Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (30 page)

On Saturday, February 4, a week or so after Franklin’s pamphlet was published, Gov. John Penn called a mass meeting on the State House grounds as the Paxton Boys headed toward the city. At first he took a strong stand. He ordered the arrest of the mob leaders, deployed British troops, and asked the crowd to join the militia companies that Franklin and others were organizing. Even many Quakers took up arms, though most of the town’s Presbyterians refused.

At midnight on Sunday, the mob of 250 reached Germantown, just north of the city. Church bells pealed alarms, and amid the chaos a surprising alliance was formed. Governor Penn, Franklin wrote a friend, “did me the honor, on an alarm, to run to my house at midnight, with his counselors at his heels, for advice, and made it his headquarters for some time.” Penn went so far as to offer Franklin control of the militia, but Franklin prudently declined. “I chose to carry a musket and strengthen his authority by setting an example of obedience to his orders.”
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Franklin and others, including many Quakers, wanted the governor to order an attack. Instead, Penn decided to send a delegation of seven city leaders, including Franklin, to meet with the Paxton Boys. “The fighting face we put on and the reasonings we used with the insurgents,” Franklin later recalled, “restored quiet to the city.” The mob agreed to disperse if they could send some of their leaders into town to present their grievances.

As the tension with the Paxton Boys receded, the antagonism between Franklin and Penn resumed. Franklin took a hard line. He wanted the governor and Assembly, acting jointly, to confront the Paxton delegation together and hold them accountable for the massacres. The governor, however, realized the political advantage he could gain by forging an alliance with the Presbyterians and Germans who sympathized with the frontiersmen (and who were offended by the harsh slurs Franklin had written about them). So he met with the Paxton delegation in private, listened to them courteously, and agreed not to press charges against them. He also, at their suggestion, instituted a policy of offering a bounty for any Indian scalps, male or female.

Franklin was livid. “These things bring him and his government into sudden contempt,” he wrote a friend. “All regard for him in the Assembly is lost. All hopes of happiness under a Proprietary government are at an end.” The feeling was mutual. In a letter to his uncle, the Proprietor Thomas Penn, Gov. John Penn wrote an equally strong condemnation of Franklin: “There will never be any prospect of ease and happiness while that villain has the liberty of spreading about the poison of that inveterate malice and ill nature which is deeply implanted in his own black heart.”

A darkness had indeed begun to infect Franklin’s usually optimistic heart. Feeling confined by Philadelphia and its foul politics, restless at home, and finding few scientific or professional diversions, he lost some of his amused, wry demeanor. His letters contained harsh rather than humorous assessments of politics and even gloomier personal passages. To the medical doctor John Fothergill, a Quaker friend living in London, Franklin wrote, “Do you please yourself with the fancy that you are doing good? You are mistaken. Half the lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless; and almost the other half ought not to be saved, as being mischievous.”
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And so the fights between governor and Assembly resumed, more heated than ever. They clashed over control of militia appointments, a lighthouse, and, of course, taxes. When the Assembly passed a bill taxing the Proprietors’ estates, which followed the general outline but not the precise formula of the Privy Council compromise, Franklin wrote a message from the Assembly to the governor warning that the consequences of vetoing the bill “will undoubtedly add to that load of obloquy and guilt the Proprietary family is already burdened with and bring their government into (if possible) still greater contempt.” The governor vetoed it.
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At stake was not just principle but power. Franklin realized that the Proprietary party now had strong support from the frontiersmen and their Scots-Irish and German kinsmen. That reignited his resolve to continue pursuing, against all odds, his dream of convincing the British to revoke the Proprietors’ charter and make Pennsylvania a Crown colony.

Most people in Pennsylvania still did not share his fervor for a royal rather than Proprietary government. The members of Philadelphia’s merchant aristocracy were friends with the Penns. The Presbyterian frontiersmen and ethnic working class had forged a new alliance after the Paxton Boys affair, plus they feared a royal takeover would bring the official establishment of the Church of England, which their dissenting families had fled. Even many prominent Quakers such as Isaac Norris and Israel Pemberton, who tended to be Franklin’s allies, were leery of a new charter that might remove some of the religious liberties that the late William Penn had secured long ago. With his stubborn crusade, Franklin was succeeding in dividing his friends and uniting his enemies.

