Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

  The time he spent in Scotland, he wrote Lord Kames on his way home, “was six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life.” This was, perhaps, a small exaggeration. But it helped explain why he was not hurrying back to Philadelphia.35

  Indeed, by early 1760, Franklin was beginning to harbor some hope that Deborah and Sally would join him in England. His dream, now that he realized William was unlikely to marry Polly Stevenson, was another middle-class union: to have Sally marry William Strahan’s son Billy. It was a match he had fantasized about when Sally was a mere toddler and Strahan was someone he knew only through his letters. Although arranged marriages were no longer prevalent, they were not uncommon, and Strahan proposed in writing a plan to unite their children. Franklin passed it along to Deborah tentatively, assuming that it was unlikely to entice her over:

  I received the enclosed some time since from Mr. Strahan. I afterwards spent an evening in conversation with him on the subject. He was very urgent with me to stay in England and prevail with you to move hither with Sally. He proposed several advantageous schemes to me which appeared reasonably founded. His family is a very agreeable one; Mrs. Strahan a sensible and good woman, the children of amiable characters and particularly the young man, who is sober, ingenious and industrious, and a desirable person.

  In point of circumstances there can be no objection, Mr. Strahan being in so thriving a way as to lay up a thousand pounds every year from the profits of his business, after maintaining his family and paying all charges…I gave him, however, two reasons why I could not think of removing hither. One my affection to Pennsylvania, and long established friendships and other connections there. The other your invincible aversion to crossing the seas.

  Sally was almost 17, and the union held out the promise of a comfortable life in a smart and fun circle. But Franklin left the decision up to his wife. “I thanked him for the regard shown us in the proposal, but gave him no expectation that I should forward the letters,” he wrote. “So you are at liberty to answer or not as you think proper.” There is no indication that Deborah was tempted in the least.36

  As for William, Franklin was not only a bad matchmaker, he was an even worse role model. Around this time, probably in February 1760, William followed in his father’s steps by siring an illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin, known as Temple. His mother was apparently a woman of the streets who (like William’s own mother) seems never to have been heard from again. William accepted paternity, but instead of promptly finding a wife and taking him home (as his own father had done), he sent the child to be raised secretly by a foster family.37

  Temple would eventually become a treasured grandchild to Benjamin Franklin, who oversaw his education and then brought him under his wing as a personal secretary. Later, when his grandfather and father were on opposite sides during the Revolutionary War, Temple would become a pawn in a heart-wrenching struggle for his loyalty and devotion, one that Benjamin Franklin would win at great personal cost. But for the time being, he was kept out of sight while William enjoyed the social whirl of London and more excursions with his celebrated father.

  The most memorable was a trip to the continent in the summer of1761. Because Britain was still at war with France, they traveled instead to Holland and Flanders. Franklin noted with pleasure that the observance of religion there was not as strict as in America, especially when it came to observing Sundays as the Sabbath. “In the afternoon, both high and low went to the play or the opera, where there was plenty of singing, fiddling and dancing,” he reported to a Connecticut friend. “I looked around for God’s judgments but saw no signs of them.” He concluded, with a touch of amusement, that this provided evidence that the Lord did not care so much about preventing pleasure on the Sabbath as the strict Puritans would have people believe. The happiness and prosperity in Flanders, he wrote, “would almost make one suspect that the Deity is not so angry at that offense as a New England justice.”

  Franklin’s fame as a scientist meant that he was celebrated wherever he went. In Brussels, Prince Charles of Lorrains showed them the equipment he had bought to replicate Franklin’s electricity experiments. And in Leyden, a meeting of the world’s two great electricians occurred: Franklin spent time with Pieter van Musschenbroek, inventor of the Leyden jar. The professor said he was about to publish a book that would make use of a letter Franklin had sent him about electricity, but alas, he died just two weeks after the Franklins left.38

  Canada and Empire

  Franklin cut short his trip to the continent to come back to London to attend the coronation of King George III in September 1761. Still very much a proud British royalist, he harbored high hopes for the new king and fancied that he might protect the colonies from the tyranny of the Proprietors.

  In America, the French and Indian War had pretty much ended, with England and her colonies capturing control of Canada and many of the Caribbean sugar islands belonging to France and Spain. In Europe, however, the broader struggle between Britain and France, known as the Seven Years’ War, would not be resolved until a Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763. Franklin’s ardor for the expansion of the king’s empire led him to continue his crusade to convince Britain to keep control of Canada, rather than cede it back to France in return for some Caribbean islands as part of a negotiated settlement. In an anonymous article in Strahan’s London Chronicle, he used his old trick of parody and produced ten facetious reasons why Canada should be restored to France. Among them:

  We should restore Canada because an uninterrupted trade with the Indians throughout a vast country, where the communication by water is so easy, would increase our commerce, already too great…

  We should restore it lest, through a greater plenty of beaver, broad-brimmed hats become cheaper to that unmannerly sect, the Quakers.

  We should restore Canada that we may soon have another war, and another opportunity of spending two or three millions a year in America, there being great danger of our growing too rich.

