Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (41 page)

(Franklin ended up remaining close friends with Strahan, who four years earlier had declared that “though we differ we do not disagree.” The very day Franklin wrote his unsent note, Strahan wrote one from London lamenting the possibility that the looming war would lead to “the ultimate ruin of the whole of the most glorious fabric of civil and religious government that ever existed.” They continued to correspond throughout 1775, with Strahan begging Franklin to return to England “with proposals of accommodation.” Franklin responded in October by suggesting that Strahan “send us over fair proposals of peace, if you choose it, and nobody will be more ready than myself to promote their acceptation: for I make it a rule not to mix personal resentments with public business.” He signed the letter, as Strahan had signed his, “your affectionate and humble servant.” A year later, when he arrived in Paris as an American envoy, Franklin would receive a gift of Stilton cheese that Strahan sent over from London.)
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Franklin wrote his two other close British friends on July 7 as well. To Bishop Shipley, he railed against England’s tactics of stirring up slaves and Indians against the colonists, and then he apologized for the angry tone of his letter. “If a temper naturally cool and phlegmatic can, in old age, which often cools the warmest, be thus heated, you will judge by that of the general temper here, which is now little short of madness.”
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To Joseph Priestley, he lamented that the Olive Branch Petition was destined to be rejected. “We have carried another humble petition to the crown, to give Britain one more chance, one opportunity more of recovering the friendship of the colonies; which however I think she has not sense enough to embrace, and so I conclude she has lost them for ever.” The letter to Priestley also offered a glimpse into Franklin’s workday and the mood of relative frugality in the colonies:

Liberated by his private break with his son and his public break with Strahan, Franklin became one of the most ardent opponents of Britain in the Continental Congress. He served on a committee to draft a declaration to be issued by General Washington, and the result was so strong that the Congress was afraid to pass or publish it. The document clearly came from Franklin’s pen. It contained phrases he had used before to refute Britain’s claims of having funded the defense of the colonies (“groundless assertions and malicious calumnies”), and it even concluded by seriously comparing the American-British relationship to the one between Britain and Saxony (“her mother country”), a comparison he had earlier made facetiously in his parody “An Edict by the King of Prussia.” In an even more strongly worded preamble to a congressional resolution on privateering that he drafted but never submitted, Franklin accused Britain of “the practice of every injustice which avarice could dictate or rapacity execute” and of “open robbery, declaring by a solemn act of Parliament that all our estates are theirs.”
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No longer was there any doubt, even among his detractors, where Franklin stood. Ever eager, like many Virginians, to hear about Franklin, Madison wrote to Bradford to see if the rumors of his ambivalence persisted. “Has anything further been whispered relative to the conduct of Dr. Franklin?” Bradford confessed that opinions had changed. “The suspicions against Dr. Franklin have died away. Whatever was his design at coming over here, I believe he has now chosen his side and favors our cause.”

Likewise, John Adams reported to his wife, Abigail, that Franklin was now squarely in their revolutionary camp. “He does not hesitate at our boldest measures, but rather seems to think us too irresolute.” The jealous orator could not suppress a slight resentment that the British believed that American opposition was “wholly owing” to Franklin, “and I suppose their scribblers will attribute the temper and proceedings of this Congress to him.”
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For the colonies to cross the threshold of rebellion, they needed to begin conceiving of themselves as a new nation. To become independent of Britain, they had to become less independent of each other. As one of the most traveled and least parochial of colonial leaders, Franklin had long espoused some form of confederation, beginning with his Albany Plan of 1754.

That plan, which was never adopted, envisioned an intercolonial Congress that would be loyal to the king. Now, in 1775, Franklin put forth the idea again, but with one big difference: although his plan allowed for the possibility that the new confederation would remain part of the king’s empire, it was designed to work even if the empire broke apart.

The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union that he presented to the Congress on July 21, like his Albany Plan, contained the seeds of the great conceptual breakthrough that would eventually define America’s federal system: a division of powers between a central government and those of the states. Franklin, however, was ahead of his time. His proposed central government was very powerful, indeed more powerful than the one eventually created by the actual Articles of Confederation that the Congress began to draft the following year.

Much of the wording in Franklin’s proposal was drawn from New England confederation plans that stretched back to one forged by settlements in Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1643. But the scope and powers went far beyond anything previously proposed. “The Name of the Confederacy shall henceforth be The United Colonies of North America,” Franklin’s detailed thirteen articles began. “The said United Colonies hereby severally enter into a firm League of Friendship with each other, binding on themselves and their posterity, for their common defense against their enemies, for the security of their liberties and properties, the safety of their persons and families, and their mutual and general welfare.”
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Under Franklin’s proposal, the Congress would have only a single chamber, in which there would be proportional representation from each state based on population. It would have the power to levy taxes, make war, manage the military, enter into foreign alliances, settle disputes between colonies, form new colonies, issue a unified currency, establish a postal system, regulate commerce, and enact laws “necessary to the general welfare.” Franklin also proposed that, instead of a single president, the Congress appoint a twelve-person “executive council” whose members would serve for staggered three-year terms.

Franklin included an escape provision: in the event that Britain accepted all of America’s demands and made financial reparation for all of the damage it had done, the union could be dissolved. Otherwise, “this confederation is to be perpetual.”

As Franklin fully realized, this pretty much amounted to a declaration of independence from Britain and a declaration of dependence by the colonies on each other, neither of which had widespread support yet. So he read his proposal into the record but did not force a vote on it. He was content to wait for history, and the rest of the Continental Congress, to catch up with him.

