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He needed the revival, for awaiting his return to England was the worst flare-up of anti-American feeling since the aftermath of the Stamp Act riots. To Franklin’s embarrassment, the Townshend duties—which were just the kind of external taxes he said the Americans preferred—were immediately rejected in America as illegitimate. Boston called a town meeting that endorsed a renewal of the nonimportation compact of the Stamp Act crisis. Providence and Newport did the same. New York merchants embargoed trade with Britain; New York artisans embargoed business with merchants who failed to live up to the merchandise embargo.
Although the American response lacked the violence of the Stamp Act period, it convinced many in England of the Americans’ fundamental bad faith. The Townshend duties, in this view, were a generous effort by Parliament to keep peace within the empire; the American call for nonimportation was therefore an insult and an outrage. The London journals throbbed with denunciations of the rebellious ingrates across the water; demands that they be brought to heel rang through the taverns and clubs of the city.
Franklin again found himself in a difficult position. As during the Stamp Act crisis, many in America suspected him of toadying to Parliament. By his own words, had he not brought on these new duties? At the same time, many in England considered him a sly deceiver. Had he not said the Americans accepted the idea of external taxes? Why were they then rejecting these external taxes?
Out of self-defense as much as the defense of American interests, Franklin felt obliged to respond. Characteristically, he called for calm. “Instead of raving (with your correspondent of yesterday) against the Americans as ‘diggers of pits for this country,’ ‘lunatics,’ ‘sworn enemies,’ ‘false,’ ‘ungrateful,’ ‘cut-throats,’ &c. which is a treatment of customers that I doubt is not like to bring them back to our shop,” he wrote to the editor of the London Gazetteer, “I would recommend to all writers on American affairs (however hard their arguments may be) soft words, civility, and good manners.” The current differences with the colonies were not fatal, and might be bridged by reason and fairness. Intemperate words would only aggravate matters. “Railing and reviling can answer no good end; it may make the breach wider; it can never heal it.” The raver Franklin referred to had adopted the name “Old England”: Franklin signed himself “Old England in its Senses.”
A more thorough piece appeared in the London Chronicle. “The waves never rise but when the winds blow,” he quoted the proverb and himself, before essaying to smooth the waters by diminishing the gale. The source of the trouble, he said, was a basic misunderstanding; a recounting of the distant and recent past by “an impartial historian of American facts and opinions” would set things straight. Again writing anonymously, he explained that the colonies’ traditional method of contributing to imperial upkeep was by grants, supplied in response to royal requisition. This method “left the King’s subjects in those remote countries the pleasure of showing their zeal and loyalty, and of imagining that they recommended themselves to their Sovereign by the liberality of their voluntary grants.” This practice, and the opinions it entailed, conformed to the Americans’ belief that their rights as Englishmen forbade their taxation by any assembly not of their choosing.
All was well, he continued, until an unnamed (but easily identified) minister determined to levy a stamp tax upon the Americans. The Americans naturally resented this imposition and resisted it, till Parliament wisely rescinded it. The rescission put the Americans in “high good humour,” but the ousted ministers in England who had designed the Stamp Act were resentful and eager for revenge. The objection of New York to quartering the king’s troops afforded a pretext for suspending the assembly there. This greatly alarmed all the people of America, who inferred that what was done to New York might be done to them.
Their alarm intensified from the concurrent introduction of a new set of taxes. The taxes themselves were less odious than the purposes for which they were designed, namely, to support governors, judges, and other royal officials, thereby freeing those officials from any dependence on the provinces in which they served. This was the critical point. The governors, judges, and the rest had no permanent interest in the colonies, typically being sent out from England for a few years, to return to England at the end of their service. Should they be relieved of even the necessity of looking to the provincial assemblies for their pay, there would be no influencing them in the least. Governors might well take to ignoring the assemblies entirely, perhaps not even calling them. “Thus the people will be deprived of their most essential rights.”
The colonists had other complaints. At the insistence of a handful of self-interested British merchants, they had been deprived of the right to issue paper currency of their own. Equally selfish parties benefited from prohibitions against the Americans’ producing nails, steel—even hats. “It is of no importance to the common welfare of the empire, whether a subject of the King’s gets his living by hats on this side or that side of the water. Yet the hatters of England have prevailed to obtain an act in their own favour, restraining that manufacture in America, in order to oblige the Americans to send their beavers to England to be manufactured, and purchase back the hats, loaded with the charges of a double transportation.” No less galling was the long-standing practice of allowing the prisons of Britain to dump their human refuse upon American shores. For decades England had been availing itself of this opportunity to export its rogues and villains; just recently Scotland won this dubious distinction.
How were the Americans to respond? Could they conclude other than to look out for themselves by the only means in their power? Contravening no law, they simply decided not to import goods from Britain, the better to conserve the gold and silver they needed as currency, to avoid the taxes they had no part in designing, to lighten the burden British monopolies regularly exacted from them, to prepare for the day when a reenlightened Parliament and Crown would constitutionally request support rather than unconstitutionally extort it. “For notwithstanding the reproaches thrown out against us in their public papers and pamphlets, notwithstanding we have been reviled in the senate as rebels and traitors, we are truly a loyal people. Scotland has had its rebellions, and England its plots against the present royal family; but America is untainted with those crimes; there is in it scarce a man, there is not a single native of our country, who is not firmly attached to his King by principle and by affection.”
But something novel was expected: a loyalty to Parliament, a loyalty that extended to surrender of all Americans’ property to a body in which there sat not a single member of America’s choosing. This was not merely novel; it was unconstitutional, and it threatened mortal harm to the empire. “We were separated too far from Britain by the Ocean, but we were united to it by respect and love, so that we could at any time freely have spent our lives and little fortunes in its cause. But this unhappy new system of politics tends to dissolve those bands of union, and to sever us for ever.”
