Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

  As part of his effort to keep his son rooted in his “middling” heritage, Franklin took him on a genealogical excursion during the summer of 1758. They traveled to Ecton, about sixty miles northwest of London, where generations of Franklins had lived before Josiah had migrated to America. Still living nearby was Franklin’s first cousin Mary Franklin Fisher, daughter of Josiah’s brother Thomas. She was “weak with age,” Franklin noted, but “seems to have been a very smart, sensible woman.”

  At the parish church, the Franklins uncovered two hundred years of birth, marriage, and death records of their family. The rector’s wife entertained them with stories of Franklin’s uncle Thomas, whose life bore some resemblance to that of his nephew. As Franklin reported to Deborah:

  [Thomas Franklin was] a very leading man in all county affairs, and much employed in public business. He set on foot a subscription for erecting chimes in their steeple, and completed it, and we heard them play. He found out an easy method of saving their village meadows from being drowned, as they used to be sometimes by the river, which method is still in being…His advice and opinion were sought for on all occasions, by all sorts of people, and he was looked upon, she said, by some, as something of a conjuror. He died just four years before I was born, on the same day of the same month.”

  Franklin may have noted that the description “conjuror” was the same that Caty Ray had once used about him. And William, impressed by the coincidence of dates, surmised that a “transmigration” had occurred.

  At the cemetery, as William copied data from the gravestones, Franklin’s servant, Peter, used a hard brush to scour off the moss. Franklin’s account of the scene is a reminder that, as enlightened as he would eventually become, he had brought with him to England two slaves. He viewed them, however, more as old family servants than as property. When one of them left soon after they arrived in England, Franklin did not try to force his return, as British law would have allowed. His response to Deborah, when she asked about their welfare later, is revealing:

  Peter continues with me, and behaves as well as I can expect in a country where there are many occasions of spoiling servants, if they are ever so good. He has as few faults as most of them, [but I see them] with only one eye and hear with only one ear; so we rub on pretty comfortably. King, that you enquire after, is not with us. He ran away from our house, near two years ago, while we were absent in the country; but was soon found in Suffolk, where he had been taken in the service of a lady that was very fond of the merit of making him a Christian and contributing to his education and improvement.24

  As he felt about Peter, so too he felt about slavery for the time being: he saw the faults with only one eye, heard them with only one ear, and rubbed along pretty comfortably, though increasingly less so. The evolution of his views on slavery and race was indeed continuing. He would soon be elected to the board of an English charitable group, the Associates of Dr. Bray, dedicated to building schools for blacks in the colonies.

  With William in tow, Franklin spent that spring and summer of 1758 wandering England to soak up the hospitality and acclaim of his intellectual admirers. On a visit to Cambridge University, he conducted a series of experiments on evaporation with the renowned chemist John Hadley. Franklin had previously studied how liquids produce different refrigeration effects based on how quickly they evaporate. With Hadley he experimented using ether, which evaporates very quickly. In a 65-degree room, they repeatedly coated a thermometer bulb with ether and used a bellows to evaporate it. “We continued this operation, one of us wetting the ball, and another of the company blowing on it with the bellows to quicken the evaporation, the mercury sinking all the time until it came down to 7, which is 25 degrees below the freezing point,” Franklin wrote. “From this experiment one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.” He also speculated, correctly, that summer breezes do not by themselves cool people; instead, the cooling effect comes from the increased evaporation of human perspiration caused by the breeze.

  His study of heat and refrigeration, though not as seminal as his work on electricity, continued throughout his life. In addition to his evaporation experiments, they included further studies of how different colors absorb heat from light, how materials such as metal that conduct electricity are also good at transmitting heat, and how to better design stoves. As usual, his strength was devising not abstract theories but practical applications that could improve everyday life.25

  His visit to Cambridge made such an impression that he was invited back later that summer to view the university’s commencement. “My vanity was not a little gratified by the particular regard shown me,” he admitted to Deborah. But that regard was not awaiting him when he returned to London in the fall.26

  The Penns Respond

  In November 1758, more than a year after Franklin had submitted his “Heads of Complaint,” the Penns finally responded. Snubbing Franklin, they had their lawyer, Ferdinand Paris, write directly to the Pennsylvania Assembly, with a copy to Franklin, and then followed with a letter of their own to the Assembly.

  On the issue of the Assembly’s power, the Proprietors held firm: their instructions to their governors were inviolable, and the charter “gives the power to make laws to the Proprietary.” The Assembly could provide only “advice and consent.” On the issue of taxation, however, the Penns held open the possibility of some compromise. “They are very ready to have the annual income of their estate inquired into,” Paris wrote, and consider some contributions based on what “is in its nature taxable.”

  The murky response, which offered no concrete assurances of any real money, prompted Franklin to write seeking clarification. But a key aspect of the Proprietors’ position was that they would not deal with him anymore. Paris pointedly told the Assembly that they had not chosen a “person of candor” to be their agent. And the Penns, in their own letter, said that further negotiations would require “a very different representation.” To emphasize the point, Paris visited Franklin personally to deliver the Penns’ message that “we do not think it necessary to keep up a correspondence with a gentleman who acknowledges he is not empowered to conclude proper measures.” Franklin “answered not a word,” Paris reported, and “looked as if much disappointed.”

