The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Within a short generation this language of slavery would characterize colonial complaints against the government of Britain itself. Franklin and the Pennsylvanians anticipated affairs by applying it to their proprietor.

  Yet if Franklin was precocious, he was not foolish. Morris charged that the logical terminus of the Assembly’s line of argument was democracy—a concept that in the mid-eighteenth century was commonly equated with anarchy. Franklin would grow more democratic with age, but at this point he refused Morris’s bait. “We are not so absurd as to ‘design a Democracy,’ of which the Governor is pleased to accuse us,” he wrote. If anyone, it was Morris who was bringing democracy closer, by his adamancy in defense of the proprietors. “Such a conduct in a Governor appears to us the most likely thing in the world to make people incline to a Democracy, who would otherwise never think of it.”

  Looking back on the fight with Morris, Franklin later conceded its intemperate nature. “Our answers as well as his messages were often tart, and sometimes indecently abusive. And as he knew I wrote for the Assembly, one might have imagined that when we met we could hardly avoid cutting throats.”

  Yet in the governor Franklin found a kindred temperament, if not a kindred intellect. Politics aside, Morris was as reasonable as Franklin. “He was so good-natured a man that no personal difference between him and me was occasioned by the contest, and we often dined together.” At one of these dinners Morris remarked jokingly that he much admired the idea of Sancho Panza, the companion and foil of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, who, when offered a government, requested that it be a government of Africans, as then, if he could not agree with his black subjects, he might sell them for slaves. A friend of Morris, seated next to Franklin, picked up the governor’s theme (perhaps by previous arrangement). “Franklin,” he queried, “why do you continue to side with these damned Quakers? Had you not better sell them? The Proprietor would give you a good price.” Franklin responded, “The Governor has not yet blacked them enough.” In his recollection Franklin went on to say of Morris (and of himself), “He had indeed laboured hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wiped off his colouring as fast as he laid it on, and placed it in return thick upon his own face.”

  At the time, and privately, Franklin reckoned Morris “the rashest and most indiscreet Governor that I have known.” This made him difficult to deal with, but might yet work to the advantage of the Assembly and the people. “He has 1000 little arts to provoke and irritate the people, but none to gain their good-will, esteem or confidence, without which public business must go on heavily, or not at all.” Such being the case, Franklin thought, Morris would “do more mischief to the Proprietaries’ interest than good, and make them more enemies than friends.”

  The only question was whether the province could hold out till then. “We are all in flames,” Franklin told Peter Collinson.

  Amid the flames of war the spark of something Franklin had not felt for years—or at least not acted on—flickered anew.

  Catharine Ray was the daughter of Simon and Deborah Greene Ray of Block Island, in the colony of Rhode Island. Twenty-three years old at the time of Franklin’s visit to Boston at the end of 1754, Katy Ray was staying with her sister Judith, who happened to be married to the stepson of Franklin’s brother John. Franklin met Katy through that familial connection, and was immediately entranced by her beauty and charm. He may have been smitten equally by the mere fact of her youth, and the fact that she appeared quite taken by him.

  There was nothing in Franklin’s home life to push him toward a liaison with a woman the same age as his son. By all evidence Debbie suited him as well as ever; indeed he quoted to Katy the song he had composed about Debbie and his acceptance of her faults. Yet on certain days this acceptance must have seemed like resignation, and as his fame and horizons expanded, he must have wondered whether life held more for him. He was not the first traveler to feel the constraints of domesticity lessen with distance from home.

  The circumstances of Franklin’s introduction to Katy Ray are uncertain, but at some point it became apparent that he would be heading south for New York and Philadelphia about the same time she would depart in the same direction for her parents’ Block Island home. Likely Franklin suggested they travel together; Judith, feeling responsible for her younger sister, must have been happy to accept this offer of a chaperone. He would accompany Katy as far as Westerly, Rhode Island, where another sister lived. From there he would take the road west to New York, while she would backtrack to where she could catch a boat to Block Island.

  Precisely what transpired on that journey through the frozen New England countryside is impossible to re-create with confidence. The only record is found in a handful of letters exchanged between the two in the succeeding several months—and in the relationship that persisted between them for the next thirty years. Katy wrote first, shortly after her safe arrival at her parents’ home. Her letter is lost—doubtless partly because Franklin did not desire it to fall into the hands of Debbie.

  He answered with an alacrity commanded by no other correspondent during this busy time of his life. “Your kind letter of January 20 is but just come to hand, and I take this first opportunity of acknowledging the favour,” he wrote. Evidently the two had stretched their journey beyond what was strictly necessary; only with real reluctance had Franklin—who extended his own journey even farther, to accompany her right to the Rhode Island shore—let her go. “I thought too much was hazarded when I saw you put off to sea in that very little skiff, tossed by every wave. But the call was strong and just, a sick parent. I stood on the shore and looked after you, till I could no longer distinguish you, even with my glass.”

  Franklin explained how he had tarried in New England, lingering on the road, soaking up memories of his childhood—“my earliest and most pleasant days”—and basking in the recognition that accompanied his recent accomplishments. “I almost forgot I had a home.” New England revivified him; by contrast, when he reached New York he felt “like an old man who, having buried all he loved in this world, begins to think of heaven.”

