“The wise Lord Hillsborough,” as Franklin wryly described him, now arose to strongly second Sandwich’s call for rejection. Members of the Opposition, including Lord Shelburne and Lord Camden, insisted that the plan ought to be considered, either on its merits or at the very least for the character and dignity of the House. But one of these lords made the mistake of mentioning that Lord Dartmouth, speaking for the ministry, had also recommended consideration of the plan. Dartmouth rose, his soft, feminine eyes clouded with agitation, his bow lips petulant at being divided from his fellow ministers, and humbly ate his own words. He had altered his mind, he said, after having heard the opinions of so many lords against the plan and he too recommended rejecting it immediately.
Lord Chatham now rose and coolly replied to Sandwich. He said the plan was entirely his own, a declaration he felt he was obliged to make since so many of their lordships appeared to have such a mean opinion of it. If it was to be censured, it was unjust to let any blame for it fall on another individual. In the past, people had said his greatest fault was his unwillingness to take advice. But now he did not hesitate to say that if he was the First Minister of this country, and had “the care of settling this momentous business,” he would not be ashamed “of publicly calling to his assistance a person so perfectly acquainted with the whole of American affairs” as the gentleman Sandwich had alluded to and “so injuriously reflected on.” He was a man “whom all Europe held in high estimation for his knowledge and wisdom” and ranked with England’s Boyle and Newton. He was an honor, not to the English nation only, but to human nature.
Franklin again struggled to maintain a wooden face and succeeded. What he saw happen next in that conclave of Britain’s bluest and supposedly best blood was shocking enough to freeze anyone’s features. Sandwich’s motion to reject passed sixty-one to thirty-two. “Lord Chatham’s bill,” Franklin told Charles Thomson in a letter four days later, “tho’ on so important a subject, and offered by so great a character, and supported by such able and learned speakers . . . was treated with as much contempt as they could have shown to a ballad offered by a drunken porter.”
A few days later, Franklin received bad news of a more disturbing personal nature. William Franklin wrote to tell him that Deborah was dead. She had suffered a stroke almost a year ago, which left her enfeebled in both mind and body. A second stroke had carried her into eternity, on December 19, 1774, and William had struggled through snow drifts to arrive, barely a half hour before her funeral, to pay the respects which duty, if not inclination, required of him. Deprived of her fiery spirit, Deborah must have been a rather pitiful sight in her last days. Even William forgot his animosity and spoke of her as “my poor old mother.” The news shook Franklin in several ways. He reproached himself for not having gone home sooner, especially when he heard that Deborah had lamented bitterly his decision to stay another year after the Cockpit humiliation. She had wept and said the news meant she would never see her Pappy alive again. Moreover, there was now no one to superintend his considerable capital and property in Pennsylvania, and with a war threatening, it was all the more imperative to put his financial house in order. He decided to leave as soon as possible.
Nothing that happened in England, during the next few weeks, inclined him to change his mind. The House of Commons voted down or ignored petition after petition from London and Liverpool merchants, the manufacturers of Manchester and the traders of Wolverhampton, begging them to avert the crisis that was certain to disrupt Great Britain’s economy. Lord North rose in the Commons to propose an address to the King in which the state of affairs in Massachusetts Bay would be called a rebellion, and begged his Majesty to take immediate action to insure obedience to the laws and sovereignty of England. Only a passing reference was made to the government’s willingness to show the Americans “every just and reasonable indulgence” if they made “proper application.”
Then, in one of those inexplicable reversals, which can only be explained by Lord North’s incoherent, divided mind, the ministry suddenly announced that they were prepared to make a conciliatory proposal. On February 20, North appeared in Parliament to announce that any colony that agreed to contribute by vote of their Assembly “their proportion to the common defense,” and also agreed to raise money for the salaries of the governor and the courts, would henceforth be exempt from all further taxation, except duties imposed for the regulation of commerce, and even the monies raised by these duties would he deposited to the account of each colony for their individual use. It was nothing more than Franklin’s old idea of raising money by requisition. If the proposition had been put to the Continental Congress, and the ministry had abandoned its insistence on the technicality that the Congress was not a legal body, something might have come of it. But in the present situation, it sounded like an attempt to bribe individual colonies away from their loyalty to Congress.
