The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (94 page)

You will hear from others the treatment I have received. I leave you to your own reflections and determinations upon it.

William might well have read this as encouragement to resign his post; Franklin might well have intended it so. Two weeks later Franklin wrote to Richard Bache, who evidently had hoped to use his father-in-law’s connections to gain employment for himself. Franklin said that those connections now no longer existed, and hence no possibility of a post-office job. He added, “As things are, I would not wish to see you concerned in it. For I conceive that the dismissing me merely for not being corrupted by the office to betray the interests of my country will make it some disgrace among us to hold such an office.”

Yet if resigning had been his message to William, he soon amended it. Not that he considered service under the Crown any more honorable than in the immediate aftermath of his Cockpit ordeal; he simply reverted to his previous philosophy of never resigning. William had been weighing a move from Burlington to Perth Amboy; Franklin told him to go slow incurring the expense of such a move, as the future of his governorship was in jeopardy. Some reports suggested that William would simply be dismissed, while others hinted at a more indirect approach by their mutual foes. “They may expect that your resentment of their treatment of me may induce you to resign, and save them the shame of depriving you whom they ought to promote.” Franklin went on, “But this I would not advise you to do. Let them take your place if they want it, though in
truth I think it scarce worth your keeping…. One may make something of an injury, nothing of a resignation.”

For himself, he thought he had already made something of his injury. He wrote to Jane Mecom, whose own money problems disposed her to worry about her brother in his loss of income, telling her not to be troubled. “You and I have almost finished the journey of life. We are now but a little way from home, and have enough in our pockets to pay the post chaises.” As for the principle involved, it was plainer than ever, to honest men if not to his enemies. “Intending to disgrace me, they have rather done me honour. No failure of duty in my office is alleged against me; such a fault I should have been ashamed of. But I am too much attached to the interests of America, and an opposer of the measures of Administration. The displacing me is therefore a testimony of my being uncorrupted.”

The more he reflected on his situation, the more he understood the heart of the matter. To his partner in the American post office, John Foxcroft, he explained his dismissal in a sentence: “I am too much of an American.”

As philosophical
as he could be with relatives and friends, Franklin remained irate at those who were forcing this choice between America and Britain. They displayed their folly by word and deed, and though, as he told Cushing, he might have suffered their folly for his own sake, that folly was rending the empire. No man of public feeling could keep silent.

In the London papers he struck back with scorn. “The admirers of Dr. Franklin in England are much shocked at Mr. Wedderburn’s calling him a thief,” he wrote in the
Public Advertiser,
over a signature no one present at the Cockpit hearing, or familiar with Wedderburn’s by-now-famous assault, could mistake:
Homo Trium Litterarum.
“But perhaps they will be less surprised at this circumstance when they are informed that his greatest admirers on the Continent agree in entertaining the same idea of him.” As evidence Franklin enclosed a poetical epigraph from Dubourg’s recently published
Oeuvres de M. Franklin.
“It will even be seen that foreigners represent him as much more impudent and audacious in his thefts than the English orator (though he was under no restraint from a regard to truth).” Franklin reproduced the stanza in French, then helpfully supplied a translation:

To steal from Heaven its sacred fire he taught,
The Arts to thrive in savage climes he brought
In the New World the first of men esteemed;
Among the Greeks a god he had been deemed.

It was unlike Franklin to boast of his fame, particularly in such transparent manner, but after the abuse he had received from the Privy Council, he allowed himself this riposte. Who did these people think they were dealing with? What had Wedderburn, of these cribbed classical allusions, ever done besides extort office from his betters—or men who would have been his betters had they not lowered themselves to his level?

In American papers he spoke at greater length. The
Boston Gazette
carried his unsigned account of the proceedings at the Cockpit. He explained how the counsel for the Massachusetts House had begun its presentation with propriety and decency, whereupon the solicitor general “totally departed from the question and was permitted to wander into a new case, the accusation of the person who merely delivered the petition.” The lords of the Privy Council disgraced themselves by their toleration of—indeed their conniving in—this astonishing performance. “Not a single lord checked and recalled this orator to the business before them; but on the contrary (a very few excepted) they seemed to enjoy highly the entertainment and frequently burst out into loud applause.”

To what purpose this ad hominem attack? To wound Dr. Franklin’s character, and to distract attention from the issue at hand. As to the former design, the shaft missed its mark. “His character is not so vulnerable as they imagined.” As to the latter:

Even supposing he had
infamously
obtained the letters, would that have altered the nature of them, their tendency and design? Would that have made them innocent? How weak and ridiculous is this?

