So, in the summer of 1769, Walpole Associates was formed, absorbing the claims and ambitions of the Indiana Company. Its name was drawn from one of its most prominent partners, banker Thomas Walpole, nephew of the former First Minister, Robert Walpole. The rest of the company read like a Who’s Who of English society. There was Thomas Pownall, staunch supporter of America in Parliament; Anthony Todd, secretary of the British post office; Charles Pratt, better known as Lord Camden, Lord Chancellor of England; Lord Gower, president of the Privy Council; Lord Rochford, Secretary of State for the Northern Department; and Earl Temple, George Grenville’s brother. Richard Stonehewer, private secretary to the Duke of Grafton, the First Minister, was another choice addition. Grey Cooper, a Secretary of the Treasury and a firm Franklin friend, was also there, along with Richard Jackson, William Strahan and his son Andrew. For good measure, there was Thomas Bradshaw, an intimate political lieutenant of the Duke of Grafton. Franklin, of course, was a partner, and he made sure William Franklin and Joseph Galloway were also named.
Franklin’s letter to Grey Cooper, bringing him into the company, is a perfect example of his skill as a political operator in the imperial capital.
An application being about to be made for a grant of lands in the territory on the Ohio lately purchased of the Indians, I cannot omit acquainting you with it, and giving you my opinion, that they will very soon be settled by people from the neighboring provinces, and be of great advantage in a few years to the undertakers. As you have those fine children, and are likely to have many more, I wish for their sakes, you may incline to take this opportunity of making a considerable addition to their future fortunes, as the expence will be a trifle. If therefore you will give me leave, I shall put your name down among us for a share (40,000 acres)??
Hillsborough must have gasped when he saw Franklin’s lineup. Walpole Associates represented almost every level of British society, and every political faction. Pro-Americans and anti-Americans were apparently more than willing to sit side by side on the board of directors of a company that seemed likely to make millions out of the American wilderness. Exultantly, Thomas Wharton, Samuel’s older brother, told Sir William Johnson, “There are 72 shareholders, among which, are some of the first noble men in the kingdom. . . They are promised a charter on the most ample basis Capt. Trent writes to his wife . . . that he sho’d finish his business to his entire satisfaction. . ..”
Walpole Associates petitioned the Privy Council for a grant of 2,400,000 acres within the Fort Stanwix grant. They were prepared to pay the treasury 10,460 pounds, 7 shillings, 3 pence, the exact amount that William Johnson had laid out for presents at the Fort Stanwix tribal conference. The price was a Franklinesque needle that we can be sure was not lost on Lord Hillsborough. The Privy Council referred the request to the Board of Trade.
A committee, led by Franklin, appeared before this body in early December, 1769. Hillsborough, in the chair as president, listened pokerfaced to their proposal. He did not even twitch when Franklin again specified the amount of money they were prepared to pay, even though Franklin was in effect threatening him with the humiliation of being forced to ratify a treaty he had denounced. Instead of exploding, Hillsborough amazed Franklin and everyone else by becoming enraptured that such a group of distinguished gentlemen were interested in colonizing America. The only thing wrong with their request, he declared, was that it was too small. “Why not ask for more land? Enough to make a province?” Managed by such distinguished hands, it could not fail to reap honor and profit to the King. In fact, Hillsborough said he was so enthusiastic about the idea he was himself prepared to present the proposition to the lords of the Treasury.
Although Franklin was certainly astonished, he managed to stammer his appreciation and accept his Lordship’s generous offer. A meeting of Walpole Associates was instantly convened at the Crown and Anchor Tavern on December 27. The company was reorganized into the Grand Ohio Company and they decided to ask for 20,000,000 acres. In that same meeting, Franklin and his partners undoubtedly also figured out why Hillsborough had performed his startling about face. He had been shrewd enough to see that Franklin had hopelessly outgunned him with Walpole Associates. He therefore had decided to outsmart the outsmarters by urging them to ask for a province. Even if the Treasury and the Privy Council approved such a huge grant, Hillsborough reasoned that Franklin and his friends could never raise the money to pay for it. This looked like simple arithmetic to Hillsborough. If two and a half million acres were worth 10,460 pounds, 7 shillings, 3 pence, then twenty million acres ought to cost at least 100,000 pounds. Also, at the pace the government usually moved, twenty million acres should take them ten times as long to grant as two million.
