The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Know then ’twas —I.

  I forged the letter, I disposed the picture;

  I hated, I despised, and I destroy.

  I ask, my Lords, whether the revengeful temper attributed, by poetic fiction only, to the bloody African, is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy [that is, lack of emotion] of the wily American.

  Wedderburn dissected and held up to gory scorn Franklin’s published argument that the letters somehow belonged in the public domain because they were written from public men to another public man on public issues. No, these were private missives, “as sacred and as precious to gentlemen of integrity as their family plate or jewels are.” Franklin had added the argument that the letters were intended to influence public policy. “Is this crime of so heinous a nature as to put Mr. Whately’s friends out of the common protection? And to give Dr. Franklin a right to hang them up to party rage, and to expose them, for what he knew, to the danger of having their houses a second time pulled down by popular fury?” Franklin had cited the fact that Hutchinson and Oliver desired to keep their letters secret as evidence that they had much to hide. “But if the desiring of secrecy be the proof, and the measure of guilt, what then are we to think of Dr. Franklin’s case, whose whole conduct in this affair has been secret and mysterious, and who through the whole course of it has discovered the utmost solicitude to keep it so?”

  Wedderburn reiterated the argument made by the government (and by Hutchinson and Oliver) that the unrest in America was not the work of ordinary people—“these innocent, well-meaning farmers, which compose the bulk of the Assembly,” Wedderburn said—but of self-serving conspirators, of whom Franklin was the “first mover and prime conductor” (Wedderburn liked this phrase enough to repeat it), the “actor and secret spring,” and the “inventor and first planner.”

  My Lords, we are perpetually told of men’s incensing the mother country against the colonies, of which I have never known a single instance. But we hear nothing of the vast variety of arts which have been made use of to incense the colonies against the mother country. And in all these arts no one I fear has been a more successful proficient than the very man who now stands forth as Mr. Hutchinson’s accuser. My Lords, as he has been pleased in his own letter to avow this accusation, I shall now return the charge, and shew to your Lordships who it is that is the true incendiary, and who is the great abettor of that faction at Boston which, in the form of a Committee of Correspondence, have been inflaming the whole province against his Majesty’s government.

  Wedderburn linked Franklin to Sam Adams, and Adams to the effort to forge a united front against Parliament by the circulation of “an inflammatory letter sounding an alarm of a plan of despotism, with which the Administration and the Parliament intended to enslave them, and threatened them with certain and inevitable destruction.” This letter was accompanied by a pamphlet designed to incite the ordinary people still further. “It told them a hundred rights of which they never had heard before, and a hundred grievances which they never before had felt.” Franklin and Adams did their work well; the townships of Massachusetts responded as if on cue, with resolves like none ever seen. “They are full of the most extravagant absurdities, such as the most enthusiastic rants of the wildest of my countrymen in Charles the Second’s days cannot equal.” Not least of the absurdities was the treasonous assertion of desire to call in foreign powers to rectify imagined injuries perpetrated by Parliament against the people of New England. “These are the lessons taught in Dr. Franklin’s school of politics.”

  What was the purpose of the conspirators in attacking Governor Hutchinson? “To establish their power, and make all future governors bow to their authority. They wish to erect themselves into a tyranny greater than the Roman; to be able, sitting in their own secret cabal, to dictate for the Assembly, and send away their verbosa et grandis epístola, and get even a virtuous Governor dragged from his seat, and made the sport of a Boston mob.” The destructive capacities of Boston mobs were most lately revealed in the destruction of the tea cargoes of the three British vessels lying peacefully in Boston’s harbor.

  For Franklin the prize was more specific: the governorship for himself. Wedderburn conceded that their lordships might find this hard to believe. “But nothing, surely, but a too eager attention to an ambition of this sort could have betrayed a wise man into such a conduct as we have now seen.” Wedderburn offered no real evidence on this point; their lordships would have to judge for themselves. But they should surely keep the possibility in mind in weighing the issue at hand. “I hope that Mr. Hutchinson will not meet with the less countenance from your Lordships for his rival’s being his accuser. Nor will your Lordships, I trust, from what you have heard, advise the having Mr. Hutchinson replaced, in order to make room for Dr. Franklin as a successor.”

  Through all of this Franklin remained silent. The audience, including many of the lords, laughed and cheered at the solicitor’s slashing assault on Franklin’s behavior and character, but the object of the day’s entertainment stood before his accuser betraying not the slightest emotion. “The Doctor was dressed in a full dress suit of spotted Manchester velvet,” Edward Bancroft recalled, “and stood conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed, so as to afford a placid tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear during the continuance of the speech in which he was so harshly and improperly treated.” He appeared, Bancroft said, “as if his features had been made of wood.”

