The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read online

  61. Poor Richard Improved, 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 7:326-50.

  62. Patrick Sullivan, “Benjamin Franklin, the Inveterate (and Crafty) Public Instructor: Instruction on Two Levels in ‘The Way to Wealth,’” Early American Literature 21 (1986-1987): 248-59.

  63. George Rude, Hanoverian London, 1714-1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 55; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 31.

  64. The tall narrow Georgian house at 36 Craven Street still stands in the heart of London and is being restored for tourists and others to visit in 2005. During the restoration more than twelve hundred pieces of human bones from the eighteenth century were discovered in a pit in the basement. The most plausible explanation for the bones is that William Hewson, who married Polly Stevenson in 1770, operated an anatomy school in the house during the early 1770s. Hewson was a student of John and William Hunter who were the great anatomists of the day. To make room for Hewson’s school, Franklin and Mary Stevenson sought other lodging on Craven Street. After Hewson died of blood poisoning in 1774 at age thirty-four, leaving Polly with two young sons and an unborn daughter, Franklin and Polly’s mother moved back to 36 Craven Street. Manchester Guardian Weekly, 27 Aug. 2003, p. 21. (I owe this citation to Brendon McConville.) See also www.rsa.org.uk/franklin/no36/bones.html.

  65. BF to Deborah Franklin, Jan. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 7:369; Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 56-57.

  66. Adam Sisman, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (London: Penguin, 2000), 138.

  67. BF to Deborah Franklin, 6 Sept. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 8:134.

  68. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 55, 58—60.

  69. BF to Joseph Galloway, 7 Apr. 1759, in Papers of Franklin, 8:310; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 89.

  70. BF to Deborah Franklin, 21 Jan. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 7:364.

  71. BF to Deborah Franklin, 10 June 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 8:93; BF, Autobiography, 129; Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 82-83; Paul W. Conner, Poor Richard’s Politicks: Benjamin Franklin and His New American Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 215; The Craven Street Gazette, Sept. 1770, in Papers of Franklin, 17:220-26.

  72. Strahan to Deborah Franklin, 13 Dec. 1757, in Papers of Franklin, 7:297.

  73. Hugh Roberts to BF, 15 May 1760, in Papers of Franklin, 9:113.

  74. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 89.

  75. BF, London Chronicle, 9 May 1759, in Papers of Franklin, 8:342.

  76. BF to Lord Kames, 3 Jan. 1760, in Papers of Franklin, 9:6-7.

  77. BF, The Interest of Great Britain Considered (1760), in Papers of Franklin, 9:59—100, quotation at 90.

  78. BF to William Franklin, 22 Mar. 1775, and Journal of Negotiations in London, in Papers of Franklin, 21:546—47.

  79. BF to Isaac Norris, 14 Jan. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 7:361—62.

  80. BF to Norris, 16 Sept. 1758, 19 Jan. 1759, in Papers of Franklin, 8:157, 236. Later, in June 1760, the Board of Trade criticized the weakness of the proprietary governor in dealing with the Pennsylvania Assembly. Such weakness, the Board declared, was bound to exist “while the Prerogatives of Royalty are placed in the feeble hands of Individuals, and the Authority of the Crown is to be exercised, without the Powers of the Crown to support it.” This could be read as a desire to make the colony royal, and Isaac Norris in Pennsylvania certainly read it that way. Board of Trade: Report on Pennsylvania Laws, 24 June 1760, ibid., 9:173. On these efforts to royalize Pennsylvania, see James H. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 1764—1770: The Movement for Royal Government and Its Consequences (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1972).

  81. Robert Middlekauff sees Franklin’s attempt to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony as the “surprising” action of an “irrational” man. Franklin was normally “a generous and calm spirit,” writes Middlekauff, “but in this case his feeling about Penn overcame all his usual standards of conduct, skewed his vision, and set him on a course that he abandoned only after years of reckless behavior.” Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 55—114, quotation at 107. Edmund S. Morgan likewise finds Franklin’s confidence that he could get the British government to cancel all the powers of the proprietors “a mystery.” Morgan writes that in Franklin’s two years at home, from November 1762 to November 1764, he was afflicted “with a prolonged fit of political blindness.... He made mistakes,” says Morgan, “mistakes that make us wonder if we have made mistakes in our attempts to understand him.” Morgan, Franklin, 120, 129. I think we have indeed made mistakes in our attempts to understand Franklin. Once we accept the fact that Franklin in these years was a fervent royalist who very much wanted to participate in the grandeur of the British Empire—which was, after all, a royal empire—much of the surprise, confusion, and mystery about his behavior in the early 1760s falls away. Pennsylvania was no longer as important to him as the empire.

  82. William D. Liddle, “‘A Patriot King, or None’: Lord Bolingbroke and the American Renunciation of George III,” Journal of American History 45 (1979): 951. In assessing Franklin’s views of the imperial relationship, it is important that we do not mingle his statements of the early 1760s with those later in the decade or in the early 1770s.

