The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (17 page)

Franklin had long accepted the cultural inferiority of the New World to the Old World without embarrassment or complaint. In 1745 he had told his correspondent Strahan that he and his fellow colonists were eager to gobble up anything and everything written in the mother country, whether good or bad. Indeed, he said, the British authors had so much “Fame ... on this Side [of] the Ocean” that the colonists had become “a kind of Posterity with respect to them. We read their Works with perfect Impartiality, being at too great a Distance to be bypassed by the Fashions, Parties, and Prejudices that prevail among you. We know nothing of their personal Failings; the Blemishes in their character never reach us, and therefore ... we praise and admire them without Restraint.”
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Sometimes the distance from the center of British civilization seemed so great to Franklin that his imagination ran wild. In his 1749 pamphlet
Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania,
Franklin had noted that “Something seems wanting in America to incite and stimulate Youth to Study.” He thought that “the Encouragements to Learning” were much greater in Europe than in America. “Whoever distinguishes himself there, in either of the three learned Professions, gains Fame, and often Wealth and Power: A poor Man’s Son, has a Chance, if he studies hard, to rise ... to an extraordinary Pitch of Grandeur; to have a Voice in

Parliament, a Seat among the Peers; as a Statesman or first Minister to govern Nations, and even to mix his Blood with Princes.” No wonder he wanted to get to England.
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His experience when he arrived in England in the late 1750s was very different from that of many other Americans. Wealthy colonists such as John Dickinson of Delaware or Charles Carroll of Maryland who lived in London in these years were overawed by the city’s sophistication and grandeur and in response seemed to need to justify the deficiencies and provinciality of colonial America by expressing disgust with the luxury and corruption of English life. As a young law student at the Inns of Court in 1754, Dickinson was shocked at the notorious ways in which hundreds of thousands of pounds were being spent to buy elections. This “most unbounded licentiousness and utter disregard of virtue,” he told his parents, could end, as it always had, only in the destruction of the empire. Young Carroll in 1760, despite his worldliness from having studied and traveled abroad for twelve years, agreed with this dire prediction of England’s fate. “Our dear-bought liberty,” he told his father, “stands upon the brink of destruction.” These became increasingly widely held views among the colonists.
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Franklin felt little of this American provincial need to denigrate English life. Of course, he had long recognized that the English themselves were continually complaining in their public papers of their own “prevailing corruption and degeneracy.” But he himself had always known, as he had told Peter Collinson back in 1753, that “you have a great deal of Virtue still subsisting among you” and that the English constitution was “not so near a dissolution, as some seem to apprehend.” Upon his arrival in England he had met up with the same mood of England’s feeling “itself so universally corrupt and rotten from Head to Foot, that it has little Confidence in any publick Men or publick Measures.”
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Yet his experience in London soon convinced him that much of that English self-criticism was mistaken.

He began filling his letters with disparaging comments about the provinciality and vulgarity of America in contrast with the sophistication and worthiness of England. Britain, “that little Island,” he wrote in

1763, enjoyed “in almost every Neighbourhood, more sensible, virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests.”
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No one brought up in England, he said, could ever be happy in America. In fact, it was not England that was corrupt and luxury-loving, it was America; and the great danger was that the English nation, if it did not draw off some of its wealth, “would, like ours, have a Plethora in its Veins, productive of the same Sloth, and the same feverish Extravagance.”
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Everywhere in the Old World he saw contrasts with provincial America that mortified him. The Sunday gaiety of the people of Flanders, together with their ordered prosperity, for example, only reminded him, by contrast, of how narrow and straitlaced, and how silly, was Puritan New England.
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In these years Franklin scarcely seems to have regarded himself as an American.

