Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  This sounded as if William should have forbidden the Assembly to consider the Massachusetts letter, a power which Hillsborough must have known no governor possessed, and which he should have known would have instantly aroused the Assembly to rebellious fury. Hillsborough made a great deal of noise about the good behavior of the Pennsylvania and New York Assemblies, which had not replied to the circular letter. The implication, of course, was that William, echoing his father’s sentiments, had been whispering rebellion to his Assembly’s ears. Hillsborough closed with more huffing and puffing about “his Majesty’s disapprobation of your conduct” and added that he himself was concerned that he had “occasion for animadversion upon your conduct in so many instances.” He hoped that an explanation from William would enable him to discover “there has not been so just grounds for it [his concern] as I have too much foundation to apprehend. . . .”

  William gave him his explanation, and it was a good one. He did not cower or cringe, but he was also not defiant. He told Hillsborough that the Secretary’s “animadversion and censures” were “unmerited” and he was confident that he could “prove them so to every impartial person. As such I flatter myself I may address your Lordship. . ..” He then coolly proceeded to point out that whoever told the King that New York and Pennsylvania were setting New Jersey a good example was “greatly mistaken.” The Assemblies of both colonies had appointed committees to petition for the repeal of the Townshend Acts within the previous month. He urged Hillsborough to face the fact that there was “scarce an assembly man in America, but what either believes that Parliament has not a right to impose taxes for the purposes of a revenue in America, or thinks that it is contrary to justice, equity and sound policy to exercise that right, under the present circumstances of the colonies, supposing it ever so unquestionable.” As for trying to suppress the agitation at the point of a gun, as the Crown was attempting to do in riot-torn Boston with two regiments of regular troops, this was no solution. In words that should have made Hillsborough and every other British official think twice, William declared, “Men’s minds are sour’d, a sullen discontent prevails, and in my opinion, no force on earth is sufficient to make the assemblies acknowledge, by any act of theirs, that the Parliament has a right to impose taxes on America. . . .” He then proceeded to answer in precise detail Hillsborough’s accusation that he did not know what was going on inside the New Jersey Assembly.

  Obviously, William Franklin was Benjamin’s son. The letter ran to thirty smoothly written pages, ending with the hope that he had said enough to remove the King’s displeasure “than which nothing could affect me more sensibly as I have long valued myself on a strict performance of my duty, and the strongest attachment to my sovereign.”

  Lord Hillsborough did not deign to reply to William Franklin’s defense. He also did not remove him from his governorship. Obviously the ministry was attempting to harass Benjamin Franklin into a more compliant mood by simultaneously tempting him with a better job, and threatening the positions held by him and his son. To make sure he was striking the right political note, William began sending his official dispatches to his father first. It was not just the political tone that concerned William. He also wanted his father to know his exact words, so that he could defend him on the spot against Hillsborough’s potential back stabbings. He made no secret of his bitter dislike of Hillsborough. “I suppose the success which has attended the measure of sending troops to Boston, that is, in putting a stop to the riots, & preventing any opposition to the late acts of Parliament, will be a means of establishing Lord H in the administration, and I don’t doubt but he exults greatly on the occasion. The same spirit, however, still prevails in the colonies, as did before, and nothing can make them acknowledge the right of Parliament to tax them, tho’ they may at present acquiesce in it.” William also told his father of the numerous petty ways in which Hillsborough was continuing their quarrel. He appointed people to the New Jersey Governor’s Council without even bothering to inform William and instead of ending his letters with the usual friendly salutation which gentlemen, particularly Crown officials, used in the eighteenth century, Hillsborough simply said, “I am, sir, etc.” There was, William said, “a meanness in this kind of conduct extremely unbecoming one in his station.”

  When the new Parliament met, Lord Hillsborough showed his true anti-American colors. He took the lead in a heated debate about what course England should follow toward America. Hillsborough introduced a complete program, aiming at nothing less than total repression. It even included a threat to suspend the Massachusetts charter. It was typical of the chaotic state of British politics that the King’s First Minister, the Duke of Grafton, opposed the program and persuaded the King to decline his support. But this was the closest the pro-Americans in the government and in Parliament came to a victory. Toward the end of the session, Thomas Pownall, a former colonial governor and a good friend of Franklin, made a motion to repeal the Townshend Acts. The motion was defeated, but it won a substantial number of supporters, proof that the Americans’ nonimportation campaign was having its impact.

  Franklin did everything in his power to hearten his countrymen in this peaceful but highly effective resistance. He told his old Boston friend, Samuel Cooper that the anti-American ministers “flatter themselves you cannot long subsist without their manufactures. They believe you have not virtue enough to persist in such agreements, they imagine the colonies will differ among themselves, deceive and desert one another, and quietly one after the other submit to the yoke, and return to the use of British fineries. . .. I have ventured to assert, that they will all find themselves mistaken; and I rely so much on the spirit of my country, as to be confident I shall not be found a false prophet tho’ at present not believed.” In this same letter, however, Franklin struck another note, which illustrated the delicate balancing act he was struggling to perform. “I hope nothing that has happened, or may happen, will diminish in the least our loyalty to our sovereign or affection for this nation in general,” he told Cooper. “I can scarcely conceive a King of better dispositions, of more exemplary virtues, or more truly desirous of promoting the welfare of all his subjects. . . The body of this people too, is of a noble and generous nature, loving and honoring the spirit of liberty and hating arbitrary power of all sorts. We have many, very many friends among them.”

