Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  That is why it was a rude surprise to Franklin when, shortly after his arrival, he met Lord Granville, the president of the Privy Council, the group of top ministers who acted for the king. “You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your constitution,” Lord Granville said. The instructions given to colonial governors were “the law of the land,” and colonial legislatures had no right to ignore them. Franklin replied that “this was new doctrine to me.” The colonial charters specified that the laws were to be made by the colonial assemblies, he argued; although the governors could veto them, they could not dictate them. “He assured me that I was totally mistaken,” recalled Franklin, who was so alarmed that he wrote the conversation down verbatim as soon as he returned to Craven Street.15

  Franklin’s interpretation had merit. Years earlier, Parliament had rejected a clause that would give the power of law to governors’ instructions. But the rebuke from Granville, who happened to be an in-law of the Penns, served as a warning that the Proprietors’ interpretation had support in court circles.

  A few days later, in August 1757, Franklin began a series of meetings with the primary Proprietor, Thomas Penn, and his brother Richard. He was already acquainted with Thomas, who had lived for a while in Philadelphia and even had bookplates printed at Franklin’s shop (though Franklin’s account books show he did not pay all of his bills). Initially, the sessions were cordial; both sides proclaimed their desire to be reasonable. But as Franklin later noted, “I suppose each party had its own idea of what should be meant by reasonable.”16

  The Penns asked for the Assembly’s case in writing, which Franklin produced in two days. Entitled “Heads of Complaint,” Franklin’s memo demanded that the appointed governor be allowed “use of his best discretion,” and it called the Proprietors’ demand to be exempt from the taxes that helped defend their land “unjust and cruel.” More provocative than its substance was the informal style Franklin used; he did not address the paper to the Penns directly or use their correct title of “True and Absolute Proprietaries.”

  Offended by the snub, the Penns advised Franklin that he should henceforth deal only through their lawyer, Ferdinand John Paris. Franklin refused. He considered Paris a “proud, angry man,” who had developed a “mortal enmity” toward him. The impasse served the Proprietors’ ends; for a year they avoided giving any response while waiting for legal rulings from the government’s lawyers.17

  Franklin’s famous ability to be calm and congenial abandoned him at a rancorous meeting with Thomas Penn in January 1758. At issue was Penn’s right to veto the Assembly’s appointment of a set of commissioners to deal with the Indians. But Franklin used the meeting to assert the broader claim that the Assembly had powers in Pennsylvania comparable to those that Parliament had in Britain. He argued that Penn’s revered father, William Penn, had expressly given such rights to Pennsylvania’s Assembly in his 1701 “Charter of Privileges” granted to the colonists.

  Thomas replied that the royal charter held by his father did not give him the power to make such a grant. “If my father granted privileges he was not by the royal charter empowered to grant,” Penn said, “nothing can be claimed by such a grant.”

  Franklin replied, “If then your father had no right to grant the privileges he pretended to grant, and published all over Europe as granted, those who came to settle in the province…were deceived, cheated and betrayed.”

  “The royal charter was no secret,” Penn responded. “If they were deceived, it was their own fault.”

  Franklin was not entirely correct. William Penn’s 1701 charter in fact declared that the Pennsylvania Assembly would have the “power and privileges of an assembly, according to the rights of the free-born subjects of England, and as is usual in any of the King’s Plantations in America,” and thus was subject to some interpretation. Franklin was nevertheless furious. In a vivid description of the row, written to Assembly Speaker Isaac Norris, Franklin used words that would later, when the letter leaked public, destroy any chance he had to be an effective lobbyist with the Proprietors: “[Penn spoke] with a kind of triumphing, laughing insolence, such as a low jockey might do when a purchaser complained that he had cheated him in a horse. I was astonished to see him thus meanly give up his father’s character, and conceived at that moment a more cordial and thorough contempt for him than I have ever before felt for any man living.”

  Franklin found his face growing warm, his temper starting to rise. So he was careful to say little that would betray his emotions. “I made no other answer,” he recalled, “than that the poor people were no lawyers themselves, and confiding in his father, did not think it necessary to consult any.”18

  The venomous meeting was a turning point in Franklin’s mission. Penn refused any further personal negotiations, described Franklin as looking like a “malicious villain,” and declared that “from this time I will not have any conversation with him on any pretence.” Whenever they subsequently ran into one another, Franklin reported, “there appears in his wretched countenance a strange mixture of hatred, anger, fear and vexation.”

  Abandoning his usual pragmatism, Franklin began to vent his anger to allies back in Pennsylvania. “My patience with the Proprietors is almost, though not quite, spent,” he wrote his Pennsylvania ally Joseph Galloway. He was, along with his son, preparing to publish a history of the Pennsylvania disputes, one “in which the Proprietors will be gibbeted up as they deserve, to rot and stink in the nostrils of posterity.”19

  Franklin’s ability to act as an agent was thus pretty much over, at least for the time being. He was nevertheless still able to provide his Philadelphia friends with inside intelligence, such as advance word that the Penns were planning to fire Gov. William Denny, who had violated his instructions by allowing a compromise that taxed the Proprietary estates. “It was to have been kept a secret from me,” he wrote Deborah, adding with a bit of Poor Richard’s wit: “So you may make a secret of it too, if you please, and oblige all your friends with it.”