Franklin, through his private sources, reported that North had intended to make a much more generous and elaborate offer, but the extremists in the cabinet threatened to revolt and bring down the ministry. They accepted the watered-down proposition North finally offered because, Franklin was certain, they “rely upon [it] as a means of dividing, and by that means subduing us.” Fervently he wrote to friends in America, urging them to stand together. “The eyes of all Christendom are now upon us,” he told James Bowdoin, “and our honour as a people has become a matter of the utmost consequence to be taken care of. If we tamely give up our rights in this contest, a century to come will not restore us in the opinion of the world; we shall be stamped with the character of dastards, poltroons and fools; and be despised and trampled upon, not by this haughty, insolent nation only, but by all mankind.”
As his own hopes of compromise plummeted to zero, he became uncomfortably aware that he was being separated from friends who had over the years followed his original lead. The gap between him and his son William was already acutely evident. In the same letter that contained his almost tender comments on Deborah’s death, William Franklin had turned to politics and tried to give his father some advice. He told him to give up squabbling with the ministry and come home. The advice was almost paternal on William’s part. Perhaps seeing Deborah dwindle into enfeeblement and death made him think of his father as equally old and almost as helpless. “If there was any prospect,” he wrote, “of your being able to bring the people in power to your way of thinking, or those of your way of thinking being brought into power, I should not think so much of your stay. But as you have had by this time pretty strong proofs that neither can be reasonably expected, and that you are looked upon with an evil eye in that country, and are in no small danger of being brought into trouble for your political conduct, you had certainly better return while you are able to bear the fatigues of the voyage, to a country where the people revere you, and are inclined to pay a deference to your opinions. I wonder none of them, as you say, requested your attendance at the late Congress, for I heard from all quarters that your return was ardently wished for at that time, and I have since heard it lamented by many that you were not at that meeting; as they imagined, had you been there, you would have framed some plan for accommodation of our differences that would have met with the approbation of a majority of the delegates, though it would not have coincided with the deep designs of those who influence that majority. However mad you may think the measures of the ministry are, yet I trust you have candour enough to acknowledge that we are no ways behindhand with them in madness on this side of the water....”
Next Joseph Galloway wrote to him, enclosing a copy of the plan of union, which he had proposed in the Continental Congress. It was more or less the same plan he had urged on Franklin a year ago, the descendant of Franklin’s Albany Plan. It had been voted down by Congress 6 to 5. Deeply hurt by this rejection of what he felt was the only hope of compromise; Galloway retreated to his country estate, and would have nothing more to do with Congress. He sent the plan to London, in the hope that it might inspire s
ome action from that side of the Atlantic. Regretfully Franklin had to tell him that he no longer believed in his own brainchild. “I have not heard what objections were made to the plan in the Congress, nor would I make more than this one, that when I consider the extream corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this old rotten state, and the glorious publick virtue so predominant in our rising country, I cannot but apprehend more mischief than benefit from a closer union. I fear they will drag us after them in all the plundering wars, which their desperate circumstances, injustice and rapacity may prompt them to undertake; and their wide, wasting prodigality and profusion is a gulph that will swallow up every aid we may distress ourselves to afford them. . . . However, I would try anything, and bear anything that can be borne with safety to our just liberties, rather than engage in a war with such near relations, unless compelled to it by dire necessity in our own defense.” In this divided spirit, Franklin continued to negotiate behind the scenes with Barclay, Fothergill, and Howe.