  It was not New England alone that made Franklin feel young; it was Katy Ray. Apparently at some point on their journey he attempted to trade the role of chaperone for one more passionate; she rebuffed him—but with such gentleness and tact as to enamor him of her even more. “I write this during a N. East storm of snow, the greatest we have had this winter. Your favours [those expressed in her letter] come mixed with the snowy fleeces which are as pure as your virgin innocence—and as cold.”

  Katy’s rebuff reminded Franklin that he was, by her standards, an old man. His hopes of something more than a kiss on the cheek would remain unrequited; her further favors would be bestowed on one much younger—and unattached. Referring again to that “cold” virgin innocence, he declared, “Let it warm towards some worthy young man, and may Heaven bless you with every kind of happiness.”

  Perhaps his hopes revived, perhaps he merely experienced confusion, when she responded with some of that warmth he thought was reserved for another. “Absence rather increases than lessens my affections,” she said. Franklin’s quartermastering work for Braddock kept him away from home during the spring of 1755; consequently he was slow receiving her letters and responding to them. “My not getting one line from you in answer to 3 of my last letters …” she wrote in June, “gives me a vast deal of uneasiness and occasioned many tears.” Franklin did not save these letters either; this, and Katy’s own remarks in the surviving correspondence, suggest they contained comments inappropriate from a single woman to a married man. “Surely I have wrote too much and you are affronted with me,” she said, “or have not received my letters in which I have said a thousand things that nothing should have tempted me to say to any body else, for I knew they would be safe with you.” She must hear from him. “Tell me you are well and forgive me and love me one-thousandth part so well as I do you.”

  Their letters crossed in the mai
l. “You may write freely everything you think fit, without the least apprehension of any person’s seeing your letters but myself,” he said. “You have complimented me so much in those I have already received that I could not show them without being justly thought a vain coxcomb for doing so.” He teased her for what she denied him. She had asked whether everybody loved him yet; he replied, “I must confess (but don’t you be jealous) that many more people love me now than ever did before. For since I saw you, I have been enabled to do some services to the country and to the army, for which both have thanked and praised me, and say they love me. They say so, as you used to do, and if I were to ask any favours of them, would, perhaps, as readily refuse me. So that I find little real advantage in being beloved, but it pleases my humour.”

  Real advantage or no from Katy’s love, he urged her to keep sending him letters. “The pleasure I receive from one of yours is more than you can have from two of mine. The small news, the domestic occurrences among our friends, the natural pictures you draw of persons, the sensible observations and reflections you make, and the easy chatty manner in which you express every thing, all contribute to heighten the pleasure; and the more, as they remind me of those hours and miles that we talked away so agreeably, even in a winter journey, a wrong road, and a soaking shower.”

  She had spoken of a long thread she spun. He answered, “I wish I had hold of one end of it, to pull you to me.” Yet his wish was merely that, he knew. “You would break it rather than come.”

  In the contest between the Assembly and the proprietors, the proprietors yielded first, but in a manner initially unacceptable to the Assembly. In November, Governor Morris received word from London that the Penns were pleased to make a “free gift from us to the public” of £5,000, to be used for colonial defense but not to be construed in any way whatsoever as a tax payment or other concession to the unwarranted and irresponsible demands of the Assembly.

  This news reached Philadelphia about the same time the Germans from Reading did; almost simultaneous with both came a report of a massacre at Tulpehoccon, which included the ghastly tale of Indians scalping children alive. A bitterly ironic plea accompanied the report: “The Assembly can see by this work how good and fine friends the Indians are to us. We hope their eyes will go open & their hearts tender to us, and the Governor’s the same, if they are true subjects to our King George the Second, of Great Britain, or are willing to deliver us in the hands of these miserable creatures.”

  Under the circumstances Franklin and his allies in the Assembly decided that to allow the impasse with the proprietors to continue would be unconscionable. Without yielding the principle that the Assembly should determine which properties were taxed and at what level, they accepted the Penns’ gift and approved a defense appropriations bill that exempted the proprietary estates.

  Meanwhile the Assembly weighed a militia bill that would put the appropriated money to use. Almost without exception, substantive bills laid before the Assembly originated in committees; the militia bill was one of the exceptions, being directly proposed by Franklin. That such was the case indicated both the extreme danger to the province and the increasingly obvious ascendancy of Franklin within the Assembly. The militia envisioned by the bill was similar to that of Franklin’s 1747 Association. Service would be voluntary, and the militiamen would elect their own officers. There was, however, one important difference between the militia of 1755 and the Association: The new version was organized under the auspices of the provincial government, rather than outside the government.