  83. BF to Deborah Franklin, 14 Sept. 1761, in Papers of Franklin, 9:356.

  84. BF to Strahan, 8 Aug., 19 Dec. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:320, 407-8.

  85. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 144-46; BF to Thomas Becket, 17 Dec. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:395^ Shelia L. Skemp, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 40, 302. John Adams tells the story of Franklin’s pride in his ability to influence the British government. When someone expressed some doubt about the extent of that influence, Franklin, according to Adams’s autobiography, “broke out into a Passion and swore, contrary to his usual reserve, ‘that he had an Influence with the Ministry and was intimate with Lord Bute.’” Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:I5°-5L

  86. R. C. Simmons, “Colonial Patronage: Two Letters from William Franklin to the Earl of Bute, 1762,” WMQ 59 (2002): 123—34.

  87. Thomas Bridges to Jared Ingersoll, 30 Sept. 1762, in Papers of Franklin, I0:I46-47n. John Adams always assumed that Franklin had to have had some considerable influence with Lord Bute in order for his son to be appointed governor of New Jersey. “Without the Supposition of some kind of Backstairs Intrigues,” said Adams, “it is difficult to account of that mortification of the pride, affront to the dignity and Insult to the Morals of America, the Elevation to the Government of New Jersey of a base born Brat.” Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:I50-5I.

  88. BF to Strahan, 12 Feb. 1745, in Papers of Franklin, 3:13—14.

  89. BF, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749), in Papers of Franklin, 3:400.

  90. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 89—92.

  91. BF to Collinson, 9 May 1753, and BF to Galloway, 17 Feb. 1758, in Papers of Franklin, 4:486; 7:375.

  92. BF to Mary Stevenson, 25 Mar. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:232.

  93. BF to Richard Jackson, 8 Mar. I763, in Papers ofFranklin, I0:2I0.

  94. BF to Ingersoll, II Dec. I762, in Papers ofFranklin, I0:I74—76.

  95. BF to Galloway, 9 Jan. 1760, and BF to Strahan, 23 Aug. 1762, in Papers of Franklin, 9:I7; I0:I49.

  96. BF to Jackson, 8 Mar. 1763, in Papers of Franklin, 10:210.

  97. BF to Strahan, 8 Aug. 1763, and BF to Deborah Franklin, 18 June 1763, in Papers of Franklin, I0:320, 29I.

  98. BF to John Fothergill, I4 Mar. I764, in Papers ofFranklin, II:I0I—5.

  99. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 125—27; BF, Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation of Our Public Affairs (1764), in Papers of Franklin, 11:154—57, 171.

  100. David
L. Jacobson, “John Dickinson’s Fight Against Royal Government 1764,” WMQ19 (1962), 71—77.

  101. Editorial note, Papers of Franklin, n:i9jn.

  102. Philip J. Gleason, “A Scurrilous Colonial Election and Franklin’s Reputation,” WMQ18 (1961), 68-84.

  103. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 180—82.

  104. BF to Strahan, i Sept. 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:332.

  105. BF, Remarks on a Late Protest Against the Appointment of Mr. Franklin an Agent for This Province, 5 Nov. 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:431—33.

  106. Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968); Hanna, Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics, 171.

  107. Martin Howard Jr. to BF, 16 Nov. 1764, and Samuel Johnson to BF, Nov. ? 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:459—60, 477—78.

  108. Gleason, “A Scurrilous Colonial Election,” 84.

  CHAPTER 3: BECOMING A PATRIOT

  1. BF to Richard Jackson, ii Feb. 1764, in Papers of Franklin, 11:76.

  2. BF to Jackson, i6 Jan. ^64, in Papers of Franklin, ii:i9—20.

  3. BF to Peter Collinson, 30 Apr. ^64, in Papers of Franklin, ii:i82.

  4. BF to David Hall, i4 Feb. ^65, in Papers of Franklin, i2:65—67.

  5. BF, Scheme for Supplying the Colonies with a Paper Currency (i768), in Papers ofFranklin, i2:55.

  6. BF to Joseph Galloway, ii Oct. i766, in Papers of Franklin, ^449.

  7. BF to Charles Thomson, ii July ^65, in Papers of Franklin, i2:208.

  8. The best account of the Stamp Act crisis is Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, i953).

  9. James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), i40.

  10. New York Mercury, 2i Oct. ^65, in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764—1766 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, i973), 94.

  11. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, K260. In ^65, Hutchinson was fifty-four and Franklin was fifty-nine. For an elegant and sympathetic study of Hutchinson, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, i974).

  12. Thomas Hutchinson to BF, 27 Oct., i8 Nov. ^65, in Papers of Franklin, ^339—40, 380—8i.

  13. Richard Penn Jr., quoted in Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 206.

  14. Bailyn, Hutchinson, 62.

  15. John Hughes to BF, 8—17 Sept. ^65, in Papers of Franklin, i2:264—66.

  16. Hall to BF, 6 Sept. ^65, in Papers of Franklin, i2:259.

  17. Benjamin Rush to Ebenezeer Hazard, 5 Nov. 1765, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:18; Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: Norton, 1975), 129.

