Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Despite what he had written Strahan, the conflict about which side of the ocean he would inhabit was still unresolved. Deborah, for sure, still had no desire to live more than a few hundred yards from where she had been raised. “My mother is so averse to going to sea that I believe my father will never be induced to see England again,” William wrote in his own letter to Strahan. “He is now building a house to live in himself.” Franklin had also flirted with the idea of getting a land grant in Ohio, looking west rather than east. By late in 1763, he was confessing to Strahan that he was baffled about where he would spend his remaining years: “We shall see in a little time how things will turn out.”6

  The Paxton Boys

  Franklin’s future plans would depend, in part, on the conduct of Pennsylvania’s new governor, John Penn, who was a nephew of Proprietor Thomas Penn and had been a delegate with Franklin to the Albany Conference. Franklin was hopeful. “He is civil,” he wrote to Collinson, “so I think we shall have no personal difference, at least I will give him no occasion.”

  The first issue that Penn and the Pennsylvania Assembly faced was frontier defense. The British victory in the French and Indian War had not fully secured peace with all of the Indians, and settlers in the west were being plagued by raids led by the Ottawa chief known as Pontiac. By the fall of 1763, the fighting had subsided, but not the resentments of many of Pennsylvania’s rough-hewn backwoodsmen.

  These erupted on December 14, when a mob of more than fifty frontiersmen from around the town of Paxton murdered six unarmed Indians, all of them peaceful, converted Christians. Two weeks later, an even larger mob slaughtered fourteen more Indians who had been harbored for their safety in a nearby workhouse.

  The “Paxton Boys,” as the growing mob of frontiersmen came to be called, declared that their next stop was Philadelphia, where more than 140 other peaceful Indians were being sheltered. They threatened to kill not only the Indians but also any whites who protected them, including prominent Quakers. This provoked some Quakers to set aside pacifism and take up arms, and it led others to flee the city.

  The uprising threatened to become the most serious crisis Pennsylvania had ever faced, a full-fledged social and religious civil war. On one side were the frontiersmen, mainly Presbyterians, plus their working-class sympathizers in town, including many German Lutherans and Scots-Irish Presbyterians. On the other side were Philadelphia’s old-line Quakers, with their pacifist proclivities and desire to trade with the Indians. The Quakers, despite being now easily outnumbered by the new German immigrants, dominated the Assembly and repeatedly resisted spending much for frontier defense. For a change, Philadelphia’s upper-class Anglican merchants, who tended to support the Proprietors in their fights with the Assembly, found themselves allied with the Quakers, at least temporarily.

  A virulent pamphlet war ensued. Philadelphia’s Presbyterians, supporting their backwoods brethren, assailed the Quakers for coddling the Indians and refusing to allow the frontiersmen the proper representation in the Assembly that was decreed in the charter. Franklin responded with his own pamphlet in late January 1764. Entitled “A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County,” it was among the most emotional pieces he ever wrote.

  He began his screed with poignant profiles of each of the Indians killed, which stressed their gentle personalities and used their English names. “These poor, defenseless creatures were immediately fired upon, stabbed and hatcheted to death!” he wrote, describing the massacre in gory detail. The eldest Indian was “cut to pieces in his bed,” the others “scalped and otherwise horribly mangled.”

  Franklin went on to describe the second massacre two weeks later in even more horrid terms:

  Being without the least weapon for defense, they divided into their little families, the children clinging to their parents. They fell on their knees, protested their innocence, declared their love to the English, and that, in their whole lives, they had never done them injury; and in this posture they all received the hatchet! Men, women and little children—were every one inhumanly murdered!—in cold blood!

