Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  As was his custom, Franklin did more listening than talking. The other agents told him of their May 17, 1764, meeting with Grenville, during which they had desperately sought to find out from the First Lord of the Treasury such elementary facts as how much money he expected to make from his stamp tax in order that they might give their respective Assemblies some idea of how much cash they would have to raise to forestall the measure. To this Grenville replied that details were unnecessary. Earlier in a speech in Parliament, Grenville had given the distinct impression that he was willing to consider alternatives to a stamp tax, but the First Lord was obviously talking out of both sides of his mouth. Simultaneously, his secretary Thomas Whately was collecting the information from the colonies that he needed to write the act. Richard Jackson, who also served as Grenville’s secretary, undoubtedly made this clear to his good friend Franklin. In his May 17 conference with the colonial agents, Grenville had offered, with the air of a man making a concession that he would consult with the agents just before Parliament convened, but only if they would request their Assemblies to agree in advance to the principle of a stamp tax. All this was interlarded with profuse statements of affection for the colonies, and glowing testimonials that the King and the mother country sought nothing but their good and protection.

  Was there no opposition organized anywhere against the bill? Franklin asked. He knew how solidly Americans were united against it, and he found it hard to believe that all the letters they had written and all the resolves forwarded by their Assemblies had not raised any response among friends of America in England. The Massachusetts agent Jasper Mauduit shrugged and spoke glumly of a vague spirit of opposition among British merchants, but it was all talk and no action. Not even Grenville’s secretaries had been able to change the First Lord’s mind. Jackson had been against the bill from the start, and Thomas Whately had reaped an ominous harvest of negative letters when he wrote to America for information. Jared Ingersoll, an old Franklin friend from Connecticut, was in London on private business, and he had been invited by the agents and Franklin to join them, no doubt on Franklin’s recommendation. “I told Mr. Whately,” Ingersoll declared, “that I had heard gentlemen in New England, gentlemen of the greatest property, say very coolly that if the government took such a step, they would immediately remove themselves and their families and fortunes into some foreign kingdom.”

  Another agent, perhaps South Carolina’s Charles Garth, suggested, with a feeble grope for optimism, that at least the tax was not terribly large. “Large or small is not the point,” declared Ingersoll. “Once Parliament lays a tax, no matter how moderate, who can say what will follow?”

  There was obviously only one move left. Charles Garth and Jackson, the two members of Parliament who were agents, and Franklin and Ingersoll, as two distinguished men fresh from America, would go to Grenville and make a last desperate attempt to stop the bill.

  Down to the office of the First Lord of the Treasury they went on February 2, 1765. It was Franklin’s first official meeting with men at the very summit of English power. In his previous years in England, he had met powerful peers socially, but officially he had dealt with sub-ministers and secretaries more directly concerned with colonial affairs. So he sought in vain a conference with the First Minister of that era, William Pitt. Thus, this meeting between George Grenville and Benjamin Franklin was far more significant in the lives of both men, and in the histories of their countries, than anyone (including the men themselves) realized at the time.

  Grenville was an unusual British politician in some respects. He worked at his job with the zeal of a sub-accountant, mastering reams of detail. Unfortunately, he combined this talent with a trait that was more typical of the leading politicians of his era - overwhelming arrogance bred of his aristocratic background and a sense of being a leader of the world’s most powerful nation. He combined this inner certainty with a languid, rather bored manner which produced almost instant irritation in those who had to listen to him. About a year earlier he had risen in the House of Commons to defend the government’s policy of imposing new taxes. An immense debt piled up by the Seven Years War made them a necessity, yet the Members repeatedly objected to specific imposts, with the politician’s usual passion to protect the specific interests of his constituents. Where were new taxes to be laid? Grenville cried. “I wish gentlemen would show me where to lay them.” Again and again he repeated this question in his querulous way until William Pitt suddenly began mocking him with words from an old song, “Gentle shepherd, tell me where!” Instantly, Grenville became known as the Gentle Shepherd, a name which stuck to him for the rest of his life.

  The story also underscored Grenville’s favorite political tactic. He operated on the principle that no one else knew quite as much about the machinery of the government as he did, and was notably fond of throwing protests back in the laps of the protesters, with a what-would-you-do-if-you-were-in-my-place cry. At the same time, Grenville considered himself a superior politician. He had boldly sought the job of First Minister, and ruthlessly driven out of influence George III’s favorite, Lord Bute. Now he thought he could handle these naive colonials with that most superficial of political arts, ingratiation.

  The great man was all smiles as Franklin and his friends sat down in his office. Exuding good cheer, he told them how distressed he was to learn that they were troubled about the stamp tax. He listened with a profusion of tut-tuts and tsk-tsks as the agents detailed their respectful disagreement with his policies. He told them that he took “no pleasure” in giving Americans this “uneasiness” and simultaneously implied that he did not truly believe serious unease existed anywhere but in the minds of the agents.

