Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  His quest was driven by his usual mix of motives: control of the post would allow him to invigorate the American Philosophical Society, improve his publishing network by placing friends and relatives in postal jobs across America, and perhaps make some money. He installed his son as Philadelphia’s postmaster, and he later gave jobs in various towns to his brothers Peter and John, John’s stepson, his sister Jane’s son, two of Deborah’s relatives, and his New York printing partner James Parker.

  Franklin drew up typically detailed procedures for running the service more efficiently, established the first home-delivery system and dead letter office, and took frequent inspection tours. Within a year, he had cut to one day the delivery time of a letter from New York to Philadelphia. The reforms were costly, and he and Hunter incurred £900 in debt over their first four years. But then they started turning a profit, earning at least £300 a year apiece.

  By 1774, when the British fired him for his rebellious political stances, he would be making more than £700 a year. But an even greater benefit of the job, both to him and history, was that it furthered Franklin’s conception of the disparate American colonies as a potentially unified nation with shared interests and needs.12

  The Albany Plan for

  an American Union

  The summit of Pennsylvanians and Indians at Carlisle had done nothing to deter the French. Their goal was to confine the British settlers to the East Coast by building a series of forts along the Ohio River that would create a French arc from Canada to Louisiana. In response, Virginia’s governor sent a promising young soldier named George Washington to the Ohio valley in late 1753 to demand that the French vacate. He failed, but his vivid account of the mission made him a hero and a colonel. The following spring, he began a series of haphazard raids against the French forts that would grow into a full-scale war.

  Britain’s ministers had been wary of encouraging too much cooperation among their colonies, but the French threat now made it necessary. The Board of Trade in London thus asked each colony to send delegates to a conference in Albany, New York, in June 1754. They would have two missions: meeting with the Iroquois confederation to reaffirm their allegiance and discussing among themselves ways to create a more unified colonial defense.

  Cooperation among the colonies did not come naturally. Some of their assemblies declined the invitation, and most of the seven that accepted instructed their delegates to avoid any plan for colonial confederation. Franklin, on the other hand, was always eager to foster more unity. “It would be a very strange thing,” he had written his friend James Parker in 1751, “if six nations of ignorant savages [the Iroquois] could be capable of forming a scheme for such a union…and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary.”

  In his letter to Parker, Franklin sketched out a structure for colonial cooperation: there should be, he said, a General Council with delegates from all the colonies, in rough proportion to the amount each paid in taxes to the general treasury, and a governor appointed by the king. The meeting sites should rotate among the various colonial capitals, so delegates could better understand the rest of America, and money would be raised by a tax on liquor. Typically, he felt the council should arise voluntarily rather than being imposed by London. The best way to get it going, he thought, was to pick a handful of smart men to visit influential people throughout the colonies and enlist support. “Reasonable, sensible men can always make a reasonable scheme appear such to other reasonable men.”

  When news of Washington’s defeats reached Philadelphia in May 1754, just before the Albany conference, Franklin wrote an editorial in the Gazette. He blamed the French success “on the present disunited state of the British colonies.” Next to the article he printed the first and most famous editorial cartoon in American history: a snake cut into pieces, labeled with names of the colonies, with the caption: “Join, or Die.”13

  Franklin was one of the four commissioners (along with the Proprietor’s private secretary, Richard Peters, Thomas Penn’s nephew John, and Assembly Speaker Isaac Norris) chosen to represent Pennsylvania at the Albany Conference. The Assembly, to his regret, had gone on record against “propositions for a union of the colonies,” but Franklin was undeterred. He carried with him, as he left Philadelphia, a paper he had written called “Short Hints towards a Scheme for Uniting the Northern Colonies.” It had one modification from the union plan that he had described in his earlier letter to James Parker: because the colonial assemblies seemed recalcitrant, perhaps it would be best, if and when the commissioners in Albany adopted such a plan, to send it back to London “and an act of Parliament obtained for establishing it.”

  On a stopover in New York, Franklin shared with friends the plan he had drafted. In the meantime, Peters and others went shopping for the £500 of wampum the Assembly had authorized as gifts for the Indians: blankets, ribbons, gunpowder, guns, vermilion for face paint, kettles, and cloth. Then, on June 9, they left on a well-laden sloop for Albany with “a pipe of the oldest and best Madeira wine to be got.”14

  Before the Indians arrived, the twenty-four colonial commissioners gathered for their own discussions. New York governor James DeLancey proposed a plan to build two western forts, but it stalled because the delegates could not agree to share the costs. So a motion was passed, likely at Franklin’s instigation, that a committee be appointed “to prepare and receive plans or schemes for the union of the colonies.” Franklin was one of seven named to the committee, which offered a perfect venue for him to gather support for the plan he had in his pocket.

  In the meantime, the Indians arrived led by the Mohawk chief Tiyanoga, also known as Hendrick Peters. He was scornful. The Six Nations had been neglected, he said, “and when you neglect business, the French take advantage of it.” In another tirade he added, “Look at the French! They are men, they are fortifying everywhere. But, we are ashamed to say it, you are all like women.”

