The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (21 page)

Amid all the excitement few colonists noticed the price the British government had to pay to get the repeal through a reluctant House of Commons. Some opposition members had wanted to maintain what Franklin called a token tax “merely to keep up the Claim of Right.”
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But instead the government passed a Declaratory Act that asserted, in case anyone thought otherwise, that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” This claim of Parliamentary sovereignty—the claim that there must exist in each state one final, indivisible, supreme lawmaking power—would ultimately destroy the empire.
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FRANKLIN’S NEW CONCEPTION OF EMPIRE

Franklin, like nearly every American, was thrilled by the repeal of the Stamp Act. He thought that it demonstrated that the empire was a working structure and that, if only the passionate irrational mobs could be ignored, reasonable men could work out their differences in an amicable manner “We now see that tho’ the Parliament may sometimes possibly thro’ Misinformation be mislead to do a wrong Thing towards America, yet,” he told his partner David Hall, “as soon as they are rightly inform’d, they will immediately rectify it, which ought to confirm our Veneration for that most august Body, and Confidence in its Justice and Equity.” On the surface at least, he remained sanguine about the future of the British Empire—as long as all the rioting in America would “totally cease” and the colonists now behave in “a decent, dutiful, grateful” manner and show the mother country that its repeal of the Stamp Act had not been a mistake.
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He knew too that he personally had been through a rough patch, but life had its ups and downs. He wasn’t going to let “the unthinking undiscerning Multitude” determine his mood. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it hails, he told his sister in March 1766, but then “again ’tis clear and pleasant, and the Sun shines on us.” All in all, he said in his best Pan-glossian manner, “the World is a pretty good sort of a World; and ’tis our Duty to make the best of it and be thankful.”
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He had lost none of his faith in the British Crown, and he was determined to get back to the reason for his mission to London—to oust the proprietors and establish Pennsylvania as a royal colony. However many doubts he may have had of Parliament’s authority, the king was still the king, and of his authority over the colonies Franklin had no doubt whatsoever. During his examination in the House of Commons, Franklin had been asked how the various colonial assemblies could levy taxes for the Crown in violation of the 1688 Declaration of Rights, which stated that only the consent of Parliament could raise money for the Crown. He answered that however august a body Parliament was, its consent in matters of taxation applied only to the realm, and “the Colonies are not supposed to be within the realm; they have assemblies of their own, which are their parliaments.”
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Whether he fully realized it or not at the time, this statement suggested an entirely new way of looking at the empire.

After the repeal of the Stamp Act, thirty-three dissenting members of the House of Lords published a protest against the way the riotous colonists had been appeased. In his copy of the protest Franklin entered in the margins his retorts to the statements of the Lords. In the process he further clarified his thinking about the structure of the empire. More and more he tended to see the Crown as the benign center of the empire and Parliament as the malevolent source of tyranny.

This was not how most English Whigs then saw things. With the accession to the throne of the twenty-two-year-old George III in 1760, many Whigs sensed the signs of a revival of crown tyranny, more subtle than the Stuart tyranny of the seventeenth century because it was using influence and corruption in place of brute force. George III tried to heed his mother’s wishes that he be a strong king; he ousted the Old Corps of Whig ministers and appointed his own “friends” to office, including his favorite Lord Bute, even though these friends did not have the support of the House of Commons. These actions aroused traditional Whig fears of crown influence and tyranny, which is why Edmund Burke, a good Whig and champion of Parliament, eventually became such a fervent defender of American rights against George III’s despotism.

Franklin did not at all share this view of matters. As a crown officer Franklin seemed to think the king could do no wrong. The Whigs believed that Bute was the insidious and invisible power behind the throne, and that even after his dismissal from office in 1764 he was still pulling secret strings and causing all current political disturbances. But Franklin admired Bute; the king’s favorite was the patron who was principally responsible for his son’s being appointed royal governor of New Jersey. Given these circumstances, Franklin could not help being an enthusiast for the monarch against the tyrannical Parliament that had passed the Stamp Act, and he assumed his fellow Americans were with him. In the political context of the time his was actually an extreme Tory position, the Tories being traditionally noted for their support for broad and extensive crown authority.

When the Lords in their 1766 protest suggested that the colonists had insulted the honor of the king, Franklin was quick to reply, Not true. “All acknowledge their Subjection to his Majesty.” He resented the Lords’ calling the colonists “OUR North American subjects.” They were not the Lords’ subjects, but “the King’s.” In comment after comment Franklin made it clear that Parliament had no business dealing with the colonies. Indeed, throughout his comments Franklin accused the Lords, as members of Parliament, of “thrust[ing] themselves in with the Crown in the Government of the Colonies.” When the Lords declared that the repeal of the Stamp Act would make the authority of Great Britain
“contemptible,"
Franklin said Great Britain’s authority perhaps, but “Not the King’s.” When the Lords referred to the legislative authority of Great Britain over the colonies, he pointed out that “this is encroaching on the Royal Power.” And when they said that Parliament’s power to tax extended to all members of the state, he responded, “Right, but we are different States, subject to the King.” When the Lords expressed fear that the colonists would in time claim to be “free from any obedience to the power of the British Legislature,” Franklin pointedly added, “but not to the Power of the Crown.” When the Lords complained that the colonists had showed “so much contempt of the Sovereignty of the British Legislature,” Franklin answered, “The Sovereignty of the Crown I understand. The Sovereignty of the British Legislature out of Britain I do not understand.”
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Following the repeal of the Stamp Act, Franklin had begun to imagine an empire in which all the colonies were tied to Great Britain solely through the king, at least until some sort of fair and equal representation of the colonies in Parliament could be worked out. “In this View they seem so many separate little States, subject to the Same Prince.”
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Modern historians have called this a “commonwealth” theory of the empire because it anticipated the idea of the empire expressed in the Statute of Westminster of 1951, which established the modern Commonwealth of Nations in which the independent dominions are tied together solely by their common allegiance to the Crown. Franklin’s view was precocious. Other Revolutionary leaders, such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Wilson, did not reach such a conception of the empire until some years later—for most of them, not until the 1770s. In the mid-1760s most of these leaders continued to accept some parliamentary authority; they, like John Dickinson in his
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,
tried to divide Parliament’s power, arguing that it could not tax the colonists but could regulate their trade.
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These attempts to divide Parliament’s power eventually proved futile.

