Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  As he prepared to leave for England in November 1764, Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter. It included paternal exhortations to be “dutiful and tender towards your good mama” and typical Franklin advice, such as “to acquire those useful accomplishments arithmetic and bookkeeping.” But it also contained a more serious note. “I have many enemies,” he said. “Your slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound and afflict me. It is therefore the more necessary for you to be extremely circumspect in all your behavior that no advantage may be given to their malevolence.”

  He also had many supporters. More than three hundred cheered him as he left Philadelphia for his ship. Cannons were fired as a send-off, and a song was sung to the tune of “God Save the King,” with the new ending “Franklin on thee we fix / God save us all.” He told some friends that he expected to be gone only a few months, others that he might never return. It is not clear which prediction, if either, he truly believed, but as it turned out, neither proved correct.14

  Chapter Ten

  Agent Provocateur

  London, 1765–1770

  An Extended Family

  Mrs. Stevenson was out when Franklin arrived, unannounced, at his old home on Craven Street, and her maid did not know where to find her. “So I sat me down and waited her return,” Franklin recalled in a letter to her daughter, Polly. “She was a good deal surprised to find me in her parlor.” Surprised, perhaps, but prepared. His rooms had been left vacant, for his English friends and surrogate family had no doubt he would someday return.1

  It would be just a short visit, he led his real wife, and perhaps even himself, to believe. He wanted to be back home by the end of the summer, he wrote Deborah soon after his arrival. “A few months, I hope, will finish affairs here to my wish, and bring me to that retirement and repose with my little family.” She had heard that many times before. He would, in fact, never see her again. Despite her pleas and declining health, he would continue his increasingly futile mission for more than ten years, right up to the eve of the Revolution.

  That mission involved complex balancing acts that would test all of Franklin’s wiles. On the one hand, he was still a committed royalist who wanted to stay in favor with the king’s ministers in order to wrest Pennsylvania from the hated Penns. He also had personal motives: protecting his postmastership, perhaps achieving an even higher appointment, and pursuing his dream of a land grant. On the other hand, once it became clear that the British government had little sympathy for colonial rights, he would have to scramble to reestablish his reputation as an American patriot.2

  In the meantime, Franklin had the pleasure of settling back into the life he loved in London. Sir John Pringle, the distinguished physician, had become his best friend. They played chess, made the rounds to their regular coffeehouse clubs, and soon got into the habit of taking summer trips together. The great Samuel Johnson biographer James Boswell was another acquaintance. After dropping in on one of their chess games, Boswell noted in his journal that Pringle had “a peculiar sour manner,” but that Franklin was, as always, “all jollity and pleasantry.” Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson resumed their relationship of domestic convenience, and Polly, still living with an aunt in the countryside, remained an object of Franklin’s paternal affection and intellectual flirtation.

  He picked Polly as his first potential convert to a new phonetic alphabet that he had invented in a quixotic quest to simplify English spelling. It is easy to see why it did not catch on. “Kansider chis alfa-bet, and giv mi instanses af syts Inlis uyrds and saunds az iu mee hink kannat perfektlyi bi eksprest byi it,” went one of his more comprehensible sentences. After a long reply that is near impossible to translate, in which she halfheartedly says the alphabet “myit bi uv syrvis,” she lapses into standard English to conclude, “With ease & with sincerity, I can in the old way subscribe myself…”

  It was a measure of their intellectual bonding that Polly would indulge this linguistic fantasy as faithfully as she did. Franklin’s phonetic reform showed little of his usual regard for utility, and it took his passion for social improvement to radical extremes. It required the invention of six new letters for which there were no printing fonts, and it dropped six other letters that Franklin considered superfluous. Answering Polly’s many objections, he insisted that the difficulty in learning the new spellings would be overcome by the logic behind them, and he dismissed her concerns that the words would be divorced from their etymological roots and thus lose their power. But he soon gave up the endeavor. Years later, he turned his scheme over to Noah Webster. The famed lexicographer reprinted Franklin’s letters to Polly in his 1789 book Dissertations on the English Language (which he dedicated to Franklin) and called the project “deeply interesting,” but added, “Whether it will be defeated by insolence and prejudice remains for my countrymen to determine.”3

