(Pennsylvania was a Proprietary colony, which meant that it was governed by a private family that owned most of the unsettled land. In 1681, Charles II granted such a charter to William Penn, in repayment of a debt. A majority of the colonies started out as Proprietary ones, but by the 1720s most had become Royal colonies directly ruled by the king and his ministers. Only Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware remained under their Proprietors until the Revolution.)
Two big issues faced Pennsylvania at the time: forging good relations with the Indians and protecting the colony from the French. These were related, because alliances with the Indians became all the more important whenever the recurring wars with the French flared up.
Remaining on good terms with the Indians required significant sums of money for gifts, and colonial defense was also costly. This led to complex political struggles in Pennsylvania. The Quakers opposed military spending on principle, and the Penns (acting through a series of appointed lackey governors) opposed anything that would cost them much money or subject their lands to taxes.
Franklin had been instrumental in finessing these issues in 1747, when he formed the voluntary militia. But by the early 1750s, tensions with France over control of the Ohio valley were rising again and would soon erupt into the French and Indian War (an offshoot of what was known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War). The situation would lead Franklin to take two momentous initiatives that were to shape not only his political career but also the destiny of America:
He became an increasingly fervent opponent of the Proprietors, and eventually of the British, as they stubbornly asserted their right to control the taxes and government of the colony, a stance that reflected his anti-authoritarian and populist sentiments.
He became a leader of the effort to get the colonies, heretofore truculently independent of one another, to join together and unite for common purposes, which reflected his penchant for forging associations, his nonparochial view of America, and his belief that people could accomplish more when they worked together than when they stood separately.
The process began in 1753, when Franklin was appointed one of three commissioners from Pennsylvania to attend a summit conference with a congregation of Indian leaders at Carlisle, halfway between Philadelphia and the Ohio River. The goal was to secure the allegiance of the Delaware Indians, who were angry with the Penns for cheating them in what was known as the “Walking Purchase.” (An old deed had given the Penns a tract of Indian land that was defined as what a man could walk in a day and a half, and Thomas Penn had hired three fleet runners to sprint for thirty-six hours, thus claiming far more land than intended.) Allied on the side of the Pennsylvanians were the Six Nations of the Iroquois confederacy, which included the Mohawk and Seneca tribes.
More than a hundred Indians came to the Carlisle conference. After the Pennsylvanians presented the traditional string of wampum, in this case, a whopping £800 worth of gifts,* the Iroquois chief Scaroyady proposed a peace plan. The white settlers should pull back to the east of the Appalachians, and their traders should be regulated to operate honestly and sell the Indians more ammunition and less rum. They also wanted assurances that the English would help defend them from the French, who were militarizing the Ohio valley.
The Pennsylvanians ended up pledging little more than a stricter regulation of their traders, which eventually caused the Delaware to drift over to the French side. On the last night, Franklin saw a frightening display of the dangers of rum. The Pennsylvanians had refused to offer the Indians any until the summit was over, and when the ban was lifted, a bacchanal erupted. As Franklin described the scene:
They had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square. They were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-colored bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagined.
Franklin and his fellow commissioners wrote an angry report decrying the white traders who regularly sold rum to the Indians. By doing so they threatened to “to keep these poor Indians continually under the force of liquor” and “entirely estrange the affections of the Indians from the English.”11
Upon his return, Franklin learned that he had been appointed by the British government to share, along with William Hunter of Virginia, the top post office job in America, known as the Deputy Postmaster for the Colonies. He had been eagerly seeking the position for two years and had even authorized Collinson to spend up to £300 lobbying on his behalf in London. “However,” Franklin joked, “the less it costs the better, as it is for life only, which is an uncertain tenure.”
His quest was driven by his usual mix of motives: control of the post would allow him to invigorate the American Philosophical Society, improve his publishing network by placing friends and relatives in postal jobs across America, and perhaps make some money. He installed his son as Philadelphia’s postmaster, and he later gave jobs in various towns to his brothers Peter and John, John’s stepson, his sister Jane’s son, two of Deborah’s relatives, and his New York printing partner James Parker.
Franklin drew up typically detailed procedures for running the service more efficiently, established the first home-delivery system and dead letter office, and took frequent inspection tours. Within a year, he had cut to one day the delivery time of a letter from New York to Philadelphia. The reforms were costly, and he and Hunter incurred £900 in debt over their first four years. But then they started turning a profit, earning at least £300 a year apiece.
