Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  Virginia never suffered any single massacre as large as some in Pennsylvania but, with its settlers scattered out over a wider area in more isolated farmsteads, lost more total people killed or captured. “They go about and Commit their Outrages at all hours of the day and nothing is to be seen or heard of, but Desolation and murders,” Adam Stephen reported to Washington about the Natives around Fort Cumberland in October 1755. “The Smouk of the Burning Plantations darken the day, and hide the neighbouring mountains from our Sight.”51

  One classic ambush, in April 1756, cost the lives of two officers and fifteen soldiers—“a very unlucky affair,” Washington called it52—amid a springtime surge in raids that terrorized the population. Two years later, a similar number of Virginia soldiers died when two contingents of them, one led by Washington, mistakenly fired on each other in the wilderness and continued doing so until Washington, as he remembered it, rushed “between [the] two fires, knocking up with his sword the presented pieces.” With bullets again whistling around him, he felt the protective hand of providence. At that moment, Washington long after wrote, his life was “in as much jeopardy as it had ever been before or since.”53

  Unlike Pennsylvania, Virginia had the added worry that raiders would cross the mountains to incite slave revolts in long-settled regions, which forced the colony to keep local militia units on guard in their home counties. Virginia also had a history of worse relations with the Native people than Pennsylvania and lacked the mediating influence of Quakers, who struggled to maintain a dialogue with the Delaware throughout the conflagration. Treaties quieted the Pennsylvania frontier in 1756 even as the situation worsened in Virginia. Ever the realist, Franklin was on record doubting whether Pennsylvania would “ever have a firm Peace with the Indians until we have drubb’d them,”54 but fully supported a negotiated solution and had earlier written of “the lovely White and Red” increasing together in America,55 while Washington always viewed removal as the only solution to the so-called Indian problem.

  NEITHER FRANKLIN NOR WASHINGTON saw the war through to its victorious conclusion in 1763, when all of Canada and the Ohio Country passed from French to British rule along with Florida going from Spain to Britain and Louisiana from France to Spain, but each remained involved until stability returned to his colony’s frontier. Franklin left first, following his role in negotiating the Easton Treaty with the Delaware, when Pennsylvania’s assembly chose him in 1757 as its agent to press its grievances against the proprietors in London and perhaps overthrow their rule altogether. Already a renowned scientist, Franklin regarded this extended sojourn, which covered fifteen of the next seventeen years, as a chance to circulate on an international stage. His final wartime conference with Washington and other colonial military leaders came in February 1757, shortly before he sailed for England. Franklin had planned to depart earlier but the supreme British commander requested his attendance. Washington used the occasion of this conference to renew his petition for a regular British officer’s commission, adding the telling plea on behalf of himself and his men, “We cant conceive, that being Americans shoud deprive us of the benefits of British Subjects; nor lessen our claim to preferment.”56 By this time, he very much did view his American status as a black mark in British eyes, and resented it.

  In April 1758, Washington returned west for one last season at the front. This stint culminated in autumn with a march on Fort Duquesne by a seven-thousand-man force composed mostly of troops from five middle colonies. By this time, the colonial French and Indian War, ignited in part by Washington’s rash attack at Jumonville Glen, had exploded into the global Seven Years’ War involving all the great powers of Europe and their colonies on five continents. Britain pressed French Canada on multiple fronts. Those assaults coupled with the Easton Treaty left French control of Fort Duquesne unsustainable. The French abandoned it before the British arrived in November, and with it their ability to support raids into Virginia.

  In the meantime, Washington had come into his own as a full-fledged member of the Virginia landed gentry. During 1758, his final year of colonial military service, he expanded Mount Vernon; became engaged to a wealthy widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, with vast dower holdings in land and slaves; and was elected to Virginia’s assembly, the House of Burgesses. With the frontier secure and his domestic prospects bright, he resigned his military post for the life of a country squire.