  Franklin brought his grandson, Temple, the illegitimate son of his own illegitimate son, out of anonymity and into his odd domestic orbit on Craven Street. The relationship was weird, even by Franklin family standards. The boy, who was 4 when Franklin reestablished contact, had been cared for by a series of women who sent itemized bills for his expenses (haircuts, inoculations, clothes) to Mrs. Stevenson, who then sought reimbursement from William in New Jersey. In all of his letters to Deborah at the time, filled with details of various friends and acquaintances, Franklin never mentioned Temple. But by the time the boy turned 9, William was asking, in a quite cowardly way, whether his son could be brought to live with him in America. “He might then take his proper name and be introduced as the son of a poor relation, for whom I stood Godfather and intended to bring up as my own.”

  Foreshadowing a later struggle for the boy’s allegiance, Franklin instead took him under his own wing. On Craven Street he was known merely as “William Temple,” and Franklin enrolled him in a school run by William Strahan’s brother-in-law, an eccentric educator who shared Franklin’s passion for spelling reform. Even though Temple became part of the extended Stevenson family, they pretended (at least publicly) to be unaware of his exact provenance.

  (As late as 1774, in a letter describing a wedding in which he was an usher, Polly would refer to him as “Mr. Temple, a young gentleman who is at school here and is under the care of Dr. Franklin.” Not until later, after Franklin and his grandson returned to America and Temple took up his true last name, did Polly confess that she suspected all along that there was some relationship. “I rejoiced to hear he has the addition of Franklin [to his name], which I always knew he had some right to.”)4

  The Stamp Act of 1765

  Back in Philadelphia, Franklin was still seen as a “tribune of the people” and a defender of their rights. When word finally reached there in March 1765 of his safe arrival in London, bells were rung “almost all night,” his supporters “ran about like mad men,” and copious quantities of “libations” were drunk to his health. But their joy would be fleeting. Franklin was about to become embroiled in a controversy over the notorious Stamp Act, which would require a tax stamp on every newspaper, book, almanac, legal document, and deck of cards.5

  It was the first time that Parliament had proposed a major internal tax on the colonies. Franklin believed that Parliament had the right to impose external taxes, such as duties and tariffs, to regulate trade. But he thought it unwise, perhaps even unconstitutional, for Parliament to levy an internal tax on people who had no representation in that assembly. Nevertheless, he did not fight the Stamp Act proposal with much vigor. Instead, he tried to play conciliator.

  He and a small group of colonial agents met in February 1765 with George Grenville, the prime minister, who explained that the high cost of the Indian wars made some tax on the colonies necessary. What was a better way to levy it? Franklin argued that it should be done in the “usual constitutional way,” which meant by a request from the king to the various colonial legislatures, who alone had the power to tax their own inhabitants. Would Frankl
in and his fellow agents, Grenville asked, be able to commit that the colonies would agree to the proper amount and how to apportion it among themselves? Franklin and the others admitted that they could make no firm commitment.

  Franklin offered another alternative a few days later. It stemmed from his long-standing desire, both as a rather sophisticated economic theorist and as a printer, to have more paper currency circulating in America. Parliament, he proposed, could authorize new bills of credit that would be issued to borrowers at 6 percent interest. These paper bills would serve as legal tender and circulate like currency, thus increasing America’s money supply, and Britain would collect the interest instead of levying direct internal taxes. “It will operate as a general tax on the colonies, and yet not an unpleasing one,” said Franklin. “The rich, who handle most money, would in reality pay most of the tax.” Grenville was, in Franklin’s words, “besotted with his stamp scheme,” and dismissed the idea. This may have been fortunate for Franklin, as he later heard that even his friends in Philadelphia disliked his paper credit idea as well.6

