The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

  In Franklin’s mind the mobs and rioting had some good results. It suggested that the colony was “running fast into Anarchy and Confusion,” and that “our only Hopes are, that the Crown will see the Necessity of taking the Government into its own hands, without which we shall soon have no Government at all.” Franklin was able to get the assembly to pass a number of resolves blaming the proprietors for all of Pennsylvania’s troubles.98

  With the help of his young political lieutenant Joseph Galloway, Franklin next sought to organize a popular petition urging that Pennsylvania be turned into a royal colony. He hoped that such a show of popular support would win over doubters in the assembly and in the colony. In order to convince Pennsylvanians of the benefits of substituting royal for proprietary authority, he, Galloway, and their allies launched a propaganda campaign of unprecedented intensity and scale. Franklin and Galloway organized a mass meeting in Philadelphia at which Galloway, known as the “Demosthenes of Pennsylvania,” harangued the crowd, arguing that “the way from Proprietary Slavery to Royal Liberty was easy.” The proponents of making Pennsylvania a royal colony not only plied potential signers with liquor; they got many people to sign their names to blank sheets of paper with no knowledge of what they were signing. At the same time Franklin’s press poured forth thousands of pieces of propaganda, including the assembly’s resolves and “Explanatory Remarks” on them, newspaper articles, and broadsides, all promoting the cause of royal government, with Franklin writing much of the material. Both Galloway and Franklin wrote pamphlets as well and “by the thousands” gave them away free. In his own pamphlet, entitled Cool

  Thoughts on the Present Situation of Our Public Affairs, Franklin tried to assure the people that Pennsylvania would lose none of its privileges by becoming a royal colony. Only an act of Parliament could take those privileges away, he said, “and we may rely on the united Justice of King, Lords, and Commons, that no such Act will ever pass, while we continue loyal and dutiful Subjects.”99

  But his persuasive powers were not very effective with the public: the petition to replace the proprietary government gained only 3500 signatures, and those were mostly from Philadelphia. At the same time Franklin faced a determined opponent of his plans in the assembly, John Dickinson, the well-to-do lawyer, originally from Delaware, who had trained in England and who would later become famous in the colonies with the publication of his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in 1767—68. In an impressive speech in May 1764, Dickinson argued that revoking the charter and turning Pennsylvania into a royal colony might endanger the colony’s liberties, especially its religious freedom. “Have we not sufficiently felt the effects of royal resentment?” Dickinson asked. “Is not the authority of the Crown fully enough exerted over us?” 100 Equally damaging to Franklin’s cause was the defection of the Speaker of the assembly, Isaac Norris. Although Norris had earlier encouraged making Pennsylvania a royal colony, he now followed Dickinson, his son-in-law, and spoke against a crown takeover; then, pleading ill health, he abruptly resigned from the assembly.

  Franklin and Galloway were not used to opposition from members of the Quaker party. Dickinson had no sooner finished his speech in the assembly than the arrogant young Galloway was on his feet to answer him. Galloway was proud of his oratorical abilities, and in a vigorous extemporaneous rebuttal to Dickinson he defended the disinterestedness of the Crown in contrast to the private interest of the proprietors— a position with which Franklin completely agreed. This encounter and the subsequent publication of the speeches, with Dickinson claiming that Galloway’s printed version was “a pretended speech,” created bad blood between the two men, leading to a fistfight and a challenge to a duel that never came off.101 Despite the opposition of Dickinson and Norris, however, Franklin and Galloway still had nearly all the votes in the legislature. Franklin was elected Speaker in place of Norris, and the assembly overwhelmingly voted to request that the Crown take over the government of the colony.

  The supporters of the proprietors decided to emulate Franklin and solicit people’s signatures on petitions opposing the scheme to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony. By September 1764 they had garnered 15,000 signatures, over four times the number Franklin had raised for his petition. Under the leadership of William Smith, Anglican clergyman and provost of the College of Pennsylvania, and William Allen, chief justice of the colony, both of whom had just returned from England, the proprietary cause rapidly gained strength. More and more Pennsylvanians were having second thoughts about abandoning the charter of William Penn, which had brought them so many privileges, so much religious freedom, and so much prosperity.

