Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  Listening to Mason and perhaps believing him, for the first time Washington, a cautious Anglophile with nerves of steel in combat, took a public stand against British imperial policy. Starting in early April 1769, he began working with Mason to forge a nonimportation association for Virginia, similar to those in other colonies, to boycott nonessential British goods so long as Parliament persisted in taxing the colonies. In 1768, the Virginia assembly had sent petitions to the king and Parliament protesting the Townshend Act, but received no relief. Now Washington wanted to ratchet up the pressure with a boycott and voiced his willingness to resort to force if necessary.

  “At a time when our lordly Masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom, it seems highly necessary that something shou’d be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our Ancestors,” Washington wrote to Mason in words that he surely knew would resonate with Mason’s conspiratorial thinking. He would not “hesitate a moment to use a[r]ms in defence of so valuable a blessing,” Washington declared with a flourish, but this “should be a last resource.” Petitions had proved worthless with the British. Now was the time to draw “their attention to our rights & priviledges . . . by starving their Trade & manufactures” with a boycott, Washington wrote.26

  Washington enclosed a copy of a nonimportation agreement adopted by Philadelphia merchants and asked for Mason’s help in adapting it for use in Virginia. In it, Pennsylvania merchants vowed to boycott all British imports—not just taxed items—except for twenty-two listed essential commodities. Boston and New York merchants had already formed similar nonimportation associations. Mason readily agreed. “Our All is at Stake, & the little Conveniencys & Comforts of Life, when set in Competition with our Liberty, ought to be rejected not with reluctance but with Pleasure,” he replied to Washington.27 The two men began working together to have a nonimportation resolution ready for Washington to present at the next session of the House of Burgesses, in May 1769.

  Washington lacked Franklin’s subtlety—that is, the Virginia planter was more fixed in his ends and straightforward in his means than the Sage of Philadelphia. Once Washington declared his course, he pursued it doggedly and labored to bring others along. Committed now, he carried to Williamsburg the text of the resolution forming a nonimportation association for Virginia.

  Their proposal turned the Philadelphia agreement on its head. Rather than suspend the importation of all goods with a few stated exceptions, it listed the boycotted items, which its drafters selected to impose maximum pain on Britain with minimum injury to Virginia. Mason wanted to add the threat that, if the Townshend Act remained in effect, Virginians would stop exporting tobacco—but Washington apparently found that idea impractical. Like the Philadelphia agreement, the boycott would last until repeal of all of the Townshend duties. In Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, where trade passed through cities, only merchants and traders joined the nonimportation associations. In Virginia, with its large plantations and network of navigable tidewater rivers, consumers like Washington typically ordered imports directly from London for delivery to their riverfront docks. This difference led Washington and Mason to address their agreement to members of the Virginia assembly, which included many of the colony’s richest landowners and principal importers, with the goal of having them sign it and carry copies to their home counties for others to sign.

  Seeking broader participation than those for northern port cities, Virginia’s nonimportation association was expressly designed for “all Gentlemen, Merchants, Traders, and other Inhabitants of this Colony” to join.28 Signers agreed to instruct their British correspondents not to supply them with goods either subject to the Townshend duties or on the enumerated list of banned imports. That was the political pressure point: British merchants and manufacturers. Doing his part, Washington referenced the agreement in his next order for goods from his London business agent, adding the instruction, “I am therefore particular in mentioning this matter as I am fully determined to adhere religiously to it, and may perhaps have wrote for some things unwittingly which may be under these Circumstances.”29 Do not send him any boycotted items, he told his agent.

  Washington arrived in Williamsburg for the assembly’s May session at a pivotal moment in Anglo-American relations. Digging in its heels on the principle that it alone could tax Virginians, the House of Burgesses passed another resolution on the morning of May 16 reasserting its rights. Dispatched to Virginia to defend the principle of Parliament’s sovereignty in all matters, the colony’s new royal governor, Baron de Botetourt, by noon on the same day disbanded the assembly.

  “I have heard your Resolves, and augur ill of their Effect,” Botetourt admonished the astonished members in words that they never forgot. “You have made it my Duty to dissolve you; and you are dissolved accordingly.”30

  Rather than quietly disperse, virtually all members of the Virginia assembly promptly reconvened at nearby Raleigh Tavern. After discussing matters, they appointed a committee that included Washington to prepare a nonimportation association agreement for ratification on the following day. Apparently Washington had been shopping around the plan that he had drafted with Mason. Probably still in shock from the governor’s abrupt action, 87 of the assembly’s 116 members signed the nonimportation agreement at that next meeting and agreed to circulate copies for added signatures.

  Having taken their stand, they drank toasts both to “A speedy and lasting Union between Great Britain and her colonies” and to “The constitutional British Liberty in America, and all true Patriots, the supporters thereof.”31 Still favoring union with Britain, these men now saw themselves as patriots to a higher cause. With Washington assuming a lead role for the first time since the French and Indian War, they vowed to defend liberty in America through joint action with other colonies. Before leaving Williamsburg, Washington bought a new book, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, articulating a Burkean conservative view of colonial rights certain to reinforce his resolve. A year earlier, Franklin had written the preface to its English edition. The two men were on converging paths.