The British argued relentlessly and unyieldingly that Parliament was sovereign and that its power was supreme, indivisible, and final. All British subjects, British officials said over and over in the years after 17 66, were either totally under this supreme Parliamentary authority or totally outside it; there could be no middle ground. This was the view that lay behind Parliament’s Declaratory Act of 1766. Confronted with these powerful arguments for the complete sovereignty of Parliament, Franklin in 1768 found himself increasingly confirmed in his opinion “that no middle doctrine can be well maintained.... Something might be made of either of the extremes; that Parliament has a power to make
all laws
for us, or that it has a power to make
no laws
for us.”
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Given this choice, most Americans decided that Parliament had no power to make any laws for them. Of course, this position, reached by nearly all American leaders by 1774, did not satisfactorily explain previous colonial experience in the empire, since the colonists had obeyed many Parliamentary statutes in the past.

Still, Franklin was anxious to stifle “publick Discussion of Questions that had better never have been started,” and thus he hesitated to follow out the logic of this doctrine of sovereignty.
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Instead, he continued to cling to the hope of uniting the two countries, Britain and America, through parliamentary representation in the way Scotland and England had been united in 1707. In the meantime, as a royal officeholder, he continued to celebrate his personal connection to the king. “I am a Subject of the Crown of Great Britain,” he wrote at the end of the Lords’ protest. “[I] have ever been a loyal one, have partaken of its Favours.”
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His king and queen, he told Polly Stevenson in 1767, remained “the very best in the World and the most amiable.”
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The crisis over the Stamp Act had eroded none of his earlier confidence in the king. Even now he continued to work hard to destroy the Penns’ charter and bring royal government to Pennsylvania.

TOO ENGLISH IN AMERICA AND TOO AMERICAN IN ENGLAND

For the next four or five years after 1766 Franklin was ambivalent about the nature of England’s relation to America. He felt himself caught in a widening gulf, one that he tried desperately to bridge. “Being born and bred in one of the countries, and having lived long and made many agreeable connections of friendship in the other,” he could only “wish all prosperity to both.” Being unideological in an intensely ideological age made him seem a man apart and out of touch with his times. He talked and wrote and sought to explain each side to the other until he was weary with the effort—especially since he seemed to have no effect in either country, “except that of rendering myself suspected by my impartiality.” The English thought him too American, while the Americans thought him too English.
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Inevitably he was accused of having “no fixed principles at all.”
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He continued to write dozens of pieces for the British press, posing sometimes as a colonist, many other times as an Englishman. Far from being simply the experimenter in electricity, he was fast becoming known as a thinker and publicist—as a writer, something he always valued as “a principal Means of my Advancement” in the world.
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The famous portrait of him by David Martin, exhibited in 1767, makes no reference to electricity but shows him merely as a learned man deeply involved in reading and writing (see page 126). Franklin liked the painting so much that he had a copy made at his own expense and sent it to Deborah in Philadelphia. In his will he left the portrait to the executive council of Pennsylvania; it was how he wanted to be remembered.
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In his many writings for the press he tried to be evenhanded, and he did all he could to calm the passions of both sides. Perhaps, as has been suggested, he was conditioned to act impartially by his earlier experience as a printer—an experience that he had tried to codify in his “Apology for Printers.”
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Just as he had tried to avoid libel and abuse in his newspaper, so did he try to smooth over the political debate between Britain and its colonies. Scurrilous attacks in the press, he said, were not helping the situation at all. He told his partner David Hall that he agreed wholeheartedly with Hall’s decision to avoid printing inflammatory pieces in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
at the time of the Stamp Act crisis. He would have done the same, even if he had held no crown office. The colonists had to realize that such incendiary writing was only making matters worse. “At the same time that we Americans wish not to be judged of, in the gross by particular papers written by anonymous scribblers and published in the

Franklin, by David Martin, 1776

colonies,” Franklin wrote to his son, William, in 1767, “it would be well if we could avoid falling into the same mistake in America in judging of ministers here by the libels printed against them.” He saw his role as a reporter of the arguments of both sides. He had an obligation to lower the heat and lessen the passions of opinion—“to extenuate matters a little,” he said.
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CONSPIRACIES ON BOTH SIDES

Franklin was especially appalled by all the talk of conspiracy and hidden designs that existed on both sides of the Atlantic. It was not that seeing conspiracies and plots was unusual; in fact, such conspiratorial interpretations— attributing events to the concerted designs of willful individuals—were common to the age. This pre-modern society lacked our modern repertory of impersonal forces such as “industrialization,” “urbanization,” or the “stream of history,” which we so blithely invoke to explain complicated combinations of events. It had as yet little understanding of the indeliberate and unintended processes of history. It tended to ask of events not “How did they happen?” but “Who did them?” The moral order of the world depended on answering the latter question correctly. Although the world was becoming more and more complicated and was outrunning people’s capacity to explain it in personal terms, many Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic still sought to hold particular individuals morally responsible for all that happened. Since, as one colonial clergyman declared in 1770, “every moral event must have ... a moral cause,” by which he meant a motive, then every immoral event must have an immoral cause, which could be found in the evil motives of dissembling and designing individuals.
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