  Each then having defined lives in distinct positions on distant shores, the budding relationship between Franklin and Washington went into hibernation. At the time, of course, Franklin was still twice Washington’s age and, with the war over for them, they had no need to meet or correspond. Once another war loomed, however, that would change.

  They had both learned similar lessons from the French and Indian War. First, the British had different objectives from their American colonists. The British wanted to keep the colonies divided and dependent, Franklin concluded from his experience with the Albany Plan of Union, and would gladly tax them without representation. Washington found the British unwilling to secure the frontier except as it served their larger geopolitical interests. Second, American colonists would always remain subordinate to their British counterparts. Washington’s bitter frustration with rank confirmed this. He pleaded for a royal commission without receiving one and was compelled to submit to inferior British officers. As for Franklin, when Pennsylvania’s proprietors (who still ran the colony within broad parameters set by Parliament) heard of his appointment as the assembly’s agent in London, they dismissed his possible influence in England. “Mr. Franklin’s popularity is nothing here,” Thomas Penn coolly commented. “He will be looked very coldly upon by great People.”57 Third, the American colonies would benefit from greater unity as reflected in Franklin’s visionary Albany Plan and Washington’s calls for joint intercolonial military action. After all, it was a force composed mainly of troops from five colonies that finally drove the French from Fort Duquesne. This experience made Washington, as much as Franklin, a believer in union.58

  These three lessons might suggest benefits from American independence but were insufficient to support it as a realistic option. A final shared lesson carried more weight. Despite the war’s ultimate outcome, the British were beatable in New World combat. “This whole Transaction gave us Americans the first Suspicion that our exalted Ideas of the Prowess of British Regulars was not well founded,” Franklin wrote of Braddock’s defeat.59 Washington had been there to see it and to report that, at least in frontier fighting, Virginia soldiers outperformed British troops. If put to the test, they might do so again. Coupled with the disastrous effects of British colonial policy following the French and Indian War, these shared lessons helped to nurture the revolutionary spirit that would bring Franklin and Washington back together a quarter century later to fight for and forge a new American nation.

  Three

  From Subjects to Citizens

  FOR HALF A DECADE after the end of their participation in the French and Indian War—even as that increasingly global conflict dragged on until 1763—Franklin and Washington took different paths. Seeking to overthrow proprietary rule in Pennsylvania and replace it with a royal charter akin to those of most other British colonies, Franklin served as the agent for his colony’s assembly in London. He returned to Philadelphia for two years, 1762–1764, but soon was back in London as the agent not only for his colonial assembly but for others too. His fame and wit won him entrance to elite salons, the ear of government ministers, and friendship with philosophers and scientists, but his best efforts could not dislodge the Penn dynasty from its proprietorship. Meanwhile, faced with mounting debts due to depressed tobacco prices, Washington struggled to maintain his planter lifestyle by carefully managing his expanding plantation, diversifying its products, and speculating in frontier lands. That and a rising role in Virginia’s House of Burgesses kept him close to home.

  Although both men gloried in their Englishness and rejoiced in the victory that brough
t all of eastern North America from Florida to Canada under British rule, their paths might have never crossed again save for the Stamp Act crisis, which erupted in 1765 after Parliament imposed taxes directly on the colonists. It jarred their interests back into alignment, set them on parallel political courses, and reminded them of their essential Americanness. Yet neither saw it coming.

  By the fall of 1765, riots tore through many of America’s major towns, touched off not by foreign invaders but by homegrown tax resisters calling themselves Sons of Liberty.1 The liberty they claimed was the supposedly age-old right of the English to be taxed only by their own representatives, not by a parliament with none of their elected members. Both Franklin and Washington had espoused this right in the years leading up to the Stamp Act crisis, and Franklin had argued for colonial representation in the British Parliament as a cure, but neither of them appreciated the depth of the right’s popular appeal. Strangely tone-deaf prior to the crisis and nearly left behind by the popular surge, both managed to get themselves ahead of the crowd and assume a moderating leadership role in the end. In the process, they began gradually shifting their loyalty from imperial Britain to republican America.

