The First American

by H. W. Brands

  The five measures together were called the “Intolerable Acts” in America, for after everything else of the previous decade, they seemed more than the Americans could bear. Even before the last of the laws was enacted, committees of correspondence in the colonies were writing furiously, dispatching messages up and down the Atlantic Coast, calling on the assemblies and people of the separate provinces to join forces against this latest usurpation. The Intolerable Acts fell most heavily on Massachusetts, of course, but what Parliament and the Crown could do to Massachusetts, they could do to the other colonies.

  Virginia thought so; the House of Burgesses there, led by Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, declared that Boston was suffering a “hostile invasion.” In a touch doubtless appreciated in Puritan Boston, the Virginia assembly denominated June 1, 1774, as a “day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, devoutly to implore the divine interposition for averting the heavy calamity which threatens the destruction to our civil rights, and the evils of civil war.”

  During the weeks that followed, one colony after another selected delegates to a continental convention. In some cases the regular assemblies did the choosing; where royal governors attempted to derail the process by dissolving the assemblies, extraordinary bodies supplied the names. Pennsylvania offered to host the convention; September was set for the time, and Philadelphia for the place.

  Franklin half expected to be home in time for the gathering. His two hours in the Cockpit erased what thoughts remained of retiring to England. He still had friends in Britain; he hoped he always would. But that part of imperial politics he had been able to put aside as superficial—the place-mongering, partisanship, sheer personal nastiness—he now saw as the central theme of London life. What had appealed about England was its intellectual openness, the opportunities it afforded to share ideas with men (and the occasional woman, such as Polly Stevenson) of curiosity, ingenuity, and a willingness to challenge received wisdom. But there was nothing open about a system determined to stifle the most fundamental liberties of a large portion of its people simply because they lived across the ocean.

  Franklin was no stranger to political abuse; the proprietary party in Pennsylvania had circulated slanders petty and grand against him for years. But until now—and this had been one aspect of England’s appeal—those kinds of criticisms had gained little currency in London. The Penns muttered against him, of course, and Lord Hillsborough. But for the most part the British were courteous and respectful, even admiring.

  No longer. In the London papers he was assailed as “this old snake” and “the old veteran of mischief.” He was called a “traitor,” “old Doubleface,” a “grand incendiary,” the “living emblem of iniquity in grey hairs.” His living quarters became “Judas’s office in Craven Street”; in that place were conceived and hatched his “vindictive subtlety, watchfulness, and politician tricks.” To his face—Franklin was in the gallery—Lord Sandwich castigated him before the House of Lords as “one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies” Britain had ever known.

  Franklin took the slanders for what they were worth. “You know that in England there is every day in almost every paper some abuse on public persons of all parties,” he wrote an Austrian acquaintance. “The King himself does not always escape; and the populace, who are used to it, love to have a good character cut up now and then for their entertainment.” He comforted himself that his friends were able to pierce the propaganda against him. “I do not find that I have lost a single friend on the occasion. All have visited me repeatedly with affectionate assurances of their unalterable respect and affection.”

  In fact things were not so simple. Franklin’s friends were indeed willing to give him the benefit of the doubt—but they did have their doubts. Joseph Priestley’s were fewer than most others’; he stood by Franklin, literally, in his hour of distress. Priestley described the denouement of the Cockpit scene:

  Dr. Franklin, in going out, took me by the hand, in a manner that indicated some feeling. I soon followed him, and going through the anteroom, saw Mr. Wedderburn there, surrounded with a circle of his friends and admirers. Being known to him, he stepped forwards as if to speak to me; but I turned aside, and made what haste I could out of the place.

  The next morning Priestley ate breakfast with Franklin and heard his friend’s reaction to events of the previous day. “He said he had never been so sensible of the power of a good conscience; for that if he had not considered the thing for which he had been so much insulted, as one of the best actions of his life, and what he should certainly do again in the same circumstances, he could not have supported it.”

  David Hume was not present for Wedderburn’s performance, but he heard all about the Hutchinson affair. He wanted to believe the best of Franklin yet found it difficult. He wrote William Strahan:

  I hope you can tell me something in justification, at least in alleviation, of Dr. Franklin’s conduct. The factious part he has all along acted must be given up by his best friends. But I flatter myself there is nothing treacherous or unfair in his conduct; though his silence with regard to the method by which he came by these letters leaves room for all sorts of malignant surmizes. What a pity, that a man of his merit should have fallen into such unhappy circumstances!

  Hume added an anecdote he thought applicable to the case of Franklin and America. Hume had been visiting the Earl of Bathurst, whose son was currently Lord Chancellor. Discussion turned to America, and the authority formerly exercised over the colonies.

  I observed to them that nations, as well as individuals, had their different ages, which challenged a different treatment. For instance, My Lord, I said to the old Peer, you have sometimes, no doubt, given your son a whipping; and I doubt not but it was well merited and did him much good. Yet you will not think it proper at present to employ the birch. The colonies are no longer in their infancy. But yet I say to you, they are still in their nonage, and Dr. Franklin wishes to emancipate them too soon from their mother country.