The anonymous Franklin, posing as a devoted supporter of Parliament, disowned these views for himself. “No reasonable man in England can approve of such sentiments.” They were, rather, “the wild ravings of the at present half distracted Americans.” Yet British self-interest required taking them into account. “I sincerely wish, for the sake of the manufactures and commerce of Great Britain, and for the sake of the strength which a firm union with our growing colonies would give us, that these people had never been thus needlessly driven out of their senses.”
Franklin’s distancing himself from the views of the American malcontents was a tactic of propaganda, aimed to avoid throwing his readers on the defensive. But it was also an indication of an honest ambivalence. Even while writing regularly on relations between the British government and the American colonies, he was unsure quite what those relations were or ought to be.
To his surprise, he received an education in the matter from a man he had until lately vehemently opposed. John Dickinson was a near-contemporary of William Franklin, and for a time their career paths ran parallel. Dickinson read law in Philadelphia at about the same time William did; he finished his legal education at London’s Middle Temple just before William. Both went into politics after a brief legal practice; each became a solid supporter of the status quo.
But where William’s appointment as royal governor of New Jersey placed him in league with Franklin, Dickinson’s election to the Pennsylvania Assembly put him opposite Franklin, for the status quo Dickinson supported was that of the province’s proprietary government. That Dickinson was an ardent advocate and facile writer merely made him, in Franklin’s opinion, the more dangerous. Consequently it was with some surprise that Franklin read a series of articles published by Dickinson in the Pennsylvania Chronicle starting in the winter of 1767–68, articles that comprised the most astute and incisive argument in print on the subject of relations between Britain and the American colonies.
Actually, the surprise came after the fact, for the “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” were published, like most of Franklin’s own pieces during this period, anonymously. Lord Hillsborough initially guessed that Franklin himself was the author. “My Lord H. mentioned the Farmer’s letters to me,” Franklin wrote William, “said he had read them, that they were well written, and he believed he could guess who was the author, looking in my face at the same time as if he thought it was me.” Franklin did not know who the author was, and did not discover Dickinson’s identity until some months later. By then he had arranged the republication of the “Letters” as a pamphlet in London, to which he appended an appreciative preface.
Dickinson’s letters denied the central argument Franklin had made in his testimony before Parliament, and again when writing as Benevolus: that a meaningful distinction existed between internal and external taxes. This was the wrong way to slice the taxing issue, Dickinson said. The distinction that mattered was between taxes designed for revenue and those designed for regulation. The latter were unavoidable in a mercantile empire and were constitutionally innocuous. The former, even if devised as external taxes upon imports, were illegitimate and insidious when levied, as the Townshend taxes were, without the consent of those required to pay them.
Dickinson’s letters provided the theoretical justification for colonial opposition to the Townshend acts. Most colonists had concluded that the acts were mischievous or worse, but they had struggled to find constitutional grounds for this conclusion. Dickinson discovered what they were looking for.
Franklin thought so, although he was fairly certain the Farmer would not have the last word. The problem, Franklin told William, was that even Dickinson’s distinction was philosophically suspect. Dickinson allowed Parliament the power to regulate the trade of the colonies but withheld the right to tax trade for revenue. Where did one draw the line between regulation and revenue? Was a sugar tax of one penny a tariff for regulation and a sugar tax of two pence a tariff for revenue? More important than where the line lay, who would draw it? “If Parliament is to be the judge, it seems to me that establishing such principles of distinction will amount to little.”
The fundamental problem was that any effort to subdivide sovereignty was almost certainly doomed to fail. Either Parliament was sovereign over the American colonies or it was not.
The more I have thought and read on the subject the more I find myself confirmed in my opinion that no middle doctrine can be well maintained, I mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might be made of either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to make all laws for us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us.
At this moment, in March 1768, Franklin reached what seemed the Rubicon of relations between Britain and the American colonies. Either Parliament was supreme in all areas pertaining to the provinces or it was supreme in none. “I think the arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those for the former,” he told William.
Typically, however, Franklin declined to be dogmatic on this point, nor on the conclusions to which it logically led. If Parliament was supreme in nothing touching the colonies, then the colonies were perfectly justified—in theory—in resisting every effort by Parliament to legislate for them in any manner whatsoever. “Supposing that doctrine established, the colonies would then be so many separate states, only subject to the same King, as England and Scotland were before the Union.” Whether a union like that between England and Scotland should be effected between the American colonies and England would be a matter for Americans and English to decide. Franklin, still the British imperialist, favored a transatlantic union. “Though particular parts might find particular disadvantages in it, they would find greater advantages in the security arising to every part from the increased strength of the whole.” He realized, however, that the moment was not propitious. “Such union is not likely to take place while the nature of our present relation is so little understood on both sides the water, and sentiments concerning it remain so widely different.”
Two years earlier Franklin had parried a hostile question in Parliament suggesting that Americans’ denial of Parliament’s right to tax would logically lead to a denial of Parliament’s right to legislate; he had asserted that they did not so reason then but might be convinced if Parliament got pushy. He had spoken half humorously, in an effort to turn aside an uncomfortable query. But events were proving him right, against his own wishes. He had no desire to break up the British empire, but logic was leading in that direction. And emotion—the emotion of others, not yet himself—was encouraging logic.
