Independence (7 page)

The colonial protest gained momentum in 1768. This time the popular leaders took pains to establish greater control over unruly mobs. The wild and frightening urban rampages in 1765 had served their purpose. They had alarmed officials in London, helping to convince them to repeal the Stamp Act. However, many American protest leaders feared that the mayhem had also been counterproductive, chasing away some in the colonies who otherwise might have joined in the protest against the tax. In 1768 crowds once more poured into the streets, venting their anger in noisy, assertive demonstrations. But the protests were largely peaceful. While protestors marched and rallied around Liberty Poles in the major cities, the assemblies in nearly every colony once again remonstrated against parliamentary taxation, beginning with Massachusetts, which in February sent a Circular Letter to the other provincial legislatures. It asked every assembly to appeal to the king to protect the colonists from Parliament’s illegal taxation. At the same moment, leaders in several colonies organized boycotts of British imports. Not only were more trade embargoes ginned up than had been the case in 1765, but they were also better planned and less porous, their organizers having learned a thing or two from the shortcomings of the previous boycotts.

The American protest was aided by London’s clumsy early response to the colonial resistance. Wills Hill, Lord Hillsborough, the American secretary, ordered the dissolution of every assembly that endorsed Massachusetts’s Circular Letter. Hillsborough’s maladroit overreaction only fueled the American outcry. Pamphlets attacking British policy rolled off the colonial presses in 1768 in record numbers. The most influential was
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
, written by John Dickinson, in reality a lawyer who lived in Delaware and probably never went near a plow or a pitchfork. Parliament had acted unconstitutionally, Dickinson wrote. It had no authority to levy any sort of tax on Americans—direct or indirect—as the colonists were not, and could never be, represented in a Parliament that met three thousand miles away. Unlike some, however, Dickinson did not suggest that Parliament had no authority over America. Despite the all-too-apparent contradiction in his argument, Dickinson conceded Parliament’s power to regulate imperial commerce, something that was “essential … and necessary for the common good of all” those living within the empire.
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Dickinson’s more moderate tone appealed to many who longed for accommodation with London.

No one read Dickinson’s pamphlet more carefully than Franklin. The two were longtime political enemies, as Dickinson was the leader of the Proprietary Party in Pennsylvania, a faction that had come into being to resist the Franklin-Galloway initiative to royalize the province. Although Franklin did not entirely agree with Dickinson’s stance on imperial matters, he thought the conciliatory tone of
Letters from a Farmer
might offer a bridge toward an eventual solution to the Anglo-American quandary. He quietly arranged the publication of Dickinson’s tract in London.
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In fact, Franklin acted so covertly that Galloway was unaware of what his longtime political partner had done.

If any Americans yearned for independence in 1768, Franklin was not among them. When Franklin told an acquaintance late that year that he “wish[ed] all prosperity to both” sides, he meant what he said. He still loved and trusted the king and praised him as “the very best in the world.”
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But there was more than that to his thinking. Having spent most of the past decade in England, Franklin desperately hoped for a settlement that would prevent an imperial clash, enabling him to live out his days in London. In Franklin’s time, those who escaped the perils of infancy and childhood had a reasonable chance of surviving into their sixties, though few lived much beyond age sixty-five. Franklin turned sixty-two in 1768.

He loved London, a great cosmopolitan center and a city in which, as he said, he had “made many agreeable connections of friendship.”
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London offered convivial clubs and rich enticements for a man with insatiable social and intellectual appetites. The Continent was nearby, too, and Franklin had already traveled there twice, exploring France and Germany. But London had become his home, and it offered him much more than tiny Philadelphia.

It even offered him at least as much female companionship as he had enjoyed at home. At age twenty-four, Franklin had entered into a common-law marriage with Deborah Read of Philadelphia. She had not been his first choice, but when his other courtships failed, Franklin turned to her. Franklin’s marriage—like everything that he did—was a cold, calculated move. Deborah was plain and barely literate, but she brought several virtues to the union. She was prudent, frugal, industrious, and helpful around her husband’s shop. She was also willing to raise Franklin’s illegitimate son, William, born to another woman. Two years into the marriage, Deborah gave birth to a son, Francis, who died of smallpox when he was four years old. (Though he exhorted others to be inoculated, Franklin had mysteriously failed to take the precaution with little Francis.) As Deborah and Benjamin approached their fortieth birthdays, she bore a second child, Sarah, who was called Sally.

Whatever the nature of their relationship may have been in their early years together, Benjamin and Deborah rarely saw one another once they reached middle age. She refused to accompany her husband on his two Atlantic crossings, possibly from fear of sailing, perhaps from an apprehension that she and the great metropolis would not be a good fit, or, more likely, because Franklin led her to believe that his absences would be brief. Between the time of Franklin’s voyage to England in 1757 and Deborah’s death near the end of 1774, the two were together for only a few months. They did not see each other at all during the last nine years of Deborah’s life. She was disconsolate when they were separated. Her husband, who drifted farther and farther apart from his wife until he appears to have lost interest in her altogether, was quite content with the arrangement.