  To the Paxton Boys, all Indians were alike and there was no need to treat them as individuals. “Whoever proclaimed war,” their spokesman declared, “with part of a nation, and not with the whole?” Franklin, on the other hand, used his pamphlet to denounce prejudice and make the case for individual tolerance that was at the core of his political creed. “If an Indian injures me, does it follow that I may revenge that injury on all Indians?” he asked. “The only crime of these poor wretches seems to have been that they had a reddish brown skin and black hair.” It was immoral, he argued, to punish an individual as revenge for what others of his race, tribe, or group may have done. “Should any man with a freckled face and red hair kill a wife or child of mine, [by this reasoning] it would be right for me to revenge it by killing all the freckled red-haired men, women and children I could afterwards anywhere meet.”

  To reinforce his point, he provided historical examples of how various other people—Jews, Muslims, Moors, blacks, and Indians—had all shown a greater morality and tolerance in similar situations. It was necessary, Franklin concluded, for the entire province to stand up to the Paxton Boys as they prepared to march on Philadelphia and to bring them to justice. Ignoring the slight inconsistency in his argument, he warned of the collective guilt all whites would otherwise share: “The guilt will lie on the whole land till justice is done on the murderers.”7

  The pamphlet would later damage Franklin politically, for it reflected his underlying prejudice against the German settlers as well as his lifelong distaste for Presbyterian-Calvinist dogma. He showed little sympathy for the grievances of the frontiersmen, calling them “barbarous men” who had acted “to the eternal disgrace of their country and color.” Though a populist in many ways, he was wary of the rabble. His outlook, as usual, was from the perspective of a new middle class: distrustful both of the unwashed mob and of the entrenched elites.

  On Saturday, February 4, a week or so after Franklin’s pamphlet was published, Gov. John Penn called a mass meeting on the State House grounds as the Paxton Boys headed toward the city. At first he took a strong stand. He ordered the arrest of the mob leaders, deployed British troops, and asked the crowd to join the militia companies that Franklin and others were organizing. Even many Quakers took up arms, though most of the town’s Presbyterians refused.

  At midnight on Sunday, the mob of 250 reached Germantown, just north of the city. Church bells pealed alarms, and amid the chaos a surprising alliance was formed. Governor Penn, Franklin wrote a friend, “did me the honor, on an alarm, to run to my house at midnight, with his counselors at his heels, for advice, and made it his headquarters for some time.” Penn went so far as to offer Franklin control of the militia, but Franklin prudently declined. “I chose to carry a musket and strengthen his authority by setting an example of obedience to his orders.”8

  Franklin and others, including many Quakers, wanted the governor to order an attack. Instead, Penn decided to send a delegation of seven city leaders, including Franklin, to meet with the Paxton Boys. “The fighting face we put on and the reasonings we used with the insurgents,” Franklin later recalled, “restored quiet to the city.” The mob agreed to disperse if they could send some of their leaders into town to present their grievances.

  As the tension with the Paxton Boys receded, the antagonism between Franklin and Penn resumed. Franklin took a hard line. He wanted the governor and Assembly, acting jointly, to confront the Paxton delegation together and hold them accountable for the massacres. The governor, however, realized the political advantage he could gain by forging an alliance with the Presbyterians and Germans who sympathized with the frontiersmen (and who were offended by the harsh slurs Franklin had written about them). So he met with the Paxton delegation in private, listened to them courteously, and agreed not to press charges against them. He also, at their suggestion, instituted a policy of offering a bounty for any Indian scalp
s, male or female.

  Franklin was livid. “These things bring him and his government into sudden contempt,” he wrote a friend. “All regard for him in the Assembly is lost. All hopes of happiness under a Proprietary government are at an end.” The feeling was mutual. In a letter to his uncle, the Proprietor Thomas Penn, Gov. John Penn wrote an equally strong condemnation of Franklin: “There will never be any prospect of ease and happiness while that villain has the liberty of spreading about the poison of that inveterate malice and ill nature which is deeply implanted in his own black heart.”