For the first time, the steady drift toward war began to affect his nerves. At one point, when Lord Howe told him that the ministry was definitely swinging toward reconciliation, and would soon send him as a peace commissioner to America, with Franklin at his side, Franklin lost control of himself and wept with joy. But like so many of North’s and Dartmouth’s ideas, it was nine-tenths wish and one-tenth will, and it soon dissolved in the glare of Sandwich-Suffolk belligerence. Franklin for the first time in his life, found himself unable to sleep, and this worried him. “Whatever robs an old man of his sleep, soon demolishes him,” he said.
In his desperation, Franklin agreed to risk his popularity in America, and promise on his own authority that in spite of all the injuries they had since received, Boston would agree to pay for the tea. But he insisted if the ministry demanded such a dangerous concession from him, the least he could expect from them was an equally large retreat, rescinding the punitive acts. This, the ministry refused to do, and the two Quakers sadly advised Franklin to withdraw his offer. Lord Howe, after raising Franklin’s hopes so high, mournfully reported that he too was empty-handed. There was no immediate hope of his appointment as a peace commissioner, and when Franklin explained that he must leave for America as soon as possible, the admiral mournfully told him to go.
In Parliament, the North ministry swung, like a ship without a rudder, into the prevailing current of arrogant belligerence. A bill for restraining all of New England’s trade passed 215 to 61. The friends of America in the opposition denounced it as certain to cause war, a war that England could not possibly win. In a distinctly Franklinesque echo, Lord Camden cited the number of men. America could put in the field. Lord Sandwich rose to reply. “I cannot think the noble Lord can be serious on this matter,” he said. “Suppose the colonies do abound in men, what does that signify? They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men. I wish instead of 40 or 50,000 of these brave fellows, they would produce in the field at least 200,000, the more the better, the easier would be the conquest; if they did not run away, they would starve themselves into compliance with our measures.”
This was typical of the almost incredible contempt for America that Franklin heard in Parliament, in clubs, and in private homes during these last weeks in England. William Strahan came to him with a story about a Scotch sergeant in Boston who had captured forty American militiamen single-handed and marched them into captivity at the point of his bayonet.
The climax came for Franklin in a debate he attended at the House of Lords. Lord Camden rose to defend America and called for reconciliation. The ministry replied with “base reflections on American courage, religion, understanding, etc.,” in which Franklin heard his countrymen treated “with the utmost contempt as the lowest of mankind, and almost of a different species from the English of Britain.” American honesty was particularly abused. Several of the lords asserted that the whole dispute was a pretext to avoid paying just debts.
An enraged Franklin went home and drew up a Memorial to present to Lord Dartmouth. It was a wholesale attack on the punitive acts, in which he demanded “satisfaction” for the accumulated damage the laws had done to Massachusetts and New England. Fortunately, he had the good sense to take it to his friend Thomas Walpole, head of the Grand Ohio Company, and ask him his opinion. Walpole, who was a member of the House of Commons, read the wild accusatory words with growing astonishment. He looked at the paper, looked at Franklin, and then at the paper again, as if he could not quite believe his own eyes. The violent, intemperate prose was completely foreign to the Benjamin Franklin he knew. When he saw Walpole was speechless, Franklin asked him to show it to Lord Camden, who lived nearby, and hurried off to continue his packing. The next day, Franklin got the Memorial back with a note advising him that both Walpole and Camden thought it “might be attended with dangerous consequences to your person, and contribute to exasperate the nation.” The next day, when Walpole called at Craven Street, he found that Franklin had gone to the House of Lords. He was so worried about Franklin’s emotional state that he followed him there, took him aside, and begged him not to deliver the paper to Lord Dartmouth. Since he had no instructions to make such a protest, it would only draw the ministerial lightning in Franklin’s direction once more. They would call it “a national affront” and possibly arrange another, even worse ordeal before the Privy Council.
By this time Franklin had reserved a cabin aboard the Pennsylvania packet, had taken William Temple Franklin out of school, and was within a few days of departing. The lawsuit between him and William Whately was still dragging through the courts, and he knew that this in itself would give the government the right to detain him if they were so inclined. So Franklin took Walpole’s advice and decided not to deliver his last roar of defiance.
