Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  Although these achievements won him the praise of his father’s generation, they did not seem to elicit similar acclaim from his contemporaries. Perhaps William spent too much time associating with older men; perhaps he had suffered too many snubs from Americans his own age. At any rate, his manner impressed younger people as condescending. Philip Livingston, a New Jerseyite studying law in London, was anything but enchanted to learn that “the high and mighty William Franklin” had become the ruler of his native colony. But the new governor was hardly inclined to worry about such carping. In one leap, he had outdistanced his entire generation, moving into the upper echelon of colonial America at an age when most men were still struggling to define their careers. As a citizen of a tough-minded century, he probably took some pleasure in the knowledge that Elizabeth Graeme was reported to be heartbroken over his recent marriage. No doubt the repeated statements of her parents that William was not good enough for her now rang hollow.

  If William Franklin’s thoughts about Philadelphia were cold, he did not blame their temperature on his father. As the stagecoach rumbled down the road to Bristol on the Delaware, the two Franklins were soon enjoying that companionship that William Strahan admired. William had inherited Benjamin’s love for a good laugh, and he told a droll story every bit as well as his father. No doubt he soon had Benjamin chuckling, as he told him the latest news from Craven Street, with special emphasis on how much Polly Stevenson and her friends missed his cheerful pursuit of their kisses. Benjamin, in turn, soon had William chuckling as he told him of the excitement caused by his latest invention, a musical instrument called the harmonica. A series of glass jars, partially filled with water, revolved on a treadle, it created incredibly beautiful music, and it was already on its way to becoming the rage of Europe. One night, Franklin was playing the model he had brought home with him from England, and Deborah awakened downstairs listening to the ethereal music in the darkness, she was convinced that she had died and gone to Heaven.

  But joking was soon dropped for serious discussion of New Jersey politics. The Penns, who by now all but sprouted hives at the mention of the name Franklin, had been outraged at William’s appointment. Obviously hoping to stir up trouble, they wrote to influential friends in New Jersey, lamenting that “the whole of this matter has been transacted in so private a manner that not a tittle of it escaped until it was seen in the public papers; so that there was no opportunity of counteracting, or indeed, doing a single thing that might put a stop to this shameful affair. I make no doubt but the people of New Jersey will make some remonstrance upon this indignity put upon them.”

  Another English acquaintance of the Franklins wrote to a friend in Connecticut: “I hear there was some difficulty in his being confirmed in his place, for in our conscientious age many scruples were raised on account of his being illegitimate, which we were strangers to till very lately.” Closer friends had written Benjamin, warning him about “unruly spirits” in New Jersey, who might cause William trouble. So there was a double reason for Benjamin to accompany his son on this journey. William still needed the aura of his father’s prestige to guarantee a good reception.

  One of the most powerful troublemakers was William Alexander, son of Franklin’s old friend James Alexander. Lord Sterling, as the son called himself insisting on his legal right to the family’s ancient Scottish title, was an intense, argumentative man. Thanks to his knowledge of the family, Franklin was able to provide William with shrewd advice on how to deal with this touchy character, as well as numerous other New Jerseyites who he had met on his trips through the state, and his visits to New York. The travelers dined at Bristol on the Delaware and found the swift-running river hidden beneath a thick covering of ice, further testimony to the harshness of winter’s grip. With burlap on the wheels and on the horses’ hoofs, they crossed where, in summer, a ferry would have awaited them and at Trenton found a bed in a local inn.

  The next morning, they were pleasantly surprised by a visit from Sir John St. Clair, General Braddock’s ex-Hussar, now retired from the British Army and settled in New Jersey. He offered them his coach pulled by four splendid horses, and they were quick to accept. Later in the morning, the three men rolled through the frozen New Jersey country-side toward New Brunswick. The conversation turned first to England, and Franklin was soon reiterating to St. Clair the deep, almost passionate affection he felt for the mother country. Little more than a month earlier he had written to his friend Strahan: “God bless you and let me find you well and happy when I come again to England; happy England! . . . In two years at farthest I hope to settle all my affairs in such a manner, as that I may then conveniently remove to England, provided we can persuade the good woman to cross the seas.” In a letter to another English friend, he exclaimed: “Why should that petty island, which compared to America is but like a stepping stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one’s shoes dry; why, I say, should that little island, enjoy in almost every neighborhood, more sensible, virtuous and elegant minds, than we can collect in ranging a hundred leagues of our vast forests!”

  Sir John wanted to hear all they could tell him about young King George III, whose coronation the Franklins had attended. Was he as virtuous and high-minded as people said? Both Franklins emphatically agreed that he was a paragon. All omens - political, personal, and military - pointed toward a reign that would reap an unparalleled harvest of glory and prosperity for the people of his empire. The Seven Years War with France was sputtering to a close with the British flag flying over one-fifth of the globe. Canada was conquered, Havana had just fallen to an Anglo-American army, the vast subcontinent of India and the coasts of Africa had been cleared of their once proud French enemies.