During the roughly sixteen years that Franklin lived in London after 1757, he lodged in a four-room apartment in Margaret Stevenson’s spacious four-story home on Craven Street in the center of the city. Mrs. Stevenson, a widow and the same age as Franklin, provided what he called a “genteel” environment, something other than what he was accustomed to with Deborah. The true nature of the relationship between Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson remains a mystery, but she seems to have fulfilled his needs as Deborah no longer could. Contented as he had not been for some time at his own home in Philadelphia, Franklin preferred the company of Margaret Stevenson to that of his wife and daughter.
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While Franklin may have returned to London to facilitate his hopes of becoming the governor of Pennsylvania, his sights might have shifted higher after several years there. By 1768 rumors were swirling that he might be named an undersecretary in the newly created ministerial office of American secretary. The tattle would have caused only sweet sensations for this ambitious man. A subministerial post—the highest public office to which any American could aspire, and which hardly any attained—would be the capstone to Franklin’s glorious life. Consequently, the growing imperial strife was a great threat to all of his hopes. If a breach came, Franklin would have to choose between America and England, and he likely already knew that he would choose America. It was his homeland. More important, his property and investments were in America, and they alone could provide security for his last years. But he did not want to have to make the choice between America and the mother country. He wanted to find a solution to the empire’s problems so that he might live his final years in London.

Franklin attempted a balancing act. He wished to do nothing that would jeopardize his standing in Pennsylvania or his possible selection to be a subminister. With several irons in the fire, Franklin tried to convince officials in London that the Americans were not as radical as they sometimes appeared to be. He also sought to persuade the Americans to tone down their rhetoric, which he privately labeled “wild ravings.”
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Increasingly, however, Franklin was coming to believe that it would not be easy to resolve the Anglo-American difficulties. Earlier than most, he saw clearly where the imperial clash appeared to be heading. America, he wrote as early as 1767, “must become a great Country, populous and mighty.” It might already be capable of shaking “off any Shackles that may be impos’d on her,” and it might even be sufficiently powerful to “place them on the Imposer.” Abundant “Respect, Veneration and Affection” for Great Britain yet existed in America, Franklin advised, and if Britain ruled wisely and gently, the colonists “might be easily govern’d [by London] for Ages” to come. Franklin also pointed out that over the long haul, Great Britain would need America more than America would need its mother country. But he warned that if the British were so unwise as to attempt to govern the colonists with a heavy hand, it would drive them to “a Separation,” for “the Seeds of Liberty are universally sown” in America and “nothing can eradicate them.” The fate of the empire, he predicted, depended on the prudence of those who held power in London. But even at that early moment Franklin did “not see … a sufficient quantity of the Wisdom” needed to preserve Britain’s ties to America.
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Franklin scratched out several anonymous essays for a London newspaper attacking the Townshend Duties. He charged that Parliament was bent on “oppressing and enslaving … the last brave Assertors” of freedom. A faction existed in Parliament that “harbors inveterate Malice to the Americans.” They had “no true Idea of Liberty, or real Desire to see it flourish and increase,” he maintained, even claiming that some in Parliament wished to push things to the brink, giving London the pretext “to hang” every American dissident.
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Franklin was not alone in this view. As the colonial protest spread in 1768, calls for Britain to use force to “effectually quell the spirit of sedition” in America grew louder. The ministry, it was said, had placated the colonists by repealing the Stamp Act, but it was clear now that such a course had been unavailing. Appeasement had only “encreased the storm instead of laying it” aside. By that autumn both the undersecretary of state in the American secretary’s office and Connecticut’s agent in London feared that the ministry was close to a decision to use force.
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Franklin was sufficiently alarmed that he addressed the matter in a newspaper essay. Five years and an army of more than forty thousand men had been required to reduce one American province—Canada—in the Seven Years’ War, he wrote. He added that hostilities with thirteen colonies would likely drag on interminably, bleeding Great Britain of manpower and depleting its treasury, and in the end Britain might lose America.
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In the course of this feverish crisis, Franklin’s conception of the empire slowly changed. He had earlier come to the conclusion that Parliament had no authority to raise revenue in America, but he equivocated on the matter of Parliament’s right to regulate American commerce. Between the middle and the end of the decade, Franklin moved toward the notion of free trade for the colonists. Increasingly, he was coming to believe that Parliament’s only imperial role should be to protect all components of the Anglo-American union from foreign competition. Whereas Dickinson saw commercial regulation as in the general interest of America and Britain, Franklin was coming to see it more as a means of advancing the economic interests of powerful sectors within the mother country at the expense of the colonists.
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By sometime in 1768 or 1769, Franklin’s thinking came into greater focus. With regard to Parliament’s power over America, Franklin, unlike Dickinson, saw that there could be “no middle doctrine.” Either “Parliament has a power to make
all laws
for us, or … it has a power to make
no laws
for us.”
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He had decided that Parliament had no constitutional authority whatsoever over the colonies, a position from which he never wavered. Franklin had already begun to envisage an imperial arrangement in which the colonists owed allegiance only to the king—a union that in the distant future would come to be called the commonwealth theory of empire. It was a concept that within seven or eight years would be embraced by virtually all Americans who opposed British policies. In the late 1760s, however, Franklin, who only three years earlier had found himself so far behind the thinking of most colonists that his popularity had for a time suffered, had come to embrace a more radical position than Dickinson, the most popular American pamphleteer.
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When asked by officials in London whether there was a solution to the empire’s problems, Franklin, in a pensive mood, replied: “
Repeal
the LAWS,
Renounce
the RIGHT [of Parliament to legislate for America],
Recall
the Troops,
Refund
the Money [raised thus far by taxation], and
Return to the old
”—that is, to the easy imperial relationship that had existed prior to the Stamp Act.
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But should the British government persist in its “unhappy new system of politics”—a system that required “a new kind of loyalty” from America, “a loyalty to P[arliamen]t”—the colonists would be driven “to dissolve those bands of union, and to sever … for ever” their ties with Great Britain.
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