By late August, when it was time for Temple to return from New Jersey to Philadelphia, William tentatively suggested that he could accompany the boy there. Franklin, uncomfortable at the prospect of his loyalist son arriving in town while the rebellious Congress was in session, decided instead to fetch Temple himself.
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Temple was lanky, fun-loving, and as disorganized as most 15-year-olds. Much correspondence was spent reuniting him with personal items he had left in the wrong place. As his stepmother noted, “You are extremely unlucky in your clothes.” William tried hard to keep up the pretense of family harmony and included kind words about Franklin in all his letters to Temple. He also tried to keep up with Temple’s frequent requests for more money; in the tug-of-war for his affections, the lad got fewer lectures about frugality than other members of his family had.

Once again, Franklin surrounded himself with the sort of domestic menagerie he found so comfortable: his daughter and her husband, their two children (Benny, 6, and William, 2), Temple, and eventually Jane Mecom, his sole surviving sibling. In none of the letters we have from that time is Deborah mentioned; life on Market Street seemed to go along without her.

For the time being, Franklin was able to close out his accounts, literally and symbolically, with his counterpart family back in London. He sent Mrs. Stevenson a £1,000 payment for his back rent, and stiffly warned her to invest it in a piece of land instead of stocks. “Britain having begun a war with us, which I apprehend is not likely soon to be ended,” he wrote, “there is great probability of these stocks falling headlong.”

For her part, Mrs. Stevenson sunk into “weak spirits” pining for his return. “Without the animating hope of spending the remainder of life with you,” a friend of hers wrote Franklin, “she would be very wretched indeed.” In his jovial way, Franklin once again proposed an arranged marriage, this time between his grandson Benny and Polly Stevenson’s daughter, Elizabeth Hewson.
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Franklin had been serving his country, as it headed toward revolution, in roles befitting a man of his age: diplomat, elder statesman, sage, and dozing delegate. But he still had the inclination and talent for hands-on management, organizing things and making them happen in a practical way.

He was the obvious choice to chair a committee to figure out how to replace the British-run postal system and then become, as he did in July, America’s new postmaster general. The job paid a handsome £1,000 per year, but Franklin’s patriotism overwhelmed his frugality: he donated the salary to care for wounded soldiers. “Men can be as diligent with us from zeal for the public good as with you for thousands per annum,” he wrote Priestley. “Such is the difference between uncorrupted new states and corrupted old ones.” His penchant for nepotism, however, remained intact. Richard Bache became the financial comptroller of the new system.

Franklin was also put in charge of establishing a system of paper currency, one of his long-standing passions. As usual, he immersed himself in many of the details. Using his botanical knowledge of the vein structures of different types of leaves, he personally drew the leaf designs for the various notes to make them harder to counterfeit. Once again, Bache benefited: he was one of those Franklin selected to oversee the printing.

Franklin’s other assignments included heading up the effort to collect lead for munitions, devising ways to manufacture gunpowder, and serving on committees to deal with the Indians and to promote trade with Britain’s enemies. In addition, he was made president of Pennsylvania’s own defense committee. In that capacity, he oversaw construction of a secret system of underwater obstructions to prevent enemy warships from navigating the Delaware River and wrote detailed proposals, filled with historical precedents, for using pikes and even bows and arrows (reminiscent of the suggestions he had made in 1755 for using dogs) to compensate for the colonial shortage of gunpowder. The idea of using arrows might seem quirky, but he justified it in a letter to Gen. Charles Lee in New York. Among the reasons he offered: “A man may shoot as truly with a bow as with a common musket…He can discharge four arrows in the same time of charging and discharging one bullet…A flight of arrows, seen coming upon them, terrifies and disturbs the enemies’ attention to their business…An arrow striking in any part of a man puts him hors du combat till it is extracted.”
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Given his age and physical infirmities, Franklin might have been expected to contribute his expertise from the comfort of Philadelphia. But among his attributes was a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to be involved in practical details rather than detached theorizing. He was also, both as a teen and as a septuagenarian, revitalized by travel. Thus, he would find himself embarked on missions for the Congress in October 1775 and the following March.

The October trip came in response to an appeal from General Washington, who had taken command of the motley Massachusetts militias and was struggling to make them, along with various undisciplined backwoodsmen who had arrived from other colonies, into the nucleus of a true continental army. With little equipment and declining morale, it was questionable whether he could hold his troops together through the winter. So the Congress appointed a committee to look into the situation, which was about all it could do, and Franklin agreed to serve as its head.

On the eve of his departure, Franklin wrote two of his British friends to emphasize that America was determined to prevail. “If you flatter yourselves with beating us into submission, you know neither the people nor the country,” he told David Hartley. To Joseph Priestley, he provided a bit of math for one of their friends to ponder: “Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20,000 a head…During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all.”
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Franklin and his two fellow committee members met with General Washington in Cambridge for a week. Discipline was a big problem, and Franklin approached it in his usual meticulous manner by drawing up (as he had done two decades earlier for Pennsylvania’s militia) incredibly detailed methods and procedures. His list of prescribed punishments, for example, included between twenty and thirty-nine lashes for sentries caught sleeping, a fine of a month’s pay for an officer absent without leave, seven days’ confinement with only bread and water for an enlisted man absent without leave, and the death penalty for mutiny. The rations for each man were spelled out in similar detail: a pound of beef or salt fish per day, a pound of bread, a pint of milk, a quart of beer or cider, and so on, down to the amount of soap and candles.
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