Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  Washington and virtually all members present for the session reconvened the next day at Raleigh Tavern to debate and sign a nonimportation agreement covering tea and other East India Company products.46 The assembly had already created a committee of correspondence led by its speaker, Peyton Randolph, to coordinate efforts with other colonies. It now issued letters calling for “the Appointment of Deputies from the several Colonies to meet annually in a general Congress” to forge a coordinated response to British policy.47 Finally, on May 30, those burgesses still present, which included Washington, called an extralegal meeting of all members for August 1, a so-called Virginia Convention, to consider further action after each had time to collect the sense of his respective counties on how to proceed.

  To prepare for the Virginia Convention, Washington called a meeting of Fairfax County freeholders for July 5, but heavy rains kept all but local Alexandria residents from attending. Those present voted to send relief supplies to Boston and named a committee to draft resolutions for a rescheduled meeting on July 18. George Mason largely took over drafting duties. He stayed at Mount Vernon on July 17 and rode with Washington to the second meeting. Washington chaired that meeting and presented the draft resolves. Once they passed, he carried them to the Virginia Convention.

  Going far beyond condemning taxation without representation, the Fairfax Resolves painted a sinister picture of British tyranny. “There is a premeditated Design and System, formed and pursued by the British Ministry, to introduce an arbitrary Government into his Majesty’s American Dominions,” they declared. “The Act inflicting ministerial Vengeance upon the Town of Boston, and the two Bills lately brought into Parliament for abrogating the Charter of the Province of Massachusets Bay, and for the protection and Encouragement of Murderers in the said Province, are Part of the above mentioned iniquitous System.”48 As news of these resolves spread across Virginia and then to other colonies, Washington’s name went with it. He became a revolutionary leader.

  At the time, Washington’s private rhetoric mirrored the Fairfax Resolves. “That Government is pursuing a regular Plan at the expence of Law & justice, to overthrow our Constitutional Rights & liberties,” Washington wrote on July 20, 1774, to his pro-British neighbor Bryan Fairfax about the administration of Lord North, who by this time had become prime minister. “Shall we after this whine & cry for releif, when we have already tried it in vain?, or shall we supinely sit, and see one Provence after another fall a Sacrafice to Despotism?”49 No, he wrote to Fairfax’s half brother George William at roughly the same time, “We shall not suffer ourselves to be sacrificed by piecemeal [to a government that is] endeavouring by every piece of Art & despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavry upon us.”50 Washington went to the Virginia Convention breathing fire.

  A rebel act from its call to order on August 1 to its adjournment eight days later, the Virginia Convention met in Williamsburg while Lord Dunmore was away. Claiming to represent their counties and constituents, the former members of a dismissed assembly—with two-thirds of those eligible in attendance—approved a sweeping agreement to boycott all British imports beginning in November and, “unless American Grievances are redressed before the 10th day of August, 1775,” stop all exports of tobacco.51 The convention declared tea a “detestable” drink due to its association with “the present Sufferings of our distressed Friends in the Town of Boston” and condemned Gage for his “odious and illegal” acts of martial law in Massachusetts.52 It elected seven of its members, including Washington, to represent Virginia at a general congress of all colonies scheduled for Philadelphia during the following month. Unfounded reports circulated that Washington offered to raise a regiment of one thousand men and lead them in relief of Boston.

  Meeting from September 4 to October 26, 1774, the First Continental Congress gave Washington a chance to strut on an intercolonial stage. Torn between conservatives like John Dickinson, who simply sought limits on Parliament’s power to tax colonists, and radicals like Patrick Henry and the Adamses, Samuel and John, who hoped to assert a broad array of colonists’ rights, the Congress mainly approved an intercolonial nonimportation agreement modeled on Virginia’s most recent one and called a second congress for May 1775.53 With his gift for engineering collective solutions to communal problems, had he been there, Franklin may have been able to extract greater results from the Congress. As it was, he could do little more than tout its nonimportation association in London. For his part, Washington said little in sessions but impressed many with the calm demeanor under fire that would become his trademark characteristic.

  Washington’s apparent tranquility was mainly on the surface. In letters from Philadelphia, he attacked the North ministry’s “Systematic ascertion of an arbitrary power, deeply planned to overturn the Laws & Constitution” and warned “that more blood will be spilt on this occasion (if the Ministry are determined to push matters to extremity) than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.”54 Betraying his readiness to fight, before leaving Philadelphia, Washington bought accessories for his militia uniform and ordered a European military treatise. With Franklin there by the time it began six months later, Washington would return to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress.

  EVENTS ON THE GROUND had dramatically changed the political landscape by the time the Second Continental Congress convened on May 10, 1775. Virginia, for example, had begun arming for war. Volunteer militia companies sprang up in various counties, with five asking Washington to command them. In a clear case of taxation with representation, to pay for munitions, Fairfax County levied a poll tax that Washington and Mason collected. When Dunmore refused to call the assembly for fear of what it might do, in March 1775, the members met again as an extralegal convention, this time beyond the governor’s reach in Richmond. When it hesitated to pass resolutions authorizing mobilization for defense, Henry electrified the convention: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”55

  Henry’s words struck like a thunderclap. No one now shouted him down with cries of treason, least of all the assembly’s speaker and convention’s moderator, Peyton Randolph. The resolutions passed, with Henry and Washington put on a planning committee to raise, arm, and discipline troops. Both were also returned to the Continental Congress, this time with Washington placing second in the overall vote, behind only Randolph and ahead of Henry.