On January 4, 1770, Lord Hillsborough got one of the biggest shocks of his life. He had scarcely sat down to dinner when one of his retainers informed him that the Treasury lords had granted the twenty million acres to the Grand Ohio Company, only eight incredible days after the partners had submitted their petition. Even more mortifying was the price, 10,460 pounds, 7 shillings, 3 pence. We can be fairly certain that his Lordship’s digestion was not very good that night.
But Hillsborough refused to surrender. He lobbied fiercely behind the scenes against the Treasury decision, and in April, 1770, the Treasury lords executed a slight retreat under this pressure. They suddenly announced that they had only approved the purchase price, but they did not have the power to authorize the grant itself. This sent Franklin and his friends back to the Privy Council, who once more referred the matter to the Board of Trade and thus, almost a year later, Franklin was eyeball to eyeball with Lord Hillsborough again.
Hillsborough flourished a petition from another group of speculators, the Mississippi Company, claiming prior rights to the same land. The Mississippi Company was represented by a small, querulous Virginian named Arthur Lee, a name that would someday haunt Benjamin Franklin. Also on the scene with counterclaims was the Ohio Company of Virginia, in which George Washington, among others, was a major stockholder. Lee’s father had been a founder of this company, but it was represented by another Virginian, James Mercer. Franklin and his friends had no trouble demolishing the Mississippi Company’s case, but Mercer swung the weight of his colony’s prestige behind his argument, and it was hard to down Hillsborough when he huffed that he could not approve the grant without getting more information on Virginia’s plea. This meant letters to America and a delay of three to six months. To William Franklin and his debt-ridden friends, this was a blow. Creditors in America were pressing them hard, and William wrote angrily to Trent that he had more than one reason “to repent my going to the treaty of F. Stanwix. . ..” There was, however, nothing they could do but wait.
Meanwhile, Parliament was convening, and once more the problem of America was the obsessive subject. As the Grafton administration blundered and blustered and threatened to collapse into complete confusion, Franklin saw a paradoxical sign of hope. He told Joseph Galloway, “Of late a cry begins to arise, can no body propose a plan of conciliation? Must we ruin ourselves by intestine quarrels? I was asked in company lately by a noble lord if I had no plan of that kind to propose.”
“‘Tis easy to propose a plan,” Franklin had answered. “Mine may be express’d in a few words; repeal the laws, renounce the right, recall the troops, refund the money, and return to the old method of requisition.”
The noble lord thought all of these things were possible, except renouncing the right. This, he said, was something to which Parliament would never consent, and he pointed out that “your own little assemblies” were very stubborn about rescinding acts which they had passed.
“If continuing the claim pleases you,” Franklin said, “continue it as long as you please, provided you never attempt to execute it; we shall consider it in the same light with the claim of the Spanish monarch to the title of King of Jerusalem.”
For a while, the British government showed signs of listening to this witty but wise advice. Graft
on persuaded his erratic coalition to abandon all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea, which was retained as a solace to those who felt the Parliament’s right to tax had to be upheld. Grafton and his supporters wanted the tea tax withdrawn as well, but Hillsborough and the Bedfordites refused to go along. In a circular letter announcing the government’s intention, Hillsborough deliberately left out conciliatory sentences on which the cabinet had agreed, and made nasty references to “legislative authority” and “execution of the law” in a manner certain to wound American feelings. When Grafton did nothing to discipline him, except shrug his shoulders helplessly, the pro-Americans decided it was time to go into opposition.
