The First American

by H. W. Brands

  A captain in the Royal Navy, stationed at Portsmouth, heard of Franklin’s design and invited him to come test it. Accordingly, on a day in October 1772 when the wind was blowing toward the shore, a crew was sent out in a longboat beyond the breakers, there to pour oil from a large stone bottle onto the water. A team of observers was specially chosen to observe the waves and determine whether they diminished after application of the oil.

  “The experiment had not in the main the success we wished, for no material difference was observed in the height or force of the surf upon the shore,” Franklin explained to an interested friend. Yet the oil did smooth the water somewhat behind the longboat, rendering the surface there largely immune to roughening by the brisk wind.

  And in this Franklin saw both the cause for the present failure and the reason for success on smaller bodies of water. Waves on water, he said, resulted from friction between windy air and the surface of the water. Oil acted as a lubricant between air and water, diminishing the friction and the wave-raising power of the wind. On a pond, the entire surface might be covered with oil, entirely depriving the wind of its purchase and allowing a complete stilling. On the ocean, needless to say, any such comprehensive covering was out of the question; the waves that broke on the shore acquired their momentum long before encountering the oil from the longboat.

  “It may be of use to relate the circumstances even of an experiment that does not succeed, since they may give hints of amendment in future trials,” Franklin remarked. He went on to suggest just such amendment. “If we had begun our operations at a greater distance [from shore], the effect might have been more sensible. And perhaps we did not pour oil in sufficient quantity. Future experiments may determine this.”

  Franklin’s simultaneous experiments in pouring oil of the metaphorical sort on politically troubled waters were even less successful, and for a similar reason: the waves were originating beyond his reach.

  Much of the turbulence was transatlantic. On their face, the affairs of the colonies were more placid than for some years. Franklin’s advocacy of continued nonimportation failed to persuade most American merchants, who decided to accept the partial victory of the partial repeal of the Townshend duties and retreat to a partial embargo—of tea, the still-dutied item. Boston held out longer for nonimportation than New York and Philadelphia, but finally Boston too abandoned the beyond-tea embargo. By then the furor over the Boston Massacre had quieted as well, partly because Governor Hutchinson nodded to prudence and withdrew the British troops from the city proper to island quarters in the harbor, and partly because the soldiers involved in the shooting were brought to trial. If Captain Preston and the others were initially nervous that their defense was directed by the well-known patriot John Adams, they could not complain at the verdict: Preston and six of his men were acquitted of all charges; the remaining two were found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder and were released with a brand on the hand. “There seems now to be a pause in politics,” Samuel Cooper wrote Franklin on the first day of 1771.

  But a pause was not a halt, and beneath the surface calm, deep trouble impended. On the fundamental issue of constitutional relations, the Americans and the British were further apart than ever. Parliament claimed the right to legislate in all matters for the Americans; the American assemblies denied that right, with increasing fervor. At the moment Parliamentary rule rode lightly on American shoulders; but for the tax on tea they were choosing not to drink, the colonists hardly noticed. Yet the Declaratory Act remained on the statute books, and while it did it threatened to be the rock on which the empire would break.

  Other sources of trouble were closer to Franklin’s current residence but hardly more within his reach. After Hillsborough’s unexpected hospitality in Ireland, Franklin decided to test the secretary’s good faith. “When I had been a little while returned to London,” he informed William, “I waited on him to thank him for his civilities in Ireland, and to discourse with him on a Georgia affair.” It was as though the Irish interlude had never happened. “The porter told me he was not at home. I left my card, went another time, and received the same answer, though I knew he was at home, a friend of mine being with him. After intermissions of a week each, I made two more visits, and received the same answer.” The last occasion was a levee day, when a row of carriages lined the lane by Hillsborough’s door. “My coachman driving up, alighted and was opening the coach door, when the porter, seeing me, came out, and surlily chid my coachman for opening the door before he had enquired whether my lord was at home; and then turning to me, said, ‘My lord is not at home.’” Franklin concluded that whatever had motivated the secretary’s superficial kindness in Ireland had already failed. “As Lord Hillsborough in fact got nothing out of me, I should rather suppose he threw me away as an orange that would yield no juice, and therefore not worth more squeezing.”

