The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Whatever The North Briton Number 45 said about Grenville and the other ministers, it put George in the position of choosing between being a ventriloquist’s dummy and a liar. The king felt no obligation to accept such a choice; instead he signed a general warrant (one that did not name a particular individual) for the arrest of those responsible for the publication of the noxious issue. The charge was seditious libel. The sweep yielded more than two score prisoners before Wilkes was apprehended. He was clapped in irons and tossed into the Tower of London.

  But the arrests backfired. A judge freed Wilkes on grounds that his arrest violated his immunity as a member of Parliament. Juries threw out charges against the other prisoners. Wilkes and the others sued the ministers who signed the general warrant; Wilkes won £1,000, while several others received smaller amounts, and the use of general warrants was declared illegal.

  But Wilkes’s scrapes were far from over. Some years earlier he had collaborated on an obscene, blasphemous, and likely libelous parody of Pope’s Essay on Man, entitled Essay on Woman. Through theft and bribery the authorities acquired copies of the proof sheets. These were read to Parliament, with some gusto, by Lord Sandwich, formerly a Wilkes ally but now a member of the government. (“Satan preaching against sin,” remarked one listener of Sandwich’s performance.) Wilkes’s ouster from Parliament seemed certain, prosecution probable. Hoping to add injury to insult, a partisan of Bute’s challenged Wilkes to a duel. Wilkes was considerably less skilled with pistol than pen; moreover, his challenger had been practicing. This was frowned upon among gentlemen, but few gentlemen were willing to include Wilkes among their number.

  Yet the masses loved him. Mobs crowded the streets shouting “Wilkes and Liberty!”; the scrawled numeral “45” decorated walls across the city. Nor did enthusiasm diminish when Wilkes, assessing the weight of the forces arrayed against him, decamped from London on Christmas Eve of 1763 and fled to France. Three weeks later he was formally expelled from Commons; the following month a (specific) warrant was sworn out for his arrest. When he refused to return to England he was officially declared an outlaw. And thus was completed, according to the Annual Register, “the ruin of that unfortunate gentleman.”

  Events would reveal the gross prematurity of this judgment, but it was one Franklin shared. Writing at the time of Wilkes’s expulsion from Parliament, Franklin told Richard Jackson he was “pleased to find a just resentment so general in your House against Mr. W.’s seditious conduct.”

  Gratified though he was at Wilkes’s comeuppance, Franklin could hardly take comfort from other developments in British politics. Strahan, as promised, provided Franklin a firsthand view. Bute’s fall, Strahan asserted, was richly deserved. “I am sorry to tell you that my countryman [both were Scots] has shewn himself altogether unequal to his high station. Never did a ministry, in our memory, discover so much weakness. They seem to have neither spirit, courage, sense, nor activity, and are a rope of sand.” Pitt, the leader of the opposition, was no better. Citing recent insults the former prime minister had hurled against constituents who differed with him on the merits of the peace treaty, Strahan said, “Did you ever before hear of such an instance of arrogance?” Strahan went on to call Pitt “this imperious tribune of the people,” a man “of whose honesty I entertain no good opinion, and whom I strongly suspect to be a secret abettor and fomentor of the present unreasonable discontents, and of that contempt with which the king and his government hath of late been treated.”

  Strahan saw little prospect of improvement. The “jaws of faction” were closing on the king, who was well meaning but “not possessed of any striking talents or any great degree of sagacity.” Strahan closed gloomily: “In my mind the danger is greater than most people seem to apprehend.”

  Such a statement from the most ardent advocate of Franklin’s relocation to England could not but call the project into question. “Surely you would not wish me to come and live among such people,” Franklin said half jokingly. “You would rather remove hither, where we have no savages but those we expect to be such.”

  Yet Franklin hoped for better, as he usually did. “I think your madmen will ere long come to their senses, and when I come I shall find you generally wise and happy.”

  If Strahan spied danger in political corruption, Richard Jackson detected it in political reform. At the end of the war with France and Spain the Grenville ministry undertook to reorganize the finances of the empire and reinstitute responsibility where profligacy had reigned. Government debt had reached record levels, largely from the cost of the war. Government spending, which included enormous sums devoted to debt service, was projected for 1764 at twice what it had been just twenty-five years earlier. Grenville, head of the Treasury as well as premier, scrutinized both sides of the ledger in seeking a solution to the country’s financial problems; he would raise revenues even as he curtailed expenditures.

  Revenues meant taxes. Inhabitants of Britain paid a discouraging diversity of taxes, of which the most important were property taxes, import taxes, and excise taxes. By the end of the war the British people bore about all the taxes they or their leaders thought they could stand; indeed, an excise on cider touched off demonstrations in Exeter and the burning of Bute in effigy.

