Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  With two such potent talkers as Barré and Garrick, Franklin said little when the party was general. But he quietly upstaged even the great Garrick with a performance of his own, while they were strolling through the park of the Bowood estate. Donning his conjuror’s mantle, Franklin mysteriously declared that his study of science had given him powers which he seldom revealed. For instance, he said, pointing to a nearby stream, where a brisk breeze was causing a good deal of turbulence, he had learned how to calm storm-tossed waters. The remark inspired instant skepticism in the company. Leaving them where they stood, about zoo paces from the water, Franklin advanced to the edge of the stream and made a series of magical passes over it with his cane. Suddenly, to the disbelieving eyes of the spectators, the surface of the water subsided and became as smooth and glassy as a sheltered puddle. Morellet, Shelburne, and the others rushed to the bank but they saw nothing that explained the miracle. A workman who happened to be standing nearby was so awestruck he was convinced that Franklin had supernatural powers. “What am I to believe?” he cried.

  “Only what you see,” said Franklin.

  After letting his friends rack their brains for an hour or two, Franklin smilingly revealed his secret. In the hollow bottom of his cane, he had taken to carrying a small vial of clear oil. He had been experimenting for two years on calming water by pouring oil on it. Trials in the ocean inclined him to think that it was not, as he had at first hoped, a technique that might preserve a ship at sea, during a storm. But it worked quite well on smaller bodies of water.”

  Franklin’s optimism about Lord Dartmouth’s ministry increased tenfold when he attended his first levee, early in November 1772. Dartmouth received him with the cordiality of an old friend, and, Franklin told William in a letter written the same day, his first order of business was “to recommend my son to his protection, who, says I, is one of your governors in America.” John Pownall, still one of the ministerial secretaries, was with them and he added, “And a very good governor he is.”

  “Yes,” said Lord Dartmouth, “he has been a good governor and has kept his province in good order during times of difficulty.” Franklin wisely decided that it would be better to bring up the Ohio Company some other time, and bowed his way out with a remark that he would wait on his Lordship another day on business. Dartmouth graciously replied that he would always be ready to hear him and glad to see him.

  “I shall attend his levee again today, on some New England affairs, and hope we may now go on more smoothly,” Franklin said “But time will show.” As for the “Ohio affair,” as he called it, the Boards were meeting again, and the partners hoped to push it forward with all possible speed. A few hours later, Franklin added a postscript to this hopeful letter. He was just back from Dartmouth’s levee, and delightedly reported that his Lordship had shown him “particular respect in sending for me out of the crowd long before my turn, and apologizing for having kept me so long. . .” He also made no objection to Franklin’s acting as agent for Massachusetts without the governor’s approval. Whether this would continue would depend on whether he could resist pressure from his secretaries, John Pownall and William Knox, both thoroughly anti-American, who would undoubtedly urge him to continue, as a matter of honor, Hillsborough’s objections to Franklin’s agency.

  But Franklin was soon to discover that Lord Dartmouth was more symbol than reality. Even out of office, Lord Hillsborough remained a close friend and influential ally of the First Minister, Lord North. Not a few of the members of the Privy Council who had voted against Hillsborough were hoping that the blow would knock out North as well, and that a new ministry, under the political heirs of the Duke of Bedford (now dead), would come into power. Lord Gower, the Privy Council president, was head of the Bedfordites, and this was as much his motive for knifing Hillsborough as was his partnership in the Grand Ohio Company. Hillsborough thus had no difficulty poisoning North’s complaisant second-rate mind against Franklin. During a visit to the country estate of a mutual friend, North and Franklin ate dinner, supper, and breakfast together without exchanging more than three sentences. Franklin was soon reporting mournfully to his son that Lord Dartmouth was “truly a good man and wishes sincerely a good understanding with the colonies, but does not seem to have strength equal to his wishes.”

