The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Laughing came easier when the Assembly, in an obvious slap at the Penns, reappointed Franklin agent to England. He should sail back east and petition for an end to proprietary rule. Franklin gladly obliged, and his departure turned into a raucous triumph. Three hundred supporters followed him from his home to the quay at Chester; cannons were fired in his honor and hurrahs shouted. An anthem was sung—“God Save the King,” with lyrics adapted to the occasion, culminating in “Confound their politics/Frustrate such hypocrites/Franklin, on thee we fix/God save us all.”

  His reception in London, after a rough but fast winter crossing, was quieter but hardly less devoted. William Strahan greeted him with delight, determined that his friend not escape again. Mrs. Stevenson had held his rooms for him; he resumed residence on Craven Street as though he had never been gone. He surprised Polly Stevenson by writing her from her mother’s own parlor; Polly responded with her usual warmth. Other old friends, he told Deborah, gave him a “most cordial welcome.”

  Richard Jackson had a political reason for being happy to see Franklin. George Grenville had lately proposed a new plan for taxing the American colonies; it involved stamps on various documents and papers. Jackson and some of his fellow agents for the American colonies—including Charles Garth, representing South Carolina—had objected to the stamp tax, but to no avail. Now Jackson enlisted Franklin, as a person recently arrived from America and consequently familiar with the mood there, to approach Grenville directly. Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut, another recent arrival, joined Jackson, Franklin, and Garth. Ingersoll later summarized the meeting.

  Mr. Grenville gave us a full hearing—told us he took no pleasure in giving the Americans so much uneasiness as he found he did—that it was the duty of his office to manage the revenue—that he really was made to believe that considering the whole of the circumstances of the Mother Country and the colonies, the latter could and ought to pay something, and that he knew of no better way than that now pursuing to lay such tax, but that if we could tell of a better he would adopt it.

  Franklin and the others had reason to doubt Grenville’s candor on this point. The Americans did not love taxes, but they chose to make their case on the question of who would levy the taxes: Parliament or the colonial assemblies? The Americans stood on the right of Englishmen to be taxed only by their own representatives—that is, their assemblies. Grenville and most members of Parliament, without disputing the principle of self-taxation, contended that the writ of Parliament ran to America, that the colonies were represented in Parliament, at least as well represented as many of the king’s subjects living in Britain.

  When Grenville had first floated the possibility of a stamp tax, Jackson and other agents argued that if revenue needed to be raised, the colonies ought to be allowed to raise it themselves. Grenville voiced vague support for this alternative but failed to provide the information necessary to apportion the tax burden fairly among the several colonies. In the meeting with Franklin and the others, Grenville again said he might listen to a proposal from the colonial assemblies; he asked if the agents “could agree upon the several proportions each colony should raise.” At this late hour, and still lacking critical details, the agents were in no position to answer affirmatively. “We told him no,” Ingersoll recorded—which, by most evidence, was what Grenville wanted to hear.

  Yet Franklin would not leave the matter at that. Instead he proposed an alternative to Grenville’s stamp scheme. Franklin’s plan would raise the revenue Grenville needed; it would also solve a perennial problem for the colonies—and for that reason be far more palatable than a batch of new taxes. As part of Grenville’s program for reorganizing imperial finances, Parliament recently had forbidden the colonies to issue paper currency. Presumably the ban was temporary, but in the meantime the colonial economies, already suffering from a postwar depression, might strangle.

  Franklin proposed that Parliament authorize the issue of paper currency at interest. In effect this would be a stamp tax on paper money, but Franklin thought it would go down far better than a stamp tax on the sorts of items Grenville envisioned: licenses, deeds, indentures, leases, newspapers, almanacs, playing cards, dice. Grenville’s list hit people unused to paying for those items, people often without much money. The appeal of Franklin’s plan was that the people likely to avail themselves of the paper money—merchants, most obviously—were used to paying for money (in the form of interest) and had the wherewithal to do so. As Franklin explained his scheme, “It will operate as a general tax on the colonies, and yet not an unpleasing one, as he who actually pays the interest has an equivalent or more in the use of the principal.” He added, “The rich, who handle most money, would in reality pay most of the tax.”

  It was an intriguing idea. It might have worked. If it had, it would have saved both Britain and America a great deal of trouble and ill will. Whether it would have materially altered the course of the next two decades is impossible to know.

  But Grenville—“besotted with his stamp scheme,” according to Franklin—refused to entertain it. Nor was Parliament interested. To some degree the very unpalatableness of the stamps in America became an argument for approving them. Charles Townshend, whom the Americans would learn to loathe, defended the principle of Parliamentary taxation of the colonies: “Will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence until they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

  A lonely few in Westminster challenged this version of imperial history. Isaac Barré, a veteran of the French and Indian War, rebuffed Townshend:

  They planted by your care? No! Your oppressions planted them in America…. They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of them…. They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defence of a country whose frontier, while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument.