Chaos threatened, until there appeared on deck a surprising candidate for First Minister, Lord North. As bland as he was pudgy, he appealed to a loose group of men without any really strong opinions about the conflicts that were agitating the empire. They thought of themselves as “the King’s friends” and piously declared that above all they wanted a stable government. The years of instability had persuaded a great many eager politicians from various factions to gravitate toward the source of power, the throne. Thus North was able to pull together a government that had a semblance of unity because it represented a wide spectrum of influence. But most of the men in the key jobs were second-raters who had never even achieved leadership in their own groups.
Nevertheless, North was better than someone as crassly anti-American as Hillsborough or Sandwich. The new First Minister proclaimed his intention to go ahead with repealing the Townshend duties, except the tax on tea, and pledged that during his administration the Parliament would lay no new taxes upon the colonies. It was ironic that on the very day that he introduced the repealing bill, March 5, 1770, what Franklin had dreaded finally occurred in Boston. A mob clashed with a squad of British soldiers, a volley of shots was fired, and five men lay dead or dying in the snow. But the Boston Massacre, although it caused a furor in that city, had little or no impact in England or in other colonies because the British government had already taken a major step toward conciliating America.
It did, however, affect Franklin deeply on an emotional level. He was a Bostonian by birth and never forgot it. On June 8, 1770, he wrote an extremely important letter to his friend Samuel Cooper. With the Townshend duties largely out of the way, except the duty on tea, with its “obnoxious preamble” which declared Parliament’s right to tax in uncompromising terms, the major remaining issue, as Franklin saw it, was the British policy of maintaining a “standing army . . . among us in time of peace, without the consent of our assemblies.” He emphatically declared it was unconstitutional. The King himself could not do it in England, without the consent of Parliament.
Franklin repeated his contention that the colonies were founded by free men and were in effect independent states, united as England and Scotland had been before the Union by having one common sovereign, the King. He boldly called the colonial Assemblies “plantation parliaments” and urged Americans henceforth to refrain from using such expressions as “the supreme authority of Parliament” or “the subordinacy of our assemblies to Parliament” in colonial papers. He maintained that the only way in which the Americans’ right to legislate for themselves could be abrogated was by a formal act of union, such as the one that joined Scotland and England. “If Great Britain now think such a union necessary with us, let her propose her terms, and we may consider them....”
“This kind of doctrine the Lords and Commons here would deem little less than treason,” Franklin warned Cooper. “I unbosom myself thus to you, in confidence of your prudence. . .”
Franklin knew that the temporary repeals and assertions of rights were no solution to the problem of England’s relationship with America. They were merely cheap salve rubbed over a festering wound. In his search for new principles, he evolved the idea of independent commonwealth, on which the British Empire eventually organized itself. In this, as in many other of his ideas, Franklin was too far ahead of his time. Hardly an Englishman alive in the reign of George III was able to perceive the brilliance of the theory Franklin was creating, and the few who did appreciate it, had little or no voice in Parliament.
Nevertheless, Franklin’s thinking on this all-important subject, particularly as he expressed it in that letter to Samuel Cooper, became a major turning point in Franklin’s own life, and in the national lives of England and America. By the fall of 1770, the Massachusetts Assembly had become completely disgusted with Governor Thomas Hutchinson, because among other things he had played such an obviously partisan role in the trials of the British soldiers after the Boston massacre. When the London agent for Massachusetts died, the colony’s Assembly plunged into an acrimonious debate over his replacement. One wing suggested Benjamin Franklin. But some of the more radical thinkers in Boston, notably Samuel Adams, suspected Franklin because he was still a royal official. They argued that he could not be trusted to represent them impartially in their disputes with the governor and the Crown.
Samuel Adams supported Arthur Lee, who called himself Junius Americanus, and specialized in circulating vicious slanders about the British ministry to anyone who would listen. Other assemblymen pointed out that Franklin already was agent for three colonies and hardly needed the business of a fourth. But Samuel Cooper produced Franklin’s letter describing his theory of the Crown’s authority, and a majority instantly voted for the philosopher of electricity. “Your letter came most seasonably,” Cooper wrote to Franklin. Because the governor had recently vetoed bills relating to other colony agents, the Assembly rebelliously chose Franklin as their agent, in effect telling the governor to find his own agent in London to represent his diametrically opposite views.
