The First American

by H. W. Brands

  “I was pleased with this ready admission and preference (having sometimes waited 3 or 4 hours for my turn),” Franklin recorded; “and being pleased, I could more readily put on the open cheerful countenance that my friends advised me to wear.”

  Hillsborough initially reciprocated the cheer. He had been dressing to go to court, he said, but on learning that Franklin had arrived, desired to see him at once.

  Franklin thanked the secretary and explained that he would not delay him. He merely wished to inform him of his recent appointment by the Massachusetts House, and to say that he hoped to be of service to the public in this capacity.

  Hillsborough did not let him finish this sentence. With what Franklin identified as “something between a smile and a sneer,” he interjected, “I must set you right there, Mr. Franklin. You are not agent.”

  “Why, my lord?” responded Franklin.

  “You are not appointed.”

  “I do not understand your lordship. I have the appointment in my pocket.”

  “You are mistaken. I have later and better advices. I have a letter from [Lieutenant] Governor Hutchinson. He would not give his assent to the bill.”

  “There was no bill, my lord. It is a vote of the House.”

  “There was a bill presented to the Governor, for the purpose of appointing you, and another, one Dr. Lee, I think he is called, to which the Governor refused his assent.”

  “I cannot understand this, my lord. I think there must be some mistake in it. Is your lordship quite sure that you have such a letter?”

  “I will convince you of it directly.” Hillsborough rang a bell. “Mr. Pownall will come in and satisfy you.”

  “It is not necessary that I should now detain your lordship from dressing. You are going to court. I will wait on your lordship another time.”

  “No, stay. He will come in immediately.” Hillsborough motioned to a servant. “Tell Mr. Pownall I want him.”

  Pownall arrived. Hillsborough addressed him: “Have you not at hand Governor Hutchinson’s letter mentioning his refusing his assent to the bill for appointing Dr. Franklin agent?”

  Pownall answered, “My lord?”

  Hillsborough: “Is there not such a letter?”

  Pownall: “No, my lord.”

  Hillsborough was annoyed at being shown wrong, but he was more annoyed at the Massachusetts House for presuming to appoint an agent without the concurrence of the governor. This, of course, was common practice; Franklin’s appointment from Pennsylvania had not, needless to say, elicited the approval of the Penns’ governor. But as part of the overall effort to tighten the administration of the colonies, Hillsborough was determined to put an end to it.

  “The House of Representatives has no right to appoint an agent,” he told Franklin angrily. “We shall take no notice of any agents but such as are appointed by acts of assembly to which the governor gives his assent. We have had confusion enough already.”

  Franklin challenged this novelty. “I cannot conceive, my lord, why the consent of the governor should be thought necessary to the appointment of an agent for the people. It seems to me that—”

  Hillsborough’s visage assumed what appeared to Franklin “a mixed look of anger and contempt.” He snapped, “I shall not enter into a dispute with you, sir, upon this subject.”

  Franklin persisted. “I beg your lordship’s pardon. I do not presume to dispute with your lordship”—though of course both men realized this was precisely what he was doing. “I would only say that it seems to me that every body of men, who cannot appear in person where business relating to them may be transacted, should have a right to appear by an agent. The concurrence of the governor does not seem to me necessary. It is the business of the people that is to be done. He [the Governor] is not one of them; he is himself an agent.”

  “Whose agent is he?” demanded Hillsborough.

  “The king’s, my lord.”

  Hillsborough dismissed this. “Besides,” he added, “this proceeding is directly contrary to express instructions.”

  “I did not know there had been such instructions. I am not concerned in any offence against them.”

  “Yes, your offering such a paper [the copy of the House vote, which Franklin had handed Hillsborough upon entering] to be entered is an offence against them. No such appointment shall be entered.”

