The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

  Grenville decided that the tax would go down easier in the colonies if Americans were appointed to collect the tax and receive a commission for doing so. He asked the agents in London to nominate stamp commissioners for each colony, men who would distribute the stamps. Franklin jumped at the opportunity to patronize an ally and friend in Pennsylvania, and he named as stamp distributor John Hughes, one of his most fervent supporters in his struggle with the colony’s proprietors. It was a huge mistake. The appointment almost ruined Franklin’s position with the American public and nearly cost Hughes his life.

  The Stamp Act sparked a firestorm of protest that swept up and down the American continent.8 The colonists knew only too well from European history that monarchies that could take their subjects’ money without their subjects’ consent would become absolute and tyrannical. They knew too from history that direct taxes, like that of the stamp tax, had always been regarded as a form of subjection.9 American resistance was thus inevitable. Merchants in the principal ports formed protest associations and pledged to stop importing British goods in order to bring economic pressure on the British government. Newspapers and pamphlets, the number and like of which had never appeared in America before, seethed with resentment against what one New Yorker called “these designing parricides” who had “invited despotism to cross the ocean, and fix her abode in this once happy land.”10 At hastily convened meetings of towns, counties, and legislative assemblies, the colonists’ anger boiled over into fiery declarations.

  This torrent of angry words could not help but bring the constitutional relationship between Britain and its colonies into question. In the spring of 1765, the Virginia House of Burgesses adopted a series of resolves denouncing the parliamentary taxation and asserting the colonists’ right to be taxed only by their elected representatives. These were introduced by Patrick Henry, who at age twenty-nine had just been elected to the legislature. In the dignified setting of the House of Burgesses, Henry dared to challenge crown authority directly. Just as Julius Caesar had had his Brutus and King Charles I his Oliver Cromwell, so, he declared, he did not doubt that some American would now stand up for his country against this new tyranny. The Speaker of the House stopped Henry for suggesting treason; and some of Henry’s resolves (including one proclaiming the right of Virginians to disobey any law that had not been enacted by the Virginia assembly) were too inflammatory to be accepted by the legislature. Nevertheless, colonial newspapers printed the resolves as though the Virginia House of Burgesses had endorsed them all. Many Americans became convinced that Virginians had virtually asserted their legislative independence from Great Britain.

  Henry’s boldness was contagious. The Rhode Island Assembly declared the Stamp Act “unconstitutional” and authorized the colony’s officials to ignore it. In October 1765 thirty-seven delegates from nine colonies met in New York in a Stamp Act Congress and drew up a set of formal declarations and petitions denying Parliament’s right to tax them. Overnight the Stamp Act brought about the colonial union that Franklin and Hutchinson’s Albany Plan had failed to bring about a decade earlier. But as remarkable as this unprecedented display of colonial unity was, the Stamp Act Congress could not fully express American anger and hostility.

  Ultimately it was mob violence that destroyed the Stamp Act in America. On August 14, 1765, a crowd tore apart the office and attacked the home of Andrew Oliver, the stamp distributor for Massachusetts. The next day Oliver promised not to enforce the Stamp Act. A week and a half later mobs attacked Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s elegant mansion, scattered and destroyed many of his papers, completely wrecked the interior of the building, and tore down much of its exterior.

  At the very moment that the fiery thirty-year-old John Adams was pouring out his suspicions and loathing of Hutchinson—calling him a man of “very ambitious and avaricious Disposition” who was exciting “Jealousies among the People”—Hutchinson’s contemporary, Franklin, was sharing thoughts and commiserating with his old friend.11 In October and November 1765 Hutchinson, who would eventually become the arch-loyalist and the most hated man in all of North America, wrote Franklin in despair. Since the two men had collaborated earlier at the Albany Congress and were both royal officeholders, Hutchinson identified with Franklin and he assumed, correctly, that Franklin identified with him. Franklin hated mobs as much as anyone, and he could only sympathize with Hutchinson over what the Massachusetts mobs had done to him. Franklin had earlier told Hutchinson of his doubts that Parliament would repeal the Stamp Act, but Hutchinson dared not pass on to the people of Boston these doubts. Bostonians expected an early repeal, and “it is not safe there to advance any thing contrary to any popular opinions whatsoever. Every body who used to have virtue enough to oppose them,” Hutchinson said, “is now afraid of my fate.” Hutchinson could not help pointing out that opponents of the Stamp Act were now using Franklin’s motto from the time of the Albany Congress, “join or die.” “When you and I were at Albany ten years ago,” he noted ruefully, “we did not Propose an union for such Purposes as these.”12

