The First American

by H. W. Brands

  I looked round for God’s judgments, but saw no signs of them. The cities were well built and full of inhabitants; the markets were filled with plenty; the people well favoured and well clothed; the fields well tilled; the cattle fat and strong; the fences, houses and windows all in repair; and no Old Tenor [paper currency] anywhere in the country; which would almost make one suspect that the Deity is not so angry at that offence as a New England justice.

  They arrived back in London just in time to see the coronation of George III. Franklin had made arrangements for himself and William to watch the procession of the great and good of the empire, the first such event in forty years. As it happened, however, William did not sit with his father but walked in the procession himself.

  Precisely how he rated this honor is unclear; hardly more transparent is how William suddenly became one of the king’s favorite, or at least most favored, Americans. In August 1762 the Crown announced the appointment of William Franklin as royal governor of New Jersey.

  Deliberate secrecy cloaked the consideration leading to the appointment. One contemporary remarked that the affair was “transacted in so private a manner that not a tittle of it escaped until it was seen in the public papers.” Part of the secrecy reflected the desire of William’s supporters to keep the Penns in the dark lest they mobilize opposition. The last thing Pennsylvania’s proprietors wanted was the proliferation of Franklins in positions of influence; at a minimum, the bestowal of such an honor on such a young and inexperienced person would be read as approbation of his father. Doubtless more important to the king and his close advisers was the turmoil through which the government was going during this period. The accession of George III, the ascendancy of Bute, the eclipse and resignation of Pitt—all left little room and less stomach for a fight over the governorship of New Jersey.

  Not that New Jersey was worth much of a fight. As plums went, it was small and not especially sweet. The job paid little and included few nonsalary emoluments; George’s first choice turned the offer down flat.

  But William Franklin was looking for work. He had applied for a post as deputy secretary of Carolina and would have been happy with anything respectable in the Admiralty court or the customs service. He definitely would not say no to a provincial governorship.

  Promising as the young man might be, he almost certainly received his appointment because of his connection to his famous father. Through John Pringle, Bute had become acquainted with Franklin. Bute required little insight to recognize Franklin’s gifts, nor to determine that Franklin would make a better friend than an enemy. New Jersey was an inexpensive down payment on Franklin’s goodwill.

  William’s appointment inspired him to pursue another goal: matrimony. Some while earlier his eye had fallen on Elizabeth Downes, the daughter of a Barbados planter whose family possessed money but lacked station. William now had station but scant money; the match seemed ideal.

  Franklin endorsed both his son’s appointment to governor and his marriage to Betsy Downes. “The lady is of so amiable a character that the latter gives me more pleasure than the former,” he told Jane Mecom, “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 perhaps he was not quite so delighted as he let on. Franklin did not attend William’s wedding, having departed for America some weeks before. Considering that he had put off and put off again going back to Pennsylvania, one might have expected he could wait a little longer to see his only son married. But he did not. Nor did he subsequently explain why not.

  He may have decided, by the summer of 1762, that if he was ever to go home, he had to go now. Until the moment Franklin’s ship weighed anchor, William Strahan tried to get him to stay—and nearly succeeded. Franklin told Strahan that it required his most resolute efforts to depart, “in opposition to your almost irresistible eloquence, secretly supported by my own treacherous inclinations.” To Lord Kames he wrote from Portsmouth:

  I am now waiting here only for a wind to waft me to America, but cannot leave this happy island and my friends in it without extreme regret, though I am going to a country and a people that I love. I am going from the Old World to the new, and I fancy I feel like those who are leaving this world for the next: grief at the parting, fear of the passage, hope of the future.

  If Franklin regretted going, still more did his friends and admirers regret his leaving. “I am very sorry that you intend soon to leave our hemisphere,” said David Hume. “America has sent us many good things: gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo &c. But you are the first philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters for whom we are beholden to her. It is our own fault that we have not kept him; whence it appears that we do not agree with Solomon, that wisdom is above gold, for we take care never to send back an ounce of the latter which we once lay our fingers on.”

  William Strahan was still more regretful. He sent a letter to David Hall via Franklin, remarking, “This will be brought you by our worthy friend Dr. Franklin, whose face you should never again have seen on your side the water had I been able to prevail upon him to stay, or had my power been in any measure equal to my inclination.” Strahan’s letter to Hall afforded a glimpse at the man Strahan and many others in England, including Kames and Hume, considered one of the most remarkable personalities of their day.

  Though his talents and abilities in almost every branch of human science are singularly great and uncommon, and have added to the pleasure and knowledge of the greatest geniuses of this country, who all admire and love him, and lament his departure, yet he knows as well how to condescend to those of inferior capacity, how to level himself for the time to the understandings of his company, and to enter without affectation into their amusements and chit-chat, that his whole acquaintance here are his affectionate friends.

