Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (39 page)

His satires and sarcasm became ever more biting. In one essay, written after General Gage had been sent to replace Hutchinson as governor in Massachusetts, he suggested that Britain “without delay introduce into North America a government absolutely and entirely military.” That would “so intimidate the Americans” that they would happily submit to all taxes. “When the colonists are drained of their last shilling,” he added, “they should be sold to the best bidder,” such as Spain or France. In another piece, he proposed a policy for General Gage to assure that more rebels did not arise in America: “all the males there be castrated.” For good measure, the “ringleaders” such as John Hancock and Sam Adams “should be shaved quite close.” Among the side benefits, he added, were that it would be useful to the opera and it would reduce the number of people emigrating from Britain to America.
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Once again, the question arose: Why not finally head home? His wife was near death, he was a political outcast. Once again, he resolved to do so. As soon as he settled the post office accounts, he told friends; by May, he promised Richard Bache. And once again, he ended up not returning. For the rest of 1774, Franklin stayed in England with little to do, no official business to conduct, no ministers to lobby. Even the king found it curious.

“Where is Dr. Franklin?” His Majesty asked Lord Dartmouth that summer.

“I believe, sir, he is in town. He was going to America, but I fancy he is not gone.”

“I heard,” said the king, “he was going to Switzerland.”

“I think,” Lord Dartmouth replied, “there has been such a report.”

In fact, he had stayed close to Craven Street, venturing out rarely, seeing mainly close friends. As he would write to his sister in September, “I have seen no minister since January, nor had the least communication with them.”
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The impending clash between Britain and America inevitably foreshadowed a personal one between Franklin and his loyalist son. Tormented about the former prospect, Franklin remained callous about the latter.

William, on the other hand, agonized mightily as he tried to balance his duties as a son with those of being the royal governor of New Jersey. In his letters to his father after the Cockpit fight, he hoped to curry favor by flattering him, reassuring him, and cajoling him to come home. “Your popularity in this country, whatever it may be on the other side, is greatly beyond what it ever was,” William wrote in May. “You may depend when you return here on being received with every mark of regard and affection.” He made clear, however, that he had no intention of resigning his governorship, despite his father’s occasional suggestions that he do so.

Caught in the middle was the printer William Strahan, one of Franklin’s closest friends in England, who had become a confidant of the younger Franklin as well. He urged William to be his own man, to stick to loyalist positions, and to let the ministers know that he would not let his father’s views interfere with his allegiance to the government he served.

William heeded the advice. Shortly after writing the solicitous letter to his father, he wrote one to Lord Dartmouth, the colonial secretary. “His Majesty may be assured that I will omit nothing in my power to keep this province quiet,” he promised. Then he added pointedly, “No attachment or connections shall ever make me swerve from the duty of my station.” Translation: his loyalty to his father would not tug him away from his loyalty to Britain. Lord Dartmouth promptly responded with reassurances: “I should do injustice to my own sentiments of your character and conduct in supposing you could be induced by any consideration whatever to swerve from the duty you owe the King.”

William went further than merely offering professions of fealty. He opened what he called a “secret and confidential” correspondence with Lord Dartmouth that provided information about American sentiments. Support was growing throughout the colonies to aid Massachusetts, he warned, in reaction to the British decision to blockade Boston’s port. A meeting of colonial delegates, which would become known as the First Continental Congress, had been scheduled for Philadelphia in September. William made clear which side he was on. The proposed gathering, he declared, was “absurd if not unconstitutional,” and he doubted that it would lead to a mass boycott of British goods.
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His father disagreed on all counts. He had been recommending a continental congress for more than a year, he felt strongly that it should call for a boycott, and he was confident that it would. In that case, he wrote gleefully to William, “the present ministry will certainly be knocked up.” He also chided William for clinging to his governorship and, typically, cast the issue in pecuniary as well as political terms. By remaining dependent on the salary of a governor, said Franklin, he would never be able to pay off the debts he owed his father. In addition, the changing political climate meant “you will find yourself in no comfortable situation and perhaps wish you had soon disengaged yourself.” It was signed, simply, “B. Franklin.”
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Even though he knew his letters were being opened and read by British authorities, Franklin forcefully urged his American supporters to take a firm stand. The Continental Congress, he wrote, must vote “immediately to stop all commerce with this country, both exports and imports…until you have obtained redress.” At stake was “no less than whether Americans, and their endless generations, shall enjoy the common rights of mankind or be worse than eastern slaves.”

In those days, when it could take up to two months for the mail to be delivered overseas, there were a lot of crossed letters. William continued to try to convince his father that a continental congress was a bad idea. “There is no foreseeing the consequences that may result from such a Congress.” Instead, Bostonians should make restitution for the tea they destroyed, and then “they might get their port opened in a few months.”

Franklin had actually expressed, a few months earlier, similar sentiments about how Bostonians would be prudent to pay restitution for their tea party. “Such a step will remove much of the prejudice now entertained against us,” he had written Cushing in March. It infuriated him, however, to be given such a lecture by his son, and in September he wrote a crushing response rebutting William point by point. Britain had “extorted many thousands of pounds” from the colonies unconstitutionally. “Of this money they ought to make restitution.” The argument ended in insult: “But you, who are a thorough courtier, see everything with government eyes.”

Franklin wrote his son again in October, making many of the same arguments and then turning personal: he pointedly noted that his son was behind in paying back the money he had loaned him over the years and would not likely be able to do so if he remained a royal governor.
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For a while there was no answer. Then, on Christmas eve of 1774, William sent his father a letter of brutal sadness and pain. Deborah had died, with Franklin not there.

