Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  Why had they lost this confidence? Wedderburn piously ignored the fact that Hutchinson and Oliver had been feuding with the Assembly almost continuously since they took office. The sole reason for this supposed loss of confidence, he thundered, was the letters Franklin had sent to Boston.

  Wedderburn now turned on Franklin the full force of his savage, mercenary rhetoric, his natural violence enhanced by the opportunity of performing before such an elite political audience, and enhanced again by his friendship with the late Thomas Whately. “Dr. Franklin, therefore, stands in the light of the first mover and prime conductor of this whole contrivance against His Majesty’s two governors; and having, by the help of his own special confidants and party leaders, first made the Assembly his agents in carrying on his own secret designs, he now appears before Your Lordships to give the finishing stroke to the work of his own hands.”

  What made Franklin’s tactics especially odious, Wedderburn roared, was the use of private letters. The solicitor general’s voice throbbed with emotion as he read the half-dozen lines in the letters that did in fact allude to relatively private concerns. Whately had been hospitable to some friends of Hutchinson and Oliver when they were visiting in London, and the writers thanked him for his trouble.

  “How these letters came into the possession of anyone but the right owners is a mystery for Dr. Franklin to explain,” Wedderburn cried. “They who know the affectionate regard which the Whately’s had for each other, and the tender concern they felt for the honor of their brother’s memory as well as their own, can witness the distress which this occasioned. My Lords, the late Mr. Whately was most scrupulously cautious about his letters. We lived for many years in the strictest intimacy; and in all those years I never saw a single letter written to him. These letters, I believe, were in his custody at his death. . . Nothing, then, will acquit Dr. Franklin of the charge of obtaining them by fraudulent or corrupt means for the most malignant purposes, unless he stole them from the person who stole them. This argument is irrefragable.

  “I hope, My Lords, you will mark and brand the man, for the honor of this country, of Europe, and of mankind,” urged Wedderburn on behalf of a government which had been rifling Franklin’s mail for years. “Private correspondence has hitherto been held sacred in times of the greatest party rage, not only in politics but religion. He has forfeited all the respect of societies and of men. Into what companies will he hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. He will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters; this man of three letters.

  Smiles and snickers had been emanating from the Privy Council table at Wedderburn’s acrid sarcasm. This last line brought a wholesale guffaw. Every well-educated man of the time got the joke, which was from a play by the Roman playwright, Plautus, in which a character spoke of a thief as a “trium litterarum homo,” --a man of three letters, fur.

  “Wherein had my late worthy friend or his family offended Dr. Franklin,” Wedderburn cried, “that he should first do so great an injury to the memory of the dead brother, by secreting and sending away his letters; and then, conscious of what he had done, should keep himself concealed, until he had nearly, very nearly, occasioned the murder of the other? After the mischiefs of this concealment had been left for five months to have their full operation, at length comes out a letter, which is impossible to read without horror, expressive of the coolest and most deliberate malevolence. My Lords, what poetic fiction only had penned for the heart of a cruel African, Dr. Franklin has realized, and transcribed from his own. His too, is the language of a Zanga.

  “Know then ‘twas-—I

  I forg’d the letter--I dispos’d the picture--

  I hated, I despised, and I destroyed.”

  Zanga was the Negro villain in a popular tragedy of the time, Revenge. Wedderburn now proceeded to explain Franklin’s motives. His ego had become so inflated by the way the newspapers mentioned his arrivals and departures, and his cordial reception in the best houses of England, he had become drunk with absurd notions of power. He began to think of himself as the minister for “the great American republic,” an independent power for whom he alone was qualified to speak. Finally, Wedderburn said with a sneer in Franklin’s direction, he began acting like a foreign ambassador who . . . “when residing here, just before the breaking out of a war, or upon particular occasions, may bribe a villain to steal or betray any state papers; he is under the command of another state, and is not amenable to the laws of the country where he resides; and the secure exemption from punishment may induce a laxer morality. But Dr. Franklin, whatever he may teach the people at Boston, while he is here at least is a subject; and if a subject injure a subject, he is answerable to the law. And the Court of Chancery will not much attend to his new self-created importance.”

