The First American

by H. W. Brands

  In this letter Franklin offered a blueprint for just such a colonial union. The several colonies should select delegates to a general council, which would be headed by a governor general appointed by the Crown. This council, acting with the governor general, would direct matters relating to Indian affairs and colonial defense.

  Franklin acknowledged the political difficulties such a scheme would encounter. The separate provinces were possessive of their independence and privileges; anything essayed in common would tend to diminish these. Governors often mouthed approval of colonial coordination only to subvert it privately lest it undermine their authority or diminish their perquisites.

  For this reason the initiative toward the union Franklin proposed ought to be entrusted to a handpicked cadre of perhaps half a dozen men of insight, public spirit, and persuasive skills. Such a group would travel from colony to colony explaining the benefits of union and rebutting criticism. “I imagine such an union might thereby be made and established, for reasonable sensible men can always make a reasonable scheme appear such to other reasonable men, if they take pains, and have time and opportunity for it.” Like the Association Franklin had devised for Philadelphia, this should be an organization that grew upward from below, rather than downward from above. “A voluntary union entered into by the Colonies themselves, I think, would be preferable to one imposed by Parliament.”

  As did many other Franklin schemes, this one took time to mature. The provinces were then at peace, and Franklin’s fellow provincials felt little inclination to accept the limitations on colonial autonomy his union entailed.

  The resumption of hostilities on the Ohio frontier altered calculations. In June 1754 a convention of delegates from seven colonies gathered in Albany to discuss measures for intercolonial cooperation. The auguries were not especially promising; as a group the delegates were hardly the most influential men of their provinces, and such important provinces as Virginia shunned the proceedings entirely. Yet, for what it was worth, the convention had the blessing of the British Board of Trade, the London body that oversaw colonial affairs.

  Franklin was selected to represent Pennsylvania, along with Richard Peters, Isaac Norris, and John Penn, a grandson of William Penn. Planning for the event coincided with the setbacks suffered by the Virginians on the Ohio that spring. “Friday last an express arrived here from Major Washington,” noted the Gazette on May 9, in a piece Franklin enclosed in a letter to a correspondent in England. Washington’s dispatch described the French attack at the Forks, and it elicited reflection from the Gazette article’s anonymous author on the need for unity among the English colonies. From the style of the writing, and from what is known of Franklin’s views on the matter, the author quite likely was Franklin himself. To hear from Washington and other witnesses, the author said, the French were confident of success in their offensive. And why not? “The confidence of the French in this undertaking seems well-grounded on the present disunited state of the British colonies, and the extreme difficulty of bringing so many different governments and assemblies to agree in any speedy and effectual measures for our common defence and security, while our enemies have the very great advantage of being under one direction, with one council, and one purse.” So long as the English colonies remained disunited, the French would retain their advantage. “They presume that they may with impunity violate the most solemn treaties subsisting between the two crowns, kill, seize and imprison our traders, and confiscate their effects at pleasure (as they have done for several years past), murder and scalp our farmers, with their wives and children, and take an easy possession of such parts of the British territory as they find most convenient for them; which if they are permitted to do, must end in the destruction of the British interest, trade and plantations in America.”

  Attached to the Gazette article was an illustration, a woodcut of a dismembered snake. The eight segments of the snake’s body were labeled for the two Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England. Beneath the illustration was the motto “Join, or Die.” This illustration has often been characterized as the first original political cartoon printed in America; whether the artist was Franklin or someone else, the concept for the cartoon almost certainly was his. As the Gazette circulated through the mail, other papers reprinted the illustration, allowing readers to absorb the essence of Franklin’s argument for unity at a glance.

  Consequently it was to a collective mind preconditioned to union that Franklin addressed further thoughts on the nature of an American union. In New York City en route to Albany he began buttonholing fellow delegates and other influential persons. He showed an outline for a supracolonial government to Cadwallader Colden and James Alexander, requesting each man to supply suggestions for improvements.

  Franklin’s outline was just that; it supplied only sufficient detail to serve as a basis for discussion at Albany. Heading the union, in this conception, would be a governor general, a military man appointed and paid by the king and charged with executing measures adopted by a “grand council,” except for those measures he vetoed. The grand council would consist of persons selected by the provincial assemblies; the smaller provinces each would send one member, the larger two, in rough proportion to the payments each colony made to a general treasury. Franklin suggested that the general treasury be funded by excise taxes collected by the several provinces; these excise taxes might be levied upon liquor or tea, items consumed at fairly equal rates across the land and therefore serving as a fiscal stand-in for population.

  Franklin’s was a federal system, its members answerable to the provincial assemblies that selected them, rather than to the people of the colonies. Its responsibilities lay in the realm of what might have been called foreign and defense policy: relations with the Indian tribes, construction and garrisoning of forts, outfitting of naval vessels for the protection of the coast and the security of trade in wartime.

