Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  In America, the French and Indian War had pretty much ended, with England and her colonies capturing control of Canada and many of the Caribbean sugar islands belonging to France and Spain. In Europe, however, the broader struggle between Britain and France, known as the Seven Years’ War, would not be resolved until a Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763. Franklin’s ardor for the expansion of the king’s empire led him to continue his crusade to convince Britain to keep control of Canada, rather than cede it back to France in return for some Caribbean islands as part of a negotiated settlement. In an anonymous article in Strahan’s London Chronicle, he used his old trick of parody and produced ten facetious reasons why Canada should be restored to France. Among them:

  We should restore Canada because an uninterrupted trade with the Indians throughout a vast country, where the communication by water is so easy, would increase our commerce, already too great…

  We should restore it lest, through a greater plenty of beaver, broad-brimmed hats become cheaper to that unmannerly sect, the Quakers.

  We should restore Canada that we may soon have another war, and another opportunity of spending two or three millions a year in America, there being great danger of our growing too rich.

  On a far more serious note, he produced a fifty-eight-page pamphlet entitled “The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies,” in which he argued that keeping control of Canada would benefit the British Empire and help protect its American colonies from constant harassment by the French and their Indian allies. “To leave the French in possession of Canada when it is in our power to remove them,” he wrote, “seems neither safe nor prudent.”

  The pamphlet dwelled in great detail on the issue of Canada, but it also raised an even more important topic: the relationship between Britain and her colonies. Franklin wrote as a man who was still a loyal, indeed an ardent, supporter of the empire, “happy as we now are under the best of Kings.” The inhabitants of the colonies, he argued, were “anxious for the glory of her crown, the extent of her power and commerce, the welfare and future repose of the whole British people.” The best way to assure continued harmony, he wrote, was to provide safe and abundant land so that the colonies could expand.

  Franklin had a theory about the underlying cause of the growing friction between Britain and her colonies, one that he first expressed nine years earlier in his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.” The conflicts, he believed, grew from the attitude of the British mercantilists, who had something in common with the Proprietors: they viewed the colonies as a market to be exploited. Consequently, they opposed the development of manufacturing in the colonies as well as greater rights of self-government. In the pamphlet, he noted his fear that this attitude could even provoke “the future independence of our colonies.”

  The best way to make America prosperous without turning it into a manufacturing center, Franklin said, was to keep Canada and thus assure there was always an abundance of land for the colonists to settle. “No man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labor to subsist his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer and work for a master,” he wrote. “Hence while there is enough land in America for our people, there can never be manufacturers of any amount or value.” An expanding America would thus always provide a market for British goods.

  He also argued that, as long as Britain avoided “tyranny and oppression,” there was no danger of the colonies rebelling. “While the government is mild and just, while important civil and religious rights are secure, such subjects will be dutiful and obedient.” Then he provided a metaphor that drew from his studies of turbulent waters: “The waves do not rise, but when the winds blow.”

  Britain would therefore be best served, he concluded, by treating the people of the colonies as full citizens of the empire, with the same liberties and rights and economic aspirations. He would, in the end, fail to sell the British ministry on this expansive vision of imperial harmony. But he and others who argued for Britain’s retention of Canada did prevail.39

  Bittersweet Farewell

  In the summer of 1762, five years after his arrival, Franklin finally decided it was time to return home. He was torn. He loved his life in England, both the acclaim (he had just been awarded an honorary doctorate at Oxford) and the friends and surrogate family he had made.

  But the decision was made a bit easier because he assumed that he would soon be back. “The attraction of reason is at present for the other side of the water, but that of inclination will be for this side,” he wrote Strahan. “You know which usually prevails.” Indeed, his inclination to be in England would prevail again within two years. He was, however, too optimistic about both his personal and public life when he added, “I shall probably make but this one vibration and settle here forever. Nothing will prevent it if I can, as I hope I can, prevail with Mrs. F. to accompany me.”40

  William was ready to return as well, and he needed a job. He had applied for appointment as deputy secretary of North Carolina and inquired about opportunities in the customs service and the Caribbean. But luck and good connections ended up producing something surprisingly better. The royal governor of New Jersey had just been recalled, and his presumed replacement decided to decline the post. Acting quietly to avoid alerting the Penns, William successfully lobbied for the job with the help of his father’s friend John Pringle, who was the doctor and close adviser of the new prime minister, Lord Bute. When news of the pending appointment became public, the Penns surreptitiously tried to derail it by spreading word that he was a bastard, but to no avail.

  William’s appointment was partly an attempt by Bute and others to assure the loyalty of William’s famous father, but there is no sign that the elder Franklin did much to help his son. Years later, Franklin would tell his friends in France that he had tried to dissuade his son from pursuing the post, or any appointed patronage position, by telling him of the time as a child when he had paid too much for a whistle. “Think of what the whistle may one day cost you,” he said to William. “Why not become a joiner or a wheelwright, if the estate I leave you is not enough? The man who lives by his labor is at least free.” William, however, had become infatuated with the title “excellency” as a way to emerge from his father’s shadow.41

  In possession of a public job, William was in need of a wife. So, at the same time he was securing his appointment, he was making plans to marry a sweet and well-born planter’s daughter, Elizabeth Downes, a fixture of high Tory society whom he had met at the balls of London. His father had trouble extinguishing all hope that William would marry Polly Stevenson, but he finally gave his “consent and approbation” to the marriage.

