The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (20 page)

Most Americans reacted to these midcentury expressions of English arrogance with defensive outrage. “Are the inhabitants of British America,” asked the fiery Boston lawyer James Otis in 1765 (“our great incendiary,” Hutchinson called him), “all a parcel of transported thieves, robbers, and rebels, or descended from such?”
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Did the English think most people in North America were Negroes and mulattoes? “Are you not of the same stock?” asked a Pennsylvanian of his fellow colonists in 1760. “Was the blood of your ancestors polluted by a change of soil? Were they freemen in England and did they become slaves by a six-weeks’ voyage to America?” By the 1760s and especially after 17 65, the colonial press was full of these kinds of statements of indignation and fury. “Are not the People of America, BRITISH Subjects? Are they not
Englishmen?"
These were the angry and anguished cries of people who felt snubbed and deeply humiliated by their supposed cousins back home.
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Franklin’s response was inevitably different. As a distinguished scientist and world celebrity and the recipient of several British honorary degrees, he naturally possessed a self-confidence and a sense of equality with most Britons that few of his fellow colonists could match. When he heard or read the aspersions that the English were casting upon his countrymen, he generally reacted, at least at first, not with self-protective outrage, but with reason, humor, and satire.

In the many newspaper pieces he wrote in 1765-1766 in answer to the “frequent invectives” and the “angry reflections on the Americans in the public papers,” he appealed to British reasonableness and self-interest. The colonists, he pointed out, were an important source of British prosperity, both by supplying needed goods and by purchasing British manufactures. And they loved the British monarch as much as any Englishman at home. What was the purpose of all the railing against the Americans? he asked in an anonymous piece published in a London paper in December 1765. Was all this denunciation supposed to persuade the colonists to accept the Stamp Act? “The gentle terms of
republican race, mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish and foreign vagabonds, descendants of convicts, ungrateful rebels,
&c.,” he said, “are some of the sweet flowers of English rhetorick, with which our colonists have of late been regaled. Surely, if we are so much their superiors, we should shew the superiority of our breeding by our better manners!”
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Sarcastic responses like this—indeed, satire in general—supposed commonly understood standards of rightness and reasonableness. Since a satirist like Franklin could expose to instantaneous ridicule only what was readily considered ridiculous by his readers, he necessarily believed he was on intimate terms with them and could count on their sharing his tastes and viewpoint.
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In 1766, writing as “Pacifus” in the English press, Franklin proposed a solution to the Stamp Act crisis that Jonathan Swift would have loved. Britain, wrote Franklin, should impose overwhelming military force on the colonists, burn all their capitals, cut the throats of every man, woman, and child in the capitals, and destroy all their trade. “No Man in his Wits, after such terrible Military Execution, will refuse to purchase stamp’d Paper,” he concluded. “If any one should hesitate, five or six Hundred Lashes in a cold frosty Morning would soon bring him to Reason.”
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Naturally Franklin believed that his modest proposal was so harsh, so oppressive, and presumably so un-English that no Englishman in his right mind would contemplate it. With such satirical exaggeration Franklin assumed that he and his London readership were participating in the same moral universe—something his fellow Americans were coming increasingly to doubt. Stamp Act or no Stamp Act, Franklin had not lost hope, in other words, that the magnificent empire he admired so much could be made whole.