  After a week of discussions, the commissioners made a series of promises to the Indians: There would be more consultation on settlements and trade routes, certain land sales would be investigated, and laws would be passed to restrict the rum trade. The Indians, with little choice, accepted the presents and declared their covenant chain with the English to be “solemnly renewed.” Franklin was not impressed. “We brightened the chain with them,” he wrote Peter Collinson, “but in my opinion no assistance is to be expected from them in any dispute with the French until by a complete union among ourselves we are able to support them in case they should be attacked.”

  In his effort to forge such a union at Albany, Franklin’s key ally was a wealthy Massachusetts shipping merchant named Thomas Hutchinson. (Remember the name; he was later to become a fateful foe.) The plan that their committee approved was based on the one Franklin had written. There would be a national congress composed of representatives selected by each state roughly in proportion to their population and wealth. The executive would be a “President General” appointed by the king.

  At its core was a somewhat new concept that became known as federalism. A “General Government” would handle matters such as national defense and westward expansion, but each colony would keep its own constitution and local governing power. Though he was sometimes dismissed as more of a practitioner than a visionary, Franklin in Albany had helped to devise a federal concept—orderly, balanced, and enlightened—that would eventually form the basis for a unified American nation.

  On July 10, more than a week after the Indians had left Albany, the full group of commissioners finally voted on the plan. Some New York delegates opposed it, as did Isaac Norris, the Quaker leader of Pennsylvania’s Assembly, but it nevertheless passed rather easily. Only a few revisions had been made to the scheme sketched out in the “Short Hints” that Franklin had carried with him to Albany, and he accepted them in the spirit of compromise. “When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair,”
he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, “one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater.” It was a sentiment he would express in similar words when he became the key conciliator at the Constitutional Convention thirty-three years later.

  The commissioners decided that the plan should be sent both to the colonial assemblies and to Parliament for approval, and Franklin promptly launched a public campaign on its behalf. This included a spirited exchange of open letters with Massachusetts governor William Shirley, who argued that the king rather than the colonial assemblies should choose the federal congress. Franklin replied with a principle that would be at the heart of the struggles ahead: “It is supposed an undoubted right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own consent given through their representatives.”

  It was to no avail. The Albany Plan was rejected by all of the colonial assemblies for usurping too much of their power, and it was shelved in London for giving too much power to voters and encouraging a dangerous unity among the colonies. “The assemblies did not adopt it as they all thought there was too much prerogative in it,” Franklin recalled, “and in England it was judged to have too much of the democratic.”

  Looking back on it near the end of his life, Franklin was convinced that the acceptance of his Albany Plan could have prevented the Revolution and created a harmonious empire. “The colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves,” he reasoned. “There would then have been no need of troops from England; of course the subsequent pretence for taxing America, and the bloody contest it occasioned, would have been avoided.”

  On that score he was probably mistaken. Further conflicts over Britain’s right to tax her colonies and keep them subservient were almost inevitable. But for the next two decades, Franklin would struggle to find a harmonious solution even as he became more convinced of the need for the colonies to unite.15

  Catherine Ray

  After the Albany Conference, Franklin embarked on a tour of his postal realms that culminated in a visit to Boston. He had not been back there since before his mother’s death two years earlier, and he spent time with his sprawling family, arranging jobs and apprenticeships. While staying with his brother John, he met an entrancing young woman who became the first intriguing example of his many amorous and romantic—but probably never consummated—flirtations.

  Catherine Ray was a lively and fresh 23-year-old from Block Island, whose sister was married to John Franklin’s stepson. Franklin, then 48, was immediately both charmed and charming. She was a great talker; so too was Franklin, when he wanted to flatter, and he was also a great listener. They played a game where he tried to guess her thoughts; she called him a conjurer and relished his attention. She made sugarplums; he insisted they were the best he’d ever eaten.

  When it came time, after a week, for her to leave Boston to visit another sister in Newport, he decided to accompany her. Along the way, their poorly shod horses had trouble on the icy hills; they got caught in cold rains and on one occasion took a wrong turn. But they would recall, years later, the fun they had talking for hours, exploring ideas, gently flirting. After two days with her family in Newport, he saw her off on the boat to Block Island. “I stood on the shore,” he wrote her shortly afterward, “and looked after you, until I could no longer distinguish you, even with my glass.”

  He left for Philadelphia slowly and with reluctance, loitering on the way for weeks. When he finally arrived home, there was a letter from her. Over the next few months he would write her six times, and through the course of their lives more than forty letters would pass between them. Franklin didn’t save most of her letters, perhaps out of prudence, but the correspondence that does survive reveals a remarkable friendship and provides insights into Franklin’s relations with women.