  Franklin maintained his stoic silence after Wedderburn ended his tirade. Understanding the nature of the proceeding, he refused to rebut the solicitor or to answer his questions. John Dunning, his counsel, started to reply to Wedderburn but, unable to speak above a croaking whisper, had to stop. Franklin made no effort to speak for him—that is, for himself. He preferred not to dignify Wedderburn’s diatribe with a response, confident that honest men would appreciate the unfairness of the situation into which he had been thrust. At present honest men seemed in short supply; the Privy Council sneeringly rejected the Massachusetts petition as baseless and intended only “for the seditious purpose of keeping up a spirit of clamour and discontent.” The Lord President thereupon adjourned the session.

  The government shortly added the expected sanction. Within forty-eight hours of his session in the Cockpit, Franklin received notice of his dismissal as deputy postmaster. Although anticipated, this move struck Franklin as both unfair to one who had built the American post from nothing to an efficient and profitable operation, and symptomatic of the wicked folly of a government that would cut off its nose to spite its face.

  The entire business outraged Franklin. He normally made it a point of pride to keep his emotions clear of his pen; he almost always composed himself before composing. But more than two weeks after his encounter with Wedderburn and the Privy Council, he told Thomas Cushing bluntly, “I am very angry.” His anger was both personal and political. Of the former he declined to speak, even to Cushing, lest his remarks “should be thought the effects of resentment and a desire of exasperating.” But he went on, “What I feel on my own account is half lost”—but only half lost—“in what I feel for the public. When I see that all petitions and complaints of grievances are so odious to government that even the mere pipe which conveys them becomes obnoxious, I am at a loss to know how peace and union is to be maintained or restored between the different parts of the empire. Grievances cannot be redressed unless they are known; and they cannot be known but through complaints and petitions. If these are deemed affronts, and the messengers punished as offenders, who will henceforth send petitions? And who will deliver them?” Wise governments encouraged the airing of grievances, even those that were lightly founded. Foolish governments did the opposite—to their peril. “Where complaining is a crime, hope becomes despair.”

  And Franklin, treated as a criminal for complaining, had reached the point
of despair. There was nothing for honest Americans in the empire but illegitimate insult and unwarranted condemnation. Franklin wrote William with information and advice:

  This line is just to acquaint you that I am well, and that my office of Deputy-Postmaster is taken from me.

  As there is no prospect of your being ever promoted to a better government [that is, a more lucrative governorship], and that you hold has never defrayed its expenses, I wish you were settled in your farm. ’tis an honester and a more honourable because a more independent employment.

  You will hear from others the treatment I have received. I leave you to your own reflections and determinations upon it.

  William might well have read this as encouragement to resign his post; Franklin might well have intended it so. Two weeks later Franklin wrote to Richard Bache, who evidently had hoped to use his father-in-law’s connections to gain employment for himself. Franklin said that those connections now no longer existed, and hence no possibility of a post-office job. He added, “As things are, I would not wish to see you concerned in it. For I conceive that the dismissing me merely for not being corrupted by the office to betray the interests of my country will make it some disgrace among us to hold such an office.”

  Yet if resigning had been his message to William, he soon amended it. Not that he considered service under the Crown any more honorable than in the immediate aftermath of his Cockpit ordeal; he simply reverted to his previous philosophy of never resigning. William had been weighing a move from Burlington to Perth Amboy; Franklin told him to go slow incurring the expense of such a move, as the future of his governorship was in jeopardy. Some reports suggested that William would simply be dismissed, while others hinted at a more indirect approach by their mutual foes. “They may expect that your resentment of their treatment of me may induce you to resign, and save them the shame of depriving you whom they ought to promote.” Franklin went on, “But this I would not advise you to do. Let them take your place if they want it, though in truth I think it scarce worth your keeping…. One may make something of an injury, nothing of a resignation.”

  For himself, he thought he had already made something of his injury. He wrote to Jane Mecom, whose own money problems disposed her to worry about her brother in his loss of income, telling her not to be troubled. “You and I have almost finished the journey of life. We are now but a little way from home, and have enough in our pockets to pay the post chaises.” As for the principle involved, it was plainer than ever, to honest men if not to his enemies. “Intending to disgrace me, they have rather done me honour. No failure of duty in my office is alleged against me; such a fault I should have been ashamed of. But I am too much attached to the interests of America, and an opposer of the measures of Administration. The displacing me is therefore a testimony of my being uncorrupted.”

  The more he reflected on his situation, the more he understood the heart of the matter. To his partner in the American post office, John Foxcroft, he explained his dismissal in a sentence: “I am too much of an American.”

  As philosophical as he could be with relatives and friends, Franklin remained irate at those who were forcing this choice between America and Britain. They displayed their folly by word and deed, and though, as he told Cushing, he might have suffered their folly for his own sake, that folly was rending the empire. No man of public feeling could keep silent.

