The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  THE ROYALIST FRANKLIN

  By the early 1760s Franklin had become a thoroughgoing imperialist and royalist. He had developed an emotional commitment to the Crown’s empire, a vision of a pan-British world that was rivaled in its grandeur only by that of William Pitt. Few Englishmen in 1760 were more proud of being English, and few were more devoted to the English monarchy and the greatness of the British Empire. Although he remained sensitive to criticism of the colonists, he sought at every turn to affirm his own and his fellow Americans’ “respect for the mother country, and admiration of everything that is British.”75

  With the British conquest of Canada, Franklin’s long existing dream of establishing new colonies in the West seemed closer to realization, and he himself now became involved in several land schemes, first in Nova Scotia and later in the American West. Although he believed that “the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire” lay in America, he spoke, as he said, “not merely as I am a Colonist, but as I am a Briton.”76 The New World might be the source of “the greatest Political Structure Human Wisdom ever yet erected,” but this structure, this empire, would remain British.

  Although some Britons in the mother country continued to suggest that the colonists at some future date might get together and break up this empire, Franklin, like most colonists in 1760, would have none of it. There was no danger whatsoever, he said, of the Americans’ “uniting against their own nation, which protects and encourages them, with which they have so many connections and ties of blood, interest, and affection, and which ’tis well known they all love much more than they love one another. . . . I will venture to say, an union amongst them for such a purpose is not merely improbable, it is impossible.” Of course, “the most grievous tyranny and oppression” could drive any people to rebellion, but in 1760 Franklin could not conceive of the British government’s becoming tyrannical.77

  At the outset of his mission Franklin had been so confident of his reputation in the world that he had tried to go right to the top of the British government and meet with the Crown’s chief minister, William Pitt. But Pitt refused to see him. “He was then too great a Man,” Franklin later explained, “or too much occupy’d in Affairs of greater Moment,” and Franklin had to settle for meeting with secretaries and ultimately with Thomas Penn, the principal proprietor.78

  As he became increasingly frustrated negotiating with Penn, his dislike of the man deepened. When Franklin suggested to Penn in January 1758 that the 1682 charter granted to Penn’s father to establish the colony gave the General Assembly all the rights of a parliamentary legislature, Penn disagreed. Penn said that the royal charter was not empowered to make such a grant and that if his father had granted any privileges to the assembly, it was not by authority of the charter. Franklin replied that if William Penn had no right to grant these privileges and yet had promised the many settlers who came to the province that they would have them, then the colonists had been “deceived, cheated and betrayed.”

  Penn’s answer infuriated Franklin. The colonists themselves, Penn said, “should have looked” into the royal charter; it “was no Secret; ...if they were deceiv’d, it was their own fault.” According to Franklin, Penn said all this “with a Kind of triumphing laughing Insolence, such as a low Jockey might do when a Purchaser complained that He had cheated him in a Horse.” At that moment, said Franklin, he conceived “a more cordial and thorough Contempt for him than I ever before felt for any Man living.”79

  As a consequence, Franklin became more certain than ever that the king’s government in Pennsylvania would be far preferable to rule by such a man. Friends cautioned him that his enthusiasm for turning Pennsylvania into a royal province might be disastrous for the colony. They suggested that only Parliament could take away the proprietors’ charter, and Parliament might in the process decrease the power of the assembly and some of the province’s liberties. But in his passion and with his confidence in royal authority, Franklin ignored such warnings and pressed ahead, much to the bewilderment of some of his contemporaries and some modern historians. He urged the General Assembly to petition “the Crown to take the Province under its immediate Government and Protection.” Although he had little evidence that the Crown was interested in taking the colony under its protection, he told the legislature that such a petition “would be even now very favourably heard” and “might without much Difficulty be carried.”80

  In light of what eventually happened to the empire in 1776, Franklin’s efforts to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony may seem as futile and foolish as some contemporaries and some subsequent historians have asserted.81 But at the time they did not seem so to Franklin and to others who were enamored of crown authority. Franklin was not simply driven by his hatred of Thomas Penn. He was in fact a good royalist, a crown officeholder, after all, who was completely devoted to the king and to the king’s empire. Therefore, despite considerable opposition within Pennsylvania itself to changing the charter, it was not at all strange or irrational for him to want to enhance royal authority and tighten the bonds of the empire by eliminating an anachronistic private interest like that of the Penn proprietors.

