The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (86 page)

Siding with
Boston lost Franklin any lingering leverage with Hillsborough; it also forced him to hone his thinking on the nature of relations between Britain and America. Not long after leaving his stormy session with the secretary of state, Franklin received a letter from a committee of correspondence of the Massachusetts House, consisting of Thomas Cushing, Sam Adams, John Hancock, and John Adams. This letter laid out current conditions in the colonies and the present state of opinion there. The colonies, the committee said, “are justly tenacious
of their constitutional and natural rights, and will never willingly part with them.” Nor could it be to the advantage of the British nation to steal them. “Great Britain can lose nothing that she ought to retain, by restoring the colonies to the state they were in before the passing the obnoxious Stamp-Act, and we are persuaded that if that is done they will no further contend.”

Franklin drew reassurance from this comparatively moderate statement and believed it might form the basis for reconciliation. “The doctrine of the right of Parliament to lay taxes on America is now almost generally given up here,” he replied to Cushing and the others, “and one seldom meets in conversation any who continue to assert it.”

If Franklin was speaking of the English public at large, he may have been right; if of the influential factions in Parliament, he overspoke—as his own letters had already revealed and as events would soon demonstrate. Yet he wished to make clear to the Boston men the position of those in England he considered the likeliest to seek reconciliation. “We ought to be contented, they say, with a forbearance of any attempt hereafter to exercise such a right; and this they would have us rely on as a certainty.” Not simply Parliamentary prestige but British dignity was at stake. The colonists could hardly expect the British government to honor demands that would subject it “to the contempt of all Europe.” In other words, if Americans could live with the
reality
of the status quo ante the Stamp Act (“Hints are also given that the duties now subsisting may be gradually withdrawn”), Parliament would settle for the
principle
underlying the Declaratory Act.

Even as he delineated this rationale, Franklin was not sure how far to trust it. Status quos had a way of congealing around whatever was not challenged. Regarding the duties said to be on the verge of repeal, such repeal could be assured only by continued pressure from America. “If by time we become so accustomed to these as to pay them without discontent, no minister will afterwards think of taking them off, but rather be encouraged to add others.” Franklin was far from advocating violence, but determination was indispensable. “I hope the colony assemblies will show, by frequently repeated resolves, that they know their rights, and do not lose sight of them.”

Obviously this counsel undercut the conciliatory scenario he sketched; at the same time it revealed Franklin’s increasing conviction that America was fundamentally distinct, and essentially independent of England. His conversation with Hillsborough had underscored the
ministry’s view that the colonies were creatures of Parliament; only on this reasoning ought the ministry, acting through the colonial governors, to have any voice in the selection of the colonial agents.

By contrast, Franklin saw the agents almost as ambassadors, sent by the people of America to the British government. A correct understanding of the nature of the colonies vis-à-vis Britain would yield this conclusion as a corollary. “When they come to be considered in the light of
distinct states,
as I conceive they really are, possibly their agents may be treated with more respect, and considered more as public ministers.”

This was strong punch, which could hardly fail to provoke a fight with Britain if quaffed straight; in the months after his argument with Hillsborough, as his anger subsided, Franklin began to dilute it. Even after the repeal of most of the Townshend duties, the Massachusetts House protested the Crown’s policy of paying royal officials in America. Franklin understood the argument against the policy, having made it himself, but he was fairly certain most people in England did not, or did not credit the argument if they understood it. “It is looked on as a strange thing here to object to the King’s paying his own servants sent among us to do his business; and they say we should seem to have much more reason of complaint if it were required of us to pay them.” Indeed, because the American complaint on this count seemed so counterintuitive, many in England suspected the Americans of attempting to suborn the king’s servants and subvert his rule. Franklin advised against mounting a major campaign against this issue; better to protest it politely on occasion and continue to shun British imports.

Although Franklin’s anger had abated, his opinion of Hillsborough had not improved, and this low opinion was another reason for counseling restraint. The secretary of state for America was “proud, supercilious, extremely conceited (moderate as they are) of his political knowledge and abilities, fond of every one that can stoop to flatter him, and inimical to all that dare tell him disagreeable truths.” Hillsborough’s deficiencies were recognized by many in Britain; he could not long retain his office. Wisdom therefore cautioned against actions that might provoke other, more reasonable, souls to join the secretary in his “settled malice against the colonies, particularly ours [in this case, Massachusetts].”

