The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Page 18
By this action Franklin was willing to make Thomas Hutchinson, his former friend and colleague at the Albany Congress, a scapegoat for the whole imperial crisis. Indeed, he actually had the nerve to say of Hutchinson and Oliver that “if they are good Men, and agree that all good Men wish a good Understanding and Harmony to subsist between the Colonies and their Mother Country, they ought the less to regret, that at the small Expence of their Reputation for Sincerity and Publick Spirit among their Compatriots, so desirable an Event may in some degree be forwarded.” In other words, said Franklin, perhaps with as much naiveté as cynicism, if Hutchinson and Oliver, Hutchinson’s successor as lieutenant governor, truly cared about the empire, they ought to be willing to be scapegoats and accept the sacrifice of their reputations for the sake of bringing about an Anglo-American reconciliation.93
With the Hutchinson letters as evidence, Franklin believed that the present government in London would be cleared of responsibility for the crisis in the empire and the way would be opened for rational settlement of the differences between the mother country and her colonies. Once the colonists saw where blame for the imperial crisis truly lay, then their hostility toward the British ministry would eventually subside. As Lord Dartmouth, the new pro-American secretary of the American Department, told Franklin, time was needed for passions to cool. Besides, Franklin noted, time was on America’s side. “Our growing Strength both in Wealth and Numbers ... will make us more respectable, our Friendship more valued, and our Enmity feared; thence it will soon be thought proper to treat us, not with Justice only, but with Kindness.” Thus Franklin advised the Massachusetts patriots “to be quiet,” and give “no fresh Offence to Government.” By all means, stick up for “our Rights” in resolutions and memorials, but, he said, bear “patiently the little present Notice that is taken of them.” In the meantime Lord Dartmouth, with Franklin’s help, would have an opportunity to straighten things out and save the empire.94
This was a spectacular miscalculation, so spectacular a miscalculation in fact that it raises questions once again about Franklin’s political judgment and his understanding of the emotions involved in the imperial crisis.95 Franklin actually thought that he and a few men of goodwill could head off the crisis. As late as 1775 he was still persuaded that the issues separating Britain and the colonies were merely “a Matter of Punctilio, which Two or three reasonable People might settle in half an Hour.”96 In fact, as his earlier mistakes over trying to make Pennsylvania a royal colony and getting Americans to accept the Stamp Act indicate, Franklin was not always a shrewd politician, at least not when it came to judging popular passions.
To be sure, he was free of the wild suspicions and conspiratorial notions that beguiled many on both sides of the imperial conflict. But he suffered from a naive confidence in the power of reason and a few sensible men to arrange complicated and impassioned matters. He always thanked God for giving him “a reasonable Mind ... with moderate Passions, or so much of his gracious Assistance in governing them,” that freed him, he said, from much of the “Uneasiness” that afflicted other men. He was by nature a conciliator. Just as “every Affront is not worth a Duel,” and “every Injury not worth a War,” so too, he was fond of saying, “every Mistake in Government, every Incroachment on Rights is not worth a Rebellion.”97 It was as if he were temperamentally incapable of comprehending popular emotions in America, emotions whose extent and intensity severely limited the ability of a small number of individuals to manipulate events and reach compromises. It had been his problem ever since at least the time of the Stamp Act, if not of the Albany Plan.
The consequences of Franklin’s sending the Hutchinson letters to Massachusetts could not have been worse, both to him personally and to the relationship between Britain and her colonies. Although Franklin had stipulated that the Hutchinson-Oliver letters not be published but instead be circulated among only a few “Men of Worth” in Massachusetts, he should not have been surprised that by June 1773 they were published as a pamphlet and distributed throughout the colony. The title page of this pamphlet told its readers that they would discover “the fatal source of the confusion and bloodshed in which this province especially has been involved and which threatened total destruction to the liberties of all America.”98
The published letters created an uproar in Massachusetts. The House of Representatives immediately petitioned the Crown to recall Hutchinson and Oliver. In presenting the Massachusetts petition to Lord Dartmouth, Franklin thought his plan had worked. He tried to persuade the secretary for American affairs that the people of Massachusetts, “having lately discovered, as they think, the authors of their grievances to be some of their own people, their resentment against Britain is thence much abated.”99
Franklin could not have been more wrong. Rather than becoming less resentful of Britain, the Massachusetts colonists were angrier than ever at the mother country. The revelation of the letters seemed to confirm the conspiracy against their liberty that Americans earlier had only feared and suspected. Those letters gave proof, declared the Boston Committee of Correspondence, that God had “wonderfully interposed to bring to light the plot that has been laid for us by our malicious and invidious enemies.”100 The Massachusetts radicals looked for an opportunity to renew the struggle, and on December 16, 1773, taking advantage of that year’s British Tea Act, which gave a monopoly to the East India Company to sell tea in America, they dumped £10,000 of British tea into Boston harbor.
