Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Defeating Hillsborough

  Lord Hillsborough’s solicitous warmth in Ireland, which had so baffled Franklin, soon dissipated. “When I had been a little while returned to London,” Franklin wrote his son, “I waited on him to thank him for his civilities in Ireland.” The porter informed Franklin that the minister was “not at home.” Franklin left his card and returned another day to hear the same response, even though Franklin knew Hillsborough was indeed receiving guests that day. He tried the next week, then the next, to no avail. “The last time was on a levee day, when a number of carriages were at his door. My coachman, driving up, alighted and was opening the coach door when the porter, seeing me, came out and surlily chid the coachman for opening the door before he had enquired whether my lord was at home; and then, turning to me, said: ‘My lord is not at home.’ I have never since been nigh him, and we have only abused one another at a distance.”

  Hillsborough “threw me away as an orange that would yield no juice and therefore not worth more squeezing,” Franklin complained. Again he considered returning to Philadelphia. “I grow homesick,” he wrote William. But there was still one factor that kept him from leaving England in fury. Against all odds, he remained hopeful that he could secure for himself (and friends, family, and partners) a western land grant along the Ohio.26

  To that end, he had been involved with a variety of partnerships, including ones called the Illinois Company and then the Indiana Company, that had failed to win support in London. In the summer of 1769, Franklin helped organize a consortium so powerful that he was convinced it would be able to outmaneuver Lord Hillsborough. The Grand Ohio Company, as it was named, included a collection of some of London’s richest and most prominent names, most notably Thomas and Richard Walpole. For a while, it seemed the group, known as the Walpole Company, was destined for success. But in the summer of 1770, Hillsborough managed to have the scheme tabled for more study.

  The Walpole group, however, was able to keep its prospects alive by spreading around ownership shares to an array of top ministers, including the lord chancellor and the president of the Privy Council. By the spring of 1772, Hillsborough could delay the matter no longer. Even the king let Hillsborough know that he expected the matter to be considered. In April, the board of trade sent the land application to the Privy Council with a recommendation that it be denied. But the Privy Council, two months later, held its own hearing, attended by Franklin, Walpole, and many of their influential shareholders. Hillsborough threatened to resign if it was approved, a prospect that likely hurt his case because many on the council were eager, in Franklin’s words, “to mortify him.” And they did. The grant was approved, and Hillsborough resigned.

  Franklin and friends would never end up getting their land grant; the growing tensions between Britain and the colonies intervened. “The affair of the grant goes on but slowly,” he wrote a friend the following year. “I begin to be a little of the sailor’s mind when they were handing a cable out of a store into a ship, and one of them said: ‘ ’Tis a long, heavy cable. I wish we could see the end of it.’ ‘Damn me,’ says another, ‘if I believe it has any end; somebody has cut it off.’ ”

  Still, Franklin had succeeded in ousting his nemesis. “At length we have gotten rid of Lord Hillsborough,” he exulted to William. Hillsborough, in turn, called Franklin “one of the most mischievous men in England.” Yet, in that odd way they had of cloaking their enmity in occasional bouts of feigned cordiality, the two men made peace when they happened upon each other at Oxford the following summer. Hillsborough made a point of bowing and complimenting Franklin. “In return for this extravagance,” Franklin reported to William, “I complimented him on his son’s performance in the theatre, though indeed it was but indifferent; so that account was settled. For as people say when they are angry: ‘If he strikes me, I’ll strike him again’; I sometimes think it might be right to say: ‘If he flatters me, I’ll flatter him again.’”27

  The Hutchinson Letters

  “There has lately fallen into my hands part of a correspondence that I have reason to believe laid the foundation of most if not all our present grievances.” With these fateful words, written to his Massachusetts supporter Thomas Cushing in December 1772, Franklin stirred up a tempest that would lead to his final break with Britain. Enclosed was a batch of letters, six of them written by Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, a Boston merchant from an old Puritan family, who had once been Franklin’s friend when they had put together the Albany Plan for colonial union in 1754. The letters had been given to Franklin surreptitiously by an unnamed member of Parliament, and he forwarded them to Cushing with the injunction that they not be made public.

  Hutchinson’s letters were filled with advice on how to subdue colonial unrest. “There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties,” he had written. When they were published in Boston (John and Samuel Adams, with the acquiescence of Thomas Cushing, made sure that they were, despite Franklin’s request that they not be), they stoked the growing fury of the radical patriots there.

