Prelude to Glory Vol, 3

by Ron Carter

  They called Benjamin Franklin.

  Born in Boston, January 17, 1706, Franklin was seventy years of age, frail, plagued with gout that could disable him for two weeks at a time, and a rash that covered part of his body and most of his scalp. He had a high forehead with long, receding gray hair, jowls that were beginning to sag, and eyesight that required bifocals to see or read. He had long since retired from the arena of business with enough wealth to see him comfortably through life, and given his last years to matters in which he had a personal interest, including public service. He had listened carefully to the urgent plea from Congress and responded with his usual sagacity.

  “I am old and good for nothing,” he had said to Doctor Benjamin Rush seated nearby upon hearing the announcement, “but as the storekeepers say of their remnants of cloth, I am but a bolt end, and you may have me for what you are pleased to give.”

  Those who knew him understood the profound message behind his self-effacing, witty response. In his own homespun colonial style he had silently declared to the world that history had brought a suffering humanity to the threshold of a new day. It remained hidden to those who refused to see, but those who had the eyes saw the hand of the Almighty immutably moving mankind towards a dawn that was glorious beyond anything ever dreamed.

  The steady gaze in Franklin’s half-closed eyes, and the set of his chin silently said what Franklin had not. I am ready and I will go, and I will do whatever I can as God gives me strength and inspiration, and we shall see who is standing and who has fallen at the end of the day.

  With his usual foresight, he had brought along his two grandsons, William because he was old enough and clearheaded enough to be used as a confidential courier, and Benjamin because he was young enough that being exposed to an education in France and the affairs in Europe would serve him well in the world that was coming.

  Franklin heard the shouted command, and felt the horses answer to the pull on the reins as they stiffened their forelegs and set them slipping in the hardened mud to slow the coach and bring it to a rocking stop. He peered out the coach window into the deep gloom of late twilight searching for a reason for the stop, but there was nothing—no lights, no town, no approaching coach, no one in the roadway.

  The driver clambered down from his box and opened the coach door, vapor rising from his face as he spoke. “We will rest the horses for a few moments while I light two lanterns on the coach. That will give a little light to show the road for the horses, but not enough to be seen far.” His face was long and serious as he pointed ahead. “A band of robbers infests the woods just ahead. A fortnight ago they stopped a coach such as this near this very spot and murdered the travelers and stole their money and baggage.” He paused, then added, “I will move through the woods quickly and I will stop for nothing.”

  A wry smile passed over Franklin’s face as a thought flickered through his mind. How considerate of the driver to deliver such a joyous message on this side of the woods.

  Minutes later the coach jerked into motion and the driver raised the horses to a gallop and held it for five minutes while Franklin and his two grandsons clung to the sides as it bucked and jumped over the ruts and pits in the road. The coach broke out of the woods onto an open plain and slowed. Again Franklin shifted his weight, wincing at the pain. During the sea voyage his teeth had proved too weak to tear and chew the flesh of the fowl in the ship’s food stores. The only meat on board Franklin could chew was the salted beef, which alone had sustained him through the rough voyage. The result was an eruption of painful boils on his neck and back, and sitting had become a matter of enduring the sharp pain of the pressure on the red, angry eruptions.

  A frosty quarter moon rose as the coach jostled easterly along the narrow, twisted road, and Franklin’s high forehead wrinkled and his shoulders sagged for a moment at the unbearable weight that had been placed on his tired, aging body by a Congress that knew if Franklin failed, the Revolution failed with him. He drew a great breath, coughed at the bite of the cold in his lungs, and began gathering his thoughts, organizing them, sorting out the answers he must have almost instantly on his arrival in Paris, and he groped for a plan to get them. He reached back in his memories.

  Where did this all begin—the events that now found him riding in an old coach in the dark of a frigid winter’s night on a backcountry road in France, bound for Paris with the ludicrous hope of persuading King Louis XVI, the young monarch with a rather limited grasp of both politics and power, to join hands with a loosely gathered, untutored, unproven collection of colonies half a world away in a do-or-die effort to take on and defeat the greatest army on the earth?

