19
In March 1770 the spark from the forge Franklin had spoken of hit the gunpowder of the magazine.
Boston’s winter had everyone in the city on edge. The cold white blanket that covered the streets and the Common had long lost the charm of first snowfall; the icicles that hung from each eave and had once seemed picturesque now simply threatened the crania of passersby. Yet such was true every winter; what made this winter worse was that to the insults of nature were added those of Parliament. Boston was a town under siege. British soldiers patrolled the streets; British warships were anchored in the harbor. The soldiers had little to do, and less money to do it with; to supplement both deficiencies they sought casual work.
This annoyed unskilled Bostonians who themselves wanted work and needed it more than the soldiers did. Both groups were young, male, physically inclined, and prone to spend what little cash they did command drinking rum in the town’s taverns. To some, brawling was the intended climax of an evening out; to others simply a satisfactory alternative when loose women were in short supply—as they usually were to men short of money.
Had the young bucks been left to themselves, the brawling might have produced broken heads, the odd bitten ear, and little more, but upon their rowdy shoulders was placed the burden of the escalating imperial conflict. The most vocal elements of Boston’s popular political class—Sam Adams, James Otis, and the Sons of Liberty—seized every opportunity to attack the Parliament that had sent the young men in red uniforms to keep such as Adams, Otis, and the Sons in line. Boston papers related, and in some cases created, lurid stories of insults and atrocities inflicted upon the innocent people of the city by the mercenaries camped in their midst. Townsmen tried to sap said mercenaries’ morale by enticing them to desertion, which the British officers combated by floggings and, in one exemplary instance, execution.
The tension turned Boston upon itself. A merchant accused of violating the nonimportation pact was branded an enemy of the people; a shouting crowd of young men and boys put up a sign—IMPORTER—outside his shop. A neighbor, Ebenezer Richardson, came to his friend’s defense and tore down the sign. The crowd turned on Richardson, who himself labored under the radicals’ suspicion (one of them called him “the most abandoned wretch in America”). Richardson was cornered in his house; a radical challenged him, above the tumult: “Come out, you damn son of a bitch. I’ll have your heart out, your liver out!” Rocks through Richardson’s windows punctuated the challenge.
Richardson had seen what happened to Thomas Hutchinson’s house, and though his was hardly so elegant, it was home, and he aimed to defend it. He emerged with a shotgun; when the crowd continued to taunt and threaten, he unleashed a load of swan shot. A boy of eleven named Christopher Seider was killed by the discharge; another lad was wounded. This sobered some in the crowd but inflamed others; while Richardson paused to reload, the latter group engulfed him and might well have torn him limb from limb had not one of their number, a well known Son of Liberty, insisted that he receive a trial before being executed.
Richardson was a Bostonian, not a British soldier, but the killing of the Seider boy was blamed upon the British policies the soldiers represented. And the boy’s funeral became an occasion for display of popular fury at the condition of servitude to which Parliament appeared bent on subjecting Boston. For the next two weeks tempers in the taverns and on the streets grew shorter. A patriot ropemaker provoked a fight by asking a soldier if he wanted work; when the soldier said he did, the hemp man told him what he might do: “Clean my shithouse.”
On the night of March 5 a feisty apprentice mocked a British officer on King Street. A British private named Hugh White, who happened to be standing nearby, struck the apprentice for his insolence. The young man shouted for help, which appeared as if from nowhere. In the middle distance, church bells began ringing, as they did for a fire. Hundreds of men and women answered the call—but suspiciously armed. “It is very odd to come to put out a fire with sticks and bludgeons,” an observer remarked.
As the crowd surged, the captain of the British guard mobilized his men to rescue Private White. Muskets at the ready, with bayonets fixed, the small company thrust its way through the shouting throng to White. But the crowd closed in behind, and instead of one hostage it now held nine. Curses, oaths, snowballs, and chunks of jagged ice rained down upon the soldiers; in the semi-glow of moonlight (Boston’s byways lacked streetlamps) the soldiers credibly feared for their lives. The crowd bayed for blood—at times not seeming to care whose. “Damn you, you sons of bitches, fire!” taunted one radical. “You can’t kill us all!”
An especially vicious frozen missile struck another private, Hugh Montgomery. The young man staggered, slipped, and went down. In response—on orders or otherwise: the question became the focus of bitter and ultimately unresolved controversy—soldiers fired. At point-blank range the balls could only be lethal. Three of the crowd were killed at once; two more died later; half a dozen were wounded but survived.
“Horrid Massacre” was how Sam Adams styled the affair. “Bloody Massacre” was the headline of the Paul Revere print that soon began circulating. “Boston Massacre” was the message that echoed down the American seaboard, and across the Atlantic to where Franklin was expecting word of some such tragedy.
“Those detestable murderers,” Franklin called the soldiers. Although anticipated, the violence at Boston still came as a shock. The killings demonstrated more graphically than anything yet the stakes in the struggle between the American colonies and the British government. The contest was about constitutionalism, but it was also about people’s lives—and their deaths.