  This was the opposite of what Franklin had intended. His aim was to calm the rebellious sentiments by privately showing Cushing and a few other leaders that England’s misguided policies had been caused by bad advice from people such as Hutchinson more than by unreasonable hatred for America. The letters, he believed, might even promote a “tendency…towards a reconciliation,” which is what, he later claimed, “I earnestly wished.”28

  Indeed, most of Franklin’s missives in early 1773 were designed to decrease tensions. “I hope that great care will be taken to keep our people quiet,” he wrote Cushing in March, “since nothing is more wished for by our enemies than that by insurrections we would give a good pretence for increasing the military among us and putting us under more severe restraints.” When the Massachusetts Assembly passed a resolution declaring that it was not subservient to Parliament, Franklin similarly urged the English to refrain from overreacting. “In my opinion, it would be better and more prudent to take no notice of it,” he wrote Colonial Secretary Lord Dartmouth, who had replaced Hillsborough. “It is words only.”29

  To make his point without stirring up more animosity, Franklin reverted to his youthful love of satire in two anonymous propaganda pieces he wrote for the English papers in September 1773. The first was entitled “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One.” Noting that “an ancient sage” (it was the Greek admiral and ruler Themistocles) had once boasted that he knew how to turn a little city into a great one, the essay listed twenty ways to do the reverse to an empire. Among them:

  In the first place, gentlemen, you are to consider that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

  Take special care the provinces are never incorporated with the Mother Country, that they do not enjoy the same common rights, the same privileges in commerce, and that they are governed by severer laws, all of your enacting, without allowing them any share in the choice of legislators.

  However peaceably your colonies have submitted to your government, shown their affection to your interest, and patiently borne their grievances, you are to suppose them always inclined to revolt, and treat them accordingly. Quarter troops among them, who by their insolence may provoke the rising of mobs…Like the husband who uses his wife ill from suspicion, you may in time convert your suspicions into realities.

  Whenever the injured come to the capital with complaints…punish such suitors with long delay, enormous expense, and a final judgment in favor of the oppressor.

  Resolve to harass them with novel taxes. They will probably complain to your Parliaments that they are taxed by a body in which they have no representative, and that this is contrary to common right…Let the Parliaments flout their claims…and treat the petitioners with utmost contempt.

  The list, reflecting the indignities that had been perpetrated on America, went on at length: send them “prodigals” and “petty-fogging lawyers” t
o govern them, “perplex their commerce with infinite regulations,” appoint “insolent” tax collectors, and garrison your troops in their homes rather than on the frontier where they can be of use. If you follow these rules for diminishing your colonies, the essay concluded, you will “get rid of the trouble of governing them.” It was signed “Q.E.D.,” the initials for the Latin phrase quod erat demon-strandum (which was to be demonstrated), used at the end of a philosophical argument to note the proposition was proved.30

  Two weeks later, Franklin published an even broader parody of Britain’s treatment of America, “An Edict by the King of Prussia.” A thinly disguised hoax, it purported to be a declaration issued by King Frederick II. Whereas the Germans had long ago created the first settlements in England and had lately protected it in the war against France, they had decided “that a revenue should be raised from said colonies in Britain.” So Prussia was levying 4.5 percent duties on all English imports and exports, and it was prohibiting the creation of any further manufacturing plants in England. The edict added that the felons in German jails “shall be emptied out” and sent to England “for the better peopling of that country.” Lest anyone be so thick as to miss the point, it concluded by noting that all of these measures should be considered “just and reasonable” in England because they were “copied” from the rules imposed by the British Parliament on the American colonies.31

  When his “Edict” appeared, Franklin had the pleasure of being a guest at the country estate of Lord Le Despencer, who, as postmaster general of Britain, was Franklin’s boss and had become his friend. Le Despencer was, in Van Doren’s words, a “seasoned old sinner” who had restored a former abbey where he gathered dissolute friends for, as rumor had it, blasphemous rites and an occasional orgy. Franklin befriended him in 1772, when Le Despencer had become a bit more respectable, and helped him compile a simplified and deistic version of the Book of Common Prayer. (In his reformist zeal, Franklin had recently written a “more concise” version of the Lord’s Prayer as well.)

  Franklin was chatting in the breakfast parlor with Le Despencer and others when a guest “came running in to us out of breath” with the morning papers and exclaimed, “Here’s the King of Prussia claiming a right to this kingdom!” Franklin feigned innocence as the story was read aloud.

  “Damn his impudence,” one of those present proclaimed.

  But as the reading neared its end, another guest began to sense the hoax. “I’ll be hanged if this is not some of your American jokes upon us,” he said to Franklin. The reading, Franklin noted, “ended with abundance of laughing and a general verdict that it was a fair hit.”

  Franklin proudly described the parodies in a letter to William. He preferred the one on “Rules,” he said, because of the “quantity and variety of the matter contained and a kind of spirited ending of each paragraph,” but others preferred the “Edict.” He boasted, “I am not suspected as the author, except by one or two friends, and have heard the latter [‘Edict’] spoken of in the highest terms as the keenest and severest piece that has appeared here for a long time.”

  His letter to William, however, was not wholly jovial. Slowly, inevitably, a rift was widening between the increasingly radical American agent and the royal governor with upper-class friends and aspirations. “Parliament has no right to make any law whatever binding on the colonies,” Franklin argued in the letter. “I know your sentiments differ from mine on these subjects. You are a thorough government man.”32

  In the Cockpit

  “I want much to hear how that tea is received,” Franklin worriedly wrote a friend in late 1773. Parliament had added to the indignity of its continued tariff on tea by passing new regulations that gave the corrupt East India Company a virtual monopoly over the trade. Franklin urged calm, but the radicals of Boston, led by Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty, did not. On December 16, 1773, after a mass rally in the Old South Church, some fifty patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians went down to the wharves and dumped 342 chests of tea worth £10,000 into the sea.

