American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  His hopes were frustrated, of course, though only because the British proved blind to the realities of the situation. Again, his frustration may have been aggravated by personal feelings about the people he had to deal with. Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the colonies from 1768 to 1772, he described as “proud, supercilious, extreamly conceited,…fond of every one that can stoop to flatter him, and inimical to all that dare tell him disagreeable Truths.” Lord Dartmouth, who succeeded Hillsborough, was effusive in expressions of good will but no more capable than the other great lords of comprehending what was going on in North America. The men governing Great Britain and the empire, Franklin concluded at last, had “scarce Discretion enough to govern a Herd of Swine.”

  By the time he left England, late in 1774, his pragmatic efforts to save the empire had reached an end. From that time forward he knew that independence was the only way Americans could gain the rights they claimed and would never give up. He waited for other Americans to catch up, as the Continental Congress made pragmatic efforts to save the empire in petitions to the king that he knew were useless. But in July 1776, in the document he helped to draft, independence became nonnegotiable. After his colleagues in Congress sent him as their envoy to France, he gave a frosty answer to all British overtures to win the colonies back. There was now no room for pragmatism, no room for concessions, no halfway house on the road to independence. But what had been the end, in the sense of purpose, of his pragmatic efforts to smooth relations between Britain and the colonies before they reached the point of no return?

  Franklin has been called a reluctant revolutionary, and so he was, reluctant to break up the empire. But that label is a little misleading, for he was never a reluctant American. Throughout his public career, whether he was making compromises or stubbornly refusing to, the end, the goal, of his pragmatism was a vision that others only gradually learned to share and none ever fully shared. Franklin’s vision, his ultimate goal, first began to take shape in an essay he wrote in 1751, but did not publish until 1755, entitled “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries &c.” The immediate occasion of it may have been the British Iron Act of 1750, limiting iron manufacturing in the colonies. Most Americans at that time, and right through their quarrel with the British Parliament over taxation, had taken care not to object to the restrictions imposed by Parliament on American manufacturing. There was no public outcry against the Iron Act when it was passed. Even the Declaration of Independence, in its catalog of tyrannical British actions, made no mention of the limitations placed on colonial trade and manufactures. Franklin objected to them in 1751 because they would inhibit a growth that he saw as the most significant development in modern history.

  The growth that he foresaw in the immediate future was not a growth of manufacturing iron or anything else that would compete with British products. It was a growth in the number of Americans, who would actually, for the foreseeable future, become customers for those products. British policy, he argued, should take account of something that the policy makers had not noticed—namely, the increase of population in America from causes unique to new countries. To understand the impact of Franklin’s argument and its implications both for him and for the American future, it has to be seen in the context of a continuing discussion in print among writers of the time on British economic policy.

  It was a basic premise of the discussion that a country’s prosperity and strength were to be measured by the size of its population. Anything that increased population was good; anything that decreased it was bad. Immigration was good; emigration was bad. Another premise was that the population within a settled country could be increased only by adding manufacturing enterprises and the laborers engaged in them—at the lowest possible wage that would keep them alive. Colonies in this formula were by nature bad, because any number of people emigrating to them weakened the mother country by that much. But it could be argued, and was, that if the colonists could be required to buy all their manufactures from the mother country, their trade would make up for the loss in numbers at home by expanding the number of laborers needed to supply them. Colonies could be, in effect, foreign countries whose economies you could control, as England had been doing all along with the American colonies, in the Navigation Acts of the seventeenth century and in the acts forbidding or penalizing colonial manufactures: the Woollen Act of 1699, the Hat Act of 1732, and the Iron Act just passed.

  Some writers, but by no means all, were convinced by this reasoning. Many continued to regard colonies as more of a burden than a benefit to England’s population. Franklin entered the discussion with a new slant on the sources of population increase. The argument of his essay was that population in new countries, that is, America, did not depend on the same forces that governed population in old, urbanized countries like England. Americans occupied a continent originally peopled by natives who could maintain only the numbers that a life of hunting and gathering could support (a misconception about Indian economies but not about their post-Columbian numbers). The English settlers, by farming the land, could grow in numbers as fast as they could marry and have children, which they did at an early age in large families. Sustained only by farming the abundant land, they doubled their numbers every twenty-five years. It was foolish and needless for the English (and irritating to the Americans, or at least to Franklin) to limit manufacturing in America, because Americans were too busy farming to spend their time on any but the crudest manufactures. They bought English goods in quantities that grew with their numbers and would continue to do so as they continued to grow, and thus would enable the English manufacturing population to grow. It was also foolish to allow immigration to English colonies from other countries, foolish to admit the Germans who were swarming to Pennsylvania and the Africans who were dragged forcibly to the southern colonies. America should be an extension of England, peopled by the prolific American Englishmen already there.