When the Hutchinson letters were published in England that August, everyone wanted to know how they had been obtained. William Whately, the brother of the deceased Thomas Whately, thought that an imperial bureaucrat, John Temple, was the culprit and challenged him to a duel, in which Whately was wounded. When a second challenge followed, Franklin felt he could no longer keep silent, and in December 1773 he publicly confessed to having sent the letters to Boston, but he never revealed how he had obtained them. Although he scarcely anticipated the remarkable British reaction to this confession, his confidence in his ability to calm the imperial crisis was already fast eroding.
BULLBAITING IN THE COCKPIT
Within weeks of the publication of the Hutchinson letters in England, Franklin sensed that his efforts to absolve the ministry for the imperial crisis were not turning out as he had hoped. When he realized that British officials were not cooperating to save the empire, he composed two of his most brilliant satires, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” and “An Edict by the King of Prussia,” both published in the London Public Advertiser in September 1773.101
When his sister expressed hope that he would become the means of restoring harmony between Britain and its colonies, he responded that he had grown tired of “Meekness” and had written the two “saucy” papers in order to hold up “a Looking-Glass in which some Ministers may see their ugly Faces, and the Nation its Injustice.” Although Franklin preferred “Rules for Reducing a Great Empire” because of the spirited endings of the paragraphs, all of which promised that the suggested rules would make the people “more disaffected, and at length desperate,” most people liked the “Edict” piece better. This essay purported to be a decree of the king of Prussia, Frederick II, pointing out to the English that Britain had originally been settled by Germans, and informing them that they had not sufficiently compensated Prussia for its aid in the Seven Years War. For these reasons the English in the future would have to pay taxes to the German kingdom and suffer other impositions on their trade and manufacturing—taxes and impositions that were precisely those the colonists were suffering at the hands of Great Britain. Franklin delighted in telling his son how many people were “taken in” by the hoax, “and imagined it a real edict,” until they got to the end and found out that all of the Prussian regulations had been copied from acts of the English Parliament dealing with the colonies.
Although Franklin realized that the satires would probably backfire by angering the government and by encouraging the colon
ists in their resistance, he did not seem to care anymore. All that writing he had done over the previous decade trying to explain the nature of the colonies to successive British ministries had come to naught. Perhaps the time for conciliation was over. “A little Sturdiness when Superiors are much in the Wrong,” he told his sister, “sometimes occasions Consideration. And there is truth in the Old Saying, That if you make yourself a Sheep, the Wolves will eat you.”102
Franklin’s admission that it was he who had sent the Hutchinson letters to Massachusetts touched off a bitter British newspaper assault against him. This rhymed denunciation was a good sample.
To D——r F——n
Thou base, ungrateful, cunning, upstart thing!
False to thy country first, then to thy King:
To gain thy selfish and ambitious ends,
Betraying secret letters writ to friends:
May no more letters through thy hands be past,
But may thy last year’s office be thy last.103
In the eyes of the British government Franklin had now come to represent all the guile and treachery of the unruly colonists. On January 20, 1774, news of the Boston Tea Party arrived in London, a few days before the Privy Council was to meet to decide the fate of the Massachusetts petition to have Hutchinson removed from office. Instead of focusing on the Massachusetts petition, the meeting of the Privy Council turned into a full-scale indictment of Franklin, who now seemed responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the empire, including the recent Tea Party.
On January 29, in an amphitheater in Whitehall aptly called the Cockpit, and before the entire king’s council, many members of the court, and scores of curious spectators in the gallery, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn viciously attacked Franklin, in what Franklin compared to a “Bull-baiting.”104 For nearly an hour Wedderburn poured abuse on Franklin the likes of which many had never heard before. Much of it was even too scurrilous for the press to publish. Franklin, Wedderburn declared, was “the true incendiary” and “the first mover and prime conductor” behind all of the troubles in Massachusetts. He had “forfeited all the respect of societies and of men,” for he was not a gentleman; he was in fact nothing less than a thief.105
Through the entire tirade, with the crowd cheering and laughing,
Franklin stood silent, his face frozen, determined to show the audience no emotion whatsoever. At the end the Privy Council rejected the Massachusetts petition as groundless—designed only “for the Seditious Purpose of keeping up a Spirit of Clamour and Discontent.” 106
As Franklin told his Pennsylvania colleague Galloway three weeks later, he had hoped that his sending the Hutchinson letters to Massachusetts would have convinced the colonial leaders there that the “Blame” for the breakdown in imperial relations ought to lie with their own native officials. This, he had hoped, would “remove much of their Resentment against Britain as a harsh unkind Mother,... and by that means promote a Reconciliation.” For its part the Massachusetts assembly did indeed resolve that all its grievances were the responsibility of Hutchinson and Oliver. “If the Ministry here had been disposed to a Reconciliation, as they sometimes pretend to be, this,” said Franklin, “was giving a fair Opening, which they might have thanked me for; but they chuse rather to abuse me,” who was really only a public messenger. Once again he invoked the old notion based on his earlier experience as a printer that he was merely an impartial relater of information and news.107
Everything had turned out the opposite of what he had intended. Rather than Thomas Hutchinson’s becoming a scapegoat for the imperial crisis, Franklin himself had become in British eyes the single person most responsible for American resistance. By publicly humiliating Franklin in this brutal manner, the British government may have vented some of its rising hostility toward its rebellious colonists, but at the same time it virtually destroyed the affections of the only colonist in England who might have brought about reconciliation. Whether true or not, the story later circulated that Franklin upon leaving the Cockpit whispered in Wedderburn’s ear, “I will make your master a LITTLE KING for this.”108 Two days later the government fired Franklin as deputy postmaster general of North America.
