Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  ALTHOUGH OPPOSED TO THE STAMP ACT from the outset, Franklin and Washington failed at first to foresee its significance. As the historian Edmund Morgan has noted, Franklin cared more about doing what was right than defending abstract rights. To him, the Stamp Act’s predictable adverse impact on commerce and imperial relations made it wrong for Britain and the colonies. Being in London, however, Franklin could not feel the resistance that the rights-based argument was stirring in the hearts and minds of colonists from Boston to Charleston. Not sensing this, once the act passed, he tried to salvage what he could from the new law by using his position as assembly agent to secure the lucrative post of stamp distributor for Pennsylvania and Delaware for the assembly’s speaker, John Hughes. Better that the job go to a political ally than to a lackey of the proprietors, Franklin reasoned. By appearing complicit in the administration of the Stamp Act, however, he made one of the worst blunders of his career. Although less directly implicated than Franklin, Washington also suffered some taint when George Mercer, an old friend, former military aide, and current business partner, was named the stamp distributor for Virginia. Once the issue became a fight for principle, Franklin and Washington found that anything less than purity was suspect.

  The troubles began in Virginia where, after word reached America that Parliament had passed the Stamp Act, Patrick Henry, a self-made, silver-tongued lawyer newly elected to the House of Burgesses, persuaded that assembly to approve five new resolutions against it. By this point, at Otis’s urging, Massachusetts had called for an intercolonial congress to consider a unified response to the issue. A spellbinding orator with radical views, Henry now gave it a hard edge with Virginia’s resolves. The first four largely restated positions that the assembly had staked out in its earlier pleas. The fifth inched further by declaring that the colony’s assembly had the “Sole Right and Authority to lay Taxes and Impositions upon It’s Inhabitants: And, That every Attempt to vest such Power in any other Person or Persons whatsoever, has a Manifest Tendency to Destroy AMERICAN FREEDOM.” By various accounts, none of them authoritative, Henry secured passage of the resolves with an impassioned speech that bordered on sedition (“Caesar had his Brutus—Charles the First, His Cromwell—And George the Third . . .” was how legend remembered it) before House of Burgesses speaker Peyton Randolph and others shouted him down with cries of “Treason!” To this, Henry reportedly replied, “If this be treason, make the most of it.”8

  Henry apparently had two more resolutions in reserve but, after the fifth barely passed, he did not offer them. All seven resolutions appeared in some published lists of those passed. As printed in many newspapers, a sixth resolve declared that colonists “are not bound to yield Obedience to” an improper tax. The seventh held that any person enforcing such a tax “shall be Deemed, AN ENEMY TO THIS HIS MAJESTY’S COLONY.”9 Washington likely went home before these end-of-session resolutions passed, and after Henry left the assembly expunged the fifth one. By then, however, Virginia had set the tone for stiff resistance to the Stamp Act. All seven resolves were widely discussed, and Rhode Island’s assembly passed ones modeled on them, including the sixth but not the seventh.

  Boston exploded first. Organized working-class mobs invoked by a middle- and upper-class group of artisans, merchants, and lawyers, the so-called Sons of Liberty, destroyed the homes of Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver, the colony’s designated stamp distributor. Some protesters threatened worse if Oliver did not resign. He did. Taking refuge in an offshore British fort, the colony’s royal governor ordered drummers to call out the local militia to restore order, only to learn that the drummers had joined the mob. So had much of the militia. The sheriff refused to intervene. All attempts to enforce the tax proved futile. Calling in British troops would likely make matters worse, the governor feared. Commerce soon resumed and courts reopened as if the act had never passed.

  Similar scenarios played out everywhere. In Franklin’s Philadelphia, Hughes brandished arms to deter a mob threatening his house but ultimately agreed not to enforce the Stamp Act in Pennsylvania unless other colonies implemented it. They didn’t. Egged on by a pro-proprietor Presbyterian faction within the fragmented and fractious world of Pennsylvania politics, the mob even threatened Franklin’s house, which his wife vowed to defend in his absence. It was her home too, of course.