  Hillsborough then launched into a diatribe. “When I came into the administration of American affairs, I found them in great disorder. By my firmness they are now something mended; and while I have the honour to hold the seals, I shall continue the same conduct, the same firmness. I think my duty to the master I serve and to the government of this nation require it of me. If that conduct is not approved, they may take my office from me when they please. I shall make ’em a bow, and thank ’em. I shall resign with pleasure. That gentleman knows it”—here he pointed to Pownall. “But while I continue in it, I shall resolutely persevere in the same firmness.”

  Franklin recorded that at this point Hillsborough was “turning pale in his discourse, as if he was angry at something or somebody besides the agent, and of more importance.”

  By Franklin’s telling, the agent had the last word. “I beg your lordship’s pardon for taking up so much of your time. It is, I believe, of no great importance whether the appointment is acknowledged or not, for I have not the least conception that an agent can at present be of any use, to any of the colonies. I shall therefore give your lordship no farther trouble.”

  “I have since heard that his lordship took great offence at some of my last words, which he calls extremely rude and abusive,” Franklin confided to Samuel Cooper three weeks later. “He assured a friend of mine, they were equivalent to telling him to his face that the colonies could expect neither favour nor justice during his administration. I find he did not mistake me.”

  Franklin rarely let emotion displace reasonableness, but after three years of trying to make Hillsborough and the rest of the ministry see reason in relations with the colonies, he had had his fill; and after the secretary of state declared that he would have nothing to do with Franklin, Franklin reciprocated. He had grown accustomed to mediocrities in positions of power, but this particular mediocrity at this particular moment was more than he could stand. “His character is conceit, wrongheadedness, obstinacy and passion,” he told Cooper. “Those who would speak most favourably of him allow all this; they only add that he is an honest man, and means well. If that be true, as perhaps it may, I wish him a better place, where only honesty and well-meaning are required, and where his other qualities can do no harm.”

  Perhaps on reflection Franklin considered that by alienating Hills-borough he was jeopardizing the interests of those he was representing (which by now included Georgia and New Jersey as well as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts). Yet Hillsborough had already taken great umbrage at Franklin’s writings on behalf of the colonies; there was really little to lose. In any event, Franklin was willing to pay the cost of his actions. “Whatever the consequences of his displeasure, putting all my offences together, I must bear them as well as I can.” Yet not everything was bleak. “One encouragement I have: the knowledge that he is not a whit better liked by his colleagues in the Ministry than he is by me, that he cannot probably continue where he is much longer, and that he can scarce be succeeded by anybody who will not like me the better for his having been at variance with me.”

  Siding with Boston lost Franklin any lingering leverage with Hillsborough; it also forced him to hone his thinking on the nature of relations between Britain and America. Not long after leaving his stormy session with the secretary of state, Franklin received a letter from a committee of correspondence of the Massachusetts House, consisting of Thomas Cushing, Sam Adams, John Hancock, and John Adams. This letter laid out current conditions in the colonies and the present state of opinion there. The colonies, the committee said, “are justly tenacious of their constitutional and natural rights, and will never willingly part with
them.” Nor could it be to the advantage of the British nation to steal them. “Great Britain can lose nothing that she ought to retain, by restoring the colonies to the state they were in before the passing the obnoxious Stamp-Act, and we are persuaded that if that is done they will no further contend.”

  Franklin drew reassurance from this comparatively moderate statement and believed it might form the basis for reconciliation. “The doctrine of the right of Parliament to lay taxes on America is now almost generally given up here,” he replied to Cushing and the others, “and one seldom meets in conversation any who continue to assert it.”

  If Franklin was speaking of the English public at large, he may have been right; if of the influential factions in Parliament, he overspoke—as his own letters had already revealed and as events would soon demonstrate. Yet he wished to make clear to the Boston men the position of those in England he considered the likeliest to seek reconciliation. “We ought to be contented, they say, with a forbearance of any attempt hereafter to exercise such a right; and this they would have us rely on as a certainty.” Not simply Parliamentary prestige but British dignity was at stake. The colonists could hardly expect the British government to honor demands that would subject it “to the contempt of all Europe.” In other words, if Americans could live with the reality of the status quo ante the Stamp Act (“Hints are also given that the duties now subsisting may be gradually withdrawn”), Parliament would settle for the principle underlying the Declaratory Act.