  Even if there were uneasiness, Grenville made it clear that it was his duty to balance the books, not merely for America but for the entire Empire. He again repeated the arguments he had used on the colonial agents the year before. Everybody in England paid a stamp tax without protest. Was there a better way to raise money in America? If so, would they please tell him?

  As usual, Franklin let others do most of the talking. Jackson, schooled in the traditions of the House of Commons, showed no hesitation about saying bluntly what he thought. He feared the act was the first of many, which would end by fully demolishing the tradition of representative government in America. Once the home government was able to collect all the revenues its royal governors needed by Parliamentary, imposed taxation, no governor in his right mind would ever summon a colonial assembly. In a few years, they would quietly wither away. The First Lord of the Treasury expressed horror at the thought. He had absolutely no desire of such a goal, nor did he think it was in the mind of any English statesman. Jackson was dealing with fantasy, a monster of his own imagination. The simple truth was that the government had to lay a tax. “Can any of you gentlemen tell me a better way to do it?”

  Once more the Americans renewed their plea to let each colony raise a share of the money through its own internal taxation.

  “But, gentlemen,” cried Grenville, “can you agree on the proportion each colony should raise?”

  Of course they could not agree for reasons which Grenville himself knew perfectly well. In the first place, he had never told them how much money he wanted to raise. If he had been serious about this idea, he should have ordered his secretary, Thomas Whately, to send a circular letter to the colonies when he began collecting information a year ago telling them to confer and decide on just proportions, or at least send Whately enough information so that he and Grenville could decide. Franklin and his friends could only mumble that neither they nor any other colonial agent had the power to negotiate such a deal. It was something that only the Assemblies, the tax gathering bodies, could handle.

  Grenville now proceeded to top this absurdity by announcing to the delegation that he had “pledged his word” to offer a stamp bill to Parliament. The Gentle Shepherd did not have a good memory. In his own words, he was proving himself a liar by contradicting what
he had said a year ago about having an open mind toward raising money in America. In a different atmosphere, Franklin and his friends might have sharply reminded him of this fact, but they were not prepared for such a confrontation. On the contrary, they all shared Franklin’s deep reverence for the concept of a united, glorious British Empire, and this man, handed the seals of power by George III in his closet, and was the living personification of it. So they could only sit and listen despairingly as Grenville closed their half-hour meeting by calling for “coolness and moderation in America” and expressing a simultaneous hope that there would be no “resentments indecently and unbecomingly expressed.” Only when they were in Benjamin Franklin’s coach, riding back to Craven Street, did they realize that they had been treated like children.

  Conversations with Jackson and other members of Parliament in the ensuing days soon made it clear that there was another, even more dismaying side to the government’s insistence on the Stamp Act. The majority of Parliament, from the theoretically independent country gentlemen to the retainers of the powerful party leaders, elected from so-called “rotten boroughs,” where only a handful of people had the right to vote, were intensely irritated by the first murmurs of American resistance to the Stamp Act. One member of Parliament haughtily declared that the prime purpose of the Act was to establish the right of Parliament to tax the colonies “by a new execution of it, and in the strongest instance, an internal tax.”

  The whole experience must have been almost overwhelming for Franklin. The problem that had agitated him and his friends in Pennsylvania for so long - the battle with the Proprietors - vanished in this much more important issue. Day after day, Franklin followed the debates in Parliament as reported in the newspapers and conferred with his influential friends, such as Pringle and Strahan, on how the battle was going. None of the news he heard was good. Only a relative handful of members opposed the tax, but some of them did it with vigor. Franklin must have noted with not a little interest that two of the most spirited opposition spokesmen were Irish. Their country, too, had a colonial status within the empire, and they obviously spoke out with a resentment that he - a thus far contented servant of the King - did not yet feel. Franklin may have been sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons on the day when the debates on the Stamp Act reached a kind of climax. Certainly he read and heard about it in vivid detail from men such as Jared Ingersoll, who wrote an electrifying letter home describing it.

  Charles Townshend - a member of Parliament who shared and, in fact, propagated a large measure of the prejudice against Americans - arose to make an incredibly condescending speech about colonial opposition to the Stamp Act. “And now will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence until they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?” The burden, of course, was the British war debt. Colonel Isaac Barré - an Irishman who had fought in America during the French and Indian War - paid no attention to the financial side of this querulous rhetorical question. It was Townshend’s tone that infuriated him, and he leaped to his feet with words that would soon resound throughout the American colonies.

  “They planted by your care? No! Your oppressions planted ‘em in America. They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable country, where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable, and among others to the cruelties of a savage foe, the most subtle and I take upon me to say the most formidable of any people upon the face of God’s earth. And yet, actuated by principles of true English lyberty, they met all these hardships with pleasure, compared with those they suffered in their own country, from the hands of those who should have been their friends.

