The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (22 page)

Thus English officials thought that some of the colonial leaders were rebellious and were conspiring to throw off British rule and become independent. Events in Massachusetts in 1768 convinced the House of Lords, for example, that “wicked and designing men” in the colonies were “evidently manifesting a design ... to set up a new and unconstitutional authority independent of the crown of England.” The answer to such plots was to send fleets and troops to the colonies and bring the principal rebels back to England to be hanged. The Americans, for their part, could only conclude that what was happening to them was the result of the concerted designs of purposeful individuals, and thus they were prone to see ministerial plots everywhere against their liberties—indeed, against English liberty in general. Someone as sophisticated as Thomas Jefferson, for example, might ascribe “single acts of tyranny ...to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably thro’ every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” In such a frame of mind everything that happened in England took on a heightened meaning. The colonists came to believe, for instance, that the fate of the English radical John Wilkes and his riotous supporters was intimately involved with their own; he and they were both fighting for English liberty against an oppressive establishment.
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John Wilkes, the man the Americans came to champion in the 1760s, was one of the greatest demagogues in English history. He was an impoverished gentleman and journalist with a seedy reputation, but he had the patronage of Lord Temple and had become a member of Parliament. In 1763 he had been imprisoned for publishing a libel against the king in No. 45 of his newspaper the
North Briton.
The House of Commons ordered the offending issue of the paper publicly burned. Wilkes fled to France, and the English courts declared him an outlaw. In 1768 Wilkes returned to England and was several times elected to the House of Commons, but each time Parliament denied him his seat. Huge London crowds, crying “Wilkes and liberty” and backed by thousands of the kinds of middling people from whom Franklin himself had sprung— shopkeepers, tradesmen, petty merchants, and others denied a substantial role in English politics—took to the streets in tumultuous riots that the authorities were unable to contain. The windows of the Lord Mayor’s Mansion House as well as those of every house that refused “to put out lights for Mr. Wilkes” were smashed. Finally, on May 10, 1768, troops fired on the Wilkesite mobs in St. George’s Fields in London, killing eleven and wounding a dozen others, including several bystanders. This “massacre,” as it was called, provoked even more disturbances and rioting over the following months.
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When the colonists learned of these events, they turned Wilkes into an American hero. “Wilkes and liberty” was toasted up and down the coast of North America. The colonists made the No. 45 into a symbol of liberty; they named towns and children after Wilkes, raised money for his cause, and opened up communications with him. The suppression of Wilkes and his repeated exclusion from Parliament seemed to the Americans to represent all that was wrong with Britain’s corrupt and oligarchic politics. To most Americans, Wilkes was not a rioter and demagogue but a victim of British tyranny.
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Experiencing the Wilkesite mobs firsthand, Franklin had a very different view. He hated mobs, all mobs, but the “drunken mad mobs” stirred up by Wilkes were the worst anyone had ever witnessed. “The scenes,” he told his son, the royal governor of New Jersey, “have been horrible.” For the life of him he could not understand how Americans could turn Wilkes into a hero. As far as he was concerned, Wilkes was “an outlaw and an exile, of bad personal character, not worth a farthing.” He was appalled to learn that some Americans were applauding Wilkes’s

No. 45, “which I suppose they do not know was a Paper in which their King was personally affronted, whom I am sure they love and honour.” When “sober sensible Men” in England saw the colonists “so easily infected with the Madness of English Mobs,” America’s reputation was seriously hurt.