  Yet it was Hillsborough who was thrown away, not many months later. And though Franklin was hardly responsible, those who were responsible were allies of Franklin, which afforded Franklin fleeting satisfaction and Hillsborough lasting distress.

  Unfortunately—to Franklin’s way of thinking—the issue that brought Hillsborough down was not the central one of constitutionalism but the peripheral one of land. Since falling out with Hillsborough in 1770, Franklin had retreated to the rear of efforts by the Walpole Company to win its western bonanza. Franklin had always been a small player in this large game; his value to the bigger bettors was the influence he wielded among those who could make the project or break it. By alienating Hillsborough he lost what influence he possessed; discretion dictated he step back.

  Yet Hillsborough himself was alienating many people, as Franklin saw, and this group included some who took a growing interest in the Walpole Company. The prospective Ohio grandees infiltrated the government by the tested means of offering shares to ministers and friends of ministers. Hillsborough still opposed the scheme, but he was outmaneuvered, and when the Walpole-friendly Privy Council overruled Hillsborough’s Board of Trade and approved the land grant, the secretary of state (and president of the board) resigned.

  “At length we have got rid of Lord Hillsborough,” Franklin reported to William. Franklin conceded that the Walpole question was the proximate cause of the secretary’s downfall, but the ultimate cause was Hillsborough’s lack of friends, and excess of enemies, among his fellow ministers. Nor did his troubles stop there. “The King too was tired of him, and of his administration, which had weakened the affection and respect of the colonies for a royal government”—here Franklin could not resist a little self-congratulation, adding, “with which (I may say to you) I used proper means from time to time that his Majesty should have due information and convincing proofs.”

  After Hillsborough anyone would have been an improvement. Lord Dartmouth certainly seemed so. The new secretary of state indicated that he much admired Franklin, and at an early levee made a special point of greeting Franklin ahead of a crowd of others. He said nothing about Franklin’s not having the approval of the Massachusetts governor but treated him like any fully accredited agent. “I hope business is getting into better train,” Franklin told Thomas Cushing.

  Better—but still not good. In November 1772 Franklin presented Dartmouth a petition from Massachusetts complaining at the Crown’s paying the salary of the Massachusetts governor. A few days later Dartmouth summoned Franklin to discuss the matter. In tones Franklin found reasonable and ultimately persuasive, the secretary of state explained that the present was a poor season for forwarding such a petition. The king would be offended. He might turn it over to his lawyers; if he did, they would deliver an adverse opinion. If he handed it to Parliament, that body almost certainly would censure the province—which in turn would produce more unrest there. Dartmouth professed great goodwill for New England and said he did not wish the first act of his administration to be one that led to unavoidable dissatisfaction there. When Franklin interjected that it would be a dangerous t
hing for the government to deny the people the right of petition, Dartmouth responded that Franklin misunderstood. As a government minister he was not refusing the Massachusetts petition, and if Franklin insisted, he would receive it. But as a friend of America he hoped Franklin would reconsider whether he really wished to insist just now. Perhaps he could consult once more with the Massachusetts House. After all, since the petition was initially ordered, there had been a change in the administration in London. The responsible thing would be to confirm that the Massachusetts body still desired to go forward.

  “Upon the whole I thought it best not to disoblige him in the beginning of his administration,” Franklin told Thomas Cushing, by way of explaining why in fact he was not going forward at once with the petition. The House ought to reconsider the matter and re-advise. “If after deliberation they should send me fresh orders, I shall immediately obey them.” The petition might well gain weight from the mere reconsideration. Sounding somewhat unsure of himself, Franklin added, “I hope my conduct will not be disapproved.”