  As news of the rioting in Massachusetts spread to other colonies, similar violence and threats of violence spread with it. From Newport, Rhode Island, to Charleston, South Carolina, local groups organized for resistance. In many places fire and artillery companies, artisan associations, and other fraternal bodies formed the bases for these emerging local organizations, which commonly called themselves Sons of Liberty. Led mostly by shopkeepers, printers, master mechanics, and small merchants—the middling sort that Franklin had once been part of—the Sons of Liberty burned effigies of royal officials, forced stamp agents to resign, compelled businessmen and judges to carry on without stamps, developed an intercolonial network of correspondence, generally enforced nonimportation of British goods, and managed antistamp activities throughout the colonies. The governor of Pennsylvania thought that “we are not more than one degree from open Rebellion.”13 In no colony were stamps ever issued.

  The stamp tax seemed to Americans such a direct and unprecedented threat to their constitutional right not to be taxed without their own consent that resistance was immediate, spontaneous, and widespread. Even Thomas Hutchinson had known that such a stamp tax was a terrible mistake and had vigorously disapproved of the Stamp Act from the moment he first heard of it—speaking against it and writing letters to English correspondents, and then formally sending a treatise opposing the act to England for circulation there.14 That Franklin condoned the Stamp Act in the manner he did clearly reveals just how little he understood American opinion.

  As soon as Hughes, the appointed stamp distributor for Pennsylvania, learned of the mob violence and destruction that had occurred in the colonies north of Pennsylvania, he wrote Franklin a series of anguished letters, which he thought might be his last. “The Spirit or Flame of Rebellion is got to a high Pitch amongst the North Americans,” he said; “and it seems to me that a Sort of Frenzy or Madness has got such hold of the People of all Ranks that I fancy some Lives will be lost before this Fire is put out.” Fearing that the mobs would try to pull down his house, Hughes vowed that he would defend his home “at the Risque of my Life.” He armed himself and prepared for a siege, but eventually a large numbers of friends came to his aid and his house was saved.15

  Since many people in Pennsylvania actually blamed Franklin for bringing about the Stamp Act, the mobs threatened to level his newly built Philadelphia house as well. His partner David Hall wished that Franklin were in Philadelphia to deal with the events, but then added, “I should be afraid for your Safety.”16 His wife, Deborah, and several of her relatives resolved to defend the new house, and that determination encouraged friends to protect her and the house successfully. But Franklin’s reputation in America was not so easily defended. His enemies in Pennsylvania accused him not only of framing the Stamp Act but also of profiting from it. “ O Franklin, Franklin, thou curse to Pennsylvania and America, may the most accumulated vengeance burst speedily on thy gui
lty head!” exclaimed the young Benjamin Rush, not yet the famous Philadelphia physician and friend of Franklin. Some warned that Franklin might be hanged in effigy.17