  The campaign for elections to the Pennsylvania Assembly in October 1764 was one of the most scurrilous in American colonial history, and both Franklin and Galloway lost their seats. Franklin was accused of a host of sins—of lechery, of having humble origins, of abandoning the mother of his bastard son, of stealing his ideas of electricity from another electrician, of embezzling colony funds, and of buying his honorary degrees. But what ultimately cost Franklin his seat was the number of Germans who voted against him, angry at his earlier ethnic slur about “Palatine Boors.”102

  Franklin was stunned by his defeat. He had completely misjudged the sentiments of his fellow colonists, something he would continue to do over the succeeding decade. Nevertheless, even though he was now out of the assembly, his political influence remained strong, and his Quaker party still controlled a majority of the legislature. At least some members of the assembly wanted to continue threatening the Penns with royalization in order to extract taxes and other privileges from them.103 Hence in late October the assembly voted to send Franklin once again to England to request the Crown to end proprietary rule in Pennsylvania. Although some legislators may have intended to use Franklin’s mission simply to intimidate the proprietors into reforms, Franklin himself was as serious as ever in his desire to bring royal government to the colony No doubt he was equally desirous of getting back to London, where he was more appreciated.

  “A LONDONER FOR THE REST OF MY DAYS”

  His two years back in America had not diluted in any way his love of London and his faith in the beneficence of royal authority, a faith that exceeded not only that of his fellow Americans but that of his British friends in London. He told his friend Strahan that if the proprietary party with which he was at war was able to destroy him and prevent his bringing royal government to Pennsylvania, then he would become “a Londoner for the rest of my Days.” 104 He was as fervent a royalist as he had ever been. In defending his reputation among His Majesty’s ministers and his ability to bring royal government to Pennsylvania, he emphasized his “constantly and uniformly promoting the Measures of the Crown.” In fact, he told his fellow Pennsylvanians, as “a Man who holds a profitable Office under the Crown,” he could be counted on to behave “with the Fidelity and Duty that becomes every good Subject.”105 Most colonists in the early 1760s were not yet thinking of rebellion, but they were certainly no lovers of crown prerogative as exercised by their royal governors. They prided themselves on the ability of their colonial assemblies—the “democratic” part of their mixed constitutions—to defend their English rights and liberties against what was always thought to be the continually encroaching power of the Crown. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, colonial politics had been marked by greater degrees of popular participation than people in the mother country experienced. Not only could two out of three adult white males vote in most colonies, compared with one out of six in England, but the royal patronage and political power necessary to control the people and their legislative representatives were much weaker in the colonies than in Britain itself. Coupled with this popular participation was a confusion over who precisely the leaders of the society were, a situation that made authority in the colonies repeatedly vulnerable to challenge. Eighteenth-century royal governors continually complained of the fury and madness of the people in the colonies and the extent to which repu
blican principles were eroding proper respect for royal authority. Thomas Penn himself warned that the power of the contentious colonial assemblies must be curbed or “the constitution will be changed to a perfect Democracy.”106

  Although Franklin at one time had been one of those colonial demagogues whom British officials frequently complained about, he was now on the other side of the water and the other side of the political fence. Just at the moment when many of his fellow colonists were becoming ever more fearful that Great Britain was becoming corrupt and losing its liberty, just at that moment that many Americans were becoming more mistrustful of the intentions of the British government, Franklin was becoming ever more confident of its benevolence and the future of the British Empire. Far from seeing the British nation sinking in luxury and corruption, he was seriously considering settling there forever. He had an excessive faith in the British Crown, and he had many friends and acquaintances in the colonies who shared his faith and who encouraged his mission to change Pennsylvania into a royal colony. Indeed, it is remarkable how many of his American friends in the early 1760s were future Tories and loyalists.