  Was it 1757? Did it begin in 1757 with his first officially ordered voyage by Governor Denny of Pennsylvania to London to seek parliamentary approval of Franklin’s compromise bill to settle grievances between the disgruntled Penn family—the political leaders in the colonies—and the Crown? No, it began farther back.

  A smile tugged as he remembered the earliest prominent appearance of his name in French society. In early May of 1752, in a walled garden in the small village of Marly-la-Ville, twenty-five miles north of Paris, the French natural philosopher Thomas-François Dalibard had erected a strange apparatus that included a long metal rod set upright into the sky and a wire insulated in a bottle, according to the directions found in the writings of Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia in British North America. Dalibard waited impatiently for three days for a thunderstorm to provide the necessary lightning, and when nature failed him, he explained the crude machinery to a close group of enthralled friends and made his way back to Paris.

  Then, on May 10, 1752, with a thunderstorm approaching, a fearless, retired French dragoon named Coiffier who understood something about the Dalibard experiment, grasped the wire and waited. The storm rolled in, Coiffier touched the wire to the rod, sparks flew, and the smell of sulfur was everywhere. Sulfur meant the Devil, and Coiffier instantly sent a runner sprinting to get M. Raulet, Prior of Marly, to use his priestly authority to dispel the powers of evil. The storm had worsened and hail was slanting when Prior Raulet arrived, grasped the bottle with the wire and touched it to the rod six times. Each time sparks flew and the sulfur smell became overpowering. Then Prior Raulet touched the rod with his hand. The shock stood his hair on end and threw him back, hand and arm numb, eyes popping from his head.

  Prior Raulet sent a full account of the historic experiment to Dalibard in Paris, and Dalibard prepared a report for the Royal Academy of Sciences. Franklin, the unlettered colonial, with no formal education beyond the second grade, and a printer by trade, had indeed proven that lightning was electricity and could be caught and stored. The name Benjamin Franklin began appearing first in one place, then another.

  Shortly the name became more—a household possession in every kitchen in every hamlet in France, and his history and achievement were discussed over back fences, in pubs, schools, churches, inns, wherever people gathered. Franklin—the fifteenth child of a tallow chandler—apprenticed to his brother in Boston as a printer at age twelve, left at age seventeen for Philadelphia to seek his fortune, and find it he did. A master printer, essayist, journalist, author and publisher of the world renowned Poor Richard’s Almanack. Inventor of street paving and streetlights, the Franklin stove, bifocal glasses, the lightning rod. Founder of the first circulating library, a hospital, the first fire insurance company, the American Philosophical Society, and an academy. Writer of scientific research on eclipses, whirlwinds, ants, and the Gulf Stream.

  Retired from business at age forty-two, he became a civic leader, then a leader in the colonies, then in the affairs of the world. With his second-grade education, he received honorary degrees from Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, and finally a doctorate degree from the University of Edinburgh. Forever after he was addressed as “Doctor Franklin.” With it all, he remained a simple man from the colonies. He moved quickly into the dress and manners of the English political hierarchy, and developed a
n uncanny ability to blend into the people and circumstances wherever he found himself, sharing incomparable wit and seeming to enjoy immensely whatever he happened to be doing at any moment.

  The sound of a wolf mourning the moon came clear in the night, and Franklin leaned forward in the rocking coach to stare into the darkness. There was no light, no movement, nothing, and he settled back and tucked the blanket over his legs. He sobered and his eyes narrowed as he once again picked up his thoughts.

  A somber feeling crept through him as he recalled. If 1752 was the beginning, 1775 was the end. He stared unseeing into his lap as the bright images flickered in his mind. The great, cold, opulent halls of Parliament in London, the crossroads of the civilized world and the fountainhead of political power, corruption and intrigue—the statesmen and the knaves, the brilliant and the foolish—the lessons each had taught him in his unparalleled rise to prominence in the politics of London, and the world, representing the House of Representatives of Massachusetts Bay as its agent to England.

