Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  Everyone knew the real battle was going to take place in October when the elections were held. John Dickinson opened the hostilities by publishing a speech he had made in the Assembly, with a long preface written by one of the Proprietary Party, full of effusive eulogies of William Penn and, by implication, his descendants. Franklin replied by publishing a speech by his lieutenant in the Assembly, earnest, argumentative Joseph Galloway. Franklin wrote a preface for it that skewered Dickinson and the Penns with Franklin’s favorite weapon, humor.

  Dickinson’s prefacer had made the mistake of composing, in the form of a memorial, a hymn of praise to William Penn.

  WILLIAM PENN

  A man of principles truely humane,

  An advocate for

  RELIGION and LIBERTY

  Possessing a noble spirit

  That exerted itself

  For the good of mankind

  It continued in this lapidary style for another page and a half, ending with the declaration that Penn’s good deeds deserved “ever to be remembered”

  With

  GRATITUDE and AFFECTION

  By PENNSYLVANIANS

  Franklin’s answer was a counter-memorial to the sons.

  Be this a Memorial

  Of T[homasj and R[ichard] P[enn],

  P[roprietaries] of Pennsylvania]

  Who with Estates immense,

  Almost beyond Computation,

  When their own Province,

  And the whole British Empire

  Were engag’d in a bloody and most expensive War

  Begun for the Defence of those Estates,

  Could yet meanly desire

  To have those very Estates

  Totally or Partially

  Exempted from Taxation,

  While their Fellow-Subjects all around them

  Groan’d

  Under the universal Burthen.

  To gain this Point,

  They refus’d the necessary Laws

  For the Defence of their People,

  And suffer’d their Colony to welter in its Blood,

  Rather than abate in the least

  Of these their dishonest Pretentions.

  The Privileges granted by their Father

  Wisely and benevolently

  To encourage the first Settlers of the Province

  They,

  Foolishly and cruelly,

  Taking Advantage of public Distress,

  Have extorted from the Posterity of those Settlers;

  And are daily endeavoring to reduce them

  To the most abject Slavery:

  Tho’ to the Virtue and Industry of those People

  In Improving their Country,

  They owe all that they possess and enjoy.

  A striking Instance

  Of human Depravity and Ingratitude;

  And an irrefragable Proof,

  That Wisdom and Goodness

  Do not descend with an Inheritance;

  But that ineffable Meanness

  May be connected with unbounded Fortune.

  Simultaneously, Franklin opened a second front in London. William Franklin sent “Cool Thoughts” and other information to William Strahan, who gave the Franklin side of the story comprehensive coverage in his newspaper, The London Chronicle. Again, the pivotal role William played in Franklin’s overall battle plan was evident in the way this propaganda praised New Jersey as strongly as it condemned Pennsylvania. Franklin was soon writing cheerfully to Strahan, “I thank you for inserting the messages and resolutions entire. I believe it has had a good effect; for a friend writes me, that ‘it is astonishing with what success it was propagated in London by the Proprietaries, that the [Assembly’s] resolutions were the most indecent and undutiful to the Crown, &c, so that when he saw them, having before heard those reports, he could not believe that they were the same.’”

  Back in Philadelphia, meanwhile, Franklin’s enemies launched a fierce counterattack. Off their press came a pamphlet with the staggering title, “What is SAUCE for a GOOSE is also SAUCE for a GANDER. BEING A Small Touch in the LAPIDARY Way OR TIT for TAT, in Your Own Way. AN EPITAPH on a Certain Great Man. Written by a Departed Spirit and now Most Humbly Inscribed to all His Dutiful Sons and Children, Who May Hereafter Choose to Distinguish Him by the Name of A PATRIOT.”

  Then - written in the same parody-epitaph style Franklin had used to skewer the Penns - came the following blast:

  AN EPITAPH &c

  TO the much esteem’d Memory of

  B____ F____ Esq; LL.D;

  The only man of his day

  In Pennsylvania

  Or perhaps of any age or in any country,

  Whose ingrate Disposition and Badness of Heart

  (These enormous Vices)

  Ever introduced to

  POPULARITY.