  “I sente to aske my Brother to Cume and bring his gun,” she reported to her husband in London. “So we maid one room into a Magazin. I ordored sum sorte of defens up Stairs such as I Cold manaig my selef.”10

  Signing himself “your ever loving husband,” Franklin wrote back, “I honour much the Spirit and Courage you show’d, and the prudent Preparations you made.” Blaming the leader of the Philadelphia Presbyterians for circulating a rumor that he planned the Stamp Act, Franklin sarcastically added, “I thank him he does not charge me (as they do their God) with having plann’d Adam’s Fall, and the Damnation of Mankind. It might be affirm’d with equal Truth and Modesty.”11

  Shunting aside Hughes as its leader, Franklin’s faction in the assembly promptly declared the Stamp Act unconstitutional in Pennsylvania and blamed the entire mess on the proprietors and their party.

  The confrontation took a different form in Washington’s Virginia because Mercer, the stamp distributor, was in London when the Stamp Act passed and at sea with the stamps as riots broke out elsewhere. He was greeted at the dock in Williamsburg by two thousand Virginians demanding his resignation. After consulting with the royal governor, who suggested that he step down if he feared for his life, Mercer accepted the inevitable. No stamp taxes were ever collected in Virginia or any of the original thirteen mainland colonies. The assemblies of nine colonies passed resolutions claiming the exclusive right to tax their citizens—others being prevented from doing so by their royal governors—and nine sent delegates to the Stamp Act Congress in New York, which adopted similar resolves. In both a budding reaction to the Sugar Act and a strategic response to the Stamp Act, boycotts of British products spread.

  Washington lamented Mercer’s rough treatment by the mob but sent an angry letter to his business agent in London denouncing imperial policy in terms that echoed the mob. “The Stamp Act,” he wrote, “engrosses the conversation of the speculative part of the Colonists, who look upon this unconstitutional method of Taxation as a direful attack upon their Liberties.” Knowing that his agent had influence with Parliament and hoping to turn him against the act, Washington explained that, so long as this “ill Judgd measure” is in force, the courts (which required stamped papers to act) will close. He called it “morally impossible” for Virginia lawyers and judges to comply with it. With courts needed to collect debts, Washington then pointedly asked, “Who is to suffer most in this event—the [British] Merchant, or the [Virginia] Planter?” Expanding his critique to include the Sugar Act, Washington embraced the growing nonimportation movement. “The Eyes of our People,” he wrote, are “already beginning to open” that domestic products can replace British ones. Washington closed with a question that answered itself: “Great Britain may then load her Exports with as Heavy Taxes as She pleases but where will the consumption be?”12

  FOR REASONS WHOLLY UNRELATED to the Stamp Act fiasco, the more moderate Marquis of Rockingham, a Pitt ally, replaced Grenville as British prime minister in July 1765. With full support from London merchants, Rockingham wanted nothing more than to repeal the divisive and ineffective Stamp Act, but he needed to proceed cautiously in light of the still powerful Grenville faction, which refused to concede authority over taxes to the colonies.

  For help, Rockingham turned to Franklin, who took center stage in Parliament’s artfully choreographed retreat. Franklin was the best-known and most respected colonist in London, and recognized as a moderate on imperial issues—so much so that anti–Stamp Act mobs had threatened his house. He was, in short, the ideal witness to testify for repeal. With Parliament sitting as a committee of the whole, Rockingham invited him to stand in the well of the House of
Commons as an expert on American public opinion. The result was a remarkable three-hour-long performance during which Franklin fielded friendly questions from Rockingham, William Pitt, and backers of repeal along with furious queries from Grenville and his allies.

