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By the early 1770s Franklin was by far the most famous American in the world, and arguably the most illustrious subject of George III. His electrical papers, first published in London in 1751 as Experiments and Observations on Electricity, were now in their fourth edition; translations circulated across the European continent. The Marquis de Condorcet, one of France’s leading mathematical and literary lights, wrote to “mon cher et illustre confrère” to strike up a correspondence that lasted for years. Giambattista Beccaria of Turin, by now a regular
correspondent, declared, “To you it is given to enlighten human minds with the true principles of the electric science, to reassure them by your conductors against the terrors of thunder, and”—referring to Franklin’s armonica—“to sweeten their senses with a most touching and suave music.” The German philosopher Immanuel Kant dubbed Franklin the “modern Prometheus.”
In 1772 Franklin was notified of his election as an associé étranger of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, one of only eight foreigners so honored. He was speaking no less accurately than politely when he answered, “A place among your foreign members is justly esteemed by all Europe the greatest honour a man can arrive at in the Republic of Letters.”
The following year his fame widened further. A Paris physician named Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, himself something of a scientific celebrity, with membership in royal academies and societies across Europe, had for some time been translating Franklin’s papers into French. In 1773 these appeared as the Oeuvres de M. Franklin in two volumes. Dubourg was delighted to report to the author that the edition was being received “avec une sorte de passion favorable.”
“Learned and ingenious foreigners that come to England almost all make a point of visiting me,” Franklin matter-of-factly wrote William in the summer of 1772. “Several of the foreign ambassadors have assiduously cultivated my acquaintance…. The King too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard.”
Franklin continued to give his admirers cause for admiration. The most superficial knowledge of chemistry and electricity revealed that gunpowder and lightning made bad companions; in 1769 an enormous explosion in Italy followed a lightning strike upon a powder magazine at Brescia, in which a thousand persons perished and much of the town was leveled. The disaster made the London papers and alerted the keepers of the Crown’s munitions to the potential for similar peril at home. Fortunately, they noted, the world’s leading expert on lightning resided in Craven Street; ignoring the questions that surrounded Franklin’s politics, they invited him to join a commission devoted to diminishing—eliminating, if possible—the danger from aerial electricity to the large new magazine at Purfleet on the Thames. The appointment involved Franklin in an ongoing debate regarding the optimal shape for lightning rods—pointed (Franklin’s view) or blunt. Franklin’s arguments won in the end, and by the autumn of 1773 the king’s gunpowder nestled quietly beneath pointed rods—from where, but two years hence, it was loaded onto ships hostilely bound for America.
While preserving England from death by explosion, Franklin also strove to keep the English free from coughing themselves to pieces. At least since his early correspondence with Polly Stevenson he had been curious as to what caused colds. He was convinced to a moral and medical certainty that the conventional notion betrayed by the malady’s very name—that one caught cold by being cold—was quite mistaken. “Travelling in our severe winters, I have suffered cold sometimes to an extremity only short of freezing, but this did not make me catch cold,” he asserted to Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia friend and noted physician. Nor did moisture have much to do with the matter. “I have been in the river every evening two or three hours for a fortnight together, when one would suppose I might imbibe enough of it to take cold if humidity could give it; but no such effect followed. Boys never get cold [that is, catch cold] by swimming. Nor are people at sea, or who live at Bermudas, or St. Helena, where the air must be ever moist, from the dashing and breaking of waves against their rocks on all sides, more subject to colds than those who inhabit part of a continent where the air is driest.”
So what was the cause? “People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in small close rooms, coaches, &c. and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other’s transpiration.” Additional agents were bedclothes and other items that caught and somehow preserved “that kind of putridity which infects us.”
If close quarters contributed to colds, fresh air guarded against them—especially if the fresh air came in the course of outdoor exercise. Franklin was an early and ardent advocate of regular vigorous exercise. In a day when exercise for the upper classes often meant riding in a coach or sitting on a horse, Franklin devised a graduated—and remarkably modern—scale of physiological effort. William had written of a recent indisposition; his father told him to engage in exercise, which was “of the greatest importance to prevent diseases.” Franklin elaborated:
In considering the different kinds of exercise, I have thought that the quantum of each is to be judged of, not by time or distance, but by the degree of warmth it produces in the body. Thus when I observe if I am cold when I get into a carriage in a morning, I may ride all day without being warmed by it; that if on horse back my feet are cold, I may ride some hours before they become warm; but if I am ever so cold on foot, I cannot walk an hour briskly without glowing from head to foot by the quickened circulation.
