The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (27 page)

He could scarcely believe that his formerly beloved England was waging such a ferocious war against America. In one of his most passionate exaggerations, he told his friend Jonathan Shipley that General Gage caused more destruction to Charlestown, Massachusetts, in one day than “the Indian
Savages
” had caused in all our wars, “from our first settlement in America, to the present time.” Dr. Johnson (who was nothing but “a Court Pensioner”) infuriated him by urging that English officials seek to excite the slaves to cut their masters’ throats and to hire the Indians to fight the Americans. “When I consider that all this Mischief is done my Country, by Englishmen and Protestant Christians, of a Nation among whom I have so many personal Friends,” he told Shipley, “I am ashamed to feel any Consolation in a prospect of Revenge.” Ashamed or not, he very much wanted revenge.

“You see I am warm,” he said, but he could not help it. Although he possessed “a Temper naturally cool and phlegmatic,” he was only responding to the temper of his fellow Americans, “which is now little short of Madness.”
²⁰
Years later, even as the peace negotiations with Britain were taking place in 1782, Franklin circulated a fictitious document describing a package sent by a Seneca Indian chief to the governor of Canada listing all the American men, women, and children his tribesmen had killed on behalf of the English. The list, together with hundreds of scalps, was to be sent to King George for his refreshment. Franklin saw nothing wrong with his hoax: “The
Form
may perhaps not be genuine,” he told a French friend, “but the
Substance
is truth.”
²¹

Just how personal the Revolution was for Franklin is vividly revealed in his treatment of his son. Up to now Franklin and William had had the closest possible relationship. They had been partners in Franklin’s electrical experiments; in fact, William had been the only person Franklin had involved in his famous kite experiment. William had shared his

William Franklin, by Mather Brown, c. 1790

father’s dreams for the British Empire and his hopes of a fortune in western land speculation. He had accompanied him to Albany in 1754 and had collaborated with him during the Seven Years War. He traveled with his father to London in 1757. They had journeyed to his father’s ancestral homes at Ecton and Banbury and collected genealogical information together. And like his father, William had become a royal officeholder and a keen supporter of royal authority. When they weren’t together, the father and son had kept constantly in touch and had looked after each other’s family. Few eighteenth-century fathers and sons had ever been closer or more intimate with one another.

Now all this intimacy came to an end. Several days after Franklin had his office of deputy postmaster taken from him, he urged his son to give up his office as royal governor and retire to his farm. “ ’Tis an honester and a more honourable because a more independent Employment.” With barely concealed anger he told William that he would “hear from others the Treatment I have receiv’d.” Although he left William to his “own Reflections and Determinations upon it,” it was clear from a subsequent letter that he expected his son to give up his crown office in support of his father. Shortly after his return to America in 1775 Franklin met with William at the home of Joseph Galloway, who had just resigned from politics in disgust with the patriot direction of affairs. Franklin was surprised to discover that his old friend and close confidant Galloway was such a committed royalist, but it was he, not Galloway, who had changed. Franklin tried to persuade both Galloway and his son to join him in the patriot cause. When they refused, Franklin sought to cut his communications with both of them to the barest minimum. He gave up completely on William, but he kept trying with Galloway; as late as the fall of 1776 he assumed that Galloway would at least remain neutral in the conflict. As royal governor of New Jersey, William had no opportunity to remain neutral. The two times Franklin met his son again in the summer of 1775 ended in shouting matches loud enough to disturb the neighbors.
²²

Franklin was naturally embarrassed by the fact that his son was royal governor of New Jersey—indeed, by 1776 the only royal governor still in office in America—but his anger at his son went beyond his need to display his own American patriotism. When Governor Franklin was arrested in June 1776 and sent as a prisoner to Connecticut, Franklin said and did nothing, unaffected even by a poignant plea for help from William’s wife. After William violated his parole and made contact with the British commanders in New York, General William Howe and his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, George Washington had him placed in solitary confinement in Litchfield, Connecticut, and deprived him of all writing materials. Even the pleadings of Strahan could not move Franklin to ease the conditions of his son’s confinement. “Whatever his Demerits may be in the Opinion of the reigning Powers in America,” Strahan told Franklin in 1778, “the Son of Dr. Franklin ought not to receive such Usage from them.”
²³
Franklin refused to lift a finger to aid his son, but others did, including Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache. Eventually Congress arranged for William’s exchange, and William became a fervent loyalist leader in New York.

Because rumors abounded during the Revolutionary War that Franklin and his son were actually in collusion, Franklin perhaps had some reason to avoid all contact with his loyalist son. But after the peace treaty recognizing American independence was signed in September 1783, the situation was different and William wrote his father requesting reconciliation. Franklin’s reply was cool, to say the least. While he suggested that reconciliation might be possible, he wanted William to know how personal the Revolution had been to him. “Indeed,” he said, “nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen Sensations, as to find my self deserted in my old Age by my only Son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up Arms against me, in a Cause wherein my good Fame, fortune and Life were all at Stake.” Although Franklin acknowledged William’s claim that duty to king and country accounted for his loyalism, he really wasn’t persuaded. “
There are,”
he emphasized,
“Natural Duties which precede political Ones, and cannot be extinguished by them
.”
²⁴

