Franklin hoped that Hunter’s death would mean that, after twenty-four years of service, he would become the sole postmaster in the colonies, as his original commission stipulated. That was not to be. Despite Franklin’s ardent appeal to his superiors in London, Virginia’s governor was able to secure the appointment of his secretary, John Foxcroft, as Franklin’s new partner. Franklin’s more collegial nature returned to the fore, and he forged a friendship with Foxcroft on his visit to Virginia. There was much work to be done. With Canada now part of the British Empire, they set up a system for extending mail delivery to Montreal. They also arranged for packet ships to the West Indies and for postal riders to travel at night. A letter sent from Philadelphia to Boston could receive a reply within six days, and a round-trip to New York could be done within twenty-four hours, a service that seems remarkable even now.
Foxcroft joined Franklin on a brief visit to Philadelphia, and then they left for New York and a tour of the northern post offices. Franklin ardently wanted Deborah to come. If she could learn to share his love for travel and curiosity about the world, he felt, she might even agree to accompany him to London someday. Not surprisingly, she again refused to be uprooted; she was as independent in her own way as he was in his. But their relationship was close enough that he gave her permission to open any mail he got from England, “as it must give you pleasure to see that people who knew me there so long and so intimately retain so sincere of a regard for me.” There was more than vanity involved: the letters might, he hoped, soften her resistance to visiting England.3
In Deborah’s stead, he took their daughter, Sally, then 19, on his tour. It would serve as her coming-out party. In New Jersey they stayed with William and Elizabeth, who took them to formal parties as well as pleasant excursions to the countryside. They then traveled by boat to Newport, where Sally had the pleasure (and it did indeed turn out to be that) of meeting her father’s long-ago flirtation Caty, now Catherine Ray Greene, a married mother of two girls. (Never one to forget the women who had become parts of his extended family, he also exchanged letters with Polly Stevenson on the trip, noting that “the tender filial regard you constantly express for your old friend is particularly engaging.”)4
Franklin dislocated his shoulder falling from his carriage, and Sally was willing to linger in Newport so that she and Caty could nurse him. But he was eager to press on to Boston. They stayed there for two months, Franklin living with his sister Jane Mecom and Sally with her cousins, who owned a harpsichord. “I would not have her lose her practice,” Franklin explained to Jane, adding sweetly, “and then I shall be more with my dear sister.”
During much of his stay in Boston, Franklin was confined to the house. He had suffered another fall, on a short trip to New Hampshire, and once again dislocated his shoulder. With most of his Boston relatives now dead, and his own stamina at age 57 diminished, his letters turned more reflective and less flirtatious. “I am not yet able to travel rough roads,” he lamented to Caty. Nevertheless, he still harbored hopes of traveling to England again. “No friend can wish me more in England than I do myself,” he wrote Strahan. “But before I go, everything I am concerned in must be settled here as to make another return to America unnecessary.”5
When he got back to Philadelphia in November, he would find it harder than ever to settle affairs in a way that would allow him a sedentary retirement in England. More ferocious political turmoil, and four more crossings of the Atlantic, lay ahead. Franklin’s seven-month tour of the colonies, along with the time he had spent in England, put him in a unique position to play a role in the coming storms. As a publishing magnate and then as a postmaster, he was one of the few to view America as a whole. To him, the colonies were not merely disparate entities. They were a new world with common interests and ideals.
During his postal trip, Franklin made plans and issued instructions for the construction of a new three-story brick home on Market Street, just steps from the spot where Deborah had first spotted him as a runaway lad. Since their common-law marriage in 1730, they had lived in at least six rented houses, but never one that they owned. Now, for the first time, they would have room to enjoy all the finery they had acquired since Deborah had bought him his first china breakfast bowl: the armonica and harpsichord, the stove and scientific equipment, the library and lace curtains.