  In 1764 Rhode Islander Martin Howard Jr. asked Franklin, whom he had known from the Albany Congress, to support a secret petition already on the way to England requesting the transformation of his colony’s popular government into a crown colony. Rhode Islanders, complained Howard, who would eventually become a prominent loyalist, had “now Nothing but a Burlesque upon Order and Government, and will never get right without the Constitution is altered.” The Anglican clergyman Samuel Johnson of Connecticut was likewise disgusted with his colony’s government. It was, he said, “so monstrously popular, that all our Judges and the other officers depend intirely on the people, so that they are under the strongest Temptation in many Cases to consider not so much what is Law or Equity, as what may please their Constituents.” He told Franklin on the eve of Franklin’s departure for England, “Would to God you were charged with pleading the same Cause in behalf of all the Governments, that they might all alike be taken into the Kings more immediate Protection.”

  Only because Franklin’s royalist friends and acquaintances expected a sympathetic hearing from him did they dare to voice such sentiments to him, sentiments that, if they should be revealed, these men realized would “bring a popular Odium” on those who held them. They had heard Franklin’s views on the king and the empire, and they knew that he was a crown officer and that his son was the royal governor of New Jersey. Consequently, they had every reason to believe that he was one with them. In fact, Howard said as much. He told Franklin that he had “not time to enlarge [on the issue of becoming a royal colony] and indeed your thorough Knowledge of the Subject would anticipate all and more than I could say.”107

  Franklin’s Pennsylvania supporters who saw him off on November 7, 1764, now openly linked his fate with that of King George III, hoping that they would soon have cause “to sing with Heart and Voice, GEORGE AND FRANKLIN.”108 Before the year was over, Franklin was back in London in his old lodgings with Mrs. Stevenson on Craven Street. This time also Franklin thought his mission in England would be brief. Instead, it lasted over a decade. Deborah Franklin remained in Philadelphia and never saw her husband again.

  THREE

  BECOMING A PATRIOT

  THE STAMP ACT

  In 1763 Great Britain emerged from the Seven Years War as the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. Its armies and navies had been victorious from India to the Mississippi River. The Treaty of Paris that concluded the war gave Britain undisputed dominance over the northeastern half of North America. From the defeated powers, France and Spain, Britain acquired all of Canada, East and West Florida, and millions of fertile acres between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. France turned over to Spain the territory of Louisiana in compensation for Spain’s loss of the Floridas; and thus this most fearsome of Britain’s enemies was completely removed from the North American continent.

  But all this new land had to be policed, and that would cost money, lots of it. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief in North America, estimated that he would need 10,000 troops to keep the peace with the French settlers in Quebec and the Indians and to deal with squatters, smugglers, and bandits in the West. The costs of maintaining this army would well exceed £300,000 a year. Where was the money to come from? Britain’s war debt already totaled £137 million; interest payments on that debt were running £5 million a year, a huge figure when compared with an ordinary annual British peacetime budget of £8 million. Since British subjects in the home islands felt pressed to the wall by taxes, it seemed reasonable to the government to seek new sources of revenue in the colonies.

  The first step in this program of reform and taxation was to replace the 1733 Molasses Act with the Sugar Act of 1764. The earlier Molasses Act had levied a sixpence per gallon duty on French and Spanish West Indian molasses, a by-product of sugar refining, that the colonists sought to import in order to make rum. In deference to the rum industry maintained by the British West Indian planters, the extremely high duty of 1733 had been designed not to raise revenue but to prohibit the importation of any foreign West Indian molasses into the colonies. In other words, the prohibitory duty was meant to prevent the colonists from developing their own rum industry that would rival that of the British West Indian sugar planters. But the Molasses Act had not been effectively enforced, and despite the prohibitory duty the New Englanders had created a flourishing and prosperous rum industry. Through bribery and smuggling, New Englanders continued to import foreign, especially French, West Indian molasses. (France had forbidden its colonial sugar planters to use their own surplus molasses to make rum in the way the British planters did because it would compete with its brandy and wine industry.)

