The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Richardson had seen what happened to Thomas Hutchinson’s house, and though his was hardly so elegant, it was home, and he aimed to defend it. He emerged with a shotgun; when the crowd continued to taunt and threaten, he unleashed a load of swan shot. A boy of eleven named Christopher Seider was killed by the discharge; another lad was wounded. This sobered some in the crowd but inflamed others; while Richardson paused to reload, the latter group engulfed him and might well have torn him limb from limb had not one of their number, a well known Son of Liberty, insisted that he receive a trial before being executed.

  Richardson was a Bostonian, not a British soldier, but the killing of the Seider boy was blamed upon the British policies the soldiers represented. And the boy’s funeral became an occasion for display of popular fury at the condition of servitude to which Parliament appeared bent on subjecting Boston. For the next two weeks tempers in the taverns and on the streets grew shorter. A patriot ropemaker provoked a fight by asking a soldier if he wanted work; when the soldier said he did, the hemp man told him what he might do: “Clean my shithouse.”

  On the night of March 5 a feisty apprentice mocked a British officer on King Street. A British private named Hugh White, who happened to be standing nearby, struck the apprentice for his insolence. The young man shouted for help, which appeared as if from nowhere. In the middle distance, church bells began ringing, as they did for a fire. Hundreds of men and women answered the call—but suspiciously armed. “It is very odd to come to put out a fire with sticks and bludgeons,” an observer remarked.

  As the crowd surged, the captain of the British guard mobilized his men to rescue Private White. Muskets at the ready, with bayonets fixed, the small company thrust its way through the shouting throng to White. But the crowd closed in behind, and instead of one hostage it now held nine. Curses, oaths, snowballs, and chunks of jagged ice rained down upon the soldiers; in the semi-glow of moonlight (Boston’s byways lacked streetlamps) the soldiers credibly feared for their lives. The crowd bayed for blood—at times not seeming to care whose. “Damn you, you sons of bitches, fire!” taunted one radical. “You can’t kill us all!”

  An especially vicious frozen missile struck another private, Hugh Montgomery. The young man staggered, slipped, and went down. In response—on orders or otherwise: the question became the focus of bitter and ultimately unresolved controversy—soldiers fired. At point-blank range the balls could only be lethal. Three of the crowd were killed at once; two more died later; half a dozen were wounded but survived.

  “Horrid Massacre” was how Sam Adams styled the affair. “Bloody Massacre” was the headline of the Paul Revere print that soon began circulating. “Boston Massacre” was the message that echoed down the American seaboard, and across the Atlantic to where Franklin was expecting word of some such tragedy.

  “Those detestable murderers,” Franklin called the soldiers. Although anticipated, the violence at Boston still came as a shock. The killings demonstrated more graphically than anything yet the stakes in the struggle between the American colonies and the British government. The contest was about constitutionalism, but it was also about people’s lives—and their deaths.

  Until 1770 Franklin had often chosen to blur the issues between America and Britain, hoping reasonableness might soften reason and allow both sides to live with a solution imperfect on strictly logical grounds. The Boston Massacre and the events surrounding it forced him to focus, to think very carefully about what an acceptable ultimate outcome might be. Ironically—and figuratively—they also drove him back to Boston, the city he had fled in his own personal rebellion half a century earlier.

  Ironies abounded that season. On the very day of the Boston Massacre, a new prime minister in London (Chatham having finally resigned due to his illness) laid before Parliament a bill repealing nearly all the Townshend duties. As Rockingham had done after the Stamp Act, Lord North distanced himself from what he considered the failed policies of his predecessors; but, also like Rockingham, he had to take account of the sentiment in Parliament that could not abide capitulation to the colonists. Rockingham had appeased the Grenvillites with the Declaratory Act; North employed the device of lifting all the Townshend taxes but one—the tax on tea. In a separate but related decision, the Quartering Act was allowed to expire.

