Now, Franklin conceded that colonists who defended their liberties while holding other humans in bondage were indeed hypocrites. His change of mind was particularly apparent in 1773, the year following the Somerset decision. That year, Franklin pointedly visited Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved poet, in London. He offered “any Services I could do her,” a clear invitation to take advantage of the Somerset decision and remain, as a free woman, in London. (Wheatley’s master, lurking in a nearby room, was outraged.) Despite the continued presence of slaves in his own family, Franklin wrote Benezet that the colonies must “get clear of a Practice that disgraces them” without “producing any equivalent Benefit.”59
He even concluded, rather remarkably, that all Atlantic migration should be free. He had long been arguing that the colonies needed no migrants. He finally got his way in 1773, when British ministers proposed restrictions on emigration to the unruly colonies. Franklin immediately switched his position, invoking nature to do so. “It is the natural Right of Men to quit when [ever] they please the Society or State, and the Country in which they were born,” he now insisted. In a letter he sent to the Public Advertiser that year, he argued that the laws of nature proved this “Liberty”:The Waters of the Ocean may move in Currents from one Quarter of the Globe to another, as they happen in some places to be accumulated and in others diminished; but no Law beyond the Law of Gravity, is necessary to prevent their Abandoning any Coast entirely. Thus the different Degrees of Happiness of different Countries and Situations find or rather make their Level by the flowing of People from one to another, and where that Level is once found, the Removals cease.
Ocean currents obeyed natural laws—why not British ministers? If Franklin thought that invoking Isaac (“Law of Gravity”) Newton might lend authority to his argument, he miscalculated. The Public Advertiser declined to publish his letter.60
JUST as Franklin’s stock was faltering in London, it rose in Paris. (The 1770 political cartoon showing him flying a kite in France had been oddly accurate, on this point at least.) If the fourth edition of the Experiments and Observations had expanded Franklin’s English-speaking audience, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg’s two-volume translation of his works, Oeuvres de M. Franklin (1773), strengthened his philosophical reputation on the Continent and hinted at a political radicalism Franklin himself had never publicly avowed. Three years later, this political character would come in handy in ways neither Barbeu-Dubourg nor Franklin could have anticipated.
The previous French edition of Franklin’s work was nearly twenty years old. Unless they read English, French natural philosophers had access to a mere fraction of his recent work. When Franklin made his second visit to France in 1769, just after the expanded English edition of his works had appeared, it was obvious that something needed to be done. Barbeu-Dubourg translated the 1769 English edition and added pieces from other sources (including Franklin’s letters to him). He also begged Franklin for some new tidbits to make the French product distinctive. Franklin dutifully expanded his treatment of swimming, to Barbeu-Dubourg’s delight—not even the landmark Encyclopédie had discussed swimming.61
Barbeu-Dubourg also introduced a new Franklin to the world. His “M. Franklin” may seem uncannily familiar—he is the mythic American we know quite well. In Britain, Franklin was a dignified figure of learning, moderate in religion and politics, completely at home in London, and fundamentally loyal to Great Britain. Barbeu-Dubourg’s Franklin, in contrast, was a wilderness autodidact, a Quakerish bundle of radical virtues, and an American at odds with British government. Franklin had worked with Barbeu-Dubourg on the edition. He presumably had his own reasons for wanting his French audience to see him as a radical figure who favored eccentric bodily therapies, the education of women, and the destruction of British tyranny. Maybe it provided a kind of release from his willed serenity and moderate politics in London.