  THE CRISIS RESTED on a fundamental difference: Parliament viewed colonists as its subjects; colonists viewed themselves as British citizens. On this score, Franklin and Washington held the colonists’ view. This difference might have remained academic had a new British government not sought to balance the postwar budget on the back of colonists. True, the war had cost Britain dearly, but it had also cost the colonies, in both blood and treasure. True, British armies had fought in America to conquer Canada, but so had colonial forces. True, the British victory had removed the French threat from the colonies’ frontier, but the colonists saw themselves as partners in that victory and Britain as gaining the most, particularly after the Proclamation of 1763 barred colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains and the 1764 Quebec Act appended the Ohio Country to Canada. True, colonists did not pay taxes directly to Britain other than the regulatory import tariffs common to all within the Empire, but they paid taxes to their colonies, which in turn contributed to imperial causes. While people might disagree on the justice of taxing unrepresented colonists, self-interest inclined colonists to see it as unjust. After the fall from power of William Pitt, whose imperial strategy relied on cooperating with the colonies, and the rise of George Grenville as prime minister, those in favor of taxing colonists gained control of Parliament.

  Ruling a vastly expanded British Empire after the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Grenville proposed a comprehensive scheme of imperial administration that a critical mass of American colonists deplored. Where many earlier ministries adopted a sort of benign neglect toward the colonies by valuing them mainly as captive markets for trade, Grenville regarded them as subservient parts of an empire in desperate need of revenue. The war had left the British government with an enormous debt. The peace saddled it with the ongoing expense of militarily occupying such restive new domains as French Canada, Spanish Florida, and a Great Lakes region that promptly erupted in a widespread uprising of Native peoples initiated by the Ottawa leader Pontiac. That clash left nearly five hundred British soldiers, two thousand settlers, and countless Natives dead. Adding to these costs, Grenville sought to ensure submissive colonial governors and officers by having London pay their salaries directly rather than leaving it to their colonial assemblies. Under his scheme, colonists would foot the bill for their own administration and defense through new revenue tariffs on goods imported into the colonies and tax stamps on paper used for court filings, commercial transactions, and a wide range of printed items, from newspapers to playing cards. Even pamphlets protesting the Stamp Act would be taxed. An additional act authorized the quartering of British troops in colonial homes and buildings.

  Although he unveiled his full plan in 1764, fearing focused opposition to it as a direct, internal excise, Grenville delayed a parliamentary vote on the stamp-tax provision until the next year to allow the colonies and their agents time to offer alternatives. As Grenville hoped, the new revenue tariffs generated little initial opposition in the colonies, presumably because they seemed like the old regulatory tariffs—the main change being that British agents now tried harder to collect them. Known in America as the Sugar Act because of its tariff on foreign sugar, the American Duties Act of 1764 elicited official protests only from New York and Massachusetts. James Otis and Samuel Adams stirred the pot in the latter, but the formal petition from Boston did not even raise the thorny issue of taxation without representation. Otis and Adams had harped on it of course, but Thomas Hutchinson, the colony’s loyalist lieutenant governor, turned the petition into one about the act’s harsh impact on trade rather than its constitutionality.

  Trade was an issue too, providing an essential context for colonial resistance to British taxation, because peace with France had not brought prosperity to the colonies. Quite to the contrary, the end of wartime military spending coupled with a European bank panic triggered a business downturn that began in northern ports during the early 1760s and gradually engulfed all the colonies in an economic depression that persisted for most of the decade. Britain’s decision with the Currency Act of 1764 to protect its merchants by barring the colonies from issuing new paper money and directing them to phase out old issues made matters worse by restricting the money supply that fueled the local economy. Virginia, which at the time had nearly a quarter million pounds of such notes in circulation, was especially hard hit as its money supply shrank. Sinking in debt to his London business agent and without money to repay it, in 1764 Washington began the process of turning his plantation from raising tobacco for export to growing wheat for domestic sale. America could get along with less reliance on Britain, he started to grasp. In 1763, Washington had hailed news of peace with France by stating his hope “that the Tobacco trade will fall into an easy and regular Channel again.” But he soon realized that it would not happen under emerging British trade, tax, and monetary policies.2