AMERICAN REPRESENTATION IN PARLIAMENT

But he knew things had changed. England and America seemed to be more and more two separate countries. The sense that the empire was a single community could no longer be taken for granted. If there were to be a union, it would now have to be a constructed one, more or less in the way the Act of Union of 1707 had bound together the two countries of Scotland and England to create Great Britain, and that meant American representation in Parliament. In August 1765 Franklin asked Thomas Hutchinson whether the colonists ought to apply for representation in the House of Commons. Through the fall he continued to think of colonial representation in Parliament as a solution to the imperial problems of taxation.
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In February 1766 he published in Strahan’s
London Chronicle
the letters he presumably had written to Massachusetts governor William Shirley twelve years earlier arguing the need for colonial representation in Parliament. In these letters Franklin had reminded Shirley that it was the right of Englishmen not to be taxed without their own consent and had agreed with Shirley that perhaps that consent could be satisfied by American representation in the House of Commons. It was certainly in Franklin’s interest to have such letters come out in this tense moment when colonial suspicions of him were widespread.
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Franklin gradually came to realize that neither Americans nor Englishmen liked the idea of colonial representation in Parliament. Since Americans were becoming more and more resentful of English arrogance, he believed they would not now ask for representation in the House of Commons. But he thought the colonists would accept it if it were offered. If a union similar to that with Scotland was established with America, “which methinks it highly imports this Country to establish, it would probably subsist as long as Britain shall continue a Nation.” Yet he feared that the English had become too proud and despised the Americans too much “to bear the Thought of admitting them to such an equitable Participation in the Government of the whole.” Nevertheless, he clung to the idea in desperation; even as late as 1767 he thought that American representation in Parliament was the only firm basis on which the empire’s “political Grandeur and Stability can be founded.”
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In fact, the time for colonial representation in Parliament had long since passed, if it had ever existed. After the Stamp Act, Congress had pointed out in 1765 that the colonists “are not, and from their local Circumstances” could never be, represented in the House of Commons, those few patriots like James Otis who had earlier suggested colonial representation in Parliament ceased doing so. Franklin remained the great exception.
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FRANKLIN’S EXAMINATION BEFORE THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

Three thousand miles away, and with many of his allies royal officials, Franklin had no great ear for American public opinion, and he struggled to understand what Americans were saying. He had no liking whatsoever for mobs and rioting, but he slowly came to appreciate that even reasonable Americans would not support a stamp tax under any conditions. True to his practical nature, he searched for some sort of compromise that would hold the two countries in the empire together. He was busy everywhere, as he told the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames, “attending Members of both Houses, informing, explaining, consulting, disputing, in a continual Hurry from Morning to Night.”
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Under a variety of pseudonyms he wrote more articles for the London newspapers, reminding his English readers that the colonies and Britain had a common interest in the empire. If he were to rescue his reputation in America, he had much catching up to do.

In an interview in November 1765 with the Earl of Dartmouth, newly appointed head of the Board of Trade, Franklin declared that enforcing the Stamp Act would create more mischief than it was worth. Franklin realized that Parliament would find it difficult to back down in the face of mobbing and violence. But if the act were merely suspended for a few years, he told Dartmouth, it could eventually be dropped “on some other decent Pretence without ever bringing the question of Right to a Decision.” Any attempt to enforce the act with troops, he warned, would have the effect, “by mutual Violences, Excesses and Severities, of creating a deep-rooted Aversion between the two Countries, and laying the Foundation of a future total Separation.” If suspension of the tax were not possible, then, Franklin suggested to Dartmouth his usual solution to complicated political problems: “three or four wise and good Men, Personages of some Rank and Dignity, should be sent over to America, with a Royal Commission to enquire into Grievances, hear Complaints, learn the true State of Affairs, giving Expectations of Redress where they found the People really aggriev’d, and endeavouring to convince and reclaim them by Reason, where they found them in the Wrong.” Perhaps such a royal commission could save the British government from its present perplexity. It was reluctant to send troops to enforce the Stamp Act, but neither did it want to repeal the act, “as it will be deem’d a tacit giving up the Sovereignty of Parliament.”
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The sovereignty of Parliament! An awesome concept and the one over which the empire was finally broken. It is difficult for us today to appreciate the respect and wonder with which nearly all Englishmen held Parliament in the eighteenth century, certainly all Englishmen who thought of themselves as Whigs and defenders of liberty and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. For all good Whigs—and indeed for all those who rejected the seventeenth-century Tory beliefs in absolute monarchy, indefeasible hereditary succession, and passive obedience— Parliament was the great defender against tyranny. It was the august author of the Bill of Rights of 1689, the historical protector of the people’s property, and the eternal bulwark of their liberties against the encroachments of the Crown. The eighteenth-century Parliament may not have represented the British people in any modern democratic sense, but it certainly stood for the nation and embodied its Britishness as no other institution did.
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In fact, Parliament was superior to the people it supposedly represented, which is why its members referred to visitors to its proceedings as “strangers,” a practice still in effect today. Because Parliament was what had always stood between the power of the Crown and the liberty of the subject, to oppose Parliament in the name of liberty was incomprehensible to most Englishmen.