  Franklin was shocked by “the act of violent injustice on our part.” His sympathies for the colonial cause were not enough to overcome his basic conservatism about rabble rule. The shareholders of the East India Company “are not our adversaries,” he declared. It was wrong “to destroy private property.”33

  As Boston was having its tea party, England was being roiled by recriminations from the release of the purloined Hutchinson letters. Franklin had expressed surprise that “my name has not been heard” in connection with the affair and added his “wish it may continue unknown.” But in December, two men engaged in an inconclusive duel in Hyde Park after one accused the other of leaking the letters. When a rematch seemed imminent, Franklin felt he had to step forward. “I alone am the person who obtained and transmitted to Boston the letters in question,” he wrote in a letter to the London Chronicle on Christmas Day. But he did not apologize. These were not “private letters between friends,” he claimed, but were “written by public officers to persons in public station.” They were designed to “incense the Mother Country against her colonies.”34

  Franklin’s role in publicizing purloined copies gave ammunition to those in Britain who saw him as a troublemaker. In early January, he was summoned to appear before the Privy Council in a famed room known as the Cockpit, because cockfights had been held there during the time of Henry VIII. The ostensible reason was to hear testimony on a petition from the Massachusetts Assembly to remove Hutchinson from the governorship. The questioning, however, quickly focused on whether the letters from Hutchinson, which had been presented as evidence by Franklin, were private and how they were obtained.

  Franklin was surprised to find at the hearing the solicitor general, Alexander Wedderburn, a nasty and ambitious prosecutor who had voted against the repeal of the Stamp Act and possessed (in the words of his prime minister Lord North) “an accommodating conscience.” It was clear that the political issue of the petition against Hutchinson was being turned into a legal case against Franklin for making his letters public. The government, Wedderburn said pointedly, had “the right of inquiring how they were obtained.”

  “I thought this had been a matter of politics and not of law,” Franklin told the committee, “and I have not brought any counsel.”

  “Dr. Franklin may have the assistance of counsel, or go on without it, as he shall choose,” said one of the lords on the council.

  “I desire to have counsel,” Franklin replied. Asked how long he needed to prepare his case, Franklin answered, “Three weeks.”

  It was not a fun three weeks for Franklin. News of the Boston Tea Party reached England, further undermining sympathy for the American cause. He was called “an incendiary” and, he noted, “the papers were filled with invectives against me.” There were even hints that he might be jailed. His fellow shareholders in the Walpole group expressed fear that his involvement would hurt their case for a land grant, so he wrote them that “I do therefore desire that you will strike my name out of the list of your Associates.” (The letter, it should be noted, was cleverly phrased so that he did not, in fact, actually resign; he remained a secret shareholder without voting rights.)35

  When the Privy Council reconvened in the Cockpit on January 29, 1774, the showdown made the original use of that room seem tame. “All the courtiers were invited,” Franklin noted, “as to an entertainment.” The packed crowd of councilors and spectators ranged from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the revenge-hungry Lord Hillsborough, with but a few friends of Franklin—including Edmund Burke, Lord Le Despencer, and Joseph Priestley—there to lend him moral support. Franklin later said it was like a “bull baiting.”

  Wedderburn, that man of sharp tongue, was both clever and brutal in his hour-long tirade. He called Franklin the “prime conductor”—an allusion to his electric fame—of the agitation against the British government. Instead of focusing on the merits of the Massachusetts petition, he homed in on the purloined letters.
“Private correspondence has hitherto been held sacred,” he raged. “He has forfeited all the respect of societies and of men.” With a zinging wit, he added, “He will henceforth call it a libel to be called a man of letters.” In addition to wit there was ample invective. Burke called Wedderburn’s attack a “furious Phillipic,” and another spectator called it “a torrent of virulent abuse.”

  Amid his fury, Wedderburn scored some valid points. Ridiculing Franklin’s argument that Hutchinson’s desire to keep the letters secret was an admission he had something to hide, the solicitor correctly noted that Franklin had kept his own involvement in the affair secret for almost a year. “He kept himself concealed until he nearly occasioned the murder” of an innocent man, he said, referring to the duel in Hyde Park. Pounding the council table until (according to Jeremy Bentham) it “groaned under the assault,” Wedderburn accused Franklin of wanting to be governor himself.

  The crowd cheered and jeered, but Franklin betrayed not the slightest emotion as he stood at the edge of the room wearing a plain suit made of blue Manchester velvet. Edward Bancroft, a friend of Franklin’s (who later spied on him in Paris), described his behavior: “The Doctor was dressed in a full suit of spotted Manchester velvet, and stood conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed as to afford a placid tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear.”

  At the finale of his speech, Wedderburn called Franklin forward as a witness and declared, “I am ready to examine him.” The official records of the proceedings notes, “Dr. Franklin being present remained silent, but declared by his counsel that he did not choose to be examined.” Silence had often been his best weapon, making him seem wise or benign or serene. On this occasion, it made him look stronger than his powerful adversaries, contemptuous rather than contrite, condescending rather than cowed.36