Barbeu-Dubourg’s Franklin was a fleshed-out philosopher, not a brain without a body. If the English-speaking Franklin appeared in “undress,” his French counterpart was stark naked. He swam more, and he took an “air bath” that was most effective when entirely nude, the better to facilitate a healthy flow in and out of the pores in the skin. (This topic had been the subject of earlier letters to Barbeu-Dubourg, first evidence of Franklin’s nudism.) Barbeu-Dubourg found none of this scandalous. Of the Franklin-Stevenson correspondence, for instance, he was “persuaded that many fathers of families would wish such a Mentor for their daughters.”62
Barbeu-Dubourg lionized Franklin, body and soul, as an exemplar of the “peoples of America.” In the paragraph directly following the one on naked air baths, Barbeu-Dubourg addressed the “dissentions” between London and the colonies. His Franklin defended colonial rights against the British court, something Franklin himself did not do in the London editions of his works. Barbeu-Dubourg also mentioned his earlier translations of Franklin, including his hero’s 1766 interview before Parliament and his 1768 essay in the London Chronicle, the one that represented British ministers as winds that lashed colonial waves.63
By turning Franklin’s philosophical sagacity against Britain, Barbeu-Dubourg rendered him more appealing to a French audience. The French philosophes were discovering in America a boundless source of examples for their social theories. But this was tricky. How could they praise their former antagonists in several colonial wars? Barbeu-Dubourg needed his French readers to overlook the awkward fact of Franklin’s active military career in the Seven Years’ War and his considerable prejudice against the French—in his Canada pamphlet, Franklin had described New France as populated by “barbarous tribes of savages” who were “strongly attach’d” to France “by the art and indefatigable industry of [Catholic] priests.”64
The Quakers had stood aside from the recent warmongering, which may be why Barbeu-Dubourg did his best to transform Franklin into a Philadelphia Quaker, friendly to all, including the French. (There is no mention of Boston in Barbeu-Dubourg’s introduction, and London is only hinted at.) Philadelphia had sprung up, Barbeu-Dubourg explained, “in the midst of America’s savages” (au milieu des Sauvages de l’Amérique) and Franklin had been raised among “les Trembleurs (ou Quakers),” the pious pacifists who had been persecuted in England. It is not clear whether the editor knew the truth about his subject. But Franklin surely remembered his past, though he never corrected Barbeu-Dubourg’s version. (Maybe he closed his eyes, held his breath, and thought hard of his mother’s Quaker relations on Nantucket.)65
Barbeu-Dubourg’s portrait of Franklin as a cheerful, simple, life-and liberty-loving American was enhanced by the inclusion of the “Speech of Father Abraham,” the almost comically concise compendium of Poor Richard’s years of advice. Barbeu-Dubourg described it as a kind of “bonhomie,” economic sermons (leçons oeco-nomiques ) suited admirably to the spirit of Franklin’s native land.66
But above all, Franklin was a genius. Barbeu-Dubourg sandwiched Franklin’s less philosophical essays and letters among the pieces “de physique générale,” but it was those general essays on physics that gave readers the best sense of “la fécondité de son génie,” his fecund genius. Franklin had been labeled a philosopher and genius in English; now, in French, he was a philosophe endowed with génie.67
HIS FAME across the channel would prove useful in future, but for the moment, Franklin was more concerned about his authority in the British Atlantic world. He still expected that British officials and American colonists could reach some compromise, one in which Britain would gain cooperation and some revenue from the colonies without reducing Americans to second-class citizens. He may have been unduly optimistic because he worked for the Post Office, the one imperial service that clearly worked and pleased just about everyone.