  If Britons in Britain could not be made to pay more, perhaps Britons across the sea could be. From the east side of the Atlantic the Americans looked like the chief winners of the war, which freed them from fear of the French. They were taxed lightly by British standards, and little of what they paid went to imperial purposes, broadly construed. It certainly occurred to Grenville and others contemplating new sources of revenue that the Americans, unlike those boisterous cider-makers in Exeter, could not vote for members of Parliament. This rendered new American taxes constitutionally suspect, in that a cardinal tenet of English constitutionalism insisted that taxes could be levied only by the representatives of those who would pay. But it made such taxes politically tempting. If the Americans complained, who would be listening?

  As part of the Grenville program, Charles Townshend, the president of the Board of Trade, proposed a change in the duty on molasses imported into America from non-British sources—meaning, for the most part, the French and Spanish West Indies. For thirty years the tax had been six pence per gallon; Townshend recommended a reduction to two pence. This may have seemed like a gift to the Americans but decidedly was not. At six pence the duty had been widely evaded, via smuggling and bribery of customs officials; at two pence importers might actually pay it, for honesty would then become competitive with criminality. It would certainly be so if, as London threatened, it cracked down on bribery in the customs ranks and sent warships to patrol the coasts.

  “I fear something relating to America will be done very much against my opinion,” Jackson wrote Franklin regarding the molasses proposal. “But I shall endeavour to prevent it by all the means in my power both in the House and out of the House.” The government and British molasses-makers were too strong to prevent some such change as Townshend proposed, but Jackson would try to mitigate the ill effects. “I shall only say that though I wish the duty on foreign molasses was but 1 d. I shall not oppose a duty of 2 d. a gallon.”

  In the event, Jackson’s efforts were not simply unsuccessful but perhaps counterproductive. By the time the Townshend proposal became the Sugar Act of 1764, the duty on foreign molasses had been increased to three pence per gallon. The measure also levied a fee on foreign wine and certain luxury goods, including silk from the East Indies.

  Franklin was phlegmatic about the change. He understood London’s logic in lowering the molasses tax. “A moderate duty on foreign molasses may be collected, when a high one could not,” he told Jackson. At the time he wrote, duties on tea and slaves were under consideration, along with those on molasses and wine; Franklin thought such taxes could benefit both the character and commerce of the empire. “A duty not only on tea but on all East India goods might perhaps not be amiss, as they are generall
y rather luxuries than necessaries, and many of your Manchester manufactures might well supply their places. The duty on Negroes I could wish large enough to obstruct their importation, as they everywhere prevent the increase of Whites.”

  Although an imprudent ministry and Parliament might get carried away with taxing the colonies, Franklin hoped for prudence—or, more specifically, an appreciation that the interests of the empire subsumed, but need not subordinate, those of the colonies. “If you lay such duties as may destroy our trade with the foreign colonies, I think you will greatly hurt your own interest as well as ours,” he said. He elaborated: “I am not much alarmed about your schemes of raising money on us. You will take care for your own sakes not to lay greater burthens on us than we can bear; for you cannot hurt us without hurting your selves. All our profits center with you, and the more you take from us, the less we can lay out with you.”

  As neither an importer of molasses nor a heavy consumer of the rum into which the molasses was made, Franklin fretted little over the Sugar Act. (He preferred milk punch, made with brandy.) But as a student of population growth, an expansive imperialist, and a promoter of settlement schemes, he remained intensely interested in the question of land.

  Americans—including Franklin—interpreted the end of the war as the beginning of a new age of expansion, across the mountains and into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Two other interested parties took a different view. The British government, having just finished a long and expensive war that began on the American frontier, had no desire to let the frontier trigger another such war. To be sure, the French were no longer as able to provoke unrest among the Indians as formerly, but the English (and Scottish and German) settlers had shown themselves sufficiently provocative on their own. The best way to minimize such provocations, it seemed to Grenville and his associates, was to insulate the Indians and the settlers from each other. To this end the government issued a proclamation in October 1763 placing the transmontane territories essentially off-limits to settlement.

  The Proclamation of 1763 came too late to mollify the third party interested in the question of western lands—the party, in fact, most interested of all. If the defeat of the French augured peace and cheap land for the English, it did so at the expense of the Indians. As long as two imperial powers had vied for control of North America, the Indians had been able to play one against the other; now, with but one imperial power, the Indians were at that power’s mercy. To what extent the Indians appreciated that London wished to protect them against the Americans is unclear; considering their experience of the last few decades they might have been forgiven for thinking all English acted alike. In any event, while the British government prepared the proclamation it would make regarding the American west, the Indians launched a war against the settlers.

  Almost at once the war became associated with the name of Pontiac, an Ottawa chief of uncertain origins but undeniable ambition and charisma. Pontiac invoked the Great Spirit, as translated by a mystic called the Delaware Prophet, in calling for Indians to return to their traditional ways and drive out the invaders. One account (historically problematic, to be sure, in that it was fourth hand, quoting Pontiac quoting the Delaware Prophet quoting God) caught the gist of the message:

  Why do you suffer the white man to dwell among you? My children, you have forgotten the customs and traditions of your forefathers. Why do you not clothe yourselves in skins, as they did, and use the bows and arrows, and the stone-pointed lances, which they used? You have bought guns, knives, kettles, and blankets from the white men, until you can no longer do without them; and, what is worse, you have drunk the poison fire-water, which turns you into fools. Fling all these away; live as your wise fore-fathers lived before you. And as for these English—these dogs dressed in red, who have come to rob you of your hunting grounds and drive away the game—you must lift the hatchet against them. Wipe them from the face of the earth. And then you will have my favor back again, and once more be happy and prosperous.