  This talk of victories naturally made Sir John and the Franklins think back eight years to the days when they had first met. How hopeless things had seemed after Braddock’s death, with the frontier towns exposed to the Indian’s scalping knife, and the French triumphant everywhere! Then William Pitt had taken control of the British war effort, and victory followed victory in dizzying succession until France was prostrate and George III became King of the greatest empire since men began to write history.

  The travelers slept that night in New Brunswick, the standard stop-over for the New York stagecoach. The next morning on the way to Perth Amboy, they had another pleasant surprise. A half-dozen of the most distinguished men in Middlesex County arrived to pay their respects to the new governor. Then down the snowy road came a glittering spectacle, the Middlesex troop of horse, a local militia unit. The winter light glistened on their plumed helmets and upraised sabers as they saluted the new governor and about faced to accompany him into Perth Amboy. By noon, they had arrived in that pleasant village of 200 houses, on the shores of Raritan Bay. There they were greeted by the outgoing governor, Josiah Hardy, and several members of his council, as well as the mayor and other officials of the town. New Jersey had two capitals, Amboy for East Jersey, Burlington for West Jersey; the oddity was a relic of earlier days, when the colony had been divided into the separate provinces.

  The new governor and his father proceeded to the Governor’s Council Room in the courthouse, and there his commission was read. The language was redolent with royal authority.

  George the Third, by the grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland; King, Defender of the Faith &c. To our trusty and well beloved William Franklin, esq. . . . Know you that we reposing especial trust and confidence in the prudence courage and loyalty of you, the said William Franklin, of our especial grace certain knowledge and mere motion, have thought fit to constitute and appoint and by these presents do constitute and appoint you the said William Franklin to be our Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over our province of Nova Caesarea or New Jersey. . . .”

  While his father and “a numerous concourse of people” (as one newspaper reported) looked on with smiling approval, William Franklin placed his hand upon a Bible and swore to obey and uphold the autho
rity of King George in the province of New Jersey.

  Two days later after receiving a glowing address from the mayor and Common Council of the city of Perth Amboy and replying to it with admirable brevity, the fledgling governor returned to New Brunswick, where he met an equally warm reception. The address of the mayor and “commonalty” was as rich in royal sentiments as the governor’s commission. “From His Majesty’s known goodness and tender regard for his subjects, even in this distant part of his dominions, we rest satisfied and are persuaded that the reins of government are happily placed in the hands of Your Excellency,” they told Franklin. The governor in return congratulated them on their loyalty “to the best of princes.”

  From New Brunswick, the Franklins rode on to Princeton, where the school’s president Samuel Finley welcomed them with an even more eloquent address. “From your being entrusted with so honorable and important a commission by the father of his country, the royal patron of religion, virtue, learning, and whatever is good, and from an education under the influence and direction of the very eminent Doctor Franklin, Your Excellency’s honored father, we cannot but assure ourselves that you will view this institution, erected for the best purposes, with a favorable eye.” Finally, the Franklins reached Burlington, the West Jersey capital, where there were still more polite addresses and replies and gracious personal greetings and congratulations from the leading local citizens.

  The trip was a success from start to finish. Not a single unkind word was spoken, not a suggestion that anyone resisted or was inclined to resent the new governor. Contentedly, Benjamin Franklin wrote to his friend William Strahan that he “had the pleasure of seeing [William] received everywhere with the utmost respect and even affection of all ranks of people.” As they left Burlington to recross the Delaware on the way back to Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin must have pondered for a bit the way that their triumphant procession had retraced much of his first journey across New Jersey as a runaway Boston apprentice. He had landed at Perth Amboy hungry and feverish after a miserable trip by boat from New York, and trudged the fifty miles to Burlington on foot, in rainy October weather, befriended only by an innkeeper who liked to talk about books, and a lonely old woman who was eager to talk to anybody. What a difference forty years had made.

  But Benjamin did not get a chance to share any of these thoughts with William. The enthusiastic young governor was much too busy talking about himself, and the relief he felt at the warm reception from his subjects. Already his agile mind was analyzing the complex local politics of New Jersey, deciding whom he should choose for vacancies on his Council, whether he should establish his residence in Burlington or Perth Amboy. So the contented father and the happy son - two dedicated and well-rewarded servants of the King - rode back to Philadelphia, mercifully unaware of the years ahead.

  In June, Franklin was back in New Jersey to attend a lavish dinner given to William by the town of Elizabeth. By now the new governor was firmly in the saddle. He had handled with admirable smoothness the trickiest part of his job, getting money out of the colony’s Assembly, striking the right balance between control and cooperation in the bargain. From Elizabeth, Franklin set out on one of his tours of North America, in his role as the King’s Deputy Postmaster General. Once more, he visited post offices from Boston to Virginia, stopping along the way to renew his acquaintance with the prominent Americans of every state: Jared Ingersoll, the respected Connecticut lawyer whom Franklin had met in London; Cadwalader Colden, now lieutenant governor of New York; Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of the British Army in North America.