Emotions were running high in England during the spring of 1768 on subjects besides the colonies. John Wilkes was back from France, and back in the thick of popular and Parliamentary politics. Defying his outlawry, Wilkes stood for Parliament from the City of London. He lost badly, finishing last in a field of seven, but blamed it on his late arrival. Unabashed, he hied off to Middlesex, where a seat was open and a cooperative opponent of the government gave him land enough to qualify to stand. Middlesex, like much of England during this season, was in a ferment from rising prices and falling wages. Silk weavers were striking; sailors refused to set sail; coal heavers dropped their shovels and raised their fists. Wilkes became an instrument of the popular distress, and disgruntled individuals discovered that the old cry of “Wilkes and liberty!” transmuted easily to “Wilkes and the coal heavers forever!” and the like.
Wilkes won handily, and on election night mobs of his supporters marched howling on London. King George called out the troops but himself stayed indoors; the troops proved sadly insufficient to their assignment. The Wilkites smashed windows at the house of London’s Lord Mayor, a known foe of their hero, and at houses of such other notables as Bute and Lord Egmont. The Duke of Northumberland was cowed into drinking Wilkes’s health; the Austrian ambassador, whose entire offense consisted of being caught in a coach on a street the rowdies made their own, was hauled out, thrown to his knees, and had “45” scrawled across the soles of his shoes.
Wilkes let the entertainment run its course before declaring, the following evening, that as the authorities were obviously incapable of keeping the peace, he and his friends would do so. A committee was appointed to patrol the streets; the group had special instructions to steer unruly persons—themselves included—away from St. James’s Palace, “that no insult or indecency might be offered to the King.”
Wilkes’s libel conviction still hung over his head, but the government was too terrified to arrest him. The ministers were certain this would simply loose the mob again. Although Wilkes offered to surrender peacefully, he was rebuffed by the Lord Chief Justice, who wanted nothing to do with him; Wilkes finally had to insist on his right as an Englishman to be arrested. With great reluctance, the sheriff accepted him into custody—only to see his reluctance corroborated when Wilkes’s followers hijacked the vehicle carrying him, cut free the horses, and then, to the amazement of all, put themselves in the shafts and traces and pulled the vehicle forward. Coach and team rumbled along the Strand and past Temple Bar before halting for refreshments at the Three Tuns Tavern, where Wilkes thanked his friends for their support but excused himself to proceed to prison afoot.
Conditions grew only more unruly with Wilkes behind bars. Actually, the bars on his room at the prison in St. George’s Fields were more notional than real: the prisoner entertained guests of both sexes, including a seemingly endless train of young women who found Wilkes even more fascinating as a convicted criminal than he had been as a mere rake. Admirers sent cases of wine, butts of ale, countless hams, pheasants, turtles; from Maryland (the cause of Wilkesian liberty resonated across the Atlantic) arrived forty-five hogsheads of tobacco, which contributed their share to the further fouling of London’s atmosphere.
Outside the prison thousands demonstrated against Wilkes’s confinement. On May 10 the crowd swelled to perhaps twenty thousand, shouting, gesticulating, threatening authorities and passersby alike. The nervous authorities attempted to disperse the mob, but as the justice was reading the Riot Act, a hurled stone struck him. He summoned the troops that had been standing nearby and set them upon the crowd. In the melee that followed, some half dozen civilians were killed and many more wounded. The “St. George’s Fields Massacre,” as it was immediately labeled, triggered additional violence across London and environs. Wilkes was one theme of the window-smashing and house-wrecking but not the only one. Unemployed artisans shouted for work; sailors swung staves for cheaper bread; coalers demanded better beer. The defiance of authority revealed a common opinion, expressed variously, that hanging was better than starving. The upper classes held their breath. “We are glad if we can keep our windows whole, or pass and repass unmolested,” wrote Horace Walpole. “I call it reading history as one goes along the street…. I do not love to think what the second volume must be of a flourishing nation running riot.”
Franklin watched with astonishment. “The scenes have been horrible,” he wrote William in April.
London was illuminated two nights running at the command of the mob for the success of Wilkes in the Middlesex election; the second night exceeded any thing of the kind ever seen here on the greatest occasions of rejoicing, as even the small cross streets, lanes, courts, and other out-of-the-way places were all in a blaze with lights, and the principal streets all night long, as the mobs went round again after two o’clock, and obliged people who had extinguished their candles to light them again. Those who refused had all their windows destroyed.
The damage done to property (and the cost of the candles) had been computed at £50,000; the cost to the morale of the law-abiding citizenry was still higher. “’tis really an extraordinary event,” Franklin said, “to see an outlaw and exile, of bad personal character, not worth a farthing, come over from France, set himself up as candidate for the capital of the kingdom, miss his election only by being too late in his application, and immediately carrying it for the principal county.” Wilkes’s hoodlums had terrorized not only London but far out into the countryside. Franklin had been to Winchester, more than sixty miles from London, and seen their scrawled “45” and other evidence of their passage the entire way.
As the anarchy persisted, so did Franklin’s astonishment. “This capital, the residence of the King, is now a daily scene of lawless riot and confusion,” Franklin wrote in May.
Mobs are patrolling the street at noon day, some knocking all down that will not roar for Wilkes and liberty; courts of justice afraid to give judgment against him; coalheavers and porters pulling down the houses of coal merchants that refuse to give them more wages; sawyers destroying the new sawmills; sailors unrigging all the outbound ships, and suffering none to sail till merchants agree to raise their pay; watermen destroying private boats and threatening bridges; weavers entering houses by force, and destroying the work in the looms; soldiers firing among the mobs and killing men, women and children; which seems only to have produced an universal sullenness that looks like a great black cloud coming on, ready to burst in a general tempest.
Nothing remained to hold the chaos at bay. “All respect to law and government seems to be lost among the common people, who are moreover continually enflamed by seditious scribblers to trample on authority and every thing that used to keep them in order.”