But the mobbing suggested to Franklin that Britain itself was in trouble. How could someone of Wilkes’s reputation even dare to come over from France and set himself up for election to the House of Commons? The country seemed to be going to the dogs. “All respect to law and government,” he told Galloway, “seems to be lost among the common people, who are moreover continually enflamed by seditious scribblers to trample on authority and every thing that used to keep them in order.” The action of the troops in the “massacre” at St. George’s Fields infuriated some English leaders, especially, he said, since a Scottish regiment had done the shooting. As a result, several soldiers were imprisoned. “If they are not hanged,” he said, “it is feared there will be more and greater mobs; and if they are [hanged], that no soldier will assist in suppressing any mob hereafter. The prospect either way is gloomy.” Something had to be done. Instead of “angry declaimers on both sides the water” blowing up the flames of discord, Franklin wanted a few prudent men promoting concord and harmony.
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With all their talk of deliberate designs and conspiracies, both British officials and American leaders, he concluded, seemed to have lost their senses. “To be apprehensive of chimerical dangers, to be alarmed at trifles, to suspect plots and deep designs where none exist, to regard as mortal enemies those who are really our nearest and best friends, and to be very abusive”—what could such ideas be but a kind of insanity? Perhaps because he saw the disarray of the British government close up— the officials’ lack of any intimate knowledge of America, the shuffling of men in and out of office for reasons that had nothing to do with America—he saw confusion, passion, stupidity, and arrogance, but no plots and designs. Amid all the conspiratorial thinking on both sides he could only sigh and shake his head at the foolishness of people. He spent most of his energy in these years of the imperial crisis trying “to palliate matters” and to mitigate the “Railing and reviling” of zealots and dissidents who were only widening the breach between England and her colonies.”
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THE TOWNSHEND DUTIES AS EXTERNAL TAXES

Living in London, Franklin was often able to sense what the English were up to, but he had a much harder time gauging American opinion. In June 1767, Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend seemed to take to heart Franklin’s earlier distinction between external and internal taxes voiced during his examination in Parliament, and decided to levy customs duties, or external taxes, on a number of British products shipped to the colonies, including paper, glass, paint, and tea. Perhaps Townshend, like many in London, believed that Franklin represented American opinion. If so, Townshend would have thought he was doing the right thing: as late as that April, Franklin stated categorically in the London press that “the colonies submit to pay all external taxes laid on them by way of duty on merchandizes imported into their country, and never disputed the authority of parliament to lay such duties.”
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Such statements again reveal Franklin’s difficulty in catching up with American opinion. Even after the Townshend duties were passed, he continued to describe them as
external
taxes and therefore in his opinion well within Parliament’s authority to levy. When he learned of the colonists’ outcry against the duties and the American nonimportation agreements boycotting British goods, his first impulse was not to deny the constitutionality of the duties but to try to placate the English and quiet the Americans. He tried to explain to the English the various sources of the colonists’ anger, including the prohibitions on their manufacturing hats and iron products. Above all, he wanted to assure the English that the colonists, “notwithstanding the reproaches thrown out against us,” were “truly a loyal people.” Indeed, he wrote in the
London Chronicle
in 1768, “there is not a single native of our country who is not firmly attached to his King by principle and by affection.”
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At the same time he urged his fellow Americans to be patient and quiet, avoid tumults, and “hold fast [our] Loyalty to our King, (who has the best Disposition towards us, and has a Family Interest in our Prosperity).” Above all, he said to his countrymen, do not do anything that would lose the sympathy of the English people, who were not at fault, their being of “a noble and generous Nature.”
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FRANKLIN AND HIS PHILADELPHIA FAMILY

By 1768 his original mission had become less and less meaningful. Little hope of Pennsylvania’s becoming a royal colony remained. Yet Franklin lingered on in London. He had lived, he said, “so great a Part of my Life in Britain,” and had “formed so many Friendships in it,” that he could not help loving the mother country.
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He was enjoying the city, going to his clubs, meeting people, not just ordinary people but royalty. He was flattered that the king of Denmark, Christian VII, who was visiting England in 1768, expressed a desire to meet and converse with him. And so he dined with the king, as he explained in an effusive letter to William in which he proudly drew the table to show where each dinner guest sat.
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There was nothing in Philadelphia to match that. Although he told people in Pennsylvania—including his wife, who kept pleading with him to come back home—that he would soon return, he kept putting off the move.