  On a far more serious note, he produced a fifty-eight-page pamphlet entitled “The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies,” in which he argued that keeping control of Canada would benefit the British Empire and help protect its American colonies from constant harassment by the French and their Indian allies. “To leave the French in possession of Canada when it is in our power to remove them,” he wrote, “seems neither safe nor prudent.”

  The pamphlet dwelled in great detail on the issue of Canada, but it also raised an even more important topic: the relationship between Britain and her colonies. Franklin wrote as a man who was still a loyal, indeed an ardent, supporter of the empire, “happy as we now are under the best of Kings.” The inhabitants of the colonies, he argued, were “anxious for the glory of her crown, the extent of her power and commerce, the welfare and future repose of the whole British people.” The best way to assure continued harmony, he wrote, was to provide safe and abundant land so that the colonies could expand.

  Franklin had a theory about the underlying cause of the growing friction between Britain and her colonies, one that he first expressed nine years earlier in his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.” The conflicts, he believed, grew from the attitude of the British mercantilists, who had something in common with the Proprietors: they viewed the colonies as a market to be exploited. Consequently, they opposed the development of manufacturing in the colonies as well as greater rights of self-government. In the pamphlet, he noted his fear that this attitude could even provoke “the future independence of our colonies.”

  The best way to make America prosperous without turning it into a manufacturing center, Franklin said, was to keep Canada and thus assure there was always an abundance of land for the colonists to settle. “No man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labor to subsist his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer and work for a master,” he wrote. “Hence while there is enough land in America f
or our people, there can never be manufacturers of any amount or value.” An expanding America would thus always provide a market for British goods.

  He also argued that, as long as Britain avoided “tyranny and oppression,” there was no danger of the colonies rebelling. “While the government is mild and just, while important civil and religious rights are secure, such subjects will be dutiful and obedient.” Then he provided a metaphor that drew from his studies of turbulent waters: “The waves do not rise, but when the winds blow.”

  Britain would therefore be best served, he concluded, by treating the people of the colonies as full citizens of the empire, with the same liberties and rights and economic aspirations. He would, in the end, fail to sell the British ministry on this expansive vision of imperial harmony. But he and others who argued for Britain’s retention of Canada did prevail.39

  Bittersweet Farewell

  In the summer of 1762, five years after his arrival, Franklin finally decided it was time to return home. He was torn. He loved his life in England, both the acclaim (he had just been awarded an honorary doctorate at Oxford) and the friends and surrogate family he had made.

  But the decision was made a bit easier because he assumed that he would soon be back. “The attraction of reason is at present for the other side of the water, but that of inclination will be for this side,” he wrote Strahan. “You know which usually prevails.” Indeed, his inclination to be in England would prevail again within two years. He was, however, too optimistic about both his personal and public life when he added, “I shall probably make but this one vibration and settle here forever. Nothing will prevent it if I can, as I hope I can, prevail with Mrs. F. to accompany me.”40

  William was ready to return as well, and he needed a job. He had applied for appointment as deputy secretary of North Carolina and inquired about opportunities in the customs service and the Caribbean. But luck and good connections ended up producing something surprisingly better. The royal governor of New Jersey had just been recalled, and his presumed replacement decided to decline the post. Acting quietly to avoid alerting the Penns, William successfully lobbied for the job with the help of his father’s friend John Pringle, who was the doctor and close adviser of the new prime minister, Lord Bute. When news of the pending appointment became public, the Penns surreptitiously tried to derail it by spreading word that he was a bastard, but to no avail.

  William’s appointment was partly an attempt by Bute and others to assure the loyalty of William’s famous father, but there is no sign that the elder Franklin did much to help his son. Years later, Franklin would tell his friends in France that he had tried to dissuade his son from pursuing the post, or any appointed patronage position, by telling him of the time as a child when he had paid too much for a whistle. “Think of what the whistle may one day cost you,” he said to William. “Why not become a joiner or a wheelwright, if the estate I leave you is not enough? The man who lives by his labor is at least free.” William, however, had become infatuated with the title “excellency” as a way to emerge from his father’s shadow.41

  In possession of a public job, William was in need of a wife. So, at the same time he was securing his appointment, he was making plans to marry a sweet and well-born planter’s daughter, Elizabeth Downes, a fixture of high Tory society whom he had met at the balls of London. His father had trouble extinguishing all hope that William would marry Polly Stevenson, but he finally gave his “consent and approbation” to the marriage.

  In a letter to his sister Jane, Franklin professed to be pleased by William’s new appointment and even more by his marriage. “The lady is of so amiable a character that the latter gives me more pleasure than the former, though I have no doubt but that he will make as good a governor as husband, for he has good principles and good dispositions, and I think is not deficient in good understanding.” Yet Franklin, usually so fond of younger ladies and surrogate family members, did not warm up to Elizabeth, and never would.