  A darkness had indeed begun to infect Franklin’s usually optimistic heart. Feeling confined by Philadelphia and its foul politics, restless at home, and finding few scientific or professional diversions, he lost some of his amused, wry demeanor. His letters contained harsh rather than humorous assessments of politics and even gloomier personal passages. To the medical doctor John Fothergill, a Quaker friend living in London, Franklin wrote, “Do you please yourself with the fancy that you are doing good? You are mistaken. Half the lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless; and almost the other half ought not to be saved, as being mischievous.”9

  Fighting the Proprietors Again

  And so the fights between governor and Assembly resumed, more heated than ever. They clashed over control of militia appointments, a lighthouse, and, of course, taxes. When the Assembly passed a bill taxing the Proprietors’ estates, which followed the general outline but not the precise formula of the Privy Council compromise, Franklin wrote a message from the Assembly to the governor warning that the consequences of vetoing the bill “will undoubtedly add to that load of obloquy and guilt the Proprietary family is already burdened with and bring their government into (if possible) still greater contempt.” The governor vetoed it.10

  At stake was not just principle but power. Franklin realized that the Proprietary party now had strong support from the frontiersmen and their Scots-Irish and German kinsmen. That reignited his resolve to continue pursuing, against all odds, his dream of convincing the British to revoke the Proprietors’ charter and make Pennsylvania a Crown colony.

  Most people in Pennsylvania still did not share his fervor for a royal rather than Proprietary government. The members of Philadelphia’s merchant aristocracy were friends with the Penns. The Presbyterian frontiersmen and ethnic working class had forged a new alliance after the Paxton Boys affair, plus they feared a royal takeover would bring the official establishment of the Church of England, which their dissenting families had fled. Even many prominent Quakers such as Isaac Norris and Israel Pemberton, who tended to be Franklin’s allies, were leery of a new charter that might remove some of the religious liberties that the late William Penn had secured long ago. With his stubborn crusade, Franklin was succeeding in dividing his friends and uniting his enemies.

  Likewise, in London there was no more support for a royal takeover than there had been when Franklin began his crusade as an agent there. Lord Hyde, Franklin’s boss at the British postal department, wrote that even those royal ministers who might like to “get their hands on” the colony were not willing to take on the Penn family. He publicly warned Franklin, a royal appointee, that “all officers of the crown are expected to assist government.” Franklin made a little joke of the warning, noting that he would “not be Hyde-bound.”11

  Nevertheless, Franklin still enjoyed effective control of the Assembly, and in March 1764 he pushed through a series of twenty-six resolutions—a “necklace of resolves,” he called them—calling for the end of Proprietary government. The Proprietors, he wrote, had acted in ways that were “tyrannical and inhuman.” They had used the Indian threat “to extort privileges from the people…with the knife of savages at their throat.” The final resolution declared that the Assembly would consult citizens as to whether a “humble address” should be sent to the king “praying that he would be graciously pleased to take the people of this province under his immediate protection and government.”

  The result was a petition drive asking for the ouster of the Proprietors. Franklin printed copies in English and German, and even created a slightly different version for the Quaker community, but his supporters could garner merely thirty-five hundred signers. Opponents of the change were eventually able to come up with fifteen thousand on their own petitions.

  Once again, a pamphlet war broke out. Franklin’s contribution, “Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation,” was more heated than its title implied. He was not, at least for now, detached enough to employ his old tools of humor, satire, indirection, and gentle wryness in argument. His pamphlet attacked the Proprietors for truckling to the Paxton Boys and for being unable to manage the colony. “Religion has happily nothing to do with our present differences, though great pains is taken to lug it into the squabble,” he wrote, not altogether correctly. In any case, he continued, the Crown rather than the Proprietors was most likely to protect religious liberties.

  Franklin’s newest opponent was John Dickinson, a young lawyer who was the son-in-law of the great Quaker eminence, Isaac Norris. Dickinson had been a friend of Franklin’s and no great fan of the Proprietors, but he rationally argued that the safeguards of the Penn charter should not be lightly abandoned, nor should it be assumed that the royal ministers would be more enlightened than the Proprietors. Norris, unwilling to be caught in the crossfire, feigned sickness and resigned as Assembly speaker in May. Franklin was elected to the post.

