The First American

by H. W. Brands

  And what was the temper of the Americans now?

  “Very much altered.”

  In what light had the Americans formerly viewed Parliament?

  “As the great bulwark and security of their liberties and privileges.” Arbitrary ministers might overstep, but as a body Parliament could always be counted on to redress grievances.

  And did the Americans retain their respect for Parliament?

  “No, it is greatly lessened.”

  A questioner probed the matter of taxes and duties. Had the Americans formerly objected to Parliament’s authority on these subjects?

  “I never heard any objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce; but a right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in Parliament, as we are not represented there.”

  After additional discussion of duties—which Franklin interchangeably called external taxes—and taxes proper, or internal taxes, a former minister under Grenville suggested that a tax was a tax. What was the difference?

  “The difference is very great. An external tax is a duty laid on commodities imported; that duty is added to the first cost, and other charges on the commodity, and when it is offered to sale, makes a part of the price. If the people do not like it at that price, they refuse it; they are not obliged to pay it. But an internal tax is forced from the people without their consent, if not laid by their own representatives. The Stamp Act says we shall have no commerce, make no exchange of property with each other, neither purchase nor grant, nor recover debts; we shall neither marry nor make our wills unless we pay such and such sums, and thus it is intended to extort our money from us, or ruin us by the consequences of refusing to pay it.”

  A friend asked whether anything less than military force could compel the Americans to accept the stamps.

  “I do not see how a military force can be applied to that purpose.”

  Why not? one of the Grenville men asked.

  “Suppose a military force is sent into America. They will find nobody in arms. What are they then to do? They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.”

  By the testimony of those most interested, the effect of Franklin’s appearance in Commons was electric. “The Marquis of Rockingham told a friend of mine a few days after, that he never knew truth make so great a progress in so very short a time,” said William Strahan. “From that very day, the repeal was generally and absolutely determined, all that passed afterwards being only mere form.” Strahan was never shy about heralding Franklin’s triumphs, but even he thought his friend had outdone himself. “Happy man! In truth I almost envy him the inward pleasure, as well as the outward fame, he must derive from having it in his power to do his country such eminent and seasonable service.”

  Repeal had more fathers than Strahan conceded, but Franklin’s performance was indeed inspired. The opponents of repeal could rouse indignation against the rabble who tore down Thomas Hutchinson’s house and defied king and Parliament, but indignation dissolved in the sweet reason of Dr. Franklin. If that sweet reason included some tenuous reasoning—Franklin’s distinction between internal and external taxes, for example, was more his own invention than a reflection of opinion in America—none present was placed to refute him. (When one unfriendly questioner tried to do so, Franklin rebuffed him with a clever riposte. This member suggested that the Americans might use the same arguments Franklin deployed against internal taxes to reject external taxes. “They never have hitherto,” Franklin responded. “Many arguments have been lately used here to shew them that there is no difference, and that if you have no right to tax them internally, you have none to tax them externally, or make any other law to bind them. At present they do not reason so, but in time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments.”)

  To reasonableness he added just the right note of resolve. He was not defiant, not bellicose. He was simply reporting the state of the American mind and the American spirit. Here again he bent the truth to suit his purpose. He must have known, after all the violence of the summer and autumn in America, that a return to the status quo would not appease those who now had the bit in their teeth. But as with his posited distinction between internal and external taxes, he was willing to deal with the consequences of that interpretation later. For the present the goal was repeal of the Stamp Act.

  The goal was achieved in March 1766, almost a year to the day after the act had received royal approval. To no one’s great surprise, repeal was accompanied by a Declaratory Act, which asserted the right of Parliament to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”

  Equally unsurprising, this mixed outcome left a certain sour taste. Many in America remained unreconciled to Parliament’s authority; many in Britain resented the Americans’ ability to flout the law with impunity. The latter feeling gave rise to a demand that the colonies compensate the home government for the cost of stamping all that paper, which was never used.

  Franklin registered a sardonic judgment on this demand. In an anonymous letter to a London journal he wrote that the affair put him in mind of a Frenchman who used to accost English visitors on the Pont-Neuf in Paris, with effusive compliments in his mouth and a red-hot poker in his hand.

  “Pray Monsieur Anglais,” says he, “Do me the favour to let me have the honour of thrusting this hot iron into your backside?”

  “Zoons, what does the fellow mean! Begone with your iron, or I’ll break your head!”

  “Nay, Monsieur,” replies he, “if you do not choose it, I do not insist upon it. But at least you will in justice have the goodness to pay me something for the heating of my iron.”

  17

  Duties and pleasures

  1766–67

  “My Dear Child,” Franklin wrote Debbie a little later, packing a box for shipment home:

  As the Stamp Act is at length repealed, I am willing you should have a new gown, which you may suppose I did not send sooner as I knew you would not like to be finer than your neighbours, unless in a gown of your own spinning. Had the trade between the two countries totally ceased, it was a comfort that I had once been clothed from head to foot in woolen and linen of my wife’s manufacture, that I never was prouder of any dress in my life, and that she and her daughter might do it again if it was necessary.