  Getting the news of this change of course across the Atlantic took several weeks; by the time Boston learned that Parliament had backed most of the way down, the hot anger over the killings had hardened into cold hatred of Parliament and all its works. What many Bostonians noticed was not the taxes that were repealed but the tax that remained, not the olive branch the new ministry was holding out but the club that branch could quickly become.

  In the month between the creation of the North ministry and the decision for partial repeal, Franklin had done his best to discredit such a half measure, hoping to steel the resolve of the repealers to be through with the duties entirely. “The Grenvillenians, who have done all this mischief, would terrify us (in case of a repeal) with the apprehensions of imaginary future demands from the Americans,” he wrote in the Gazetteer, over the signature “Another Merchant.” This was silly; the Americans wanted nothing more than to have restored the rights they enjoyed “before these new-fangled projects took place.” The idea of partial repeal brought to mind a story:

  A collector on the King’s highway, who had rifled the passengers in a stage coach, desirous to shew his great civility, returned to one a family seal, to another a dear friend’s mourning ring, which encouraged a third to ask a watch that had been his grandmother’s?

  “Zounds,” says he, “have you no conscience? Presently you will all expect your money again! A pack of unreasonable dogs and b—s; I have a great mind to blow your brains out.”

  Such was the proper pose when complete repeal remained possible, yet it was more than a pose, for Franklin continued to hold it after partial repeal occurred. In late March, Franklin had not yet heard of the killings at Boston, but the debate over repeal had convinced him that if the colonies held firm they might complete the job they had started. North and his supporters would have been happy to have dumped the Townshend duties completely, Franklin inferred. Yet a faction surrounding the Duke of Bedford resisted any such thing. “This party never speak of us but with evident malice,” Franklin related to a Philadelphia friend, Charles Thomson. “Rebels and traitors are the best names they can afford us, and I believe they only wish for a colourable pretence and occasion of ordering the soldiers to make a massacre among us.”

  By themselves the Bedfordites lacked the power to block repeal; what had briefly tipped the balance to their side were reports from America that the nonimportation pacts were fragmenting. Since then, however, the merchants of Britain had received material proof that nonimportation was alive and well. A ship had sailed all the way from Bristol to Boston with nails and glass, items thought to be of utmost necessity in America; finding no buyers for its cargo, it had sailed all the way back, to the serious financial embarrassment of its owners. Ten merchant captains from New York had held their vessels in harbor in England, hoping for repeal; on learning that the tea tax would remain, they sailed off, bearing only ballast. British manufacturers lost ten cargoes in the bargain.

  “The tone of the manufacturers begins to change,” Franklin reported, “and there is no doubt that if we are steady and persevere in our resolutions, these people will soon begin a clamour that much pains has hitherto been used to stifle.” Nonimportation was working; it must not be abandoned. “In short, it appears to me that if we do not now persist in this measure till it has had its full effect, it can never again be used on any future occasion with the least prospect of success; and that if we do persist another year, we shall never afterwards have occasion to use it.”

  In a letter to Joseph Galloway, Franklin amplified his argument. “I am assured that the manufacturers cannot another year be kept quiet by all the artifices of our adversaries, as they begin now seriously to f
eel the effects of their late credulity.” He elaborated his earlier contention that the self-denial of nonimportation would strengthen American virtue, to Americans’ lasting benefit.

  This stoppage in the trade, if it should continue longer, will have this good effect among us, to assist several new manufactures in striking root so as afterwards to support themselves in a flourishing condition. Great sums of money too, for our produce, will come into the country and remain there to the improvement of our estates and increase of their value; so that though a few traders may be hurt at present, not having English goods in such quantities as heretofore to sell, yet in a little time those who cannot turn to other businesses will have their shops and stores replenished with our own commodities; while their customers, grown richer by industry and frugality, though they do not buy so much, will be enabled to make better pay for what they do buy.