  Franklin painted a telling portrait. Loyal but aggrieved, colonists were ready to submit to Parliament, he said, on virtually all matters except internal taxes. “They had not only a respect, but an affection, for Great-Britain, for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fondness for its fashions, that greatly increased the commerce,” Franklin said of the colonists’ temper before 1763. “They were governed by this country at the expence only of a little pen, ink and paper. They were led by a thread.” But after the Stamp Act, their temper was “very much altered.”13

  Nothing will get them to pay this tax, he declared, not even armed soldiers sent for that purpose. “They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one,” he warned.14 Having long argued that mob violence would only serve to stiffen British resolve, Franklin stressed the peaceful nature of the protests. The assemblies themselves would punish the rioters “if they could,” he said.15 Rather than threaten that retaining the Stamp Act might lead to open revolt, he averred that it would result in expanding boycotts of British goods. This was what proponents of its repeal wanted to hear.

  Focused on securing that repeal, Franklin drew an expedient but unworkable line between unacceptable internal excises and acceptable external duties. When asked about acceptable taxes by friendly questioners, he spoke with care of duties designed to regulate trade, but when pressed by Grenville or other hostile interrogators, he expanded them to include revenue duties as well. “The sea is yours,” he said at one point, “you may have therefore a natural and equitable right to some toll or duty on merchandizes carried through that part of your dominions.”16 Franklin knew that in principle the Sugar Act was as objectionable as the Stamp Act to many colonists and that some of the petitions to Parliament condemned both, but when faced with such evidence he dismissed it. “They mean only internal taxes,” Franklin said of petitions that rejected all taxes imposed by Parliament, “the same words have not always the same meaning here and in the Colonies.”17

  An eminently practical politician, Franklin accepted the fateful political compromise that would expunge the Stamp Act in exchange for retaining (and later expanding) external revenue tariffs—a compromise that kept the revolutionary spirit alive in America without placating imperialists in Britain. In a rehearsed response, Franklin also affirmed that, so long as Parliament did not actually impose any internal taxes on them, colonists would give “very little concern” to a face-saving gesture, the so-called Declaratory Act, asserting that Britain had the right to do so.18 Without any evidence on this point, he simply asserted that colonists were as pragmatic about their principles as he was about his.

  When Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1767, colonists from Massachusetts to the Carolinas praised Franklin for his role in the process without realizing the concessions that he offered in the process. Focusing on the repeal of the Stamp Act rather than the continuation of the Sugar Act or passage of the Declaratory Act, Washington hailed the result as good for Britain and America. “All therefore who were Instrumental in procuring the Repeal,” he wrote with Franklin presumably in mind, “are entitled to the Thanks of every British Subject & have mine cordially.”19

  Historians generally see the Stamp Act crisis as a pivotal moment in American popular politics and political thought. For the first time, the colonists, realizing that their interests were not represented in London, began thinking of themselves more as citizens of their colonies under the king than as subjects of Parliament. Franklin and Washington observed this important shift in others and felt it within themselves. While they remained loyal to the crown and hoped that the Empire would endure, both grew wary of parliament.

  Privately, Franklin finally gave up on his idea of representation for the colonies in Parliament, seeing all parties as indifferent or hostile to the notion. When speaking about the colonists in his testimony before the House of Commons, he duly recited that “they consider themselves as a part of the British empire, and as having one common interest with it,” but added the critical caveat that “they may be looked on here as foreigners.”20 As Poor Richard might say, alienation breeds estrangement.21

  The uniform American response to the Stamp Act united the colonies. “Such a Union was never before known in America,” John Adams noted at the time. “In the Wars that have been with the French and Indians a Union could never be effected.” Foreseeing its value, both Franklin and Washington had called for intercolonial cooperation during the French and Indian War. Now its value was widely apparent. For thirteen small colonies, power lay in unity, not division. Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts asked Franklin to serve as their agent in London, along with his work for Pennsylvania, and both Washington and Franklin began speculating in frontier land beyond the boundaries of their own colonies. By working together to oppose the Stamp Act, the colonies had prevailed. Thus, while their boycotts wound down once Parliament repealed the act, they never completely ended. Concerns remained about the Declaratory and Sugar Acts, with some like George Mason, Washington’s neighbor and a former member of the House of Burgesses, seeing them as part of the same grand British plot against individual liberty that produced the Stamp Act. Washington began thinking that way too, and it was reflected in the resolution passed by the Virginia assembly after the Stamp Act’s repeal, which still spoke in terms of defending “just Rights and Liberties” and opposing “unconstitutional” violations.22

