Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Supplying General Braddock

  When he returned to Philadelphia in early 1755 after his dalliance with Caty Ray, Franklin was able, for the moment, to forge a workable relationship with most of the political leaders there. The Proprietors had appointed a new governor, Robert Hunter Morris, and Franklin assured him that he would have a comfortable tenure “if you will only take care not to enter into any dispute with the Assembly.” Morris responded half-jokingly. “You know I love disputing,” he said. “It is one of my greatest pleasures.” Nevertheless, he promised to “if possible avoid them.”

  Franklin likewise worked hard to avoid disputes with the new governor, especially when it involved the issue of protecting Pennsylvania’s frontier. So he was pleased when the British decided to send Gen. Edward Braddock to America with the mission of pushing the French out of the Ohio valley, and he supported Governor Morris’s request that the Assembly appropriate funds to supply the troops.

  Once again, the members insisted that the Proprietors’ estates be taxed. Franklin proposed some clever schemes involving loans and excise taxes designed to break the impasse, but he was not able to resolve the issue right away. So he took on the mission of finding other ways to make sure that Braddock got the necessary supplies.

  A delegation of three governors—Morris of Pennsylvania, Shirley of Massachusetts, and DeLancey of New York—had been chosen to meet with the general on his arrival in Virginia. The Pennsylvania Assembly wanted Franklin to be part of the delegation, as did his friend Governor Shirley, and Franklin was eager to be involved. So he joined the group wearing his postmaster hat, ostensibly to help arrange ways to facilitate Braddock’s communications. Along the way, he impressed his fellow delegation members with his scientific curiosity. Encountering a small whirlwind, Franklin rode his horse into it, studied its effects, and even tried to break it up with his whip.19

  General Braddock was brimming with arrogance. “I see nothing that can obstruct my march to Niagara,” he crowed. Franklin cautioned that he should be wary of Indian ambushes. Replied Braddock: “These savages may be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they would make any impression.” As Franklin later recalled, “He had too much self-confidence.”

  What he lacked, besides humility, were supplies. Because the Americans had come up with only a fraction of the horses and wagons promised, he declared his intention to return home. Franklin interceded. Pennsylvanians would rally to his cause, he said. The general promptly designated Franklin to be in charge of procuring the equipment.

  The broadsides that Franklin wrote advertising Braddock’s need to hire horses and wagons played on fear, self-interest, and patriotism. The general had proposed to seize the horses and compel Americans into service, he said, but had been prevailed on instead to try “fair and equitable means.” The terms were good, Franklin argued: “The hire of these wagons and horses will amount to upwards of £30,000, which will be paid you in silver and gold and the King’s money.” As an inducement, he assured the farmers that “the service will be light and easy.” Finally came a threat that if voluntary offers did not come, “your loyalty will be strongly suspected,” “violent measures will probably be used,” and a “Hussar with a body of soldiers will immediately enter the province.”

  Franklin acted selflessly, indeed remarkably so. When the farmers said they were unwilling to trust the financial pledges of an unknown general, Franklin gave his personal bond that they would receive full payment. His son, William, helped him sign up the farmers, and within two weeks they had procured 259 horses and 150 wagons.20

  General Braddock was thrilled with Franklin’s performance, and the Assembly profusely commended him as well. But Governor Morris, not heeding Franklin’s advice to avoid disputes, could not resist attacking the Assembly for being of little help. This upset Franklin, but he still tried to be a conciliator. “I am heartily sick of our present situation: I like neither the governor’s conduct nor the Assembly’s,” he wrote his London friend Collinson, “and having some share in the confidence of both, I have endeavored to reconcile them, but in vain.”

  Ever collegial, Franklin was able to remain on good personal terms with the governor for the time being. “You must go home with me and spend the evening,” Morris said one day on meeting him on the street. “I am to have some company that you will like.” One guest told the tale of Sancho Panza, who, when offered a government, requested that his subjects be blacks so that he could sell them if they gave him trouble. “Why do you continue to side with these damned Quakers?” he asked Franklin. “Had not you better sell them? The Proprietors would give you a good price.” Franklin replied, “The governor has not yet blacked them enough.”

  Though everyone laughed, the fissures were deepening. By attempting to blacken the reputation of the Assembly, Franklin later wrote, Morris had “negrofied himself.” Morris likewise had begun to distrust Franklin. In a letter to Proprietor Thomas Penn, he charged that Franklin was “as much a favorer of the unreasonable claims of American assemblies as any man whatever.”21

  In the meantime, Braddock was confidently marching west. Most Philadelphians were sure that he would prevail, and they even launched a collection to buy fireworks to celebrate. Franklin, more cautious, refused to contribute. “The events of war are subject to great uncertainty,” he warned.

  His worries were warranted. The British army was ambushed and routed, and Braddock was killed along with two-thirds of his soldiers. “Who would have thought it?” Braddock whispered to an aide just before he died. Among the few survivors was the American colonel George Washington, who had two horses shot out from under him and four bullets pierce his clothing.