  Knowing what happened in 1776 as we do makes it difficult for us to interpret American thinking in 1760. There were many Americans who were as excited over the accession of George III to the throne in 1760 as Englishmen and many who were as deeply loyal to the British Empire as anyone in the mother country. Franklin was one of the most excited and most loyal of all.82

  Although in his mission of 1757 Franklin ostensibly had been the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly, he had become in reality the king’s man. No one in 1760 could have been more respectful of royal authority. Royalty fascinated him, and he cut short a trip to the Continent so that he could attend the new king’s coronation.83 Like most colonists that year, he had no inkling of any impending imperial crisis, but, unlike most colonists, he had no sense either of any real disparity of interests between Britain and her colonies. In fact, his confidence in the virtue and good sense of politicians at the highest levels of the British government was so great that it bewildered and amazed even some of his British friends. He could not share their “melancholly Apprehensions” and “Fears for the

  Nation,” and he castigated “the stupid brutal Opposition” that the new young king and his measures were receiving. Far from declining, English virtue, he wrote in 1763, “bids fair for Increasing,” especially “if the old Saying be true, as it certainly is, Ad Exemplum Regis, &c.” Ahead he saw only a “happy and truly glorious” reign for George III.84

  Franklin used his influence with Dr. Pringle and perhaps Peter Collinson to meet George III’s “dearest friend” and chief minister, Lord Bute. Bute was a great patron of the arts and sciences, very interested in botany and electricity, and would have wanted to meet the celebrated Dr. Franklin. At any rate Franklin bragged of his acquaintance with his lordship. He bought two engravings of Allan Ramsay’s portrait of the chief minister and even sent one of them back to Pennsylvania to be prominently displayed in his Philadelphia home, along with a picture of the king and queen. Indeed, he had enough influence with Lord Bute in 1762 to get his thirty-one-year-old son appointed royal governor of New Jersey.85

  Although William possessed his own charm and connections, having Franklin as his father was undoubtedly his most important attribute, which William was more than willing to acknowledge. Since Franklin had found posts for his son back in Philadelphia—first the clerkship of the Pennsylvania Assembly and later the office of postmaster of Philadelphia—it was natural that he would try to help William in London. William first asked Bute for the office of secretary of the colony of South Carolina, but when he learned that that position had gone to another, he asked Bute for the governorship of New Jersey, which had recently become vacant. In his memorial to Bute, the Scottish lord, William shrewdly appealed to their mutual non-Englishness. If “your Lordship,” he said, had not “given such repeated Proofs of
your having no local Attachments, that you consider all His Majesty’s Subjects, however distant, if of equal Virtue and Loyalty, on an equal Footing, I who am an American, should scarce have had the Boldness to solicit your Patronage and Assistance on this Occasion.” Although we do not have all the details relating to the appointment, Lord Bute satisfied William’s desire to be “particularly serviceable to Government.”86

  Since New Jersey was a relatively poor colony and its governor’s salary was not large, not everyone wanted the position; indeed, Thomas

  Pownall, who had returned to England after several administrative positions in the colonies, was reported to have refused it. Still, there were usually more candidates for colonial governorships than could be satisfied. Thus William’s appointment, especially since he was a native American and, in John Adams’s later caustic phrase, “a base born Brat,” was no small achievement. In fact, as one observer noted in September 1762, “many Scruples were raised on account of [William’s] being Illegitimate, which we were Strangers to till very lately.”87 The entire process of William’s appointment as governor of New Jersey reveals not only the peculiar nature of that patronage-dominated world but also the desires and the ability of the two Franklins, father as well as son, to move in that world and to be “serviceable to Government.” It was thought that Franklin himself had an eye on an imperial office. Some of his enemies accused him of wanting to turn proprietary Pennsylvania into a crown colony so that he could become its first royal governor.