  “But as to the Parliament!” This, Franklin made it clear, was in his opinion the source of all America’s woes. He wrote in a similar vein to the Committee of Merchants in Philadelphia, assuring them that “by persisting steadily” they would be “the means under God of recovering and establishing the freedom of our country entire, and of handing it down complete to posterity.”

  About this time, Franklin began taking a tougher line in the propaganda articles he was writing in the English newspapers. Only in recent years have historians become aware of the prodigious number of these pieces. They were published under pseudonyms, and many of the originals were lost when Franklin’s papers were scattered after his death. But an exhaustive search of English and American newspapers by Verner W. Crane rediscovered literally dozens of them. His book, which reprints only those which were previously unknown, and does not include the several dozen already printed in earlier collections of Franklin’s papers, runs to 283 pages. Day and night, Franklin toiled at his desk, struggling to shed light on the historic argument, to present it as the Americans saw it, and to answer the outrageous calumnies being circulated by anti-American pamphleteers and parliamentarians.

  In one of his best efforts, he wrote under the pen name Expositor. He portrayed himself as an Englishman who was considerably alarmed by the mounting acrimony between America and the mother country because he had “considerable” investments as well as several near relations on that side of the water.

  “From the epithets of unjust ungenerous rogues, rebels, etc., which are so lavishly bestowed on the Americans, I have been induced to look into those late acts of Parliament, which the colonie
s refuse to comply with, and to my very great surprize find there is not one single word in those acts for the purpose of raising money to help poor old England, from which I begin to suspect we are all on a wrong scent. How can we justly accuse them of refusing to assist poor old England in her distresses, when we neither ask nor require it of them?” He then went on to point out that all of the controversial acts had specifically declared themselves to be for the purpose of raising money to defend and support the civil government in America. Wasn’t this odd, to ask the Americans to raise money to defend themselves “when every enemy is driven out of the country?” As to supporting the civil government, this was something the Americans had always done by raising their own taxes. “My countrymen,” Franklin declared, “we are all by the nose: there is a snake in the grass....” Who or what was it? Franklin suggested the answer was “a very common custom among pickpockets, i.e., a thief cries catch thief.” The people who were hoping to profit from the American revenues were the “friends and favourites” of the ministers in power. “Whoever therefore will give themselves the trouble to look at these acts, which the Americans refuse to comply with, will at once see the whole as a piece of ministerial policy, designed not for the good of Great Britain or her colonies, but for an American establishment, whereby they may be able to provide for friends and favourites.

  “The Irish establishment has been much talked of as a sinecure for friends and favourites and cast-off mistresses; but this American establishment promises a more ample provision for such like purposes.”

  These were harsh words, and since the government had ways of finding out the identity of the various propagandists, Franklin must have known he was risking the enmity of some very powerful men, whom he was boldly calling thieves. Franklin himself never made a particularly serious effort to disguise the source of his newspaper writing. He signed one of his harshest letters “Francis Lynn,” and his son William was soon writing him jovially that it was “much admir’d and has been much reprinted, I believe, in all the papers on the continent.

  Everybody attributed it to you, and some have had sagacity enough to discover that the signature is a pun on the real name of the author.”

  If these letters earned Franklin some dangerous enemies, they also won him some enthusiastic friends. In mid-1768, the legislature of Georgia voted to appoint him their London agent, with a salary of 100 pounds sterling yearly. In 1769, the New Jersey legislature, thanks no doubt to some subtle politicking on the part of William Franklin, asked him to handle their legal and diplomatic affairs. With his wealth of contacts in New England, particularly Massachusetts, his solid political base in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and this unsolicited tribute from Georgia (it took Franklin completely by surprise, he remarked to William that he could not even think of a single person he knew in that colony), Benjamin Franklin was becoming more and more a spokesman for all of America. It did not make him any more popular with the anti-Americans in the ministry. Nor did another typically Franklinesque bit of whimsy which he began practicing about this time. As a Deputy Postmaster General, he had a franking privilege and simply had to write on his letters “Free B. Franklin.” But now, particularly on letters he wrote to America, he began writing “B. Free Franklin.”

  The mounting hostility made it more and more probable that he was under the kind of scrutiny men in power have always been prone to give their enemies. Both Franklins were well aware of the tactic. When William Franklin failed to get the usual letters from his father on a packet boat that arrived early in 1769, he immediately voiced a suspicion that “Lord H. may have given orders to the Postmaster General to stop your letters to me.” A year later, Joseph Galloway was warning Franklin that General Thomas Gage, a man “void of principle or virtue,” was sending copies of Franklin’s letters to the ministry, whenever he could lay his hands on them.

