by H. W. Brands
William Franklin knew just the man for help getting the treaty approved, and his father, shortly apprised of the details and invited to join in the prospective rewards, was more than happy to oblige. In the spring of 1769 Franklin met with two of the Suffering Traders (whose suffering seemed materially diminished by the Fort Stanwix deal) to plot political strategy. Franklin fully realized by now that nothing passed through the British government on its merits; what counted was friends. He advised the Traders to broaden their partnership to include individuals influential at court and in Parliament. With such sponsorship their project stood a chance of approval; without it, none.
Among those added to the list, the most prominent were Thomas and Richard Walpole, nephews of the great Robert Walpole; and Thomas Pitt, nephew of Chatham. In honor of the Walpoles, the bruited partnership became known as the Walpole Company colloquially, although officially it was denominated the Grand Ohio Company. Upon reconsideration of the politics and economics of the project, Franklin and the others proposed to petition the Crown for the right to purchase 2.4 million acres in the territory included under the terms of the Fort Stanwix treaty; the land would be divided into 60 shares of 40,000 acres each, which would be distributed among the participants or sold to additional partners.
Franklin took it upon himself to find those additional partners. He started at the top, or as close as seemed feasible. He approached Grey Cooper, Grafton’s deputy at the Treasury, with an appeal to profit and posterity. “An application being about to be made for a grant of lands in the territory on the Ohio lately purchased of the Indians,” Franklin wrote Cooper, “I cannot omit acquainting you with it and giving you my opinion that they will very soon be settled by people from the neighbouring provinces, and be of great advantage in a few years to the undertakers.” Franklin had met Cooper’s children. “I wish for their sakes you may incline to take this opportunity of making a considerable addition to their future fortunes.” The expense would be a “trifle”: £200 for 40,000 acres. He pressed to close the deal: “If therefore you will give me leave, I shall put your name down among us for a share.”
While Cooper considered the offer, Franklin pondered his own posterity, for even as he wrote this letter he was awaiting his first legitimate grandchild. Franklin had grown accustomed to the marriage of Sally to Richard Bache—but slowly. For many months he refused to answer Bache’s letters; when he finally got around to writing back he explained that in light of Bache’s financial problems he had considered the marriage “very rash and precipitate.” “I could not therefore but be dissatisfied with it, and displeased with you whom I looked upon as an instrument of bringing future unhappiness upon my child.” In this frame of mind he had deliberately not written. “I could say nothing agreeable; I did not choose to write what I thought, being unwilling to give pain where I could not give pleasure.” But his anger had subsided. “Time has made me easier.” He now chose to be encouraged by reports of improving prospects in the Bache business and urged his son-in-law to industrious application, whereby past losses might be retrieved. “I can only add at present that my best wishes attend you, and that if you prove a good husband and son, you will find in me an affectionate father.”
A happy marriage for his daughter mattered more to Franklin the older he got, for he suspected he would not live much longer. A letter to Debbie written two weeks before his sixty-third birthday—a letter in which he expressed pleasure that Debbie found much to approve of in Bache—contained an assessment of Franklin’s physical condition and his expectations regarding the future. He suffered a “touch of the gout” but otherwise was in good health. Yet he did not flatter himself that he would live to a great age. “I know that men of my bulk often fail suddenly; I know that according to the course of nature I cannot at most continue much longer, and that the living of even another day is uncertain. I therefore now form no scheme but such as are of immediate execution.”
Yet grandchildren held out the prospect of immortality, after an earthly fashion. Franklin had one grandchild already, of course: William’s son, Temple. What inheritance the child might claim was problematic; as yet even his father did not acknowledge him. Temple was six at the beginning of 1769, and that January, William suggested a roundabout way of bringing the boy into the family. Franklin talked of returning to America come spring; could he bring Temple along? “He might then take his proper name and be introduced as the son of a poor relation, for whom I stood godfather and intended to bring up as my own.”
That situation would have to sort itself out; before it did, Sally brought into the world a grandchild the family could openly delight in. Even William, who might have been expected to have at least mildly mixed feelings about his half sister’s child, registered pleasure in “my little nephew,” as he wrote in introducing Benjamin Franklin Bache to his grandfather. “He is not so fat and lusty as some children at his time are, but he is altogether a pretty little fellow, and improves in his looks every day.” The boy’s grandmother told her husband, “Every body says he is much like you.”
Franklin had to take Debbie’s word on the subject. Although he constantly talked about returning home—especially in letters to her—he stayed in London. The marriage of his daughter did not bring him home, nor the arrival of his grandson.
Not even a serious illness in Debbie drew him back across the Atlantic. During the winter of 1768–69 Debbie suffered a stroke that slurred her speech and erased her memory. Although she recovered somewhat, in June 1769 a Philadelphia doctor friend, Thomas Bond, wrote Franklin that “her constitution in general appears impaired.” Bond added, “These are bad symptoms in advanced life and augur danger of further injury on the nervous system.”