  When the Stamp Act passed in March, Franklin made the mistake of taking a pragmatic attitude. He recommended that his good friend John Hughes be appointed the collection officer in Pennsylvania. “Your undertaking to execute it may make you unpopular for a time, but your acting with coolness and steadiness and with every circumstance in your power of favor to the people will by degrees reconcile them,” he mistakenly argued in a letter to Hughes. “In the meantime, a firm loyalty to the Crown and faithful adherence to the government of this nation will always be the wisest course for you and I to take, whatever may be the madness of the populace.” In his desire to remain on decent terms with the royal ministers, Franklin badly underestimated the madness of the populace back home.

  Thomas Penn, on the other hand, played the situation cleverly. He refused to offer his own candidate for stamp collector, saying that if he did so “the people might suppose we were consenting to the laying this load upon them.” John Dickinson, Franklin’s young adversary as the leader of the Proprietary party in the Assembly, drew up a declaration of grievances against the Stamp Act that resoundingly passed.7

  It was one of Franklin’s worst political misjudgments. His hatred of the Penns blinded him to the fact that most of his fellow Pennsylvanians hated taxes imposed from London more. “I took every step in my power to prevent the passing of the Stamp Act,” he claimed unconvincingly to his Philadelphia friend Charles Thomson, “but the tide was too strong against us.” He then went on to argue the case for pragmatism: “We might well have hindered the sun’s setting. That we could not do. But since it is down, my friend, and it may be long before it rises again, let us make as good a night of it as we can. We may still light candles.”

  The letter, which became public, was a public relations disaster for Franklin. Thomson replied that Philadelphians, rather than being willing to light candles, were ready to launch “the works of darkness.” By September, it was clear that this could include mob violence. “A sort of frenzy or madness has got such hold of the people of all ranks that I fancy some lives will be lost before this fire is put out,” a frightened Hughes wrote the man who had gotten him what had become an unenviable job.8

  Franklin’s printing partner, David Hall, sent a similar warning. “The spirit of the people is so violently against everyone they think has the least concern with the Stamp law,” he wrote. Angry Philadelphians had “imbibed the notion that you had a hand in the framing of it, which has occasioned you many enemies.” He added that he would be afraid for Franklin’s safety if he were to return. A cartoon printed in Philadelphia showed the devil whispering in Franklin’s ear: “Thee shall be agent, Ben, for all my dominions.”9

  The frenzy climaxed one evening in late September 1765 when a mob gathered at a Philadelphia coffeehouse. Leaders of the rabble accused Franklin of advocating the Stamp Act, and they set out to level his new home, along with those of Hughes and other Franklin supporters. “If I live until tomorrow morning, I shall give you a farther account,” Hughes wrote in a log he later sent Franklin.

  Deborah dispatched their daughter to New Jersey for safety. But ever the homebound stalwart, she refused to flee. Her cousin Josiah Davenport arrived with more than twenty friends to help defend her. Her account of that night, while harrowing, is also a testament to her strength. She described it in a letter to her husband:

  Toward night I said he [cousin Davenport] should fetch a gun or two, as we had none. I sent to ask my brother to come and bring his gun. Also we made one room the magazine. I ordered some sort of defense upstairs as I could manage myself. I said when I was advised to remove that I was very sure you had done nothing to hurt anybody, nor I had not given any offense to any person at all. Nor would I be made uneasy by anybody. Nor would I stir.

