Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (40 page)

Many of the colonial agents in London refused to have anything to do with the resolutions when they arrived. So Franklin and the other agents from Massachusetts took it upon themselves to deliver them to Lord Dartmouth, who “told us it was a decent and proper petition and cheerfully undertook to present it to his Majesty.”

On Christmas day, Franklin visited Mrs. Howe for another chess match. As soon as he arrived, she mentioned that her brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, wanted to meet him. “Will you give me leave to send for him?” she asked.

Franklin readily agreed, and soon he was listening as Lord Howe showered him with compliments. “No man could do more towards reconciling our differences,” the admiral told him. He asked Franklin to offer some suggestions, which he would then communicate to the proper ministers.

Franklin, wary of being caught in the middle, noted that the Continental Congress had made clear what the colonies wanted. But he agreed to another secret session a week later, again under the guise of visiting Mrs. Howe to play chess.

This time, the meeting was not quite as cordial. Lord Howe asked Franklin if he thought it might be useful for England to send an emissary to America to seek an accommodation. It might “be of great use,” Franklin responded, as long as the person was one of “rank and dignity.”

Mrs. Howe interjected by nominating her brother for such a role, subtly noting that there was talk of sending over their other brother, the army general, on a less peaceful mission. “I wish, brother, you were to be sent thither on such a service,” she said. “I should like that much better than General Howe’s going to command the army there.”

“I think, madam,” Franklin said pointedly, “they ought to provide for General Howe some more honorable employment.”

Lord Howe then pulled out a piece of paper and asked if Franklin knew anything about it. It was a copy of the “Hints for a Conversation” that he had prepared. Franklin said that his role in drawing up the paper was supposed to be a secret, but he readily owned up to having been the originator. Howe replied that he “was rather sorry” to find that the propositions were Franklin’s, because there was no likelihood that the ministers would accept them. He urged Franklin to reconsider the proposals and come up with a new plan “that would be acceptable.” Mrs. Howe could recopy it in her own hand, so that the authorship would be kept secret. If Franklin did so, Lord Howe hinted, he could “expect any reward in the power of the government to bestow.”

Franklin bristled at the implied bribe. “This to me was what the French call ‘spitting in the soup,’ ” he later noted. Nevertheless, Franklin found himself trusting Lord Howe and decided to play along. “I liked his manner,” he noted, “and found myself disposed to place great confidence in him.”

The paper he sent to Mrs. Howe the next day made no substantive concessions. Instead, it merely restated the American position and declared them necessary “to cement a cordial union.” Although the talks with Howe continued fitfully through February, fueled mainly by the admiral’s ambition to be chosen as an envoy, they never moved much closer to a solution.

In the meantime, Franklin was engaged in a variety of other back-channel talks and negotiations, most notably with Lord Chatham. The former prime minister invited him to his country house to show him a series of proposals he planned to put before Parliament, and then visited him for two hours on Craven Street for further discussions. Lord Chatham’s presence at Franklin’s humble boarding-house—his coach waiting very visibly in the narrow street outside the door—caused quite a stir in the neighborhood. “Such a visit from so great a man, on so important a business, flattered not a little my vanity,” Franklin admitted. It was particularly savory because it fell precisely on the first anniversary of his humiliation in the Cockpit.

The compromise that Chatham proposed, as the two men sat together in the tiny parlor of Mrs. Stevenson’s house, would permit Parliament to regulate imperial trade and to send troops to America. But only the colonial legislatures would have the right to impose taxes, and the Continental Congress would be given official and permanent standing. Although Franklin did not approve of all its particulars, he readily agreed to lend his support by being present when Chatham presented the plan to the House of Lords on February 1.

Chatham gave an eloquent explanation of his proposals, and Lord Dartmouth responded for the government by saying they were of “such weight and magnitude as to require much consideration.” For a moment, Franklin felt that all of his back-channel talks and lobbying might be bearing fruit.

Then Lord Sandwich, who as first lord of the admiralty had taken a hard line on colonial affairs, took the floor. In a “petulant, vehement speech,” he attacked Chatham’s bill and then turned his aim on Franklin. He could not believe, he said, that the plan came from the pen of an English peer. Instead, it appeared to him the work of some American. As Franklin recounted the scene: “Turning his face to me, [he] said he fancied he had in his eye the person who drew it up, one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies this country had ever known. This drew the eyes of many lords upon me; but…I kept my countenance as immovable as if my features had been made of wood.”