Until 1770 Franklin had often chosen to blur the issues between America and Britain, hoping reasonableness might soften reason and allow both sides to live with a solution imperfect on strictly logical grounds. The Boston Massacre and the events surrounding it forced him to focus, to think very carefully about what an acceptable ultimate outcome might be. Ironically—and figuratively—they also drove him back to Boston, the city he had fled in his own personal rebellion half a century earlier.
Ironies abounded that season. On the very day of the Boston Massacre, a new prime minister in London (Chatham having finally resigned due to his illness) laid before Parliament a bill repealing nearly all the Townshend duties. As Rockingham had done after the Stamp Act, Lord North distanced himself from what he considered the failed policies of his predecessors; but, also like Rockingham, he had to take account of the sentiment in Parliament that could not abide capitulation to the colonists. Rockingham had appeased the Grenvillites with the Declaratory Act; North employed the device of lifting all the Townshend taxes but one—the tax on tea. In a separate but related decision, the Quartering Act was allowed to expire.
Getting the news of this change of course across the Atlantic took several weeks; by the time Boston learned that Parliament had backed most of the way down, the hot anger over the killings had hardened into cold hatred of Parliament and all its works. What many Bostonians noticed was not the taxes that were repealed but the tax that remained, not the olive branch the new ministry was holding out but the club that branch could quickly become.
In the month between the creation of the North ministry and the decision for partial repeal, Franklin had done his best to discredit such a half measure, hoping to steel the resolve of the repealers to be through with the duties entirely. “The Grenvillenians, who have done all this mischief, would terrify us (in case of a repeal) with the apprehensions of imaginary future demands from the Americans,” he wrote in the Gazetteer, over the signature “Another Merchant.” This was silly; the Americans wanted nothing more than to have restored the rights they enjoyed “before these new-fangled projects took place.” The idea of partial repeal brought to mind a story:
A collector on the King’s highway, who had rifled the passengers in a stage coach, desirous to shew his great civility, returned to one a family seal, to another a dear friend’s mourning ring, which encouraged a third to ask a watch that had been his grandmother’s?
“Zounds,” says he, “have you no conscience? Presently you will all expect your money again! A pack of unreasonable dogs and b—s; I have a great mind to blow your brains out.”
Such was the proper pose when complete repeal remained possible, yet it was more than a pose, for Franklin continued to hold it after partial repeal occurred. In late March, Franklin had not yet heard of the killings at Boston, but the debate over repeal had convinced him that if the colonies held firm they might complete the job they had started. North and his supporters would have been happy to have dumped the Townshend duties completely, Franklin inferred. Yet a faction surrounding the Duke of Bedford resisted any such thing. “This party never speak of us but with evident malice,” Franklin related to a Philadelphia friend, Charles Thomson. “Rebels and traitors are the best names they can afford us, and I believe they only wish for a colourable pretence and occasion of ordering the soldiers to make a massacre among us.”
By themselves the Bedfordites lacked the power to block repeal; what had briefly tipped the balance to their side were reports from America that the nonimportation pacts were fragmenting. Since then, however, the merchants of Britain had received material proof that nonimportation was alive and well. A ship had sailed all the way from Bristol to Boston with nails and glass, items thought to be of utmost necessity in America; finding no buyers for its cargo, it had sailed all the way back, to the serious financial embarrassment of its owners. Ten merchant captains from New York had held their vessels in harbor in England, hoping for repeal; on learning that the tea tax would remain, they sailed off, bearing only ballast. British manufacturers lost ten cargoes in the bargain.
“The tone of the manufacturers begins to change,” Franklin reported, “and there is no doubt that if we are steady and persevere in our resolutions, these people will soon begin a clamour that much pains has hitherto been used to stifle.” Nonimportation was working; it must not be abandoned. “In short, it appears to me that if we do not now persist in this measure till it has had its full effect, it can never again be used on any future occasion with the least prospect of success; and that if we do persist another year, we shall never afterwards have occasion to use it.”
In a letter to Joseph Galloway, Franklin amplified his argument. “I am assured that the manufacturers cannot another year be kept quiet by all the artifices of our adversaries, as they begin now seriously to feel the effects of their late credulity.” He elaborated his earlier contention that the self-denial of nonimportation would strengthen American virtue, to Americans’ lasting benefit.
This stoppage in the trade, if it should continue longer, will have this good effect among us, to assist several new manufactures in striking root so as afterwards to support themselves in a flourishing condition. Great sums of money too, for our produce, will come into the country and remain there to the improvement of our estates and increase of their value; so that though a few traders may be hurt at present, not having English goods in such quantities as heretofore to sell, yet in a little time those who cannot turn to other businesses will have their shops and stores replenished with our own commodities; while their customers, grown richer by industry and frugality, though they do not buy so much, will be enabled to make better pay for what they do buy.
For decades, since long before the current controversy over taxes and duties, the American colonies had been economically dependent on English merchants due to the buying habits of the colonists. They would remain dependent long after the repeal of the last Townshend duty, unless those buying habits changed. The current crisis was a challenge, but equally an opportunity—for Americans to take control of their fate.