  This tougher stance made it much more difficult for Franklin to approach the ministry as a lobbyist for a western colony. The Illinois Company sank into a kind of limbo. William Franklin had already foreseen this fate, and informed his fellow speculators in America accordingly. They swiftly concocted new and, what seemed to them, better plans. They formed an Indiana Company which purported to represent “suffering traders” who had lost great sums of money in goods and buildings during Pontiac’s war in 1763. Samuel Wharton, George Croghan, and William Franklin had represented the company at the tribal conference arranged by Sir William Johnson at Fort Stanwix in November 1768. They claimed that the Indians owed the Indiana Company some 85,000 pounds. Impressed by Sir William Johnson’s firm, and apparently disinterested, backing of this claim and pleased by the presents Sir William had lavished on them to the tune of 10,460 pounds, 7 shillings, 3 pence, the chiefs had ceded to the Indiana Company no less than 1.8 million acres. Sir William violated specific instructions he had received from Whitehall on the limitations of the western boundary to include this vast domain, and as a final fillip made it part of the treaty with the Six Nations, literally “a condition of sale.” If the Crown refused to ratify it, the whole treaty would be invalidated and the immense amount of time and money spent to gather the Indians, some 3400 had come to Fort Stanwix, from so many tribes would have to be spent all over again.

  Exultantly, Samuel Wharton wrote William Franklin to “urge your father, rather to drop the Illenoise affair than miss succeeding in the restitution.” He also urged William in turn to urge Benjamin to warn Lord Hillsborough that any delay in the ratification of the treaty could start another Indian war. There was a twist involved, even in the use of this scare tactic. The Six Nations claimed the lands, but so did the Cherokees and the Shawnees. Wharton argued that hesitation by the Crown would alienate the Iroquois, traditional allies of England, by impugning “their right to the country.”

  But the steady escalation of the quarrel between the ministry and America made Franklin all but useless with Hillsborough. That noble lord, prejudiced as he was against the whole idea of western expansion, angrily disapproved of Sir William Johnson’s helping the Indiana Company execute a private purchase within the terms of a government treaty. He probably knew by then, thanks to Thomas Gage, who resented Johnson’s powerful role in Indian affairs, that Johnson was a silent partner of the company, as was Governor William Franklin, also no favorite of Hillsborough’s. At the nobleman’s instigation, his fellow lords on the Board of Trade voted to censure Johnson.

  Franklin’s inability to give much help to his son and his partner was undoubtedly part of the reason why energetic Samuel Wharton decided to come to London and lobby for the grant. By the time he got there, Franklin had already hired an attorney, and Hillsborough’s opposition was known. The problem was how to circumvent or, even better, over-come this powerful nobleman. To make sure that Lord Hillsborough’s spies could not decipher their letters if they intercepted them, Franklin and Wharton worked out a code system in which Franklin became “Moses” and Wharton always referred to himself through false initials.

  Franklin advised Wharton to persuade Sir William Johnson to mention “with spirit” the certainty of war with the Six Nations if the treaty and the boundary were not confirmed in entirety. The ministry was so unstable, Franklin reasoned, it would not dare oppose someone with Johnson’s prestige.

  Franklin must have been well aware that there was a growing desperation in the ranks of his son’s partners. Wharton’s firm had already gone bankrupt because of their failure to obtain restitution from the Crown for earlier losses in the French and Indian War, as well as in Pontiac’s war. George Croghan had mortgaged every house and piece of land he owned. William Franklin had borrowed 3000 pounds, largely on the strength of his father’s name, from wealthy friends to finance the trip to London for Wharton. At Fort Stanwix William had also purchased a huge tract of land from the willing Indians; perhaps 50,000 acres around Lake Otsego in upper New York State, and had borrowed heavily to pay for this as well. He had been borrowing small sums from his father continually since he became gov
ernor, his salary was no match for his upper-class tastes, and when Franklin gently reminded him that he was falling rather far in arrears, William begged him to be patient “a little longer till I have got my land patented.” He was betting that the western grant would come through before the creditors began calling in the mortgages and loans. Wharton wrote nervously that if they failed “I must pine away the remainder of my days in mortification, beggary and contempt.” He undoubtedly displayed the same hysteria to Franklin in their many conversations at his Craven Street lodgings.

  But Lord Hillsborough proved much tougher and meaner than Franklin or anyone else had suspected. Reassured by Gage, he scoffed at rumors of an Indian war and frightened Johnson into silence. Meanwhile, he helped to circulate vicious rumors about the Indiana Company, describing it as “a certain Junto who . . . have lately pursued such indirect, fraudulent and selfish schemes. . ..”

  But Franklin had only begun to fight. A born politician, he loved the shock and clash, the subtle twists and turns of mood and luck that spelled success or failure in the treacherous world of imperial power. When another Indiana partner, William Trent, arrived in England, also on money borrowed from William Franklin, he was awed by Franklin’s contacts among “the first people of the nation.” He communicated some of this awe to Wharton, who was more inclined to try to fight Hillsborough alone. The two younger men sat down and finally took the advice which Franklin had offered them when the Illinois Company was formed. There was only one way to defeat Hillsborough, and that was by enveloping him. Dissolve the Indiana Company, already blackened by Hillsborough’s rumor brush, and resurrect it in another larger company which would include a select group of the “first people.”