The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (66 page)

If Philadelphians had not changed, Philadelphia had. “I find this city greatly increased in building,” he told Jackson. “And they say it is so in numbers of inhabitants.” On this last point he did not consider himself the best judge, for his perspective had changed. “To me the streets seem thinner of people, owing perhaps to my being so long accustomed to the bustling crowded streets of London.”

The cost of living had greatly increased in the five years Franklin had been gone. “It is more than double in most articles, and in some ’tis treble.” For decades Franklin had advocated an expanded currency as a spur to trade; lately the currency had expanded so much the horse had run right out from under the rider. Citing the £800,000 Parliament had spent in Pennsylvania during the war, as well as large paper issues by Pennsylvania and its neighbors, Franklin asserted, “This is such an overproportion of money to the demand for a medium of trade in these countries that it seems from plenty to have lost much of its value. Our tradesmen are grown as idle, and as extravagant in their demands when you would prevail on them to work, as so many Spaniards.” Franklin wondered whether something similar might afflict England, now that it led the world in trading. “Your commerce is now become so profitable,” he told Jackson, “and naturally brings so much gold and silver into the island, that if you had not now and then some expensive foreign war to draw it off, your country would, like ours, have a plethora in its veins, productive of the same sloth and the same feverish extravagance.”

Franklin
was hardly advocating war for the sake of the economy; this last remark was rather a relic from the arguments he had been making in England against an early halt to the war. By the end of 1762 such arguments were unnecessary, for the war was concluding, and to Britain’s advantage. Spain had entered the conflict opportunistically late—but also foolishly so, for the revivified British navy soon descended on Cuba and isolated Havana. The city fell in October 1762. Franklin described the victory as “a conquest of the greatest importance.” Yet Canada was more important, and Franklin feared that the earlier victory in the north would
be frittered away. Pointing out the expense of the Havana campaign, in which thousands of British soldiers died of disease, he said that the success there would help Britain achieve favorable terms of peace—“if John Bull does not get drunk with victory, double his fists, and bid all the world kiss his a—e till he provokes them to drub him again into his senses.”

John Bull sobered up shortly. In November his negotiators initialed preliminary articles of peace with France and Spain; the following February the treaty became definitive.

Having taken such a strenuous part in the debate over the terms of peace, Franklin naturally and anxiously awaited details of the accord. To his delight he learned that on the issue of compelling concern west of the Atlantic and north of the Caribbean, the British negotiators had held firm. Canada, won in war, would be British in peace. With Canada came the eastern half of Louisiana, between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi, including the Ohio Valley. France would get back Martinique and Guadeloupe. Havana was returned to Spain, but Britain kept Florida.

Franklin greeted the settlement with enthusiasm. It was a “glorious peace,” he said, “the most advantageous to Great Britain, in my opinion, of any our history has recorded.” “Throughout this continent,” he told William Strahan, “I find it universally approved and applauded.” Franklin had been proud before of his Britishness; he was now nearly bursting. “The glory of Britain was never higher than at present.”

Franklin was more than happy to include the new young king in his encomiums. Britain, he said, “never had a better prince.” In his excitement Franklin went so far as to compare the prince of this peace to the Prince of Peace. Franklin’s informants in London described certain mumblings against George III; whence the complaints?, he asked an English correspondent rhetorically.

I can give but one answer. The King of the Universe, good as he is, is not cordially beloved and faithfully served by all his subjects. I wish I could say that half mankind, as much as they are obliged to him for his continual favours, were among the truly loyal. ’tis a shame that the very goodness of a prince should be an encouragement to affronts. An answer now occurs to me, for that question of Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday, which I once thought unanswerable,
Why God no kill the Devil?
It is to be found in the Scottish proverb:
Ye’d do little for God an the Deel were dead.

Franklin put the matter slightly differently to Strahan. “Grumblers there will always be among you, where power and places are worth striving for, and those who cannot obtain them are angry with all that stand in their way. Such would have clamoured against a ministry not their particular friends even if instead of Canada and Louisiana they had obtained a cession of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Franklin left the kingdom of heaven to the hereafter; he concentrated on empires of this earth. And he saw every reason to believe that the empire Britain had built would grow and prosper, especially on the western side of the Atlantic. “Here in America she has laid a broad and strong foundation on which to erect the most beneficial and certain commerce, with the greatness and stability of her empire.” In his Canada pamphlet he had argued that Britain could return the sugar islands to France with impunity; the treaty, he believed, bore him out. “While we retain our superiority at sea, and are suffered to grow numerous and strong in North America, I cannot but look on the places left or restored to our enemies on this side the ocean as so many pledges for their good behaviour. Those places will hereafter be so much in our power that the more valuable they are to the possessors, the more cautious will they naturally be of giving us offence.”

Franklin’s
imperial vision included himself. Since 1754 he had floated proposals for erecting new settlements beyond the mountains to the west. In that year, as part of the thinking that produced his Albany Plan of union, he advocated the establishment of two colonies between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. Such colonies would appeal to the chronic land hunger of Americans (Franklin described the “many thousands of families that are ready to swarm, wanting more land”); at the same time they would forestall the French, subdue the Indians, and buffer the colonies of the seaboard from the turbulence of the frontier.

