TO BE USEFUL TO GOVERNMENT
In 1768 Franklin had a new reason for making London his permanent home. The English government finally decided that American affairs merited their own executive department, and rumor spread that the government might even draw on American expertise to help run it. That January, Franklin told his son that there was talk of his being appointed an undersecretary in the new department. Since he thought the government considered him to be “too much of an American,” he was skeptical of the rumors. Besides, with the constant change of ministers nothing was certain anymore.69
By the late spring of 1768, however, Franklin had something more concrete than rumors to excite him. The secretary to the Treasury, Grey Cooper—“my fast friend,” Franklin called him—dangled before him the possibility of Franklin’s having a subministerial position in the Grafton government. This would settle the matter once and for all of returning home. One of the reasons Franklin had contemplated going home to Philadelphia was to protect his position as deputy postmaster, a royal office that his enemies threatened to take from him and one he did not want to lose. Indeed, he was convinced that because he had made the office profitable he “had some kind of Right to it.”70 The Earl of Sandwich, the postmaster general and Franklin’s boss, thought that Franklin ought either to return to America and run his post office there or resign the office. Cooper (who, in Sir John Pringle’s opinion, was “the honestest man of a courtier that he ever knew”) informed Franklin that the Duke of Grafton, the head of the Treasury and chief minister, might have a solution to his dilemma. If Franklin wanted to maintain his post office position, fine, said Grafton, then he could return to America. “Yet,” as Franklin relayed what Grafton had said, “if I chose rather to remain in England, my merit was such in [Grafton’s] opinion, as to entitle me to something better here, and it should not be his fault if I was not well provided for.”
Franklin was obviously excited by this possibility, but he did not want to show it. He did tell Cooper, however, that he had lived so long in England and had so many friends here that “it could not but be agreeable to me to remain among them some time longer, if not for the rest of my life.” He added in the best courtier fashion that “there was no nobleman to whom I could from sincere respect for his great abilities and amiable qualities, so cordially attach myself, or to whom I should so willingly be obliged for the provision he mentioned, as to the Duke of Grafton, if his Grace should think I could, in any station where he might place me, be serviceable to him and to the public.”71
At Cooper’s urging Franklin called on Grafton in the early summer of 1768, but Grafton apologetically broke several appointments. Franklin, however, did get to meet with Frederick North, the Earl of Guildford, who was chancellor of the exchequer and Grafton’s close colleague. North told Franklin that if he could be persuaded to stay in England, the government hoped to “find some way of making it worth your while.” Franklin replied that he would “stay with pleasure if I could any ways be useful to government.” Franklin believed that if a post were offered him he could not turn it down. It would be a terrible mistake, he told his son, “to decline any favour so great a man expressed an inclination to do me, because at court if one shews an unwillingness to be obliged it is often construed as a mark of mental hostility, and one makes an enemy.” Of course, Franklin told everybody that he was going to go home to America, but, as he confided to his son, this was just in case the offer of a position fell through. Although he did not want to lose face by being rejected, he very much wanted an office in the government. This “flattering expectation” was a dream come true. At last, he might be able to bring some reason to bear on the imperial crisis and help to save the empire that he had loved so much.72
Cooper introduced Franklin to other members of the government, whom he thoroughly charmed—at least he said he did. He made friends with the secretary to the post office, Anthony Todd, and, as he told his son, he completely won over Lord Clare, the former head of the Board of Trade. Clare, he said, had liked him ever since his examination before the House of Commons “for the spirit I showed in defence of my country. ... At parting, after we had drank a bottle and half of claret each, he hugged and kissed me, protesting he never in his life met with a man he was so much in love with.” Although Franklin self-protectively played down the possibility of an office in the ministry, he was very much dazzled by the prospect.73
