The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (25 page)

Franklin’s admission that it was he who had sent the Hutchinson letters to Massachusetts touched off a bitter British newspaper assault against him. This rhymed denunciation was a good sample.

To D——r F——n

Thou base, ungrateful, cunning, upstart thing!

False to thy country first, then to thy King:

To gain thy selfish and ambitious ends,

Betraying secret letters writ to friends:

May no more letters through thy hands be past,

But may thy last year’s office be thy last.
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In the eyes of the British government Franklin had now come to represent all the guile and treachery of the unruly colonists. On January 20, 1774, news of the Boston Tea Party arrived in London, a few days before the Privy Council was to meet to decide the fate of the Massachusetts petition to have Hutchinson removed from office. Instead of focusing on the Massachusetts petition, the meeting of the Privy Council turned into a full-scale indictment of Franklin, who now seemed responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the empire, including the recent Tea Party.

On January 29, in an amphitheater in Whitehall aptly called the Cockpit, and before the entire king’s council, many members of the court, and scores of curious spectators in the gallery, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn viciously attacked Franklin, in what Franklin compared to a “Bull-baiting.”
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For nearly an hour Wedderburn poured abuse on Franklin the likes of which many had never heard before. Much of it was even too scurrilous for the press to publish. Franklin, Wedderburn declared, was “the true incendiary” and “the first mover and prime conductor” behind all of the troubles in Massachusetts. He had “forfeited all the respect of societies and of men,” for he was not a gentleman; he was in fact nothing less than a thief.
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Through the entire tirade, with the crowd cheering and laughing,

Franklin stood silent, his face frozen, determined to show the audience no emotion whatsoever. At the end the Privy Council rejected the Massachusetts petition as groundless—designed only “for the Seditious Purpose of keeping up a Spirit of Clamour and Discontent.”
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As Franklin told his Pennsylvania colleague Galloway three weeks later, he had hoped that his sending the Hutchinson letters to Massachusetts would have convinced the colonial leaders there that the “Blame” for the breakdown in imperial relations ought to lie with their own native officials. This, he had hoped, would “remove much of their Resentment against Britain as a harsh unkind Mother,... and by that means promote a Reconciliation.” For its part the Massachusetts assembly did indeed resolve that all its grievances were the responsibility of Hutchinson and Oliver. “If the Ministry here had been disposed to a Reconciliation, as they sometimes pretend to be, this,” said Franklin, “was giving a fair Opening, which they might have thanked me for; but they chuse rather to abuse me,” who was really only a public messenger. Once again he invoked the old notion based on his earlier experience as a printer that he was merely an impartial relater of information and news.
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Everything had turned out the opposite of what he had intended. Rather than Thomas Hutchinson’s becoming a scapegoat for the imperial crisis, Franklin himself had become in British eyes the single person most responsible for American resistance. By publicly humiliating Franklin in this brutal manner, the British government may have vented some of its rising hostility toward its rebellious colonists, but at the same time it virtually destroyed the affections of the only colonist in England who might have brought about reconciliation. Whether true or not, the story later circulated that Franklin upon leaving the Cockpit whispered in Wedderburn’s ear, “I will make your master a LITTLE KING for this.”
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Two days later the government fired Franklin as deputy postmaster general of North America.

LAST EFFORTS TO SAVE THE EMPIRE

Despite his humiliation and his anger, Franklin had not given up all hope. He continued for a year more to try to save the empire. At one point he even offered to pay out of his own pocket the cost of the tea thrown into Boston harbor. He lobbied desperately against the passage in 1774 of the Coercive Acts, which closed the port of Boston and altered the Massachusetts charter, and he sought by a variety of avenues to convey the American position to the British government. But he knew his situation was becoming hazardous. “If by some Accident the Troops and People of N[ew] E[ngland] should come to Blows,” he told Galloway in October 1774, “I should probably be taken up [that is, arrested], the ministerial People affecting every where to represent me as the Cause of all the Misunderstanding.”
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His friends advised him to leave England, but he stayed on. Confident of his innocence, he thought “the worst which can happen to me will be an Imprisonment on Suspicion, tho’ that is a thing I should desire to avoid, as it may be expensive and vexatious, as well as dangerous to my Health.”
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Besides he was anxious to see what the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia in September 1774 would do. Perhaps it could use nonimportation of British goods to bring pressure to bear on the British government and result in the present ministers’ going out and giving “Place to Men of juster and more generous Principles.” In response to rumors that he was returned to royal favor and would be promoted to a better position than his former one, Franklin declared he was no longer interested in any offices that the government might offer him. Indeed, he informed his sister several times that year, “I would not accept the best Office the King has to bestow, while such Tyrannic Measures are taking against my Country.” He was becoming ever more convinced, as he told his son in August, that “Posts and Places are precarious Dependencies,” not fit for someone who would be “a Freeman.” Nevertheless, he still thought he had some influence in England and was reluctant to leave if there was the slightest possibility of his helping to prevent the destruction of that “great political Building,” the British Empire.
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When the Earl of Chatham, who as the untitled William Pitt had led the government to victory in the Seven Years War, approached Franklin that same month in hopes of saving the empire Pitt had done so much to create, Franklin was guardedly optimistic. He saw new British “Advocates” for America’s cause “daily arising.” If the Americans could stop importing and consuming British goods, he said, “this Ministry must be ruined.” But as he gained a greater hold on American opinion he lost touch with British opinion. The nonimportation and nonconsumption agreements that the First Continental Congress approved in 1774 did not ruin the ministry. He could not have been more mistaken in telling Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts that the new Parliament to be elected in October would likely be more favorable to America. Once the British people saw the Continental Congress’s resolve, he told Cushing, he was persuaded that “our Friends will be multiplied, and our Enemies diminish’d, so as to bring on an Accommodation in which our undoubted rights shall be acknowledg’d and establish’d.” Unless, of course, said Franklin, the court was able to bribe its way to a majority in the new Parliament."
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Although Franklin had no authority to negotiate for America, some peace-seeking Englishmen assumed he had and tried to use him as an intermediary in their desperate efforts to head off the breakup of the empire. Since Franklin was persona non grata with the king and with Whitehall, Franklin never talked directly with any member of the government. But others who consulted Franklin, including two prominent Quakers, David Barclay and John Fothergill, and Admiral Lord Richard Howe, did carry on some sort of secret negotiations with several members of the government. By December 1774 Franklin tried to make it clear to the negotiators that above all else Americans would never agree to the right of Parliament to legislate on the internal affairs of any colony—a denial of Parliamentary sovereignty that the British government would never accept. Two months later, in February 1775, the negotiators had virtually given up hope that the American and ministerial positions could be reconciled.