Americans must seize the opportunity, for it might not return. The recent scandalous events in England presaged more, and worse. “The public affairs of this nation are at present in great disorder,” Franklin told Galloway. “Parties run very high, and have abused each other so thoroughly that there is not now left an unbespattered character in the kingdom of any note or importance; and they have so exposed one another’s roguery and rapacity that the respect for superiors, trust in Parliament, and regard to Government, is among the generality of the people totally lost.”
For many months Franklin had labored under a cloud in the minds of observers on both sides of the Atlantic. Radicals in America observed his continuance as deputy postmaster and assumed he therefore was a creature of the ministers who could have snatched that office away. As father of the royal governor of New Jersey he incurred additional doubts. On the other hand, proponents in England (and, less numerously and vocally, in America) of Parliamentary supremacy read or heard of his testimony to Parliament, encountered his views personally, or divined his authorship (which was no deep secret in any event) of numerous pieces defending the American colonies, and concluded that he was one of the radicals himself, or close to it.
Franklin recognized the betwixt-and-betweenness of his predicament. “Being born and bred in one of the countries, and having lived long, and made many agreeable connections of friendship in the other, I wish all prosperity to both,” he remarked in a letter printed, with his authentic name, in the Gentleman’s Magazine. But despite his best efforts he was making little headway in bringing the two countries together. “I do not find that I have gained any point in either country, except that of rendering myself suspected by my impartiality: in England of being too much an American, and in America of being too much an Englishman.”
The Boston Massacre, the fight for repeal of the Townshend duties, and Franklin’s stout endorsement of continued nonimportation cleared up much of the confusion surrounding where he stood. Those parties in America rejecting Parliamentary authority over the colonies embraced him happily. Joseph Galloway wrote from Philadelphia with congratulations for what had been accomplished and assurances regarding what remained. “I am much obliged to you for the state of American affairs on your side the water,” said Galloway, speaking for his allies in the Assembly as well. “The Ministry are much mistaken in imagining that there will ever be an union either of affections or interest between Great Britain and America until justice is done to the latter and there is a full restoration of its liberties.”
The reaction in Boston was still more striking. From the passage of the Stamp Act until almost the present, Franklin’s friends in that hotbed of protest had had to apologize for or explain away his search for a middle ground. Jane Mecom regularly wrote wondering whether the unflattering things her neighbors were saying about her brother could possibly be true.
But now, with his ringing endorsement of continued nonimportation, he became something of a hero. His letter to Charles Thomson in Philadelphia, in which he had essentially accused the Bedford group of provoking the Boston Massacre, was quickly forwarded to Boston and published there, placing him in the ranks of the most radical.
Sam Adams thereupon drafted a letter, signed by other members of a committee of the town meeting, appealing to Franklin as one of “our friends on your side the water” to help ensure that the true circumstances of the late crime at Boston not be muddied by the enemies of American liberty. Shortly thereafter the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted to make Franklin that body’s agent in England. The resolution offering him the post registered considerable confidence in his abilities and bona fides, describing the House as “entirely relying on his vigilance and the exertion of his utmost endeavours to support the constitutional rights of this House and of the Province.” A following letter, signed by House speaker Thomas Cushing, explained that the House “greatly confided” in Franklin’s abilities and asserted assuredly that “your own acquaintance with this Province, and your well known warm attachment to it, will lead you to exert all your powers in its defence.”
Franklin appreciated that accepting the Massachusetts offer would render him still more suspect in the eyes of many in England. In the months after the Boston Massacre, and as his support for continued nonimportation echoed back across the Atlantic to London, his position in the post office came under regular attack. He resented the attacks, both because they impugned his performance as postmaster and because they revealed (to him, if not to his attackers) an unconstitutional animus to the rights of Americans.
“I have enemies, as every public man has,” he explained to Postmaster General Lord Le Despencer, his superior, by way of attempting to neutralize those enemies. “They would be glad to see me deprived of my office; and there are others who would like to have it.” Yet they should not be suffered to do so. Besides the money—£300 per year, which if lost “would make a very serious difference in my annual income”—there were principles involved. “I rose to that office gradually through a long service of now almost forty years, have by my industry and management greatly improved it, and have ever acted in it with fidelity to the satisfaction of all my superiors.” Moreover, a British subject should be able to speak his mind on public matters. “I hope my political opinions, or my dislike of the late measures with America (which I own I think very injudicious) expressed in my letters to that country, or the advice I gave to adhere to their resolutions till the whole Act was repealed, without extending their demands any farther, will not be thought a good reason for turning me out.” Franklin persuaded Le Despencer not to sack him; whatever the postmaster general’s opinion of Franklin’s politics, he appreciated the efficiencies Franklin had brought to the delivery of the mail, and he knew Franklin could not easily be replaced. This did not silence Franklin’s critics, however; they simply modified their tactics and opened a campaign to force him to resign.
“In this they are not likely to succeed, I being deficient in that Christian virtue of resignation,” he told Jane Mecom. “If they would have my office, they must take it.” He went on to summarize a philosophy of public service that forever became attached to his name. “I have heard of some great man, whose rule it was with regard to offices, Never to ask for them, and never to refuse them. To which I have always added in my own practice, Never to resign them.”