THE CONFRONTATION WITH LORD HILLSBOROUGH
Already, Franklin was concocting land schemes in the North American West that would help to realize some of his dreams for the British Empire and make some money for him besides. As governor of New Jersey, his son William had participated in treaty negotiations with the Indians in 1768 and had arranged land deals involving hundreds of thousands of acres in the West. In order to get the scheme approved by the Crown, the American speculators made Franklin a partner and asked him for help in recruiting support. Franklin brought in a number of his friends and pressured others, including Grey Cooper, secretary to the Treasury, to join. The Franklins were important, but the real heavyweights in the company were Thomas and Richard Walpole, nephews of the great former chief minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Although the company was officially called the Grand Ohio Company, everyone referred to it as the Walpole Company.74
Lord Hillsborough was the head of the new American Department and not at all happy with this Walpole Company. As an Anglo-Irish landlord with nearly 20,000 tenants on his huge estates in County Down, he was very much opposed to any land schemes that would encourage settlers to migrate from the British Isles to North America, especially tenants in search of freehold land. Already some Britons were becoming apprehensive that too many of their countrymen were depopulating the British Isles, creating deserted villages and half-empty estates. During these years leading up to the Revolution there was talk everywhere in Britain of desperate measures, including parliamentary legislation, to curb the emigration of Britons to America.75
When the Walpole partners first approached Hillsborough as secretary of the American Department, they asked for a grant of only 2.5 million acres for their company. Hillsborough told them that they were too modest: ask for 20 million acres, he suggested. This was a duplicitous suggestion, as Franklin later realized, but the Walpole speculators bought it and upped their request to 20 million acres—one of the biggest land grabs in world history. Hillsborough actually hoped that such a grandiose claim would discredit the whole project and prevent its getting a royal charter. He wanted to diminish the power of the colonies, not help them grow.
Hillsborough had emerged as very much a hard-liner on American affairs, eager to put the rebellious colonists in their place. When in February 1768 the Massachusetts assembly issued to the other colonies a “Circular Letter” denouncing the Townshend duties as unconstitutional, Hillsborough ordered the legislature to rescind its action. Once the assembly refused and mobbing broke out in Boston, Hillsborough dispatched two regiments of troops to Massachusetts. With nearly 4000 armed redcoats in the crowded seaport of 15,000 inhabitants, Boston was set up for a confrontation, and with the “massacre” of March 1770, in which five civilians were killed by British soldiers, it got one.
Franklin expressed a great deal of sympathy with Massachusetts, which he now regarded as his homeland as much as Pennsylvania. In letters that reached the Massachusetts patriots, he described the colonies as distinct states in the empire, under no parliamentary authority whatsoever. Even before he learned of the Boston Massacre, he told the colony’s patriots that the Duke of Bedford’s party, which dominated the government, was full of malice toward the colonists and was just looking for a pretext to order soldiers “to make a Massacre among us.” By identifying himself with his countrymen in this way and by referring to the soldiers in Boston as “detestable Murderers,” Franklin won over enough sympathizers in the Massachusetts assembly to be named its agent in London.76 He was already agent of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Georgia—an indication that the colonis
ts were finding it difficult to locate anyone in London who could lobby on their behalf. But though the Massachusetts assembly agreed to Franklin’s appointment as its agent, some important patriots in the colony, including Samuel Adams, had been opposed to appointing him, being unsure that he was really one of them.
In January 1771 Franklin went to see Hillsborough, the secretary of state for American affairs, to present his credentials as the agent for the Massachusetts assembly. The confrontation was an important experience for Franklin, so important, in fact, that he immediately went home and wrote it all down in the form of a dramatic dialogue—the better to demonstrate to some of his skeptical Massachusetts constituents his devotion to American interests.