Chatham replied that the plan was his own, but he was not ashamed to have consulted “a person so perfectly acquainted with the whole of American affairs as the gentleman alluded to and so injuriously reflected on.” He then proceeded to heap praise on Franklin as a person “whom all Europe held in high estimation for his knowledge and wisdom and ranked with our Boyles and Newtons; who was an honor not to the English nation only but to human nature.” Franklin later wrote to his son, with perhaps a bit of feigned humility, “I found it harder to stand this extravagant compliment than the preceding equally extravagant abuse.”
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But Chatham was not only out of power, he was out of touch. Lord Dartmouth quickly abandoned his initial openness and agreed with Lord Sandwich that the bill should be rejected immediately, which it was. “Chatham’s bill,” Franklin wrote to a Philadelphia friend, “was treated with as much contempt as they could have shown to a ballad offered by a drunken porter.”
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For the next few weeks, Franklin engaged in a flurry of further meetings designed to salvage some compromise. But by early March 1775, as he finally prepared to leave England, his patience had run out. He drew up an insolent petition to Lord Dartmouth demanding British reparations for the blockade of Boston Harbor. When he showed it to his friend and land deal partner Thomas Walpole, “he looked at it and me several times alternately, as if he apprehended me a little out of my senses.” Franklin returned to his senses and decided not to submit the petition.

Instead, he played a small role in one of the final and most eloquent pleas for peace. He spent the afternoon of March 19 with the great Whig orator and philosopher Edmund Burke. Three days later, Burke rose in Parliament to give his famous but futile “On Conciliation with America” speech. “A great empire and little minds go ill together,” he proclaimed.

By then, Franklin was already on the Philadelphia packet ship heading west from Portsmouth. He had spent his last day in London with his old friend and scientific partner Joseph Priestley. People who did not know Franklin, Priestley wrote, sometimes found him reserved, even cold. But that day, as they discussed the looming war and read from the newspapers, he grew very emotional. For a while, the tears in his eyes made it impossible for him to read.
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Philadelphia, 1775–1776

Just as his son, William, had helped him with his famed kite-flying experiment, now William’s son, Temple, lent a hand as he lowered the homemade thermometer into the ocean. Three or four times a day, they would take the temperature and record it on a chart. Franklin had learned from his Nantucket cousin, the whaling captain Timothy Folger, about the course of the Gulf Stream. During the latter half of his six-week voyage home, after writing a detailed account of his futile negotiations, Franklin turned his attention to studying it. The maps he published and the temperature measurements he made are included on the NASA Web site, which notes how remarkably similar they are to the infrared data gathered by modern satellites.
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The voyage was notably calm, but in America the long-brewing storm had begun. On the night of April 18, 1775, while Franklin was in midocean, a contingent of British redcoats headed north from Boston to arrest the tea party planners Samuel Adams and John Hancock and capture the munitions stockpiled by their supporters. Paul Revere spread the alarm, as did others less famously. When the redcoats reached Lexington, seventy American “minutemen” were there to meet them.

“Disperse, ye rebels,” the British major ordered. At first they did. Then a shot was fired. In the ensuing skirmish, eight Americans were killed. The victorious redcoats marched on to Concord, where, as Emerson put it, “the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world.” (Somehow, the poor Lexington fighters lost out in Emerson’s poetic version of history, just as William Dawes and other messengers got slighted in Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.”) On their day-long retreat back to Boston, more than 250 redcoats were killed or wounded by American militiamen.

When Franklin landed in Philadelphia with his 15-year-old grandson on May 5, delegates were beginning to gather there for the Second Continental Congress. Bells were rung to celebrate his arrival. “Dr. Franklin is highly pleased to find us arming and preparing for the worst events,” wrote one reporter. “He thinks nothing else can save us from the most abject slavery.”

America was indeed arming and preparing. Among those arriving in Philadelphia that week, with his uniform packed and ready, was Franklin’s old military comrade, George Washington, who had become a plantation squire in Virginia after the French and Indian War. Close to a thousand militiamen on horse and foot met him at the outskirts of Philadelphia, and a military band played patriotic songs as his carriage rode into town. Yet there was still no consensus, except among the radical patriots in the Massachusetts delegation, about whether the war that had just erupted should be waged for independence or merely for the assertion of American rights within a British Empire that could still be preserved. For that question to be resolved would take another year, though not for Franklin.

