“Political Electricity” (1770). AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY.
In all this, Franklin’s “Character” was suitably ambivalent, his reward, yet again, for appearing to play all sides. It was probably known that he was an anti-Wilkesite. And he was known to admire Bute, whose picture adorned his house in Philadelphia. (John Adams claimed that Bute was trying to use Franklin to advance his philosophical standing while Franklin hoped to benefit from Bute’s political patronage.) But was Franklin truly as evil as the king’s hated adviser? Even if not, was this any time to be flying a kite? It is remarkable that Franklin is represented as so powerful, roughly equivalent to a British prime minister. Equally, it is remarkable that his electrical power, the force so much associated with him, could be lethal. He commanded nature’s power, but in the service of what? 39
Franklin left few indications as to what he really thought. But he did leave us one amazing clue. At some point before the middle of 1773, he arranged on a piece of paper two columns under the headings “Stay” and “Go.” He was thinking about getting out of London. The agonized note is a rare example of Franklin’s prudential algebra. (Perhaps he used it frequently and then burned the results but forgot to this time.) The first column had nine reasons for staying in London; the second had six for going home. Franklin put his philosophical ambitions first. Four of the nine reasons for staying indicated his wish to travel in Europe and work on his philosophical writings, including a fifth edition of his works. Only one of the reasons for returning to Philadelphia might have had an intellectual foundation. “Repose,” Franklin wrote, as if a weary traveler with a vague memory of a clean bed, somewhere. To have repose would mean being free from public affairs and having free time to think clearly again about philosophy.40
These were his choices. For Dr. Franklin, there was the heady republic of letters based in London, a city that used up so much of his time and money that he could barely answer family letters or pay his landlady but gave him access to all the learned heads of Europe. Or for Poor Richard, there was a quiet, thrifty, provincial life in America. Stay or go?
Dr. Franklin stayed, of course.
HIS DECISION to stay in London meant that he remained at the heart of an expanding empire, which daily offered up new opportunities in the sciences and just about everything else.
The British incursion into India was probably the most gripping development—tigers and nabobs easily chased electrical Americans and rioting Wilkesites out of the headlines. England had held trading interests in South Asia since the early seventeenth century, when the East India Company was formed, but Britain remained a minor player in comparison to Portugal and France. The situation changed after the Seven Years’ War, when Britain won important concessions from France and its South Asian allies and gained a meaningful foothold on the subcontinent.
India was a long way from British America, but it had important implications for American colonists, as Franklin knew. The British East India Company was the trading monopoly that had had access to India since the early seventeenth century. Its officials did not lose a second, after the war, in expanding company interests—and offering more revenue to the state, more commodities to consumers, and more work to sailors. It was as these opportunities were expanding that Franklin recalled his half brother Josiah’s return from the fabled Indies. Now, the younger generation of his family hankered to go east. Jonathan Williams Jr., Franklin’s grandnephew, intended to go “to East India as a Writer in the Company’s Service”; Franklin applauded the idea because “he cannot fail bringing home a Fortune.” Williams instead returned to Boston but solicited East India Company ships and goods for his trade in America. He asked his London-based granduncle to “recommend their Business” there.41
Through merchants such as the Williamses, many new goods from Asia made their way to Britain and America, permanently changing the texture of everyday life. Cotton became a standard fabric for ladies’ dresses; tea, the standard drink that the awakening ladies sleepily sipped before they donned the dresses; and china, the standard container for the tea. “Mark how Luxury will enter Families,” Franklin warned. His household had long breakfasted on “Bread and Milk, (no Tea)” served in earthenware and pewter until one morning his wife presented him with “a China Bowl with a Spoon of Silver.” It was all done “without my Knowledge,” Franklin claimed; Deborah justified it as a matter of keeping up with the neighbors, which was probably how the eastern “luxuries” did infiltrate the colonies.42