  He set his jaw at the remembrance of the jealousy it evoked from Arthur Lee when it was Franklin and not Lee who received the appointment, and the resulting confrontation that wintry morning of January 16, 1771, when Franklin called on Lord Hillsborough, who had become England’s secretary of state for the colonies, to announce his appointment. Lord Hillsborough had denied Franklin’s announcement, bluntly telling him that Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts had refused to give assent to the necessary bill confirming the appointment and had in fact written to Hillsborough to make the refusal official. Shocked, Franklin had told Hillsborough no bill was necessary for the appointment and asked to see the letter from Governor Hutchinson, which Hillsborough did not produce. It was later that Franklin puzzled over a letter written by Governor Hutchinson to Hillsborough wherein the governor took the confusing position that “The Council have renewed their choice of Mr. Bollan and the House have chosen Doctor Franklin” as the official representative, which he, Governor Hutchinson could not condone since two agents were not needed. Hutchinson would prepare legislation to remedy the problem and notify Hillsborough upon its approval. The legislation failed when the Council and the House each refused to change their appointment, and Governor Hutchinson refused to confirm Franklin as the official representative, and so informed Hillsborough in 1772.

  Once again Franklin felt the sick rise in his stomach as he concluded that there was something more than Hutchinson’s letter behind Hillsborough’s refusal to acknowledge him, and although he showed no hint of his fear, the episode had left him with the growing conviction that somehow, for reasons he could not dream, he had suddenly fallen out of favor with the entire English ministry.

  Was it his plan to create and populate a new colony in America, west of the Alleghenies? One million two hundred thousand acres to be wrested from the great Ohio valley wilderness and populated to serve as a western defense for the colonies already in place on the Atlantic seaboard, and bring to the Indians the blessings of civilization. He had dreamed the plan and worked out the details by 1763, but no one, either in England or the colonies, had shown the slightest interest. His own dogged determination had kept the plan alive until 1769 when Samuel Wharton and William Trent of Pennsylvania arrived in London to support the plan and move it along.

  It was expanded from 1,200,000 acres to 20,000,000 acres, and soon attracted Lord Hertford, the lord chamberlain, Lord Camden, the lord chancellor, and Lord Rochford, secretary of state for the northern department, all of whom became shareholders in what was formally named the Grand Ohio Company. They selected three alternative names for the new colony, one of which would finally be selected according to the political winds at that future time. Indiana, Pittsylvania, or Vandalia, the latter name because Queen Charlotte was said to be a descendant of the royal line of the Vandals.

  The plan stalled when Virginia and Pennsylvania, as well as the Indian tribes living in the wilderness, contested the land claims of the Grand Ohio Company, and once again Franklin stubbornly refused to let it die. Finally in 1772, a formally drawn petition was considered by the English Board of Trade, but it was denied by none other than Lord Hillsborough! The Privy Council was advised of the denial, following which Lord Gower and other prominent English shareholders in the Grand Ohio Company contested the denial and persuaded the Privy Council to hear evidence against the decision of the Board of Trade and Hillsborough.

  Franklin’s breathing slowed at the memory of June 5, 1772, when he, Thomas Walpole, and others interested in the plan, appeared before a committee of the Privy Council in the Cockpit at Whitehall, that historically famous chamber where great matters of the kingdom were subjected to the intense, intimidating scrutiny of the political denizens of the British Empire. With frowning eyes the council had listened in stony silence and left the chamber.

  Their decision had stunned Franklin. The Privy Council had overturned the Hillsborough ruling and agreed to forward the petition, and the prospects for the Grand Ohio Company leaped. Hillsborough was devastated, and Franklin would never forget the day Hillsborough resigned rather than remain in office, beaten by the colonial, Benjamin Franklin.

  In the near total blackness of night, Franklin reached to close the curtains on the coach windows to stop the flow of freezing air, then settled back into his seat and tucked the blanket, and continued laboring with his thoughts.