  For decades, since long before the current controversy over taxes and duties, the American colonies had been economically dependent on English merchants due to the buying habits of the colonists. They would remain dependent long after the repeal of the last Townshend duty, unless those buying habits changed. The current crisis was a challenge, but equally an opportunity—for Americans to take control of their fate.

  Americans must seize the opportunity, for it might not return. The recent scandalous events in England presaged more, and worse. “The public affairs of this nation are at present in great disorder,” Franklin told Galloway. “Parties run very high, and have abused each other so thoroughly that there is not now left an unbespattered character in the kingdom of any note or importance; and they have so exposed one another’s roguery and rapacity that the respect for superiors, trust in Parliament, and regard to Government, is among the generality of the people totally lost.”

  For many months Franklin had labored under a cloud in the minds of observers on both sides of the Atlantic. Radicals in America observed his continuance as deputy postmaster and assumed he therefore was a creature of the ministers who could have snatched that office away. As father of the royal governor of New Jersey he incurred additional doubts. On the other hand, proponents in England (and, less numerously and vocally, in America) of Parliamentary supremacy read or heard of his testimony to Parliament, encountered his views personally, or divined his authorship (which was no deep secret in any event) of numerous pieces defending the American colonies, and concluded that he was one of the radicals himself, or close to it.

  Franklin recognized the betwixt-and-betweenness of his predicament. “Being born and bred in one of the countries, and having lived long, and made many agreeable connections of friendship in the other, I wish all prosperity to both,” he remarked in a letter printed, with his authentic name, in the Gentleman’s Magazine. But despite his best efforts he was making little headway in bringing the two countries together. “I do not find that I have gained any point in either country, except that of rendering myself suspected by my impartiality: in England of being too much an American, and in America of being too much an Englishman.”

  The Boston Massacre, the fight for repeal of the Townshend duties, and Franklin’s stout endorsement of continued nonimportation cleared up much of the confusion surrounding where he stood. Those parties in America rejecting Parliamentary authority over the colonies embraced him happily. Joseph Galloway wrote from Philadelphia with congratulations for what had been accomplished and assurances regarding what remained. “I am much obliged to you for the state of American affairs on your side the water,” said Galloway, speaking for his allies in the Assembly as well. “The Ministry are much mistaken in imagining that there will ever be an union either of affections or interest between Great Britain and America until justice is done to the latter and there is a full restoration of its liberties.”

  The reaction in Boston was still more striking. From the passage of the Stamp Act until almost the present, Franklin’s friends in that hotbed of protest had had to apologize for or explain away his search for a middle ground. Jane Mecom regularly wrote wondering whether the unflattering things her neighbors were saying about her brother could possibly be true.

  But now, with his ringing endorsement of continued nonimportation, he became something of a hero. His letter to Charles Thomson in Philadelphia, in which he had essentially accused the Bedford group of provoking the Boston Massacre, was quickly forwarded to Boston and published there, placing him in the ranks of the most radical.

  Sam Adams thereupon drafted a letter, signed by other members of a committee of the town meeting, appealing to Franklin as one of “our friends on your side the water” to help ensure that the true circumstances of the late crime at Boston not be muddied by the enemies of American liberty. Shortly thereafter the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted to make Franklin that body’s agent in England. The resolution offering him the post registered considerable confidence in his abilities and bona fides, describing the House as “entirely relying on his vigilance and the exertion of his utmost endeavours to support the constitutional rights of this House and of the Province.” A following letter, signed by House speaker Thomas Cushing, explained that the House “greatly confided” in Franklin’s abilities and asserted assuredly that “your own acquaintance with this Province, and your well known warm attachment to it, will lead you to exert all your powers in its defence.”

  Franklin appreciated that accepting the Massachusetts offer would render him still more suspect in the eyes of many in England. In the months after the Boston Massacre, and as his support for continued nonimportation echoed back across the Atlantic to London, his position in the post office came under regular attack. He resented the attacks, both because they impugned his performance as postmaster and because they revealed (to him, if not to his attackers) an unconstitutional animus to the rights of Americans.