  As he roared out this threat, Wedderburn brought his fist down upon a cushion on the table, to the right of the Lord President. Jeremy Bentham, not yet famous as a political economist, was standing nearby. “I would, not for double the greatest fee the orator could on that occasion have received, been in the place of that cushion,” he later said. “The ear was stunned at every blow.... The table groaned under the assault.”

  Along with Franklin’s swollen ego there was another more vicious motive, Wedderburn howled. He wanted the governorship of Massachusetts for himself. “It was not easy before this to give credit to such surmises,” roared the solicitor general, “but nothing surely but a too eager attention to an ambition of this sort, could have betrayed a wise man into such conduct as we have now seen.” And what kind of government would Franklin and his willing tools in Boston create? “A tyranny greater than the Roman,” Wedderburn bellowed. Had they not heard, in the past few days, the latest news from the “good men of Boston?”

  For almost an hour, Franklin had to endure this scurrilous abuse, while the Cockpit rocked with laughter at Wedderburn’s best sallies, and the lords of the Privy Council studied him with mocking, haughty eyes. Many of the spectators did not believe any man could remain silent under such treatment. Ralph Izard, with his hot South Carolina blood, said, “Had it been me that was so grossly insulted, should instantly have repelled the attack, in defiance of every consequence.” Yet Franklin achieved the seemingly impossible. He remained, in Jeremy Bentham’s words, “the whole time like a rock, in the same posture, his head resting on his left hand, and in that attitude abiding the pelting of the pitiless storm.” It was in fact more than a storm. It was a political and emotional catastrophe, which makes Franklin’s self-control all the more remarkable. He was seeing the death of all his hopes of reconciliation between England and America, for which he had labored ten years. All the wishful thinking he had done about the eventual good sense of the English people asserting itself, all the deep affection for England and Englishmen which he had acquired over so many years, one might even say the essential structure of his life, was being demolished in front of his eyes. That these men, most of whom he knew personally, could scheme to make him the spectacle of such a crude sideshow, allow him to become the target of a man as despicable as Wedderburn, was almost beyond belief. A profound, even immense personal resentment was thus added to the natural impetus to rage. Franklin’s self-control in the face of such provocation was certainly one of the most remarkable achievements of his life.

  But his masterful silence did not mean that Franklin intended to forgive or forget the outrage which Lord North and his ministers had perpetrated against him. As the meeting broke up, and the crowd flowed out of the Council chamber into an anteroom, Franklin found himself walking beside his tormentor, Wedderburn. Gently, Franklin took the orator by the arm and whispered in his ear, “I will make your master a little king for this.”

  While the courtiers swarmed around Wedderburn in the anteroom of the Cockpit, Franklin went quietly home to Craven Street. The next day he received a le
tter from the government informing him that he had been dismissed as Deputy Postmaster General for America. In another twenty-four hours, another letter arrived ordering him to submit his accounts to his successor, who had already been appointed. His only consolation for the moment was the numerous friends, such as Joseph Priestley, who rushed to Craven Street to let him know that they were standing by him, no matter how reckless the ministry in their rage might become. But Franklin’s first thoughts were not of himself, or of his own safety. Instead, his emotions raced across the ocean to Governor William Franklin. After this crushing and total repudiation by the Ministry, with the obvious consent of the King, how could his son have any future in the service of the British government?

  Dear Son:-—This line is just to acquaint you that I am well, and that my office of Deputy-Postmaster is taken from me. As there is no prospect of your being ever promoted to a better government, and that you hold has never defray’d its expenses, I wish you were well settled in your farm. ‘Tis an honester and more honourable because a more independent employment. You will hear from others the treatment I have receiv’d. I leave you to your own reflections and determinations upon it, and remain ever your affectionate Father.

