans; and it seems to me that a sort of frenzy or madness has got such hold of the people of all ranks that I fancy some lives will be lost before this fire is put out.
Four days later Hughes wrote again.
Our clamours run very high, and I am told my house shall be pulled down and the stamps burnt. To which I give no other answer than that I will defend my house at the risque of my life.
Another four days later:
Common report threatens my house this night, as there are bonfires and rejoicings for the change of ministry [for reasons unrelated to the Stamp Act, Grenville had resigned in favor of the Marquis of Rockingham]…. I for my part am well-armed with fire-arms, and am determined to stand a siege. If I live till tomorrow morning I shall give you a farther account.
Fortunately for Hughes, his friends rallied to his side in large numbers, and the storm passed. At five the next morning he wrote Franklin:
We are all yet in the land of the living, and our property safe. Thank God.
Franklin himself had reason to thank God, for the same mob that threatened Hughes made angry noises about him. The house he had begun building before leaving for England was essentially complete—and suggested to suspicious or envious souls that its owner intended to fatten with his friend Hughes on the stamps the commissioner would sell to the oppressed Pennsylvania.
Samuel Wharton, a Philadelphia merchant and political ally of Franklin, described the night of maximum danger in a letter to Franklin: “In the evening, a large mob was collected at the coffee house and the party declared that your house, Mr. Hughes’, Mr. Galloway’s and mine should be leveled with the street, for that you had obtained the Stamp Act and we were warm advocates for the carrying it into execution.”
Deborah Franklin heard of the danger. During all her husband’s political contests she had remained on the sidelines, but she was not about to see her house pulled down. Friends and relatives warned her to leave the city and get out of harm’s way; though she sent Sally to Burlington and William, she stubbornly stayed. She related the critical several hours to Franklin:
Cousin [Josiah] Davenport came and told me that more than twenty people had told him it was his duty to be with me. I said I was pleased to receive civility from any body, so he stayed with me some time.
Towards night I said he should fetch a gun or two as we had none. I sent to ask my brother to come and bring his gun. So we made one room into a magazine. I ordered some sort of defence upstairs such as I could manage myself.
I said when I was advised to remove that I was very sure you had done nothing to hurt any body, nor I had not given any offence to any person at all. Nor would I be made uneasy by any body nor would I stir or show the least uneasiness. But if any one came to disturb me I would show a proper resentment and I should be very much affronted with any body.
Deborah’s resolve encouraged Franklin’s friends to come to her and his defense. Years earlier he had taught them to mobilize for good causes; now they mobilized for his. Some of the more rambunctious, led by a group of artisans and mechanics calling themselves the White Oak Company, let it be known that if Franklin’s house came down, so would the houses of those responsible. This sobered the plotters long enough for the authorities of the city to bring matters under control.
Franklin obviously did not learn about the events until weeks later. When he did, he could not help admiring his wife. “I honour much the spirit and courage you showed,” he said, “and the prudent preparations you made in that time of danger. The woman deserves a good house that is determined to defend it.”
Although Franklin’s house survived the Stamp Act rioting, his reputation remained in jeopardy. It did so partly because his enemies in Pennsylvania crafted lurid tales of how he had conspired to foist stamps upon the unsuspecting populace. Franklin’s friends countered the slanders as best they could, but he and they realized there was only so much they could do. Of one critic, a leader of Philadelphia Presbyterians, who, not content with alleging stamp conspiracy, added other heinous actions, Franklin told Debbie, “I thank him he does not charge me (as they do their God) with having planned Adam’s fall, and the damnation of mankind. It might be affirmed with equal truth and modesty.”
Yet there was more to Franklin’s predicament than unjust accusations. With the response to the Stamp Act, American politics commenced a remarkable change—a change Franklin had not anticipated and to which he was slow to react. Ironically, however, it built on work Franklin himself had done a decade earlier. Then he had tried to forge a collective identity among the British colonies in North America, and failed. Now just such a collective identity was taking shape in the resistance to the Stamp Act. Upon the initiative of the Massachusetts assembly, a congress was held in New York in October 1765. Nine colonies were represented, including Pennsylvania; the delegates produced a series of resolutions denying the right of Parliament to tax the colonies and urging repeal of the noxious measure.