  For three pages, the Proprietary satirist battered Franklin with every available charge from revolutionary intentions to William’s illegitimate birth. Then the memorialist turned to slander and accused Franklin of retaining William’s mother as a part-time paramour and maid of all work in his own house for several years.”

  The tone of the election campaign was set, and nothing said or done afterwards did anything to improve it. One of Philadelphia’s most influential clergymen, Dr. John Ewing applauded the Paxtons and denounced Franklin and the Quakers. “Few but Quakers think that the Lancaster Indians have suffered anything but their just desserts,” he declared piously. The tactics on Election Day were in keeping with the rest of the campaign. Franklin and his friends ran on what they called “the Old Ticket.” Dickinson, the Proprietors, and anyone else they could dragoon, ran on “the New Ticket.” An eyewitness described the scene before City Hall: “The poll was opened about nine in the morning, the first of October, and the steps so crowded, till between eleven and twelve at night, that at no time a person could get up in less than a quarter of an hour from his entrance at the bottom, for they could go no faster than the whole column moved. About three in the morning the advocates for the New Ticket moved for a close. But (0! fatal mistake!) the old hands kept it open, as they had a reserve of the aged and lame, which could not come in the crowd, and were called up and brought out in chairs and litters . . . between three and six o’clock, about 200 voters. As both sides took care to have spies all night, the alarm was given to the New Ticket men! Horsemen and footmen were immediately dispatched to Germantown and elsewhere; and by nine or ten o’clock they began to pour in, so that after the move for a close, 7 or 8oo votes were procured; about 500 or near it of which were for the New Ticket . . .”

  When the votes were finally counted, the following day, the Proprietary Party and their supporters staged jubilant parades through Philadelphia. Franklin and his lieutenant, Galloway, had been beaten by a squeaky twenty-five votes. “Mr. Franklin died like a philosopher,” declared the reporter who was telling the story to a friend in London. “But Mr. Galloway agonized in death like a mortal Deist, who has no hopes of a future existence,” The Proprietaries stopped cheering when reports of the voting in other counties’ reached the capital. It quickly became clear that the Old Ticket retained a strong majority in the Assembly.

  Undaunted by his personal loss, Franklin grimly proceeded with the problem of getting rid of the Penns. Over repeated protests by John Dickinson, the Assembly named Franklin as its agent in England to press the petition to the King. Dickinson declared that “no man in Pennsylvania is at this time so much the object of the public dislike” as Franklin. The Assembly ignored the orator, and Franklin accepted the post. Eleven hundred pounds were voted for his expenses, but because the treasury was empty, and even this much money had to be borrowed, Franklin accepted only Sao pounds. Dickinson and his party replied by demanding that a minority protest be inserted in the Assembly minutes. This too was voted down.

  Franklin announced he was leaving immediately for England, but he found time while packing to launch a final volley at his opponents. His pamphlet, “Remarks on a Late P
rotest,” was a bruising reply to Dickinson’s assertion that Franklin was the worst possible choice to represent the colony in England. Why was he the wrong man to represent Pennsylvania in London? Had he by speeches and writing “endeavored to make His Majesty’s government universally odious in the province?” Thus, he deftly turned the Proprietaries’ arguments back on them. “If I had harangued by the week to all corners and goers on the pretended injustice and oppressions of royal government and the slavery of the people under it; if I had written traitorous papers to this purpose arid got them translated into other languages, to give His Majesty’s foreign subjects here those horrible ideas of it; if I had declared, written, and printed that ‘the King’s little finger we should find heavier than the Proprietors’ whole loins’ with regard to our liberties; then indeed might [his Majesty’s] ministers be supposed to think unfavorably of me. But these are not exploits for a man who holds a profitable office under the Crown, and can expect to hold it no longer than he behaves with the fidelity and duty that becomes every good subject.”