By 1774, when the British fired him for his rebellious political stances, he would be making more than £700 a year. But an even greater benefit of the job, both to him and history, was that it furthered Franklin’s conception of the disparate American colonies as a potentially unified nation with shared interests and needs.12
The Albany Plan for
an American Union
The summit of Pennsylvanians and Indians at Carlisle had done nothing to deter the French. Their goal was to confine the British settlers to the East Coast by building a series of forts along the Ohio River that would create a French arc from Canada to Louisiana. In response, Virginia’s governor sent a promising young soldier named George Washington to the Ohio valley in late 1753 to demand that the French vacate. He failed, but his vivid account of the mission made him a hero and a colonel. The following spring, he began a series of haphazard raids against the French forts that would grow into a full-scale war.
Britain’s ministers had been wary of encouraging too much cooperation among their colonies, but the French threat now made it necessary. The Board of Trade in London thus asked each colony to send delegates to a conference in Albany, New York, in June 1754. They would have two missions: meeting with the Iroquois confederation to reaffirm their allegiance and discussing among themselves ways to create a more unified colonial defense.
Cooperation among the colonies did not come naturally. Some of their assemblies declined the invitation, and most of the seven that accepted instructed their delegates to avoid any plan for colonial confederation. Franklin, on the other hand, was always eager to foster more unity. “It would be a very strange thing,” he had written his friend James Parker in 1751, “if six nations of ignorant savages [the Iroquois] could be capable of forming a scheme for such a union…and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary.”
In his letter to Parker, Franklin sketched out a structure for colonial cooperation: there should be, he said, a General Council with delegates from all the colonies, in rough proportion to the amount each paid in taxes to the general treasury, and a governor appointed by the king. The meeting sites should rotate among the various colonial capitals, so delegates could better understand the rest of America, and money would be raised by a tax on liquor. Typically, he felt the council should arise voluntarily rather than
being imposed by London. The best way to get it going, he thought, was to pick a handful of smart men to visit influential people throughout the colonies and enlist support. “Reasonable, sensible men can always make a reasonable scheme appear such to other reasonable men.”
When news of Washington’s defeats reached Philadelphia in May 1754, just before the Albany conference, Franklin wrote an editorial in the Gazette. He blamed the French success “on the present disunited state of the British colonies.” Next to the article he printed the first and most famous editorial cartoon in American history: a snake cut into pieces, labeled with names of the colonies, with the caption: “Join, or Die.”13
Franklin was one of the four commissioners (along with the Proprietor’s private secretary, Richard Peters, Thomas Penn’s nephew John, and Assembly Speaker Isaac Norris) chosen to represent Pennsylvania at the Albany Conference. The Assembly, to his regret, had gone on record against “propositions for a union of the colonies,” but Franklin was undeterred. He carried with him, as he left Philadelphia, a paper he had written called “Short Hints towards a Scheme for Uniting the Northern Colonies.” It had one modification from the union plan that he had described in his earlier letter to James Parker: because the colonial assemblies seemed recalcitrant, perhaps it would be best, if and when the commissioners in Albany adopted such a plan, to send it back to London “and an act of Parliament obtained for establishing it.”
On a stopover in New York, Franklin shared with friends the plan he had drafted. In the meantime, Peters and others went shopping for the £500 of wampum the Assembly had authorized as gifts for the Indians: blankets, ribbons, gunpowder, guns, vermilion for face paint, kettles, and cloth. Then, on June 9, they left on a well-laden sloop for Albany with “a pipe of the oldest and best Madeira wine to be got.”14
Before the Indians arrived, the twenty-four colonial commissioners gathered for their own discussions. New York governor James DeLancey proposed a plan to build two western forts, but it stalled because the delegates could not agree to share the costs. So a motion was passed, likely at Franklin’s instigation, that a committee be appointed “to prepare and receive plans or schemes for the union of the colonies.” Franklin was one of seven named to the committee, which offered a perfect venue for him to gather support for the plan he had in his pocket.
In the meantime, the Indians arrived led by the Mohawk chief Tiyanoga, also known as Hendrick Peters. He was scornful. The Six Nations had been neglected, he said, “and when you neglect business, the French take advantage of it.” In another tirade he added, “Look at the French! They are men, they are fortifying everywhere. But, we are ashamed to say it, you are all like women.”
After a week of discussions, the commissioners made a series of promises to the Indians: There would be more consultation on settlements and trade routes, certain land sales would be investigated, and laws would be passed to restrict the rum trade. The Indians, with little choice, accepted the presents and declared their covenant chain with the English to be “solemnly renewed.” Franklin was not impressed. “We brightened the chain with them,” he wrote Peter Collinson, “but in my opinion no assistance is to be expected from them in any dispute with the French until by a complete union among ourselves we are able to support them in case they should be attacked.”
In his effort to forge such a union at Albany, Franklin’s key ally was a wealthy Massachusetts shipping merchant named Thomas Hutchinson. (Remember the name; he was later to become a fateful foe.) The plan that their committee approved was based on the one Franklin had written. There would be a national congress composed of representatives selected by each state roughly in proportion to their population and wealth. The executive would be a “President General” appointed by the king.