  Other colonies were arming as well, particularly in New England, which faced the most immediate threat from British troops. In Massachusetts, the local militia began operating independent of the governor as soon as Gage assumed that post and town meetings continued in defiance of the Intolerable Acts. When Gage dissolved the colony’s assembly in October 1774, it removed to Concord and reformulated itself into a provincial congress with full power to levy taxes, purchase supplies, and maintain troops. Gage governed only in regions occupied by his troops, which were largely confined to Boston. They did not extend even as far as Cambridge, which (along with Concord) became somewhat of a revolutionary command and supply center.

  Largely as a result of his own actions and choices, Franklin watched these developments from the sidelines in London. With his service as a colonial agent effectively over following his denouncement before the Privy Council in January 1774, once the immediate risk of arrest for trafficking in stolen letters passed, Franklin could have returned to Pennsylvania. If so, he would have attended the First Continental Congress in September and been present for his wife’s death in December. But London had been his home for fifteen of the past seventeen years and, whether out of stubbornness or the belief that he could still do some good there, he hesitated to leave.

  His son William urged him to return. “It seems your Popularity in this Country, whatever it may be on the other Side, is greatly beyond whatever it was,” William wrote to his father in May fro
m Philadelphia. “You may depend, when you return here, on being received with every Mark of Regard and Affection.”56 Indeed, colonists had protested his denouncement and saw him as a fellow victim of British tyranny, whereas in London, many vilified him as a chief provocateur of colonial resistance. As the rift widened, Franklin still hoped against hope to broker reconciliation between his two countries.

  Even though Franklin duly noted in late September, “I have seen no Minister since January, nor had the least Communication with them,” he fairly added, “The generous and noble Friends of America in both Houses do indeed favour me with their Notice and Regard.”57 Franklin based his hopes for reconciliation on these private contacts and the prospect that nonimportation might bring down the North ministry. He also continued making the case for the colonies in articles published under pseudonyms in popular journals. Meetings with such leading dissident lords as Chatham, Howe, and Camden as well as with public intellectuals like Edmund Burke and Joseph Priestley gave Franklin some reason to believe that a compromise solution might still succeed. By early 1775, however, he realized that talking with such people was a waste of time. They could not speak for the government and Franklin could not speak for the colonies. Any compromise they brokered held no promise whatsoever as the sides for which they contended pulled ever further apart. The final straw was added on February 1, when the House of Lords rejected out of hand a comprehensive solution personally offered by none other than the legendary Lord Chatham, the former William Pitt, who made his proposal with a nod toward Franklin in the gallery. The lords, Franklin concluded, “Have scarce Discretion enough to govern a Herd of Swine,” and “the elected House of Commons is no better.”58 All hope lost, Franklin sailed for Philadelphia on March 20, 1775.

  While Franklin was at sea and Washington prepared to leave for the Second Continental Congress, the shots rang out that launched a revolution. To bolster his army’s position in Boston, early on April 19, 1775, Gage dispatched seven hundred British troops on a seventeen-mile march to capture the militia armory in Concord. Forewarned, thousands of militiamen gathered to stop them. The first skirmish occurred at the commons in Lexington, where eight militiamen died. Another broke out at a bridge outside Concord. By then, little remained in Concord for the British to capture. Their mission frustrated, a long line of redcoats headed back to Boston on a winding road lined with trees, stone walls, and buildings. Now the militiamen got their revenge as they fired in coordinated formations from protected positions. A survivor of Braddock’s defeat, when he heard his officers’ accounts, Gage must have recalled scenes from twenty years before—but this time colonists did the shooting. The British suffered 250 casualties compared with under 100 for the colonists.

  “Unhappy it is though to reflect,” Washington wrote after hearing the details, “the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood, or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative!”59 By slaves, of course, Washington referred to white colonists subject to British tyranny, not the human chattel of white colonists.60 A fifteen-thousand-person militia army soon bottled up Gage’s much smaller force in Boston. This was the army that Washington would inherit.

  A new, urgent reality greeted delegates as they arrived in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress. A war for colonial rights (if not for outright independence) had begun. Massachusetts delegate John Adams had toured the still blood-soaked battlefield before departing for Congress. Commenting later on his feelings, he recalled thinking, “The Die was cast, the Rubicon crossed.”61 Delegates wanted to hear Adams’s full report when he reached Philadelphia, but Pennsylvanians reserved their most fervent welcomes for two other delegates.

  Franklin’s packet ship docked in Philadelphia on May 5, five days before Congress convened. Bells rang to mark the occasion. “Dr. Franklin is highly pleased to find us arming,” a newspaper reported. “He thinks nothing else can save us from the most abject slavery.”62 Pennsylvania added him to its congressional delegation on the following day—at age sixty-nine, he was the oldest delegate from any colony.