Such petitioning was entirely within the English constitutional tradition; no one in Parliament could have much quarrel with it. But the insurrectionary spirit that drove the riots was another matter. And as that spirit took hold throughout the American colonies, it made the events of 1765 distinctive and portentous. This was what Franklin misunderstood. He was not a violent man; he much preferred the politics of reason to the politics of passion.
So did Thomas Hutchinson, who felt the irony of the situation more immediately, and more painfully, than Franklin. Hutchinson wrote Franklin in November assessing the violence in the various colonies, and noting, from his own experience, that in Massachusetts all doubts of the legitimacy of the mob’s opinions had been forcibly suppressed. “It is not safe there to advance any thing contrary to any popular opinions whatsoever,” Hutchinson said. “Every body who used to have virtue enough to oppose them is now afraid of my fate.” Briefly the violence in Boston had diminished, only to revive from example elsewhere. “The riots at New York have given fresh spirits to the rioters here.” Pointing out that the opponents of the Stamp Act had seized Franklin’s motto from 1754, “Join or Die,” Hutchinson remarked, “When you and I were at Albany ten years ago we did not propose an union for such purposes as these.”
The riots gave bite to demands by the opponents of the Stamp Act for a coordinated rejection of the stamps. As few souls dared incur the wrath of the mobs, and as the stamps were necessary for the conduct of most legal and commercial transactions, daily life was thrown into confusion. Joseph Galloway, writing from Philadelphia in late November, three weeks after the date on which the Stamp Act had been scheduled to take effect, informed Franklin of the situation:
It is difficult to describe the distress to which these distracted and violent measures have subjected the people of this province and indeed all North America. Here are Stamp papers, but the mob will not suffer them to be used, and the public officers of justice and of trade, being under obligation of their oaths and liable to the penalties of the statute, will not proceed in their duties without them.
A stop is put to our commerce, and our Courts of Justice is shut up. Our harbours are filled with vessels, but none of them, save those cleared out before the 2d. of November dare to move, because neither the Governor or Collector will clear them out, and if they would, the men of war threaten to seize them as forfeited for want of papers agreeable to the laws of trade.
Our debtors are selling off their effects before our eyes, and removing to another country, with innumerable other mischiefs brought on us by this fatal conduct, from which I can see no relief but from an immediate repeal of the Act.
However emotionally satisfying, the rejection of the stamps had little effect on Parliament, as it inflicted most of its injury on the colonies, whose influence with Parliament on this subject was demonstrably nil. Another mass action, one that hit closer to the homes of the honorable members, appeared more promising. Upon the passage of the Sugar Act the previous year, calls for an embargo against British imports arose here and there among the American colonies. But not until the Stamp Act galvanized opposition to Parliamentary taxation—and the stamp riots suggested a formidable mechanism for enforcing an embargo—did concerted nonimportation take hold. Just as the Stamp Act was to go into effect, some two hundred New York merchants pledged to have nothing to do with British imports. Philadelphia merchants followed suit, as did those of Boston.
Almost immediately nonimportation evoked the desired response. British merchants petitioned Parliament for repeal of the Stamp Act. For them the niceties of constitutionalism were irrelevant; what mattered were their vanishing sales. The point of empire was profit, and without sales there would be no profits.
Franklin had reckoned from the start that Parliament’s weakness would be the ledgers of the British merchant class. And he believed that this weakness might be exploited by the practice of one of the virtues—frugality—that Poor Richard had long extolled. In a letter written after the Stamp Act passed but before the rioting began, Franklin repeated his counsel of patience, with an economic and moral addendum:
We might as well have hindered the sun’s setting. That we could not do. But since ’tis down, my friend, and it may be long before it rises again, let us make as good a night of it as we can. We may still light candles. Frugality and industry will go a great way towards indemnifying us. Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and Parliaments. If we can get rid of the former we may easily bear the latter.
As a moralist, Franklin found the violence of the stamp riots appalling, in the same way that the terrorism of the French and Indian War and the murderous rampage of the Paxton Boys were appalling. In such violence the better angels of human nature were held hostage to its basest devils.
As a politician, Franklin found the violence counterproductive. Parliament already considered the tax issue a matter of principle; the riots simply stiffened Parliament’s resolve to impress its sovereignty on the people of the provinces.
Both aspects of Franklin’s thinking informed a letter to John Hughes, written before Hughes faced the full blast of popular wrath. Franklin explained that he was doing all he could to cause repeal of the Stamp Act, but success was uncertain.
