Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  Discussing Lord North’s conciliatory proposal, Franklin compared it to the request of “a highwayman, who presents his pistol and hat at a coach window, demanding no specific sum, but if you will give all your money or what he is pleas’d to think sufficient, he will civilly omit putting his own hands into your pockets; if not, there is his pistol.” in Describing Dartmouth’s about-face on Chatham’s proposal, Franklin noted savagely, “I am the more particular in this, as it is a trait of that nobleman’s character, who from his office is suppos’d to have so great a share in American affairs, but who has in reality no will or judgment of his own, being with dispositions for the best measures, easily prevail’d with to join in the worst.” He was even more devastating in his description of the ministry’s attack on Lord Chatham’s plan. “To hear so many of these hereditary legislators declaiming so vehemently against, not the adopting merely, but even the consideration of a proposal so important in its nature, . . . gave me an exceeding mean opinion of their abilities, and made their claim of sovereignty over three millions of virtuous, sensible people in America seem the greatest of absurdities, since they appear’d to have scarce discretion enough to govern a herd of swine. Hereditary legislators! Thought I. There would be more propriety, because less hazard of mischief, in having (as in some university of Germany) hereditary professors of mathematicks! But this was a hasty reflection: For the elected House of Commons is no better, nor ever will be while the electors receive money for their votes, and pay money wherewith ministers may bribe their representatives when chosen.”

  Not even the seekers after peace, Howe, Barclay and Fothergill, came off unscathed. Franklin spoke in scornful terms of Howe’s repeated attempts to offer him the “favors” of the government in return for his cooperation. At another point, he told how Barclay and Fothergill disagreed with him when Franklin insisted that Parliament had to give up their asserted right to alter colonial charters and constitutions at their pleasure. America would never feel safe or secure as long as this pretension was maintained. The two Englishmen apparently could not resist pointing out that America was not very safe right now. Somewhat too smugly, they reminded Franklin that it would be easy for Britain to order the fleet to burn every seaport on the American continent. Franklin exploded. “I grew warm,” he told William, “said that the chief part of my little property consisted of houses in those towns; that they might make bonfires of them whenever they pleased; that the fear of losing them would never alter my resolution to resist to the last that claim of Parliament.”

  With equally obvious pride, he stressed Lord Chatham’s praise of the Continental Congress. He quoted the great man as saying that the Americans had acted “with so much temper, moderation and wisdom,” that he thought it “the most honourable assembly of statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, in the most virtuous times.” A born writer, Franklin gave the narrative the pace and emotional structure of a novel, building it from the “cool, sullen silence” that he was maintaining at the opening of the story to the exasperated fury of his insulting Memorial to Lord Dartmouth at the close, with Fothergill’s final crushing letter as an abrupt, dramatic coda.

  To relieve his mind and calm his nerves while writing this 30,000-word letter, Franklin studied the Gulf Stream. He had discussed this strange ocean river with several American captains, and observed it in an offhand way on his earlier crossings. Now he dropped thermometers over the side as they sailed through it, took samples of the water, and noted it was far less phosphorescent in the dark than the rest of the sea. Years before, one of his Nantucket cousins had told him that American captains made better time than British captains because they understood how to use the Gulf Stream’s current when they were sailing with it, and avoided it when they were sailing in the other direction. Franklin now concluded that they were right. He decided that the best way to find out whether a ship was in the Gulf Stream or not was to equip it with thermometers. This was a scientific discovery of the first rank, but it would be a long time before Franklin decided it was wise to confide the news to the world.

  On the fifth of May, when the packet dropped anchor in the Delaware opposite Philadelphia, the first news Franklin heard from those who came aboard was what he dreaded most: war had begun. Sixteen days before, General Gage had sent a military expedition to Concord, Massachusetts, to seize cannon, gunpowder, and other supplies stored there. Fighting had erupted on the Lexington green at dawn on April 19, and before the day was over forty-nine Americans had been killed and thirty-four wounded. The British in their running retreat from Concord lost 273 killed, wounded, and missing. Franklin could only think wearily of the ninety-seven-page letter in his trunk and wonder if he had come home too late to send it to the royal governor of New Jersey.

  Franklin found Philadelphia in a frenzy of military preparation. Associated companies, recruited as Franklin had raised militia in the past, were drilling in every open field and yard. The Continental Congress was to meet in five days. Franklin, once he was settled in his house, after a joyous welcome from his daughter Sally, his son-in-law Richard Bache, and their three sons, asked the question that was paramount in his mind: has William resigned?

  Faces fell. The answer was no. William maintained the last time they heard from him that he felt “obligated” to the ministry for their permitting him to retain his post, in spite of his father’s disagreements with them. He still argued that there was “madness” on both sides of the water, and struggled to maintain some kind of middle position.