The Massachusetts agency cost him more trouble than he could have imagined. In the first place, as he learned only after the fact, his appointment was by no means unanimous. Sam Adams still suspected him of closet Anglophilia; Adams and James Otis had sponsored instead the candidacy of Arthur Lee, a physician currently studying law in London. Although Speaker Cushing and a majority of the House of Representatives voted for Franklin, Adams and Otis won approval of Lee as an alternate in case Franklin declined the agency or was otherwise unavailable.
More vexing was the opposition of Lord Hillsborough. When Hillsborough had assumed the new post of secretary of state for (all) the American colonies, Franklin at first expressed guarded optimism. “I do not think this nobleman in general an enemy to America,” he told Galloway. Six months later, in July 1768, Franklin added, “His inclinations are rather favourable towards us (so far as he thinks consistent with what he supposes to be the unquestionable rights of Britain).”
But that qualification proved critical. Hillsborough brooked nothing that hinted of sedition or even obstruction of the smooth administering of the colonies. He had ordered the Massachusetts House of Representatives to rescind its appeal to the other colonies for common action against the Townshend acts, and when Adams and the others refused, he sent the troops ashore in Boston.
In matters relating to Franklin personally, Hillsborough had proved something of a puzzle. Like Grafton he early dropped hints of an appointment for Franklin as undersecretary, but these came to no more than Grafton’s had (or would). He opposed the land schemes of the Franklins and their partners until a critical hearing in December 1769, when he suddenly told them that far from asking too much, they were asking far too little. Surprised, Franklin and the others redrew their maps of the Ohio Valley and, instead of asking for 2.4 million acres, requested 20 million. But rather than back this new proposal, Hillsborough let it disappear into the maw of the British bureaucracy, leading Franklin to surmise that Hillsborough had lent his weight to the project the better to sink it.
At the beginning of 1771 the Hillsborough puzzle acquired a new piece. Franklin visited Hillsborough’s house for what he thought would be a routine presentation of his credentials as the agent for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. At first he was put off and told to try later, but as his coach drove away, the porter called out, saying that his lordship could see him after all. Franklin entered the secretary’s quarters, only to encounter Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts, the most outspoken critic of the Massachusetts House, and various other gentlemen. Franklin settled into a chair for what he assumed would be a substantial wait. But after just minutes Hillsborough’s assistant summoned Franklin ahead of the others.
“I was pleased with this ready admission and preference (having sometimes waited 3 or 4 hours for my turn),” Franklin recorded; “and being pleased, I could more readily put on the open cheerful countenance that my friends advised me to wear.”
Hillsborough initially reciprocated the cheer. He had been dressing to go to court, he said, but on learning that Franklin had arrived, desired to see him at once.
Franklin thanked the secretary and explained that he would not delay him. He merely wished to inform him of his recent appointment by the Massachusetts House, and to say that he hoped to be of service to the public in this capacity.
Hillsborough did not let him finish this sentence. With what Franklin identified as “something between a smile and a sneer,” he interjected, “I must set you right there, Mr. Franklin. You are not agent.”
“Why, my lord?” responded Franklin.
“You are not appointed.”
“I do not understand your lordship. I have the appointment in my pocket.”
“You are mistaken. I have later and better advices. I have a letter from [Lieutenant] Governor Hutchinson. He would not give his assent to the bill.”
“There was no bill, my lord. It is a vote of the House.”
“There was a bill presented to the Governor, for the purpose of appointing you, and another, one Dr. Lee, I think he is called, to which the Governor refused his assent.”
“I cannot understand this, my lord. I think there must be some mistake in it. Is your lordship quite sure that you have such a letter?”
“I will convince you of it directly.” Hillsborough rang a bell. “Mr. Pownall will come in and satisfy you.”
“It is not necessary that I should now detain your lordship from dressing. You are going to court. I will wait on your lordship another time.”
“No, stay. He will come in immediately.” Hillsborough motioned to a servant. “Tell Mr. Pownall I want him.”
Pownall arrived. Hillsborough addressed him: “Have you not at hand Governor Hutchinson’s letter mentioning his refusing his assent to the bill for appointing Dr. Franklin agent?”
Pownall answered, “My lord?”
Hillsborough: “Is there not such a letter?”
Pownall: “No, my lord.”
Hillsborough was annoyed at being shown wrong, but he was more annoyed at the Massachusetts House for presuming to appoint an agent without the concurrence of the governor. This, of course, was common practice; Franklin’s appointment from Pennsylvania had not, needless to say, elicited the approval of the Penns’ governor. But as part of the overall effort to tighten the administration of the colonies, Hillsborough was determined to put an end to it.
“The House of Representatives has no right to appoint an agent,” he told Franklin angrily. “We shall take no notice of any agents but such as are appointed by acts of assembly to which the governor gives his assent. We have had confusion enough already.”