  This was an argument, on the surface, against restricting American manufactures. But it seemed to make the restriction more needless than harmful. At the same time it advertised a fact that could make uneasy the writers and policy makers who measured a country’s wealth and greatness by the size of its population. Some eighty thousand Englishmen, Franklin estimated, had peopled the colonies in the seventeenth century. They were now more than a million. “This Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will in another Century be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water.” And he went on to rhapsodize about the great accession of power to the British Empire, including the ominous fact that the number of American privateers in the war with France just concluded (the War of the Austrian Succession), exceeded in both men and guns the entire British navy in Queen Elizabeth’s day, the navy, he did not need to say, that defeated the Spanish Armada.

  Franklin was undoubtedly sincere in his exultation over the new power that American Englishmen were bringing to England, not to mention the new customers they were bringing to English merchants and manufacturers. This was more than a mathematical calculation. It was an expression of the pride in his country’s future that sustained him in his pragmatic efforts to guide the British to a peaceful acceptance of that future. He could not have been unaware of the implications of his prediction that in another century there would be more Englishmen in America than in England. Modern readers are a little shocked by the ethnocentrism of his appeal against Africans and Germans. But contemporary readers must have noticed that this was based on his identification of Americans as Englishmen. The American colonies were not a foreign country that you could control. They were Englishmen and would soon outnumber their brothers and sisters in England.

  He reprinted the essay at the end of his famous “Canada Pamphlet” of 1760, in which he argued for the retention of Canada rather than the French West Indies in the peace that would conclude the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War). The conquest and retention of C
anada would open a vast new territory to be peopled, not by a needless immigration from England, but by American Englishmen as they proliferated and spread over the continent. They would bring to “the British name and nation a stability and permanency that no man acquainted with history durst have hoped for, ’till our American possessions opened the pleasing prospect.”

  Note that he says “name and nation.” Franklin was developing a vision of the empire in which North America, with its immense territory and limitless natural resources, would be the center of “the greatest Political Structure Human Wisdom ever yet erected.” As he said to his Scottish friend Lord Kames in 1760, after finishing the Canada Pamphlet, “I have long been of Opinion, that the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire, lie in America.” He did not say, then or later, that he had plans for transferring the government of the empire to the center of its power and population. But when his “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind” landed among the writers who had been discussing population as the measure of a country’s strength, they were not slow to draw the inference that Franklin’s objective was to bring the government where the people were. Josiah Tucker, dean of Gloucester, had been an ardent proponent of laws to encourage foreign immigration to England as a means of increasing population. In the reverse of Franklin’s argument against allowing the non-English to people America, Tucker argued for laws to make naturalization easier for foreign immigrants to England. He viewed colonies as a burden and a dangerous burden at that. They were a drain on the population of the mother country. They were not a foreign country under your control but one you could not control, one that might in the end control you. Franklin, he believed, was the man who meant to bring that about. In 1767 in a conversation with Lord Shelburne about a paper Shelburne had written anonymously, advocating settlements in the Ohio Valley, Tucker remarked “that he was sure that paper was drawn up by Dr. Franklin, he saw him in every paragraph; adding that Dr. Franklin wanted to remove the seat of government to America; that, says he, is his constant plan.”

  It was not, in fact, Franklin’s plan, but it could very well have been his unspoken prediction. In pressing the colonists’ case against Parliamentary taxation in the 1760s and 1770s, Franklin was arguing simply for their recognition as Englishmen, the full equals of Englishmen in England, united with them in allegiance to the same king. His campaign against the Penns can be seen as the first application in practical politics of the view of the British Empire that he had adumbrated in his essay on population growth. It was an empire of Englishmen, divided into many kingdoms: England, Scotland, Ireland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, and so on. The king’s government in each of his kingdoms was conducted by representative assemblies of the people under the direction of royal appointees. Pennsylvania (along with Maryland) was an anomaly, where the king’s authority had been mistakenly entrusted to the family of one of his private subjects, a kind of imperium in imperio. That needed correcting. No subject should stand between the king and his other subjects anywhere, as the Penn family did in Pennsylvania. Much worse was the interposition of the British Parliament between him and his other subjects in all the American colonies. The campaign for removing the authority of the Penns in Pennsylvania was a dress rehearsal for removing the authority of Parliament anywhere outside of Great Britain.