  Franklin had long accepted the cultural inferiority of the New World to the Old World without embarrassment or complaint. In 1745 he had told his correspondent Strahan that he and his fellow colonists were eager to gobble up anything and everything written in the mother country, whether good or bad. Indeed, he said, the British authors had so much “Fame ... on this Side [of] the Ocean” that the colonists had become “a kind of Posterity with respect to them. We read their Works with perfect Impartiality, being at too great a Distance to be bypassed by the Fashions, Parties, and Prejudices that prevail among you. We know nothing of their personal Failings; the Blemishes in their character never reach us, and therefore ... we praise and admire them without Restraint.”88

  Sometimes the distance from the center of British civilization seemed so great to Franklin that his imagination ran wild. In his 1749 pamphlet Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, Franklin had noted that “Something seems wanting in America to incite and stimulate Youth to Study.” He thought that “the Encouragements to Learning” were much greater in Europe than in America. “Whoever distinguishes himself there, in either of the three learned Professions, gains Fame, and often Wealth and Power: A poor Man’s Son, has a Chance, if he studies hard, to rise ... to an extraordinary Pitch of Grandeur; to have a Voice in

  Parliament, a Seat among the Peers; as a Statesman or first Minister to govern Nations, and even to mix his Blood with Princes.” No wonder he wanted to get to England.89

  His experience when he arrived in England in the late 1750s was very different from that of many other Americans. Wealthy colonists such as John Dickinson of Delaware or Charles Carroll of Maryland who lived in London in these years were overawed by the city’s sophistication and grandeur and in response seemed to need to justify the deficiencies and provinciality of colonial America by expressing disgust with the luxury and corruption of English life. As a young law student at the Inns of Court in 1754, Dickinson was shocked at the notorious ways in which hundreds of thousands of pounds were being spent to buy elections. This “most unbounded licentiousness and utter disregard of virtue,” he told his parents, could end, as it always had, only in the destruction of the empire. Young Carroll in 1760, despite his worldliness from having studied and traveled abroad for twelve years, agreed with this dire prediction of England’s fate. “Our dear-bought liberty,” he told his father, “stands upon the brink of destruction.” These became increasingly widely held views among the colonists.90

  Franklin felt little of this American provincial need to denigrate English life. Of course, he had long recognized that the English themselves were continually complaining in their public papers of their own “prevailing corruption and degeneracy.” But he himself had always known, as he had told Peter Collinson back in 1753, that “you have a great deal of Virtue still subsisting among you” and that the English constitution was “not so near a dissolution, as some seem to apprehend.” Upon his arrival in England he had met up with the same mood of England’s feeling “itself so universally corrupt and rotten from Head to Foot, that it has little Confidence in any publick Men or publick Measures.”91 Yet his experience in London soon convinced him that much of that English self-criticism was mistaken.

  He began filling his letters with disparaging comments about the provinciality and vulgarity of America in contrast with the sophistication and worthiness of England. Britain, “that little Island,” he wrote in

  1763, enjoyed “in almost every Neighbourhood, more sensible, virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests.”92 No one brought up in England, he said, could ever be happy in America. In fact, it was not England that was corrupt and luxury-loving, it was America; and the great danger was that the English nation, if it did not draw off some of its wealth, “would, like ours, have a Plethora in its Veins, productive of the same Sloth, and the same feverish Extravagance.”93 Everywhere in the Old World he saw contrasts with provincial America that mortified him. The Sunday gaiety of the people of Flanders, together with their ordered prosperity, for example, only reminded him, by contrast, of how narrow and straitlaced, and how silly, was Puritan New England.94 In these years Franklin scarcely seems to have regarded himself as an American.

