by H. W. Brands
Franklin observed the events surrounding the accession of George III with mixed emotions. As a proud Briton himself, he could not help applauding the new king’s embrace of Britain. Yet neither could he help considering ominous the ouster of Pitt, the architect of the war policy that promised finally to secure the borders of Pennsylvania and the other colonies against French and Indian attack.
Franklin had further reason for paying attention to the politics of court and Parliament. Having resolved, upon the breakdown of his relations with the Penns, to seek the protection of the Crown, he had to approach the Crown—or rather the officers of the Crown responsible for the colonies. These included the members of the Board of Trade and the Privy Council.
Bureaucracies being what they are, and Pennsylvania being as far from the minds of most British bureaucrats as it was from British shores, simply scheduling a hearing took many months. Franklin employed the time to probe the weaker points of the proprietors’ defense. He could not expect the Board of Trade to become exercised about who paid what taxes in Pennsylvania; such a provincial matter hardly touched high interests of state. But the board might pay attention to proprietary policies responsible for unrest among the Indians, for it was this unrest that had provoked the current war.
In this tactical maneuvering Franklin had a most unlikely ally. Tedyuscung was a chief of the Delawares, a man who had been a friend of the English, then an enemy (his raiders were responsible for at least some of the attacks Franklin had countered in Northampton County in 1755), then again a friend. Yet even in burying the hatchet, Tedyuscung complained of historic wrongs the English had done his people, beginning with the Walking Purchase of 1737. Franklin and his allies in the Assembly thereupon urged Tedyuscung to address his people’s complaints to King George, who might protect them against the evil proprietors.
Upon arrival in London, Franklin took up Tedyuscung’s petition, and, in an audaciously broad interpretation of representative government, made the Indians’ case the Assembly’s own. As had become his custom, Franklin contrasted the beneficent policy of William Penn with the “deceit and circumvention” of the great man’s heirs. Franklin did not go quite so far as to blame the present Penns for the current war, but he cited, without contradiction, the Indians’ assertion that land fraud had been a principal cause of what Franklin himself described as “the cruelest murders and most horrid devastation” suffered by the people of Pennsylvania. By now Franklin’s letter likening Thomas Penn to a “low jockey” had reached the proprietor’s eyes; Franklin could not resist sticking a finger in one of those eyes by declaring, in his petition presenting Tedyuscung’s case, that the Walking Purchase exhibited “such arts of jockeyship” as to give the Indians the worst possible opinions of the English.
Franklin was not quite cynical in forwarding the Delawares’ grievances, but he was certainly opportunistic. Having witnessed the bloody effects of bad Indian policy, Franklin was all for redressing wrongs. Yet without question he cared less for an old land dispute than for the continuing struggle with the proprietors. (He also realized that while Tedyuscung might be useful as a character witness against the Penns, the chief’s own character could be impeached. Besides having made war against Britain, Tedyuscung shared the weakness for alcohol that afflicted so many of his people. He died when Iroquois enemies caught him comatose and burned his house down around him.)
The Tedyuscung petition was a flanking maneuver; Franklin’s central assault on the proprietors involved several laws passed by the Assembly and accepted by Governor Denny but rejected by the proprietors. The rejection put the Penns in the awkward position of overruling their appointed deputy; they defended this awkwardness by alleging that the Assembly had bribed the governor to ignore his instructions. The substance of the allegation, if not the proprietors’ interpretation of it, was true enough. After years of frustration with governors financially bound to veto measures favored by a majority of Pennsylvanians, the Assembly awakened to the possibility of outbidding the proprietors. The Assembly voted to indemnify Denny against the Penns; in addition it awarded him £3,000 in appreciation of his courage. Predictably, the Penns judged this transaction unethical and unacceptable.
Whether it was unlawful was what they and Franklin spent most of 1760 arguing about. Franklin and his fellow agent, Robert Charles, hired a team of legal professionals to prepare and present their case; the Penns engaged their own lawyers. The Privy Council referred the dispute to the Board of Trade, which put the matter on the docket for late March or early April. But a scandalously exciting murder trial of a prominent member of the House of Lords (who was convicted and hanged) distracted the board and delayed the case. Then Thomas Penn lost a son to illness just before the boy’s fourth birthday; this occasioned further delay. (If Franklin, remembering the death of his own Franky at four, felt sympathy for his foe, he concealed it well.)
When the board finally convened the hearings, the Penns’ lawyer indignantly attacked the Assembly for its “almost rebellious declarations” against royal authority and its “other acts of avowed democracy.” He repeated the charge against the Assembly of bribing the governor, and he chastised that body for taking advantage of the proprietors’ good nature in allowing it to meet on a regular basis. He implied that he need not say—although he certainly did say—that the late measures levying taxes on the proprietors’ holdings were unwarranted and illegal.
Franklin’s legal strategist was Francis Eyre; his courtroom lawyers were William de Grey and Richard Jackson. De Grey denied that any bribery had taken place. The Assembly had indeed voted an allowance for the governor, but this hardly represented a quid pro quo; it was simply a reimbursement for the governor’s expenses. De Grey disputed the charge of incipient democracy; no less authorities than officers of the king’s army testified to the loyalty and meritorious conduct of the Assembly. The proprietors had no business appealing the statutes in question to the Crown, for their own agent—the governor—had signed them, making them, under the terms of the royal charter, the law of the colony.