  Franklin told Priestley, who breakfasted with him the following morning, “that he had never before been so sensible of the power of a good conscience; for that, if he had not considered the thing for which he had been so much insulted, as one of the best acts of his life, and what he should certainly do again in the same circumstances, he could not have supported it.”

  That same day, February 2, 1774, Franklin wrote another letter to Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, and other leading Boston patriots, urging them to offer to pay the East India Company for the ruined tea. “This all our friends here wish with me; and that if war is finally to be made upon us, which some threaten, an act of violent injustice on our part, unrectified, may not give a colourable pretense for it. A speedy reparation will immediately set us right in the opinion of all Europe.” He pointed out that Parliament had frequently made similar grants from the public treasury when private property was destroyed by rioting mobs in England and America.

  Not until February 15, more than two full weeks after the ordeal in the Cockpit, did Franklin sit down to write a full account of it to his friends in Massachusetts. He obviously wanted time to let his emotions cool. But even after two weeks, there was more than a little acid in his description of Wedderburn’s speech. He told how the solicitor general had “bestowed plenty of abuse” upon the people of Massachusetts. “But the favorite part of his discourse was leveled at your Agent, who stood there the butt of his invective ribaldry for near an hour, not a single Lord adverting to the impropriety and indecency of treating a public messenger in so ignominious a manner, who was present only as the person delivering your petition, with the consideration of which no part of his conduct had any concern.” Franklin then added words that can only be described as incendiary. “When I see, that all petitions and complaints of grievances are so odious to government, that even the mere pipe which conveys them becomes obnoxious, I am at a loss to know how peace and union are to be maintained or restored between the different parts of the Empire. Grievances cannot be redressed unless they are known; and they cannot be known but through complaints and petitions. If these are deemed affronts, and the messengers punished as offenders, who will henceforth send petitions? And who will deliver them? Where complaining is a crime, hope becomes despair.”

  He then told of his dismissal as Deputy Postmaster, and warned that henceforth the American Postmaster General was no longer permitted to fill vacancies without awaiting instructions from the government. This meant that in the future these vacancies would probably be filled by ministers’ lackeys. “How safe the correspondence of our Assembly committees along the continent will be through the hands of such officers may now be worth consideration, especially as the Post office Act of Parliament allows a postmaster to open letters, if warranted to do so by the order of a Secretary of State, and every provincial secretary may be deemed a Secretary of State in his own province.” This letter was all the Americans needed to hear. Within a few months, the British postal service in the colonies had been virtually abandoned, and an independent post office organized. It was one of the first, if not the first, agencies of the British government to be discarded by the Americans, a fact which must have given Franklin considerable satisfaction.

  This was hardly the voice of moderation and conciliation, which Franklin has so long been pictured as personifying during his years in England. It was true, that at one point Franklin tried to espouse this role. But over the last few years, his patience and his generous feelings for England had been steadily eroded by persistent collision with the stupidity, venality, stubbornness and arrogance of the rulers of England’s empire. Two years before the Continental Congress voted with anguish and hesitation for independence, Franklin had arrived at this momentous conclusion in England, at least on the level of his emotions. Intellectually he permitted his cool head to talk hopefully of some basis for a future settlement. But already he was thinking ahead, toward a new political order when he sat down to write two more letters, one to Joseph Galloway, and the second to William Franklin.

  To Galloway he carefully explained his motives for sending the Hutchinson-Oliver letters to Massachusetts. Franklin reiterated his belief that if the ministry “had been dispos’d to a reconciliation, as they sometimes pretend to be, they could have chosen this opportunity to demonstrate it.” Instead, they let the solicitor general wander into “a long studied invective against me.” He added that Wedderburn’s speech had since been printed in a heavily edited version. “Compar’d to the verbal speech, the printed one is perfectly decent,” Franklin said. “I shall soon answer it & give this Court my farewell.”