  From reading their letters, and reading between the lines, one gets the impression that Franklin made a few playful advances that Caty gently deflected, and he seemed to respect her all the more for it. “I write this during a Northeaster storm of snow,” he said in the first one he sent after their meeting. “The snowy fleeces which are pure as your virgin innocence, white as your lovely bosom—and as cold.” In a letter a few months later, he spoke of life, math, and the role of “multiplication” in marriage, adding roguishly: “I would gladly have taught you that myself, but you thought it was time enough, and wouldn’t learn.”

  Nevertheless, Caty’s letters to him were filled with ardor. “Absence rather increases than lessens my affections,” she wrote. “Love me one thousandth part so well as I do you.” She was soulful and tearful in her letters, which conveyed her affection for him yet also described the men who were courting her. She begged him to destroy them after he had finished reading them. “I have said a thousand things that nothing should have tempted me to say.”

  Franklin reassured her that he would be discreet. “You may write freely everything you think fit, without the least apprehension of any person’s seeing your letters but myself,” he promised. “I know very well that the most innocent expressions of warm friendship…between persons of different sexes are liable to be misinterpreted by suspicious minds.” That, he explained, was why he was being circumspect in his own letters. “Though you say more, I say less than I think.”

  And so we are left with a set of surviving letters that are filled with nothing more than tantalizing flirtations. She sent him some sugarplums that she had marked with (one assumes) a kiss. “They are every one sweetened as you used to like,” she said. He replied, “The plums came safe, and were so sweet from the cause you mentioned that I could scarce taste the sugar.” He spoke of the “pleasures of life” and noted that “I still have them all in my power.” She wrote of spinning a long strand of thread, and he replied, “I wish I had hold of one end of it, to pull you to me.”

  How did his loyal and patient wife, Deborah, fit into this type of long-distance flirtation? Oddly enough, he seemed to use her as a shield, both with Caty and the other young women he later toyed with, to keep his relationships just on the safe side of propriety. He invariably invoked Deborah’s name and praised her virtues in almost every letter he wrote to Caty. It was as if he wanted Caty to keep her ardor in perspective and to realize that, though his affection was real, his flirtations were merely playful. Or, perhaps, once his sexual advances had been rebuffed, he wanted to show (or to pretend) that they had not been serious. “I almost forgot I had a home,” he wrote to Caty in describing his trip back from their first encounter. But soon he began “to think of and wish for home, and as I drew nearer I found the attraction stronger and stronger.” So he sped ever faster, he wrote, “to my own house and to the arms of my good old wife and children, where I remain, thanks to God.”

  Later that fall, he was even more explicit in reminding Caty that he was a married man. When she sent him a present of cheese, he replied, “Mrs. Franklin was very proud that a young lady should have so much regard for her old husband as to send such a present. We talk of you every time it comes to table.” Indeed, there was an interesting aspect to this and subsequent letters he wrote to her: they revealed less about the nature of his relationship with Caty than about the relationship, less passionate but deeply comfortable, that he had with his wife. As he told Caty, “She is sure you are a sensible girl and…talks of bequeathing me to you as a legacy. But I ought to wish you a better, and hope she will live these hundred years; for we are grown old together, and if she has any faults I am so used to them that I don’t perceive them…Let us join in wishing the old lady a long life and happy.”

  Instead of merely continuing their flirtation, Franklin also began to provide Caty with paternal exhortations about duty and virtue. “Be a good girl,” he urged, “until you get a good husband; then stay at home, and nurse the children, and live like a Christian.” He hoped that when he next visited her, he would find her surrounded by “plump, juicy, blushing pretty little rogues, like their mama.” And so it happened. The next t
ime they met, she was married to William Greene, a future governor of Rhode Island, with whom she would have six children.16

  So what are we to make of their relationship? Clearly, there were sweet hints of romantic attraction. But unless Franklin was dissembling in his letters in order to protect her reputation (and his), the joy came from fun fancies rather than physical realities. It was probably typical of the many flirtations he would have with younger women over the years: slightly naughty in a playful way, flattering to both parties, filled with intimations of intimacy, engaging both the heart and the mind. Despite a reputation for lecherousness that he did little to dispel, there is no evidence of any serious sexual affair he had after his marriage to Deborah.

  Claude-Anne Lopez, a former editor of the Franklin Papers project at Yale, has spent years researching his private life. Her analysis of the type of relationships he had with women such as Catherine Ray seems both astute and credible:

  A romance? Yes, but a romance in the Franklinian manner, somewhat risqué, somewhat avuncular, taking a bold step forward and an ironic step backward, implying that he is tempted as a man but respectful as a friend. Of all shades of feeling, this one, the one the French call amité amoureuse—a little beyond the platonic but short of the grand passion—is perhaps the most exquisite.17

  Franklin only occasionally forged intimate bonds with his male friends, who tended to be either intellectual companions or jovial club colleagues. But he relished being with women, and he formed deep and lasting relationships with many. For him, such relationships were not a sport or trifling amusement, despite how they might appear, but a pleasure to be savored and respected. Throughout his life, Franklin would lose many male friends, but he never lost a female one, including Caty Ray. As he would tell her thirty-five years later, just a year before he died, “Among the felicities of my life I reckon your friendship.”18