The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (16 page)

Deborah Franklin, by Benjamin Wilson, c. 1759

out to be slower and more difficult than he expected. But, more important, he soon found that he enjoyed London more and more and was now as much at home in the huge metropolis as he had been in Philadelphia. As early as January 1758, he told his wife that he could not possibly return for at least a year from then. His work, he said, required “both time and patience.”
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By 1760 he had given up even bothering to mention to Deborah when he might return. Although he repeatedly told his wife that he missed her and his daughter, Sally, his letters home soon became more and more perfunctory. Perhaps to ease his conscience over his long absence from his family, he showered gifts on Deborah and Sally. Crate after crate of fine goods were shipped to Philadelphia—carpeting, bedding, tablecloths, blankets, glassware, silverware, shoes, gloves, and curiosities of all sorts. Franklin, who earlier in his life had been happy with his simple pewter spoon and earthen bowl, now spared no expense in spreading luxury over his absent family.

Franklin’s friend William Strahan wrote a strange and convoluted letter to Deborah and tried to persuade her and Sally to join Franklin in London. He even hinted that there were ladies in London who would sail twice the ocean to get her illustrious husband. But Deborah knew better than to try to enter Franklin’s ever widening London world. She refused Strahan’s appeal, pleading her fear of the ocean, and stayed in Philadelphia.

Franklin was not surprised by Deborah’s refusal to heed Strahan’s clever and cunning pleas to come over to London. In fact, he told her, he “was much pleas’d” with her answer to Strahan’s “Rhetoric and Art.” He certainly would not have been comfortable with the loud and plain Mrs. Franklin accompanying him on all his calls, dinners, and sojourns. Although Franklin continued to call Deborah his “dear child” and never voiced any feelings about her lack of sophistication, most of his letters to her from London have all the intimacy of a business manager talking to his employee—in sharp contrast to the warm and chatty letters Franklin wrote to his sister Jane Mecom. Deborah was not like John Adams’s Abigail: although she was an efficient and doting wife—“a good and faithful Helpmate,” Franklin called her—she was scarcely an intellectual companion. It is hard, for example, to envision Deborah fully appreciating the charming humor of
The Craven Street Gazette,
a parody of newspaper gossip about the court that Franklin wrote for the amusement of the Stevensons and their friends.
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Deborah’s situation was awkward, to say the least. When Strahan told Deborah that Mrs. Stevenson, “a very discreet good gentlewoman,” had nursed Franklin through a two-month illness “with an assiduity, concern, and tenderness, which perhaps, only yourself could equal,” she had no answer. What could she say?
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As a Quaker friend in Philadelphia noted, Deborah and Sally bore Franklin’s “long absence with a more resign’d and Christian Spirit than could be expected.” In fact, the friend added, many Philadelphians were also wondering when Franklin was coming back home.
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But Franklin, like many other colonists, had always thought of England as “home.” Now he was beginning to identify with Britain even more closely than he had earlier and was actually thinking of following Stra-han’s advice and settling in England permanently. He and his son visited his ancestral home in Northampton and discovered roots and relatives they had not known. When Franklin looked up Deborah’s relatives in Birmingham, he found that “they are industrious, ingenious, working people and think themselves vastly happy that they live in dear old England.”
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The more he thought about the differences between the mother country and the colonies, the more impressed he was with Britain and with the British government.

THE ROYALIST FRANKLIN

By the early 1760s Franklin had become a thoroughgoing imperialist and royalist. He had developed an emotional commitment to the Crown’s empire, a vision of a pan-British world that was rivaled in its grandeur only by that of William Pitt. Few Englishmen in 1760 were more proud of being English, and few were more devoted to the English monarchy and the greatness of the British Empire. Although he remained sensitive to criticism of the colonists, he sought at every turn to affirm his own and his fellow Americans’ “respect for the mother country, and admiration of everything that is British.”
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With the British conquest of Canada, Franklin’s long existing dream of establishing new colonies in the West seemed closer to realization, and he himself now became involved in several land schemes, first in Nova Scotia and later in the American West. Although he believed that “the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire” lay in America, he spoke, as he said, “not merely as I am a Colonist, but as I am a Briton.”
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The New World might be the source of “the greatest Political Structure Human Wisdom ever yet erected,” but this structure, this empire, would remain British.

Although some Britons in the mother country continued to suggest that the colonists at some future date might get together and break up this empire, Franklin, like most colonists in 1760, would have none of it. There was no danger whatsoever, he said, of the Americans’ “uniting against their own nation, which protects and encourages them, with which they have so many connections and ties of blood, interest, and affection, and which ’tis well known they all love much more than they love one another. . . . I will venture to say, an union amongst them for such a purpose is not merely improbable, it is impossible.” Of course, “the most grievous tyranny and oppression” could drive any people to rebellion, but in 1760 Franklin could not conceive of the British government’s becoming tyrannical.
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At the outset of his mission Franklin had been so confident of his reputation in the world that he had tried to go right to the top of the British government and meet with the Crown’s chief minister, William Pitt. But Pitt refused to see him. “He was then too great a Man,” Franklin later explained, “or too much occupy’d in Affairs of greater Moment,” and Franklin had to settle for meeting with secretaries and ultimately with Thomas Penn, the principal proprietor.
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As he became increasingly frustrated negotiating with Penn, his dislike of the man deepened. When Franklin suggested to Penn in January 1758 that the 1682 charter granted to Penn’s father to establish the colony gave the General Assembly all the rights of a parliamentary legislature, Penn disagreed. Penn said that the royal charter was not empowered to make such a grant and that if his father had granted any privileges to the assembly, it was not by authority of the charter. Franklin replied that if William Penn had no right to grant these privileges and yet had promised the many settlers who came to the province that they would have them, then the colonists had been “deceived, cheated and betrayed.”