At its core was a somewhat new concept that became known as federalism. A “General Government” would handle matters such as national defense and westward expansion, but each colony would keep its own constitution and local governing power. Though he was sometimes dismissed as more of a practitioner than a visionary, Franklin in Albany had helped to devise a federal concept—orderly, balanced, and enlightened—that would eventually form the basis for a unified American nation.
On July 10, more than a week after the Indians had left Albany, the full group of commissioners finally voted on the plan. Some New York delegates opposed it, as did Isaac Norris, the Quaker leader of Pennsylvania’s Assembly, but it nevertheless passed rather easily. Only a few revisions had been made to the scheme sketched out in the “Short Hints” that Franklin had carried with him to Albany, and he accepted them in the spirit of compromise. “When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair,” he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, “one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater.” It was a sentiment he would express in similar words when he became the key conciliator at the Constitutional Convention thirty-three years later.
The commissioners decided that the plan should be sent both to the colonial assemblies and to Parliament for approval, and Franklin promptly launched a public campaign on its behalf. This included a spirited exchange of open letters with Massachusetts governor William Shirley, who argued that the king rather than the colonial assemblies should choose the federal congress. Franklin replied with a principle that would be at the heart of the struggles ahead: “It is supposed an undoubted right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own consent given through their representatives.”
It was to no avail. The Albany Plan was rejected by all of the colonial assemblies for usurping too much of their power, and it was shelved in London for giving too much power to voters and encouraging a dangerous unity among the colonies. “The assemblies did not adopt it as they all thought there was too much prerogative in it,” Franklin recalled, “and in England it was judged to have too much of the democratic.”
Looking back on it near the end of his life, Franklin was convinced that the acceptance of his Albany Plan could have prevented the Revolution and created a harmonious empire. “The colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves,” he reasoned. “There would then have been no need of troops from England; of course the subsequent pretence for taxing America, and the bloody contest it occasioned, would have been avoided.”
On that score he was probably mistaken. Further conflicts over Britain’s right to tax her colonies and keep them subservient were almost inevitable. But for the next two decades, Franklin would struggle to find a harmonious solution even as he became more convinced of the need for the colonies to unite.15
Catherine Ray
After the Albany Conference, Franklin embarked on a tour of his postal realms that culminated in a visit to Boston. He had not been back there since before his mother’s death two years earlier, and he spent time with his sprawling family, arranging jobs and apprenticeships. While staying with his brother John, he met an entrancing young woman who became the first intriguing example of his many amorous and romantic—but probably never consummated—flirtations.
Catherine Ray was a lively and fresh 23-year-old from Block Island, whose sister was married to John Franklin’s stepson. Franklin, then 48, was immediately both charmed and charming. She was a great talker; so too was Franklin, when he wanted to flatter, and he was also a great listener. They played a game where he tried to guess her thoughts; she called him a conjurer and relished his attention. She made sugarplums; he insisted they were the best he’d ever eaten.
When it came time, after a week, for her to leave Boston to visit another sister in Newport, he decided to accompany her. Along the way, their poorly shod horses had trouble on the icy hills; they got caught in cold rains and on one occasion took a wrong turn. But they would recall, years later, the fun they had talking for hours, exploring ideas, gently flirting. After two days with her family in Newport, he saw her off on the boat to Block Island. “I stood on the shore,” he wrote her shortly afterw
ard, “and looked after you, until I could no longer distinguish you, even with my glass.”
He left for Philadelphia slowly and with reluctance, loitering on the way for weeks. When he finally arrived home, there was a letter from her. Over the next few months he would write her six times, and through the course of their lives more than forty letters would pass between them. Franklin didn’t save most of her letters, perhaps out of prudence, but the correspondence that does survive reveals a remarkable friendship and provides insights into Franklin’s relations with women.
From reading their letters, and reading between the lines, one gets the impression that Franklin made a few playful advances that Caty gently deflected, and he seemed to respect her all the more for it. “I write this during a Northeaster storm of snow,” he said in the first one he sent after their meeting. “The snowy fleeces which are pure as your virgin innocence, white as your lovely bosom—and as cold.” In a letter a few months later, he spoke of life, math, and the role of “multiplication” in marriage, adding roguishly: “I would gladly have taught you that myself, but you thought it was time enough, and wouldn’t learn.”
Nevertheless, Caty’s letters to him were filled with ardor. “Absence rather increases than lessens my affections,” she wrote. “Love me one thousandth part so well as I do you.” She was soulful and tearful in her letters, which conveyed her affection for him yet also described the men who were courting her. She begged him to destroy them after he had finished reading them. “I have said a thousand things that nothing should have tempted me to say.”
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