Other “Indian” imports included Asian specimens that naturalists solicited and then passed on to others. These joined the stream of seeds, dried plants, preserved animals—and live ones—that were crossing the Atlantic at the same time. Britons transported Asian plants to the tropical and subtropical American colonies in order to generate new crops. In 1771, for example, Franklin distributed “a few seeds from India” to Georgia, for which he was acting as colonial agent. Calcutta to London to Savannah—a seemingly small gesture brought seeds across two oceans and halfway around the world.43
It only remained for the British to command the Pacific, and their empire would span the globe. Unfortunately, others had the same idea. From 1763 and through the Napoleonic Wars that would rage into the next century, Europe was possessed by a “South Seas” craze. Although Europeans had traversed parts of the Pacific since the 1520s and although the Spanish had claimed the Philippines since 1521, the greatest part of the ocean remained known only to its native populations. (It was not even clear whether it was a single ocean or whether it held mere islands or another whole continent.) The French South Pacific voyage from 1766 to 1769 set off a race for the Pacific. Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s account of the venture spread rapidly. It helped produce an important stereotype of the peoples of the South Seas as “noble savages,” loving creatures who transcended the violent ambitions that plagued Europeans. Recall Franklin’s new regard for Indians, after the Seven Years’ War; the concept of noble Pacific savages also exemplified this changed attitute toward non-European peoples.44
Britons wanted the Pacific people and places for themselves, but first, they had to elbow the French out of the way. The French commandeered New Zealand and some smaller islands, but the British planned to beat them to the rumored continent, terra australis (southern land), in the South Pacific. From 1769 to 1771, James Cook, commanding the Endeavour, made the first of three voyages into the Pacific, with orders to navigate as much of that ocean as possible and, in particular, to chart the coast of what came to be known as Australia. It turned out not to be connected to Antarctica, so it was not quite the long-rumored continent of the South Seas. But all the other news from Cook’s ventures was so astonishing that the disappointment was fleeting.45
It was the British state’s most ambitious undertaking to date, an unprecedented merger of naval power and the sciences. Joseph Banks, the naturalist who later became president of the Royal Society, and Daniel Solander, a protégé of Linnaeus, both sailed with Cook, as did a train of other naturalists and sketch artists. The Endeavour returned with natural history specimens, charts of the ocean, maps of the coastlines, and a vast quantity of narrative material to encourage further British advance into the Pacific. Cook’s second voyage, from 1772 to 1774, was even more spectacular. He hauled back still more scientific material as well as a Tahitian man, Omai, who was sent around London’s dinner-party circuit and painted by Joshua Reynolds. One naturalist, from the second voyage, rejoiced that “what Cook has added to the mass of our knowledge is such that it will strike deep roots and will long have the most decisive influence on the activity of men.”46
Well into his sixties, unable to cross the Atlantic without endangering his health, Franklin could not even hope to join Cook’s expeditions. But he advised the ventures to a remarkable degree. The admiralty was interested in testing whether Joseph Priestley’s method of making soda water might also sweeten saltwater at sea; Franklin advised Priestley how to persuade Banks and Solander to do t
he experiment, and Cook took samples of the soda with him. (Cook also experimented with using citrus juice for scurvy.) Franklin must have been especially gratified that the Endeavour proved the efficacy of a chain conductor as a means of protecting ships against lightning. Cook’s ship emerged unscathed from a storm at Batavia, while an unprotected Dutch ship was “almost demolished by the Lightning.”47
Franklin also knew that Cook’s first expedition would help answer a big question: how far away was the sun? The 1769 transit of Venus across the sun and the expanded dimensions of the British empire gave Britons a unique opportunity to determine the distance. If an observer could measure the time it took an object to pass over the face of the sun and then compare the interval with those measured elsewhere on the earth, the distance between the earth and sun could be calculated. Edmond Halley had predicted Venus’s two transits, in 1761 and 1769, noting that the planet’s slow movement would allow such calculation, whereas faster objects, such as comets, would not.48
The second transit was not observable in Europe. Only Britain’s greatly expanded empire could hold a suitable mirror up to the vast heavens. There were now many global outposts for science, from the middle of the Pacific Ocean to the middle of Philadelphia.