  In 1764 British officials decided that the need for revenue was now more important than protecting the British West Indian planters’ rum industry. They thus lowered the prohibitory duty of sixpence a gallon on foreign molasses to what seemed to be a more affordable threepence a gallon (later lowered to a single pence). By rigidly enforcing this lower duty’s collection, however, British officials hoped to stop the colonists’ bribery and the smuggling of foreign molasses and encourage its legal importation instead, which in turn would earn revenue for the Crown. In addition to this lower duty on foreign molasses, the Sugar Act levied duties on foreign wine and certain other goods imported into the colonies.

  Although most colonists, especially New Englanders, were angered by the Sugar Act, Franklin was not. If revenue had to be raised to support the troops, then so be it. Empires cost money. “A moderate Duty on Foreign Mellasses may be collected; when a high one could not,” he said. “The same on Foreign Wines; a Duty not only on Tea but on all East India Goods might perhaps not be amiss, as they are generally rather

  Luxuries than Necessities.”1 This was a reasonable, pragmatic view, but only if seen by someone looking at the empire from Whitehall.

  Of course, Franklin assumed that the British government would do nothing to hurt the empire. Even a rumor of Parliament’s directly taxing the colonists did not bother him. “I am not much alarm’d about your Schemes of raising Money on us,” he told Richard Jackson in January

  1764. “You will take care for your own sakes not to lay greater Burthens on us than we can bear; for you cannot hurt us without hurting your selves. All our Profits center with you, and the more you take from us, the less we can lay out with you.”2 His trust in the good sense of British officials was remarkable. “We are in your Hands as Clay in the Hands of the Potter,” he told Collinson, and “as the Potter cannot waste or spoil his Clay without injuring himself; so I think there is scarce anything you can do that may be hurtful to us, but what will be as much or more so to you. This must be our chief Security.”3

  But the British government needed more revenue to maintain the army in the colonies, and under the leadership of George Grenville, who replaced Bute as chief minister, it propos
ed levying a stamp tax on legal documents, almanacs, newspapers, playing cards, and nearly every form of paper used in the colonies. Before the government acted, however, Grenville asked the colonial agents in London, including Franklin, what they thought should be done. The agents, of course, were opposed to a stamp tax, as were many colonial officials, including even Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts. (As the partner in printing firms, Franklin had a special reason to object to the stamp tax. “It will affect the Printers more than anybody,” he told his Philadelphia partner, David Hall.)4

  But could the agents come up with an alternative plan for raising revenue? Grenville asked. The other agents had nothing to offer, but Franklin, inventive as always, naturally proposed something: that Parliament authorize the issuing of paper currency at interest—in effect, imposing a tax on paper money. Franklin thought this tax would be more acceptable to the colonists than a stamp tax. Although “it will operate as a general Tax on the Colonies,” it would not be “an unpleasing one,” for it would burden mostly “the rich who handle most money.”5 That Franklin could think that any sort of tax would be acceptable to his fellow

  Americans in 1765 suggests that his commitment to the empire was seriously clouding his political judgment. But Grenville was “Besotted with his Stamp Scheme,” said Franklin, and he rejected his proposal.6

  Once Parliament did pass the Stamp Act in March 1765, Franklin decided to make the best of the situation. He did so even though two of his partners—David Hall and James Parker—warned him that this tax would likely put them out of business. He could not have prevented its passage, Franklin reported to his Philadelphia friend Charles Thomson that July; that would have been like hindering the setting of the sun. The stamp tax did not amount to a lot of money anyhow, and Americans could work it off. “Frugallity and Industry will go a great way towards indemnifying us,” he said. “Idleness and Pride Tax with a heavier Hand than Kings and Parliaments; If we can get rid of the former we may easily bear the Latter.”7 He could not have been more out of touch with American opinion.