  But instead of rejoicing with these leaders over the prospects of peace, the talk was the same familiar tale of woe he had heard when he made the same journey to the Albany Congress a decade ago. The colonial frontier was aflame once more, and all anyone could do was lament American disunity. The Peace of Paris - as the treaty that ended the Seven Years War was called - ceded to England not only Canada, but all the vast swath of land between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River. Realizing that they had backed the wrong side, the Indians decided to make an all-out attempt to keep the whites out of this territory. For the first time, they did not fight as isolated tribes, but as united people under the leadership of Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas. Within a few weeks, beginning in the middle of May of 1763, every British post west of Niagara was destroyed except Detroit and Fort Pitt. Once more the frontier echoed to the chilling howl of the war whoop, and men, women, and children died under the tomahawk and the scalping knife along the western borders of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Pennsylvania was especially hard hit. Franklin’s partner in the printing of The Pennsylvania Gazette, David Hall, wrote him early in the summer, telling him that the back-country settlements were already in trouble. Farms were aflame, families were fleeing to the safety of nearby forts, and there was a terrifying lack of arms and ammunition. Hall begged Franklin to “return as soon as possible as your advice may be of use in this time of calamity.”

  Franklin must have grimaced when he read these words. He had no desire to relive those exhausting days in 1754 and ‘55, when he had organized the colony’s defenses after Braddock’s defeat. All he had received by way of thanks for risking his capital and his life was vilification from the descendants of William Penn and their local Pennsylvania supporters. This time, Franklin declined to rush to Pennsylvania’s rescue. Instead, with his daughter Sally for companionship, he jogged on his way through Connecticut and Rhode Island to Boston. Now twenty, Sally was a sturdily proportioned girl who had inherited her mother’s plainness and her father’s genial temper. Franklin thought it was time for her to meet the New England part of the family. Perhaps, too, he wanted to reassure Deborah Franklin that he was as fond of his daughter as he was of his son.

  Even before Franklin set out from New York with Sally, he got a stack of letters from the English mail ship telling about the amazingly chaotic political situation in England. Lord Bute, George III’s friend and adviser and the man responsible for William Franklin’s appointment as governor, had turned out to be a disaster as Prime Minister, and had petulantly resigned on April 8, 1763. He had been replaced by George Grenville, and with him came a new cast of characters into the cabinet offices that controlled the destiny of Franklin and his son. Dr. John Pringle, Franklin’s good friend had hustled to ingratiate the new Colonial Secretary, Lord Shelburne, and urge him to continue William’s appointment. Pringle told Franklin that Shelburne had heard him “with some indulgence,” but had made no promises. “This being the state of that affair, I am persuaded that if you were determined before to return to England,” Pringle wrote, “you will now see a good reason for hastening your departure; because your being present yourself may be a considerable weight in the scale in case matters should come near to a ballance.”

  Franklin’s response to this shift in the political climate was indignation. Like every politician, he did not like to hear that his friends were out and strangers in a position to do him harm were in power. Much of Lord Bute’s troubles had concerned the Peace of Paris which, in the opinion of many Britishers, granted too many concessions to their defeated enemy, France. Some of the barbs were flung at young George III personally because he had been an outspoken advocate of a peace of reconciliation. Franklin placed himself wholeheartedly behind this royal policy. “The glory of Britain was never higher than at present, and I think you never had a better prince,” he wrote one English friend. “Why then is he not universally rever’d and belov’d?” He also wrote to his friend William Strahan, begging him to take a half hour from cribbage and give him a careful analysis of the situation. Strahan complied, reassuring Franklin that he thought William had “sagacity enough, with your assistance, to deserve and secure” his post. Strahan then renewed his campaign to persuade Franklin to return to England for good, insisting that his arguments were “strong and unanswerable.”

  Franklin remained noncommittal until he finished his New England tour, but bac
k in Philadelphia he sat down to write Strahan a long letter and suddenly found his longing for the mother country near overwhelming. “Now I am returned from my long journeys which have consum’d the whole summer, I shall apply myself to such a settlement of all my affairs, as will enable me to do what your friendship so warmly urges. I have a great opinion of your wisdom (Madeira apart) and am apt enough to think that what you seem so clear in, and are so earnest about, must be right. Tho’ I own, that I sometimes suspect, my love to England and my friends there seduces me a little, and makes my own middling reasons for going over; appear very good ones. We shall see in a little time how things will turn out.”

  From there he swept into new apostrophes to George III. He told Strahan not to fear for “our virtuous young King.” Franklin was convinced “the consciousness of his sincere intentions to make his people happy, will give him firmness and steadiness in his measures and in the support of the honest friends he has chosen to serve him.” Franklin foresaw a reign that would be “happy and truly glorious.”

  One significant barrier to his retirement in England was Deborah Franklin’s continuing fear of sea travel. Although her own husband was living proof that the Atlantic could be crossed safely, Deborah simply would not consider it. Soon William Franklin was writing Strahan informing him that his father had given up his dream of moving to England. He was building a large expensive house on Market Street in Philadelphia. Deborah Franklin had apparently won her struggle to keep her husband in America.