  The Penns, Franklin and his allies contended, were “private subjects” like everyone else in Pennsylvania and should be required to obey the same laws and pay the same taxes as everyone else. More importantly, they should not be given powers that properly belonged only to the king, powers that placed them between the king and other subjects. After the king’s privy council finally rejected Franklin’s petition for royal government in 1766, an ally in Pennsylvania, Joseph Galloway, warned Franklin that his countrymen would never “be easy under a Government which Admits of the Intervention of a Private Subject between their Sovereign and them.” By this time Franklin, a little ahead of other Americans, had decided that the authority of Parliament extended only to Great Britain: the colonies had their own parliaments and were joined to one another and to Great Britain only by allegiance to the king. Other Americans may have reached that position from a belief in natural and constitutional rights. For Franklin it was a matter of colonists’ being Englishmen united in equality before the king.

  Franklin’s stubborn and fruitless demand for royal government in Pennsylvania did not arise from oppression by the proprietary government, which actually gave more power to the colony’s representative assembly than was the case in existing royal colonies like Massachusetts and Virginia. What Franklin objected to was placing the Pennsylvania colonists on a different footing from other Englishmen. Similarly what he objected to in Parliamentary taxation was not the burden, which in the attempted statutes would have been small, but Parliament’s usurpation of the king’s authority over his subjects in America. The expressed devotion to the king was scarcely a prostration before the throne. It was a way of displacing Parliament from its already anachronistic place at the top of an empire that would soon be, properly speaking, American. And the equality of subjects meant more, at least for Franklin, than an equality of rights. It meant an equality that would deflate the air of condescension he had to suffer in the officials he had to deal with, all of them his intellectual inferiors, who could treat him and his constituents as supplicants.

  As early as 1754 Franklin had confided to a friend in London, Peter Collinson, his opinion that “Britain and her Colonies should be considered as one Whole, and not as different States with separate Interests.” As the colonies’ quarrel over taxation developed, Franklin dreamt of a consolidation of the empire under a new, written constitution that would treat Americans the same as Englishmen in England. At first he thought of simply admitting American representatives to Parliament. When he realized that this was not practicable, he was willing to settle for making American legislative assemblies equal to Parliament. He would still have preferred a general reorganization of the empire, a union of Great Britain and the colonies on the equal terms that the word “union” implied. In 1767 he confided his hopes to Lord Kames, with whom he could be more open than in public statements. Such a union, he explained, would actually benefit Britain more than America by preserving for Britain an equal place in an empire that must soon be principally American. America had resources far outweighing what the British Isles possessed. It was bound to “become a great Country, populous and mighty; and will in a less time than is generally conceiv’d be able to shake off any Shackles that may be impos’d on her, and perhaps place them on the Imposers. In the mean Time, every act of Oppression will sour their Tempers…and hasten their final Revolt.”

  Franklin continued to hope that British statesmen would recognize the opportunity they had for preserving their empire by ceasing to treat the colonies as a foreign country they could control. The only alternative if they continued on their course was for America to become a foreign country indeed and one beyond their control. More and more as he viewed at first hand the way the British ran their empire, the more he despaired of his attempts to save it for them. In Pennsylvania his friend Galloway, without Franklin’s firsthand experience, worked on a plan for the union they had both wanted. When the Continental Congress met in 1774 and Galloway presented them with his plan, the Congress rejected it, and so, when he learned of it, did Franklin. America, treated as a foreign country, had become one, and Franklin did not wish to see its future inhibited any longer by connection with a people so blind to America’s future importance. “When I consider,” he wrote Galloway from London, “the extream Corruption prevalent among all Orders of Men in this old rotten State,…I cannot but apprehend more Mischief than Benefit from a closer Union.”

  The vision that had guided Franklin’s pragmatism continued to guide him in the years ahead. He still had many good friends in England, but they had no more power than he did to lift the blinders from the king’s ministers. He regretted, as
he told them, that his hopes for allowing England to remain a part of the great American future had been destroyed “by the mangling hands of a few blundering ministers.” But America’s growth to greatness, he assured his friends, could not be stopped: “God will protect and prosper it: You will only exclude yourselves from any share in it.”

  The greatness that Franklin envisioned for America embraced the whole continent but was not to be measured merely by the huge population he predicted. It was to be found in “the greatest Political Structure Human Wisdom ever yet erected.” Independence had become a necessary step toward that goal. The peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War, with boundaries short of Canada, Louisiana, and Florida, was another step. The Constitution of 1787 was another step. Each step had been worth taking, worth whatever compromises and concessions it had required. But they all stopped well short of the great political structure he predicted. His vision of that structure had itself grown. He had long since found reason to repent his expressed wish to exclude the German immigrants from a share in it, if only because they had become a force to be reckoned with in Pennsylvania politics. And at some time after he returned to Philadelphia, he joined his friends there in a wish to give Africans a share. There had never been a chance that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 would abolish slavery. In one of the last acts of his public career, he put his name on a petition to the new Congress for a national abolition of slavery; and just before he died he penned one of his most effective satirical pieces, mocking the reasons offered in Congress for rejecting the petition.