  FRANKLIN’S RESPONSE TO THE STAMP ACT CRISIS

  At first Franklin dismissed these charges and dismissed the possibility of popular rioting as well. He could not believe that Americans had become so worked up over the Stamp Act. “The Rashness of the Assembly of Virginia is amazing!” He could only hope that the Pennsylvania Assembly would act with “Prudence and Moderation; for that is the only way to lighten or get clear of our Burthens.” His printing partners— David Hall in Philadelphia, James Parker in New York, and Peter Timothy in Charleston—tried to maintain Franklin’s traditional policy of neutrality in their newspapers, with disastrous results. “All the Papers on the Continent, ours excepted,” Hall told Franklin, “were full of Spirited Papers against the Stamp Law, and that because I did not publish those Papers likewise, I was much blamed, got a great Deal of Ill-will, and that some of our Customers had dropt on that Account.” For his part, Parker, despite sometimes feeling “the true Old English Spirit of Liberty,” had become resigned to “acquiesce in the Chains laid upon me.” By trying to avoid the heated controversy aroused by the Stamp Act, he had lost his business to a more Whiggish rival newspaper and was even charged with being “no Friend to Liberty.” In South Carolina, Timothy discovered that his declining to engage in violent opposition to the Stamp Act in his newspaper had “so exasperated every Body” that a rival paper was set up in order to destroy him. He found himself “from the most popular reduced to the most unpopular Man in the Province.” It was fast becoming clear to his printing partners, if not to Franklin himself, that his policy of impartiality, which he had set forth in his 1731 “Apology for Printers,” no longer made sense at a time when “the People are all running Mad.” It did not help matters that both Parker and Timothy had been appointed local crown officers through the influence of Franklin.18

  As for John Hughes and his apprehensions, Franklin told him to keep calm and persevere in executing the Stamp Act. It might make Hughes “unpopular for a time,” but if Hughes acted “with Coolness and Steadiness,” the people would slowly come round to accept the stamp tax. “In the meantime, a firm Loyalty to the Crown and faithful Adherence to the Government of this Nation, which it is the Safety as well as the Honour of the Colonies to be connected with, will always be the wisest Course for you and I to take, whatever may be the Madness of the Populace or their blind Leaders, who can only bring themselves and Country into Trouble, and draw on greater Burthens by Acts of rebellious Tendency.”19 Franklin had long wanted Britain and its colonies to be “considered as one Whole, and not as different States with separate Interests,” and he had thought that American representation in Parliament might be a way of bringing that union about.20 But representation took on a new urgency as he sensed a change in the relationship between Britain and its colonies.

  ENGLISH ARROGANCE

  Far from coming to think of the colonists more and more as their fellow subjects, the mid-eighteenth-century English had become increasingly distanced from them. With their military successes over France, the English (not the British, for the Scots were unable to sustain any strong sense of nationhood) developed an ever keener sense of their own Englishness—a sense of nationality distinct from that of the Scots, the Irish, and the Americans who lived on the outer edges of the empire. The very success of the English in the Seven Years War, in which the British Empire became a world empire, increased this sense of English distinctiveness. The English now began to regard the North American colonists less as fellow Englishmen across the Atlantic and more as another set of people to be ruled. Indeed, in 1763 the Earl of Halifax, former head of the Board of Trade and secretary of state for the southern department in charge of the colonies during the Grenville ministry, went so far as to say that “the people of England” considered the Americans, “though H.M.’s subjects, as foreigners.”21

  As Franklin began to discover more and more during the Stamp Act crisis, Englishmen in the realm no longer regarded colonists three thousand miles away as equal to themselves. In fact, it was the English on the home island who first and most often invoked the term “Americans” to refer to the far-removed colonists. For sophisticated Englishmen, the term “American” often conjured up images of unrefined, if not barbarous, persons, degenerate and racially debased, who lived in close proximity to African slaves and Indian savages thousands of miles from civilization. They liked to emphasize that, as the eighteenth-century colonies had become a dumping ground for English criminals, one should not be surprised that the Americans were coarse, rowdy, and prone to breaking the law. Dr. Johnson was reported to have labeled the colonists “a race of convicts.”22