  Franklin’s uncertainty probably reflected an understanding that his conduct would be disapproved, at least by such skeptics as Sam Adams and James Otis. From the start they had suspected him of being too easy on the ministry, and here he was meekly following Dartmouth’s lead. Quite likely a desire to show he was no minister’s tool contributed to the most fateful misstep of his career—fateful for both himself and the British empire.

  “There has lately fallen into my hands part of a correspondence that I have reason to believe laid the foundation of most if not all our present grievances.” This was Franklin writing to Cushing, in the same letter breaking the news that he was delaying the petition. Franklin declined to say how the correspondence fell into his hands, and in fact he never did say, to Cushing or to anyone else who recorded the information for posterity. The pilferage of mail was hardly unheard of; Franklin had some reason to think his own letters to America were being opened. One might have guessed that his many years as postmaster would have inspired a deep respect for the confidentiality of the mails; on the other hand, as Poor Richard and any number of other aphorists knew, familiarity breeds contempt. Moreover, the pragmatist in Franklin was never one to set airy principle above practical effect; if a peek beneath someone else’s seal could effect a reconciliation between the colonies and Britain, the sin would be venial and easily forgiven.

  The correspondence in question consisted of several letters by various authors written between 1767 and 1769. The most important authors were Thomas Hutchinson and his brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver. The offices of the two men—Massachusetts governor and lieutenant governor, respectively—were what gave the letters such interest, for the opinions expressed were no more inflammatory than many others emanating from Massachusetts at this time, and the authors’ views on constitutional relations between that colony and Britain paralleled the conventional wisdom of officials of the British government—among whom, of course, they numbered themselves. Yet at the same time they spoke as Massachusetts men, which of course they also were and were so understood in England to be. This was what galled Franklin, and doubtless what moved him to forward the letters to Cushing.

  The gist of the letters was that the troubles in America reflected no broad disaffection but simply the political perversions of a minority. The most damning passage—damning in the eyes of American patriots—was one written by Hutchinson in January 1769 outlining the measures he judged necessary to restore order and respect for government in Massachusetts.

  There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties. I relieve myself by considering that in a remove from the state of nature to the most perfect state of government there must be a great restraint of natural liberty. I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony 3000 miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy all the liberty of the parent state. I am certain I have never yet seen the projection. I wish the good of the colony when I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connexion with the parent state should be broken; for I am sure such a breach must prove the ruin of the colony.

  In forwarding the letters to Cushing, Franklin still sought reconciliation. He hoped to show that the oppressive policies lately pursued by the British government were the result of evil counsel from an identifiable source—namely Hutchinson and Oliver—and not the consequence of a general conspiracy in England against American liberty. The malicious influence of the two men could be countered and neutralized, and the situation corrected.

  Franklin understood the delicacy of what he was doing, and when he passed the correspondence to Cushing, he included a proviso: “I have engaged that it shall not be printed, nor any copies taken of the whole or any part of it; but I am allowed and desired to let it be seen by some men of worth in the province for their satisfaction only.” He expected the letters back after “some months in your possession”; presumably he would return them to his source.

  Franklin did not deal in stolen goods without compunction. But Hutchinson and Oliver had crossed the line. For years they had been “bartering away the liberties of their native country for posts”—it was not lost on Franklin, nor did he want it lost on Cushing and the others in Massachusetts, that Hutchinson and Oliver had gained their present positions after these letters reached Britain. As part of the bargain the two received increases in their salaries and pensions, “for which the money is to be squeezed from the people.” The people naturally resisted; to suppress the resistance, and preserve their ill-gotten gains, Hutchinson and Oliver summoned British troops, conjuring “imaginary rebellions” and “exciting jealousies in the Crown, and provoking it to wrath against a great part of its faithful subjects.” In sum, the malign pair had shown themselves “mere time-servers, seeking their own private emolument through any quantity of public mischief; betrayers of the interest, not of their native country only, but of the Government they pretend to serve, and of whole English Empire.”

