The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  For Franklin this was virtually the last straw. The Lords’ rejection of Chatham’s proposal in such a hasty and frivolous manner stunned him. Their ignominious action, he said, revealed only the depth of their ignorance, passion, and prejudice. It gave him “an exceeding mean Opinion of their Abilities, and made their Claim of Sovereignty over three Millions of virtuous sensible People in America, seem the greatest of Absurdities.” “Hereditary Legislators!” he exclaimed. They were not fit “to govern a Herd of Swine.”114

  Listening in Parliament during the following weeks to the arrogant dismissals of Americans “as the lowest of Mankind and almost of a different Species from the English of Britain,” Franklin became more and more irate. Not only were the Americans said to be dishonest knaves, but they were called dastardly cowards who were no match for His Majesty’s soldiers. He later recalled hearing one British general say “that with a Thousand British Grenadiers he would undertake to go from one end of America to the other and geld all the Males partly by force and partly by a little Coaxing.” Never had he been so angry; indeed, he was so furious that one friend feared that he might be “a little out of [his] Senses.” England, Franklin told his American confidants, had become rotten to the core; in fact, continuation of the union with England might infect America and destroy “the glorious publick Virtue so predominant in our rising Country.”115

  At last he knew that his mediating role in the imperial crisis was over. He had learned that his wife had died, and he had to go home. He thought he had done his best, but British officials had made his task impossible. He was now convinced that the glorious empire to which he had devoted so much of his life was “destroyed by the mangling hands of a few blundering ministers.”116 He felt his Americanness as never before. His emotional separation from England was now final and complete. On March 19, 1775, he and his friend Joseph Priestley read over some American newspapers that had just arrived, looking for propaganda pieces. When Franklin came to the stories about the addresses sent by the neighboring towns to the closed port of Boston, recalled Priestley, his emotions gave way and “the tears trickled down his cheeks.”117 The next day the man whom Dr. Johnson called a “maker of mischief” sailed for America and became a passionate patriot, more passionate in fact than nearly all the other patriot leaders.118

  FOUR

  BECOMING A DIPLOMAT

  UNDER SUSPICION

  By the time Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775, fighting between the colonists and British soldiers had already broken out in Lexington and Concord. The year before, in order to enforce the Coercive Acts, the British Crown had replaced the much abused governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, with a military commander in chief, Thomas Gage. Hutchinson went to England in exile, full of despair over what was happening in his beloved Massachusetts, just as his former royalist colleague was returning to the land of his birth. Because Franklin had become an international celebrity, he was interviewed by a newspaper editor upon his return—perhaps the first person in American history to be so greeted at the dock. In the news account Franklin urged Americans to stand firm and prepare for the struggle ahead. “He says we have no favours to expect from the Ministry; nothing but submission will satisfy them.” Only a “spirited opposition” could save Americans from “the most abject slavery and destruction.”1

  Franklin brought with him from London his fifteen-year-old illegitimate grandson, William Temple Franklin, at last openly acknowledged as William’s son and called Temple by his family.2 Franklin moved into the Market Street house, which he had never before seen completed and which Deborah had labored to furnish in accordance with his precise instructions. He seems to have completely forgotten about Deborah, even though she had been dead for less than half a year. In no surviving document of this period does Franklin ever mention her. In fact, not a single friend or relative ever wrote him a note of sympathy or even referred to the death of his wife.3

  The day after Franklin landed, May 6, the Pennsylvania Assembly elected him as one of its delegates to the Second Continental Congress, which was to meet in Philadelphia on May 10. At first Franklin tried to maintain a low profile. When he was not engaged in public business, he spent his time at home. Never a great speaker at best, he was unusually silent during the debates in the Congress. John Adams wondered what Franklin was doing in there, since “from day to day, sitting in silence, [he was] a great part of his time fast asleep in his chair.”4