The truth is, the Doctor came by the letters
honourably;
his intention in sending them was
virtuous:
to lessen the breach between Britain and the colonies, by showing that the injuries complained of by
one
of them did not proceed from the
other,
but from
traitors among themselves.
The
treason
thus discovered, the
conspirators
were complained of. The agent is suffered to be abused by a
solicitor;
the complaint
called
—I had like to have said
judged
—false, vexatious, scandalous; and the complainers factious and seditious.

The pain we feel on Dr. Franklin’s account is lost in what we feel for America and for Britain.

The government had followed this shameful affair by dismissing Dr. Franklin from his position with the post office. Such action was discreditable in itself; it was even more pernicious in its prospect. Appointments to the post office—a service essential to all who lived in the colonies—were being held hostage to adherence to the policies of whatever ministry happened to hold power. Moreover, at a time when committees of correspondence in the several colonies were attempting to coordinate opposition to oppression, the very mails communicating those attempts were subject to surveillance by government placemen.
“Behold Americans where matters are driving!
”

Where
they were driving was hard against Boston and the liberty of Massachusetts. The Boston Tea Party had excited great wrath in England, a substantial portion of which had broken upon the head of Franklin. But more remained. King George, heretofore in the background on colonial issues, took a direct interest in the insurrectionary activity across the water. He called in General Gage—fresh from seeing Franklin being pilloried—for advice. The British commander-in-chief for America was esteemed an expert on the colonies; he urged vigorous measures. “He says they will be lions whilst we are lambs,” George recorded. “But if we take the resolute part, they will be very meek.” Lord North, hardly a truculent sort, concurred. “We are not entering into a dispute between internal and external taxes,” the prime minister declared, “not between taxes laid for the purpose of revenues and taxes laid for the regulation of trade, not between representation and taxation, or legislation and taxation; but we are now to dispute the question whether we have, or have not, any authority in that country.” He added, “If they deny authority in one instance, it goes to all; we must control them or submit to them.”

Parliament agreed. It immediately passed the Boston Port Act, which closed the port of Boston to overseas trade (with tightly controlled exceptions for food and fuel). The closure would remain in force until the king decided to lift it, a decision that could not come before the East India Company had been compensated for its tea. Although the act
threatened Massachusetts with economic strangulation—as Franklin, who had grown up in sight and sound of all those ships in Boston’s harbor, appreciated full well—it might have been worse, given the mood in London. Even Isaac Barré, who had opposed the Stamp Act and was generally thought a friend of America, offered his “hearty affirmative” for the port closure. Likening the protesters to wayward children, he told Parliament, “Boston ought to be punished.”

Whether the acts that followed were more or less moderate depended on one’s point of view. The Massachusetts Government Act suspended the charter of the colony and granted the Crown much greater control over its affairs. The Administration of Justice Act allowed royal officials charged with certain crimes to be tried in England. The Quartering Act required private householders to take in troops upon the order of the British commanding officer. The Quebec Act—not a direct response to the Boston Tea Party but passed in the same atmosphere of disregard for American sensibilities—established a London-dominated civil government for Canada and extended the boundaries of Canada to the Ohio River, effectively vetoing claims of several of the existing colonies to the region.

The five measures together were called the “Intolerable Acts” in America, for after everything else of the previous decade, they seemed more than the Americans could bear. Even before the last of the laws was enacted, committees of correspondence in the colonies were writing furiously, dispatching messages up and down the Atlantic Coast, calling on the assemblies and people of the separate provinces to join forces against this latest usurpation. The Intolerable Acts fell most heavily on Massachusetts, of course, but what Parliament and the Crown could do to Massachusetts, they could do to the other colonies.

Virginia thought so; the House of Burgesses there, led by Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, declared that Boston was suffering a “hostile invasion.” In a touch doubtless appreciated in Puritan Boston, the Virginia assembly denominated June 1, 1774, as a “day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, devoutly to implore the divine interposition for averting the heavy calamity which threatens the destruction to our civil rights, and the evils of civil war.”

During the weeks that followed, one colony after another selected delegates to a continental convention. In some cases the regular assemblies did the choosing; where royal governors attempted to derail the process by dissolving the assemblies, extraordinary bodies supplied the names. Pennsylvania offered to host the convention; September was set for the time, and Philadelphia for the place.