I have been ready to say (using round numbers without regard to exactness, but merely to mark a great difference) that there is more exercise in one mile’s riding on horseback, than in five in a coach; and more in one mile’s walking on foot, than in five on horseback; to which I may add, that there is more in walking one mile up and down stairs, than in five on a level floor.
The two latter exercises may be had within doors, when the weather discourages going abroad [this of course defeated the fresh-air purpose of being outdoors, but some days were simply too nasty for that]. And the last may be had when one is pinched for time, as containing a great quantity of exercise in a handful of minutes. The dumb bell is another exercise of the latter compendious kind; by the use of it I have in forty swings quickened my pulse from 60 to 100 beats in a minute, counted by a second watch. And I suppose the warmth generally increases with quickness of pulse.
If Franklin’s study of exercise was strikingly modern, his observations in another area were almost ancient. Pliny had described how sailors soothed the angry sea by spreading oil on the waves; Franklin, in hours stolen from his apprenticeship to his brother James, had read Pliny’s account and wondered if it were truly so. Not till his voyage to England in 1757 had he managed to investigate the phenomenon. Then, observing that the wakes of two ships were remarkably smooth compared to the dozens of others in the convoy, he inquired of one of the old salts, who told him, with an air of disdain for such landlubbing ignorance, that the cooks in the two vessels must have dumped greasy water through the scuppers, which in turn greased the sides of the ships and thereby smoothed the waves.
Since then Franklin had pondered the subject further, collecting anecdotal evidence, devising conjectures, and considering how they might be tested. In time opportunity arose, in the form of a windy day on the pond of the common at Clapham, east of Lancaster, during his tour of northern England. “I fetched out a cruet of oil, and dropt a little of it on the water,” he wrote. “I saw it spread with surprising swiftness upon the surface.” But the sheen had scant effect in stilling the wind-driven waves, for he had oiled the water on the leeward side of the pond, where the wind drove the oil back onto the bank. “I then went to the windward side, where they [the waves] began to form; and there the oil, though not more than a tea spoonful, produced an instant calm, over a space several yards square, which spread amazingly, and extended itself gradually till it reached the lee side, making all that quarter of the pond, perhaps half an acre, as smooth as a looking glass.”
Delighted and intrigued, Franklin determined to exploit every chance to investigate further. He placed a small quantity of oil in the upper hollow joint of a bamboo cane he carried when walking or riding in the country; at each opportunity he spilled the oil on ponds and streams and observed the effects. Gradually he conceived a quite ambitious experiment, one to quell not merely the ripples on a pond but the breakers on the open sea.
A captain in the Royal Navy, stationed at Portsmouth, heard of Franklin’s design and invited him to come test it. Accordingly, on a day in October 1772 when the wind was blowing toward the shore, a crew was sent out in a longboat beyond the breakers, there to pour oil from a large stone bottle onto the water. A team of observers was specially chosen to observe the waves and determine whether they diminished after application of the oil.
“The experiment had not in the main the success we wished, for no material difference was observed in the height or force of the surf upon the shore,” Franklin explained to an interested friend. Yet the oil did smooth the water somewhat behind the longboat, rendering the surface there largely immune to roughening by the brisk wind.
And in this Franklin saw both the cause for the present failure and the reason for success on smaller bodies of water. Waves on water, he said, resulted from friction between windy air and the surface of the water. Oil acted as a lubricant between air and water, diminishing the friction and the wave-raising power of the wind. On a pond, the entire surface might be covered with oil, entirely depriving the wind of its purchase and allowing a complete stilling. On the ocean, needless to say, any such comprehensive covering was out of the question; the waves that broke on the shore acquired their momentum long before encountering the oil from the longboat.
“It may be of use to relate the circumstances even of an experiment that does not succeed, since they may give hints of amendment in future trials,” Franklin remarked. He went on to suggest just such amendment. “If we had begun our operations at a greater distance [from shore], the effect might have been more sensible. And perhaps we did not pour oil in sufficient quantity. Future experiments may determine this.”
Franklin’s simultaneous experiments in pouring oil of the metaphorical sort on politically troubled waters were even less successful, and for a similar reason: the waves were originating beyond his reach.