On the day of the meeting he was surprised to be ushered in to see the secretary ahead of others who were waiting. He apologized to Lord Hillsborough, saying he had only wanted to pay his respects and acquaint the secretary with his appointment by the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Upon hearing the name “Massachusetts,” Hillsborough cut Franklin short and told him, “with something between a Smile and a Sneer,” that he would not accept his appointment, since the assembly had no right to appoint an agent without the consent of the governor. The dialogue went on for a number of minutes until Hillsborough, “with a mix’d look of Anger and Contempt," declared that he would not dispute the matter further with Franklin. After a few more exchanges, Franklin finally withdrew. But not without a parting shot: “It is I believe of no great Importance whether the Appointment is acknowledged or not,” he told Hillsborough, “for I have not the least Conception that an Agent can at present be of any Use, to any of the Colonies.”77
Although this remark infuriated Hillsborough, Franklin at first did not care. He had only contempt for Hillsborough’s abilities and defined his character as a combination of “Conceit, Wrongheadedness, Obstinacy and Passion.” If it came to a knockdown political struggle between the two of them, Franklin thought that he had sufficient influence with prominent men in the government to win and that Hillsborough would be removed from office. “One Encouragement I have, the Knowledge that he is not a Whit better lik’d by his Colleagues in the Ministry than he is by me, and that he cannot probably continue where he is much longer, and that he can scarce be succeeded by anybody who will not like me the better for his having been at Variance with me.”78
But Franklin was mistaken, and once he realized that Hillsborough did indeed have the backing of the government, he was shocked and became deeply depressed. He realized, as Strahan explained to William Franklin, that he was “not only on bad Terms with Lord Hillsborough, but with the Ministry in general.”79 All the flattering expectations that he had had over the previous three years of his becoming an important player in imperial affairs were suddenly shattered.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
It was in the aftermath of this dramatic failure in 1771 that Franklin began reflecting upon his remarkable life. For the next six months he was confused, irritable, and dispirited. He thought himself useless and seemed to lose all his zest and ambition. He was angry at the system that he had tried and failed to conquer. No longer did he refer to England as “home.” America became the “home” he increasingly began to long for.80
Poor Richard Bache, Franklin’s new son-in-law, came to England seeking Franklin’s help in acquiring a government position at this moment, which was just the wrong time. In his anger and depression Franklin told his son-in-law to go back to Philadelphia, become a businessman, and “by Industry and Frugality” and a hardworking wife “get forward in the World”—in other words, follow the early career of his famous father-in-law. “Almost any Profession a Man has been educated in,” said Franklin, “is preferable to an Office held at Pleasure, as rendering him more independent, more a Freeman [and] less subject to the Caprices of Superiors.”81 This from a man who had held a crown office at pleasure for eighteen years and who recently had been ardently hoping for another one.
To ease his bitterness and his depression Franklin set out on a series of journeys around the British Isles, and on one of these visits in the summer of 1771, to the country house of his friend Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph, he began writing his Autobiography.
The first part of his life, up to age twenty-five—the best part, most critics have agreed—was thus written in a mood of frustration, nostalgia, and defiance. Look, he suggested in this first part of his memoir, he was not really a dependent courtier seeking office at some superior’s pleasure; he was a free man who against overwhelming odds had made it as a hardworking and independent tradesman. This first section of his Autobiography thus became a salve for his wounds and a justification for his apparent failure in British politics.
Franklin explicitly addressed the Autobiography to his son William, stating at one point that it had been written with the intention “of gratifying the suppos’d Curiosity of my Son.” Some scholars have suggested that this was simply a literary device common to memoirs in the early modern period, but it is more likely that Franklin actually did intend the first part of his memoir for his son, perhaps partly as an admonishment to William to cut his expenses and do as his father had done.82 As early as 1750, Franklin had worried that his son might not be as industrious as he had been; and he had warned the young man that he intended to spend his money before he died. Not for Franklin the “absurd” English practice of leaving a huge estate.83
Of course, in at least one respect William had done exactly what his father had done. In 1760 he had indulged “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth” with an unknown woman and, like the young Benjamin Franklin, had fathered an illegitimate son, whom he named William Temple. But, unlike his father, William Franklin had been raised as a gentleman from birth and had taken that for granted. Certainly the first part of Franklin’s memoir reminded William that his father had not had William’s privileged upbringing and implied that the best course for a young man was to make his own way in the world. In a letter to William telling him about the advice Franklin had recently given his son-in-law, Richard Bache, Franklin could not help stressing his desire “to see all I am connected with in an Independent Situation supported by their own Industry.”84
THE AFFAIR OF THE HUTCHINSON LETTERS
Suddenly, however, the signals from the British government shifted and became more positive. During travels in Ireland that fall, Franklin met Lord Hillsborough, who to his amazement changed his tone toward him.
