The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (24 page)

THE AFFAIR OF THE HUTCHINSON LETTERS

Suddenly, however, the signals from the British government shifted and became more positive. During travels in Ireland that fall, Franklin met Lord Hillsborough, who to his amazement changed his tone toward him.

His lordship even invited him to his Irish estates, where Franklin was “detain’d by a 1000 Civilities from Tuesday to Sunday.”
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Franklin was bewildered and wondered what this shift of attitude meant. Even better, in August 1772 Hillsborough was finally ousted from the ministry, and Lord Dartmouth, whom Franklin knew and liked, was appointed in his place.

Franklin recovered some of his earlier sense of his importance in English politics and actually thought he himself might have had something to do with Hillsborough’s resignation and Dartmouth’s appointment. Since Dartmouth was sympathetic to America and western expansion and land speculation, and had “express’d some personal Regard for me,” Franklin hoped it would now be much easier to transact imperial business.
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And who knows, maybe a subministerial position might materialize after all? With his earlier expectations renewed, he immediately dropped the writing of his
Autobiography,
which he would not resume until 1784 in France, following the successful negotiation of the treaty establishing American independence.

By August 1772 Franklin was as optimistic as he had ever been. He once more felt immune to the slings and arrows of his enemies, who had tried to injure him and take away his crown office. For years popular images of him, including medallions made by Josiah Wedgwood, had circulated throughout the British Isles, and he had become by far the most famous American in Britain and indeed in the world. He bragged to his son of how much the intellectual community respected him and how many friends he had in Britain—“my company so much desired that I seldom dine at home in winter, and could spend the whole summer in the country houses of inviting friends, if I chose it.” Even the king “too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard.”
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With this heightened sense that he once again could be a significant figure in imperial politics and might be able finally to reconcile the colonies and the mother country, Franklin became involved in the affair of the Hutchinson letters. This affair was the most extraordinary and revealing incident in his political life. It effectively destroyed his position in England and ultimately made him a patriot.
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In the late 1760s, Thomas Hutchinson, then lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, as part of a small group that included Andrew Oliver,

Franklin, porcelain medallion by Josiah Wedgwood, 1778

Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, had written some letters to a British undersecretary, Thomas Whately. In these letters Hutchinson especially urged that stern measures, including “an abridgment of what are called English liberties,” were needed in America to maintain the colonies’ dependency on Great Britain. If nothing was done, “or nothing more than some declaratory acts or resolves,” Hutchinson had written in Janu-ary 1769,
“it is all over with us.
The friends ... of anarchy will be afraid of nothing be it ever so extravagant.”
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After Thomas Whately’s death in 1772, Franklin was given these letters, which included some from Andrew Oliver, by “a Gentleman of Character and Distinction” (no one knows who).
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That December he sent them to Massachusetts in order, as he said, to convince key persons in the colony that blame for the imperial crisis lay solely with a few mischievous colonial officials like Hutchinson, who was now the royal governor of the colony.
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These native officials, and not the British government in London, were the ones who had bartered “away the Liberties of their native Country for Posts” and betrayed the interest of not only Massachusetts but the Crown they pretended to serve, and indeed, the interest of “the whole English Empire.” The ministry in England, Franklin suggested, was not conspiring against American liberty after all. It had been misled by the evil counsel of these “mere Time-servers” whose letters back to London “laid the Foundation of most if not all our present Grievances.” These local American officials were the persons who actually created the “Enmities between the different Countries of which the Empire consists.”
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By this action Franklin was willing to make Thomas Hutchinson, his former friend and colleague at the Albany Congress, a scapegoat for the whole imperial crisis. Indeed, he actually had the nerve to say of Hutchinson and Oliver that “if they are good Men, and agree that all good Men wish a good Understanding and Harmony to subsist between the Colonies and their Mother Country, they ought the less to regret, that at the small Expence of their Reputation for Sincerity and Publick Spirit among their Compatriots, so desirable an Event may in some degree be forwarded.” In other words, said Franklin, perhaps with as much naiveté as cynicism, if Hutchinson and Oliver, Hutchinson’s successor as lieutenant governor, truly cared about the empire, they ought to be willing to be scapegoats and accept the sacrifice of their reputations for the sake of bringing about an Anglo-American reconciliation.
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With the Hutchinson letters as evidence, Franklin believed that the present government in London would be cleared of responsibility for the crisis in the empire and the way would be opened for rational settlement of the differences between the mother country and her colonies. Once the colonists saw where blame for the imperial crisis truly lay, then their hostility toward the British ministry would eventually subside. As Lord Dartmouth, the new pro-American secretary of the American Department, told Franklin, time was needed for passions to cool. Besides, Franklin noted, time was on America’s side. “Our growing Strength both in Wealth and Numbers ... will make us more respectable, our Friendship more valued, and our Enmity feared; thence it will soon be thought proper to treat us, not with Justice only, but with Kindness.” Thus Franklin advised the Massachusetts patriots “to be quiet,” and give “no fresh Offence to Government.” By all means, stick up for “our Rights” in resolutions and memorials, but, he said, bear “patiently the little present Notice that is taken of them.” In the meantime Lord Dartmouth, with Franklin’s help, would have an opportunity to straighten things out and save the empire.
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This was a spectacular miscalculation, so spectacular a miscalculation in fact that it raises questions once again about Franklin’s political judgment and his understanding of the emotions involved in the imperial crisis.
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Franklin actually thought that he and a few men of goodwill could head off the crisis. As late as 1775 he was still persuaded that the issues separating Britain and the colonies were merely “a Matter of Punctilio, which Two or three reasonable People might settle in half an Hour.”
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In fact, as his earlier mistakes over trying to make Pennsylvania a royal colony and getting Americans to accept the Stamp Act indicate, Franklin was not always a shrewd politician, at least not when it came to judging popular passions.