Wilkes symbolized a system beset by cynicism and corruption. Electioneering had become little but bribery and boozing. “There have been amazing contests all over the kingdom,” Franklin recorded, “£20 or 30,000 of a side spent in several places, and inconceivable mischief done by debauching the people and making them idle, besides the immediate actual mischief done by drunken mad mobs to houses, windows, &c.” No less discouraging than the fact of the corruption was the insouciance that informed it. “’tis thought that near two millions will be spent in this election. But those who understand figures and act upon computation say the Crown has two millions a year in places and pensions to dispose of, and ’tis well worth while to engage in such a seven years lottery though all that have tickets should not get prizes.”
The entire spectacle appalled Franklin, and it called into question an objective toward which he had been working his whole political life. From the 1740s until now he had opposed Pennsylvania’s proprietary government, contending that Pennsylvanians would be better off under direct Crown rule. But England was under the rule of the Crown, and this was the sorry state to which it had fallen. He wrote one of his allies in the fight for royal rule, “I have urged over and over the necessity of the change we desire; but this country itself being at present in a situation very little better, weakens our argument that a royal government would be better managed and safer to live under than that of a proprietary.”
If not proprietary rule, and not royal rule, then what? Logic—the same logic that was pushing Franklin to deny Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies—indicated an answer. But it was an answer he was not ready to accept.
As bad as things were in Britain, Franklin feared they could get worse. Rumors swirled of the replacement of Shelburne as secretary of state by Grenville. Franklin had jousted personally with Grenville and felt the man’s animosity toward Americans; and he knew that Americans wasted no love on the author of the Stamp Act. The prospect of Grenville’s return chilled him. “If this should take place,” Franklin wrote Joseph Galloway, “or if in any other shape he comes again into power, I fear his sentiments of the Americans and theirs of him, will occasion such clashings as may be attended with fatal consequences.”
Franklin had hoped that the Parliamentary elections would render the future clear enough for him to return to Pennsylvania; during the spring of 1768 he repeatedly anticipated embarking in a few weeks. But this new possibility pulled him back from wharfside and left him ensconced in Craven Street. With the fate of America in the balance, it would be irresponsible to leave.
There was something else. Franklin was clever at playing the politics of the imperial capital, with his artful phrasing in Parliament and his veiled authorship of articles in the London journals; but the politicians he was playing against included some who were clever in their own right, and were not entirely inept at playing him. Upon the appointment of Hillsborough as secretary of state for America, rumors began swirling of a possible appointment for Franklin as Hillsborough’s undersecretary. Franklin initially discounted the rumors. “It is a settled point here that I am too much of an American,” he told William. But apparently the point was not as settled as Franklin suggested, for the rumors persisted for many months. Significantly, he did nothing to stifle them—as by a declaration that he did not want the job.
From the perspective of the ministry, a Franklin appointment made obvious sense. Franklin was clearly the most capable of the colonial agents, and governments are always on the lookout for capable people. More to the immediate point, Franklin aboard would be less dangerous than Franklin adrift. As a member of the government rather than an antagonist, he would be unable—because unwilling—to frustrate the government’s designs, which would be his designs. It was one of the oldest practices of politics, because it was one of the most effective.
During much of 1768 various ministers dangled the possibility of appointment before Franklin. Under the circumstances existing between the colonies and the government this was a topic Franklin was reluctant to share with most correspondents; the one to whom he confided was his son, the recipient and continuing beneficiary of just such an appointment. In a letter of July, Franklin explained both his prospects and his predicament. Sometime earlier the secretary to the Treasury, Grey Cooper—“my fast friend,” Franklin called him—had said that the Duke of Grafton had lately been speaking favorably of him. Grafton headed the Treasury; more important, following Townshend’s sudden death, he had assumed the role of acting leader of the government, and heir apparent, in place of the still-ailing Chatham. Some question had been raised regarding Franklin’s long residence in England, and whether this hindered his fulfillment of his duties as deputy postmaster. There were two ways to skin this cat, Grafton intimated to Cooper, in words intended for Franklin. Grafton had directed Cooper to tell Franklin—as Franklin retold the story to William—“that though my going to my post might remove the objection, yet if I chose rather to reside in England, my merit was such in his opinion as to entitle me to something better here, and it should not be his fault if I was not well provided for.”
Franklin responded cagily. “I told Mr. Cooper that without having heard any exception had been taken to my residence here, I was really preparing to return home, and expected to be gone in a few weeks.” But his trunk was not on the boat yet. He informed Cooper “that I was extremely sensible of the Duke’s goodness in giving me this intimation and very thankful for his favourable disposition towards me; that having lived long in England, and contracted a friendship and affection for many persons here, it could not but be agreeable to me to remain among them some time longer, if not for the rest of my life.” Moreover, “there was no nobleman to whom I could from sincere respect for his great abilities and amiable qualities so cordially attach myself, or to whom I should so willingly be obliged for the provision he mentioned, as to the Duke of Grafton, if his Grace should think I could, in any station where he might place me, be serviceable to him and to the public.”
Cooper was delighted to hear this. He said he had hoped to keep Franklin in England and was pleased that Franklin was not averse to staying. Cooper suggested that Franklin call at the Treasury for a personal meeting with the duke.
Franklin did call, only to learn that the duke was out. Cooper instead ushered him to a meeting with Lord North, the chancellor of the exchequer. North was as complimentary as Grafton had been, and said he hoped the government could find some way to make it worth the doctor’s while to remain in England. “I thanked his lordship, and said I should stay with pleasure if I could any ways be useful to government.”