  Most Americans reacted to these midcentury expressions of English arrogance with defensive outrage. “Are the inhabitants of British America,” asked the fiery Boston lawyer James Otis in 1765 (“our great incendiary,” Hutchinson called him), “all a parcel of transported thieves, robbers, and rebels, or descended from such?”23 Did the English think most people in North America were Negroes and mulattoes? “Are you not of the same stock?” asked a Pennsylvanian of his fellow colonists in 1760. “Was the blood of your ancestors polluted by a change of soil? Were they freemen in England and did they become slaves by a six-weeks’ voyage to America?” By the 1760s and especially after 17 65, the colonial press was full of these kinds of statements of indignation and fury. “Are not the People of America, BRITISH Subjects? Are they not Englishmen?" These were the angry and anguished cries of people who felt snubbed and deeply humiliated by their supposed cousins back home.24

  Franklin’s response was inevitably different. As a distinguished scientist and world celebrity and the recipient of several British honorary degrees, he naturally possessed a self-confidence and a sense of equality with most Britons that few of his fellow colonists could match. When he heard or read the aspersions that the English were casting upon his countrymen, he generally reacted, at least at first, not with self-protective outrage, but with reason, humor, and satire.

  In the many newspaper pieces he wrote in 1765-1766 in answer to the “frequent invectives” and the “angry reflections on the Americans in the public papers,” he appealed to British reasonableness and self-interest. The colonists, he pointed out, were an important source of British prosperity, both by supplying needed goods and by purchasing British manufactures. And they loved the British monarch as much as any Englishman at home. What was the purpose of all the railing against the Americans? he asked in an anonymous piece published in a London paper in December 1765. Was all this denunciation supposed to persuade the colonists to accept the Stamp Act? “The gentle terms of republican race, mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish and foreign vagabonds, descendants of convicts, ungrateful rebels, &c.,” he said, “are some of the sweet flowers of English rhetorick, with which our colonists have of late been regaled. Surely, if we are so much their superiors, we should shew the superiority of our breeding by our better manners!”25

  Sarcastic responses like this—indeed, satire in general—supposed commonly understood standards of rightness and reasonableness. Since a satirist like Franklin could expose to instantaneous ridicule only what was readily considered ridiculous by his readers, he necessarily believed he was on intimate terms with them and could count on their sharing his tastes and viewpoint.26 In 1766, writing as “Pacifus” in the English press, Franklin proposed a solution to the Stamp Act crisis that Jonathan Swift would have loved. Britain, wrote Franklin, should impose overwhelming military force on the colonists, burn all their capitals, cut the throats of every man, woman, and child in the capitals, and destroy all their trade. “No Man in his Wits, after such terrible Military Execution, will refuse to purchase stamp’d Paper,” he concluded. “If any one should hesitate, five or six Hundred Lashes in a cold frosty Morning would soon bring him to Reason.”27 Naturally Franklin believed that his modest proposal
was so harsh, so oppressive, and presumably so un-English that no Englishman in his right mind would contemplate it. With such satirical exaggeration Franklin assumed that he and his London readership were participating in the same moral universe—something his fellow Americans were coming increasingly to doubt. Stamp Act or no Stamp Act, Franklin had not lost hope, in other words, that the magnificent empire he admired so much could be made whole.

  AMERICAN REPRESENTATION IN PARLIAMENT

  But he knew things had changed. England and America seemed to be more and more two separate countries. The sense that the empire was a single community could no longer be taken for granted. If there were to be a union, it would now have to be a constructed one, more or less in the way the Act of Union of 1707 had bound together the two countries of Scotland and England to create Great Britain, and that meant American representation in Parliament. In August 1765 Franklin asked Thomas Hutchinson whether the colonists ought to apply for representation in the House of Commons. Through the fall he continued to think of colonial representation in Parliament as a solution to the imperial problems of taxation.28 In February 1766 he published in Strahan’s London Chronicle the letters he presumably had written to Massachusetts governor William Shirley twelve years earlier arguing the need for colonial representation in Parliament. In these letters Franklin had reminded Shirley that it was the right of Englishmen not to be taxed without their own consent and had agreed with Shirley that perhaps that consent could be satisfied by American representation in the House of Commons. It was certainly in Franklin’s interest to have such letters come out in this tense moment when colonial suspicions of him were widespread.29