Independence

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Independence Page 5

by John Ferling


  The American protest was aided by London’s clumsy early response to the colonial resistance. Wills Hill, Lord Hillsborough, the American secretary, ordered the dissolution of every assembly that endorsed Massachusetts’s Circular Letter. Hillsborough’s maladroit overreaction only fueled the American outcry. Pamphlets attacking British policy rolled off the colonial presses in 1768 in record numbers. The most influential was Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, written by John Dickinson, in reality a lawyer who lived in Delaware and probably never went near a plow or a pitchfork. Parliament had acted unconstitutionally, Dickinson wrote. It had no authority to levy any sort of tax on Americans—direct or indirect—as the colonists were not, and could never be, represented in a Parliament that met three thousand miles away. Unlike some, however, Dickinson did not suggest that Parliament had no authority over America. Despite the all-too-apparent contradiction in his argument, Dickinson conceded Parliament’s power to regulate imperial commerce, something that was “essential … and necessary for the common good of all” those living within the empire.40 Dickinson’s more moderate tone appealed to many who longed for accommodation with London.

  No one read Dickinson’s pamphlet more carefully than Franklin. The two were longtime political enemies, as Dickinson was the leader of the Proprietary Party in Pennsylvania, a faction that had come into being to resist the Franklin-Galloway initiative to royalize the province. Although Franklin did not entirely agree with Dickinson’s stance on imperial matters, he thought the conciliatory tone of Letters from a Farmer might offer a bridge toward an eventual solution to the Anglo-American quandary. He quietly arranged the publication of Dickinson’s tract in London.41 In fact, Franklin acted so covertly that Galloway was unaware of what his longtime political partner had done.

  If any Americans yearned for independence in 1768, Franklin was not among them. When Franklin told an acquaintance late that year that he “wish[ed] all prosperity to both” sides, he meant what he said. He still loved and trusted the king and praised him as “the very best in the world.”42 But there was more than that to his thinking. Having spent most of the past decade in England, Franklin desperately hoped for a settlement that would prevent an imperial clash, enabling him to live out his days in London. In Franklin’s time, those who escaped the perils of infancy and childhood had a reasonable chance of surviving into their sixties, though few lived much beyond age sixty-five. Franklin turned sixty-two in 1768.

  He loved London, a great cosmopolitan center and a city in which, as he said, he had “made many agreeable connections of friendship.”43 London offered convivial clubs and rich enticements for a man with insatiable social and intellectual appetites. The Continent was nearby, too, and Franklin had already traveled there twice, exploring France and Germany. But London had become his home, and it offered him much more than tiny Philadelphia.

  It even offered him at least as much female companionship as he had enjoyed at home. At age twenty-four, Franklin had entered into a common-law marriage with Deborah Read of Philadelphia. She had not been his first choice, but when his other courtships failed, Franklin turned to her. Franklin’s marriage—like everything that he did—was a cold, calculated move. Deborah was plain and barely literate, but she brought several virtues to the union. She was prudent, frugal, industrious, and helpful around her husband’s shop. She was also willing to raise Franklin’s illegitimate son, William, born to another woman. Two years into the marriage, Deborah gave birth to a son, Francis, who died of smallpox when he was four years old. (Though he exhorted others to be inoculated, Franklin had mysteriously failed to take the precaution with little Francis.) As Deborah and Benjamin approached their fortieth birthdays, she bore a second child, Sarah, who was called Sally.

  Whatever the nature of their relationship may have been in their early years together, Benjamin and Deborah rarely saw one another once they reached middle age. She refused to accompany her husband on his two Atlantic crossings, possibly from fear of sailing, perhaps from an apprehension that she and the great metropolis would not be a good fit, or, more likely, because Franklin led her to believe that his absences would be brief. Between the time of Franklin’s voyage to England in 1757 and Deborah’s death near the end of 1774, the two were together for only a few months. They did not see each other at all during the last nine years of Deborah’s life. She was disconsolate when they were separated. Her husband, who drifted farther and farther apart from his wife until he appears to have lost interest in her altogether, was quite content with the arrangement.

  During the roughly sixteen years that Franklin lived in London after 1757, he lodged in a four-room apartment in Margaret Stevenson’s spacious four-story home on Craven Street in the center of the city. Mrs. Stevenson, a widow and the same age as Franklin, provided what he called a “genteel” environment, something other than what he was accustomed to with Deborah. The true nature of the relationship between Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson remains a mystery, but she seems to have fulfilled his needs as Deborah no longer could. Contented as he had not been for some time at his own home in Philadelphia, Franklin preferred the company of Margaret Stevenson to that of his wife and daughter.44

  While Franklin may have returned to London to facilitate his hopes of becoming the governor of Pennsylvania, his sights might have shifted higher after several years there. By 1768 rumors were swirling that he might be named an undersecretary in the newly created ministerial office of American secretary. The tattle would have caused only sweet sensations for this ambitious man. A subministerial post—the highest public office to which any American could aspire, and which hardly any attained—would be the capstone to Franklin’s glorious life. Consequently, the growing imperial strife was a great threat to all of his hopes. If a breach came, Franklin would have to choose between America and England, and he likely already knew that he would choose America. It was his homeland. More important, his property and investments were in America, and they alone could provide security for his last years. But he did not want to have to make the choice between America and the mother country. He wanted to find a solution to the empire’s problems so that he might live his final years in London.