  “I have enemies, as every public man has,” he explained to Postmaster General Lord Le Despencer, his superior, by way of attempting to neutralize those enemies. “They would be glad to see me deprived of my office; and there are others who would like to have it.” Yet they should not be suffered to do so. Besides the money—£300 per year, which if lost “would make a very serious difference in my annual income”—there were principles involved. “I rose to that office gradually through a long service of now almost forty years, have by my industry and management greatly improved it, and have ever acted in it with fidelity to the satisfaction of all my superiors.” Moreover, a British subject should be able to speak his mind on public matters. “I hope my political opinions, or my dislike of the late measures with America (which I own I think very injudicious) expressed in my letters to that country, or the advice I gave to adhere to their resolutions till the whole Act was repealed, without extending their demands any farther, will not be thought a good reason for turning me out.” Franklin persuaded Le Despencer not to sack him; whatever the postmaster general’s opinion of Franklin’s politics, he appreciated the efficiencies Franklin had brought to the delivery of the mail, and he knew Franklin could not easily be replaced. This did not silence Franklin’s critics, however; they simply modified their tactics and opened a campaign to force him to resign.

  “In this they are not likely to succeed, I being deficient in that Christian virtue of resignation,” he told Jane Mecom. “If they would have my office, they must take it.” He went on to summarize a philosophy of public service that forever became attached to his name. “I have heard of some great man, whose rule it was with regard to offices, Never to ask for them, and never to refuse them. To which I have always added in my own practice, Never to resign them.”

  The Massachusetts agency cost him more trouble than he could have imagined. In the first place, as he learned only after the fact, his appointment was by no means unanimous. Sam Adams still suspected him of closet Anglophilia; Adams and James Otis had sponsored instead the candidacy of Arthur Lee, a physician currently studying law in London. Although Speaker Cushing and a majority of the House of Representati
ves voted for Franklin, Adams and Otis won approval of Lee as an alternate in case Franklin declined the agency or was otherwise unavailable.

  More vexing was the opposition of Lord Hillsborough. When Hillsborough had assumed the new post of secretary of state for (all) the American colonies, Franklin at first expressed guarded optimism. “I do not think this nobleman in general an enemy to America,” he told Galloway. Six months later, in July 1768, Franklin added, “His inclinations are rather favourable towards us (so far as he thinks consistent with what he supposes to be the unquestionable rights of Britain).”

  But that qualification proved critical. Hillsborough brooked nothing that hinted of sedition or even obstruction of the smooth administering of the colonies. He had ordered the Massachusetts House of Representatives to rescind its appeal to the other colonies for common action against the Townshend acts, and when Adams and the others refused, he sent the troops ashore in Boston.

  In matters relating to Franklin personally, Hillsborough had proved something of a puzzle. Like Grafton he early dropped hints of an appointment for Franklin as undersecretary, but these came to no more than Grafton’s had (or would). He opposed the land schemes of the Franklins and their partners until a critical hearing in December 1769, when he suddenly told them that far from asking too much, they were asking far too little. Surprised, Franklin and the others redrew their maps of the Ohio Valley and, instead of asking for 2.4 million acres, requested 20 million. But rather than back this new proposal, Hillsborough let it disappear into the maw of the British bureaucracy, leading Franklin to surmise that Hillsborough had lent his weight to the project the better to sink it.

  At the beginning of 1771 the Hillsborough puzzle acquired a new piece. Franklin visited Hillsborough’s house for what he thought would be a routine presentation of his credentials as the agent for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. At first he was put off and told to try later, but as his coach drove away, the porter called out, saying that his lordship could see him after all. Franklin entered the secretary’s quarters, only to encounter Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts, the most outspoken critic of the Massachusetts House, and various other gentlemen. Franklin settled into a chair for what he assumed would be a substantial wait. But after just minutes Hillsborough’s assistant summoned Franklin ahead of the others.