The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

  For such an imperial union the colonists could not rely on the governors and members of the assemblies of each of the colonies to act; they were much too caught up in their local squabbles to think about the empire as a whole. Instead, Franklin presented a solution that he was to return to time and again in his career—a reliance on a few good men, or even a single man, to set matters straight. That was the way he had operated with such success in Philadelphia, but whether he could operate the same way in larger arenas was the challenge of his career.

  Now, if you were to pick out half a Dozen Men of good Understanding and Address, and furnish them with a reasonable Scheme and proper Instructions, and send them in the Nature of Ambassadors to the other Colonies, where they might apply particularly to all the leading Men, and by proper Management get them to engage in promoting the Scheme; where, by being present, they would have the Opportunity of pressing the Affair both in publick and private, obviating Difficulties as they arise, answering Objections as soon as they are made, before they spread and gather Strength in the Minds of the People, &c., &c. I imagine such a Union might thereby be made and established: For reasonable sensible Men, can always make a reasonable Scheme appear such to other reasonable Men, if they take Pains, and have Time and Opportunity for it.

  At this point he thought a voluntary union entered into by the colonies themselves was preferable to one imposed by Parliament. After all, the colonists in the seventeenth century had formed confederations without the approval of Parliament. Why couldn’t they do the same now? Besides, it would be easier to make future changes in the union if people believed they had consented to it from the beginning.32

  In detailing his plan for Indian affairs and colonial defense, Franklin proposed an intercolonial council made up of representatives from all the colonies, with a governor appointed by the Crown. Money for the union might be raised by an excise tax on liquor. To avoid jealousy among the colonies, the council might rotate its meeting place from colony to colony. If the colonists were to defend themselves during the war with the French and the Indians that seemed destined to come, Franklin was convinced, they had to put together some kind of union.

  Other Englishmen were also worried about the French and Indians in North America. Even before fighting broke out on the Ohio frontier between English and French forces, the British Board of Trade in London had called for an unprecedented meeting of commissioners from the several colonies to negotiate a treaty with the Six Nations of the Iroquois. In June 1754 commissioners from each of the colonies were to meet in Albany with the Indians and consider issues of intercolonial defense and security. Franklin was one of the four commissioners selected to represent Pennsylvania, along with Richard Peters, secretary of the province, Isaac Norris, the speaker of the assembly, and John Penn, a grandson of the colony’s founder—a high-powered group that gives us some indication of Franklin’s remarkable political rise. Although Pennsylvania instructed its delegates merely to hold an interview with the Iroquois and renew friendship with them, Franklin had grander ideas. He went to Albany well prepared with a plan for union.33

  Although Franklin had been moving in the highest circles of Pennsylvania’s political society for several years, he now saw new political worlds opening up. On his way to Albany, he stopped in New York and showed his proposal to James Alexander and Archibald Kennedy, “two Gentlemen of great Knowledge in public Affairs,” whose approval fortified his confidence to present his proposal to the upcoming congress.34 In Albany he met and impressed some of the most influential officials of the other colonies, including William Smith Sr., Yale graduate and member of the New York council, and Thomas Hutchinson, Harvard graduate and member of the Massachusetts council. In the few years since the public had “laid hold” of him, he had come a long way.

  A squabble among the colonies over precedence at the conference did not bode well for their cooperation. Virginia, perhaps the most important colony of all, did not even send a delegation. But finally the representatives who attended agreed that some sort of colonial union was needed, and they appointed a committee made up of a commissioner from each colony to draw one up. Franklin was the Pennsylvania representative. Although a few other commissioners came with proposals for union, none had thought out or detailed his plan as fully as Franklin. His 1754 proposal was essentially the same as his earlier one, with one big difference. Whereas in 1751 he had believed that the union ought to be organized by the colonies themselves, he now thought the plan ought to be sent to England and unilaterally established by Parliament. His experience with the Pennsylvania Assembly’s reluctance to resist French encroachments in the Ohio Valley and his frustration with the parochialism of some other colonies had convinced him that only imposition by act of Parliament could bring about the kind of union he wanted.35

  On the committee, Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts, in collaboration with Franklin, took the lead in presenting a case for some sort of colonial union—no easy task, since most of the delegates, like those from Pennsylvania, had been instructed simply to negotiate with the Indians, not construct a union. But the Albany Congress unanimously accepted the committee’s report and delegated Franklin, as the strongest proponent of the idea, to draw up a detailed plan of union. In doing so Franklin had to make some concessions to the views of his fellow commissioners. “When one has so many different People with different Opinions to deal with in a new Affair,” he explained to Cadwallader Colden, “one is oblig’d sometimes to give up some smaller Points in order to obtain greater.”36 But the plan that the Albany Congress adopted in July 1754 came pretty close to his original proposal.