  He also was effective, as he had been since a teenager, at using the press to wage a propaganda campaign. Writing anonymously in Strahan’s paper, the London Chronicle, he decried the actions of the Penns as being contrary to the interests of Britain. A letter signed by William Franklin, but clearly written with the help of his father, attacked the Penns more personally, and it was reprinted in a book on the history of Pennsylvania that Franklin helped compile.20

  As the summer of 1758 approached, Franklin faced two choices: he could return home to his family, as planned, but his mission would have been a failure. Or he could, instead, spend his time traveling through England and enjoying the acclaim he found among his intellectual admirers.

  There is no sign that Franklin found it a difficult decision. “I have no prospect of returning until next Spring,” he reported to Deborah rather coolly that June. He would spend the summer, he reported, wandering the countryside. “I depend chiefly on these intended journeys for the establishment of my health.” As for Deborah’s complaints about her own health, Franklin was only mildly solicitous: “It gives me concern to receive such frequent accounts of your being indisposed; but we both of us grow in years, and must expect our constitutions, though tolerably good in themselves, will by degrees give way to the infirmities of age.”

  His letters remained, as always, kindly and chatty but hardly romantic. They tended to be paternalistic, perhaps a bit condescending at times, and they were certainly not as intellectually engaging as those to his sister Jane Mecom or Polly Stevenson. But they do convey some genuine fondness and even devotion. He appreciated Deborah’s sensible practicality and the accommodating nature of their partnership. And for the most part, she seemed accepting of the arrangement they had made long ago and generally content about staying ensconced in her comfortable home and familiar neighborhood, rather than having to follow him on his far-flung travels. Their correspondence contained, until near the end, only occasional reproaches from either side, and he dut
ifully provided gossip, instructions about how to dismantle his lightning rod bells, and some old-fashioned advice about women and politics. “You are very prudent not to engage in party disputes,” he wrote at one point. “Women should never meddle in them except in endeavors to reconcile their husbands, brothers and friends, who happen to be on contrary sides. If your sex can keep cool, you may be a means of cooling ours the sooner.”

  Franklin was likewise solicitous, but again only mildly so, about the daughter he had left behind. He expressed his happiness at receiving a portrait of Sally, and he sent her a white hat and cloak, some sundries, and a buckle made of French paste stones. “They cost three guineas, and are said to be cheap at that price,” he wrote. If he felt the tug of his family, it was not particularly strong, because he had a mirror one in London. As he noted in a cavalier postscript to a rambling letter to Deborah that June, “Mrs. Stevenson and her daughter desire me to present their respects.”21

  William and the Family Tree

  William Franklin, perhaps in reaction to being referred to regularly by his family’s enemies as a base-born bastard, had a yearning for social status that was far greater than his father’s. Among the most thumbed of his books was one titled The True Conduct of Persons of Quality, and in London he liked to frequent the fashionable homes of the young earls and dukes instead of the coffeehouses and intellectual salons favored by his father. Both in his social world and in his legal studies at the Inns of Court, where his father enrolled him, William would eventually be tugged toward a more Tory and loyalist outlook. But the change would be gradual, fitful, and filled with personal conflicts.

  Before leaving Philadelphia, William had been courting a well-born young debutante named Elizabeth Graeme. Her father, Dr. Thomas Graeme, a physician and member of the Governor’s Council, owned a grand home on Society Hill and a three-hundred-acre country estate considered the finest in the Philadelphia area. Her mother was the stepdaughter of Benjamin Franklin’s unreliable patron Governor Keith. The relationship between the Graemes and the Franklins was strained; Dr. Graeme had felt insulted when the elder Franklin did not initially enlist him to run the staff of the new Philadelphia Hospital, and he was a close friend of the Penn family in its struggle with the Assembly.

  Nevertheless, with the grudging assent of Dr. Graeme, the relationship had progressed to the point where Elizabeth tentatively accepted William’s offer of marriage. She was 18, he close to ten years older. It came with a stipulation: William would withdraw from any involvement in politics. She refused, however, to accompany him to London or to marry him before he left. They would, both agreed, await his return to be married.

  Once in England, William’s ardor for her apparently cooled far more than his ardor for politics. After a short note on his arrival, he did not write her again for five months. Gone were the flowery clichés he had once penned about their love, replaced instead with descriptions of the joy of “this bewitching country.” Worse yet, he proudly sent her the political screed he had signed in the London Chronicle attacking the Proprietors, and he went so far as to solicit her opinion of how the article was received back in Philadelphia.