Franklin challenged this novelty. “I cannot conceive, my lord, why the consent of the governor should be thought necessary to the appointment of an agent for the people. It seems to me that—”
Hillsborough’s visage assumed what appeared to Franklin “a mixed look of anger and contempt.” He snapped, “I shall not enter into a dispute with you, sir, upon this subject.”
Franklin persisted. “I beg your lordship’s pardon. I do not presume to dispute with your lordship”—though of course both men realized this was precisely what he was doing. “I would only say that it seems to me that every body of men, who cannot appear in person where business relating to them may be transacted, should have a right to appear by an agent. The concurrence of the governor does not seem to me necessary. It is the business of the people that is to be done. He [the Governor] is not one of them; he is himself an agent.”
“Whose agent is he?” demanded Hillsborough.
“The king’s, my lord.”
Hillsborough dismissed this. “Besides,” he added, “this proceeding is directly contrary to express instructions.”
“I did not know there had been such instructions. I am not concerned in any offence against them.”
“Yes, your offering such a paper [the copy of the House vote, which Franklin had handed Hillsborough upon entering] to be entered is an offence against them. No such appointment shall be entered.”
Hillsborough then launched into a diatribe. “When I came into the administration of American affairs, I found them in great disorder. By my firmness they are now something mended; and while I have the honour to hold the seals, I shall continue the same conduct, the same firmness. I think my duty to the master I serve and to the government of this nation require it of me. If that conduct is not approved, they may take my office from me when they please. I shall make ’em a bow, and thank ’em. I shall resign with pleasure. That gentleman knows it”—here he pointed to Pownall. “But while I continue in it, I shall resolutely persevere in the same firmness.”
Franklin recorded that at this point Hillsborough was “turning pale in his discourse, as if he was angry at something or somebody besides the agent, and of more importance.”
By Franklin’s telling, the agent had the last word. “I beg your lordship’s pardon for taking up so much of your time. It is, I believe, of no great importance whether the appointment is acknowledged or not, for I have not the least conception that an agent can at present be of any use, to any of the colonies. I shall therefore give your lordship no farther trouble.”
“I have since heard that his lordship took great offence at some of my last words, which he calls extremely rude and abusive,” Franklin confided to Samuel Cooper three weeks later. “He assured a friend of mine, they were equivalent to telling him to his face that the colonies could expect neither favour nor justice during his administration. I find he did not mistake me.”
Franklin rarely let emotion displace reasonableness, but after three years of trying to make Hillsborough and the rest of the ministry see reason in relations with the colonies, he had had his fill; and after the secretary of state declared that he would have nothing to do with Franklin, Franklin reciprocated. He had grown accustomed to mediocrities in positions of power, but this particular mediocrity at this particular moment was more than he could stand. “His character is conceit, wrongheadedness, obstinacy and passion,” he told Cooper. “Those who would speak most favourably of him allow all this; they only add that he is an honest man, and means well. If that be true, as perhaps it may, I wish him a better place, where only honesty and well-meaning are required, and where his other qualities can do no harm.”
Perhaps on reflection Franklin considered that by alienating Hills-borough he was jeopardizing the interests of those he was representing (which by now included Georgia and New Jersey as well as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts). Yet Hillsborough had already taken great umbrage at Franklin’s writings on behalf of the colonies; there was really little to lose. In any event, Franklin was willing to pay the cost of his actions. “Whatever the consequences of his displeasure, putting all my offences together, I must bear them as well as I can.” Yet not everything was bleak. “One encouragement I have: the knowledge that he is not a whit better liked by his colleagues in the Ministry than he is by me, that he cannot probably continue where he is much longer, and that he can scarce be succeeded by anybody who will not like me the better for his having been at variance with me.”
Siding with Boston lost Franklin any lingering leverage with Hillsborough; it also forced him to hone his thinking on the nature of relations between Britain and America. Not long after leaving his stormy session with the secretary of state, Franklin received a letter from a committee of correspondence of the Massachusetts House, consisting of Thomas Cushing, Sam Adams, John Hancock, and John Adams. This letter laid out current conditions in the colonies and the present state of opinion there. The colonies, the committee said, “are justly tenacious of their constitutional and natural rights, and will never willingly part with them.” Nor could it be to the advantage of the British nation to steal them. “Great Britain can lose nothing that she ought to retain, by restoring the colonies to the state they were in before the passing the obnoxious Stamp-Act, and we are persuaded that if that is done they will no further contend.”
Franklin drew reassurance from this comparatively moderate statement and believed it might form the basis for reconciliation. “The doctrine of the right of Parliament to lay taxes on America is now almost generally given up here,” he replied to Cushing and the others, “and one seldom meets in conversation any who continue to assert it.”
If Franklin was speaking of the English public at large, he may have been right; if of the influential factions in Parliament, he overspoke—as his own letters had already revealed and as events would soon demonstrate. Yet he wished to make clear to the Boston men the position of those in England he considered the likeliest to seek reconciliation. “We ought to be contented, they say, with a forbearance of any attempt hereafter to exercise such a right; and this they would have us rely on as a certainty.” Not simply Parliamentary prestige but British dignity was at stake. The colonists could hardly expect the British government to honor demands that would subject it “to the contempt of all Europe.” In other words, if Americans could live with the reality of the status quo ante the Stamp Act (“Hints are also given that the duties now subsisting may be gradually withdrawn”), Parliament would settle for the principle underlying the Declaratory Act.