  This last aspect might well have made the new plan more acceptable to the proprietors than the Association had been. Thomas Penn’s complaint at that time, that the Association was extralegal and therefore potentially insurrectionary, no longer applied. But in fact this was thin comfort, for Franklin’s success in gaining Assembly approval of a militia simply indicated that he had taken over the government—at any rate the popular part of it. Where once the Quakers had stood against a provincial armed force, now they stepped aside. Not even the governor—handpicked by Thomas Penn himself—could prevent Franklin’s coup, for with the colony in flames, refugees on the roads, and the backcountry folk clamoring for protection, Morris was obliged to swallow his reservations and accept the militia bill.

  He nearly gagged, as he related to Penn. Morris made clear that Franklin was the evil genius behind the recent developments. The governor described a meeting with representatives of the “back People” at the capital; he had explained that they long since would have had their protection if not for the recalcitrance of the legislature. They had been satisfied with his explanation, he told Penn, and proceeded to visit the Assembly.

  Upon this Franklin harangued them, telling them the Assembly had done every thing that was consistent with the liberties and privileges of the people, for which they, the House, were contending. Some of the people answered that they did not know that their liberties were invaded, but they were sure their lives and estates were, and while they [the Assembly] were contending, the country was bleeding, and therefore hoped they would dispute no longer but send the Governor such a bill as he could pass.

  His harangue had not, therefore, the effect he desired, and I suppose expected, for great pains had been taken by some of the members and all their numerous emissaries to sow sedition in the minds of these country people, who were, however, proof against all their lies.

  Morris almost certainly exaggerated Franklin’s “harangue.” Franklin rarely addressed large groups, and then, by most evidence, without conspicuous success. But Franklin did lead the opposition to the proprietors on this issue as on others, and thereby singled himself out for criticism. In another letter Morris told Thomas Penn, “Since Mr. Franklin has put himself at the head of the Assembly they have gone to greater lengths than ever, and have not only discovered the warmth of their resentment against your family but are using every means in their power, even while their country is invaded, to wrest the Government out of your hands.”

  If Morris was happy to charge the current disarray to Franklin, Franklin preferred to split the blame between the governor and the proprietors. In a letter to Richard Partridge, the Assembly’s agent to the British government, Franklin asserted, “If we cannot have a Governor of some discretion (for this gentleman is half a madman) fully empowered to do what may be necessary for the good of the province and the King’s service, as emergencies may arise, this Government will be the worst on the continent.” As for the Penns, Franklin declared that by their “senseless refusal” of the initial defense bill and by their “mean selfish claim” to exemption from taxes, they had brought upon themselves “infinite disgrace and the curses of all the continent.”

  The distrust and alarm the governor and proprietors felt toward Franklin escalated dramatically when the de facto leader of the Assembly donned the uniform of the soldier. In view of his experience organizing the Association and his central role in winning approval of the militia bill, Franklin naturally took charge of raising the troops the bill authorized. “We meet every day, Sundays not excepted,” he informed an old friend, regarding the committee supervising provincial defense. When the governor and other allies of the Penns began circulating rumors that the militia was designed simply to glorify Franklin and perhaps allow him to seize the government, he published an imagined dialogue among some ordinary Pennsylvanians, explaining the bill, justifying its objectives, and countering its critics—all in plain, straightforward language. “I am no coward,” says one, in a typical passage, “but hang me if I’ll fight to save the Quakers.” Answers his companion, “That is to say, you won’t pump ship, because ‘twill save the rats, as well as yourself.”

  In late November an enemy raiding party attacked the Moravian mission of Gnadenhutten on the Lehigh River northwest of Bethlehem, a village some fifty miles north of Philadelphia. The viciousness of the attack and the continuing lack of provisions for defense had terrorized the inhabitants and threatened to depopulate
the region. The governor and the Assembly, finally—and temporarily—working in harness, dispatched Franklin, former governor James Hamilton, and Joseph Fox, a Quaker assemblyman who would be disowned by his coreligionists for his activities on behalf of their defense, to the northwest frontier. Fifty mounted militiamen and a small baggage train accompanied the commissioners. William Franklin, having reenlisted in the military and wearing the scarlet uniform of the king’s grenadiers, rode beside his father, who at this point remained in mufti.

  The purpose of the expedition was to organize frontier defense. The first step was simply to show up, thereby giving flesh-and-blood substance to the recent legislative promise to secure the border. With luck the commissioners’ appearance would rally the locals to their own and the colony’s defense. Initial evidence indicated just such luck. Franklin had feared that the pacifist Moravians, who had a special Parliamentary exemption from military service, would refuse to take up arms; his first view of Bethlehem revealed an opposite intent. “I was surprised to find it in so good a posture of defence,” he wrote. “The principal buildings were defended by a stockade. They had purchased a quantity of arms and ammunition from New York, and had even placed quantities of small paving stones between the windows of their high stone houses, for their women to throw down upon the heads of any Indians that should attempt to force into them.” When Franklin expressed his surprise to the local bishop, the prelate explained that pacifism was not a principle of their faith but had been thought, at the time of the Parliamentary exemption, to be a tenet embraced by the members individually. The bishop said the members had amazed themselves by their alacrity to arms. Franklin remarked wryly, “It seems they were either deceived in themselves, or deceived the Parliament. But common sense aided by present danger will sometimes be too strong for whimsical opinions.”