  Although the rest of America was comparatively quiet, something close to open warfare still raged between the Massachusetts Assembly and Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Thus Franklin spent more and more time representing and defending Massachusetts, and his standing with Dartmouth began to slip steadily. This in turn had an adverse effect on the progress of the new colony, which now had been named Vandalia in honor of Queen Charlotte’s Germanic ancestors. A draft constitution had been drawn up and approved by the Board of Trade and on May 19, 1773, the Privy Council ordered Edward Thurlow, the attorney general, and Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general, to draw up the final papers for the grant.

  But these two tough Scotsmen were purchased friends of Lord North’s and they proceeded to find dozens of objections to various legal aspects of the project. Lord Dartmouth himself began to voice uneasiness about the colony. Lord North and Dartmouth were half-brothers, North’s father having married Dartmouth’s widowed mother.

  These delays strained the nerves of the younger speculators to the snapping point. Samuel Wharton complained bitterly to George Crag-halt, bankrupt and hounded by creditors back in America, that “all we were thought to believe [about Benjamin Franklin] before I left America, was bluff and declamation.” Wharton’s business partners, Baynton and Morgan, accused him of swindling them because he had failed to name them as partners in the Grand Ohio Company. William Franklin warned his father that he suspected Wharton was opening their mail. Franklin was more inclined to suspect William Knox, the anti-American undersecretary in Dartmouth’s office.

  Franklin himself took a philosophic attitude toward the Ohio Company’s lack of progress, and spiced it, as he so often did, with humor. He told Joseph Galloway, “I begin to be a little of the sailor’s mind when they were handing a cable out of a store into a ship, and one of ‘em said, “Tis a long, heavy cable. I wish we could see the end of, it.’ D—n,’ says another, ‘if I believe it has any end; somebody has cut it off’, Even before he wrote these soothing words, Franklin had taken a step which was to sink the Grand Ohio Company forever and arouse his enemies in the British government as never before. On December 2, 1772, in a letter to Thomas Cushing, Franklin wrote the following fateful words: “On this occasion I think it fit to acquaint you, that there has lately fallen into my hands part of a correspondence that I have reason to believe laid the foundation of most if not all our present grievances. I am not at liberty to tell thro’ what channel I received it; and I have engag’d that it shall not be printed, nor copies taken of the whole, or any part of it; but I am allow’d to let it be seen by some men of worth in the province, for their satisfaction only. In confidence of your preserving inviolably my engagement, I send you inclosed the original letters, to obviate every pretense of unfairness in copying, interpolation or omission.”

  These letters which Franklin sent to Boston had been written by Governor Thomas Hutchinson and his lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver, in 1768-69, during the riots in Boston over the Townshend duties. They described the state of the province in terms that suggested anarchy was imminent, and urged the Crown to send troops to cow the Boston mobs. Hutchinson wrote: “There must be some abridgement of what is called English liberty.” Oliver suggested that officers of the Crown ought to be made “in some measure independent” of the Assembly. Franklin had heard about these letters in the summer or early fall of 1772. He was talking with “a gentleman of character and distinction,” as he told it several years later, and was complaining about the numerous grievances which the Hillsborough administration had inflicted on Massachusetts, particularly the quartering of troops in Boston. To his “great surprise” the gentleman assured him that this measure and all the other
grievances could be traced not to the British government in London, but to Americans in Boston. The measures had been “projected, proposed to administration, solicited, and obtained by some of the most respectable among the Americans themselves,” the gentleman avowed, “as necessary measures for the welfare of that country.” Franklin was unconvinced, until the gentleman called on him “some days after and produced to me these very letters from Lieut.Gov. Hutchinson, Seery, Oliver and others’.”

  Who was this “gentleman of character and distinction”? It may have been John Temple, the relative of the powerful Temple clan whom Benjamin and William Franklin had met in 1757 on their voyage to London. Temple had achieved the purpose of his journey to the imperial capital. His kinship to the Temples, which genealogists now consider somewhat dubious, won him a post as surveyor-general of Customs in North America, with a salary of 1000 pounds a year. This was not a job that was designed to win a man much popularity in America, but as a Boston-born man himself, Temple was emotionally, if not legally, on the American side of the quarrel with England. An additional impetus to this commitment was his marriage to the daughter of Franklin’s good friend, James Bowdoin.