  Washington reached Philadelphia on May 9 along with other southern delegates. A militia regiment met him outside the city and, with bands playing, escorted his carriage into town—the only delegate to receive such a martial welcome.

  America’s most experienced diplomat and its best-known soldier brought the skills that other delegates now knew were needed by Congress. After not seeing each other since Franklin sailed for London in 1757, they met soon after Washington arrived in Philadelphia, most likely at Franklin’s home, where the senior statesman frequently entertained fellow delegates. They also inevitably dined together, cooperated in committee matters, and talked in the Assembly Room, where the Congress met. Entrusted with sometimes overlapping responsibilities exceeding those laid upon other delegates, they worked closely together until the war’s end. For America, they became the two indispensable leaders for its revolution.

  Book II

  Partners in a Revolution

  Four

  Taking Command

  TO DISTINGUISH THEM FROM LATER LEFTIST REBELS, some historians characterize Franklin and Washington as reluctant revolutionaries with much to lose—conservatives who fought to preserve historic English rights rather than to gain or redistribute power. This characterization is simplistic. Although rooted in English tradition, the idealized rights that Franklin and Washington sought to preserve (or gain) had sprouted in such fundamentally different soil from that of feudal or early modern England as to make them a distinctly New World species.

  The critical right to representation for determining taxation and internal lawmaking meant something profoundly different in the colonies, where most free, white, adult males elected members of their assemblies, than in England, where only a tiny fraction of such people could vote in elections for the House of Commons and none at all for anyone in the House of Lords (which needed to concur in legislation and often supplied the prime minister). In some more democratic colonies, like Pennsylvania, partisan politics drew on a broad electorate unlike anything that would emerge in Britain for more than a century. Even in aristocratic colonies like Virginia, where a nonpartisan elite dominated the assembly, candidates needed to secure support from a diverse spectrum of voters. Although generally successful, Franklin and Washington did not always win their assembly races and could not take victory for granted. In 1775, their concept of a popular right to representative government was without precedent. Indeed, only three years later, Franklin joined others in hailing America’s War for Independence as “the greatest revolution the world ever saw.”1

  Although complaints about taxation without representation launched the American Revolution, Franklin, Washington, and other patriot leaders had a long list of grievances against Parliament. They were up in arms about the Intolerable Acts closing Boston harbor and imposing military rule in Massachusetts. The Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act had deprived colonists of their power to exploit the frontier, which personally impacted Franklin and Washington. A host of oppressive mercantilist laws consolidated imperial power over colonial trade and commerce. Revolutions are often about the distribution of power, and by 1775 the colonies demanded more. One of Washington’s modern biographers, Joseph Ellis, captured the Virginian’s view of the American Revolution: “Essentially, he saw the conflict as a struggle for power in which the colonists, if victorious, destroyed British pretentions of superiority and won control over half of a continent.”2

  Private factors inevitably influence public actions. Like many later, more radical revolutionaries, Franklin and Washington held personal grudges against the corrupt exercise of excessive power by the governing regime, which in their case meant the British government and its officers. Franklin’s stemmed from his shabby treatment as a colonial agent in London, particularly in his humiliation before the Privy Council, which turned him against British rule. Washington’s dated back to his second-class status as a colonial military officer
during the French and Indian War and his inability then to gain a regular army commission. If not yet irrevocably committed to American independence, both men went to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress in 1775 resolved to effect a fundamental transfer of rights and power within the British imperial system.

  FOR HIS PART, Washington arrived wearing the crisp, new, blue uniform of the Fairfax Independent Company, one of the county militias he then commanded in defense of Virginia against the specter of British tyranny. A copper gorget, the symbolic relic of a medieval warrior’s neck armor that still adorned an officer’s uniform in most European armies, caught many eyes. Engraved with the motto of colonial Virginia “En Dat Virginia Quartam” (“Behold Virginia Makes the Fourth”), Washington’s neckpiece signaled his colony’s continued loyalty as the king’s fourth (and first overseas) domain even as it turned against Parliament.

  Some historians surmise that, by his apparel, Washington signaled his desire to serve as commander in chief of patriot forces. Such interpretations run counter to his solemn assertions to family and friends that he did nothing to solicit the post.3 He hardly needed to since he was the obvious pick. Washington had more military experience than any other member of Congress. The only plausible alternative with more military experience, the former British colonel turned rebel Charles Lee, was unacceptable due to his foreign birth and personal eccentricities. John Adams called him “a queer Creature” who loved dogs more than people, which Lee (when he heard it) took as a compliment.4 Artemas Ward, the Massachusetts militia general then commanding the patriot forces besieging Boston, lacked support even from his own state’s leaders. From Adams on down, most of them favored Washington over Ward. The Virginian also had Franklin’s full support and, with it, the backing of Pennsylvania. Rather than to signal an interest in the joint command, Washington may have worn his militia uniform simply to show his willingness to lead his colony’s defense of liberty until called to a higher post. Such a pose suited him.