  In the London papers he struck back with scorn. “The admirers of Dr. Franklin in England are much shocked at Mr. Wedderburn’s calling him a thief,” he wrote in the Public Advertiser, over a signature no one present at the Cockpit hearing, or familiar with Wedderburn’s by-now-famous assault, could mistake: Homo Trium Litterarum. “But perhaps they will be less surprised at this circumstance when they are informed that his greatest admirers on the Continent agree in entertaining the same idea of him.” As evidence Franklin enclosed a poetical epigraph from Dubourg’s recently published Oeuvres de M. Franklin. “It will even be seen that foreigners represent him as much more impudent and audacious in his thefts than the English orator (though he was under no restraint from a regard to truth).” Franklin reproduced the stanza in French, then helpfully supplied a translation:

  To steal from Heaven its sacred fire he taught,

  The Arts to thrive in savage climes he brought

  In the New World the first of men esteemed;

  Among the Greeks a god he had been deemed.

  It was unlike Franklin to boast of his fame, particularly in such transparent manner, but after the abuse he had received from the Privy Council, he allowed himself this riposte. Who did these people think they were dealing with? What had Wedderburn, of these cribbed classical allusions, ever done besides extort office from his betters—or men who would have been his betters had they not lowered themselves to his level?

  In American papers he spoke at greater length. The Boston Gazette carried his unsigned account of the proceedings at the Cockpit. He explained how the counsel for the Massachusetts House had begun its presentation with propriety and decency, whereupon the solicitor general “totally departed from the question and was permitted to wander into a new case, the accusation of the person who merely delivered the petition.” The lords of the Privy Council disgraced themselves by their toleration of—indeed their conniving in—this astonishing performance. “Not a single lord checked and recalled this orator to the business before them; but on the contrary (a very few excepted) they seemed to enjoy highly the entertainment and frequently burst out into loud applause.”

  To what purpose this ad hominem attack? To wound Dr. Franklin’s character, and to distract attention from the issue at hand. As to the former design, the shaft missed its mark. “His character is not so vulnerable as they imagined.” As to the latter:

  Even supposing he had infamously obtained the letters, would that have altered the nature of them, their tendency and design? Would that have made them innocent? How weak and ridiculous is this?

  The truth is, the Doctor came by the letters honourably; his intention in sending them was virtuous: to lessen the breach between Britain and the colonies, by showing that the injuries complained of by one of them did not proceed from the other, but from traitors among themselves. The treason thus discovered, the conspirators were complained of. The agent is suffered to be abused by a solicitor; the complaint called—I had like to have said judged—false, vexatious, scandalous; and the complainers factious and seditious.

  The pain we feel on Dr. Franklin’s account is lost in what we feel for America and for Britain.

  The government had followed this shameful affair by dismissing Dr. Franklin from his position with the post office. Such action was discreditable in itself; it was even more pernicious in its prospect. Appointments to the post office—a service essential to all who lived in the colonies—were being held hostage to adherence to the policies of whatever ministry happened to hold power. Moreover, at a time when committees of correspondence in the several colonies were attempting to coordinate opposition to oppression, the very mails communicating those attempts were subject to surveillance by government placemen. “Behold Americans where matters are driving!”

  Where they were driving was hard against Boston and the liberty of Massachusetts. The Boston Tea Party had excited great wrath in England, a substantial portion of which had broken upon the head of Franklin. But more remained. King George, heretofore in the background on colonial issues, took a direct interest in the insurrectionary activity across the water. He called in General Gage—fresh from seeing Franklin being pilloried—for advice. The British commander-in-chief for America was esteemed an expert on the colonies; he urged vigorous measures. “He says they will be lions whilst we are lambs,” George recorded. “But if we take the resolute part, they will be very meek.” Lord North, hardly a truculent sort, concurred. “We are not entering into a dispute between internal and external taxes,” the prime minister declared, “not between taxes laid for the purpose of revenues and taxes laid f
or the regulation of trade, not between representation and taxation, or legislation and taxation; but we are now to dispute the question whether we have, or have not, any authority in that country.” He added, “If they deny authority in one instance, it goes to all; we must control them or submit to them.”

  Parliament agreed. It immediately passed the Boston Port Act, which closed the port of Boston to overseas trade (with tightly controlled exceptions for food and fuel). The closure would remain in force until the king decided to lift it, a decision that could not come before the East India Company had been compensated for its tea. Although the act threatened Massachusetts with economic strangulation—as Franklin, who had grown up in sight and sound of all those ships in Boston’s harbor, appreciated full well—it might have been worse, given the mood in London. Even Isaac Barré, who had opposed the Stamp Act and was generally thought a friend of America, offered his “hearty affirmative” for the port closure. Likening the protesters to wayward children, he told Parliament, “Boston ought to be punished.”

  Whether the acts that followed were more or less moderate depended on one’s point of view. The Massachusetts Government Act suspended the charter of the colony and granted the Crown much greater control over its affairs. The Administration of Justice Act allowed royal officials charged with certain crimes to be tried in England. The Quartering Act required private householders to take in troops upon the order of the British commanding officer. The Quebec Act—not a direct response to the Boston Tea Party but passed in the same atmosphere of disregard for American sensibilities—established a London-dominated civil government for Canada and extended the boundaries of Canada to the Ohio River, effectively vetoing claims of several of the existing colonies to the region.