So happy was he during his five years in Britain that he very nearly did not return to America. When his friend Strahan urged him to stay and run for Parliament, he was tempted. Although he talked of growing “weary” of his long “Banishment” and of his desiring to return to “the happy Society of my Friends and Family in Philadelphia,” he repeatedly put off leaving. Finally, in 1762, the need to settle his affairs in America, especially the business of the post office (the royal office that he much valued), compelled his return. But he knew he would come back to England. “The Attraction of
Reason
,” he told Strahan on the eve of his departure for America, “is at present for the other Side of the Water, but that of
Inclination
will be for this side. You know which usually prevails. I shall probably make but this one Vibration and settle here for ever.”
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FRANKLIN’S BRIEF RETURN TO AMERICA

When he arrived in America in the fall of 1762, Franklin found that it had changed. The streets of Philadelphia seemed “thinner of People, owing perhaps to my being so long accustom’d to the bustling crowded Streets of London.” But, more alarming, there was too much money everywhere, and the Philadelphia artisans were not what they used to be when he was one of them. “Our Tradesmen are grown as idle, and as extravagant in their Demands when you would prevail on them to work, as so many Spaniards.”
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He was no sooner back in America than he began thinking of returning to England. “No Friend can wish me more in England than I do my self,” he told Strahan in August 1763. “But before I go, every thing I am concern’d in must be so settled here as to make another Return to America unnecessary.” First, he had to settle the business of the North American post office. He spent seven months of 1763 on postal inspection tours that took him from Virginia to New England, totaling, he said, some 1,780 miles. He sought to improve service between the major cities and to extend it to the newly acquired territory of Canada. He tried to talk Deborah into accompanying him on these trips, but she refused.

While he was away on these tours he did give Deborah permission to open all the mail that would arrive from England. He told her, in a sentence as revealing of their relationship as any, “It must give you Pleasure to see that People who knew me there so long and so intimately, retain so sincere a Regard for me.” Knowing that his wife would never leave Philadelphia, he now laid plans to build a new three-story brick house on Market Street, just a few feet from the spot where Deborah had first spied him in 1723. Since he began building it at the same time he was telling his friends in England that he would soon be with them, the home, which he never saw completed until 1775, may have been for Deborah alone. Maybe it was another part of the business he had to settle so he would not have to come back to America again—another salve for his conscience perhaps.
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Before he could return to England, Franklin had to deal with an uprising of some Scotch-Irish settlers from the Paxton region on the Pennsylvania frontier who were angry at Indian violence and neglect by the eastern-dominated assembly. Franklin had no sympathy with “armed Mobs” and was happy to have the governor call on him for help in putting them down. He wrote a pamphlet, he said, “to render the Rioters unpopular; promoted an Association to support the Authority of the Government and defend the Governor by taking Arms, sign’d it first myself, and was followed by several Hundreds, who took Arms accordingly.”

The governor flattered him with an offer of the command of the militia, but he “chose to carry a Musket.” More flattering still, with the so-called Paxton Boys threatening to march on Philadelphia, the governor ran “to my House at midnight, with his Counsellors at his Heels, for

Advice, and made it his Head Quarters for some time.” The governor then appointed him and several others to negotiate with the rioters; the delegation met with the armed frontiersmen and persuaded them to return home. Although he made fun of the colony’s desperate need for him, Franklin could barely suppress his glee at his renewed authority in Pennsylvania politics. Think of it, he said to Dr. John Fothergill back in London, “within four and twenty Hours, your old Friend was a common soldier, a Counsellor, a kind of Dictator, an Ambassador to the Country Mob, and on [the governor’s and his counsellors’] Returning home,
Nobody,
again.”