It certainly worked for him. The avalanche of American groceries continued to arrive at Craven Street. In one 1773 instance of excessive affection, different members of Franklin’s family sent him six barrels of American apples within a month. He could, day
after blissful day, crunch into the fresh apples he loved. He could also snack on the “Applepye” he had praised, in the character of “Dr. Fatsides” (“the great Person”), in the “Cravenstreet Gazette,” which he wrote in 1770 to amuse the Stevensons. But six barrels was quite a load. If a contemporary barrel held about 365 apples and a pie generously used five apples, Mrs. Stevenson could have baked her lodger 438 pies. Even allowing for spoilage and snacking, that’s a lot of “applepye.”68
Franklin kept adding items to his list of American imports. He had long ago learned, in his father’s chandlery, to appreciate a good candle. Now, he disdained English candles and wanted only spermaceti ones from New England. He requested them, usually from his relatives and often as part of the regular exchange with them. Was this untaxed traffic legal? In a private letter, Franklin jokingly reported to Timothy Folger that Mrs. Stevenson was “vex’d to hear that the Box of Spermaceti Candles” Folger had tried to send her from Nantucket had been “seiz’d.” Stevenson, Franklin warned Folger, promised that “if ever she sees you again, she will put you in a way of making Reprisals. You know she is a Smuggler upon Principle; and she does not consider how averse you are to every thing of the kind.” Franklin was soon assuring Folger, unrepentently, “I have since received a Box of Spermaceti Candles from you that are excellent.”69
Other imports were legal, if unusual. Franklin asked his wife to send young American apple trees or their cuttings for a British friend; the fresh apples or pieces of pie might have been advertisements for American pippins. Deborah Franklin also sent pet squirrels for her husband to bestow on friends’ children, including the daughters of Jonathan Shipley, the Bishop of St. Asaph, who delighted over “Mungo” (killed by a dog and eulogized by Franklin) and “Beebee” (who lived to a good age for a squirrel). More than apples or even apple trees, the hapless squirrels showed Franklin’s authority over and trust in his network of ship’s captains, who, agreeing to transport the animals, accepted the delicate task of keeping them fed, watered, and out of the hands of ravenous, rodent-roasting midshipmen.70
These small, happy trades existed, however, within an otherwise quite troubled Atlantic economy. In 1767, the Townshend Duties had laid taxes on a variety of British manufactures imported into the colonies. Colonists responded with some well-organized boycotts. Franklin wrote pamphlets supporting them, deploying political arithmetic to defend continental colonists’ value to the empire. They were like geese that laid golden eggs: they generated revenue by voluntarily consuming British goods but might be killed by obtuse ministers of finance. Carried away with this idea, Franklin overstated the potential impact of Americans’ nonimportation of British goods. He predicted that “suspending our trade with the WEST INDIES will ruin every plantation there.”71
The less the colonies were regulated, Franklin maintained, the greater their wealth and ultimate contribution to the empire. The continental population was growing, America was expanding as a market for consumption, and colonists were increasingly able to navigate the continent and Atlantic themselves. When British ministers were anxious about the burgeoning colonial fishing trades, Franklin, writing as “N. N.,” advised them to regard colonial fishing, “coasting trade,” and commerce with the West Indies and Europe as activities that—independent of metropolitan regulation—would increase “the numbers of English seamen” and augment “our naval power.”72
Again, the colonists won. The Townshend Duties were removed in 1770, except for the tax on tea. Throughout the debate over the duties, Franklin mixed his messages. Americans could contribute to imperial might, he promised, but they would resist any attempt at close regulation.
Hydrography proved it. Warning Britain to anticipate a “populous and mighty” British America, one that could “shake off any Shackles that may be impos’d on her,” Franklin included among North America’s assets its “great navigable Rivers and Lakes.” When he read a 1770 pamphlet that described how the spread of colonial population would increase the costs of trade and transportation, he jabbed angry marginalia into his copy. North America was “full of Rivers and Lakes: which this Writer seems not to know.” In notes on agriculture and manufacturing that he made circa 1771, Franklin again stressed the power of internal navigation, though with tempered optimism. A mutually beneficial relationship among farmers and manufacturers was obvious but only if farms were “near the Sea or navigable Rivers . . . those distant will find it difficult.”73
Where American nature failed, canals might help. Canal building—like chemistry, soda water, India, and the Pacific Ocean—was a craze in the late eighteenth century. Franklin duly researched its possible use for landlocked colonists. In 1766, he had overheard a Dutch boatman say that slow progress in a canal resulted from a low level of water. Franklin thought this might result from displaced water ; the shallower the water, the more of it had to pass along the sides of the boat rather than underneath it, which would slow the boat. He “did not recollect to have met with any mention of this matter in our philosophical books,” so as he made his way around London, he chatted to Thames watermen. They confirmed that shallow water meant delay. In a wooden trough, Franklin conveyed a miniature boat by silk thread and pulley to perform eight timed experiments in 1768, each test at three different depths of water; the deepest water allowed the swiftest passage. He concluded that even if deeper canals cost more to build, they were cheaper to operate—horses could more easily drag boats in deep water.74
Franklin began keeping track of colonial canal projects, particularly in the mid-Atlantic region. In 1769, for example, he read of a possible canal between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays; from 1770 to 1772, he learned about plans to connect the Susquehanna and Schuylkill rivers. He researched the optimal construction of canal boats by consulting a Dutch authority; he solicited help from a British cartographer and surveyor. Thus, science assisted empire yet again, but the question remained: Could Britons and British Americans unite in efforts to improve the colonies?75
BY THAT TIME, the years 1771 to 1774, Franklin’s political involvement alternated between explosive confrontations and tranquil achievements. Remarkably, the pattern was also true of the philosophical topics he chose to address at the same time.