  The next day, the Pennsylvania Assembly voted to appoint Franklin as an additional member of the colony’s delegation to the Continental Congress. He immediately accepted. This was a high honor, but that same day he got more bad news. Joseph Galloway, who had also been elected a member of the delegation, had declared he would not serve. This meant that the leading voice in Pennsylvania was Franklin’s old foe, John Dickinson. Few previous biographers have tried to assess the impact of these double blows to Franklin’s hopes and plans. Galloway’s desertion meant that Franklin was politically isolated in Pennsylvania. Instead of being able to sit in Congress as the spokesman for the host state, and give Pennsylvania an equal voice in Congress with the other two large states, Massachusetts and Virginia, he represented no one and nothing but himself.

  On May 8, 1775, Franklin wrote a letter to Galloway, expressing his deep concern at his old friend’s “resolution of quitting publick life at a time when your abilities are so much wanted.” He told Galloway that William Franklin would be at Burlington on May 15 to meet with the New Jersey Assembly. If William could not “conveniently come hither” to meet him before that date, he proposed seeing him there, and then swinging down to Trevose to see Galloway on the way back. He signed the letter “With unalterable esteem and affection.” Galloway was extremely anxious to talk with Franklin, and had offered to send his carriage to bring him directly to Trevose. Franklin explained that he was “so taken up with people coming in continually I cannot stir,” but he was tempted by the offer. Sometime within the next ten days, the three men met. As Galloway recalled the scene later, they sat up late, and bottles of Madeira went around and around while they talked about happier days, when the three of them were like a father and two sons, running Pennsylvania and New Jersey and planning even more magnificent colonies in the West, under the protection of a benevolent empire. Finally, Franklin, hoping he had bridged their eleven-year separation, raised the question they all hesitated to discuss. Where did they stand?

  Tensely, William tried to explain to his father the sense of obligation he felt to the King and to the ministry, which prevented him from resigning. He denounced with equal fervor the stupidity of Thomas Gage, for sending his troops into the country on a brainless, needless expedition and the “violent men” in Massachusetts and in the Continental Congress. He even attempted to argue that his father should at the very least feel enough obligation to the British government to avoid playing more than a neutral spectator’s role.<
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  While William Franklin nodded approval, Galloway talked bitterly about mechanics and tradesmen trying to be statesmen, under the leadership of Charles Thomson, who had become his chief political foe in Pennsylvania. He was so blinded by local politics and the blow to his pride when Congress made Thomson its secretary, and then rejected his plan of union, that he simply could not see the larger struggle with any kind of perspective. Galloway’s temper rose as he described the treatment he had received from the radicals in the Pennsylvania Assembly. He had attempted to bypass the Continental Congress, and persuade the Assembly to petition the King directly. A box with a noose and a threatening letter in it was left in his lodgings. This, of course, made it easy for him to tell himself he was opposing “lawless measures.”

  With a harsh sigh, Franklin told them where he stood. He was for independence. The two younger men could only gasp and shake their heads. They could not quite believe that the man who was for them a symbol of moderation and rational compromise could embrace this doctrine, which thus far only a few extremists dared to whisper in private. In desperation, Franklin read the two men parts of the ninety seven-page letter to William that he had composed on board ship. Nothing changed their minds. They were both convinced that the Continental Congress was as wrongheaded and foolhardy as the British ministry, with the worse handicap that it had no legal right to exist and issue orders or resolutions.

  Galloway retired to Trevose and William went back to Perth Amboy, where the government had recently built him a handsome new mansion. But for the Franklins, political separation could not mean personal separation. Especially now, when there was a new link between them: William Temple Franklin childless all these years, the governor was almost pathetically overjoyed to claim Temple as his son, and he swiftly exerted his formidable charm to win the handsome sixteen-year-old boy’s affection. When he returned to Perth Amboy, William took Temple with him. Franklin, as he often did when he was emotionally distressed, reached for his pen to continue the argument. The letter almost seems to pick up in the middle of a sentence, and constitute a reply that Franklin thought of giving his son, and forebode to say, perhaps because he would not have been able to control his temper.

  I don’t understand it as any favour to me or to you, the being continued in an office by which, with all your prudence, you cannot avoid running behindhand if you live suitably to your station. While you are in it I know you will execute it with fidelity to your royal master, but I think independence more honourable than any service, and that in the state of American affairs, which, from the present arbitrary measures is likely soon to take place, you will find yourself in no comfortable situation, and perhaps wish you had soon disengaged yourself.

  The next day, Franklin wrote a similar letter to Galloway, urging him to serve in the Continental Congress. Once more his old lieutenant stonily refused. On May 12, the Pennsylvania Assembly finally acceded to his request, and excused Galloway from his appointment. He published a statement in the newspapers, denying the “malevolent reports” that were circulating about his loyalty, and permanently retired to Trevose.