Cooper insisted that Franklin come to his country house at Richmond with him, where they dined and Franklin spent the night. Shortly thereafter Cooper introduced Franklin to other ministerial worthies, including Lord Sandwich, who had been a critic but was won over by Franklin’s charm. “We parted very good friends,” Franklin told William. Lord Clare, lately president of the Board of Trade, was another admirer. “He gave me a great deal of flummery, saying that though at my examination [before Commons] I answered some of his questions a little pertly, yet he liked me from that day, for the spirit I showed in defence of my country; and at parting, after we had drank a bottle and a half of claret each, he hugged and kissed me, protesting he never in his life met with a man he was so much in love with.”
Since then nothing had come of these overtures. Franklin could not say whether Grafton had changed his mind about him, or whether some appointment impended. He had another meeting scheduled with Grafton at the Treasury in a few days. If a post were offered, he indicated to William, he would not turn it down. “I did not think fit to decline any favour so great a man expressed an inclination to do me, because at court if one shews an unwillingness to be obliged it is often construed as a mark of mental hostility, and one makes an enemy.”
Yet there were limits on what a person could ethically accept. “If Mr. Grenville comes into power again in any department respecting America, I must refuse to accept of any thing that may seem to put me in his power, because I apprehend a breach between the two countries; and that refusal will give offence.”
For this reason a person must not place excessive store in the future. “A turn of a die may make a great difference in our affairs. We may either be promoted, or discarded; one or the other seems likely soon to be the case, but ’tis hard to divine which.”
As a young tradesman in America, Franklin had made much of the virtues of industry and frugality. Industry allowed the tradesman to employ each moment gainfully, frugality to husband the gains of industry. Even the appearance of these virtues was important, for it won customers to the man so diligent in his craft and thrifty with his resources.
As a mature politician and philosopher, Franklin had less use for such bourgeois values. The governing classes in England were the leisured and comfortable classes, and a man who wished to make headway among them needed to fit in. Excessive industry was cause for suspicion, while frugality reflected poorly on one’s accomplishments. The philosopher, of course, required leisure to think and read and write, and pleasant circumstances conduced to such intellectual endeavors.
Franklin never lived extravagantly, but the longer he stayed in London, the more attached he became to London’s standards of living. His comfortable Craven Street apartment, his servants, his private coach, his annual travels, his socializing at clubs—all contributed to a life he learned to enjoy considerably.
Yet enough of those early values survived that when he discovered an indulgence that gave pleasure while costing nothing, or while allowing time for productive work, he took double delight. A French admirer had written with news of a novel method for treating smallpox, one that involved cold baths. Franklin answered that he had long heard cold baths touted as a tonic, but considered the shock to the system too violent.
I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise early almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. This practice is not in the least painful, but on the contrary, agreeable; and if I return to bed afterwards, before I dress myself, as sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night’s rest, of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined.
Air baths were free; another indulgence actually saved money—and trouble. “I reckon it among my felicities,” Franklin told his Scottish friend Kames, “that I can set my own razor and shave myself perfectly well, in which I have a daily pleasure, and avoid the uneasiness one is otherwise obliged to suffer sometimes from dull razors and the dirty fingers or bad breath of a slovenly barber.”
The naked philosopher pondered matters large and small, among them why shaving himself was such a pleasure. Franklin and Kames had been comparing notes on true happiness; Franklin summarized for them both: “I have long been of an opinion similar to that you express, and think happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.”
Happiness was the subject of another correspondence. A young man asked Franklin’s views on marriage—in particular, whether youth or age was more likely to contract connubial bliss. “From the matches that have fallen under my observation,” Franklin replied, “I am rather inclined to think that early ones stand the best chance for happiness. The tempers and habits of young people are not yet become so stiff and uncomplying as when more advanced in life, they form more easily to each other, and thence many occasions of disgust are removed.” To be sure, youth lacked experience. But this might be remedied by the advice of relatives and friends. Perhaps recalling his own oat-sowing days, he asserted that despite occasional reasons to delay entrance into the married state, it was best not to tarry. “In general, when Nature has rendered our bodies fit for it, the presumption is in Nature’s favour, that she has not judged amiss in making us desire it.”
Still other correspondence concerned a more literal plunge. “I cannot be of opinion with you that ’tis too late in life for you to learn to swim,” he wrote an acquaintance who had accepted employment entailing frequent boat travel but feared for his life because he had never learned to swim. In a long letter that conjoined the physics of floating bodies, the psychology of desensitization to fear, and the pedagogy of new tricks to old dogs, Franklin laid out a concise program for basic drown-proofing. Yet this should be but the first step—for anyone. “Learn fairly to swim, as I wish all men were taught to do in their youth. They would, on many occurrences, be the safer for that skill, and on many more the happier, as freer from painful apprehensions of danger, to say nothing of the enjoyment in so delightful and wholesome an exercise.”
A public-health issue of a different sort involved a mysterious medley of complaints from people in diverse locations and occupations. In his years as a practicing printer, Franklin had sometimes warmed his type pieces during cold weather to make them easier to handle, but at the end of days when he had done so he often noted a curious pain and stiffness in his hands. Inquiry of veteran typesetters revealed instances where regular practice of this kind had deprived persons of the use of their hands permanently. Something in the lead type, released upon heating, seemed toxic.
Franklin filed away this information, and learned to set cold type. He may or may not have recalled it in 1745 when he printed an article for Thomas Cadwalader entitled Essay on the West India Dry Gripes; but it certainly came to mind when he and John Pringle traveled to France the first time. The pair toured a hospital devoted to patients afflicted with the “dry belly ache,” a gastrointestinal disorder associated with various occupations. Analyzing the list of patients, Franklin concluded that what the jobs had in common was chronic exposure to lead.