Even as he delineated this rationale, Franklin was not sure how far to trust it. Status quos had a way of congealing around whatever was not challenged. Regarding the duties said to be on the verge of repeal, such repeal could be assured only by continued pressure from America. “If by time we become so accustomed to these as to pay them without discontent, no minister will afterwards think of taking them off, but rather be encouraged to add others.” Franklin was far from advocating violence, but determination was indispensable. “I hope the colony assemblies will show, by frequently repeated resolves, that they know their rights, and do not lose sight of them.”
Obviously this counsel undercut the conciliatory scenario he sketched; at the same time it revealed Franklin’s increasing conviction that America was fundamentally distinct, and essentially independent of England. His conversation with Hillsborough had underscored the ministry’s view that the colonies were creatures of Parliament; only on this reasoning ought the ministry, acting through the colonial governors, to have any voice in the selection of the colonial agents.
By contrast, Franklin saw the agents almost as ambassadors, sent by the people of America to the British government. A correct understanding of the nature of the colonies vis-à-vis Britain would yield this conclusion as a corollary. “When they come to be considered in the light of distinct states, as I conceive they really are, possibly their agents may be treated with more respect, and considered more as public ministers.”
This was strong punch, which could hardly fail to provoke a fight with Britain if quaffed straight; in the months after his argument with Hillsborough, as his anger subsided, Franklin began to dilute it. Even after the repeal of most of the Townshend duties, the Massachusetts House protested the Crown’s policy of paying royal officials in America. Franklin understood the argument against the policy, having made it himself, but he was fairly certain most people in England did not, or did not credit the argument if they understood it. “It is looked on as a strange thing here to object to the King’s paying his own servants sent among us to do his business; and they say we should seem to have much more reason of complaint if it were required of us to pay them.” Indeed, because the American complaint on this count seemed so counterintuitive, many in England suspected the Americans of attempting to suborn the king’s servants and subvert his rule. Franklin advised against mounting a major campaign against this issue; better to protest it politely on occasion and continue to shun British imports.
Although Franklin’s anger had abated, his opinion of Hillsborough had not improved, and this low opinion was another reason for counseling restraint. The secretary of state for America was “proud, supercilious, extremely conceited (moderate as they are) of his political knowledge and abilities, fond of every one that can stoop to flatter him, and inimical to all that dare tell him disagreeable truths.” Hillsborough’s deficiencies were recognized by many in Britain; he could not long retain his office. Wisdom therefore cautioned against actions that might provoke other, more reasonable, souls to join the secretary in his “settled malice against the colonies, particularly ours [in this case, Massachusetts].”
Franklin gave greater credence than before to arguments from British honor. The latter half of 1770 had produced a crisis with Spain over the Falkland Islands; for months war impended. Such a war might well reopen the long struggle against France, with all that that struggle entailed. Although the war scare had considerably diminished by early 1771, it reminded Franklin of one reason he had been a British imperialist: that in the cruel world of nations, safety often resided in numbers. Accordingly he urged the Massachusetts men to consider “whether it will not be prudent for us to indulge the Mother Country in this concern for her own honour, so far as may be consistent with the preservation of our essential rights, especially as that honour may in some cases be of importance to the general welfare.”
He perceived two possible outcomes should the colonies push to a test of British authority. “If we are not found equal, that authority will by the event be more strongly established.” Needless to say, this would not conduce to the welfare of America. But neither, necessarily, would the other outcome. “If we should prove superior, yet by the division the general strength of the British nation must be greatly diminished.”
Although Franklin refrained from offering explicit advice to Massachusetts, his inclination was clear. He suggested that it would “be better gradually to wear off the assumed authority of Parliament over America” than to mount a direct challenge. Moreover, Americans should remember that Parliament was not the entire British government. “I wish to see a steady dutiful attachment to the King and his family maintained among us.”
Predictably, Franklin’s espousal of moderation failed to satisfy those holding more radical views. Arthur Lee disputed Franklin’s politics; he apparently also resented Franklin’s appointment as Massachusetts agent ahead of himself. From whatever amalgam of politics and pique, Lee launched a one-man campaign to discredit Franklin and undermine his influence.
Sam Adams presumably required little convincing, but Lee provided plenty. “I have read lately in your papers an assurance from Dr. Franklin that all designs against the charter of the colony are laid aside,” Lee wrote Adams from London. “This is just what I expected of him, and if it be true, the Dr. is not the dupe but the instrument of Lord Hillsborough’s treachery.” On sudden second thought, Lee dismissed the notion of Franklin as dupe, for “notorious as he [Hillsborough] is for ill faith and fraud, his duplicity would not impose on one possessed of half Dr. F.’s sagacity.” Whatever Franklin might write to the House of Representatives, his interests—and therefore his intentions—lay elsewhere. “The possession of a profitable office at will, the having a son in a high post at pleasure, the grand purpose of his residence here being to effect a change in the government of Pennsylvania, for which administration must be cultivated and courted, are circumstances which, joined with the temporising conduct he has always held in American affairs, preclude every rational hope that in an open contest between an oppressive administration and a free people, Dr. F. can be a faithful advocate for the latter.” Calling Franklin a “false friend,” Lee said he himself would gladly serve as Massachusetts’s agent for nothing “rather than you and America, at a time like this, should be betrayed by a man who, it is hardly in the nature of things to suppose, can be faithful to his trust.”
