The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

  Franklin gradually came to realize that neither Americans nor Englishmen liked the idea of colonial representation in Parliament. Since Americans were becoming more and more resentful of English arrogance, he believed they would not now ask for representation in the House of Commons. But he thought the colonists would accept it if it were offered. If a union similar to that with Scotland was established with America, “which methinks it highly imports this Country to establish, it would probably subsist as long as Britain shall continue a Nation.” Yet he feared that the English had become too proud and despised the Americans too much “to bear the Thought of admitting them to such an equitable Participation in the Government of the whole.” Nevertheless, he clung to the idea in desperation; even as late as 1767 he thought that American representation in Parliament was the only firm basis on which the empire’s “political Grandeur and Stability can be founded.”30

  In fact, the time for colonial representation in Parliament had long since passed, if it had ever existed. After the Stamp Act, Congress had pointed out in 1765 that the colonists “are not, and from their local Circumstances” could never be, represented in the House of Commons, those few patriots like James Otis who had earlier suggested colonial representation in Parliament ceased doing so. Franklin remained the great exception.31

  FRANKLIN’S EXAMINATION BEFORE THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

  Three thousand miles away, and with many of his allies royal officials, Franklin had no great ear for American public opinion, and he struggled to understand what Americans were saying. He had no liking whatsoever for mobs and rioting, but he slowly came to appreciate that even reasonable Americans would not support a stamp tax under any conditions. True to his practical nature, he searched for some sort of compromise that would hold the two countries in the empire together. He was busy everywhere, as he told the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames, “attending Members of both Houses, informing, explaining, consulting, disputing, in a continual Hurry from Morning to Night.”32 Under a variety of pseudonyms he wrote more articles for the London newspapers, reminding his English readers that the colonies and Britain had a common interest in the empire. If he were to rescue his reputation in America, he had much catching up to do.

  In an interview in November 1765 with the Earl of Dartmouth, newly appointed head of the Board of Trade, Franklin declared that enforcing the Stamp Act would create more mischief than it was worth. Franklin realized that Parliament would find it difficult to back down in the face of mobbing and violence. But if the act were merely suspended for a few years, he told Dartmouth, it could eventually be dropped “on some other decent Pretence without ever bringing the question of Right to a Decision.” Any attempt to enforce the act with troops, he warned, would have the effect, “by mutual Violences, Excesses and Severities, of creating a deep-rooted Aversion between the two Countries, and laying the Foundation of a future total Separation.” If suspension of the tax were not possible, then, Franklin suggested to Dartmouth his usual solution to complicated political problems: “three or four wise and good Men, Personages of some Rank and Dignity, should be sent over to America, with a Royal Commission to enquire into Grievances, hear Complaints, learn the true State of Affairs, giving Expectations of Redress where they found the People really aggriev’d, and endeavouring to convince and reclaim them by Reason, where they found them in the Wrong.” Perhaps such a royal commission could save the British government from its present perplexity. It was reluctant to send troops to enforce the Stamp Act, but neither did it want to repeal the act, “as it will be deem’d a tacit giving up the Sovereignty of Parliament.”33

  The sovereignty of Parliament! An awesome concept and the one over which the empire was finally broken. It is difficult for us today to appreciate the respect and wonder with which nearly all Englishmen held Parliament in the eighteenth century, certainly all Englishmen who thought of themselves as Whigs and defenders of liberty and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. For all good Whigs—and indeed for all those who rejected the seventeenth-century Tory beliefs in absolute monarchy, indefeasible hereditary succession, and passive obedience— Parliament was the great defender against tyranny. It was the august author of the Bill of Rights of 1689, the historical protector of the people’s property, and the eternal bulwark of their liberties against the encroachments of the Crown. The eighteenth-century Parliament may not have represented the British people in any modern democratic sense, but it certainly stood for the nation and embodied its Britishness as no other institution did.34 In fact, Parliament was superior to the people it supposedly represented, which is why its members referred to visitors to its proceedings as “strangers,” a practice still in effect today. Because Parliament was what had always stood between the power of the Crown and the liberty of the subject, to oppose Parliament in the name of liberty was incomprehensible to most Englishmen.

  Once the British brought in Parliament as the instrument of reforming the empire in the 1760s, the stakes were raised to an entirely different level. Many Englishmen more or less expected the colonists to resist the power of the royal governors in the king’s empire, and they were not deeply disturbed by such resistance. Indeed, during the first half of the eighteenth century, many members of Parliament with Whiggish and anticrown sympathies had themselves tended to restrain the desire of royal bureaucrats to expand the king’s empire. This was in fact where the “salutary neglect” that Edmund Burke later spoke of came from. Resisting crown power was what good Whigs did. So colonial opposition to the power of the king was one thing. But opposition to the acts of Parliament was quite another thing altogether. For the Americans to oppose Parliament was unconscionable. It was Toryish and alien to the Whig understanding of politics, and it struck at all that the Glorious Revolution had been about.