  So happy was he during his five years in Britain that he very nearly did not return to America. When his friend Strahan urged him to stay and run for Parliament, he was tempted. Although he talked of growing “weary” of his long “Banishment” and of his desiring to return to “the happy Society of my Friends and Family in Philadelphia,” he repeatedly put off leaving. Finally, in 1762, the need to settle his affairs in America, especially the business of the post office (the royal office that he much valued), compelled his return. But he knew he would come back to England. “The Attraction of Reason,” he told Strahan on the eve of his departure for America, “is at present for the other Side of the Water, but that of Inclination will be for this side. You know which usually prevails. I shall probably make but this one Vibration and settle here for ever.”95

  FRANKLIN’S BRIEF RETURN TO AMERICA

  When he arrived in America in the fall of 1762, Franklin found that it had changed. The streets of Philadelphia seemed “thinner of People, owing perhaps to my being so long accustom’d to the bustling crowded Streets of London.” But, more alarming, there was too much money everywhere, and the Philadelphia artisans were not what they used to be when he was one of them. “Our Tradesmen are grown as idle, and as extravagant in their Demands when you would prevail on them to work, as so many Spaniards.”96

  He was no sooner back in America than he began thinking of returning to England. “No Friend can wish me more in England than I do my self,” he told Strahan in August 1763. “But before I go, every thing I am concern’d in must be so settled here as to make another Return to America unnecessary.” First, he had to settle the business of the North American post office. He spent seven months of 1763 on postal inspection tours that took him from Virginia to New England, totaling, he said, some 1,780 miles. He sought to improve service between the major cities and to extend it to the newly acquired territory of Canada. He tried to talk Deborah into accompanying him on these trips, but she refused.

  While he was away on these tours he did give Deborah permission to open all the mail that would arrive from England. He told her, in a sentence as revealing of their relationship as any, “It must give you Pleasure to see that People who knew me there so long and so intimately, retain
so sincere a Regard for me.” Knowing that his wife would never leave Philadelphia, he now laid plans to build a new three-story brick house on Market Street, just a few feet from the spot where Deborah had first spied him in 1723. Since he began building it at the same time he was telling his friends in England that he would soon be with them, the home, which he never saw completed until 1775, may have been for Deborah alone. Maybe it was another part of the business he had to settle so he would not have to come back to America again—another salve for his conscience perhaps.97

  Before he could return to England, Franklin had to deal with an uprising of some Scotch-Irish settlers from the Paxton region on the Pennsylvania frontier who were angry at Indian violence and neglect by the eastern-dominated assembly. Franklin had no sympathy with “armed Mobs” and was happy to have the governor call on him for help in putting them down. He wrote a pamphlet, he said, “to render the Rioters unpopular; promoted an Association to support the Authority of the Government and defend the Governor by taking Arms, sign’d it first myself, and was followed by several Hundreds, who took Arms accordingly.”

  The governor flattered him with an offer of the command of the militia, but he “chose to carry a Musket.” More flattering still, with the so-called Paxton Boys threatening to march on Philadelphia, the governor ran “to my House at midnight, with his Counsellors at his Heels, for

  Advice, and made it his Head Quarters for some time.” The governor then appointed him and several others to negotiate with the rioters; the delegation met with the armed frontiersmen and persuaded them to return home. Although he made fun of the colony’s desperate need for him, Franklin could barely suppress his glee at his renewed authority in Pennsylvania politics. Think of it, he said to Dr. John Fothergill back in London, “within four and twenty Hours, your old Friend was a common soldier, a Counsellor, a kind of Dictator, an Ambassador to the Country Mob, and on [the governor’s and his counsellors’] Returning home, Nobody, again.”