In the meantime Lord Chatham had approached Franklin once again with hopes for conciliation. At the end of December 1774 and throughout January 1775 they met and talked about what might be done. On January 29, Chatham actually called on Franklin at Craven Street—an event, Franklin told his son, “much taken notice of and talk’d of.... Such a Visit from so great a Man, on so important Business, flattered not a little my Vanity; and the Honour of it gave me the more Pleasure, as it happen’d on the very Day 12 month, that the Ministry had taken so much pains to disgrace me before the Privy Council.” Then without giving Franklin any time to make any final suggestions, Chatham on February 1, 1775, went ahead and introduced his comprehensive plan for conciliation in the House of Lords. Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, rose and declared that the plan ought to be rejected with the contempt it deserved. The plan, he said, could never have been drafted by a British peer; it had to be the work of an American. Sandwich then looked at Franklin, who was present in the gallery, and said that he fancied it was the work of “one of the bitterest and most mischievous Enemies this Country had ever known.” Chatham’s proposal was hooted down and soundly rejected without a second reading by the House of Lords. The Lords treated it, said Franklin, “with as much Contempt as they could have shown to a Ballad offered by a drunken Porter.”
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For Franklin this was virtually the last straw. The Lords’ rejection of Chatham’s proposal in such a hasty and frivolous manner stunned him. Their ignominious action, he said, revealed only the depth of their ignorance, passion, and prejudice. It gave him “an exceeding mean Opinion of their Abilities, and made their Claim of Sovereignty over three Millions of virtuous sensible People in America, seem the greatest of Absurdities.” “Hereditary Legislators!” he exclaimed. They were not fit “to govern a Herd of Swine.”
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Listening in Parliament during the following weeks to the arrogant dismissals of Americans “as the lowest of Mankind and almost of a different Species from the English of Britain,” Franklin became more and more irate. Not only were the Americans said to be dishonest knaves, but they were called dastardly cowards who were no match for His Majesty’s soldiers. He later recalled hearing one British general say “that with a Thousand British Grenadiers he would undertake to go from one end of America to the other and geld all the Males partly by force and partly by a little Coaxing.” Never had he been so angry; indeed, he was so furious that one friend feared that he might be “a little out of [his] Senses.” England, Franklin told his American confidants, had become rotten to the core; in fact, continuation of the union with England might infect America and destroy “the glorious publick Virtue so predominant in our rising Country.”
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At last he knew that his mediating role in the imperial crisis was over. He had learned that his wife had died, and he had to go home. He thought he had done his best, but British officials had made his task impossible. He was now convinced that the glorious empire to which he had devoted so much of his life was “destroyed by the mangling hands of a few blundering ministers.”
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He felt his Americanness as never before. His emotional separation from England was now final and complete. On March 19, 1775, he and his friend Joseph Priestley read over some American newspapers that had just arrived, looking for propaganda pieces. When Franklin came to the stories about the addresses sent by the neighboring towns to the closed port of Boston, recalled Priestley, his emotions gave way and “the tears trickled down his cheeks.”
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The next day the man whom Dr. Johnson called a “maker of mischief” sailed for America and became a passionate patriot, more passionate in fact than nearly all the other patriot leaders.
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FOUR

BECOMING A DIPLOMAT

UNDER SUSPICION

By the time Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775, fighting between the colonists and British soldiers had already broken out in Lexington and Concord. The year before, in order to enforce the Coercive Acts, the British Crown had replaced the much abused governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, with a military commander in chief, Thomas Gage. Hutchinson went to England in exile, full of despair over what was happening in his beloved Massachusetts, just as his former royalist colleague was returning to the land of his birth. Because Franklin had become an international celebrity, he was interviewed by a newspaper editor upon his return—perhaps the first person in American history to be so greeted at the dock. In the news account Franklin urged Americans to stand firm and prepare for the struggle ahead. “He says we have no favours to expect from the Ministry; nothing but submission will satisfy them.” Only a “spirited opposition” could save Americans from “the most abject slavery and destruction.”
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