  “AS THE STAMP ACT IS AT LENGTH REPEAL’D,” Franklin had written to his wife from London in 1766, “I am willing you should have a new Gown, which you may suppose I did not send sooner, as I knew you would not like to be finer than your Neighbours, unless in a Gown of your own Spinning.”32 Now that he viewed the boycott as over, Franklin lavished British products on family members in America. “Take one thing with another,” he wrote at this time to his sister in Boston, “and the World is a pretty good sort of World; and ’tis our Duty to make the best of it and be thankful.”33 Reflecting this sort of pragmatic optimism in light of the Stamp Act’s repeal, Franklin all but ignored the continuing slights of Sugar Act duties, Quartering Act impositions, and Declaratory Act provocations.

  In 1767, then, the Townshend Act came as a shock to him, just as it did for other colonists who (unlike Mason and his ilk) wanted to think the best of Britain. Admittedly, the Townshend duties fell on the right side of the bright line between internal excises and external imposts that Franklin had so artfully drawn to secure the Stamp Act’s repeal. That made them no less objectionable to colonists like Washington who fixed the divide at raising revenue versus regulating trade.

  At first, Franklin tried to downplay the significance of the Townshend Act, but Letters from a Farmer made the case against it on compelling constitutional grounds. Franklin again had to play catch-up, which he did in part by writing his preface to Letters from a Farmer. Many in England even surmised that he penned the book itself, so much did the anonymous tract reflect his evolving views. He was surprised to learn that its author was the pro-proprietor Philadelphia lawyer John Dickinson, a longtime foe of Franklin’s political faction. A common enemy was uniting Americans behind a shared cause.

  “The parliament unquestionably possesses a legal authority to regulate the trade of Great-Britain, and al
l her colonies,” Dickinson wrote in his second letter. “The single question is,” he asserted, “whether parliament can legally take money out of our pocket, without our consent. If they can, all our boasted liberty is but a sound, and nothing else.”34

  Franklin was moving beyond even this point. Who can fairly distinguish “between duties for regulation and those for revenue?” Franklin asked in a 1768 letter to his son, the royal governor of New Jersey. “The more I have thought and read on the subject the more I find myself confirmed in opinion, that no middle doctrine can be well maintained,” he noted. “Something might be made of either of the extremes; that Parliament has a power to make all laws for us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us; and I think the arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those for the former.”35

  For Britain and its American colonies, Franklin began envisioning some sort of commonwealth of separate states under a single crown, such as Scotland and England before the 1707 Acts of Union or later emerged with Dominion status for Canada. Being more a practical than an abstract political thinker, Franklin conceived of this only as events forced the issue. “The Colonies originally were constituted distinct States,” he wrote in 1770. “Our Assemblies with the King have true Legislative Authority.”36 By the end of 1773, Franklin was lecturing his son, “the parliament has no right to make any law whatever, binding on the colonies.”37

  In the meantime, from his perch as an assembly agent in London, Franklin launched a vigorous private lobbying and public writing campaign against the Townshend Act. Most of all, like Washington, he urged colonists to boycott British imports until Parliament repealed the duties. This gradually burned his bridges in London, where the tenor turned increasingly against what many in England widely viewed as the colonists’ intransigence.

  Matters only became worse after resistance to the Townshend Act in Boston led the British to dispatch a warship and troops to enforce compliance there. The result was bloodshed. On March 5, 1770, a band of hard-pressed soldiers, their backs to the wall, fired on a harassing mob of several hundred colonists, many of them young, killing five in what quickly became known in the colonies as the Boston Massacre. The soldiers had never received an order to shoot. The first did so after being hit by a thrown object. The others followed with an undisciplined volley into the crowd. Three Bostonians died on the spot; two more later from their wounds. Shots struck six additional protesters, permanently disabling one of them.

  Although the news had not reached America, in response to the ongoing boycotts, Townshend’s successor as chancellor of the exchequer, Lord North, had already engineered partial repeal of the Townshend Act. To maintain the principle of its sovereignty, however, Parliament retained the tax on tea. That, coupled with outrage over the Boston Massacre, kept the situation in the colonies fluid, with the Sons of Liberty urging a continued boycott everywhere.

  Franklin and Washington remained firmly committed to the boycott. In a widely republished letter dated two weeks after partial repeal, Franklin wrote concerning nonimportation, “It appears to me, that if we do not now persist in this Measure till it has had its full Effect, it can never again be used on any future Occasion with the least prospect of Success, and that if we do persist another year, we shall never afterwards have occasion to use it.”38 He put it succinctly in an earlier dispatch: “It is not the Sum paid in that Duty on Tea that is Complain’d of as a Burthen, but the Principle of the Act.”39

  During the 1770 assembly session in Williamsburg, Washington served on a committee charged with revising the Virginia nonimportation association in response to partial repeal. He argued for maintaining the full boycott but, describing it as “the best that the friends to the cause coud obtain here,” settled for a modified agreement that took some items off the proscribed list.40 Branding it as “too much relaxd,” Washington expressed his wish for one “ten times as strict.”41 Yet everywhere the boycott slackened until in many places it remained only on imported tea. Once moderates, Franklin and Washington had become hard-liners.