  In a letter to his sister Jane, Franklin professed to be pleased by William’s new appointment and even more by his marriage. “The lady is of so amiable a character that the latter gives me more pleasure than the former, though I have no doubt but that he will make as good a governor as husband, for he has good principles and good dispositions, and I think is not deficient in good understanding.” Yet Franklin, usually so fond of younger ladies and surrogate family members, did not warm up to Elizabeth, and never would.

  Franklin was, in fact, unenthusiastic about, perhaps even bothered by, his son’s successes. William’s marriage to an upper-class woman was a declaration of independence, and his appointment as governor meant he was no longer subservient to his father. Indeed, it meant that William, then about 31, would have a station in life higher than his father’s, one that would likely reinforce his son’s unattractive tendency to adopt elitist airs and pretenses.

  A cloud was coming over the horizon, and there was no lightning rod to defuse its emotional charge. The first signs of the tension that would develop between father and son came when Franklin decided to sail from England without him on August 24, 1762—the very day the news of William’s pending appointment appeared in the papers and less than two weeks before his scheduled wedding. On September 4, Willi
am married Elizabeth Downes at the fashionable St. George’s Church on Hanover Square, without his father in attendance. A few days later, he went to St. James’s Palace, where he kissed the ring of young King George III and received his royal commission. His father, who had rushed back to London from Flanders a year earlier to witness George III’s coronation, was not there. Then William and Elizabeth sailed for New Jersey, leaving William’s secret son, Temple, behind in England.

  With the cool detachment he could display toward his family, Franklin never expressed any sorrow or apologies for missing these momentous events in his son’s life. In his parting letter to Polly Stevenson, on the other hand, he expressed great emotion and regret that she had not become his daughter-in-law. Writing from a “wretched inn” in Portsmouth, using the third person, he lamented that he “once flattered himself” that she “might become his own in the tender relation of a child, but can now entertain such pleasing hopes no more.” Yet, though his son had not married her, Franklin promised that his paternal love would be undiminished. With more emotion than he ever used in his letters to his real daughter, he bid Polly farewell. “Adieu, my dearest child: I will call you so. Why should I not call you so, since I love you with all the tenderness, all the fondness of a father?”42

  Franklin’s mission to London had produced mixed results. The dispute over taxing the Proprietors had reached a compromise for the moment, and the end of the French and Indian War had calmed the larger disagreements over raising funds for colonial defense. Unresolved, however, was the underlying question of colonial governance. For Franklin, who saw himself equally as a Briton and an American, the answer was obvious. The powers of the colonial assemblies should evolve to mirror those of Parliament, and Englishmen on either side of the ocean should enjoy the same liberties. After five years in England, however, he had begun to realize that the Penns were not the only ones who saw things differently.

  On his voyage home, Franklin resumed his study of the calming effect of oil on water, this time with more disturbing metaphorical implications. The lanterns aboard his ship had a thick layer of oil that floated atop a layer of water. The surface was always calm and flat, so viewed from above, it would seem that the oil had stilled the roiling water. But when the lantern was viewed from the side, so that both layers could be seen, it became evident that, as Franklin recorded, “the water under the oil was in great commotion.” Even though oil could give the appearance of stilling turbulence, the water beneath the surface was still “rising and falling in irregular waves.” This underlying turbulence, Franklin realized, was not something that could easily be calmed, even by the most judicious application of oil.43

  Chapter Nine

  Home Leave

  Philadelphia, 1763–1764

  The Peripatetic Postmaster

  When William Franklin arrived in Philadelphia in February 1763, three months after his father’s arrival, any tension between the two men quickly dissipated. He and his new wife stayed four days at Franklin’s house, recovering from their frightful winter crossing, and then father and son set off for New Jersey. The local gentry came out in sleighs to escort them to Perth Amboy, a tiny village of two hundred homes, during a driving snowstorm. After William took his oath of office there, they traveled to repeat the ceremony in the colony’s other capital, Burlington, where the festivities concluded “with bonfires, ringing of bells, firing of guns.”

  In Philadelphia, Franklin’s enemies were appalled that his son had won a royal appointment. But Proprietor Thomas Penn, writing from London, suggested it might have a calming effect. “I am told you will find Mr. Franklin more tractable, and I believe we shall,” he said. “His son must obey instructions, and what he is ordered to do the father cannot well oppose in Pennsylvania.”1

  That would turn out to be wishful thinking, because Franklin (at least for the time being) saw a distinction between instructions issued by the Proprietor and those issued by the king. Nevertheless, his first year back in America would be a peaceful one. He was, indeed, far more tractable about Pennsylvania politics—partly because he was less engaged by politics, and partly because he was less engaged by life in Pennsylvania. Always invigorated by travel and the pursuit of diverse interests, and clearly not wedded to the hearth and home he had forsaken for five years, Franklin left in April on a seven-month, 1,780-mile postal inspection tour that took him from Virginia to New Hampshire.