Was Franklin becoming domesticated? In some ways, despite his love of travel and sometimes distant relationship to his own household, the aging runaway had always been a rather domestic soul, wherever he had lived. He loved his Junto and clubs, his regular routine, and the surrogate domestic arrangements he had made in England. He had also remained somewhat solicitous, even caring, about his wife and daughter, as well as his relatives, even as he indulged his wanderlust. Whether his new house was intended for his own enjoyment or mainly for that of his family was unclear, perhaps even to himself, but his love of projects led him to be deeply involved in all the details, down to the quality of the doorknobs and hinges.
Despite what he had written Strahan, the conflict about which side of the ocean he would inhabit was still unresolved. Deborah, for sure, still had no desire to live more than a few hundred yards from where she had been raised. “My mother is so averse to going to sea that I believe my father will never be induced to see England again,” William wrote in his own letter to Strahan. “He is now building a house to live in himself.” Franklin had also flirted with the idea of getting a land grant in Ohio, looking west rather than east. By late in 1763, he was confessing to Strahan that he was baffled about where he would spend his remaining years: “We shall see in a little time how things will turn out.”6
The Paxton Boys
Franklin’s future plans would depend, in part, on the conduct of Pennsylvania’s new governor, John Penn, who was a nephew of Proprietor Thomas Penn and had been a delegate with Franklin to the Albany Conference. Franklin was hopeful. “He is civil,” he wrote to Collinson, “so I think we shall have no personal difference, at least I will give him no occasion.”
The first issue that Penn and the Pennsylvania Assembly faced was frontier defense. The British victory in the French and Indian War had not fully secured peace with all of the Indians, and settlers in the west were being plagued by raids led by the Ottawa chief known as Pontiac. By the fall of 1763, the fighting had subsided, but not the resentments of many of Pennsylvania’s rough-hewn backwoodsmen.
These erupted on December 14, when a mob of more than fifty frontiersmen from around the town of Paxton murdered six unarmed Indians, all of them peaceful, converted Christians. Two weeks later, an even larger mob slaughtered fourteen more Indians who had been harbored for their safety in a nearby workhouse.
The “Paxton Boys,” as the growing mob of frontiersmen came to be called, declared that their next stop was Philadelphia, where more than 140 other peaceful Indians were being sheltered. They threatened to kill not only the Indians but also any whites who protected them, including prominent Quakers. This provoked some Quakers to set aside pacifism and take up arms, and it led others to flee the city.
The uprising threatened to become the most serious crisis Pennsylvania had ever faced, a full-fledged social and religious civil war. On one side were the frontiersmen, mainly Presbyterians, plus their working-class sympathizers in town, including many German Lutherans and Scots-Irish Presbyterians. On the other side were Philadelphia’s old-line Quakers, with their pacifist proclivities and desire to trade with the Indians. The Quakers, despite being now easily outnumbered by the new German immigrants, dominated the Assembly and repeatedly resisted spending much for frontier defense. For a change, Philadelphia’s upper-class Anglican merchants, who tended to support the Proprietors in their fights with the Assembly, found themselves allied with the Quakers, at least temporarily.
A virulent pamphlet war ensued. Philadelphia’s Presbyterians, supporting their backwoods brethren, assailed the Quakers for coddling the Indians and refusing to allow the frontiersmen the prope
r representation in the Assembly that was decreed in the charter. Franklin responded with his own pamphlet in late January 1764. Entitled “A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County,” it was among the most emotional pieces he ever wrote.
He began his screed with poignant profiles of each of the Indians killed, which stressed their gentle personalities and used their English names. “These poor, defenseless creatures were immediately fired upon, stabbed and hatcheted to death!” he wrote, describing the massacre in gory detail. The eldest Indian was “cut to pieces in his bed,” the others “scalped and otherwise horribly mangled.”
Franklin went on to describe the second massacre two weeks later in even more horrid terms:
Being without the least weapon for defense, they divided into their little families, the children clinging to their parents. They fell on their knees, protested their innocence, declared their love to the English, and that, in their whole lives, they had never done them injury; and in this posture they all received the hatchet! Men, women and little children—were every one inhumanly murdered!—in cold blood!