  As for myself, I never found a person in my whole life more thoroughly to my mind. As far as my knowledge or experience or sentiments of every kind could reach his more enlarged sagacity and conceptions, they exactly corresponded with his; or if I accidentally differed from him in any particular, he quickly and with great facility and good nature poured in such light upon the subject as immediately convinced me I was wrong.

  Strahan mourned Franklin’s departure as akin to an untimely death and cherished the hope that his friend would soon return to Britain. Yet if fate decreed otherwise, Strahan knew that Franklin would always be “an honour to his country and an ornament to human nature.”

  15

  Rising in the West

  1762–64

  Franklin left England as full-blooded a Briton as he had ever been. By his own testimony heintended to return, permanently. He wrote to Strahan just prior to leaving, “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, especially if we have a peace.”

  Franklin’s inquisitive mind craved stimulation, consistently gravitating toward whatever community of intellects asked the most intriguing questions; his expansive temperament sought souls that resonated with his own generosity and sense of virtue. In five years in England he had found more of both than in a lifetime in America. “Of all the enviable things England has,” he told Polly Stevenson, “I envy most its people. Why should that petty island, which compared to America is but like a stepping stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one’s shoes dry; why, I say, should that little island enjoy in almost every neighbourhood more sensible, virtuous and elegant minds than we can collect in ranging 100 leagues of our vast forests?” He left such people reluctantly and, he trusted, temporarily.

  The voyage home—Franklin’s fourth Atlantic passage—was slow but pleasant. The slowness reflected the wartime need to travel in a convoy, which, as convoys do, traveled at the rate of the slowest member. The pleasantness resulted from fair weather, agreeable company, and a delightful
three-day stop at Madeira, located on the southern loop to the west, which carried the convoy close to Africa and out of the reach of the Gulf Stream. “It produces not only the fruits of the hot countries, such as oranges, lemons, plantains, bananas, &c. but those of the cold also, as apples, pears and peaches in great perfection,” Franklin recorded. “The mountains are excessively high, and rise suddenly from the town, which affords the inhabitants a singular conveniency, that of getting soon out of its heat after they have done their business, and of ascending to what climate or degree of coolness they are pleased to choose, the sides of the mountains being filled with their country boxes at different heights.” Grapes were in season at the time of Franklin’s visit; he and his shipmates took on numerous bunches, which they hung from the ceiling of the ship’s cabin and plucked for dessert after dinner for weeks afterward.

  Franklin may have envied England its people, but he would have been churlish to complain of the welcome he received from the people of Pennsylvania. Rumors had arisen during his last year in England that he had fallen somewhat out of favor with his home folks; foremost of the rumormongers was the Reverend William Smith, recently arrived in London with what he retailed as the latest intelligence from the west. Franklin guessed that Smith was spinning stories, but he could not be sure. Now he was. “I arrived here well on the 1st ultimo,” Franklin told Richard Jackson at the beginning of December, “and had the pleasure to find all false that Dr. Smith had reported about the diminution of my friends. My house has been filled with a succession of them from morning to night almost ever since I landed to congratulate me on my return; and I never experienced greater cordiality among them.”

  If Philadelphians had not changed, Philadelphia had. “I find this city greatly increased in building,” he told Jackson. “And they say it is so in numbers of inhabitants.” On this last point he did not consider himself the best judge, for his perspective had changed. “To me the streets seem thinner of people, owing perhaps to my being so long accustomed to the bustling crowded streets of London.”

  The cost of living had greatly increased in the five years Franklin had been gone. “It is more than double in most articles, and in some ’tis treble.” For decades Franklin had advocated an expanded currency as a spur to trade; lately the currency had expanded so much the horse had run right out from under the rider. Citing the £800,000 Parliament had spent in Pennsylvania during the war, as well as large paper issues by Pennsylvania and its neighbors, Franklin asserted, “This is such an overproportion of money to the demand for a medium of trade in these countries that it seems from plenty to have lost much of its value. Our tradesmen are grown as idle, and as extravagant in their demands when you would prevail on them to work, as so many Spaniards.” Franklin wondered whether something similar might afflict England, now that it led the world in trading. “Your commerce is now become so profitable,” he told Jackson, “and naturally brings so much gold and silver into the island, that if you had not now and then some expensive foreign war to draw it off, your country would, like ours, have a plethora in its veins, productive of the same sloth and the same feverish extravagance.”

  Franklin was hardly advocating war for the sake of the economy; this last remark was rather a relic from the arguments he had been making in England against an early halt to the war. By the end of 1762 such arguments were unnecessary, for the war was concluding, and to Britain’s advantage. Spain had entered the conflict opportunistically late—but also foolishly so, for the revivified British navy soon descended on Cuba and isolated Havana. The city fell in October 1762. Franklin described the victory as “a conquest of the greatest importance.” Yet Canada was more important, and Franklin feared that the earlier victory in the north would be frittered away. Pointing out the expense of the Havana campaign, in which thousands of British soldiers died of disease, he said that the success there would help Britain achieve favorable terms of peace—“if John Bull does not get drunk with victory, double his fists, and bid all the world kiss his a—e till he provokes them to drub him again into his senses.”