  THE EVOLUTION IN COLONIAL ATTITUDES toward Britain that began with the Sugar Act, Currency Act, and Quebec Act in 1764 turned toward revolution with passage of the Stamp Act in 1765. No one could disguise it as anything but a direct, internal tax on American colonists. Grenville did not seek cover. He wanted to establish the principle of parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies. Washington and Franklin dreaded this. In December 1764, during the comment period after Grenville proposed the stamp tax but before Parliament voted on it, Virginia’s colonial assembly, with Washington present, raised the volatile issue in a petition to King George III. It asked him to protect the “People of this Colony in the Enjoyment of their ancient and inestimable Right of being governed by such Laws respecting their internal Polity and Taxation as are derived from their own Consent.”3 Addressing longer pleas to the House of Lords and House of Commons, the House of Burgesses declared “it to be a fundamental Principle of the British Constitution, without which Freedom can no Where exist, that the People are not subject to any Taxes but such as are laid on them by their own Consent, or by those who are legally appointed to represent them.”4 Washington expressed support for these petitions in letters to family and friends.

  Pennsylvania’s assembly also formally objected to the proposed Stamp Act and, in November 1764, dispatched Franklin back to London as its agent to oppose it. He had been home for two years, during which time he resumed active administration of the colonial postal service. This included adding routes to Canada and overnight delivery between Philadelphia and New York. He also began constructing a new house, the first that he owned rather that rented; started speculating in western lands; and saw his son William installed as the royal governor of New Jersey. Mainly, however, he reclaimed his seat in the assembly, became its speaker, and then lost his seat by nineteen votes in the complex battle over proprietary rule. His faction retained power, however, and promptly returned him to his post in Londo
n, where he now had to balance seeking a royal charter for Pennsylvania with slamming parliamentary measures infringing on the rights and interests of colonists. This proved a tricky minuet because, to some, the old sins of Penn’s descendants paled in contrast with the new ones of Parliament and a royal charter would put Pennsylvania more directly under parliamentary rule.

  Shortly after Franklin arrived in London, Grenville called him and other colonial agents together to discuss the proposed stamp tax. “Mr. Grenville gave us a full hearing,” one of them reported to his governor, but maintained that the colonies “ought to pay something, & that he knew of no better way than that now pursing to lay such Tax, but that if we could tell of a better he would adopt it.”5 Franklin could and did but, “being besotted with his Stamp Scheme” (as Franklin put it), “Grenville paid little Attention to it.”6

  Displaying his usual cunning, Franklin had proposed that, instead of a general stamp tax, Britain levy a tax (in the form of interest) on paper money printed by the colonies. This would at once shift the burden onto voluntary acts of colonial governments, thus avoiding a clear assault on individual rights, and address the economically devastating effects of tight money by effectively reversing the Currency Act. In part because he wished to establish the power of Parliament to tax colonists, Grenville ignored Franklin’s compromise and pushed the Stamp Act through the House of Commons on February 27, 1765. It became law a month later.

  Only one member of the Commons rose in strong defense of colonists’ rights. His speech to Parliament became a rallying cry in America. Warning that the Stamp Act would create “disgust, I had almost said hatred,” Isaac Barré spoke warmly of “those Sons of Liberty” who “Actuated by principles of true english Lyberty” had carved British colonies out of “a then uncultivated and unhospitable Country.” Barré concluded his address with the prophetic observation that, from his experience with them as a British officer during the Seven Years’ War, the colonists in America “are as truly Loyal as any Subjects the King has, but a people Jealous of their Lyberty and who will vindicate them, if ever they should be violated.”7 Reprinted widely throughout the colonies, Barré’s artful phrase “Sons of Liberty” was embraced by those colonists who rose in opposition to the Stamp Act and subsequent efforts to tax the colonies.