  Franklin was, in fact, unenthusiastic about, perhaps even bothered by, his son’s successes. William’s marriage to an upper-class woman was a declaration of independence, and his appointment as governor meant he was no longer subservient to his father. Indeed, it meant that William, then about 31, would have a station in life higher than his father’s, one that would likely reinforce his son’s unattractive tendency to adopt elitist airs and pretenses.

  A cloud was coming over the horizon, and there was no lightning rod to defuse its emotional charge. The first signs of the tension that would develop between father and son came when Franklin decided to sail from England without him on August 24, 1762—the very day the news of William’s pending appointment appeared in the papers and less than two weeks before his scheduled wedding. On September 4, William married Elizabeth Downes at the fashionable St. George’s Church on Hanover Square, without his father in attendance. A few days later, he went to St. James’s Palace, where he kissed the ring of young King George III and received his royal commission. His father, who had rushed back to London from Flanders a year earlier to witness George III’s coronation, was not there. Then William and Elizabeth sailed for New Jersey, leaving William’s secret son, Temple, behind in England.

  With the cool detachment he could display toward his family, Franklin never expressed any sorrow or apologies for missing these momentous events in his son’s life. In his parting letter to Polly Stevenson, on the other hand, he expressed great emotion and regret that she had not become his daughter-in-law. Writing from a “wretched inn” in Portsmouth, using the third person, he lamented that he “once flattered himself” that she “might become his own in the tender relation of a child, but can now entertain such pleasing hopes no more.” Yet, though his son had not married her, Franklin promised that his paternal love would be undiminished. With more emotion than he ever used in his letters to his real daughter, he bid Polly farewell. “Adieu, my dearest child: I will call you so. Why should I not call you so, since I love you with all the tenderness, all the fondness of a father?”42

  Franklin’s mission to London had produced mixed results. The dispute over taxing the Proprietors had reached a compromise for the moment, and the end of the French and Indian War had calmed the larger disagreements over raising funds for colonial defense. Unresolved, however, was the underlying question of colonial governance. For Franklin, who saw himself equally as a Briton and an American, the answer was obvious. The powers of the colonial assemblies should evolve to mirror those of Parliament, and Englishmen on either side of the ocean should enjoy the same liberties. After five years in England, however, he had begun to realize that the Penns were not the only ones who saw things differently.

  On his voyage home, Franklin resumed his study of the calming effect of oil on water, this time with more disturbing metaphorical implications. The lanterns aboard his ship had a thick layer of oil that floated atop a layer of water. The surface was always calm and flat, so viewed from above, it would seem that the oil had stilled the roiling water. But when the lantern was viewed from the side, so that both layers could be seen, it became evident that, as Franklin recorded, “the water under the oil was in great commotion.” Even though oil could give the appearance of stilling turbulence, the water beneath the surface was still “rising and falling in irregular waves.” This underlying turbulence, Franklin realized, was not something that could easily be calmed, even by the most judicious application of oil.43

  Chapter Nine

  Home Leave

  Philadelphia, 1763–1764

  The Peripatetic Postmaster

  When William Franklin arrived in Philadelphia in February 1763, three months after his father’s arrival, any tension between the two men quickly dissipated. He and his new wife stayed four days at Franklin’s house, recovering from their frightful winter crossing, and then father and son set off for New Jersey. The local gentry came out in sleighs to escort them to Perth Amboy, a tiny village of two hundred homes, during a driving snowstorm. Afte
r William took his oath of office there, they traveled to repeat the ceremony in the colony’s other capital, Burlington, where the festivities concluded “with bonfires, ringing of bells, firing of guns.”

  In Philadelphia, Franklin’s enemies were appalled that his son had won a royal appointment. But Proprietor Thomas Penn, writing from London, suggested it might have a calming effect. “I am told you will find Mr. Franklin more tractable, and I believe we shall,” he said. “His son must obey instructions, and what he is ordered to do the father cannot well oppose in Pennsylvania.”1

  That would turn out to be wishful thinking, because Franklin (at least for the time being) saw a distinction between instructions issued by the Proprietor and those issued by the king. Nevertheless, his first year back in America would be a peaceful one. He was, indeed, far more tractable about Pennsylvania politics—partly because he was less engaged by politics, and partly because he was less engaged by life in Pennsylvania. Always invigorated by travel and the pursuit of diverse interests, and clearly not wedded to the hearth and home he had forsaken for five years, Franklin left in April on a seven-month, 1,780-mile postal inspection tour that took him from Virginia to New Hampshire.

  In Virginia, he performed one of those acts of quiet generosity that led him to have, even in controversial times, more loyal friends than enemies. His partner as colonial postmaster, William Hunter, had died, leaving a destitute illegitimate son. Franklin was asked by one of Hunter’s friends to take care of the boy and oversee his education. It was a difficult assignment, and Franklin expressed some reluctance. “Like other older men, I begin in most things to consult my ease,” he noted. “But I shall with pleasure undertake the charge you propose to me.” With both an illegitimate son and grandson of his own, he was sensitive to the situation, and he noted that Hunter would have done the same for him.2