Likewise, in London there was no more support for a royal takeover than there had been when Franklin began his crusade as an agent there. Lord Hyde, Franklin’s boss at the British postal department, wrote that even those royal ministers who might like to “get their hands on” the colony were not willing to take on the Penn family. He publicly warned Franklin, a royal appointee, that “all officers of the crown are expected to assist government.” Franklin made a little joke of the warning, noting that he would “not be Hyde-bound.”
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Nevertheless, Franklin still enjoyed effective control of the Assembly, and in March 1764 he pushed through a series of twenty-six resolutions—a “necklace of resolves,” he called them—calling for the end of Proprietary government. The Proprietors, he wrote, had acted in ways that were “tyrannical and inhuman.” They had used the Indian threat “to extort privileges from the people…with the knife of savages at their throat.” The final resolution declared that the Assembly would consult citizens as to whether a “humble address” should be sent to the king “praying that he would be graciously pleased to take the people of this province under his immediate protection and government.”

The result was a petition drive asking for the ouster of the Proprietors. Franklin printed copies in English and German, and even created a slightly different version for the Quaker community, but his supporters could garner merely thirty-five hundred signers. Opponents of the change were eventually able to come up with fifteen thousand on their own petitions.

Once again, a pamphlet war broke out. Franklin’s contribution, “Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation,” was more heated than its title implied. He was not, at least for now, detached enough to employ his old tools of humor, satire, indirection, and gentle wryness in argument. His pamphlet attacked the Proprietors for truckling to the Paxton Boys and for being unable to manage the colony. “Religion has happily nothing to do with our present differences, though great pains is taken to lug it into the squabble,” he wrote, not altogether correctly. In any case, he continued, the Crown rather than the Proprietors was most likely to protect religious liberties.

Franklin’s newest opponent was John Dickinson, a young lawyer who was the son-in-law of the great Quaker eminence, Isaac Norris. Dickinson had been a friend of Franklin’s and no great fan of the Proprietors, but he rationally argued that the safeguards of the Penn charter should not be lightly abandoned, nor should it be assumed that the royal ministers would be more enlightened than the Proprietors. Norris, unwilling to be caught in the crossfire, feigned sickness and resigned as Assembly speaker in May. Franklin was elected to the post.

Franklin also faced a more vitriolic older opponent: Chief Justice William Allen, who had also once been a friend but whose ardent support of the Proprietors had long ago led to a bitter break. When Allen returned from a trip to England in August, Franklin paid him a visit as “an overture.” In front of other guests, Allen denounced his assault on the Proprietors. A switch to a royal government, he said, would cost Pennsylvania £100,000, and it had no support in London.

As the October 1 Assembly elections neared, the pamphlet war turned vicious as Franklin’s foes sought to thwart his bid for reelection. One anonymous offering, entitled “What is Sauce for a Goose is also Sauce for a Gander,” raked up every possible allegation against Franklin—most notably, that his son, William, was the bastard child of a “kitchen wench” named Barbara. It also reprinted, and embellished a bit, various anti-German passages Franklin had written earlier. And it accused him, falsely but vociferously, of buying honorary degrees, seeking a royal governorship for himself, and stealing his electricity experiments from other scientists.

Another broadside painted him as an excitable lecher:

Modern election campaigns are often criticized for being negative, and today’s press is slammed for being scurrilous. But the most brutal of modern attack ads pale in comparison to the barrage of pamphlets in the 1764 Assembly election. Pennsylvania survived them, as did Franklin, and American democracy learned that it could thrive in an atmosphere of unrestrained, even intemperate, free expression. As the election of 1764 showed, American democracy was built on a foundation of unbridled free speech. In the centuries since then, the nations that have thrived have been those, like America, that are most comfortable with the cacophony, and even occasional messiness, that comes from robust discourse.

Election Day was as wild as the pamphlets. Throngs of voters clogged the State House steps throughout the day of October 1, and the lines remained long well past midnight. Franklin’s supporters were able to force the polls to stay open until dawn as they roused anyone they could find who had not yet voted. It was a tactical mistake. The Proprietary party sent workers up to Germantown to round up even more supporters. Franklin finished thirteenth out of fourteen candidates vying for the eight seats in Philadelphia.

His faction, however, kept control of the Assembly, which promptly voted to submit to the British ministers the petition against the Proprietors. And as a consolation prize that was perhaps better than a victory, it voted 19–11 to send Franklin back to England as an agent to present it.