If it continues, your undertaking to execute it may make you unpopular for a time, but your acting with coolness and steadiness, and with every circumstance in your power of favour to the people, will by degrees reconcile them. In the meantime, a firm loyalty to the Crown and faithful adherence to the government of this nation, which it is the safety as well as the honour of the colonies to be connected with, will always be the wisest course for you and I to take, whatever may be the madness of the populace or their blind leaders, who can only bring themselves and country into trouble, and draw on greater burthens by acts of rebellious tendency.
As word of the riots reached London, Franklin shuddered at their effect. “The disturbances in the colonies give me great concern,” he wrote David Hall, “as I fear the event will be pernicious to America in general.”
His concern caused him to redouble his efforts toward a compromise solution. A compromise, of course, was precisely what both the street rioters in America and the Parliamentary supremacists in England did not want. Yet Franklin hoped that reason, combined with the interests of moderate elements on both sides of the Atlantic, might yet make a compromise possible. In the second week of November he called upon Rockingham and Lord Dartmouth, the president of the Board of Trade.
A practical man speaking to practical men, Franklin explained that enforcing the Stamp Act would occasion more mischief than it was worth. Americans would be utterly alienated from Britain and would simply stop buying British goods. He acknowledged that the riots in America had freighted the problem with political peril for the Rockingham ministry; to repeal in the face of violence might be unacceptable. But the act could be suspended for a time, till the heat on both sides had dissipated a bit. Then a pretense could be found for quietly dropping it, without ever bringing the constitutional question to a head.
Franklin elaborated on the difficulties of enforcing the act upon an unwilling American populace. London might send armies, but the Americans would take every opportunity to encourage the soldiers to desert, which, given the high wages commanded by laborers and the ease of vanishing into the frontier, would be very tempting. A naval blockade could interdict commerce but would ruin Britain’s trade.
Franklin recognized that suspension of the Stamp Act, even if followed by repeal, would be a stopgap. Eventually the question of Parliamentary sovereignty and colonial rights would have to be addressed. “I strongly recommended either a thorough union with America,” Franklin told William afterward, “or that government here would proceed in the old method of requisition, by which I was confident more would be obtained in the way of voluntary grant than could probably be got by compulsory taxes laid by Parliament.”
But to insist on a final decision at present could be disastrous. To do so would risk creating a deep-rooted aversion between the two countries and laying the foundation of “a future total separation.”
At the start of 1766, a total separation was the last thing Franklin wanted. On his previous visit he had found Britain more congenial in many respects than Pennsylvania; in light of the abuse and threats of violence to which he and his had been subjected of late in Pennsylvania, Britain seemed more congenial still. Had Debbie been willing, he almost certainly would have relocated to London by now. But it seemed clear that Debbie would never be willing; a woman who armed herself against an angry mob to defend her home would not be talked out of it even by one as persuasive as her husband. This being so, separation between America and Britain would force Franklin to choose between wife and friends. He loved his wife; he loved them. He did not wish to have to choose.
Franklin spent January and February 1766 striving to mend the breach between Britain and America. It was a demanding business, in that the loudest voices on both sides of the Atlantic were trying to shout him down. Joseph Galloway wrote from Philadelphia describing “the violent temper of the Americans, which has been so worked up as to be ready even for rebellion itself.” Galloway wanted to urge moderation by composing a pamphlet to that effect. “But the difficulty will be in getting it published, the printers on the [American] continent having combined together to print every thing inflammatory and nothing that is rational and cool…. The people are taught to believe the greatest absurdities, and their passions are excited to a degree of resentment against the Mother Country beyond all description.”
On the other side of the water, the insisters on respect for the rule of law issued dire warnings to the Rockingham ministry against retreating in the face of illegal and unwarranted violence. “Can it be supposed that the colonists will ever submit to bear any share in those grievous burdens and taxes, with which we are loaded, when they find that the Government will not or dare not assert its own authority and power?” demanded one regular contributor to the published debate. “Have we not reason to expect that they will shake off all dependence and subjection, and neither suffer a limitation of their trade nor any duty to be imposed upon their commodities? Is not this want of spirit and resolution a direct encouragement of the mob to redress every imaginary grievance by force and violence?”