  In Virginia, he performed one of those acts of quiet generosity that led him to have, even in controversial times, more loyal friends than enemies. His partner as colonial postmaster, William Hunter, had died, leaving a destitute illegitimate son. Franklin was asked by one of Hunter’s friends to take care of the boy and oversee his education. It was a difficult assignment, and Franklin expressed some reluctance. “Like other older men, I begin in most things to consult my ease,” he noted. “But I shall with pleasure undertake the charge you propose to me.” With both an illegitimate son and grandson of his own, he was sensitive to the situation, and he noted that Hunter would have done the same for him.2

  Franklin hoped that Hunter’s death would mean that, after twenty-four years of service, he would become the sole postmaster in the colonies, as his original commission stipulated. That was not to be. Despite Franklin’s ardent appeal to his superiors in London, Virginia’s governor was able to secure the appointment of his secretary, John Foxcroft, as Franklin’s new partner. Franklin’s more collegial nature returned to the fore, and he forged a friendship with Foxcroft on his visit to Virginia. There was much work to be done. With Canada now part of the British Empire, they set up a system for extending mail delivery to Montreal. They also arranged for packet ships to the West Indies and for postal riders to travel at night. A letter sent from Philadelphia to Boston could receive a reply within six days, and a round-trip to New York could be done within twenty-four hours, a service that seems remarkable even now.

  Foxcroft joined Franklin on a brief visit to Philadelphia, and then they left for New York and a tour of the northern post offices. Franklin ardently wanted Deborah to come. If she could learn to share his love for travel and curiosity about the world, he felt, she might even agree to accompany him to London someday. Not surprisingly, she again refused to be uprooted; she was as independent in her own way as he was in his. But their relationship was close enough that he gave her permission to open any mail he got from England, “as it must give you pleasure to see that people who knew me there so long and so intimately retain so sincere of a regard for me.” There was more than vanity involved: the letters might, he hoped, soften her resistance to visiting England.3

  In Deborah’s stead, he took their daughter, Sally, then 19, on his tour. It would serve as her coming-out party. In New Jersey they stayed with William and Elizabeth, who took them to formal parties as well as pleasant excursions to the countryside. They then traveled by boat to Newport, where Sally had the pleasure (and it did indeed turn out to be that) of meeting her father’s long-ago flirtation Caty, now Catherine Ray Greene, a married mother of two girls. (Never one to forget the women who had become parts of his extended family, he also exchanged letters with Polly Stevenson on the trip, noting that “the tender filial regard you constantly express for your old friend is particularly engaging.”)4

  Franklin dislocated his shoulder falling from his carriage, and Sally was willing to linger in Newport so that she and Caty could nurse him. But he was eager to press on to Boston. They stayed there for two months, Franklin living with his sister Jane Mecom and Sally with her cousins, who owned a harpsichord. “I would not have her lose her practice,” Franklin explained to Jane, adding sweetly, “and then I shall be more with my dear sister.”

  During much of his stay in Boston, Franklin was confined to the house. He had suffered another fall, on a short trip to New Hampshire, and once again dislocated his shoulder. With most of his Boston relatives now dead, and his own stamina at age 57 diminished, his letters turned more reflective and less flirtatious. “
I am not yet able to travel rough roads,” he lamented to Caty. Nevertheless, he still harbored hopes of traveling to England again. “No friend can wish me more in England than I do myself,” he wrote Strahan. “But before I go, everything I am concerned in must be settled here as to make another return to America unnecessary.”5

  When he got back to Philadelphia in November, he would find it harder than ever to settle affairs in a way that would allow him a sedentary retirement in England. More ferocious political turmoil, and four more crossings of the Atlantic, lay ahead. Franklin’s seven-month tour of the colonies, along with the time he had spent in England, put him in a unique position to play a role in the coming storms. As a publishing magnate and then as a postmaster, he was one of the few to view America as a whole. To him, the colonies were not merely disparate entities. They were a new world with common interests and ideals.

  During his postal trip, Franklin made plans and issued instructions for the construction of a new three-story brick home on Market Street, just steps from the spot where Deborah had first spotted him as a runaway lad. Since their common-law marriage in 1730, they had lived in at least six rented houses, but never one that they owned. Now, for the first time, they would have room to enjoy all the finery they had acquired since Deborah had bought him his first china breakfast bowl: the armonica and harpsichord, the stove and scientific equipment, the library and lace curtains.

  Was Franklin becoming domesticated? In some ways, despite his love of travel and sometimes distant relationship to his own household, the aging runaway had always been a rather domestic soul, wherever he had lived. He loved his Junto and clubs, his regular routine, and the surrogate domestic arrangements he had made in England. He had also remained somewhat solicitous, even caring, about his wife and daughter, as well as his relatives, even as he indulged his wanderlust. Whether his new house was intended for his own enjoyment or mainly for that of his family was unclear, perhaps even to himself, but his love of projects led him to be deeply involved in all the details, down to the quality of the doorknobs and hinges.