That prompted a new flurry of pamphlets. Dickinson declared that Franklin would be ineffectual because he was hated by the Penns, disdained by the king’s ministers, and “extremely disagreeable to a very great number of the serious and reputable inhabitants” of Pennsylvania. Chief Justice Allen labeled him “the most unpopular and odious name in the province…delirious with rage, disappointment and malice.” But now that he was heading back to England, Franklin’s even temper started to return. “I am now to take leave (perhaps a last leave) of the country I love,” he wrote in response. “I wish every kind of prosperity to my friends, and I forgive my enemies.”
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Once again, his wife declined to accompany him to England. Nor would she permit him to take their daughter. So why was he so willing to leave home again? Partly because he missed London, and partly because he felt depressed and confined by Philadelphia.

There was also a loftier reason. Franklin had been developing a vision of an American future that went beyond even wresting Pennsylvania from the Proprietors. It involved a greater union among the colonies, along the lines of his Albany Plan, and a more equal relationship between the colonies and the mother country as part of a greater British Empire. That could include, he suggested, representation in Parliament. Responding to reports that Britain might propose taxes on the colonies, he wrote to Richard Jackson, whom he had left behind in London as Pennsylvania’s other agent, a suggested response: “If you choose to tax us, give us members in your legislature, and let us be one people.”

As he prepared to leave for England in November 1764, Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter. It included paternal exhortations to be “dutiful and tender towards your good mama” and typical Franklin advice, such as “to acquire those useful accomplishments arithmetic and bookkeeping.” But it also contained a more serious note. “I have many enemies,” he said. “Your slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound and afflict me. It is therefore the more necessary for you to be extremely circumspect in all your behavior that no advantage may be given to their malevolence.”

He also had many supporters. More than three hundred cheered him as he left Philadelphia for his ship. Cannons were fired as a send-off, and a song was sung to the tune of “God Save the King,” with the new ending “Franklin on thee we fix / God save us all.” He told some friends that he expected to be gone only a few months, others that he might never return. It is not clear which prediction, if either, he truly believed, but as it turned out, neither proved correct.
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London, 1765–1770

Mrs. Stevenson was out when Franklin arrived, unannounced, at his old home on Craven Street, and her maid did not know where to find her. “So I sat me down and waited her return,” Franklin recalled in a letter to her daughter, Polly. “She was a good deal surprised to find me in her parlor.” Surprised, perhaps, but prepared. His rooms had been left vacant, for his English friends and surrogate family had no doubt he would someday return.
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It would be just a short visit, he led his real wife, and perhaps even himself, to believe. He wanted to be back home by the end of the summer, he wrote Deborah soon after his arrival. “A few months, I hope, will finish affairs here to my wish, and bring me to that retirement and repose with my little family.” She had heard that many times before. He would, in fact, never see her again. Despite her pleas and declining health, he would continue his increasingly futile mission for more than ten years, right up to the eve of the Revolution.

That mission involved complex balancing acts that would test all of Franklin’s wiles. On the one hand, he was still a committed royalist who wanted to stay in favor with the king’s ministers in order to wrest Pennsylvania from the hated Penns. He also had personal motives: protecting his postmastership, perhaps achieving an even higher appointment, and pursuing his dream of a land grant. On the other hand, once it became clear that the British government had little sympathy for colonial rights, he would have to scramble to reestablish his reputation as an American patriot.
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In the meantime, Franklin had the pleasure of settling back into the life he loved in London. Sir John Pringle, the distinguished physician, had become his best friend. They played chess, made the rounds to their regular coffeehouse clubs, and soon got into the habit of taking summer trips together. The great Samuel Johnson biographer James Boswell was another acquaintance. After dropping in on one of their chess games, Boswell noted in his journal that Pringle had “a peculiar sour manner,” but that Franklin was, as always, “all jollity and pleasantry.” Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson resumed their relationship of domestic convenience, and Polly, still living with an aunt in the countryside, remained an object of Franklin’s paternal affection and intellectual flirtation.

He picked Polly as his first potential convert to a new phonetic alphabet that he had invented in a quixotic quest to simplify English spelling. It is easy to see why it did not catch on. “Kansider chis alfa-bet, and giv mi instanses af syts Inlis uyrds and saunds az iu mee hink kannat perfektlyi bi eksprest byi it,” went one of his more comprehensible sentences. After a long reply that is near impossible to translate, in which she halfheartedly says the alphabet “myit bi uv syrvis,” she lapses into standard English to conclude, “With ease & with sincerity, I can in the old way subscribe myself…”

