Franklin Read online

  GOD Save our Gracious King,

  From whom all Blessings spring,

  Our Wrongs redress.

  Franklin’s political lieutenant, Joseph Galloway, and two friends, Thomas Wharton and Abel James, prominent Philadelphia merchants, boarded the ship with him and sailed down the Delaware to New Castle. This loyalty touched Franklin. On the night of November 8, alone in his cabin one worry nagged him: his daughter, Sarah, whom he called Sally. At twenty-one, she was certain to be exposed to the same insults from her father’s political enemies that had dogged William. Benjamin wanted to take Sally to England, to put her beyond the reach of this, at least for the year he expected to be gone, but Deborah refused to let her go.

  Before the ship sailed, Franklin wrote Sally, assuring her of his love and urging her to ignore what enemies were saying. Even the pastor of the church Sally attended was anti-Franklin and uttered cruel remarks from the pulpit. Nevertheless, Franklin urged Sally to attend church. Finally, he encouraged her to acquire “those useful accomplishments, arithmetick and bookkeeping.” With the Philadelphia establishment against the Franklins, Sally had little chance to marry a wealthy heir. Franklin prepared her for life as a tradesman’s wife, to enable her to give her husband the help Deborah had given him.

  Franklin had no such worries about William. He was married and excelling as governor in New Jersey. William was based in the western capital of Burlington. He rented a house on the river with his new wife until, with a handsome pay raise from the Assembly, he was able to build his own waterfront mansion. His dining room was decorated with two oil portraits – one of King George III, the other of Benjamin Franklin. Living in Burlington put them closer to Philadelphia, but it had been some time since William had seen his father. William took Elizabeth dancing at Assembly balls and to horse races. The couple entertained friends and politicians at their home; Elizabeth hosted tea parties, dinners, and church benefits. Still, for Elizabeth, Burlington was no substitute for London. She did her best to adjust, even importing an English maid. But William “had much to do to keep up poor Mrs. Franklin’s spirits.” She became afflicted with more than just homesickness. She was asthmatic and suffered regular bouts of illness.

  William’s first few years as governor were calm and uneventful. He built on the self-confidence he had won in England and made new friends – even of potential enemies. Politically, he managed to strike a balance between the king’s demands and the needs and interests of his colonists. The absence of his father from his life seemed to have a positive effect.

  Franklin believed his mission in England would be successful. With the friends he had there, he was confident he could drive the Penns out of Pennsylvania and get the government’s approval of a new colony in the Ohio Valley. Together, he and his son would build a model society. Franklin had no idea he was sailing into a maelstrom that would destroy his relationship with William.

  When Franklin reached England in December 1764, he found himself embroiled in an unexpected political uproar. After spending more than £200 million to defeat France in the Seven Years War, the British government was in debt. With people complaining about taxes, British politicians hesitated to impose more taxes in England, Scotland, or Ireland.

  It cost the British a lot of money to maintain an army in America to protect residents, and parliament decided to make Americans pay for this. When Franklin arrived, he found government preparing to pass a Stamp Act for America. All legal documents, marriage licenses, wills, contracts, as well as newspapers and other items, would be required to carry a Royal stamp, which the government would sell. A similar law was in place in England.

  Franklin and three other Americans went to see George Grenville, leader of the British cabinet, called the prime minister, to argue against the law, warning Americans would resent it. They did not believe parliament had a right to tax people in the colonies, because they had no representatives in parliament. But Grenville presented the bill to parliament, where it passed with little debate. Franklin advised friends at home to be patient. He and other Americans in England would work to get the law repealed, but it might take time.

  In America, almost every colony condemned the bill. In Virginia, Patrick Henry, a backwoods orator, arose in the House of Burgesses to thunder, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, let George III profit from their example.” In Boston and New York, mobs rioted, destroying the houses of government officials and forcing commissioners who were to sell stamps to resign. A boycott of the stamps by all New Jersey lawyers meant no legal business could be conducted in the colony. When a barge arrived in New Jersey with a shipment of the stamps, Governor William Franklin refused to allow it to land and unload. His answer to the king, under whose grace he served, would be that he had received no clear instructions about the dispensation of the stamps. He practiced this justification in a letter to his father: “It seems to me that we might legally go on with business in the usual way, as much as if the stamps had never been sent or had been lost at sea, seeing that no commission or instructions have been sent to anybody.”

  In Philadelphia, Franklin’s enemies spread word that he favored the Stamp Act and had helped the British government draft the law. A mob threatened to attack his house. Franklin heard the story from Deborah, in vivid letters. For nine days, she said, she was kept in “one contineued hurrey” by people urging her to flee with Sally to William’s home in Burlington, New Jersey. But other friends and relatives supported them. One of Deborah’s cousins arrived to tell her “more than twenty pepel” told him it was his duty to stay with her. She told him she was “pleased to receive civility from aney bodey.”