  Even as he delineated this rationale, Franklin was not sure how far to trust it. Status quos had a way of congealing around whatever was not challenged. Regarding the duties said to be on the verge of repeal, such repeal could be assured only by continued pressure from America. “If by time we become so accustomed to these as to pay them without discontent, no minister will afterwards think of taking them off, but rather be encouraged to add others.” Franklin was far from advocating violence, but determination was indispensable. “I hope the colony assemblies will show, by frequently repeated resolves, that they know their rights, and do not lose sight of them.”

  Obviously this counsel undercut the conciliatory scenario he sketched; at the same time it revealed Franklin’s increasing conviction that America was fundamentally distinct, and essentially independent of England. His conversation with Hillsborough had underscored the ministry’s view that the colonies were creatures of Parliament; only on this reasoning ought the ministry, acting through the colonial governors, to have any voice in the selection of the colonial agents.

  By contrast, Franklin saw the agents almost as ambassadors, sent by the people of America to the British government. A correct understanding of the nature of the colonies vis-à-vis Britain would yield this conclusion as a corollary. “When they come to be considered in the light of distinct states, as I conceive they really are, possibly their agents may be treated with more respect, and considered more as public ministers.”

  This was strong punch, which could hardly fail to provoke a fight with Britain if quaffed straight; in the months after his argument with Hillsborough, as his anger subsided, Franklin began to dilute it. Even after the repeal of most of the Townshend duties, the Massachusetts House protested the Crown’s policy of paying royal officials in America. Franklin understood the argument against the policy, having made it himself, but he was fairly certain most people in England did not, or did not credit the argument if they understood it. “It is looked on as a strange thing here to object to the King’s paying his own servants sent among us to do his business; and they say we should seem to have much more reason of complaint if it were required of us to pay them.” Indeed, because the American complaint on this count seemed so counterintuitive, many in England suspected the Americans of attempting to suborn the king’s servants and subvert his rule. Franklin advised against mounting a major campaign against this issue; better to protest it politely on occasion and continue to shun British imports.

  Although Franklin’s anger had abated, his opinion of Hillsborough had not improved, and this low opinion was another reason for counseling restraint. The secretary of state for America was “proud, supercilious, extremely conceited (moderate as they are) of his political knowledge and abilities, fond of every one that can stoop to flatter him, and inimical to all that dare tell him disagreeable truths.” Hillsborough’s deficiencies were recognized by many in Britain; he could not long retain his office. Wisdom therefore cautioned against actions that might provoke other, more reasonable, souls to join the secretary in his “settled malice against the colonies, particularly ours [in this case, Massachusetts].”

  Franklin gave greater credence than before to arguments from British honor. The latter half of 1770 had produced a crisis with Spain over the Falkland Islands; for months war impended. Such a war might well reopen the long struggle against France, with all that that struggle entailed. Although the war scare had considerably diminished by early 1771, it reminded Franklin of one reason he had been a British imperialist: that in the cruel world of nations, safety often resided in numbers. Accordingly he urged the Massachusetts men to consider “whether it will not be prudent for us to indulge the Mother Country in this concern for her own honour, so far as may be consistent with the preservation of our essential rights, especially as that honour may in some cases be of importance to the general welfare.”

  He perceived two possible outcomes should the colonies push to a test of British authority. “If we are not found equal, that authority will by the event be more strongly established.” Needless to say, this would not conduce to the welfare of America. But neither, necessarily, would the other outcome. “If we should prove superior, yet by the division the general strength of the British nation must be greatly diminished.”