His lordship even invited him to his Irish estates, where Franklin was “detain’d by a 1000 Civilities from Tuesday to Sunday.”85 Franklin was bewildered and wondered what this shift of attitude meant. Even better, in August 1772 Hillsborough was finally ousted from the ministry, and Lord Dartmouth, whom Franklin knew and liked, was appointed in his place.
Franklin recovered some of his earlier sense of his importance in English politics and actually thought he himself might have had something to do with Hillsborough’s resignation and Dartmouth’s appointment. Since Dartmouth was sympathetic to America and western expansion and land speculation, and had “express’d some personal Regard for me,” Franklin hoped it would now be much easier to transact imperial business.86 And who knows, maybe a subministerial position might materialize after all? With his earlier expectations renewed, he immediately dropped the writing of his Autobiography, which he would not resume until 1784 in France, following the successful negotiation of the treaty establishing American independence.
By August 1772 Franklin was as optimistic as he had ever been. He once more felt immune to the slings and arrows of his enemies, who had tried to injure him and take away his crown office. For years popular images of him, including medallions made by Josiah Wedgwood, had circulated throughout the British Isles, and he had become by far the most famous American in Britain and indeed in the world. He bragged to his son of how much the intellectual community respected him and how many friends he had in Britain—“my company so much desired that I seldom dine at home in winter,
and could spend the whole summer in the country houses of inviting friends, if I chose it.” Even the king “too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard.”87
With this heightened sense that he once again could be a significant figure in imperial politics and might be able finally to reconcile the colonies and the mother country, Franklin became involved in the affair of the Hutchinson letters. This affair was the most extraordinary and revealing incident in his political life. It effectively destroyed his position in England and ultimately made him a patriot.88
In the late 1760s, Thomas Hutchinson, then lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, as part of a small group that included Andrew Oliver,
Franklin, porcelain medallion by Josiah Wedgwood, 1778
Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, had written some letters to a British undersecretary, Thomas Whately. In these letters Hutchinson especially urged that stern measures, including “an abridgment of what are called English liberties,” were needed in America to maintain the colonies’ dependency on Great Britain. If nothing was done, “or nothing more than some declaratory acts or resolves,” Hutchinson had written in Janu-ary 1769, “it is all over with us. The friends ... of anarchy will be afraid of nothing be it ever so extravagant.”89
After Thomas Whately’s death in 1772, Franklin was given these letters, which included some from Andrew Oliver, by “a Gentleman of Character and Distinction” (no one knows who).90 That December he sent them to Massachusetts in order, as he said, to convince key persons in the colony that blame for the imperial crisis lay solely with a few mischievous colonial officials like Hutchinson, who was now the royal governor of the colony.91 These native officials, and not the British government in London, were the ones who had bartered “away the Liberties of their native Country for Posts” and betrayed the interest of not only Massachusetts but the Crown they pretended to serve, and indeed, the interest of “the whole English Empire.” The ministry in England, Franklin suggested, was not conspiring against American liberty after all. It had been misled by the evil counsel of these “mere Time-servers” whose letters back to London “laid the Foundation of most if not all our present Grievances.” These local American officials were the persons who actually created the “Enmities between the different Countries of which the Empire consists.”92
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