In Franklin’s mind the mobs and rioting had some good results. It suggested that the colony was “running fast into Anarchy and Confusion,” and that “our only Hopes are, that the Crown will see the Necessity of taking the Government into its own hands, without which we shall soon have no Government at all.” Franklin was able to get the assembly to pass a number of resolves blaming the proprietors for all of Pennsylvania’s troubles.
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With the help of his young political lieutenant Joseph Galloway, Franklin next sought to organize a popular petition urging that Pennsylvania be turned into a royal colony. He hoped that such a show of popular support would win over doubters in the assembly and in the colony. In order to convince Pennsylvanians of the benefits of substituting royal for proprietary authority, he, Galloway, and their allies launched a propaganda campaign of unprecedented intensity and scale. Franklin and Galloway organized a mass meeting in Philadelphia at which Galloway, known as the “Demosthenes of Pennsylvania,” harangued the crowd, arguing that “the way from Proprietary Slavery to Royal Liberty was easy.” The proponents of making Pennsylvania a royal colony not only plied potential signers with liquor; they got many people to sign their names to blank sheets of paper with no knowledge of what they were signing. At the same time Franklin’s press poured forth thousands of pieces of propaganda, including the assembly’s resolves and “Explanatory Remarks” on them, newspaper articles, and broadsides, all promoting the cause of royal government, with Franklin writing much of the material. Both Galloway and Franklin wrote pamphlets as well and “by the thousands” gave them away free. In his own pamphlet, entitled
Cool

Thoughts on the Present Situation of Our Public Affairs,
Franklin tried to assure the people that Pennsylvania would lose none of its privileges by becoming a royal colony. Only an act of Parliament could take those privileges away, he said, “and we may rely on the united Justice of King, Lords, and Commons, that no such Act will ever pass, while we continue loyal and dutiful Subjects.”
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But his persuasive powers were not very effective with the public: the petition to replace the proprietary government gained only 3500 signatures, and those were mostly from Philadelphia. At the same time Franklin faced a determined opponent of his plans in the assembly, John Dickinson, the well-to-do lawyer, originally from Delaware, who had trained in England and who would later become famous in the colonies with the publication of his
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
in 1767—68. In an impressive speech in May 1764, Dickinson argued that revoking the charter and turning Pennsylvania into a royal colony might endanger the colony’s liberties, especially its religious freedom. “Have we not
sufficiently felt
the effects of royal resentment?” Dickinson asked. “Is not the authority of the Crown fully enough exerted over us?”
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Equally damaging to Franklin’s cause was the defection of the Speaker of the assembly, Isaac Norris. Although Norris had earlier encouraged making Pennsylvania a royal colony, he now followed Dickinson, his son-in-law, and spoke against a crown takeover; then, pleading ill health, he abruptly resigned from the assembly.

Franklin and Galloway were not used to opposition from members of the Quaker party. Dickinson had no sooner finished his speech in the assembly than the arrogant young Galloway was on his feet to answer him. Galloway was proud of his oratorical abilities, and in a vigorous extemporaneous rebuttal to Dickinson he defended the disinterestedness of the Crown in contrast to the private interest of the proprietors— a position with which Franklin completely agreed. This encounter and the subsequent publication of the speeches, with Dickinson claiming that Galloway’s printed version was “a
pretended speech
,” created bad blood between the two men, leading to a fistfight and a challenge to a duel that never came off.
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Despite the opposition of Dickinson and Norris, however, Franklin and Galloway still had nearly all the votes in the legislature. Franklin was elected Speaker in place of Norris, and the assembly overwhelmingly voted to request that the Crown take over the government of the colony.

The supporters of the proprietors decided to emulate Franklin and solicit people’s signatures on petitions opposing the scheme to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony. By September 1764 they had garnered 15,000 signatures, over four times the number Franklin had raised for his petition. Under the leadership of William Smith, Anglican clergyman and provost of the College of Pennsylvania, and William Allen, chief justice of the colony, both of whom had just returned from England, the proprietary cause rapidly gained strength. More and more Pennsylvanians were having second thoughts about abandoning the charter of William Penn, which had brought them so many privileges, so much religious freedom, and so much prosperity.

The campaign for elections to the Pennsylvania Assembly in October 1764 was one of the most scurrilous in American colonial history, and both Franklin and Galloway lost their seats. Franklin was accused of a host of sins—of lechery, of having humble origins, of abandoning the mother of his bastard son, of stealing his ideas of electricity from another electrician, of embezzling colony funds, and of buying his honorary degrees. But what ultimately cost Franklin his seat was the number of Germans who voted against him, angry at his earlier ethnic slur about “Palatine Boors.”
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