  Temple’s fellow Customs’ officers in Boston hated him intensely, and they accused him of falsifying his accounts. Recalled, he was cleared of their slanderous charges, but the government declined to send him again to America. Instead, he was given a lucrative office in the British Customs Service. But he had expressed bitter regret at being forced to leave “my native country which I sincerely love,” and he was, like Franklin, convinced that a handful of wrongheaded men on both sides of the Atlantic were responsible for igniting the quarrel between America and the mother country. High on his list, for personal and political reasons, were Hutchinson and Oliver, who had supported and perhaps even connived in his expulsion from the American Customs Service. While he was in Boston, Temple had been, in the routine of his office, a constant correspondent of Thomas Whately, the Joint Secretary of the Treasury, to whom Hutchinson and Oliver wrote their letters. Whately had died intestate in May 1772, and his estate, including his voluminous correspondence, had been placed in the hands of his brother, banker William Whately. It would have been a fairly simple matter for Temple to ask Whately’s permission to go through his brother’s papers, to extract some of his own letters. In the process, it would have been equally easy for him to purloin those of Hutchinson and Oliver.

  Franklin’s motive in sending off the letters to Boston could only have been what he stated in his covering letter, the hope that the Boston patriots would find less reason to hate England when they discovered that the British government had been acting on misrepresentations, sent to them by fellow Bostonians. But there was also in this tangled web the sudden surge of optimism and the new sense of power which Franklin had felt when Lord Dartmouth came into office. Almost certainly Franklin recalled the attitude of Lord Shelburne, the previous American secretary who had favorable feelings toward the colonies, when Governor Francis Bernard had written violently negative letters home. Franklin would never have taken such a serious step without the comfortable reassurance in the back of his mind that Lord Dartmouth would agree with his stand and support him in the face of possible censure. Forgetting his recent lament about Dartmouth’s lack of strength, Franklin was dangerously overestimating the American secretary’s power, as well as his fondness for Benjamin Franklin.

  Events moved slowly in the eighteenth century, especially when the principal actors were separated by 3000 miles of ocean. Franklin spent the next few months peacefully enough, visiting friends in the countryside and watching the British government as it attempted to solve a new overseas problem: India. The British East India Company, a semi-public organization that operated with almost complete independence from the English government, was in severe financial difficulty. Its stock plummeted on the London exchange, and in January 1773, it requested from the government a loan of 1.5 million pounds to stave off imminent bankruptcy. Part, but by no means all, of its troubles were the losses it had suffered in exporting tea, one of its chief sources of profit, to America. Americans were still drinking prodigious quantities of this favorite beverage, but much of it was being smuggled from the Dutch and French West Indies. Not only was it more profitable, but it was a patriotic gesture of defiance against the North ministry’s insistence on keeping the tax on tea to “maintain the right.” In a letter to William Franklin, Benjamin reported that the company had imported “great quantities in the faith that that agreement [the nonimportation agreement] could not hold; and now they [the East India Company] can neither pay their debts nor dividends.” The ensuing “shock to credit” caused a recession in the manufacturing districts, and thousands of British workers were “now starving, or subsisting on charity.” All, Franklin noted wryly, “the blessed effects of pride, pique and passion in government, which should have no passions.”

  For a while the North ministry played around with the idea of having the company “save its honor by petitioning for the repeal of that duty,” Franklin told Joseph Galloway, adding, “A fine hobble they are all got into by their unjust and blundering politics with regard to the Colonies.” But North, although he was personally inclined to avoid trouble, was too much in the grip of the anti-Americans in the cabinet to accept this solution. So, after a great deal of wrangling, the government imposed another solution on the reluctant East India Company. Henceforth, the government would have much more say in regulating the company’s internal affairs. In return, the government would help them get rid of their surplus tea, by repealing the English duty on it and setting up a special agency to sell the tea in America at a price which would be even cheaper than the smuggled products of their competitors. Simultaneously, of course, the ministers expected to enjoy the pleasant spectacle of seeing Americans pay the hated duty in order to get cheaper tea. Thus Parliament’s right would be simultaneously affirmed, and the British economy rescued from the “hobble.”