  He denied that he had “a fixed enmity to the Proprietaries.” “Let them do justice to the people of Pennsylvania, act honorably by the citizens of Philadelphia, and become honest men; my enmity, if that’s of any consequence, ceases from the very moment, and as soon as I possibly can, I promise to love, honour, and respect them.”

  Then with the skill of a born writer, he changed pace and became more philosopher than pamphleteer. “I am now to take leave (perhaps the last leave) of the country I love and in which I have spent the greatest part of my life. Esto perpetua. I wish every kind of prosperity to my friends; and. I forgive my enemies.”

  Franklin’s friends, meanwhile, were marshaling their forces. They were determined to show Philadelphia and the world that their man was still the hero of the majority. On November 7, Franklin left Philadelphia, escorted by no less than 300 men on horseback. Down at Chester on the Delaware, the ship King of Prussia was waiting for him. Cannon, borrowed from the Philadelphia armory, boomed as he went aboard, and the crowd sang an improvised version of “God Save the King”:

  O LORD our GOD arise, Scatter our Enemies,

  And make them fall.

  Confound their Politicks; Frustrate such Hypocrites, Franklin, on Thee we fix,

  GOD Save us all.

  Thy Knowledge rich in Store, On Pennsylvania pour,

  Thou [sic] great Blessing: Long to defend our Laws, Still give us greater Cause,

  To sing with Heart and Voice,

  GEORGE and FRANKLIN

  GOD Save Great GEORGE our King;

  Prosper agent FRANKLIN: Grant him Success:

  Hark how the Vallies ring; GOD Save our Gracious King, From whom all Blessings spring,

  Our Wrongs redress.

  Franklin’s faithful political lieutenant, Joseph Galloway, and two other close friends, Thomas Wharton and Abel James, both prominent Philadelphia merchants, went on board ship with him and sailed down the Delaware to New Castle. Franklin was deeply touched by this outpouring of affection and loyalty. On the night of November 8, alone in his cabin aboard the King of Prussia, he had only one concern that still nagged at his mind: his daughter, Sally. At twenty-one, she was almost certain to be exposed to the same kind of embarrassing snubs and petty insults that had made William Franklin unhappy. Benjamin had wanted to take Sally with him to England to put her beyond the reach of this malevolence, at least for the year he expected to be gone. But Deborah Franklin had categorically refused to part with her.

  Out of this deep concern, Franklin sat down and wrote one of the tenderest letters a father has ever sent a daughter.

  “My dear Child, the natural prudence and goodness of heart that God has blessed you with, make it less necessary for me to be particular in giving you advice; I shall therefore only say, that the more attentively dutiful and tender you are towards your good Mama, the more you will recommend yourself to me; But why shou’d I mention me, when you have so much higher a promise in the commandment, that such a conduct will recommend you to the favour of God. You know I have many enemies (all indeed on the public account, for I cannot recollect that I have in a private capacity given just cause of offence to anyone whatever) yet they are enemies and very bitter ones, and you must expect their enmity will extend in some degree to you, so that your slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound and afflict me. It is therefore the more necessary for you to be extreamly circumspect in all your behavior that no advantage may be given to their malevolence. Go constantly to church whoever preaches. The acts of devotion in the common prayer book are your principal business there; and if properly attended to, will do more towards mending the heart than sermons generally can do. For they were composed by men of much greater piety and wisdom, than our common composers of sermons can pretend to be. And therefore I wish you wou’d never miss the prayer days. Yet I do not mean that you shou’d despise sermons even of the preachers you dislike, for the discourse is often much better than the man, as sweet and clear waters come to us thro’ very dirty earth. I am the more particular on this head, as you seem’d to express a little before I came away some inclination to leave our church [The rector of Christ Church was a bitter anti-Franklin man, and often made it clear in his sermons.], which I wou’d not have you do. . .”