On one of his final days in London, he conferred for hours with Edmund Burke, the intellectual leader of the Rockingham wing of the opposition. Burke was planning to make a major speech on conciliating the colonies and, like Lord Chatham; he wanted to make sure it was as realistic as possible, from an American point of view. That night Franklin received a last mournful letter from Dr. Fothergill. The Quaker urged Franklin to gather the leading Philadelphians together and inform them “that whatever specious pretences are offered, they are all hollow; and that to get a larger field on which to fatten a herd of worthless parasites, is all that is regarded.” This was grim confirmation of Franklin’s old accusation, that the British government’s attempt to broaden its jurisdiction in America was primarily motivated by a hunger for more patronage. The efforts he, Franklin, and Barclay had made for peace would, Fothergill hoped, “stun at least, if not convince, the most worthy that nothing very favourable is intended, if more unfavourable articles cannot be obtained.”
War was very close, and Franklin knew it. It filled him with dread, not only because it was a war which had raged inside his own mind and body for almost ten years. Again and again he had struggled to compose and suppress the violence, to subdue it behind the mask of philosophic serenity he yearned to wear. But now it had broken out in his own mind. The raging defiance he had felt as he wrote that last Memorial, the astonished dismay on his friend Thomas Walpole’s face as he read it, made that clear. This was agony enough, this loss of his sense of place in the world, this division between an England and an America whom he had long loved equally. But there was an even more appalling division, a more painful loss, threatening him on the other side of the Atlantic. What would William Franklin think and do if war broke out?
A long time ago, Franklin had seen, intellectually, that there was really no middle ground in this contest. Now he saw even more starkly that once blood was spilled, no man would be permitted to hold the middle ground that his son and Galloway were attempting to maintain without being called a traitor.
On that last day in London, Franklin also spent some time with his old friend Joseph Priestley. They went over a bundle of newspapers recently arrived from America, and Franklin pointed out to Priestley the arti
cles that might do America the most good if they were reprinted in English papers. Perhaps it was this last attempt to play the propagandist on America’s behalf, a role in which he had tragically failed, that overwhelmed him. “He was frequently not able to proceed for the tears literally running down his cheeks,” Priestley said.
The source of these tears and the best possible proof of the intricate connection between the personal and the political in Franklin’s mind were the first words he wrote on board the Pennsylvania packet. On the same day Edmund Burke was delivering to a temporarily hypnotized House of Commons his magnificent speech on reconciling America. “The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle in all parts of the Empire; . . . It is simple peace; sought in its natural course, and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific.”
While Burke stunned the Tory majority with the majesty of his rolling periods, Franklin began the longest letter he ever wrote with two simple words: “Dear Son.”
Day after day, as the Pennsylvania packet plowed through seas so calm that a London barge would have found them no more troublesome than the Thames, Franklin wrote the detailed history of his secret negotiations with the British government. Not even young Josiah Quincy, who had sailed for Boston two weeks before, his delicate frame racked by the consumption that would kill him before he reached home, knew about this hidden tangle of hopes, hints, and frustrations. Perhaps Franklin feared to reawaken the suspicions of him Quincy had brought from Boston. At any rate, what he hesitated to reveal to the young idealist, who was literally sacrificing his life for the Cause, Franklin told in infinite detail to the man he had already called a “thorough courtier.” He was prepared to take the risk because in his own spacious mind, the truth was the most powerful of all arguments. So, day after day he wrote and wrote, until the words that flowed out from that opening “Dear Son” ran to ninety-seven extraordinary pages. Today they remain a masterpiece of diplomatic reporting. But almost no previous Franklin biographer has paid sufficient attention to their other face, the anguished, sometimes bitter personal argument which lies embedded in the narrative like splotches of blood on a beautifully woven rug.
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