  “Thus a final end is put to all further negotiation between them and me,” Franklin wrote Assembly Speaker Norris. His mission stymied, he could have returned home and let others work out the details of a compromise on taxation. So he made a halfhearted offer to resign. “The House will see,” he wrote Norris, “that if they propose to continue treating with the Proprietors, it will be necessary to recall me and appoint another person or persons for that service who are likely to be more acceptable or more pliant than I am, or, as the Proprietors express it, persons of candor.”

  But Franklin did not recommend this approach. His usual pragmatic instincts fell prey to sentiments he had once tried to train himself to avoid, such as bitterness, wounded pride, emotionalism, and political fervor. He proposed, instead, a radically different alternative: attempting to take Pennsylvania away from the Penns and turning it into a Crown colony under the king and his ministers. “If the House, grown at length sensible of the dangers to the liberties of the people necessarily arising from such growing power and property in one family with such principles, shall think it expedient to have the government and property in different hands, and for that purpose shall desire that the Crown would take the province into its immediate care, I believe that point might without much difficulty be carried.” With some eagerness he concluded, “In that I think I could still do service.”27

  There was no reason to believe that England’s ministers would meddle with the Proprietary charter or strike a blow for democracy in the colonies. So why did Franklin fixate on an ill-considered, and ill-fated, crusade to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony? Part of the problem was that his animosity toward the Penns had blurred his peripheral vision. To the Yale historian Edmu
nd Morgan, this “prolonged fit of political blindness” seems surprising, even puzzling. “Franklin’s preoccupation, not to say obsession, with the Proprietary prerogatives not only wasted his immense talents but obscured his vision and his perceptions of what was politically feasible,” he writes.

  Yet Franklin’s actions can be explained, at least partly, by his enthusiasm for the glory of the king’s growing empire. “Once we fully accept the fact that Franklin between 1760 and 1764 was an enthusiastic and unabashed royalist who did not and could not foresee the breakup of the Empire, then much of the surprise, confusion and mystery of his behavior in these years falls away,” argues Brown University professor Gordon Wood.28

  Others in America were quicker than Franklin to realize that it was the prevailing attitude among most British leaders, and not merely the Proprietors, that the colonies ought to be subservient both politically and economically. Franklin’s allies in the Pennsylvania Assembly, however, shared his belief that the struggle was with the Proprietors, and they agreed he should stay to fight them. So, with no personal desire to leave England, he launched assaults against the Penns on three fronts.

  The first involved the Penns’ handling of Indian affairs. Franklin had long been sympathetic to the rights of the Indians, especially the Delawares, who felt that the Penns had cheated them of land. In the fall of 1758, he submitted a brief on the Delawares’ behalf to the Privy Council. In it, he echoed his use of the phrase “low jockey” that he knew had already enraged the Penns. The Penns, he wrote, had extended their holdings “by such arts of jockeyship [that] gave the Indians the worst of opinions of the English.” Little came of Franklin’s advocacy, but he helped publicize the case to score propaganda points against the way the Penns managed their colony.29

  Franklin’s second line of attack involved a libel case the Pennsylvania Assembly had won against William Smith, the provost of the Academy who had become Franklin’s political adversary. When Smith appealed to the Privy Council in London for a reversal, Franklin turned the case into a larger struggle on behalf of the Assembly’s rights. Ferdinand Paris represented Smith, arguing that “the Assembly of Pennsylvania was not a Parliament nor had anything near so much power as the House of Commons had.” In June 1759, the Privy Council ruled against Franklin. On a narrow point, it noted that the Assembly in question had adjourned and a new one been voted in, so the current Assembly had no case. More ominously, it noted that “inferior assemblies” like those in the colonies “must not be compared in power or privileges to the House of Commons.”30

  On the third issue Franklin was somewhat more successful. It involved the case of Gov. William Denny, who had violated his instruction in a number of cases by approving bills that taxed the Proprietors’ estates. The Penns, alleging with some evidence that Denny had been bribed, not only recalled him but also appealed to the Privy Council to have the bills nullified.

  An initial advisory opinion by the Board of Trade went against Franklin and the Assembly. But something surprising happened when the Privy Council heard the appeal. Lord Mansfield, a member of the Council, beckoned Franklin to join him in the clerk’s office while the lawyers were arguing. Was he really of the opinion that the taxes could be levied in such a way that did not injure the Penn estates?

  “Certainly,” Franklin replied.

  “Then,” said Lord Mansfield, “you can have little objection to enter into an engagement to assure that point.”

  “None at all,” said Franklin.