  Adding to Franklin’s distress was the financial exposure he faced because of the loans he had personally guaranteed. These “amounted to near £20,000, which to pay would have ruined me,” he recalled. Just as the farmers began to sue him, Massachusetts governor Shirley, now the general of the British troops, came to his rescue and ordered that the farmers be paid from the army’s funds.

  Braddock’s disaster increased the threat from the French and Indians, and it deepened the political rift in Philadelphia. The Assembly quickly passed a bill appropriating £50,000 for defense, but again it insisted a tax be placed on all lands, “those of the proprietors not excepted.” Governor Morris rejected it, demanding that the word “not” be changed to “only.”

  Franklin was furious. No longer casting himself as a mediator, he wrote the reply that the Assembly sent to Morris. He called the governor a “hateful instrument of reducing a free people to the abject state of vassalage,” and he accused Proprietor Thomas Penn of “taking advantage of public calamity” and trying “to force down their throats laws of imposition abhorrent to common justice and common reason.”

  Franklin became particularly enraged when he learned that Morris was required by a secret clause in his commission as governor to reject any tax on the Proprietary estates. In another message from the Assembly a week later, responding to Morris’s objection to the use of the word “vassalage,” Franklin wrote of Penn: “Our lord would have us defend his estate at our own expense! This is not merely vassalage, it is worse than any vassalage we have heard of; it is something we have no adequate name for; it is even more slavish than slavery itself.” In a subsequent message, he added what would become a revolutionary cry: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

  In the end, a series of patchwork compromises was reached. The Proprietors, on gauging the Assembly’s anger, agreed to a voluntary contribution of £5,000 to supplement whatever the Assembly raised. Although that defused the immediate crisis, the principle remained unresolved. More significant, for himself and for history, Franklin had abandoned his long-standing aversion to dispute. Henceforth he would become an increasingly fervent foe of the Proprietors.22

 
Colonel Franklin of the Militia

  The issue of how to pay for frontier defense had been settled, for the time being, by the uneasy compromises between the Assembly and the Proprietors. To Franklin fell the task of figuring out how to spend the money and raise a militia. He pushed through a bill to create a force that was purely voluntary, thus securing the support of the Quakers, and then published an imaginary discourse designed to rally support for the plan. One character, objecting to the idea that the Quakers did not have to join, declares, “Hang me if I’ll fight to save the Quakers.” Replies his friend: “That is to say you won’t pump ship, because it will save the rats as well as yourself.”

  Franklin’s plan was modeled on the Association Militia he had organized in 1747, but this time it would be under the aegis of the government. Once again, he spelled out at length the details of training, organization, and election of officers. In one letter he also came up with a very specific scheme for using dogs as scouts. “They should be large, strong and fierce,” he wrote, “and every dog led in a slip strong to prevent them tiring themselves by running out and in and discovering the party by barking at squirrels.”

  Governor Morris grudgingly accepted Franklin’s militia bill, though he disliked the provisions making it voluntary and allowing the democratic election of officers. Even more distressing was that Franklin had become the de facto leader and most powerful man in the colony. “Since Mr. Franklin has put himself at the head of the Assembly,” Morris warned Penn, his followers “are using every means in their power, even while their country is invaded, to wrest the government out of your hands.” For his part, Franklin had developed a burning contempt for Morris. “This man is half a madman,” he wrote the Assembly’s lobbyist in London.23

  The Proprietors’ fears were not calmed when Franklin donned a military uniform and, along with his son, headed to the frontier to oversee the construction of a line of stockades. He spent the week of his fiftieth birthday, in January 1756, camping at the Lehigh Gap and dining on the provisions that his dutiful wife had sent. “We have enjoyed your roast beef and this day began on the roast veal,” he wrote her. “Citizens that have their dinners hot know nothing of good eating; we find it in much greater perfection when the kitchen is four score miles from the dining room.”

  Franklin enjoyed his stint as a frontier commander. Among his clever accomplishments was devising a reliable method for getting the five hundred soldiers under his command to attend worship services: he assigned to the militia’s chaplain the task of doling out the daily allotments of rum right after his services. “Never were prayers more generally and punctually attended.” He also found time to observe and record, in his wry way, the customs of the local Moravians, who believed in arranged marriages. “I objected if the matches were not made by the mutual choice of the parties, some of them may chance to be very unhappy,” Franklin recounted. “‘And so they may,’ answered my informer, ‘if you let the parties choose for themselves,’ which indeed I could not deny.”24

  After seven weeks on the frontier, Franklin returned to Philadelphia. Despite the worries of the Proprietors and their governor, he had little desire to play the hero on horseback or parlay his popularity into political power. Indeed, he hurried his return so that he arrived late at night to avoid the triumphant welcome that his supporters had planned.

  He did not, however, decline when the militia’s Philadelphia regiment elected him their colonel. Governor Morris, who had reluctantly sought Franklin’s help during the crisis, balked at approving the selection. But he had little choice, as Franklin’s militia bill called for the democratic selection of officers, and after a few weeks he grudgingly assented.