  Franklin attempted a balancing act. He wished to do nothing that would jeopardize his standing in Pennsylvania or his possible selection to be a subminister. With several irons in the fire, Franklin tried to convince officials in London that the Americans were not as radical as they sometimes appeared to be. He also sought to persuade the Americans to tone down their rhetoric, which he privately labeled “wild ravings.”45

  Increasingly, however, Franklin was coming to believe that it would not be easy to resolve the Anglo-American difficulties. Earlier than most, he saw clearly where the imperial clash appeared to be heading. America, he wrote as early as 1767, “must become a great Country, populous and mighty.” It might already be capable of shaking “off any Shackles that may be impos’d on her,” and it might even be sufficiently powerful to “place them on the Imposer.” Abundant “Respect, Veneration and Affection” for Great Britain yet existed in America, Franklin advised, and if Britain ruled wisely and gently, the colonists “might be easily govern’d [by London] for Ages” to come. Franklin also pointed out that over the long haul, Great Britain would need America more than America would need its mother country. But he warned that if the British were so unwise as to attempt to govern the colonists with a heavy hand, it would drive them to “a Separation,” for “the Seeds of Liberty are universally sown” in America and “nothing can eradicate them.” The fate of the empire, he predicted, depended on the prudence of those who held power in London. But even at that early moment Franklin did “not see … a sufficient quantity of the Wisdom” needed to preserve Britain’s ties to America.46

  Franklin scratched out several anonymous essays for a London newspaper attacking the Townshend Duties. He charged that Parliament was bent on “oppressing and enslaving … the last brave Assertors” of freedom. A faction existed in Parli
ament that “harbors inveterate Malice to the Americans.” They had “no true Idea of Liberty, or real Desire to see it flourish and increase,” he maintained, even claiming that some in Parliament wished to push things to the brink, giving London the pretext “to hang” every American dissident.47

  Franklin was not alone in this view. As the colonial protest spread in 1768, calls for Britain to use force to “effectually quell the spirit of sedition” in America grew louder. The ministry, it was said, had placated the colonists by repealing the Stamp Act, but it was clear now that such a course had been unavailing. Appeasement had only “encreased the storm instead of laying it” aside. By that autumn both the undersecretary of state in the American secretary’s office and Connecticut’s agent in London feared that the ministry was close to a decision to use force.48 Franklin was sufficiently alarmed that he addressed the matter in a newspaper essay. Five years and an army of more than forty thousand men had been required to reduce one American province—Canada—in the Seven Years’ War, he wrote. He added that hostilities with thirteen colonies would likely drag on interminably, bleeding Great Britain of manpower and depleting its treasury, and in the end Britain might lose America.49

  In the course of this feverish crisis, Franklin’s conception of the empire slowly changed. He had earlier come to the conclusion that Parliament had no authority to raise revenue in America, but he equivocated on the matter of Parliament’s right to regulate American commerce. Between the middle and the end of the decade, Franklin moved toward the notion of free trade for the colonists. Increasingly, he was coming to believe that Parliament’s only imperial role should be to protect all components of the Anglo-American union from foreign competition. Whereas Dickinson saw commercial regulation as in the general interest of America and Britain, Franklin was coming to see it more as a means of advancing the economic interests of powerful sectors within the mother country at the expense of the colonists.50

  By sometime in 1768 or 1769, Franklin’s thinking came into greater focus. With regard to Parliament’s power over America, Franklin, unlike Dickinson, saw that there could be “no middle doctrine.” Either “Parliament has a power to make all laws for us, or … it has a power to make no laws for us.”51 He had decided that Parliament had no constitutional authority whatsoever over the colonies, a position from which he never wavered. Franklin had already begun to envisage an imperial arrangement in which the colonists owed allegiance only to the king—a union that in the distant future would come to be called the commonwealth theory of empire. It was a concept that within seven or eight years would be embraced by virtually all Americans who opposed British policies. In the late 1760s, however, Franklin, who only three years earlier had found himself so far behind the thinking of most colonists that his popularity had for a time suffered, had come to embrace a more radical position than Dickinson, the most popular American pamphleteer.52 When asked by officials in London whether there was a solution to the empire’s problems, Franklin, in a pensive mood, replied: “Repeal the LAWS, Renounce the RIGHT [of Parliament to legislate for America], Recall the Troops, Refund the Money [raised thus far by taxation], and Return to the old”—that is, to the easy imperial relationship that had existed prior to the Stamp Act.53 But should the British government persist in its “unhappy new system of politics”—a system that required “a new kind of loyalty” from America, “a loyalty to P[arliamen]t”—the colonists would be driven “to dissolve those bands of union, and to sever … for ever” their ties with Great Britain.54