  Barré’s words drew cheers in America but moved Grenville not at all. The prime minister pushed the stamp bill through the necessary three readings; on February 27, 1765, it passed the House of Commons; on March 22 it received the royal assent.

  Franklin had done as much as any reasonable man in his position could to prevent Grenville’s bill from becoming law; once it became law he did what any reasonable man in his position would have done to make the best of an unsatisfactory situation.

  “I think it will affect the printers more than anybody,” he told David Hall when passage appeared inevitable; “as a sterling halfpenny stamp on every half sheet of a newspaper, and two shillings sterling on every advertisement, will go near to knock up one half of both. There is also fourpence sterling on every almanac.” Franklin could not do much about the almanacs, but he hoped to save Hall and himself some money on the newspapers. The Pennsylvania Gazette was printed on what technically was called a full sheet (although when folded and printed on both sides it yielded four pages). Certain London papers were printed on half-sheets, which despite their name yielded almost as much printed area (when folded twice into an eight-page paper) as the full sheets. Yet an American paper printed on the latter would pay but half the new tax of a paper made from the former. Aiming to outfox the taxman, Franklin ordered one hundred reams of the half-sheets from his friend and supplier Strahan, to be sent to Hall in Philadelphia.

  He was too clever for his and Hall’s good. As the Stamp Act took final shape, it mandated that newsprint receive its stamp in England. The fifty thousand sheets proved useless as sent, and had to be expensively returned. “I hope you will excuse what I did in good will, though it happened wrong,” Franklin wrote Hall.

  Another Franklin slip was less easily excused. In working to stop the stamp bill, Franklin found himself in an uncomfortable alliance with Thomas Penn, who likewise o
pposed new taxes on his colony. The alliance dissolved upon passage, however, not only because of the longstanding hostility between the two men but because Grenville, evidently appraising Franklin as the more significant of the two, awarded him the right to name the stamp commissioner for Pennsylvania. The post would not be the most lucrative in the colony, but it might earn its holder a neat supplement to an existing income.

  Franklin put forward John Hughes, whom Grenville approved at once. Hughes was a Franklin friend from Philadelphia, a staunch ally in the fight against the proprietors. It was Hughes who had moved that Franklin be dispatched to England after his defeat at the polls in October 1764; Hughes continued to defend Franklin against the attacks of the proprietary party in Franklin’s absence. The contest was more bitter than ever. Chief justice and ardent Penn man William Allen, judging Franklin a “grand incendiary … fully freighted with rancour and malice,” lambasted him from behind a thin veil of anonymity. Franklin’s friends responded with “tomahawk, scalping knife, chewed bullets, or any other barbarous weapons,” in the metaphor of Penn foe Cadwalader Evans. John Hughes was in the thickest of the fight. Hughes challenged Allen to come out in the open, promising to pay £10 to the provincial hospital for every accusation against Franklin that could be proved true, if Allen would agree to pay £5 for every accusation shown false. Allen declined the challenge, allowing Hughes and the pro-Franklin forces to claim a “victory as complete as we could wish,” in Evans’s characterization. Franklin, appreciating his debt to Hughes, sought to repay it by having Grenville award Hughes the concession on the stamps.

  This turned out to be no favor to Hughes, and it was one of the worst mistakes of Franklin’s career. Franklin had a tendency to believe he knew best in most situations, and, brilliant and reasonable man that he was, he usually did. But he grievously misgauged the reaction to the Stamp Act. When news of the act’s approval reached America, several colonies erupted in protest. The first outburst was rhetorical. In Williamsburg, Virginia, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named Patrick Henry stood up in the House of Burgesses—after a tenure there of less than two weeks—and declared the Stamp Act unconstitutional. As Englishmen, Henry said, Americans had the right to be taxed by none but their own elected representatives; as Englishmen they must resist this encroachment on their rights. Inflamed by his own eloquence, Henry uttered words to the effect that Caesar had met his Brutus and Charles I his Cromwell, and that George III might encounter someone similar among the Americans. At this the speaker of the house shouted treason and cut Henry off. Henry thereupon begged the House’s pardon and swore his loyalty to the king—but then undercut his apology by explaining that he had been carried away by fear for his country’s “dying liberty.”

  The apology was undercut further by a set of resolves Henry laid before the House. Four of these reiterated in comparatively innocuous terms the rights of Englishmen regarding taxes. The fifth was more straightforward, claiming for the Virginia assembly the “only sole and exclusive right and power” to tax Virginians, and asserting that any effort to vest this right and power elsewhere had a “manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom.”

  Support for Henry’s resolves was far from overwhelming. He introduced them only at the end of the legislative session, after most of the burgesses had gone home. The debate over the fifth resolve was, in Thomas Jefferson’s recollection, “most bloody.” Jefferson also recalled Peyton Randolph declaring afterward, “By God, I would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote!” Following the bloody debate all five resolves passed the house, but the fifth was rescinded after Henry departed in premature triumph.