Much of the turbulence was transatlantic. On their face, the affairs of the colonies were more placid than for some years. Franklin’s advocacy of continued nonimportation failed to persuade most American merchants, who decided to accept the partial victory of the partial repeal of the Townshend duties and retreat to a partial embargo—of tea, the still-dutied item. Boston held out longer for nonimportation than New York and Philadelphia, but finally Boston too abandoned the beyond-tea embargo. By then the furor over the Boston Massacre had quieted as well, partly because Governor Hutchinson nodded to prudence and withdrew the British troops from the city proper to island quarters in the harbor, and partly because the soldiers involved in the shooting were brought to trial. If Captain Preston and the others were initially nervous that their defense was directed by the well-known patriot John Adams, they could not complain at the verdict: Preston and six of his men were acquitted of all charges; the remaining two were found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder and were released with a brand on the hand. “There seems now to be a pause in politics,” Samuel Cooper wrote Franklin on the first day of 1771.
But a pause was not a halt, and beneath the surface calm, deep trouble impended. On the fundamental issue of constitutional relations, the Americans and the British were further apart than ever. Parliament claimed the right to legislate in all matters for the Americans; the American assemblies denied that right, with increasing fervor. At the moment Parliamentary rule rode lightly on American shoulders; but for the tax on tea they were choosing not to drink, the colonists hardly noticed. Yet the Declaratory Act remained on the statute books, and while it did it threatened to be the rock on which the empire would break.
Other sources of trouble were closer to Franklin’s current residence but hardly more within his reach. After Hillsborough’s unexpected hospitality in Ireland, Franklin decided to test the secretary’s good faith. “When I had been a little while returned to London,” he informed William, “I waited on him to thank him for his civilities in Ireland, and to discourse with him on a Georgia affair.” It was as though the Irish interlude had never happened. “The porter told me he was not at home. I left my card, went another time, and received the same answer, though I knew he was at home, a friend of mine being with him. After intermissions of a week each, I made two more visits, and received the same answer.” The last occasion was a levee day, when a row of carriages lined the lane by Hillsborough’s door. “My coachman driving up, alighted and was opening the coach door, when the porter, seeing me, came out, and surlily chid my coachman for opening the door before he had enquired whether my lord was at home; and then turning to me, said, ‘My lord is not at home.’” Franklin concluded that whatever had motivated the secretary’s superficial kindness in Ireland had already failed. “As Lord Hillsborough in fact got nothing out of me, I should rather suppose he threw me away as an orange that would yield no juice, and therefore not worth more squeezing.”
Yet it was Hillsborough who was thrown away, not many months later. And though Franklin was hardly responsible, those who were responsible were allies of Franklin, which afforded Franklin fleeting satisfaction and Hillsborough lasting distress.
Unfortunately—to Franklin’s way of thinking—the issue that brought Hillsborough down was not the central one of constitutionalism but the peripheral one of land. Since falling out with Hillsborough in 1770, Franklin had retreated to the rear of efforts by the Walpole Company to win its western bonanza. Franklin had always been a small player in this large game; his value to the bigger bettors was the influence he wielded among those who could make the project or break it. By alienating Hillsborough he lost what influence he possessed; discretion dictated he step back.
Yet Hillsborough himself was alienating many people, as Franklin saw, and this group included some who took a growing interest in the Walpole Company. The prospective Ohio grandees infiltrated the government by the tested means of offering shares to ministers and friends of ministers. Hillsborough still opposed the scheme, but he was outmaneuvered, and when the Walpole-friendly Privy Council overruled Hillsborough’s Board of Trade and approved the land grant, the secretary of state (and president of the board) resigned.
“At length we have got rid of Lord Hillsborough,” Franklin reported to William. Franklin conceded that the Walpole question was the proximate cause of the secretary’s downfall, but the ultimate cause was Hillsborough’s lack of friends, and excess of enemies, among his fellow ministers. Nor did his troubles stop there. “The King too was tired of him, and of his administration, which had weakened the affection and respect of the colonies for a royal government”—here Franklin could not resist a little self-congratulation, adding, “with which (I may say to you) I used proper means from time to time that his Majesty should have due information and convincing proofs.”
After Hillsborough anyone would have been an improvement. Lord Dartmouth certainly seemed so. The new secretary of state indicated that he much admired Franklin, and at an early levee made a special point of greeting Franklin ahead of a crowd of others. He said nothing about Franklin’s not having the approval of the Massachusetts governor but treated him like any fully accredited agent. “I hope business is getting into better train,” Franklin told Thomas Cushing.