For Franklin, deep in his political struggle to create the western colony, the Massachusetts appointment was a severe embarrassment. He had not sought the job, any more than he had asked to be agent for Georgia. But Georgia was an innocuous cipher in the colonial scheme of things, while Massachusetts was considered by Parliament the fountainhead of rebellion and sedition. For Franklin to be chosen agent by this most radical of all the colonies, was like a contemporary American politician becoming a lobbyist for the Chinese Communists.
Why didn’t Franklin turn down the appointment? He was, after all, already agent for three other colonies. Unfortunately, this too was a political impossibility in the wider context of the British-American quarrel. Just as a refusal of an offer from a noble lord implied hostility, so the refusal of an (implied) endorsement from rebellious Massachusetts would quickly be construed by Franklin’s American critics as a sign that he was at heart lukewarm to the American cause. Finally and more fundamentally, there was the obvious fact that Franklin was not lukewarm to the American cause. On the contrary, he was in many ways more radical at this point in the historic debate than American leaders such as Samuel Adams, who as late as 1771 was still conceding Parliament’s right to lay external taxes on America to control the trade of the empire. By this point, Franklin had receded so far from the untenable middle position, as he called it, that he was very close to saying Parliament could not tax Americans at all without the consent of their individual Assemblies.
Throughout the preceding months, Franklin had been vigorously prose cutting his newspaper campaign against the anti-Americans in the government. Again and again, Franklin had struck directly at the men in power, especially Lord Hillsborough. In one newspaper article be wrote, “We are told indeed sometimes that the people of America would generally be quiet, if it were not for their factious demagogues, and that the whole mischief is owing only to two or three restless spirits there. . . But in truth, the parties are G. G. [George Grenville], Ld H. [Lord Hillsborough], and the D. of B. [The Duke of Bedford] on the one side, and on the other all our fellow subjects in America.” Elsewhere in this attack Franklin stated bluntly, “There is not the smallest probability of an accommodation [between England and the colonies] while the present A-n M-r [American Minister] continues in that d
epartment, nor the least prospect of his being removed; but on the contrary, all his rash, ill-judged measures are to be approved, confirmed and pursued.”
On January 2, 1770, the newspaper, the Public Advertiser, published “NEW FABLES humbly inscribed to the S-y of St-e for the American Department.”
FABLE ONE
A herd of cows had long afforded plenty of milk, butter and cheese to an avaricious farmer, who grudged them the grass they subsisted on, and at length mowed it to make money of the hay, leaving them to shift for food as they could, and yet still expected to milk them as before; but the cows, offended with his unreasonableness, resolved for the future to suckle one another.
FABLE TWO
An eagle, king of birds, sailing on his wings aloft over a farmer’s yard, saw a cat there basking in the sun, mistook it for a rabbit, swoop’d, seized it and carried it up into the air, intending to prey on it. The cat turning, set her claws into the eagle’s breast; who, finding his mistake, opened his talons, and would have let her drop; but puss, unwilling to fall so far, held faster; and the eagle, to get rid of the inconvenience, found it necessary to set her down where he took her up.
FABLE THREE
The lion’s whelp was put on board a Guinea ship bound to America as a present to a friend in that country: it was tame and harmless as a kitten, and therefore not confined, but suffered to walk about the ship at pleasure. A stately, full-grown English Mastiff, belonging to the captain, despising the weakness of the young lion, frequently took its food by force, and often turned it out of its lodging box, when he had a mind to repose therein himself. The young lion nevertheless grew daily in size and strength, and the voyage being long, he became at last a more equal match for the mastiff; who continuing his insults, received a stunning blow from the lion’s paw that stretched his skin over his ears, and deterred him from any future contest with such growing strength; regretting that he had not further secured it’s friendship, than provoked it’s enmity.
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