  Yet the point had been made, and during the following summer and autumn it was made again and again, and far more violently. In Boston the Stamp Act exacerbated tensions of long duration and deep bitterness; opponents of the act seized the occasion to take their fight to the streets. A group of artisans and shopkeepers initially calling themselves the Loyal Nine (a name soon changed to Sons of Liberty) met at a distillery on Hanover Square and, after fortifying their spirits, plotted a protest. Of late the historically competing North End and South End mobs had linked arms; the Sons of Liberty engaged the combined mob to attack the property of Andrew Oliver, the stamp commissioner for Massachusetts, and those connected to him.

  On August 14 the mob hanged Oliver in effigy. The lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who was Oliver’s brother-in-law, took the insult both officially and personally and ordered the sheriff to remove the effigy. The sheriff prudently gathered intelligence regarding the mood of the mob before reporting back to Hutchinson that any effort to follow his orders would result in loss of life, probably starting with his and his deputies’.

  As evening fell, the leader of the mob, Ebenezer MacIntosh, and his fellows cut down the effigy themselves and carried it about the town. They hooted at the office where the governor was meeting with his council, then marched to the waterfront, to Oliver’s dock. Somewhat arbitrarily denominating a new building on the dock the “Stamp Office”—although no stamps had yet arrived from England—MacIntosh and crew demolished it. They proceeded to Oliver Street, where Oliver lived. While some amused themselves ripping the head of the Oliver effigy from the torso, others hurled rocks through the windows of the Oliver house. The rioters did not lack a certain sense of humor, as they demonstrated by “stamping” the stamp commissioner’s effigy—with their boots. Then they burned it.

  The mob began to hunt for Oliver himself. They broke through the barricaded doors of Oliver’s house and searched each room—splintering furniture along the way. But the owner was not at home, and after a futile examination of nearby houses—in one of which Oliver in fact was hiding—they called off the hunt.

  The experience persuaded Oliver to resign his post as stamp commissioner, which he did the next day; but the mob was not appeased. On August 26 the crowd mobilized once more and went on a rampage against houses owned by various government officials known or merely thought to favor the Stamp Act. Hardest hit was the mansion of Thomas Hutchinson. The Hutchinson house was not only magnificent, it was sturdy—so sturdy that the mob needed all night to complete its destruction, and even then some brick walls and part of the roof remained. But everything else—doors, windows, wainscoting, wallpaper, china, silver, lamps, furniture, clothing, £900 cash—was shattered, burned, scattered, or stolen. Hutchinson escaped with his life, but perhaps not by much. He was dining with his family when word arrived that the mob was approaching; he vowed to defend his home against the intruders. Only when his daughter swore similar defiance, saying she would not leave if he would not, did he relent and retreat.

  John Hughes anticipated like treatment in Philadelphia. In early September he wrote Franklin:

  You are now from letter to letter to suppose each may be the last that you will receive from your old friend, as the spirit or flame of rebellion is got to a high pitch amongst the North Americans; and it seems to me that a sort of frenzy or madness has got such hold of the people of all ranks that I fancy some lives will be lost before this fire is put out.

  Four days later Hughes wrote again.

  Our clamours run very high, and I am told my house shall be pulled down and the stamps burnt. To which I give no other answer than that I will defend my house at the risque of my life.

  Another four days later:

  Common report threatens my house this night, as there are bonfires and rejoicings for the change of ministry [for reasons unrelated to the Stamp Act, Grenville had resigned in favor of the Marquis of Rockingham]…. I for my part am well-armed with fire-arms, and am determined to stand a siege. If I live till tomorrow morning I shall give you a farther account.

  Fortunately for Hughes, his friends rallied to his side in large numbers, and the storm passed. At five the next morning he wrote Franklin:

  We are all yet in the land of the living, and our property safe. Thank God.

  Franklin himself had reason to thank God, f
or the same mob that threatened Hughes made angry noises about him. The house he had begun building before leaving for England was essentially complete—and suggested to suspicious or envious souls that its owner intended to fatten with his friend Hughes on the stamps the commissioner would sell to the oppressed Pennsylvania.

  Samuel Wharton, a Philadelphia merchant and political ally of Franklin, described the night of maximum danger in a letter to Franklin: “In the evening, a large mob was collected at the coffee house and the party declared that your house, Mr. Hughes’, Mr. Galloway’s and mine should be leveled with the street, for that you had obtained the Stamp Act and we were warm advocates for the carrying it into execution.”

  Deborah Franklin heard of the danger. During all her husband’s political contests she had remained on the sidelines, but she was not about to see her house pulled down. Friends and relatives warned her to leave the city and get out of harm’s way; though she sent Sally to Burlington and William, she stubbornly stayed. She related the critical several hours to Franklin:

  Cousin [Josiah] Davenport came and told me that more than twenty people had told him it was his duty to be with me. I said I was pleased to receive civility from any body, so he stayed with me some time.

  Towards night I said he should fetch a gun or two as we had none. I sent to ask my brother to come and bring his gun. So we made one room into a magazine. I ordered some sort of defence upstairs such as I could manage myself.