Not long back in London, Franklin received a letter from Cadwalader Evans, apparently a relative of Thomas Cadwalader. Evans noted that the symptoms of the dry gripes of the West Indies were similar to the symptoms of the dry bellyache of the British North American colonies and Britain. He also noted that although the climate and lifestyle of the British West Indies approximated that of the French West Indies, the latter exhibited nothing like the incidence of the malady in the former. Evans suggested a reason: while the inhabitants of the French Indies drank wine, the people of the British Indies drank rum—as did many people in the North American colonies and Britain. Rum, unlike wine, was distilled, and often the stills used a worm—or coil—made of lead.
Franklin replied that something similar had been observed in New England, and indeed the local authorities there had outlawed the use of lead in stills. He went on to say of the dry gripes, “I have long been of opinion that that distemper proceeds always from a metallic cause only, observing that it affects among tradesmen those that use lead, however different their trades, as glazers, type-founders, plumbers, potters, white lead-makers and painters.”
The epidemiology and etiology of lead poisoning were ongoing interests for Franklin; likewise other of his scientific studies. He helped coordinate what amounted to an international effort to calculate the distance from the earth to the sun, an effort that involved observing the transit of Venus across the sun’s face from different spots on earth and measuring the parallax. His electrical investigations took practical form when he advised the custodians of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on how to preserve Christopher Wren’s masterwork from lightning bolts. A venture by William Franklin into farming prompted his father to delve into the latest thinking on scientific agriculture. The possibility of starting a British silk industry propelled him into the natural history of the silkworm and the mulberry tree.
He devised a new phonetic alphabet to regularize English spelling. Polly Stevenson was his experimental subject in this endeavor. “Diir Pali,” he wrote her—in a note that then introduced six invented letters (irreproducible without Franklin’s special fonts) and numerous redefinitions of use and pronunciation. He conceded that convincing anyone else to employ the new alphabet would be difficult. But it was worth trying. English spelling was already so far from pronunciation as to make literacy difficult for native speakers, nearly impossible for foreigners. “If we go on as we have done a few centuries longer,” he said (in translation), “our words will gradually cease to express sounds; they will only stand for things, as the written words do in the Chinese language.”
Not content with editing man, Franklin marked up God. The Lord’s Prayer, in Franklin’s rendering, became:
Heavenly Father, may all revere thee, and become thy dutiful children and faithful subjects. May thy laws be obeyed on Earth as perfectly as they are in Heaven. Provide for us this day as thou has hitherto daily done. Forgive us our trespasses, and enable us likewise to forgive those that offend us. Keep us out of temptation, and deliver us from evil.
Franklin glossed his revision with arguments literary, historical, and theological. “Heavenly Father” replaced “Our Father which art in heaven” because the former was “more concise, equally expressive, and better modern English.” “Lead us not into temptation” gave way to “Keep us out of temptation” because the former reflected an outdated view of the relationship of God to man. “The Jews had a notion that God sometimes tempted, or directed or permitted the tempting of people. Thus it was said he tempted Pharoah; directed Satan to tempt Job; and a false prophet to tempt Ahab; &c. Under this persuasion it was natural for them to pray that he would not put them to such severe trials. We now suppose that temptation, so far as it is supernatural, comes from the Devil only.” To blame God for temptation was unworthy of Him.
Among his other distractions, Franklin continued to pursue his land schemes. His modest success in Nova Scotia having whetted his appetite, he looked again to the far greater rewards to be anticipated in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Compared to cold Nova Scotia, the heartland of the continent was warm and welcoming; the one essential thing that prevented settlement there was the presence of Indian tribes unreconciled to the loss of their ancestral lands (or, in some cases, lands they had taken from other tribes’ ancestors). This military barrier was what had prompted the legal barrier thrown up by the Proclamation of 1763; it seemed fair to assume that should the first be removed, the second would fall in turn. Indeed, the government in London had indicated a readiness to move the Proclamation Line west should a settlement be reached with the Indians.
Just such a settlement took tentative place in the autumn of 1768. At Fort Stanwix, on the New York frontier, governors William Johnson of New York and William Franklin of New Jersey met with some three thousand Indians to negotiate a treaty and the sale of lands to the English. The transaction was complicated—but very promising for William Franklin, who attended both as the representative of his province and as a personal empire-builder. He and some partners from New Jersey purchased 30,000 acres in Albany County, New York. With another group he acquired rights to a separate 100,000 acres. And he helped supervise the transfer of 1.8 million acres to a motley collection of hopefuls calling themselves the “Suffering Traders”—the principal suffering of whom consisted of so-far-disappointed dreams of vast wealth. The whole arrangement was tied to the treaty between the representatives of the Indians and the British Crown; approval of the treaty would signify approval of the land sales.
William Franklin knew just the man for help getting the treaty approved, and his father, shortly apprised of the details and invited to join in the prospective rewards, was more than happy to oblige. In the spring of 1769 Franklin met with two of the Suffering Traders (whose suffering seemed materially diminished by the Fort Stanwix deal) to plot political strategy. Franklin fully realized by now that nothing passed through the British government on its merits; what counted was friends. He advised the Traders to broaden their partnership to include individuals influential at court and in Parliament. With such sponsorship their project stood a chance of approval; without it, none.
Among those added to the list, the most prominent were Thomas and Richard Walpole, nephews of the great Robert Walpole; and Thomas Pitt, nephew of Chatham. In honor of the Walpoles, the bruited partnership became known as the Walpole Company colloquially, although officially it was denominated the Grand Ohio Company. Upon reconsideration of the politics and economics of the project, Franklin and the others proposed to petition the Crown for the right to purchase 2.4 million acres in the territory included under the terms of the Fort Stanwix treaty; the land would be divided into 60 shares of 40,000 acres each, which would be distributed among the participants or sold to additional partners.