Franklin was selected a member of the Congress the day after his arrival. Nearing 70, he was by far the oldest. Most of the sixty-two others who convened in the Pennsylvania statehouse—such as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry from Virginia and John Adams and John Hancock from Massachusetts—had not even been born when Franklin first went to work there more than forty years earlier.

Franklin moved to the house on Market Street that he had designed but never known, the one where Deborah had been living without him for the past ten years. His daughter, Sally, took care of his housekeeping needs, her husband, Richard Bache, remained dutiful, and their two children, Ben and Will, provided amusement. “Will has got a little gun, marches with it, and whistles at the same time by way of fife,” Franklin wrote.
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For the time being, Franklin kept quiet about whether or not he favored independence, and he avoided the taverns where the other delegates spent the evenings debating the topic. He diligently attended sessions and committee meetings, said little, and then went home to dine with his family. Beginning what would become a long and conflicted association with Franklin, the loquacious and ambitious John Adams complained that the older man was treated with reverence even as he was “sitting in silence, a great part of the time fast asleep in his chair.”

Many of the younger, hotter-tempered delegates had never witnessed Franklin’s artifice of silence, his trick of seeming sage by saying nothing. They knew him by reputation as the man who had successfully argued in Parliament against the Stamp Act, not realizing that oratory did not come naturally to him. So rumors began to circulate. What was his game? Was he a secret loyalist?

Among the suspicious was William Bradford, who had taken over the printing business and newspaper of his father, Franklin’s first patron and later competitor. Some of the delegates, he confided to the young James Madison, “begin to entertain a great suspicion that Dr. Franklin came rather as a spy than as a friend, and that he means to discover our weak side and make his peace with the ministers.”
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In fact, Franklin was biding his time through much of May because there were two people, both very close to him, whom he first wanted to convert to the American rebel cause. One was Joseph Galloway, his old ally in the struggle against the Penns, who had acted as his lieutenant and surrogate for ten years in the Pennsylvania Assembly. During the First Continental Congress, Galloway had proposed the creation of an American congress that would have power parallel to that of Parliament, with both loyal to the king. It was a plan for an imperial union along the lines that Franklin had supported at the Albany Conference and later, but the Congress peremptorily rejected it. Sulking, Galloway had declined an appointment to the Second Continental Congress.

By early 1775, Franklin had come to believe it was too late for a plan like Galloway’s to work. Nevertheless, he tried to persuade Galloway to join him as a member of the new Congress. It was wrong to quit public life, he wrote, “at a time when your abilities are so much wanted.” Initially, he also gave Galloway no more clue than he had given others about where he stood on the question of independence. “People seemed at a loss what party he would take,” Galloway later recalled.
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The other person Franklin hoped to convert to the revolutionary cause was someone even closer to him.

New Jersey governor William Franklin, still loyal to the British ministry and embroiled in disputes with his own legislature, read of his father’s return to Philadelphia in the papers. It was, he wrote Strahan, “quite unexpected news to me.” He was eager to meet with his father and to reclaim his son, Temple. First, however, he had to endure a special session of the New Jersey legislature he had called for May 15. Shortly after it ended in rancor, the three generations of Franklins—father and son and a poor grandson caught in the middle—were finally reunited.
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Franklin and his son chose a neutral venue for their summit: Trevose, the grand fieldstone manor house of Joseph Galloway in Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia. Surprisingly, given the intensely emotional nature of the meeting, neither they nor Galloway apparently ever wrote about it. The only source for what transpired is, ironically, the diary of Thomas Hutchinson, the Massachusetts governor whose letters Franklin had purloined; in his diary, Hutchinson recorded an account of the meeting Galloway gave three years later, when both men were exiled loyalists in England.

The evening started awkwardly, with embraces and then small talk. At one point, William pulled Galloway aside to say that he had avoided, until now, seriously talking politics with his father. But after a while, “the glass having gone around freely” and much Madeira consumed, they confronted their political disagreements. “Well, Mr. Galloway,” Franklin asked his longtime ally, “you are really of the mind that I ought to promote a reconciliation?”

