Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  But even with this formidable support, chances for repeal of the Stamp Act looked dim, at first. The Rockingham ministry was weak. On the right, it lacked the support of the Grenvilleites, and, on the left, the Great Commoner, William Pitt, had refused to lend it his prestige, because, as usual, be wanted his own way on everything - or nothing. The Grenvilleites made it clear that they could not care less about the value of the Stamp Act, either in terms of a revenue bill or the damage it was doing to British American relations. The right of Parliament to Jay taxes was the essential point. One of the more vociferous Grenvilleites, Robert Nugent, made that clear when he arose in Parliament to declare, “A peppercorn in acknowledgment of the right was of more value than millions without.”

  Edmund Burke decided that the answer to the political dilemma was information. “Ignorance of American affairs,” Burke said later, “had misled Parliament. Knowledge alone could bring it into the right road.” For the better part of six weeks, the Rockingham administration paraded witnesses to the bar of the House of Commons. Fugitive Stamp Commissioners from Rhode Island and Virginia, driven out of the colonies by the fury of their fellow citizens, testified. London merchants and experts from the Board of Trade inundated the Members with data on the cost of civil government and military defense, and how much money England made from its trade with the colonies. This avalanche of fact and opinion could - and probably would - have numbed Parliament’s collective mind. Acutely aware of their own weakness, the Rockinghamites were trying almost too hard. But they did one thing right. They asked Benjamin Franklin to testify. Once he had agreed, Franklin made sure that his performance would have a climactic impact. With the help of several Rockingham supporters, he drew up and carefully rehearsed a list of questions and answers that would refute the Stamp Act, once and for all. There would, of course, be questions from the Grenvilleites and other hostile members of Parliament, but Franklin was prepared to take his chances with them, relying on his native wit and the confidence that he knew more about America than anyone in Parliament, including George Grenville.

  In these days of intense discussion, and despite the personal urgency he felt, Franklin’s sense of humor did not desert him; at one point, a member of Parliament began upbraiding him for his insistence on the repeal of the Stamp Act. If he truly wanted to help matters, the MP imperiously declared, he would suggest some amendments to the Act which might make it tolerable to the colonists.

  “I must confess,” Franklin gravely replied, “I have thought of one amendment. If you will make it, the Act may remain, and yet the Americans will be quieted. It is a very small amendment too; it is only the change of a single word.”

  The MP and his listening colleagues quivered with anticipation. Was this the answer to the crisis? The opponent of repeal begged Franklin to tell him.

  “The change is in that clause,” Franklin said, “where it is said that ‘from and after the first day of November, one thousand seven hundred and sixty-five, there shall be paid, etc.’ The amendment I would propose is for one, read two, and then all the rest of the Act may stand as it does.”

  William Pitt, now Lord Chatham, spoke out against the Stamp Act, calling for its repeal. But he also insisted on “the sovereign authority of this country over the colonies.” Since this and not the Stamp Act as such, was the real nub of the problem, Pitt in effect canceled himself out. Meanwhile, the Grenvilleites and their cohorts fought back with a battery of logical and emotional arguments, in and out of Parliament. The chaplain of the Earl of Sandwich, a man who made no secret of his contempt for Americans, ridiculed the Rockingham ministry’s weakness and warned that if Parliament succumbed to a policy of appeasement, the Americans would swiftly become ungovernable. “Can it be supposed,” he asked, “that the colonists will ever submit to bear any share in those grievous burdens and taxes, with which we are loaded, when they find that the government will not, or dare not assert its own authority and power?” On London streets, a satirical ballad made the same point.

  “Who’d stay in musty England,

  And work himself to death,

  Where, choaked with debts and taxes,

  No man can fetch his breath,

  And to America we’ll go &c.

  Then to America we’ll go,

  Where we will merry be;

  Since there no taxes need be paid,

  And wise men all agree.

  And to America we’ll go &c.

  Then fare thee well, Old England,

  Where honesty can’t thrive;

  Farewell roast-beef, and bread, and beer,

  We’ll go to yonder hive.

  And to America we’ll go &c.”

  In this heated atmosphere, the moment of truth for Parliament and Franklin arrived on February 13, 1766.

  “What is your name and place of abode?”

  “Franklin, of Philadelphia.”

  The calm, quiet voice carried clearly across the packed benches of the House of Commons. At first glance, the man standing before the bar, a horizontal piece of wood that blocked the passage into the well of the House, was unimpressive. Benjamin Franklin wore no royal orders or ribbons. His clothes were in the simple — but by no means inexpensive - style of a well-to-do English merchant. He was stout and the white wig he wore was just a little old-fashioned, dropping too low on the shoulders, definitely missing the dash and style which was the mode of upper-class London. But there was a serene self-possession about the man that made the niceties of high fashion inconsequential. He stood there, and his very silence said: important.