  Too late he had realized that by beating Hillsborough, he had provoked powerful political enemies in high places, and slowly, surely, seemingly insignificant things began to occur. Individually they meant little until one day Franklin began to put them all together, and he could still feel the shock.

  Following the British Stamp Act of 1765, and the Townshend Act of 1767, Britain had sent troops to quiet the growing restlessness in the colonies. In 1770, a mob of Boston colonials forced a confrontation with a small British patrol, and in the face of snowballs and sticks being thrown at them, the frightened soldiers levelled their muskets and fired. Five colonials died, and the cry went out from Boston, “Massacre!” It reverbrated in the corridors of Whitehall in London, and Franklin still remembered the confused feeling of speaking out again and again in an attempt to explain and reconcile the Americans to the English and the English to the Americans.

  And he vividly remembered the guarded glances that soon began among the British political powers that plainly bespoke their silent, unanswered questions. Where does Mr. Franklin stand in this widening void between England and her colonies? How long can he remain with one foot firmly planted in England and the other in America?

  Franklin stopped to cough and shift his weight once more, wincing from the pain of the boils down his back. For long moments he pondered before he once again opened the door into his memory where he had carefully locked away the most catastrophic episode of his political career in London.

  It was the winter of 1772 when a British gentleman of some political standing had been in private conversation with Franklin regarding the use of British troops in the colonies. When Franklin stated that in his opinion the sending of troops to control the colonies seemed to suggest something less than parental regard on the part of England, the unnamed gentleman had taken exception. He replied that if blame were to be laid, it would have to be on the Americans themselves, since it was their leaders who had suggested the British take harsh measures. Astonished, Franklin demanded proof. Shortly thereafter, this same unnamed British gentleman delivered to Franklin letters written by Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, to Thomas Whatley in the British Parliament. If the letters were read from the British point of view, they could be construed to mean that Hutchinson was urging the British to take stronger measures against his own constituents in Massachusetts.

  Riding in the ancient coach in the middle of a freezing night, on an unknown back road in France, Franklin felt again the rise of his gorge at the awful weapon that had been placed in his hands. This was the same Governor Thomas Hutchinson who had flatly re
fused to recognize Franklin’s appointment by the Massachusetts House of Representatives as its agent to England! Caught in seditious correspondence with Whatley in England! What would happen if these letters were made public in Massachusetts? Who would believe Franklin had exposed Hutchinson out of a sense of patriotic duty, and not out of revenge for what Hutchinson had done to him?

  Days turned to weeks while Franklin agonized. How well he knew the unspoken rules of the game of political intrigue and character assassination. It was standard British practice that none of his mail arriving from America, and none of his correspondence leaving London, was forwarded without agents of the British government first opening the envelopes with chemicals that left no trace, and carefully reading all of the contents. He also knew that if he so much as suggested the practice publicly, the outcry of innocence and righteous indignation would be instant and thunderous. Gentlemen simply did not read other gentlemen’s mail, let alone make the contents public.

  He remembered the date of December 2, 1772, when he sent the clandestine letters to Thomas Cushing in Boston. Despite Franklin’s specific directions to Cushing regarding strict limitations on the use of the letters, by June 2, 1773, they had reached the floor of the House of Representatives of the Massachusetts legislature, where Sam Adams had them read into the house minutes and moved for a Committee of the whole House to consider them. Franklin was appalled! He had only meant to inform the proper persons of the ambivalence of Governor Hutchinson. In fact, he had sewn a political whirlwind that was instantly out of his control. The House voted 101 to 5 that “the tendency and design of the letters … was to overthrow the Constitution of this Government and to introduce Arbitrary Power into the Province.” They thereupon drafted a resolution that “if His Majesty in his great Goodness, shall be pleased to remove His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson Esq., and the Hon’ble Andrew Oliver Esq., from the Offices of Governor and Lieutenant Governor, it is the humble opinion of this Board, that it will be promotive of His Majesty’s Service, and the Good of his loyal and affectionate People of this Province.”