Poor Richard had worked hard to transform his provincial readers into backyard astronomers, and just in time for the 1769 transit, he succeeded. Colonists had failed to observe the 1761 transit. (Franklin’s friend John Winthrop IV, Hollis Professor at Harvard and Fellow of the Royal Society, had arranged the only significant attempt.) Now they outdid themselves. In the northern colonies especially, observers with every level of skill and every kind of instrument rallied. In Philadelphia, for example, Mary Norris offered her telescope to the official observers. Franklin himself sent telescope lenses to Harvard, though the Pennsylvania observers nabbed them when it was clear they would not get to Massachusetts in time. On the day of the event, people poured outside and silently waited—with, we hope, the right protective eyewear—for the crucial minutes of transit. Philadelphians gathered in the square outside the State House, where Franklin had done his electrical experiments. The excitement was overwhelming—at a critical moment, Philadelphia astronomer David Rittenhouse fainted. And the event left its mark: Providence, Rhode Island, still has a Transit Street.49
Philosophy united colonists and Britons. The result, a statement of the distance between the earth and sun, is not now accepted as definitive, but the attempt to measure it was astonishing, especially because it organized so many people in so many places to do the same thing at the same time. In the end, twenty-two reports on the transit made their way into colonial newspapers and other publications and then crossed the Atlantic. Franklin could report that the official American measurements arrived at the Royal Society before those “made in the South Sea.” The first volume of the American Philosophical Society’s Transactions (1771) would be devoted to the transit. It proved colonial aptitude in the sciences and publicized the society’s president, Franklin, as the acme of American learning.50
But the colonial interest in philosophy was superficial and fractured—it reminded Franklin that London seemed a far better place for him. He was annoyed that the APS’s proprietary faction had sent their observations to Thomas Penn rather than to him, as president. In contrast to the undisciplined American society, Franklin scolded, “the Royal Society is of all Parties, but Party is entirely out of the Question in all our Proceedings.” Initially hopeful that Pennsylvania might build an observatory (the transit observers had worked from a mere platform), Franklin then heard otherwise from doubters: “I begin to fear the Expence will be thought too heavy for us,” he regretted. The American colonists did not intend to invest much in learning, in sharp contrast to Cook’s state-sponsored activities in the Pacific.51
Franklin himself could not hear enough about the Pacific. In 1768, just after Bougainville’s return, he sent to a British acquaintance “a Piece of the Bark Cloth with which the new-discover’d People dress themselves.” Franklin had known Banks before Cook’s first Pacific voyage and met Solander during the Pacific craze. In August 1771, he dined with Sir John Pringle and the newly returned Banks and Solander, hearing them describe “the People of Otahitee” (or Tahiti) as “civilized in a great degree.” He was interested that those people had “a considerable Knowledge of the Stars, sail by them, and make Voyages of three Months westward among the Islands.” Franklin also heard flattering things about the New Zealand Maori and derogatory ones about the people of New Holland, or Australia. Knowing that Franklin was among the lucky few who knew Banks and Solander, a friend pumped him for “a few of the Particulars you have heard of the Voyage of the Endeavour.”52
So taken was Franklin with the Pacific that he endorsed a scheme to bring the “Arts and Conveniencies of Life” to the New Zealanders in exchange for any of its plants that Britain might profitably grow. A 1771 prospectus solicited investors for a three-year expedition costing £15,000, and Franklin wrote its introduction. He, the constant thorn in the side of the British colonial office, argued that colonization could be a benign force. Only by being colonized and brought into trade with other peoples had ancient Britain gained “vast advantages,” he contended, including a cornucopia of flora, fauna, and arts, all of them introduced by outsiders. The nation should return the favor. “Britain is now the first Maritime Power in the world,” he observed, blessed with innumerable ships and “bold, skilful, and hardy” seamen. Moreover, the British knew the use both of compass and celestial navigation.53
“Does not Providence, by these distinguishing Favours, seem to call on us,” Franklin demanded, “to do something ourselves for the common Interests of Humanity?” Other oceangoing “voyages have been undertaken with views of profit or of plunder, or to gratify resentment.” Rather than cheat or enslave a people, this venture would “do them good.”54
Keep in mind the year when Franklin wrote these phrases. In 1771, any pleas to avoid profit and plunder echoed colonial protests against taxes on Atlantic commerce. References to providence and to the common good were sure signs of an argument in need of rhetoric. Yet, more positively, Franklin’s interest in New Zealand represented the new trend to make empire into a benign or even benevolent force. The Pacific Ocean’s very name invited a pacific empire. It was a place acquired peacefully, in contrast to the territories gained in the recent and ruinously expensive war for empire. Above all, Franklin was conceiving of Britons and (white) British Americans as partners in empire, the Christian and enlightened people who together would improve the world.