It was a measure of their intellectual bonding that Polly would indulge this linguistic fantasy as faithfully as she did. Franklin’s phonetic reform showed little of his usual regard for utility, and it took his passion for social improvement to radical extremes. It required the invention of six new letters for which there were no printing fonts, and it dropped six other letters that Franklin considered superfluous. Answering Polly’s many objections, he insisted that the difficulty in learning the new spellings would be overcome by the logic behind them, and he dismissed her concerns that the words would be divorced from their etymological roots and thus lose their power. But he soon gave up the endeavor. Years later, he turned his scheme over to Noah Webster. The famed lexicographer reprinted Franklin’s letters to Polly in his 1789 book
Dissertations on the English Language
(which he dedicated to Franklin) and called the project “deeply interesting,” but added, “Whether it will be defeated by insolence and prejudice remains for my countrymen to determine.”
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Franklin brought his grandson, Temple, the illegitimate son of his own illegitimate son, out of anonymity and into his odd domestic orbit on Craven Street. The relationship was weird, even by Franklin family standards. The boy, who was 4 when Franklin reestablished contact, had been cared for by a series of women who sent itemized bills for his expenses (haircuts, inoculations, clothes) to Mrs. Stevenson, who then sought reimbursement from William in New Jersey. In all of his letters to Deborah at the time, filled with details of various friends and acquaintances, Franklin never mentioned Temple. But by the time the boy turned 9, William was asking, in a quite cowardly way, whether his son could be brought to live with him in America. “He might then take his proper name and be introduced as the son of a poor relation, for whom I stood Godfather and intended to bring up as my own.”

Foreshadowing a later struggle for the boy’s allegiance, Franklin instead took him under his own wing. On Craven Street he was known merely as “William Temple,” and Franklin enrolled him in a school run by William Strahan’s brother-in-law, an eccentric educator who shared Franklin’s passion for spelling reform. Even though Temple became part of the extended Stevenson family, they pretended (at least publicly) to be unaware of his exact provenance.

(As late as 1774, in a letter describing a wedding in which he was an usher, Polly would refer to him as “Mr. Temple, a young gentleman who is at school here and is under the care of Dr. Franklin.” Not until later, after Franklin and his grandson returned to America and Temple took up his true last name, did Polly confess that she suspected all along that there was some relationship. “I rejoiced to hear he has the addition of Franklin [to his name], which I always knew he had some right to.”)
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Back in Philadelphia, Franklin was still seen as a “tribune of the people” and a defender of their rights. When word finally reached there in March 1765 of his safe arrival in London, bells were rung “almost all night,” his supporters “ran about like mad men,” and copious quantities of “libations” were drunk to his health. But their joy would be fleeting. Franklin was about to become embroiled in a controversy over the notorious Stamp Act, which would require a tax stamp on every newspaper, book, almanac, legal document, and deck of cards.
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It was the first time that Parliament had proposed a major internal tax on the colonies. Franklin believed that Parliament had the right to impose external taxes, such as duties and tariffs, to regulate trade. But he thought it unwise, perhaps even unconstitutional, for Parliament to levy an internal tax on people who had no representation in that assembly. Nevertheless, he did not fight the Stamp Act proposal with much vigor. Instead, he tried to play conciliator.

He and a small group of colonial agents met in February 1765 with George Grenville, the prime minister, who explained that the high cost of the Indian wars made some tax on the colonies necessary. What was a better way to levy it? Franklin argued that it should be done in the “usual constitutional way,” which meant by a request from the king to the various colonial legislatures, who alone had the power to tax their own inhabitants. Would Franklin and his fellow agents, Grenville asked, be able to commit that the colonies would agree to the proper amount and how to apportion it among themselves? Franklin and the others admitted that they could make no firm commitment.

Franklin offered another alternative a few days later. It stemmed from his long-standing desire, both as a rather sophisticated economic theorist and as a printer, to have more paper currency circulating in America. Parliament, he proposed, could authorize new bills of credit that would be issued to borrowers at 6 percent interest. These paper bills would serve as legal tender and circulate like currency, thus increasing America’s money supply, and Britain would collect the interest instead of levying direct internal taxes. “It will operate as a general tax on the colonies, and yet not an unpleasing one,” said Franklin. “The rich, who handle most money, would in reality pay most of the tax.” Grenville was, in Franklin’s words, “besotted with his stamp scheme,” and dismissed the idea. This may have been fortunate for Franklin, as he later heard that even his friends in Philadelphia disliked his paper credit idea as well.
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When the Stamp Act passed in March, Franklin made the mistake of taking a pragmatic attitude. He recommended that his good friend John Hughes be appointed the collection officer in Pennsylvania. “Your undertaking to execute it may make you unpopular for a time, but your acting with coolness and steadiness and with every circumstance in your power of favor to the people will by degrees reconcile them,” he mistakenly argued in a letter to Hughes. “In the meantime, a firm loyalty to the Crown and faithful adherence to the government of this nation will always be the wisest course for you and I to take, whatever may be the madness of the populace.” In his desire to remain on decent terms with the royal ministers, Franklin badly underestimated the madness of the populace back home.