Debbie’s affliction was evident in her letters to Franklin. Spelling and punctuation had always given her trouble, but now the very meaning of her sentences strayed and circled back upon itself. In her words on the pages before him, Franklin could trace her decline.
Yet he did not go home. In fairness, there was nothing he could have done at home to alleviate her condition. She would get better, God willing, or she would not, God unwilling. It was out of human hands.
All the same, had he been looking for a reason to leave London, this was more than he needed. His allies in the Pennsylvania Assembly would have understood, as would his friends in England. No one would have accused him of abandoning his post.
But he was not looking for a reason to go home; he was looking for reasons to stay. And he did not have to look far. He hoped to win approval of the land schemes he and William had been pushing; success was hardly assured, but it appeared more likely than ever. Yet success was a delicate flower that required constant cultivation, especially in the demanding environment of political London; to leave now would jeopardize years of work and dreams. The possibility of a choice appointment to government remained a tantalizing possibility. Franklin eschewed ambition, but for the runaway from Boston to culminate his career in a distinguished position in the imperial capital would be most satisfying. As Poor Richard might have said, plums don’t fall far from the tree; for Franklin to depart London would eliminate any chance of his catching one.
Both the land scheme and the possibility of an appointment depended on the larger and overriding issue of the day—overriding at least for a colonial agent. The elections in England had temporarily eclipsed the question of the nature and fate of relations between the American colonies and the motherland. But the new Parliament would soon be sitting, and it would certainly take up the colonial question.
As before, Franklin did what he could to influence Parliament’s thinking. He wrote letters to London papers urging conciliation and warning against the opposite. In one such letter he recalled the revolt of the United Provinces of the Netherlands against Spanish rule, a conflict that lasted eighty years and ruined the Spanish empire. British soldiers might justly judge themselves braver and more competent than their Spanish counterparts, Franklin conceded (again anonymously), but
a war against America would place them in unusually unfavorable circumstances. “It is well known that America is a country full of forests, mountains, &c. That in such a country a small irregular force can give abundance of trouble to a regular one that is much greater.” In the late war against France, Canada held out for five years against 25,000 British regulars and a like number of American troops. Canada, now British, was far from the strongest of the fifteen American colonies; a war against all fifteen, with those colonial troops now in opposition, would take—by Franklin’s half-spurious, half-serious arithmetic—fifteen times as long, or seventy-five years.
In another published piece he vigorously disavowed an intention often imputed to the Americans: to gain independence. “Allow me to tell you that you are certainly mistaken,” he replied to a journal’s letter-writer who had described the colonies as harboring advocates of independence, “and that there is not a single wish in the colonies to be free from subjection to their amiable sovereign, the King of Great Britain.” This contribution was only slightly pseudonymous, as anyone who thought twice about the name of the author, “Francis Lynn,” might have recognized.
In another instance he posed as a Frenchman. France was in the process of subduing a rebellion in Corsica and was coming under considerable criticism in England for doing so. “You English consider us French as enemies to liberty,” Franklin covertly wrote. “How easy it is for men to see the faults of others while blind to their own.” Corsicans had never enriched France by their labor and commerce, had never fought side by side with Frenchmen in war, had never loved and honored France, were not the very children of France. “But all this your American colonists have been and are to you! Yet at this very moment, while you are abusing us for attempting to reduce the Corsicans, you yourselves are about to make slaves of a much greater number of those British Americans.” What did the British know about liberty? “All the liberty you seem to value is the liberty of abusing your superiors, and of tyrannizing over those below you.”
Franklin supplemented his public—if often disguised—campaign with private letters devoted to preventing the situation in America from escalating beyond control. Boston seemed the likeliest location of trouble. In October 1768, British troops had been landed at Boston to suppress incipient sedition, which Governor Francis Bernard detected in the Massachusetts assembly, in the streets of the city, and in the writings of Samuel Adams and others. Franklin feared the worst. “I am under continued apprehensions that we may have bad news from America,” he wrote to George Whitefield. “The sending soldiers to Boston always appeared to me a dangerous step; they could do no good, they might occasion mischief.” The colonists considered themselves injured and oppressed; the soldiers were as insolent as young men under arms usually were. “I cannot but fear the consequences of bringing them together. It seems like setting up a smith’s forge in a magazine of gunpowder.”
(In this letter to the great evangelist, Franklin continued their theological debate of thirty years. “I see with you that our affairs are not well managed by our rulers here below; I wish I could believe with you that they are well attended to by those above.” But he could not. “I rather suspect, from certain circumstances, that though the general government of the universe is well administered, our particular little affairs are perhaps below notice, and left to take the chance of human prudence or imprudence, as either may happen to be uppermost.”)