  Franklin redoubled his efforts to get the Stamp Act repealed. He had letters from American friends published in British newspapers, warning the English they were in danger of losing the colonies. Franklin spent hours at his desk, answering criticisms of Americans that began appearing in the English press, and he worked tirelessly to influence parliament. Almost every moment was spent “forming, explaining, consulting, disputing” with Britain’s lawmakers. He worked with a committee of twenty-eight London merchants, who pressured parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. Americans had signed non-importation agreements, pledging to buy no English goods until the tax was repealed. The merchants sent circulars to twenty other British towns and cities, urging them to petition parliament to abandon the Stamp Act before it wrecked the British economy.

  Initially, Franklin made little progress. Many parliament members saw the Stamp Act as a test of their right to tax Americans. Edmund Burke, an Irish-born member of parliament who wanted to repeal the Stamp Act, decided his colleague’s “ignorance of American affairs” had misled them. To inform them, he summoned several experts to testify about America. One was Benjamin Franklin.

  With the help of friends in Parliament, Franklin formulated and rehearsed questions and answers he hoped would refute the Stamp Act permanently.

  On February 13, 1766, Franklin appeared before the House of Commons. His testimony overwhelmed supporters of the Stamp Act. Refuting the notion America was rich and relatively untaxed, Franklin told how many taxes Americans were paying to colonial assemblies. He demonstrated the Stamp Act was not only unjust, but it also was impractical. In thinly populated settlements along the frontier and in Canada (now an English possession), mail service did not exist, and people could not get stamps, which meant they could not marry, make wills, or buy or sell property without making long journeys and “spending perhaps three or four pounds, that the crown might get sixpence.”

  At one point, Franklin won an exchange with George Grenville, the man who had proposed the Stamp Act. Out of office now, Grenville reacted angrily to anyone who criticized his legislation. “Do you think it right that America should be protected by this country and pay no part of the expense?” he demanded.

  “That is not the case,” Franklin replied. “The colonies raised, clothed, and paid during the last war, near 25,000 men, and spent many millions.”r />
  “Were you not reimbursed by parliament?”

  “We were only reimbursed what in your opinion we had advanced beyond our proportion, or beyond what might reasonably be expected from us; and it was a very small part of what we spent. Pennsylvania, in particular, disbursed £500,000 and the reimbursements in the whole did not exceed £60,000.”

  Grenville sat down.

  In answer to prepared questions from friends, Franklin presented statistics about the population of America and how much the colonists imported from Britain. There were 300,000 men in America between sixteen and sixty, more than enough to make a formidable army. Pennsylvania alone imported £500,000 of British goods each year. The implication was obvious: Not only would a war with the colonies be dangerous; it would be highly uneconomic.

  The questions and answers continued, with Franklin portraying the Stamp Act as idiocy. At the end of his presentation, a friend asked, “If the act is not repealed, what do you think will be the consequences?” Said Franklin: “A total loss of the respect and affection the people of America bear this country, and of all the commerce that depends on that respect and affection.”

  A week later, the House of Commons repealed the Stamp Act. In America, the news touched off celebrations. Newspapers reprinted Franklin’s testimony before parliament, and his popularity soared. William led the celebration in Burlington, New Jersey, where cannons fired at a public festival on the lawn of his estate. In Philadelphia, “the bells rang, we had bonfires,” Sally Franklin wrote in a letter to her father. “Indeed I have never heard so much noise all my life, the very children were distracted.”

  But in London, the man who made victory possible was not as optimistic. He noted parliament had passed a Declaratory Act, which insisted it had the right to enact laws binding the British colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Only a few weeks later, parliament renewed the law that gave England the power to export convicts to the colonies. Among his friends, Franklin circulated another bill, which would give the colonies the right to export convicts to Scotland. Most members of parliament considered it a joke, overlooking Franklin’s serious message: Americans were not going to let the British give them orders.

  Franklin stayed in London. The people of Pennsylvania felt no one could do a better job of representing them before the various boards and committees that ran the empire. He worked on a plan to create a paper currency for all colonies. Not only would it help unify them, it would increase the circulation of money and thus stimulate business. In Franklin’s plan, the British government would derive a small profit from selling money to the colonies, which would be a painless and invisible form of taxation. But as usual, he found it difficult to convince the British government. America was only one part of the great British Empire; colonies in India, Africa, and the West Indies also clamored for the government’s attention. And the English political scene was tumultuous, with new cabinets and new ministers taking office every year.

  At the same time, Franklin worked to create a new colony in the Ohio River Valley, a dream William Franklin now pursued. In America, Governor Franklin had joined friends in a company that negotiated a treaty with the Indians, giving them access to some of this land. In London, Franklin tried to secure the British government’s approval. Eventually, he persuaded William and his friends to dissolve their American company and merge it with a larger British enterprise that Franklin and his friends formed in London. Franklin drew into this company some of the biggest names in the British establishment. Lord Gower, president of the Privy Council, was a partner. Slowly, patiently, for five years, Franklin worked on this.

  Almost every year, he would tell his wife or son he was discouraged and eager to return home. But something always kept him in England. If it was not the hope of some progress on the Ohio colony, it was turmoil between England and America.

  In 1768, parliament’s Charles Townshend proposed new taxes, placing duties on paper, lead, glass, and other commodities that the colonies imported from England. Americans resented these taxes and began lobbying for their repeal. Franklin busied himself writing articles in British newspapers, defending America against accusations from Britons.