Once the British brought in Parliament as the instrument of reforming the empire in the 1760s, the stakes were raised to an entirely different level. Many Englishmen more or less expected the colonists to resist the power of the royal governors in the king’s empire, and they were not deeply disturbed by such resistance. Indeed, during the first half of the eighteenth century, many members of Parliament with Whiggish and anticrown sympathies had themselves tended to restrain the desire of royal bureaucrats to expand the king’s empire. This was in fact where the “salutary neglect” that Edmund Burke later spoke of came from. Resisting crown power was what good Whigs did. So colonial opposition to the power of the king was one thing. But opposition to the acts of Parliament was quite another thing altogether. For the Americans to oppose Parliament was unconscionable. It was Toryish and alien to the Whig understanding of politics, and it struck at all that the Glorious Revolution had been about.

Franklin was faced with the need to explain American opposition to this sacred British bastion of liberty to Englishmen in London. A lengthy examination before the House of Commons in February 1766 gave him an opportunity to begin this explanation and at the same time to recover some of his lost reputation in America. A new ministry led by Lord Rockingham had replaced the Grenville government for reasons that had nothing to do with American affairs. Nonetheless, the new ministry was eager to repeal the Stamp Act enacted by its predecessor. American boycotts of British goods were hurting British merchants, and pressure from the merchant community had convinced many members of Parliament that repeal of the Stamp Act was necessary. But the Rockingham government needed reasons for doing so and found in Franklin a means of explaining why the government had to retreat. Dr. Franklin was the celebrated American philosopher and scientist, noted everywhere for his practicality and reasonableness. If any one of the forty-odd persons called to testify on the harmful consequences of the Stamp Act could convince the House of Commons to repeal it, he could.

In four hours of testimony, Franklin performed brilliantly. Some of the questions were friendly and they gave him the opportunity to show what a mistake the Stamp Act had been. But when hostile questions were raised, he deftly parried them. Since many of his fellow Americans thought he had planned the Stamp Act, Franklin was most eager to establish his sympathy with American opposition to it. So when he was asked whether some modified stamp tax would be acceptable to Americans, his response was sharp: “No; they will never submit to it.” He shot back just as quickly with “They would not pay it” when asked whether any tax similar to the stamp tax would be acceptable to the colonists. When asked, “If the stamp-act should be repealed, would it induce the assemblies of America to acknowledge the rights of parliament to tax them?” his answer was as direct as it could be: “No, never.” He made it as clear as possible that Parliament had no right to lay a stamp tax on the colonists, and his pointed responses probably saved his reputation in America.

Yet when he was confronted with the question of whether Americans denied the right of Parliament to levy any kind of tax or duty whatsoever, he unwittingly revealed his distance from his fellow Americans. He said that he had “never heard any objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce; but a right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in parliament, as we are not represented there.”
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With this distinction between internal taxes, such as the stamp tax, and external taxes, such as the duties on molasses and other colonial imports, Franklin had opened up a can of worms.

Within days the repeal of the Stamp Act was moved in the House of Commons, and on March 8, 1766, the king reluctantly assented to the bill. Franklin’s friend William Strahan thought that Franklin had brought about the repeal all by himself, and many in America thought so too, which was just as well, since they also thought he was responsible for the Stamp Act in the first place. His examination in the House of Commons had been taken down verbatim and was immediately published in London and later in Boston, New London, New York, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg. Charles Thomson congratulated Franklin for the repeal and told him of all the joy that was in the hearts of the colonists—“a Joy not expressed in triumph but with the warmest sentiments of Loyalty to our King and a grateful acknowledgement of the Justice and tenderness of the mother Country.”
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