Franklin entered the fray in print and in person. He wrote several pieces for London journals defending American moderates against charges of guilt by association with the rioters, countering imputations of American niggardliness in matters touching imperial defense, pointing out that much of the tax burden Britons complained of got passed on to the Americans in the form of higher prices, and generally reminding readers of the essential unity of interest between colonies and mother country.
He also produced and circulated a political cartoon depicting to what end the Stamp Act and other such measures might lead. The picture was a bloody one, showing Britannia dismembered, her legs and arms lying about her as she leaned disconsolately against a globe. The lost limbs were labeled Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England; the motto declared “Date Obolum Bellisario,” or “Give a penny to Belisarius,” referring to a Roman general who reduced the provinces to Rome’s rule but was reduced himself to poverty in old age. Franklin had the cartoon printed on cards “on which I have lately wrote all my messages,” he explained to David Hall. His sister Jane Mecom got one, along with a note: “The moral is, that the colonies might be ruined, but that Britain would thereby be maimed.”
His most telling testimony, however, came in an appearance before the House of Commons. For three days the House convened as a committee of the whole to examine evidence relating to the Stamp Act, its unfavorable reception in America, and the demands of both the colonists and British merchants to have the measure repealed. The leading witness was Franklin.
As is often the case in such hearings, Franklin’s appearance was not entirely unorchestrated. The Rockingham ministry was looking for a way to distance itself from what it considered the shortsighted, if not downright stupid, legacy of its predecessor. But it needed better reason than the riots in Boston and New York and Philadelphia. Franklin—the august doctor, the celebrated philosopher and scientist, the astute observer of politics and human character, the deft writer and discussant; in short, the epitome of reason—fit the ministry’s need admirably. Many of the questions put to Franklin gave the impression of having been scripted—an impression confirmed by Franklin’s later remarks and writings.
Yet his appearance at Westminster was hardly a love-fest. By mid-February 1766 the wailing of the British merchants made repeal of the Stamp Act almost certain, but the terms of repeal—in particular, whether it would be accompanied by a reaffirmation of Parliament’s sovereignty over the American colonies, and what form such reaffirmation might take—remained to be determined. Several of Franklin’s questioners sought to undermine his answers by reading either more or less into them than he intended.
A friend opened the questioning by asking what taxes the Americans paid, of their own levying. “Many, and very heavy taxes,” Franklin replied. Asked to specify regarding Pennsylvania, Franklin continued, “There are taxes on all estates real and personal; a poll tax; a tax on all offices, professions, trades, and businesses, according to their profits; an excise on all wine, rum, and other spirits; and a duty of ten pounds per head on all Negroes imported, with some other duties.”
A second friend inquired of the feasibility of distributing the stamps in the American colonies. Deputy Postmaster Franklin, speaking with knowledge unexcelled of transport and communications in North America, described grave difficulties. “The posts go only along the sea coasts; they do not, except in a few instances, go back into the country; and if they did, sending for stamps by post would occasion an expense of postage amounting, in many cases, to much more than that of the stamps themselves.”
An adversary, a member of the late Grenville ministry, broke in to ask bluntly whether the colonies could afford to pay the stamp duty.
Franklin replied equally bluntly. “In my opinion, there is not gold and silver enough in the colonies to pay the stamp duty for one year.”
George Grenville himself queried whether Franklin thought that the Americans, protected by the British army and navy, should pay no part of the expense of maintaining those forces.
Franklin rejected the premise. The colonies, he said, had essentially defended themselves during the last war, raising 25,000 soldiers and spending millions of pounds.
Quite so, Grenville continued, but had not Parliament reimbursed the colonies for their expenses?
Franklin parried this as well. “We were only reimbursed what, in your opinion, we had advanced beyond our proportion, or beyond what might reasonably be expected from us; and it was a very small part of what we spent.”
Franklin’s friends put questions that allowed him to state his argument most succinctly. What was the temper of the Americans toward Great Britain before 1763?
“The best in the world,” he answered. “They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid, in all their courts, obedience to acts of Parliament. Numerous as the people are in the several old provinces, they cost you nothing in forts, citadels, garrisons, or armies, to keep them in subjection. They were governed by this country at the expense only of a little pen, ink, and paper. They were led by a thread.”
And what was the temper of the Americans now?
“Very much altered.”
In what light had the Americans formerly viewed Parliament?