To the Paxton Boys, all Indians were alike and there was no need to treat them as individuals. “Whoever proclaimed war,” their spokesman declared, “with part of a nation, and not with the whole?” Franklin, on the other hand, used his pamphlet to denounce prejudice and make the case for individual tolerance that was at the core of his political creed. “If an Indian injures me, does it follow that I may revenge that injury on all Indians?” he asked. “The only crime of these poor wretches seems to have been that they had a reddish brown skin and black hair.” It was immoral, he argued, to punish an individual as revenge for what others of his race, tribe, or group may have done. “Should any man with a freckled face and red hair kill a wife or child of mine, [by this reasoning] it would be right for me to revenge it by killing all the freckled red-haired men, women and children I could afterwards anywhere meet.”
To reinforce his point, he provided historical examples of how various other people—Jews, Muslims, Moors, blacks, and Indians—had all shown a greater morality and tolerance in similar situations. It was necessary, Franklin concluded, for the entire province to stand up to the Paxton Boys as they prepared to march on Philadelphia and to bring them to justice. Ignoring the slight inconsistency in his argument, he warned of the collective guilt all whites would otherwise share: “The guilt will lie on the whole land till justice is done on the murderers.”7
The pamphlet would later damage Franklin politically, for it reflected his underlying prejudice against the German settlers as well as his lifelong distaste for Presbyterian-Calvinist dogma. He showed little sympathy for the grievances of the frontiersmen, calling them “barbarous men” who had acted “to the eternal disgrace of their country and color.” Though a populist in many ways, he was wary of the rabble. His outlook, as usual, was from the perspective of a new middle class: distrustful both of the unwashed mob and of the entrenched elites.
On Saturday, February 4, a week or so after Franklin’s pamphlet was published, Gov. John Penn called a mass meeting on the State House grounds as the Paxton Boys headed toward the city. At first he took a strong stand. He ordered the arrest of the mob leaders, deployed British troops, and asked the crowd to join the militia companies that Franklin and others were organizing. Even many Quakers took up arms, though most of the town’s Presbyterians refused.
At midnight on Sunday, the mob of 250 reached Germantown, just north of the city. Church bells pealed alarms, and amid the chaos a surprising alliance was formed. Governor Penn, Franklin wrote a friend, “did me the honor, on an alarm, to run to my house at midnight, with his counselors at his heels, for advice, and made it his headquarters for some time.” Penn went so far as to offer Franklin control of the militia, but Franklin prudently declined. “I chose to carry a musket and strengthen his authority by setting an example of obedience to his orders.”8
Franklin and others, including many Quakers, wanted the governor to order an attack. Instead, Penn decided to send a delegation of seven city leaders, including Franklin, to meet with the Paxton Boys. “The fighting face we put on and the reasonings we used with the insurgents,” Franklin later recalled, “restored quiet to the city.” The mob agreed to disperse if they could send some of their leaders into town to present their grievances.
As the tension with the Paxton Boys receded, the antagonism between Franklin and Penn resumed. Franklin took a hard line. He wanted the governor and Assembly, acting jointly, to confront the Paxton delegation together and hold them accountable for the massacres. The governor, however, realized the political advantage he could gain by forging an alliance with the Presbyterians and Germans who sympathized with the frontiersmen (and who were offended by the harsh slurs Franklin had written about them). So he met with the Paxton delegation in private, listened to them courteously, and agreed not to press charges against them. He also, at their suggestion, instituted a policy of offering a bounty for any Indian scalps, male or female.
Franklin was livid. “These things bring him and his government into sudden contempt,” he wrote a friend. “All regard for him in the Assembly is lost. All hopes of happiness under a Proprietary government are at an end.” The feeling was mutual. In a letter to his uncle, the Proprietor Thomas Penn, Gov. John Penn wrote an equally strong condemnation of Franklin: “There will never be any prospect of ease and happiness while that villain has the liberty of spreading about the poison of that inveterate malice and ill nature which is deeply implanted in his own black heart.”