  Thus ended the relationship. She waited months before sending a cold and bitter response, which labeled him “a collection of party malice.” The next day he replied, through a mutual friend, that the fault lay with her fickleness and he would be glad to see her find happiness with another man. For his part, William was finding his own happiness, both with the fashionable ladies of London and, too much his father’s son, occasionally with prostitutes and other women of low repute.22

  Benjamin Franklin, who had mixed emotions about the relationship, seemed unfazed by the breakup. His own hope was that his son would marry Polly Stevenson. There was little chance of that, as William’s social aspirations were higher than those of his father. Indeed, William was developing social and financial airs that had begun to worry Franklin. So he began an effort, which would later become a theme in the section of his autobiography that was written ostensibly as a letter to his son, to restrain William from putting on upper-class pretensions. It would ultimately prove futile and become, as much as politics, a cause of their estrangement.

  Years earlier, Franklin had warned William not to expect much of an inheritance. “I have assured him that I intend to spend what little I have myself,” he wrote his own mother. Once in England, Franklin kept a meticulous account of all of William’s expenses—including meals, lodging, clothing, and books—with the understanding that they were advances that must someday be repaid. By 1758, even as he was pampering himself a bit with a carriage at Pennsylvania’s expense, Franklin was warning his son to be more frugal on meals and to avoid becoming attached to a high style of London living. William, who was traveling with friends in the south of England, was cowed. “I am extremely obliged to you for your care in supplying me with money,” he wrote, adding that he had changed his lodgings for something “much for the worse, though cheaper.”23

  As part of his effort to keep his son rooted in his “middling” heritage, Franklin took him on a genealogical excursion during the summer of 1758. They traveled to Ecton, about sixty miles northwest of London, where generations of Franklins had lived before Josiah had migrated to America. Still living nearby was Franklin’s first cousin Mary Franklin Fisher, daughter of Josiah’s brother Thomas. She was “weak with age,” Franklin noted, but “seems to have been a very smart, sensible woman.”

  At the parish church, the Franklins uncovered two hundred years of birth, marriage, and death records of their family. The rector’s wife entertained them with stories of Franklin’s uncle Thomas, whose life bore some resemblance to that of his nephew. As Franklin reported to Deborah:

  [Thomas Franklin was] a very leading man in all county affairs, and much employed in public business. He set on foot a subscription for erecting chimes in their steeple, and completed it, and we heard them play. He found out an easy method of saving their village meadows from being drowned, as they used to be sometimes by the river, which method is still in being…His advice and opinion were sought for on all occasions, by all sorts of people, and he was looked upon, she said, by some, as something of a conjuror. He died just four years before I was born, on the same day of the same month.”

  Franklin may have noted that the description “conjuror” was the same that Caty Ray had once used about him. And William, impressed by the coincidence of dates, surmised that a “transmigration” had occurred.

  At the cemetery, as William copied data from the gravestones, Franklin’s servant, Peter, used a hard brush to scour off the moss. Franklin’s account of the scene is a reminder that, as enlightened as he would eventually become, he had brought with him to England two slaves. He viewed them, however, more as old family servants than as property. When one of them left soon after they arrived in England, Franklin did not try to force his return, as British law would have allowed. His response to Deborah, when she asked about their welfare later, is revealing:

  Peter continues with me, and behaves as well as I can expect in a country where there are many occasions of spoiling servants, if they are ever so good. He has as few faults as most of them, [but I see them] with only one eye and hear with only one ear; so we rub on pretty comfortably. King, that you enquire after, is not with us. He ran away from our house, near two years ago, while we were absent in the country; but was soon found in Suffolk, where he had been taken in the service of a lady that was very fond of the merit of making him a Christian and contributing to his education and improvement.24

  As he felt about Peter, so too he felt about slavery for the time being: he saw the faults with only one eye, heard them with only one ear, and rubbed along pretty comfortably, though increasingly less so. The evolution of his views on slavery and race was indeed continuing. He would soon be elected to the board of an English charitable group, the Associates of Dr. Bray, dedicated to building schools for blacks in the colonies.

  With William i
n tow, Franklin spent that spring and summer of 1758 wandering England to soak up the hospitality and acclaim of his intellectual admirers. On a visit to Cambridge University, he conducted a series of experiments on evaporation with the renowned chemist John Hadley. Franklin had previously studied how liquids produce different refrigeration effects based on how quickly they evaporate. With Hadley he experimented using ether, which evaporates very quickly. In a 65-degree room, they repeatedly coated a thermometer bulb with ether and used a bellows to evaporate it. “We continued this operation, one of us wetting the ball, and another of the company blowing on it with the bellows to quicken the evaporation, the mercury sinking all the time until it came down to 7, which is 25 degrees below the freezing point,” Franklin wrote. “From this experiment one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.” He also speculated, correctly, that summer breezes do not by themselves cool people; instead, the cooling effect comes from the increased evaporation of human perspiration caused by the breeze.

  His study of heat and refrigeration, though not as seminal as his work on electricity, continued throughout his life. In addition to his evaporation experiments, they included further studies of how different colors absorb heat from light, how materials such as metal that conduct electricity are also good at transmitting heat, and how to better design stoves. As usual, his strength was devising not abstract theories but practical applications that could improve everyday life.25