Better—but still not good. In November 1772 Franklin presented Dartmouth a petition from Massachusetts complaining at the Crown’s paying the salary of the Massachusetts governor. A few days later Dartmouth summoned Franklin to discuss the matter. In tones Franklin found reasonable and ultimately persuasive, the secretary of state explained that the present was a poor season for forwarding such a petition. The king would be offended. He might turn it over to his lawyers; if he did, they would deliver an adverse opinion. If he handed it to Parliament, that body almost certainly would censure the province—which in turn would produce more unrest there. Dartmouth professed great goodwill for New England and said he did not wish the first act of his administration to be one that led to unavoidable dissatisfaction there. When Franklin interjected that it would be a dangerous thing for the government to deny the people the right of petition, Dartmouth responded that Franklin misunderstood. As a government minister he was not refusing the Massachusetts petition, and if Franklin insisted, he would receive it. But as a friend of America he hoped Franklin would reconsider whether he really wished to insist just now. Perhaps he could consult once more with the Massachusetts House. After all, since the petition was initially ordered, there had been a change in the administration in London. The responsible thing would be to confirm that the Massachusetts body still desired to go forward.
“Upon the whole I thought it best not to disoblige him in the beginning of his administration,” Franklin told Thomas Cushing, by way of explaining why in fact he was not going forward at once with the petition. The House ought to reconsider the matter and re-advise. “If after deliberation they should send me fresh orders, I shall immediately obey them.” The petition might well gain weight from the mere reconsideration. Sounding somewhat unsure of himself, Franklin added, “I hope my conduct will not be disapproved.”
Franklin’s uncertainty probably reflected an understanding that his conduct would be disapproved, at least by such skeptics as Sam Adams and James Otis. From the start they had suspected him of being too easy on the ministry, and here he was meekly following Dartmouth’s lead. Quite likely a desire to show he was no minister’s tool contributed to the most fateful misstep of his career—fateful for both himself and the British empire.
“There has lately fallen into my hands part of a correspondence that I have reason to believe laid the foundation of most if not all our present grievances.” This was Franklin writing to Cushing, in the same letter breaking the news that he was delaying the petition. Franklin declined to say how the correspondence fell into his hands, and in fact he never did say, to Cushing or to anyone else who recorded the information for posterity. The pilferage of mail was hardly unheard of; Franklin had some reason to think his own letters to America were being opened. One might have guessed that his many years as postmaster would have inspired a deep respect for the confidentiality of the mails; on the other hand, as Poor Richard and any number of other aphorists knew, familiarity breeds contempt. Moreover, the pragmatist in Franklin was never one to set airy principle above practical effect; if a peek beneath someone else’s seal could effect a reconciliation between the colonies and Britain, the sin would be venial and easily forgiven.
The correspondence in question consisted of several letters by various authors written between 1767 and 1769. The most important authors were Thomas Hutchinson and his brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver. The offices of the two men—Massachusetts governor and lieutenant governor, respectively—were what gave the letters such interest, for the opinions expressed were no more inflammatory than many others emanating from Massachusetts at this time, and the authors’ views on constitutional relations between that colony and Britain paralleled the conventional wisdom of officials of the British government—among whom, of course, they numbered themselves. Yet at the same time they spoke as Massachusetts men, which of course they also were and were so understood in England to be. This was what galled Franklin, and doubtless what moved him to forward the letters to Cushing.
The gist of the letters was that the troubles in America reflected no broad disaffection but simply the political perversions of a minority. The most damning passage—damning in the eyes of American patriots—was one written by Hutchinson in January 1769 outlining the measures he judged necessary to restore order and respect for government in Massachusetts.
There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties. I relieve myself by considering that in a remove from the state of nature to the most perfect state of government there must be a great restraint of natural liberty. I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony 3000 miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy all the liberty of the parent state. I am certain I have never yet seen the projection. I wish the good of the colony when I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connexion with the parent state should be broken; for I am sure such a breach must prove the ruin of the colony.
In forwarding the letters to Cushing, Franklin still sought reconciliation. He hoped to show that the oppressive policies lately pursued by the British government were the result of evil counsel from an identifiable source—namely Hutchinson and Oliver—and not the consequence of a general conspiracy in England against American liberty. The malicious influence of the two men could be countered and neutralized, and the situation corrected.
Franklin understood the delicacy of what he was doing, and when he passed the correspondence to Cushing, he included a proviso: “I have engaged that it shall not be printed, nor any copies taken of the whole or any part of it; but I am allowed and desired to let it be seen by some men of worth in the province for their satisfaction only.” He expected the letters back after “some months in your possession”; presumably he would return them to his source.