  Franklin’s house and his wife were saved when a group of supporters, dubbed the White Oak Boys, gathered a force to confront the mob. If Franklin’s house was destroyed, they declared, so too would be the homes of anyone involved. Finally, the mob dispersed. “I honor much the spirit and courage you showed,” he wrote Deborah after hearing of her ordeal. “The woman deserves a good house that is determined to defend it.”10

  The Stamp Act crisis sparked a radical transformation in American affairs. A new group of colonial leaders, who bristled at being subservient to England, were coming to the fore, especially in Virginia and Massachusetts. Even though most Americans harbored few separatist or nationalist sentiments until 1775, the clash between imperial control and colonial rights was erupting on a variety of fronts. Young Patrick Henry, 29, rose in Virginia’s House of Burgesses to decry taxation without representation. “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third…” He was interrupted by shouts of “Treason!” before he could finish, but it was clear that some colonists were becoming deadly serious. Soon he would find an ally in Thomas Jefferson. In Boston, a group that would take the name the Sons of Liberty met at a distillery and attacked the homes of the Massachusetts tax commissioner and Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. Among the rising patriots there who would eventually become rebels were a young merchant named John Hancock, a fiery agitator named Samuel Adams, and his sour lawyer cousin John Adams.

  For the first time since the Albany Conference of 1754, leaders from different parts of America were galvanized into thinking as a collective unit. A congress of nine colonies, including Pennsylvania, was held in New York in October. Not only did it urge the repeal of the Stamp Act, it denied the right of Parliament to levy internal taxes on the colonies. The motto they adopted was the one Franklin had written as a cartoon caption more than a decade earlier, as he sought to rally unity at Albany: “Join, or Die.”

  From his distance in London, Franklin was slow to join the frenzy. “The rashness of the Assembly in Virginia is amazing,” he wrote Hughes. “I hope, however, that ours will keep within the bounds of prudence and moderation.” For the time being, he was still more in sympathy with Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts, later a great enemy. Both were reasonable men appalled by mob rule, and in this case threatened by it. “When you and I were at Albany ten years ago,” Hutchinson wrote him, “we did not propose a union for such purposes as these.”11

  Franklin’s moderation was due in part to his temperament, his love of Britain, and his dreams of a harmonious empire. It was in his nature to be a smooth operator rather than a revolutionary. He liked witty discussion over Madeira, and he hated disorder and mob behavior. The fine wines and meals contributed not only to his gout, but also to his blurred vision about the animosity that was building back home. Perhaps more important, he was making one last attempt to turn Pennsylvania into a royal rather than Proprietary colony.

  It was always an unlikely quest, now all the more so because of the turmoil over the Stamp Act, which made royal rule less popular in Pennsylvania and made colonial pleadings less popular in London. In November 1765, a year after Franklin’s arrival and just as
he was absorbing the damage done to his reputation by his waffling over the Stamp Act, the Privy Council officially deferred action on the anti-Penn petition he had brought. Franklin initially believed (or at least publicly professed) that this was merely a temporary setback. But he soon came to realize that Thomas Penn was correct when he wrote to his nephew, Gov. John Penn, that the action meant the issue was dead “forever.”12

  Spin Cycle

  By the end of 1765, with his reputation as a defender of colonial rights in tatters because of his equivocation over the Stamp Act, Franklin faced one of the great challenges in the annals of political damage control. He began with a letter-writing campaign. To his partner David Hall and others, he strongly denied that he had ever supported the act. He also had prominent London Quakers write on his behalf. “I can safely aver that Benjamin Franklin did all in his power to prevent the Stamp Act from passing,” John Fothergill wrote a Philadelphia friend. “He asserted the rights and privileges of America with the utmost firmness.” Hall reprinted the letter in the Pennsylvania Gazette.

  Franklin felt the best way to force repeal, one that appealed to his Poor Richard penchant for frugality and self-reliance, was for Americans to boycott British imports and refrain from transactions that would require use of the stamps. This approach would also rally British tradesmen and manufacturers, hurt by the loss of exports, to the cause of repeal. Writing anonymously as “Homespun” in a British paper, he ridiculed the notion that Americans could not get by without such British imports as tea. If need be, they would make tea from corn. “Its green ears roasted are a delicacy beyond expression.”13