  Throughout his life, Franklin would find himself torn (and amused) by the conflict between his professed desire to acquire the virtue of humility and his natural thirst for acclaim. His tenure as a colonel was no exception. He could not refrain from indulging his vanity by scheduling a grand public review of his troops. More than a thousand marched past his Market Street house with great pomp and ceremony. Each company arrived to the sounds of fifes and oboes, showed off their freshly painted cannons, and then fired off a volley to herald the arrival of the next company. The shots, he later noted wryly, “shook down and broke several glasses of my electrical apparatus.”

  When he left a few weeks later on a postal inspection trip, “the officers of my regiment took it into their heads that it would be proper for them to escort me out of town.” They drew their swords and accompanied him to the ferry, which infuriated Thomas Penn when he read of it in London. “This silly affair,” Franklin noted, “greatly increased his rancor against me…and he instanced this parade with my officers as a proof of my having an intention to take the government of the province out of his hands by force.” Franklin was likewise “chagrined” by the display, or at least so he said in retrospect. “I had not been previously acquainted with the project or I should have prevented it, being naturally averse to the assuming of state on any occasion.”

  In fairness to Franklin, he was never the type of person who liked to revel in public ceremony or the pomposity and perks of power. When Penn and his allies sought to neutralize him by forming rival militias in Philadelphia and then convincing the king’s ministers to nullify his militia act, Franklin responded by readily surrendering his commission. In a reflective letter to his friend Peter Collinson, he admitted that he enjoyed the public affection but realized that he should not allow it to go to his head. “The people happen to love me,” he wrote, but then added, “Forgive your friend a little vanity, as it’s only between ourselves…You are now ready to tell me that popular favor is a most uncertain thing. You are right. I blush at having valued myself so much upon it.”25

  A New Mission

  Franklin’s days as a dexterous politician, one who was willing and able to seek pragmatic compromises in times of crisis, were temporarily over. At the height of earlier tensions, he had enjoyed occasional amiable consultations and social interactions with Governor Morris, but that was no longer the case. Morris and others in the Proprietary faction were doing whatever they could to humiliate him, and for a while he talked of moving to Connecticut or even out west to help start a colony in the Ohio region.

  So his postal inspection trip to Virginia was a welcome respite, one he extended for as long as possible. From Williamsburg he wrote to his wife that he was “as gay as a bird, not beginning yet to long for home, the worry of perpetual business being fresh in my memory.” He met with Colonel Washington and other acquaintances, marveled at the size of the peaches, accepted an honorary degree from William & Mary, and rode through the countryside inspecting postal accounts at a leisurely pace.

  When he finally returned home after more than a month, the atmosphere of Philadelphia was even more polarized. The Proprietors’ secretary, Richard Peters, conspired with William Smith, whom Franklin had recruited to run the Pennsylvania Academy, to oust him from the presidency of that board. Smith had been writing harsh attacks on Franklin, and the two men stopped speaking to each other, another in the line of rifts he had with male friends.

  Late that summer of 1756, there was a brief period of hope for restored civility when a professional military man, William Denny, replaced Morris as governor. All sides hastened to greet and embrace him. At his festive inaugural dinner, he took Franklin aside to a private room and tried to cultivate him. Drinking liberally from a decanter of Madeira, Denny profusely flattered Franklin, which was a smart approach, and then tried to bribe him with financial promises, which wasn’t. If Franklin’s opposition abated, Denny promised, he could “depend on adequate acknowledgments and recompenses.” Franklin replied that “my circumstances, thanks to God, were such as to make proprietary favors unnecessary to me.”

  Denny was less fastidious about financial inducements. Like his predecessor, he confronted the Assembly by rejecting bills that taxed the Proprietary estates, but he later reversed himself, without permission from the Penns, on being
offered a generous salary by the Assembly.

  The Assembly, in the meantime, decided that the obstinacy of the Proprietors could no longer be tolerated. In January 1757, the members voted to send Franklin to London as their agent. His goal, at least initially, would be to lobby the Proprietors to be more accommodating to the Assembly over taxation and other matters, and then, if that failed, to take up the Assembly’s cause with the British government.

  Peters, the Proprietors’ secretary, was worried. “B.F.’s view is to effect a change of government,” he wrote Penn in London, “and considering the popularity of his character and the reputation gained by his electricity discoveries, which will introduce him into all sorts of company, he may prove a dangerous enemy.” Penn was more sanguine. “Mr. Franklin’s popularity is nothing here,” he replied. “He will be looked upon coldly by great people.”

  In fact, Peters and Penn would both turn out to be right. Franklin set sail in June 1757 with the firm belief that the colonists should forge a closer union among themselves and be accorded their full rights and liberties as subjects of the British Crown. But he held these views as a proud and loyal Englishman, one who sought to strengthen his majesty’s empire rather than seek independence for the American colonies. Only much later, after he was indeed looked on coldly by great people in London, would Franklin prove a dangerous enemy to the imperial cause.26

  *Roughly equivalent to $128,000 in 2002 dollars. See page 507 for currency equivalents.