LAST EFFORTS TO SAVE THE EMPIRE
Despite his humiliation and his anger, Franklin had not given up all hope. He continued for a year more to try to save the empire. At one point he even offered to pay out of his own pocket the cost of the tea thrown into Boston harbor. He lobbied desperately against the passage in 1774 of the Coercive Acts, which closed the port of Boston and altered the Massachusetts charter, and he sought by a variety of avenues to convey the American position to the British government. But he knew his situation was becoming hazardous. “If by some Accident the Troops and People of N[ew] E[ngland] should come to Blows,” he told Galloway in October 1774, “I should probably be taken up [that is, arrested], the ministerial People affecting every where to represent me as the Cause of all the Misunderstanding.”109
His friends advised him to leave England, but he stayed on. Confident of his innocence, he thought “the worst which can happen to me will be an Imprisonment on Suspicion, tho’ that is a thing I should desire to avoid, as it may be expensive and vexatious, as well as dangerous to my Health.”110 Besides he was anxious to see what the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia in September 1774 would do. Perhaps it could use nonimportation of British goods to bring pressure to bear on the British government and result in the present ministers’ going out and giving “Place to Men of juster and more generous Principles.” In response to rumors that he was returned to royal favor and would be promoted to a better position than his former one, Franklin declared he was no longer interested in any offices that the government might offer him. Indeed, he informed his sister several times that year, “I would not accept the best Office the King has to bestow, while such Tyrannic Measures are taking against my Country.” He was becoming ever more convinced, as he told his son in August, that “Posts and Places are precarious Dependencies,” not fit for someone who would be “a Freeman.” Nevertheless, he still thought he had some influence in England and was reluctant to leave if there was the slightest possibility of his helping to prevent the destruction of that “great political Building,” the British Empire.111
When the Earl of Chatham, who as the untitled William Pitt had led the government to victory in the Seven Years War, approached Franklin that same month in hopes of saving the empire Pitt had done so much to create, Franklin was guardedly optimistic. He saw new British “Advocates” for America’s cause “daily arising.” If the Americans could stop importing and consuming British goods, he said, “this Ministry must be ruined.” But as he gained a greater hold on American opinion he lost touch with British opinion. The nonimportation and nonconsumption agreements that the First Continental Congress approved in 1774 did not ruin the ministry. He could not have been more mistaken in telling Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts that the new Parliament to be elected in October would likely be more favorable to America. Once the British people saw the Continental Congress’s resolve, he told Cushing, he was persuaded that “our Friends will be multiplied, and our Enemies diminish’d, so as to bring on an Accommodation in which our undoubted rights shall be acknowledg’d and establish’d.” Unless, of course, said Franklin, the court was able to bribe its way to a majority in the new Parliament."112
Although Franklin had no authority to negotiate for America, some peace-seeking Englishmen assumed he had and tried to use him as an intermediary in their desperate efforts to head off the breakup of the empire. Since Franklin was persona non grata with the king and with Whitehall, Franklin never talked directly with any member of the government. But others who consulted Franklin, including two prominent Quakers, David Barclay and John Fothergill, and Admiral Lord Richard Howe, did carry on some sort of secret negotiations with several members of the government. By December 1774 Franklin tried to make it clear to the negotiators that above all else Americans wo
uld never agree to the right of Parliament to legislate on the internal affairs of any colony—a denial of Parliamentary sovereignty that the British government would never accept. Two months later, in February 1775, the negotiators had virtually given up hope that the American and ministerial positions could be reconciled.
In the meantime Lord Chatham had approached Franklin once again with hopes for conciliation. At the end of December 1774 and throughout January 1775 they met and talked about what might be done. On January 29, Chatham actually called on Franklin at Craven Street—an event, Franklin told his son, “much taken notice of and talk’d of.... Such a Visit from so great a Man, on so important Business, flattered not a little my Vanity; and the Honour of it gave me the more Pleasure, as it happen’d on the very Day 12 month, that the Ministry had taken so much pains to disgrace me before the Privy Council.” Then without giving Franklin any time to make any final suggestions, Chatham on February 1, 1775, went ahead and introduced his comprehensive plan for conciliation in the House of Lords. Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, rose and declared that the plan ought to be rejected with the contempt it deserved. The plan, he said, could never have been drafted by a British peer; it had to be the work of an American. Sandwich then looked at Franklin, who was present in the gallery, and said that he fancied it was the work of “one of the bitterest and most mischievous Enemies this Country had ever known.” Chatham’s proposal was hooted down and soundly rejected without a second reading by the House of Lords. The Lords treated it, said Franklin, “with as much Contempt as they could have shown to a Ballad offered by a drunken Porter.”113