Franklin took it upon himself to find those additional partners. He started at the top, or as close as seemed feasible. He approached Grey Cooper, Grafton’s deputy at the Treasury, with an appeal to profit and posterity. “An application being about to be made for a grant of lands in the territory on the Ohio lately purchased of the Indians,” Franklin wrote Cooper, “I cannot omit acquainting you with it and giving you my opinion that they will very soon be settled by people from the neighbouring provinces, and be of great advantage in a few years to the undertakers.” Franklin had met Cooper’s children. “I wish for their sakes you may incline to take this opportunity of making a considerable addition to their future fortunes.” The expense would be a “trifle”: £200 for 40,000 acres. He pressed to close the deal: “If therefore you will give me leave, I shall put your name down among us for a share.”
While Cooper considered the offer, Franklin pondered his own posterity, for even as he wrote this letter he was awaiting his first legitimate grandchild. Franklin had grown accustomed to the marriage of Sally to Richard Bache—but slowly. For many months he refused to answer Bache’s letters; when he finally got around to writing back he explained that in light of Bache’s financial problems he had considered the marriage “very rash and precipitate.” “I could not therefore but be dissatisfied with it, and displeased with you whom I looked upon as an instrument of bringing future unhappiness upon my child.” In this frame of mind he had deliberately not written. “I could say nothing agreeable; I did not choose to write what I thought, being unwilling to give pain where I could not give pleasure.” But his anger had subsided. “Time has made me easier.” He now chose to be encouraged by reports of improving prospects in the Bache business and urged his son-in-law to industrious application, whereby past losses might be retrieved. “I can only add at present that my best wishes attend you, and that if you prove a good husband and son, you will find in me an affectionate father.”
A happy marriage for his daughter mattered more to Franklin the older he got, for he suspected he would not live much longer. A letter to Debbie written two weeks before his sixty-third birthday—a letter in which he expressed pleasure that Debbie found much to approve of in Bache—contained an assessment of Franklin’s physical condition and his expectations regarding the future. He suffered a “touch of the gout” but otherwise was in good health. Yet he did not flatter himself that he would live to a great age. “I know that men of my bulk often fail suddenly; I know that according to the course of nature I cannot at most continue much longer, and that the living of even another day is uncertain. I therefore now form no scheme but such as are of immediate execution.”
Yet grandchildren held out the prospect of immortality, after an earthly fashion. Franklin had one grandchild already, of course: William’s son, Temple. What inheritance the child might claim was problematic; as yet even his father did not acknowledge him. Temple was six at the beginning of 1769, and that January, William suggested a roundabout way of bringing the boy into the family. Franklin talked of returning to America come spring; could he bring Temple along? “He might then take his proper name and be introduced as the son of a poor relation, for whom I stood godfather and intended to bring up as my own.”
That situation would have to sort itself out; before it did, Sally brought into the world a grandchild the family could openly delight in. Even William, who might have been expected to have at least mildly mixed feelings about his half sister’s child, registered pleasure in “my little nephew,” as he wrote in introducing Benjamin Franklin Bache to his grandfather. “He is not so fat and lusty as some children at his time are, but he is altogether a pretty little fellow, and improves in his looks every day.” The boy’s grandmother told her husband, “Every body says he is much like you.”
Franklin had to take Debbie’s word on the subject. Although he constantly talked about returning home—especially in letters to her—he stayed in London. The marriage of his daughter did not bring him home, nor the arrival of his grandson.
Not even a serious illness in Debbie drew him back across the Atlantic. During the winter of 1768–69 Debbie suffered a stroke that slurred her speech and erased her memory. Although she recovered somewhat, in June 1769 a Philadelphia doctor friend, Thomas Bond, wrote Franklin that “her constitution in general appears impaired.” Bond added, “These are bad symptoms in advanced life and augur danger of further injury on the nervous system.”
Debbie’s affliction was evident in her letters to Franklin. Spelling and punctuation had always given her trouble, but now the very meaning of her sentences strayed and circled back upon itself. In her words on the pages before him, Franklin could trace her decline.
Yet he did not go home. In fairness, there was nothing he could have done at home to alleviate her condition. She would get better, God willing, or she would not, God unwilling. It was out of human hands.
All the same, had he been looking for a reason to leave London, this was more than he needed. His allies in the Pennsylvania Assembly would have understood, as would his friends in England. No one would have accused him of abandoning his post.
But he was not looking for a reason to go home; he was looking for reasons to stay. And he did not have to look far. He hoped to win approval of the land schemes he and William had been pushing; success was hardly assured, but it appeared more likely than ever. Yet success was a delicate flower that required constant cultivation, especially in the demanding environment of political London; to leave now would jeopardize years of work and dreams. The possibility of a choice appointment to government remained a tantalizing possibility. Franklin eschewed ambition, but for the runaway from Boston to culminate his career in a distinguished position in the imperial capital would be most satisfying. As Poor Richard might have said, plums don’t fall far from the tree; for Franklin to depart London would eliminate any chance of his catching one.
Both the land scheme and the possibility of an appointment depended on the larger and overriding issue of the day—overriding at least for a colonial agent. The elections in England had temporarily eclipsed the question of the nature and fate of relations between the American colonies and the motherland. But the new Parliament would soon be sitting, and it would certainly take up the colonial question.