  Despite Franklin’s efforts to keep out of the limelight, however, he was the most famous American in the world and someone who presumably knew British officials and British ways as no other American did, and naturally everyone wanted to exploit his expertise and inventiveness for a variety of tasks. He was immediately appointed postmaster general and then assigned to a multitude of congressional committees. In between working on a petition to the king, the manufacture of saltpeter for gunpowder, and devices for protecting American trade, he found time to design the face of the proposed new currency and a model for pikes for the soldiers. He even drew up a revised version of his Albany Plan of Union for the colonies, which the Congress listened to but refused to record officially

  What impressed most delegates, however, was the intensity of Franklin’s commitment to the patriot cause. He seemed deeply angry at the Crown and British officialdom and was impatient with all efforts at reconciliation. He thought the various colonial petitions to the king were a waste of time; he fully expected a long, drawn-out war; and he believed that independence was inevitable. All this was startling to Americans who had come to believe that Franklin, because of his long residence in London, had to be more English than American. The degree of Franklin’s Revolutionary fervor and his loathing of the king surprised even John Adams, who was no slouch himself when it came to hating.5 Adams told his wife, Abigail, in July that Franklin had now shown himself to be “entirely American”; indeed, he had become the bitterest enemy of Great Britain, the firmest spokesman for separation. “He does not hesitate at our boldest Measures,” said Adams, “but rather seems to think us, too irresolute, and backward.”6 His passion for independence was all the more impressive coming from a Pennsylvanian, since that colony’s leadership was especially divided and hesitant in 1775. In fact, many Americans in the other colonies had not yet lost hope of reconciliation with Britain.

  It was actually left to a former English artisan and twice-dismissed excise officer named Thomas Paine, who had only recently arrived in the colonies, to voice openly and unequivocally the hitherto often unspoken desire to be done with Britain once and for all. In his pamphlet Common Sense, published anonymously in January 1776, Paine dismissed George III as the “Royal Brute” and called for immediate American independence. When this radical pamphlet appeared anonymously, Franklin’s reputation for being an eager and passionate advocate for immediate separation from Britain was so well-known that some people attributed it to Franklin.7

  No doubt some of Franklin’s displays of anger and antagonism toward Britain were calculated. There were many Americans in 1775 suspicious of Franklin’s dedication to the American cause, and he needed to overcome these suspicions. As early as 1771 Arthur Lee, a member of the well-known Lee family of Virginia, had written to Samuel Adams that Franklin was a “false” friend and should not be counted on to be a faithful agent of the Massachusetts assembly. Franklin, said Lee, who was in London at the time, was a crown officeholder whose son was royal governor of New Jersey. He had come to London to convert Pennsylvania into a royal province, which necessarily had made him something of a courtier. All these circumstances, “joined with the temporising conduct he has always held in American affairs,” meant, Lee concluded, that in any contest between British oppression and a free people Franklin could not be trusted to support America. Lee, whom Franklin would tangle with later in Paris, possessed an innately suspicious mind, and on top of that he was jealous of Franklin. Not only did he and his powerful Virginia family have land claims in the West that rivale
d those of the Franklins, but he also wanted the Massachusetts agency for himself. He even offered to serve as agent without pay rather than have the American cause betrayed.8

  The Massachusetts legislature did not accept Lee’s charges, but Lee’s suspicions of Franklin did not go away. He passed them on to his Virginia family, including his brother Richard Henry Lee, who became very influential in the Second Continental Congress. Samuel Adams and some other patriots still thought that Franklin had “a suspicious doubtful character,” and wrote to people who knew something of Franklin and asked about his political leanings.9 Shortly after the Congress convened, William Bradford, son of Franklin’s old printing rival and publisher of the Pennsylvania Journal, wrote his Virginia friend James Madison of the doubts some of the delegates had of Franklin’s patriotism, largely, it seems, because of rumors spread by Richard Henry Lee. “They begin to entertain a great Suspicion that Dr. Franklin came rather as a spy than as a friend,” said Bradford, “& that he means to discover our weak side & make his peace with the minister by discovering it to him.”