  Franklin described how he had told Parliament that the Americans could learn to make their own clothes before the ones they were wearing wore out. “And indeed if they all had as many old clothes as your old man has, that would not be very unlikely; for I think you and George reckoned when I was last at home, at least 20 pair of old breeches.”

  So Debbie got a bolt of satin and Sally a new negligee and petticoat, while ships traveling in the opposite direction carried cargo of another sort, namely congratulations for Franklin on a job well done. “The Assembly entertain the most grateful sense of the firmness and integrity with which you have served your country on this very important occasion—and will not be wanting in their demonstrations of it on your return,” reported Joseph Galloway. The truly inveterate of Franklin’s enemies, Galloway said, still slandered him, but counterproductively. “They are daily put to shame on that account.”

  Franklin could not but be pleased at the praise, yet he refused to overvalue it. If he was lionized now, he would be lambasted again. Two weeks after his session in Commons, but before reports of it reached America, he wrote to Jane Mecom, who herself had written to him complaining of his ill treatment at the hands of his enemies. “As to the reports you mention that are spread to my disadvantage, I give myself as little concern about them as possible,” he said.

  I have often met with such treatment from people that I was all the while endeavouring to serve. At other times I have been extolled extravagantly when I have had little or no merit. These are the operations of nature. It sometimes is cloudy, it rains, it hails, again ’tis clear and pleasant, and the sun shines on us.

  Take one thi
ng with another, and the world is a pretty good sort of world; and ’tis our duty to make the best of it and be thankful. One’s true happiness depends more upon one’s own judgement of one’s self, on a consciousness of rectitude in action and intention, and in the approbation of those few who judge impartially, than upon the applause of the unthinking undiscerning multitude, who are apt to cry Hosanna today, and tomorrow, Crucify him.

  Franklin had turned sixty during the fight for repeal; this personal milestone understandably occasioned reflection of the sort he shared with his sister, who had just lost her husband of many years. Some months earlier one of his oldest friends, Junto charter member Hugh Roberts, had written with news of the club and how the political quarreling in Philadelphia had continued to divide the membership. Franklin expressed hope that the squabbles would not keep Roberts from the meetings. “’tis now perhaps one of the oldest clubs, as I think it was formerly one of the best, in the King’s dominions; it wants but about two years of forty since it was established.” Few men were so lucky as to belong to such a group. “We loved and still love one another; we are grown grey together and yet it is too early to part. Let us sit till the evening of life is spent; the last hours were always the most joyous. When we can stay no longer ’tis time enough then to bid each other good night, separate, and go quietly to bed.”

  And in what consisted that final sleep? Franklin’s theology had changed over the years, from borderline atheism to rationalistic deism. At times in his later years he would approach Christianity. Throughout, however, Franklin’s God remained as reasonable as Franklin himself. In Philadelphia before leaving for London this latest time, Franklin heard from his old friend, the evangelist George Whitefield. Franklin replied:

  Your frequently repeated wishes and prayers for my eternal as well as temporal happiness are very obliging. I can only thank you for them, and offer you mine in return. I have my self no doubts that I shall enjoy as much of both as is proper for me. That Being who gave me existence, and through almost threescore years has been continually showering his favours upon me, whose very chastisements have been blessings to me, can I doubt that he loves me? And if he loves me, can I doubt that he will go on to take care of me not only here but hereafter? This to some may seem presumption; to me it appears the best grounded hope: hope of the future, built on experience of the past.

  And that Being looked after not only individual souls but their actions together. Franklin was the least sectarian person he knew, and he shuddered at the illegitimate intrusion of religion into politics. But he believed that right would eventually win out. “The malice of our adversaries I am well acquainted with,” he reassured a friend and ally who had gone down to defeat in the 1764 Assembly election. “But hitherto it has been harmless, all their arrows shot against us have been like those that Rabelais speaks of which were headed with butter hardened in the sun. As long as I have known the world I have observed that wrong is always growing more wrong, till there is no bearing, and that right, however opposed, comes right at last.”

  Franklin passed another milestone during that same busy period. After eighteen years his printing partnership with David Hall came to its scheduled end. Franklin at sixty had no desire to extend it; Hall was happy to proceed in the printing business on his own. Before leaving for London, Franklin had given James Parker his power of attorney to settle the account with Hall; the report Parker filed revealed, among innumerable details, that Franklin had taken nearly £14,000 out of the business over the eighteen years, in the form chiefly of cash but including certain in-kind supplies and services. At the termination of the partnership, Franklin owed Hall slightly less than £1,000, by Hall’s (and Parker’s) reckoning.

  This amount injected a slight element of friction at the close of what had been a productive and profitable relationship for both men. Franklin questioned some of the entries and totals in Parker’s accounting, but his distance from Philadelphia postponed any final settlement.