  Franklin also faced a more vitriolic older opponent: Chief Justice William Allen, who had also once been a friend but whose ardent support of the Proprietors had long ago led to a bitter break. When Allen returned from a trip to England in August, Franklin paid him a visit as “an overture.” In front of other guests, Allen denounced his assault on the Proprietors. A switch to a royal government, he said, would cost Pennsylvania £100,000, and it had no support in London.

  As the October 1 Assembly elections neared, the pamphlet war turned vicious as Franklin’s foes sought to thwart his bid for reelection. One anonymous offering, entitled “What is Sauce for a Goose is also Sauce for a Gander,” raked up every possible allegation against Franklin—most notably, that his son, William, was the bastard child of a “kitchen wench” named Barbara. It also reprinted, and embellished a bit, various anti-German passages Franklin had written earlier. And it accused him, falsely but vociferously, of buying honorary degrees, seeking a royal governorship for himself, and stealing his electricity experiments from other scientists.

  Another broadside painted him as an excitable lecher:

  Franklin, though plagued with fumbling age,

  Needs nothing to excite him,

  But is too ready to engage,

  When younger arms invite him.12

  Modern election campaigns are often criticized for being negative, and today’s press is slammed for being scurrilous. But the most brutal of modern attack ads pale in comparison to the barrage of pamphlets in the 1764 Assembly election. Pennsylvania survived them, as did Franklin, and American democracy learned that it could thrive in an atmosphere of unrestrained, even intemperate, free expression. As the election of 1764 showed, American democracy was built on a foundation of unbridled free speech. In the centuries since then, the nations that have thrived have been those, like America, that are most comfortable with the cacophony, and even occasional messiness, that comes from robust discourse.

  Election Day was as wild as the pamphlets. Throngs of voters clogged the State House steps throughout the day of October 1, and the lines remained long well past midnight. Franklin’s supporters were able to force the polls to stay open until dawn as they roused anyone they could find who had not yet voted. It was a tactical mistake. The Proprietary party sent workers up to Germantown to round up even more supporters. Franklin finished thirteenth out of fourteen candidates vying for the eight seats in Philadelphia.

  His faction, however, kept control of the Assembly, which promptly voted to submit to the British ministers
the petition against the Proprietors. And as a consolation prize that was perhaps better than a victory, it voted 19–11 to send Franklin back to England as an agent to present it.

  That prompted a new flurry of pamphlets. Dickinson declared that Franklin would be ineffectual because he was hated by the Penns, disdained by the king’s ministers, and “extremely disagreeable to a very great number of the serious and reputable inhabitants” of Pennsylvania. Chief Justice Allen labeled him “the most unpopular and odious name in the province…delirious with rage, disappointment and malice.” But now that he was heading back to England, Franklin’s even temper started to return. “I am now to take leave (perhaps a last leave) of the country I love,” he wrote in response. “I wish every kind of prosperity to my friends, and I forgive my enemies.”13

  Once again, his wife declined to accompany him to England. Nor would she permit him to take their daughter. So why was he so willing to leave home again? Partly because he missed London, and partly because he felt depressed and confined by Philadelphia.

  There was also a loftier reason. Franklin had been developing a vision of an American future that went beyond even wresting Pennsylvania from the Proprietors. It involved a greater union among the colonies, along the lines of his Albany Plan, and a more equal relationship between the colonies and the mother country as part of a greater British Empire. That could include, he suggested, representation in Parliament. Responding to reports that Britain might propose taxes on the colonies, he wrote to Richard Jackson, whom he had left behind in London as Pennsylvania’s other agent, a suggested response: “If you choose to tax us, give us members in your legislature, and let us be one people.”