  John Pringle defended Franklin against Hume’s aspersions. “I think your notion of his being naturally of a factious disposition unjust,” he wrote Hume. Yet the physician did not defend everything his erstwhile traveling partner had done. “I do not dispute his being carried by zeal for his country, and for the better serving those who employed him, to do things which cannot be easily justified.” Pringle considered himself one of Franklin’s closer friends; he was struck that during the whole Hutchinson affair Franklin had not uttered a single word to him on the subject. Pringle thought this confidentiality a fault, one that had led to the current imbroglio. “He could have advised with no mortal of common sense and common delicacy but who must have dissuaded him from availing himself in that manner of a private correspondence between two friends, much less transmitting of those letters.”

  Having said this, Pringle again defended Franklin’s motives. “I must do him the justice to say that as long as there was any prospect (at least in his eyes) of accommodation, he laboured to bring it about; and that if his advice had been taken, all this mischief would have been prevented, and England and her colonies had been again on the best terms possible.” Hume had registered a belief that the Americans had been searching for a pretext for rebellion against the mother country; Pringle disputed this, especially as it applied to Franklin. “I can witness for our friend that, for the first seven years he was amongst us, I never heard a word intimating any thing else than a perfect satisfaction in the happiness the colonies enjoyed in the state they were in. And this sentiment continued with him and them until the unlucky act of Mr. Grenville [that is, the Stamp Act].”

  Horace Walpole, a rather more distant observer, concurred that Franklin had been badly treated. Describing Wedderburn’s speech as “most bitter and abusive,” yet “much admired” by those present, Walpole continued, “The Ministry determined to turn Franklin out of his place of postmaster of America, which could but incense him and drive him (a man of vast
abilities) on farther hostilities, and recommend him as a martyr to the Bostonians.” (The editor of Walpole’s journal subsequently appended his own comment on the Cockpit scene, calling it “a capital one in giving date to the American war.”)

  Edmund Burke shook his head at the fatuity of the entire affair. And as it became clear that the mind-set of Wedderburn characterized that of the government, Burke observed, “A great empire and little minds go ill together.”

  “Your popularity in this country, whatever it may be on the other side, is greatly beyond whatever it was,” William wrote his father from America. Popular evidence certainly indicated as much. Indignant crowds carried effigies of Wedderburn and Hutchinson through the streets of Philadelphia; the tag on the Wedderburn figure read, “Such horrid monsters are a disgrace to human nature, and justly merit our utmost detestation and the gallows, to which they are assigned, and then burnt by ELECTRIC FIRE.”

  Franklin was gratified at the support, but he was more interested in what it was leading to. “I rejoice to find that the whole Continent have so justly, wisely, and unanimously taken up our cause as their own,” he told Thomas Cushing as the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia. Even now Franklin hoped history might be rescued from those who would foolishly wreck the empire. “I have been taking pains among them to show the mischief that must arise to the whole from a dismembering of the empire, which all the measures of the present mad Administration have a tendency to accomplish.” The Philadelphia meeting was what kept him in London. “Much depends on the proceedings of the Congress. All sides are enquiring when an account of them may be expected. And I am advised by no means to leave England till they arrive.” Those advising him not to leave gave him cause for optimism, which he passed along to Cushing. Referring to the resolutions expected from the Congress, he predicted, “Their unanimity and firmness will have great weight here, and probably unhorse the present wild riders.”

  If he allowed himself some small hope, it came not at the expense of his determination. Indeed, his views hardened with the passing months. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Tea Party he had argued for compensation to the East India Company as a magnanimous gesture, but now that the British government was insisting, he changed his mind and counseled withholding that satisfaction. To a Boston merchant (who happened to be married to Franklin’s niece) he urged steadfastness: “If you should ever tamely submit to the yoke prepared for you, you cannot conceive how much you will be despised here, even by those who are endeavouring to impose it on you. Your very children and grandchildren will curse your memories for entailing disgrace upon them and theirs, and making them ashamed to own their country.”

  He suffered no illusions as to the stakes of the game. If the British government failed to respond to reason, war was a real possibility, if not indeed a likelihood. General Gage had replaced Thomas Hutchinson as governor of Massachusetts; the military grip was tightening. “I am in perpetual anxiety lest the mad measure of mixing soldiers among a people whose minds are in such a state of irritation may be attended with some sudden mischief,” Franklin told Cushing. “For an accidental quarrel, a personal insult, an imprudent order, an insolent execution of even a prudent one, or 20 other things, may produce a tumult, unforeseen, and therefore impossible to be prevented, in which such a carnage may ensue as to make a breach that can never afterwards be healed.”

  His own personal welfare was in jeopardy. “My situation here is thought by many to be a little hazardous,” he said, “for that if by some accident the troops and people of N[ew] E[ngland] should come to blows I should probably be taken up, the ministerial people here affecting every where to represent me as the cause of all the misunderstanding.” Friends advised his departure. But he would accept the risk, and stay till the outcome of the Continental Congress was known.