  While more specific than his plan of 1751, Franklin’s 1754 version was an extension of the principles outlined in that earlier draft, with one important exception. Where previously he had preferred a confederation organized by the provinces on their own, without the involvement of London’s Parliament, by now he recognized that the provinces would not act on their own. Accordingly he advocated that the commissioners at Albany debate his proposal and modify it as suited their perceptions of necessity, with the result “to be sent home [that is, to England], and an Act of Parliament obtained for establishing it.”

  Alexander and Colden commented, as Franklin had requested, but another man played a larger part in persuading the Albany Congress to agree to Franklin’s plan of union. Thomas Hutchinson was a Boston boy, like Franklin, born five years later; although there is no record of it, the paths of the two may well have crossed on the streets of the Massachusetts capital. Yet if they crossed they hardly coincided, for Hutchinson enjoyed all the advantages of birth and breeding Franklin lacked. Hutchinson’s family was of the first generation of New Englanders; Anne Hutchinson, Thomas’s great-great-grandmother, out-Puritaned the Puritans in insisting that faith alone sufficed for salvation and that works were secondary. Ben Franklin later rejected this view; so too, for different reasons did Thomas Hutchinson.

  What Hutchinson disliked about Anne’s doctrine was that it earned her excommunication and exile (and ultimately death, inflicted by Indians who were seen by Anne’s accusers as agents of divine wrath against the heretic). All his life Thomas Hutchinson was a man of the status quo. He described himself as “a quietist,” believing “that what is, is best.” He certainly looked so. The only surviving portrait of him, painted when he was thirty, shows a slender man (“Tommy, skin and bones,” jibed his political opponents after he became controversial). He has a wide and high forehead, a large nose, eyes that bulge ever so slightly, and a mouth set in a careful but self-satisfied smile.

  At thirty he had reason to be self-satisfied. The heretics and theologians of the family were on the fema
le side; for several generations the males were merchants, conservatives who sought salvation through commerce. Thomas fit the male mold. His father staked him to a start in trade (“two or three quintals of fish,” by Thomas’s recollection); this he parlayed by “adventuring to sea” (that is, purchasing shares in ships) into the not inconsiderable sum of perhaps £500 sterling by the time he was twenty-one. An inheritance enlarged his fortune; the bequest included a magnificent house, the finest in Boston (“the first developed example of provincial Palladianism in New England,” according to a later historian of architecture). This house became Hutchinson’s pride and joy, the emblem of his earthly success.

  Affluence—if not salvation—assured, Hutchinson entered politics. He was elected to the Boston town council and to the provincial House of Representatives. By the mid-1740s he had ascended to the speakership of the House and was one of the most influential figures in the public life of the colony.

  The issues in Massachusetts mirrored some of those in Pennsylvania. While Franklin was promoting paper money in Philadelphia, Hutchinson—as might have been expected of a man who had made his fortune and was concerned with keeping it—championed hard currency in Boston. Through persistence and skill, and the canny employment of the gold and silver sent to Massachusetts by London in repayment for that colony’s expenses in the Louisbourg expedition, Hutchinson and his hard-money allies carried the day. It helped that they had the strong arm of the government behind them, for when the partisans of paper became particularly rowdy, Governor Jonathan Belcher forcibly crushed the incipient insurrection. “They are grown so brassy and hardy as to be now combining in a body to raise a rebellion,” Belcher said of the rioters, in words capturing Hutchinson’s view. “I have this day sent the sheriff and his officers to apprehend some of the heads of the conspirators, so you see we are becoming ripe for a smarter sort of government.”

  The smarter sort of government Hutchinson had in mind in 1754 was one that encouraged common action among the several colonies. Hutchinson agreed with Franklin that the present disunity endangered the English colonies in North America, and that decisive action must be taken to knit the too-often-competing colonies into a coherent whole. The two men—the most capable public figures of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania—joined heads and pens on a committee appointed by the Albany Congress to consider means for effecting such a union.

  With Franklin’s approval, Hutchinson took the lead in drafting a report that made the arguments Franklin had been making for some time. The British colonies were suffering badly, the report said, from their lack of cooperation. “There has never been any joint exertion of their force, or counsels to repel or defeat the measures of the French.” Each colony devised its own land policy, which typically conflicted with those of its neighbors. This produced “great uneasiness and discontents” among the Indians, who were either cheated by the competing colonies or caused to think they were being cheated. English traders, under the spur of the intercolonial competition, corrupted the Indians with rum “in vast and almost incredible quantities, the laws of the colonies now in force being insufficient to restrain the supply.”

  A reversal of direction was imperative, the report said. Common laws must be implemented to restrain the traders and the competition in land. Frontier forts must be constructed from a common fund. Most important, the colonies must be encouraged to establish “a Union of His Majesty’s several governments on the continent, that so their councils, treasure, and strength may be employed in due proportion against their common enemy.”

  The Albany Congress found the argument compelling. The body accepted the report, unanimously approved the principle of union, and appointed Franklin, as the originator of the idea, to draw up a concrete proposal to lay before Parliament.