  His name was, of course, familiar to most members of Parliament. Even the dullest country gentleman, who rarely thought about anything more significant than pursuit of the fox, the most effervescent macaroni, who found it hard to think about anything weightier than the shade of his mulberry waistcoat, at least knew that Benjamin Franklin was the American who had startled the scientific world with his epochal discoveries about the nature of electricity.

  For Franklin, this was the most momentous hour of his life. These words, Franklin of Philadelphia, tolled in his mind like a solemn sonorous bell. They said things to him that he did not really want to hear. Until this moment, or at least until the few months preceding this moment, which were all part of the same nightmarish experience, he did not think that Franklin of Philadelphia set him apart from these men who sat on the crowded benches covered with tacky green cloth, nor from their fellow politicians in their nearby Whitehall Palace offices. As a fellow servant of the Crown, with a son a royal governor, Benjamin Franklin had considered Franklin of Philadelphia as no more significant than the set speech he often used when he entered a roadside tavern during his trips around America. “I am Ben Franklin,” he would say. “I was born in Boston, now live in Philadelphia, and I have no news. Now what can you give me for dinner?” All his life Ben Franklin had thought of his native land as an essential part of that magnificent, ever-expanding empire known as Great Britain. He had gloried in, and fervently supported, the triumphs which had driven the French off the continent of North America, and made England supreme in India, Africa, the West Indies, and Europe. But now events in America had forced Benjamin Franklin to face a fact which had always squirmed just below the level of his conscious mind. England and her colonies, separated by the immense Atlantic, were not one nation. After almost 150 years of slow maturation, a new nation, or at least a new people, had arisen on the other side of the ocean, Americans. Franklin had predicted it in his essay on population. But he had not foreseen that his people would achieve political maturity long before they reached economic independence. He was facing it now. By one of those fascinating series of coincidences that make thoughtful men wonder whether history is as accidental as it seems at first glance, the man best qualified to speak for this political maturity was here in London in the moment of crisis.

  Aside from the problem of convincing these very disgruntled Englishmen that they should humiliate themselves (and to their minds impugn the
prestige of Parliament) by voting the Stamp Act’s repeal, one other aspect of the scene is worth noting. Speaking before the British Parliament was a harrowing experience for someone who lacked oratorical gifts. The artists who painted or sketched pictures of the House of Commons in the 1760s labored to create the impression that the room’s size compared favorably with Britain’s imperial power. Actually, the chamber was only sixty feet long, twenty-eight feet wide, and thirty feet high — not much larger than the living rooms of some modern upper middle class American homes. Many speakers experienced acute claustrophobia when they rose, and found themselves practically eyeball to eyeball with a sea of faces. One man, attempting his first (and last) speech, said. “I brought out two or three sentences when a mist seemed to rise before my eyes: I then lost my recollection, and could see nothing but the Speaker’s wig which swelled and swelled and swelled until it covered the whole house. I then sank back on my seat and never attempted another speech.”

  Franklin himself was not a gifted speaker. In fact he freely admitted in his autobiography that he was “a bad speaker, subject to much hesitation in the choice of words.” Standing at the bar, confronting the packed, largely hostile house, he must have thanked God that he had had the forethought to plan his performance in advance. James Hewitt, one of the Rockingham members with whom Franklin had planted questions, rose to begin the inquisition. Hewitt was from Coventry, an industrial city hard hit by the American importation boycott.

  “Do the Americans pay any considerable taxes among themselves?” be asked.

  “Certainly, many and very heavy taxes,” Franklin replied.

  “What are the present taxes in Pennsylvania, laid by the laws of the colony?”

  “There are taxes on all estates, real and personal; a poll tax; a tax on all offices, professions, trades and businesses, according to their profits; an excise on all wine, rum, and other spirits; and a duty of ten pounds per head on all Negroes imported, with some other duties.”

  “For what purposes are those taxes laid?”

  “For the support of the civil and military establishments of the country, and to discharge the heavy debt contracted in the last war.”

  “How long are those taxes to continue?”

  “Those for discharging the debt are to continue until 1772, and longer, if the debt should not be then all discharged. The others must always continue.”

  “Was it not expected that the debt would have been sooner discharged?”

  “It was, when the peace was made with France and Spain. But a fresh war breaking out with the Indians, a fresh load of debt was incurred; and the taxes, of course, continued longer by new law.”

  “Are not all the people very able to pay those taxes?”

  “No. The frontier counties, all along the continent, having been frequently ravaged by the enemy and greatly impoverished, are able to pay very little tax.”

  Another member, John Huske, one of the few men in Parliament who had been born in America, rose to replace Hewitt as straight man. He asked Franklin questions about the distribution of the stamps, as he saw it in his role as Deputy Postmaster General of North America. In the same casual, deadpan, almost humdrum way, Franklin made it clear that the act was not only unjust, it was totally impractical. In the thinly populated back settlements and in Canada, there was no mail service, and people could not get stamps, which meant they could not marry, make their wills, buy or sell property, without taking long journeys and “spending perhaps three or four pounds, that the Crown might get sixpence.”

  Suddenly the performance was interrupted by a harsh question from the opposition. “Are not the colonies from their circumstances very able to pay the stamp duty?”