  The union was to be headed by a president general appointed and paid by the Crown. This president general was to be aided by a grand council composed of representatives from each of the colonies and selected by the respective colonial legislatures in proportion to their monetary contributions to the general treasury. Until that could be determined, the grand council would comprise seven delegates each from Massachusetts and Virginia, six from Pennsylvania, and so on, down to two each from New Hampshire and Rhode Island. The president general with the advice of the grand council would be responsible for making war and peace with the Indians, raising soldiers and building forts, regulating the Indian trade, purchasing land from the Indians, granting that land to colonists, making laws, and levying taxes “as to them shall appear most equal and just.”37 It was an extraordinary proposal—totally out of touch with the political realities of the day, which was often the case when one relied on a few reasonable men for solutions to complicated political problems.

  The plan was sent to the colonies for their approval, to be followed by confirmation by the king and Parliament. Franklin confessed that he had no idea how the assemblies or the home government would view the plan. Within a few months he realized that the prospects were not good. The colonial assemblies were not willing to adopt any plan of union at all. Even the Pennsylvania Assembly refused to go along with the Albany proposal. He had come to realize that the colonies would never unite without pressure from the mother country. Although everyone cried that a union was “absolutely necessary,” the “weak Noodles” who dominated the colonial assemblies were too distracted to act. “So if ever there be a Union,” he told Peter Collinson in December 1754, “it must be form’d by the Ministry and Parliament. I doubt not that they will make a good one.”38

  But the ministry (or what later would be called the cabinet) and Parliament were no more eager to adopt the Albany Plan than the colonial assemblies, and officials in Britain rejected it as well. Although most Americans in 1754 could scarcely conceive of the colonies’ becoming independent from Great Britain, many British officials continued to worry, as they had for decades, that the colonies were becoming too rich and strong to be governed any longer from London.39 Bringing the colonies together in any way seemed to make such a possibility more likely. The Speaker of the House of Commons warned the Duke of Newcastle, the official responsible for American aff
airs, of the “ill consequences to be apprehended from uniting too closely the northern colonies with each other, an Independency upon this country to be feared from such an union.”40 With such opinions flying about it is not surprising that the British government dismissed the Albany Plan out of hand. As Franklin later recalled, “Its Fate was singular. The Assemblies did not adopt it as they all thought there was too much [crown] Prerogative in it; and in England it was judg’d to have too much of the Democratic.”41

  Despite the failure of his Albany Plan, the whole experience of making plans for the empire was exhilarating. Being deputy postmaster for North America could not compare with this kind of top-level participation in imperial affairs. When word spread of Franklin’s major involvement in drawing up the plan of union, prominent imperial officials were eager to talk with him. One of these was William Shirley, royal governor of Massachusetts, who became commander in chief of the British forces in North America in 1755. Franklin had not previously met Shirley but knew him to be “a wise, good and worthy Man,” who, as governor, had been “made the Subject of some public virulent and senseless Libels.”42 Acquiring these kinds of imperial connections was a heady experience for Franklin, and he could not help feeling some pride. He was eager to tell his son that during his meeting with Governor Shirley in 1754 the governor had been “particularly civil to me.”43

  He presumably began exchanging views with Shirley over the nature of the British Empire and the kind of union that might be possible in North America. Apparently, Shirley proposed that the colonial assemblies be bypassed not only in establishing a general government but also in the administering of such a government. Franklin admitted that a “general Government might be as well and faithfully administer’d without the people, as with them,” but he reminded Shirley that “where heavy burthens are to be laid on them, it has been found useful to make it, as much as possible, their own act.”44 The colonists themselves, he argued, knew better the needs of the colonies for defense than did the distant Parliament. Franklin said all this at the very moment he was telling his friend Collinson that the colonial assemblies were so fuzzy-headed that the ministry and Parliament not only had to impose a plan of union on the colonies but would do it right. This raises the question of just how sincere he was with Shirley, or whether he in fact then wrote this to Shirley at all. (His three letters to Shirley in December 1754 were printed in a London newspaper in 1766, but the originals in Franklin’s hand do not survive.)45

  If he did write this to Shirley that winter, he was sufficiently confident of himself to tell a crown-appointed governor to his face that such royal governors were not to be trusted to look after the colonists’ interests. Royal governors, he informed Governor Shirley, were “not always Men of the best Abilities and Integrity, have no Estates here, nor any natural Connections with us,” and “often come to the Colonies merely to make Fortunes, with which they intend to return to Britain.” He went on to remind Shirley “that it is suppos’d an undoubted Right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own Consent given thro’ their Representatives.” Since the colonists had no representatives in Parliament, for Parliament to tax the colonists “would be treating them as a conquer’d People, and not as true British Subjects.”46

  In reply, Shirley suggested that the colonists might be granted representation in Parliament. Franklin liked this idea, as long as the colonists “had a reasonable number of Representatives allowed them; and that all the old Acts of Parliament restraining the trade or cramping the manufacturing of the Colonies, be at the same time repealed, and the British Subjects on this side the water put, in those respects, on the same footing with those in Great Britain.” What he wanted above all in 1754 was for the people of Great Britain and the people of the colonies to “learn to consider themselves, not as belonging to different Communities with different Interests, but to one Community with one Interest.” This plea for treating the colonists as equals of those living in England itself was a measure of Franklin’s heightened sense of his own personal equality with nearly anyone in the British Empire. Once he actually began meeting some of the so-called great men of the empire, such as Lord Loudoun, he came to realize that they had no more ability than he had.47