Penn’s answer infuriated Franklin. The colonists themselves, Penn said, “should have looked” into the royal charter; it “was no Secret; ...if they were deceiv’d, it was their own fault.” According to Franklin, Penn said all this “with a Kind of triumphing laughing Insolence, such as a low Jockey might do when a Purchaser complained that He had cheated him in a Horse.” At that moment, said Franklin, he conceived “a more cordial and thorough Contempt for him than I ever before felt for any Man living.”
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As a consequence, Franklin became more certain than ever that the king’s government in Pennsylvania would be far preferable to rule by such a man. Friends cautioned him that his enthusiasm for turning Pennsylvania into a royal province might be disastrous for the colony. They suggested that only Parliament could take away the proprietors’ charter, and Parliament might in the process decrease the power of the assembly and some of the province’s liberties. But in his passion and with his confidence in royal authority, Franklin ignored such warnings and pressed ahead, much to the bewilderment of some of his contemporaries and some modern historians. He urged the General Assembly to petition “the Crown to take the Province under its immediate Government and Protection.” Although he had little evidence that the Crown was interested in taking the colony under its protection, he told the legislature that such a petition “would be even now very favourably heard” and “might without much Difficulty be carried.”
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In light of what eventually happened to the empire in 1776, Franklin’s efforts to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony may seem as futile and foolish as some contemporaries and some subsequent historians have asserted.
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But at the time they did not seem so to Franklin and to others who were enamored of crown authority. Franklin was not simply driven by his hatred of Thomas Penn. He was in fact a good royalist, a crown officeholder, after all, who was completely devoted to the king and to the king’s empire. Therefore, despite considerable opposition within Pennsylvania itself to changing the charter, it was not at all strange or irrational for him to want to enhance royal authority and tighten the bonds of the empire by eliminating an anachronistic private interest like that of the Penn proprietors.

Knowing what happened in 1776 as we do makes it difficult for us to interpret American thinking in 1760. There were many Americans who were as excited over the accession of George III to the throne in 1760 as Englishmen and many who were as deeply loyal to the British Empire as anyone in the mother country. Franklin was one of the most excited and most loyal of all.
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Although in his mission of 1757 Franklin ostensibly had been the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly, he had become in reality the king’s man. No one in 1760 could have been more respectful of royal authority. Royalty fascinated him, and he cut short a trip to the Continent so that he could attend the new king’s coronation.
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Like most colonists that year, he had no inkling of any impending imperial crisis, but, unlike most colonists, he had no sense either of any real disparity of interests between Britain and her colonies. In fact, his confidence in the virtue and good sense of politicians at the highest levels of the British government was so great that it bewildered and amazed even some of his British friends. He could not share their “melancholly Apprehensions” and “Fears for the

Nation,” and he castigated “the stupid brutal Opposition” that the new young king and his measures were receiving. Far from declining, English virtue, he wrote in 1763, “bids fair for Increasing,” especially “if the old Saying be true, as it certainly is, Ad Exemplum Regis, &c.” Ahead he saw only a “happy and truly glorious” reign for George III.
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Franklin used his influence with Dr. Pringle and perhaps Peter Collinson to meet George III’s “dearest friend” and chief minister, Lord Bute. Bute was a great patron of the arts and sciences, very interested in botany and electricity, and would have wanted to meet the celebrated Dr. Franklin. At any rate Franklin bragged of his acquaintance with his lordship. He bought two engravings of Allan Ramsay’s portrait of the chief minister and even sent one of them back to Pennsylvania to be prominently displayed in his Philadelphia home, along with a picture of the king and queen. Indeed, he had enough influence with Lord Bute in 1762 to get his thirty-one-year-old son appointed royal governor of New Jersey.
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Although William possessed his own charm and connections, having Franklin as his father was undoubtedly his most important attribute, which William was more than willing to acknowledge. Since Franklin had found posts for his son back in Philadelphia—first the clerkship of the Pennsylvania Assembly and later the office of postmaster of Philadelphia—it was natural that he would try to help William in London. William first asked Bute for the office of secretary of the colony of South Carolina, but when he learned that that position had gone to another, he asked Bute for the governorship of New Jersey, which had recently become vacant. In his memorial to Bute, the Scottish lord, William shrewdly appealed to their mutual non-Englishness. If “your Lordship,” he said, had not “given such repeated Proofs of your having no local Attachments, that you consider all His Majesty’s Subjects, however distant, if of equal Virtue and Loyalty, on an equal Footing, I who am an American, should scarce have had the Boldness to solicit your Patronage and Assistance on this Occasion.” Although we do not have all the details relating to the appointment, Lord Bute satisfied William’s desire to be “particularly serviceable to Government.”
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Since New Jersey was a relatively poor colony and its governor’s salary was not large, not everyone wanted the position; indeed, Thomas

Pownall, who had returned to England after several administrative positions in the colonies, was reported to have refused it. Still, there were usually more candidates for colonial governorships than could be satisfied. Thus William’s appointment, especially since he was a native American and, in John Adams’s later caustic phrase, “a base born Brat,” was no small achievement. In fact, as one observer noted in September 1762, “many Scruples were raised on account of [William’s]
being Illegitimate,
which we were Strangers to till very lately.”
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The entire process of William’s appointment as governor of New Jersey reveals not only the peculiar nature of that patronage-dominated world but also the desires and the ability of the two Franklins, father as well as son, to move in that world and to be “serviceable to Government.” It was thought that Franklin himself had an eye on an imperial office. Some of his enemies accused him of wanting to turn proprietary Pennsylvania into a crown colony so that he could become its first royal governor.