  It was a question that might have ruined a less skillful man. But Franklin knew that the Stamp Act had specified the payment was to be made in specie —gold or silver coins which were so scarce in America many colonies had already resorted to issuing paper money. So he neatly evaded the main point in his reply.

  “In my opinion, there is not gold and silver enough in the colonies to pay the stamp duty for one year.”

  Irately, the gentleman made one more slash at Franklin’s throat.

  “Don’t you know that the money arising from the stamps was all to be laid out in America?”

  “I know it is appropriated by the Act to the American service; but it will be spent in the conquered colonies [Canada and Florida] where the soldiers are, not in the colonies that pay for it.”

  The Rockinghams rose to Franklin’s rescue with more questions about the population of the colonies, and how much they imported from Britain. Smoothly Franklin delivered the significant statistics. There were 300,000 white men in America between sixteen and sixty, more than enough to make a formidable army. Pennsylvania alone imported 500,000 pounds of British goods each year. The implication was obvious. Not only would a war with these people be dangerous; it would be highly uneconomic.

  Then George Grenville, as stubborn as he was arrogant, was on his feet interrupting Franklin’s friends to shrill his favorite question. “Do you think it right that America should be protected by this country and pay no part of the expense?”

  “That is not the case,” Franklin replied. “The colonies raised, clothed, and paid during the last war, near twenty-five thousand men, and spent many millions.”

  “Were you not reimbursed by Parliament?”

  “We were only reimbursed what in your opinion we had advanced beyond our proportion or beyond what might reasonably be expected from us; and it was a very small part of what we spent. Pennsylvania, in particular, disbursed about five-hundred thousand pounds and the reimbursements in the whole did not exceed sixty thousand pounds.”

  Grenville sat down, looking very uncomfortable.

  On the questions and the answers rolled, in the same zigzag pattern; the Rockinghams drawing from Franklin reams of information that made the Stamp Act look more and more like the greatest piece of idiocy in Parliament’s history. Again and again, Franklin cut down obnoxious and difficult questions with blunt facts or subtle evasions.

  When someone tried to make him admit that the last war with Spain and France (1739-48) was fought for the sake of America because hostilities began over Spanish captures in American seas, Franklin replied, “Captures of ships carrying on the British trade there with British manufactures.”

  When another adversary asked him if the colonial Assemblies would indemnify loyal subjects whose property had been damaged by Stamp Act rioters, Franklin mildly replied, “That is a question I cannot answer.”

  Franklin made it clear that the Americans intended to maintain their opposition to the stamps for years if necessary. He vowed they were ready to begin manufacturing their own clothes, shoes, glass, tableware, farm utensils, and other items they had previously imported from Britain. Always he walked the delicate line between outright defiance, which would have insulted the ticklish tempers of many members, and pliant submission, which might have encouraged the opposition.

  One member asked him, “Can anything less than a military force carry the Stamp Act into execution?”

  “I do not see how a military force can be applied to that purpose.”

  “Why not?”

  “Suppose a military force sent into America, they will find nobody in arms; what are they then to do? They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.”

  When a skeptic asked him if the Americans would pay as much for “worse manufactures of their own, and use them preferable to better of ours,” Franklin replied with an instantaneous epigram. “People will pay as freely to gratify one passion as another, their resentment as their pride.”

  Then came the most important planted question, and the most moving moment in Franklin’s performance. A Rockingham member asked: “What was the temper of America toward Great Britain before the year 1763?”

  “The best in the world,” Franklin repli
ed. “They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid, in their courts, obedience to the acts of Parliament. Numerous as the people are in the several old provinces, they cost you nothing in forts, citadels, garrisons, or armies to keep them in subjection. They were governed by this country at the expense only of a little pen, ink, and paper; they were led by a thread. They had not only a respect, but an affection for Great Britain; for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fondness for its fashions, that greatly increased the commerce. Natives of Britain were always treated with particular regard. To be an Old-England man was, of itself, a character of some respect, and gave a kind of rank among us.”

  This was Benjamin Franklin speaking out of the wellsprings of his own experience. The words have a ring which go beyond smooth preparation to the more meaningful realm of personal truth.

  “And what is their temper now?”

  “Oh, very much altered. . . .”

  “If the Act is not repealed, what do you think will be the consequences?”

  “A total loss of the respect and affection the people of America bear to this country, and of all the commerce that depends on that respect and affection.”

  There were some floundering attempts by the opposition to regain the initiative. Most of them were repetitious. Franklin cut one questioner down with a cool “I have answered that.” He got a laugh when another somewhat muddled member asked him if the colonies would acquiesce in the authority of Parliament if the Stamp Act was repealed.

  “I don’t doubt at all that if the legislature repeal the Act the colonies will acquiesce in the authority,” said Franklin with a twinkle in his eye.

  Finally, his friends rescued him with two questions which were obviously designed to bring down the curtain on his performance.

  “What used to be the pride of the Americans?”