  Madison had no way of knowing the truth of all the rumors that were floating about, “but the times are so remarkable for strange events,” he thought, “that their improbability is almost become an argument for their truth.” Even though he was hundreds of miles from Philadelphia, he was pretty certain about Franklin. “Indeed,” said Madison, “it appears to me that the bare suspicion of his guilt amounts very nearly to a proof of its reality. If he were the man he formerly was, & has even of late pretended to be, his conduct in Philada. on this critical occasion could have left no room for surmise or distrust. He certainly would have been both a faithful informer & an active member of the Congress. His behaviour would have been explicit & his Zeal warm and conspicuous.”10 That this especially clever and sagacious future framer of the Constitution could think this way tells us a great deal about the atmosphere at the time.

  Franklin’s need to counter these rumors and suspicions that he was less than a patriot and maybe even a spy explains some of his Revolutionary fervor. It explains his decision to donate his entire salary as postmaster general to the assistance of disabled soldiers. He did this, he told his friend Strahan, so “that I might not have, or be suspected to have the least interested Motive for keeping the Breach [between Britain and America] open.”11 He knew that many Americans were thinking as Madison was, and he realized that he would have to make his patriotic zeal as “warm and conspicuous” as possible.

  Over forty years earlier Franklin had reflected on why converts to a belief tended to be more zealous than those bred up in it. Converts, he noted in 1732, were either sincere or not sincere; that is, they changed positions either because they truly believed or because of interest. If the convert was sincere, he would necessarily consider how much ill will he would engender from those he abandoned and how much suspicion he would incite among those he was to go among. Given these considerations, he would never convert unless he were a true believer. “Therefore [he] must be zealous if he does declare.” On the other hand, “if he is not sincere, He is oblig’d at least to put on an Appearance of great Zeal, to convince the better, his New Friends that he is heartily in earnest, for his old ones he knows dislike him. And as few Acts of Zeal will be more taken Notice of than such as are done against the Party he has left, he is inclin’d to injure or malign them, because he knows they contemn and despise him.”12

  Some such thinking as this explains the bizarre letter Franklin wrote on July 5, 1775, to his lifelong English friend William Strahan.

  Mr. Strahan,

  You are a Member of Parliament and one of that Majority which has doomed my Country to Destruction. You have begun to burn our Towns, and murder our People. Look upon your Hands! They are stained with the Blood of your Relations! You and I were long Friends: You are now my Enemy, and I am, Yours,

  B. Franklin

  Of course, he never sent this outrageous letter, the like of which he never wrote to any of his other British friends and correspondents. He wrote to Strahan, one of his oldest English friends, for local effect only Since he was trying to convince his fellow Americans of his patriotism, he let people in Philadelphia see the letter, and then quietly laid it away.13 Within days he was writing his usual warm letters to Strahan.

  But his fake letter to Strahan and his other displays of patriotism were effective. Bradford was soon writing Madison that the suspicions against Franklin had died away. “Whatever was his design at coming over here,” Bradford wrote on July 18, 1775, “I believe he has now chosen his side, and favors our cause.” Franklin had made his zeal for the cause very conspicuous indeed.14

  A VERY PERSONAL AFFAIR

  Some of Franklin’s anger and passion against British officialdom may have been calculated, but not all by any means. The Revolution was a very personal matter for Franklin, more personal perhaps than it was for any other Revolutionary leader. Because of the pride he took in his reasonableness and in his ability to control his passions, his deep anger at the British government becomes all the more remarkable, but ultimately understandable. Franklin had invested much more of himself in the British Empire than the other patriot leaders. He had had all his hopes of becoming an important player in that empire thwarted by the officials of the British government, and he had been personally humiliated by them as none of the other patriots had been. Although he kept telling his correspondents that he made “it a Rule not to mix personal Resentments with Public Business,” there is little doubt that his participation in the Revolution was an unusually private affair.15