  In fact he stayed longer. There was nothing new in Franklin’s lingering in London; he had been doing that for nearly two decades. But this time he really wanted to leave. He would have, but for an unusual chess match with an unexpected outcome.

  In November 1774 Franklin heard from one of his fellows in the Royal Society that a certain distinguished lady, the sister of Lord Howe, had taken a fancy to the notion of playing chess with the famous Dr. Franklin. Though the good doctor was celebrated throughout Europe for his keen mind and quick imagination, she believed she could beat him. Would he accept the challenge?

  Franklin replied that he was far out of practice, not having played the game regularly for many years. But in light of the honor the lady did him in issuing the challenge, he would accept.

  Splendid, said the go-between. Dr. Franklin should call on the lady at earliest convenience. No further introduction was required.

  Franklin made plans to visit Mrs. Howe (who had married a cousin, also named Howe, thus keeping the name in the family). But feeling rather awkward about presenting himself on her doorstep, he put off the match. Only after the mutual acquaintance reiterated the invitation and escorted Franklin to her door did the contest take place.

  It proved a very agreeable affair. They played a few games; from modesty or otherwise, Franklin did not record who won. He enjoyed himself; she, herself. They arranged to meet again.

  At the second session they played again, with as much pleasure as before. Then Mrs. Howe directed the conversation to a mathematical problem she had been considering. Franklin, impressed, pursued the matter.

  The lady changed the subject once more. “What is to be done with this dispute between Britain and the colonies?” she asked (in Franklin’s reconstruction of the conversation). “I hope we are not to have civil war. They should kiss and be friends.” She said she had long believed the government ought to employ the distinguished doctor to settle the quarrel. “I am sure nobody could do it so well. Don’t you think the thing is practicable?”

  “Undoubtedly, madam,” Franklin responded, “if the parties are disposed to reconciliation. For the two countries have really no clashing interest to differ about. It is rather a matter of punctilio, which two or three reasonable people might settle in half an hour. I thank you for the good opinion you are pleased to express of me; but the ministers will never think of employing me in that good work. They choose rather to abuse me.”

  Mrs. Howe agreed with this last comment. “They have behaved shamefully to you. And indeed some of them are now ashamed of it themselves.”

  At the time, Franklin considered these remarks simply accidental conversation and thought no more of it. On his next visit, however, the relationship acquired a new wrinkle. The day happened to be Christmas; Mrs. Howe happened to be joined by her brother, who was most interested in making Dr. Franklin’s acquaintance. Lord Howe followed his sister in regretting the disgraceful treatment Franklin had suffered at the hands of the government. Yet in light of the alarming situation with regard to America, Howe hoped personal resentments might be put aside in the interest of attempting reconciliation.

  Franklin responded that, whatever the injuries he personally had suffered, those done his country were so much greater as to put the other in shadow. “Besides,” he said, “it is a fixed rule with me not to mix my private affairs with those of the public. I could join with my personal enemy in serving the public, or, when it was for its interest, with the public in serving that enemy.” He would be happy to explore the prospect of reconciliation, but the prospect appeared quite slim. The government seemed as set as ever on the course that had led to all the troubles. Until that changed, there was little to discuss.

  Franklin expected this to dampen his lordship’s interest, but it did not. Howe hinted at discontent in the government; some of the ministers were in fact quite favorably disposed to any reasonable settlement that would allow saving the government’s dignity. He requested Franklin to prepare a document delineating terms to which the colonies might be disposed to agree. He added that under other circumstances he would be delighted to call on the doctor at his home in Craven Street or to have the doct
or come to his house, but such open meetings might inspire speculation, which could be only detrimental to discussion. They probably ought to continue to meet at Mrs. Howe’s, where the chess matches could provide cover.

  Agreeing, Franklin determined to test the waters of conciliation himself. Some months earlier he had spoken with Lord Chatham, who as William Pitt had been more responsible than any other man for creating the current empire. Not surprisingly, the earl was distressed to see his successors bent on frittering it away. The Continental Congress was about to meet; Chatham requested Franklin apprise him as soon as he learned what the Congress accomplished.

  The news had arrived just before Franklin’s surprise meeting with Lord Howe. The Americans were as steadfast and united as Franklin had hoped. The Congress condemned the Intolerable Acts and the assorted other encroachments by Parliament on the rights of Americans, reasserted the exclusive authority of the colonial legislatures to make laws for the colonies, and revived nonimportation. At the same time, however, the Congress reiterated American allegiance to the Crown.

  Franklin took the news to Chatham the day after Christmas. “He received me with an affectionate kind of respect that from so great a man was extremely engaging. But the opinion he expressed of the Congress was still more so. They had acted, he said, with so much temper, moderation and wisdom that he thought it the most honourable assembly of statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the most virtuous times.” Chatham inquired of Franklin whether the colonies would support the resolutions of the Congress. Franklin said they would—which answer increased the earl’s respect for America even further. “He expressed a great regard and warm affection for that country, with hearty wishes for their prosperity; and that Government here might soon come to see its mistakes and rectify them.”