  Franklin took his seat in the Continental Congress on May 10. In political terms he was the loneliest man in the crowded chamber of the Pennsylvania State House, where sixty-three delegates from the still widely divided thirteen colonies met to discuss the crisis. Embarrassed by the abstention of both his son and his political lieutenant, and unsure of his fellow congressmen, Franklin maintained a discreet, somewhat mournful silence. Most of the congressmen were strangers to him. They were a generation, some of them two generations, younger. Most of his contemporaries, such as Mather Byles in Massachusetts, fellow Stamp Act opponent Jared Ingersoll in Connecticut, Thomas Vernon in Rhode Island, Cadwalader Colden in New York and John Foxcroft in Virginia, were either taking the King’s side or retreating to a bewildered, pitiful neutrality.

  Almost immediately it was evident to Franklin that few in Congress shared his defiant spirit. Only some New England delegates were really ready for independence. Massachusetts had been invaded, her people shot, her houses burned by British troops. British warships were seizing American ships, largely from New England, on the high seas. But the delegates from other states, most of whom had yet to see a hostile British soldier or warship, were not so inclined to regard ship seizures or the outburst of violence at Lexington and Concord as a signal for all-out war. They were quick to point out that the British troops had retreated inside Boston and remained on the defensive since that time, making no effort to attack the improvised militia army from Massachusetts and the other New England colonies that was besieging them. There was, these congressmen argued, still some hope for peace. To Franklin’s considerable mortification, the leading spokesman for this point of view was his old political enemy, John Dickinson. Meanwhile William Franklin’s ambiguous position gave Philadelphia rumormongers a chance to whisper that his father had sold out to the British and was operating as a Parliamentary spy. Others said he was waiting for the right moment to submit a plan of reconciliation coauthored by himself and Lord Chatham. Richard Henry Lee, brother of Arthur Lee, exhibiting that mania for suspicion which was one of his family’s less endearing traits, announced that he was launching a one-man investigation to find out if Franklin was really a traitor. Young James Madison, not yet a delegate from Virginia, succumbed to a highly uncharacteristic tendency to accept the story at face value. He told the Philadelphia printer, William Bradford, nephew of Franklin’s old newspaper competitor, and an eager disseminator of this slander, that “the bare suspicion of his guilt amounts very nearly to a proof of its reality.”

  There is some evidence that at first Franklin still entertained some faint hopes for peace. He wrote to his friend, Bishop Shipley, saying, “A war has commenced which the youngest of us may not see the end of.”

  My endeavors will be if possible to quench it, as I know yours will be; the satisfaction of endeavoring to do good is perhaps all we can obtain or effect.” But this pacific spirit was soon eroded by the news of what was happening to the citizens of Boston.

  With food running short, the British were turning out all superfluous mouths. People were being forced to flee into the country with whatever they could carry in wagons and on their backs. Franklin’s widowed sister, Jane Mecom, sixty-three and asthmatic, was one of these, refugees, and she wrote a heartbreaking letter to Franklin, telling him of her travails. She had no man to assist her. Eventually, after some frantic negotiating, she managed to hire a wagon and, with the help of a granddaughter, packed it with “what I expected to have liberty to carry out, intending to seek my fortune with hundreds of others not knowing whither.” At this point of desperation, Franklin’s old friend Catherine Ray, married to a Rhode Islander, William Greene, invited Mrs. Mecom to take refuge with her. “I brought out what I could pack up in trunks and chests,” she mournfully told her brother, but she had to leave behind all her furniture. At Warwick she found the Greene house already jammed with refugees. Along with William and Catherine Greene and their five children, there were ten other Boston relatives in the eight room house, and six more expected the day Jane arrived.

  Jane’s plight was doubly disturbing to Franklin, because she not only was his favorite sister, but had already endured a life of almost unparalleled grief and disappointment. Her husband had died of a lingering illness, and of the nine children she raised to maturity, all were dead except a daughter and two sons, and both of the sons were insane. Franklin had been paying for the care of the older boy, Edward, for almost fifteen years; the second victim, Benjamin, had broken down more recently, after years of trying to make a living as a printer, frequently with his uncle’s help. Franklin was paying for his care, too, on a New Jersey farm. “I sympathize most sincerely with you and the people of my native town and country. Your account of the distresses attending their removal affects me greatly,” Franklin wrote. He urged Jane to join him in Philadelphia, or accept an invitation William had sent to her to enjoy t
he hospitality of his spacious new house in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. “Perhaps that may be a retreat less liable to disturbance than this: God only knows,” Franklin said. Obviously, he still regarded William as one of the family, in spite of their widening political breach.

  Franklin wrote this letter on June 17, a fateful day for the people of his native town and country. Hoping to thwart a British plan to launch an attack on the besieging American army, the Yankees seized high ground, known as Breed’s Hill and Bunker’s Hill, on Charlestown Heights north of Boston. The British attacked them and a full-scale battle erupted, totally different in form and far more bloody than the running skirmishes of the retreat from Concord and Lexington on April nineteenth. The British finally drove the Americans off both hills, but it cost them 1,150 men, about forty percent of their attacking force. The Americans lost an estimated 441 men. At the height of the battle, the British fired hot shot from nearby men-of-war into the village of Charlestown, just below Breed’s Hill, and some 300 houses were destroyed in the conflagration that swiftly followed.