Franklin gave greater credence than before to arguments from British honor. The latter half of 1770 had produced a crisis with Spain over the Falkland Islands; for months war impended. Such a war might well reopen the long struggle against France, with all that that struggle entailed. Although the war scare had considerably diminished by early 1771,
it reminded Franklin of one reason he had been a British imperialist: that in the cruel world of nations, safety often resided in numbers. Accordingly he urged the Massachusetts men to consider “whether it will not be prudent for us to indulge the Mother Country in this concern for her own honour, so far as may be consistent with the preservation of our essential rights, especially as that honour may in some cases be of importance to the general welfare.”

He perceived two possible outcomes should the colonies push to a test of British authority. “If we are not found equal, that authority will by the event be more strongly established.” Needless to say, this would not conduce to the welfare of America. But neither, necessarily, would the other outcome. “If we should prove superior, yet by the division the general strength of the British nation must be greatly diminished.”

Although Franklin refrained from offering explicit advice to Massachusetts, his inclination was clear. He suggested that it would “be better gradually to wear off the assumed authority of Parliament over America” than to mount a direct challenge. Moreover, Americans should remember that Parliament was not the entire British government. “I wish to see a steady dutiful attachment to the King and his family maintained among us.”

Predictably
, Franklin’s espousal of moderation failed to satisfy those holding more radical views. Arthur Lee disputed Franklin’s politics; he apparently also resented Franklin’s appointment as Massachusetts agent ahead of himself. From whatever amalgam of politics and pique, Lee launched a one-man campaign to discredit Franklin and undermine his influence.

Sam Adams presumably required little convincing, but Lee provided plenty. “I have read lately in your papers an assurance from Dr. Franklin that all designs against the charter of the colony are laid aside,” Lee wrote Adams from London. “This is just what I expected of him, and if it be true, the Dr. is not the dupe but the instrument of Lord Hillsborough’s treachery.” On sudden second thought, Lee dismissed the notion of Franklin as dupe, for “notorious as he [Hillsborough] is for ill faith and fraud, his duplicity would not impose on one possessed of half Dr. F.’s sagacity.” Whatever Franklin might write to the House of Representatives, his interests—and therefore his intentions—lay elsewhere. “The possession of a profitable office at will, the having a son in a high post at
pleasure, the grand purpose of his residence here being to effect a change in the government of Pennsylvania, for which administration must be cultivated and courted, are circumstances which, joined with the temporising conduct he has always held in American affairs, preclude every rational hope that in an open contest between an oppressive administration and a free people, Dr. F. can be a faithful advocate for the latter.” Calling Franklin a “false friend,” Lee said he himself would gladly serve as Massachusetts’s agent for nothing “rather than you and America, at a time like this, should be betrayed by a man who, it is hardly in the nature of things to suppose, can be faithful to his trust.”

Doubtless Lee intended to damage Franklin with this letter. If so, he was disappointed. Adams, intentionally or otherwise, allowed an unsigned copy of the letter to reach Thomas Cushing, Franklin’s sponsor in the Massachusetts House. Cushing showed the letter to Samuel Cooper, who, on the basis of conversation with Cushing and others, assured his friend, “It will make no impression to your disadvantage, while it shows the baseness of its author.”

By this period
Franklin’s summer travel had become a fixed habit, the closest thing to a religious practice in a man who observed no sectarian rituals. He was convinced that his annual escape from the smoke and congestion of London, combined with the stimulation of seeing new places, people, and things, was what kept him in the surprisingly good health he enjoyed for a sexagenarian. “I imagine I should have fallen to pieces long since but for that practice,” he told Joseph Galloway.

In 1771 his vacation was more extended than usual and came in multiple installments. At the end of May he toured the north of England, where the industrial revolution was well under way. The high point of the trip was a boat ride on a canal that crossed a river via an aqueduct, so that to travelers below, the canal boat appeared to be plying the sky. The low point—relative to topography—occurred on this same canal, at a place where it penetrated the earth far into a coal mine, from which that essential fuel was dug and loaded into canal boats and hauled to Manchester. Franklin saw an ironworks near Rotherham, which impressed him with the ingenuity of its design. “It appeared particularly odd,” wrote Jonathan Williams, one of Franklin’s fellow travelers, “to see a small river of liquid iron running from the furnace into the reservoir and from thence carried in ladles like hot broth.” At Derby they toured a silk works, of
which Franklin, who was still promoting the production of silk in America, took special notice. A single powered shaft drove, via pulleys and belts, scores of smaller shafts, which culminated in thousands of reels. Much of the process was tended by children “of about 5 or 7 years old,” according to Williams. At Birmingham they saw the famous metal-works of Matthew Boulton. Seven hundred persons, including women and children, fabricated all manner of products, from farthing buttons to hundred-guinea ornaments. The noise, the pace of the process, and the sheer audacity of the undertaking were overwhelming. “It is almost impossible for the strongest memory to retain it,” wrote Williams.