The hearings lasted four days; the board’s deliberations on what it had heard, three weeks. In late June 1760 the board delivered an opinion that said, at length, that the proprietors were basically right and Franklin wrong. On the critical issue of whether the proprietors were bound to accept a measure simply because their governor had done so, the board declared that this was “not only against the essential nature of all deputed power” but would tend to “establish an uniform system of collusion between the governor and the Assembly.”
Disappointing as this verdict was to Franklin, it was merely advisory. The Privy Council, acting through its Committee for Plantation Affairs, would make the final determination.
Accordingly the arguments were repeated, in the Whitehall hearing room called the Cockpit, in late August. Perhaps Franklin’s attorneys had learned from their earlier setback; perhaps the council committee felt freer to take a broadly political, rather than narrowly legal, view of the dispute. Whatever the cause, the council ruled more or less in favor of Franklin and the Assembly on the most important single measure, the bill that levied a tax on the proprietors’ estates. Some of the most heated rhetoric of the proprietors’ attorneys alleged that the Assembly intended to shift the burden of taxation from its constituents to the proprietors; Franklin’s advocates denied this. While the charges and denials flew across the Cockpit, Franklin received a summons. As he told the story years later:
Lord Mansfield, one of the Council, rose, and beckoning to me, took me into the clerks’ chamber, while the lawyers were pleading, and asked me if I was really of opinion that no injury would be done the proprietary estate in the execution of the act. I said, Certainly. Then says he, You can have little objection to enter into an engagement to assure that point. I answered, None at all. He then called in Paris [actually, Henry Wilmot, Fernando Paris having died the previous winter], and after some discourse his lordship’s proposition was accepted on both sides.<
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This compromise marked a signal victory for Franklin and the Assembly. The proprietors, after years of resisting, accepted the principle that their holdings might be taxed along with those of every other property holder in Pennsylvania. Whether they had actually believed their lawyers’ arguments about being victimized by runaway democrats in Pennsylvania, only they knew; in any case the assurances Franklin agreed to promised they would not be so victimized. (As it happened, getting the Assembly to accept Franklin’s assurances was another matter.)
On the larger question, however, Franklin lost. The very fact that the Privy Council consented to hear the case meant that it accepted the Penns’ argument that Assembly approval and governor’s signature did not a Pennsylvania law make. The proprietors had been forced to yield on the tax issue, but there was nothing to prevent their contesting any number of other measures in the future.
As Assembly agent, Franklin also found himself investment manager for the people of Pennsylvania. The Assembly authorized him to receive Pennsylvania’s portion of £200,000 allotted by Parliament to reimburse the American colonies for expenses incurred during the war with France, and over Thomas Penn’s objections—principled and personal—the Board of Trade approved.
To this point in his life Franklin’s investments had consisted chiefly of printing partnerships and occasional real-estate purchases. The money involved had been quite modest—certainly nothing like the £30,000 he now commanded. For help in putting that sum to safe use, he turned to John Rice, a stockbroker suggested by Franklin’s friends, and a man whose record revealed a career of care and circumspection. Rice recommended the purchase of a variety of stocks chosen for their stability and long-term promise. By the end of the summer of 1761 Franklin had bought shares worth nearly £27,000.
An unfortunate combination of events soon soured the investment. The Assembly decided it needed the money at once, and in late 1761 directed Franklin to sell the stocks and reclaim the cash. “A more unlucky time could not have been pitched upon to draw money out of the stocks here,” Franklin replied. The peace negotiation with France had broken down, Pitt had been forced from office, and the war had widened to include Spain. Wars are notorious for deranging stock markets; in this case the derangement hammered the issues Rice and Franklin had selected. “All imaginable care and pains was taken to sell our stocks to the best advantage,” Franklin said, “but it could only be done by degrees and with difficulty, there being sometimes no buyers to be found.” The bottom line was abysmal; in the space of months Franklin managed to lose almost £4,000 of the province’s £27,000 investment.
Things could have been worse. As events shortly proved, John Rice was not the sober stock picker he seemed. Not long after Franklin closed Pennsylvania’s accounts with the broker, Rice came up seriously short on some speculative issues. To cover his losses he forged documents granting him power of attorney and embezzled other people’s money. His crimes coming to light, he fled for France. Perhaps he hoped the hostilities between Britain and France would protect him from extradition; perhaps they would have had they persisted. But Rice’s crowning bad luck was the arrival of peace hard upon his landing in France. The French packed him back across the Channel, where the authorities jailed, tried, and hanged him.
The bad end of John Rice reinforced Franklin’s desire to proceed with a project long in the planning—“a little work for the benefit of youth,” he explained to Lord Kames, “to be called The Art of Virtue.” Franklin feared that the title sounded slightly pretentious, so he took some pains to delineate his intent.