After the new Parliament met and failed to repeal the Townshend acts, refusing even to entertain American petitions against them, Franklin wrote to friends in Boston, pleading patience. From his youth he knew the sort of roughnecks who roamed from the North End to the South End and back; they must not be given their heads. Rather Boston—and the other colonies—should stick to their peaceful nonimportation agreements as the antidote to the Townshend acts. Parliament appeared fixed in its determination not to repeal the acts. “I hope my country-folks will remain as fixed in their resolutions of industry and frugality till those acts are repealed,” Franklin wrote Samuel Cooper, a Boston minister who subsequently circulated Franklin’s views. Parliament underestimated the Americans, Franklin said. “They flatter themselves that you cannot long subsist without their manufactures; they believe that you have not virtue enough to persist in such agreements; they imagine the colonies will differ among themselves, deceive and desert one another, and quietly one after the other submit to the yoke and return to the use of British fineries.” Franklin said he had told his British acquaintances otherwise; he hoped his American friends would not prove him wrong.
Franklin laid the blame directly, and exclusively, at the door of Parliament. The people of Britain were not at fault, being of “a noble and generous nature.” “We have many, very many friends among them,” Franklin told Cooper. Still less was King George responsible for America’s woes. “I can scarcely conceive a King of better disposition, of more exemplary virtues, or more truly desirous of promoting the welfare of all his subjects.” Parliament was quite another matter. “Though I might excuse that which made the acts [that is, the previous Parliament] as being surprised and misled into the measure, I know not how to excuse this, which under the fullest conviction of its being a wrong one, resolves to continue it.” Even American opponents of the Townshend acts diplomatically referred to the “wisdom and justice” of Parliament; Franklin remarked, “If this new Parliament had really been wise it would not have refused even to read a petition against the Acts; and if it had been just it would have repealed them and refunded the money.”
Nor could Franklin honestly hope for much better. Though sentiment existed in Parliament for repeal—out of mercantile self-interest, as after the Stamp Act, rather than any love for the Americans—the government could not muster the will or energy to move. On this point Franklin had to agree with Grenville, who from the opposite vantage point likened the present ministry to two inexperienced sailors. The pair found themselves up in the round top, knowing nothing of what they were supposed to be about, so they simply pretended to keep busy. “What are you doing there, Jack?” cried the boatswain (in Franklin’s retelling of Grenville’s story). “Nothing,” replied Jack. “And, pray, what are you about, Tom?” the boatswain asked the other. “I,” answered Tom, “am helping him.”
With such in charge, the future was clouded at best. “It is very uncertain as yet what turn American affairs will take here,” Franklin told William in October 1769. “The friends of both countries wish a reconciliation; the enemies of either endeavour to widen the breach. God knows how it will end.”
19
The Rift Widens
1770–71
In March 1770 the spark from the forge Franklin had spoken of hit the gunpowder of the magazine.
Boston’s winter had everyone in the city on edge. The cold white blanket that covered the streets and the Common had long lost the charm of first snowfall; the icicles that hung from each eave and had once seemed picturesque now simply threatened the crania of passersby. Yet such was true every winter; what made this winter worse was that to the insults of nature were added those of Parliament. Boston was a town under siege. British soldiers patrolled the streets; British warships were anchored in the harbor. The soldiers had little to do, and less money to do it with; to supplement both deficiencies they sought casual work.
This annoyed unskilled Bostonians who themselves wanted work and needed it more than the soldiers did. Both groups were young, male, physically inclined, and prone to spend what little cash they did command drinking rum in the town’s taverns. To some, brawling was the intended climax of an evening out; to others simply a satisfactory alternative when loose women were in short supply—as they usually were to men short of money.
Had the young bucks been left to themselves, the brawling might have produced broken heads, the odd bitten ear, and little more, but upon their rowdy shoulders was placed the burden of the escalating imperial conflict. The most vocal elements of Boston’s popular political class—Sam Adams
, James Otis, and the Sons of Liberty—seized every opportunity to attack the Parliament that had sent the young men in red uniforms to keep such as Adams, Otis, and the Sons in line. Boston papers related, and in some cases created, lurid stories of insults and atrocities inflicted upon the innocent people of the city by the mercenaries camped in their midst. Townsmen tried to sap said mercenaries’ morale by enticing them to desertion, which the British officers combated by floggings and, in one exemplary instance, execution.
The tension turned Boston upon itself. A merchant accused of violating the nonimportation pact was branded an enemy of the people; a shouting crowd of young men and boys put up a sign—IMPORTER—outside his shop. A neighbor, Ebenezer Richardson, came to his friend’s defense and tore down the sign. The crowd turned on Richardson, who himself labored under the radicals’ suspicion (one of them called him “the most abandoned wretch in America”). Richardson was cornered in his house; a radical challenged him, above the tumult: “Come out, you damn son of a bitch. I’ll have your heart out, your liver out!” Rocks through Richardson’s windows punctuated the challenge.