Doubtless Lee intended to damage Franklin with this letter. If so, he was disappointed. Adams, intentionally or otherwise, allowed an unsigned copy of the letter to reach Thomas Cushing, Franklin’s sponsor in the Massachusetts House. Cushing showed the letter to Samuel Cooper, who, on the basis of conversation with Cushing and others, assured his friend, “It will make no impression to your disadvantage, while it shows the baseness of its author.”
By this period Franklin’s summer travel had become a fixed habit, the closest thing to a religious practice in a man who observed no sectarian rituals. He was convinced that his annual escape from the smoke and congestion of London, combined with the stimulation of seeing new places, people, and things, was what kept him in the surprisingly good health he enjoyed for a sexagenarian. “I imagine I should have fallen to pieces long since but for that practice,” he told Joseph Galloway.
In 1771 his vacation was more extended than usual and came in multiple installments. At the end of May he toured the north of England, where the industrial revolution was well under way. The high point of the trip was a boat ride on a canal that crossed a river via an aqueduct, so that to travelers below, the canal boat appeared to be plying the sky. The low point—relative to topography—occurred on this same canal, at a place where it penetrated the earth far into a coal mine, from which that essential fuel was dug and loaded into canal boats and hauled to Manchester. Franklin saw an ironworks near Rotherham, which impressed him with the ingenuity of its design. “It appeared particularly odd,” wrote Jonathan Williams, one of Franklin’s fellow travelers, “to see a small river of liquid iron running from the furnace into the reservoir and from thence carried in ladles like hot broth.” At Derby they toured a silk works, of which Franklin, who was still promoting the production of silk in America, took special notice. A single powered shaft drove, via pulleys and belts, scores of smaller shafts, which culminated in thousands of reels. Much of the process was tended by children “of about 5 or 7 years old,” according to Williams. At Birmingham they saw the famous metal-works of Matthew Boulton. Seven hundred persons, including women and children, fabricated all manner of products, from farthing buttons to hundred-guinea ornaments. The noise, the pace of the process, and the sheer audacity of the undertaking were overwhelming. “It is almost impossible for the strongest memory to retain it,” wrote Williams.
Franklin’s next respite was more restful but also more productive. Jonathan Shipley was an Anglican bishop of the absentee sort: his see was in Wales, but he spent nearly all his time in London or at his country home at Twyford. He was a great admirer of Franklin and invited the American to visit Twyford. Franklin accepted with pleasure—the more so for the company of Mrs. Shipley and the couple’s five daughters. Perhaps their mere presence, or their inquiries about what life was like when he was a child, recalled to mind his early years; in any event it was at Twyford that summer that he began writing his memoirs. Although taking the form of a (very long) letter to William, it was obviously intended for publication, for Franklin wrote on large folio sheets, leaving one vertical half of each page blank for subsequent interpolations (which in fact he later provided). By subsequent tradition, he wrote during the day, then read his draftwork to the Shipley family in the evening.
He charmed them all, and they him. Kitty, the youngest, rode with him back to London, where she attended school. On the way they discussed suitable husbands for her sisters (a country squire for one, a merchant for another, a duke and an earl for the third and fourth). For Kitty herself? he asked. An old general, she said. “Hadn’t you better take him while he’s a young officer, and let him grow old upon your hands?” asked Franklin (as he related the conversation to Kitty’s mother). “No, that won’t do,” she replied. “He must be an old man of 70 or 80, and take me when I am about 30. And then you know I may be a rich young widow.”
For a final fling that summer of 1771, Franklin joined Richard Jackson for a tour of Ireland and Scotland. The condition of Ireland, which also stood in a colonial position to Britain, had long intrigued Franklin, and his interest only grew with the constitutional controversy between Britain and America. In theory Ireland provided an alternative model for American relations with Britain. Franklin, the essential empiricist, wished to measure theory against practice. He devised a set of questions to direct his observations. “Can the farmers find a ready market and a good living price for the produce of their lands? Or do they raise less than they might do, if the demand was greater and the price better? … Is Ireland much in debt to England or any foreign country for goods or merchandise consumed in it? … Is Ireland in general in a state of progressive improvement, or the contrary?”
The answers shocked him. “Ireland itself is a fine country,” he noted to Thomas Cushing, speaking of the land and climate; “and Dublin a magnificent city.” But that was as far as his compliments went. “The appearances of general extreme poverty among the lower people are amazing. They live in wretched hovels of mud and straw, are clothed in rags, and subsist chiefly on potatoes. Our New England farmers of the poorest sort, in regard to the enjoyment of all the comforts of life, are princes when compared to them.”