  John Bull sobered up shortly. In November his negotiators initialed preliminary articles of peace with France and Spain; the following February the treaty became definitive.

  Having taken such a strenuous part in the debate over the terms of peace, Franklin naturally and anxiously awaited details of the accord. To his delight he learned that on the issue of compelling concern west of the Atlantic and north of the Caribbean, the British negotiators had held firm. Canada, won in war, would be British in peace. With Canada came the eastern half of Louisiana, between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi, including the Ohio Valley. France would get back Martinique and Guadeloupe. Havana was returned to Spain, but Britain kept Florida.

  Franklin greeted the settlement with enthusiasm. It was a “glorious peace,” he said, “the most advantageous to Great Britain, in my opinion, of any our history has recorded.” “Throughout this continent,” he told William Strahan, “I find it universally approved and applauded.” Franklin had been proud before of his Britishness; he was now nearly bursting. “The glory of Britain was never higher than at present.”

  Franklin was more than happy to include the new young king in his encomiums. Britain, he said, “never had a better prince.” In his excitement Franklin went so far as to compare the prince of this peace to the Prince of Peace. Franklin’s informants in London described certain mumblings against George III; whence the complaints?, he asked an English correspondent rhetorically.

  I can give but one answer. The King of the Universe, good as he is, is not cordially beloved and faithfully served by all his subjects. I wish I could say that half mankind, as much as they are obliged to him for his continual favours, were among the truly loyal. ’tis a shame that the very goodness of a prince should be an encouragement to affronts. An answer now occurs to me, for that question of Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday, which I once thought unanswerable, Why God no kill the Devil? It is to be found in the Scottish proverb: Ye’d do little for God an the Deel were dead.

  Franklin put the matter slightly differently to Strahan. “Grumblers there will always be among you, where power and places are worth striving for, and those who cannot obtain them are angry with all that stand in their way. Such would have clamoured against a ministry not their particular friends even if instead of Canada and Louisiana they had obtained a cession of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  Franklin left the kingdom of heaven to the hereafter; he concentrated on empires of this earth. And he saw every reason to believe that the empire Britain had built would grow and prosper, especially on the western side of the Atlantic. “Here in America she has laid a broad and strong foundation on which to erect the most beneficial and certain commerce, with the greatness and stability of her empire.” In his Canada pamphlet he had argued that Britain could return the sugar islands to France with impunity; the treaty, he believed, bore him out. “While we retain our superiority at sea, and are suffered to grow numerous and strong in North America, I cannot but look on the places left or restored to our enemies on this side the ocean as so many pledges for their good behaviour. Those places will hereafter be so much in our power that the more valuable they are to the possessors, the more cautious will they naturally be of giving us offence.”

  Franklin’s imperial vision included himself. Since 1754 he had floated proposals for erecting new settlements beyond the mountains to the west. In that year, as part of the thinking that produced his Albany Plan of union, he advocated the establishment of two colonies between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. Such colonies would appeal to the chronic land hunger of Americans (Franklin described the “many thousands of families that are ready to swarm, wanting more land”); at the same time they would forestall the French, subdue the Indians, and buffer the colonies of the seaboard from the turbulence of the frontier.

  The war that broke out that summer prevented any action on Franklin’s proposal, even as it underscored the a
dvantages he described. During the nine years of the Seven years’ War, western settlement did not simply stop but was reversed; Americans at war’s end were hungrier than ever for cheap land. The French were banished from Canada and the Ohio but not from beyond the Mississippi; British settlements on the eastern bank of that mighty river would help keep them beyond it. The Indians, though less troublesome in the absence of the French than in their presence, remained a potential source of friction; new settlements would encourage the aborigines to embrace an English fate.

  And what would be good for the British empire might be very good for Franklin. Perhaps the rising price of nearly everything in Pennsylvania worried him; perhaps the life he led in England enhanced his tastes; perhaps the bug that bit almost everybody in America in position to be bitten found his soft spot—but for whatever reason, Franklin determined to speculate in western lands. While in England he had discussed a speculative scheme with John Sargent, a member of Parliament and a director of the Bank of England, and Sir Matthew Featherstone, a principal in the East India Company and also a presence in the Bank of England (and a fellow of Franklin’s in the Royal Society). The idea was that Sargent and Featherstone would use their influence with those who counted in England and apply for a land grant; Franklin would stroke the egos that needed stroking in America. At the time Franklin left London, the scheme was afoot but not moving very fast. “I know not how that application goes on, or if it is like to succeed,” he told Richard Jackson. Jackson by now had been elected to Commons himself; Franklin kindly offered to include him in the land deal. The offer reflected Franklin’s generosity but also his estimate that recent reversals in British politics—in particular the resignation of Featherstone’s sponsor, the Duke of Newcastle—had weakened the speculators politically. “I think it rather probable that it may fail,” Franklin said of the project.