  WITH PARTIAL REPEAL, relations between Britain and its American colonies lapsed into an eerily quiet period until late in 1773. Then, in coordination with Parliament’s passing the Tea Act of 1773 (which lowered the price of imported tea without reducing the Townshend duty on it), the East India Company tried to break the boycott by flooding the American market with cheap tea sold directly to consumers. Alerted by the committees of correspondence, local chapters of the Sons of Liberty turned back ships in other ports, but Thomas Hutchinson, who was now the royal governor of Massachusetts, refused permission for those in Boston harbor to depart without off-loading their tea. The Company had twenty days to do so. Perhaps recalling the destruction of his home during the Stamp Act crisis, Hutchinson wanted to establish the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in the city most devoted to colonial rights. Protests organized by the Sons of Liberty prevented anyone from unloading the tea. A highly visible standoff ensued. Its consequences were as foreseeable as they were unforgettable.

  Unlike the Boston Massacre, the event later known as the Boston Tea Party was a planned revolutionary act. Summoned by the Sons of Liberty, thousands of Bostonians—up to a third of the town’s population—assembled on December 16, 1773, in and around a meeting hall near the port to make one last demand that the ships leave before the twenty-day deadline passed. Receiving no relief, later that day a hundred or so of the leaders, lightly disguised as American Mohawk warriors, boarded the ships in full view of armed guards and systematically disposed of 342 chests of tea by tossing their contents into the sea. Upon leaving, they swept the decks clean of loose tea leaves. Although they never publicly identified themselves, participants likely included such prominent Bostonians as John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Samuel Adams.

  Parliament reacted to the Boston Tea Party with rage born of pent-up frustration. It passed legislation closing the port of Boston until colonists paid for the tea. Another new law shifted the locus of governing authority in Massachusetts from the elected assembly to the appointed governor. A third of the so-called Intolerable Acts empowered the governor to transfer trials of officials charged with capital offenses to courts in Britain, which Washington dubbed the Murder Act since he said it could allow those officers to get away with murder. A fourth act authorized royal governors to order the quartering of troops in vacant public buildings. Further, Britain replaced the ineffective Hutchinson as the Massachusetts governor with the commander in chief of British forces in North America, Thomas Gage. Gage soon moved the bulk of his troops to Boston, which he viewed as the rebel heart of America. “They will be lyons, whilst we are lambs; but, if we take the resolute part, they will undoubtedly prove very meek,” Gage advised George III in February 1774. Four thousand British soldiers, Gage said, should be “sufficient to prevent any disturbance.”42

  If Parliament intended to intimidate other colonies by punishing Massachusetts, it failed. They rallied behind their sister colony, fearing that what happened to Massachusetts could await them. Even colonists like Franklin and Washington, who denounced the protesters for destroying private property, deplored Britain for obliterating the property rights and traditional liberties of the many for the actions of a few. Punish those few, they asserted, not an entire city and colony.

  Franklin was no longer in a position to have influence in London, however. A year earlier, he had forwarded to the speaker of the Massachusetts assembly old letters from Hutchinson to a high ministry official in London about how to handle the situation in Boston. “There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties,” Hutchinson had advised.43 He even proposed punishing people for boycotting British goods. “Keep secret every thing I write,” Hutchinson added.44 Franklin never revealed who gave him the purloined letters, but their content was explosive. They suggested that the colony’s governor was responsible for much of the oppression that the colonists had suffered. The resulting mistrust may have contributed to the impasse over te
a.

  Franklin’s role in supplying the letters remained unknown for months, but it came to light just as news of the Boston Tea Party reached London. Now he was caught in the crosshairs of an enraged Parliament and royal administration. Critics piled on. By divulging ill-gotten private letters, they argued, Franklin had stirred the mob in Boston. He was subject to a brutal grilling before the Privy Council and lost his post as deputy postmaster for the colonies. Access to British officials ended and he could no longer function as a colonial agent. Some British friends remained loyal, but the time had come for Franklin to turn his sights toward home. He feared that war was now inevitable.

  ALTHOUGH FRANKLIN AND WASHINGTON had similar disgust for the Intolerable Acts, Washington was better positioned to guide the colonial response. The Virginia House of Burgesses was in session when the news reached Williamsburg. It reacted swiftly. On May 24, 1774, the members passed an order condemning “the hostile Invasion of the City of Boston . . . by an Armed force” and calling for a day of fasting and prayer seeking divine aid “for averting the heavy Calamity which threatens destruction of our Civil Rights, and the Evils of Civil War.”45 Upon reading this order and assuming that more like it were on the way, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, abruptly dissolved the assembly.