  The message caught on. The fighting between British and French had hardly ended before fighting erupted between British and the Indians under Pontiac. During the spring and summer of 1763 Pontiac’s forces swept through the region of the Ohio and the Great Lakes, capturing half a dozen British forts and besieging British garrisons at Detroit and Pittsburgh. The British commander for North America, General Jeffrey Amherst, was sufficiently alarmed to suggest employing biological warfare against Pontiac’s soldiers, in the form of smallpox-laced blankets. Whether the local commander complied is unclear (like others in similar positions, Colonel Henry Bouquet feared that his own troops would succumb to the germ attack).

  Reports of the new war in the west reached Franklin at New York on his postal journey in the summer of 1763. Amherst, aware of Franklin’s experience with Indians, summoned him for an interview. Underestimating the seriousness of Pontiac’s offensive, the British general judged it a vestige of the French war that would subside once word got out to the Indians that England was now the master of the continent.

  Franklin did not deny this explanation but deemed it incomplete. The source of the trouble touched the fundamental relationship between Indians and whites, he said. “The Indians are disgusted that so little notice has lately been taken of them, and are particularly offended that rum is prohibited [not all the Indians followed the Prophet in forswearing alcohol], and powder dealt among them so sparingly. They have received no presents. And the plan of preventing war among them, and bringing them to live by agriculture, they resent as an attempt to make women of them, as they phrase it, it being the business of women only to cultivate the ground. Their men are all warriors.”

  Yet this interpretation did not prompt Franklin to advocate a more moderate policy toward the Indians, at least not under current circumstances. Indeed he recommended just the opposite. “We stooped too much in begging the last peace of them, which has made them vain and insolent…. We should never mention peace to them again till we have given them some severe blows and made them feel some ill consequences of breaking with us.”

  British troops belatedly delivered the blows Franklin spoke of. In August, Bouquet smote the Indians at the battle of Bushy Run and rescued Pittsburgh; three months later, Pontiac dropped the siege of Detroit. An uncertain peace settled upon the Pennsylvania hinterland.

  Franklin worried that the peace, such as it was, came too soon. “I only fear they have not smarted enough to make them careful how they break with us again.”

  Many of Franklin’s Pennsylvania compatriots felt the same way. Some of them attempted, in the most brutal fashion, to make the peace more permanent.

  If the Paris treaty had not seemed to promise an end to the warfare that had plagued the frontier for a generation, the Pontiac uprising might not have provoked the overreaction it did. But to settlers who looked for a respite from the terror and guerrilla warfare, the renewal of fighting came as a heartbreaking last straw. In December 1763 a band of armed frontiersmen from the town of Paxton, on the Susquehanna River, descended on a small community of Indians living on the proprietors’ Conestoga Manor near Lancaster. Reports had indicated the presence of arms among Conestoga Indians; rumors suggested that an Indian implicated in recent raids was hiding there. The Paxtonites did not tarry long with questions; instead they massacred the six Indians unfortunate enough to be at home, and burned the village to the ground.

  The other fourteen Indian members of the (very small) Conestoga community were thereupon taken into protective custody in Lancaster. Tragically for them, the custody afforded insufficient protection, and on December 27 the Paxton mob battered down the doors of the workhouse that provided their refuge, and murdered them all: men, women, and children.

  The Lancaster County massacres shocked even those Pennsylvanians not especially sympathetic to the Indians; the shock intensified when the Paxton mob threatened to march on Philadelphia. Some weeks earlier a group of Indians living among the Moravians near Bethl
ehem had been accused of abetting the recent uprising. The Pennsylvania government encouraged these “Moravian Indians” to take refuge near the provincial capital. More than a hundred accepted the offer. The Paxtonites, hot with the lust of killing, vowed to dispatch all these Indians—and anyone who tried to prevent them.

  As his earlier remarks revealed, Franklin shed no tears for warpath Indians, but this murder of innocents appalled him. And the threat the Paxton mob posed to government and order dismayed him almost beyond bearing. A man of reason, he saw reason being challenged by the darkest, bloodiest forces of unreason.

  At first he took up pen. Near the end of January he wrote A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, Friends of This Province. The pamphlet was quickly published and began circulating.

  Franklin never wrote a more emotional piece. To some degree his lamentations were calculated, designed to impress on readers the terrible wrong inflicted not only on the unfortunate victims of the violence but on society itself. But without doubt the murders troubled him deeply. Much of his philosophy of life was based on the premise that human nature was, if not perfectible, at least improvable. That such savage acts could be perpetrated, with apparent impunity, in his own Pennsylvania, by his fellow Pennsylvanians, hit at the heart of this premise.