  18. BF to Hughes, 9 Aug. 1765, Hall to BF, 6 Sept. 1765, James Parker to BF, 14 June 1765, and Peter Timothy to BF, 3 Sept. 1768, all in Papers of Franklin, 12:234-35, 255-59, J74—76; 15:200-201; Stephen Botein, “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 212—14; Stephen Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” in Bernard Bailyn and John Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1980), 24—29.

  19. BF to Hughes, 9 Aug. 1765, in Papers of Franklin, 12:234—35.

  20. BF to Collinson, 28 May 1754, in Papers of Franklin, 5:330a.

  21. As Stephen Conway has pointed out, Halifax’s opinion was extreme. Although Grenville himself seems to have regarded the colonists as separate from the British nation, apologists for the Stamp Act necessarily had to assume that the Americans were part of the same British community under Parliament; otherwise, they would have no way of explaining why the colonists should contribute taxes to the realm. Stephen Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739—1783,” WMQ^ 59 (2002): 83—84.

  22. T H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84 (1997): 29—32; Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners,” 69. On the development of British and English identities in the eighteenth century, see Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000); Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

  23. James Otis, A Vindication of the British Colonies ..., in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750-1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1:568; Hutchinson to BF, 1 Jan. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:3.

  24. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism,” 29—32.

  25. BF, Invectives Against the Americans, 1765, in Franklin: Writings, 563.

  26. Maynard Mack, “The Muse of Satire,” in Richard C. Boys, ed., Studies in the Literature of the Augustan Age: Essays Collected in Honor of Arthur Ellicott Case (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 218-31.

  27. BF, “Pacifus,” 23 Jan. 17 66, in Papers of Franklin, 13:55-57.

  28. Hutchinson to BF, 1 Jan. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:3. Franklin’s August 1765 letter is lost; we know of it and his question from Hutchinson’s reply.

  29. On the letters to Shirley, see note 45, p. 260; and Papers of Franklin, 5:441-47, 449-5^ 455-56.

  30. BF to unknown correspondent, 6 Jan. 1766, and BF to Lord Kames, 25 Feb. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 13:23; 14:65.

  31. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 14, 111.

  32. BF to Kames, 25 Feb. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:64.

  33. BF to William Franklin, 9 Nov. 1765, in Papers of Franklin, 12:363-64.

  34. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 212, 319.

  35. BF, Examination Before the Committee of the Whole of the House of Commons, 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:136, 137, 158, 137.

  36. Thomson to BF, 20 May 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:279.

  37. BF to Joseph Fox, 24 Feb. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:168.

  38. On the sovereignty of Parliament, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 200-202, 216-17; and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 347-49.

  39. BF to Hall, 24 Feb. 1766, and BF to Fox, 24 Feb. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:170, 168.

  40. BF to Jane Mecom, 1 Mar. 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:188. This display of optimism is not to deny Franklin’s often pessimistic view of human nature, which he especially expressed when he felt he had been wronged. See Ronald A. Bosco, “‘He That Best Understands the World, Least Likes It’: The Dark Side of Benjamin Franklin,” PMHB111 (1987): 525-54.

  41. BF, Examination Before the House of Commons, in Papers of Franklin, 13:153.

  42. BF, Marginalia in Protests of the Lords Against Repeal of the Stamp Act, 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:212-20.

  43. BF to Kames, 25 Feb. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:68.

  44. On the colonists’ anticipation of the commonwealth theory of the British Empire, see Randolph Adams, Political Ideas of the American Revolution: Britannic-Ame
rican Contributions to the Problem of Imperial Organization, 1765 to 1775 (Durham, N.C.: Trinity College Press, 1922). Apparently Wilson also reached his position in the late 1760s, even though he did not publish his views until 1774.

  45. BF to William Franklin, 13 Mar. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:75-76.

  46. BF to Thomas Crowley, for the London Public Advertiser, 21 Oct. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:241.

  47. BF, Marginalia in Protests of the Lords, 1766, in Papers of Franklin, 13:225.

  48. BF to Mary Stevenson, 14 Sept. 1767, in Papers of Franklin, 14:253.

  49. BF to unknown correspondent, 28 Nov. 1768, in Papers of Franklin, 15:272-73.

  50. Bailyn, Hutchinson, 233. See also David Morgan, The Devious Dr. Franklin: Benjamin Franklin’s Years in London (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996).

  51. BF, Autobiography, 60.

  52. Charles Coleman Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 328-30.

  53. Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution,” 30-31.

  54. BF to Hall, 14 Sept. 1765, and BF to William Franklin, 25 Nov., 29 Dec. 1767, all in Papers of Franklin, 12:268; 14:326, 349.

  55. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 94-159; Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” WMQ 39 (1982): 401-41.

  56. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 151; Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style,” 417; Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British North America” (1774), in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:125.

  57. George Rude, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730—184.8 (New York: Wiley, 1964), 55-57.

  58. Pauline Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,” WMQ20 (1963), 373-95; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 176—1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 163-69.

  59. BF to William Franklin, 16 Apr., 5 Oct. 1768, BF to Galloway, 14 May 1768, and BF, On the New Office of the Secretary of State for America, 21 Jan. 1768, all in Papers of Franklin, 15:98-99, 127-28, 224, 19.