  Franklin was not the only American whose outlook was transformed in the late 1760s. For him and many others, the Townshend Duties proved to be more pivotal than the Stamp Act. That was the case with George Washington. Though a member of the Virginia assembly, Washington had been so untroubled by the Stamp Act that he had not been in attendance when the House of Burgesses took a stand against the parliamentary tax. While Patrick Henry was making history in Williamsburg, Washington, according to his diary, “sowed Turneps.… Seperated my Ewes & Rams.… Finished Sowing Wheat.… Began to Pull the Seed Hemp” at Mount Vernon.55 But in 1769, Washington, who had been an inconspicuous backbencher during the initial decade that he had sat in the assembly, took the lead in organizing Virginia’s embargo of British imports. Reading Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer, which he had purchased in Williamsburg, may have contributed to his evolving radicalization. But more than anything, Washington on his own had come to see a menacing pattern in British actions. Like many other Americans, he had looked on the Stamp Act as an aberration. He thought it unconstitutional, but he believed the ministry had stumbled accidentally into the measure. The Townshend Duties convinced him that Parliament was bent on taxing the colonists. Moreover, if Parliament stripped away the Americans’ sacred right to be taxed only by their own representatives, other rights and liberties might be imperiled as well. By 1769, Washington was writing of “our lordly Masters in Great Britain,” venom dripping from his pen as he contemplated the second-class status of the colonists. That same year, he spoke in private of taking up arms against the mother country, if need be, to defend the rights of the American colonists. Washington, in fact, was one of the first colonists, if not the first, to suggest the possibility of going to war to resist the encroachments of the British government. He was inspired by “an Innate Spirit of Freedom,” he claimed, and though he could not “say where the Line between Great Britain and the Colonies should be drawn,” he believed that “one ought to be drawn; & our Rights clearly ascertained.”56

  Around the time that Washington grew more militant, growing numbers of New Englanders were also coming to suspect British intentions. In the summer of 1768 royal authorities announced that two British army regiments were being redeployed from the frontier to Boston. It was not an unexpected turn of events. Boston’s newspapers had been predicting the soldiers’ arrival for three years, always saying that troops would be sent to enforce the imperial laws and usually characterizing their arrival as an “invasion” of the Bay Colony. To many Yankees the presence of the British army smacked of tyranny, and indeed, one newspaper essayist after another pointed out how despots throughout history had utilized armies to become all-powerful. Bolstered by armed might, one screed warned, rulers soon “begin to look upon themselves as the LORDS and not the SERVANTS of the people.” In no time, he continued, they “make laws for themselves, and enforce them by the power of the sword!” “Military power is forever dangerous to civil rights,” cautioned another writer. Not a few scribblers said the British army was being sent to Boston to enforce both an “unconstitutional” tax and harsh trade laws that would wreck the city’s economy. Francis Bernard, the royal governor of Massachusetts who had requested that troops be sent to Boston, was pilloried in the press as a “Great Bashaw,” as “freedom’s foe,” and as a “knave” who longed to run a “tyrant crew.”57

  Some in Boston in 1768 spoke of raising an army of militiamen to resist the landing of the troops, or “lobster backs,” as the citizenry habitually referred to Britain’s red-clad soldiers. Some later recalled hearing Samuel Adams, the most visible leader of the resistance movement in Massachusetts, call for taking up arms, even for seizing and holding hostage all royal officials in the city. “If you are Men behave like Men … and be free,” Adams supposedly declared. Other radicals urged the seizure of Castle William, a royal fortress in Boston Harbor, and the use of its artillery to prevent troopships from docking. But cooler heads prevailed, if only because the groundwork had not been laid for uniting with other colonies, a prerequisite for armed resistance. The British army marched ashore peacefully, though all the while a small armada of British war vessels stood in the harbor, their guns trained on the city.58

  The presence of British soldiers turned Boston, already a city on edge, into a tinderbox. Putting soldiers given to “common insolence” amid civilians who burned with “warm resentment” toward the presence of the army was akin, said Franklin, to “setting up a smith’s forge in
a magazine of gunpowder.”59 There were repeated violent incidents, though somehow the friction was kept under control for eighteen months. Finally, on March 5, 1770, the long-anticipated explosion occurred.

  Some in New England who were given to thinking in terms of intrigue had from the beginning believed that the army had been sent to Boston to provoke a clash. Others—including British officials in Massachusetts and even some residents of the city who sympathized with the American resistance—thought that Boston’s popular leaders were no less interested in inciting some sort of confrontation. Rumors of depredations by the soldiers swirled through the city during February and early March 1770, stoking a white-hot atmosphere of suspicion and malevolence.

  Around nine fifteen P.M. on March 5, an alarm bell tolled—no one was ever certain who rang it—summoning residents downtown. Some hurried from their homes, others from the grog shops that lined the waterfront, most thinking they were being called to fight a fire. In no time, a crowd of upwards of two hundred men and boys had gathered on snow-covered King Street in front of the Customs House. A squad of eight regulars and one officer stood guard before the building. Little time was required for the mood of the crowd to turn ugly. Men vented their long-standing hostility toward the soldiers, doubtless emboldened by the belief that the disciplined redcoats under an officer’s command would not retaliate.

 

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