  Franklin was becoming a spokesman for all Americans, not just for Pennsylvania. Georgia asked him to be its agent in London, and then New Jersey, no doubt prompted by Governor Franklin, made the same request. Then came a surprise: Massachusetts, the most rebellious colony, asked Franklin to represent it.

  In point of fact, the Massachusetts Assembly made this request. The Assembly had been feuding with the royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, over the Townsend Acts and other matters. When the London agent for Massachusetts died, it became obvious the governor and the Assembly could not agree on a new man; the Assembly chose Franklin as its representative and told the governor to get his own agent.

  Franklin knew that serving as agent for Massachusetts was dangerous. Anyone who represented it was bound to be disliked in London. Accepting the job was painful, because he knew it might ruin his chances of getting approval for the Ohio colony. But he accepted the appointment, believing the people of Massachusetts and their fellow Americans in other colonies were right, and the British were wrong in the debate over parliament’s power.

  Franklin discovered just how much trouble Massachusetts was likely to bring when he went to see Wills Hill, Lord Hillsborough, the minister in charge of the American colonies. Franklin had quarreled with him over Ohio, which Lord Hillsborough, fearful a new colony in America might lure workers away from his estates in Northern Ireland, vigorously opposed.

  Franklin evened the score with Lord Hillsborough by forcing him to hold a hearing on the Ohio colony. The Board of Trade, which Hillsborough led, rejected the project. Franklin requested the Privy Council review this decision, and they repudiated Hillsborough’s report. Humiliated, Hillsborough resigned. But he remained a powerful enemy, and his friends in the government stalled the final decision.

  On April 6, 1773, Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Galloway about this slow progress. “The affair of the [Ohio] grant goes on but slowly. I do not yet clearly see land. I begin to be a little of the sailor’s mind when they were handing a cable out of a store into a ship, and one of ‘em said: ‘Tis a long heavy cable. I wish we could see the end of it.’”

  “‘Damn me,’ says another, ‘if I believe it has any end; somebody has cut it off.’”

  While fighting on these fronts, Franklin managed to enjoy himself. He remained interested in family and friends, keeping in touch with his wife and daughter in America. Only after much hesitation did he agree to Sally’s marriage to Richard Bache, an emigrant from Yorkshire, in England. William had written of his disapproval to Franklin, calling his twenty-four-year-old sister’s fiancé “a mere fortune hunter who wants to better his circumstances [by] marrying into a family that will support him.” But Franklin left the decision to his wife, who vouched for their future son-in-law.

  Neither her father nor brother was present to give Sally away at her wedding. Franklin, Sally learned later from her mother, was in Paris, where he dined with the king and queen of France. Shortly afterward, a letter from England described in detail another wedding – that of Polly Stevenson, whom Franklin had thought of as a second daughter. What he had denied Sally he gave Polly; he walked Polly down the aisle at her wedding, and gave her away to a young doctor, William Hewson. Franklin stayed with the Stevensons on Craven Street.

  Bache returned to England to introduce himself to his father-in-law, and Franklin loaned him money to establish himself as a merchant in Philadelphia. Later he received delightful news: Sally had made him a grandfather and named the boy Benjamin Franklin Bache.

  When Polly, too, had a baby, she made Franklin the godfather and wrote him regularly, telling him of the child’s development. Franklin, in turn, gave her advice on how to raise him. “Pray let him have everything he likes; I think it of great consequence while the features of the countenance are forming; it gives them a pleasant
air, and, that being once become natural and fix’d by habit, the face is ever after the handsomer for it, and on that much of a person’s good fortune and success in life may depend. Had I been cross’d as much in my infant likings and inclinations as you know I have been of late years, I should have been, I was going to say, not near so handsome; but as the vanity of that expression would offend other folks’ vanity, I change it, out of regard to them, and stay a great deal more homely.”

  When not at Craven Street, Franklin visited with powerful Englishmen. His favorites were William Petty, Lord Shelburne, and Francis Dashwood, Lord le Despencer, head of the British post office. Shelburne was sympathetic to America’s argument with parliament, and he favored the Ohio colony until a shift in the political power structure drove him out of office.

  One weekend at Bowood, Shelburne’s estate, Franklin played a joke on guests, including members of parliament and actor David Garrick. Walking in the landscaped gardens, Franklin remarked that, thanks to some scientific experiments he had been making, he could transform rough water into calm water with a wave of his cane. No one believed him. They pointed to a nearby brook, where a breeze stirred up small waves, and told him to prove it. Franklin walked to the side of the brook and passed his cane over it a few times. The spectators gasped with disbelief as the surface of the water became calm and glassy.

  A workman standing nearby was sure Franklin had just demonstrated supernatural powers. “What should I believe?” he asked.

  “Only what you see,” Franklin said.

  The rest of the spectators rushed to the bank and pleaded with Franklin to reveal his trick. Only then did he admit the bottom of his cane was hollow, and in the hollow he carried a small vial of oil. Franklin had been experimenting with the use of oil to calm storms at sea, in the hope of aiding vessels in distress. He found it did not work well on the ocean, but it did an excellent job on smaller bodies of water.