Franklin did not deal in stolen goods without compunction. But Hutchinson and Oliver had crossed the line. For years they had been “bartering away the liberties of their native country for posts”—it was not lost on Franklin, nor did he want it lost on Cushing and the others in Massachusetts, that Hutchinson and Oliver had gained their present positions after these letters reached Britain. As part of the bargain the two received increases in their salaries and pensions, “for which the money is to be squeezed from the people.” The people naturally resisted; to suppress the resistance, and preserve their ill-gotten gains, Hutchinson and Oliver summoned British troops, conjuring “imaginary rebellions” and “exciting jealousies in the Crown, and provoking it to wrath against a great part of its faithful subjects.” In sum, the malign pair had shown themselves “mere time-servers, seeking their own private emolument through any quantity of public mischief; betrayers of the interest, not of their native country only, but of the Government they pretend to serve, and of whole English Empire.”
So angry was Franklin that he wanted the world to know of the duplicity of the governor and lieutenant governor. “I therefore wish I was at liberty to make the letters public.” But his source insisted he not. “I can only allow them to be seen by yourself,” he told Cushing, “by the other gentlemen of the Committee of Correspondence, by Messrs. Bowdoin and Pitts, of the Council, and Drs. Chauncey, Cooper and Winthrop, with a few such other gentlemen as you may think fit to show them to.”
Franklin was no innocent in the political arts. He understood how valuable the letters of Hutchinson and Oliver would be to their many opponents in the Massachusetts House, a group that included those Franklin named. He must have expected that the letters would find the light of New England day even if his own promise precluded their publication in old England. By his own statement, he would have published them himself had he been free. Indeed, Cushing might easily have read Franklin’s statement as implicit permission to publish.
Apparently Cushing did not, for the speaker treated the letters circumspectly. Others, however, felt less constrained. It may have been John Hancock who laid the letters before the House; it certainly was Sam Adams who read them to the members. Shortly thereafter the House ordered the letters printed for members’ use. Soon they were available in pamphlet form and in installments in the Massachusetts Spy. Copies quickly found their way all over the colony.
In Franklin’s correspondence and apparently in his feelings during this period occurred a curious reversion. The boy who at seventeen had eagerly shaken the dust of Boston from his shoes found himself at sixty-seven reidentifying with the city of his birth. Had Franklin reflected on the matter he might have detected an underlying consistency, for the rebel who left Boston for its being too conservative now returned to Boston when the city itself grew rebellious. For the first twenty years of his political life Franklin had fought the powers that be in Pennsylvania; now that the contest with Parliament had superseded the struggle with the Penns, he transferred his emotional loyalties to the liveliest fight going, between Boston and London.
Yet Philadelphia continued to exercise a hold. Various people and events recalled what tied him to his adopted city. In late 1771 Franklin finally met Richard Bache, who was visiting his parents at Preston. Bache experienced more than the usual trepidation of the son-in-law upon encountering his wife’s father, for the father in this case was not merely a world-famous figure but also a stern sire who had left no doubt as to his opposition to the marriage. Yet Debbie had been working on Franklin, as had Mrs. Stevenson and Polly (now Polly Stevenson Hewson). They might have suggested, or Bache perhaps reckoned on his own, that he would make his best appearance among friends and family; from this followed an invitation to Franklin during his northern tour to stop at the Bache family home in Yorkshire. Richard Bache joined them there.
His sigh of relief was audible clear back to Philadelphia. “I can now, with great satisfaction, tell you that he received me with open arms and with a degree of affection that I did not expect to be made sensible of at our first meeting,” Bache wrote Debbie.
The younger man accompanied the elder on the return to London. During the journey Franklin grew to like Bache. “His behaviour here has been very agreeable to me,” Franklin told Debbie. He also gave Bache some advice, which he—Franklin—shared with Sally in a letter. “I advised him to settle down to business in Philadelphia where he will always be close to you.” This might have seemed odd coming from a husband who had spent less than two years of the last fifteen on the same continent with his own wife, but perhaps no odder than an additional pearl—from the king’s postmaster of thirty-five years—about eschewing public office. “I am of opinion that almost any profession a man has been educated in is preferable to an office held at pleasure, as rendering him more independent, more a freeman less subject to the caprices of superiors.” In this letter he urged Sally and her husband to be industrious and frugal; that way whatever he and Debbie bequeathed them “may be a pretty addition, though of itself far from sufficient to maintain and bring up a family.” As a foretaste, however, of that pretty addition, and perhaps recalling how peace treaties with the Indians were always sealed with gifts, he told Sally he had given Bache £200, “with which I wish you good luck.”