Thomas Penn, on the other hand, played the situation cleverly. He refused to offer his own candidate for stamp collector, saying that if he did so “the people might suppose we were consenting to the laying this load upon them.” John Dickinson, Franklin’s young adversary as the leader of the Proprietary party in the Assembly, drew up a declaration of grievances against the Stamp Act that resoundingly passed.
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It was one of Franklin’s worst political misjudgments. His hatred of the Penns blinded him to the fact that most of his fellow Pennsylvanians hated taxes imposed from London more. “I took every step in my power to prevent the passing of the Stamp Act,” he claimed unconvincingly to his Philadelphia friend Charles Thomson, “but the tide was too strong against us.” He then went on to argue the case for pragmatism: “We might well have hindered the sun’s setting. That we could not do. But since it is down, my friend, and it may be long before it rises again, let us make as good a night of it as we can. We may still light candles.”

The letter, which became public, was a public relations disaster for Franklin. Thomson replied that Philadelphians, rather than being willing to light candles, were ready to launch “the works of darkness.” By September, it was clear that this could include mob violence. “A sort of frenzy or madness has got such hold of the people of all ranks that I fancy some lives will be lost before this fire is put out,” a frightened Hughes wrote the man who had gotten him what had become an unenviable job.
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Franklin’s printing partner, David Hall, sent a similar warning. “The spirit of the people is so violently against everyone they think has the least concern with the Stamp law,” he wrote. Angry Philadelphians had “imbibed the notion that you had a hand in the framing of it, which has occasioned you many enemies.” He added that he would be afraid for Franklin’s safety if he were to return. A cartoon printed in Philadelphia showed the devil whispering in Franklin’s ear: “Thee shall be agent, Ben, for all my dominions.”
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The frenzy climaxed one evening in late September 1765 when a mob gathered at a Philadelphia coffeehouse. Leaders of the rabble accused Franklin of advocating the Stamp Act, and they set out to level his new home, along with those of Hughes and other Franklin supporters. “If I live until tomorrow morning, I shall give you a farther account,” Hughes wrote in a log he later sent Franklin.

Deborah dispatched their daughter to New Jersey for safety. But ever the homebound stalwart, she refused to flee. Her cousin Josiah Davenport arrived with more than twenty friends to help defend her. Her account of that night, while harrowing, is also a testament to her strength. She described it in a letter to her husband:

Franklin’s house and his wife were saved when a group of supporters, dubbed the White Oak Boys, gathered a force to confront the mob. If Franklin’s house was destroyed, they declared, so too would be the homes of anyone involved. Finally, the mob dispersed. “I honor much the spirit and courage you showed,” he wrote Deborah after hearing of her ordeal. “The woman deserves a good house that is determined to defend it.”
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The Stamp Act crisis sparked a radical transformation in American affairs. A new group of colonial leaders, who bristled at being subservient to England, were coming to the fore, especially in Virginia and Massachusetts. Even though most Americans harbored few separatist or nationalist sentiments until 1775, the clash between imperial control and colonial rights was erupting on a variety of fronts. Young Patrick Henry, 29, rose in Virginia’s House of Burgesses to decry taxation without representation. “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third…” He was interrupted by shouts of “Treason!” before he could finish, but it was clear that some colonists were becoming deadly serious. Soon he would find an ally in Thomas Jefferson. In Boston, a group that would take the name the Sons of Liberty met at a distillery and attacked the homes of the Massachusetts tax commissioner and Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. Among the rising patriots there who would eventually become rebels were a young merchant named John Hancock, a fiery agitator named Samuel Adams, and his sour lawyer cousin John Adams.

For the first time since the Albany Conference of 1754, leaders from different parts of America were galvanized into thinking as a collective unit. A congress of nine colonies, including Pennsylvania, was held in New York in October. Not only did it urge the repeal of the Stamp Act, it denied the right of Parliament to levy internal taxes on the colonies. The motto they adopted was the one Franklin had written as a cartoon caption more than a decade earlier, as he sought to rally unity at Albany: “Join, or Die.”