Obviously, war was imminent, and Franklin’s politics of vision went glimmering. In colony after colony, Assemblies rejected the Albany Plan of Union or ignored it altogether. Not even Franklin’s personal prestige could convince the Pennsylvania legislature to look favorably upon it. The Massachusetts legislature rejected it without even taking a roll call vote, inspiring one of his Boston friends to write Franklin sarcastically, “I thought you a wise man but . . . it has been proved by some of our own wise men and boys . . .that you and the rest of the Commissioners at Albany have shown yourselves by the projected plan for an Union to be arrant blockheads; and, at the same time, to have set up a scheme for destroying the liberties and privileges of every British subject upon the continent; but this, so thinly disguised and covered, that the meanest creature in the world could see through it in an instant.”
This was the reaction of most colonial legislatures, when they considered the proposal at all. They felt it encroached upon their traditional rights and privileges. With not a little bitterness, Franklin wrote to his friend Peter Collinson in England, “Everybody cries, a union is absolutely necessary; but when they come to the manner and form of the union, their weak noodles are presently distracted.”
In London, the plan was virtually ignored. The King’s ministers and the gentlemen in Parliament were too absorbed by the plunge toward war with France to pay attention to bright ideas from a colonial congress. Years later Franklin summed up the hard lesson he learned at Albany. “Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but are fore’d by the occasion.”
At home, Benjamin Franklin found the Assembly locked in familiar battle with Governor Robert Hunter Morris. The governor loved a fight almost as much as Franklin disliked one, and he was wholeheartedly committed to the Penns’ favorite practice of getting money out of the rest of Pennsylvania without shaking a cent loose from their own pockets. This feckless, seemingly endless row soured everyone’s perspective and may well have had something to do with the fact that Franklin had just come home from Albany when he about-faced and departed on another long journey across New England on behalf of the post office. In Boston, he made the acquaintance of one of the most talented English officials ever to serve in America, William Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts.
An astute politician with a keen interest in the people he governed, Shirley had been an avid supporter of the Albany Congress and the idea of uniting the colonies. He obtained a draft of Franklin’s plan, and it immediately suggested to him a number of alternatives that seemed appropriate to anyone who saw the colonies through the eyes of the Crown. Let the governors and one or two members of their councils meet annually, he said, work out plans for the common defense and pay for them from taxes laid on the Americans by an act of Parliament. Franklin met with Shirley several times and discussed these ideas at length. With obvious pride, he wrote to his son William that Shirley was “particularly civil to me.” But no amount of civility could make Shirley’s ideas appealing to Franklin. In three letters, he demolished Shirley’s plan by pointing out realities which were to have enormous significance in the later decades of the century.
The opening sentence of Franklin’s first letter summed up the essence of his argument. “Excluding the people of the colonies from all share in the choice of the Grand Council would probably give extreme dissatisfaction, as well as the taxing them by an act of Parliament where they have no representative.” Franklin pointed out that it was necessary to consider what people “will be apt to think and say,” as well as what they “ought to think.” He insisted that the colonies were “as loyal, and as firmly attached to the present Constitution and reigning family, as any subjects in the King’s dominions,” but they did not trust the royal governors, who often came to the colonies “meerly to make fortunes . . . are not always men of the best abilities and integrity, have no estates here, nor any natural connections with us, that should make them heartily concern’d for our welfare. . ..”
Franklin went on to point out why the colonists were touchy about taxes. They already paid “yearly great sums to the mother country unnotic’d.” Americans were forced to sell most of their farm products to Britain, pay duties there, and sell it for less than it would bring in other foreign markets. They were forbidden to manufacture certain products, which they then had to get from British merchants whose prices rose ever higher, thanks to the fact that Parliament maintained for them a monopoly on the American trade. The colonies made no complaints about these “secondary taxes,” as Franklin called them.
But they were keenly aware of them, and to put on top of them “Immediate heavy taxes” would be almost certain to provoke “animosities and dangerous feuds.”
The answer to the dilemma, Shirley replied in an ensuing conversation with Franklin, was clear: the colonies should have representatives at Parliament. It would be a excellent way of uniting both the colonies in America and America to the Crown. After thinking it over, Franklin agreed. “Such an union would be very acceptable to the colonies,” he told Shirley, “provided they had a reasonable number of representatives allowed them; and that all the old acts of Parliament restraining the trade or cramping the manufactures of the colonies, be at the same time repealed, and that British subjects this side the water put, in those respects, on the same footing with those in Great Britain.” Warming to the idea, Franklin unfolded the dream that was to dominate his life for the next decade. “I should hope too that by such a union, the people of Great Britain and the people of the colonies would learn to consider themselves, not as belonging to different communities with different interests, but to one community with one interest, which I imagine would contribute to strengthen the whole, and greatly lessen the danger of future separations.”