  Franklin was disgusted with this solution, and immediately made this clear to his friends in Boston. “It was thought at the beginning of the session, that the American duty on tea would be taken off,” he told Thomas Cushing, “but now the wise scheme is to take off so much duty here, as will make tea cheaper in America than foreigners can supply us, and to confine the duty there to keep up the exercises of the right. They have no idea that any people can act from any other principle but that of interest; and they believe, that 3d [pence] in a lb. of tea of which one does not perhaps drink ten in a year, is sufficient to overcome all the patriotism of an American.”

  The cynical attitude of the British ministry infuriated Franklin, and, as always, when emotion flowed in him, he reached for his pen. Soon there appeared in the newspapers the boldest piece of propaganda he had yet produced.

  RULES BY WHICH A GREAT EMPIRE MAY BE REDUCED TO A SMALL ONE

  PRESENTED TO A LATE MINISTER

  WHEN HE ENTERED UPON HIS ADMINISTRATION

  The last line of the title was a dig at Lord Hillsborough, but Franklin made it clear in his opening paragraph that he was addressing himself “to all ministers who have the management of extensive dominions.” He then proceeded to give them twenty satiric rules for wrecking the empire.

  I. In the first place, gentlemen, you are to consider, that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges. Turn your attention, therefore, first to your remotest provinces; that, as you get rid of them, the next may follow in order.

  II. That the possibility of this separation may always exist, take special care the provinces are never incorporated with the mother country; that they do not enjoy the same common rights, the same privileges in commerce; and that they are governed by severer laws, all of your enacting, without allowing them any share in the choice of the legislators. By carefully making and preserving such distinctions, you will (to keep to my simile of the cake) act like a wise gingerbread maker, who, to facilitate a division, cuts his dough half through
in those places where, when baked, he would have it broken so pieces.

  No reader could miss the immediate application of these and the rules that followed:

  However peaceably your colonies have submitted to your government, shewn their affection to your interests, and patiently borne their grievances; you are to suppose them always inclined to revolt and treat them accordingly. Quarter troops among them, who by their insolence may provoke the rising of mobs and by their bullets and bayonets suppress them. By this means, like the husband who uses his wife ill from suspicion, you may in time convert your suspicions into realities.

  Rule V suggested sending out as governors and other royal officials, “prodigals who have ruined their fortunes, broken gamesters or stock jobbers wrangling proctors and pettifogging lawyers.” Next came a slam at Francis Bernard, who had been recalled as governor of Massachusetts and made a baronet. “When such governors have crammed their coffers, and made themselves so odious to the people that they can no longer remain among them, with safety to their persons, recall and reward them with pensions. You may make them baronets too, if that respectable order should not think fit to resent it.” This, Franklin assured them, “will contribute to encourage new governors in the same practice, and make the supreme government, detestable.”

  Next came a series of wry advices on how to lay taxes in the worst possible way, and make them as odious as possible. After that came a blast at the harsh British enforcement of the Customs Jaws. “Convert the brave, honest officers of your Navy into pimping tide-waiters and colony officers of the Customs. Let those, who in time of war fought gallantly in defense of the commerce of their countrymen; in peace be taught to prey upon it. Let them learn to be corrupted by great and real smugglers, but (to shew their diligence) scour with armed boats every bay, harbor, river, creek, cove or nook throughout the coast of your colonies; stop and detain every coaster, every wood boat, every fisherman, tumble their cargoes and even their ballast inside out and upside down; and, if a penn’orth of pins is found unentered, let the whole be seized and confiscated. Thus shall the trade of your colonists suffer more from their friends in time of peace, than it did from their enemies in war.”