Many people lead bad lives that would gladly lead good ones, but know not how to make the change. They have frequently resolved and endeavoured it; but in vain, because their endeavours have not been properly conducted. To exhort people to be good, to be just, to be temperate, &c. without shewing them how they shall become so, seems like the ineffectual charity mentioned by the Apostle, which consisted in saying to the hungry, the cold, and the naked, be ye fed, be ye warmed, be ye clothed, without shewing them how they should get food, fire, or clothing.
Most people naturally had some virtues, but none naturally had all the virtues. To secure those bestowed by nature, and to acquire those wanting, was the subject of an art.
It is as properly an art as painting, navigation, or architecture. If a man would become a painter, navigator, or architect, it is not enough that he is advised to be one, that he is convinced by the arguments of his adviser that it would be for his advantage to be one, and that he resolves to be one; but he must also be taught the principles of the art, be shewn all the methods of working, and how to acquire the habits of using properly all the instruments. And thus regularly and gradually he arrives by practice at some perfection in the art.
Franklin distinguished virtue from religion. Christians were exhorted to have faith in Christ as the means to achieving virtue; having spent his life among Christians, Franklin was by no means inclined to deny the possibility of this path to virtue. But that same life among Christians disinclined him to assert its inevitability. Besides, Christians—either nominal or practicing—were not the whole world.
All men cannot have faith in Christ; and many have it in so weak a degree that it does not produce the effect. Our Art of Virtue may therefore be of great service to those who have not faith, and come in aid of the weak faith of others. Such as are naturally well-disposed, and have been carefully educated, so that good habits have been early established, and bad ones prevented, have less need of this art; but all may be more or less benefited by it. It is, in short, to be adapted for universal use.
Franklin’s Art of Virtue became his unfinished masterpiece. His friends encouraged him to put his project to paper. Kames had been thinking about something similar as applied to thinking; at the beginning of 1761 he published his Introduction to the Art of Thinking. Franklin was impressed. “I never saw more solid useful matter contained in so small a compass,” he told the author. “A writer can hardly conceive the good he may be doing when engaged in works of this kind.” He was speaking as much to himself as to Kames. “With these sentiments you will not doubt my being serious in the intention of finishing my Art of Virtue.” He explained that the work had been under way for thirty years. “I have from time to time made and caused to be made experiments of the method, with success. The materials have been growing ever since; the form only is now to be given.”
Yet the form was never given. Exactly what form Franklin had in mind cannot be known. In his autobiography, which he began writing ten years later, he included the tale of his attempt at moral perfection, with the charts recording his daily progress in each of thirteen virtues. Perhaps this provided the basis for his projected work. But perhaps not, considering the failure of that experiment.
A lifelong writer and a career publisher, Franklin almost never suffered from the perfectionism that prevents many would-be authors from committing themselves to print. Perhaps he suffered so in this case, thinking a work about perfection ought to be perfect. Perhaps perfectionism of a different sort crept into his thinking. He may have recalled that early failure to achieve perfect virtue and deemed presumptuous any attempt to instruct others in what he had not mastered. In the letter to Kames containing the outline of his project, Franklin concluded, “I imagine what I have now been writing will seem to savour of great presumption; I must therefore speedily finish my little piece and communicate the manuscript to you, that you may judge whether it is possible to make good such pretensions.”
Kames never had the opportunity, for Franklin—perhaps judging on his own that it was impossible to make good his pretensions—never finished the work.
Yet if he could not direct the public at large to perfection, he did manage to provide guidance to a particular friend. Polly Stevenson, leaving her mother’s Craven Street house to live with an elderly aunt in Essex, had proposed a correspondence touching matters of moral and natural philosophy. Franklin was happy to oblige. He sent her books to
seed the conversation, urging her to write regarding “whatever occurs to you that you do not thoroughly apprehend, or that you clearly conceive and find pleasure in.”
Polly proved an apt pupil, and inquisitive. Why did the tide in rivers rise first at the mouth? she asked. Franklin had remarked that sailors at sea did not catch cold from wet clothes, the way landsmen did; she wondered whether the salt in the water had something to do with it. Spring-water at a particular location seemed warmer after being pumped than it was at the spring itself; could Franklin explain?
On the last question Franklin remarked that he expected the pumping “to warm not so much the water pumped as the person pumping.” He would not impugn Polly’s observation, but, especially as he had never heard of nor encountered this phenomenon, he wished to verify its existence before trying to explain it. “This prudence of not attempting to give reasons before one is sure of facts,” he said, “I learnt from one of your sex, who, as Selden [John Selden, jurist and Orientalist] tells us, being in company with some gentlemen that were viewing and considering something which they called a Chinese shoe, and disputing earnestly about the manner of wearing it, and how it could possibly be put on, put in her word, and said modestly, Gentlemen, are you sure it is a shoe? Should not that be settled first?”
On the other points he endeavored to instruct. He devoted many pages of correspondence and at least one detailed diagram to explain the theory of waves and tides. The causes of colds stumped him. “No one catches cold by bathing, and no clothes can be wetter than water itself. Why damp clothes should then occasion colds is a curious question, the discussion of which I reserve for a future letter, or some future conversation.” (Eventually Franklin would decide that colds had nothing to do with wet clothes, or even wet bodies.)