  In recent letters, Galloway had discussed with Franklin the possibility of creating a constitution that would specify America’s rights within the empire. Basically, it was an elaboration by his legal mind of Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union. Franklin agreed on the importance of such a document but he was wryly pessimistic about the chances of anyone in England helping to work out such an understanding. “If ‘tis to be settled, it must settle itself, nobody here caring for the trouble of thinking on’t.”

  “I long to be with you & to converse with you on these important heads. A few months I hope will bring us together. In the calm retirement of Trevose [Galloway’s country estate] perhaps we may spend some hours usefully. I am sure they will be spent agreeably too, dear friend.” Then Franklin added a postscript which did nothing to raise Galloway’s spirits. “The ship Ohio still aground.” On the same day, Franklin wrote another letter to William, in which he reversed the advice he had given him on February 2.

  Some tell me that it is determined to displace you likewise, but I do not know it as certain....Perhaps they may expect that your resentment of their treatment of me may induce you to resign, and save them the shame of depriving you when they ought to promote. But this I would not advise you to do. Let them take your place if they want it, tho’ in truth I think it scarce worth your keeping, since it has not afforded you sufficient to prevent your running even, year behindhand with me. But one may make something of an injury, nothing of a resignation.

  That superb last line is clear proof that Franklin the philosopher was once more in charge of his mental and emotional house. He did, as he promised Galloway, write a rebuttal to Wedderbum’s speech, defending his motives and role in the Hutchinson-Oliver letters affair. But after it was finished he decided not to publish it. Meanwhile, the British government was demonstrating that their intemperate attack on Franklin was no accident. They proceeded to display the same reckless attitude toward the colony of Massachusetts and America in general.

  The North ministry rammed through Parliament a series of punitive laws. The port of Boston was peremptorily closed to all shipping until the destroyed tea had been paid for and the revenue officers compe
nsated for the duties owed them. Next came an act “for regulating the government in the Province of Massachusetts Bay.” Most of the powers acquired over the generations by the Assembly and courts of Massachusetts were removed. “I propose in this bill, to take the executive power from the hands of the democratic part of the government,” Lord North candidly admitted. The Regulating Acts, as they were called, also authorized British officers to quarter their troops in the homes of private citizens in Massachusetts. As a new governor, to make sure that the colonists got the message, the King appointed General Thomas Gage, heretofore commander-in-chief of the British Army in North America.

  The debate on these bills could only have enraged Franklin. John Dunning, Franklin’s ex-attorney, condemned the Regulating Acts in a two-hour speech that was a devastating analysis of their aggressive aims. The Acts were intended to provoke the colonists into rebellion by taking away their charters, he declared, while empowering the government to authorize ruthless wholesale repression when that rebellion occurred. Edmund Burke followed Dunning and spoke for almost two hours, calling for conciliation instead of punishment. But the North majority shouted down these voices of moderation with the most extreme sentiments. “I say stand and deliver to the Americans,” roared Richard Rigby, speaking for the followers of the Duke of Bedford. A North supporter, John St. John, working hard for the lucrative sinecure, Surveyor General of Inland Revenue, scorned the idea that America could do anything about the punitive acts. “Tis said that America will be exasperated. Will she then take arms? `Tis not as yet, thank God, the strength of America which we dread when put in competition with this country. She has neither army, navy, money, or men.... Shall we then fear the destruction of our trade? Believe it not; while it is her interest to trade with us, so long she will in spite of her resentment.” The non-importation agreements which the colonists were attempting to construct in support of Massachusetts were “cobweb confederacies” that self-interest would soon destroy. In despair, as the North squadrons rolled over them, West Indian born Rose Fuller, another leading member of the Opposition, lamented, “It is not an error of the Ministry, it is an error of the nation: I see it wherever I go. People are of the opinion that these measures ought to be carried into execution.”