More than two decades later, James Madison, reading these letters, declared that Franklin had summed up the whole argument of the American Revolution “within the compass of a nutshell,” twenty years before it occurred to anyone else. But to Franklin the positive side of the argument was far more important. Always willing to accept differences reasonably, he remained confident that Great Britain’s shortsighted colonial policies could be modified by vigorous debate. But there were times when Franklin’s toughness overtook his reasonableness. Once, in the Gazette, he modestly proposed that since England was so fond of exporting her felons and murderers from her jails to America, the colonies should return the compliment by shipping to England all their rattlesnakes. Occasionally, this toughness could get close to cynicism. In Poor Richard for 1755, the wisdom for the month of July was a good example of this side of Franklin’s mind.
Who is wise? He that learns front everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content.
Who is that? Nobody.”
Part of this sentiment may have been inspired by a remarkable young woman Franklin met in Boston that year. While visiting the city of his birth, Franklin stayed at his brother John’s house. Another guest was a pretty twenty-three-year-old brunette, named Catherine Ray, a relative of John’s wife. At forty-nine, Franklin was at that peculiar point in a man’s middle age when he knows he is no longer young and yet feels himself very much in possession of his vital powers. It is a combination that can lead to a plaintive, May-December romance. Catherine promoted such a relationship, talking about nothing but love. Hour after hour she regaled Franklin with stories of advances she had resisted from suitors young and old. There was a Spaniard who had wooed her with Latin passion and gone home to Spain in despair. There were a half dozen younger Americans who made pilgrimages to Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast, where she lived in almost monastery-like seclusion with her parents. Katy, as Franklin called her, was a first class flirt. She obviously took pleasure in tormenting the opposite sex, luring them on with her eyes and with low-cut gowns, and
simultaneously proclaiming her pride in her virginity, on which she expected a high price.
She found in Franklin a perfect foil, so it seemed at first. He loved witty conversation, and the game of love always fascinated him. Svelte Katy awakened in him a long-suppressed desire for a woman so different from his rough, plain, indelicate Deborah. He plunged into a half-real, half dream relationship that was all words and no action, at first. They talked about everything, from the value of innocence to the meaning of love and the problem of choosing a marriage partner for life. Franklin dazzled her with his everyday wisdom and his effortless fun. One of their favorite games was forcing her to reveal the truth of her earlier loves because, he solemnly assured her, he would find out everything anyway. Franklin was ideally equipped to play this role because, in the eighteenth century, there was still an aura of the magician around the scientist, and it was particularly applicable to the electrician, who was able to accomplish so many strange and dazzling effects with his mysterious invisible fire. The game obviously made pretty Katy shiver with delight, and she poured out her heart to Franklin, never realizing that she was stirring depths in her friend.
One night he made it clear that this was more than a game to him. Katy instantly recoiled. Flirting was one thing, but genuine love was something else for which she was not prepared, especially with a married man.
Franklin accepted defeat gracefully. It is hard to believe that he ever expected to triumph. With consummate tact, he let the relationship become a bittersweet romance in which the words were ardent and the actions more than proper. How much Katy trusted him was evident, on December 30, 1754, when she left Boston for Newport beside Franklin in his chaise. The seventy-mile journey almost certainly meant they stopped overnight at a tavern, a daring act for an unmarried girl. The weather was terrible. They drove all day in driving, soaking rain and compounded their misery by taking a wrong road. But Franklin vowed later on that he treasured the memory of those “hours and miles that we talked away so agreeably.”
They continued to enjoy each other’s company immensely at Westerly, Rhode Island, where they visited with Catherine’s sister, Anna, wife of Samuel Ward. Then came an anxious message from Block Island; Katy’s father was seriously ill. Although the day was raw and stormy, Katy insisted on making the eleven-mile crossing in a tiny skiff. Franklin stood on the rocky shore, sick with worry and sudden wrenching loss, watching the little boat plunging up and down on the heaving sea. Ignoring the weather, he held it in the round eye of his telescope until it vanished into the threatening haze.
Soon after he arrived in Philadelphia, he wrote Katy a note about how slowly he had journeyed home. Because of her, he had hated to depart from New England, he said. “I almost forgot I had a home,” so slow and lingering was his journey, full of “loitering visits on the road, for three or four weeks.”
On paper, he continued to play the ironic game of love for which he had settled. “Persons subject to the [hypochondria] complain of the north east wind as increasing their malady. But since you promis’d to send me kisses in that wind, and I find you as good as your word, ‘tis to me the gayest wind that blows, and gives me the best spirits. I write this during an N. east storm of snow, the greatest we have had this winter: Your favours come mixed with the snowy fleeces which are as pure as your virgin innocence, white as your lovely bosom, and as cold.”
Katy replied with three long letters, begging for his advice on new affairs of the heart. The correspondence continued on this plane, full of ribald good spirits which make it clear that a puritanical attitude toward sex was not one of the problems of eighteenth-century Americans. “I long to hear,” Franklin wrote in another letter, “whether you have continued ever since in that monastery [Block Island]; or have broke into the world again, doing pretty mischief . . . what [is] the state of your heart at this instant? But that, perhaps, I ought not to know; and, therefore, I will not conjure as you sometimes say I do. . . commend your prudent resolutions in the article of granting favors to lovers. But if I were courting you, I could not heartily approve such conduct. I should even be malicious enough to say you were too knowing.”