  Although Franklin refrained from offering explicit advice to Massachusetts, his inclination was clear. He suggested that it would “be better gradually to wear off the assumed authority of Parliament over America” than to mount a direct challenge. Moreover, Americans should remember that Parliament was not the entire British government. “I wish to see a steady dutiful attachment to the King and his family maintained among us.”

  Predictably, Franklin’s espousal of moderation failed to satisfy those holding more radical views. Arthur Lee disputed Franklin’s politics; he apparently also resented Franklin’s appointment as Massachusetts agent ahead of himself. From whatever amalgam of politics and pique, Lee launched a one-man campaign to discredit Franklin and undermine his influence.

  Sam Adams presumably required little convincing, but Lee provided plenty. “I have read lately in your papers an assurance from Dr. Franklin that all designs against the charter of the colony are laid aside,” Lee wrote Adams from London. “This is just what I expected of him, and if it be true, the Dr. is not the dupe but the instrument of Lord Hillsborough’s treachery.” On sudden second thought, Lee dismissed the notion of Franklin as dupe, for “notorious as he [Hillsborough] is for ill faith and fraud, his duplicity would not impose on one possessed of half Dr. F.’s sagacity.” Whatever Franklin might write to the House of Representatives, his interests—and therefore his intentions—lay elsewhere. “The possession of a profitable office at will, the having a son in a high post at pleasure, the grand purpose of his residence here being to effect a change in the government of Pennsylvania, for which administration must be cultivated and courted, are circumstances which, joined with the temporising conduct he has always held in American affairs, preclude every rational hope that in an open contest between an oppressive administration and a free people, Dr. F. can be a faithful advocate for the latter.” Calling Franklin a “false friend,” Lee said he himself would gladly serve as Massachusetts’s agent for nothing “rather than you and America, at a time like this, should be betrayed by a man who, it is hardly in the nature of things to suppose, can be faithful to his trust.”

  Doubtless Lee intended to damage Franklin with this letter. If so, he was disappointed. Adams, intentionally or ot
herwise, allowed an unsigned copy of the letter to reach Thomas Cushing, Franklin’s sponsor in the Massachusetts House. Cushing showed the letter to Samuel Cooper, who, on the basis of conversation with Cushing and others, assured his friend, “It will make no impression to your disadvantage, while it shows the baseness of its author.”

  By this period Franklin’s summer travel had become a fixed habit, the closest thing to a religious practice in a man who observed no sectarian rituals. He was convinced that his annual escape from the smoke and congestion of London, combined with the stimulation of seeing new places, people, and things, was what kept him in the surprisingly good health he enjoyed for a sexagenarian. “I imagine I should have fallen to pieces long since but for that practice,” he told Joseph Galloway.

  In 1771 his vacation was more extended than usual and came in multiple installments. At the end of May he toured the north of England, where the industrial revolution was well under way. The high point of the trip was a boat ride on a canal that crossed a river via an aqueduct, so that to travelers below, the canal boat appeared to be plying the sky. The low point—relative to topography—occurred on this same canal, at a place where it penetrated the earth far into a coal mine, from which that essential fuel was dug and loaded into canal boats and hauled to Manchester. Franklin saw an ironworks near Rotherham, which impressed him with the ingenuity of its design. “It appeared particularly odd,” wrote Jonathan Williams, one of Franklin’s fellow travelers, “to see a small river of liquid iron running from the furnace into the reservoir and from thence carried in ladles like hot broth.” At Derby they toured a silk works, of which Franklin, who was still promoting the production of silk in America, took special notice. A single powered shaft drove, via pulleys and belts, scores of smaller shafts, which culminated in thousands of reels. Much of the process was tended by children “of about 5 or 7 years old,” according to Williams. At Birmingham they saw the famous metal-works of Matthew Boulton. Seven hundred persons, including women and children, fabricated all manner of products, from farthing buttons to hundred-guinea ornaments. The noise, the pace of the process, and the sheer audacity of the undertaking were overwhelming. “It is almost impossible for the strongest memory to retain it,” wrote Williams.