  Hall was willing to trust Franklin for the balance; somewhat more unsettling was what Hall interpreted to be Franklin’s participation in a new printing venture just months after Franklin & Hall dissolved. Two of the prime movers behind the new partnership were Joseph Galloway and Thomas Wharton; the expressed purpose was the dissemination of the views of the antiproprietary party through a new paper called the Pennsylvania Chronicle. The partnership and purpose certainly suggested Franklin’s participation, as did rumors that Franklin was putting money into the new venture. When it opened for business in a house owned by Franklin, the connection appeared confirmed.

  Not surprisingly, Hall was miffed. He wrote Franklin relating what he knew of this upstart press, and what he was hearing about Franklin’s taking a part. “This I will never allow myself to believe, having still, as I always had, the highest opinion of your honour,” he declared, as if requesting reassurance. Hall reminded Franklin of the clause in their contract that forbade either to compete with the other. “Though you are not absolutely prohibited from being any farther concerned in the printing business in this place, yet so much is plainly implied.” But Hall preferred not to rely on a contract; rather he appealed their long-standing friendship, a friendship “I shall always value and endeavour to deserve.”

  Franklin supplied the requested reassurance. He had no hand in the new printing business and told Hall so. “It was set on foot without my knowledge or participation, and the first notice I had of it was by reading the advertisement in your paper.”

  Yet he could not let Hall’s interpretation of their own partnership agreement go uncontested. That agreement forbade competition during the life of the partnership but not beyond. There was reason for this. “I could not possibly foresee 18 years beforehand, that I should at the end of that term be so rich as to live without business. And if this did not happen, it would be obliging myself to the hard alternative of starving or banishment, since threescore is rather too late an age to think of going ’prentice to learn a new trade, and I have no other.”

  As matters currently stood, Franklin did not expect to reenter the printing trade. His office as deputy postmaster provided an income, as to a lesser extent did rents from his various properties. Certain debts were owed him, which he hoped to collect. Nor were his needs great: “I am not inclined to much expense.” But things might change, and he could not bar himself his trade. “I am sure you would take no pleasure in seeing me ruined, or obliged at my time of life to quit my country, friends and connections to get my bread in a strange place.”

  Franklin had other hopes for his retirement from the printing business. His speculative schemes in land moved forward—slowly, to be sure, and in a different direction than originally planned, but forward still. Although the Proclamation of 1763 ruled out the Ohio project for the time being, opportunities elsewhere beckoned. The British government appeared eager to make British the territories seized from France; to this end London granted real estate in Nova Scotia to speculators willing to develop the property and plant settlements. Richard Jackson alerted Franklin to this opportunity, and in the autumn of 1765 Franklin became one of twenty-three individuals, mostly Philadelphians, jointly awarded 200,000 acres on the St. John and Peticodiac rivers.

  The land was not free. Legal and surveying costs had to be covered. Attempt was made to minimize the former by chartering the venture on October 31, 1765, the day before the Stamp Act, which decreed a tax on such transactions, was to take effect. (In light of the colonies’ refusal of the stamps, and the later repeal of the act, what Franklin and his associates saved by their timeliness was not money but several months.) Regarding the surveying costs, Deborah six weeks later reported paying £53 to a young surveyor named Anthony Wayne (who would win renown as “Mad Anthony” Wayne of the Revolutionary War). “So you see that I am a real land jobber,” Deborah remarked, in words that applied as well to her husband.

  The grantees committed themselves to improving their lands—enclosing them, cultivating them, or finding ot
hers to do so—at the rate of one-third of the grant for each ten years elapsed. An annual quitrent eventually amounting to one farthing per acre would be owed the Crown, starting in five years. Should the grantees fail to meet these conditions, the land would revert to the Crown.

  But should the grantees find settlers to whom to sell the land, they might expect to turn a profit. The most ambitious speculators in that era could hope to become very wealthy, from holdings in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of acres. Franklin, whose Nova Scotia tracts totaled some 11,500 acres, initially set his sights lower. Yet even he could hope to leave a legacy. “I tell Sally this is for grandchildren,” Debbie said in the letter to Franklin about paying Anthony Wayne. “She seemed very well pleased.”

  Encouraged, Franklin applied for a grant on his own. Early in 1766 he requested 20,000 acres in Nova Scotia, to be selected where he or his agent thought best. His request bubbled slowly up through the British bureaucracy; in June 1767 the Privy Council awarded Franklin his prize, subject to conditions similar to those on the earlier grant.

  Even as the second Nova Scotia request was moving forward, Franklin was working on a scheme far grander—one, moreover, in which he cooperated more closely than ever with his son. Perhaps because William sensed, after the tumultuous events surrounding the Stamp Act, that the tenure of a royal governor might be brief, he worked assiduously, almost obsessively, to gain a stake in unsettled lands. With some Philadelphia friends of his father’s, the Indian agent George Croghan, and Sir William Johnson, the superintendent for Indian affairs in the northern part of the colonies, William organized a group called the Illinois Company to seek vast grants in the Illinois country beyond the Ohio River. Eventually the project grew to encompass the creation of a new colony in the west. William knew that such a venture required an agent in England; for this purpose he invited his father to join. Franklin did so with pleasure.