If Bache’s visit reminded Franklin of home, so did his encounters with his godson, Polly Hewson’s little boy William. Franklin had never seen Sally’s son Benjamin Franklin Bache, now nearly four years old; what he knew he got by letter from her and her mother. His imagination supplied the rest as he watched Billy Hewson grow. “In return for your history of your Grandson,” he wrote Debbie, “I must give you a little of the history of my Godson. He is now 21 months old, very strong and healthy, begins to speak a little, and even to sing. He was with us a few days last week, grew fond of me, and would not be contented to sit down to breakfast without coming to call Pa, rejoicing when he had got me into my place…. It makes me long to be at home to play with Ben.”
Thoughts of Ben recalled another child. Across the ocean and across the years, Franklin still thought of his second son, dead now thirty-six years and buried in Philadelphia. “All who have seen my grandson agree with you in their accounts of his being an uncommonly fine boy,” he told his sister Jane, “which bring often afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky.” This was the letter in which the still-grieving father declared his lost child to be a boy “whom I have seldom seen equaled in every thing, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh.”
Another grandson was nearer to hand, even if his circumstances were problematic. Temple Franklin, now twelve, spent most months at a school in Kent operated by a brother-in-law of William Strahan. The precise relation of Temple to his father and grandfather remained publicly obscure, but Franklin brought him to London for holidays and attended to him much as he attended to Billy Hewson. “He improves continually,” Franklin informed Temple’s father, “and more and more engages the regard of all that are acquainted with him, by his pleasing, sensible, manly behaviour.”
If cover were needed for Temple, some was supplied by Sarah Franklin, granddaughter of Franklin’s cousin Thomas. Hoping to expand upon the opportunities available to a young woman in the English countryside, Sally came to London to live with Franklin. In exchange she helped look after the needs of her older relative, who no longer kept a servant man. “She is nimble-footed and willing to run of errands and wait upon me,” Franklin told Debbie. Unfortunately for him, her venture to the city had proved successful, and she was to be married. “I shall miss her.”
Observing youth, Franklin pondered age. On January 6, 1773, he wrote Debbie, “I still feel some regard for this Sixth of January, as my old nominal birth-day, though the change of style has carried the real day forward to the 17th, when I shall be, if I live till then, 67 years of age. It seems but t’other day since you and I were ranked among the boys and girls, so swiftly does time fly!”
Thoughts of home warred in Franklin’s heart against the continuing attractions of England. For all his distaste of recent English politics, London still offered much to a man of the world. The famous scientists and philosophers who called on him in London would never find their way to Philadelphia. His closest current friends all lived in England; with each passing year more old friends from Philadelphia passed on. A decade and a half after he had really made Philadelphia home, Franklin found London more familiar and comfortable, in many respects, than the city of the Quakers.
Torn between his old and present homes, Franklin applied a method of decision-making he had developed over time. He explained the method in a letter to Joseph Priestley, the scientist who had done much to spread Franklin’s fame even while winning a first-rate reputation of his own. Priestley had received an offer from Lord Shelburne to be his librarian; the offer appealed on grounds of pay, prestige, and patronage. But Priestley was happy with his current life in Leeds, which afforded him both personal satisfaction and scientific opportunity. What should he do? he asked Franklin.
“I cannot, for want of sufficient premises, advise you what to determine,” Franklin replied. “But if you please I will tell you how.” The reason hard choices were hard, he said, was that persons facing such decisions typically considered arguments on opposite sides serially—first the pros, then the cons—and as a result vacillated from one side to the other.
To get over this, my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four days’ consideration I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives that at different times occur to me for or against the measure. When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavour to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons con equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies.
Franklin did not pretend to mathematical precision in this method; reasons on one side never exactly canceled reasons on the other. “Yet when each is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less likely to make a rash step; and in fact I have found great advantage from this kind of equation, in what might be called Moral or Prudential Algebra.”
Franklin applied his prudential algebra to the question of returning to America. In one column he listed the reasons to stay in England; in the other, to go home. The former included his political work, his various philosophical projects, and the Ohio land scheme. The latter involved the settlement of certain accounts and the attractions of retirement. Thus reckoned, the reasons to stay prevailed.
Although the omens were not auspicious, Franklin retained hope that the contest between Massachusetts, the most forward of the American colonies, and the British government could be worked out. Dartmouth continued to express goodwill, which was much more than could be said for his predecessor. And Dartmouth might bring his colleagues around.