Franklin often urged Katy to marry as soon as possible. As a man of the world, he knew what a dangerous game she was playing. He gave her the advice in his own inimitable style. Once wed, he told her, “you must practice addition to your husband’s estate, by industry and frugality; subtraction of all unnecessary expenses; multiplication (I would gladly have taught you that myself, but you thought it was time enough, & wouldn’t learn) he will soon make you a mistress of it.”
When she sent him sugar plums made sweet by her kisses, Franklin told her that they were so “sweet from the cause you mention that I could scarce taste the sugar.” But when she seemed reticent, he warned her in another letter not to “hide your heart from me. You know that I can conjure.” If the rest of her family failed to treat her with the utmost kindness, he would “send a young gentleman to steal & run away with you, who shall bring you to a country from whence they shall never hear a word of you, without paying postage.”
Franklin made no secret of his flirtation. He ended some of his letters by sending Katy Mrs. Franklin’s regards, and, at one point, reported that Deborah was considering leaving him to Katy in her will. But Franklin added, “I ought to wish you a better [legacy] and hope she [Deborah] will live these one hundred years; for we are grown old together, and if she has any faults, I am so us’d to ‘em that I don’t perceive ‘em . . . and since she is willing I should love you as much as you are willing to be lov’d by me; let us join in wishing the old lady a long life and a happy.”
Katy may have helped get Franklin’s mind off the disastrous fate of his Plan of Union. When his fellow Americans either ignored or condemned his brainchild, he relapsed into a bitter attitude, “If ever there be an Union, it must be form’d at home by the ministry and Parliament,” he told his influential English friend, Peter Collinson. “I doubt not but they will make a good one, and I wish it may be done this winter.”
But the British reaction to the precarious situation in the colonies revealed their basic lack of confidence in the Americans. Franklin himself in his letter to Shirley had mentioned the possibility of an eventual separation. The King’s ministers in Whitehall were intelligent men, perfectly capable of thinking the same thoughts. They saw no logic in a marriage that might make these distant children powerful enough to defy the absent parent. It would be far better, they thought, to send them proof of the parent’s panoply and power. In the spring of 1755, the baronet of Scotland Sir John St. Clair arrived in Williamsburg, Virginia, as Deputy Quartermaster General of British forces in America. A few weeks later, Major General Edward Braddock, with a commission as Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s Army in North America, followed him. In his wake came two British regiments in their bright red coats.
Governor Robert Hunter Morris immediately asked the Pennsylvania Assembly to vote in favor of a large sum in support of the war effort. The usual argument about taxing the Proprietors’ estates ensued. Franklin, just back from his lengthy tour of New England, was put on almost every committee by his fellow assemblymen and spent half his waking hours drafting replies to the governor’s disputatious messages.
“Our answers as well as his messages were often tart and sometimes indecently abusive,” he recalled later.
The result was a standoff; General Braddock got no money from Pennsylvania. Although he conferred with as many as five governors at one time, Braddock did not have much better luck with other colonial Assemblies. Soon the choleric sixty-year-old soldier exploded into picturesque barracks-room oaths every time he heard the word American. Pennsylvanians were a particular target of Braddock’s wrath. He had heard that they were doing a brisk business selling supplies - and even guns - to the French Canadians and their Indian allies. They were also supposed to be hard at work opening a way over the mountains to the French fort at the forks of the Monongahela, but so far no one had s
wung an ax or turned a shovelful of dirt on it.
Braddock swore he would treat Pennsylvania as a conquered country, and - for good measure - he would quarter his troops there next year at the colony’s expense. Echoes of these threats came drifting into the Quaker colony’s Assembly, and the members decided that someone needed to explain to Braddock why they were refusing to support the King’s arms. Franklin was selected as the diplomatic messenger. Thanks to his job as Deputy Postmaster General, Franklin had a way to get this information to Braddock. He would reach out to the General wearing his Postmaster’s hat and carrying with him a letter from the Assembly. They were graciously offering to pay the expenses for a special postal service that would enable Braddock to communicate with colonial governors and commanders on the northern front where an attack was also being planned.
As his chief adviser on this delicate diplomatic mission, as well as a companion for the 120 mile journey to Frederick, Maryland, where Braddock was camped, Franklin chose his son, William. The Franklins arrived to find Braddock on the point of apoplexy. The supplies sold to the Army by colonial contractors were rotten. There were only twenty-five wagons collected to carry tents and supplies for 2250 men. Braddock damned everyone involved - from the ministers in England who had thought up the trip to the haggling farmers who would risk not even a wagon for their country. Franklin watched earnest George Washington - who was serving as Braddock’s aide - as he tried to defend America’s reputation from wholesale slander.
Franklin was less combative than young Washington. Eager to convince the general of Pennsylvania’s loyalty, Franklin sympathized with his shortage of transport, and remarked that there were plenty of wagons available in the Quaker colony. Desperate, Braddock seized on this remark: “Then you, sir, who are a man of interest there, can probably procure them for us, and I beg you will undertake it.”
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