“As the great bulwark and security of their liberties and privileges.” Arbitrary ministers might overstep, but as a body Parliament could always be counted on to redress grievances.
And did the Americans retain their respect for Parliament?
“No, it is greatly lessened.”
A questioner probed the matter of taxes and duties. Had the Americans formerly objected to Parliament’s authority on these subjects?
“I never heard any objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce; but a right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in Parliament, as we are not represented there.”
After additional discussion of duties—which Franklin interchangeably called external taxes—and taxes proper, or internal taxes, a former minister under Grenville suggested that a tax was a tax. What was the difference?
“The difference is very great. An external tax is a duty laid on commodities imported; that duty is added to the first cost, and other charges on the commodity, and when it is offered to sale, makes a part of the price. If the people do not like it at that price, they refuse it; they are not obliged to pay it. But an internal tax is forced from the people without their consent, if not laid by their own representatives. The Stamp Act says we shall have no commerce, make no exchange of property with each other, neither purchase nor grant, nor recover debts; we shall neither marry nor make our wills unless we pay such and such sums, and thus it is intended to extort our money from us, or ruin us by the consequences of refusing to pay it.”
A friend asked whether anything less than military force could compel the Americans to accept the stamps.
“I do not see how a military force can be applied to that purpose.”
Why not? one of the Grenville men asked.
“Suppose a military force is sent into America. They will find nobody in arms. What are they then to do? They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.”
By the testimony of those most interested, the effect of Franklin’s appearance in Commons was electric. “The Marquis of Rockingham told a friend of mine a few days after, that he never knew truth make so great a progress in so very short a time,” said William Strahan. “From that very day, the repeal was generally and absolutely determined, all that passed afterwards being only mere form.” Strahan was never shy about heralding Franklin’s triumphs, but even he thought his friend had outdone himself. “Happy man! In truth I almost envy him the inward pleasure, as well as the outward fame, he must derive from having it in his power to do his country such eminent and seasonable service.”
Repeal had more fathers than Strahan conceded, but Franklin’s performance was indeed inspired. The opponents of repeal could rouse indignation against the rabble who tore down Thomas Hutchinson’s house and defied king and Parliament, but indignation dissolved in the sweet reason of Dr. Franklin. If that sweet reason included some tenuous reasoning—Franklin’s distinction between internal and external taxes, for example, was more his own invention than a reflection of opinion in America—none present was placed to refute him. (When one unfriendly questioner tried to do so, Franklin rebuffed him with a clever riposte. This member suggested that the Americans might use the same arguments Franklin deployed against internal taxes to reject external taxes. “They never have hitherto,” Franklin responded. “Many arguments have been lately used here to shew them that there is no difference, and that if you have no right to tax them internally, you have none to tax them externally, or make any other law to bind them. At present they do not reason so, but in time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments.”)
To reasonableness he added just the right note of resolve. He was not defiant, not bellicose. He was simply reporting the state of the American mind and the American spirit. Here again he bent the truth to suit his purpose. He must have known, after all the violence of the summer and autumn in America, that a return to the status quo would not appease those who now had the bit in their teeth. But as with his posited distinction between internal and external taxes, he was willing to deal with the consequences of that interpretation later. For the present the goal was repeal of the Stamp Act.
The goal was achieved in March 1766, almost a year to the day after the act had received royal approval. To no one’s great surprise, repeal was accompanied by a Declaratory Act, which asserted the right of Parliament to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”
Equally unsurprising, this mixed outcome left a certain sour taste. Many in America remained unreconciled to Parliament’s authority; many in Britain resented the Americans’ ability to flout the law with impunity. The latter feeling gave rise to a demand that the colonies compensate the home government for the cost of stamping all that paper, which was never used.
Franklin registered a sardonic judgment on this demand. In an anonymous letter to a London journal he wrote that the affair put him in mind of a Frenchman who used to accost English visitors on the Pont-Neuf in Paris, with effusive compliments in his mouth and a red-hot poker in his hand.
“Pray Monsieur Anglais,” says he, “Do me the favour to let me have the honour of thrusting this hot iron into your backside?”
“Zoons, what does the fellow mean! Begone with your iron, or I’ll break your head!”
“Nay, Monsieur,” replies he, “if you do not choose it, I do not insist upon it. But at least you will in justice have the goodness to pay me something for the heating of my iron.”