  Beyond discovering the surprising resolve of colonists from all stations of life to stand up for their rights, Franklin and Washington saw in the Stamp Act crisis a means for the colonies to assert their interests peacefully through boycotts. “Many of the Luxuries which we have heretofore lavished our Substance to Great Britain for can well be dispensed with whilst the Necessaries of Life are to be procurd (for the most part) within ourselves,” Washington wrote during the height of the crisis. “This consequently will introduce frugality; and be a necessary stimulation to Industry.”23

  Franklin made a similar point in his testimony before Parliament. “The goods they take from Britain are either necessaries, mere conveniences, or superfluities,” he said of the colonists. “The first, as cloth, &c. with a little industry they can make at home; the second they can do without.” As for the third, he added perhaps with an impish grin, “They are mere articles of fashion, purchased and consumed because [they are] the fashion in a respected country, but will now be detested and rejected.”24 The beauty of a boycott, both men agreed, lay in its making colonists more economically independent even as it upheld their political rights. Over the next decade, nonimportation associations became favored tools of Franklin and Washington for combating imperial oppression.

  IN 1767, less than a year after the Stamp Act’s repeal, Washington planted his first full crop of wheat at Mount Vernon. To stay afloat financially, he transformed his seven-thousand-acre estate from a tobacco plantation into a grain farm. British policies and practices made it hard for large plantations like Mount Vernon, with marginal soil and hundreds of slaves, to turn a profit on tobacco. With the overseas tobacco trade required by law to pass through England, much of the revenue went to London agents. Many planters sunk deep in debt. Washington turned to domestic products, such as wheat, corn, and livestock. He built a gristmill to grind his grain and, for a fee, his neighbors’ crops as well. With fewer slaves needed to grow grain than raise tobacco, he redeployed some of them to such profitable enterprises as weaving, fishing, and distilling. In this way, Mount Vernon became virtually self-sufficient, other than in luxury goods. Heavily indebted to his London agent at the onset of the postwar depression in 1764, by embracing the Franklinian virtues of industry and frugality (though in practice more of the former than o
f the latter), Washington cut his unpaid obligations in half by 1770.

  The shift from export tobacco to domestic grains made it easier for Washington to boycott British goods when the need arose again. Further, as he noted in a letter to George Mason, nonimportation furnished “a pretext to live within bounds,” where otherwise “such an alteration in the System of my living, will create suspicions of a decay in my fortune, & such a thought the world must not harbour.”25

  Colonists such as Franklin may have believed, and those such as Washington hoped, that repeal of the Stamp Act would signal the end of imperial experiments with colonial taxes, but some feared otherwise, the conspiracy-minded Mason included. These doubters had reasons to fear the worst. The Declaratory Act asserted Parliament’s sovereignty over the colonies in all cases whatsoever. If the supposed bright line between unacceptable internal and acceptable external taxes held, then Parliament could (and most likely would) impose whatever duties it wished on colonial trade. It only took the fall of Rockingham and the rise of the Grenville-like Charles Townshend as chancellor of the exchequer in 1767 for Parliament to pass the so-called Townshend Act imposing revenue duties on tea, paper, glass, lead, and paint entering the colonies. Compounding the problem, as a Tory backer of the ambitious young Hanoverian king George III, Townshend was viewed by some radical Whigs as a witting or unwitting pawn in a plot to undermine traditional English liberties and impose continental absolutism at home as well as in the colonies. Taxing colonists without representation, these Whigs feared, was the first step in a dark conspiracy. Libertarian-minded colonists like Mason drank in these fears and shared them widely.