  Franklin closed the fetter by urging Sally to spend some time acquiring “those useful accomplishments, arithmetick and bookkeeping.” Sally was clearly no genius, and with the Philadelphia Establishment so thoroughly aroused against the Franklins, there was not much chance that she would marry a scion. So Franklin was attempting to prepare her for becoming a tradesman’s wife and wanted her to be able to give her husband the kind of valuable help that Deborah had given him.

  For us, with the comfortable wisdom of hindsight, Franklin’s new mission to London is almost top-heavy with irony. He was returning to the England he loved to ask George III and his ministers to become the lawful rulers of Pennsylvania. Franklin was still very much a man of his own time, of those earlier eighteenth-century decades, when England and her colonies stood in sometimes desperate battle array against the power of France and Spain. He had played his part in helping to shape the outlines of the present triumphant empire, and now, like a good citizen, he was seeking a way to perfect it. He spoke and acted out of deep wellsprings of old emotion and out of a faith that was also part of his time, a belief that men could use the light of reason with which they were illuminating nature’s mysteries to bring sanity and order into their political and personal lives. Within this fabric of thought and feeling were intimately woven the ardent affections of a husband and father. Benjamin Franklin had no way of knowing he was sailing into a whirlwind that would shred this fabric and ultimately destroy the deepest and most meaningful relationships in his life.

  The King of Prussia plowed the wintry Atlantic at a lively pace. Joseph Galloway and the other political friends who had gone aboard ship with Franklin had, in one of their last toasts, wished him thirty days of fair wind. The wish was almost too abundantly granted. The weather was terrible, and the seas were mountainous. But the King of Prussia did, indeed, reach the Isle of Wight in just thirty days. Franklin quickly dashed off a letter to his distraught wife informing her that he had survived another crossing, and admitting that because of the severe weather, he had “often been thankful that our dear Sally was not with me.”

  Ashore, Franklin made record time to London and went straight to his house on Craven Street. He found no one at home but the maid, and he sat in the parlor savoring the anticipation of seeing Mrs. Stevenson’s face, when she finally arrived. The good woman was suitably astonished to see her old friend, whom she thought was 3,000 miles away in Philadelphia, greeting her with a hearty chuckle from his favorite easy chair. Daughter Polly was away visiting friends in the country, but Franklin made time in the next few days to write a letter to her telling how “surpriz’d” her “good mama” was to find him in h
er parlor. To Deborah he wrote a lovely little note that began with the familiar “My dear child,” telling her that so far he had done nothing but catch “a most violent cold.” He added that all his friends had given him “a most cordial welcome.” This was soothing stuff intended for a worried wife. Franklin did not want to burden Deborah with the more somber news he was hearing in London.

  To Craven Street came a steady stream of American agents for other colonies, as well as Richard Jackson, the official spokesman for Pennsylvania. With sorrowful faces and in equally sorrowful words, they told the same troubled tale. Parliament was about to approve a new tax, a Stamp Act, that would for the first time require Americans to pay taxes to Parliament in order to conduct their daily affairs. A royal stamp would be required on every conceivable legal document, from lawyers’ certificates to marriage licenses. It was the first time that Parliament had ever taxed Americans internally, to use the language of Franklin and his friends. External taxes and duties on imports and exports had always been imposed, but they were seen as part of the need to regulate trade throughout the empire, for the eventual advantage of all its citizens both at home and in the colonies.

  Franklin was appalled. Word that the British government was considering such an act had been drifting around America for almost a year. Pennsylvania and several other colonial Assemblies had passed resolutions objecting to it, and declaring their willingness to raise taxes for the Crown in the traditional way -- each colony voting an amount proportionate to its resources -- but the First Lord of the Treasury, George Grenville, had ignored these mild protestations and gone ahead with his plan for a stamp tax. The situation was, in short, a perfect jumble of political confusion, in unfortunate consistency with the slapdash manner with which England had governed the colonies since the beginning.