The war that broke out that summer prevented any action on Franklin’s proposal, even as it underscored the advantages he described. During the nine years of the Seven years’ War, western settlement did not simply stop but was reversed; Americans at war’s end were hungrier than ever for cheap land. The French were banished from Canada and the Ohio but not from beyond the Mississippi; British settlements on the eastern bank of that mighty river would help keep them beyond it. The Indians, though less troublesome in the absence of the French than in
their presence, remained a potential source of friction; new settlements would encourage the aborigines to embrace an English fate.

And what would be good for the British empire might be very good for Franklin. Perhaps the rising price of nearly everything in Pennsylvania worried him; perhaps the life he led in England enhanced his tastes; perhaps the bug that bit almost everybody in America in position to be bitten found his soft spot—but for whatever reason, Franklin determined to speculate in western lands. While in England he had discussed a speculative scheme with John Sargent, a member of Parliament and a director of the Bank of England, and Sir Matthew Featherstone, a principal in the East India Company and also a presence in the Bank of England (and a fellow of Franklin’s in the Royal Society). The idea was that Sargent and Featherstone would use their influence with those who counted in England and apply for a land grant; Franklin would stroke the egos that needed stroking in America. At the time Franklin left London, the scheme was afoot but not moving very fast. “I know not how that application goes on, or if it is like to succeed,” he told Richard Jackson. Jackson by now had been elected to Commons himself; Franklin kindly offered to include him in the land deal. The offer reflected Franklin’s generosity but also his estimate that recent reversals in British politics—in particular the resignation of Featherstone’s sponsor, the Duke of Newcastle—had weakened the speculators politically. “I think it rather probable that it may fail,” Franklin said of the project.

Simultaneously he found a second road west. In 1629 Charles I, in a fit of political magnanimity and geographic ignorance, had granted to Sir Robert Heath an enormous tract of land extending from the 31st parallel to the 36th and from the Atlantic Ocean to the South Sea (the Pacific). For various reasons Heath made nothing of his claim, which, by a series of deaths and purchases, passed to the sons of Daniel Coxe of New Jersey. The sons, Franklin’s contemporaries, hoped to make good the original claim—or as much as was feasible after 150 years and the establishment of the Carolinas and Georgia on the old Heath claim.

The Coxe sons, William and Daniel, appealed to Franklin for help. They asked him to recommend someone in England to defend their claim or arrange for them to receive other territory in compensation for it. Cash compensation might be acceptable in lieu of land. They were prepared to offer the person thus engaged the option to purchase for £5,000 half of what they received.

Franklin agreed to help them find such a representative—for a fee of his own. He told the Coxe brothers he knew just their man: Richard Jackson.
“I have assured them that no one was more capable, or would be better disposed to serve them, than yourself,” Franklin wrote Jackson. Then he recommended the brothers—and himself—to Jackson: “If this application of Messieurs Coxe should succeed, which, from its great equity may I think be very reasonably expected, I would very willingly engage with you and those gentlemen, and any others you may think proper to associate with you, and take a fifth of the half Messrs. Coxe offer in their letter to you, upon the terms there mentioned; and shall use all my diligence and all my interest in these colonies to promote a speedy settlement.”

Franklin went on to suggest bringing John Pringle into the plan. Franklin liked Pringle but especially valued Pringle’s tie to Bute. In registering confidence that Jackson would know whom to approach, Franklin said, “I would only request you to offer a share to my good friend Dr. Pringle, as, if the affair succeeds it may be advantageous to him whom I much desire to serve, and I have reason to think he has an interest that may greatly facilitate the application.”

Time was of the essence. Franklin sent Jackson a four-year-old article from a New Jersey magazine promoting a scheme to settle a new colony on the Ohio, and projecting the eager emigration thereto of ten thousand families. This enthusiasm was in spite of expectations then that the French would continue to control Canada. “Now that power is reduced,” Franklin said, “we may suppose people are much more willing to go into those countries. And in fact there appears every where an unaccountable penchant in all our people to migrate westward.” Within the week of writing these words, Franklin received reports of other settlement schemes. He postscripted Jackson: “We must strike while the iron is hot.”

Franklin’s
closest partner in his land schemes would be his son, William, who arrived from England with his bride in the dead of February 1763 after a stormy Atlantic crossing. William and Betsy stayed with Franklin and Debbie and Sally for three days before William and Franklin ventured over the frozen Delaware River to New Jersey. (Betsy waited for warmer weather.) Father and son spent the first night at Trenton, the next at New Brunswick. Several inquisitive gentlemen in sleighs met the new governor on the road to Perth Amboy, the more eastern of the province’s twin capitals and the one in which William took his oath of office. Despite the bad weather, the ceremony brought out the leading figures of the province, who wished the new man well. Governor and
father proceeded to Princeton, where the president of the College of New Jersey congratulated the two together by commending the governor for his education “under the influence and direction of the very eminent Doctor Franklin.”