A political bomb landed early in 1771, when Lord Hillsborough took his revenge on Franklin, his pamphleteering opponent. Franklin had just been appointed agent for the Massachusetts Assembly. He called on Hillsborough, who, still Secretary of State for the American colonies, had to approve the appointment. The interview went badly. His lordship refused to acknowledge any appointment that did not carry the consent of the governor. This had indeed been the usual practice, though it had lapsed. Hillsborough’s insistence on it looked like a way to deny that colonists could choose their representative to the metropole (and a way to humiliate Franklin). Franklin was taken aback, Hillsborough was adamant, and both men lost their heads, Franklin worst of all, since he crossed a line by insulting his opponent. “It is,” he declared, “of no great importance whether the appointment is acknowledged or not.” Thus dismissing Hillsborough—and the authority he held—Franklin stormed out.76
It was only a momentary victory for Hillsborough, who was replaced by Lord Dartmouth in the summer of 1772. Franklin thought Dartmouth might broker a compromise over colonial affairs and left for his annual summer tour in a good mood. He had journeyed to Ireland, Scotland, and the north of England in the summer of 1771; he returned to the northwest part of England in 1772. It was very nearly a trip to the future, a form of time travel. In several of these places, Britain was quickly advancing into the industrial era and the age of steam. Franklin toured two different coal mines (one gradually sloped “80 Fathoms under the Surface of the Sea”) and several factories, two of them ironworks. He liked what he saw, even though what he was seeing was the production of the troublesome, taxable manufactures over which colonists and British ministers were squabbling.77
He remained torn over his place in the British Atlantic. Ret
urning to London in August 1772, Franklin confessed to his son that “a violent longing for home sometimes seizes me.” His situation in London was, however, very “agreeable.” There, he enjoyed “a general respect paid me by the learned,” the primary reason for his happiness. He also had many friends; “my company [is] so much desired that I seldom dine at home in winter, and could spend the whole summer in the country homes of inviting friends if I chose it.” (That October, Franklin fled to the home of Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Le Despencer, Postmaster General, while Mrs. Stevenson moved to another house on Craven Street.) Above all, Franklin confided, the new ministry promised less trouble over colonial affairs, and “the K[ing] too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard.”78
The royal attention was a first and entirely welcome to Franklin. Among all British monarchs, George III is still the one who received the best education in science. His (working) collection of scientific instruments—including electrical devices—was vast. He was in a position to appreciate Franklin’s expertise.79
But his service to the Crown led Franklin into an explosive scientific debate. Between 1763 and 1768, the royal powder magazine had been moved—very carefully—from Greenwich to Purfleet. Then, in 1769, lightning had struck the powder magazine in Brescia, Italy, killing more than a thousand people and destroying the town. In response to the disaster, Parliament passed two acts in 1771 and 1772 regulating private stores of gunpowder. In 1772, the Board of Ordnance also took a hard look at its powder-houses. Benjamin Wilson, who had painted Franklin’s portrait in 1759 (the men were both fellows of the Royal Society and remained on good terms) initially proposed to protect Purfleet with blunt-ended lightning rods. The board then consulted Franklin. He inspected the arsenal and recommended pointed conductors instead. The head of the Ordnance Board ordered the Franklin plan “executed as above proposed.” But someone worried over the difference between Wilson’s and Franklin’s plans, and the work stopped. The Board of Ordnance asked the Royal Society to adjudicate, which they did with a committee that included Wilson and Franklin.80
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