The key, Franklin believed, was time. He explained to Thomas Cushing, “Our great security lies, I think, in our growing strength both in wealth and numbers, that creates an increasing ability of assisting this nation in its wars, which will make us more respectable, our friendship more valued, and our enmity feared. Thence it will soon be thought proper to treat us, not with justice only, but with kindness; and thence we may expect in a few years a total change of measures with regard to us.” Needless to say, the Americans must maintain their sturdy spirit in order to effect this appreciation in English minds. But sturdiness need not imply belligerence, which in fact would disrupt the process. “In confidence of this coming change in our favour, I think our prudence is meanwhile to be quiet, only holding up our rights and claims on all occasions, in resolutions, memorials, and remonstrances, but bearing patiently the little present notice that is taken of them. They will all have their weight in time, and that time is at no great distance.”
Perhaps Franklin’s years provided the patience that informed this advice; perhaps it simply reflected a temperament long willing for progress to arrive incrementally. Not everyone possessed Franklin’s patience. The Massachusetts House itched to have matters out with Parliament. Thomas Cushing, hardly the most radical member, asserted that the petition to the Crown that Franklin had postponed delivering represented “the sentiments of nine tenths of the people.” Referring to the previous autumn, when he had reiterated the grievances of the colony, Cushing added, “I apprehended it was high time the controversy was settled and thought that was as good a time as any, and that any further delay would render it more difficult…. I foresaw a storm arising and the breach widening. It is in vain for administration to flatter themselves that the people will rest quiet, when they find the ministry are depriving them of their charter by piece meal and there is not a year passes without one essential clause or another’s being rendered null and void.” In no uncertain terms Cushing instructed Franklin as the agent of the House to put the petition before Dartmouth. For good measure the House had passed a second petition, expanding the complaints about Parliamentary usurpation; Franklin was to deliver this as well.
Franklin followed instructions. To no one’s surprise—certainly not his—the petitions raised tempers in Parliament. But the anger over the petitions was lost in the uproar surrounding the publication of the Hutchinson-Oliver letters.
“They have had great effect; they make deep impressions wherever they are known,” a delighted Samuel Cooper reported to Franklin from Boston. “They strip the mask from the authors who under the profession of friendship to their country have been endeavouring to build up themselves and their families upon its ruins. They and their adherents are shocked and dismayed. The confidence reposed in them by many is annihilated; and Administration must soon see the necessity of putting the provincial power of the Crown into other hands.”
But the administration saw no such necessity. If anything, the publication of the Hutchinson letters confirmed the government in its belief that the Americans were ingrates and scoundrels. Nor did the official opinion improve when the Massachusetts House formally responded to the Hutchinson letters by petitioning for the recall of Hutchinson and Oliver.
In his dealings with the government Franklin strove to place the most favorable light on this latest petition. “I have the pleasure of hearing from that province by my late letters,” he informed Dartmouth, “that a sincere disposition prevails in the people there to be on good terms with the Mother Country; that the Assembly have declared their desire only to be put into the situation they were in before the Stamp Act; they aim at no novelties. And it is said that having lately discovered, as they think, the authors of their grievances to be some of their own people, their resentment against Britain is thence much abated.”
This was a brave front—although it would have been braver, if perhaps less a front, had Franklin acknowledged his part in the printing of these private letters. But he saw no good that could come from doing so, and much harm. He still considered himself a conciliator, one of the few voices of calm reason in a time when the shouts of passion threatened to make conciliation impossible. Let the deed speak for itself.
Franklin was a conciliator, but he was also a propagandist. During the summer and autumn of 1773 he wrote regularly for the London papers; two pieces from the period became two of his most famous short works. One was cast in the form of a dispatch from Danzig containing an edict of the king of Prussia, Frederick II. This edict informed the inhabitants of Britain that henceforth they would be subject to a variety of taxes and other impositions, payable to and enforced by Prussia. The asserted justification for these measures was the historic fact that Germans in distant times past had settled in the island of Britain, thereby planting what Frederick was pleased to denominate his German colonies. Moreover, Prussia had fought to defend Britain against France in the late war, a boon for which Prussia had not received adequate compensation. The taxes to be levied, on imports to Britain and exports therefrom, would afford Prussia just such compensation. Various restraints on British trade would benefit Prussian merchants and manufacturers. The edict additionally decreed the transport of German felons to Britain “for the Better Peopling of that country.” Lest the inhabitants of Britain conceive this order as unreasonable, Frederick pointed out that he had modeled his edict on several statutes—he obligingly listed them—that the monarchs and Parliament of Britain had enacted toward their own colonies in America and Ireland.
The entire article, until the very end, was written in all apparent seriousness. Only in the last paragraph, a comment by the unnamed person communicating the edict from Danzig, did Franklin tip his hand.