It was the optimal moment for an abolition movement to gain ground. Concern over the injustice of slavery, which had started with people such as Thomas Tryon, the ranting vegetarian, were beginning to find moral and political purchase. Few advocated freeing slaves, but they spoke and wrote angrily about the slave trade itself, which created new slaves. Moreover, they expressed sympathy with the plight of slaves in a way that hinted at disapproval of slaveholding, as well. These ideas entered public debate—they appeared in newspapers and even at the doors of Whitehall and Parliament. This was the advent of the monumental antislavery campaign that would, after the American Revolution, end the British slave trade and then move on to dismantle slavery in the West Indies.55
Though Franklin still supported Dr. Bray’s Associates and deplored the slave trade, he did not immediately accept any criticism of slaveholding. He perceived within it an implicit critique of the American colonists who held slaves. In January 1770, he wrote a defensive dialogue between an “Englishman” and an “American,” published in Strahan’s Public Advertiser. The dialogue’s Englishman argues that white colonists have little right to talk of liberty if they keep slaves. The American objects that Britons have no right to point a finger when their own poor suffer more than domestic slaves do in America. Most British coal was dug by “Wretches,” argues the American, who are “absolute Slaves by your Law, and their Children after them.” (This was true:
colliers inherited their miserable lot.) Nor could subjects in the home country frown on colonial forms of subjection; national security depended on conscripted soldiers and impressed sailors. The latter were “well described” as slaves, states the American. (Clearly, Franklin was getting over his 1768 revulsion at London’s striking sailors—or was willing to pretend to be in order to make his point.)56
But Franklin’s doubts about slavery were mounting. Just as he had needed Deborah Franklin to chide him into supporting Dr. Bray’s Associates, so he now had another better angel, Anthony Benezet, to lead him beyond his defensive reaction to the antislavery movement. Benezet was a French-born Quaker who had moved from London to Philadelphia and pressured Friends there to disavow slave trading; he recruited Franklin and Fothergill as London-based allies. Franklin also received antislavery writings from Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia and “commenc’d an Acquaintance with Mr. Granville Sharpe,” or Sharp, the abolition movement’s foremost leader.57
These were nudges, but then a legal case gave Franklin a shove. James Somerset, a slave, had been taken to England by his owner, Bostonian Charles Stewart. Somerset ran away while in England but was later recaptured, and Stewart intended to take him back to America. Somerset’s bid for freedom came before the Court of King’s Bench, which ruled in 1772 that it was illegal to remove slaves forcibly from England. The decision shocked many colonists, especially West Indians, because it stigmatized their way of life. Franklin broke rank with many well-off Americans by declaring the decision inadequate. He rallied his old ally against slavery—political arithmetic. He cited Benezet’s estimate that there were already 850,000 “Negroes” in the British colonies and that 100,000 more were shipped there each year. Franklin questioned whether the Somerset case, which affected only a tiny number of slaves in England, was any great threat to the trade in fellow humans—the numbers were against it. “Can sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar, be a circumstance of such absolute necessity” that the “pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men” should continue?58
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