  With his usual discretion, Franklin accommodated the suggestions of others. “When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair,” he explained to Cadwallader Colden, “one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater.” Under Franklin’s revised plan the unified government would be headed by a “President General.” The “Grand Council” would comprise seven members each from Massachusetts and Virginia, six from Pennsylvania, and so on down to two from Rhode Island and New Hampshire. The council would meet at Philadelphia, at least initially. On the critical matter of powers, the “President General with the advice of the Grand Council” would be responsible for making war and peace with the Indian nations, for regulating trade and land sales on the frontier, for raising soldiers and building forts, for levying taxes and other duties. The individual colonies would retain their own governments, which would continue to act in those areas not preempted by the common government.

  Franklin’s revisions provoked further discussion, at times heated. “We had a great deal of disputation about it, almost every article being contested by one or another,” he told Colden. But finally the Congress strongly approved the union plan and referred it to the individual provinces and to Parliament.

  Gratified though he was at this endorsement, Franklin appreciated that the hard work lay ahead. In the confines of the Albany gathering, Franklin’s reasonableness, his understated style, his willingness to work through such others as Thomas Hutchinson, and his ability to accommodate varying viewpoints made his arguments almost irresistible. In the larger world, however—the world of the provincial assemblies and Parliament—the fate of the union plan might be far different. “How they will relish it,” he said of the assemblies, “or how it will be looked on in England, I know not.”

  He did what he could to whet the pertinent appetites. In late July he produced an extensive explanation of the reasons and motives behind the union plan. This gloss answered objections already raised, anticipated others, and amplified the arguments for union made by Franklin himself, by Hutchinson, and by other advocates.

  Subsequently Franklin parried alternatives to the Albany plan, explaining where and why they fell short. In December 1754 he took on Governor Shirley of Massachusetts, who proposed a scheme diluting the popular role of the provinces in selecting the members of the union government. Franklin judged such dilution deadly, and told Shirley so. One letter explicating his views revealed much not only about the Albany plan but about Franklin’s developing theories of government and of the relation of the American colonies to the British homeland.

  “Excluding the people of the Colonies from all share in the choice of the Grand Council would probably give extreme dissatisfaction,” Franklin said. The people of the colonies considered themselves, with justice, “as loyal and as firmly attached to the present Constitution and reigning family as any subjects in the King’s dominions.” They were as willing as any Englishmen to furnish supplies for the defense of their country. But to be required to do so by a Council unanswerable to them contravened one of the most venerable English traditions. “It is supposed an undoubted right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own consent given through their own representatives.”

  To this, Governor Shirley responded with a proposal that the colonies receive representation in Parliament—effecting, in essence, a union of the colonies with Britain. Franklin thought the idea a good one, if correctly construed. “Such an Union would be very acceptable to the Colonies provided that they had a reasonable number of representatives allowed them, and that all the old Acts of Parliament restraining the trade or cramping the manufactures of the Colonies be at the same time repealed, and the British subjects on this side the water put in those respects on the same footing with those in Great Britain till the new Parliament, representing the whole, shall think it for the interest of the whole to re-enact some or all of them.”

  Needless to say, this proviso severely diminished the appeal to Parliament of Shirley’s suggestion. What was the point of having colonies if not to be able to discriminate against them in trade, manufacture, or otherwise? Franklin knew this. Yet his stricture allowed him to explicate a larger
argument: that the American colonists were and ought to be considered full members of the English nation. “I should hope too, that by such an union, the people of Great Britain and the people of the Colonies would learn to consider themselves, not as belonging to different communities with different interests, but to one community with one interest.”

  Franklin offered an analogy to the situation in which the colonies currently found themselves. At the eastern entrance to the Strait of Dover lay a line of shoals called the Goodwin Sands. Low tide exposed a stretch of the sands, lending the appearance that England’s land area had grown.

  Could the Goodwin Sands be laid dry by banks, and land equal to a large country thereby gained to England, and presently filled with English inhabitants, would it be right to deprive such inhabitants of the common privileges enjoyed by other Englishmen, the right of vending their produce in the same ports, or of making their own shoes, because a merchant or a shoemaker, living on the old land, might fancy it more for his advantage to trade or make shoes for them? Would this be right, even if the land were gained at the expence of the state? And would it not seem less right, if the charge and labour of gaining the additional territory had been borne by the settlers themselves?

  The American colonies stood in an even stronger position than the hypothesized province, for unlike the imagined Goodwinites, the British Americans produced raw materials unavailable in England’s latitude, and their distance across the sea served to strengthen Britain’s shipping, essential to national defense.

  The present habit of thinking of old England and New England as distinct diminished them both. “What imports it to the general state whether a merchant, a smith, or a hatter grow rich in Old or New England?” In either case the empire gained. Imperial laws ought to recognize this reality and reward effort wherever it occurred. “If, through increase of people, two smiths are wanted for one employed before, why may not the new smith be allowed to live and thrive in the new Country, as well as the old one in the old?” Britain must eventually realize the fundamental truth: “The strength and wealth of the parts is the strength and wealth of the whole.”