Galloway was indeed of such a mind, but Franklin would hear none of it. He had brought with him the long letter he had written to William during his Atlantic crossing, which detailed his futile attempts at negotiating a reconciliation. Although Galloway had already heard portions of it, Franklin again read most of it aloud and told of the abuse he had suffered. Galloway volleyed with his own horror stories about how anonymous radicals had sent him a noose for proposing a plan to save the British union. A revolution, he stressed, would be suicidal.

William argued that it was best for them all to remain neutral, but his father was not moved. As Hutchinson later recorded, he “opened himself and declared in favor of measures for attaining to independence” and “exclaimed against the corruption and dissipation of the kingdom.” William responded with anger, but also with a touch of concern for his father’s safety. If he intended “to set the colonies in flame,” William hoped, he should “take care to run away by the light of it.”
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So William rode back to New Jersey, defeated and dejected, to resume his duties as royal governor. With him was his son, Temple. The one issue that Benjamin and William had settled at Trevose was that the boy would spend the summer in New Jersey, then return to Philadelphia to be enrolled in the college his grandfather had founded there. William had hoped to send him to King’s College (now Columbia) in New York, but Benjamin scuttled that plan because it had become a hotbed of English loyalism. Temple was soon to be caught in a tug-of-war between two men who vied for his loyalty. He eagerly sought to please them both, but he was fated to find that impossible.

It is hard to pinpoint precisely when America crossed the threshold of deciding that complete independence from Britain was necessary and desirable. It is even difficult to determine when that tipping point came for specific individuals. Franklin, who for ten years had juggled hope and despair that a breach could be avoided, made his own private declaration to his family during their summit at Trevose. By early July 1775, precisely a year before his fellow American patriots made their own stance official, he was ready to come out publicly.

There were many specific events that pushed Franklin across the line to rebellion: personal slights, dashed hopes, betrayals, and the accretion of hostile British acts. But it is also important to take note of the core causes of Franklin’s evolution and, by extension, that of a people he had come to exemplify.

When Englishmen such as his father had immigrated to a new land, they had bred a new type of people. As Franklin repeatedly stressed in his letters to his son, America should not replicate the rigid ruling hierarchies of the Old World, the aristocratic structures and feudal social orders based on birth rather than merit. Instead, its strength would be its creation of a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen who were assertive of their rights and proud of their status.

Like many of these new Americans, Franklin chafed at authority, which is why he had run away from his brother’s print shop in Boston. He was not awed by established elites, whether they be the Mathers or the Penns or the peers in the House of Lords. He was cheeky in his writings and rebellious in his manner. And he had imbibed the philosophy of the new Enlightenment thinkers, who believed that liberty and tolerance were the foundation for a civil society.

For a long time he had cherished a vision of imperial harmony in which Britain and America could both flourish in one great expanding empire. But he felt that it would work only if Britain stopped subju-gating Americans through mercantile trading rules and taxes imposed from afar. Once it was clear that Britain remained intent on subordinating its colonies, the only course left was independence.

The bloody Battle of Bunker Hill and the burning of Charleston, both in June 1775, further inflamed the hostility that Franklin and his fellow patriots felt toward the British. Nevertheless, most members of the Continental Congress were not quite as far down the road to revolution. Many colonial legislatures, including Pennsylvania’s, had instructed their delegates to resist any calls for independence. The captain of the cautious camp was Franklin’s long-time adversary John Dickinson, who still refrained from erecting a lightning rod on his house.

On July 5, Dickinson pushed through the Congress one last appeal to the king, which became known as the Olive Branch Petition. Blaming the troubles on the perfidies of “irksome” and “delusive” ministers, it “beseeched” the king to come to America’s rescue. The Congress also passed a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, in which it proclaimed “that we mean not to dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored.”

Like the other delegates, Franklin agreed for the sake of consensus to sign the Olive Branch Petition. But he made his own rebellious sentiments public the same day. The outlet he chose was quite odd: a letter to his long-time London friend and fellow printer, William Strahan. No longer addressing him as “dear Straney,” he wrote in cold and calculated fury:

What made the famous letter especially odd was that Franklin allowed it to be circulated and publicized—but he never sent it. Instead, it was merely an artifice for making his sentiments clear to his fellow Americans.

In fact, Franklin wrote Strahan a much mellower letter two days later, which he actually sent. “Words and arguments are now of no use,” he said in tones more sorrowful than angry. “All tends to a separation.” Just as he had not mailed the angrier version, Franklin did not keep a copy of the milder letter in his papers.
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