  Franklin was faced with the need to explain American opposition to this sacred British bastion of liberty to Englishmen in London. A lengthy examination before the House of Commons in February 1766 gave him an opportunity to begin this explanation and at the same time to recover some of his lost reputation in America. A new ministry led by Lord Rockingham had replaced the Grenville government for reasons that had nothing to do with American affairs. Nonetheless, the new ministry was eager to repeal the Stamp Act enacted by its predecessor. American boycotts of British goods were hurting British merchants, and pressure from the merchant community had convinced many members of Parliament that repeal of the Stamp Act was necessary. But the Rockingham government needed reasons for doing so and found in Franklin a means of explaining why the government had to retreat. Dr. Franklin was the celebrated American philosopher and scientist, noted everywhere for his practicality and reasonableness. If any one of the forty-odd persons called to testify on the harmful consequences of the Stamp Act could convince the House of Commons to repeal it, he could.

  In four hours of testimony, Franklin performed brilliantly. Some of the questions were friendly and they gave him the opportunity to show what a mistake the Stamp Act had been. But when hostile questions were raised, he deftly parried them. Since many of his fellow Americans thought he had planned the Stamp Act, Franklin was most eager to establish his sympathy with American opposition to it. So when he was asked whether some modified stamp tax would be acceptable to Americans, his response was sharp: “No; they will never submit to it.” He shot back just as quickly with “They would not pay it” when asked whether any tax similar to the stamp tax would be acceptable to the colonists. When asked, “If the stamp-act should be repealed, would it induce the assemblies of America to acknowledge the rights of parliament to tax them?” his answer was as direct as it could be: “No, never.” He made it as clear as possible that Parliament had no right to lay a stamp tax on the colonists, and his pointed responses probably saved his reputation in America.

  Yet when he was confronted with the question of whether Americans denied the right of Parliament to levy any kind of tax or duty whatsoever, he unwittingly revealed his distance from his fellow Americans.
He said that he had “never heard any objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce; but a right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in parliament, as we are not represented there.”35 With this distinction between internal taxes, such as the stamp tax, and external taxes, such as the duties on molasses and other colonial imports, Franklin had opened up a can of worms.

  Within days the repeal of the Stamp Act was moved in the House of Commons, and on March 8, 1766, the king reluctantly assented to the bill. Franklin’s friend William Strahan thought that Franklin had brought about the repeal all by himself, and many in America thought so too, which was just as well, since they also thought he was responsible for the Stamp Act in the first place. His examination in the House of Commons had been taken down verbatim and was immediately published in London and later in Boston, New London, New York, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg. Charles Thomson congratulated Franklin for the repeal and told him of all the joy that was in the hearts of the colonists—“a Joy not expressed in triumph but with the warmest sentiments of Loyalty to our King and a grateful acknowledgement of the Justice and tenderness of the mother Country.”36

  Amid all the excitement few colonists noticed the price the British government had to pay to get the repeal through a reluctant House of Commons. Some opposition members had wanted to maintain what Franklin called a token tax “merely to keep up the Claim of Right.”37 But instead the government passed a Declaratory Act that asserted, in case anyone thought otherwise, that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” This claim of Parliamentary sovereignty—the claim that there must exist in each state one final, indivisible, supreme lawmaking power—would ultimately destroy the empire.38

  FRANKLIN’S NEW CONCEPTION OF EMPIRE

  Franklin, like nearly every American, was thrilled by the repeal of the Stamp Act. He thought that it demonstrated that the empire was a working structure and that, if only the passionate irrational mobs could be ignored, reasonable men could work out their differences in an amicable manner “We now see that tho’ the Parliament may sometimes possibly thro’ Misinformation be mislead to do a wrong Thing towards America, yet,” he told his partner David Hall, “as soon as they are rightly inform’d, they will immediately rectify it, which ought to confirm our Veneration for that most august Body, and Confidence in its Justice and Equity.” On the surface at least, he remained sanguine about the future of the British Empire—as long as all the rioting in America would “totally cease” and the colonists now behave in “a decent, dutiful, grateful” manner and show the mother country that its repeal of the Stamp Act had not been a mistake.39

  He knew too that he personally had been through a rough patch, but life had its ups and downs. He wasn’t going to let “the unthinking undiscerning Multitude” determine his mood. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it hails, he told his sister in March 1766, but then “again ’tis clear and pleasant, and the Sun shines on us.” All in all, he said in his best Pan-glossian manner, “the World is a pretty good sort of a World; and ’tis our Duty to make the best of it and be thankful.”40

  He had lost none of his faith in the British Crown, and he was determined to get back to the reason for his mission to London—to oust the proprietors and establish Pennsylvania as a royal colony. However many doubts he may have had of Parliament’s authority, the king was still the king, and of his authority over the colonies Franklin had no doubt whatsoever. During his examination in the House of Commons, Franklin had been asked how the various colonial assemblies could levy taxes for the Crown in violation of the 1688 Declaration of Rights, which stated that only the consent of Parliament could raise money for the Crown. He answered that however august a body Parliament was, its consent in matters of taxation applied only to the realm, and “the Colonies are not supposed to be within the realm; they have assemblies of their own, which are their parliaments.”41 Whether he fully realized it or not at the time, this statement suggested an entirely new way of looking at the empire.