“I came here on Thursday last to attend the funeral of my poor old mother, who died Monday,” he began, referring to his stepmother.

Franklin’s dutiful and long-suffering wife had been pining away since her stroke five years earlier. “I find myself growing very feeble very fast,” she had written in 1772. For most of 1774, she had been too weak to write at all. Oblivious, Franklin had continued to send off short notes to her, some paternalistic and others businesslike, that contained breezy references to his own health, greetings from the Stevenson family, and admonitions for not writing him.

“A very respectable number of the inhabitants were at the funeral,” William continued. Clearly wanting his father to feel guilty, he described his last visit with Deborah that October. “She told me that she never expected to see you unless you returned this winter, that she was sure she would not live until next summer. I heartily wish you had happened to have come over in the fall, as I think her disappointment preyed a good deal on her spirits.”

At the end of the letter, William turned plaintive as he beseeched his father to leave England. “You are looked upon with an evil eye in that country, and are in no small danger of being brought into trouble for your political conduct,” William warned. “You had certainly better return while you are able to bear the fatigues of the voyage to a country where the people revere you.” He also ached to see his own son, Temple, now 14, and he begged Franklin to bring him to America. “I hope to see you and him in the spring and that you will spend some time with me.”
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As his wife was dying that December, Franklin was enjoying a flirtatious series of chess matches with a fashionable woman he had just met in London. But the games were not merely social. They were part of a secret last-ditch effort by some members of Britain’s Whig opposition to stave off a revolution by the colonies.

The process had begun in August, when he received a request to call on Lord Chatham, formerly William Pitt the Elder, who had served two stints as prime minister and been known as “the Great Commoner” until unwisely accepting a peerage as the Earl of Chatham. The great Whig orator was a steadfast supporter of America. By 1774, he was ailing and out of government, but he had decided to reengage in public affairs as an outspoken opponent of Lord North and his policy of colonial repression.

Lord Chatham received Franklin warmly, professed full support for the resistance by the colonies to British taxation, and said he “hoped they would continue firm.” Franklin responded by urging Chatham to join with other Whig “Wise Men” to oust the “present set of bungling ministers” and form a government that would restore the “union and harmony between Britain and her colonies.”

That was not likely, Chatham said. There were too many in England who felt that there could be no further concessions because “America aimed at setting up for itself an independent state.”

“America did not aim at independence,” Franklin claimed. “I assured him that, having more than once traveled almost from one end of the continent to the other, and kept a great variety of company, eating, drinking and conversing with them freely, I never had heard in any conversation, from any person drunk or sober, the least expression of a wish for separation.”

Franklin was not being fully forthright. It had been ten years since he had traveled in America, and he knew full well that a small but growing number of radical colonists, drunk and sober, desired independence. He had even begun entertaining that possibility himself. Josiah Quincy Jr., a zealous Boston patriot and son of an old Franklin friend, visited him that fall and reported that they had discussed “total emancipation” of the colonies as an increasingly likely outcome.
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The next act in the drama began with a curious invitation from a well-connected society matron who let it be known that she wanted to play chess with Franklin. The woman in question was Caroline Howe, the sister of Adm. Richard Howe and Gen. William Howe. They would eventually end up the commanders of England’s naval and land forces during the Revolution, but at the time they were both somewhat sympathetic to the American cause. (Their sister was the widow of a distant cousin, Richard Howe, and thus known as Mrs. Howe.)
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When Franklin called on Mrs. Howe in early December, he found her “of very sensible conversation and pleasing behavior.” They enjoyed a few games and Franklin “most readily” accepted an invitation to play again a few days later. This time, the conversation wandered. They discussed her interest in math, which Franklin noted was “a little unusual in ladies,” and then Mrs. Howe turned to politics.

“What is to be done,” she asked, “about this dispute between Great Britain and her colonies?”

“They should kiss and be friends,” replied Franklin.

“I have often said that I wished the government would employ you to settle the dispute,” she said. “I am sure nobody could do it so well. Don’t you think that the thing is practicable?”

“Undoubtedly, madam, if the parties are disposed to reconciliation,” he responded. “The two countries really have no clashing interests.” It was a matter that “reasonable people might settle in half an hour.” He added, however, that “the ministers will never think of employing me in that good work; they choose rather to abuse me.”

“Aye,” she agreed, “they have behaved shamefully to you. And indeed some of them are now ashamed of it themselves.”

Later that same evening, Franklin dined with two old friends, the Quakers John Fothergill and David Barclay, who made the same plea that he act as a mediator. “Put pen to paper,” they urged him, and draft a plan for reconciliation.

And so he did. His “Hints for a Conversation” included seventeen points, among them: Massachusetts would pay for the destroyed tea, the tea duties would be repealed, the regulations on colonial manufacturing would be reconsidered, all money raised by trade duties would go to the colonial treasuries, no troops would be stationed in a colony without the approval of its legislature, and all powers of taxation would reside with the colonial legislatures rather than Parliament. His friends asked permission to show the list to some “moderate ministers,” and Franklin agreed.

These private negotiations were interrupted in mid-December, when Franklin finally received the resolutions that had been approved by the First Continental Congress. At its meeting in Philadelphia, which lasted until late October, the rump assembly had reasserted America’s loyalty to the Crown—but not to Parliament. In addition, it voted a boycott of British goods if Parliament did not repeal its coercive acts.