Some take this edict to be merely one of the King’s jeux d’esprit. Others suppose it is serious, and that he means a quarrel with England. But all here think the assertion it concludes with, “that these regulations are copied from Acts of the English Parliament respecting their colonies,” a very injurious one; it being impossible to believe that a people distinguished for their love of liberty, a nation so wise, so liberal in its sentiments, so just and equitable towards its neighbours, should, from mean and injudicious views of petty immediate profit, treat its own children in a manner so arbitrary and tyrannical!
Upon publication of this piece Franklin had the pleasure of watching readers swallow the bait before realizing they had been hooked. “I was down at Lord Le Despencer’s when the post brought in that day’s papers,” he wrote William. Several gentlemen were present, including Paul Whitehead, a satirist of some note (and a former associate of John Wilkes).
He had them in another room, and we were chatting in the breakfast parlour, when he came running in to us, out of breath, with the paper in his hand. Here! says he, here’s the news for ye! Here’s the king of Prussia, claiming a right to this kingdom! All stared, and I as much as any body; and he went on to read it. When he had read two or three paragraphs, a gentleman present said, Damn his impudence. I dare say we shall hear by next post he is upon his march with one hundred thousand men to back this. Whitehead, who is very shrewd, soon after began to smoke it, and looking in my face said, I’ll be hanged if this is not some of your American jokes upon us.
Franklin’s other noteworthy piece that autumn was more straightforwardly satire. The title—“Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One”—put readers on notice that something was amiss. An ancient sage (Themistocles, as it happened) had once formulated a set of rules by which a small city might be enlarged into a great one; the current author—who labeled himself “a modern Simpleton” and signed himself “Q.E.D.”—essayed the reverse.
“In the first place, Gentlemen, you are to consider that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges. Turn your attention therefore first to your remotest provinces, that as you get rid of them, the next may follow in order.”
Second, in order that such separation remain possible, special care should be taken that the provinces not be incorporated into the Mother Country, that they not enjoy the same rights and privileges, but that they be subject to laws more severe, and not of their own enacting.
Third, should said provinces acquire strength of trade or fleet, strength that enabled them to assist the Mother Country in wartime, this must be forgotten by the Mother Country, or treated as an affront. Should the colonists acquire the spirit of liberty, nurtured in the principles of the Mother Country’s own revolution, this must be stamped out. “For such principles, after a revolution is thoroughly established, are of no more use; they are even odious and abominable.”
Fourth, however peaceable the provinces, and however inclined to bear grievances patiently, “you are to suppose them always inclined to revolt, and treat them accordingly.” Troops should be quartered among them, troops who by their insolence might provoke them, and by their bullets and bayonets suppress them. “By this means, like a husband who uses his wife ill from suspicion, you may in time convert your suspicions into realities.”
There were several more principles along similar lines. Some mirrored policies already in place; others projected from present policies. The colonists, after loyally supporting the Mother Country in war, should be burdened with taxes and treated with contempt. “Nothing can have a better effect in producing the alienation proposed, for though many can forgive injuries, none ever forgave contempt.” If news arrived of general dissatisfaction in the colonies, such news must be disbelieved. “Suppose all their complaints to be invented and promoted by a few factious demagogues, whom if you could catch and hang, all would be quiet. Catch and hang a few of them accordingly; and the blood of the martyrs shall work miracles in favour of your purpose.”
By the time all these rules were put into effect in the colonies, the outcome would be guaranteed. “You will that day, if you have not done it sooner, get rid of the trouble of governing them, and all the plagues attending their commerce and connection from thenceforth and for ever.”
Not long after these pieces appeared, Franklin received a letter from his sister Jane, expressing her hope that he might be the instrument of restoring harmony between America and Britain. He replied that he would be very happy to see such harmony restored, whoever was the instrument. He went on to say that his strategy for seeking harmony had changed. “I had used all the smooth words I could muster, and I grew tired of meekness when I saw it without effect. Of late therefore I have been saucy.” Referring to his two recent sallies in the press, he explained:
I have held up a looking-glass in which some ministers may see their ugly faces, and the nation its injustice. Those papers have been much taken notice of. Many are pleased with them, and a few very angry, who I am told will make me feel their resentment, which I must bear as well as I can, and shall bear the better if any public good is done, whatever the consequence to myself.
In my own private concerns with mankind, I have observed that to kick a little when under imposition has a good effect. A little sturdiness when superiors are much in the wrong sometimes occasions consideration. And there is truth in the old saying, that if you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you.