  After the repeal of the Stamp Act, thirty-three dissenting members of the House of Lords published a protest against the way the riotous colonists had been appeased. In his copy of the protest Franklin entered in the margins his retorts to the statements of the Lords. In the process he further clarified his thinking about the structure of the empire. More and more he tended to see the Crown as the benign center of the empire and Parliament as the malevolent source of tyranny.

  This was not how most English Whigs then saw things. With the accession to the throne of the twenty-two-year-old George III in 1760, many Whigs sensed the signs of a revival of crown tyranny, more subtle than the Stuart tyranny of the seventeenth century because it was using influence and corruption in place of brute force. George III tried to heed his mother’s wishes that he be a strong king; he ousted the Old Corps of Whig ministers and appointed his own “friends” to office, including his favorite Lord Bute, even though these friends did not have the support of the House of Commons. These actions aroused traditional Whig fears of crown influence and tyranny, which is why Edmund Burke, a good Whig and champion of Parliament, eventually became such a fervent defender of American rights against George III’s despotism.

  Franklin did not at all share this view of matters. As a crown officer Franklin seemed to think the king could do no wrong. The Whigs believed that Bute was the insidious and invisible power behind the throne, and that even after his dismissal from office in 1764 he was still pulling secret strings and causing all current political disturbances. But Franklin admired Bute; the king’s favorite was the patron who was principally responsible for his son’s being appointed royal governor of New Jersey. Given these circumstances, Franklin could not help being an enthusiast for the monarch against the tyrannical Parliament that had passed the Stamp Act, and he assumed his fellow Americans were with him. In the political context of the time his was actually an extreme Tory position, the Tories being traditionally noted for their support for broad and extensive crown authority.

  When the Lords in their 1766 protest suggested that the colonists had insulted the honor of the king, Franklin was quick to reply, Not true. “All acknowledge their Subjection to his Majesty.” He resented the Lords’ calling the colonists “OUR North American subjects.” They were not the Lords’ subjects, but “the King’s.” In comment after comment Franklin made it clear that Parliament had no business dealing with the colonies. Indeed, throughout his comments Franklin accused the Lords, as members of Parliament, of “thrust[ing] themselves in with the Crown in the Government of the Colonies.” When the Lords declared that the repeal of the Stamp Act would make the authority of Great Britain “contemptible," Franklin said Great Britain’s authority perhaps, but “Not the King’s.” When the Lords referred to the legislative authority of Great Britain over the colonies, he pointed out that “this is encroaching on the Royal Power.” And when they said that Parliament’s power to tax extended to all members of the state, he responded, “Right, but we are different States, subject to the King.” When the Lords expressed fear that the colonists would in time claim to be “free from any obedience to the power of the British Legislature,” Franklin pointedly added, “but not to the Power of the Crown.” When the Lords complained that the colonists had showed “so much contempt of the Sovereignty of the British Legislature,” Franklin answered, “The Sovereignty of the Crown I understand. The Sovereignty of the British Legislature out of Britain I do not understand.”42

  Following the repeal of the Stamp Act, Franklin had begun to imagine an empire in which all the colonies were tied to Great Britain solely through the king, at least until some sort of fair and equal representation of the colonies in Parliament could be worked out. “In this View they seem so many separate little States, subject to the Same Prince.”43 Modern historians have called this a “commonwealth” theory of the empire because it anticipated the idea of the empire expressed in the Statute of Westminster of 1951, which established the mo
dern Commonwealth of Nations in which the independent dominions are tied together solely by their common allegiance to the Crown. Franklin’s view was precocious. Other Revolutionary leaders, such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Wilson, did not reach such a conception of the empire until some years later—for most of them, not until the 1770s. In the mid-1760s most of these leaders continued to accept some parliamentary authority; they, like John Dickinson in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, tried to divide Parliament’s power, arguing that it could not tax the colonists but could regulate their trade.44

  These attempts to divide Parliament’s power eventually proved futile.

  The British argued relentlessly and unyieldingly that Parliament was sovereign and that its power was supreme, indivisible, and final. All British subjects, British officials said over and over in the years after 17 66, were either totally under this supreme Parliamentary authority or totally outside it; there could be no middle ground. This was the view that lay behind Parliament’s Declaratory Act of 1766. Confronted with these powerful arguments for the complete sovereignty of Parliament, Franklin in 1768 found himself increasingly confirmed in his opinion “that no middle doctrine can be well maintained.... Something might be made of either of the extremes; that Parliament has a power to make all laws for us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us.”45 Given this choice, most Americans decided that Parliament had no power to make any laws for them. Of course, this position, reached by nearly all American leaders by 1774, did not satisfactorily explain previous colonial experience in the empire, since the colonists had obeyed many Parliamentary statutes in the past.