A darkness had indeed begun to infect Franklin’s usually optimistic heart. Feeling confined by Philadelphia and its foul politics, restless at home, and finding few scientific or professional diversions, he lost some of his amused, wry demeanor. His letters contained harsh rather than humorous assessments of politics and even gloomier personal passages. To the medical doctor John Fothergill, a Quaker friend living in London, Franklin wrote, “Do you please yourself with the fancy that you are doing good? You are mistaken. Half the lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless; and almost the other half ought not to be saved, as being mischievous.”9
Fighting the Proprietors Again
And so the fights between governor and Assembly resumed, more heated than ever. They clashed over control of militia appointments, a lighthouse, and, of course, taxes. When the Assembly passed a bill taxing the Proprietors’ estates, which followed the general outline but not the precise formula of the Privy Council compromise, Franklin wrote a message from the Assembly to the governor warning that the consequences of vetoing the bill “will undoubtedly add to that load of obloquy and guilt the Proprietary family is already burdened with and bring their government into (if possible) still greater contempt.” The governor vetoed it.10
At stake was not just principle but power. Franklin realized that the Proprietary party now had strong support from the frontiersmen and their Scots-Irish and German kinsmen. That reignited his resolve to continue pursuing, against all odds, his dream of convincing the British to revoke the Proprietors’ charter and make Pennsylvania a Crown colony.
Most people in Pennsylvania still did not share his fervor for a royal rather than Proprietary government. The members of Philadelphia’s merchant aristocracy were friends with the Penns. The Presbyterian frontiersmen and ethnic working class had forged a new alliance after the Paxton Boys affair, plus they feared a royal takeover would bring the official establishment of the Church of England, which their dissenting families had fled. Even many prominent Quakers such as Isaac Norris and Israel Pemberton, who tended to be Franklin’s allies, were leery of a new charter that might remove some of the religious liberties that the late William Penn had secured long ago. With his stubborn crusade, Franklin was succeeding in dividing his friends and uniting his enemies.
Likewise, in London there was no more support for a royal takeover than there had been when Franklin began his crusade as an agent there. Lord Hyde, Franklin
’s boss at the British postal department, wrote that even those royal ministers who might like to “get their hands on” the colony were not willing to take on the Penn family. He publicly warned Franklin, a royal appointee, that “all officers of the crown are expected to assist government.” Franklin made a little joke of the warning, noting that he would “not be Hyde-bound.”11
Nevertheless, Franklin still enjoyed effective control of the Assembly, and in March 1764 he pushed through a series of twenty-six resolutions—a “necklace of resolves,” he called them—calling for the end of Proprietary government. The Proprietors, he wrote, had acted in ways that were “tyrannical and inhuman.” They had used the Indian threat “to extort privileges from the people…with the knife of savages at their throat.” The final resolution declared that the Assembly would consult citizens as to whether a “humble address” should be sent to the king “praying that he would be graciously pleased to take the people of this province under his immediate protection and government.”
The result was a petition drive asking for the ouster of the Proprietors. Franklin printed copies in English and German, and even created a slightly different version for the Quaker community, but his supporters could garner merely thirty-five hundred signers. Opponents of the change were eventually able to come up with fifteen thousand on their own petitions.
Once again, a pamphlet war broke out. Franklin’s contribution, “Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation,” was more heated than its title implied. He was not, at least for now, detached enough to employ his old tools of humor, satire, indirection, and gentle wryness in argument. His pamphlet attacked the Proprietors for truckling to the Paxton Boys and for being unable to manage the colony. “Religion has happily nothing to do with our present differences, though great pains is taken to lug it into the squabble,” he wrote, not altogether correctly. In any case, he continued, the Crown rather than the Proprietors was most likely to protect religious liberties.
Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein Page 96