In July 1785 the father and son met for several days in Southampton, England, but Franklin, anxious to protect William’s son Temple from any taint of loyalism, was in no mood for reconciliation. All he wanted was for William to sell him all his unconfiscated property in New Jersey, which would then be passed on to Temple. Franklin was all business, and he bargained hard to get the property at a price far below its current value. He also demanded that William cede to him some property in New York as compensation for a debt of £1500 that William owed him. That was the end of the matter. He never communicated with William again and indeed rarely ever mentioned him and then only coldly. In his will he left his son some worthless lands in Nova Scotia and some books and papers that William already possessed—in effect, nothing. “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public Notoriety,” he wrote in his will, “will account for my leaving him no more of an Estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”
²⁵

During the peace negotiations with Britain in 1782, Franklin was passionate and implacable on only one issue—that of compensation for the loyalists. If the loyalists were to be indemnified for their losses, he said, then the patriots had to be similarly compensated for all the lootings, burnings, and scalpings carried out by the British and their Indian allies. Even his two colleagues during the peace negotiations, John Adams and John Jay, were surprised at the intensity of Franklin’s bitterness toward the loyalists. It was far greater than their own.
²⁶

THE PASSIONATE REVOLUTIONARY

Franklin identified the American cause as his own, and he spared no energy on its behalf, even though he was the oldest member of the Second Continental Congress. In October 1775 as a member of a committee to investigate the military needs of the army, he traveled from Philadelphia to Cambridge to meet with George Washington, who had been appointed commander in chief. In March 1776, at the age of seventy, Franklin and several other commissioners trekked up the Hudson Valley to Canada in a fruitless effort to bring the Canadians in on the American side. No sooner had he finished serving on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence than he became president of the Pennsylvania convention called to write a new constitution for the state. Through the summer of 1776 he alternated his time between the Pennsylvania convention and the Congress. His most important contribution to the new state constitution was his urging the creation of a plural executive and a single-house legislature, which to many smacked of simple democracy and popular radicalism. One article of the constitution he specifically claimed. It expressed a view of government that his witnessing corrupt English politicians seeking lucrative royal offices had taught him. The article declared that there was no need in the government for “offices of profit, the usual effects of which are dependence and servility unbecoming freemen, in the possessors and expectants; faction, contention, corruption, and disorder among the people.”
²⁷

Although as a colony Pennsylvania had possessed only a single-house legislature, a government with a plural executive and a unicameral legislature was such an anomaly among all the other Revolutionary state constitutions created in 1776, nearly all of which had single governors and senates as well as houses of representatives, that it turned the radical Pennsylvania constitution into an object of heated controversy over the succeeding decade. It was “intolerable,” a monster “singular in its kind, confused, inconsistent, deficient in sense and grammar, and the ridicule of all
America
but ourselves, who blush too much to laugh.” Benjamin Rush thought the Pennsylvania convention must have been drunk with liberty to have produced such an “absurd” constitution, which, he said, “substituted a mob government to one of the happiest governments in the world.” But the charge that was most often hurled at the Pennsylvania constitution was that it was “an execrable democracy—a Beast without a head.”
²⁸
For most Americans in 1776 to be a simple democracy was not a good thing, which is why nearly all the state constitutions formed at the time created governors and senates to offset the democracy embodied in their houses of representatives.

Democracy in the eighteenth century was not yet the article of faith that it would become in the decades following the American Revolution. It was still a technical term of political science, meaning simply rule by the people. In traditional political thinking going back to the ancient Greeks, rule by the people alone was never highly regarded, for it could easily slip into anarchy and a takeover by a tyrant. The best constitution was one that was mixed or balanced, where the people’s rule was offset by the rule of the aristocracy and monarchy. Eighteenth-century intellectuals admired the English constitution so much because it seemed to have nicely mixed and balanced the three simple forms of government, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, in the Crown, House of Lords, and House of Commons.

Of course, Americans in 1776 thought that the Crown had used money and influence to buy up the House of Commons and had corrupted the English constitution. They meant to prevent that corruption in their own new republican state constitutions. But most American constitution makers did not intend to abandon the idea of mixed and balanced government. John Adams, whose writings probably had the greatest influence on constitution-making in most of the states, but certainly not Pennsylvania, put the conventional wisdom best: “Liberty,” he said, “depends upon an exact Ballance, a nice Counterpoise of all the Powers of the state.... The best Governments of the World have been mixed.”
²⁹

Perhaps as much as anything it was Franklin’s identification with the simple, unmixed democratic constitution of Pennsylvania that sowed the seeds of John Adams’s growing enmity toward Franklin. Franklin’s later identification with France only made matters worse. When French intellectuals saw in the bicameral legislatures of the other constitutions an effort to retain an aristocratic social order in the senates, they were astonished. They asked how “the same equilibrium of powers which has been necessary to balance the enormous preponderance of royalty, could be of any use in republics, formed upon the equality of all the citizens.” For the French
philosophes
a state could have but a single interest. In fact, they said, that was what republicanism was all about. Believing as they did that “the representatives of a single nation naturally form a single body” and that there was no place for senates in the new egalitarian republics of the United States, the French
philosophes
celebrated the Pennsylvania Constitution as the only one that had refused to imitate the English House of Lords. John Adams, of course, reacted angrily to this French criticism and insisted all the more strenuously on the need for a mixed government with a single governor and a two-house legislature. Indeed, his magnum opus, the sprawling three-volume
Defence of the Constitutions of the United States,
was written in the white heat of his fury with this French, criticism of America’s balanced state constitutions. In his anger with the French, Adams never forgot that Franklin had favored a simple unbalanced government with a unicameral legislature. This is what gave Franklin his reputation for being a “democrat,” which for most eighteenth-century Americans remained a disparaging term.
³⁰