Why was this so? Not, apparently, because of some deficiency in the people (as the English liked to say); rather the arrangements of society prevented the improvement of the Irish people.
Such is the effect of the discouragements of industry, the non-residence not only of pensioners but of many original landlords who lease their lands in gross to undertakers that rack the tenants, and fleece them skin and all, to make estates to themselves, while the first rents, as well as most of the pensions, are spent out of the country.
An English gentleman there said to me, that by what he had heard of the good grazing in North America, and by what he saw of the plenty of flaxseed imported in Ireland from thence, he could not understand why we did not rival Ireland in the beef and butter trade to the West Indies, and share with it in its linen trade. But he was satisfied when I told him, that I supposed the reason might be, Our people eat beef and butter every day, and wear shirts themselves.
Conditions among the common people of Scotland were hardly better. Franklin and Jackson crossed over from Ireland during a lull between two hurricanes; the human devastation they saw in Scotland made hurricanes appear almost benign by contrast. And together with what Franklin had lately observed of the manufacturing regions of England, it confirmed his conviction of the superiority of the American mode of social organization.
I thought often of the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the manufactory perhaps of his own family. Long may they continue in this situation!
But if they should ever envy the trade of these countries, I can put them in a way to obtain a share of it. Let them with three-fourths of the people of Ireland live the year round on potatoes and butter milk, without shirts, then may their merchants export beef, butter and linen. Let them with the generality of the common people of Scotland go barefoot, then may they make large exports in shoes and stockings. And if they will be content to wear rags like the spinners and weavers of England, they may make cloths and stuffs for all parts of the world.
Farther, if my countrymen should ever wish for the honour of having among them a gentry enormously wealthy, let them sell their farms and pay racked rents; the scale of the landlords will rise as that of the tenants is depressed, who will soon become poor, tattered, dirty, and abject in spirit.
Had I never been in the American colonies, but was to form my judgment of civil society by what I have lately seen, I should never advise a nation of savages to admit of civilisation. For I assure you, that in the possession and enjoyment of the various comforts of life, compared to these people every Indian is a gentleman; and the effect of this kind of civil society seems only to be the depressing multitudes below the savage state that a few may be raised above it.
If Franklin’s observation of common life reinforced his patriotic feelings about America, so did his conversations with the better-off sort. The Irish parliament made a habit of allowing visiting members of the English parliament to sit among the Irish members; they accorded a similar privilege to Franklin as a distinguished representative of the American assemblies, reasoning that the American assemblies were English parliaments. “I esteemed it a mark of respect for our country,” he wrote Thomas Cushing. Franklin compared experiences with Irishmen who chafed under British rule as he and his American friends did. “They are all on the American side,” he informed Joseph Galloway.
In Edinburgh he stayed with David Hume, “in an elegant house in the new part of the city,” according to a visitor from Rhode Island, Henry Marchant. Franklin was in usual fine form. “We had a good dish of tete-a-tete,” Marchant remarked. “The Doctor was pleased to open very freely and to enter minutely into many matters—interesting as well as entertaining.” Hume could be prickly, as Franklin would discover, but on this visit host and guest enjoyed each other’s company. “The good wishes of all your Brother Philosophers in this place attend you heartily and sincerely,” Hume wrote Franklin afterward.
The encounter with Hume was a pleasure; another encounter was a puzzle. In Dublin, Franklin and Jackson chanced to meet Lord Hillsborough. Franklin expected a snub or worse from his foe, but received quite the opposite. “He was extremely civil,” Franklin related to William, “wonderfully so to me whom he had not long before abused to Mr. Strahan as a factious turbulent fellow, always in mischief, a republican, enemy to the king’s service, and what not.” Hillsborough engaged Franklin and Jackson in frank conversation and insisted they visit him at Hillsborough (the lord’s home).
“In my own mind I was determined not to go that way,” Franklin said. But the vagaries of travel made the town unavoidable, and so the man.
As soon as his Lordship knew we were arrived at the inn he sent a message over for us to come to his house. There we were detained by 1000 civilities from Tuesday to Sunday. He seemed extremely solicitous to give me and America through me a good opinion of him. In our first conversations he expressed himself as a good Irishman, censuring the English government for its narrowness with regard to Ireland, in restraining its commerce, manufactures, &c., and when I applied his observations to America, he agreed immediately that it was wrong to restrain our manufactures, that the subjects in every part of the King’s dominions had a natural right to make the best use they could of the production of their country….
His attentions to me in every circumstance of accommodation and entertainment were very particular, putting his own cloak about my shoulders when I went out, that I might not take cold, placing his eldest son, Lord Kilwarling, in his phaeton with me, to drive me 40 miles round the country, to see the manufactures, seats, &c., and when we took leave, requesting that I would let him see me often in London, &c., &c.
Franklin wondered at Hillsborough’s hospitality and apparent change of heart, clear back to London. “Does not all this seem extraordinary to you?” he wrote William from Craven Street.