  So angry was Franklin that he wanted the world to know of the duplicity of the governor and lieutenant governor. “I therefore wish I was at liberty to make the letters public.” But his source insisted he not. “I can only allow them to be seen by yourself,” he told Cushing, “by the other gentlemen of the Committee of Correspondence, by Messrs. Bowdoin and Pitts, of the Council, and Drs. Chauncey, Cooper and Winthrop, with a few such other gentlemen as you may think fit to show them to.”

  Franklin was no innocent in the political arts. He understood how valuable the letters of Hutchinson and Oliver would be to their many opponents in the Massachusetts House, a group that included those Franklin named. He must have expected that the letters would find the light of New England day even if his own promise precluded their publication in old England. By his own statement, he would have published them himself had he been free. Indeed, Cushing might easily have read Franklin’s statement as implicit permission to publish.

  Apparently Cushing did not, for the speaker treated the letters circumspectly. Others, however, felt less constrained. It may have been John Hancock who laid the letters before the House; it certainly was Sam Adams who read them to the members. Shortly thereafter the House ordered the letters printed for members’ use. Soon they were available in pamphlet form and in installments in the Massachusetts Spy. Copies quickly found their way all over the colony.

  In Franklin’s correspondence and apparently in his feelings during this period occurred a curious reversion. The boy who at seventeen had eagerly shaken the dust of Boston from his shoes found himself at sixty-seven reidentifying with the city of his birth. Had Franklin reflected on the matter he might have detected an underlying consistency, for the rebel who left Boston for its being too conservative now returned to Boston when the city itself grew rebellious. For the first twenty years of his political life Franklin had fought the powers that be in Pennsylvania; now that the contest with Parliament had superseded the struggle with the Penns, he transferred h
is emotional loyalties to the liveliest fight going, between Boston and London.

  Yet Philadelphia continued to exercise a hold. Various people and events recalled what tied him to his adopted city. In late 1771 Franklin finally met Richard Bache, who was visiting his parents at Preston. Bache experienced more than the usual trepidation of the son-in-law upon encountering his wife’s father, for the father in this case was not merely a world-famous figure but also a stern sire who had left no doubt as to his opposition to the marriage. Yet Debbie had been working on Franklin, as had Mrs. Stevenson and Polly (now Polly Stevenson Hewson). They might have suggested, or Bache perhaps reckoned on his own, that he would make his best appearance among friends and family; from this followed an invitation to Franklin during his northern tour to stop at the Bache family home in Yorkshire. Richard Bache joined them there.

  His sigh of relief was audible clear back to Philadelphia. “I can now, with great satisfaction, tell you that he received me with open arms and with a degree of affection that I did not expect to be made sensible of at our first meeting,” Bache wrote Debbie.

  The younger man accompanied the elder on the return to London. During the journey Franklin grew to like Bache. “His behaviour here has been very agreeable to me,” Franklin told Debbie. He also gave Bache some advice, which he—Franklin—shared with Sally in a letter. “I advised him to settle down to business in Philadelphia where he will always be close to you.” This might have seemed odd coming from a husband who had spent less than two years of the last fifteen on the same continent with his own wife, but perhaps no odder than an additional pearl—from the king’s postmaster of thirty-five years—about eschewing public office. “I am of opinion that almost any profession a man has been educated in is preferable to an office held at pleasure, as rendering him more independent, more a freeman less subject to the caprices of superiors.” In this letter he urged Sally and her husband to be industrious and frugal; that way whatever he and Debbie bequeathed them “may be a pretty addition, though of itself far from sufficient to maintain and bring up a family.” As a foretaste, however, of that pretty addition, and perhaps recalling how peace treaties with the Indians were always sealed with gifts, he told Sally he had given Bache £200, “with which I wish you good luck.”