To be sure, he was free of the wild suspicions and conspiratorial notions that beguiled many on both sides of the imperial conflict. But he suffered from a naive confidence in the power of reason and a few sensible men to arrange complicated and impassioned matters. He always thanked God for giving him “a reasonable Mind ... with moderate Passions, or so much of his gracious Assistance in governing them,” that freed him, he said, from much of the “Uneasiness” that afflicted other men. He was by nature a conciliator. Just as “every Affront is not worth a Duel,” and “every Injury not worth a War,” so too, he was fond of saying, “every Mistake in Government, every Incroachment on Rights is not worth a Rebellion.”
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It was as if he were temperamentally incapable of comprehending popular emotions in America, emotions whose extent and intensity severely limited the ability of a small number of individuals to manipulate events and reach compromises. It had been his problem ever since at least the time of the Stamp Act, if not of the Albany Plan.

The consequences of Franklin’s sending the Hutchinson letters to Massachusetts could not have been worse, both to him personally and to the relationship between Britain and her colonies. Although Franklin had stipulated that the Hutchinson-Oliver letters not be published but instead be circulated among only a few “Men of Worth” in Massachusetts, he should not have been surprised that by June 1773 they were published as a pamphlet and distributed throughout the colony. The title page of this pamphlet told its readers that they would discover “the fatal source of the confusion and bloodshed in which this province especially has been involved and which threatened total destruction to the liberties of all 
America
.”
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The published letters created an uproar in Massachusetts. The House of Representatives immediately petitioned the Crown to recall Hutchinson and Oliver. In presenting the Massachusetts petition to Lord Dartmouth, Franklin thought his plan had worked. He tried to persuade the secretary for American affairs that the people of Massachusetts, “having lately discovered, as they think, the authors of their grievances to be some of their own people, their resentment against Britain is thence much abated.”
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Franklin could not have been more wrong. Rather than becoming less resentful of Britain, the Massachusetts colonists were angrier than ever at the mother country. The revelation of the letters seemed to confirm the conspiracy against their liberty that Americans earlier had only feared and suspected. Those letters gave proof, declared the Boston Committee of Correspondence, that God had “wonderfully interposed to bring to light the plot that has been laid for us by our malicious and invidious enemies.”
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The Massachusetts radicals looked for an opportunity to renew the struggle, and on December 16, 1773, taking advantage of that year’s British Tea Act, which gave a monopoly to the East India Company to sell tea in America, they dumped £10,000 of British tea into Boston harbor.

When the Hutchinson letters were published in England that August, everyone wanted to know how they had been obtained. William Whately, the brother of the deceased Thomas Whately, thought that an imperial bureaucrat, John Temple, was the culprit and challenged him to a duel, in which Whately was wounded. When a second challenge followed, Franklin felt he could no longer keep silent, and in December 1773 he publicly confessed to having sent the letters to Boston, but he never revealed how he had obtained them. Although he scarcely anticipated the remarkable British reaction to this confession, his confidence in his ability to calm the imperial crisis was already fast eroding.

BULLBAITING IN THE COCKPIT

Within weeks of the publication of the Hutchinson letters in England, Franklin sensed that his efforts to absolve the ministry for the imperial crisis were not turning out as he had hoped. When he realized that British officials were not cooperating to save the empire, he composed two of his most brilliant satires, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” and “An Edict by the King of Prussia,” both published in the London
Public Advertiser
in September 1773.
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When his sister expressed hope that he would become the means of restoring harmony between Britain and its colonies, he responded that he had grown tired of “Meekness” and had written the two “saucy” papers in order to hold up “a Looking-Glass in which some Ministers may see their ugly Faces, and the Nation its Injustice.” Although Franklin preferred “Rules for Reducing a Great Empire” because of the spirited endings of the paragraphs, all of which promised that the suggested rules would make the people “more disaffected,
and at length desperate
,” most people liked the “Edict” piece better. This essay purported to be a decree of the king of Prussia, Frederick II, pointing out to the English that Britain had originally been settled by Germans, and informing them that they had not sufficiently compensated Prussia for its aid in the Seven Years War. For these reasons the English in the future would have to pay taxes to the German kingdom and suffer other impositions on their trade and manufacturing—taxes and impositions that were precisely those the colonists were suffering at the hands of Great Britain. Franklin delighted in telling his son how many people were
“taken in”
by the hoax, “and imagined it a real edict,” until they got to the end and found out that all of the Prussian regulations had been copied from acts of the English Parliament dealing with the colonies.

Although Franklin realized that the satires would probably backfire by angering the government and by encouraging the colonists in their resistance, he did not seem to care anymore. All that writing he had done over the previous decade trying to explain the nature of the colonies to successive British ministries had come to naught. Perhaps the time for conciliation was over. “A little Sturdiness when Superiors are much in the Wrong,” he told his sister, “sometimes occasions Consideration. And there is truth in the Old Saying,
That if you make yourself a Sheep, the Wolves will eat you.”
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