As before, Franklin did what he could to influence Parliament’s thinking. He wrote letters to London papers urging conciliation and warning against the opposite. In one such letter he recalled the revolt of the United Provinces of the Netherlands against Spanish rule, a conflict that lasted eighty years and ruined the Spanish empire. British soldiers might justly judge themselves braver and more competent than their Spanish counterparts, Franklin conceded (again anonymously), but a war against America would place them in unusually unfavorable circumstances. “It is well known that America is a country full of forests, mountains, &c. That in such a country a small irregular force can give abundance of trouble to a regular one that is much greater.” In the late war against France, Canada held out for five years against 25,000 British regulars and a like number of American troops. Canada, now British, was far from the strongest of the fifteen American colonies; a war against all fifteen, with those colonial troops now in opposition, would take—by Franklin’s half-spurious, half-serious arithmetic—fifteen times as long, or seventy-five years.
In another published piece he vigorously disavowed an intention often imputed to the Americans: to gain independence. “Allow me to tell you that you are certainly mistaken,” he replied to a journal’s letter-writer who had described the colonies as harboring advocates of independence, “and that there is not a single wish in the colonies to be free from subjection to their amiable sovereign, the King of Great Britain.” This contribution was only slightly pseudonymous, as anyone who thought twice about the name of the author, “Francis Lynn,” might have recognized.
In another instance he posed as a Frenchman. France was in the process of subduing a rebellion in Corsica and was coming under considerable criticism in England for doing so. “You English consider us French as enemies to liberty,” Franklin covertly wrote. “How easy it is for men to see the faults of others while blind to their own.” Corsicans had never enriched France by their labor and commerce, had never fought side by side with Frenchmen in war, had never loved and honored France, were not the very children of France. “But all this your American colonists have been and are to you! Yet at this very moment, while you are abusing us for attempting to reduce the Corsicans, you yourselves are about to make slaves of a much greater number of those British Americans.” What did the British know about liberty? “All the liberty you seem to value is the liberty of abusing your superiors, and of tyrannizing over those below you.”
Franklin supplemented his public—if often disguised—campaign with private letters devoted to preventing the situation in America from escalating beyond control. Boston seemed the likeliest location of trouble. In October 1768, British troops had been landed at Boston to suppress incipient sedition, which Governor Francis Bernard detected in the Massachusetts assembly, in the streets of the city, and in the writings of Samuel Adams and others. Franklin feared the worst. “I am under continued apprehensions that we may have bad news from America,” he wrote to George Whitefield. “The sending soldiers to Boston always appeared to me a dangerous step; they could do no good, they might occasion mischief.” The colonists considered themselves injured and oppressed; the soldiers were as insolent as young men under arms usually were. “I cannot but fear the consequences of bringing them together. It seems like setting up a smith’s forge in a magazine of gunpowder.”
(In this letter to the great evangelist, Franklin continued their theological debate of thirty years. “I see with you that our affairs are not well managed by our rulers here below; I wish I could believe with you that they are well attended to by those above.” But he could not. “I rather suspect, from certain circumstances, that though the general government of the universe is well administered, our particular little affairs are perhaps below notice, and left to take the chance of human prudence or imprudence, as either may happen to be uppermost.”)
After the new Parliament met and failed to repeal the Townshend acts, refusing even to entertain American petitions against them, Franklin wrote to friends in Boston, pleading patience. From his youth he knew the sort of roughnecks who roamed from the North End to the South End and back; they must not be given their heads. Rather Boston—and the other colonies—should stick to their peaceful nonimportation agreements as the antidote to the Townshend acts. Parliament appeared fixed in its determination not to repeal the acts. “I hope my country-folks will remain as fixed in their resolutions of industry and frugality till those acts are repealed,” Franklin wrote Samuel Cooper, a Boston minister who subsequently circulated Franklin’s views. Parliament underestimated the Americans, Franklin said. “They flatter themselves that you cannot long subsist without their manufactures; they believe that you have not virtue enough to persist in such agreements; they imagine the colonies will differ among themselves, deceive and desert one another, and quietly one after the other submit to the yoke and return to the use of British fineries.” Franklin said he had told his British acquaintances otherwise; he hoped his American friends would not prove him wrong.
Franklin laid the blame directly, and exclusively, at the door of Parliament. The people of Britain were not at fault, being of “a noble and generous nature.” “We have many, very many friends among them,” Franklin told Cooper. Still less was King George responsible for America’s woes. “I can scarcely conceive a King of better disposition, of more exemplary virtues, or more truly desirous of promoting the welfare of all his subjects.” Parliament was quite another matter. “Though I might excuse that which made the acts [that is, the previous Parliament] as being surprised and misled into the measure, I know not how to excuse this, which under the fullest conviction of its being a wrong one, resolves to continue it.” Even American opponents of the Townshend acts diplomatically referred to the “wisdom and justice” of Parliament; Franklin remarked, “If this new Parliament had really been wise it would not have refused even to read a petition against the Acts; and if it had been just it would have repealed them and refunded the money.”
Nor could Franklin honestly hope for much better. Though sentiment existed in Parliament for repeal—out of mercantile self-interest, as after the Stamp Act, rather than any love for the Americans—the government could not muster the will or energy to move. On this point Franklin had to agree with Grenville, who from the opposite vantage point likened the present ministry to two inexperienced sailors. The pair found themselves up in the round top, knowing nothing of what they were supposed to be about, so they simply pretended to keep busy. “What are you doing there, Jack?” cried the boatswain (in Franklin’s retelling of Grenville’s story). “Nothing,” replied Jack. “And, pray, what are you about, Tom?” the boatswain asked the other. “I,” answered Tom, “am helping him.”
With such in charge, the future was clouded at best. “It is very uncertain as yet what turn American affairs will take here,” Franklin told William in October 1769. “The friends of both countries wish a reconciliation; the enemies of either endeavour to widen the breach. God knows how it will end.”