  “They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of em: as soon as you began to care about em, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule over em, in one department and another, who were perhaps the deputies of deputies to some member of this house, sent to spy out their lyberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon em; men whose behaviour on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them; men promoted to the highest seats of justice, some, who to my knowledge were glad by going to a foreign country to escape being brought to the bar of a court of justice in their own.

  “They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defence of a country, whose frontier, while drench’d in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument. And believe me, remember I this day told you so, that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first, will accompany them still. But prudence forbids me to explain myself further. God knows I do not at this time speak from motives of party heat, what I deliver are the genuine sentiments of my heart.”

  But Parliament was more interested in finances than genuine sentiments. George Grenville produced figures which argued that the American colonies’ total public debts were less than a million pounds, only a fraction of England’s 129,586,789 pounds of red ink. Various opposition maneuvers, such as a motion to adjourn, were beaten down by overwhelming votes (245 to 49). When colonial agents tried to present petitions against the bill they were curtly refused. Charles Garth was soon mournfully writing his employers in South Carolina that the “power of Parliament was asserted and so universally agreed to, that no petition disputing it will be received.” This aroused the ire of another Irishman, Henry Seymour Conway, who took the floor and asked the question that Franklin and his friends might have put to George Grenville if they had been in a mood for confrontation. What was the point of postponing the Stamp Act for a year, Conway asked, in order to give the colonies time to make objections or alternative suggestions, and then huffily turn them down when they were presented by their legal representatives? “Shall we shut our ears against that information, which with an affectation of candor; we allotted sufficient time to reach us?” Conway thundered. “From whom, unless from ourselves, are we to learn the circumstances of the colonies and the fatal consequences that may attend the imposing of this tax?”

  Conway could not even arouse enough opposition to call for a vote. The “readings” given the fifty-five resolutions which made up the bill were a joke. The Stamp Act became law without another murmur of dissent. Mournfully, Franklin wrote his friend John Ross in Philadelphia even before Parliament confirmed the bill, “The Stamp Act, notwithstanding all the opposition we have been able to give it, will pass.” He also added, even more ruefully, “We have been of late so much engag’d in our general American affairs, that it was necessary to let what related particularly to our province sleep a little for the present.”

  Franklin and the rest of his American friends in England submitted with little more than a sigh of resentment to the Stamp Act. Perhaps because a similar act had long been in force in England, they paid little attention to its fantastic complications. The Act’s printed text alone consumed some twenty-five pages. It taxed no less than fifteen different types of legal documents used in court and included newspapers, almanacs, college diplomas, dice and playing cards. Even the tax on newspapers brought only a mild groan from Franklin. He told Ross, “Every newspaper advertisement and almanack is severely tax’d” with “every step in the law” also taxed. He conceded it would “fall particularly hard on us lawyers and printers.”

  With his act in hand, George Grenville now decided it was time to display some more superficial magnanimity. He wrote to the colonial agents and declared that he had no desire to irritate the colonies still further by sending strangers from England to collect the stamp tax. On the contrary, he was ready to appoint “respectable” local men and asked Franklin and the other agents for suggestions. Franklin and the other agents readily accepted this conciliatory gesture. Franklin even considered it a triumph in hi
s struggle with the Penns, and Thomas Penn obviously considered it in the same way. He complained mightily when Franklin’s candidate, his old friend John Hughes, was named Stamp Commissioner for Pennsylvania. Franklin’s friends in Philadelphia had the same reaction. One wrote to tell him how “the Old Ticket was rejoicing at the appointment of their valuable and firm representative to the office of Stamp Commissioner.” As for the Proprietary Party, they “speak their chagrin and distress in their very looks.”

  This attitude makes it easier to understand Franklin’s submissiveness. It was typical of the feelings of the men in his generation, who found it difficult (for some impossible) to think politically in any terms beyond the framework of the existing empire. Also, Franklin’s mind was distinctly practical and positive. He had tried to stop the Stamp Act and failed. What, then, was the next best thing to do? Obviously, it was to find a way for the Americans to pay for it as painlessly as possible. The answer, in Franklin’s opinion, was one of his favorite ideas, a well-regulated paper currency for all of the colonies. He had tried to persuade Grenville to accept the idea as a substitute for the Stamp Act. The paper bills were to be purchased at colonial loan offices, which would charge interest, payable to the Crown. Now he renewed his efforts to persuade Parliament to pass such a measure, and found considerable encouragement for the idea among many influential Britishers with whom be spoke.

  But as the spring of 1765 lengthened into summer, there came rolling into London, at first in a trickle that was hardly more noticeable than a wavelet splashing against a Thames River dock, and finally in a mounting surge that assumed all the roaring proportions of a tidal wave, news that the Americans were not accepting the Stamp Act as temperately as George Grenville had hoped they might. From Boston to Virginia, Assemblies denounced and newspapers fulminated. Most startling were impromptu organizations that had sprung up in every colony, calling themselves “Sons of Liberty” and urging Americans to name towns and children after Barré and Conway.