  Thus a compromise was reached. Franklin agreed that the Assembly’s tax bill would exclude the “unsurveyed wastelands” belonging to the Proprietors and would tax unsettled land at a rate “no higher than similar land owned by others.” By reverting to his old pragmatism, Franklin had won a partial victory. But the compromise did not settle permanently the issue of the Assembly’s power, nor did it restore harmony between it and the Proprietors.31

  The compromise also did nothing to further Franklin’s crusade to strip the Penns of their proprietorship of Pennsylvania. Quite the contrary. In all of its rulings, the Privy Council showed no inclination to alter the charter of the Proprietors, nor had Franklin succeeded in whipping up any public support for such a course. Once again, he faced a situation in which there was little more he could achieve in England and no real reason he could not return home. Yet once again, Franklin felt no inclination to leave.

  “Densest Happiness”

  Among Franklin’s greatest joys were his summer travels. In 1759, he and William went to Scotland, their path paved with introductions to the intellectual elite from William Strahan and John Pringle, both Edinburgh natives. He stayed at the manor of Sir Alexander Dick, a renowned physician and scientist, and there met the greats of the Scottish Enlightenment: the economist Adam Smith, the philosopher David Hume, and the jurist and historian Lord Kames.

  One night at dinner, Franklin regaled the guests with one of his best literary hoaxes, a biblical chapter he fabricated called the Parable against Persecution. It told of Abraham giving food and shelter to a 198-year-old man, then throwing him out when he said he did not believe in Abraham’s God. The parable concluded:

  And at midnight God called upon Abraham, saying, Abraham where is the stranger?

  And Abraham answered and said, Lord, he would not worship thee; neither would he call upon thy name. Therefore have I driven him out before my face into the wilderness.

  And God said, Have I borne with him these hundred ninety and eight years, and nourished him, and clothed him, notwithstanding his rebellion against me, and couldst thou not, that art thyself a sinner, bear with him one night?32

  The guests, charmed by Franklin and his philosophy of tolerance, asked him to send them copies, which he did. It was also at this time that Franklin wrote Hume about the tale of the dispute over a Maypole, which involved a Lord Mareschal who had been asked to opine on whether all forms of damnation were for eternity. Franklin compared it to the plight of a mayor in a Puritan Massachusetts village who was called on to resolve a dispute between those who wanted to erect a Maypole and others who considered it blasphemous:

  He heard their altercation with great patience, and then gravely determined thus: You that are for having no Maypole shall have no Maypole; and you that are for having a Maypole shall have a Maypole. Get about your business and let me hear no more of this quarrel. So methinks Lord Mareschal might say: You that are for no more damnation than is proportioned to your offenses, have my consent that it may be so; and you that are for being damned eternally, G——d eternally d——n you all, and let me hear no more of your disputes.33

  David Hume was the greatest British philosopher of his era and one of the most important logical and analytic thinkers of all time. He had already written the two seminal tracts, A Treatise of Human Nature and Essays Concerning Human Understanding, that are now considered among the most important works in the development of empirical thought, placing him in the pantheon with Locke and Berkeley. When Franklin met him, he was completing the six-volume History of England that would make him rich and famous.

  Franklin assiduously courted him and helped convert him to the colonial cause. “I am not a little pleased to hear of your change of sentiments in some particulars relating to America,” Franklin subsequently wrote him, adding as flattery, “I know no one that has it more in his power to rectify” the British misunderstandings. Of one of Hume’s essays favoring free trade with the colonies, Franklin enthused that it would have “a good effect in promoting a certain interest too little thought of by selfish man…I mean the interest of humanity, or common good of mankind.”

  Franklin and Hume also shared an interest in language. When Hume berated him for coining new words, Franklin agreed to quit using the terms “colonize” and “unshakeable.” But he lamented that “I cannot but wish the usage of our tongue permitted making new words when we want them.” For example, Franklin argued, the word “inaccessible” was not nearly as good as coining a new word such a
s “uncomeatable.” Hume’s response to this suggestion is unknown, but it did nothing to diminish his ardent admiration for his new friend. “America has sent us many good things, gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo,” he wrote back. “But you are the first philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters, for whom we are beholden to her.”34

  During his visit to Scotland, Franklin also became friends with Henry Home, Lord Kames, whose interests ranged from farming and science to literary criticism and history. Among the things they discussed on their horseback rides through the countryside was the need for Britain to keep control of Canada, which had been wrested from the French earlier that year when an Anglo-American force captured Quebec in one of the decisive battles of the French and Indian War. Franklin pushed the case “not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a Briton.” As he wrote Kames soon after his departure, “The future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America.” For all his problems with the Penns, he had not yet turned into a rebel.

  The visit to Scotland was capped by Franklin’s acceptance of an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews. As the crimson silk and white satin robe was draped over his shoulder, Franklin was read a citation praising “the rectitude of his morals and sweetness of his life and conversation.” It added, “By his ingenious inventions and successful experiments, with which he has enriched the science of natural philosophy and more especially of electricity which heretofore was little known, [he has] acquired so much praise throughout the world as to deserve the greatest honors in the Republic of Letters.” Thereafter, he was often referred to, even by himself, as Dr. Franklin.