Franklin seemed virtually to have put Deborah out of his mind as a wife and lover; instead, he more and more regarded her as an informant about the lives and deaths of people they knew in America and the manager of his business affairs back in Philadelphia. For her part Deborah remained, as she often signed herself, his “a feck shonet wife,” who continued to supply him with long and rambling letters that were difficult to read. They were full of her chaotic spellings and unpunctuated streams of thoughts, but wonderfully warm and detailed, crammed with the everyday routines of life in Philadelphia and with minute descriptions of the new house Franklin had never seen. Despite the jealousy she must have felt toward her husband’s Craven Street family, she always managed to end her letters by sending her “love” and “Compleymentes” to “good Mrs. Stephenson” and her daughter. As with many wives in that patriarchal age, her love was mingled with respect and even awe of her husband, doubly so because of Franklin’s fame. She hesitated to say “anything to you that will give you aney uneseynes” and feared constantly to do the smallest thing, “leste it shold not be write.” She particularly hesitated to inform him of the engagement of their daughter, Sally, to Richard Bache, who ran a dry goods store in Philadelphia. “Obliged to be father and mother,” she had agreed to the engagement. “I hope I ackte to your Satisfackshon.”
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Franklin was not happy with a storekeeper for a son-in-law, and despite Deborah’s continual expectation of his imminent return, told his wife that he wouldn’t be coming back that year, 1767, either. He made no comment about missing his only daughter’s wedding and instead warned Deborah not to spend too much money on the occasion. He emphasized that he was living in London “as frugally as possible not to be destitute of the Comforts of Life.” Life on Craven Street may not have been luxurious but it was certainly comfortable, comfortable enough for him to take in the children of distant relatives and the illegitimate son of William, whom William passed off as the son of a poor relation. His surrogate London family on Craven Street seemed in many ways preferable to his real one back in Philadelphia. Mrs. Stevenson catered to all of his needs as well as Deborah could have, and Mrs. Stevenson’s daughter Polly was more lively and intelligent than Sally Franklin. No wonder that a friend visiting him in 1769 reported that “Doctor Franklin looks heartier than I ever knew him in America.”
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Deborah became more and more discouraged over Franklin’s absence. Some were telling her in 1767 that Franklin was coming home that summer, but others said he was not. As for her, she could not say, “as I am in the darke and my life of old age is one Contineuwd State of suspens.” In 1768 she complained for the first time that all her responsibilities were “very harde” on her, since she was now more than sixty. A year later she suffered a stroke, from which she only slowly recovered. She blamed the stroke on her distress over Franklin’s “staying so much longer” than she had expected. Franklin never replied to this remark but instead kept on her about her accounts. When in 1771 she overran her expenses he cruelly admonished her: “You were not very attentive to Money-matters in your best Days,” he told her, “and I apprehend that your Memory is too much impair’d for the Management of unlimited Sums, without injuring the future Fortune of your Daughter and Grandson.” At the same time as Deborah was telling him that she was “growing verey febel verey faste,” he was informing her that he had just returned from a monthlong journey, “which has given a new Spring to my Health and Spirits.” As her mind and health deteriorated, Franklin’s letters to her became more and more perfunctory: he asked nothing about her condition and told her very little about his life. She never stopped asking when he was coming home. In 1773, nine years from the time he had last seen her, Franklin told his wife that he hesitated to return to America for fear “I shall find myself a Stranger in my Own Country; and leaving so many Friends here, it will seem leaving Home to go there.”
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She wrote her last letter to him on October 29, 1773. She died a year later, in December 1774.

TO BE USEFUL TO GOVERNMENT

In 1768 Franklin had a new reason for making London his permanent home. The English government finally decided that American affairs merited their own executive department, and rumor spread that the government might even draw on American expertise to help run it. That January, Franklin told his son that there was talk of his being appointed an undersecretary in the new department. Since he thought the government considered him to be “too much of an American,” he was skeptical of the rumors. Besides, with the constant change of ministers nothing was certain anymore.
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