  PENNSYLVANIA POLITICS

  When the French and Indian War (or the Seven Years War, as it was called in Europe) began in 1754 with the expedition into the Ohio Valley by a young Virginia militia colonel named George Washington, Franklin inevitably became involved. By the next year, when the British government sent General Edward Braddock with two regiments of regulars to engage the French in the interior, Franklin had already persuaded the Pennsylvania Assembly to create a land bank to finance the war effort. The assembly deputed Franklin to meet with Braddock, disabuse him of his prejudices against Pennsylvania, and explain to him just how much the colony was contributing to the war effort. When Braddock discovered that he was short of horses and wagons to haul his expedition westward, Franklin offered to gather the horses and wagons and to stand bond for them personally. That Braddock’s expedition ended in a shocking disaster in July 1755 was not Franklin’s fault; he had warned the arrogant general that frontier warfare would not be easy.

  By the fall of 1755 the situation had become desperate. Frontier defenses had collapsed, westerners were fleeing eastward in droves, and with virtually no military force to stop them French-inspired hostile Indians were closing within a day’s ride of Philadelphia. Thoroughly alarmed, the Pennsylvania Assembly finally authorized expenditures for defense, and to raise the money passed a bill taxing all the property in the colony, including the proprietary estates. Under instructions from the proprietors in England, the governor vetoed the bill.

  Thus were renewed the increasingly angry exchanges between the governor and the legislature over the issue of taxing the proprietors’ lands, with Franklin writing most of the assembly’s messages. Franklin later recalled that “our Answers as well as his Messages were often tart, and sometimes indecently abusive.”48 But as much as Franklin abused the governor, it was the proprietors, especially Thomas Penn, who really aroused his ire. That the proprietors, who were subjects of the king as well as he, refused to pay taxes on their lands in Pennsylvania along with everyone else galled Franklin to no end.

  But something had to be done, and Franklin worked out a compromise that allowed the governor and legislature to agree to the organization of a militia. Unlike Franklin’s Militia Association of 1747, this army was public and legal, though military men regarded its democratic organization with soldiers electing their own officers as absurd. Franklin not only wrote a public defense of the militia but also took charge of raising the troops. With no military title this corpulent forty-nine-year-old civilian led a commission escorted by fifty mounted militiamen to the northwest frontier of the province in order to organize its defense. Governor Robert Morris of Pennsylvania finally recognized Franklin’s military role, and in January 1756 formally appointed him sole military commander of that area of the frontier. After overseeing the building of several forts, Franklin got word that the assembly was convening and he was needed back in Philadelphia. Franklin later recalled that the governor even proposed making him a general in charge of provincial troops to do what Braddock had failed to do and take Fort Duquesne.49 He could hardly help thinking that he had become a kind of indispensable one-man government for the colony

  All this, together with the accolades he was receiving at the same time for his scientific accomplishments, was enough to turn any man’s head, and Franklin began to become pretty full of himself. When later that year he was elected once again to the colonelcy of the militia regiment, he accepted gladly and was even escorted by his regiment with drawn swords, an honor never paid to the proprietor of Pennsylvania or to any of the colony’s governors, as Franklin delighted in pointing out.50

  Rumors reached Thomas Penn in London of the incident, and it alarmed him. He had earlier thought Franklin a dangerous man, and Franklin’s presuming to be esco
rted with drawn swords, “as if he had been a member of the Royal Family or Majesty itself,” made Penn even more suspicious of this parvenu printer.51 Penn’s confidants in Pennsylvania told him that Franklin was trying to dupe everyone in order to take over all power in the province.52

  Even Franklin’s friends were distressed that he seemed to be overreaching himself. Colden found Franklin’s conduct “most surprising,” and alerted Collinson. When a worried Collinson wrote Franklin about his display of arrogance, Franklin dismissed the matter. “The People happen to love me. Perhaps that’s my Fault.” Besides, he had nothing but contempt for the proprietors and had “not the least Inclination to be in their good Graces.” They were petty and mean men, and he had a “natural Dislike to Persons” like them. His opposition to the proprietors was based not on personal pique or resentment but on his “Regard to the Publick Good.” He may be mistaken about what that public good may be, he told Collinson, “but at least I mean well.” That’s more than could be said for the proprietors. He was ashamed for them. They should have become “Demi Gods” in the eyes of the people; instead they have “become the Objects of universal Hatred and Contempt.” Despite all the power their charter, laws, and wealth gave them, “a private Person (forgive your Friend a little Vanity),” he said to Collinson, was able to “do more Good in their Country than they.” And this “private Person” was able to do so much more than the proprietors “because he has the Affections and Confidence of their People, and of course some Command of the Peoples Purses.”53