  Because he had identified himself so closely with the empire, he took every attack by the British government on the American part of that empire as a personal affront. He was hurt and bitter over the way the British ministers had treated him. He blamed them for prosecuting him “with a frivolous Chancery suit” in the name of William Whately over his role in the affair of the Hutchinson letters, a suit that his lawyer told him would certainly lead to his imprisonment if he appeared again in England. He believed that Britain’s bombardment of Falmouth (Portland), Maine, and its apparent intention to do the same to America’s other coastal towns were designed to hurt him personally; for “my American Property,” he reminded his English friends, “consists chiefly of Houses in our Seaport Towns.”16

  Although legally he was still a member of the British Empire in 1775, emotionally he was not. He was way out ahead of many of his countrymen in his belief in the certainty of independence. And he had left his English friends even farther behind. Although his English friends kept imploring him to work out some kind of reconciliation, he now knew that all such efforts were futile. Of course, he continued to write warm and tender letters to Britain, yet he jarringly juxtaposed statements of affection toward his correspondents with severe criticisms of the nation of which they were a part. He began a letter to John Sargent, his banker in London, with accounts of the ways “your Ministry” had begun to burn “our Seaport Towns”; but he ended the letter with “My Love to Mrs. Sargent and your Sons ... [and] with sincere Esteem, and the most grateful Sense of your long continu’d Friendship.” For all his English friends it was now “your Nation,” “your Ministers,” and “your Ships of War” and for his fellow Americans and himself “our Seaport Towns,” “our Sea Coast,” and “our Liberties.”17

  One senses the mixed feelings he had in writing to some of his best friends about the impossibility of reconciliation. He was sad and angry at the same time, with the anger being more palpable. He saw clearly, as he said to one of his British friends in October 1775, that Britain and America were “on the high road to mutual enmity, hatred, and detestation,” and that “separation will of course be inevitable.” He had loved the empire as few Americans had. He had always thought that the fast-growing population of America meant “the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire [would] lie in America,” but he had never doubted that the empire would remain British. Now that was
no longer the case. And he could not help reminding his British friends what the mother country was losing. Although “the greatest Political Structure Human Wisdom ever yet erected” was being destroyed by the stupidity of a few ministers, the most important part of that empire, America, he told his English friend and member of Parliament David Hartley, “will not be destroyed: God will protect and prosper it: You will only exclude yourselves from any share in it.”18

  Since he had been personally rejected by English officialdom, he could no longer view England as the center of all civilization and virtue. Everything was now reversed. The Americans had become “a new virtuous People, who have Publick Spirit,” while the English were “an old corrupt one, who have not so much as an Idea that such a thing exists in Nature.” He was especially impressed by the devotion his fellow delegates gave to the work of the Continental Congress. Unlike the members of Parliament, the congressional delegates “attend closely without being bribed to it, by either Salary, Place or Pension, or the hopes of any.” Everywhere ordinary people were “busily employed in learning the Use of Arms.... The Unanimity is amazing.”19

  He could scarcely believe that his formerly beloved England was waging such a ferocious war against America. In one of his most passionate exaggerations, he told his friend Jonathan Shipley that General Gage caused more destruction to Charlestown, Massachusetts, in one day than “the Indian Savages ” had caused in all our wars, “from our first settlement in America, to the present time.” Dr. Johnson (who was nothing but “a Court Pensioner”) infuriated him by urging that English officials seek to excite the slaves to cut their masters’ throats and to hire the Indians to fight the Americans. “When I consider that all this Mischief is done my Country, by Englishmen and Protestant Christians, of a Nation among whom I have so many personal Friends,” he told Shipley, “I am ashamed to feel any Consolation in a prospect of Revenge.” Ashamed or not, he very much wanted revenge.